Yazar: Logan Yershow. Orijinal makale: Film Review: Bitter Harvest. Yayınlanma Tarihi: 18 Nisan 2017. Tercüman: Tuba.

Acı Hasat, 1932-33 yılları arasında Ukrayna’da yaşanan ve Holodomor olarak da bilinen devletten kaynaklı kıtlık sırasında geçen, yakın zamanda yayımlanan bir savaş macerasıdır. Ukrayna diasporasının üyeleri tarafından yönetilen, yazılan ve finanse edilen film, ekibin bir kısmının katıldığı 2013-2014 Euromaidan protestoları sırasında Ukrayna’da bir yerde çekildi. Yapımcı Ian Ihnatowycz’in de belirttiği gibi, film gerçek ama tartışmalı soykırım konusunda küresel farkındalığı artırmayı amaçlıyor.

‘Soykırım’ hafife aldığım bir kelime değil. Uzun araştırmalar ve büyükannemle büyükbabamın birinci elden anlattıklarından sonra kullanmayı seçtiğim bir kelime. Her ikisi de Sovyet Ukrayna’nın sakinleriydi ve çocukken Holodomor’dan sağ çıktılar, ancak on yıl sonra Nazi işgali sırasında Ostarbeiter işçileri olarak kaçırıldılar ve sonunda General Eisenhower’ın lütfu altında ABD’ye gittiler. Büyük amcalarından biri birkaç yıl sonra intihar etmiş. Büyükannemin erkek kardeşi Kızıl Ordu araçları tarafından sokak ortasında vurulmuş. Birçok akraba ve komşularımız kaçamamış bile.

Holodomor, Ukrayna ve Rusya’da tartışmalı bir konudur. Soykırım iddiası – Ukraynalıların Stalin ve Sovyet rejimi tarafından kasıtlı olarak aç bırakılması – Ukrayna devleti ve diasporası tarafından 600 yıllık Rus baskısının 19.871 numaralı maddesi olarak onaylanıyor. Hem modern Rusya Federasyonu hem de mevcut Sovyet savunucularının çoğu bunu inkar ederek bunun tesadüfi olduğunu ve Stalin’in tarımı hızla kolektifleştirmesinin etkilerinin güneydeki tahıl ambarı boyunca Rusların çoğunlukta olduğu bölgeleri de etkilediğini iddia ediyor. Euromaidan’ı iktidara taşıyan Ukraynalı faşist partiler kıtlığı “Yahudi Bolşeviklerin” işi olarak nitelendiriyor ve Stephan Bandera gibi Sovyet otoritesine yanlış nedenlerle direnen ve sonunda Nazilerle işbirliği yapan milliyetçi figürleri yüceltiyor. Bu arada da doğudaki Novorossiya ayrılıkçıları karargahlarına Stalin’in resimlerini asarak güçlü otoriter baba figürüne olan itaatlerini yansıtıyorlar. Bu aynı zamanda Putin’in Birleşik Rusya partisinin ve onun Avrupa ve ABD’deki aşırı sağcı hareketlere verdiği desteğin temelinde yatan neo-Avrasyacı faşizmi de yansıtıyor. Doğu Avrupa tarihine tipik olarak tarafların hepsi de dehşet verici derecede kötü ve tüm hakikat ve uzlaşma olasılıkları tankların ayak izleri ve üst üste yığılmış cesetlerin ağırlığı altında ezilmiş durumda.

Barındırdığı tartışmalara epey değindim ama filmin kendisi hakkında pek bir şey söylemedim. Acı Hasat ezici, melodramatik, TV için yapılmış bir film. İncelemelerin büyük çoğunluğu filmi klişe ve kalıplaşmış olarak nitelendiriyor -ki öyle de. Format açısından çığır açan bir film değil. Batılı izleyiciler için daha erişilebilir hale getirmek için İngilizce konuşan İngiliz oyuncuların seçilmesi anlaşılabilir olsa da rahatsız edici. Doğu Avrupa sinemasının temel unsurlarından kaliteli at dövüşleri ve kılıç oyunları dışında çok da iyi bir film değil.

Alelade anti-emperyalistlerin sandığı gibi sinsi bir NATO propagandası da değil ayrıca. “Ukrayna’nın güzel bir kültürü var, lütfen onu bir ceset çukuruna atmayın” tarzında gelişigüzel, refleksif olarak milliyetçi ve romantik. Sinir etse de hemen hemen mazur görülebilir. Ukrayna Halk Cumhuriyeti’nin “birkaç görkemli bağımsızlık yılı” olarak tanımlanan giriş bölümündeki çirkin tarihini görmezden geliyor ki bunu azıcık bile olsa mazur görmüyorum. UPR, Rus İç Savaşı’nın kaosunda ılımlı milliyetçiler tarafından kuruldu. Çarlar döneminde benzeri görülmemiş bir şekilde Yahudi nüfusuna tam eşitlik ve özerklik vaat etmesine rağmen, UPR güçleri ciddi bir katliam serisi başlatarak UPR’nin kısa varlığı süresince 35.000 ila 50.000 Yahudi’yi öldürdü. Hükümet başkanı Symon Petliura bunu durduramadı (ya da bazı iddialara göre durdurmak istemedi). Anti-semitik askerleri ve köylüleri yabancılaştırmak istemiyordu. Yakındaki Özgür Bölge’nin anarşistleri onun kuvvetlerine karşı savaştı. Sholom Schwartzbard adlı Yahudi bir anarşist 1926 yılında ona suikast düzenledi.

Bu talihsiz aklama bir yana, filmin ne savaşlar arası ne de modern türden Ukrayna faşizmini desteklediğine dair hiçbir belirti görmüyorum. Rus halkını günah keçisi ilan etmiyor ya da popüler antisemitik komplo teorilerine başvurmaya çalışmıyor. Ama Stalin’in aynı anda hem Kazaklara hem de Beyaz Rusya Yahudilerine verdiği zarardan bahsediyor oluşuna da hakkını vermek gerek.

Film, Ukraynalı iki genç aşığın ve ailelerinin Holodomor’u çevreleyen olaylar sırasında yaşadıklarını anlatıyor. Yuri, ünlü bir Kazak ailesinden gelen bir ressamdır. Kazaklar yüzyıllar boyunca Rus uygarlığının sınırlarında yarı özerk olarak yaşamış eşitlikçi asker topluluklardır. Kazaklar, Ukrayna kültürünün ve çevresindeki imparatorluklara karşı meydan okumasının sembolüdür: köleliğe karşılık özgür sahipler ve diktatörlüğe karşılık doğrudan demokrasi. Tarihleri, İç Savaş sırasında Özgür Bölge’nin Beyaz ve Bolşevik güçlere karşı mücadelesine önderlik eden Ukraynalı anarşist Nestor Makhno’ya ilham vermiştir. Çoğunlukla kaçak ve özgür bırakılmış Kırım kölelerinden oluşan anarşistler, Kazakları maroon*lar ve Karayip korsanları gibi uçlarda yaşayan ve zalimlere karşılık veren diğer kanun kaçağı topluluklarına benzetmişlerdir.

Tarihin aslı o kadar masum değil. Kazaklar; Çarlar döneminde paralı askerler ve sömürgeciler olarak hizmet ettikleri gibi, emperyalizm karşıtı isyanları da ateşlediler ve 19. yüzyıla gelindiğinde askeri ve polis devletinin asi de olsa elit bir uzantısı haline geldiler. Ayrıcalıklı dokunulmazlık karşılığında devletin diğer düşmanlarına karşı şiddet uyguluyorlardı. Yuri’nin büyükbabası Ivan onu ülkesi ve özgürlüğü için savaşmaya çağırması Amerikan vatansever askerlerinin Orwellci diliyle aynıdır.

Natalka (Yuri’nin sevdiği kız) film boyunca çiftliklerinde kalır ve Bolşeviklerin acımasızlığına ve kıtlığın giderek artan şiddetine ilk elden tanık olur. Yetkililer köylüleri ölüm ve mülksüzleştirme tehdidiyle kooperatife katılmaya zorlar ve bu süreçte topraklarını teslim ederler. Yerel komiserin, ailesinin hayatını bağışlaması karşılığında Natalka’ya tecavüz etmeye çalıştığı üzücü bir sahne var. Bu dedemlerin köyünde de olan bir şeydi. Askerlerin bekar kadınlara tecavüz etme olasılığı daha yüksek olduğu için ikisi de genç yaşta evlenmiş.

Stalin’in gerçekçi olmayan tahıl kotalarını karşılayamamaktan duyduğu hayal kırıklığı tahıl kotalarını artırmasına yol açınca birçok köylü yiyecek için hayvanlarını öldürmeye başlar. Kasım ayına gelindiğinde, hedeflerini tutturamayan kolektif çiftlikler kara listeye alınır ve orijinal miktarın 15 katını teslim etmeleri söylenir. Sovyet yasaları, çiftçilerin herhangi bir fazlalığı kendilerine saklamadan önce kotalarını karşılamalarını talep eder. Bazıları zengin olmakla suçlanır. Zengin olmak için devletin resmi kriteri ücretli işçi çalıştırmak, toprak kiralamak ya da ticaretle uğraşmak olsa da, bu tanım zaman içinde komşularından biraz daha fazla toprağa ya da hayvana sahip olan herkesi kapsayacak şekilde genişler. Başlangıçta hiçbir zaman net bir şekilde tanımlanmayan “zengin çiftçi”, komşuların kin yüzünden birbirlerini suçlamaları ya da örnek Komünistler gibi görünerek incelemeden kaçmaları nedeniyle hızla genel bir istismar terimine dönüşür.

Yuri’nin kardeşi Mykola Kiev’de Parti’ye katılır ve yerel bir memur olur. Marksizm-Leninizm ideallerine ve Stalin’in liderliğine inanır, gıda sıkıntısını ve Komiserliğin aşırılıklarını hızla değişen bir toplumun büyüme sancıları olarak görür. Ayrıca hükümetin Ukraynalılar için iyi şeyler yapmak istediğine ve onun yardımıyla Ukrayna’nın müreffeh ve saygın bir ulus haline gelebileceğine inanır.

Mykola’nın iyimserliği, Sovyetlerin ilk dönemlerindeki “yerlileştirme” politikalarını yansıtmaktadır; bu politikalar sayesinde hükümet, yüzyıllarca süren Rus baskısını telafi etmek amacıyla azınlık kültürlerini destekler. Neredeyse yüz yıl sonra ilk kez Ukraynalıların okullarda kendi dillerini konuşmalarına izin verilir. İronik bir şekilde, bu canlanma tam da Stalin’in planlarını tehdit eden ve ezmeye çalıştığı ulusal bilince yol açar. Soykırımın kültürel boyutunu Ukraynalı parti yetkilileri, aydınlar ve Yuri gibi sanatçılar idam edilir ya da Sibirya’daki çalışma kamplarına gönderilirken görüyoruz. Mykola ve onun gibilerin yerini Stalin’e sadık güçler ve bir yıl sonra “1933 Ukrayna milliyetçi karşı devriminin yenilgi yılıdır” diye ilan edecek olan kişisel temsilcisi Pavel Postyshev alır.

Stalin’in abartılı tasviri bir yana (içine kapanık bir paranoyaktı ve partilerde vardiyasız köylüler hakkında bağıracak türden bir insan değildi), gerçekler sağlam. Film, Sovyet politikalarının cezalandırıcı ve kötü niyetli doğasını vurgulayarak parti yetkilileri ve askerlerin kışın hayatta kalmak için saklanan zulalar için insanların evlerini yağmalamasını tasvir ediyor. Ukrayna SSC’nin, erzakları dışarıda ve insanları içeride tutmak için kasıtlı olarak ablukaya alındığını anlatıyor. Rus askerleri bu ablukada görev yapmak ve halkı terörize etmek için kullanılıyor. Sempatik Batılı gazeteciler trajediyi en aza indirmek için komplo kuruyorlar.

Kayıplar arttıkça ve mülksüzleştirilmiş köylüler yiyecek bulmak için şehirlere kaçtıkça, film yürek parçalayıcı derecede sahici bir kayıtsızlık hissini tasvir ediyor. Kiev sakinleri burunlarını kaldırıma dikiyor, açlık yok, sadece “yaygın yetersiz beslenme” var diyen resmi Pravda mısrasını okuyor ve sokaklarında biriken kurumuş bedenleri görmezden geliyor.

Bu noktada durup itirazlara dönmem gerekiyor. Holodomor’u gündeme getirdiğinizde siz okuyucuların karşılaşacağı itirazlara. Ukrayna dışında, Holodomor’a Yahudilerin neden olduğunu söyleyen bir Nazi bulma olasılığınız (bu, onların birçok komplo teorisinden yalnızca biridir), solcu inkarcılar bulma olasılığınızdan daha düşüktür. Holokost inkarcıları gibi, kasıtlı olmadığını iddia etmekle kasıtlı olduğunu iddia etmek (“…ama o adi zengin çiftçiler bunu hak etmişti”) arasında fırsatçı bir şekilde gidip gelecekler. Bu tür bir aptallık kolayca göz ardı edilebilir. Soykırım iddiası, Nazilerin Sovyet karşıtı propagandasından veya Robert Conquest’in Soğuk Savaş tarihlerinden değil, kelimeyi icat eden Raphael Lemkin’den kaynaklanmıştır. Stalin, kendi parti yetkililerinden kotaların gerçekçi olmadığını biliyordu ve Rusya’nın çoğunlukta olduğu bölgelerde yapılmayan bir şekilde kotaları azaltmak yerine ikiye katlamayı seçti. Kaganovich ile yazışmalarında Ukrayna’yı sadakatsiz unsurların barut fıçısı olarak gösterdi ve uyguladıkları politikalar bu potansiyel kargaşa hissine doğrudan bir yanıttı.

Kendileriyle çelişen bu iddiaları ortaya atan insanların çok azı bunları gerçekten düşünmüştür; bunlar, istismarcı tarikatlarının onları aynada tekrar tekrar okumaya zorladığı birçok satırdan sadece biridir. İdeoloji bir paket anlaşmadır ve sosyal sermayelerini korumak ve tüm dünya görüşlerinin çökmesini önlemek için bazı şeyleri (özellikle kendilerine) itiraf etmemeleri gerektiğini hissederler. Böylece yalanı içselleştirirler. Zengin çiftçi ve Holodomor şakaları, aşırı sağcı helikopter memleri ile aynı amaca hizmet ediyor: kendilerini ve diğerlerini duyarsızlaştırarak kendi gaddarlıklarıyla rahat olmalarını sağlıyor.

George R.R. Martin’den alıntı yaparsak, tamamen siyah giyinmiş, kafataslarıyla süslenmiş ve görevleri zararsız bir dini azınlığın üyelerini avlamak, onlara gaz vermek ve sonra fırınlarda pişirmek olan kötü adamlarla bir hikaye yazsaydınız, herkes bunun haddini aştığını söylerdi. Normal deneyimlerimizin o kadar dışında kalan zalimlik dereceleri vardır ki, kendimizi ontolojik uyumsuzluktan kurtarmak için refleks olarak bunlara gülüp geçeriz. Kimse takım elbiseli ve kravatlı saygın beyaz bir milliyetçinin ya da evsizlere yemek dağıtan bir Maoist’in gerçekten böyle şeyler yapabileceğine inanmak istemez. Müstakbel totaliterler bilir bunu. Bu yüzden bir dahaki sefere her şeyin farklı olacağına dair belirsiz güvenceler ve gerçekten umursamadıklarının sinyalini vermek için şakacı bir nihilizm karışımıyla bu kör noktayı kullanırlar. Köpek düdüğünü** sadece sempatizanlar ve mağdurlar duyabilir ve bu sonuncular aşırı tepki gösterdikleri ya da geçmişte yaşadıkları için kolayca gözden çıkarılabilirler.

Bu nedenle bölünmelerimizi örtbas etmek için bahaneleri kabul ediyor ve hepimiz temel motivasyonlarımızı samimiyetle tartışarak işe başlarsak dağılacak olan otoriterlerle yüzeysel işbirliğini mümkün kılıyoruz. Bazen daha acil hedeflere ulaşmak için gereklidir bu. Bazen güç arayışı o kadar üstü kapalı, o kadar doğru bir şekilde yönlendirilmiş ya da yakın bağlamdan o kadar uzak görünür ki, göz ardı edilebilir. Bazen sadece geniş bir insan kitlesine ya da hızlı ve doğrudan bir eyleme ihtiyaç duyarsınız. Ancak bu tavizlerin sınırları ve maliyetleri vardır.

İster ezilenlerin “ilerici” milliyetçiliğini desteklemek, ister diktatörlerin ve polislerin sizi gerçek niyetleri konusunda aldatmalarına izin vermek olsun, hangi yolu seçerseniz seçin, sonu kötü olacaktır. Anti-emperyalizm vatanseverliğe ve ulusu arındırma arzusuna kanarken, kendinizi Maidan protestocularının konumunda bulacaksınız. Ya da eski Komünist müttefikleri almaya gelirken ofisinde kafasına bir tabanca dayayarak oturan Mykola gibi bir sonunuz olacak.

*Karayipler’in bazı bölgelerinde yaşayan ve aslen kaçan kölelerin soyundan gelen çeşitli toplulukların herhangi bir üyesi.

**Siyasette köpek düdüğü, muhalefeti kışkırtmadan belirli bir gruptan destek toplamak için siyasi mesajlarda kodlanmış veya imalı bir dil kullanılmasıdır. Adını köpekler tarafından duyulabilen ancak insanlar tarafından duyulamayan ultrasonik köpek düdüklerinden almaktadır.

Bu platformda yapılan çeviriler tamamen bağışlarla finanse ediliyor. Burada okuduklarınız hoşunuza gidiyorsa eğer, sizi katkıda bulunmaya davet ediyoruz. Nasıl destek verebileceğinize dair talimatları C4SS’yi Destekleyin sayfasında bulabilirsiniz:
https://c4ss.org/c4ssyi-destekleyin

Transphobic protestors and commentators have recently taken to the slogan, “Leave our kids alone.” It’s part of an attempt to brand educators, librarians, authors, artists — whoever works with kids and supports trans children’s right to self-identify however they wish — as “groomers,” threats to the safety of kids via insidious brainwashing. In reality, reactionaries using the slogan “leave our kids alone” is little more than a clumsy — and violent — case of projection. And all you have to do to see this is look at how reactionaries treat authority versus even the most bland, middle-ground liberal.

Transphobes are fundamentally, and non-trivially, social conservatives, and the focus of their social conservatism in this context is the “traditional” binary division of “male” and “female.” This should be an obvious statement, to be sure, but finding solid ground in the rancid, anti-concept riddled swamp that is the “culture wars” is necessary for survival. Since increasing social conservatism entails greater and greater deference to tradition, social conservatism also entails mechanisms that preserve tradition over newer, alternative, competing ways of being with greater and greater force: hierarchical institutions, control over information (and its interpretation), stratified interpersonal power dynamics, etc etc. All of these mechanisms place power in the hands of (at least) one person and grant them the ability to constrain the actions of (at least) one other person. This too will seem obvious to many, but it’s worth repeating, given that the word “freedom” is so thoroughly abused by reactionaries that it might as well be married to a cop. 

Contrast that with supporters of trans rights and trans kids’ freedom to choose their own identities, who are socially liberal (we’ll say that “liberal,” here, essentially corresponds to what Americans typically call “liberal”). The more socially liberal you are, the more you tend to support measures that decrease the power that authority figures have over others. Your mileage will (and should) vary as to how consistent socially liberal individuals are in this realm, or if they go far enough in pushing back against mechanisms that increase the power of authority figures. But social liberals tend to fight against things like corporal punishment at home or at school, holy scripture or age trumping personal experience and feelings, discipline over creativity, etc etc (and if you get close enough to consistent social liberalism, you’ll see people advocating that we abolish any coercive structures we can find in their entirety). 

Now, take two communities: one that’s socially conservative and one that’s socially liberal. Plug any set of ideas — any ideas at all — into both of them. Which community has the greatest potential for brainwashing: the one where authority is valorized and tradition reigns supreme, or the one where authority figures like parents, teachers, administrators, and so on have sharp constraints on what they can make a kid do, and the message that kids ought to always obey their superiors is as absent?

And what if we plug in the “debate” over whether schools should be an inclusive and safe environment for trans kids—which community is more likely to impose views on students without their consent or contrary to their own self-identity? The community where authority reigns supreme? Or the community where children are expected, first and foremost, to travel freely along a path of self-discovery? 

Obviously it’s the socially conservative one. 

It’s entirely consistent with the social conservative mindset to brainwash, manipulate, push, file, stamp, index, and number to preserve tradition for its own sake, and to eliminate anything conservatives see as threatening the “traditional” way of life. They don’t want freedom for children; they want to eliminate any competition over the direction of children’s lives, including from children’s innate curiosity about the world. By contrast, it’s perfectly consistent with the social liberal mindset to shrink hierarchy, encourage exploration, and respect any identity that’s willing to respect others in turn. When liberals fail to be consistent, it’s because they refuse to go far enough in condemning hierarchy and domination. 

There are, of course, plenty more reasons for calling the moral panic over trans children what it is: an immoral and authoritarian (I repeat myself) attempt to place children under the boot heel of fearful, ignorant parents. But if anyone out there is siding with the transphobes because of a legitimate concern for children’s wellbeing, it would be best to note the discussion above: these culture war battles don’t occur in a vacuum. The side you’ve hitched your wagon to worships at the altar of authority and wants nothing more than to tighten its grip over the vulnerable.

Alex McHugh interviews sci-fi author Dennis Danvers on anarchist ideas in fiction, his books The Watch and Leaving the Dead, and the life of a writer.

Mr. Danvers has written a variety of well-received sci-fi novels, including Circuit of Heaven, Time and Time Again, and End of Days, as well as the Locus and Bram Stoker nominee Wilderness. His short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Space and Time, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, F & SF, Realms of Fantasy, Electric Velocipede, Lightspeed, Tor.com, See the Elephant, Apex Magazine; and in anthologies Tails of Wonder, Richmond Noir, The Best of Electric Velocipede, Remapping Richmond’s Hallowed Ground, and Nightmare Carnival. He taught fiction writing and science fiction and fantasy literature at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia for over thirty years.

Thanks for your continued patience with our wonky publishing schedule! This was a fun one to record as it’s a bit different from our usual fare. If you’d like to support our podcasts and C4SS in general, a great way to do so is to pledge a donation on Patreon!

Sanders’ book centers on two tasks facing the American people. He states them at the outset. First:

These Americans [the predominantly younger voters who supported Sanders’ candidacy] understand that proposals that tinker around the edges are an insufficient response to the enormous crises we face. For them, there is a rapidly growing recognition that this country has deep systemic problems and that it is not good enough to deal only with symptoms of the problem. We have got to get to the root causes. We have got to confront the destructiveness of modern-day uber-capitalism.

But this is complicated by the need to fight a second enemy at the same time:

Now is the time when, with all our energy, we must also oppose the reactionary and neo-fascist forces in this country that are undermining American democracy and moving us toward authoritarianism and violence as they scapegoat minorities and attempt to divide us based on our race, our gender, our sexual orientation, or our ethnicity.

As Sanders states , “Trump was not a normal political figure and these were not normal elections.”

I’m totally on board with him on both counts.

There’s probably little in this book that will be new to anyone who followed the 2020 Democratic primaries closely or is familiar with Sanders’ political positions and rhetoric. However, he does analyze issues and states his positions in greater detail in the topical chapters than he’s ever had time for in a political speech. In the first part of the book, he reminisces on the primary campaign, the general election, and his role in implementing Biden’s agenda in the Senate. The second part is organized chapter by chapter, according to political issues and his policy proposals for dealing with them.

His policy discussions, in particular, will sound familiar to anyone who’s either a Sanders supporter or follows national political news. 

The premise of the chapter “Billionaires Should Not Exist” is as straightforward as its title and entirely correct. It’s a standard progressive indictment of wealth concentration and corporate power. However — as I’ll discuss below — there are serious problems with the framing. He also has chapters on the profit-driven corporate healthcare system, labor policy and the future of automation, education reform, and corporate control of the media.

Sanders’ framing still largely ignores the role of the state in capitalism. For example, the chapter “Billionaires Should Not Exist” repeatedly uses the cliched expression “unfettered capitalism” and focuses largely on wealth taxation as the actual means for ensuring billionaires do not, in fact, exist. 

Now, so long as capitalism exists, I’ll take the New Deal or Social Democratic version of state capitalism over the Reagan-Thatcher version of state capitalism any day of the week. But simply taxing billionaire wealth is by no means to use Sanders’ own language at the beginning of the book, dealing with “systemic problems” or “root causes”; it’s a slightly more ambitious way to “tinker around the edges.”

There’s no such thing as “unfettered capitalism,” and never was — any more than there was “unfettered feudalism” or an “unfettered latifundist slave economy.” The overwhelming majority of billionaire wealth and large corporate profits results either from direct government subsidies or from economic rents on artificial property rights, artificial scarcity, and entry barriers enforced by the state.

So the very phrase “rethink our adherence to the system of unfettered capitalism” amounts to a set of self-imposed blinders that limits us to the kind of incrementalism Sanders claims to oppose. By its very terms, it misleads us into believing that concentrated wealth and corporate power are spontaneous phenomena that occur in a “laissez-faire” environment if the state doesn’t actively prevent them, and misdirects us into limiting ourselves entirely to redistributionist policies after the fact.

Since billionaire wealth is unearned, a system in which billionaire wealth exists to be taxed in the first place has already failed. Instead of taxing billionaire wealth after the fact, we should systematically dismantle all the structures that facilitate such income levels in the first place. 

We should be radically scaling back and then eliminating intellectual property — particularly patents, the primary legal tool by which international trade and outsourced production are enclosed within corporate walls. We should be breaking the power of landlords and absentee owners of natural resources and replacing them with community land trusts and Ostromite resource commons. We should eliminate the legal monopolies by which owners of stockpiled wealth are enabled to monopolize the credit and investment functions. And we should eliminate the massive subsidies to long-distance transportation and energy extraction, which facilitate supply chains and scales of production far beyond what would be the point of negative returns if all costs were internalized. 

And all these things should be accompanied by direct actions from below, like squats taking over landlord property, workers taking over ownership and control of workplaces, file-sharing sites, and hardware hackers making intellectual property unenforceable, etc., rather than merely relying on state policy.

Imagine someone making grand pronouncements about the need to address the basic structural problems of feudalism and get to the root of the problem — and then proposing that feudal rents be taxed or peasants’ work days on the lord’s domain be limited, rather than simply abolish feudal land titles and give the land to the peasants. I suppose peasants would be better off after than before; but it would still be a Rube Goldberg approach, tinkering around to regulate landlords’ abuses of powers that were given to them in the first place rather than just taking away the powers.

His approach to healthcare reform shows a similar lack of vision. His focus is almost entirely on healthcare finance, i.e., Medicare for All, at the expense of delivery of service (especially governance issues). Mandating safe staffing ratios, negotiating drug prices, etc., are all ways of imposing limits to abuse from above and outside a system, after you’ve already given away the game by accepting internal governance by for-profit corporate hierarchies. 

Shifting healthcare finance from private insurance to a single-payer system would certainly be a relief for those burdened by the premiums at the individual level. But it would do little to address the system’s actual costs, as opposed to shifting them. Health insurance profits and overhead are far less important than the costs of the service delivery system itself — the bloated administrative and overhead costs, senior management compensation, embedded intellectual property, and other monopoly rents, etc. 

Ultimately the system needs to be radically decentralized whenever it is technically feasible. Bureaucratic hierarchies (whether in for-profit chains or community nonprofits) need to be replaced by stakeholder cooperative governance, and the costs of high-priced medical equipment need to be downsized by an order of magnitude or more via the open-source hardware ethos (i.e., what projects like Open Source Ecology have already done for micromanufacturing tools).

Regarding labor policy, Sanders uses language like “radical” and “addressing the root causes” in the immediate context of FDR and the CIO. It’s odd to see a self-described democratic socialist so seemingly unaware of leftist analysis of the New Deal labor accord — an analysis which makes it clear that a major function of establishment unions under that accord was to restrain the rank-and-file and safeguard “management’s right to manage.” I don’t doubt for a minute that card check unionism, and 67% unionization rates and $20/hr fast food wages like in Denmark, would make capitalism a hell of a lot more tolerable for workers under capitalism; given a choice between the present capitalist model and capitalism with strong unions, I’d take the latter in a heartbeat. But a labor policy that goes only that far, without addressing corporate ownership or governance, is neither democratic nor socialist.

To be fair, Sanders mentions “removing barriers to worker-ownership” and labor representation on corporate boards — but only as an eventual third step, to be pursued after full employment and unionization.

And although he calls for policies that address technological change and allow workers to benefit from the resulting increases in productivity, his “job guarantee” — “full employment at a living wage” — is the direct opposite of the proper way to approach these issues. It’s a reversion to mid-20th century, industrial-age workerism.

And again, in fairness, he does eventually get around to things like shortening the work week and promoting workplace democracy; but it’s only after a prolonged discussion of “taxing robots” and using the revenue for “job retraining.” The emphasis should be just the opposite: actively celebrate automation, eliminating as many unnecessary jobs as possible (Graeber’s “bullshit jobs,” subsidized waste production, planned obsolescence, etc.), and then see that what work remains — ideally as little as possible — is evenly distributed and pays enough to live on.

It’s also ironic that he mentions the Sunrise Movement and Green New Deal as examples of ways labor could be put to work on a “green energy transition,” because his jobs guarantee flies in the face of the kind of degrowth we actually need to avoid destroying the planet. Harnessing the productivity benefits of new technology in a way that truly benefits workers, would require the mass liquidation of what David Graeber called “bullshit jobs,” and the elimination of all subsidized waste and planned obsolescence — accompanied by a drastic shortening of the work week with no reduction in pay. Ultimately, it will require decoupling consumption from “jobs.”

Aside from advocacy for employee ownership via ESOP plans and worker representation on corporate boards, and a throwaway line about community land trusts alongside advocacy for more public housing, Sanders’ proposals are almost entirely warmed-over FDR. He comes nowhere near the levels of outside-the-box thinking demonstrated by, among others, Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn was a radical departure from the mid-2oth century managerialism of the Atlee government, which under the nationalization policies of Herbert Morrison, altered nothing but the ownership of nationalized industry while leaving the hierarchical corporate management model still intact. It was likewise a departure from the old approach to public housing, which left residents as powerless clients of local bureaucratic managers. In virtually every area of public life, he proposed replacing bureaucratic and managerial control with stakeholder governance and democratic self-management.

For all his talk of economic democracy, nowhere does Sanders once mention one of the most important phenomena on the Left in recent years: the new municipalist movements like the outgrowths of M15 in Madrid and Barcelona, Preston in the UK, the Evergreen movement in Cleveland, Cooperation Jackson, and hundreds of similar movements around the world. 

There’s also the problem that Sanders focuses excessively on electoralism to the exclusion of everything else. Even when he discusses grassroots organizing and “bottom-up” politics, it’s almost entirely in the context of influencing electoral outcomes.

With rural over-representation in the Senate and massive levels of Republican gerrymandering at the state level, the American political system is deliberately stacked against radical agendas. And in half the country, any local attempts to think outside the box are stymied by reactionary state legislatures (e.g., restrictions on municipal reform in Austin, Texas and Jackson, Mississippi). That’s not to say it isn’t at least plausible that a leftward demographic shift, as Millennials and Zoomers become the voting majority, will reduce the threat of neofascism and make Sanders’ ideas more politically feasible. But until we reach a tipping point where, at the very least, there’s a filibuster-proof majority at the national level and reinvigorated voting rights legislation, an increasingly fascist GOP has locked itself into power in a major portion of the country. 

In the meantime, purely electoral efforts must supplement their strength by alliance with the grassroots movements actively engaged in constructing a postcapitalist society from outside the state: squats, radical unions, community self-defense, economic counter-institutions, and the like. And electoral efforts would carry a lot more weight against fascist attempts to overturn elections if they actively enlisted the support of those engaged in planning rent, debt, and logistics strikes, and other forms of direct action to disrupt any would-be coup and make it impossible for fascists to hold onto power. The civics book crap, by itself, just isn’t enough to cut it anymore.

Bernie Sanders was head and shoulders above any other major figure contending for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020. But for someone who talks so much about new ways of doing things and making radical structural change, he still limits himself to old ways of thinking to a dismaying extent.

The roots of timebanking can be found in what early economists of the late 1700s like Adam Smith and David Ricardo described as the “Labor Theory of Value” (LTV); which proposes that all commodities produced in a market system originate their value in human labor. As Ricardo writes:

In speaking then of commodities, of their exchangeable value, and of the laws which regulate their relative prices, we mean always such commodities only as can be increased in quantity by the exertion of human industry, and on the production of which competition operates without restraint [1].

Born in the context of proto-industrial capitalism as an attempt to explicitly conceptualize the basic rules of the proto-global economy in the de-marcantilizing nations of Europe, socialists of various stripes would use this empirical axiom as an ethical basis for why workers are “entitled to all they create” (a common saying in militant labor circles). In this sense the LTV becomes a means to resist the logic of the factory—wherein workers create for the profit of bosses and owners and only receive back a fraction of the value they create—and as such it is no surprise that, beyond Marxian economics, the theory has been abandoned by most mainstream economists in favor of the “subjective theory of value” [2].  However, within many radical movements, time-based currencies became an application of the LTV to not just to production but to exchange; x hours of labor for x hours of labor.

On this basis, the English-born Robert Owen—an early 19th century industrialist and a founder of the modern cooperative movement—worked for decades establishing and expanding trade unions, cooperatives, and intentional communities in North America and, in many ways set a precedent for socialists after Ricardo, held firmly to the LTV; believing, according to Edward J. Martin, that “workers ought to be compensated based on both human needs and effort.” After numerous failed attempts at “pure” communism—i.e. no property and no currency etc.—in many intentional communities throughout the 1820s, Owen—then entrenched in establishing trade unions and cooperative enterprises back in England—would advocate for the “development of labor exchanges where workmen and producers’ cooperatives could exchange products directly and thus dispense with both employers and merchants.” In 1832, he founded the “National Equitable Labor Exchange” which “sought to secure a wider market for cooperative groups and to enable them to exchange their products at an equitable valuation resting on labor time” through printed labor vouchers. This would lead to similar exchanges emerging in several other provincial cities [3].

The Bostonian anarchist Josiah Warren participated in several communistic Owenite communities in the United States and also left with the belief that a means of market exchange based on the LTV was a key part of a liberatory economic project. Based on that idea, in 1827 Warren would establish his “Time Store” in Cincinnati, Ohio, wherein, according to William Bailie in his 1906 book on Warren, 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” [5]. The Time Store was apparently very successful—even resulting in several other stores coming to accept the labor-time vouchers alongside standard U.S. currency. After two years, Warren left the store to a friend and traveled throughout the midwest; helping establish time stores and entire communities based on the principles of the LTV and equitable exchange. He, like Owen before him, hoped that these efforts would birth a socialist society not based on governmental control but voluntary, cooperative production and exchange by producers. However both Owen’s exchanges in England and Warren’s many stores and “Equity Villages” in the U.S. had collapsed or faded away as the turn of the century neared, unable to match the competitive advantages of 19th century industrial capitalism [6].

After Warren’s death in 1874, time-based currencies fell to the wayside among anarchists in his vein (like Benjamin Tucker and William B. Greene) in favor of a focus on credit. Greene would go as far as to argue that it is the current “confused” organization of credit and its emergence from the “insufficiency of circulating medium which results from laws making specie the sole legal tender” that leads most immediately to “want of confidence, bad debts, expensive accommodation-loans, law-suits, insolvency, bankruptcy, separation of classes, hostility, hunger, extravagance, distress, riots, civil war, and, finally, revolution” [8].  As a result, these anarchists began to advocate for mutual credit through free banking, an open-ended system wherein, as members of the Voluntary Cooperation Movement (a contemporary anarchist group) outline,

[a]ny group of private individuals could cooperate to form a mutual bank, which would issue monetized credit in the form of private banknotes, against any form of marketable collateral the membership was willing to accept. Membership in the bank and receipt of credit were conditioned on willingness to accept the notes as tender [9].

In fact, by the 1930s, anarchist writer Laurance Labadie—described by Herbert C. Roseman as the “heir of Warren”—would explicitly reject the idea of making “labor-time a standard for a monetary unit” as “a fallacy and bound to fail in practice” in favor of a free banking strategy [10] [11].

Looking back again a few decades, Marx, a year after Warren’s death, had in turn proposed that, at least in a transitional phase phase between capitalism and socialism, labor vouchers would function as such:

[T]he individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds), and with this certificate he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor costs. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form he receives back in another [12].

Marx would go on to seemingly abandon this idea and later critique Owen’s labor exchange in the footnotes of Capital Vol. 1, but the core idea would inspire heterodox Marxists for the next two centuries [13]. For example, 20th century Marxist-influenced autonomist Cornelius Castoriadis advocated for a similar structure wherein “[p]eople will receive a token [revenu] in return for what they put into society . . . allowing people to organize what they take out of society, spreading it out (1) in time, and (2) between dif­ferent objects and services, exactly as they wish” [14]. Then in the 90s, Marxian economists Paul Cockshott and Allin ​​Cottrell embraced the computer age in advocating for a socialist system wherein “some form of labour credit card . . . keeps track of how much work you have done” which can then be used to acquire goods from communal stores [15].

This mirrors the kind of economics proposed within Marx’s lifetime by the anarchists of the Jura Federation—which Marx had worked hard to expel from the International Workingmen’s Association. Mikhail Bakunin and his associates, according to his friend James Guillaume in 1876, proposed that confederated communes would each establish their own “Banks of Exchange.” Then

[t]he workers’ association, as well as the individual producers (in the remaining privately owned portions of production), will deposit their unconsumed commodities in the facilities provided by the Bank of Exchange, the value of the commodities having been established in advance by a contractual agreement between the regional cooperative federations and the various communes, who will also furnish statistics to the Banks of Exchange. The Bank of Exchange will remit to the producers negotiable vouchers representing the value of their products; these vouchers will be accepted throughout the territory included in the federation of communes [16].

Like the Marxist formulations above, it is somewhat vague if the vouchers in the Bakunist scheme are based solely on labor-time or other factors like type of work and intensity, but regardless, later communist and collectivist anarchists largely abandoned the idea of labor vouchers in favor gift economies or, as in the case of anarchists during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) according to Percy Hill, “money was abolished in Aragon, [but] no one system predominated to replace it, instead the various towns organised broadly under the principle of ‘free consumption’” [17].

Around that same time in the United States, the Great Depression led to the emergence of literally countless local currencies (called scrips) in the face of the extremely devalued American dollar and lack of work opportunities [18]. It has been suggested by some (including one of my interviewees) that some of these scrips were time-based, but little information is available. Beyond this and some discussion of Warren’s experiments in obscure periodicals, the first contemporary timebank would not appear until it was founded in 1973 by Teruko Mizushima in Japan to give greater valuation to the work of housewives in particular. At almost the exact same time as [Sylvia] Federici and other autonomist and socialist feminists were campaigning for the productive/reproductive work of women in the household to be acknowledged and compensated, Mizushima was, according to Jill Miller, “recruiting housewives who, she believed, suffered from inadequate recognition of their abilities” into her “new currency to create a more caring society, through increasing the exchange of mutual assistance in the community, and to value everyday tasks, such as those of housewives and carers, which the wage system did not reward.” Of particular importance to this sorority was the care of elders, many of whom had served in the Pacific Theater of World War II and “were hospitalised or unable to look after themselves or their homes” [19]. 

A few years after Mizushima’s project began, [Edgar S.] Cahn began promoting “time dollars” (known regionally sometimes as “time credits” or, especially at Hour Exchange Portland, “Hours”) in the United States. For Cahn, there are

at least three interlocking sets of problems: growing inequality in access by those at the bottom to the most basic goods and services; increasing social problems stemming from the need to rebuild family, neighborhood and community; and a growing disillusion with public programs designed to address these problems [20].

The solution he proposed was, of course, timebanking; a scheme whereby neighbors could exchange labor with each other; x hours for x hours. One of the first communities to adopt this program was Grace Hill Settlement House, a mutual aid program founded in 1903 focused on helping immigrants in St. Louis neighborhoods. By the 1980s, it had become a more general social service provider and established their Member Organized Resource Exchange (MORE). This included community computer stations, the “Neighborhood College,” and more, but, as The Annie E. Casey Foundation argues, the “centerpiece of the MORE system is its Time Dollar Exchange,” which not only allowed for members to exchange services but “[a]t Grace Hill, Time Dollars also can be used at Time Dollar Stores, which offer donated goods such as food, toiletries, clothing, and furniture” [21]. Not only was this a practical success but, according to Stephen Beckett (who will be discussed momentarily), several of the women involved in Grace Hill helped lay out the first four “values of timebanking:” “1) Everyone is an Asset, 2) Redefining Work, 3) Reciprocity, and 4) Social Networks or Social Capital” [22]. Then, with the addition of “5) Respect,” Cahn would go on to campaign for time dollars across the world, and, thanks to him and co-current projects like Ithaca HOURS in New York state, hundreds of timebanks now exist all across the world [23] [24].

A History of Hour Exchange Portland

The history of Hour Exchange Portland (“Hour Exchange” or, formerly, “HEP”) begins with Cahn and his campaign to popularize timebanking [25]. Their website states that “[i]n late 1995 Dr. Richard Rockefeller (the founder of Hour Exchange Portland) first heard Dr. Edgar Cahn speak” and

realized that we can’t expect people to take care of our environment, if we are not first taking care of each other. Compelled to bring the Time Dollar concept to Maine, Richard began to share his vision. In 1997 Maine hosted an International Time Dollar Congress in cooperation with Dr. Edgar Cahn . . . bringing together 40 Service Exchanges from all over the world. For many, it was the first opportunity to share their experiences about their programs and learn from others. For the Portland community, the Congress inspired a new vision and direction. It was time to grow a local Service Exchange, and the seed that became today’s Hour Exchange Portland was born [26].

That seed would sprout into the 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization “Maine Time Dollar Network,” and originally it was one of an ecosystem of active timebanks in the various cities, towns, and counties of Maine. Over the years many of these have collapsed or been absorbed by other banks and new ones have sprung up again and again, but through it all the renamed “Hour Exchange Portland” persists.

Lucy [pseudonym] elaborated in length on the history of Hour Exchange and emphasized to me the important role that Rockefeller played both in its inception and ongoing maintenance. One of the heirs to his family’s fortune, Rockefeller utilized his resources (alongside numerous grants and an AmeriCorps VISTA contract) to support the timebank for nearly a decade. This funding allowed the timebank to initially employ multiple full-time and part-time paid administrative positions. One of the many documents Hour Exchange provided for this research included the following information:

Hour Exchange Portland’s annual expenses from 2007 through 2010 averaged around $300,000. Salary and benefit expenses for the paid employees comprised about 75%-80% of the budget in any given year. In 2011, the organization reduced its budget considerably by employing only one full-time staff person. Beginning in 2013 Hour Exchange Portland employed only part-time office assistance.

Throughout this time period (2007-2013), Rockefeller also, according to Lucy, “tried to encourage Hour Exchange to be more self-sufficient” by “providing less and less support over the years.” Though reorganization to account for this had started around 2011, this self-sufficiency was put to the test when Rockefeller died unexpectedly in 2014. From then onward, Hour Exchange has been “member run” in that its perpetuation is solely the responsibility of the board and general membership without any consistent paid staff.

Since its founding, Hour Exchange had largely functioned without printed “time dollars” and rather through written records and then basic spreadsheets introduced by Kent Gordon, but in 2006, Hour Exchange members Stephen V. Beckett, Terry Daniels, Linda Hogan, and, later, John Saare saw that “everything was getting on the Internet,” and started the hOurworld cooperative, through which they developed the software Time and Talents. I spoke to Stephen via video call in the early spring and he explained to me that previously, the Hour Exchange system was only partially digital for administrative purposes, with “first just a single computer, then a local area network, then a local area network with part of the database online.” Much of what was elaborated upon in Time and Talent after finishing the basic software elements was ways that these two databases, one local and one online, could be synced up. Other software for timebanking had existed before Stephen’s project such as Timekeeper and, more popularly, Community Weaver v1-3 (developed by Mark McDonough and Cahn’s organization Timebanks USA) but both had major bugs and ease of use issues, and additionally the latter required fees from member timebanks—in contrast to Time and Talents which is free to this day and funded primarily by contracts for specialized versions of the software. This matter of fees in particular brought on, as Paul Weaver writes, further disagreements “over the ownership and development of the software (open source versus proprietary), over data (who own the data, who has access to data, who has control and rights over information generated from data, etc.), over decision making, etc” [27].

This tension between which software timebanks should use and, more fundamentally, over who would lead the western timebanking movement eventually led to a split between advocates of time dollars; with Hour Exchange Portland at the heart of it, both because of Stephen’s membership thereof and Rockefeller’s adamant opposition to fees. On the one hand, many timebanks stayed with the Community Weaver software and its reliable association with Cahn’s work, but numerous others switched to Time and Talents for its accessibility and affordability [28]. Today, Time and Talents helps coordinate and catalog exchanges in and between 388 timebanks, including its birthplace Hour Exchange Portland, across the planet and allows for anyone to set up a timebank with only a small group of people and a click of a button. However, the Covid-19 Pandemic in the 2020s did substantial damage to these timebanks and the activeness of their memberships. Such was the case of Hour Exchange Portland in particular, Lucy explained to me that she saw “a lot of people didn’t feel comfortable doing face-to-face exchanges, so the number of exchanges dropped precipitously.” She also emphasized to me that much of what kept the bank’s momentum was in-person community events like potlucks and the annual Bizarre Bazaar, where members gather to exchange crafts, second-hand items, and more with time dollars. Dorothy [pseudonym] added that many of the relationships Hour Exchange had with artistic institutions like Meryl Auditorium, Portland Stage, and various art exhibits pre-pandemic have lapsed, removing that incentive as well. And while it is in the process of recovering, it is in the context of the “pandemic aftermath” that I am doing my research on timebanking and its intersections with eldercare.

1. David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (London, UK: John Murray, 1817), 15, Epub. 
2. Robert P. Murphy, “The Labor Theory of Value: a Critique of Carson’s Studies in Mutualist Political Economy,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 20, no. 1 (Winter 2006), accessed April 21, 2023, https://cdn.mises.org/20_1_3.pdf. 
3. Edward J. Martin, “The Origins of Democratic Socialism: Robert Owen and Worker Cooperatives,” Dissident Voice, last modified December 6, 2019, accessed April 14, 2023, https://dissidentvoice.org/2019/12/the-origins-of-democratic-socialism-robert-owen-and-worker-cooperatives/. 
4. Socialist Party of Great Britain, “Labour Time Vouchers,” Socialism or Your Money Back, last modified November 30, 2016, accessed April 14, 2023, https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2016/11/labour-time-vouchers.html. 
5. William Bailie, Josiah Warren, the First American Anarchist: A Sociological Study (Boston, MA: Small, Maynard and Company, 1906), 9, accessed April 15, 2023, https://archive.org/details/josiahwarrenfirs00bailiala/page/n5/mode/2up. 
6. Steve Kemple, “The Cincinnati Time Store As An Historical Precedent For Societal Change” (Presented at CS13 Creative Economy exhibition, Cincinnati, OH, March 19, 2010), 5, 9, https://www.scribd.com/document/32919811/The-Cincinnati-Time-Store-As-An-Historical-Precedent-For-Societal-Change. 
7. “Cincinnati Time Store,” Wikipedia, accessed April 15, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_Time_Store. 
8. William Batchelder Greene, The Radical Deficiency of the Existing Circulating Medium: And the Advantages of a Mutual Currency (Boston, MA: B.H. Greene, 1857), 238-39, accessed April 15, 2023, https://books.google.com/books?id=RBkqAQAAIAAJ&source=gbs_book_other_versions.
9. Voluntary Cooperation Movement, “A Mutualist FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions About Mutualism,” Anarchist Library, accessed April 15, 2023, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mutualists-org-a-mutualist-faq. 
10. Herbert C. Roseman, “Laurance Labadie and His Critics” (1967), Union of Egoists, last modified April 1, 2018, accessed April 15, 2023, https://www.unionofegoists.com/2018/04/01/laurance-labadie-and-his-critics-by-herbert-c-roseman/. 
11. Laurance Labadie, “Letter to Mother Earth” (1933), The Anarchist Library, last modified 1 17, 2022, accessed April 15, 2023, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/laurance-labadie-letter-to-mother-earth. 
12. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, Foundations 16 (Paris, France: Foreign Language Press, 2021), 14, accessed April 15, 2023, https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/C16-Critique-of-the-Gotha-Program-1st-Printing.pdf.
13. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers, 1974), 1:97-8, accessed April 20, 2023, http://www.marx2mao.com/PDFs/Capital,%201.pdf. 
14. Cornelius Castoriadis, “On the Content of Socialism, II,” 1957, in Political and Social Writings Volume 2, 1955-1960: From the Workers’ Struggle Against Bureaucracy to Revo­lution in the Age of Modern Capitalism, trans. David Ames Curtis, vol. 2, Political and Social Writings(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, n.d.), 2:125, accessed April 15, 2023, https://files.libcom.org/files/cc_psw_v2.pdf. 
15. Paul Cockshott and Allin ​Cottrell, Towards a New Socialism (Nottingham, UK: Spokesman Books, 1993), 25, accessed April 15, 2023, https://users.wfu.edu/cottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.pdf. 
16. James Guillaume, “On Building the New Social Order,” in Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the Activist-Founder of World Anarchism, by Mikhail Bakunin and James Guillaume, ed. Sam Dolgoff (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 222, PDF. 
17. Percy Hill, “Anarchist Communist Political Economy and the Spanish Revolution,” Red and Black Notes, last modified September 13, 2020, accessed April 15, 2023, https://www.redblacknotes.com/2020/09/13/anarchist-communist-political-economy-and-the-spanish-revolution/. 
18. Loren Gatch, “Local Money in the United States During the Great Depression,” Essays in Economic & Business History XXVI (2008), accessed April 15, 2023, https://scriplibraryhome.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/local-money.pdf. 
19. Jill Miller, “Teruko Mizushima: Pioneer Trader in Time as a Currency,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, last modified July 2008, accessed April 15, 2023, http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue17/miller.htm. 
20. Edgar S. Cahn, “Time dollars, work and community: from `why?’ to `why not?,'” Futures 31, no. 5 (1999): 499, accessed April 15, 2023, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328799000099. 
21. Annie E. Casey Foundation, “Grace Hill’s MORE: Neighbors Helping Neighbors,” hOurworld.org, last modified February 2008, accessed April 16, 2023, https://hourworld.org/pdf/Grace_Hill_MORE_Study.pdf. 
22. [Edgar S. Cahn, No More Throw-Away People: The Co-Production Imperative(Washington, DC: Essential Books, 2000), 24.]
23. “Goals & Core Values,” Waikato TimeBank, accessed April 20, 2023, https://waikato.timebanks.org/page/683-goals–core-values. 
24.  “Ithaca HOURS: Community Currency since 1991,” paulglover.org, accessed April 16, 2023, https://www.paulglover.org/hours.html. 
25. Hour Exchange used to employ the abbreviation “HEP” until it was brought to the previous board’s attention that it resembled the “hep hep” rallying cry of antisemitic rioters in early 19th century Germany.
26. “Mission,” Hour Exchange Portland, accessed April 16, 2023, https://hourxport.org/mission.htm. 
27. Paul Weaver, “Software development and arising governance tensions,” Transformative Social Innovation Theory, last modified 2017, accessed April 20, 2023, http://www.transitsocialinnovation.eu/sii/ctp/tb-usa-5. 
28. Ibid.

Por Claire Wolf. Artículo original: Dark Satanic Cubicles — It’s time to smash the job culture! del 20 de septiembre de 2012. Traducido por Vince Cerberus.

Cargas dieciséis toneladas, ¿y qué obtienes?
Otro día más viejo y más profundo en deuda.
San Pedro, no me llames, porque no puedo ir.
Debo mi alma a la tienda de la compañía.
—  Merle Travis , coro de la canción Sixteen Tons

En 1955, Tennessee Ernie Ford, con voz de trueno, grabó esa canción como cara B de un sencillo. Pronto, nadie podía siquiera recordar qué era el lado A. Los DJ de todo el país comenzaron a darle vueltas al disco, y dos meses después de su lanzamiento, Sixteen Tons se había convertido en el sencillo más grande jamás vendido en Estados Unidos.

Sixteen Tons es una fábula al estilo de John Henry sobre un minero de carbón que es duro como un clavo:  un puño de hierro y el otro de acero. Es capaz de hacer el trabajo más agotador y masacrar a cualquier oponente. Pero a pesar de que ha estado trabajando en las minas desde el día que nació, no puede salir adelante. Merle Travis escribió y grabó la canción en 1946. Pero hasta que Ford la hizo una versión, Sixteen Tons no le había hecho ningún bien a Travis.

Lejos de ahí. Aunque Travis era un chico patriótico de Kentucky, el gobierno de los EE. UU. pensaba que cualquier canción que se quejara del trabajo duro y la deuda sin esperanza era subversiva. La canción hizo que Travis fuera tildado de simpatizante comunista (una etiqueta peligrosa en esos días). Un ejecutivo discográfico de Capitol que era DJ en Chicago a finales de los 40 recuerda a un agente del FBI que llegó a la estación y le aconsejó que no tocara Sixteen Tons.

Gran alboroto por una pequeña canción.

Para 1955, cuando la canción finalmente se convirtió en un gran éxito, la mayoría de los estadounidenses ya se habían alejado de los trabajos del tipo de las minas de carbón. Era la era del  hombre del traje de franela gris , el hombre de la corporación, el experto en eficiencia y la angustia desconsolada por la conformidad, de personas que continuaban desesperadamente viajando, consumiendo, cooperando, conformándose, y engullendo sus tranquilizantes de Milltown y rogando a los médicos que lo hicieran tratar sus úlceras provocadas por la tensión. Este era un mundo muy, muy, muy lejos de las minas de carbón, con un conjunto aparentemente muy diferente de tribulaciones.

Sin embargo, de alguna manera ese coro todavía resonaba: Otro día más viejo y más endeudado.

Más allá de todas las letras de fantasía sobre ser criado en el cañaveral por una vieja mamá león, Sixteen Tons todavía resuena.

No trabajamos para empresas mineras que pagan en scrip canjeable solo en la tienda de la empresa. Pero trabajamos duro y terminamos con tarjetas de crédito que nos golpean con un interés del 19.99 por ciento, cargos por pagos atrasados ​​de $ 40 y otros cargos ocultos tan altos que es posible, incluso común, pagar durante años y en realidad debe más de lo que comenzó.

Trabajamos incluso más horas que nuestros padres, pagamos impuestos más altos, dependemos de dos salarios para mantener un hogar unido, empujamos a nuestros hijos alienados a guarderías y campamentos de educación del gobierno, vemos cómo nuestro dinero se va inflando constantemente y sufrimos mucho por una serie de trabajos. enfermedades mentales y físicas relacionadas.

No podemos hacer trabajo manual. Pero trabajamos incluso más horas que nuestros padres, pagamos impuestos más altos, dependemos de dos salarios para mantener unido un hogar, empujamos a nuestros hijos alienados a guarderías y campamentos de educación del gobierno, vemos cómo nuestro dinero se infla constantemente (mientras que la televisión nos dice el precio al consumidor índice se mantiene estable) y sufren mucho de una serie de enfermedades mentales y físicas relacionadas con el trabajo.

¿Qué ha cambiado sino los detalles? Para todas nuestras posesiones materiales, estamos en el mismo viejo ciclo de trabajar, sufrir y perder.

Y aunque es posible que el FBI no nos haga una visita por quejarnos al respecto, rebelarse contra los trabajos sigue siendo una amenaza para los poderes fácticos.

Sin embargo, el gobierno no tiene que preocuparse mucho por la rebelión. Porque hoy estamos programados desde el momento en que nos despertamos hasta el momento en que nos acostamos para valorar los trabajos, las grandes corporaciones, y las cosas que nos compran los trabajos, sobre los placeres reales y las necesidades reales de ser humanos.

Las noticias lo dicen todos los días:

• En julio se crearon 130.000 puestos de trabajo. Trabajos = Bueno.
• Estamos perdiendo trabajos en el extranjero. Perder trabajos = Malo.
• Los principales indicadores económicos dicen. Indicadores económicos (cualesquiera que sean) = Importante.
• El promedio industrial Dow-Jones subió… El mercado de valores = Vital.

Todos los días en los medios de comunicación, la salud de la nación se mide, a veces casi exclusivamente, en empleos y acciones, empleo y corporaciones.

No quiero decir que los ingresos, la producción y otras medidas similares no sean importantes. Son importantes, en su lugar. En perspectiva. Pero, ¿por qué nosotros (a través de nuestros medios) creemos que estos pocos factores son tan vitales y exclusivamente importantes cuando se trata de determinar la salud económica de nuestra sociedad?

Damos por sentado que los trabajos = buenos, las acciones altas = buenas y que trabajar más y gastar mucho dinero = más trabajos y acciones más altas.

Luego nos vamos a trabajos que en su mayoría detestamos. O trabajos que disfrutamos, pero que nos estresan, nos alejan de nuestras familias y convierten nuestras horas de hogar en una carga frenética, en la que tenemos que luchar para hacer de todo, desde entretenernos hasta hacer tiempo de calidad artificial con niños que apenas nos conocen.

Hay algo mal con esta imagen.

En nuestra configuración económica actual, que es un desarrollo evolutivo, no revolucionario, de hace 250 años, cuando comenzó la Revolución Industrial, sí, los trabajos son importantes. Pero eso es como decir que la quimioterapia para inducir el vómito es importante cuando se tiene cáncer.

Oh, sí. Pero es mejor no tener cáncer en primer lugar, ¿verdad?

En una comunidad humana saludable, los trabajos no son ni necesarios ni deseables. El trabajo productivo   es necesario, por razones económicas, sociales e incluso espirituales. Los mercados libres también son algo sorprendente, casi mágico en su capacidad para satisfacer miles de millones de necesidades diversas. ¿Emprendimiento? ¡Excelente! Pero los trabajos (salir con un horario fijo para realizar funciones fijas para otra persona día tras día por un salario) no son buenos para el cuerpo, el alma, la familia o la sociedad.

Intuitivamente, sin palabras, la gente lo sabía en 1955. Lo sabían en 1946.  Realmente lo sabían cuando Ned Ludd y sus amigos estaban destrozando las máquinas de la Revolución Industrial temprana (aunque es posible que los luditas no hayan entendido exactamente por qué necesitaban hacer lo que querían lo hicieron).

Los trabajos apestan. El empleo corporativo apesta. Una vida abarrotada en cajas de 9 a 5 apesta. Los cubículos grises no son más que una actualización de los oscuros molinos satánicos de William Blake. Por supuesto, los cubículos son más luminosos y aireados; pero son diferentes en grado más que en tipo de los molinos de la Revolución Industrial. Tanto los cubículos como los molinos oscuros significan trabajar en los términos de otras personas, para las metas de otras personas, con el sufrimiento de otras personas. Ninguno de los dos tipos de trabajo suele resultar en que seamos dueños de los frutos de nuestro trabajo o tengamos la satisfacción de crear algo de principio a fin con nuestras propias manos. Tampoco nos permite trabajar a nuestro ritmo, ni al ritmo de las estaciones. Tampoco nos permite acceder a nuestras familias, amigos o comunidades cuando los necesitamos o ellos nos necesitan. Ambos aíslan el trabajo de cualquier otra parte de nuestra vida.

Y diablos, especialmente si trabaja para una gran corporación, puede estar seguro de que Ebenezer Scrooge se preocupó más por Bob Cratchett que su empleador se preocupa por usted.

Los poderes fácticos han temido durante los últimos 250 años que averigüemos todo eso y tratemos de hacer algo al respecto. ¿Por qué otra razón el FBI intentaría suprimir una oscura canción popular falsa? La historia estadounidense está llena de historias ocultas de milicias privadas o estatales que se utilizan para aplastar rebeliones y huelgas de trabajadores. En la época de los luditas, el gobierno británico llegó a convertir el sabotaje industrial en un crimen capital. En un momento, la corona y el parlamento pusieron a trabajar a más soldados para aplastar a los luditas que en el campo luchando contra Napoleón Bonaparte.

Ahora, eso es miedo para ti.

Pero hoy, no te preocupes. Hemos hecho de la esclavitud asalariada una parte tan importante de nuestra cultura que probablemente ni siquiera se le ocurra a la mayoría de la gente que hay algo antinatural en separar el trabajo del resto de nuestras vidas. O sobre pasar toda nuestra vida laboral produciendo cosas en las que a menudo podemos sentir un mínimo orgullo personal, o ningún orgullo en absoluto.

¡Fueron felices! Nos decimos a nosotros mismos. ¡Somos los más prósperos! ¡gratis! ¡feliz! gente que jamás haya vivido en la tierra! Somos más longevos, más sanos, más inteligentes y, en general, mejor que nadie, nunca, en cualquier momento en el planeta Tierra. Así continuamos diciéndonos a nosotros mismos mientras nos dirigimos a nuestras citas de asesoramiento, tomamos nuestro Prozac o contemplamos los pozos de la última botella de vino.

¡Plumas de caballo! ¿Sabes cómo sonamos, asegurándonos de nuestra buena fortuna? Sonamos como las voces mecanizadas susurrando a los biberones preprogramados en  Brave New World de Aldous Huxley:

Los niños alfa… trabajan mucho más duro que nosotros, porque son terriblemente inteligentes. Estoy muy contento de ser un Beta, porque no trabajo tan duro. Y entonces somos mucho mejores que los Gammas y Deltas.

Para creer lo felices que somos, tenemos que ignorar nuestras crecientes tasas de abuso de drogas, nuestras crecientes tasas de depresión, nuestros dolores de espalda, nuestros síndromes del túnel carpiano y nuestro síndrome de fatiga crónica. Tenemos que ignorar los miles de millones de dólares y miles de millones de horas que gastamos en productos farmacéuticos que alteran el estado de ánimo, asesoramiento sobre abuso de drogas, remedios para el dolor de cabeza, entretenimiento de escape sin sentido, guarderías, compras de estatus, alimentos reconfortantes poco saludables, juergas de compras y atención médica para todas nuestras enfermedades físicas y mentales vagas e inespecíficas.

¿Crees que así es como una persona feliz gasta su tiempo y su dinero? ¡Dame un descanso!

Deje de escuchar ese pequeño susurro mecánico del estado corporativo que le dice lo que se supone que debe considerar importante, que le dice que se supone que los trabajos son el foco central de su vida. Deja de escuchar esa voz que te dice que eres feliz cuando todo tu cuerpo y tu alma te gritan que eres infeliz.

Aquí hay algo para gritarse a sí mismo: ¡Los trabajos apestan! ¡Los trabajos son malos para ti!

Grítalo hasta que realmente te escuches a ti mismo gritándolo, luego sal de la locura laboral, de la esclavitud asalariada, de la rutina que te mantiene endeudado con el gobierno, el patrón, el banco y la compañía de tarjetas de crédito.

¡Ay, pero espera! Morirás si no tienes trabajo, al igual que un paciente de cáncer podría morir sin quimioterapia. En nuestra sociedad, si no tienes trabajo, andas por los suelos. Eres un pobre desafortunado. Eres un vagabundo. Eres una sanguijuela. Eres un perdedor. Y de verdad, de verdad, si no tienes un empleo regular de algún tipo, estás en peligro de irte por el desagüe de la vida.

Como individuo, por supuesto que puedes escapar de la trampa del trabajo hasta cierto punto. Como escritor independiente, lo tengo. Todavía tengo que trabajar para otras personas, pero puedo hacerlo a un ritmo orgánico. Cuando brilla el sol, a menudo puedo sentarme en la terraza o dar un paseo.

El hombre que a veces corta mi césped se ha escapado un poco. Puede programar su propio día sin tener que pedir permiso o sin arruinar la línea de producción de nadie.

Mi exnovio, el ingeniero de software, también ha escapado. Trabaja en su habitación de invitados y vive y trabaja en el mundo de los sueños informáticos que más disfruta.

Así era para la mayoría de la gente, antes de la Revolución Industrial. Es posible que hayan trabajado duro y que no hayan tenido mucho. Como en todas las épocas, tuvieron que soportar el salvajismo de las luchas por el poder de los gobernantes, las guerras de los gobernantes y la confiscación de propiedades de los gobernantes. Pero, en general, podían pasar sus días según lo dictaran las estaciones y sus propias necesidades (y las necesidades de sus familias y comunidades). Tenían una conexión directa y personal con los bienes que fabricaban y los servicios que realizaban.

Señoras de Avon, carpinteros autónomos, asesores de seguridad, personas que se ganan la vida vendiendo productos en eBay, practicantes de reflexología, vendedores de reuniones de intercambio, jardineros autónomos, madereros contratados, traficantes de drogas, tejedores caseros, psíquicos: hoy han todos hicieron un escape personal parcial de la trampa del trabajo.

Pero escapar puede ser peligroso. Cuando trabaja por cuenta propia, a menudo no puede darse el lujo de proporcionarse la “red de seguridad” que viene con un trabajo (seguro médico, vacaciones, pago por enfermedad, seguro de desempleo, etc.). Y el problema aún más profundo es que la sociedad, esa abstracción difícil de precisar, pero de vital importancia, aún impone sus valores y sus problemas incluso a aquellos de nosotros que hacemos nuestros mejores esfuerzos personales para escapar de ellos.

Usted y yo podemos ser lo suficientemente inteligentes y afortunados como para crear para nosotros empleos hechos a mano que no nos obliguen a cubículos grises, rutina de 9 a 5, viajes espantosos, almuerzos que inducen indigestión engullidos en nuestros escritorios, compañeros de trabajo y jefes que nos irritan los nervios, trajes de tres piezas, pantimedias y agotamiento total al final del día.

Pero tú y yo, los cautelosos trabajadores por cuenta propia, todavía estamos atrapados lidiando con las consecuencias de un sistema que produce niños descuidados y mal educados, una cultura de consumo frenética, corporaciones impersonales, televisión y abuso de drogas como un medio para adormecer el dolor, la infelicidad. y vecinos y familiares insatisfechos y muchos, muchos más problemas que nos perjudican tanto como perjudican a los trabajadores.

¿Es posible, entonces, crear una sociedad en la que el trabajo sea más satisfactorio personalmente y se adapte de manera más orgánica al resto de nuestras vidas? ¿Es posible crear tal elección para todos los que quieran tomarla?

Casi todos los escritores que abogan por la abolición de los trabajos y la celebración del ocio repiten el mismo puñado de mensajes interesantes, pero ligeramente inútiles.

Primero, miran hacia atrás a las sociedades de cazadores-recolectores (que trabajan, en promedio, de 3 a 4 horas al día) y dicen: si ellos pueden hacerlo, ¿por qué nosotros no? No se dan cuenta de que los cazadores-recolectores, cualesquiera que sean sus otras virtudes, no inventan vacunas, no construyen dispositivos de alta tecnología ni tienen comodidades tales como plomería interior.

Los escritores contra el trabajo también hablan de convertir el trabajo en una especie de diversión. Ese es otro gran rasgo de las sociedades de cazadores-recolectores. Es fácil divertirse cuando estás cosechando bayas o persiguiendo ciervos con un grupo de amigos. Pero nadie construye equipos médicos de precisión por diversión. Tampoco se sumergen una milla bajo tierra para “cargar dieciséis toneladas de carbón número nueve” por diversión.

Finalmente, los escritores anti-trabajo son grandes en la teoría utópica: la sociedad podría funcionar tan bien, si solo, sí solo. Las propuestas utópicas son inevitablemente ligeras en detalles clave. No consideran cómo alejarnos de la cultura laboral corporativa sin coerción. No se dan cuenta de cómo se podrían producir bienes y servicios modernos sin las instituciones grandes, bien financiadas y basadas en el trabajo que proporcionan gran parte de la vida moderna. (No puedes empalmar genes, dividir átomos o construir chips de computadora en tu pintoresco taller Amish).

Entonces las preguntas son:

1. ¿Es posible tener una cultura orgánica de trabajo y ocio sin retroceder al nivel de supervivencia de subsistencia?

2. ¿Y es posible tener los beneficios de la tecnología avanzada sin tener que sacrificar tanto de nuestro tiempo, nuestra individualidad y nuestra cordura para obtenerlos?

Mientras el gobierno y sus corporaciones fuertemente favorecidas y subsidiadas y los mercados financieros gobiernen nuestros días de trabajo, las respuestas a estas preguntas nunca llegarán. Podemos encontrar nuestro camino hacia una sociedad humana de trabajo y ocio solo a través del experimento y la experiencia. Y podremos hacer esos experimentos solo junto con (perdónenme por usar la expresión cliché, pero precisa) un cambio de paradigma. La cultura laboral actual, que nos aprisiona con las cadenas de plata de los beneficios y los grilletes de hierro de la deuda, se cierne sobre nuestro camino.

El cambio radical necesario parece lejano ahora. Sin embargo, los paradigmas cambian. Las instituciones caen. Y a menudo caen justo cuando los viejos paradigmas parecen más arraigados o las viejas instituciones parecen más inamovibles.

Es posible que parte de la maquinaria del cambio ya esté en funcionamiento. Por ejemplo:

• Aunque la automatización aún no nos ha dejado sin trabajo, como se suponía, todavía tiene el potencial de eliminar muchos tipos de trabajo pesado.

• Aunque el trabajo del conocimiento basado en computadoras no ha permitido que millones de nosotros dejemos el mundo corporativo y trabajemos en casa (como, nuevamente, se suponía que debía suceder), eso es más un problema de la psicología del poder corporativo que de la tecnología. Nuestros jefes temen dejarnos trabajar permanentemente en casa; después de todo, ¡podríamos tomar descansos para tomar café de 20 minutos, en lugar de 10! Pero, ¿y si, por ejemplo, una crisis de combustible o una epidemia obligaran a más de nosotros a quedarnos en casa para hacer nuestro trabajo? El paradigma podría cambiar tan rápido que nuestros jefes se derrumbarían.

• Un cambio de actitud a gran escala también podría derribar la estructura laboral tradicional. Y eso, también, puede que ya esté sucediendo. Cuántos padres están mirando a su alrededor y diciendo: ¿Esta mierda de dos trabajos no nos llevará a ninguna parte? Es solo un pequeño salto desde allí a la verdad real: la basura de un solo trabajo tampoco satisface nuestras necesidades reales. Cuántos de nosotros hemos pasado 10 o 20 o 30 años comprando los trabajos = bueno; gastar = ¿buena exageración solo para decidir alejarse del laberinto de ratas y hacer algo menos lucrativo, pero más gratificante?

¿Escuchas a muchas personas lamentándose de dolor después de alejarse del mundo laboral y establecer una vida más centrada en el hogar, la familia, la aventura, el espíritu y la comunidad? Solo aquellos pocos que, por mala planificación o extrema mala suerte, lo intentaron y no lo lograron.

Hasta que la gran ilusión trabajo = buena se haga añicos, es ciertamente posible que millones de personas vivan vidas más orgánicas, sin la esclavitud del trabajo. A medida que más personas declaran su independencia, surgen más redes de apoyo para ayudarlos (por ejemplo, un seguro de salud asequible para los trabajadores por cuenta propia o proveedores de atención médica que optan por brindar servicios más asequibles a través de programas de solo efectivo como Simple Care ).

Y podemos comenzar a considerar: ¿Qué tipos de tecnología nos permiten vivir de manera más independiente y qué tipos de independencia aún nos permiten aprovechar las tecnologías que mejoran la vida mientras nos mantenemos fuera de la trampa laboral que degrada la vida?

Toma un trabajo y habrás vendido parte de ti mismo a un maestro. Te has privado de los verdaderos frutos de tus propios esfuerzos.

Cuando eres dueño de tu propio trabajo, eres dueño de tu propia vida. Es un gol digno de mucho sacrificio. Y mucho pensamiento profundo.

Mientras tanto, desafortunadamente, cualquiera que llore, ¡no se necesitan trabajos! ¡Los trabajos no son saludables para los adultos y otros seres vivos! está llorando en el desierto. Se puede contar con que Elijahs y Cassandras seamos tratados como idiotas marginales. Y cualquiera que comience a idear un plan serio que comience a cortar los cimientos de la estructura de poder estatal-corporativo puede esperar ser tratado como el Enemigo Público Número Uno y es mejor que se vigile el trasero. Porque al igual que Merle Travis y Ned Ludd, amenaza la seguridad de quienes tienen poder sobre los demás.

Si te ha gustado este articulo y quieres apoyar a esta comunidad, puedes donar a través de este link: https://c4ss.org/apoyo

Par Dawie Coetzee. Article original: The Long Shadow of Colonialist Ideology, 16 octobre 2022. Traduction française par Éléazar Duhot.

Dans le discours politique sud-africain actuel, il est tragique de constater à quelle fréquence des éléments de l’idéologie colonialiste resurgissent dans les arguments des personnes qui s’efforcent le plus de montrer qu’ on ne peut pas démolir la maison du maître avec les outils du maître [En référence à un discours de la poétesse Audre Lorde prononcé pendant la Second Sex Conference en 1979, NdT], tragique parce que j’aimerais qu’ils aient raison ! La métaphore est absurde en elle-même : le nom gravé sur le manche d’une massue n’a aucun effet sur sa capactié à abattre un mur porteur. Supposer qu’il y a là une pertinence nécessaire, c’est passer à côté de l’intention précise de l’expression, à savoir que les outils du maître sont ici analogues aux complexes et aux structures idéologiques, façonnés et conçus pour accomplir leur fonction oppressive spécifique, et uniquement celle-ci. Car l’idée même que tout ce qui concerne le maître porte son essence unique et exclusive est elle-même l’un des outils du maître, et en fait l’expression l’inclut.

Par exemple, j’ai rencontré des personnes dont je soupçonne qu’elles sont convaincues que les gens sont génétiquement prédisposés à parler une langue plutôt qu’une autre, que l’injustice inhérente à l’imposition institutionnelle de langues dans lesquelles les gens ne se sentent pas à l’aise n’est pas un non-respect des circonstances découlant de leurs histoires spécifiques d’isolement et d’oppression, mais un rejet de leur essence génétique. L’accusation devient alors non pas celle de perpétuer un mode injuste, mais de favoriser une “race” au sens le plus littéral et fasciste du terme.

Au cours de l’année écoulée, j’ai également de plus en plus souvent été confronté à une position sur l’invasion russe de l’Ukraine qui va bien au-delà des poncifs habituels des tankies sur les médias mainstream et la propagande de la CIA. La logique semble être la suivante :

1. L’Union soviétique et le régime de Poutine sont des incarnations d’une même entité, c’est-à-dire d’une essence ethnique russe éternelle ;

2. Cette essence russe  a fait preuve de bienveillance à l’égard des luttes anticoloniales africaines, et donc à l’égard d’une essence ethnique africaine éternelle, pendant les années Brejnev ;

3. Par conséquent, l’essence ethnique africaine éternelle est redevable envers l’essence ethnique russe éternelle, ce qui place les Africains dans une obligation éthique-ethnique de soutenir Poutine.

L’ironie est que cette allégeance indirecte à l’Union soviétique est construite, non pas en s’appuyant sur un marxisme supposé de l’Union soviétique, mais en sur  un ethnonationalisme qui est certainement antithétique au marxisme.

Le fil conducteur de ces anecdotes est une croyance en des entités ethnico-culturelles mutuellement indépendantes et autosuffisantes, dont les individus sont présumés être de simples projections semi-réelles. Je crains que cela ne soit un socle métaphysique anthropologique  plus répandu dans la société sud-africaine que ce que les apparences laissent penser. Même parmi les voix raisonnables et mainstream, il arrive parfois qu’une remarque anodine ou un commentaire sans importance prenne tout son sens uniquement grâce à cette croyance.

D’où vient cette croyance ? Je me méfie de qualifier les gens de “lobotomisés” ou de “moutons” : j’évite toute suggestion selon laquelle les gens sont incapables de se forger leur propre opinion, alors qu’une partie importante de ma position est précisément que les gens sont parfaitement capables de forger leur propre opinion, et qu’ils le font d’ailleurs en permanence. En même temps, je suis insatisfait de constater que cette croyance représente une sorte de position par défaut, concernant les humains en général ou pour les Africains en particulier : elle est trop caractéristique d’un moment précis de l’histoire des idées. Je serais tout à fait réticent à répondre à la question, si ce n’était pour ma propre expérience du discours politique comme une chambre de résonnance des Blancs dans l’apartheid en Afrique du Sud, où la croyance en des entités ethnico-culturelles mutuellement indépendantes et autosuffisantes représentait un socle métaphysique anthropologique omniprésent.

Je me souviens des débats de cette époque. Tout tournait autour de “Comment une nation peut-elle espérer s’épanouir ?” et “Comment une race peut-elle espérer survivre ?” L’idée selon laquelle les nations ou les races sont les véritables sujets de l’histoire, un angle plus proche de Lukács que de Hegel, était très largement diffusée. Le mot même d’apartheid – littéralement “séparation” – résume l’idée d’entités ethnico-culturelles autonomes et imperméables, à la fois une nécessité anthropologique et une finalité historique bancale. Ma propre compréhension embryonnaire de la société en termes de relations structurées entre des personnes était accueillie avec une incompréhension totale.

Il est significatif que les deux guerres anglo-boers de 1880-1881 et 1899-1902 soient souvent appelées les “Vryheidsoorloë”, ou Guerres de la liberté, dans le contexte des Afrikaners blancs. “Liberté” ici n’a rien à voir avec la capacité d’action d’un agent humain, mais concerne uniquement l’élimination de l’hégémonie de l’Empire britannique sur le processus d’“émergence nationale” des Afrikaners blancs. Dans ces termes, il est donc axiomatique que les bottes doivent toujours être léchées : peu importe si “certainement dans n’importe quel État réussi”, les gens se font botter les dents, mais seulement qui donne les coups de pied et à qui appartiennent les dents. La liberté devient incompréhensible sauf en tant que “notre dictature totalitaire à nous”.

La cristallisation du nationalisme blanc afrikaner après les guerres anglo-boers, qui a finalement conduit à la philosophie de l’apartheid et à la plateforme qui a porté le Parti National au pouvoir en 1948, s’est inspirée non seulement du même climat intellectuel hégélio-nietzschéo-wagnérien sur lequel s’appuyait le développement contemporain du nazisme en Allemagne, mais aussi les constructions idéologiques coloniales européennes antérieures. L’idée d’entités ethnico-culturelles autonomes et imperméables est étroitement liée à l’idée largement britannique d’une “Afrique profonde et sombre”, qui permettait aux Européens de mener des explorations ad hoc à des fins diverses en les présentant comme une découverte, une “ouverture à la lumière” motivée par l’impérialisme colonial européen.

Cette idée exigeait une compréhension anhistorique de l’Afrique précoloniale, unifiée dans son isolement par rapport au reste du monde (peu importe qu’elle soit homogène ou non à l’intérieur) : il fallait que l’Afrique soit comprise comme une “chose” cohérente, fondamentalement et éternellement séparée du monde. Il était nécessaire que la nature fondamentale de l’univers change à Gibraltar, au canal de Suez et au Bab-el-Mandeb, et que des choses comme la gravité et le comportement de la lumière soient différentes de ce côté-ci. L’idée d’une territorialité ethnique éternelle – que ce sang est lié à ce sol – était donc une idée coloniale centrale, comme en témoignent les efforts coloniaux visant à imposer des notions d’État-nation à des populations assujetties, bien que ces notions remontent probablement à l’ère coloniale elle-même. “L’Orient est l’Orient, l’Occident est l’Occident et jamais ils ne se rencontreront.” (bien que, d’après les lignes suivantes, il soit clair que Kipling ne faisait pas ici une proclamation, mais décrivait une attitude courante à son époque). Nous en sommes encore souvent à une “Occident” unitaire, une chose où on trouverait des calculatrices de poche et de la glace, en contraste non seulement avec un “Orient” qui est un tapis de riffs orientaux et de gongs allant du Bosphore à la Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinée, mais aussi avec l’Afrique. Il était nécessaire que “l’Afrique” et “l’Africain” deviennent des vérités fondamentales et éternelles, essentielles à la nature la plus fondamentale de la réalité ; de même que “l’homme noir” et “l’homme blanc”, “l’Europe” et “l’Européen”, et bien d’autres catégories encore. Cela convient à l’idée que toutes les personnes agissent nécessairement principalement dans l’intérêt de “leur propre genre”. La revendication axiomatique d’une essence éternelle nie tout contexte historique. Elle permet des projections insouciantes de son propre contenu idéologique, conduisant à des énormités historiques qui, hélas, sont dures à cuire. Il y a à peine une semaine, j’ai rencontré l’affirmation selon laquelle Jésus aurait fondé l’Empire romain pour assurer la suprématie de la race européenne : mais cette affirmation était-elle en faveur ou en défaveur du colonialisme ?

Ce n’était rien de moins que de construire le monde, associé par la suite à un space opera : la construction d’un univers entier de telle façon que les programmes des bâtisseurs d’empire moustachus britanniques se révèlent fondamentalement nécessaires en lui – et présentés avec une telle force que cela est devenu la vision du monde de générations successives.

C’est cet environnement métaphysique qui a permis au Parti National de maintenir un système de parti dominant pendant 46 ans. En reformulant toutes les questions politiques non en questions de “quoi” ou “comment”, mais en questions de “qui”, en modifiant le discours pour qu’il ne porte plus sur ce qui constitue une condition souhaitable et sur ce qu’il faut faire pour l’atteindre, pour en faire une seule pour déterminer quels intérêts doivent être servis par quelque moyen que ce soit, le PN a pu se définir comme la représentation nécessaire, voire même la manifestation politique directe et très littérale, de la prétendue “nation” afrikaner blanche. En présentant un vote contre le PN comme un vote contre “la nation”, le succès électoral pouvait être entièrement découplé de la performance administrative ou économique tant qu’une majorité de l’électorat blanc s’identifiait aux Afrikaners.

Je suis donc convaincu de pouvoir retracer la persistance actuelle de cette métaphysique anthropologique dans la société sud-africaine à un courant intellectuel qui traverse l’idéologie de l’apartheid jusqu’à l’idéologie colonialiste qui l’a précédée. Dans quelle mesure l’idéologie colonialiste détermine-t-elle la métaphysique implicite par défaut, tacite, de la culture sud-africaine aujourd’hui ? Dans quelle mesure l’empreinte de l’idéologie colonialiste est-elle profonde ? Quelle est l’étendue de son spectre ? Parmi toutes les défaillances de l’ANC depuis son accession au pouvoir en 1994, celle que je suis le moins enclin à pardonner est leur refus de démanteler activement cette métaphysique et, au lieu de cela, leur exploitation explicite de celle-ci pour leurs propres fins électorales. Car le discours est aujourd’hui exactement le même, jusqu’au hypothèses les plus fondamentales, qu’en 1975.

Il est sans doute raisonnable de s’attendre à ce que la majorité sud-africaine, bien qu’elle se soit violemment vue exclue de la participation au discours politique pendant les années d’apartheid, ait néanmoins été profondément affectée par celui-ci, simplement en ayant vécu dans un environnement imprégné d’une idéologie colonialiste et en étant bombardée pendant des décennies avec ses idées fondamentales ? C’est ici que nous trouvons une faille, car l’idée même d’entités ethniques et culturelles autonomes et imperméables implique que les gens pensent en termes d’idées ethniquement spécifiques déterminées par leur génétique, comprises comme existant séparément d’un contexte général. Il nie l’idée de l’échange culturel, sans parler de l’idée que l’échange culturel est universel, abondant dans sa portée, et central à la mécanique de la culture même.

Ayant grandi dans un contexte où la croyance par défaut est que vos idées proviennent de vos gènes, il devient très difficile de ne pas simplement accepter que cette croyance elle-même provient de votre génétique. Il devient presque impossible donc de la remettre en question. C’est comme si l’idéologie colonialiste vous conduisait à travers une porte qui devient invisible une fois que, l’ayant franchie, vous vous retournez pour regarder derrière vous. Quelle idée génialement malsaine ! Car elle nous a laissés aujourd’hui avec un mouvement anti-colonial impregné dans des idées développées spécifiquement pour permettre et faciliter le colonialisme, désireux de défendre “l’Afrique profonde  et sombre” contre sa propre histoire cosmopolite.

L’idéologie colonialiste nous a convaincus non seulement que les outils du maître ont vraiment été uniquement les nôtres pour toute l’éternité, mais elle nous a également convaincus qu’une vaste gamme d’outils qui n’ont rien à voir avec le maître sont réellement les siens. Est-il étonnant que la maison du maître continue d’être reconstruite ?

Nous devons dépasser cela. Nous devons prendre du recul, nous frotter les yeux, et voir le monde qui émerge des développements récents dans les études historiques et anthropologiques. Au lieu de “l’Afrique profonde et sombre”, l’image qui ressort est celle d’une Afrique qui a toujours été en communication avec le reste du monde, qui a toujours appris et enseigné, dont les frontières ont toujours été floues et poreuses. N’est-ce pas une bien meilleure revendication pour les Africains ? Car c’est une revendication, partagée, sur le monde entier.

Yazar: Jessica Flanagan. Orijinal makale: Politics and Anarchist Ideals. Yayınlanma Tarihi: 18 Haziran 2017. Tercüman: Zagreides.

Anarşizmle devletçilik arasındaki temel bir fark, anarşistlerin kamu memurlarının ahlaki olarak iktidar kullanmaya veya insanları şiddetle tehdit etmeye herhangi birinden daha fazla salahiyetli olduğu varsayımını kabul etmemeleridir* . Bundan dolayı anarşistler, yetkililerin, mesela farklı yerlerde doğmuş kimselerin birbirleriyle yakınlık kurmasına mani olan resmi hudutları dayatma yetkisine sahip olmadığını müdafaa ederler. Yahut yetkililerin, bazılarının reddedebileceği belli bir kolektif projeye herkesi katılmaya mecbur etme yetkisi olmadığını kabul ederler. Bu manada, Grayson English’in bu sempozyumda ibraz ettiği gibi anarşizm ve demokrasi paralel birer ruha sahiptir. Bunun bariz emaresi ise demokrasi aynı zamanda bazı insanların siyasi idareye öbürlerinden daha çok iştirak etme hakkına sahip olduğunu reddetmesidir. Anarşizm ve devletçilik arasındaki bir başka temel fark, anarşistlerin umumiyetle, sorumsuz bir şahsın zorlama ve zorlamaya karşı haklar gibi tabii haklarının ihlalini haklı çıkarmanın çok zor olduğunu düşünmeleridir. Bu nedenle anarşistler, tüm insanların şiddet kullanmaktan veya vatandaşlarını bir şeylere mecbur etmekten eşit derecede imtina etmelerinin lazım olduğunu düşünür. Tam da bu nokta, demokratlar ve anarşistlerin kırılma çizgisidir. Demokratlar, tüm beşeriyetin siyasi şiddet fiillerinin nasıl kullanılacağını ve kendileriyle vatandaşlarının zorlanıp zorlanmayacağına ve ne vakit zorlanacağına karar verme hususunda eşit haklara sahip olduğu kanısında. Bu sempozyumda ortaya çıkan tartışmalara cevap olarak, demokrasinin anarşizmin dostu olmadığını, ancak belki bir müttefiki olabileceğini öngörmekteyim. Adil bir toplum, insanların tabii haklarına saygı duyulan toplumdur ve bu sebepten dolayı insanların tabii haklarını muhafaza etmenin ötesine geçen kanunlara tabi olanların rızasını gerektirir. Basitçe, insanların rızası olmayan bir hukuki veya siyasi nizam adaletsizdir. Bir kanuna veya siyasi nizama sadece rey vererek rıza gösterilmez, lakin rey vermekle hangi kanun ya da nizam tercih edilirse edilsin evvelden kabul edilebilir. Fakat insanlar, vatandaşlarının reyleriyle vücuda gelen kanunlar ile siyasi nizamlara da ekseriyetle önceden rıza göstermezler. Bundan dolayı, demokratik müesseseler, insanların tabii haklarının muhafazasının ötesine geçen kanunları tatbik ettikleri, bu kanunları tatbik etmek için şiddet ve şiddet tehditini kullandıkları raddede demokratik müesseselerin kendileri de insanların tabii haklarını ihlal etmektedir. Ve işte bu sebeple prensip olarak adaletsizdir. Pratikte, şiddet ihtiva etmeyen ve bedeni haklar gibi tabii haklara saygı duyanlar için demokrasi daha da fazla zahmetlidir. Hakiki seçmenler önyargılıdır, umumiyetle feci şekilde ırkçıdır, azınlıklara düşmanca davranan ve savunmasız insanların haklarını ihlal eden politikaları uygulama olasılığı yüksektir**. Bu halde çoğunluğun diktatörlüğü kaçınılmaz gibi gözüküyor.  Demokratik devletler bundan başka meclisler ve mutat seçimler de istediğinden mütevellit, her nesil bir öncekinden daha fazlas aktif olmak için siyasi teşviklere sahip olduğundan, küçük ölçekte bile olsa, hükümetin genişlemesini sürdürürler. Bir başka yandan, Shawn Wilbur’un düşündüğü gibi, bazı vaziyetlerde beraber yaşayan insanlar bazı toplu kararlar almak mecburiyetindedir ve rıza veya fikir birliğini tesis etmek her zaman mümkün olamaz.Mesela, çocuklara bakma vazifesinin pay edilmesi veya tabii kaynakların dağılımı mevzularında ortaya çıkan problemler, sadece şiddetsiz  gönüllülük yoluyla çözülme ihtimali düşük olan problemlerdir. Fakat yine de, William Gillis’in kolektif karar vermenin psikopatolojisine dair ilham verici argümanının altını çizdiği gibi, grup halinde ve birbirine muhtaç insanlar tam katılım ya da fikir birliği hususunda ısrar ettiklerinde, hür ve bağımsız insanlardan müteşekkil bir toplum sürdürmek son derece güç olabilir. Konsensus, -demokrasi gibi- rıza denilse bile, kolayca kendine has bir tahakküm şekline dönüşebilir. İdeal olarak, toplu kararlar, tüm insanların tahakkümünü asgariye indirgeyecek, şeffaflık ve insani hürriyeti teşvik edecek şekillerde alınmak zorundadır. Buradaki problem, toplu karar verme için mevcut herhangi bir enstitüsyonel mekanizmanın bu ideale yaklaşıp yaklaşamayacağı problemidir. Nathan Goodman, demokrasi veya serbest pazar gibi şeylerin anarşistlerin aradığı şeffaflık ve açıklık idealine ancak bir dereceye kadar benzeyebileceğini iddia ediyor. Fakat demokrasi gibi, piyasalar da bazı mülkiyet kurallarının mukaveleler yoluyla devam etmesi ve bu mukavelelerin tatbik edilmesinin sorumsuz kimselerin tabii haklarını da ihlal etmesi nispetinde idealin gerisinde kalıyor. Bu sebeplerden mütevellit, ahlaki eşitlik ve haklara saygı benzeri anarşist ideallerin, bu ideallere yaklaşan müesseselere ne şekilde dönüşebileceğini ve bu ideallerin aynı zamanda koruma için toplu karar vermenin mecburi olduğu hallerde insanların toplu karar alma sürecine girmelerini nasıl sağlayabileceğini bilmiyorum. Bu, anarşist mütefekkirler için temel bir meydan okuma gibi geliyor bana. Sadede gelmek için, bu meydan okumaya karşı iki muvakkat cevap sunacağım.

Bir: anarşist idealler, ruhumuzu bilgilendirmek açısından değerli olabilir.Mevcut herhangi bir siyasi topluluğun bu ideallere göre tam olarak yaşaması pratikte (hatta zorunlu olarak) mümkün olmasa bile, yasaların ve kurumların tüm değerlendirmeleri. Ve yasalar ve kurumlar hakkındaki ahlaki değerlendirmelerimizi bilgilendirerek, ideallerin kendileri yine de pratik olarak faydalıdır.

rİki: Piyasalar ve demokratik müesseseler, anarşist ideallere problemsiz bir şekilde intibak etmese dahi, bu idealler göz önünde tutulduğu vakit, devletleri bu ideallere statükodan daha yakın hale getirme ihtimaline sahip olabilirler. Bu şekilde, daha barışçıl ve gönüllü bir topluma giden yol, mecburen barış ve gönüllülük esaslarının dışına çıkabilir. Tehlike barizdir: demokrasi ya da piyasa toplumunun müdafileri sık sık bu uzlaşma müesseselerinin kendileri sadece müesseselermiş gibi konuşmaya başlarlar. Demokrasiye (yahut dapiyasalara) enstrümental olarak yaklaşmak, bu müesseselerin toplumu daha az şiddetli ve daha hür kıldığı derecede meşrulaştırılabilir***. Demokrasinin kendisini hür ve adil bir toplum sanmak ise, doğru bir yargı değildir.

Referanslar

* Michael Huemer, The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

** Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

*** Richard J. Arneson, “Defending the Purely Instrumental Account of Democratic Legitimacy,” Journal of Political Philosophy 11, no. 1 (2003): 122–132.

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I’ll keep this short. I count myself among the defenders of private gun ownership, because I am an anarchist and I see utility in having a population that can challenge the state monopoly on violence if needed. Despite this, I am highly critical of right wing gun culture and it’s simple manichean narratives that cast those who support private ownership as the defenders of liberty and those who oppose private ownership as mad tyrants. Guns are tools. They’re not magic wands, and they don’t inherently signify anything about one’s feelings towards liberty.

The idea that mass private ownership of fire arms could potentially be a bulwark against tyranny is valid, but not without some caveats. It’s easy enough to understand the simple logic of “if the people are well armed then they can fight off tyrants.” I often think of anarchist resistance to Franco in the Spanish Civil War and how a well armed peasantry and proletariat might have been a deciding factor in the struggle. Spanish peasants and workers often didn’t have access to private firearms. They had to break into state armories to aquire weapons, and these weapons were often old, out dated, and poorly maintained. What if they had been as well armed as the North American population is today albeit with weapons of the time? Perhaps they wouldn’t have had to rely as much on weapons from Stalin, and maybe his goons wouldn’t have been in a position to stab them in the back as a result. We’ll never know.

The flip side that people need to consider is that private fire arms can also be used to establish tyranny. What if a majority of gun owners support a mad man hell bent on personal dictatorship? What if the majority of gun owners in Spain were supporters of Franco? What if the rich are the only people who can afford decent weapons? Sadly this was the case. The rich fascists were indeed the most likely group to be well armed in Spain, because they were on average the most wealthy and well connected. This is the dark side of private fire arms that not many of us want to broach.

Now, to be clear, I am not making an argument against private ownership. I am in favor. However, we all need to understand the duality of an armed population if we are going to be an armed population. Education is the first bulwark against tyranny. If people understand how to spot a tyrant they will be less likely to follow one. Social equality is the second. If everyone is taken care of, we won’t have a desperate mass willing to sacrifice their freedom for bread. A culture of non domination is the third. If people are socialized to have an anti authoritarian bias they will find authority repugnant. Horizontal institutions are the fourth. If we have federalism, direct democracy and free association then there won’t be a central node of power which can be used to subordinate the masses. The abolition of the state is a must if we truly want to avoid tyranny. Guns, however, are dead last. Guns are for when everything else has failed.

Unfortunately, “the people” are not always the good guys. The people could be progressive working class libertarian socialists, or they could be reactionaries, racists, and totalitarians. Unfortunately, I think we’re trending towards the latter rather than the former these days. A big factor is a simple formula people run through their minds. The formula goes like this;

Pro gun = anti tyranny, anti gun = pro tyranny, therefore the most pro gun voice is the most anti tyranny voice.

From this point of view anyone can be conned into following an authoritarian, while paradoxically believing they are on the side of liberty.

This logic is baked into the American consciousness. The narrative goes that “we’re a revolutionary country and we used our private rifle stockpiles to fight off the tyrannical monarchy.” So, anyone who wants to overthrow the government is just doing 1776 all over again, right? But if guns can be used to knock down authoritarian regimes, can they not also be used to set them up? What if that pro gun leader you’re following has you fooled? What if the obnoxious anti gun liberal is in other ways, more libertarian even if not on that one issue? After all, Mao famously said; power comes at the barrel of a gun. This was not an anti gun quote either, as some have bizarrely claimed. Mao was a guerrilla warlord who established a totalitarian state, and he did it by convincing legions of peasants to follow him by promising land and liberty. Of course after they used their guns to defeat the enemy, they then used their guns to establish a monopoly on violence.

White supremacists have a similar formula for taking power;

Step one- talk about using the gun to protect freedom.

Step two- trick people into using the gun to establish a dictatorship.

The famous white supremacist novel “The Turner Diaries” depicts a “revolution” which is kicked off by a liberal seizure of guns. In the book, the white supremacists use terrorism in order to goad the liberal state into confiscating assault rifles. The white supremacist revolutionaries then lead a revolution. What does their revolution look like? Well, they hang every black person, jew, and liberal from a street post. Not very much on the side of liberty were they? But they sure did love their guns! In this book they used the foolishness of white American gun culture to initiate their totalitarian race war. Today this book forms the basic blue print for the strategy of every right wing mass shooter in America.

The thing is, one’s position on gun ownership is not really a good litmus test for detecting be tyrants. A tyrant might very well at least initially be very supportive of private firearm ownership before they have consolidated power. Especially if they are attempting to subvert a democracy. This is because they can use their followers as a private army. Meanwhile, perhaps the democrat railing about the evil of guns might be a better friend of liberty, even if they are extremely misguided on this one subject.

Consider a boiler plate liberal president. They ban assault rifles, but nominally support unions, gay marriage, the legalization of Marijuana, separation of church and state, easy emigration/immigration, and abortion. Now consider a theocratic president that was a proponent of private fire arms and told his followers to destroy democracy with their fire arms. After doing so, this hypothetical leader then bans abortion, bans emigration and immigration (trapping you there), institutes the death penalty for the sale of Marijuana, and jails union organizers, outlaws homo sexuality of any kind, establishes Christianity as the official state religion. Which scenario gives the individual greater autonomy? It should be obvious.

To be clear, I do not support the prohibition of assault rifles, or private ownership. I do not support the democratic party either. I am merely debunking the idea that anyone who supports the prohibition must be a tyrant, and that anyone who is against is on the side of liberty. This is a simple narrative that has led many astray. Authoritarianism is a spectrum. A person can be an authoritarian in one way, and a libertarian in another. This is the case for most people. For instance, people will often support the legalization of weed, while simultaneously believing we should shoot every heroin dealer in the head without a trial. Or they might be highly critical of state violence committed by ICE, but totally fine with police using violence against tenants on a regular basis. Humans are complex and paradoxical, we are not always the rational animals we believe ourselves to be.

Next time your leader asks you to break out your rifle. Ask them, why? Look deeper than this one issue. Part of being a gun owner is respecting and acknowledging the potential misuse of weapons. Part of being a libertarian of any kind is thinking critically about how any institution can be used to affect individual autonomy in both positive and negative ways. We don’t want to inadvertently get sucked into doing the bidding of a statist, especially not when we’re doing it at the end of a gun.

Escrito por Eric F. Artigo original: In Lieu of Free Banking, do 23 de maio de 2023. Traduzido por Gabriel Camargo.

Em círculos libertários e anarquistas de mercado, o conceito de sistema bancário livre sempre foi um importante ideal para uma genuinamente livre e saudável sociedade competitiva. Isso implica em um sistema monetário no qual os bancos não apenas mantêm moeda, mas podem emitir sua própria sem a necessidade de um ente centralizado. Assim sendo, a oferta de dinheiro seria determinada exclusivamente por sua demanda, bem como a disposição das instituições financeiras em emiti-lo—com diferenças em confiança, taxas de juros e termos gerais sendo fatores competitivos essenciais. A origem do sistema bancário livre se encontra no século XIX, quando países como os Estados Unidos e a Escócia não possuíam o forte sistema bancário centralizado dos dias atuais. Embora o primeiro fosse mais um sistema descentralizado, mesmo que ainda estatista, o segundo foi um sistema amplamente desregulado de mercado aberto para bancos não registrados, que circundavam três bancos registrados principais e que, por fim, mostrou-se altamente estável e bem-sucedido. Argumentos ideológicos favoráveis mais explícitos ao sistema bancário livre tornar-se-iam populares entre anarquistas individualistas nos Estados Unidos entre a metade do século XIX e início do XX. Benjamin Tucker, por exemplo, argumentou que o monopólio de emissão de moeda constituía um dos “quatro de principal importância” ao capitalismo de estado, e que, baseando-se em Josiah Warren e Pierre-Joseph Proudhon…

caso o setor bancário fosse livre para todos, cada vez mais pessoas nele entrariam, até que a concorrência se tornasse forte o suficiente para reduzir os preços dos empréstimos de dinheiro aos custos da mão de obra, que estatísticas mostram ser inferior a três quartos de um por cento. Assim sendo, os milhares de pessoas que são atualmente impedidas de abrir seu negócio devido às taxas ruinosamente altas que precisam pagar pelo capital necessário, verão removidas as dificuldades.

Lysander Spooner, abordando outros aspectos específicos, especulou que…

sob perfeita liberdade bancária, substancialmente toda a riqueza material do país poderia ser utilizada como capital bancário. O montante de moeda que esse capital é capaz de prover é tão grande . . . que nunca haveria escassez. E a competição para sua oferta sem dúvida seria grande o bastante para manter baixas as taxas de juros.

Outros pensadores, como Friedrich Hayek—em seu livro de 1976 The Denationalization of Money—argumentam que um sistema bancário livre não apenas promoveria inovação e flexibilidade em serviços financeiros, mas que também possibilitaria um maior volume de trocas internacionais e reduziria a necessidade de intervenção governamental na economia.

No entanto, os argumentos de Hayek não contêm alguns dos mais radicais elementos anticapitalistas que possuíam os primeiros pensadores individualistas—o principal sendo como o sistema bancário livre levaria ao mutualismo bancário, em última instância alternado a balança de poder de classe do próprio sistema de mercado. Mutualismo bancário é um esquema financeiro no qual um banco depende de crédito mútuo, em oposição ao empréstimo de dinheiro a juros, e envolve a reunião de recursos próprios dos membros desses bancos para a concessão de crédito uns aos outros, com base na confiança e na capacidade de crédito. Como escreve Kevin Carson: “Em um genuíno mercado bancário livre, todo e qualquer grupo voluntário de indivíduos poderia formar um banco cooperativo e emitir notas bancárias sobre o lastro que desejassem estabelecer, com a aceitação dessas notas como meio de pagamento sendo a condição de associação.” E mais do que apenas proporcionar um modelo mais flexível de financiamento, Carson aponta que “caso a propriedade pertencente à classe trabalhadora fosse livre para a mobilização como capital por esses meios, e os produtores permitidos organizar seu crédito sem entraves, os recursos disponíveis seriam enormes,” e esse “crédito barato abundante dramaticamente alteraria o balanço de poder entre capital e trabalho, e retornos por trabalho substituiriam retornos por capital como a forma dominante de atividade econômica.” Gary Elkin mantém que:

pelo fato da proposta de Tucker de elevar o poder de barganha dos trabalhadores por meio do acesso ao crédito mútuo, seu assim chamado anarquismo Individualista não é apenas compatível com o controle dos trabalhadores, de fato, o promove. Pois se o acesso ao crédito mútuo elevasse o poder de barganha dos trabalhadores ao ponto que Tucker declara, eles poderiam (1) demandar e receber democracia no local de trabalho e (2) reunir seus créditos para comprar e possuir empresas coletivamente. Isso eliminaria a estrutura top-down da firma e a habilidade dos proprietários de pagarem a si mesmos salários injustamente altos.

Infelizmente, nos Estados Unidos contemporâneo (como na maior parte do mundo) não temos um sistema bancário livre e, graças à regulação existente, somos muito limitados em nossa habilidade de estabelecer um esquema substancial de crédito mútuo. Então, além de prosseguirmos defendendo um sistema financeiro aberto, devemos também ver o que atualmente existe como meios para estabelecer proxies mais imediatos.

Um bom lugar para começar são as cooperativas de crédito; sem fins lucrativos, as cooperativas financeiras são propriedade de seus membros, provendo-lhes serviços. Elas oferecem uma variedade de serviços de crédito como um banco tradicional; contas corrente ou poupança, cartões de crédito e débito, bem como empréstimos e financiamentos. Contudo, uma diferença vital é que os ‘lucros’ provenientes dos serviços retornam aos membros por meio de dividendos e menores taxas internas. A maioria das cooperativas de crédito possuem critérios de elegibilidade, como habitar certa área geográfica, trabalhar em uma profissão específica ou pertencer a uma organização comum fora da cooperativa. Caso um indivíduo cumpra os requisitos para se tornar um membro, não apenas terá acesso aos serviços bancários tradicionais, mas poderá também participar da governança e dos processos de decisão. Graças a ambos os fatores cooperativos e comunitários, as cooperativas geralmente focam não apenas em gerar retornos para os membros, mas no desenvolvimento comunitário e na responsabilidade social. E mesmo que as cooperativas de crédito atuais estejam envoltas na estrutura regulatória do capitalismo de estado e monopólio da moeda, há algumas estratégias que elas podem utilizar (e às vezes utilizam) que poderiam servir de alternativas imediatas ao sistema bancário mútuo.

De fato, as cooperativas de crédito já aproveitam o crédito mútuo em alguns dos seus serviços. Algumas oferecem poupança compartilhada e programas de empréstimo, pelos quais os membros podem conceder crédito entre si sem as restrições usuais de uma instituição de empréstimo. Outras possuem fundos de desenvolvimento comunitário e/ou fundos de empréstimos rotativos para pequenas empresas e empresas comunitárias sem histórico de crédito ou acesso a fontes tradicionais de financiamento. Para exemplos do mundo real, veja a Vancouver City Savings Credit Union (Vancity) e a Self-Help Credit Union (servindo ambas as Carolinas e a Flórida). A primeira possui um programa de Sucesso Compartilhado, no qual os membros podem reunir suas poupanças para lastrear um empréstimo requerido por um projeto comunitário ou outro propósito coletivo. A segunda possui uma variedade de programas baseados no crédito mútuo, como os Empréstimos garantidos por ações—por meio do qual os membros podem utilizar suas contas de poupança cooperativa como garantia. Outra interessante estratégia implementada pela Alternatives Credit Union, em Ithaca, Nova York—juntamente aos Empréstimos garantidos por ações— é a ligação com sistemas de moeda comunitária, como os bancos de tempo. Em um sistema bancário temporal, como o Ithaca HOURS local, os membros trocam serviços com base na igualdade de tempo (x horas de trabalho por x horas de trabalho). Em Mutual Life, Limited, o antropólogo Bill Maurer conta como a Alternatives Credit Union aceitava depósitos em HORAS e permitia HORAS “para taxas de associação, empréstimos, devolução de cheques e transferência automática, bem como em troca de um pacote de ‘Investimento Socialmente Responsável'”. Portanto, além de as cooperativas de crédito expandirem seus serviços de crédito mútuo, elas também poderiam seguir o exemplo do esquema Ithaca HOURS e integrar o sistema temporal aos seus serviços bancários tradicionais, de modo que os membros pudessem ter acesso a uma ampla variedade de serviços financeiros, enquanto promovem a comunidade e a ajuda mútua.

Mas, como sempre, o contexto é essencial. Da mesma forma que o verdadeiro sistema bancário mútuo exige um mercado bancário e de produção de moeda não regulamentado, cooperativas de crédito nos moldes atuais fortemente dependem das mesmas (ou similares) estruturas regulatórias que os bancos tradicionais; sem dúvidas, o mesmo controle monopolístico que levou a uma situação político-econômica na qual não está claro se o sistema bancário livre poderia ser a panaceia que foi originalmente apresentada pelos anarquistas individualistas do século XIX. Laurance Labadie—o “herdeiro de Warren, Spooner e Tucker” de acordo com Herbert C. Roseman—escreve como, no fim da vida, Tucker se tornou cada vez mais convencido de que as concentrações de propriedade e riqueza “haviam chegado a um ponto tal que, mesmo que pudesse ser instituído, o sistema bancário livre por si mesmo não seria suficiente para quebrar o poder monopolista do capital.” Labadie expressaria um sentimento similar nas últimas décadas de sua vida, ajudando na articulação do grande desafio pessimista atualmente enfrentado pelos anarquistas de mercado: “o que podemos fazer no lugar do sistema bancário livre?” Talvez a resposta seja repensar nosso foco na socialização do acesso ao capital para o ganho mais imediato de controle sobre os meios de produção. Tucker escreve como “Proudhon e Warren se viram incapazes de aprovar qualquer plano como o confisco de capital pela sociedade. Contudo, apesar de se oporem à socialização da propriedade do capital, eles almejavam socializar seus efeitos, tornando seu uso algo benéfico a todos, em vez de meios para empobrecer muitos e enriquecer poucos.” Talvez seja a hora de começarmos a pensar como sindicalistas e autonomistas [1]; nos posicionando não apenas como anarquistas de mercado, mas explicitamente como anarquistas de mercado pela luta de classes (não diferente de Dyer Lum e Joseph Labadie no século XIX, ou Carson e Logan Glitterbomb atualmente), que almejam formas imediatas e cotidianas de resistência como meios de impulsionar o controle pelos trabalhadores (no sentido mais amplo possível, i.e. incluindo donas de casa, estudantes, o “exército de mão de obra” dos desempregados, etc.) sobre os espaços de produção, a fim de estabelecer autonomia econômica às comunidades e poder dual, em oposição à economia do capitalismo de estado [2]. Adicionalmente às tentativas de radicalizar as cooperativas de crédito, precisamos de um esforço conjunto para o desenvolvimento cooperativo, sindicalização radical e um maior poder dos trabalhadores em geral. Precisamos ajudar no estabelecimento de “livres associações de produtores”, que podem transacionar entre si sem intervenção centralizada, e oferecer meios contraeconômicos para formar algo como a ágora proposta por Samuel Edward Konkin III—um espaço de trocas não violentas mantido seguro da coerção do estatal—as condições perfeitas para se estabelecer os verdadeiros Bancos Populares (como Proudhon chamou o conceito) baseados no crédito mútuo [3].

Notas

1. Para uma boa visão geral acerca dessas tendências, ver a introdução de Immanuel Ness para a antologia New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class Struggle Unionism.

2. Realizei uma breve defesa das reivindicações dos trabalhadores em vários espaços de produção em “Toward a Cooperative Agorism”, mas geralmente indico libertários e anarquistas de mercado ao “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle”, de Murray Rothbard.

3. Isso não é dissimilar à visão Bakunista de empresas de propriedade coletiva, federações regionais e “Bancos de Câmbio” (ver “Ideas on Social Organization”, de James Guillaume), mas eu rejeito a excessiva dependência até mesmo do planejamento econômico descentralizado em favor de uma economia de mercado de cooperativas, propriedade de usufruto e liberdade (econômica) individual.

Understanding the problems around care requires us to look back and more nationally than just Maine. Many of the other elders I interviewed seemed to agree with Emma [pseudonym] about the importance of community and “care networks,” sharing a nostalgia for times when local communities and extended families cared for each other over and above both state welfare and corporate market consumption. 69-year-old Lucy (pseudonym), a core organizer in the Hour Exchange project and one of my interviewees, spoke to me about how “society used to work very much on this kind of basis of mutual aid but since modern capitalism and especially globalization, people are more isolated from one another.” Similarly, 64-year-old Peter (pseudonym), a long-time member of Hour Exchange I also interviewed, outlined how

nowadays people don’t grow up and work in the same place they live. So ya know, cousin Freddy is no longer in the next town. He’s three states away. So now you just can’t have cousin Freddy come over and mow the lawn ‘cause you’re sick or you broke your leg.

Even if there is an undeniable element of “rose-tinted glasses” (especially from a critical race theory perspective) in these assessments, the historical record bears it out in specific ways. For example, Roderick Long writes how “[i]n the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one of the primary sources of health care and health insurance for the working poor in Britain, Australia, and the United States was the fraternal society” or “friendly society” [1]. Maine in particular thrived through voluntary associations such as the Maine State Grange, which emerged after the Civil War from the Farmers’ Clubs Movement and helped rural farmers not only find community, discuss new agricultural techniques, and even get educational resources but also could provide insurance for members [2]. These sort of groups persisted until greater regulations and the expanding corporate economy displaced them. This movement away from voluntary or community organizations as a source of care was then solidified during the New Deal’s sweeping welfare expansion in response to the Great Depression (1929-1939), only to be torn down 50 years later by the Reagen administration (1981-1989).

The result of this abandonment of the supposed “common welfare” promises of the state has been theorized by queer, feminist, and disability theorists extensively. For example, Khiara M. Bridges observes that neoliberalism positions “the private family as the entity that provides (and is expected to provide) the social support that the state once offered in earlier political economic moments” [3]. In the context of eldercare, this often takes the form of adult children or more able-bodied or able-minded spouses being unable to afford private in-home care or spaces in retirement homes and therefore being compelled to become full-time caretakers for the subject of said eldercare. As such a great deal of what we describe as eldercare occurs outside of the waged or even monied economy. On one hand that represents something very wonderful about human beings; that we care for each other and can do so without a (monetary) profit motive. This is the sort of cooperative basis of all societies that David Graeber calls “everyday communism.” The organization Community Economies—building off the work of feminist economic geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham—argues, this is part of an “iceberg” of “actually-existing spaces of negotiation” distinct from the realm of wage labor and top-down workplaces [4]. These “spaces of negotiation” offer the possibility of thinking outside of the hegemony of a “capitalist world” in favor of a view that there are many diverse economies existing simultaneously. As they put it: 

When the economy is framed in terms of capitalism, and when capitalism is presented as spreading across the globe, it seems that it has to be matched by an equivalent anti-capitalist struggle organized globally. This diminishes the potential of the local as a site of economic politics. Framing the economy as comprising diverse practices…

can help us think about how these various practices “might serve as building blocks for community economies” [5]. 

However, neither Community Economies nor Gibson-Graham are claiming that just because certain practices do not involve wages or even pay does not mean it is necessarily separate from the extractive logic of the dominant economy, but rather that there are “multiple sites as places of economic struggle” within which extractivism and hierarchy need to be constantly and consciously resisted [6]. One of the best ways then, in my opinion, to conceptualize the problem faced by attempts to resist those elements outside of the waged economy was forwarded in 1962 by Italian autonomist Mario Tronti in the form of the “social factory;” whereby

the social relation is transformed into a moment of the relation of production, the whole of society is turned into an articulation of production, that is, the whole of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society [7].

Where in Marx’s era the factory was the realm exclusively of the industrial proletariat, in the era of economic globalization the U.S. economy has seemingly exported the factory overseas. Especially in Maine, manufacturing jobs have been rapidly dwindling since the 1970s; leaving towns like Lewiston and Waterville with abandoned factory and mill buildings as dominant features of their urban landscape [8]. But the factory has not actually disappeared. Instead, as Dennis K. Mumby argues, “capitalism is no longer content simply to extract surplus value at the point of production from purchased labor time, but increasingly captures the (free) sociality of everyday life and turns it into surplus value” [9]. On the one hand this means the “social acts” have become increasingly commodified, not primarily in the sense that they are being acquired through a monetary transaction but in that they are mediated by platforms, devices, etc. intended to generate profit for others. On the other, the logic (and most importantly the discipline) of the factory, in line with the Marxist view that the mode of production (now a global phenomenon) influences the content of society, increasingly ingrained itself in our cultural institutions, our interpersonal relationships, our values, and even the way we think about reality.

Consider, for a stark contrast between life inside and outside of (or in between) the social factory, the treatment of elders in many non-industrialized cultures. Of course, sweeping generalizations that fetishize Indigeneity and the “non-west” are inaccurate and unhelpful, but it is absolutely true to say that there are better models for how we care for elders, with many appearing outside of Anglo-American cultural spheres. For example, some Aboriginal communities in Australia position elders as, to quote participatory research from Lucy Busija et. al, “citizens that the community looks to for guidance and whose standing in the community is” based on “community engagement, spirituality, physical and emotional well-being, and wisdom gained through life experiences” and, as such, elders are treated with great reverence [10]. Contrast this with the hegemonic “deficit model of aging,” a term coined by psychologist Catherine Roland, which dominates most “western” societies and holds that aging past a certain point is always a net loss because of its impact on the mind and the body [11]. These stigmas have only been exacerbated by capitalist globalization, where it underpins the “gray tsunami” narrative in the United States, which, according to [Ashton] Applewhite, asserts that “an aging population makes it impossible to compete in the global economy. A young labor force, on the other hand, attracts global businesses and investors” and so is required for a competitive edge [12]. In this way the whole domestic economy of the U.S. is is being pulled toward being an enterprise competing in the world economy, with the matter of economic efficiency penalizing age and ability traceable back to the domestic factories of the 19th and early 20th century where, as Robert McRuer argues, because of the need for efficient and repetitive work, “able-bodied identities were . . . produced in the disciplinary space of the factory. That new public identity, in turn, would seem to ensure that disability was more of a concern in the private or domestic realm” [13].

This “private or domestic realm”—usually consisting of the nuclear family unit—is often represented as separate from the capitalist economy, but in reality not only is it a way for capitalists to avoid as much as possible using surplus value to take care of workers but it is the very economic unit from which new workers are created. Considering the importance of this realm for the functioning of the rest of society, it should be alarming that housework—primarily performed by women—is almost entirely uncompensated in any way similar to other labor. One New York Times article suggests that if it were, it would be worth 1.9 trillion dollars in 2019 alone [14]. But, as Italian autonomist feminist Sylvia Federici theorizes, 

[b]y denying housework a wage and transforming it into an act of love, capital has killed many birds with one stone. First of all, it has got a hell of a lot of work almost for free, and it has made sure that women, far from struggling against it, would seek that work as the best thing in life (the magic words: “Yes, darling, you are a real woman”) [15].

If the social factory is indeed attempting to pervade all aspects of life, then it is homemakers who are pushed toward unwaged work in the familial production center, a fact Federici and other socialist feminists attempted to elucidate starting in 1972 through their Wages for Housework. Although the focus of this lens is generally on “wifing” and childrearing in particular, a similar point can be made with any unwaged care work—including eldercare in that there is an expectation for adult children, more able-bodied spouses, other elderly friends, and beyond to bear the brunt of care without compensation when elders are no longer considered profitable or efficient enough for the capitalist labor pool.

Edgar S. Cahn—often referred to as the “father of timebanking”—makes a similar argument regarding the presence of a “second economy” outside of the waged-monied-firmed economy without which the latter economy could not possibly function. According to Cahn, even as “at least 40 percent of all economic activity takes place outside the so-called market economy,” GDP and other traditional economic metrics are unable (or unwilling) to measure positive non-growth impacts like keeping “seniors out of nursing homes,” “child-rearing (that isn’t paid care), elder care (provided by family and relatives), volunteer work, community work,” and more. But this “present operating system—family, neighborhood community—is in bad shape,” and is increasingly unable to “reliably perform basic functions such as transmitting values, rearing children, providing support, maintaining safety, generating consensus, preserving members, sharing limited resources.” Cahn comes to a conclusion similar to Federici and other autonomist feminists regarding the solution to this problem by arguing for compensation for non-waged work but not through wages, but through an approach he calls “co-production,” which “says: Pay for what you get by contributing what you can. It says, no more free rides. But it also says, We value what you can contribute; and we do not equate what you have to offer with how much money you can afford to pay” [16].

The reference to “no more free rides” may at first seem like conservative rhetoric of faux self-reliance, but the point is not that people are not deserving of rides but rather that someone must provide that ride and should be compensated for that labor. The paradox of the social factory is that when unwaged work, like “free rides,” demands compensation, Mumby points out that this leads to a situation where

Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and many similar platform-based companies capture everyday activities such as ridesharing and couch surfing in order to monetize them. What was once a social act between acquaintances has become an economic transaction mediated by a digital platform premised on creating economic value [17].

Thus, Cahn’s approach goes further than a demand for wages in order to recognize unwaged work, and advocates for its immediate compensation within the “second economy” itself, thereby strengthening those community infrastructures. This resists the above issue or what Cahn calls the “colonization” of said economy by the capitalist money economy by “increasingly [taking] over functions previously performed by the family, kinship groups, neighborhoods and non-market institutions” while at the same time assuming the “continued contribution and support” of the networks and institutions being undermined [18]. So how do you attempt this compensation without the capitalist state’s money? For Cahn, the answer is timebanking.

1. Roderick Long, “How Government Solved the Health Care Crisis: Medical Insurance that Worked — Until Government ‘Fixed’ It,” Formulations 1, no. 2 (Winter 1993-1994): 16, accessed April 13, 2023, http://www.freenation.org/a/F/1.2.pdf. 
2. Stanley R. Howe, “To Improve the Farmer’s Lot: The Grange in Maine,” The Courier 34, no. 1 (2010)], accessed April 13, 2023, https://www.bethelhistorical.org/legacy-site/THE%20COURIER,%20Vol.%2034,%20No.%201%20%282010%29.pdf. 
3. Khiara M. Bridges, “Reflection: Committing to Change,” 2013, in Feminist Activist Ethnography: Counterpoints to Neoliberalism in North America, ed. Christa Craven and Dána-Ain Davis (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 131. 
4. David Graeber, “Communism,” 2010, in The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide, by Antonio David Cattani, ed. Keith Hart and Jean-Louis Laville (London, UK: Polity Press, 2010), accessed April 13, 2023, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/communism.
5. “Community Economies Research and Practice,” Community Economies, accessed April 13, 2023, https://www.communityeconomies.org/about/community-economies-research-and-practice. 
6. Ibid.
7. Mario Tronti, “Factory and Society (1962),” Operaismo in English, last modified June 13, 2013, accessed April 13, 2023, https://operaismoinenglish.wordpress.com/2013/06/13/factory-and-society/. 
8. “Manufacturing Jobs: Trends, Issues, and Outlook,” Maine Department of Labor, Center for Workforce Research and Information, last modified July 2012, accessed April 13, 2023, https://www.maine.gov/labor/cwri/publications/pdf/ManufacturingJobsTrendsIssuesandOutlook.pdf. 
9. Dennis K. Mumby, “Theorizing Struggle in the Social Factory,” Organization Theory 1 (April 2020): 2, accessed April 14, 2023, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341226490_Theorizing_Struggle_in_the_Social_Factory. 
10. Lucy Busija et al., “The Role of Elders in the Wellbeing of a Contemporary Australian Indigenous Community,” The Gerontologist 60, no. 3: 514, accessed April 14, 2023, https://academic.oup.com/gerontologist/article/60/3/513/5222719. 
11. Catherine Roland, “Defeating the Deficit Model of Aging,” Psychology Today, last modified June 9, 2015, accessed April 14, 2023, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/resilience-and-reframing/201506/defeating-the-deficit-model-aging. 
12. [Ashton Applewhite, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism (Celadon Books, 2019), 48, epub.]
13. Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2006), 88. 
14. Gus Wezerek and Kristen R. Ghodsee, “Women’s Unpaid Labor is Worth $10,900,000,000,000,” New York Times, last modified March 5, 2020, accessed April 14, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/04/opinion/women-unpaid-labor.html. 
15. Sylvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (Bristol, UK: Power of Women Collective & Falling Wall Press, 1975), 2, accessed April 14, 2023, https://files.libcom.org/files/Federici-Silvia-Wages-Against-Housework.pdf. 
16. Edgar S. Cahn, No More Throw-Away People: The Co-Production Imperative (Washington, DC: Essential Books, 2000), 48-49, 54, 57. 
17. Mumby, “Theorizing Struggle,” 2.
18. Cahn, No More, 114-115.

Di Eric F. Originale pubblicato il 18 maggio 2023 con il titolo 20th Century Land Reforms in Guatemala vs. Mexico. Traduzione italiana di Enrico Sanna.

Disse una volta Malcolm X che tutte “le rivoluzioni partono dalla terra. La terra è alla base dell’indipendenza. La terra è alla base della libertà, della giustizia e dell’eguaglianza.” Dal Movimento dei Lavoratori Senza Terra di ispirazione marxista al movimento indigeno #LandBack in Nord America, la lotta per la terra, intesa come mezzo di produzione o come sacra fonte di vita, va avanti. E non senza una ragione visto che in tutto il mondo lo stato protegge la proprietà assenteista di ampie fette di territorio. Si arriva così a una situazione in cui, negli Stati Uniti, cento famiglie ricche possiedono circa 260 milioni di ettari di terra (più o meno le dimensioni del New England), venticinque neo-feudatari terrieri ne possiedono otto milioni (quasi l’uno percento del paese) e Bill Gates da solo è il più grande proprietario terriero della nazione. Per questo dare uno sguardo ai movimenti per le riforme fondiarie del passato e imparare da loro non è tempo sprecato. In questo breve spazio vorrei soffermarmi in particolare sul movimento riformatore del Guatemala degli anni Cinquanta per metterlo a confronto con quello messicano durante la rivoluzione del decennio 1910-20, sottolineando in particolare sulle riforme promosse dall’Esercito di Liberazione del Sud di Emiliano Zapata (noto come movimento zapatista). Entrambi i movimenti, con marcate differenze, miravano a frammentare la proprietà pseudo feudale delle terre a favore di una proprietà più diffusa.

Tra le differenze, da notare il fatto che in Guatemala la riforma, avviata dallo stato, era più unitaria e monolitica, e questo nonostante avesse come soggetto entità e movimenti più piccoli, soprattutto tra i lavoratori. Al centro di tutto troviamo un decreto del presidente Jacobo Árbenz: il Decreto 900. Approvata dal parlamento guatemalteco il 17 giugno 1952, questa radicale riforma ridistribuì 603.704 ettari di terra tra circa 100 mila famiglie in due anni. Sorsero per l’occasione numerosi comitati e dipartimenti a livello sia locale che nazionale. In “The Law That Would Change the World”, tratto da Silence on the Mountain, Daniel Wilkinson racconta le peripezie di un’associazione di lavoratori che cercò di denunciare gli illeciti commessi da un grosso produttore di caffè, la piantagione La Patria, nell’ambito del Decreto 900. I lavoratori firmarono una petizione e la inoltrarono presso il Comitato Agrario Locale di La Igualdad, uno dei tanti comitati agrari composti da lavoratori e comunità e incaricati di mettere in pratica il decreto, con la speranza che arrivasse fino al presidente. Prima però “la petizione dovette passare per una serie di comitati istituiti dal decreto per gestire la riforma.” Il primo fu, appunto, il Comitato Agrario Locale, quindi il Comitato Agrario Dipartimentale di San Marcos e infine il Dipartimento Agrario Nazionale a Ciudad de Guatemala. Sulla scrivania del presidente Árbenz la petizione ci arrivò più di un anno dopo. Basta questo esempio di tortuosità burocratica per capire come la riforma avviata dal decreto fosse gestita da una struttura monolitica che faceva capo a uno stato centralizzato. È vero che attori non statali a livello locale rientravano nel movimento di riforma, come dimostra la petizione dei lavoratori della piantagione La Patria, ed è anche vero che, come spiega Wilkinson, i vertici del Comitato Agrario Locale di La Igualdad era espressione dei sindacati locali, ma il tutto rientrava nella struttura monolitica creata dal Decreto 900.

Dall’altro lato troviamo la riforma fondiaria messicana seguita alla rivoluzione del 1910-20, che non fu opera di una struttura monolitica, ma principalmente di attori locali esterni allo stato. Nota Helga Baitenmann che (pg. 3) quando “le varie fazioni rivoluzionarie avanzarono le loro proposte in fatto di riforme fondiarie, gli abitanti dei villaggi le accolsero come contributo alla lotta per la terra.” Le fazioni diedero vita ad associazioni di paese o regionali col fine di mettere in pratica le loro specifiche riforme fondiarie. I zapatisti nel Messico meridionale, ad esempio, nominarono dei guardatierras (guardiani delle terre, ndt) con il compito di fare una provvisoria distribuzione delle terre (pg. 14-5). Furono questi guardiani a promuovere la varietà di riforme locali. Nell’ottavo capitolo del libro Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, John Womack spiega come nello stato di Morelos occupato dagli zapatisti un villaggio…

riuscì a mantenere l’intero territorio come bene comune distribuendo solo i diritti di coltivazione; in altri casi la proprietà fu suddivisa tra piccoli proprietari singoli. Né le autorità statali né quelle federali potevano interferire sulle scelte dei singoli villaggi; al massimo, il governo federale poteva intervenire per vietare la vendita o l’affitto delle terre.

Lo stato dunque partecipava alla riforma rivoluzionaria, come dimostra il fatto che al governo federale fossero permesse interferenze (e che controllasse ampiamente gli stati del nord). Come in Guatemala, anche qui troviamo dipartimenti e consigli a cui singoli o gruppi potevano appellarsi per ottenere una concessione o la restituzione di una terra. Ma non si trattava di una burocrazia piramidale come quella creata dal Decreto 900. Le varie istituzioni rientravano tra le strutture pseudo-governative create dalle diverse fazioni rivoluzionarie.

Altra differenza importante rispetto al Guatemala è la ragione di fondo. Nel caso del Guatemala, la riforma poteva apparire a prima vista un atto tipico dell’estrema sinistra. È così che, a detta di Wilkinson, la consideravano molti guatemaltechi; tanto più che l’unico proprietario terriero di La Igualdad che discusse la riforma con il comitato locale, e che la bocciò senza appello, era fortemente anticomunista. L’idea che la riforma fosse una strategia dell’estrema sinistra dovette contagiare anche il dipartimento degli esteri degli Stati Uniti: secondo Douglas W. Trefzger il successivo intervento (pg. 32-3) armato americano in Guatemala non solo mirava a proteggere gli interessi della United Fruit Company ma rientrava anche nel più vasto tentativo di bloccare il comunismo e l’influenza sovietica sull’emisfero occidentale. Ed è indubitabile che certi rivoluzionari di sinistra, come quelli del Partito Comunista Guatemalteco, fossero parte attiva, così come è vero che in alcuni casi la ridistribuzione delle terre diede vita a cooperative di successo. Ma il Decreto 900 rimane un’opera dal chiaro indirizzo industrial-capitalistico. Árbenz si richiamava all’articolo 88 della costituzione guatemalteca che autorizzava il governo a intervenire direttamente sull’economia nazionale per sostenere l’industria e l’agricoltura. Alla base c’era la necessità di migliorare l’economia. Il decreto non mirava semplicemente alla ridistribuzione delle terre, ma anche al riordino delle terre inutilizzate. Secondo Trefzger (pg. 32), a quel tempo solo il dodici percento delle terre private era coltivato, e la riorganizzazione serviva a incrementare questa percentuale. Ma era lo stesso decreto a stabilire esplicitamente che l’obiettivo era la crescita “del modo di produzione agricolo al fine di avviare l’industrializzazione del Guatemala”. In questo modo si voleva rendere i lavoratori agricoli indipendenti dalle piantagioni, permettere loro di partecipare più liberamente al mercato del lavoro così da migliorare l’economia nazionale e sviluppare l’industrializzazione.

Quanto al Messico, è difficile dire quale fosse la ragione esatta delle riforme. Qualche suggerimento potrebbe venire dal fatto che spinte in tal senso in ambienti rurali esistevano già prima che prendessero corpo le fazioni rivoluzionarie esplicitamente ideologiche attraverso la “partecipazione popolare alla formazione dello stato” di Baitenmann. Nei villaggi, gran parte della domanda di un pezzo di terra era chiaramente motivata dagli interessi economici delle piccole attività. Nel dibattito tra concessione fondiaria e restituzione della terra, la domanda era: quale delle due garantisce la maggior quantità di terra ai contadini? Qui le ragioni che stanno alla base della fazione rivoluzionaria più famosa, quella degli zapatisti, sono ben definite. Zapata voleva che la proprietà della terra tornasse ai villaggi (pueblos); ma è anche da notare che le riforme presentate da lui e dai suoi puntavano ad un’equa distribuzione della terra più che ad un ripristino delle proprietà. Si arrivò così ad un compromesso: una parte delle terre espropriate furono rese agli originari padroni e il resto fu diviso equamente tra tutti gli altri (pg. 6-7). È evidente dunque l’impegno degli zapatisti a favore della giustizia e dell’uguaglianza, il tentativo di riparare ai torti del passato e creare un futuro più egualitario. La differenza tra le due riforme, quella guatemalteca e quella messicana, oltre che nell’opposizione centralizzazione-decentramento, è particolarmente evidente nel fatto che nel caso del Guatemala, nonostante certi elementi di giustizia e equità del Decreto 900, l’obiettivo era la modernizzazione dell’economia. Sebbene oggi siano entrambi saldamente capitalisti e partecipino all’economia mondiale, c’è molto da imparare sia dalla loro storia che dalle attuali lotte dell’Esercito Zapatista di Liberazione Nazionale, che riprende il nome dell’originario esercito rivoluzionario. Quest’ultimo combina elementi marxisti, anarchici e della cultura indigena per dar vita, nel Messico di oggi, a una lotta per un’autonomia basata sulla terra. In Guatemala troviamo invece attivisti indigeni come Isabel Solís che da decenni lottano per la comunizzazione delle terre.

Le nostre traduzioni sono finanziate interamente da donazioni. Se vi piace quello che scriviamo, siete invitati a contribuire. Trovate le istruzioni su come fare nella pagina Sostieni C4SS: https://c4ss.org/sostieni-c4ss.

Fonti (elenco non esaustivo):

• Farming While Black by Leah Penniman

• “If You Don’t Use Your Land, These Marxists May Take It” by Jack Nicas

• “Meet The 25 Land Barons Who Collectively Own 1% Of America” by Hannah Kim

• “American land barons: 100 wealthy families now own nearly as much land as that of New England” by Christopher Ingraham

• “America’s Biggest Owner Of Farmland Is Now Bill Gates” by Ariel Shapiro

• “Popular Participation in State Formation: Land Reform in Revolutionary Mexico” by Helga Baitenmann from Journal of Latin American Studies, February 2011, Vol. 43, No. 1.

• Decreto 900 Ley de Reforma Agraria by el Congreso de la República de Guatemala,

• Constitución de la República de Guatemala, 1945.

• “Guatemala’s 1952 Agrarian Reform Law: A Critical Reassessment” by Douglas W. Trefzger from International Social Science Review, 2002, Vol. 77, No. 1/2 (2002).

• Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror Betrayal and Forgetting in Guatemala by Daniel Wilkinson

• Zapata and the Mexican Revolution by John Womack

• “A Spark of Hope: The Ongoing Lessons of the Zapatista Revolution 25 Years On” by Hilary Klein

• “A Life of Struggle for Land and Community in Guatemala: Interview with Isabel Solís” by Dawn Marie Paley

Par Citizen Ilya. Article original: The Invisible Life of Migrants, 7 novembre 2022. Traduction française par Éléazar.

Après être devenu migrant en Europe, j’ai vu toutes sortes de personnes que la culture dominante et l’État ignorent. Ces gens sont rejetés par une société qui ne les utilise que pour du sale boulot. Et je parle des migrant·e·s et des réfugié·e·s en Europe qui vivent pour survivre. iels sont le groupe de personnes le plus en danger, qui resteront invisibles même après leur mort.

Beaucoup d’entre eux ont franchi les frontières sous la menace d’être abattu·e·s. Beaucoup dépendent de petites communautés de migrant·e·s alors qu’une société entière continue de les considérer comme des objets inexistants. Beaucoup travaillent du lever au coucher du soleil pour gagner un SMIC, et encore. Les clichés xénophobes les montrent comme des non-humains parce qu’iels viennent d’une culture différente, sont arrivé·e·s dans leur pays « illégalement » ou travaillent là où les gens « normaux » ne le feraient pas, et iels sont donc traité·e·s comme s’iels n’avaient aucun droit. Les migrant·e·s sont présenté·e·s comme répugnant·e·s et menaçant·e·s : iels sont les seuls à commettre des crimes tels que le trafic de drogue ou le vol, ce sont des barbares incultes qui vivent aux dépens des allocations chômage, ou qui travaillent trop peu et propagent leur propre culture “haineuse”.

Quand j’étais plus jeune, je croyais à ce genre de mythes. Maintenant, je suis moi-même un migrant et je connais toutes les difficultés de cette vie invisible. Tu n’es personne aux yeux de l’État et du marché du travail, même quand tous tes papiers sont en règle. Tu n’es personne pour ceux qui travaillent après que le soleil soit levé, car iels te reconnaissent comme migrant·e. Tu rentres chez toi surexploité·e en te disant que tu reviendras plus jamais à un boulot de 14 heures. Tu retiens les horaires du bus de nuit et les endroits où trouver de la nourriture pas trop pourrie dans les poubelles. Tu paniques quand quelqu’un te parle dans la langue du pays plutôt que dans la tienne ou en anglais. Tu n’es personne.

Tu ne deviens quelqu’un qu’après être parvenu à la classe moyenne, alors les autres te traitent comme un touriste. Ou en parlant mieux la langue locale que ta langue maternelle, pour qu’iels pensent que tu es né·e ici. Tu vois l’ironie ? Il est presque impossible d’être reconnu·e par la société pour ce que tu es. Ce n’est pas toi qui choisis ou modifie les étiquettes, ce sont les gens qui t’entourent et qui te reconnaissent comme un·e “touriste”, un·e “migrant·e”, un·e “citoyen·ne” ou un·e “cher·e client·e”, mais jamais comme un être humain ou un individu.

Être un individu implique son lot de difficultés dans la vie. Mais tu vois qu’une la société est malade quand elle devient une partie de celles-ci – de devoir lutter pour être traité·e comme un être humain. Dans le même temps, ça pourrait aider si elle était même consciente de ton existence. Comme tu le sais sans doute, la vie des migrant·e·s est compliquée et pénible. Iels se battent pratiquement toujours seul·e·s contre le système, et ça pourrait changer du tout au tout si d’autres personnes leur offraient de l’aide. C’est si facile ! Mais pourquoi quelqu’un aiderait il les migrant·e·s alors qu’il est plus facile de croire aux histoires nationalistes qui montrent comme iels sont méchant·e·s ?

La xénophobie commence par l’État. Il te déshumanise même avant même que tu aies franchies ses frontières. Si tu le fais légalement, le type de visa que tu as déterminera qui tu es dans le pays. Si tu le fais illégalement, tu n’auras même pas de statut officiel. Puisque l’État voit le fait de passer la frontière comme un crime, il essaiera de présenter ça comme immoral auprès de la population. Tu es venu·e dans un pays sans une étiquette précise qui indique comment l’État et le capitalisme devraient t’exploiter et te diviser. En guise de punition, l’autorité t’humiliera pour ne pas avoir suivi scrupuleusement la voie vers la citoyenneté.

L’établissement de documents légaux est, en soi, un processus absurde. Ce n’est pas ta volonté de t’enregistrer quelque part et de prendre des photos pour faire de la paperasse. Le fait que l’État l’exige devient ta raison de te soumettre à cette bureaucratie sans vie. Sinon, l’État et son système juridique perdront ta trace. C’est le seul moment où l’État reconnaît les migrants comme des objets. Le système ferme les yeux lorsqu’iels meurent ou sont en difficultés. Le système est interessé lorsque les migrants rapportent de l’argent à un budget pourri, ou construisent des manoirs pour la classe dirigeante.

L’autre fois où les migrant·e·s sont reconnu·e·s, c’est lorsque les nationalistes nous gavent de leur propagande. Iels accusent les migrant·e·s de tout ce qui les contrarie. Par exemple, c’est un mythe bien connu que les migrant·e·s volent les emplois des habitant·e·s de souche. En réalité, iels ne travaillent même pas là où la majorité le fait – c’est principalement des emplois mal payés et sans perspective d’avenir. Parfois, leur travail se transforme même en esclavage (et ce sous les yeux de tout le monde, mais personne ne s’en soucie !) avec des châtiments corporels et sans salaire. Un autre problème se pose sur le marché du travail. Les migrants sont-iels responsables de la rareté des emplois, ou du système économique ? Les patrons cupides ne sont-iels pas les responsables ?

Le nationalisme germe des graines de l’État. L’État considérera toujours les migrant·e·s et les réfugié·e·s comme un problème, car cela fait partie de sa logique autoritaire. Le nationalisme persiste, et il attise les flammes de la haine. Tandis que la police torture silencieusement les migrant·e·s, les nationalistes continuent de les frapper publiquement ou de perquisitionner leurs domiciles. Et ensuite, iels essaient de justifier la violence en faisant reposer la culpabilité sur la victime. De façon assez troublante, c’est l’une des rares fois où les migrant·e·s sont ne serait-ce que reconnu·e·s par la société. Tant qu’iels ne sont pas à la télé, les migrant·e·s vivent invisibles.

Et comment la société peut-elle aider les migrant·e·s ? Tout ce dont les migrant·e·s ont besoin, c’est d’être traités comme des êtres humains. Iels ne sont pas des objets ! C’est une erreur que même les bénévoles des ONG commettent parfois. En tant qu’êtres humains, nous oublions parfois que les gens qui nous entourent sont les mêmes. Nous oublions qu’iels ont les mêmes sentiments et pensées (sauf les flics et des ministres). Les nationalistes sont ceux qui appliquent les étiquettes en fonction de la couleur de peau ou de l’origine, car iels ne veulent pas reconnaître les autres comme humain·e·s. Les problèmes de discrimination pourraient simplement disparaître si on arrêtait de suivre une telle logique. Je ne suis pas unique en raison des étiquettes qu’on m’attribue – je suis unique parce que je suis humain·e. Mon origine, ma couleur de peau, la langue que je parle, la couleur de mon passeport, mon salaire, mon diplôme, mon apparence ou quoi que ce soit d’autre ne devraient pas compter autant que le fait d’être un être humain. Et traiter les autres comme des êtres humains me rend plus humain·e.

Yazar: Kevin Carson. Orijinal makale: On Fracking and Free Lunches. Yayınlanma Tarihi: Tercüman: Zagreides.

Grist’te yayınlanan bir makalesinde Amal Ahmed, Physicians for Social Responsibility’in (Sosyal Sorumluluk için Doktorlar) yayınladığı ve polifloroalkil maddelerin veya kısa adıyla PFA’ların petrol ve doğalgaz çıkarmak için yürütülen hidrolik kırma faaliyetlerinde yaygın olarak kullanıldığına dair yeni bir rapordan bahsediyor. PFA’lar sonsuza dek kimyevi madde olarak kalırlar- yani toprakta ve suda çözünmeden süresiz olarak kalır ve nihayetinde besin zincirine girerler. PFA’lar “doğum kusurları, kanser ve diğer ciddi hastalıklar”a yol açabilir. Özellikle de sık görülen yeraltı suyu kirlenmesi felaketlerinden sorumludurlar. Ahmed, PFA’ların Teksas’ta hususiyetle büyük nispette kullanıldığını söylüyor: “Teksas’ta son on yılda petrol ve doğalgaz şirketleri, eyalet genelinde binden fazla hidrolik kırma uygulanan petrol ve gaz kuyusuna en az 43.000 pound** zehirli kimyasal pompaladı… ” Toksik hidrolik kırma kimyasallarının bir bileşeni hakkında bu spesifik bilgiye sahip olmamız, yalnızca endüstrinin lütfu sayesindedir. FracFocus, “fracking” yani hidrolik kırmada kullanılan kimyasalları takip eden milli bir takip kuruluşudur. Yeraltı Suyu Koruma Konseyi’nin bir projesidir – “eyalet düzenleyici kurumlarından müteşekkil kar amacı gütmeyen bir kuruluş” olarak tanımlanır. Hidrolik kırma kimyasallarına dair veriler tamamen endüstrinin kendi bildirimlerinden gelir. Bu veriler tam veya kapsamlı olmaktan uzaktır, çünkü hidrolik kırmada kullanılan kimyasal karışımların tarifi tescillidir. “Teksas kuyularına zerk edilen 6,1 milyar poundluk*** kimyasalın nevi ticari sır olarak gizlendi…” Hatta bazı eyaletler, “doktorların tedavi amacıyla bile olsa kimyasallar hakkında bilgi elde etmesini veya bunları ifşa etmesini kısıtlayan” kanunlar çıkaracak kadar ileri gitti. Bu, hidrolik kırmanın ve daha genel olarak fosil yakıt sanayiinin, etraftaki insan topluluklarına verdiği zarar yüzünden uygun sorumluluk standartlarına tabi tutulursa nasıl hayatta kalamayacağının bir başka örneğidir. Zehirlenmenin yanı sıra, hidrolik kırma, fosil yakıt sanayiinde sondaj kuyularından çıkan atık sular için kullanılan kuyular ile birlikte insan eliyle tetiklenen depremlerin ana sebeplerinden biridir. Hidrolik kırma, Oklahoma’daki vuku bulan depremlerin sadece takribi %2’sine sebep olsa da, eyalet ülkedeki en yüksek rakamdaki insan müdahalesiyle oluşan depreme ev sahipliği yaptığı için bu, aslında çok büyük bir miktar. Ve unutmayın, insan müdahalesiyle oluşan depremlerin diğerleri de başka türlerde petrol sanayii faaliyetlerinden menbalanmaktadır. Bundan başka , fosil yakıt çıkarımından menbalanan toprak çökmesi ve bunun kıyı bölgelerindeki sel ve kasırga hasarını arttırabilmesi de var. Toprak çökmesi, deniz seviyesinin yükselmesi sebebiyle sulak alanların kaybını hızlandırmakla kalmadı, bundan başka Katrina ve diğer devasa kasırgalardan menballanan hasarı da mühim nispette arttırdı. Petrol sızıntılarından menbalanan hasarlar için fosil yakıt şirketlerinin mesuliyetini sınırlayan kanunları tabii ki unutamayız. 1990 ABD Petrol Kirliliği Kanunu, petrol sızıntılarının ekonomik zayiatını 75 milyon dolar ile sınırladı, Obama hükümeti 2014’te bir düzenlemeyle bunu 134 milyon dolara çıkardı. Kıyaslamak gerekirse, BP’nin Deepwater Horizon sızıntısı tahmini 8 milyar dolarlık hasara neden oldu. Daha da fenası, petrol şirketlerinin sebep olduğu ekonomik zararlar vergiden düşülebilir. Şimdi, tüm bunları göz önünde bulundurarak, bir anlığına durun ve hidrolik kırma kimyasallarının sağlık üzerindeki tesirlerini, depremlerin zararlarını, yol açtığı toprak çökmesinin neticelerini tam hukuki mesuliyet altında üstlenmek zorunda kalsaydı, fosil yakıt sanayiinin halini hayal edin. Arazi kaybı, sel ve petrol sızıntılarından menbalanan tüm hasarlar (açık okyanus platformları, tankerler ve boru hatları dahil). Kâr getirisini, fosil yakıtların fiyatı ve imal edilen toplam miktarlar üzerindeki tesirlerini hayal edin. Bence, kömür, gaz ve petrol santrallerinin insani olarak mümkün olan en kısa müddette yerini güneş ve rüzgar enerjisine bırakacağı, demiryolu altyapısı olabildiği kadar iyileştirildikçe nakliyatın kamyonlar yerine trenlerle yapılacağı, pek çok lüks uçak havalimanının metruk araziye dönüşeceği ve banliyo bölgelerinde yeni imar izinlerinin oranının sıfıra düşeceği gayet makul tahminlerdir. Bırakın 2050’yi, 2040’a kadar karbon salınımını sıfırlama planları en kötümser tahminler olarak görülecektir. Fosil yakıt sanayiinin işledikleri suçlardan mesul olmaktan korunmasına dair bu gerçekler, çok daha geniş bir prensibin yalnızca bir misalidir: kapitalizmin ne ölçüde menfi hariciyetlere bağlı olduğu – yani, sermayenin maliyetlerini ve risklerini sıradan halk üzerine yaymak ve zararı onlara yıkmak üzerine olduğu. Fosil yakıt sanayiine yönelik geçilen bu iltimaslar, kapitalist kârın, kaynak girdilerinin suni ucuzluğuna ve bolluğuna ne derecede bağımlı olduğunu da göstermektedir. Sağ-liberterler, bir zamanlar barlarda ve publarda yaygın olan bira sipariş eden müşterilere “bedava öğle yemeği” verme kampanyasına atıfta bulunan “Bedava Öğle Yemeği Diye Bir Şey Yoktur” (TANSTAAFL) sloganına bayılıyorlar. Öğle yemeği gerçekten bedava değildi, ama bakın –bedava öğle yemeğindeki o sandviçlerin bedeli, herkes için bira fiyatları artırılarak ödendi. Peki o zaman, burada gördüğümüz şey, kapitalistler için bedava bir öğle yemeği tabağı ve dandik sandviçlerden ya da haşlanmış yumurtalardan çok daha güzel yiyecekler içeriyor –tahmin edin bunun bedelini kim ödüyor?

*: Hidrolik Kırma: Hidrolik kırma (İngilizce: Hydraulic fracturing veya Fracking), belli bir hidrolik sıvının yerin binlerce metre altındaki tabakalara tazyikli bir biçimde pompalanarak, daha önce mümkün görülmeyen kaya gazı ve türevlerinin çıkarılmasını esas alan mevcut bir tekniğin sadece geliştirilmiş hali. Bu teknik çoğunlukla kömür gazı, kum gazı, kaya gazı ve kaya petrolü gibi kaynakları çıkarmak amacıyla kullanılmaktadır.

**: 19504,472 kilogram.

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Por Kevin Carson. Título original: The Myth of the Private Sector, Part II: The Centrally Planned Global Economy, del 1 de marzo de 2023. Traducido al español por Camila Figueroa.

En la primera entrega de esta serie, argumenté que la distinción entre “público” y “privado” carecía en gran parte de sentido porque la similitud en el estilo organizativo de las instituciones centralizadas, jerárquicas y gestionadas burocráticamente superaba su propiedad nominal por parte del gobierno o de empresas privadas.

Pero hay otro sentido en el que el “sector privado” también carece prácticamente de sentido: el “mercado global competitivo” se ha convertido, en gran medida, en un edificante cuento de hadas.

Desde su fundación poco después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial hasta su abolición en 2001, el Ministerio de Comercio Internacional e Industria de Japón (MITI) actuó como una especie de industria capitalista de planificación central para su economía corporativa, no hasta el punto de establecer objetivos reales de producción, como en la antigua URSS, sino asignando la inversión y la financiación de I+D entre empresas e industrias. Incluso asignaba divisas entre las empresas japonesas, determinando a quién se le permitía importar tecnologías extranjeras.

Del mismo modo, en la economía yugoslava, los principios de autogestión de los trabajadores y las relaciones de mercado entre empresas estaban limitados en la práctica por la capacidad del banco estatal para asignar las inversiones de capital.

Y esto es nuevo sólo en su escala global. En 1967, el teórico de la élite del poder G. William Domhoff argumentó (en ¿Quién gobierna América?) que la clase capitalista ejercía el control de la economía corporativa estadounidense, no mediante bloques de votos de acciones familiares en corporaciones individuales, sino colectivamente, a través de “‘grupos de interés’ centrados en torno a grandes bancos y casas financieras que contenían gran parte de las principales corporaciones a través de la propiedad minoritaria y el dispositivo legal” (es decir, “familias de matrimonios mixtos y camarillas sociales que operan a través de sociedades de cartera, fideicomisos familiares y fundaciones familiares”). Y el marxista Paul Sweezy informó una generación antes de que ocho de esos “grupos de interés” dominaban la economía estadounidense.

No hace mucho, en 2011, un trabajo de Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder y Stefano Battiston descubrió que un núcleo de 1.318 empresas transnacionales con propiedades entrelazadas eran capaces de influir en decenas de miles de otras transnacionales. Estas 1.318, a su vez, estaban dominadas por una “superentidad” de 147 empresas estrechamente unidas. Del núcleo de 147, las diez primeras eran bancos, compañías de seguros o fondos de inversión.

Así pues, la economía corporativa mundial está dirigida, en gran medida, por “una superentidad” de corporaciones entrelazadas, que a su vez está dominada por un puñado de empresas de la economía FIRE (Finanzas, Seguros y Bienes Raíces) que asignan el capital de inversión.

En este contexto, los despidos en el sector tecnológico en las últimas semanas empiezan a tener mucho más sentido. Como observó Josh Berkus en la instancia m6n.io Mastodon: “La gente está tratando los recientes despidos tecnológicos como algo espontáneo.  No lo fueron.  Al parecer, los despidos actuales fueron orquestados por fondos de cobertura”.

MarketWatch le respalda. El multimillonario Christopher Hohn, gestor del fondo de cobertura TCI (que posee una participación de 6.000 millones de dólares en Alphabet), escribió al CEO de Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, el 20 de enero, argumentando que los recientes despidos del 6% de la plantilla (aunque “un paso en la dirección correcta”) eran insuficientes, y que era necesario recortar el 20%. Además, al haber disminuido la “competencia por el talento”, Alphabet podría salirse con la suya con importantes recortes salariales. Hohn no es, ni mucho menos, el único gestor de fondos de alto riesgo que plantea este tipo de exigencias.  “Varios gestores de hedge funds que invierten fuertemente en valores tecnológicos han pedido recientemente considerables reducciones de costes, incluidos recortes de empleo”.

Por supuesto, como es habitual en estos casos de capitalismo de desguace, los recortes acaban siendo contraproducentes y destruyendo valor real. Como señala Bernard Marr, los fondos de cobertura y otros capitalistas buitre han justificado sus peticiones de despidos señalando las “rachas de contratación” y las ofertas salariales competitivas durante el primer o segundo año de la pandemia de COVID y la necesidad de reducir tales políticas de contratación. Pero si se examina más de cerca, el nivel medio de experiencia de los despedidos es de 11 años. 5 años. “Por tanto, no es necesariamente cierto que se trate de trabajadores subalternos con poca experiencia que podrían ser sustituidos rápidamente o incluso automatizadas sus funciones”.

Marr intenta amortiguar la importancia de este dato añadiendo que el 28% de todos los despidos se produjeron en los departamentos de RR.HH., lo que, según argumenta, podría justificarse por el hecho de que “si las empresas están despidiendo personal, también estarán recortando la contratación, y menos contratación significa menos necesidad de personal de RR.HH.”, y algunas funciones de RR.HH. también se están automatizando.

Sin embargo, esto sigue significando que el 72% de los trabajadores despedidos, que proceden de forma desproporcionada de la parte más experimentada de la mano de obra, no trabajaban en RRHH. Y la representación del personal de RR.HH. en los despidos ni siquiera fue homogénea en todo el sector. “Mientras que los RRHH y la búsqueda de talento fueron los más afectados en Microsoft y Meta, en Google y Twitter, fueron los ingenieros de software los que se llevaron la peor parte de los recortes”. Así que los despidos en la industria tecnológica, en toda la industria, son sólo una versión algo menos extrema de la forma en que Twitter ha sido vaciado bajo la supervisión del chico del cartel de Dunning Kruger, Elon Musk.

Anne Helen Peterson explica por qué los despidos, a pesar de ser la receta instintiva de los inversores en caso de caída del valor de las acciones, son contraproducentes.

¿Qué hacen los despidos? En primer lugar, cuestan dinero: en indemnizaciones y seguros de desempleo, pero también reducen la productividad y la innovación. También destruyen la confianza, como señalan Sandra J. Sucher, profesora de la Harvard Business School, y Marilyn Morgan Westner, investigadora asociada, y aumentan la ansiedad y la falta de compromiso. El “bajo rendimiento tras el despido” es muy real.

Esto destaca otra forma en la que la idea de un mercado competitivo es más un mito que una realidad: cuando todas las empresas importantes en una industria oligopólica comparten las mismas culturas internas y mejores prácticas, y todos sus directivos han aprendido los mismos supuestos erróneos en la escuela de negocios, en realidad no están compitiendo en términos de eficiencia. En palabras del profesor Jeffrey Pfeffer, catedrático de la Stanford Graduate School of Business, el comportamiento de los directivos adopta la forma de un contagio social, que se propaga a través de una red en la que una empresa copia sin pensar lo que hacen las demás. “He tenido gente que me ha dicho que saben que los despidos son perjudiciales para el bienestar de la empresa, por no hablar del bienestar de los empleados, y que no consiguen gran cosa, pero todo el mundo está haciendo despidos y su consejo de administración se pregunta por qué ellos no están haciendo despidos también”.

​Así que lo que realmente tenemos es una economía en la que la mayoría de las industrias están dominadas por un puñado de empresas que administran los precios a través de un sistema de líderes de precios y compiten sobre todo en imagen y envoltorio más que en precio, comparten la misma cultura institucional e incluso comparten muchos de los mismos directores. Y mientras estas corporaciones globales fingen competir, la única competencia real es entre los trabajadores que suministran su mano de obra y los talleres clandestinos que producen bajo contrato para estas corporaciones.

Mientras tanto, las polémicas de la derecha libertaria siguen justificando el inexistente “libre comercio” con términos obsoletos como la “ventaja comparativa” ricardiana, como si lo que ellos llaman “comercio internacional” fuera comercio y no simplemente transacciones internas dentro de entidades globales integradas verticalmente, ya sea mediante la propiedad directa o indirectamente mediante la propiedad intelectual. Si el libertarismo quiere recuperar algo de credibilidad, es hora de empezar a hablar del mundo real.

Si te ha gustado este articulo y quieres apoyar a esta comunidad, puedes donar a través de este link: https://c4ss.org/apoyo

This piece is an offshoot commentary on certain elements touched upon in a recent essay by Spooky, so it will make the most sense if one reads that first. Any quotes in the essay below, unless otherwise indicated by mention or link, are from Spooky’s essay.

Since the Republicans—and any overlap with those political circles—are viewed by so many as indefinitely under siege by unreasonable firearm fanatics and the “gun lobby,” the Democrats are often viewed as the last hope for so-called reasonable legislation and discussion surrounding mass shootings in the U.S. However, just as with so many other issues laid at the feet of Democrats—and the influence and power of progressive political circles more generally—those hoping for meaningful dialogue or change from these corners can expect only disappointment.

To be clear, if one is only seeking symbolic speeches or regulatory gestures related to mass violence committed with firearms, then they can certainly get what they’re looking for from progressives. After all, if Donald Trump had little problem contributing to that pile of history book footnotes with his own regulations and proclamations, progressives via the Democrats can deliver on that front too. 

But, if one is looking instead to further address the underlying cultural and social problems—and rot—that boil to the point of bringing someone to mass-murder, what’s required is something much different from a narrow obsession with the makes and models of firearm people are allowed to own, purchase waiting times, background checks, and so on—what is generally referred to as gun control and its related policies. 

Indeed, one must apply “a psychocultural framework to the issue of mass shootings [specifically], and the . . . phenomenon of mass violence itself [more broadly]” to truly understand what’s going on in the mind of a mass shooter, and what brings them to the point of mass harm or killing. Just as no one strikes their partner simply because they have access to their own fists, “no one becomes a mass murderer merely because they have access to firearms.” 

With this being the case, hyper-focus on what people are allowed to acquire and own is in fact a side conversation to the larger and more urgent one on the social and cultural issues underlying mass killing. In this way, the space that gun control and related policy wars take up in the public conscience is often at the expense of meaningful discussion about what’s truly going on underneath the kind of mass, targeted—and often political—violence that so many feel is now an embedded feature of American society and culture.  

If all that’s the case, then why do Democrats—and the progressive political circles that support that party’s machinery—continually focus on narrower forms of gun control?

The answer lies with what is often the reality for keeping and holding power in modern so-called liberal-democratic countries: Gun control divides and frenzies the electorate well—too well. It is to progressives and the Democratic party what abortion is to social conservatives and Republicans. Whether the parties and political powers that be truly believe the dirt they rake and throw at each other on these issues is beside the point. The point is that these topics serve both to separate the electorate sharply on a key issue, and to throw opposing camps into passionate hate against one another.

Gun control enables progressive political operators to stomp their feet and make a lot of noise, encouraging others to look at anyone opposed to firearm prohibitions or tighter regulations as an evil monster who doesn’t seem to care about needless death. All the gun control noise and news coverage tends to reach points that have so many believing an outcome one way or another is apocalyptic in nature, while what is being fought over is, in reality, often extremely minor changes to already existing gun laws or regulation.  

In other words, when it comes to American party politics, the issue of gun control is an extremely useful weapon for winning elections—not an invitation to serious, broad-form discussion on what turns someone into a self-appointed soldier or martyr of personal or broader cause. By keeping the primary focus on guns themselves, and not the monstrous act of squeezing the trigger or the perverted ideology or thinking that brought someone to doing so, progressive politicians serve the public with simpler and more easily digestible suggestions on what the core problem really is—this type of gun, that type of license, this type of cartridge, that type of barrel, and so on and so forth. All of that functions to keep votes and donations flowing.

It should also never be forgotten that for the Democratic party and progressive circles, all of this has the added bonus of keeping well-meaning people at the grassroots—such as community groups truly concerned about safety and reducing violence in their local community— narrowly focusing their efforts on the kind of superficial gun control that just so happens to align with progressive agendas and operations. In this way, grassroots organizations—independent in name or on paper—become de facto secondary associations and arms of a political party who ensure people cast their vote “the right way.” 

Another way to look at it is: Why would Democrats and elite progressive political circles get into the messy business of complex and nuanced discussions around the social and cultural issues that underlie mass shootings? Getting everyone to obsess over scare words like “semi-automatic” or “assault” is often just enough of the political nectar one needs to draw from the latest mass shooting to get or keep political power.

Furthermore, if one partisan camp were ever to take the lead on bringing serious attention and discussion to the underlying social and cultural causes of mass shootings, it might have an unintended effect that could be politically problematic: unification of people in the electorate via discussion and agreement on common concerns. It would, in fact, be terribly inconvenient for the progressives—who always posture on the moral high ground and claim they value putting public safety and lives ahead of gun ownership—to meet just as many, if not more, folks from all kinds of walks of life who value both gun ownership for sports shooting, hunting, collecting, general enthusiasm, and true self-defence purposes, and the safety of others in their community. 

The many who voice a genuine frustration with progressive political machinery and Democrats for not doing what they should, or not doing enough, on the issue of mass shootings should try looking at the issue from a different perspective. Perhaps the politicians and pundits  are doing exactly what they should, and just enough, to achieve their primary political goals and purposes. Everything else, as usual, rests on the shoulders of those outside of the circles of political power.

Por Joseph Parampathu. Artígo original: Communities of Egoists, de 9 de fevereiro 2022. Traduzido para o português por p1x0.

O anarquismo e o egoísmo há muito dividem uma tensão que acompanha todos grupos anarquistas: como nos organizamos de uma forma que respeite nossa autonomia individual enquanto nos oferece os benefícios da organização coletiva? O trabalho de organização geralmente é o constante responder da pergunta: quanto esta organização me beneficia e por quais motivos eu deveria apoiar esta organização? Essa tensão tem sido apontada como as bases para muitas falhas no hora de organizar anarquistas, geralmente com algum tipo de líder argumentando que seus camaradas são muito resistentes em se comprometer com ideais, e egoístas condenado a inabilidade da organização de responder as necessidades de seus participantes. Stirner abordou essa ideia da organização egoísta através de sua ideia de “união de egoístas”, onde egoístas escolhem se associar ou desassociar baseados em seus desejos de se organizar ou não.1 Posto de outra forma, para o egoísta, a organização é válida desde que seja benéfica, e tão logo deixe de ser benéfica, a organização não deve ser preocupação do egoísta.

Práticas anarquistas tais como apoio mútuo e a organização comunitária encontram sua força em abordar essa tensão como um recurso necessário e inerente ao anarquismo organizado. Essa tensão entre o desejo da organização de manter a si mesma, mesmo a despeito das necessidades ou vontade de seus membros, e o desejo dos membros de manterem sua própria autonomia, mesmo as custas do benefício material de seus membros, é a mesma tensão que os seguidores de Bakunin e Marx debateram incessantemente, resultando na expulsão de Bakunin do quinto congresso da Associação Internacional dos Trabalhadores. Organizadores anarquistas devem ter esse cisma sempre em mente pois foi a disputa filosófica que delimitou a tensão entre anarquistas e o socialismo marxista ortodoxo.

Uma organização pode se manifestar de maneiras que deixam de ser anarquistas, ou que ameaçam a liberdade de seus membros de se associar livremente a ela. Essa tendência das organizações de manifestar seus próprios desejos estruturais — que são separados ou completamente divorciados dos desejos de seus membros — é o começo de sua involução em formas contra as quais os anarquistas lutam, tais como o estado ou corporações. A organização que tenha sujeitado seus membros a sua própria vontade para além do ponto onde esses membros tenham experienciado uma perda de associações por estarem associados a esta organização, mas que ainda assim permanece a usar seus membros para continuação de sua existência, para o senso anarquista, já não serve a necessidade de seus membros. Esse potencial para a transformação de uma organização de uma união de livre associação para a forma de estado ou corporação exige que todos anarquistas resistam a esse processo e lutem pela dissolução de tais organizações.

Se egoístas e anarquistas reconhecem esse potencial de falha na organização, como podem se preparar para criação de organizações anarquistas? Projetos anarquistas de apoio mútuo e organização comunitária encontram sua força ao explorar os meios pelos quais a organização pode servir o indivíduo, mesmo em detrimento da existência da organização. A falha das organizações anarquistas em durar no tempo não é uma falha da organização em si mas, no sentido anarquista, um testamento da natureza transitória do desejo de seus membros. Calcificar uma organização que não muda para atender as necessidades de seus membros, ou não se dissolve quando não atende a necessidade de seus membros, é estar prestes a seguir no perigoso caminho rumo a um vitalício Politburo “transitório”. Reconhecer o tempo de vida natural das organizações anarquistas é um fato necessário para organizadores anarquistas que buscam usar apoio mútuo e organização comunitária como meios de servir a comunidades, em oposição a servir organizações apenas por servir. Existem nítidos paralelos entre este ciclo de nascimento, morte e o renascimento dentro das necessidades coletivas de organizar pessoas e a “destruição criativa” que Schumpeter expandiu dos trabalhos de Marx. 2

Na prática a organização anarquista se dá nas formas de interação entre anarquistas (autoidentificados ou não) quando estes participam em manifestações, projetos, e processos de tomada de decisão coletivos de todas as espécies. Compreendendo as tensões inerentes entre a organização anarquista em si e os vários desejos dos atores anarquistas individualmente é necessário para navegar as dinâmicas de grupo dessas organizações. Por mais que existam ações coletivas que são tão antianarquistas que anarquista algum jamais as apoiaria, e devam existir algumas decisões individuais que nenhum grupo poderia justificaria permitir em seu nome, existe uma vasta penumbra entre o preto e o branco  do anarquismo em teoria e da organização na prática. Podemos dizer que é nessas áreas cinzas que a teoria se torna prátia e a anarquia do indivíduo encontra a anarquia do grupo. Quando exploramos essas áreas cinzentas nós encontramos os limites dos métodos não-anarquistas e os benefícios (para indivíduos e grupos) de buscar-se soluções anarquistas para um problema que de outra maneira poderia separar os anarquistas do grupo de sua afiliação com o grupo.

Nos anos seguintes a crise global financeira da última década, o movimento Occupy Wallstreet tentou ocupar fisicamente o espaço do Zuccotti Park, no distrito financeiro de Wall Street em Nova York. Após meses de agressivas ações policiais contra os manifestantes, eles eventualmente foram forçados para fora do espaço físico do  Zuccotti Park e continuaram se organizando especialmente através de espaços online, mais tarde tentando ocupar espaços físicos menores. Enquanto o protesto original durou, foi tanto um teste útil das práticas anarquistas em ação quanto uma oportunidade para indivíduos aprenderem sobre o próprio poder que possuem de influenciar ações coletivas. Em um espaço sem autoridades centralizadas e livre das expectativas de realizar algo além da existência do espaço e de seus membros, o movimento floresceu por um breve momento. Após ser forçado em espaços online regulados pela mídia na qual se reuniam, os indivíduos encontraram um espaço decididamente diferente. Conforme transicionaram de um espaço que era livre pois o haviam liberto para um espaço que era “livre” pois vendia seus dados para anunciantes, tomadas de decisão por consenso e a forma flexível para membros individuais formarem seus próprios times de trabalho desapareceram. Em seu lugar, o deslocamento para um espaço digital centralizado transformou a relação dos membros para com o movimento de uma relação de hierarquia funcional, onde hierarquias existiam de forma temporária conforme necessária para indivíduos e organizações e desaparecia quando não mais necessária para ambos, para uma relação hierarquia anatômica, onde a estrutura representa hierarquia organizacional com a organização à cima e os indivíduos a baixo servindo necessidades organizacionais 3

Nós podemos expandir essa descrição para abarcar tanto uma hierarquia funcional existente entre apoiadores de um movimento como um todo e a organização (representada por todos seus membros) e um subgrupo consistindo dos membros interagindo através da organização no espaço online e a facção do movimento cujos membros representam como interagindo em uma anatomia de hierarquia (existindo dentro de hierarquia funcional). Asssim, mesmo quando a maior parte do movimento mantém sua estrutura horizontal, é possível que se forme um bolsão de hierarquia anatômica e ameace a integridade da não-dominação do movimento. Independente se o movimento como um todo é ou não prejudicado pela emergência de estruturas hierárquicas dentro deste bolsão, membros anarquistas dentro deste subgrupo vão se ver sufocados pela falta de autonomia e certamente irão se desassociar.

Conforme egoístas tentam se organizar através de apoio mútuo e organização comunitária, eles precisam fazer as mesmas perguntas que quaisquer egoístas devem fazer em qualquer situação. Se a ação de apoio mútuo é prazerosa ou de outra forma benéfica para os interesses materiais ou de classe do indivíduo, então o egoísta racionalmente participaria. Quando um egoísta busca formular a organização de forma que seja atrativa para outros egoístas, a mesma pergunta deve guiar seu pensamento. Anarquistas formam organizações com o entendimento básico de que devem servir as necessidades de seus membros ou da comunidade que existem para servir. Esse egoísmo organizacional é necessário para uma formulação anarquista adequada de organização e faz a organização uma pergunta análoga a que todo egoísta faz a si mesmo. A organização em sua forma atual atende as necessidades da nossa comunidade em sua forma atual? Se não for o caso, a organização deve mudar ou ser dissolvida. A organização que busca continuar a existir independente de ser capaz de responder afirmativamente a essa pergunta, deve entender que está continuando por si só a despeito da sua inabilidade de cumprir seus objetivos. Ela se tornou uma organização zumbi, o que tipifica a estrutura “estado”. Ou seja, mesmo falhando em responder as necessidades de sua comunidade, ela continua os acessando através de sua desnecessária existência continuada. Um anarquista egoísta que se depare com essa organização, justamente trabalharia para encerrá-la e libertar seus membros desta influência, ou, simplesmente removê-los dela.

Uma organização egoísta, se vamos usar esta terminologia, tem o dever para com seus membros de assegurar que sua existência continuada está de acordo com os melhores interesses de todos envolvidos, ou então, permanece neutra quando esses membros escolhem deixar a organização. É certo que os interesses da organização e dos indivíduos devem evoluir ao longo do tempo e com a mudança das circunstâncias, um egoísta e uma organização egoísta devem ser de entendimento mútuo de que se associam para atender a necessidades mútuas, e desassociar quando essas necessidades não estiverem sendo adequadamente atendidas. É no contexto desta ideia que Malatesta alerta para os perigos de se aceitar a violência do estado através de políticas eleitorais e da inabilidade de tais sistemas de trabalhar contra classes privilegiadas.4 Poder não pode ser usado contra não-poder, pois poder, ao ser usado, nega a existência do não-poder. Anarquia existe não onde o poder é tomado pelos anarquistas, mas onde o poder é apagado.

Organizados como uniões de egoístas e trabalhando para oferecer apoio mútuo, nós devemos considerar os benefícios de dar atenção as reclamações de outros egoístas. Se a organização corre o risco de alienar membros individuais, através de uma desagradável insistência em subserviência, ou por outro motivo, então a organização deve certamente considerar suas ações e as consequências das mesmas. Enquanto organizadores e “líderes de partido” têm comumente condenado essas pessoas como sendo resistentes a cooperação ou a “praticidade”, existe uma resiliência que a organização anarquista pode encontrar em estar aberta a considerar cada uma das reclamações.

Courtney Morris, ao relatar a misoginia descarada e a violência alienante contra outros membros, cometidas pelo informante do FBI Brandon Darby, aponta como avaliar a nós mesmos e as organizações com que trabalhamos é necessário para uma cultura de segurança consciente.5 Para uma organização anarquista proteger a si mesma adequadamente, ela deve centrar-se principalmente em apoiar seus membros. Chamados a unidade que ignoram a perspectiva de membros, independente se minoria, arriscam excluir o anarquismo da organização, deixando para trás nada que valha ser salvo.

Conflitos dentro da organização necessariamente a testam para conflitos futuros e asseguram que ela é resiliente contra a pressão externa enquanto mantém o foco em prover para seus membros individuais e as comunidades que servem. A organização anarquista que compreende os benefícios do conflito saudável como meio de adequar sua estrutura organizacional e oferecer um fórum aberto para membros e as comunidades que servem para oferecerem feedback em tomadas de decisão encontram uma força nestes conflitos que de outra forma estaria ausente. Ao considerar o conflito como parte da organização como meio de facilitar o crescimento e centrar as questões que surgem das tensões entre desejos individuais e escolhas organizacionais, organizações anarquistas constroem uma resiliência que as torna prontas para se adaptarem conforme necessário. Essa prontidão em se adaptar é necessária para evitar a calcificação que pode levar a organização a perder de vista seu propósito e continuar a existir sem responder as necessidades da comunidade que serve ou seus membros.

Movimentos de ação direta são considerados “prefigurativos” no sentido que prefiguram suas abordagens para ações propostas atualmente baseadas no futuro que elas esperam gerar. Ao se organizar horizontalmente, permitindo membros se associarem à vontade, e rejeitando hierarquias anatômicas, ação direta pode prefigurar fins anarquistas através dos meios que emprega. Ao fazer uso de uma cultura de segurança feminista, antiespecista e anticlassista, organizações anarquistas protegem a si mesmas da infiltração do estado enquanto demonstram a realidade do futuro que propõem. O colega de Bakunin, James Guillame considerava a prefiguração como a melhoria fundamental do anarquismo sobre o marxismo. 6 Ao compreender essa prefiguração de fins e meios, egoístas sabem que se tomarem parte de uma organização que não é mais anarquista, então o resultado final dessas ações organizacionais só poderão ser não-anarquistas. Organizações de anarquistas devem constantemente enfrentar esta tensão entre objetivos organizacionais e desejos individuais. A vontade de engajar nesta tensão como a função necessária a organização anarquista pode separar a totalmente calcificada anatomia da hierarquia da organização anarquista. Como essa tensão é resolvida se torna o teste que informa se seus membros retém sua autonomia como indivíduos agindo através da organização, ou se eles se tornaram os instrumentos da vontade da organização.

Radicalizada pela pobreza da Grande Depressão, Ella Baker trabalhou para empoderar comunidades para utilizarem seus próprios recursos, coletivamente, para benefício próprio. Ao encorajar negras e negros do sul a protegerem a si mesmos através da organização, o movimento dos direitos civis manteve tomadas de decisão por consenso como um valor central, e organizados em torno de grupos de afinidade com o conhecimento de que grupos de indivíduos agindo em coletivo empoderam uns aos outros enquanto empoderam a si mesmos 7,8 Grupos individuais podiam manter a proteção da responsabilidade ou culpa pelas ações de outros grupos caso algo saísse errado, enquanto prontos para agir em solidariedade com eles. Na estrutura rizomática de várias anarquistas trabalhando juntos, determinar as origens e estratégias gerais é tão desnecessário quanto desimportante. O anarquismo como família encontra força neste campo onde origens não podem ser precisamente divididas e responsabilidade é compartilhada entre uma diversidade de táticas e atores.

É provável que as diferenças entre os seguidores de Bakunin e Marx fossem grandes de mais para a Internacional para permanecerem como facções numa mesma organização. Assim como, organizações que estão dispostas ao extremo de expulsar ou atropelar as perspectivas de membros individuais em favor de dominância organizacional vão se encontrar continuamente alienando membros egoístas. Um egoísta em união com essas organizações estaria certo em se desassociar caso a organização não o servisse mais. A organização que almeja ter uma postura anarquista com o apoio mútuo e organização comunitária deve certamente considerar se ao fazê-lo responderá a seus objetivos propostos. A organização que ignora a perspectiva de seus membros em busca de unidade pode encontrar a si mesma unida somente em isolamento. Para organizações que pedem que seus membros façam sacrifícios práticos em favor de desejos organizacionais, peço que considerem seus própros conselhos e façam sacrifícios organizacionais em favor de continuar sua benéfica união com os egoístas.

[1] Stirner, M. (1995). Stirner: the ego and its own. Cambridge University Press.

[2] Joseph, A. (1942). Schumpeter, Capitalism, socialism, and democracy. Nueva York.

[3] Swann, T., & Husted, E. (2017). Undermining anarchy: Facebook’s influence on anarchist principles of organization in Occupy Wall Street. The Information Society, 33(4), 192-204.

[4] Malatesta, E. (1926). Neither Democrats, nor Dictators: Anarchists. Pensiero e Volontà.

[5] Morris, C. D. (2018). Why Misogynists Make Great Informants How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements. In J. Hoffman & D. Yudacufksi (Eds.), Feminisms In Motion Voices for Justice, Liberation, and Transformation (pp. 43–54). Chico, CA: AK Press.

[6] Franks, B. (2003). Direct action ethic. Anarchist Studies, (1), 13-41.

[7] Crass, C. (2001). Looking to the light of freedom: Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement and thoughts on anarchist organizing. Collective liberation on my mind, 43-61.

[8] Mueller, C. (2004). Ella Baker and the origins of “participatory democracy”. The black studies reader, 1926-1986.

Por Kevin Carson. Título original: Contract Feudalism, del 15 de septembre de 2012. Traducido al español por Vince Cerberus.

¿Qué es el “feudalismo de contrato”?

Elizabeth Anderson acuñó recientemente el término “feudalismo contractual” para describir el creciente poder de los empleadores sobre la vida de los empleados fuera del lugar de trabajo.

Según Anderson, uno de los beneficios que tradicionalmente recibía el trabajador a cambio de su sometimiento a la autoridad de los patrones en el trabajo era la soberanía sobre el resto de su vida en el “mundo real” fuera del trabajo. Bajo los términos de este pacto taylorista, el trabajador entregó su sentido de la artesanía y el control sobre su propio trabajo a cambio del derecho a expresar su personalidad “real” a través del consumo en la parte de su vida que todavía le pertenecía. Esta negociación asumió,

la separación del trabajo del hogar. Por arbitrario y abusivo que haya sido el patrón en la planta de producción, cuando el trabajo terminaba, los trabajadores al menos podían escapar de su tiranía… [L]a separación del trabajo de la casa hizo una gran diferencia en la libertad de los trabajadores de la voluntad de sus empleadores. [1]

El trabajo asalariado, tradicionalmente, ha supuesto un pacto con el diablo en el que “vendes tu vida para vivir”: cortas las ocho o doce horas que dedicas al trabajo y las tiras por el retrete, para conseguir el dinero que necesitas. para apoyar tu vida real en el mundo real, donde eres tratado como un ser humano adulto. Y en el mundo real, donde tu juicio y tus valores realmente importan, tratas de fingir que ese otro infierno no existe.

Al mismo tiempo, señala Anderson, esta separación del trabajo del hogar depende enteramente del poder de negociación relativo del trabajo para su aplicación. (Volveré a esto, el tema central, más adelante).

El cambio en el poder

Pero es evidente que el poder de negociación del trabajo se está alejando radicalmente de los trabajadores. Para demasiados empleadores, el trato tradicional con el diablo ya no es lo suficientemente bueno. Los empleadores (especialmente en el sector de servicios) están comenzando a ver no solo la fuerza de trabajo del empleado durante las horas de trabajo, sino también al propio empleado como su propiedad. Se espera que los trabajadores administrativos y de servicios vivan de guardia las 24 horas del día: eso que solían llamar “hogar” es solo el estante en el que están almacenados cuando su dueño no los está usando en ese momento. Y el jefe tiene un derecho sobre lo que hacen incluso durante el tiempo que no están en el reloj: las reuniones políticas a las que asistes, si fumas, las cosas que escribes en tu blog, nada es realmente tuyo. La mayoría de las personas que bloguean sobre temas políticos o sociales, probablemente, temen lo que podría surgir si la Gestapo de Recursos Humanos hace un Google sobre ellos. En cuanto a la búsqueda de trabajo en sí, ¡Dios mío! Tienes que dar cuenta de cada semana que has estado desempleado y justificar el uso que hiciste de tu tiempo sin un maestro. Si alguna vez trabajó por cuenta propia, podría ser considerado “sobrecualificado”: es decir, existe el peligro de que no tenga la mente bien, porque no necesita el trabajo lo suficiente. Sin mencionar las preguntas sobre por qué dejó su trabajo anterior, el perfil de personalidad para determinar si está ocultando alguna opinión que no sea de la esposa de Stepford detrás de una fachada de obediencia, etc. Probablemente se parezca mucho a las pruebas de “confiabilidad política” para unirse al antiguo Partido Comunista Soviético.

Los ejemplos de feudalismo contractual han sido especialmente destacados en las noticias últimamente. El ejemplo que proporcionó la propia Anderson fue el de Weyco, con sede en Michigan, cuyo presidente prohibió a sus trabajadores fumar “no solo en el trabajo sino en cualquier otro lugar”. La política, adoptada en respuesta al costo creciente de la cobertura de salud, requería que los trabajadores se sometieran a pruebas de nicotina. [2]

Otro ejemplo reciente de “feudalismo por contrato” es la saga de Joe Gordon, dueño del blog Woolamaloo Gazette, quien fue despedido de la cadena de librerías Waterstone cuando sus jefes se dieron cuenta de que había hecho una publicación ocasional para desahogarse después de un evento particularmente mal día en el trabajo. [3]

Otro más es un fallo de la Junta Nacional de Relaciones Laborales (NLRB) que permitió a los empleadores prohibir a los empleados ausentarse del trabajo. Aquí está la esencia de esto, de un artículo de Harold Meyerson en el Washington Post:

El 7 de junio, los tres republicanos designados en la junta de cinco miembros que regula las relaciones empleador/empleado en los Estados Unidos emitieron un fallo notable que amplía los derechos de los empleadores a entrometerse en la vida de sus trabajadores cuando no están en el trabajo. Respaldaron la legalidad de una regulación para los empleados uniformados en Guardsmark, una compañía de guardias de seguridad, que dice: “[T]O debes… fraternizar en el trabajo o fuera de él, tener citas o ser demasiado amistoso con los empleados del cliente o con sus compañeros de trabajo.” [4]

La respuesta “libertaria vulgar” y sus errores

Muchos libertarios del libre mercado responden instintivamente a las quejas sobre tales políticas reuniéndose en torno al empleador. Un comentarista, por ejemplo, dijo esto en respuesta a la publicación de Elizabeth Anderson en el blog Left2Right: “Es un mercado libre. Si no le gustan las reglas de su empleador, entonces trabaje en otro lado”. Asimismo, una de las defensas libertarias más comunes de los talleres clandestinos es que deben ser mejores que las alternativas disponibles, ya que nadie está obligado a trabajar allí.

Bueno, sí y no. La pregunta es, ¿quién establece la gama de alternativas disponibles? Si el estado limita la gama de alternativas disponibles para el trabajo y debilita su poder de negociación en el mercado laboral, y actúa en connivencia con los empleadores al hacerlo, entonces la defensa del “libre mercado” de los empleadores es algo falsa.

Utilizo el término “libertario vulgar” para describir esta comprensión de “lo que es bueno para General Motors” de los principios del “mercado libre”, que identifica el mercado libre con los intereses de los empleadores contra los trabajadores, las grandes empresas contra las pequeñas y el productor contra el consumidor. Como lo describí en Estudios de Economía Política Mutualista: [5]

Los apologistas libertarios vulgares del capitalismo usan el término “libre mercado” en un sentido equívoco: parecen tener problemas para recordar, de un momento a otro, si están defendiendo el capitalismo realmente existente o los principios del libre mercado. Así que tenemos [un] artículo repetitivo estándar… argumentando que los ricos no pueden hacerse ricos a expensas de los pobres, porque “no es así como funciona el mercado libre”, asumiendo implícitamente que se trata de un mercado libre. Cuando se les insista, admitirán a regañadientes que el sistema actual no es un mercado libre y que incluye mucha intervención estatal en nombre de los ricos. Pero tan pronto como creen que pueden salirse con la suya, vuelven a defender la riqueza de las corporaciones existentes sobre la base de los “principios del libre mercado”.

El hecho es que esto no es un mercado libre. Es un sistema capitalista de estado en el que (como lo expresó Murray Rothbard en “La revolución estudiantil”) “nuestro estado corporativo usa el poder impositivo coercitivo para acumular capital corporativo o para reducir los costos corporativos”. [6] Como escribió Benjamin Tucker en un hace siglo:

…No es suficiente, aunque sea cierto, decir que, “si un hombre tiene trabajo para vender, debe encontrar a alguien con dinero para comprarlo”; es necesario agregar la verdad mucho más importante de que, si un hombre tiene trabajo para vender, tiene derecho a un mercado libre en el cual venderlo, un mercado en el que las leyes restrictivas no impedirán que nadie obtenga honestamente el dinero para comprarlo. Si el hombre que tiene trabajo para vender no tiene este mercado libre, entonces se viola su libertad y se le quita virtualmente su propiedad. Ahora bien, ese mercado ha sido negado constantemente, no sólo a los trabajadores de Homestead, sino a los trabajadores de todo el mundo civilizado. Y los hombres que lo han negado son los Andrew Carnegie.

…Que Carnegie, Dana & Co. se ocupen primero de que toda ley que viole la igualdad de libertad se elimine de los estatutos. Si, después de eso, cualquier trabajador interfiere con los derechos de sus empleadores, o usa la fuerza contra inofensivos “esquimales”, o ataca a los vigilantes de sus empleadores, ya sean detectives de Pinkerton, ayudantes del alguacil o la milicia estatal, prometo Yo mismo que, como anarquista y como consecuencia de mi fe anarquista, seré uno de los primeros en ofrecerse como miembro voluntario de una fuerza para reprimir a estos perturbadores del orden y, si es necesario, barrerlos de la tierra. Pero mientras subsistan estas leyes invasoras, debo considerar todo conflicto forzoso que surja como consecuencia de una violación original de la libertad por parte de las clases patronales y, si se barre algo, ¡que los trabajadores tomen la escoba! Aún,

Pero, ¿de qué restricciones podría haber estado hablando? Al leer las principales defensas del “libre mercado” de las relaciones laborales existentes, se tiene la idea de que las únicas restricciones a la libertad de mercado son aquellas que perjudican a las clases propietarias y a las grandes empresas (ya saben, la “última minoría perseguida”).

De hecho, tales apologéticas libertarias vulgares comparten un conjunto de suposiciones muy artificiales: mira, los trabajadores simplemente se quedan atrapados con este pobre conjunto de opciones: las clases empleadoras no tienen absolutamente nada que ver con eso. Y resulta que las clases propietarias tienen todos estos medios de producción en sus manos, y las clases trabajadoras resultan ser proletarios sin propiedad que se ven obligados a vender su trabajo en los términos de los propietarios. La posibilidad de que las clases patronales puedan estar directamente implicadas en las políticas estatales que redujeron las opciones disponibles de los trabajadores es demasiado ridícula incluso para considerarla.

Es el viejo cuento infantil de la acumulación primitiva. “Lenin” del blog de la Tumba de Lenin recuerda haber sido expuesto a él en las escuelas públicas:

La ilusión de un contrato libre e igualitario entre el empleado y el empleador ejerce un poder considerable, particularmente dada la escasez de conflictos laborales en los últimos quince años. La idea de que la situación podría estar amañada de antemano, en virtud del control de los medios de producción por parte de los capitalistas, es tan obvia que elude a muchas personas que, de lo contrario, se colocan a sí mismas en la izquierda.

En parte, esto se debe a que las personas están preparadas desde temprana edad para esperar y aceptar este estado de cosas. En clases de estudios empresariales en bachillerato, me mostraron junto con mis compañeros de clase un video patrocinado por un banco que pretendía demostrar cómo se produjo la división del trabajo. Todo sucedió, al parecer, de una manera relativamente benigna y pacífica, sin cuestiones políticas intrusivas o fases económicas. Desde los hombres de las cavernas hasta las tarjetas de crédito, en realidad se trataba de dividir el trabajo en tareas separadas que serían realizadas por aquellos más capaces de realizarlas. Luego, encontrando contacto con las aldeas cercanas, intercambiaban cosas en las que eran buenos por las cosas en las que las otras aldeas eran buenas… Lo único interesante de este video de propaganda es que no levantó una sola ceja, ¿cómo podría ¿él? Uno es llevado a esperar trabajar para un capitalista sin ver nada necesariamente injusto en ello, y uno no tiene con qué compararlo.

Tuve una reacción similar a todos esos pasajes sobre la preferencia temporal en Bohm-Bawerk y Mises que simplemente aceptaban, como algo natural, que una persona estaba en posición de “aportar” capital al proceso de producción, mientras que otra por algún tiempo. la misteriosa razón necesitaba los medios de producción y el fondo de trabajo que tan graciosamente se “proporcionaban”.

El crítico más famoso de este cuento infantil, por supuesto, fue el socialista de estado Karl Marx:

En tiempos lejanos había dos tipos de personas; uno, la élite diligente, inteligente y, sobre todo, frugal; los otros, bribones perezosos, gastando sus bienes, y más, en una vida desenfrenada. La leyenda del pecado original teológico nos dice ciertamente cómo el hombre llegó a ser condenado a comer su pan con el sudor de su frente; pero la historia del pecado original económico nos revela que hay personas para quienes esto no es en modo alguno esencial. ¡No importa! Así sucedió que los primeros acumularon riquezas, y los últimos no tenían nada que vender, excepto su propia piel. Y de este pecado original data la pobreza de la gran mayoría que, a pesar de todo su trabajo, no tiene hasta ahora para vender sino a sí misma, y ​​la riqueza de unos pocos que aumenta constantemente, aunque hace mucho que han dejado de trabajar [9].

Pero la crítica no se limitó de ninguna manera a los estatistas. El defensor del libre mercado Franz Oppenheimer escribió:

Según Adam Smith, las clases en una sociedad son el resultado del desarrollo “natural”. De un estado originario de igualdad, éstos no surgieron por otra causa que el ejercicio de las virtudes económicas de la industria, la frugalidad y la providencia…

[L]a dominación de clase, según esta teoría, es el resultado de una diferenciación gradual de un estado original de igualdad y libertad generales, sin que ello implique ningún poder extraeconómico…

Esta supuesta prueba se basa en el concepto de una “acumulación primitiva”, o una reserva original de riqueza, en tierras y en bienes muebles, provocada por medio de fuerzas puramente económicas; una doctrina justamente ridiculizada por Karl Marx como un “cuento de hadas”. Su esquema de razonamiento se aproxima a esto:

En algún lugar, en algún país fértil y extenso, un número de hombres libres, de igual estatus, forman una unión para la protección mutua. Gradualmente se diferencian en clases de propiedad. Los mejor dotados de fuerza, sabiduría, capacidad de ahorro, laboriosidad y cautela, adquieren lentamente una cantidad básica de bienes inmuebles o muebles; mientras que los estúpidos y menos eficientes, y los dados al descuido y al despilfarro, quedan sin posesiones. Los ricos prestan su propiedad productiva a los menos favorecidos a cambio de un tributo, ya sea la renta de la tierra o la ganancia, y así se vuelven cada vez más ricos, mientras que los demás siempre permanecen pobres. Estas diferencias en la posesión desarrollan gradualmente distinciones de clase social; ya que en todas partes tienen preferencia los ricos, mientras que sólo ellos tienen el tiempo y los medios para dedicarse a los asuntos públicos y para convertir las leyes administradas por ellos en su propio beneficio. Así, con el tiempo, se desarrolla un estamento dirigente y propietario, y un proletariado, una clase sin propiedad. El estado primitivo de individuos libres e iguales se convierte en un estado de clase, por una ley inherente del desarrollo, porque en cada masa concebible de hombres hay, como puede verse fácilmente, fuertes y débiles, inteligentes y tontos, cautelosos y derrochadores. [10]

Cómo llegamos a donde estamos ahora

En el mundo real, por supuesto, las cosas son un poco menos optimistas. Los medios de producción, durante los siglos de la época capitalista, han sido concentrados en unas pocas manos por uno de los mayores robos de la historia de la humanidad. Los campesinos de Gran Bretaña fueron privados de los derechos consuetudinarios de propiedad sobre la tierra, mediante cercados y otros robos sancionados por el estado, y conducidos a las fábricas como ganado. Y los dueños de las fábricas se beneficiaron, además, de controles sociales casi totalitarios sobre el movimiento y la libre asociación de trabajadores; este régimen legal incluía las Actas de Combinación, la Ley de Disturbios y la ley de asentamientos (este último equivalente a un sistema de pasaporte interno).

Por cierto: si cree que los pasajes anteriores son solo retóricos marxoide, tenga en cuenta que la literatura de la clase dominante de la primera revolución industrial estaba llena de quejas sobre lo difícil que era conseguir trabajadores en las fábricas: no solo eran los más bajos Las clases no acudían en masa a las fábricas por su propia voluntad, pero las clases propietarias usaban una gran cantidad de energía pensando en formas de obligarlas a hacerlo. Los empresarios de la época se dedicaron a hablar con mucha franqueza, tan franca como la de cualquier marxista, sobre la necesidad de mantener a los trabajadores en la indigencia y privarlos del acceso independiente a los medios de producción, para que trabajen lo suficientemente duro y lo suficientemente barato.

Albert Nock, sin duda la idea que nadie tiene de un marxista, descartó el cuento infantil burgués con el desprecio típico de Nock:

Los horrores de la vida industrial de Inglaterra en el último siglo proporcionan un informe permanente para los adictos a la intervención positiva. Trabajo infantil y trabajo femenino en las fábricas y minas; Coketown y el Sr. Bounderby; salarios de hambre; horas de matanza; condiciones de trabajo viles y peligrosas; barcos ataúd dirigidos por rufianes: reformadores y publicistas acusan con ligereza a todos estos de un régimen de individualismo tosco, competencia desenfrenada y laissez-faire. Esto es un absurdo a primera vista, porque tal régimen nunca existió en Inglaterra. Se debieron a la intervención primaria del Estado mediante la cual la población de Inglaterra fue expropiada de la tierra; debido a la eliminación de la tierra por parte del Estado de la competencia con la industria por la mano de obra. El sistema fabril y la “revolución industrial” tampoco tuvieron nada que ver con la creación de esas hordas de seres miserables. Cuando llegó el sistema fabril, esas hordas ya estaban allí, expropiadas, y se metían en los ingenios a por lo que les dieran el señor Gradgrind y el señor Plugson de Undershot, porque no tenían más remedio que mendigar, robar o pasar hambre. Su miseria y degradación no estaba a las puertas del individualismo; no yacían en ninguna parte sino en la puerta del Estado. La economía de Adam Smith no es la economía del individualismo; son la economía de los terratenientes y de los molineros. Nuestros fanáticos de la intervención positiva harían bien en leer la historia de las Leyes de Cercamientos y el trabajo de los Hammond, y ver qué pueden hacer con ellos. [11] y fueron a los molinos por lo que el Sr. Gradgrind y el Sr. Plugson de Undershot les dieran, porque no tenían más remedio que mendigar, robar o morir de hambre. Su miseria y degradación no estaba a las puertas del individualismo; no yacían en ninguna parte sino en la puerta del Estado. La economía de Adam Smith no es la economía del individualismo; son la economía de los terratenientes y de los molineros. Nuestros fanáticos de la intervención positiva harían bien en leer la historia de las Leyes de Cercamientos y el trabajo de los Hammond, y ver qué pueden hacer con ellos. [11] y fueron a los molinos por lo que el Sr. Gradgrind y el Sr. Plugson de Undershot les dieran, porque no tenían más remedio que mendigar, robar o morir de hambre. Su miseria y degradación no estaba a las puertas del individualismo; no yacían en ninguna parte sino en la puerta del Estado. La economía de Adam Smith no es la economía del individualismo; son la economía de los terratenientes y de los molineros. Nuestros fanáticos de la intervención positiva harían bien en leer la historia de las Leyes de Cercamientos y el trabajo de los Hammond, y ver qué pueden hacer con ellos. [11] La economía de Adam Smith no es la economía del individualismo; son la economía de los terratenientes y de los molineros. Nuestros fanáticos de la intervención positiva harían bien en leer la historia de las Leyes de Cercamientos y el trabajo de los Hammond, y ver qué pueden hacer con ellos. [11] La economía de Adam Smith no es la economía del individualismo; son la economía de los terratenientes y de los molineros. Nuestros fanáticos de la intervención positiva harían bien en leer la historia de las Leyes de Cercamientos y el trabajo de los Hammond, y ver qué pueden hacer con ellos. [11]

Incluso en el llamado “mercado libre” que supuestamente se produjo a mediados del siglo XIX, los dueños del capital y la tierra podían exigir tributos al trabajo, gracias a un marco legal general que (entre otras cosas) restringía el acceso de los trabajadores a su propio capital barato y autoorganizado a través de los bancos mutuos. Como resultado de este “monopolio del dinero”, los trabajadores tenían que vender su trabajo en un “mercado de compradores” en los términos establecidos por las clases propietarias y, por lo tanto, pagar un tributo (en la forma de un salario inferior al producto de su trabajo) para acceder a los medios de producción. Así, el trabajador ha sido despojado por partida doble: por el uso inicial de la fuerza por parte del Estado para impedir una economía de mercado propiedad de los productores; y por la continua intervención del Estado que lo obliga a vender su trabajo por menos de su producto. La gran mayoría del capital acumulado hoy es el resultado,

Entonces, incluso en el llamado “laissez-faire” del siglo XIX, como Tucker describió la situación, el nivel de intervención estatal en nombre de las clases propietarias y empleadoras ya estaba distorsionando el sistema salarial en todo tipo de direcciones autoritarias. El fenómeno del trabajo asalariado existió en la medida en que lo hizo sólo como resultado del proceso de acumulación primitiva por el cual las clases productoras, en siglos anteriores, habían sido despojadas de su propiedad en los medios de producción y obligadas a vender su trabajo en los términos de los jefes. Y gracias a la restricción estatal del crédito autoorganizado y del acceso a tierras desocupadas, que permitió a los propietarios de tierras y capital artificialmente escasos cobrar tributos por acceder a ellos, los trabajadores se enfrentaron a la necesidad constante de vender su trabajo en condiciones aún más desventajosas.

El problema se exacerbó durante la revolución capitalista de estado del siglo XX, con niveles aún más altos de intervención corporativista y la consiguiente centralización de la economía. El efecto de los subsidios gubernamentales y la cartelización regulatoria fue ocultar o transferir los costos de ineficiencia de la organización a gran escala y promover un modelo capitalista de estado de organización empresarial que era mucho más grande, y mucho más jerárquico y burocrático, de lo que podría haber sobrevivido en un mercado libre

Los subsidios estatales al desarrollo de la producción intensiva en capital, a medida que avanzaba el siglo, promovieron la descualificación y jerarquías internas cada vez más pronunciadas, y redujeron el poder de negociación que acompañaba al control del proceso de producción por parte de los trabajadores. Muchas de las formas de tecnología de producción más poderosamente descualificadoras se crearon como resultado de los subsidios estatales a la investigación y el desarrollo. Como escribió David Montgomery en Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation,

[L]a investigación del diseño real y el uso de tecnología intensiva en capital, que ahorra mano de obra y reduce las habilidades ha comenzado a indicar que la reducción de costos no fue una motivación principal, ni se logró. En lugar de cualquier estímulo económico de este tipo, el impulso primordial detrás del desarrollo del sistema estadounidense de fabricación fue militar; el principal promotor de los nuevos métodos no fue el mercado autoajustable, sino el Departamento de Artillería del Ejército de los EE. UU. fuera del mercado… El impulso para automatizar ha sido desde sus inicios el impulso para reducir la dependencia de la mano de obra calificada, eliminar la mano de obra necesaria y reducir, en lugar de aumentar los salarios. [12]

Finalmente, la decisión de las élites neoliberales en la década de 1970 de congelar los salarios reales y transferir todos los aumentos de productividad a reinversiones, dividendos o salarios de la alta gerencia, condujo a una fuerza laboral aún más descontenta y a la necesidad de sistemas internos de vigilancia y control mucho más allá. cualquier cosa que hubiera existido antes. Fat and Mean [13] de David M. Gordon se refiere, en su subtítulo, al “Mito de la reducción de personal gerencial. Gordon demuestra que, contrariamente a la percepción errónea del público, la mayoría de las empresas emplean incluso más mandos intermedios que antes; y una de las principales funciones de estos nuevos supervisores es hacer cumplir el control administrativo sobre una fuerza laboral cada vez más sobrecargada de trabajo, insegura y amargada. La cultura profesional en los departamentos de Recursos Humanos está orientada, cada vez más, a detectar y prevenir el sabotaje y otras expresiones de descontento de los empleados, a través de elaborados mecanismos de vigilancia interna, y a detectar actitudes potencialmente peligrosas hacia la autoridad a través de perfiles psicológicos intensivos.

Los capitalistas de Estado, desde que adoptaron su nuevo consenso neoliberal de los años setenta, se han empeñado en crear una sociedad en la que el trabajador promedio esté tan desesperado por trabajar que aceptará agradecido cualquier trabajo que se le ofrezca y hará lo que sea necesario para aferrarse a ella como una muerte sombría.

Para resumir…

…las cosas no se “pusieron” así. Tuvieron ayuda. El reducido poder de negociación del trabajo, la erosión resultante de los límites tradicionales entre el trabajo y la vida privada, y el creciente control de la gestión incluso del tiempo libre, son el resultado de esfuerzos políticos concertados.

El hecho de que aceptemos como natural un estado de cosas en el que una clase tiene “trabajos” para “dar” y otra clase se ve obligada a tomarlos, por falta de acceso independiente a los medios de producción, es el resultado de generaciones de ideologías hegemónicas de las clases propietarias y sus vulgares apologistas libertarios.

Nada en la situación actual es una implicación natural de los principios del libre mercado. Como escribió Albert Nock,

Nuestros recursos naturales, aunque muy agotados, siguen siendo abundantes; nuestra población es muy escasa, aproximadamente veinte o veinticinco por milla cuadrada; y algunos millones de esta población están en este momento “desempleados”, y es probable que permanezcan así porque nadie quiere o puede “darles trabajo”. No se trata de que los hombres generalmente se sometan a este estado de cosas, o que lo acepten como inevitable, sino que no vean en él nada irregular o anómalo debido a su idea fija de que el trabajo es algo que se da. [14]

Claire Wolfe señaló, en su brillante artículo “ Cubículos satánicos oscuros ”, que no hay nada libertario en la cultura existente de las relaciones laborales:

En una comunidad humana saludable, los trabajos no son ni necesarios ni deseables. El trabajo productivo es necesario, por razones económicas, sociales e incluso espirituales. Los mercados libres también son algo sorprendente, casi mágico en su capacidad para satisfacer miles de millones de necesidades diversas. ¿Emprendimiento? ¡Excelente! Pero los trabajos (salir con un horario fijo para realizar funciones fijas para otra persona día tras día por un salario) no son buenos para el cuerpo, el alma, la familia o la sociedad.

Intuitivamente, sin palabras, la gente lo sabía en 1955. Lo sabían en 1946. Realmente lo sabían cuando Ned Ludd y sus amigos estaban destrozando las máquinas de la Revolución Industrial temprana (aunque es posible que los luditas no hayan entendido exactamente por qué necesitaban hacer lo que querían lo hicieron).

Los trabajos apestan. El empleo corporativo apesta. Una vida abarrotada en cajas de 9 a 5 apesta. Los cubículos grises no son más que una actualización de los “ molinos satánicos oscuros ” de William Blake. Por supuesto, los cubículos son más luminosos y aireados; pero son diferentes en grado más que en tipo de los molinos de la Revolución Industrial. Tanto los cubículos como los molinos oscuros significan trabajar en los términos de otras personas, para las metas de otras personas, con el sufrimiento de otras personas. Ninguno de los dos tipos de trabajo suele resultar en que seamos dueños de los frutos de nuestro trabajo o tengamos la satisfacción de crear algo de principio a fin con nuestras propias manos. Tampoco nos permite trabajar a nuestro ritmo, ni al ritmo de las estaciones. Tampoco nos permite acceder a nuestras familias, amigos o comunidades cuando los necesitamos o ellos nos necesitan. Ambos aíslan el trabajo de cualquier otra parte de nuestra vida…

Hemos hecho de la esclavitud asalariada una parte tan importante de nuestra cultura que probablemente ni siquiera se le ocurra a la mayoría de la gente que hay algo antinatural en separar el trabajo del resto de nuestras vidas. O sobre pasar toda nuestra vida laboral produciendo cosas en las que a menudo podemos sentir solo un mínimo orgullo personal, o ningún orgullo en absoluto…

Toma un trabajo y habrás vendido parte de ti mismo a un maestro. Te has privado de los verdaderos frutos de tus propios esfuerzos.

Cuando eres dueño de tu propio trabajo, eres dueño de tu propia vida. Es un gol digno de mucho sacrificio. Y mucho pensamiento profundo.

[C]ualquiera que empiece a idear un plan serio que comience a cortar los cimientos de la estructura de poder estatal-corporativa puede esperar ser tratado como el Enemigo Público Número Uno. [15]

El principal obstáculo para este último proceso, escribió, era “el gobierno y sus corporaciones y mercados financieros fuertemente favorecidos y subsidiados…”

¿Qué tan malas tienen que ser las opciones?

Ahora, antes de continuar, como anarquista de mercado, debo estipular que no hay nada intrínsecamente malo en el trabajo asalariado. Y en un mercado libre, los empleadores estarían en su derecho de hacer el tipo de demandas asociadas con el feudalismo contractual.

El problema, desde mi punto de vista, es que el reducido poder de negociación del trabajo en el mercado laboral actual permite que los empleadores se salgan con la suya. Lo que merece comentario no es la cuestión legal de si el Estado debería “permitir” que los empleadores ejerzan este tipo de control, sino la cuestión de qué tipo de mercado supuestamente libre lo permitiría.

La pregunta es, ¿cuán horribles tienen que ser las otras “opciones” antes de que alguien esté lo suficientemente desesperado como para aceptar un trabajo en tales condiciones? ¿Cómo llegan las cosas al punto en que las personas se alinean para competir por trabajos en los que se les puede prohibir asociarse con compañeros de trabajo fuera del trabajo, donde incluso los trabajos minoristas sórdidos y mal pagados pueden implicar estar disponibles las 24 horas del día, los 7 días de la semana, donde los empleados ¿No pueden asistir a reuniones políticas sin estar atentos a un informante, o no pueden bloguear con sus propios nombres sin vivir con el temor de que estén a una búsqueda en la web de ser despedidos?

No soy amigo de las regulaciones laborales federales. No deberíamos necesitar regulaciones federales para evitar que este tipo de cosas sucedan. En un mercado libre donde la tierra y el capital no fueran artificialmente escasos y costosos en comparación con la mano de obra, los trabajos deberían competir por los trabajadores. Lo notable no es que el feudalismo contractual sea técnicamente “legal”, sino que el mercado laboral es tan pésimo que podría convertirse en un problema en primer lugar.

Como ya sugirió Elizabeth Anderson en la cita anterior, la clave del feudalismo contractual es el reducido poder de negociación del trabajo. Timothy Carter pone las alternativas en términos muy claros:

donde radica el verdadero poder para ganar la mayor parte del beneficio mutuo: con el poder de alejarse. Si un lado puede alejarse de la mesa y el otro lado no puede, la parte que puede irse puede obtener casi cualquier cosa que quiera siempre y cuando deje a la otra parte solo un poco mejor que si no hubiera ningún trato…

¿Qué crea un desequilibrio en el poder de alejarse? Una situación es la necesidad. Si un lado tiene que hacer el intercambio, su poder para alejarse se ha ido.

… Para la mayoría de las personas, un trabajo es la máxima necesidad. Es a partir de las ganancias del trabajo que se satisfacen todas las demás necesidades.

Entonces, ¿cómo podemos hacer que el intercambio sea más justo?… La respuesta liberal es hacer que el gobierno se entrometa en el intercambio trabajo-capital…

Hay otra manera. La necesidad de la intromisión del gobierno podría terminar si se igualara el equilibrio del poder de negociación entre el trabajo y el capital. Actualmente, el desequilibrio existe porque el capital puede irse, pero el trabajo no. [16]

Por un Mercado Libre Genuino

Contrasta la monstruosa situación actual con lo que existiría en un mercado libre genuino: puestos de trabajo compitiendo por los trabajadores, en lugar de al revés. Así es como Tucker imaginó los efectos favorables para los trabajadores de un mercado libre de este tipo:

Porque, dicen Proudhon y Warren, si el negocio de la banca fuera libre para todos, más y más personas entrarían en él hasta que la competencia fuera lo suficientemente fuerte como para reducir el precio de prestar dinero al costo laboral, lo que las estadísticas muestran que es menos de las tres cuartas partes del uno por ciento. En ese caso, las miles de personas que ahora se ven disuadidas de emprender negocios por las tasas ruinosamente altas que deben pagar por el capital con el que iniciar y llevar a cabo negocios verán disipadas sus dificultades… Entonces se verá una ejemplificación de las palabras de Richard Cobden que, cuando dos trabajadores persiguen a un patrón, los salarios bajan, pero cuando dos patrones persiguen a un trabajador, los salarios suben. El trabajo estará entonces en posición de dictar sus salarios, y así asegurará su salario natural, todo su producto… [17]

Los autores de Anarchist FAQ describieron las consecuencias libertarias socialistas del libre mercado de Tucker, en términos aún más amplios, en este pasaje:

Es importante señalar que, debido a la propuesta de Tucker de aumentar el poder de negociación de los trabajadores a través del acceso al crédito mutuo, su anarquismo individualista no solo es compatible con el control obrero, sino que de hecho lo promovería (además de requerirlo lógicamente). Porque si el acceso al crédito mutuo aumentara el poder de negociación de los trabajadores en la medida en que Tucker afirmó que lo haría, entonces podrían: (1) exigir y obtener la democracia en el lugar de trabajo; y (2) agrupar su crédito para comprar y poseer empresas colectivamente. Esto eliminaría la estructura de arriba hacia abajo de la empresa y la capacidad de los propietarios de pagarse a sí mismos salarios injustamente elevados, además de reducir a cero las ganancias capitalistas al garantizar que los trabajadores recibieran el valor total de su trabajo.

Entonces, en lugar de que los trabajadores vivan con miedo de que los jefes puedan descubrir algo “malo” sobre ellos (como el hecho de que han dicho públicamente lo que piensan en el pasado, como hombres y mujeres libres), los jefes vivirán con miedo de que los trabajadores piensen lo suficientemente mal de ellos. para que lleven su trabajo a otra parte. En lugar de que los trabajadores estén tan desesperados por mantener un trabajo como para permitir que sus vidas privadas se regulen como una extensión del trabajo, la gerencia estaría tan desesperada por retener a los trabajadores como para cambiar las condiciones laborales para que se adapten a ellos. En lugar de que los trabajadores tomen más y más humillaciones para evitar la bancarrota y la falta de vivienda, los jefes renunciarían a más y más control sobre el lugar de trabajo para retener una fuerza laboral. En tal economía, el trabajo asociado podría contratar capital en lugar de lo contrario.

Si te ha gustado este articulo y quieres apoyar a esta comunidad, puedes donar a través de este link: https://c4ss.org/apoyo

Notas:

[1] Elizabeth Anderson, ‘Adventures in Contract Feudalism’, Left2Right, 10 de febrero de 2005, http: //left2right. typepad. com/main/2005/02/adventures_in_c. html

[2] ‘La prohibición de fumar de la compañía también significa fuera de horario’, New York Times, 8 de febrero de 2005, http: //www. nytimes. com/2005/02/08/business/08 smoking. html

[3] Patrick Barkham, ‘Blogger Sacked for Sounding Off’, The Guardian, 12 de enero de 2005, http: //www. guardian. compañía reino unido / en línea / weblogs /story/0,14024,1388466,00. html; http: //cyber-junky. co. uk/joe/

[4] Harold Meyerson, ‘Big Brother On and Off the Job’, Washington Post, 10 de agosto de 2005, http: //www. washingtonpost. c om/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/09/AR2005080901162. html

[5] Autopublicado. Fayetteville, Arkansas, 2004, http: //www. mutualist. org/id47. html

[6] The Libertarian, 1 de mayo de 1969, http: //www. mises. org/journals/lf/1969/1969_05_01. pdf

[7] ‘The Lesson of Homestead’, Liberty, 23 de julio de 1892, en lugar de un libro (facsímil de Gordon Press de la segunda edición, 1897, 1972), págs. 453-54.

[8] ‘Capitalism & Unfreedom’, Tumba de Lenin, 1 de abril de 2005, http: //leninology. blogspot. com/2005/04/capitalism-unfreedom. html

[9] Karl Marx y Friedrich Engels, Capital vol. 1, vol. 35 de Marx and Engels Collected Works (Nueva York: International Publishers, 1996) pp. 704-5.

[10] Franz Oppenheimer, El Estado, trad. por John Gitterman (San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1997), págs. 5-6.

[11] Albert Nock, Our Enemy, the State (Delavan, Wisc. Hallberg Publishing Company, 1983), pág. 106n.

[12] (Knopf, 1984)

[13] (Prensa Libre, 1996)

[14] Nuestro Enemigo, El Estado, p. 82.

[15] Claire Wolfe, ‘Dark Satanic Cubicles’, Catálogo principal de Loompanics Unlimited 2005, http: //www. loompanics. com/cgi-local/SoftCart. exe/Articles/darksatanic. html? L+scstore+ckrd3585ff813181+1108492644

[16] Timothy Carter, Alternativas al salario mínimo’, Free Liberal, 11 de abril de 2005, http: //www. freeliberal. com/archives/000988. html

[17] “Socialismo de Estado y anarquismo”, En lugar de un libro, p. 11

[18] “G.5 ‘Benjamin Tucker: ¿Capitalista o anarquista?’”  Preguntas frecuentes sobre anarquistas, http: //www. infoshop. org/faq/secG5. html

In my previous article “In Lieu of Free Banking,” I outline the mutualist and individualist anarchist arguments for free and mutual banking, its potential ability to empower labor, and, briefly, some immediate proxies available via credit unions and alternative currencies. But I also point to Laurance Labadie’s assessment of Benjamin Tucker’s (and later his own) belief that wealth and property “concentrations had reached such a pass that even if it could be inaugurated, free banking alone would not be sufficient to break the monopolistic power of capital.” I ultimately conclude then that…

maybe it’s time to start thinking more like syndicalists and autonomists; positioning ourselves as not just as market anarchists but as explicitly class-struggle market anarchists (not unlike Dyer Lum and Joseph Labadie in the 1800s or Carson and Logan Glitterbomb today), who seek immediate, everyday forms of resistance as a means to leverage control by workers (in the broadest possible sense, i.e. including homemakers, students, the un- and under-employed “reserve army of labor,” etc.) over spaces of production in order to establish economic autonomy for communities and dual power in opposition to the dominant state capitalist economy. Along with attempts to potentially radicalize credit unions, we need a concerted effort toward cooperative development, radical unionization, and greater worker power in general. We need to help establish “free associations of producers” that can exchange among themselves without centralized intervention and often via counter-economic means to form something like Samuel Edward Konkin III’s agora—a space of nonviolent exchange kept safe from state violence—the perfect conditions to establish proper Banks of the People (as Proudhon called the concept) on the basis of mutual credit

But this is not simply a response to the “pessimist challenge” of Proudhonists (more or less) like Tucker and Labadie, but also in response to a challenge from Karl Marx, specifically his arguments against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s monetary reforms found in his Grundrisse.

Within this unfinished work, Marx responds to Proudhon’s proposals for a new form of money freed from both state-control and metallic universalism that can allow labor to leverage its own power in a market system. Marx asks: “Can the existing relations of production and the relations of distribution which correspond to them be revolutionized by a change in the instrument of circulation, in the organization of circulation? Further question: Can such a transformation of circulation be undertaken without touching the existing relations of production and the social relations which rest on them?” Marx denies the possibility of a peaceful, monetary transition to post-capitalism by pointing to the example of Scottish free banking. In chapter 2 of David Harvey’s Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse, he writes how…

Marx concludes with the case of the Scottish [free] banking system, which reflects the fact that “the Scots hate gold.” The Scottish case is important “because it shows on the one hand how the monetary system can be completely regulated” so that “all the evils [the Proudhonist Alfred] Darimon bewails can be abolished—without departing from the present social basis; while at the same time its contradictions, its antagonisms, the class contradiction etc. have reached an even higher degree than in any other country in the world” (133). In fact, “the Scottish banking and monetary system was indeed the most perilous reef for the illusions of the circulation artists.” The Scots liberated themselves from the supposed chains of the metallic money commodities without accomplishing any of the revolutionary aims that Proudhon had in mind.

As such, even though Scottish free banking proved highly stable from a market economics lens, in Marx’s opinion, the lack of focus—or rather the indirect focus—on the means of production as the basis from which social relationships emerge leads even radical monetary reform to only reformist and even utopian (non-)results. Marx does express sympathy for labor-time-based currency similar to the ones he sees Proudhon as proposing but argues that this could only be effective in a context of “direct social labour.” Harvey writes that…

[w]hat [Marx] meant by this is unknown. But here is my interpretation. If a group of associated laborers got together to organize not only production but social life, they might do so on the basis of time-chits that reflected hours of labor. In a time-share organization I might put in four hours of child-minding that I could exchange for four hours of yoga instruction that could be exchanged against four hours working on fixing the plumbing or building an extension to a dwelling. A centralized ledger of hours exchanged could be maintained (by a bank?) in which both offers and wants could be roughly coordinated in terms of work hours among the participants. There are all sorts of examples of communes and living arrangements where something of this sort (including the socialist kibbutzim in early Israel). This successfully works for a while. But everything depends on the social solidarity of the participants. As soon as social solidarity breaks down and trust evaporates among the participants, then the system collapses. Workable systems face enormous challenges when they attempt to scale up to the national, let alone the global level.

This makes an excellent point: It is necessary to create different organizations of production in order for changes in the mode of exchange to be sustainable. Monetary regimes change often (on a historical scale) without generating fundamental shifts in social relations, whereas when a society reorganizes production, everything changes. Consider for example the extreme difference in results between, to use Marx’s example, even the highly successful Scottish free banking period and, say, the factory and farm reclamations by radical unions in Revolutionary Catalonia.

But even when giving credit where credit is due, Marx (and Marx via Harvey) is off base on several points. For one, if “[w]orkable [non-capitalist monetary] systems face enormous challenges when they attempt to scale up to the national, let alone the global level” then don’t scale them up. Do as Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze advocate in Walk Out Walk On, and scale across: networking between communities on their own terms as all good trade systems work. Secondly, though the point that “everything depends on the social solidarity of the participants” and “[a]s soon as social solidarity breaks down and trust evaporates among the participants, then the system collapses” holds true for non-state currencies, the same sort of collective action problem could just as easily be leveled (and has been by Frank Miroslav in “Why Collective Action Problems Are Not a Capitalist Plot”) at the Marxists’ reorganization of production via proletarian revolt. However, the most egregious issue at hand is the fact that Marx focuses on (and Harvey repeats) time-based currencies. Though Josiah Warren, James Guillaume, possibly at times Proudhon, and other anarchists such as myself have all argued that time-based currencies (or timebanking as it is called today) are viable means of mediating at least some types of labor in particular contexts, Proudhon scholar Iain McKay argues that “Marx seriously misrepresented many of Proudhon’s ideas[,] . . . namely that Proudhon’s ‘constituted value’ equals ‘labour-notes.’” In fact, “[r]ather than a system of labour-time pricing, Proudhon’s ‘constitution of value’ is simply the recognition that because all goods are ‘a representative of labour’ this meant that they ‘can be exchanged for some other’.” Proudhon, McKay continues… 

noted that in chapter two he had ‘demonstrated how, if the value of all products were once determined and rendered highly exchangeable’ then all goods would become ‘acceptable, in a word, like money, in all payments’. Therefore what ‘we had to repress in the precious metals is not the use, but the privilege’ and so the ‘means of destroying this formidable force [of gold and silver] does not lie in the destruction of the medium’ but ‘in generalising its principle’ by ensuring that ‘all the products of labour had the same exchange value as money’ as money was ‘the only value that bears the stamp of society, the only merchandise standard that is current in commerce’. This would lead to ‘the socialisation of all values, in the continuous creation of new monetary figures’. A bank-note would be ‘the equivalent to the holder having actual possession of the sum paid’ and ‘the price stipulated and accepted for sold goods can become currency in the form of a bill of exchange.’

This is the basis of mutual banking and it is not the same thing as time-based currencies. Like the later individualist anarchists in North America like Tucker and Labadie, Proudhon did not argue that labor time should be enforced as the standard of value, but rather that in a market system with open competition and no monopoly of money by the state, prices would fall toward the cost of production and various forms of currency would become simply mediums by which labor and goods made by labor could be exchanged. To this point, Kevin Carson outlined to me in an email exchange that…

Marx’s objection to monetary schemes as a weapon against capitalism results from his labor theory of monetary value. In this, he shares an assumption with Austrians and other goldbugs: that money is a commodity, or derives its value from being “backed” by something. For me the key point at issue is whether money requires such backing, or if it can function solely as a denominator of value that measures and coordinates the values of things being exchanged. . . . The actual machines and raw materials are simply production flows being created by other groups of workers; if the workers in a productive unit could use credit to deal directly with the other groups of workers producing the machines, without having to have savings or stockpiled wealth, that would destroy the very idea of absentee “investment” and the basis for capitalist property claims in the means of production [1].

For Carson then, much like for Proudhon, currency is not necessarily confined to its use as a commodity in the accumulation of capital but is rather also a potential means by which producers can negotiate among themselves with only backing necessary being actual goods and services; sidestepping many of the critiques of commodity money found in the Grundrisse’s “Chapter on Money” [2].

Marx and Marxists like Harvey are correct in pointing out that changes in means of exchange are not the sole key to reorganizing production, and that it is necessary for radicalized workers to take action to reorganize production (though on their own terms; not by any blood-stained, authoritarian vanguard). At the same time though, orthodox Marxists are, as Kojin Karatani argues in his book Transcritique, wrong to write off the possibility of currency as an important means to re-organize economic life as a whole. Harvey also forwards this sentiment, arguing that “Marx fails . . . to consider the degree to which revolutionary transformations in labor practices might necessitate radical reorganizations in the monetary and financial system if they are to succeed. He does not take the question of socialist money seriously enough.” For a good example of this kind of oversight, let’s return to revolutionary Catalonia: According to Burnett Bolloten in The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution, one of the significant economic issues faced in that era was that though many industries (means of production) were taken over by the syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), most “banks and other credit institutions” were seized by the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) bank employees’ union and—because of the latter’s association with the Marxist-Leninists who were not only attempting to grow state power but whose ranks were infected with Stalinist agents—they were essentially boycotted by the former in favor of direct cash transactions, barter, and free consumption. This led to a situation where “the profitable concerns amassed huge sums of money on their premises. This hoarding created a serious currency shortage and restricted the basis of credit, which otherwise could have been used to finance the less successful enterprises.” The February 1937 CNT Congress “proposed that the organization create its own bank, but nothing came of the project.” A great deal of the issues—whether it was not unionizing bank workers or setting up banks for themselves—can be traced back to guess what? According to Bolloten: “[T]heir contempt for money.”

It’s this gap that, yes in some contexts, “time-chits,” but many other monetary experiments like the aforementioned radicalizing of credit unions, Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS), mutual credit clearing systems, (in spaces with less established trust) cryptocurrencies, and especially mutual banking can help fill. This plurality is important especially because Marx notes in the “Chapter on Money” that “[v]arious forms of money may correspond better to social production in various stages; one form may remedy evils against which another is powerless.” But while Marx appears to confine this to a one-to-one correspondence in these different totalities in historical development, the reality is that many different forms of currency could be used in different contexts simultaneously depending on which is best suited to the needs of the producers at hand—a situation best forwarded via a free banking system. But in general, they can help, to use Marxian terminology, shift circuits of exchange. In an Interview with Neal Rockwell titled Capitalism is Just a Really Bad Way of Organizing Communism, David Graeber identifies French historian Fernand Braudel as arguing that “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. 

Warren’s (and supposedly Proudhon’s) time-based currencies would entail almost direct exchange of labor, whereas Silvio Gesell argued for a local currency called Freigeld without interest rates and with an artificial carrying cost (or “oxidation” as Harvey terms it) so as to penalize hoarding to promote its use as a means of exchange instead of a means of accumulation. Even as these have fallen out of favor, LETS and mutual banking hold up as tools to either more-or-less directly exchange labor or cause prices to fall to the cost of production organically. Then, emphasizing the importance of also reorganizing production, even the nominal ‘profits’ made via exchange are absorbed back into, as Marxian economist Richard Wolff calls them, “Worker Self-Directed Enterprises.”

Alternative currencies unauthorized by and largely illegible to the state such as these also point toward the importance of not just the difference between markets and capitalism but different kinds of markets—particularly black and grey ones. Central to agorist revolutionary strategy, the counter-economy formed by these anti-statist markets is frequently written off by orthodox Marxists as a purely “lumpenproletariat” phenomenon. However, this obfuscates its nature as a common network that everyday people (waged workers, “surplus” laborers, working-class homemakers, and independent producers alike) all participate in to varying levels as a means to survive under the regime of state capitalism (like community networks in U.S. neighborhoods or the massive black markets of the Soviet Union). A movement then toward the counter-economy entails greater control of production and exchange by everyday people, lending itself toward Logan Glitterbomb’s proposal that…

 [w]hile agorists build alternatives to the white market within the black and grey markets, syndicalists could focus on challenging existing white market entities from the inside, eventually taking them over as [Murray] Rothbard advocated. But it doesn’t have to stop there. Agorists should indeed advocate that syndicalists go even further. Once a white market business is successfully syndicalized, agorist-syndicalists should help transition the business into the agora. The newly collectivized business should eventually do what all good agorist businesses do: ignore state licensing regimes, refuse to pay taxes, engage in the use of alternative currencies, and generally disregard statist interference with their business dealings. They just successfully ousted the boss, why submit to yet another authority? They just got rid of the corporate cronies who became rich by stealing the fruits of their labor so then why let the state do the same through taxes?

The hope then would be to network between these counter-economic spaces of worker self-management via non-capitalist markets with alternative currencies and mutual credit institutions; as opposed to writing off exchange as a secondary, bourgeois issue in favor of the ineffective, bureaucratic bludgeoning tool that even decentralized planning tends toward. Ultimately this more comprehensive vision of worker control of both production and exchange follows the view of sociologist Georges Gurvitch “that no social doctrine that is concerned about both dedogmatising Marxism and correcting Proudhon by surpassing them both is possible without a synthesis of the thought of these enemy brothers. For these enemy brothers are condemned to seeing their contributions melt into a third doctrine” based on “worker self-management;” a move that also further bridges the “complementary” split in autonomist Marxist praxis between, as Carson outlines in chapter six of his book Exodus, the “seizing [of] the factories, whether social or literal” (à la Antonio Negri and Micheal Hardt) and the undertaking of “an ever larger share of production of life’s necessities in the social sphere, in self-provisioning in the informal economy, through commons-based peer production, or through cooperative labor by workers using affordable high-tech tools in their own homes and shops” more in line with the likes of Sylvia Federici and John Holloway.

1. Check out Carson’s review of A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse.
2. With the exception perhaps of Marx’s point (again via Harvey) that “[t]he use and proliferation of local banknotes is not limited by the metallic base. The private discounting of bills by merchants is an entirely different operation and is not limited by the gold reserves. Whether or not I extend credit to accommodate the needs of my customers does not depend upon the gold reserves of the banks.” This is true, in that it is not the banks’ reserve[s] but rather the banking monopoly—a political influence as outlined by Benjamin Tucker—that restricts the proliferation of anything more than “complementary currencies” and [limited interpersonal] credit extensions. This is in addition [to] the place of state-capitalist money in cultural hegemony.

Click the image to view or download
the .pdf version of this study.

Traduzione italiana: Io, la matita: Una Rilettura.

Introduction

There is probably no libertarian polemic more widely distributed and more familiar, or held in higher esteem, than “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read.” It originally appeared in the December 1958 issue of The Freeman. It has since been circulated as a pamphlet by the Foundation for Economic Education to generations of secondary and post-secondary students, as well as to the public at large. This study takes the FEE’s pamphlet version as its text.^[1]

The essay purports to illustrate, exemplified by the production history of a humble pencil, the superior efficiency of coordination of “millions of tiny know-hows” by the Invisible Hand of the market compared to “human master-minding.”^[2] More than anything, it sought to imprint on its readers the importance of a “faith in free people” — and, by implication, the capitalist system that produced the pencil as an exemplar of such human freedom.^[3]
It has received fulsome praise from such right-libertarian eminences as economists Milton Friedman and Donald Boudreaux, as well as Lawrence F. Reed (the latter currently president emeritus of FEE). In his Afterword to the FEE pamphlet, Friedman lauded it for its emphasis on the dispersed knowledge of millions of market actors coordinated by the market price system, going on to quote from his own television series “Free to Choose”:

None of the thousands of persons involved in producing the pencil performed his task because he wanted a pencil. Some among them never saw a pencil and would not know what it is for. Each saw his work as a way to get the goods and services he wanted….

It is even more astounding that the pencil was ever produced. No one sitting in a central office gave orders to these thousands of people. No military police enforced the orders that were not given.^[4]

In an Afterword to the version hosted by the Online Library of Liberty, Boudreaux gushes: “No newcomer to economics who reads ‘I, Pencil’ can fail to have a simplistic belief in the superiority of central planning or regulation deeply shaken.”^[5]

* * *

Lawrence Reed, writing the Foreword to his foundation’s pamphlet, observed quite truthfully that “Ideas are most powerful when wrapped in a compelling story.”^[6] No one understood this principle better than Ronald Reagan, recognized as the Great Storyteller by friends and adversaries alike. Reagan sold an entire transformative generational agenda of neoliberalism wrapped in simple, compelling stories about welfare queens in Cadillacs, slum-dwellers paying $113 a month for luxury apartments, and lazy bums using food stamps to buy an orange and vodka. The stories were simple, compelling — and false.

The Foundation for Economic Education itself was created as part of a broader post-WWII corporate-funded propaganda offensive, aimed at selling the American public — through simple, compelling stories — on the virtues of “Our Free Enterprise System” and rolling back the prewar and wartime political gains of organized labor and the Left.

The National Association of Manufacturers was one major player in this campaign. In 1946, historian of propaganda Alex Carey quotes from a college thesis,

[a]ll available media were used to arouse the general public to insist that the country replace bureaucratic control with free competition. A series of four full-page advertisement in more than 400 daily and 2,000 weekly newspapers carried the opening message…. Special articles were written for magazines, business periodicals and farm papers; the Association’s Industrial Press Service carried a steady stream of statements and answers to 4,200 editions of weekly papers, 500 editors of metropolitan dailies and 2,700 editors of trade publications and employee magazines; ‘Brief for Broadcasters’ told the story to 700 radio commentators, and ‘Industry’s Views’ channelled the Association’s beliefs to more than 1,300 editorial writers and columnists.^[7]

In the 1946-1950 period, the NAM distributed over 18 million pamphlets, with 41 percent going to employees, 53 percent to students, and six percent to community organizations like churches and women’s groups.^[8]

The NAM was joined by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in its campaign to “drench the country with anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-union and anti-New Deal propaganda.” The Chamber’s strategy was to distribute millions of copies of large (around 50 pages) pamphlets.^[9] The American Advertising Council in 1947 launched a $100 million program to “use all media to ‘sell’ the American economic system to the American people.”^[10]

As Daniel Bell described it, this propaganda campaign reflected “industry’s prime concern”

in the post war years, to change the climate of opinion ushered in by… the depression. This ‘free enterprise’ campaign has two essential aims: to re-win the loyalty of the worker which now goes to the union and to halt creeping socialism…. In short the campaign has had the definite aim of seeking to shift the Democratic majority of the last 2o years into the Republican camp….

It was, Bell wrote, “the most intensive ‘sales’ campaign in the history of industry.”^[11]

The Foundation for Economic Education, although its ties to the efforts of the NAM, Chamber of Commerce et al were less direct, was founded in 1946 as a business-funded think tank whose purpose was to propagandize in defense of a mythical “free enterprise system.” Founder Leonard Read had had something of a conversion experience upon meeting William Clinton Mullendore of the Southern California Edison Company. The “free enterprise” creed to which Mullendore bore witness was no abstract set of free market principles, but a defense of American business interests against the “apostles of hatred” who threatened them.^[12]

The concrete meaning the “free enterprise system” held for Read might be indicated by the fact that, while virtually every reference to labor unions in his private journal^[13] framed them in a negative light as coercive, quasi-governmental institutions that extorted citizens’ money^[14], he presumably didn’t view the bloody history of the Dole Company in Hawaii as a sufficient departure from the principle of voluntary decisions by “free men and women” to disqualify its president from serving as his executive assistant (Herbert Cornuelle went on to head United Fruit Company, another paragon of human liberty, in the 1960s).

At the outset FEE was heavily funded by corporate donors like Con Ed, U.S. Steel, GM, and Chrysler.^[15]

The most successful libertarian organization of the postwar years, FEE quickly replaced the scattershot efforts of myriad small anti–New Deal organizations. It was well funded, courtesy of corporate supporters including Chrysler, General Motors, Monsanto, Montgomery Ward, and U.S. Steel, and received its single largest donation from the Volker Fund.^[16]

At the time of FEE’s founding, Read had been general manager of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. Alongside Read’s position as president, the chairman’s post went to David Goodrich, chairman of the board of B.F. Goodrich. Of the sixteen trustees, seven came from corporate backgrounds: H.W. Luhnow, president of William Volker & Company; A. C. Mattei, president of Honolulu Oil Corporation; Charles White, president of the Republic Steel Corporation; Donaldson Brown, former vice-president of General Motors; Jasper Crane, former vice-president of Du Pont; B. E. Hutchinson, chairman of the finance committee of Chrysler Corporation; and his old friend W. C. Mullendore, president of the Southern California Edison Company.^[17] Herbert Cornuelle, of the Dole Company, was assistant to the president.^[18]

* * *

“I, Pencil” is simple and compelling. Is it true? At first glance, there is little in it that appears likely to be outright fabrication or error in the same sense as Reagan’s anecdotes. All the statements of bare fact about the sourcing of actual components seem to be fairly easily falsifiable. So the only question is whether these facts still bear out Read’s implication when seen in context — or whether they are, in the words of The Simpsons attorney Lionel Hutz, “the best kind of true: technically true.” Specifically, how accurately does Read’s flowery language about “free people” actually describe the labor relations and ownership of resources at each of the many steps in the pencil’s production history?

Let’s take a closer look.

Stations of the Pencil

According to a footnote in the Online Library of Liberty version, the history in “I, Pencil” is specifically that of a Mongol 482 pencil, a product of the Eberhard Faber Pencil Company.

Now, Read does not go much into the history of the Eberhard Faber company in this tract. All his factoids about the making of the pencil reflect the state of affairs at the time of writing — presumably in 1958 or not long before. But the actual history of the company adds some possibly illuminating context.

The Wikipedia entry for the company dates its founding by John Eberhard Faber to 1861, in Manhattan.^[19]

“My family tree,” the pencil starts out, “begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon.”^[20] The Eberhard Faber Pencil Factory originally produced pencils from cedar — Eastern red cedar, to be exact — but not from California. Its wood supply came from Faber’s lumber mill near Cedar Key, Florida.^[21] Although I can find no information on when the company began sourcing its cedar from the Pacific coastal region, or whether it used wood from both Florida and the West Coast for some period of time, it presumably switched exclusively to western sources by 1896 at the latest because in that year the Florida mill burned down.^[22]

“I, Pencil” makes no mention of the actual supplier for Eberhard Faber’s cedar on the West Coast, whether it’s sourced from an independent firm or from an Eberhard Faber subsidiary, or how the supplier acquired the cedar forests in either case. But CalCedar — the California Cedar Products Company, founded in 1917 and located in Stockton — is, according to its LinkedIn page, “the world’s leading supplier of cedar pencil slats” to “pencil manufacturers around the globe.” In that regard, it can probably be taken as typical of the cedar operations supplying the pencil industry.^[23]

Regarding CalCedar’s actual acquisition of cedar forests, the Reference for Business website notes only that Charles Berolzheimer, a great-grandson of the founder,

struck out on his own in the pencil business in 1927, moving west to California to buy a young firm called California Cedar Products Company, which relied on the ready availability of Incense-cedar in the forests of California and Oregon to produce both paneling and pencil slats.^[24]

No doubt that “ready availability” of cedar leaves a lot unsaid; behind that weasel-wording, there probably lies an interesting — if less edifying than Read’s — story of how it became available. California, as any student of middle school American history should know, was forcibly acquired by the United States only twelve years before Eberhard Faber founded his pencil company — thereby leading to the “ready availability” of not only cedar, but of many other kinds of lumber, mineral, and grazing land, to the American logging, mining and ranching interests that swarmed westward to grab the loot acquired after the Mexican War.

The story of California is the story of the American West more generally; legal title to the great bulk of land area passed from the Spanish crown to the Republic of Mexico, and in turn became United States public lands. The rest of the story amounts to a Billy Jack movie. The U.S. Department of the Interior and Bureau of Land Management are, to borrow an old joke concerning the Canadian government, a bunch of mining and logging companies in a trenchcoat. Tens of thousands of square miles of forest and mineral resources were doled out to such companies in, to adapt a phrase from Vernon Parrington, a Great Barbecue; tens or hundreds of thousands more were officially retained in the public domain, but preferentially leased to the mining and logging companies at the most nominal of prices.

At any rate, the few remaining Yokuts people — upon whose unceded land the city called “Stockton” sits — might have something to say about how free, peaceful, and voluntary the process was by which that cedar was acquired to supply the wood for Read’s talkative pencil. Here’s a hint: In 1851, Governor Pete Burnett demanded that Native peoples be moved east of the Sierra mountains; else, he warned, “a war of extermination would continue to be waged until the Indian race should become extinct.”^[25]

The redwood forests, regardless of the particular corporation which actually logged them, were (as John Quiggin points out) quite likely “managed by the US Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management, or maybe a similar state agency.”

And why is this? Starting in the late 19th century, the US government (most notably under Theodore Roosevelt) judged that the nation’s forests were not likely to be adequately managed to ensure a supply of timber for, among other things, the production of pencils for future generations if they relied on existing private property rights and the workings of the invisible hand. Similar judgements have been made in Australia and many other countries. That is, the production of pencils in the US in the 1950s depended, to a substantial extent, on conscious planning undertaken 50 years ago.

It would be naive to suppose that public management of national forests is driven by a concern for some abstract notion of the common good. A variety of interests (logging companies, land developers, environmentalists and others) push with greater or lesser success for their view of how forests ought to be run, and sometimes succeed in capturing government agencies that are supposed to regulate them.^[26]

In other words, this is yet another of the many cases in which the capitalist state manages the economy on behalf of capitalist industry. Right-libertarians might raise the objection that a poor hapless business enterprise has no choice but to source its raw materials from available suppliers, regardless of whether they’ve fallen victim to predation by the wicked, aggrandizing state. But bear in mind that this is not even a matter (as per Quiggin’s unfortunately naive liberal framing) of agencies being “captured” by “government agencies that are supposed to regulate them.” Rather, as Gabriel Kolko demonstrated in The Triumph of Conservatism, most of the Progressive Era regulatory agenda was actually passed at the behest of the regulated industries themselves. He used the term “political capitalism” to describe the capitalist state’s policy objectives:

Political capitalism is the utilization of political outlets to attain conditions of stability, predictability, and security — to attain rationalization — in the economy. Stability is the elimination of internecine competition and erratic fluctuations in the economy. Predictability is the ability, on the basis of politically stabilized and secured means, to plan future economic action on the basis of fairly calculable expectations. By security I mean protection from the political attacks latent in any formally democratic political structure. I do not give to rationalization its frequent definition as the improvement of efficiency, output, or internal organization of a company; I mean by the term, rather, the organization of the economy and the larger political and social spheres in a manner that will allow corporations to function in a predictable and secure environment permitting reasonable profits over the long run.^[27]

To frame big business as distinct from the state at all, let alone the more passive of the two parties, is a bit like treating feudal landlords as separate from the medieval polity.

And one of the central functions of the capitalist state is to subsidize many of the inputs to capitalist industry — in particular by guaranteeing access to artificially cheap, abundant natural resources through colonial enclosure both within America’s own settler colonial hinterland and in the external colonial world.

Read continues:

The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto? These legions are among my antecedents….

Don’t overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation.^[28]

Of course we all know what an exemplary product of the Invisible Hand the national railroad system was. As Quiggin notes: “Read’s pencil doesn’t mention the line, but it’s presumably on the network of the Union Pacific Railroad, created by Act of Congress under Abraham Lincoln, with the plan of building a railway line across the US.”^[29] There’s some disputing in the comments under Quiggin’s post as to which line it actually was, but it makes little difference. The state was central to the creation of the entire national railroad system.

The railroads, Albert Jay Nock observed, were — “with few exceptions” — not a “response to any economic demand. They were speculative enterprises enabled by State intervention, by allotment of the political means in the form of land-grants and subsidies….”^[30]

Those federal land grants, according to Matthew Josephson, in effect transformed the railroad companies into land companies. In the decade before 1861, “the railroads, especially in the West, were ‘land companies’ which acquired their principal raw material through pure grants in return for their promise to build, and whose directors… did a rushing land business in farm lands and town sites at rising prices.” For example, under the terms of the Pacific Railroad bill, the Union Pacific (which built from the Mississippi westward) was granted twelve million acres of land and $27 million worth of thirty‐year government bonds. The Central Pacific (built from the West Coast eastward) received nine million acres and $24 million worth of bonds.^[31]

No less a right-libertarian eminence than Murray Rothbard confirms that the land grants included not only the rights-of-way for the actual track, “but fifteen-mile tracts on either side of the line.” This was so that, as the lines were completed, the railroads could cash in by selling off the now-prime real estate at its new, astronomically increased value. Every home and business in the new towns that sprang up along the railroad routes was bought from the railroad companies. In addition, the land grants also included valuable timber land.^[32]

Let’s look a little closer at those railroad bonds Josephson mentioned above, while we’re at it. Theodore Judah, chief engineer for what would be the Central Pacific railroad, stated that the project “could be done — if government aid were obtained.” One of the railroad’s leading promoters, Collis Huntington, obtained financing by bribing local governments (including Stockton, Sacramento, and San Francisco) into issuing bonds (“ranging from $150,000 to $1,000,000”), and/or extorted them with the threat of being bypassed in favor of other towns.^[33]

Michael Piore and Charles Sabel argue that it is quite unlikely the railroads would have been built anywhere near as quickly, or on as large a scale, had they not been funded by massive subsidies. The initial capital outlays required to secure rights-of-way, prepare road beds, and lay track were too costly.^[34] The federal government also overcame transaction costs by revising tort and contract law, among other things exempting common carriers from liability for many kinds of physical damage caused by their operation.^[35]

Absent all these subsidies, Lewis Mumford speculates, the railroad system that emerged would likely have been much lower in capacity and less centralized — a large number of regional railroad systems geared primarily to supporting local and regional industrial district economies, and loosely linked together (if at all) by fewer and smaller national trunk lines.^[36]

In addition to the subsidies mentioned so far, the federal government has also intervened constantly to enforce labor discipline in the railroad industry and guarantee its smooth functioning. Consider, for example, President Grover Cleveland’s use of federal troops to break the Pullman Strike in 1896. The Railway Labor Act of 1926 gave the federal government power to impose mediation and binding arbitration on unions, forcing workers to accept terms defined by the government in the interest of avoiding strikes.

The history of state subsidies and protections to the railroad industry is a prime example of the state’s role in subsidizing transportation, artificially reducing the cost of shipping freight and thereby making larger firms serving larger market areas artificially profitable. As Noam Chomsky writes:

One well-known fact about trade is that it’s highly subsidized with huge market-distorting factors…. The most obvious is that every form of transport is highly subsidized…. Since trade naturally requires transport, the costs of transport enter into the calculation of the efficiency of trade. But there are huge subsidies to reduce the costs of transport, through manipulation of energy costs and all sorts of market-distorting functions.^[37]

Also included in the pencil’s ancestry, Read writes, “are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill’s power!”^[38]

Since Read fails to specify the particular dam from which the San Leandro mill gets its power, there’s no way of knowing the details of its history. But it’s odd, to say the least, for an article touting the voluntary decisions of “free men and women” to discuss the ordinary workers pouring concrete for a dam without once mentioning eminent domain or the Army Corps of Engineers.

Railroads and hydroelectric dams both occupy prominent places in the long history of state-funded “internal improvements” in the development of the American economy. Transportation and utility infrastructure, in turn is just part of the larger phenomenon by which the capitalist state has socialized all the major input costs of “private” industry. James O’Connor, in The Fiscal Crisis of the State, referred to such expenditures as “social investment”; they referred to “expenditures required for profitable private accumulation,” and more specifically “projects and services that increase the productivity of a given amount of laborpower and, other factors being equal, increase the rate of profit.”^[39] Because taxpayers assume a major portion of the cost side of the ledger, the rate of profit on capital is artificially inflated. But over time, an increasing share of total corporate costs must be socialized in order for capital to remain profitable.

Unquestionably, monopoly sector growth depends on the continuous expansion of social investment and social consumption projects that in part or in whole indirectly increase productivity from the standpoint of monopoly capital. In short, monopoly capital socializes more and more costs of production.^[40]

Next, discussing the “$4,000,000 in machinery and building” in the pencil factory, Read manages to slip one of the most disputable assertions ever into a throwaway line, characterizing it as “all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine….”^[41]

The idea that “investors” in some way “contribute” to production by “supplying capital” is one of, if not the most common, tropes in capitalist apologetics.

It might be valid, in a world where machines could be built from piles of money, workers could subsist on money, and money could be used as a raw material for manufacturing industrial goods. But in the world we live in, those machines are built by workers acting on the raw materials supplied by nature. The machines process other raw materials, also extracted by workers from nature. And the workers engaged in the production process are fed and housed, in turn, by other groups of workers acting on still other raw materials created by nature. Everything consumed by human beings is produced by human labor acting on materials supplied by nature.

There is no store — no “labor fund” — of accumulated stockpiles of raw materials or food supplied by the capitalist. Total inventories of food are typically insufficient for more than a few days before starvation would set in absent further production. Workers are fed, on an ongoing basis, by other groups of workers who produced the food shortly before; and other groups of workers similarly supply the raw materials for production just as they’re needed.

At no point is even a single widget produced by a capitalist lifting a finger. It’s human labor acting on nature, all the way down — both the final products, and the capital goods used to produce them. The economy, in purely physical terms, is nothing but various groups of workers advancing their production streams to one another.

So-called “capital” — that is, money capital — is nothing but a set of socially constructed claims on the right to control and direct these production streams. And the legitimacy of such claims does not bear much looking into. As the Englishman Thomas Hodgskin — who was both a classical liberal advocate of free markets and a socialist — put it, the so-called “stocks” of subsistence goods and production materials, or “circulating capital,” which the political economists of his day posited, were nothing but the product of “co-existing labour.”

Betwixt him who produces food and him who produces clothing, betwixt him who makes instruments and him who uses them, in steps the capitalist, who neither makes nor uses them, and appropriates to himself the produce of both. With as niggard a hand as possible he transfers to each a part of the produce of the other, keeping to himself the large share. Gradually and successively has he insinuated himself betwixt them, expanding in bulk as he has been nourished by their increasingly productive labours, and separating them so widely from each other that neither can see whence that supply is drawn which each receives through the capitalist. While he despoils both, so completely does he exclude one from the view of the other that both believe they are indebted him for subsistence. He is the middleman of all labourers; and when we compare what the skilled labour of England produces, with the produce of the untutored labour of the Irish peasantry, the middlemen of England cannot be considered as inferior in their exactions to the middlemen of Ireland. They have been more fortunate, however, and while the latter are stigmatised as oppressors, the former are honoured as benefactors. Not only do they appropriate the produce of the labourer; but they have succeeded in persuading him that they are his benefactors and employers.^[42]

More recent defenses of capital’s entitlement to a reward for its “contribution” to production similarly fall apart under scrutiny. For example, according to the “marginal productivity” doctrine of John Bates Clark, capital’s “contribution” to productivity is whatever it adds to the value of a finished good. But upon examination, the concept quickly reveals its circularity. If the marginal productivity of capital — or any other “factor input” — is what it adds to the exchange value of the good produced, that’s another way of saying the “contribution” that capital is “rewarded” for amounts to whatever its owner can get away with charging for its “services.” So the concept of marginal productivity simply presupposes, or takes for granted, the legitimacy of whatever institutional framework governs the control of factor inputs. Anyone with a property right over the input — or even who has a property right over the opportunity to produce at all, and fails to obstruct productive activity — is entitled to whatever they’re able to charge for their contribution (or their failure to obstruct). This neutrality toward the institutional arrangements controlling access to productive resources was not a flaw of marginalism, but its defining feature as an ideological project; institutional economists like Thorstein Veblen and John R. Commons performed an inestimable service in subjecting marginalism’s institutional blinders to critical examination.

The time preference doctrine of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk fares no better. Despite Böhm-Bawerk’s protestations, it was essentially a revamped version of earlier defenses of profit as a reward for “waiting” or “abstention.” The idea is that because of workers’ stronger time-preference (their need for money now in order to eat while the good is in production) and the capitalist’s weaker time-preference (their willingness to postpone their own payment until the capital investment is realized), workers value a smaller amount of money now as much as the capitalist values a larger amount later. But like marginal productivity, this concept is circular; it’s just another way of saying the more desperate you are to get paid right now in order to avoid starvation, the cheaper you’ll work. Strong and weak time preference are proxies, respectively, for weak and strong bargaining power, and the concept is agnostic concerning the institutional framework behind those differences in bargaining power.

So both marginal productivity and time preference, rather than disproving radical theories of surplus extraction, merely disguise them behind the pretense of “neutral” laws of distribution, by obscuring actual power relations.^[43]

So what we’re left with is the dogma that capitalists are entitled to a reward for their “contribution” because they control the accounting and credit system by which the mutual flows of production between different groups of workers are coordinated. How did they come to be in this position? The short answer is that 1) they, as a class, possess stockpiles of wealth from past robbery (e.g. enclosure of the commons, colonial conquest, and slavery) and ongoing extraction of economic rents (e.g. landlordism and intellectual property), and 2) the credit and money functions are artificially restricted to those with stockpiles of wealth.^[44] So, not to put too fine a point on it, there was in fact an enormous amount of violence involved in creating the system of voluntary exchange by “free men and women” that Read celebrates, and equally enormous amounts of background violence required to maintain the conditions under which people would “voluntarily” act consistently with the needs of capital.

To return to the story of the pencil: Read, writing at a time hardly halfway through the postwar decolonization process, blithely mentioned a number of only recently decolonized countries as the sources for various resource inputs into the pencil’s production process: graphite from Ceylon^[45], eraser material from Indonesia^[46], etc. These countries, which under colonial rule had had their economies structured around the export of raw materials and the consumption of manufactured goods from the industrial West, continued to be locked into a neocolonial division of labor after independence in which they supplied raw materials on disadvantageous terms largely set by the industrial countries.

My “lead” itself — it contains no lead at all — is complex. The graphite is mined in Ceylon. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships. Even the lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth — and the harbor pilots.

Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka since Read wrote), the source of graphite for the pencil “lead,” had been a British crown colony until 1948. Ceylon’s economy as a whole under British rule was characterized by large-scale plantation production for export (rubber and tea, in particular), and the importation of Tamil indentured laborers from India.^[47] The graphite mines, under direct British ownership in the 19th century, then passed into the hands of British-coopted native elites.^[48] We can get some idea of the relationship between the British crown, British and native owners, and the ordinary native population, from this 1910 account in Scientific American:

Owing to the heavy demand for graphite that ensued as a result of the South African war, when $315 per ton was realized, a plumbago fever broke out among the natives. Such a price induced individual working and illicit mining on crown lands. Even to-day the latter traffic takes place. Should the mineral be proved to exist on the government property, licenses are duly issued by the authorities to respectable individuals to exploit the deposits, but the natives resort to poaching.

…The industry is also for the greater part in the hands of the natives, many of whom have amassed considerable fortunes, since owing to the cheapness of the labor, ample supplies of which are readily available…, a handsome profit is secured.^[49]

Would anyone care to venture a guess as to why “ample supplies” of cheap native labor were “readily available”?

A prominent example of the sort of “respectable individual” in the native colonial elite to whom the British authorities licensed mining operations was Don Charles Gemoris Attygalle (d. 1901), who purchased the Kahatagaha mine from the British.^[50] An oligarchy of “respectable” families dominated the mining industry under British rule; they continued to do so for some time after independence. Historian Michael Roberts describes the self-perception of this elite, as distinguished from the majority of the population:

The identification of a category of Ceylonese “at the top” who could be differentiated from the masses is not simply a product of recent historical writings. It found contemporary acknowledgement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, those Ceylonese “at the top,” those with substantial power and status, had an image of themselves as a distinctive social group. They sent petitions which claimed that they represented the opinion of “the leading and respectable classes” of indigenous society or which used some such phrase. The meetings which they arranged were invariably described as being attended by “the respectable and influential residents” or by “a representative gathering of influential members of various communities.” Again individuals within the elite were inclined to describe themselves as “scion(s) of one of the best known families” or as “leading members” of this or that caste or ethnic group; or to use such descriptive adjectives as “well-known,” “leading” and “successful.” In requesting the introduction of elected Ceylonese representatives to the Legislative Council in 1908, James Peiris referred to the existence of a ready made electorate: “a highly intelligent one, composed of members of the Government Service, professional men, graduates, landed proprietors, and merchants of all races, who [could] be safely entrusted with the task of electing their representatives in Council” — a body which he felt to include “the most intelligent as well as the most influential of its inhabitants.”^[51]

These colonial elites emerged to a large extent through their role as managers and overseers within colonial industry, geared toward serving the economic needs of the British Empire.^[52] Within the graphite industry, in particular, the “handful of families” who “amassed great wealth in the graphite mining and export trade between the 1860’s and the 1910’s”^[53] quite typically were founded by individuals on the make who originally held positions as overseer or foreman in the industry.^[54] Having been encultured as economic managers supervising the extraction of raw materials in the service of a capitalist global economy, these leading families continued after independence to oversee the neocolonial integration of their export-oriented economy into the postwar global system.

My bit of metal — the ferrule — is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature.^[55] Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain.

Read does not specify the source of the copper, but as of 2013 six of the ten largest mines in the world were in Chile, which produced 27% of the world total. The other four were in Peru, Mexico, and Indonesia, Peru being the second largest producer with another 10% of world output.^[56]

To get a sense of the natural resources picture in Chile will require a bit of a digression. In the late 19th century the discovery that bat guano and saltpeter from the Andes were a source of nitrates for fertilizer caused a considerable bonanza. The nitrate mines were worked by imported Chinese coolie labor, with 80,000 of them in 1875 working under conditions little short of slavery. With little profit accruing to anyone in Peru other than the plutocracy, and the country being increasingly burdened by foreign debt, the state in 1875 expropriated the mines from private investors. In 1879, Bolivia raised taxes on nitrate exports by Chilean intermediaries. Chile, in return, “backed by British investors,” declared war on both Bolivia and Bolivia’s ally Peru.

With its more modern, British-built navy and French-trained army, Chile was soon able to seize Bolivia’s Atacama province and Peru’s Tarapacá – never to leave. Before the war Chile had almost no nitrate fields and no guano deposits. By the end of the war in 1883 it had seized all of the nitrate zones in Bolivia and Peru and most of Peru’s coastal guano deposits.16 Before the war British controlled 13 per cent of Peru’s Tarapacá nitrate industry; immediately after the war – given Chile’s possession of the region – the British share rose to 34 per cent, and by 1890 it was 70 per cent.

James G. Blaine, former American Secretary of State, testified that this war, known as the War of the Pacific, was “an English war on Peru” — a war for nitrates — “with Chile as the instrument.”^[57] But Chile, backed by Great Britain, not only acquired Peru’s nitrate industry; it also acquired its major copper region (including the site of the present-day largest open pit copper mine in the world at Chuquicamata), launching the birth of large-scale copper mining in Chile.^[58]

From the 1860s through WWI, British investment in the Chilean copper industry was gradually supplanted by American, with American capital totaling 86% of all investment.^[59] At the time Read wrote, two of the three main copper mines in Chile were owned by the American Anaconda Copper Company; the third was owned by the Kennecott Copper Corporation, also American.^[60] Copper was by far Chile’s largest export industry, and in 1969 a Kissinger memorandum stated that “Subsidiaries of Anaconda and Kennecott have produced three-fourths of Chile’s copper output.”^[61]

The post-WWII momentum for bringing foreign copper interests under greater state control came against the background of U.S. price-fixing during WWII, which limited the price of copper to 12 cents per pound.^[62] President Salvador Allende justified expropriation of the American-owned copper mines by arguing that the industry had pursued an extractive profit model at the expense of the Chilean people; its profits in excess of the normal global rate of profit — $774 million from 1955-1970 — exceeded the book value of the companies.^[63]

Preserving the ability to continue extracting copper entirely on American terms was, not surprisingly, the central focus of U.S. foreign policy toward Chile for most of the postwar period. The panicked American reaction to Salvador Allende’s dangerously close loss in the presidential election of 1958 was the beginning of a decade and a half of U.S. intervention in Chilean politics. Up to 100 operatives from both the State Department and the CIA threw their covert support behind the Christian Democratic candidate, Eduardo Frei, and the CIA spent $20 million on the operation — more than the combined spending by Johnson and Goldwater in the U.S. election. Most of the expenditures went toward “disinformation” and “black propaganda.”^[64] The result was a landslide for Frei.^[65]

This victory notwithstanding, Allende won the election of 1970 despite another all-out American effort to block his victory. A CIA study immediately after Allende’s 1970 victory noted that, while no “vital U.S. interests” were at stake and there would be no significant shift in the superpower balance of military power, the U.S. would suffer “tangible economic losses” — presumably referring to Allende’s stated intention to nationalize the copper industry without compensation.^[66]

Most of us are familiar with the subsequent American campaign to remove him from power, by subverting Chile’s military and sabotaging its economy. The tone of U.S. policy is indicated by National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger’s statement “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”^[67] U.S. Ambassador Edward Korry, similarly, warned that “Not a nut or bolt [will] be allowed to reach Chile under Allende.”^[68]

Although Pinochet did not denationalize the copper industry after coming to power, he did compensate foreign copper companies at full market value. Read continues:

Then there’s my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to in the trade as “the plug,” the part man uses to erase the errors he makes with me. An ingredient called “factice” is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rape-seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride.^[69]

Make of it what you will that Read, writing in 1958, refers to Indonesia as the “Dutch East Indies.” In any case, Indonesia had achieved independence from the Netherlands only nine years before, and Eberhard Faber’s sourcing of rapeseed oil clearly originated in the context of Dutch rule.

B.J. Widick, writing in mid-1940, characterized the social system in the Dutch East Indies as follows:

All things in the Dutch East Indies are divided into two categories: European and native. There are European courts of law for Europeans (i.e. whites) and native “justice” for the natives. Agriculture of the 5,000,000 fertile acres of land is sliced in half. To work the plantations for profit is a right reserved primarily to Europeans with a small scattering of native aristocrats carefully cultivated by the government.

To till the soil for food. This is granted the natives. Of course, all the best lands are owned by the Dutch government which leases them to capitalists on a 75 year basis. The Dupont dynasty, for example, owns 132,000 acres of rubber plantations valued at $18,000,000 and bringing a profit of $40,000,000 in the last decade. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. has holdings as large. Export business is a monopoly of the “foreigners,” while retail trade is largely in the hands of Indonesians. Those who profit and those who toil is another way of dividing society in the East Indies.

The rubber industry, in particular, imported Chinese and Indian laborers, who died by the thousands.^[70]

Although pencil erasers are not made from actual rubber, the prevailing conditions under which rubber was produced — the bulk of the land being owned by the Dutch government and leased to capitalists — can safely be assumed to have characterized rapeseed cultivation and other forms of agriculture as much as it did rubber for the Duponts.

The British and French intervened in the East Indies after the fall of the Netherlands, for fear the native population would take advantage of the situation to declare independence.^[71] War planners’ circles in the United States government, meanwhile, operated on the assumption — as we shall see below — that America would take the initiative in going to war if it became necessary to prevent the stragetically important resources of the East Indies from falling into Japanese hands.

Indonesian independence came only after a fight — with the Dutch, who attempted to restore control of the colony after WWII.

The eventual Japanese surrender in World War II on, August 15 of 1945, caused a temporary power vacuum in Indonesia because at that time the Dutch, who had been liberated from German occupation on May 5 of 1945, had not yet reorganized their colonial occupation of Indonesia. Sukarno and Hatta set out to make use of this power vacuum. They quickly organized the preparation of a Declaration of Independence on the day following the Japanese surrender. And then had this read out loud on August 17, marking Indonesia’s claim to independence.

But the Dutch had different plans for Indonesia. The Dutch economy was thoroughly destroyed by the war and the plan was to exploit Indonesia as much as possible in order to pay for the recovery. So the Dutch organized an army and sent it to Indonesia to suppress the independence movement.

But the war between the Dutch and the Indonesian freedom fighters dragged on, without any side developing a clear advantage over the other. Until, one day, the Americans intervened. Under the Marshall plan the Dutch were receiving large loans from America to finance the post-war restoration of the country. America therefore threatened the Dutch that unless they halted their efforts to bring Indonesia back under their control, the Marshall aid would be stopped. This left the Dutch with no choice but to accept Indonesian independence. And following long negotiations, in 1949 the Dutch finally recognized Indonesia’s independence.

Nevertheless, as part of the U.S. brokered agreement between the Netherlands and Indonesia, Indonesia was required to pay an indemnity to the Dutch equivalent to $198 billion in 2023 dollars.^[72]

The agreement also mandated continued Dutch control of the “all ‘modern’ sections of Indonesia’s economy,”

such as industry, mining, plantations, finance and banking, and large scale international trade. This caused the establishment of a “dual economy” in Indonesia, in which the Dutch and Chinese Indonesians controlled the most important and profitable sectors of the economy, with little to no participation of other Indonesians.

Although remedying this foreign control and “Indonesianizing” the economy was a central goal of post-independence policy, little to nothing had been achieved toward this goal by the late 1950s.^[73]

“Starting in 1957,” Dutch interests were nationalized.^[74] It is unclear from this article whether nationalization had sufficiently progressed to include the rapeseed industry, in particular, by the time Read finished writing “I, Pencil,” or whether the industry was specifically under Dutch control. But a right-wing source reports elsewhere that Sukarno’s nationalization of plantations occurred in 1959^[75]; and a great deal of industry under foreign ownership other than by the Dutch persisted until Sukarno’s nationalizations of the early and mid-1960s.^[76] So presumably Eberhard Faber’s Indonesian source of rapeseed oil for erasers remained under foreign ownership of foreign colonizers at the time Read celebrated the transaction as one in a long chain of voluntary interactions between “free men and women.”

The United States responded to Sukarno’s anti-colonial economic rhetoric with an unsuccessful covert destabilization campaign aimed at removing him. CIA Deputy Director of Plans Frank Wisner’s 1956 comment that it was “time we held Sukarno’s feet to the fire”^[77] was followed in late 1957 by official approval of a covert CIA paramilitary operation.

In this undertaking, as in others, the Agency enjoyed the advantage of the United States’ far-flung military empire. Headquarters for the operation were established in neighboring Singapore, courtesy of the British; training bases set up in the Philippines; airstrips laid out in various parts of the Pacific to prepare for bomber and transport missions; Indonesians, along with Filipinos, Taiwanese, Americans, and other “soldiers of fortune” were assembled in Okinawa and the Philippines along with vast quantities of arms and equipment.

For this, the CIA’s most ambitious military operation to date, tens of thousands of rebels were armed, equipped and trained by the US Army. US Navy submarines, patrolling off the coast of Sumatra, the main island, put over-the-beach parties ashore along with supplies and communications equipment. The US Air Force set up a considerable Air Transport force which air-dropped many thousands of weapons deep into Indonesian territory. And a fleet of 15 B-26 bombers was made available for the conflict after being “sanitized” to ensure that they were “non-attributable” and that all airborne equipment was “deniable”.^[78]

Despite local rebellions on some islands of the archipelago, some military defections, and terror bombing of civilian targets by CIA planes, the rebels were able to win no decisive victories and Sukarno retained control. After the capture of a U.S. operative with incriminating documents, the CIA abandoned the campaign out of embarrassment.^[79]

The Kennedy administration took a continued interest not only in isolating Sukarno in Asia and Africa but in “liquidating” him, according to a mid-1962 conversation between Kennedy and British Prime Minister Macmillan, recorded in a CIA memo whose author was redacted.^[80]

The United States took another shot at it, this time successful, in 1965. The operation far surpassed the scale of the previous effort, constituting a destabilization campaign rivalled only by that against Allende — and a death toll unmatched by any covert operation anywhere. The “communists” liquidated in the aftermath — estimates of fatalities range from 500,000 to a million — included not only members of the Communist Party, but members of the Communist youth organization, suspected communists, other leftists, and even ethnic Chinese.^[81] And the U.S. Embassy and CIA station in Jakarta were far from passive parties.

Twenty-five years later, American diplomats disclosed that they had systematically compiled comprehensive lists of “Communist” operatives, from top echelons down to village cadres, and turned over as many as 5,000 names to the Indonesian army, which hunted those persons down and killed them. The Americans would then check off the names of those who had been killed or captured. Robert Martens, a former member of the US Embassy’s political section in Jakarta, stated in 1990: “It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment”…

Although the former deputy CIA station chief in Indonesia, Joseph Lazarsky, and former diplomat Edward Masters, who was Martens’ boss, confirmed that CIA officers contributed in drawing up the death lists, the CIA in Langley categorically denied any involvement.^[82]

All this bloody business, for the primary purpose of safeguarding the right of foreign capital to extract Indonesian natural resources, on its own terms — presumably including the rapeseed oil that went into Read’s crowning glory — without interference.

Thanks to the Military Assistance Program more than 1,200 Indonesian officers had been trained in the United States, “including senior military figures.” As a result much of the Indonesian military leadership had ongoing friendly ties with the U.S. military. In the aftermath of the coup, Defense Secretary McNamara joked about it before a Senate committee:

Senator Sparkman: At a time when Indonesia was kicking up pretty badly — when we were getting a lot of criticism for continuing military aid — at that time we could not say what that military aid was for. Is it secret any more?

McNamara: I think in retrospect, that the aid was well justified.

Sparkman: You think it paid dividends?

McNamara: I do, sir.^[83]

Following the successful overthrow of Sukarno, much as in Pinochet’s Chile, the Suharto coup regime proceeded to restructure the economy along lines dictated by international capital.

One of the first acts of general Suharto following his grab of power was to send a team of economists to a conference held in Geneva, Switzerland, named “Indonesian Investment Conference: To aid in the rebuilding of a nation”. The conference was organized by Time Life Corporation of America and, in addition to the Indonesian economists, was attended by representatives of mostly American multinational corporations. Professor Jeffrey Winters of Northwestern University in Chicago studied the conference papers and described the proceedings at the conference in the following manner: “They divided up into five different sections: mining in one room, services in another, light industry in another, banking and finance in another. And what Chase Manhattan did was sit with a delegation and hammer out policies that were going to be acceptable to them and other investors. You had these big corporate people going round the table, saying ‘this is what we need: this, this and this’; and they basically designed the legal infrastructure for investment in Indonesia. I’ve never heard of a situation like this where global capital sits down with the representatives of a supposedly sovereign state and hammers out the conditions of their own entry into that country.” In 1967 the demands of international business were translated into law by Suharto through the passing of the “Law regarding Foreign Investment”.^[84]

From the Trees Back to the Forest

In one aspect, Read’s pamphlet is — to repeat that line — “The best kind of true: technically true.” It is true, in a sense, that all or most of the series of transactions recounted by Read in the history of his pencil were “voluntary.” Although there were no guns present at the immediate point of any of the transactions, no soldiers or policemen standing by to coerce either party into participating, we’ve seen the role of robbery and other forms of coercion behind the individual steps involved in the production history of the pencil.

And it’s true, as Read observes at the outset: “Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”^[85]

Read is entirely correct — so far as he goes — both in touting the importance of distributed knowledge under any economic system, and in celebrating the usefulness of allowing the formation of market-clearing prices as a tool for coordination.

But that’s not the end of the story. Not only was there a coercive background — with guns, soldiers, and police — behind each of those individual transactions.

There was also coercion at a systemic level to create the background against which the entire process took place. There were centuries of coercion, to create the background conditions necessary for the weaker party to “voluntarily” accept terms offered by the stronger with no gun or soldier immediately present.

The choices of components, where to source them, and where and how to combine them into a finished pencil, as recounted by Read, were not the only possible choices. The overall process, with its attendant supply and distribution chains, was one choice among many alternatives. We have yet to consider the larger systemic background against which these choices were made.

From their very beginnings, the institutional foundations of both capitalism and the wage system were laid through violence. For centuries, landlords and capitalists in league with the state nullified the land tenure rights of the majority of the population in the West so that the propertyless majority were left with no choice but to accept wage employment on any terms offered. When the lack of access to land for subsistence was inadequate on its own, “masterless men” and “sturdy rogues” were coerced by more direct means: the Vagabonds Act, the Laws of Settlement, the Riot Act, and the Combination Acts, among others.

In the non-Western world, a similar combination of expropriation and force by the colonizing countries was used to coerce subordinate countries into a role, in the “international division of labor,” of exporting natural resources to the West and importing Western manufactured goods.

This same division of labor was continued even after nominal independence, through a global order set up by the Western powers after WWII. American foreign policy concerns, and the postwar institutions it set up pursuant to those concerns in cooperation with the Western Allies, were a direct outgrowth of the concerns that had drawn it into the Pacific war.

Policy analysts in the State Department, from mid-1940 on, feared that Japan’s Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere would withdraw a critical number of countries, the integration of whose resource inputs and markets into the U.S. industrial economy was critical for its survival, from the global division of labor. They calculated that the resources of a “Grand Area” — which consisted of the Western Hemisphere, British Empire, and Western Pacific — were the minimum required for the American economy to function in its existing form. In particular, they feared the loss of French Indochina’s tin and the rubber of the Dutch East Indies. It was FDR’s fears in this regard that led to the United States oil embargo against Japan and its backing of Chinese guerrillas.^[86]

The American objective in the Pacific was stated in CFR memorandum E-B34, “Methods of Economic Collaboration: Introductory. The Role of the Grand Area in American Economic Policy” (July 24, 1941): “to secure integration,” so as “to transform the economic potential of the area into military power.” Such integration required “a conscious program of broadly conceived measures for… securing the full use of the economic resources of the whole area.” Japanese expansion, on the other hand, “continues to threaten the integration of the Grand Area.”^[87]

The primary object of U.S. foreign policy in the postwar period, similarly, was to prevent the rise of another power which would present a similar challenge to Western control of the “Grand Area,” and to ensure that radical governments in economically vital countries of the Global South did not attempt to revise the existing division of labor or defect from the Grand Area.

This vision of a global economy integrated into the needs of the West, and managed primarily by the United States, predated the beginning of the Cold War and would likely have been the same in all essentials had the Cold War never occurred. After the war as before, the central focus on U.S. foreign policy, without specific regard to the USSR, was to counter and “contain” any new power — an “aggressor” by definition — which challenged this hegemony on the prewar pattern of Fortress Europe or the Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Indeed the threat from the USSR itself was viewed in the early Cold War period primarily in Grand Area terms — i.e., the appeal of its model of economic development in the Third World. Most reasonable policy-makers largely dismissed the possibility of direct military aggression by the Soviet bloc against the West. The more realistic threat, as stated by the policy wonks of a Woodrow Wilson Center study group in 1955, was a “serious reduction in the potential resource base and market opportunities of the West owing to the subtraction of the communist areas and their economic transformation in ways that reduce their willingness and ability to complement the industrial economies of the West….”^[88]

U.S. planning for the postwar order, from 1944 on, outlined the implications for the colonial and post-colonial world. Charles P. Taft, director of the State Department Office of Wartime Economic Affairs, in May 1944 predicted that most petroleum and metals used by U.S. industry would eventually be imported. Accordingly, it would be necessary for the U.S. to export industrial goods and capital, for which the developing world could pay only with exports of its raw materials. This required an expanded version of America’s “Open Door” policy — one in which not only did all foreign interests operating in a country have parity with the most favored nation, but one in which all foreign interests had parity with domestic interests. In particular, it meant no toleration for national strategies of development by import substitution or protection of domestic industry.^[89]

For example the National Security Council document NSC 5432, “U.S. Policy Toward Latin America” (18 Aug 1954) stated the primary U.S. policy goal as to guarantee “[a]dequate… access by the United States to raw materials essential to U.S. security,” and to guard against “domestic pressures” in the post-colonial world to “increase production and to diversify their economies” (emphasis added). The means of accomplishing this would be to “[f]oster closer relations between Latin American and U.S. military personnel in order to increase the understanding of, and orientation toward, U.S. objectives…, recognizing that the military establishments… play an influential role in government.”^[90]

Still another NSC document from August 1962, “U.S. Overseas Defense Policy,” asserted a right to intervene militarily in Third World countries to protect purely economic interests. It was even more vital than before that “developing nations evolve in a way that affords a congenial world environment.” This meant not only preventing their “manpower and national resources” from falling under “communist control,” but extended to America’s “economic interest that the resources and markets of the less developed world remain available to us and to other Free World countries.”^[91]

In Read’s day, the setup was for the most part still the old colonial one persisting into the post-colonial era: colonial and post-colonial countries earned foreign exchange by exporting raw materials and cash crops, and then purchased consumer goods manufactured by Western industry. That “international division of labor” relied, as we have seen, on considerable use of force to maintain. In the decades since, the division of labor has changed in ways that depend even more strongly on state involvement. Since “I, Pencil” was written, capital has ceased to be primarily national, and a major share of production in the global economy is controlled by transnational corporations. And in the new division of labor, countries of the Global South, rather than simply ordering goods produced by factories in the West, supply the sweatshop labor to produce those goods in their own countries. But, far from being some sort of immaculate Ricardian “comparative division of labor” in which relative power plays no role, it’s an extractive division of labor in which the state plays an even greater role in enforcing disadvantageous terms on the neo-colonial world.

Although the former industrial corporations of the West increasingly outsource all production to offshore sweatshops in Third World countries, this production by nominally independent “third parties” remains firmly under Western corporate control. The mechanism of control is a draconian global intellectual property regime — a regime enforced by the Uruguay Round of GATT and a number of other so-called “Free Trade Agreements” — which is, if anything, more protectionist than the tariffs of the Smoot-Hawley era. The main differences are that 1) the beneficiaries of old-style tariffs were national industrial corporations, while the beneficiaries of IP protectionism are transnational corporations, and 2) tariffs operated at national borders while patents operate at the boundary between the corporation and the rest of the world. But they are alike in that they confer a legal monopoly on the right to sell a given good in a given market. Under this arrangement, Western corporations completely outsource actual production to nominally independent contractors in countries with a cheap labor supply, while using their control of finance, marketing, and intellectual property to retain a complete monopoly on disposal of the final product. The resulting “Swoosh markup” can amount to several hundred percent of what offshore factories are paid for actual labor and materials.

At the same time, this “division of labor” is massively subsidized. A major share of foreign aid and World Bank loans go toward financing the utility and road infrastructure needed to support overseas production facilities, and without which the profitable export of Western industrial capital would be impossible. And much of the cost of shipping outsourced goods from the Global South back to the shelves of Western retailers is borne by the American “defense” effort: one of the U.S. Navy’s primary missions is to keep global sea lanes open for container ships, and the Navy is the most expensive component of the American “defense” budget.

So the global capitalist system has become even more coercive and state-reliant than it was at the time “I, Pencil” was written. But it’s still standard right-libertarian practice today, just as much as in Read’s time, to describe this state of affairs as “free trade.”

The Invisible Hand vs. “Master Minds”

The final part of “I, Pencil” is a celebration of the alleged lessons — namely the governance of our “free market system” by the distributed knowledge of freely interacting individuals — of the pencil’s production history.

Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?

Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others…. There isn’t a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how….

There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to which I earlier referred….

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies — millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding!…

The above is what I meant when writing, “If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing.” For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand — that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive masterminding—then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.

But even Read’s critique of central planning — “master-minding” — itself displays logical weaknesses to the point of approaching incoherence.

Once government has had a monopoly of a creative activity such, for instance, as the delivery of the mails, most individuals will believe that the mails could not be efficiently delivered by men acting freely. And here is the reason: Each one acknowledges that he himself doesn’t know how to do all the things incident to mail delivery. He also recognizes that no other individual could do it. These assumptions are correct. No individual possesses enough know-how to perform a nation’s mail delivery any more than any individual possesses enough know-how to make a pencil. Now, in the absence of faith in free people — in the unawareness that millions of tiny know-hows would naturally and miraculously form and cooperate to satisfy this necessity — the individual cannot help but reach the erroneous conclusion that mail can be delivered only by governmental “master-minding.”

The difference between the Post Office and private mail companies like FedEx and UPS is not the lack of internal “master-minding” as found in the former — the latter are structured along virtually the same lines, with essentially the same managerial hierarchies — but the former’s lack of external competition in delivering certain services like first class mail. (In my experience the Postal Service is sometimes actually more efficient than UPS or FedEx, and makes better use of the distributed knowledge of its workers.)^[92]

So, if the Postal Service is governed by “master-minds” insofar as it is internally managed by a bureaucratic hierarchy, then so is every corporation of any size. On the other hand, if it’s restraints on competition that constitute “master-minding,” then every large corporation in an industry characterized by oligopoly market structure is governed by “master-minds.”

If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men and women can accomplish when free to try, then those with little faith would have a fair case. However, there is testimony galore; it’s all about us and on every hand. Mail delivery is exceedingly simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things.

But these things are made within an institutional planning framework which is, if anything, even more complicated than mail delivery — not to mention more complicated than pencil manufacturing. The automobile corporation — General Motors as organized under William Durant, to be specific — was the pioneering example of the multi-division, or M-form corporation. The large corporation is governed internally by an accounting system, including internal transfer pricing, much like that used by planning agencies like Gosplan in centrally planned economies like that of the USSR. And, ironically, the primary goal of “scientific management” from Andrew Ure through Frederick Taylor was to actively suppress, to the maximum extent feasible (even at the cost of degraded efficiency), dependence on the very distributed knowledge Read celebrates, in order to reduce the bargaining power of labor and render it more amenable to managerial control and planning.

Read moved on to telecommunications. “Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second….” The Bell system, through the breakup of AT&T in the 1980s, was a textbook example of state-enforced monopoly power. It had its origin in the Bell Patent Association, formed in 1875, which held patents — state-enforced monopolies — on virtually every aspect of telephony. It held this monopoly power through the 1890s, when its patents began to expire. This expiration enabled the rise of independent phone service providers from 1894 on, with half of all new phone service provided by independents in 1907 and Bell’s annual profit rate falling from 40% to 8%. The Bell system responded to the threat of market competition by becoming a regulated monopoly, with municipal governments licensing it as the sole provider of telephone service in each locality.^[93] In other words, the United States spent a century under the thumb of one or another form of Ma Bell only because an awful lot of “men” were not “left free to try.”

Those “men… left free to try,” likewise, “deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours….” Ah, yes, that paragon of free market bootstrapping — the civil aviation system. In fact the American infrastructure of commercial airports is a creature of the state, built almost entirely at taxpayer expense and relying heavily on eminent domain. According to James Coston, the 1992 estimated “current replacement value of the U.S. commercial airport system — virtually all of it developed with federal grants and tax-free municipal bonds” was $1 trillion. Not until 1971 did the government begin attempting to recoup this previous outlay with user fees — and even afterward, it continued to subsidize the FAA to the tune of $3 billion a year for its network of control towers, air traffic control centers, and radar systems.^[94] As for large passenger jets, the jumbo jet industry was largely made possible by the Cold War. In Harry Truman and the War Scare of 1948, Frank Kofsky described the aircraft industry as spiraling into red ink during the postwar demobilization, and on the verge of bankruptcy when it was rescued by Truman’s new bout of Cold War spending on heavy bombers.⁴⁹ David Noble argued out that civilian jumbo jets would never have existed without the government’s heavy bomber contracts. The production runs for the civilian market alone were too small to pay for the complex and expensive machine tools.⁵¹

…they deliver gas from Texas to one’s range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard — halfway around the world — for less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!

Well, if there’s one place we’d expect to see just a bunch of freely cooperating men and women, without any government involvement, it’s the fossil fuel industry! Sarcasm aside, the model of federal land preemption followed by preferential treatment for extractive industries that we already discussed in the case of the lumber industry, also applies to the oil, gas and coal industries. Add to that the use of eminent domain for pipeline construction, liability caps for environmental contamination, and regulatory preemption of tort liability law. To that, add the history of colonialism in oil industry (among many other things, British and American backing for the House of Saud, and the U.S. overthrow of Mossadegh after the nationalization of British Petroleum). And on top of all that throw in all the wars the United States has fought for access to Persian Gulf oil on American terms, and the role of the US Navy in keeping sea lanes open for oil tankers at taxpayer expense. Add them all together, and all that cheap oil the industry delivers doesn’t sound so cheap after all.

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society’s legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand.

In the real world the rest of us inhabit, capitalism — much like the previous feudal system of extraction it replaced — is utterly dependent on the inhibition or coercive channeling of creative energies in a thousand ways. And a great deal of violence is involved in creating the background power structures on which that illusion of an Invisible Hand depends.

A great deal of effort has been spent in the ideological realm concealing this history of violence behind the facade of “voluntary exchange.” We already saw above, in the case of marginal productivity and time preference, the ways in which modern economic theory does this.

Chomsky, noting the role of the state in virtually every aspect of corporate capitalism — in funding new technologies at taxpayer expense, subsidizing long-distance shipping, etc. — argues that “invocation of market forces, as if they were laws of nature, has a large element of fraud associated with it. It’s a kind of ideological warfare.”^[95]

Just so.

A Final Note, in the Interest of Steel-Manning

One might argue that, regardless of the validity of his specific examples, the basic principle he states — the superiority of coordination by a price system over central planning — is still valid.

I would agree, or at least stipulate, as far as it goes.

But, first, it takes a considerable effort to disembed the valid economic principle from Read’s context, which clearly presents the actual capitalist system of the 1950s and its institutions as examples of a free market, based on voluntary exchange between free people, in action. If you also take into account the fact that the biggest players in the violent, larcenous capitalist system of power in the real world of the postwar period played a leading role in organizing and funding Read’s think tank, and that “I, Pencil” was written to sell that very system to the public as “free enterprise,” there’s really no way to polish it into something other than what it is.

Second, there is no such thing as an immaculate or neutral price system. Many alternative sets of initial property rules and institutions for organizing production are all compatible with the unhindered formation of market-clearing prices.

Third, the bare existence of unhindered price formation is not a sufficient criterion for the existence of “voluntary action” by “free men and women.”

In short, if you want to promote a market price system as the most efficient method of coordination, get yourself a new pamphlet and stop peddling this disingenuous dreck to students. It’s long past time to retire “I, Pencil.”

Endnotes

^[1] Leonard E. Read, I, Pencil: My Family History as Told to Leonard E. Read (Atlanta: Foundation for Economic Education, March 2019).
^[2]Ibid., pp. 8, 9.
^[3]Ibid., p. 9.
^[4]Ibid., p. 11.
^[5] <https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/read-i-pencil-my-family-tree-as-told-to-leonard-e-read-dec-1958>.
^[6] Leonard E. Read, I, Pencil, p. 1 (henceforth all references unless otherwise specified will be to the FEE pamphlet).
^[7] Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty. Edited by Andrew Lohrey, Foreword by Noam Chomsky (University of New South Wales, 1995), p. 28.
^[8]Ibid., p. 28.
^[9]Ibid., p. 29.
^[10]Ibid., p. 30.
^[11]Ibid., p. 30.
^[12] Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (W.W. Norton, 2008), p. 26. Pagination is from the pdf conversion (via Cloud Convert) of the epub version hosted at Library Genesis <http://library.lol/main/F3D8A3A2960BAF35A21A4FE6FF25A072>.
^[13] Leonard E. Read Journal at FEE (preserved by Internet Archive) <https://web.archive.org/web/20200313041517/https://history.fee.org/leonard-read-journal/>.
^[14] August 15, 1952 <https://web.archive.org/web/20190818053400/https://history.fee.org/leonard-read-journal/1952/leonard-e-read-journal-august-1952/>; in the August 27 entry he referred to the by-laws of “a CIO union” as “a stronger communist statement than the Manifesto” (accessed February 5, 2023).
^[15] Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, p. 60.
^[16] Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 115.
^[17] Henry Hazlitt, “The Early History of FEE,” The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty (May 2006), pp. 38-39.
^[18]Ibid., p. 39.
^[19] “Eberhard Faber,” Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eberhard_Faber>. Accessed January 26, 2023.
^[20] Leonard E. Read, I, Pencil, p. 5.
^[21]Ibid.; “Eberhard Faber Pencil Factory,” Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eberhard_Faber_Pencil_Factory>. Accessed January 26, 2023.
^[22] “Eberhard Faber.”
^[23] “California Cedar Products Company” profile, LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/company/california-cedar-products-comapny/about/>. Accessed January 26, 2023.
^[24] “California Cedar Products Company – Company Profile, Information, Business Description, History, Background Information on California Cedar Products Company,” Reference for Business <https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/26/California-Cedar-Products-Company.html>. Accessed January 26, 2023.
^[25] “Yokuts,” Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokuts>. Accessed January 26, 2023.
^[26] John Quiggin, “I Pencil: A product of the mixed economy (updated),” Crooked Timber, April 16, 2011 <https://crookedtimber.org/2011/04/16/i-pencil-a-product-of-the-mixed-economy/>.
^[27] Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1923), p. 3.
^[28] Leonard E. Read, I, Pencil, p. 5.
^[29] Quiggin, “I Pencil.”
^[30] Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State (Delavan, Wisconsin: Hallberg Publishing Corporation, 1983), p. 102.
^[31] Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists 1861-1901 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1934, 1962), pp. 77-78.
^[32] Murray N. Rothbard, Power & Market: Government and the Economy (Menlo Park, California: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970), p. 70.
^[33] Josephson, The Robber Barons, pp. 83-84.
^[34] Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York: Harper-Collins, 1984), p. 66.
^[35]Ibid., pp. 66-67. This, by the way, was just one example in a much longer history of common law at the state level being modified by courts to make it more business-friendly. See Morton Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860. Studies in Legal History (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1977).
^[36] Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1961), pp. 333-334.
^[37] Noam Chomsky, “How Free is the Free Market?” Resurgence no. 173 (Nov/Dec 1995). Reproduced at <https://lafavephilosophy.x10host.com/chomsky_free_market.html>.
^[38] Read, I, Pencil, p. 5.
^[39] James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), pp. 6-7.
^[40] O’Connor, Fiscal Crisis of the State, p. 24.
^[41] Read, I, Pencil, p. 6.
^[42] Thomas Hodgskin, “Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital” (1825). Hosted at Marxists.org <https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/hodgskin/labour-defended.htm>.
^[43] For more on this obscurantist function of neoclassical and Austrian economics, and in particular marginalism and time preference, see Carson, “The Methodenstreit Revisited: Marginalism and the Lost Power Context” (C4SS 2021) <https://c4ss.org/content/54432>.
^[44] For more on this see Carson, “Credit As an Enclosed Commons, Part I,” Center for a Stateless Society <https://c4ss.org/content/52718>.
^[45] Read, I, Pencil, p. 6.
^[46]Ibid., p. 7.
^[47] “British Ceylon,” Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Ceylon>. Accessed January 29, 2023.
^[48] “Kahatagaha Graphite Mine,” Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahatagaha_Graphite_Mine>; “Bogala Graphite Mine,” Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogala_Graphite_Mine>. Both accessed January 29, 2023.
^[49] “Graphite Mining in Ceylon,” Scientific American, January 8, 1910, pp. 37, 39.
^[50] “Kahatagaha Graphite Mine”; “Don Charles Gemoris Attygalle,” Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Charles_Gemoris_Attygalle>, accessed January 29, 2023.
^[51] Michael Roberts, “Problems of Social Stratification and the Demarcation of National and Local Elites in British Ceylon,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 33:4 (1974), pp. 551-552.
^[52]Ibid., pp. 554-555.
^[53]Ibid., p. 565.
^[54]Ibid., pp. 565-566.
^[55] Read, “I, Pencil,” p. 7.
^[56] “The top 10 biggest copper mines in the world,” Mining Technology, November 4, 2013 <https://www.mining-technology.com/features/feature-the-10-biggest-copper-mines-in-the-world/>; Bruno Venditti, “Which countries produce the most copper?” World Economic Forum, December 12, 2022 <https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/12/which-countries-produce-the-most-copper>.
^[57] John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Ecological Imperialism: The Curse of Capitalism,” Socialist Register (2004) <https://www.nodo50.org/cubasigloXXI/taller/foster_clark_301104.pdf>, pp. 190-191.
^[58] “Chuquicamata,” Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuquicamata>. Accessed February 18, 2023.
^[59] Charles William Centner, “Great Britain and Chilean Mining 1830-1914,” The Economic History Review, Vol. 12, No. 1/2 (1942), p. 79.
^[60] “Chilean nationalization of copper,” Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilean_nationalization_of_copper>. Accessed February 18, 2023.
^[61] Memorandum From the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon, July 11, 1969, <https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v21/d17>.
^[62] Markos Mamalakis, “The American Copper Companies and the Chilean Government, 1920-1967. Profile of an Export Sector.” Center Discussion Paper No. 37 (New Haven: Yale University Economic Growth Center, September 22, 1967), p. 13.
^[63] “Chilean nationalization of copper.”
^[64] William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995), pp. 206-207.
^[65]Ibid., p. 208.
^[66]Ibid., pp. 214-215.
^[67]Ibid., p. 209.
^[68]Ibid., p. 2011.
^[69] Read, “I, Pencil,” p. 7.
^[70] B. J. Widick, “East Indies – A Tender Morsel for the Imperialist Appetite,” Labor Action 4:8 (June 3, 1940). Hosted at Marxists.org <https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/widick/1940/06/eastindies.htm>. Accessed January 29, 2023.
^[71]Ibid.
^[72] Idries De Vries, “Neo-Colonialism And The Example Of Indonesia – Analysis,” Eurasia Review, November 3, 2011 <https://www.eurasiareview.com/03112011-neo-colonialism-and-the-example-of-indonesia-analysis/>. The source cited gave $150 bn as the equivalent in 2011; my figure is based on an online conversion table.
^[73]Ibid.
^[74]Ibid.
^[75] William E. James, “Lessons from Development of the Indonesian Economy,” Journal of Asian Studies 5:1 (Spring 2000) <https://www.asianstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/lessons-from-development-of-the-indonesian-economy.pdf>, p. 32.
^[76] William A. Redfern, “Sukarno’s Guided Democracy and the Takeovers of Foreign Companies in Indonesia in the 1960s.” Doctoral dissertation in history (University of Michigan, 2010).
^[77] Blum, Killing Hope, p. 99.
^[78]Ibid., p. 102.
^[79]Ibid., pp. 102-103.
^[80]Ibid., p. 195.
^[81]Ibid., pp. 193-194.
^[82]Ibid., p. 194.
^[83]Ibid., p. 196.
^[84] De Vries, “Neo-Colonialism And The Example Of Indonesia – Analysis.”
^[85] Read, “I, Pencil,” p. 5.
^[86] Laurence Shoup and William Minter, “Shaping a New World Order: The Council on Foreign Relations’ Blueprint for World Hegemony,” in Holly Sklar, ed., Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning For World Management (Boston: South End Press, 1980), pp. 135-156.
^[87] G. William Domhoff, The Power Elite and the State (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990), pp. 161-162.
^[88] William Yandell Elliot, ed., The Political Economy of American Foreign Policy (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1955) p. 42.
^[89] Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968, 1990), p. 254.
^[90] Noam Chomsky, On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures (Boston: South End Press, 1987), pp. 20-21.
^[91] Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy 1945-1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), p. 130.
^[92] Carson, “The Myth of the Private Sector, Part I: Why Big-Small and Vertical-Horizontal Trumps ‘Public-Private’,” Center for a Stateless Society, November 5, 2020 <https://c4ss.org/content/53835>.
^[93] Mary Ruwart, Healing Our World: The Compassion of Libertarianism (Kalamazoo: Sunstar Press, 1992, 2015), pp. 112-114.
^[94] James Coston, Amtrak Reform Council, 2001, in “America’s long history of subsidizing transportation” <http://www.trainweb.org/moksrail/advocacy/resources/subsidies/transport.htm>.
^[95] Noam Chomsky, “How Free is the Free Market?” Resurgence no. 173 (Nov/Dec 1995). Reproduced at <https://lafavephilosophy.x10host.com/chomsky_free_market.html>.