Identity Theft

Via Alan Turin on the LeftLibertarian yahoogroup. The "neolibertarian" (aka liberventionist, warblogger, or other derisive term of choice) QandO blog has started a periodical called New Libertarian: A Journal of Neo-Libertarian Thought. That thumping sound you hear is Samuel Edward Konkin III spinning in his grave. For those of you who don't know, the name "New Libertarian" has been associated with SEK3's Movement of the Libertarian Left (or agorists) for years.

I don't believe "New Libertarian" should be an enforceable trademark. I don't believe in so-called "intellectual property." I do, however, believe in karma--and QandO has just earned a great big heapin' helpin' of the bad kind.

Kunstler: The Long Emergency

Via Progressive Review. Yeah, I know it's, like, the third item from ProRev today. Well, it's my damn blog.

As Sam Smith asks in his lead-in, "What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?" Jim Kunstler has some pretty disconcerting answers in The Long Emergency.

The circumstances of the long emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the long emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long Emergency. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not information, not high tech, not "services" like real estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers to tourists.

Farming. This is no doubt a startling, radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work. The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. Food production will necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it has been for decades. We can anticipate the reformation of a native-born American farm-laboring class. . .

Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels" won't be such a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy. The national chain stores' 12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines could easily be interrupted by military contests over oil and by internal conflict in the nations that have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods, because they, too, will be struggling with similar issues of energy famine and all the disorders that go with it.

As these things occur, America will have to make other arrangements for the manufacture, distribution and sale of ordinary goods. They will probably be made on a "cottage industry" basis rather than the factory system we once had, since the scale of available energy will be much lower -- and we are not going to replay the twentieth century. Tens of thousands of the common products we enjoy today, from paints to pharmaceuticals, are made out of oil. They will become increasingly scarce or unavailable. The selling of things will have to be reorganized at the local scale. It will have to be based on moving merchandise shorter distances. It is almost certain to result in higher costs for the things we buy and far fewer choices.

The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than the public realizes. If the "level of service" (as traffic engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart.

America today has a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of. Neither of the two major presidential candidates in 2004 mentioned railroads, but if we don't refurbish our rail system, then there may be no long-range travel or transport of goods at all a few decades from now. The commercial aviation industry, already on its knees financially, is likely to vanish. The sheer cost of maintaining gigantic airports may not justify the operation of a much-reduced air-travel fleet. Railroads are far more energy efficient than cars, trucks or airplanes, and they can be run on anything from wood to electricity. The rail-bed infrastructure is also far more economical to maintain than our highway network.

The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful and tumultuous. In many American cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis, that process is already well advanced. Others have further to fall. New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being oversupplied with gigantic buildings out of scale with the reality of declining energy supplies. Their former agricultural hinterlands have long been paved over. They will be encysted in a surrounding fabric of necrotic suburbia that will only amplify and reinforce the cities' problems. Still, our cities occupy important sites. Some kind of urban entities will exist where they are in the future, but probably not the colossi of twentieth-century industrialism.

Although he jumped the gun a bit on peak oil, Warren Johnson made some very similar predictions during the energy crisis of the 1970s about the effects of a significant long-term increase in fuel prices. The outcome would be a decentralized economy of diversified production for local markets, much less demographic mobility, and more stable intermediate social institutions like extended families, neighborhoods, and communities.

Another Manufactured Revolution

Another one from the Progressive Review.

Well, what a surprise! It turns out that the recent "revolution" in the Kyrgyz Republic was just the latest in the series of manufactured Orange, Inky Finger, and Cedar Revolutions, of the same ilk as most of the other examples of "People Power" over which the neocons have waxed so eloquent these past 20 years. The following is from a December 30 report by Ambassador Stephen M. Young:

Taking into account the interests, of our presence in the region and development of democratic society in Kyrgyzstan, our primary goal —according to the earlier approved plans — is to increase pressure upon Akaev to make him resign ahead of schedule after the parliamentary elections Realizing the plan is of key importance as, we think, the present opposition is not strong enough to challenge the present authorities, though Akaev has claimed he is not going to prolong his terms of office. . .
With a view to providing favorable conditions and helping democratic opposition leaders come to power, our primary goal for the pre-elections period is to arouse mistrust to the authorities in force and Akaev’s incapacitated corruption regime, his pro-Russian orientation and illegal use of "an administrative resource" to rig elections. In this regard, the embassy’s Democratic commission, Soros Foundations, Eurasia Foundation in Bishkek in cooperation with USAID have been organizing politically active groups of voters in order to inspire riots against pro-president candidates.

It mystifies me, by the way, that Bill O'Reilly insists on labelling George Soros as "far left."

We have set up and opened financing for an independent printing office — the Media Support center — and AKIpress news agency to interpret impartially the course of the elections and minimize state mass media propaganda impact. We also render financial support to promising non-governmental tele- and radio companies.

According to public polls results, we can come to conclusion that only a minor part of the population— former USSR citizens — is satisfied with close cooperation with Russia. Young people are most likely oriented to the West. Therefore we consider it extremely important to popularize American way of life among them to diminish Russian influence. At least 45 national higher schools have their local Students in Action organizations, which we are planning to use properly during parliamentary and presidential elections. In our opinion, those additional funds ($5 mm) transferred by the Department of State to hold seminars in all leading Universities of Kyrgyzstan and organize training in western countries turned out insufficient.

In the view of the pit-election situation and effort to provide fair and democratic elections in the KR and retain our positions in mass media and contacts with the opposition leaders, I advise focusing on discrediting the present political regime, thus making Akaev and his followers responsible for the economic crisis. We should also take steps to spread information on probable restriction of political freedoms during the election campaign.

It is worthwhile compromising Akaev personally by disseminating data in the opposition mass media on his wife’s involvement in financial frauds and bribery at designation of officials. We also recommend spreading rumors about her probable plans to run for the presidency, etc. All these measures will help us form an image of an absolutely incapacitated president.

Young's repeated references to Russian political influence confirm that American involvement in former Soviet Central Asia is just a strategic effort by Oceania to mop up the remnants of Eurasia, and to secure control of the Caspian oil basin.

Thomas Carothers' work is useful for properly evaluating what neoconservatives mean when they exult over "democracy" and "rule of law." Writing in "The Reagan Years: The 1980s," (in Abraham F. Lowenthal, ed., Exporting Democracy), he argued that American "pro-democratic" policy in the Third World has traditionally identified "democracy" with electoralism, and little else. The "underlying objective" of pro-democracy policies is "to maintain the basic order of what... are quite undemocratic societies." Democracy is a means of "relieving pressure for more radical change," but only through "limited, top-down forms of democratic change that [do] not risk upsetting the traditional structures of power with which the United States has been allied." Democracy policy in El Salvador, for instance, promoted a form of "democracy" through the Duarte regime that did not touch the power of the military or the landed elite.

As I've written repeatedly here (some might call it an obsession), the main purpose of all these so-called "democratic" revolutions is to install a pliable leadership that'll be easier for the World Bank and IMF to deal with.

Update. *Sigh* Jesse Walker tipped me off that all or part of the memo may be a fake. The U.S. embassy in Kyrgyzstan has denied its authenticity. Even Justin Raimondo is repudiating it. I'm not sure how much of it is a forgery (if any), but take it with a grain of salt.

Northwest Arkansas Blogging: More Welfare for Wal-Mart

I guess corporate welfare for Wal-Mart falls into the "Dog Bites Man" category; but anyway, here goes. Via Progressive Review. "House OKs $37 million for Wal-Mart H.Q. road"

BENTONVILLE, Ark. - The U.S. House has approved a federal highway bill that includes $37 million for widening and extending the Bentonville street that provides the main access to the headquarters of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

The company says it asked U.S. Rep. John Boozman, R-Ark., to help get federal money for the proposed project. U.S. Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, added an amendment that put the work into the $284 billion bill, which is now before the Senate.

Wal-Mart spokesman Jay Allen said the company wants Eighth Street improved so the 10,000 workers at company headquarters will have an easier time getting to their jobs. In the time Wal-Mart’s headquarters has been at the site, the company has grown at a much greater rate than the street has been improved. Wal-Mart, as measured by sales, is the world’s largest company. Wal-Mart has 20,000 employees in the Bentonville area; about half of them work at the company’s headquarters.

“We have people living all over the area,” Allen said. “Infrastructure in northwest Arkansas is a big issue for us. This would represent another east-west corridor connected to the interstate, which would benefit everybody.”

The money in the transportation bill would widen the street and pay for connecting it to Interstate 540.

For most of living memory, the central function of "our" elected representatives in northwest Arkansas has been to secure lots and lots of highway and airport pork for local corporate interests. For years, Third District Congressman John Paul Hammerschidt pursued federal highway funds with a single-mindedness that made Al "Senator Pothole" D'Amato look like a piker. I've written before in this blog about the Northwest Arkansas Council's (aka Cockroach Caucus) role in lying and manipulating its way into a taxpayer-funded regional airport. As long as I can remember, "our" local government has been a corrupt good ol' boy club serving the interests of Tyson, Wal-Mart, J.B. Hunt, and Jim Lindsey.

Nice to know those public-spirited citizens are still tirelessly pursuing the "public interest" (while lining their own pockets, of course).

What a bunch of filthy pigs.

Public Services, "Privatized" and Mutualized

Larry Gambone has a couple of good posts on the organization of public services at the Porcupine Blog. In the first, "Why Privatization and Deregulation Haven't Worked," he writes:

The central concern of any corporation is to make a profit. Anything which interferes with this profit making is eliminated. When this rule is applied to services, most particularly those 'natural monopolies' like electricity, water, rail transport, and 'human services' like hospitals, the results can be highly negative. Profitable, 'high traffic' areas are serviced, while less profitable are not. The wealthy get health care, the poor remain sick. In the old days, rural areas were not electrified because it cost too much. City districts with a lower population were not served with tram ways because it wasn't profitable.

I confess to some reservations about this complaint. Ultimately, services should be paid for by those using them, and the price should reflect the cost of providing them. Of course, that's leaving aside near-term expedients for dealing with the unjust distribution of wealth, which results from government intervention on behalf of the privileged owning classes. But ideally, in an economy where labor keeps its full product and no economic exploitation takes place, people should not receive subsidized services that they aren't willing to pay for at the full cost. The cost of providing electricity and water to rural areas may be so high that, when the cost is internalized in price, people in those areas find wells, cisterns, solar and wind power, etc., to be more cost-effective.

Of course, violations of the cost principle more often benefit the well-to-do at everyone else's expense. Many comfortable middle-class people live in outlying areas and engage in costly behavior precisely because the government has been providing subsidized utilities. (This is comparable to the yuppie practice of building those beach front houses that keep going down in mudslides, because the government bears the cost of insurance) One of the main forces behind sprawl is the provision of below-cost utilities to new suburban housing developments and big-box stores, at the expense of homeowners and businesses in older downtown neighborhoods.

And, as Larry points out, privatized utilities violate the cost principle more than they honor it. Ordinary residential rate-payers pay higher bills to compensate for provision of cheap services to industry.

Then, the corporation has a debt, the amount it had to pay to the city for the water works. To pay for this debt, employees are fired and rates increased. Since the industrial users are charged low rates, the people least able to afford the increases, small business and home owners, will pay the balk of increased costs. The consumer and the worker end up paying for the purchase.

On the whole, I think the provision of below-cost services by government-owned utilities has been a powerful force for promoting our dependence on "hard energy" distributed through centralized grids, and impeding the adoption of decentralized forms of appropriate technology or intermediate technology.

Larry is 100% correct that the real motive behind "privatization" has nothing to do with genuine free market principles. It's just another example of the old game of "public assets, private profits":

Rail, public transit, electricity generation, water and sewage treatment represent hundreds of billions of dollars of tax payer money invested over the last 90 years. To this figure must be added lands expropriated or given as gifts to build dams and railroads. Privatization hands all this wealth - that we tax payers in theory own - to corporations at a cut rate, for if they were sold at their true cost, no one would buy them.

The policy of deregulation and privatization was never designed to improve services, it was designed to loot.

Amen! This was pretty much the finding of a recent study of water "privatization." In many cases, the government had to spend even more money upgrading facilities, before "private" corporations would find it worthwhile to purchase them. In effect, the taxpayers have paid the corporations to take public assets off their hands.

Instead of encouraging investment, privatisation has left governments offering increased concessions to entice investors to acquire their assets– often to meet the requirements of donors. For example, between 1991 and 1998 the Brazilian Government made some US$85 billion through the sale of state run enterprises. However, over the same period, it spent US$87 billion ‘preparing’ the companies for privatisation.

Rather than being a major source of finance, private contractors are committing little of their own capital and are instead looking to municipalities, central government or donor governments/institutions to provide the money....

In fact, in many cases foreign companies are relying on the donor community to bail them out when they get it wrong.

Larry concludes his post with a call for expropriating "privatized" services (without compensation), and placing them under a system of cooperative governance with day-to-day management carried out by the workforce's representatives, and strategic control divided between representatives of the labor force, consumers, and community.

In his second post on a similar theme, "All Power to the Bureaucrats," he writes specifically about the government-owned super-hospitals being built in the Montreal area.

Doctors, trade unions, Medicins sans frontieres are all opposed. These projects result from bureaucratic empire-building, and are not derived from any real need.

The mega-hospitals will centralize the power of the health care bureaucracy even more than it already is. And as someone who works in health care, I can tell you that they have enough trouble running the system now.

Hospitals, he writes, are an ideal candidate for mutualization:

Ironically, hospitals would be an ideal place for introducing worker-self management. They are not owned by a corporation, and supposedly belong to the community. They have a highly educated staff. A council composed of nurses, doctors, technical, trade and support staff, elected by mass meetings of the groups concerned would be the best form of management. For sure such a group would not come up with a crack pot idea like a mega hospital!

Suppression of Alternatives

An interesting post over at Flagrancy to Reason. It's too complex to summarize adequately without, for all intents and purposes, pasting in the whole thing. So just go read it.

By way of inadequate summary, though, Buermann riffs off of Gabriel Kolko's remarks in The Triumph of Conservatism on the neglect of alternative models of economic organization. Because of the two parties' attachment to slightly different versions of the same centralized corporate-state system, and the mainstream socialists' technocratic assumption (shared by thinkers as diverse as Engels and DeLeon) that centralization was inherent in the nature of industrial production, decentralized and democratic alternatives were completely marginalized. Buermann draws a parallel to the active suppression of such alternatives in the Third World today, with the connivance of neoliberal economists like Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Krugman.

Primitive Accumulation

This is something fairly old that I just happened on in the last few days--but there's no law that says a blog can only be about current stuff. This is definitely worth calling to the attention of anybody who, like me, missed it the first time around.

For the Record had a couple of great posts back in August on the subject of primitive accumulation, under the title "Industrial-Corporate Capitalist Coercion": Part 1: “Enclosure” and the Privatization of the English Commons, and Part II: The Clothier’s Delight, or the rich Men’s Joy, and the poor Men’s Sorrow, wherein is exprest the Craftiness and Subtility of many Clothiers in England, by beating down their Workmen’s Wages.

Arthur Silber: "I Accuse"

Good News! The first three parts of Arthur Silber's foreign policy essay "I Accuse: To Those Who Pave the Way for the New Fascism" is now back online, with the rest likely to follow soon: Part I Part II and Part III. If you read it in conjunction with David Neiwert's essays, "Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism" and "The Rise of Pseudo-Fascism," you'll get a very sobering look at where American politics might be headed.

Update: Parts IVA and IVB are now up, along with his essay "In Praise of Contextual Libertarianism."

Cooperative Economics in B.C.

Via Porcupine Blog. Peter Dimitrov has a third installment in his series "Toward a New Economics for British Columbia" at BC Politics. (See also Part 1 and Part 2).

It is asserted that for British Columbia, the "co-op" or "co-operative model" of development, while is thusfar underutilized, is the best institutional vehicle to bring about such an economic model of development.

A model of development predicated on co-operatives could maximize democratic control of development by local citizens who would be the voting members of the co-op. It could mobilize the savings of citizens and perhaps even union pension funds.

"Corporate capitalists don't want free markets...."

Via Jeffery Smith on the Democratic Freedom Caucus' yahoogroup. This is a quote from RFK, Jr.:

You show me a polluter and I’ll show you a subsidy. I’ll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and load his production costs onto the backs of the public.

The fact is, free-market capitalism is the best thing that could happen to our environment, our economy, our country. Simply put, true free-market capitalism, in which businesses pay all the costs of bringing their products to market, is the most efficient and democratic way of distributing the goods of the land – and the surest way to eliminate pollution. Free markets, when allowed to function, properly value raw materials and encourage producers to eliminate waste – pollution – by reducing, reusing, and recycling.

In a real-market economy, when you make yourself rich, you enrich your community.

The truth is, I don’t even think of myself as an environmentalist anymore. I consider myself a free-marketeer.

Corporate capitalists don’t want free markets, they want dependable profits, and their surest route is to crush the competition by controlling the government.

Let’s not forget that we taxpayers give away $65 billion every year in subsidies to big oil, and more than $35 billion a year in subsidies to western welfare cowboys. Those subsidies helped create the billionaires who financed the right-wing revolution on Capitol Hill and put George W. Bush in the White House.

Porcupine Blog

Larry Gambone's getting his feet wet in the blogosphere with the Porcupine Blog. It's a new venue for his older ezine version of The Porcupine. It already has some good stuff up, and we can expect more good things to come.

A Heads-Up on My New Project

Over the past few weeks, I've finally come out of the post-partum malaise that followed the publication of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, the culmination of two years' research and writing.

I recently started digging into a new research project, loosely built around questions of anarchist organizational theory. I've been exploring the tie-ins between orthodox theories of transaction costs and diseconomies of scale, and the work of anarchist thinkers like Ivan Illich, Paul Goodman, and R.A. Wilson on the irrationality of large-scale organization. Wilson's comments on information flow within hierarchies, and the following remark by Kenneth Boulding, are also relevant.

There is a great deal of evidence that almost all organizational structures tend to produce false images in the decision-maker, and that the larger and more authoritarian the organization, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds.

So is Goodman's commentary on the failure to internalize the good and bad effects of individual actions within an organization, the separation of intrinsic motivation from work, and the consequent increasing reliance on extrinsic motivators like authoritarian surveillance and control mechanisms.

The organizing theme, as I understand it so far, is that the state subsidizes the diseconomies of large scale, and thus encourages the growth of business firms far beyond the size that could possibly survive in a free market. As a result, society becomes dominated by institutions with pathological organizational cultures (brilliantly captured by Wilson with his title "Empire of the Rising Scum"), and bureaucratic irrationality becomes the norm in every sector. Government subsidies to inefficiency cost also create large-scale negative externalities, which relates closely to Illich's ideas on "counterproductivity" and the "second threshold."

The project will probably, before it's over, involve a course of reading in industrial engineering, public administration, and sociology comparable in scope to the study of economic theory I had to do for Mutualist Political Economy.

I recently stumbled across several interesting leads. One of them is The Theory of Incentives: The Principal-Agent Model, by Jean-Jacques Laffont, which has an excellent literature review on the history of this problem. Another is Oliver Williamson's body of work on diseconomy of scale and internal transaction costs. Finally, in rereading Kirkpatrick Sale's Human Scale, I noticed this brilliant quote from Hazel Henderson's Creating Alternative Futures:

when complexity and interdependence have reached such unmanageable proportions... the system generates transaction costs faster than it does production...."

Now that I've thoroughly jinxed myself, I welcome any suggestions or feedback.

Lormand on Vulgar Libertarians

Via Upaya. Eric Lormand writes, in "How to Be a Progressive Libertarian":

Right-libertarians sometimes wish to weaken the state without simultaneously weakening other institutions that have grown fat on the state.

My better nature is struggling to avoid the obvious allusion to "Europe's favorite think tank blog," but it's really an effort.

"Building the Structure of the New Society Within the Shell of the Old"

Alan Avans has an interesting post up at Ecodema, provocatively entitled "The Social Economy and Social Credit: Two Wings of One Bird?"

The post was inspired by a recent commenter's question:

Why do the greater part of cooperatives behave in much the same way as other firms in terms of management and in terms of the links they develop, or don't develop, in their communities?

The answer, according to Avans:

I've concluded that the essense of the challenge activists for economic democracy face is that we can never negotiate a cooperative commonwealth based on orthodox economic terms.

The prairie populists of Canada and USAmerica once had a unique opportunity for a breakthrough past the restraints of the orthodox economics of the early twentieth century.

So what went wrong? The takeover of a socialist movement, originally dominated by actual producers and interested in building alternative economic institutions, by Fabian social democrats.

Social democratic Fabianism, which would be an early adopter of Keynesian policy prescriptions, came to dominate socialist thought and shape the limits of a socialist agenda. It also displaced guild socialism and its historic project of building a decentralized and non-statist social economy. Fabianism more-or-less adopted the conventional wisdom of orthodox economics.

Populists and socialists in USAmerica and Canada squandered their opportunity to build the cooperative commonwealth in North America when the larger part of the movement gave way to a Fabian form of social democracy.

The guild socialist G.D.H. Cole argued in an article I once stumbled across (in Dissent, I think, but I'm too lazy to dig it up) that Fabianism preferred to leave the institutional framework of the capitalist economy as it was, with the government merely redistributing part of the product. The reason, Cole suspected, was that changing the institutional framework to put workers in direct control of the production process wouldn't leave much of a role for Fabian intellectuals.

"Social democracy," on the other hand, has plenty of room for a caste of privileged managers and planners. As John Kenneth Galbraith used to describe it, "socialism" just meant reclassifying the men in gray flannel suits who ran the big corporations as employees of the state planning agency rather than the corporate stockholders--and then they'd go on doing pretty much the same thing they did before. And, naturally, workers would also go right on doing what they did before: taking orders from the men in gray flannel suits.

In practice, of course, even that never happened; the SD and Fabian intellectuals have been the dupes of the plutocracy. As corporate liberalism (aka "Progressivism") evolved in the U.S., the New Class was simply adopted as a junior partner by the capitalist class. As Hilaire Belloc predicted in The Servile State, the New Class has been allowed to pursue its agenda of regimenting the lower orders and socially engineering us "for our own good," only to the extent that it has served the plutocracy's need for rational planning to guarantee secure and predictable profits. Anyone who thinks nanny statists like Hillary, Rosie, Barbra and their ilk are "anti-capitalist" is delusional: Hillary made a 10,000% profit on cattle futures and was a Wal-Mart director, for cryin' out loud!

The problem that Avans points to is a real one. Economic counter-institutions, unfortunately, work within the framework of a larger corporate capitalist economy. They compete in markets in which the institutional culture of the dominant firms is top-down and hierarchical, and are in great danger of absorbing this institutional culture themselves. That's why you have a non-profit and cooperative sector whose management is indistinguishable from its capitalist counterparts: prestige salaries, middle management featherbedding, bureaucratic irrationality, and slavish adherence to the latest motivational/management theory dogma. The problem is exacerbated by a capitalist financial system, which extends positive reinforcement (in the form of credit) to firms following an orthodox organizational model (even when bottom-up organization is far more efficient). Paul Goodman described it this way, in The Community of Scholars:

In brief, ...the inevitability of centralism will be self-proving. A system destroys its competitors by pre-empting the means and channels, and then proves that it is the only conceivable mode of operating.

The solution is to promote as much consolidation as possible within the counter-economy. We need to get back to the job of "building the structure of the new society within the shell of the old." A great deal of production and consumption already takes place within the social or gift economy, self-employment, barter, etc. The linkages need to be increased and strengthened between those involved in consumers' and producers' co-ops, self-employment, LETS systems, home gardening and other household production, informal barter, etc. What economic counter-institutions already exist need to start functioning as a cohesive counter-economy.

As Hernando de Soto has pointed out, the resources already available to us are enormous. If we could leverage and mobilize them suffiiciently, they might be made to function as a counterweight to the capitalist economy. For example: the average residential lot, if subjected to biointensive farming methods, could supply the majority of a family's vegetable needs. And what's more important, the total labor involved in doing this would be less than it takes to earn the money to buy equivalent produce from the supermarket. The average person could increase his independence of the wage-system, improve the quality of his food, and reduce his total work hours, all at once. This is an ideal theme for mutualist propaganda.

A key objective should be building the secondary institutions we need to make the resources we already have more usable. Most people engage in a great deal of informal production to meet their own needs, but lack either access or awareness of the institutional framework by which they might cooperate and exchange with others involved in similar activities. Expanding LETS systems and increasing public awareness of them is vital. Every need that can be met by producing for oneself, or exchanging one's own produce for that of a neighbor, increases the amount of one's total consumption needs that can be met without depending on employment at someone else's whim. If an organic gardener lives next door to a plumber and they exchange produce for plumbing work, neither one can provide an outlet for the other's entire output. But both, at least, will have a secure source of supply for both his vegetables and plumbing needs, and an equally secure market for the portion of his own output consumed by the other. The more different trades come into the system, the larger the proportion of total needs that can be met outside the framework of a job.

Ultimately, we need a cooperative alternative to the capitalists' banking system, to increase the cooperative economy's access to its own mutual credit. This is illegal, under the terms of capitalist banking law. The banking system is set up to prevent ordinary people from leveraging their own property for interest-free credit through mutual banking. Gary Elkin has argued that it might be possible to slip mutual banking in through the back door, by piggybacking it on a LETS system. Members of a LETS system might start out by extending store credit against the future labor of other members, and expand from there. Here's how Elkin described the functioning of such a system:

Along these lines, I want to sketch an updated version of mutual banking, complete with e-money transfer capability via the Internet. As I see it, a mutual bank should grow from a collectively owned and operated barter association that is responsive to the participatory-democratic assembly of a radical urban community. Here's a possible scenario:

The new economic system -- not yet self-sufficient but increasingly so -- is born when the community barter association begins issuing an alternative currency accepted as money by all businesses within the system. For reasons discussed below, this "currency" does not at first take the form of tangible monetary tokens (i.e. coins or bills), but is circulated entirely through transactions involving the use of barter-cards, personal checks, and "e-money" transfers via modem/Internet.

Since it doesn't charge interest -- the source of regular banks' profits -- and since its purpose is to provide economic assistance to the community, it may be possible to charter this new financial institution as a nonprofit charitable organization. In order to get non-profit status, however, it is essential that mutual-credit organizations not be officially described as "banks" "thrifts," "savings and loans," "credit unions," etc., which would make them subject to the charter laws governing such institutions. For convenience I'll refer to an anarchist zero-interest credit-issuer as a "mutual barter clearinghouse" (or just "clearinghouse" for short). Other semantic expedients regarding the official description of its operations may also be necessary in dealing with the State.

The clearinghouse has a twofold mandate: first, to extend interest-free credit to members; second, to manage the circulation of credit-money within the system, charging only a small service fee (probably one percent or less) which covers its costs of operation. Such costs would include the making of plastic barter cards, printing personal checks, keeping track of transactions, paying its workers, insuring itself against losses from uncollectible debts, and so forth.

The clearinghouse is organized and functions as follows. Members of the original barter association are invited to become subscriber-members of the mutual bank by pledging a certain amount of property as "collateral" (referred to by some other term -- perhaps "pledge" is good enough). On the basis of this pledge, an account is opened for the new member and credited with a sum of mutual dollars equivalent to some fraction of the assessed value of the property pledged. [2] The new member agrees to repay this amount plus the cost-covering service fee by a certain date. The mutual dollars in the new account may then be transferred through the clearinghouse by using a barter card, by writing a personal check, or by sending e-money via modem to the accounts of other members, who have agreed to receive mutual money in payment for all debts.

The opening of this sort of account is, of course, the same as taking out of a "loan" in the sense that a commercial bank "lends" by extending credit to a borrower in return for a signed note pledging a certain amount of property as security. It's like fractional-reserve banking in this respect. The crucial difference, however, is that the clearinghouse does not purport to be "lending" a sum of money that it *already has*, as is fraudulently claimed, with much hand-waving and doubletalk, by commercial banks. (Hence the creation of mutual credit does not have to be officially described as "making a loan.") Instead it honestly admits that it is creating new money in the form of credit, but charging no interest for doing so. New accounts can also be opened simply telling the clearinghouse that one wants an account and then arranging with other people who already have balances to transfer mutual money into one's new account. --

The capital and land of the rich is worthless to them without a supply of labor to produce surplus value. And even if they can find labor, their ability to extract surplus value from their labor force depends on a labor market that favors buyers over sellers. Anything that marginally increases the independence of labor and reduces its dependence on wages, and marginally reduces the supply of labor available to capitalists and landlords, will also marginally reduce the rate of profit and thus make their land and capital less profitable to them. The value of land and capital to landlords and capitalists depends on the ability to hire labor on their own terms. Anything that increases the marginal price of labor will reduce the marginal returns on capital and land.

What's more, even a partial shift in bargaining power from capital to labor will increase the share of their product that wage-workers receive even in capitalist industry. The individualist anarchists argue that a removal of special legal privileges for capital would increase the bargaining power of labor until the rate of profit was effectively zero, and capitalist enterprises took on the character (de facto) of workers' co-ops.

And the owning classes use less efficient forms of production precisely because the state gives them preferential access to large tracts of land and subsidizes the inefficiency costs of large-scale production. Those engaged in the alternative economy, on the other hand, will be making the most intensive and efficient use of the land and capital available to them. So the balance of forces between the alternative and capitalist economy will not be anywhere near as uneven as the distribution of property might indicate.

If everyone capable of benefiting from the alternative economy participates in it, and it makes full and efficient use of the resources already available to them, eventually we'll have a society where most of what the average person consumes is produced in a network of self-employed or worker-owned production, and the owning classes are left with large tracts of land and understaffed factories that are almost useless to them because it's so hard to hire labor except at an unprofitable price. At that point, the correlation of forces will have shifted until the capitalists and landlords are islands in a mutualist sea--and their land and factories will be the last thing to fall, just like the U.S Embassy in Saigon.

Addendum--Right after posting this, I happened on this excellent post by Dave Pollard. It included the following passage, which is a perfect restatement of what Paul Goodman said in the block quote above.

What is the reason that so many bottom-up ideas and innovations never make it into the commercial marketplace? I'm not a believer in conspiracy theories that corporations deliberately buy up and suppress more durable inventions to keep them from cannibalizing their market. I think it's more likely that people with good ideas are just disconnected from those with the skills and resources needed to implement those ideas. And vice versa -- those with commercialization skills and resources are rewarded by the market (and by shareholders) for not fixing what ain't broke, for not changing what they're doing until and unless they have to.

So on the one hand we have an astonishing and unprecedented flood of good ideas, made possible by the democratization of knowledge (the Internet etc.), and on the other hand we have this incredible inertia by those who could make those ideas reality, change everything.

Claire Wolfe: Dark Satanic Cubicles

Via Ender's Review. Great article by Claire Wolfe in the Loompanics catalog. Wolfe starts by riffing off of Tennessee Ernie Ford's hit "Sixteen tons" (actually a cover of a 1946 song by Merle Travis, which had got him branded a commie fellow-traveller by the U.S. government).

Although Travis was a patriotic Kentucky boy, the U.S. government thought any song complaining about hard work and hopeless debt was subversive. The song got Travis branded a “communist sympathizer” (a dangerous label in those days). A Capitol record exec who was a Chicago DJ in the late 40s remembers an FBI agent coming to the station and advising him not to play “Sixteen Tons.”

She goes on, quite eloquently (if less lyrically than Travis), with some prose that might get her labelled subversive in her own right:

In a healthy human community, jobs are neither necessary nor desirable. Productive work is necessary – for economic, social, and even spiritual reasons. Free markets are also an amazing thing, almost magical in their ability to satisfy billions of diverse needs. Entrepreneurship? Great! But jobs – going off on a fixed schedule to perform fixed functions for somebody else day after day at a wage – aren't good for body, soul, family, or society.

Intuitively, wordlessly, people knew it in 1955. They knew it in 1946. They really knew it when Ned Ludd and friends were smashing the machines of the early Industrial Revolution (though the Luddites may not have understood exactly why they needed to do what they did).

Jobs suck. Corporate employment sucks. A life crammed into 9-to-5 boxes sucks. Gray cubicles are nothing but an update on William Blake's “dark satanic mills.” Granted, the cubicles are more bright and airy; but they''re different in degree rather than in kind from the mills of the Industrial Revolution. Both cubicles and dark mills signify working on other people's terms, for other people's goals, at other people's sufferance. Neither type of work usually results in us owning the fruits of our labors or having the satisfaction of creating something from start to finish with our own hands. Neither allows us to work at our own pace, or the pace of the seasons. Neither allows us access to our families, friends, or communities when we need them or they need us. Both isolate work from every other part of our life....

We've made wage-slavery so much a part of our culture that it probably doesn't even occur to most people that there's something unnatural about separating work from the rest of our lives. Or about spending our entire working lives producing things in which we can often take only minimal personal pride – or no pride at all.

Reminds me of a quote from Albert Jay Nock:

Our natural resources, while much depleted, are still great; our population is very thin, running something like twenty or twenty-five to the square mile; and some millions of this population are at the moment "unemployed," and likely to remain so because no one will or can "give them work." The point is not that men generally submit to this state of things, or that they accept it as inevitable, but that they see nothing irregular or anomalous about it because of their fixed idea that work is something to be given.

One especially interesting comment in Wolfe's article is her assessment of the failure of telecommuting to materialize on anything near the scale it was expected to ten or fifteen years ago:

Although computer-based “knowledge work” hasn't enabled millions of us to leave the corporate world and work at home (as, again, it was supposed to), that's more a problem of corporate power psychology than of technology. Our bosses fear to “let” us work permanently at home; after all, we might take 20-minute coffee breaks, instead of 10!

That was a great deal of the motivation behind creating the factory system in the first place: not because it was a more efficient form of production (there were forms of new technology that could have made labor much more productive in the context of the household labor or putting-out system), but because it put the capitalist in direct control of the production process and promoted the social control of labor. The same motive persists for maintaining the factory's successor, the cubicle system--even when abolishing it would be far more efficient in terms of everything but work-discipline. See, for example, Stephen Marglin's article "What Do Bosses Do?"

Wolfe concludes:

And we can begin to consider: What types of technology let us live more independently, and what types of independence still enable us to take advantage of life-enhancing technologies while keeping ourselves out of the life-degrading job trap?

Take a job and you've sold part of yourself to a master. You've cut yourself off from the real fruits of your own efforts.

When you own your own work, you own your own life. It's a goal worthy of a lot of sacrifice. And a lot of deep thought.

Like Merle Travis and Ned Ludd, anybody who begins to come up with a serious plan that starts cutting the underpinnings from the state-corporate power structure can expect to be treated as Public Enemy Number One.

The chief obstacle to the process?

government and its heavily favored and subsidized corporations and financial markets....

She can probably expect that FBI agent to show up any minute now.

Note: Wolfe has a couple of articles on the same theme ("How to Avoid Work," Part I and Part II) in her archive of articles at Backwoods Home.

New Hodgskin Texts Online

Via Ken Gregg at Liberty & Power. The Online Library of Liberty has another couple of Thomas Hodgskin's works online: Popular Political Economy and A Lecture on Free Trade. Their online Hogskin texts already included The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted.

Sagebrush Rebels on the Government Tit

Logan Ferree at Democratic Freedom writes (on ANWR drilling):

A Republican friend of mine, who supported the drilling, asked why doesn't the government just auction off the property rights? That way if the environmentalists want to stop the drilling, they can try to buy it, and is the oil companies want to drill, they'll actually have to pay for it.

Sounds like Logan's friend answered his own question.

It's a genius idea, and one I'd advocate for much of the public lands system.

But a lot of mining, drilling, ranching, logging, and agribusiness would no longer be profitable if the corporations involved had to pay the costs on their own dime--which is exactly why it won't be done short of near-revolutionary pressure on Congress.

It's quite likely that any price at all on Alaskan land would be enough to finish off any plans for ANWR drilling. According to Progress Report,

The United States Treasury will likely never see the drilling revenues presupposed by President Bush's 2006 budget. The budgetary estimates drastically exaggerate the price per leased acre, in some cases expecting "between 66 and 120 times the historic average." Waning industry interest in the area is also a serious factor and one of President Bush's own advisors stated, "If the government gave [the oil companies] the leases for free, they wouldn't take them."

In that case, why is the GOP so stridently insisting on it? It gets the camel's nose under the tent.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) spoke about the "symbolism involved in opening up the refuge to drilling" as well as the precedent the move will set. DeLay's comments reveal that drilling in ANWR is "a domino game that will lead to drilling in the Rocky Mountains, off the California coast and in the Gulf of Mexico." Watch out when the moratorium on eastern Gulf drilling expires in 2007.

"We're Running a Library, and They Can Suck It"

Via freeman, lc:

This September, returning residents of East Quad were dismayed to find that the dorm’s Benzinger Library had sold off its collection of hundreds of CDs and DVDs, converting it from a circulating library into a so-called Community Learning Center. Outraged by the decision to unload the library’s collection and fed up with the general lack of transparency on the part of University Housing, several students have banded together to form the Benzinger Library Cooperative to rebuild from scratch the once-mighty collection of media free from the meddling influence of University administrators....

The BLC’s dealings with University administration have been less than successful. University Housing is trying to maintain control over the library without providing any material assistance to the students’ efforts. Atkinson describes Director of Community Learning Centers David Pimentel as “a bureaucrat of the most aggravating sort” for refusing to relax his iron grip on the Benz and relinquish control to students. But in the end, fruitless negotiations will have no impact on future BLC operations. “Generally, we’re pretty fearless,” boasts Atkinson. “We’re running a library, and they can suck it.”...

Another example of unnecessary Housing meddling in student affairs is the recent efforts of officials to eradicate any and all remnants of originality from East Quad’s basement café, the Halfway Inn (known colloquially as the Halfass). Up until two years ago, students were encouraged to decorate the Halfass however they saw fit. Sadly, the enlightened minds in University Housing decided that it would be in the students’ best interest to replace the vibrant murals with a bland shade of white paint and destroy the subdued ambience by installing soul-suckingly drab fluorescent lighting. After enacting these changes and facing the inevitable torrent of criticism, Housing benevolently offered to hold a mural-making contest in which Housing administrators would select a student to paint a pre-approved mural. An alternative proposed by students is to hold a mural day in which all residents are enc