Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism

New MIcropayment System at C4SS

2012-01-13T12:09:00.000-08:00

Center for a Stateless Society (c4SS) has switched to a new method of paying contributors. There's a Flattr button at the top of every column. So if you like what you're reading and you have a Flattr account, you can simply click the button and make a one-time payment of any size you like (even just a dollar) to support the writer.

Call Emory Campus Police to Protest Arrest of Joe Diaz

2011-12-12T13:47:00.000-08:00

Please call and email to protest the arrest of Joe Diaz, a PhD student at Emory University, who was brutally assaulted in the University Library by campus police, arrested, and held under degrading and punitive conditions. In the library he saw his diminutive friend Alice, surrounded by hulking uniformed officers standing over her as she sat peacefully on the floor. As you can see in the video, he stepped in in a non-confrontational manner, identified himself, and asked if his friend was OK. It immediately escalated into a violent confrontation, initiated by the police, who might have following the script of soldiers storming a living room in a house-to-house search of occupied Baghdad. The cop's behavior was that of an Alpha Male dog confronting someone who didn't roll over and show their belly fast enough.

As you can see in the video, Joe did not obstruct police business. That accusation was a lie, coming from someone so hyped on his own adrenaline and authority that he could see only a red haze before his eyes. Joe was not resisting. That was another obvious lie barked by the snarling animal in uniform. The cops also lied when they said it was illegal to videotape them, and when they accused those recording them of having a camera "in my face" -- but that lie's standard police operating procedure, repeated as a matter of course regardless of what "the law" is. Because, you see, "the law" only applies to people who aren't wearing uniforms and carrying guns.

Here's Joe's written account of the events. Here's the video.

What have things come to, when a campus police force dealing with peaceful students in a library behave like Nazi soldiers dealing with an occupied population? Thirty years of the Drug War and SWAT team militarization have bred up uniformed beasts of prey in our midst.

I've aready written before, in the case of UC Davis thug John Pike, of the power of viral video for holding these cockroaches up to the light of day. Please help me give the Emory thugs the John Pike treatment.

Please call and/or email the Emory Campus Police to demand an end to such behavior, and please circulate this message as widely as possible.

Emory Campus Police email: Police@emory.edu

Emory Campus Police email: (404) 727-6115

Know Your Enemy

2011-11-21T23:51:00.000-08:00

"One of the officers began to remove us physically without the use of weapons. And Lieutenant John Pike ordered them to stop, raising his pepper can and saying ... 'Leave them. I want to spray these kids.'"

Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth...

Lieutenant. John Pike
Records Unit Manager
Phone: 530-752-3989
Cell: 530-979-0184
Skype: japike3
email id: japikeiii@ucdavis.edu
Address: 4005 Cowell Boulevard, Apartment No 616. Davis,
CA 95618-6017.
LinkedIn Account: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/john-pike/18/a76/879

NYPD Gestapo Shutting Down OWS. Shut Down NYPD!

2011-11-15T00:11:00.000-08:00

NYPD Whiteshirt Gestapo are raiding Zuccotti Park on orders from Bloomberg, evicting protestors, conducting mass arrests.

Let's shut down the NYC government. Swarm the phone lines, emails and faxes of the Mayor's office and NYPD.

For starters:

Bloomberg's email: http://www.nyc.gov/html/mail/html/mayor.html
Bloomberg's Fax: (212) 312-0700
NYPD 1st precinct: (212) 334-0611
NYPD Central Booking: (718) 875-6303
NYPD Internal Affairs: (212) 487-7350
City Hall: (212) 788-3058

Circulate this far and wide, jam the city government's phone lines, and demand Bloomberg's thugs STAND DOWN NOW!

Happy Veterans Day

2011-11-10T23:55:00.000-08:00

It was just before dawn
One miserable morning in black 'forty four.
When the forward commander
Was told to sit tight
When he asked that his men be withdrawn.
And the Generals gave thanks
As the other ranks held back
The enemy tanks for a while.
And the Anzio bridgehead
Was held for the price
Of a few hundred ordinary lives.

And kind old King George
Sent Mother a note
When he heard that father was gone.
It was, I recall,
In the form of a scroll,
With gold leaf and all.
And I found it one day
In a drawer of old photographs, hidden away.
And my eyes still grow damp to remember
His Majesty signed
With his own rubber stamp.

It was dark all around.
There was frost in the ground
When the tigers broke free.
And no one survived
From the Royal Fusiliers Company C.
They were all left behind,
Most of them dead,
The rest of them dying.
And that's how the High Command
Took my daddy from me.

When YouTube's Advertising Algorithm Goes Awry

2011-11-03T00:16:00.000-07:00

The ad next to this video was: "Earn a Bible Degree."

Property is Theft! A Proudhon Anthology

2011-10-28T19:47:00.001-07:00

Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology. Edited by Iain McKay (AK Press, 2011).

Every time I look through this book, I'm amazed at the sheer amount and quality of material in it, and the scholarly apparatus included with it.

As I keep telling people, the last major Proudhon anthology out there -- if you can call it that -- was Stewart Edwards' Selected Writings of P. J. Proudhon. Calling Selected Writings an anthology is generous. Its format was actually more like that of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, with a long series of short excerpts from assorted works grouped together under topic headings. It totalled 262 pages, which meant that even if someone took the trouble to assemble all the scattered excerpts from any particular book in order in a single place, the result would hardly qualify as an abridgement.

On the other hand, this effort by Iain McKay -- widely familiar as the principal author of An Anarchist FAQ -- is over 800 pages, with almost twice as many words per page. It includes modestly abridged versions of almost all of Proudhon's major works, along with dozens of shorter works in their entirety. The abridgements of longer works include What is Property?, both volumes of System of Economic Contradictions, Solution of the Social Problem, Organisation of Credit and Circulation, Bank of the People, Confessions of a Revolutionary, Interest and Principal, General Idea of the Revolution, The Federative Principle, The Political Capacity of the Working Classes, and The Theory of Property. The excerpted material from General Idea of the Revolution, for example, is over fifty pages, and over forty pages are excerpted from Political Capacity of the Working Classes.

A considerable portion of the material is in English translation for the first time, some of it translated by Proudhon scholar Shawn Wilbur.

Iain McKay's fifty-page Introduction is not only a studied bibliographic essay on Proudhon, but also a closely argued thesis regarding the place of markets in the anarchist movement and anarchism in the socialist movement. As such, it is the latest contribution to the ongoing and often heated "Who is an anarchist?" debates, and will no doubt attract careful attention from my market anarchist comrades at Center for a Stateless Society.

Edwards' venture at a Proudhon anthology, for better or worse, was pretty much it for thirty years or so. I expect this one will stand -- far more deservedly -- as the standard anthology for at least that long.

Alleluia, Nunc Dimittis, and Glory Be!

2011-10-16T23:15:00.000-07:00

Something to celebrate, in the five-thousand-year war between the people who own the world and the people who live in it. Read here if you want to know why I'm so happy.

Fourth Quarter 2011 C4SS Fundraiser

2011-10-06T19:20:00.000-07:00

The Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) just began its Fourth Quarter Fundraiser. It's a pretty big target, since it includes a rollover of all our shortfalls for the previous fundraisers.

The rate of contributions has fallen way, way down over the last year or so, even as the readership continues, presumably either because former contributors no longer consider us worth supporting or because they're no longer able to do so. So we've been working mostly for free -- getting considerably less than half our pay -- for a long time.

The thing is, C4SS will keep on going no matter what. We keep writing -- and doing our media relations, social media, and other work -- regardless of whether we get paid, because we believe in it. Our director, Brad Spangler, doesn't get any pay at all, aside from coverage of bare webhosting costs he pays. Our media director, Tom Knapp, usually gives back a considerable portion of his salary. And with my actual pay down to about a hundred or less a month on average, I'm still contributing $20 a month to the fundraiser.

If you can't afford to contribute, or don't like most of what we do, you obviously have no obligation to support us. But if you're one of the people who used to contribute, just fell out of the habit, and can still afford to do so, please consider helping us out again on a regular basis.

You can donate here.

Why Hierarchy Creates Clusterfucks

2011-09-19T23:53:00.000-07:00

At Unqualified Offerings, thoreau devotes a post to "an important point about organizing a bureaucratic organization." Most of my post will consist of the money quote from thoreau's original, inspired piece, and a digest of the debate that ensued in the comment thread. My development of the issues, which follows, is a minority of the whole thing. But I strongly recommend you read the first part in full, because it's one of the most intellectually engaging debates I've read in a long time.

Thoreau, in the body of his post:

If you make it costly to go through Official Channels, people will find ways to do things outside of Official Channels. Most of what they do will be harmless. However, some of it won’t be. By driving the activity underground you guarantee the following:
1) Harmful activities will not be spotted except through chance or when there’s An Incident. And we all know what bureaucracies do when there’s An Incident.

2) There will be no chance to work with people on making their activities safe, because they won’t come to you in advance. The only chance you’ll have to talk to them is when they get caught by chance (at which point they’ll be more focused on doing a better job of keeping secrets) or when there’s An Incident (at which point their main concern will be deflection of blame).

3) The institutional culture will develop an even greater disdain for Rules and even (in many cases) for Safety. Given the realities of how these things work out so frequently, disdain for Rules and even Safety (in most cases) is largely a healthy thing. However, to the extent that a bureaucrat actually values these things, that bureaucrat should try to make it so that doing things through Official Channels is cheaper than skipping Official Channels. That’s your only hope of getting people to actually respect these things. Well, there’s also fear, but fear isn’t respect. It’s mindless, panicked compliance, and it can fade over time, or motivate people to find even better evasive tactics.

Another thought on when there’s An Incident: Besides all of the usual problems with incentives and information in large institutions, it occurs to me that size guarantees that the people responsible for Safety, Compliance, and related matters will be separated from the people on the ground doing whatever it is that the organization is allegedly there to do. Consequently, the person who enforces a ridiculous rule, or who makes you sit through a useless presentation full of statements that are at best insulting and at worst factually wrong, will not be having lunch with you. Often the local enforcers (especially people whose primary task is something other than Safety) are more reasonable than the distant enforcers because, frankly, they need to be. Yes, their access to local information leads to smarter decisions, and they have at least some sort of incentive to see that the job gets done (whereas the distant enforcers only care about Compliance). But they also can’t afford to piss everyone else off (too much) because they will be having lunch with everyone else. If they insult everyone else with a boring and factually wrong Powerpoint, they’ll be ostracized.

This elicited an immediate response from Eli Rabett -- the first in the comment thread:

Obviously you never had to clean up after a big one, like one where a) people get seriously hurt and b) the potential for more to get hurt and buildings to go blooey is not zero.

Let Eli tell you a story about a physicist who thought he knew what he was doing, and was sucking silane into a cryopump, until the pump blew up and took most of a student’s hearing and almost the student, and there was a second cryopump in the system that had not YET blown up.

Clowns who think safety is a joke are auditioning for a Darwin test.

As you might expect, a vigorous debate ensued. First, thoreau's rejoinder:

I don’t think that safety in the lab is a joke, Eli.
I think that most of the safety training sessions that I’ve sat through were worthless, that many of the procedures are more focused on covering bureaucratic ass than on helping people do things safely, and that anybody who relies on the safety officers to tell him how to be safe (as opposed to learning everything he can about the apparatus that he’s using, and learning from other people’s experiences with similar apparatuses) is the one auditioning for a Darwin Award.

I think that clowns who say “Look! Somebody almost died in some other context!” as soon as somebody criticizes a safety rule (I’ve dealt with such people) are the ones who lack the critical thinking ability to think through a situation and make good choices.

A student once left a harmless chemical in a refrigerator that had food. This refrigerator was NOT in a lab. Again, the refrigerator was NOT in a lab. Please re-read that sentence as many times as you deem necessary.

I will be the first to say that the student should be severely chastised and learn a very harsh lesson. Not because there was anything remotely dangerous about the situation, but because the student needs to learn good habits if he is going to avoid truly dangerous situations. (In fact, I was hoping that Samuel L. Jackson might get involved, and say something about the path of the righteous man, just to really make the lesson as dramatic as possible.)

Instead, the response was to take away the refrigerator. A refrigerator that was NOT in a laboratory room. A refrigerator that was in fact in an office. One joker even tried to ban food from the room before I pushed back. Again, the room was NOT a laboratory. It was a shared office area.

And when I said that this was stupid, do you know what the response was? Some idiot pointed out that a student had died in a fire in a chemistry lab at another school. As if that had anything to do with this.

What did the student learn? The student learned that if you get caught people will do stupid things. The teachable moment was tainted.

At this point it is customary for somebody to point out that a person once died or nearly died in some other situation. As if that had anything to do with this....

And of course, I had to jump in:

The point is not that safety considerations are a joke. It’s that if pointy-haired bosses several steps of bureaucratic hierarchy removed from the actual situation make safety rules that are effective, it will be by accident.
The best preventative measure against the kind of incident you described would have been collective policing within the department, by colleagues who actually understood the technical issues involved. If the physicist who thought he knew what he was doing really didn’t, what makes you think some fucking pointy-haired boss insulated from direct contact with the situation by several layers of bureaucracy would know?

Ever play the telephone game? It results in fucked up communication filtering even without power relationships coming into consideration. As R. A. Wilson pointed out, hierarchies are a cybernetic nightmare with one-way information flow.
Information is systematically filtered as it travels up a hierarchy, because power relationships distort communications. Everyone self-censors in talking to a superior, so that the person at the top of a hierarchy lives in a completely imaginary world. According to Wilson, rational behavior requires accurate feedback about the actual effects of one’s decisions — i.e., two-way communications between equals. A decision-maker who is cut off from accurate feedback by the unidirectional communication in a hierarchy becomes functionally insane.

In short: a boss or bureaucrat wouldn’t know an effective safety rule if it bit him on the ass.

Let me pause here to insert Wilson's remarks on Proudhon, because they're so damned brilliant.

A civilization based on authority-and-submission is a civilization without the means of self-correction. Effective communication flows only one way: from master-group to servile-group. Any cyberneticist knows that such a one-way communication channel lacks feedback and cannot behave "intelligently."

The epitome of authority-and-submission is the Army, and the control-and-communication network of the Army has every defect a cyberneticist's nightmare could conjure. Its typical patterns of behavior are immortalized in folklore as SNAFU (situation normal—all fucked-up), FUBAR (fucked-up beyond all redemption) and TARFU (Things are really fucked-up). In less extreme, but equally nosologic, form these are the typical conditions of any authoritarian group, be it a corporation, a nation, a family, or a whole civilization.

Or as he put it in Illuminatus!:

A man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger [or fire them--K.C.]. Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs.... The result can only be progressive deterioration among the rulers.

The innominate one added some experiences of his/her own illustrating the idiocy of the bureaucratic safety process:

Our yearly safety training meetings are heavy on chemical hazards, despite the fact that our university has a web-based centralized inventory records system for hazardous chemicals. So, in theory, the safety people could do what I suggested in writing year before last and check the chemical inventory of all labs in our department and then tailor the safety training meeting to something useful. Guess what didn’t happen. We heard the same spiel about hydrofluoric acid and P-listed wastes (no definition or explanation of what the hell a P-listed waste is). We’re a biology department, heavy on ecologists. I bet no one in our department uses that crap.

This year, at least, they added a section on dealing with biohazardous wastes, which if memory serves was another suggestion I made two years ago (though this might be a memory of convenience). However, we are still instructed to dispose of materials which are not biohazardous in the biohazardous waste disposal, which is a waste (no pun intended) of money.

I did learn from the biohazard disposal training that all rDNA organisms must be deactivated before disposal. No definition of what an rDNA organism is was provided. After the lesson I asked the obviously clueless trainer for a definition and he stated that he thought it was an organism with ribosomal DNA. I said, so, all organisms everywhere? But not viruses, which arguably aren’t organisms and definitely don’t have ribosomal DNA. Viruses must not need to be deactivated before disposal.

Eli made it clear he wasn't having any of it:

1. There was NO ONE in the department who understood the danger. When the EE and I on the investigation committee heard about what was being done we turned white and he is black. We also closed the lab down immediately because of the remaining pump.

This later became an issue years later when the clown sued for persecution. As it happened I had retained the investigation report, so yes, record keeping is important.

2. It is the responsibility of the DEPARTMENT to work with the ES&H office to tailor safety training to risks in the department.

3. On the refrigerator thing, you can look at it another way. From the viewpoint of ES&H it had already been shown that there was a failure of safety training, and given that safety for undergrads should be much more failsafe, the fridge was a risk. You had to do much more than say we ain’t gonna do it again to get that fridge back.

4. A lot of this is the same idiocy as the PFM thing. If you want safety training to be tailored, you are going to have to work with the safety trainers. That means hours of soul deadening meetings, written reports, taking responsibility if bad things happen (we said do it this way and we were wrong) and more.

You guys appear to think that Osha is a village in Wisconsin....
5. Think of it as training your students for industrial and government lab jobs.

The innominate one explained what "working with the safety trainers to tailor safety training" translated to, in practice:

“It is the responsibility of the DEPARTMENT to work with the ES&H office to tailor safety training to risks in the department.”

ES&H has to be willing to do so. Since ES&H has responsibility for conducting safety training, why don’t they take the initiative in getting the department to work with them to customize the training into something useful? I bet it’s because:

1. most ES&H people aren’t hired with an eye toward having expertise in the various areas needed to be aware of safety concerns in such differing areas as chemistry, biology and physics (not even counting the range of variation within just one of those sciences)

2. in my experience most ES&H people don’t know anything more than what the regulations are, no real lab experience. As an example, I refer you to my anecdote above about rDNA organism deactivation.

3. it’s easier to just keep doing what you’re doing and give the same, general training instead of doing the work to develop customized training. just do the same thing that’s always been done, and your ass is covered until someone screws the pooch, then just add a few minutes to your training session the next time to explain the newly discovered problem.

Hey, you want to see some truly useless training? Get MSHA safety certification.

And thoreau added some comments on the same theme:

Your attitude seems to be that we exist to serve the safety office, not that the safety office exists to serve us....
A system where the Safety Office provides training that is unresponsive and useless (as in TIO’s case), and where they recommend unnecessary, expensive, and possibly even inadequate procedures (e.g. TIO’s example of treating chemical waste as biohazardous waste, despite the differences between the two types) is a system that will NOT lead to safe outcomes. It will NOT avoid An Incident. I care about safety enough to want intelligent rules that lead to safe practices. I care enough about safety to want teachable moments to be used productively.
In my example, I was not the one primarily interacting with the students who put the chemicals in the fridge–I only got involved because the fridge was in an office that my students shared with the students in question–and I was out of town when it happened (so I was putting out fires via email). Had I been in front of the students, I would have delivered a lesson on habits, and how they were lucky that it was a completely benign chemical in a sealed container. I would have pointed out what could have happened if they had gotten into the habit of putting chemicals next to food, what could have happened if they did not have well-honed habits and multiple layers of safeguards. And then I would have read them the riot act and pointed out the other things that could have gone wrong, i.e. the possible administrative consequences. In other words, I would have been factual rather than capricious.

I could give other examples where I’ve seen IT, Conference Services, and other support departments act like we exist to serve them, and make cooperation expensive, and the consequence has been that people keep their activities (mostly harmless, but not always) hidden. You can take the moral stance that we just ought to do things the right way, and you aren’t even wrong. However, you are not designing a system with incentives that get good results from real people in the real world.

Since we were all sharing stories about specific examples of Pointy-Haired Bossism in the safety field, I reentered the fray with some juicy ones of my own:

I’ll give a couple examples of my own.

At the hospital where I work the Infection Control policy is to wear gowns and gloves in the rooms of patients on contact isolation (as well as masks if it’s droplet isolation). But when we transport them through the halls, the patients are not to wear isolation gear of any kind. Why? It might alarm visitors and other patients.

The written policy re masks for droplet isolation is to wear them at all times in the room. Then take them off outside the room and deposit them in the trash can outside the door. After all, it wouldn’t make much sense to wear the mask in the room till you finished your task, and then take it off and walk the eight feet from the patient’s trash can to the door unprotected — right? Only we don’t have trash cans outside the door, because there are extremely detailed bureaucratic rules on what can be in the halls — it’s a JCAHO fire safety thing.

I would also add that the safety departments in most large organizations are a stovepiped bureaucracy whose policies aren’t coordinated with those of the other bureaucracies. Their main purpose is to have a safety policy on paper so their asses are covered, and they can point to it to impress the visiting JCAHO inspectors (who, despite supposedly accrediting hospitals for safety and quality, never never ask how the patient care floors are staffed).

Meanwhile, on the patient care floors, the orderlies have ten or upwards patients apiece, and nurses stay over two or three hours finishing paperwork they couldn’t get done on-shift because of patient load and acuity. Half our patients have bed alarms because they are confused and get up by themselves. Now, imagine that you’re one of two orderlies on a floor with 20 patients, your coworker is tearing her hair out trying to run to three call lights at once, and you’re tied up in with a patient on contact isolation. If several bed alarms start going off around the floor, and you’ve got to get out of the isolation room and get to them before the patients fall down and crack their skulls, what’s gonna give? If you guessed “handwashing and other contact precautions,” you win the kewpie doll!

I’ll close with an example from the news. Several years back a PETA activist took a job undercover at Tyson and filmed chickens being manually decapitated when the machines got jammed up. The boys in the C-suite (of course) screamed “Foul!” and pointed to their written policies and training films on humane measures that prohibited manual decapitation. “But we have a written policy! We told him!”

The PETA activist said, yeah, I saw those films. And then my supervisor told me, when the machine’s jammed, this is how we do it manually (wink, nudge). But all that mattered was that senior management’s asses were covered because they had a written policy.

Auschwitz probably had a “written policy” against killing Jews.

Poor Eli, having suffered about all the abuse he was willing to take, took a Parthian shot:

No, Eli’s attitude is that you, or your students can not exist if you don’t have a functioning safety culture.

Let me tell you a story about a long time friend and megabigshot who told Eli what he did on his first day of retirement. He said: “I went to my new office which they gave me for being emeritus, I put up my feet on the desk and relaxed and gave thanks that none of my students or co-workers had ever been hurt when I was in charge.”

Running a lab is an immense responsibility for the lives and safety of others and the kind of attitudes being displayed here are invitations to disaster. The tension is that you can’t have a failsafe environment, but have to build on and rely on good judgement for many things. The mismatch with ES&H is that they are built to ensure failsafe.

And thoreau presented the closing argument for the prosecution:

So, let’s talk about the attitudes that we’ve been displaying toward safety:

1) In the refrigerator incident, I specifically said that instead of insulting the students’ intelligence and pretending that the chemical in question was dangerous, we should have made it clear that the HABITS (i.e. part of a functioning safety culture) that they were displaying were dangerous. The reason to never, ever leave any chemicals in the fridge, even benign ones, is that it develops a bad habit.

So far, I’m all about safety culture.

2) Several of us said that safety training sessions should focus on things that are actually relevant to the real hazards in the department. This way people see the safety training as something useful, rather than a wasted hour. Again, a functioning safety culture requires productive discussions of safety issues.

3) TIO pointed out that EH&S couldn’t even be bothered to consult an existing chemicals inventory, to make sure that the actual chemical hazards in the department were addressed. Paying attention to documented hazards is another important part of a functioning safety culture.

4) TIO also pointed out that EH&S urged a blanket policy of disposing of everything as biohazardous. In a functioning safety culture, you sort out materials according to hazard type and dispose of each accordingly, rather than mixing different categories.

5) Kevin Carson pointed out a complete lack of attention to critical chokepoints in the safety procedures at his hospital, specifically inadequate staffing. In a lab, the number one rule is never work alone. In a larger operation, the generalization of that rule would be to never work when there are too few people to address a dangerous situation. Again, safety culture.

6) I specifically said that a person using a piece of equipment has an obligation to research that piece of equipment, and learn about hazards that others have encountered with similar equipment, rather than relying on that 1 hour powerpoint presentation. Again, that’s part of a functioning safety culture.

Your only point in this entire thread has been that we should have more respect for the bureaucracy, even though we have repeatedly given examples of how bureaucratic thinking was at best orthogonal to good safety culture and at worst counter-productive.

Maybe your EH&S department is so superbly competent and useful that you cannot imagine any of the problems that we have described. Or maybe you are having an affair with the head of EH&S at your institution and consequently you cannot tolerate any criticism of the person supplying you with blowjobs. Either way, you need to stop and actually think about the experiences that we are describing.

Now, this is going to be me typing from here on out.

I think Eli writes from an implicit Weberian/Taylorist perspective embedded in the original Progressivist ideology of the early 20th century, which was very heavy on apolitical, immaculate expertise as a way of transcending the irrationality of "mere" politics and class conflict. See, for example, here and here.

To someone working from Eli's perspective, the functionaries in the office with a plate on the door reading "Safety" 1) really are motivated primarily by a desire to promote safety, and 2) are the best judges of how to accomplish this. In short, the pointy-haired bosses mean well, and they don't have their heads up their asses. It follows that if you make snide comments about any "duly constituted authority" with X in its title, you are opposed to X.

Analysis of Point 1. Any office, regardless of its ostensible official purpose, will be headed by functionaries whose primary skill is advancing up a hierarchy through bureaucratic infighting. The ostensible purpose of their office will always take (at best) second place to ladder-climbing. That was the argument of Robert Shea, in "Empire of the Rising Scum":

Every combination of two or more human beings has both a useful aspect and a political aspect. These tend to conflict with each other. As the political aspect becomes more and more influential, the organization ceases to be useful to its members and starts using them.

Why does this happen? Because the better an organization is at fulfilling its purpose, the more it attracts people who see the organization as an opportunity to advance themselves.

The ability to get ahead in an organization is simply another talent, like the ability to play chess, paint pictures, do coronary bypass operations or pick pockets. There are some people who are extraordinarily good at manipulating- organizations to serve their own ends. The Russians, who have suffered under such people for centuries, have a name for them-- apparatchiks. It was an observer of apparatchiks who coined the maxim, "The scum rises to the top."

The apparatchik's aim in life is to out-ass-kiss, out-maneuver, out-threaten, out-lie and ultimately out-fight his or her way to the top of the pyramid-any pyramid. Appropriately, Russia produced a superb specimen of homo apparatchikus--Josef Stalin.... Niccolo Machiavelli wrote a handbook for apparatchiks that is unsurpassed to this day--The Prince. But the most successful of this breed need neither exemplars or hand-books; they seem to know instinctively what to do....
Unfortunately, the existence of this talent means that every successful organization will sooner or later be taken over by apparatchiks. As such people achieve influence within the organization, whenever there is a conflict between their own interest and the interest of the organization, their interests will win out. Thus, over time, the influence of apparatchiks will deflect the organization further and further from its original intent....

Any policy they adopt in the name of their ostensible purpose -- "safety" or whatever -- will have the primary purposes of: 1) covering their asses and deflecting blame in the event of (thanks, thoreau) An Incident by having an impressive-looking policy in place on paper -- regardless of whether or not it works; 2) minimizing the autonomy and discretion of their subordinates; and 3) maximizing the flow of money and perks upward.

Analysis of Point 2. The cognitive and information-flow problems inherent in hierarchy mean that -- even if the bosses really did genuinely want to maximize the ostensible goal of "safety" or whatever -- they still wouldn't know an effective policy if it bit them in the ass. It's almost guaranteed that whatever policy they adopt will be directly counterproductive to their stated purposes.

People who advance in bureaucratic hierarchies tend to be those who started out learning to shut off their capacity for critically evaluating the statements of those in authority in terms of evidence or logic (see here and here). As such, a person at any level in a hierarchy above the bottom rung is likely predisposed to evaluate all statements based on the authority of their source.

In addition, the higher one advances in a hierarchy, the more likely they are to be surrounded by people who are afraid to tell them anything except what they want to hear. Any subordinate who points out possible unintended consequences of a policy proposal, or who points out unforeseen consequences of an actual policy in place, will be perceived as a "troublemaker" or "not a team player." This is what Irving Janis called "groupthink."

Consequently, the people who make "safety" or any other policy will almost certainly be operating on the ingrained assumption that "executive-type hair" is a badge of superior knowledge on any subject for which they are making policy. They will, therefore, see any questioning of the effectiveness of a policy as a sign of a "bad attitude," and will label as "noncompliant" any attempt by those in contact with the situation to mitigate the clusterfuck that would result from strictly adhering to management policy.

Take another look at my comments above on R.A. Wilson and Proudhon.

We can state, as a general rule, that -- as a result of both the incentive-alignment and cognitive problems outlines above -- the intrusion of authority into any organizational relationship will produce suboptimal results. Any attempt by those in authority and removed from a situation to interfere with the judgment of those directly engaged and experienced in it will result in irrationality.

Organizations continue to function only because those directly engaged in the situation treat intrusions of management irrationality as an obstacle to be routed around -- just as the Web treats censorship as damage and routes around it. The fastest way for subordinates to destroy an organization is by always adhering to official policy in preference to their own judgement. This is the basis of the devilishly effective labor tactic known as working-to-rule.

John Boehner, Leninist

2011-09-19T22:56:00.000-07:00

Lenin, in a marginal note in his copy of On War, enthusiastically endorsed Clausewitz's argument that wars were not started by aggressors who moved their armies across other countries' borders -- but by the governments of the invaded countries who decided to resist. See, the invading country would like nothing more than to occupy the other country without firing a shot. The war doesn't start until the invaded country starts fighting back.

In that sense, I guess the working class and the Left can be legitimately said to be waging class warfare. The corporate plutocracy has been waging a full-scale class invasion for the past thirty or forty years, with the ratio of CEO-to-line-worker pay rising from 50 to 500 and almost all real dollar increases in GDP going to rentiers and senior management. The percentage of wealth owned by the top 1% has risen from around 25% to around 40%.

So when workers propose fighting back, maybe they're "starting the war" in Clauzewitz's and Lenin's sense.

I never thought Lenin and John Boehner would be on the same page.

Bleg for People Who Share

2011-09-19T12:53:00.001-07:00

Benita Matofska is raising funds for People Who Share at Buzzbnk. Here's her description of the project:

The People Who Share is both a movement and a social enterprise. We are a marketplace for the new ‘sharing sector’ (car sharing, skills exchange, upcycling, freecycling, swap trading, redistribution…). We’ll make sharing easy, proving that it’s cheap, green, social and fun! As campaigners, we’ll engage more and more people as "Collaborative Consumers".

Online, we are building a marketplace for people who want to share. Onland, we will provide services and experiences.

If I can raise £2,800 in 30 days, then I'm in the running to get an investment of £50K from Village Capital. Together with your support, this will enable me to take my idea forward. Please share with me, and together we can make a better world.

Announcements Moved to Twitter

2011-09-17T23:43:00.000-07:00

From now on, I'll link to most of my new publications online, etc., at my Twitter account: @KevinCarson1

At C4SS--Rick Perry's Government: "Inconsequential" as a Ball and Chain

2011-09-16T15:24:00.000-07:00

Bleg for Factor e Farm

2011-09-11T13:35:00.000-07:00

Marcin Jakubowski of Factor e Farm had an anticipated $60k grant either delayed or fall through altogether (it's not clear which), and has an emergency fundraiser to raise $20k ASAP to keep plans for concurrently prototyping the entire Global Village Construction Set on track. $10k came from one generous contributor. Some $4500 of the remaining $10k has come in via ChipIn. If you can afford to help put them over the top and keep this project going, please consider doing so here.

At C4SS: Move Over, Lawrence O'Donnell

2011-09-10T23:57:00.000-07:00

At C4SS: Another Stupid Comment from Mitt Romney -- But Who's Counting?

2011-09-10T23:53:00.000-07:00

At C4SS: When the Mafia Can't Compete With the Chamber of Commerce

2011-09-07T17:22:00.000-07:00

At C4SS: Jesus Christ, Pirate

2011-09-06T21:08:00.000-07:00

Carson's Corner Appearance

2011-09-03T10:10:00.000-07:00

I'll be on Carson's Corner with Bob Carson (no relation, AFAIK) -- a progressive radio show on Underground Progressive Radio, 530 AM Brick, New Jersey. It will be streaming tonight and tomorrow at 9PM EST here: http://s7.myradiostream.com/27564.htm

The podcast should be archived early next week.

Mutualist Political Economy in Kindle Format

2011-08-17T23:55:00.000-07:00

Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, previously available only in print, can now be purchased in Kindle format:

U.S. Kindle Store
UK Kindle Store
German Kindle Store

Thanks a lot to Thomas Eicher for reformatting the pdf file to .doc so I could upload it.

At C4SS: Criminalizing Competition

2011-08-17T22:48:00.000-07:00

Bleg re Mutualist Political Economy

2011-08-15T16:42:00.000-07:00

I'd like to do a Kindle version of MPE, and unfortunately all the versions I can find (including on thumb drives saved from my old hard drives) are in pdf format. If anyone has it in Word, Open Office or .doc, I'd appreciate if you'd email me a copy.

At C4SS: Corporations Are People? So Was Hitler

2011-08-15T15:35:00.000-07:00

Organization Theory Available in Kindle Format

2011-08-14T11:57:00.000-07:00

Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective at Kindle Store. Also available at Amazon.uk and Amazon.de.

Homebrew Industrial Revolution Available in Kindle Format

2011-08-11T22:42:00.001-07:00

Since I've been informed that the text is indeed readable, I'm announcing once again that Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto is for sale in Kindle format.

Bleg re Homebrew Industrial Revolution on Kindle

2011-08-11T18:32:00.000-07:00

I'd appreciate some feedback from anyone who's purchased The Homebrew Industrial Revolution on Kindle.

Is it in a readable format? Any serious glitches, like strings of empty pages? I announced some time ago that I couldn't vouch for its quality, but there have been occasional Kindle purchases since then. (I haven't checked it myself in a long time because I don't have a reader and -- aside from the sheer hassle of navigating the CreateSpace dashboard -- I don't know if the version that appears there is an accurate representation of what a reader on Kindle sees).

If it's OK, I'll start promoting it again.

Twitter

2011-08-11T16:52:00.000-07:00

I'm on Twitter now @KevinCarson1

Just occasional brief updates about new publications and appearances. "Occasional," especially, because I have to tweet from public computers; Twitter doesn't load properly on my Firefox browser at home.

At C4SS: We're All "Social Democrats" Now

2011-08-09T22:46:00.001-07:00

Welfare State for the Rich

2011-08-07T12:00:00.000-07:00

Living as I do in Arkansas, I'm privileged to read the commentary of Bradley Gitz, a conservative columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette who occasionally makes libertarian noises. I wish there was a Thomas Sowell Award For By-the-Numbers Regurgitation Of Republican Talking Points, so I could nominate Mr. Gitz.

In his column of Aug. 1, Gitz notes the tendency of welfare states to push themselves to bankruptcy. He quotes the old saw, attributed in urban legend to 18th century Scottish historian Alexander Tytler, that democracies only survive until "voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury."

Politicians shower the general public with unearned benefits, rather than telling them to "find jobs, work hard, and save"; you get a lot more votes for having "compassion" than for being "cruel and heartless."

Reading Gitz, you'd get the impression that the main beneficiaries of the welfare state are working people and the poor. But genuine welfare for the poor, like TANF and food stamps, barely amounts to a CBO rounding error. Adding up the so-called "defense" budget, two unfunded wars, "national security" spending on DHS, CIA, DOE and NASA, and interest on debt from past wars, the bulk of the federal government's budget goes to welfare for the Military-Industrial Complex.

Indeed, the dominant feature of the American polity is welfare for big business and the rich. This welfare consists of a wide array of government interventions into the market to enforce artificial scarcities and artificial property rights.

These interventions include patents and copyrights. They include enforcement of absentee title to vacant and unimproved land, which has never been altered by human labor -- the only legitimate means of appropriating land in a free market (in fact, the government pays landowners tens of billions to hold land out of cultivation). They include enforcement of entry barriers to free competition in the supply of credit. And they include enforcement of regulatory cartels, mandated artificially high capital outlays, and all sorts of other entry barriers.

The cumulative effect is to make land and capital artificially scarce, impose overhead costs and other penalties on self-employment, and raise the price of the means of production and subsistence relative to the price of labor. As a result, government intervention shifts income from those who work to those who live off the rents of artificial property rights and artificial scarcity.

That's welfare for the rich. Every time a consumer pays $200 for a CD of MS Windows or Word, when the free market price absent copyright would be $10, she's taxed to pay welfare to Bill Gates. Every time she pays $200 for a prescription that would cost $10 without patents, the patent markup is a tax for welfare to Pfizer. Every time a tenant pays an extra $100 in rent because untold hundreds of millions of square miles of land are closed to development, the extra rent is welfare for the landlord.

The problem is that this welfare state for the rich shifts income from classes with a propensity to spend to classes with a propensity to save and invest. The rentier classes have far more investment capital on their hands than they can find productive outlets for, because there's insufficient demand to fully utilize existing productive capacity. So government resorts to things like the perpetual warfare state, the drug war and prison-industrial complex, and boondoggles like the Interstate Highway System, to use up surplus capital and productive capacity and stave off depression. The financial sector grows steadily, and becomes increasingly prone to speculative bubbles, as investors seek outlets for excess capital.

The welfare state for the poor was actually created to solve the problems created by the welfare state for the rich. New Deal programs like Social Security and AFDC were promoted by "socialists" like GE head Gerard Swope and the Business Advisory Council in order to put a floor under aggregate demand. Government-enforced monopoly and unequal exchange redistribute wealth upward with a backhoe, and then the welfare state for the poor gives back some of it with a teaspoon.

If it weren't for the welfare state for the rich, we wouldn't need welfare for the poor.

At C4SS: Welfare State for the Rich

2011-08-05T23:14:00.001-07:00

Two Letters to Lawrence O'Donnell

2011-08-05T23:01:00.000-07:00

These are two emails I sent to Lawrence O'Donnell -- thelastword@msnbc.com -- regarding this incident .

Reason and the Police

August 3, 2011

Dear Mr. O'Donnell:

Before you called the Reason staff "right-wing Republicans" and asserted they never criticized the police, perhaps you should have Googled "site:reason.com police" or "site:reason.com 'radley balko'" to see what they've actually written about the police.

Well, better late than never. Now you should do the above-mentioned searches -- followed up by a retraction and an apology.

This is the sort of canard that, if anyone else had done it, you would have used as fodder for a rewrite and demanded a public apology for. If you fail to do so in this instance, you should be ashamed.

Sincerely,
Kevin Carson

Tu Quoque

August 6, 2011

Dear Mr. O'Donnell:

Remember earlier this year when you aired footage of Gov. Christie telling an ordinary woman in his audience that his schooling choices were "none of her business," followed by footage of him politely explaining the reasons for his schooling choices to a Fox News host? You said the difference was that the talking head show host was entitled to courtesy because he was somebody; the ordinary woman wasn't because she was nobody.

Fast forward to your remarks about Reason magazine's coverage of the police. Now, I know you're a smart man. There's no doubt in my mind you've found out by now that Reason does -- and more specifically Radley Balko -- does, in fact, do very extensive coverage of police abuses. In fact, as I'm sure you've found out, Balko has the best claim to being the Internet go-to guy on the subject. And I have no doubt you've realized that you screwed up enormously, and that there's a somewhat embarrassing kerfluffle about it in the libertarian blogosphere.

So what to do about it? If you'd made the erroneous accusation against Somebody, you'd have already apologized -- as you've done many times before under similar circumstances when the target had a high enough profile. But since the target was Nobody -- a commentator from a comparatively marginal political movement most of your audience is familiar with only second-hand -- you can afford to just stonewall and wait for the issue to go away.

Does that about sum it up?

Sincerely,
Kevin Carson

At C4SS: Democracy(TM) -- Coming Soon to a Corporate Welfare State Near You

2011-08-03T17:07:00.000-07:00

AnCap Tees

2011-08-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

I pretty adamantly eschew the ancap label, but Sasha Shepherd's new AnCap Tees website has a lot of T-shirts whose sentiments left-leaning market anarchists like me (and anarchists of all stripes) would stand behind. There are some shirts that are too pro-capitalist for my taste, but Sasha is genuinely anti-corporatist despite the ancap label and has a lot of really great anti-authoritarian stuff for sale. I ordered these two for myself:

Free Software, Free Society
God Bless America(c) (with corporate logo flag)

There's also a lot of great antiwar, anti-drug war, anti-police, and anti-tsa stuff.

At C4SS: Some Mirror-Imaging from Jeffrey Sachs

2011-07-28T23:00:00.000-07:00

At C4SS--Obama: The Best "Enemy" Money Can Buy

2011-07-25T22:02:00.000-07:00

Carson on Thinking Liberty

2011-07-25T15:02:00.001-07:00

I'll be on the Thinking Liberty program tomorrow, July 26, with Darian Worden and Tennyson McCalla [and Bosco and Bile, who aren't exactly non-player characters]. The program starts at 8PM Eastern and my interview segment starts at 8:25.

Update: Here's the program.

At C4SS: "Property Rights" Aren't Just for the Rich

2011-07-23T23:27:00.001-07:00

At C4SS: The Policeman is Not Your Friend

2011-07-23T23:24:00.000-07:00

Jehu Eaves' Critique of My Work

2011-07-23T10:57:00.000-07:00

Jehu Eaves has written a thoughtful, multipart "critical examination of Kevin Carson's mutualism" at Gonzo Times.

Eaves begins in Part One by acknowledging the truth of my account of the state's indispensible role in the primitive accumulation process and the rise of capitalism, but defends Marx against the charge that he denied the indispensibility of the state. "He writes of the bloody violence unleashed on the floating population of England under Henry VIII, and, moreover, the history of plunder and colonization, and intensified inter-state conflict that accompanied the rise of Capital...."

Eaves quotes Marx again, in Part Two, reiterating his argument that "Wage Slavery was, in Marx’s opinion, not a result of nature, nor was it the mere product of preexisting social development."

And in Part Three, he asserts once again that I would "get no argument from Marx" regarding the claim that "every step in the development of Capital has required State coercion and violence...."

Here I would just say that the problem with Marx is that he describes the state's role in ways that imply its indispensibility in some places, while hedging on it in others. He is ambivalent. And Engels, in Anti-Duhring, flat-out asserts that the process of separation of capital from labor and the rise of wage-employment as the predominant model for organizing production would have occurred even if not a single hectare of peasant land been expropriated. (My reading of Engels will become a topic of dispute later on).

In any case, Eaves himself acknowledges that bloody, brutal state coercion was central to the rise of capitalism and the wage system as we know it. And more importantly, he acknowledges that

Even with the appearance of commodities, trade, money, etc. the emergence of capitalist social relations is not a necessary outcome. It occurs in history only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence enters into a specific relationship with another who has the “freedom” to sell her capacity to labor and is, moreover, compelled by circumstances, on pain of starvation, to sell this capacity. However, as was shown in the previous post, even facing starvation, it still took relentless state violence over many decades — centuries — for this mass of pitiful sub-humans to be broken to a life of wage slavery.

Wage slavery is no natural state for any human being. Despite the violence of the State and the efforts to starve them into submission, domesticating human beings to the routine of modern wage slavery was nowhere near as clean and elegant as is implied by the supply/demand curve of the simple-minded economist. It was — and remains today — an arena of constant violent aggression within society against the worker, in which every means available — political, military and economic — are brought to bear to compel her submission.

Despite all this in defense of Marx himself, Eaves seconds my scorn for modern-day Marxists. Interestingly, in Part Two, he seems to be of the opinion regarding Marx that (in the words of Nietzsche) "There was one Christian and he died on the cross."

On the other hand, we have the Marxist, who, despite his self-identification, could not pick Karl Marx out of a crowd of well shaven Keynesian economists. Unlike the Anarcho-Capitalist — who, reflecting his social base, decries the imposts of the Fascist State on the meager wealth of the petty capitalists, marginalized from productive employment of their capital by the progress of Capital itself, and forced to scurry about in various speculative enterprises to protect it from inflation — the Marxist is a poseur, who advocates on behalf of the wage slave — but only so far as she remains a slave of the State. Reduction of hours of labor to end unemployment forever? The Marxist has never heard of such nonsense, despite having read Capital, where Marx explicitly referred to it as the “modest Magna Carta” of the working class. In any case, the Marxist explains, we need the Fascist State to “invest” in “infrastructure” and “green jobs”, so the active laboring population must be worked to its absolute limit and the unemployed left to starve, so that the Fascist State may have the resources it needs to accomplish this. (Taking a page from the talking points memo of Fascist economists like Paul Krugman, the Marxist has taken to referring to wasteful Fascist State expenditures as “investments”.) If, by some fantastic chance, working people should overthrow this Fascist State, the Marxist explains, even then compulsory labor cannot be done away with. The workers is not prepared intellectually to manage her own affairs without the despotism of the party-state, which alone has the foresight and vision to manage society on her behalf until such time as she is deemed capable. When might this be? The party-state will know it, when the time arrives, of course.

Eaves' main area of disagreement with me, stated in Part Three, concerns my difference from Marx -- and himself -- "on the question... of, which, the State or Capital, is the driving force in this development," and my belief that "the State is the autonomous actor in the development of capitalist exploitation...." He takes what, in the terminology of 20th century Marxist analysis, would be considered a much more purely instrumental role of the state in relation to capital. The role of the state, although essential, is an inevitable outgrowth of the nature of capital:

However, even if we... assume the State has acted throughout history directly on its own behalf as the social capitalist, it is still obvious that the inherent contradictions of the capitalist mode of production impose on the State-Capital entity precisely the same laws as are imposed on the total social capital when it is formally operating independent of the State. The entirely formal distinction between the State, on the one hand, and the total social capital, on the other, has absolutely no impact on the influence of the relations of production on political relations generally, but only on the ways this influence is expressed in actual political events.

This is because, in historical materialism, the State, whatever its relation to the existing mode of production prevailing in society, is nevertheless only a body composed of members of society carrying out the particular public functions of the State. It is a part of the general division of labor prevailing in society, and not, as mainstream political-economy would have us believe, an entity standing outside this division of labor. It does not matter in the least whether politics forms a sphere separate from the direct exploitation of labor power in the capitalist mode of production — as, for instance, is said to prevail in the United States — or is entirely fused with this direct exploitation of labor power — as might be argued in the case of the People’s Republic of China at present — the contradiction arising from the process of production of surplus value itself gives rise to the same necessities.

Moreover, in every historical epoch known to us, the State is not, and has never been, anything but a given quantity of surplus product of the existing mode of exploitation of labor organized in the form of the State. Since, in all epochs for which historical records are available, it is composed of men and women who are, by definition, unproductive drones within society, wasting the productive capacity of society on efforts, which, under any and all previous epochs, are entirely superfluous to human needs, it follows that its entire constitution depends on the productive labor of the remaining portion of society, and on the actual mode of production of surplus product prevailing in the society, however historically determined. For the State to be otherwise, it would no longer be the State, but a particular element of the productive capacity of society itself.

Now, as to the chicken-or-egg question of the state versus capital, I would argue that they've existed in a dialectical relationship from the beginning. The state has existed since its first origins as an instrument for the "poliitcal means" of extracting wealth from labor, and existed -- at least in some form -- before the rise of modern capitalism. The rise of the absolute monarchies in early modern times and the rise of modern capitalism were parallel developments, feeding off one another in a dialectical manner. The monarchies aided the rise of the nascent mercantile capitalist class in the towns and their corruption of the craft guilds into oligarchies, while capitalists elbowed their way into a larger and larger share of the seats at the table -- alongside the landed interests -- in the "executive committee of the ruling class." The state, to some extent for its own autonomous reasons, took actions that -- wittingly or unwittingly -- promoted the growth of capitalism and the wage system, but at every step in the process the growing capitalist class changed the character of the state, and the state in dialectical fashion changed to reflect the character of the coalition of ruling class forces.

And at any point in this process, I would argue, the state itself constituted some portion -- in its own right -- of the ruling class. In some societies, the state itself is the primary component of the ruling class, extracting surplus value directly (as in the so-called Asiatic Mode, in which a despotic state is superimposed on the peasant communes, with village society itself organized on the neolithic pattern (something like the English open-field model) that predated the rise of the state. Even under capitalism, the state pursues autonomous interests of its own, with the state apparatus itself occupying some of the chairs on the executive committee alongside the representatives of capital.

Eaves' next area of disagreement with me is my "offensive" and "absurd" attribution to Marx of the belief that "the system of Wage Slavery could only be abolished given the abolition of labor itself," and that

Wage Slavery could not be abolished until the productive forces founded on Wage Slavery "had reached their fullest possible development under that society." Carson offers not one bit of evidence to support this outrageous claim, and is demonstrably wrong on it.

But Eaves himself excerpts this passage from Marx from my Studies in Mutualist Political Economy:

No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society.

And he follows it directly with this quote from me:

For the Marxists, a “higher” or more progressive form of society could only come about when productive forces under the existing form of society had reached their fullest possible development under that society. To attempt to create a free and non-exploitative society before its technical and productive prerequisites had been achieved would be folly.

As far as I can tell, they say essentially the same thing. I leave it to the reader to decide.

In Part Four, Eaves goes on to argue that Marx himself acknowledged that the prerequisites for a free and cooperatively organized society already existed within industrial capitalism, in his own day, and that no further development of productive forces need occur before such a society could be viable. Marx himself argued that industrial capitalism had already created sufficient productive forces for a socialist society to exist.

In the German Ideology, Marx explains that Capital has already rendered a great mass of society propertyless, and produced great wealth and culture, based on a great increase in productive power of labor. It had already developed the productive forces and brought about universal competition within society; which produced a global labor force of wage slaves, made each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and effectively created a perverse sort of global community founded on wage slavery.

Thus, in 1845, Marx argues, the premises for a voluntary association were already in existence. These developments, in Marx’s opinion, not only made a free and non-exploitative society possible, they made its eventual emergence inevitable.

Perhaps so. But first, this is not inconsistent with a belief that the PAST development of industrial capitalism had been necessary to create the productive forces which existed in Marx's day, or that the rise of industrial capitalism and the wage system fulfilled a progressive role in creating these productive forces that would have been impossible in a society of peasant proprietors. Second, the argument that the productive forces already achieved made inevitable the emergence of socialism does not contradict my paraphrase of his argument; it affects, not the principle I attributed to Marx, but only the periodization of its application. And third, the evidence that Eaves amasses does not change the implications of the material from Marx that I quoted -- which I believe I interpreted correctly. It just indicates that Marx was ambivalent and conflicted, and -- like most thinkers, myself included -- was not fully consistent throughout his entire body of work.

And for what it's worth, my interpretation of Marx on this question owes nothing to Benjamin Tucker. I'm not even aware that he ever addressed this specific issue.

Interestingly, in Part Four Eaves himself characterizes Marx's argument in a way that -- to me at least -- seems to be a paraphrase of my own position:

Even if we consider Carson’s assertion that

'Just social and economic relations are compatible with any level of technology; technical progress can be achieved and new technology integrated into production in any society, thorough free work and voluntary cooperation.'

we only arrive at the conclusion that in all epochs men and women have struggled to put an end to the exploitation of their labor under whatever were the prevailing conditions of its extraction and realize a society in which they were not treated as the property of another in one guise or another. Marx makes no argument against this assertion, except to state that, owing to the conditions of society up to Capita,l all of these attempts merely end in new fetters on the individual. While the existing mode of the exploitation of labor is abolished, it is merely replaced by a new mode of exploitation. He does not offer a theoretical response to Carson’s hypothetical argument, but a historical one, in which men and women replace one limited mode of existence with another.

Isn't that what I said Marx said?

Then Eaves immediately seems to hedge on this:

However, Marx never once argued development of the productive forces could not take place within a producer owned context; he only argued that the actual historical development of productive forces took place in opposition to peasant property and the free cities. Far from making the patently absurd argument that development of the productive forces could not take place within the context of producer control over the forces of production, Marx made the argument that, with the system of wage slavery, producer control of the productive forces could be achieved only through their voluntary association and the means of production made the common wealth of society — there was no other possible route to ownership and control over the means of production by the great mass of propertyless wage slaves other than by establishing this control in a voluntary cooperative union.

I think he did, in fact, at least "once" argue this, in the passage I quoted. Marx's argument was not simply an empirical description of how history had actually occurred -- it was a theoretical argument that a new system of organizing production could only come about when the productive possibilities of its predecessor had been exhausted.

Eaves continues:

From these passages, it is clear that Marx could not have believed that a non-exploitative society had to wait until the productive forces created by wage slavery reached their fullest possible development, because he believed the system of wage slavery itself created barriers to development of the productive forces.

On the contrary, this simply proves that Marx believe the building up of productive forces necessary for socialism had already occurred, or was almost complete, and that he was witnessing in his own time the birth pangs of those productive forces "bursting out of their capitalist integument." But his belief that the productive forces were already achieved does not in any way contradict his belief that they had to have already been achieved, at some point -- even if the process was complete in his day -- before wage slavery could be superceded.

In Part Five, Eaves writes:

Kevin Carson’s attempt to synthesize the arguments of Anarcho-Capitalism and Marxism was always a fool’s errand. He produces a mash up of a critique of Capital from the viewpoint of the capitalist and from the viewpoint of the laborer, when what was really called for from him is a critique of capitalist labor itself — of the relation between these two classes and the implications this relationship has on the emergence and development of the Fascist State. We are led to believe that the relation between property and wage labor is entirely innocuous save for Fascist State intervention. Thus, Carson makes the assertion that wage labor can exist in a non-exploitative society without ever investigating the nature of wage labor itself as a historical social form. He essentially treats the worker as a self-owned commodity and applies to the labor market the same analysis he applies to the market in shoes.

Is this possible? Marx, who before he even begins to consider the commodity in circulation, and before he considers it as an essential element of the capitalist mode of production, takes the time to consider the commodity in its own right as an object. He begins by noting that every commodity has a two-fold character — that, for the producer, it satisfies no need for her and exists for her only as an object to be exchanged, a social use value. Without these two together, it is not a commodity....

My error, Eaves writes, is "the very idea that human capacities can simply be treated as another commodity for sale." Of my assertion that "the natural wage of labor in a free market is its product," he writes,

The only thing differentiating one set of human capacities from another are not the uniquely human desires and wants of the individuals concerned, nor how these unique desires and wants are expressed in their activities, but the impersonal exchange value contained in each as expressed in so many ounces of gold. Thus, human beings can be compared to each other as one might compare linen and coats.

I believe the alienation of labor as such has less to do with the formal characteristics of wage labor, than it does with the social context in which it exists. In a society where self-employment, cooperative organization or informal production for barter is the norm, and wage labor is atypical and usually merely an irregular source of supplementary income, it will have a fundamentally different character from a society where full-time wage labor is the norm. And likewise, it will have a different character in an economy where most business enterprises produce for a local market with customers and trading partners who are known to the producers.

Regarding Anti-Duhring, Engels' argument did not merely concern the emergence of pre-capitalist private property from communal property without the state. It concerned the development of capitalism itself without the expropriation of peasant land -- regardless of how it was owned. The issue is not whether the emergence of private property requires force, but whether the expropriation of the peasantry and concentration of property in the hands of a small landed oligarchy requires force.

In Part Six, Eaves makes this assertion:

...in Marx’s actual theory the worker is never paid “less than her product”, since the only “product” in her possession is her labor power. There is no reason to explain how she is compelled to receive less than the value of this commodity; there is no need to appeal to vague nonsense phrases like “social power” or “market power” to explain profit....

My argument is not that the worker receives less than the market value of her labor power under capitalism, as a result of state-enforced artificial scarcity of the means of production, but that she receives less than the value of the product of her labor. They are two entirely different things. The value of labor power is less than the embedded labor-value in the product of labor precisely because artificial property rights and artificial scarcity cause the worker to sell her labor-power for a price less than the value of her product. The capitalist is able to sit in the position of a monopsonist, targeting the price of labor-power to the minimum value the worker is willing to accept rather than the free market value of her labor, for the same reason that a monopolist is able to target price to the consumer's ability to pay rather than cost of production.

Carson wants the worker to be paid the full value produced by the actual consumption of the labor power; but, as we can now see, when the labor power is actually being exploited, it is no longer the property of the worker — it belongs to the capitalist who purchased it. The exchange of money for the commodity was only the first step and has been completed. It is now the property of the capitalist — although it still physically stands before him in the body of the worker. The labor power is not put to work until the capitalist has closed the deal to the satisfaction of both parties. Carson is entirely correct to say that the value of the labor power is its product, but this value is determined by the use to which its owner will now put it. Carson wants to skip over this observation, or treat it as inconsequential to the discussion; but it is, in fact, the heart of the matter. When the laborer puts her own labor power to use as an individual producer, its usefulness for her is directly realized in the product her labor can produce. If we could speak of value (wage) in this context (which, of course, would be silly) the “natural wage” of this labor would indeed be its product. This does not change one iota if we now assume the labor power is employed, not by the direct producer, but by the capitalist: the same condition holds: the usefulness of the labor power for the capitalist is directly realized in the product it produces.

Is there anything in this latter act of exploitation that requires State intervention? Is there anything in the latter act that requires unequal exchange in the former? Is there any reason why just this sort of exchange cannot happen completely as described in the absence of the State?

The concrete values which the capitalist must pay for labor-power, versus what he can receive for the worker's labor product, are not constants. They are heavily influenced by the structure of privilege. The capitalist's power of exploitation is conditioned by the question of whether or not he has to compete with the possibility of self-employment. And the more artificially scarce and expensive the means of production, the less competition the capitalist faces from self-employment.

I'd like to thank Jehu Eaves for the attention and effort he devoted to producing his critique of my work.

At C4SS: In a Free Market, Information Wants to be Free

2011-07-23T00:17:00.000-07:00

At C4SS: High-Tech Swadeshi

2011-07-15T23:45:00.000-07:00

Casey Anthony

2011-07-11T23:01:00.000-07:00

Radley Balko wrote a column on why "Caylee's Law" is a bad idea, and why we should stop naming laws after dead children. Of course a lot of hysterical idjuts left comments that amounted to incoherent shrieks of "For the children!"

I think we should start naming laws after people we wish were dead. First up: Nancy Grace.

The genetic drift who wallowed in this vulgar spectacle are probably the same ones who stayed glued to the screen during the previous O.J., Jonbenet and Laci prolefeed sessions. Also probably the same ones who left boquets at the Buckingham Palace gates in 1997.

I'm with Jennifer Abel on the whole Casey Anthony thing:

I do not condone the killing of toddlers, especially not cute ones, but anything that makes Nancy Grace so pissed off must have something going for it. And if Grace and a certain few I know in real life work themselves into a fatal stroke or aneurysm over this -- hope springs eternal -- I'm getting a sex-change operation and converting to Catholicism solely so I can work my way up to Pope and nominate Casey Anthony for sainthood.

Preferably the aneurism will be the explosive kind where red jelly squirts out of Nancy "Crooked Prosecutor" Grace's eye sockets, she falls down and starts frenetically drumming her feet on the floor, and shits her pants. You know, like Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner, only with red jelly and pants-shitting.

If the Nancy Grace Show emitted deadly radiation that gave brain cancer to everyone watching it, it would set the gene pool ahead 200 years.

Update: I got sent this sketch in response. Skip it if you're on Ritalin. Otherwise, check it out.

At C4SS: Put Not Your Faith in Princes -- Even Liberal Ones

2011-07-09T23:37:00.000-07:00

Carson Interview

2011-07-07T23:16:00.000-07:00

At C4SS: Empire of the Rising Scum

2011-07-06T16:10:00.001-07:00

At C4SS: Rights or Privileges?

2011-07-04T23:47:00.000-07:00

C4SS Third Quarter Fundraiser

2011-07-01T23:14:00.000-07:00

Below is a message from Brad Spangler, Director of Center for a Stateless Society.

But first, this is me talking.

I'm not going to give you the poormouth about C4SS going away unless you cough up the dough, because we won't -- we're not Jim and Tammy Faye. C4SS will continue its work whether or not we meet our funding goals. We're in this for the long haul. Most of our writers will probably keep doing this, regardless of whether or not we get paid (and so far we've been paid through mid-February), because we can't not do it.

But your contributions make a huge difference in how effective our work is, and how many people we reach.

Hundreds of columns by C4SS commentators has been picked up by mainstream newspapers in the United States and around the world, exposing libertarian ideas to people who'd never before heard of them, or who'd only heard them caricatured by non-libertarians.

We think what we're doing is important. If you do as well, and can afford to do so, please consider contributing.

Thanks.

C4SS Q3 Fundraiser -- by Brad Spangler

Dear Supporters of the Center for a Stateless Society,

I’m starting the third quarter 2011 fundraiser early in hopes that it will clear up an apparent database problem with the donation software we use.

Here’s where we’re at…

C4SS staff has been paid for up through half of their February 2011 pay. Here is what our regular monthly expenses for staff pay look like.

Research Associate: Carson — $250 (2 weekly articles + $50, 1/6 of 1 biannual study)
News Analyst: Worden — $100 (1 weekly article)
News Analyst: D’Amato — $300 (3 weekly articles)
Social Media Specialist: Litz — $320 (10 hours/wk / 40 hours/month @ $8/hour)
Media Coordinator: Knapp — $640 (20 hours/wk / 80 hours/month @ $8/hour)

Total: $1610

So, half of February plus all of March through June means we’re seeking 4.5 times $1610 — which means we’re looking to raise $7245 between now and the end of August 2011.

To donate, please click on the “Contribute” button which you’ll find on the fundraising widget you’ll find on every page of our web site.

http://c4ss.org/

Nobody else really fills the niche we fill. If you agree that what we do matters, please support our work as best you can.

Regards,

Brad Spangler
Director, Center for a Stateless Society

At C4SS: Who Controls the Past Controls the Future

2011-07-01T23:02:00.000-07:00

At C4SS--Bitcoin: What Comes Next?

2011-06-29T17:42:00.000-07:00

At C4SS: Our Corporate Military

2011-06-21T23:50:00.000-07:00

At C4SS: "Public Service"? I'm Taking My Business Elsewhere

2011-06-15T14:09:00.000-07:00

At P2P Blog: Vertical Integration and Moore's Law for Atoms

2011-06-14T21:35:00.001-07:00

Gary Chartier. Conscience of an Anarchist

2011-06-14T20:23:00.000-07:00

Gary Chartier. Conscience of an Anarchist: Why It's Time to Say Good-Bye to the State and Build a Free Society (Apple Valley, CA: Cobden Press, 2011).

Jeff Riggenbach's interview with Gary Chartier does a pretty good job bringing out some notable themes in Chartier's approach to his audience. For example, as Riggenbach notes, it "entirely eschews the word libertarian." Where Rothbard and his followers would naturally use the term "libertarian," Chartier prefers "anarchist." By way of explanation, Chartier says,

I really want this book to reach an audience of people for whom the word "libertarian" might be a red flag — people for whom the word "libertarian" might suggest any number of things that they think they know about and don't like. And I felt as if by focusing on anarchy, that certainly is another red flag term, but I thought perhaps there might be some people's defenses I could move past that.

Another such idiosyncracy, although I think Riggenbach exaggerates it, is Chartier's comparative downplaying of moral or natural law arguments against the state. Riggenbach characterizes this approach, based on his interview, as "purely strategic; it does not signal... any general unwillingness on his part to argue for liberty from a natural-rights perspective." In Chartier's words:

Not in this book, no. I'm prepared to argue that at some length elsewhere, but it's definitely, from a strategic point of view, not what I wanted to argue here … not because I want to argue against certain kinds of natural rights approaches — I mean, one of my ongoing academic interests is natural law theory, and I've worked quite a bit in that area. But it seemed to me that for this book that wasn't the most effective rhetorical tack to take. … What I particularly didn't want to do in this book [is] I didn't want to scare off the principled statist lefties. I also wanted this to be a book that anarchists of a pretty broad range of sorts could pick up and appreciate without thinking that by endorsing the book they were endorsing a particular position on the question, "What should a stateless society look like?" I would like somebody who identifies with Kropotkin or Proudhon to pick up this book and say, "All of this seems right to me; now I know this guy and I might well end up having an argument about what we want our stateless community to look like, but the substance of the book doesn't amount to a broadside against me, you know?"

Now, to repeat, I think Riggenbach exaggerates this tendency and goes too far in his use of absolutist language: "...eschewing all moral arguments for a free society." "...his argument... is entirely consequentialist."

In fact I can quote Chartier's own words to demonstrate just the contrary:

As an idea, anarchism is the conviction that people can and should cooperate peacefully and voluntarily....

Because governments are rooted in the use of force, anarchists maintain that no actual government is legitimate....

People can and should organize their interactions on their own terms....

Although he may not appeal to the principles of self-ownership and nonaggression in just those words, he presents what amounts to an argument that the state's claimed basis of authority -- that it initiates force for the general welfare, based on its possession of a police power derived from the will of the majority -- is illegitimate because, in Roderick Long's words, "You don't own other people."

I want to encourage you to shift your point of view -- to come to see the state as a group of people no different from your neighbors, with no more inherent authority, no greater right to tell you what to do....

I'm an anarchist because I believe there's no natural right to rule. I believe people are equal in essential dignity and worth, which means, in turn, that they have equal moral standing. That makes it hard to justify giving some people -- those who rule the state and those who enforce the rulers' decisions -- rights that others don't have. And I'm an anarchist because I believe the state lacks legitimacy. Some people argue that rulers deserve to have more rights than those they rule because their subjects have consented and continue to consent to their authority. But I believe they haven't.

That sounds pretty moral to me.

But Riggenbach is certainly correct that Chartier puts the emphasis on consequentialist arguments.

Chartier's primary aim is to make anarchism understandable to those who may intially be hostile to the mainstream image of movement libertarianism in the United States, and who are unlikely to be convinced from first principles like self-ownership and non-aggression.

His intended audience is those who, rightly or wrongly -- and unfortunately in all too many cases it's been justified -- perceive movement libertarians as "pot-smoking Republicans." His intended audience is people who constantly witness newspaper editorialists, cable news commentators and politicians defending iron-heeled corporate domination, gross inequality, and the economic insecurity and pain of the average working person in the name of "our free market system."

His intended audience, further, is people who have come to assume, based on the discourse of both mainstream liberals and mainstream conservatives, that corporate power and economic polarization are the natural outcomes of a free market, and that such evils will emerge spontaneously absent the countervailing power of the interventionist state. The average person in this country believes that, absent the regulatory and welfare state, we'd be living in an even harsher version of the Gilded Age.

Such people are not apt to be converted, via arguments for self-ownership and nonaggression, into an acceptance of the "free market" that they wrongly believe will create a Dickensian world of Dark Satanic Mills and workhouses.

The best approach is to approach these people in baby steps, to point out the extent to which the power of big business and the plutocracy result from state intervention, to show that the corporate ruling class has always played a primary role in formulating the state's policy and that it is the primary beneficiary, and to create awareness of the role of the state in suppressing all the kinds of egalitarian, bottom-up, grassroots, self-organized alternatives that people like Pyotr Kropotkin, E.P. Thompson and Colin Ward have written about.

I think this approach is the correct one, if libertarianism and market anarchism aren't to be the insular philosophies of a narrow segment of the population who sit around grumbling about lazy union workers and welfare queens, and who reflexively view any critique of corporate power as statist.

It's entirely understandable that the kinds of liberals who read Daily Kos and HuffPo come from a position of skepticism toward the free market and an assumption that state intervention is necessary to prevent big business from running roughshod over ordinary people. What mainstream "libertarian" commentators in the print and broadcast press defend, in the name of the "free market," is exactly that kind of neoliberal brutalization. If all I knew about the so-called "free market" was what I heard from people like Dick Armey and the folks at CNBC and the WSJ editorial page, I'd hate it more than anybody.

Such people need to be approached sympathetically, with an awareness of their understandable reasons for skepticism, and a willingness to address the received version of history -- shared by both mainstream Left and mainstream Right -- that has distorted their understanding of the world.

But they are approached, from the right-wing culture that dominates too much of mainstream libertarianism, by people with a chip on their shoulders, just waiting for the opportunity to denounce them and to retreat into the bastion of their righteous Lost Cause.

People on the statist Left who rightly perceive that corporate power and the concentration of wealth are evils, but who are understandably confused about the cause of these evils, are the most promising audience for a viable, growing libertarian movement. Saint Paul's role in the history of Christianity is a good analogy for this approach. He bypassed the natural audience for the messianic gospel -- the Jews who had been awaiting the Messiah since the time of the post-exilic prophets -- and took it to the Gentiles.

So long as libertarianism is the preserve of right-wing, white, middle-class people who grumble about "the unions" and people on welfare, and whine about how the poor drug companies and Microsoft are picked on, it will be about as relevant to the average person in the real world as, say, Jacobitism was in England ca. 1750.

The only way to advance the cause of libertarianism is to stop preaching to the choir and present libertarian ideas in a way that acknowledges the legitimacy of the concerns of people who are not already libertarians -- rather than treating them as the enemy.

Gary Chartier's book is the best attempt to do just this, to make market anarchism and libertarianism understandable to ordinary people who aren't already sympathetic to such ideas, that I've seen.

Chapter by chapter, he presents sensible and plausible arguments that:

rather than the disappearance of government law enforcement leading to a Hobbesian war of all against all, most people are peaceable and could organize voluntarily in fairly effective ways to protect themselves against the violent minority;
big business fears genuine free markets more than anyone, and that its power and profits result from government restriction of free market competition;
far from providing "national security" and protecting us from "foreign threats," foreign adventurism by the U.S. government is the main cause of most of the actual dangers to the American people;
working people have been very creative historically at making arrangements for pooling risks and income, and organizing mutual aid for the sick and unemployed, and would be even more effective if the state didn't criminalize low-cost comfortable subsistence and erect so many barriers to making ends meet, in order to keep us dependent on wage slavery.

As a specimen of apologetic literature, that presents ideas clearly and simply to those not familiar with them, I put this in the same category of books as Alexander Berkman's The ABCs of Anarchism (on the Left) and Harry Browne's How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (on the Right).

If you're the kind of person who sees libertarianism as an ideology that defends the frugal, provident and industrious rich against everyone else; if you're the kind of person for whom the main appeal of libertarianism is an eschatological vision of yourself and the rest of the Elect entrepreneurs and writers of code, all smugly chortling to yourselves in the stronghold of Galt's Gulch as the moochers, looters and slackers outside perish in the economic apocalypse; if you're this kind of person, I say, you should spare yourself a lot of aggravation and leave this book alone.

If you get goosebumps reading statements like these...

innovation is the product of exceptional, dedicated individuals who must overcome the uncomprehending dullness of most of their fellows, and often their hostility as well.
--George Reisman

You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you.
--Ludwig von Mises to Ayn Rand

...this probably isn't the book for you.

On the other hand, if you don't automatically hold in contempt everyone who isn't entirely convinced that a squalid social Darwinist shithole is an ideal society, you might like it.

If you have a family member or friend who is skeptical about anarchism, whom you want to encourage to become more open to libertarian ideas -- as opposed to shouting "Aha! I knew it -- you statist!" and righteously shaking the dust from off your sandals as you anathematize them for rejecting the prophet of Saint Ayn -- I urge you to give them this book.

At P2P Blog--Homebrew Industrial Revolution, Chapter Seven: The Alternative Economy as a Singularity

2011-06-14T01:36:00.000-07:00

At C4SS: The State is Insane

2011-06-14T00:56:00.000-07:00

Richard Garner, Rest in Peace

2011-06-14T00:23:00.000-07:00

I just learned that prolific UK Libertarian Alliance writer Richard Garner is dead.

My first knowledge of him was via his "What Is Mutualism?" pamphlet at Larry Gambone's Red Lion Press, which I encountered when I was just beginning to explore mutualist anarchism and the Internet.

Since then he moved rightward and I've moved leftward, but he always remained personally affable and courteous, and a most lucid writer even when expressing ideas I disagreed with.

Here are two appreciations of him.

How to Get Ahead in Life

2011-06-13T13:30:00.000-07:00

One of the fastest ways to get in trouble is to respond to authority with logic.

If you look at the people who are at the tops of hierarchical organizations, the part of their brains that logically evaluates the pronouncements of people in authority has been inactivated -- or at least they're able to pretend it has. They advanced to the top because they learned very early in their careers to evaluate all statements, not on the basis of their internal logic or whether they made sense, but rather on the basis of the authority of the source.

What does this mean in practice?

Let's say your CEO says: "We intend to focus like a laser beam on quality and customer service. Get to work immediately changing our Mission, Vision, and Values Statements to reflect this priority. In the meantime, we're going to downsize half the customer service staff and then give ourselves a huge multi-million dollar bonus for increasing productivity."

Now, if someone you regarded as an equal made such a statement, your likely response would be: "That's completely self-contradictory. It's a pig-ass stupid idea. You must have been fucked in the head by a rhinoceros with three dicks."

But if your CEO makes such a statement, and you want to get ahead, you say: "Right you are, C.J.! That's an absolutely brilliant idea!"

At P2P Blog: On Anagorism

2011-06-13T00:52:00.000-07:00

At P2P Blog: P2P Labor Organization

2011-06-12T00:34:00.000-07:00

At C4SS--It's Not Big Government If It Helps the Rich

2011-06-10T09:53:00.000-07:00

At C4SS--Bitcoin: With Enemies Like Schumer, Who Needs Friends?

2011-06-06T23:10:00.000-07:00

At C4SS--Copyright Argument Implications: Is Competition Theft?

2011-06-04T00:05:00.000-07:00

Carson in The Freeman

2011-05-29T22:59:00.001-07:00

A review of Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?, by Thomas Geoghegan.

A Kook's Rejoinder to Sandefur

2011-05-29T17:00:00.000-07:00

In a series of posts on the Civil War and secession, Tim Sandefur attacks the paleocons and "neo-confederates" at Lew Rockwell.com and Mises.org, among other places, and makes an attempt at an argument against the legality of secession. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the paleos have sympathies for the South and its "peculiar institution," as such, over and above a simple defense of the right of secession as such. But my main concern here is with Sandefur's specific attack on Joseph Stromberg, in his first post: "Springtime for Jeff Davis and the Confed'racy."

Of course there are plenty of historical howlers in the others. For example, this from the third post:

The American Revolution was not an act of secession, but of revolution—hence the name. The distinction between revolution and secession is crucial. Revolution is the natural right to break the law and overthrow a government whenever a long train of abuses evinces a design to reduce the people under absolute despotism. Secession is the idea that a state has the legal authority unilaterally to leave the union. The leaders of 1776 never claimed their acts were legal; they said that they were choosing to break the law, and that their doing so was justified by a higher principle—namely, by the defense of the inalienable rights that belong to all individuals.

The "leaders of 1776" and the Declaration of Independence didn't spring fully grown from the brow of Zeus. Ever read John Adams' Novanglus? It was a legal brief, written in 1774, directed against the legal authority of Parliament to bind the colonies. It was essentially a recapitulation of Adams' brief on behalf of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1773, in an exchange of legal arguments between the two houses of the General Court and Governor Hutchinson. Adams' argument was that the power of the British crown in the several colonies derived, in each colony, from the fundamental law of that colony alone. For example, the sovereign allegiance of Massachusetts was not to the imperial crown of the British Empire, but to the natural person of King George III, whose authority as King-in-General-Court was defined under the fundamental laws and charter of Massachusetts. George III was king, not of the Empire, but of Great Britain, Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth Plantation, Providence Plantation and Rhode Island, Connecticut, etc. Each colony was related to Great Britain, and any two colonies were related to each other, in the same way that England and Scotland were related to each other before the Act of Union. Adams wasn't the only person who made that sort of argument. My article "The Failure of Dual Sovereignty: The British Empire and the United States" is a fairly lengthy analysis of the legal arguments in the polemical literature of the 1760s and 1770s.

The British Empire, to sum up, was a league of sovereigns, with the authority of the imperial center holding sway within the territory of each sovereign member entirely by its own consent. The clear implication was that the colonies had the legal right to secede from the Empire, because the Empire's authority over each colony derived from the sovereign authority of that colony. Sound familiar?

Anyway, back to the first post in Sandefur's series. He lumps Stromberg in with the paleocons and neo-confederates, whose defense of the right of secession Sandefur characterizes as "the illegal 'right' of a racist despotism to perpetuate its institutions without criticism." I must have missed the part where Stromberg defended the Confederacy's immunity from criticism for slavery.

He also expends an enormous amount of straw characterizing Stromberg's argument as a claim "that the war wasn’t really about slavery; the south was fighting for free markets, you see."

For Joseph Stromberg, antislavery was only “the stalking horse for more practical causes.” This is always a convenient thesis, often a plausible one, frequently a trick devised to put us out of the right way. Seeking the “real” materialistic, cui bono cause of any historical phenomenon enables us to ignore the professed purposes of the actors themselves, and thus perpetuates a sort of conspiracy theory or pareidolia method of history. It’s a favorite of such as Howard Zinn, who seek to ignore or hide the ideological factor in historical events in the service of a broader propaganda campaign. That’s not to say that materialistic self-interest is never the right answer on the history test; it’s certainly a common human motivation. But we should always beware anyone who tells us that an historical figure who said he believed X, acted to promote X, fought the enemies of X, sacrificed other interests to X—didn’t really believe X, but only said it to disguise his real interest in Z. It’s always equally likely that the person who says this is seeking not the truth but the denigration of X in his own time....

But for Stromberg, antislavery, which wrecked the chances of compromise, was really the work of northern agitators—where have we heard this before?—because capitalists wanted rid of slavery so they could get subsidies and tariffs: “railroads represented the biggest new business opportunity, provided large-scale government subsidies (state and federal) were available. Northern railroad promoters and land speculators, many based in New England, worked both to get subsidies and remove obstacles. On the removal side, some of them, like John Murray Forbes, donated money to John Brown’s good works in Kansas apparently to put pressure on southern opponents of internal improvements.”

Of course, there were wealthy businessmen who supported antislavery work—the Tappans, most obviously, and Gerrit Smith. But there were far more business interests who opposed any change in slavery. Cotton Whiggery was all about appeasing the slave power because agitation was bad for business. It was to forestall the economically deleterious consequences of justice that the nation compromised and prostituted itself for seventy years after the Miracle at Philadelphia. But we are to just ignore the massive moneyed interests that supported and perpetuated slavery; no, it was greedy corporate welfareists who made compromise impossible and are thus at fault for the war....
It is of course true that the Republican party of the 1860s was not a libertarian laissez-faire party. It called for subsidies and tariffs and central banking. From this we are expected to fallaciously conclude that southern Democrats opposed these ideas out of a commitment to free markets....
Stromberg tells us that Yankee businessmen were determined to preserve the union for economic gain (evidently southerners never considered such ignoble motives)...
From his distorted mass of secondary source quotations, Stromberg concludes that the Republican Party’s “definition of laissez faire...would run as follows: open-ended, active federal assistance for connected businesses through tax money, favorable statutes and legal rulings, and other institutional favors, with no corresponding obligation of these businesses toward society or even the State itself. So assisted, businessmen would make big bucks and accumulate capital, thereby greasing the wheels of progress and development.” (Interesting, that last bit. Does Stromberg think industry does owe an “obligation” toward “society or even the State itself”? Does he oppose “favorable statutes and legal rulings,” by which, the context makes clear, Stromberg means lawful enforcement of contract and property rights? Is Stromberg a believer in free markets in the first place?)

Where to begin? "We are expected to conclude..." Ah, the passive voice. Just who, supposedly, expects "us" to conclude that the Confederacy was devoted to free markets? I see no indication in Stromberg's article that he expected any such thing, let alone to suggest that "ignoble motives" were lacking south of the Mason-Dixon Line. To borrow a phrase from Sandefur, "When did I say any of these things?"

And what "context makes clear," exactly, that Stromberg, by "favorable statutes and legal rulings," means "lawful enforcement of contract and property rights" -- as opposed to special privileges and immunities? As far as I can tell, what Sandefur calls a "clear context" is actually a Rorschach test, an empty vessel for Sandefur to fill with whatever he wants to read into it. Is it a plausible reading? I don't think so. The idea that corporate lobbyists might push for "statutes and legal rulings" that promote their interests at the expense of the taxpayer, or of general justice and equity -- well, that's not exactly a stretch, now, is it? Were the railroad land grants "favorable statutes"? How about the industrial tariff? How about the patent laws, under which so many industries were cartelized? I venture to say that Stromberg's more a believer in genuine free markets than Sandefur is.

Sandefur also makes this historical claim about the right of secession:

The Constitution is not a treaty among basically independent states, which somehow retain authority to break up that treaty; on the contrary, it is a constitution of the whole people of the United States. States basically have no individual relationship to that union and cannot unilaterally declare themselves independent of it.

Since he doesn't allow comments under his posts, I sent a response by email (I've numbered the items he responds to below for greater ease in tracking the debate point by point):

(1) Your bald assertions about secession and sovereignty are based on second- or third-hand historically illiterate arguments borrowed from Daniel Webster and Joseph Story.

(2) That the Constitution was ratified by the people of the U.S. as a whole, and that states had no individual relationship to it, is refuted by no less an authority than the Constitution itself, in the ratification provisions of Article VII. As James Madison pointed out in the Federalist, no state became a member of the union until its own ratifying convention had voted to do so, regardless of how many other states joined. The Constitution specified that it would go into effect when nine members of the supposedly eternal former union had ratified it -- but only between those states that had, individually, ratified it. (3) The decision to ratify and join the union, Madison made absolutely clear, was a decision made only by the people of an individual state, and binding no one but themselves. North Carolina and Rhode Island both remained de jure independent sovereign states until well in Washington's first term, before they decided -- on their own authority -- to join the union. That individual states came into the union only by their own internal votes, and not by a majority vote of the union as a whole -- and that some individual states remained outside the union for some time after it was formed -- is a rather inconvenient fact for you, Story, Webster, Lincoln et al to deal with, I'm afraid.

(4) Interesting, also, that you denounce as "conspiracy theories" all suggestions, like those by Howard Zinn, that any government action might have "real" ulterior motives besides the stated idealistic justification of the actors.

(5) So I guess the GOP never adopted the corporate mercantilist economic policy of internal improvements, a high industrial tariff, and a national bank, as suggested by Lincoln's "beau ideal of a statesman Henry Clay." I suppose all that stuff about the Gilded Age GOP and the government being bought out by railroads is just left-wing conspiracist raving. I suppose the Tonkin Gulf Incident was real, and anyone who suggests otherwise is in the same category as David Ickes and Lyndon LaRouche. I suppose Woodrow Wilson was right to lock up all those deluded conspiracists who said WWI was a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight."

(6) By the way, the fact that the Democratic Party of the slaveocracy was attached to feudal ideals, or also favored mercantilism, does not alter the validity of Stromberg's characterization of the motivation of leading circles in GOP. (7) If you think opposing Lincoln and the GOP makes Stromberg a sympathizer for the South Carolina fire-eaters, I'd call that an unwarranted inference. Haven't you ever heard of the phrase "a pox on both their houses"? (8) I know plenty of left-wing free market libertarians (myself among them) who would challenge the U.S. government's right to prevent secession, but who would also strongly sympathize with Nat Turner, John Brown, and similar figures. (9) And while I consider secession from the union as such to be legitimate, as a mirror image of the process of accession to it, I would reserve my own active sympathies for a secessionist movement in New England to avoid complicity with abominations as the Fugitive Slave Act.

(10) And the fact that there were sincere abolitionists in the GOP -- radical Republican Altkaempfers from the New England and Burnt Out District of the 1830s and 1840s -- doesn't alter the fact that the party mainstream had been taken over by plutocratic interests seeking to promote a mercantilist industrial model. No more does the existence of figures like Roehm and the NSDAP left alter the nature of the deal between von Papen and the German industrialists in 1933.

Sandefur took up the gauntlet with a post helpfully entitled "A kook responds to my civil war articles." In response to item (1) he writes:

Great way to start out an email you want taken seriously.

Well, what can I say? Sandefur himself opens up his posts with such gems as "pathetic spectacle" and "fakes like Joseph Stromberg." So I can see why he chides me for departing so drastically from the tone of high seriousness he'd set in the debate heretofore. From now on, I'll try to follow the example of dignity and decorum set by Mr. Poopyhead.

It is of course up to readers to decide whether or not my views are “historically illiterate.” I can attest that, although a great admirer of Daniel Webster, I’ve read very little, if any Joseph Story. But my views on these matters come from reading the original sources.

The "original sources" cited in his posts consist almost entirely of bare assertions, in the most general terms, written years after the fact.

He continues, in response to item (2):

This is a recitation of what is probably the strongest argument that can be made to support the assertion that the Constitution is a league among essentially independent sovereignties. But still it fails. Certainly it’s true that the Constitution only bound the people of those states who ratified it, but that does not make the Constitution any less a Constitution, or make it a league among sovereignties.

It does, at the very least, prove the falsity of Sandefur's statement that "the states have no individual relationship to [the] union." If it bound only the states whose separate peoples ratified it, that sounds pretty damn individual to me.

The Constitution was not approved by even a single state acting as a state government; it was approved by the people of the United States, as declared in its preamble, who acted in special ratifying conventions—not in state legislatures.

Strawman. Saying a state acted "as a government" and that it acted "as an independent sovereign body politic" are two different things. According to Edward Morgan and Gordon S. Wood, the concept of sovereignty as being exercised by the people directly, rather than embodied in practically sovereign governments except in revolutionary times, was novel in the 1780s. James Wilson first applied it, in his federalist writings, to the distinction between the American people and the state governments, arguing that "the people" (and implicitly the people of the nation and not the peoples of the states) rather than "the state governments" were sovereign. But Wilson's distinction between governments as mere municipal corporations, versus the people in whom general sovereignty was vested, could cut both ways, applying just as well to the sovereign people's of states as to the sovereign people of a unitary nation. So the proper question is not whether the sovereign ratifying authority was the governments of the states or the people of the union, but whether the sovereign ratifying authority was the several peoples of the states as independent bodies politic or the single people of the United States.

And the fact that the ratification vote took place in conventions rather than in state legislatures has no bearing on whether the states as bodies politic were the parties to the Constitution. The fact that extraordinary Conventions restored Charles II to the throne and invited William and Mary to assume the monarchy, rather than the regular Parliament, didn't alter the fact that both bodies were making decisions for England as a body politic. By the 1780s, based on the English precedents of the seventeenth century, Americans had come to see conventions as a vehicle for the direct exercise of popular sovereignty in a more fundamental way than an ordinary elected government. Asserting that the people who thus exercised sovereignty were the unitary people of the nation rather than the several peoples of the states is begging the question.

As for the Preamble, this is typical Straussian Constitutional exegesis -- akin to Mortimer Adler abandoning Blackstone's standard rules of common law construction and instead determining the inner meaning of the Constitution by taking all the capitalized abstract nouns in the Declaration and Preamble and looking them up in the Great Books' Syntopicon.

The actual reason the Preamble spoke of "the people of the United States" instead of enumerating the states individually is quite pedestrian. The original draft of the Preamble, as it came out of the Committee of Detail on August 6, 1787, read: "We the people of the States of [names enumerated] do ordain, declare, and establish the following Constitution for the Government of Ourselves and our Posterity." The next day the Preamble was accepted as it was, with none objecting. Following several weeks of debate and amendment, the August 6 draft was sent to the Committee of Stile for final polishing of the language. When it came out on September 12, the Preamble had been altered to its present form: "WE THE PEOPLE of the United States...." The new language was accepted without debate, which would have been unlikely, had the author intended it to reflect a substantive change in the nature of the union.

Antifederalist Luther Martin, in the Maryland Gazette of June 3, 1788, cited the Federalist justification for this: "It is said the accession of nine States being sufficient to render it binding required this." In other words, it would have been embarrassing as hell if only nine states ever ratified, and the Preamble to the instrument of union was written in the names of four non-members.

The terms of any agreement might specify that certain procedural conditions must be satisfied before the whole agreement goes into effect—for example, people often make agreements that go into effect only when a certain number of other people sign on—but this does not change the character of the agreement, which is between the people, and not between the states in their corporate capacities. That is the crucial point; it marks the difference between a treaty or league on one hand, and a constitution or nation on the other.

This argument doesn't wash. If the agreement is between the people of the United States, as opposed to the peoples of the several states, then a majority vote of the people of the whole should bind all the states. As Madison stated in Federalist 39, the compact was not one by a majority of the people of the U.S. as a whole, but between the peoples of the ratifying states as bodies politic.

In response to item (3):

It’s not inconvenient in the slightest. It in no way undermines the conclusion that the Constitution derives its authority, and the federal government its sovereignty, from the whole people of the United States, rather than in a delegated way from the state sovereignties. John Marshall—who knew a thing or two about the Constitution—answered this argument this way:

This mode of proceeding was adopted; and by the convention, by congress, and by the state legislatures, the instrument was submitted to the people. They acted upon it in the only manner in which they can act safely, effectively and wisely, on such a subject, by assembling in convention. It is true, they assembled in their several states—and where else should they have assembled? No political dreamer was ever wild enough to think of breaking down the lines which separate the states, and of compounding the American people into one common mass. Of consequence, when they act, they act in their states. But the measures they adopt do not, on that account, cease to be the measures of the people themselves, or become the measures of the state governments.

This, apparently, is one of those "original sources." It's a generalized assertion, years in retrospect, by a partisan Federalist. The closest thing that passes for an argument is a denial that voting state by state implies that states as such acceded to the Constitution -- an argument no partisan of state sovereignty actually made. And it's also another iteration of the strawman equation of the states as sovereign bodies politic to the state governments.

The fact that the people of Rhode Island didn’t choose to join in the union known as the “people of the United States,” and that the federal union respected that fact, hardly proves that the Constitution is a treaty or anything.

No. It just proves that there is -- ahem -- an individual relationship between the states and the union, and that their individual relationship to the union is determined entirely by the sovereign will of the people of that state alone. It proves that the people of a particular state only became part of the people of the United States by their own choice, and that their decision to do so was entirely individual. Even if 100% of the population of the other twelve states agreed on ratification, the fact that Rhode Island voted against ratification was enough to prevent it becoming part of the United States, until it decided -- by its will alone -- to ratify. In other words, the parties to the Constitution were the several peoples of independent states.

Contra item (4):

I did not denounce all such suggestions. What I said was that there are two ways of looking at history: as basically about ideas, or as basically about interests. Those who seek to interpret it in the latter way typically portray ideas as really just camouflage for interests, or as devices used to accomplish or rationalize interests. This is often a successful and helpful way of looking at history. But it also has the same weakness as a conspiracy theory—it evades disprovability and allows a reader to attribute whatever motive he wants to the actors, while ignoring completely what the actors actually said or did on their own accord. (Howard Zinn was particularly a master of this; never letting any facts or reality get in the way of his absurd political ravings.) Certainly there are times when people have real ulterior motives that they disguise in idealistic rhetoric. But the opposite is also often the truth, and one must always take care when looking at historical events not to discard the idealistic rhetoric reflexively, and pat oneself on the back for ultra-sophistication on the grounds that one is much too clever to believe in ideals. Sometimes people’s motives are just what they say they are.

Um, no. Sandefur didn't say it had "the same weakness as a conspiracy theory," despite his effort to walk it back. He used much stronger language, and flat-out accused Stromberg of conspiracizing. He in fact asserted that looking for the "real," or material, reason behind people's actions, in preference to their professed intent, "perpetuates a sort of conspiracy theory." Not that it had "the same weakness as a conspiracy theory," despite being "often a successful and helpful way to look at history." That it perpetuated a conspiracy theory. Damn well sounds like a denunciation to me.

And attributing ulterior motives to political action does not at all avoid falsifiability, or entail ignoring what they actually said and did. More often, it entails comparing what they said in public to what they said in private, or what they said to what they did. As Stromberg suggested by private email, "I think a great deal has been said about what people did."

What's more, it doesn't even require hypocrisy or bad faith. Given the dominance of a particular ideology as a system of legitimization in a society, its language may be used by very different groups, with very different operational meanings, to legitimize a wide range of interests.

Witness the use of free market language by some right-wing libertarians as an apologetic for corporate power, and contrariwise -- by us left-wing free marketers at Center for a Stateless Society and Alliance of the Libertarian Left -- to point out the essential statism of corporate capitalism. Witness the use of Marxist language and symbolism in the workers' uprisings in East Germany in 1953 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, with the workers organizing factory committees and calling out "All power to the workers' councils!" The very symbolism can be used as an apologetic for a system of power and the interests it serves, or can be turned into contested ground by those who "use the master's tools to tear down the master's house."

Contra item (5):

When did I ever say any of these things? But it is not necessary to believe that the Republican Party was the party of laissez-faire (as I noted, they were not) or any of these other irrelevancies, to believe that the American Civil War was, at bottom, about slavery; that the southern states had no legal right to secede, nor any legitimate claim to the right of revolution; that the Confederacy really did want to erect a basically totalitarian fascist slave state, and that the union’s victory and the ending of slavery were, with qualifications, essentially and wonderfully good things.

It's also not necessary to be a "neo-confederate" or to sympathize with slavery in any way in order to believe that the United States had no legitimate authority to prevent secession.

And given that Stromberg's article was entirely on the effects of the war, and victory by the side that actually won, on the national economic system, it's quite disingenuous -- not to say scurrilous -- to infer from this any particular position toward the Confederacy or the slave power.

In any case Sandefur is himself liable to charges of conspiracizing, given his effort to discover a neo-confederate "real agenda" behind Stromberg's treatment of the industrial interests in the GOP.

Oh, and wait -- we're supposed to only be attacking people for what they actually said, now? Please pick a set of rules and stick to it.

Sandefur omits item (6), a sentence which by rights should be included in the quote at item (7). The omitted sentence challenges Sandefur's mode of argumentation, which suggests that the pathologies, abominations and injustices of the Confederacy have any bearing on the validity of Stromberg's treatment of northern industrialists, or that his failure to address them in an article on the primary subject of the war's effect on the national political economy says anything about his alleged sympathies to the Confederacy. Anyway, re item (7) Sandefur writes:

If that were all that Stromberg did, that would be one thing. But Stromberg’s article goes far beyond that. It is a long piece—written, like your own email, as a string of non-sequiturs, and drawn almost entirely from secondary sources—and consists of almost nothing but baseless assertions (or spin) against the union—while very carefully ignoring the south’s acts or character. It is a very old propaganda technique to point accusatory fingers only at one side, while remaining silent about the other, so that one can pretend objectivity while really conveying a wildly inaccurate message. That’s what’s going on here. Stromberg wants to argue that the north was wrong in the Civil War, that the south had the right to secede, that slavery was—well, we should just ignore slavery, mostly—that the north was the aggressor, that Lincoln did all sorts of nasty things, and that everything wrong with the modern state is Lincoln’s fault.... He attempts this by disregarding the law, the facts, the philosophy, and, most of all, by trying to distract readers into forgetting who and what the enemy really was. Stromberg does not say a pox on both houses; he tries to cast a pox on one house, only one house, and that was the house that, whatever its real faults, stood for liberty and equality. Fortunately, he fails in that attempt.

As Stromberg pointed out by private email, "the house that won made the future; the kind of future they made is subject to criticism." And he also pointed out that he largely ignored the South because the article was about the political economy of the North. That doesn't mean the Confederates were good guys. The Confederacy, like all states, was the executive committee of a ruling class (before Mr. Sandefur latches onto this, I'm an anarchist not a Marxist). And the ruling class -- the slave power -- was a particularly odious one. The Civil War was a war between two bad guys -- two states.

For what it's worth, I believe the primary, immediate cause behind the Civil War was neither northern agitators nor plutocratic capitalists, but the stupidity of the southern fire-eaters. In the 1850s the national government was overwhelmingly dominated by a southern-led Democratic Party that differed mainly on whether it was batshit insane pro-slavery or just mildly pro-slavery. The country was locked into a situation where a constitutional majority sufficient for abolishing slavery would have been impossible for the foreseeable future. The only thing that could have ruined this sweetheart situation for the south is if the batshit insane pro-slavery people were willing to split the Democratic Party. And secession just meant abandoning the possibility of any expansion of slavery into the Guadalupe-Hidalgo territories at all, which (given that the national debate was over slavery in the G-H territories) was an obvious case of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. Or maybe snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

If Sandefur wants primary sources, then I challenge him -- no, I double dog dare him -- to read Claude H. Van Tyne's magisterial "Sovereignty in the American Revolution: An Historical Study" American Historical Review 12 (April 1907). Van Tyne actually agrees with Sandefur that a state's ratification was a permanent promise and that secession was impermissible -- but he makes mincemeat, based on intensive use of primary sources from the 1770s and 1780s, of Sandefur's arguments about the source of the Constitution's authority.

Please, Mr. Sandefur, read this article. And refute his arguments based on actual primary sources. And refute them on the basis of fact -- no mystical incantations after the fact from John Marshall, no Straussian hocus pocus from Harry Jaffa.

For that matter, if Sandefur likes primary sources, he might like this draft chapter of mine: "The Ultimate Source of Sovereignty in the American Federal System."

It's based on many months of reading in the polemical literature of the 1760s and 1770s, the Journals of the Continental and Confederation Congresses, letters of members of the Continental Congress, the collected charters, constitutions and fundamental laws of the states, Madison's record of the Federal Convention, Elliot's debates in the ratifying conventions, assorted collections of federalist and antifederalist literature, and the records of the First Congress. I have gone through every major nationalist argument and relentlessly fisked it, point by point, based on this reading in primary sources.

Sandefur omits the material in item (8), and then writes in response to item (9):

Two points. First, secession is not a mirror image of accession, because accession included certain promises in favor of protecting the rights and interests of the whole people of the United States. To name only one example, upon entering the union, the people of a state promise to respect the privileges and immunities of citizens of the several states; in exchange, the whole people of the United States promise to guarantee to that state a republican form of government. These promises cannot be simply undone, any more than a marriage can be simply undone. One can accomplish a divorce—through a forward-looking process of law—and a state can leave the union through a forward-looking process of law (that is, through constitutional amendment). But one cannot lawfully just ignore the fact that one is married, or accomplish a divorce through some magical formula that has no relation to the law, and one state cannot merely unilaterally leave the union by some process unknown to the Constitution. Incidentally, although New Englanders had no legal right to secede for any reason, I will agree that the Fugitive Slave Act would have given them much better grounds for revolution than the south ever had.

Whether or not states have a right to secede based on the nature of ratification, or whether there was an implied promise of perpetuity, is something that must be inferred from the history of the ratification process and the "structure and implication" of the document itself, since there is no explicit statement either way within the text.

But at the very least, the actual historical record shows that the interpretation of ratification history from which Sandefur attempts to infer a position on the legitimacy of secession is a failure. The historical claims he makes to prove the illegitimacy of secession -- based on the supposed identity of the people of the U.S. as a single entity as the ratifying party, and on the denial that the people of any particular state had an individual relationship to the Constitution -- can be shown, on the basis of the actual historical record, to be fallacious.

It's interesting that Sandefur slips and interprets the restrictions on state power in Article I Section 10 as stipulations by the people of a state promising not to do those things. Please reread your talking points!

The nationalists normally interpret those prohibitions as a set of prohibitions against a state by the people of the United States. It's the advocates of state sovereignty, of the states as the ratifying parties, that interpret them as promises by the people of a state.

Either argument, without other context, is plausible. But to determine which is probable requires recourse to the history and structure of the document.

The most plausible explanation of who's promising what, in my opinion, is that by ratifying the Constitution the sovereign people of an independent state are agreeing to create a new municipal corporation -- the United States government -- which is authorized to operate on their soil alongside another municipal corporation -- their state government -- so long as they remain accessories to the compact. The sovereign people of that state agree to delegate to the new municipal corporation the right to exercise on their soil the powers delegated in Article I Section 8, so long as it refrains from exercising those enumerated in Article I Section 8, and to refrain from themselves exercising those powers enumerated in Article I Section 10 on the condition that the peoples of the other accessory states likewise forbear. And they agree to do all these things, again, as a sovereign commitment, so long as they remain accessories to the compact. The powers of both the state government and the federal government, as municipal corporations operating on the soil of a state, derive from the sovereign people of that state.

Sandefur also ignores the fact that the states which agreed to join the new union on the accession of the ninth state, regardless of whether the remaining four came along for the ride, themselves seceded from the union of the Articles despite its explicit provision for perpetuity.

On item (10):

So the Republican Party was basically like the Nazi party. I see. Mr. Carson doesn’t want us calling him a Lyndon La Rouche type, but isn’t doing a very good job of it….

There should be another Internet convention to cover illegitimate and demagogic invocations of Godwin's Law.

Ahem. The GOP was "basically like the Nazi party" in terms, and only in terms, of the point of comparison specifically addressed by the analogy. You do understand how analogies work, right? Or is this just a case of disingenuously pretending to be more obtuse than you are in order to score demagogic debating points?

Note. Stromberg issued a rejoinder here. And Sandefur, in turn, responded here.

If you look at the points raised Stromberg's piece and the ones actually addressed in response by Sandefur, it's hard to avoid thinking of Lincoln's homely anecdote about the Jesuit who, accused of killing three men and a dog, triumphantly produced the dog in court.

Note 2 (May 31). I mistakenly clicked "publish" several weeks ago before I'd completed the draft. Although I removed it quickly, Sandefur responded here. No response to date re the finished version.

Addendum. In Sandefur's rejoinder linked immediately above, he treats Adams of Novanglus as a foil for Adams in 1776. The latter Adams, as quoted in Jefferson's records of the Congress from July 30-Aug. 1, 1776, opined that "The confederacy is to make us one individual only; it is to form us, like separate parcels of metal, into one common mass. We shall no longer retain our separate individuality, but become a single individual as to all questions submitted to the confederacy." "Thus," Sandefur concludes, "Thus even if Adams envisioned the British Empire as a league of sovereignties in 1774, he did not envision the American colonies as a league of sovereignties in 1776."

Two points:

1) The question is not simply what Adams believed at either time. My reference to Novanglus was not merely to Adams' opinion of the nature of the Empire, but to the reasoned and evidenced case he made for that opinion. As for his opinion quoted in 1776, we need only evaluate it in light of the record of what the Continental Congress actually did, and of the extent to which it relied on the states to authorize and execute its resolutions, compared to what the states did on their own authority as independent sovereigns. Here I refer Mr. Sandefur, once again, to the enormous volume of evidence in Van Tyne's article.

2) Adams' quoted opinion as to the effect of the Confederation in throwing the colonies into one mass is of questionable relevance considering that there was, in fact, no Confederation in existence at the time of Independence, and that one was not in legal effect until 1781. It's useful in this regard to read Adams' quoted opinion in light of his own speculation from June of the same year: "that we shall be obliged to declare ourselves independent States, before we confederate, and indeed before all the colonies have established their governments."

It's a good thing I'm "self-refuting"; if this is an example of Mr. Sandefur's calls a refutation he'd do better to leave me to refute myself, I think.

At C4SS--Iceland: A Thaw in the DRM Curtain

2011-05-28T21:20:00.000-07:00

New Research Paper at C4SS

2011-05-26T18:20:00.000-07:00

"Legibility & Control: Themes in the Work of James C. Scott" (C4SS Paper No. 12, Winter-Spring 2011).

At C4SS--The Political Compass: Don't Waste Your Time

2011-05-25T15:31:00.000-07:00

At C4SS--Intellectual Property: Some Countries Are More Equal Than Others

2011-05-21T23:50:00.000-07:00

At C4SS--Bitcoin: More Important Than You Realize

2011-05-20T23:56:00.000-07:00

At C4SS--Stossel: Do Your Part for the Bankers

2011-05-17T19:19:00.000-07:00

At C4SS--Those Libyan "Freedom Fighters": The Fix is On

2011-05-09T23:59:00.000-07:00

Publish Post

At C4SS: The Defeat of the United States by Al Qaeda

2011-05-04T20:06:00.000-07:00

At C4SS: Childhood's End for Humanity?

2011-05-02T22:08:00.000-07:00

At C4SS: Is Money Too Cheap or Too Dear? Both

2011-04-26T22:37:00.000-07:00

At C4SS: Knowing the Real Enemy

2011-04-23T23:04:00.000-07:00

At C4SS: Beyond the Education Bubble

2011-04-19T16:11:00.000-07:00

Richard Troxell. Looking Up at the Bottom Line: The Struggle for the Living Wage

2011-04-19T15:05:00.000-07:00

Richard R. Troxell. Looking Up at the Bottom Line: The Struggle for the Living Wage (Austin: Plain View Press, 2010).

The first two-thirds of this book is a series of anecdotes or vignettes. Even for those of us who reject a government role in creating a living wage, these stories should remind us of how bleak life is for the working poor, and how precarious life is for those who are homeless and unemployed—or perhaps just living from paycheck to paycheck. Too often, right-wing libertarians react to such accounts with a ho-hum “the poor will always be with us” attitude, condemning the “victim culture” or dismissing poverty as inevitable given the underclass's “short time preferences” or its position on the Bell Curve. Worse, their knee-jerk response is to regard those who point out such problems as enemies, or at best deserving of suspicion. For a libertarian culture that too often seems to position itself as the defender of the existing corporate model of capitalism as a proxy for “the free market,” anyone who points to widespread poverty and concentration of wealth under corporate capitalism must be some sort of statist who hates the market. What such people think the pathological side-effects of corporate capitalism have to do with a “free market” is beyond me.

Troxell's proposed agenda for solving the problem, which he presents in the latter part of the book, is a combination of affordable housing, single-payer healthcare, and local living wage ordinances tied to the price of housing.

As a libertarian, I can't endorse any proposal for government intervention in the economy. But I'm convinced that most of the evils Troxell rightly objects to result from existing government intervention—on the side of corporate interests, employers, landlords and the rich. The proper solution is not for government to start intervening on the side of the poor, or to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor—but to stop redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich.

Interestingly, I was apparently offered a review copy of this book as a result of having caught someone's favorable attention with an earlier column at Center for a Stateless Society—“Yes, the Rent Really is Too Damn High”—in which I called for just such an agenda.

A huge part of existing concentrations of wealth result from rents on artificial scarcities and artificial property rights created by the state. A huge part of poverty results from inflated costs of basic subsistence created by similar such artificial scarcities and mandated inflation of the overhead cost of daily life. A libertarian agenda for poverty relief would be to dismantle such artificial scarcities and overheads and let the competition of a freed market redistribute wealth from the present rentier classes to the poor.

Troxell quotes Baylor political science professor Jerold Waltman's book Case for a Living Wage, in which he sets the criteria for a living wage: 1) it should enable the recipient to live at a certain minimum level, and 2) should prevent too much inequality from emerging. But in a very real sense, a freed market would create a living wage by these criteria.

The natural function of a market price system is to tie the price of goods and services to the cost or effort of providing them, and to tie wages to effort or disutility. The normal equilibrium of the market—the natural ratio toward which exchange is always tending—is, when goods are reproducible and there are no artificial barriers to market entry or competition, is the exchange of equal efforts or disutility. In a market of free exchange between equals, trade is effort for effort.

Artificial scarcity and artificial property rights—privilege—break this link between effort and consumption.

As I argued in the column mentioned above, a large share of the so-called “property rights” enforced under capitalism are property rights in controlling access to natural opportunities.

The Marxist Maurice Dobb once gave the example of government granting to its favored clients a monopoly right to erect toll gates across the roads, and to enrich themselves by pocketing the tolls. Standard marginalist economics, Dobb argued, would treat opening the gates as a “productive activity,” and claim that the tolls contributed to production by the amount they added to price. Forbearing to interfere with production would be a productive activity, and the tribute collected for this forbearance would be the reward for productive services.

This is what Thorstein Veblen called “capitalized disservicability”: the assignment of an economic value to the magnanimous act of allowing production to occur without interference. Among the less academically inclined, I believe it’s called “protection money.”

Such artificial property rights include many things other than land. Every state grant of power to control the conditions under which other people may undertake productive activity is a source of illegitimate rent. Both tariffs and “intellectual property,” for example, are forms of protectionism in that they restrict the right to produce a given good for a particular market area to a privileged class of firms.

In every case, the person who would apply his labor, energy and skills to the earth and its natural resources is forced to pay tribute for the right to produce and work to feed a useless parasite in addition to himself. And in every case, the privileged classes of landlords, usurers and other extortionists seek to close off opportunities for self-employment because such opportunities make it too hard to get people to work for them on profitable terms.

Much or most of the price of most of the goods you buy consists of embedded rents on artificial property rights. Much of the product of your labor goes as rent to your employer, because the artificial dearth of natural opportunities to produce creates a buyer’s market for labor in which workers compete for jobs instead of jobs competing for workers.

The rent is, indeed, too damn high.

The person who “owns” title to a piece of vacant and unimproved land, instead of working for everything she gets, is able to force someone else to work for part of what she herself gets. Part of the purchaser's or tenant's labor is directed, not to her own consumption, but to the consumption of the landlord. Likewise, that part of the price of proprietary software, music and other content, which is above the marginal cost of reproduction, amounts to an equivalent value of the purchaser's laborer which goes to feed the “owner” of the copyright. When zoning laws criminalize microenterprise in the household, and compel the producer to rent stand-alone commercial real estate, or when “safety” and “health” regulations compel her to purchase industrial-grade equipment rather than using the spare capacity of ordinary household goods that she already owns, the margin this adds to her price results in an equal rent which the owner of an established business can collect from the customer.

As the Wobblies' Big Bill Haywood said, for every man who gets a dollar he didn't sweat for, there's another man who sweats for a dollar he didn't get. Or as the individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker put it, the deficit in unpaid labor for the non-privileged results in an equal and opposite efficit of unearned income for the privileged.

One side-effect of privilege is that the concentration of wealth in the hands of people with a high propensity to save and invest, and the reduction of income to those with a high propensity to consume, results in chronic tendencies toward overinvestment and overproduction. The system is plagued with idle productive capacity which cannot dispose of its full output when fully utilized, and with surplus investment capital which can find a profitable outlet only in speculative bubbles.

I fully agree with Troxell that a living wage—properly understood—would remedy much of the economy's chronic inclination toward crisis.

Charles Johnson, in “Scratching By,” describes all the ways the homeless and working poor are nickled and dimed to death by local government. The effect of all these policies is to raise the fixed costs of living:

Artificially limiting the alternative options for housing ratchets up the fixed costs of living for the urban poor. Artificially limiting the alternative options for independent work ratchets down the opportunities for increasing income. And the squeeze makes poor people dependent on—and thus vulnerable to negligent or unscrupulous treatment from—both landlords and bosses by constraining their ability to find other, better homes, or other, better livelihoods. The same squeeze puts many more poor people into the position of living “one paycheck away” from homelessness and makes that position all the more precarious by harassing and coercing and imposing artificial destitution on those who do end up on the street.

As described by Ivan Illich in Tools for Conviviality, as late as 1940 a major share of housing in Massachusetts was still self-built. Today, with new modular techniques, the construction of safe, comfortable and affordable housing should be easier than ever. But local building codes—written largely at the behest of building contractors—criminalize such techniques in order to lock their obsolete methods into place and protect them from competing with cheaper alternatives.

The natural effect of competition in a freed market, when all these state-enforced artificial scarcities are abolished, is to socialize the rents previously collected from them. Eliminating copyright socializes the price of proprietary content. Opening vacant land to free homesteading socializes the portion of land rent that resulted from artificial scarcity. Abolishing the zoning and licensing restrictions on household microenterprise socializes the premium brick-and-mortar downtown businesses charged on artificially inflated entry barriers. Abolishing patents socializes the benefits from increased productivity of human labor.

So in a sense, I am for socialized housing, socialized healthcare, etc. Instead of leaving the basic artificial scarcities in place and then procuring healthcare and housing at taxpayer expense for those who can't afford them, I want to make healthcare and housing affordable by abolishing the monopolies that make it possible to get rich off them in the first place. Although Troxell says it of his version of a living wage, it's also true of my version that it would reduce public expenditures on food stamps. The welfare state, when you get right down to it, is a case of the capitalists working through their state—which is, after all, the “executive committee of the ruling class”—to clean up the mess created by their privilege.

Even if Troxell doesn't agree with my emphasis, or with the principles on which my opposition to government intervention is based, I suspect he would agree with most of the agenda I propose for dismantling government support to privilege.

Some forms of that support he points to himself, such as the vagrancy laws which he discusses at considerable length. At one time, the common lands were a vital insurance policy for those who fell on hard luck. The land-poor might reduce their total need for agricultural wage labor—and thereby increase their bargaining power against the landed classes for what wage employment they did take—by meeting some of their subsistence needs through production on the common. That was, in fact, one of the chief reasons for Parliamentary Enclosures in the 18th century: the landlords complained that, when peasants had access to the common, it was difficult to get them to work as many hours, or for such cheap wages, as the gentry would prefer.

Vagrancy laws are a way of accomplishing the same result today, by criminalizing the very act of living without a permanent place of residence. All legal restrictions on individual access to public rights of way—so long as no one obstructs anyone else's movement or harasses them—are illegitimate. Such legal restrictions are in fact a violation of property rights: the individual's right of equal access to a public right of way. Restrictions on shared housing by people not related to other, living in cars, and the like, should also be removed.

By the way, Troxell points to the oddly selective enforcement of Austin's “No Camping Ordinance,” which supposedly criminalizes camping in public. For some reason, people camping out to be first in line for a sale or to buy football game or concert tickets aren't arrested. Imagine that! If you didn't know better, you'd almost think the ordinance was deliberately targeted against homeless people.

The only proper basis for appropriating previously unowned land should be human labor. Absentee titles to vacant and unimproved land should be treated as null and void. Contractor-written building code restrictions on self-built housing, which criminalize vernacular or unconventional building techniques on spurious safety grounds, should be eliminated. Vacant lots, undeveloped acreage, unused government property, vacant government buildings, military bases (Troxell mentions an attempt to turn Austin's decommissioned Bergstrom AFB into a homeless community), etc., should be opened for free homesteading. Military bases and vacant government offices should become the sites for squatter communities like Christiana in Denmark, and vacant and undeveloped land should host vibrant favelas of the sort that sprang up with self-built housing in England's Pittsea and Laindon communities, in Essex, from the early 20th century until the immediate post-WWII period (as described by Colin Ward in Talking Houses).

Like many favelas in Latin America, and like Cory Doctorow's near-future American favelas in Makers, these examples of self-built housing were by no means “substandard” or “primitive” in any objective sense. When inhabitants of squatter communities feel any sense of confidence at all, they take pride in improving their living spaces. As Colin Ward described them, most of the self-built houses in Pittsea and Laindon were quite well-built. The residents were typically people whose incomes were too low to qualify them for loans from building societies, and the houses they built—although generally safe and sturdy—would have been in violation of housing codes passed after WWII. Doctorow's description of the building skills of his fictional squatters, in the shantytowns and falelas which grew up in half-built subdivisions and abandoned shopping malls, are quite reminiscent of those of real-world communities like those in England and Latin America:

They started with plastic sheeting and poles, and when they could afford it, they replaced the sheets, one at a time, with bricks, or poured concrete and rebar.

None of them had mortgages, but they had neat vegetable gardens and walkways spelled out in white stones with garden gnomes standing guard.

Getting back to the planks of our agenda: All legal barriers to running a microbakery out of one's own home with an ordinary kitchen oven, making clothing with a sewing machine, opening a beautician shop in a spare room with the simple purchase of a chair and tools, running a cab service with the family car and a cell phone, providing daycare for the neighbors, etc., should be eliminated.

Drug patents should be abolished, legal barriers to the provision of service by clinical practitioners (dental assistants, physicians assistants, etc.) eliminated, and legal barriers to cheap cooperative health insurance like Ithaca Health (or membership-based contract practice through cooperative clinics—e.g. John Muney's $80/month plan in New York) should be removed.

Troxell mentions “Fresh Start,” a proposal to unite a variety of local social services into a single integrated program that would deal with homelessness on an integrated, process basis. In the process of discussing it, he refers to one of the contributing factors to the problem: the shutting down of the great majority of YMCAs, which once provided a source of cheap housing for the indigent. Taking these things together, I couldn't help but think of some proposals by Dougald Hine and Nathan Cravens to accomplish the same result outside the state, through voluntary self-organization. What they came up with was essentially a P2P version of Fresh Start.

In “Social Media vs. the Recession,” Dougald Hine wrote:

Looked at very simply: hundreds of thousands of people are finding or are about to find themselves with a lot more time and a lot less money than they are used to. The result is at least three sets of needs:

practical/financial (e.g. how do I pay the rent/avoid my house being repossessed?)

emotional/psychological (e.g. how do I face my friends? where do I get my identity from now I don't have a job?)

directional (e.g. what do I do with my time? how do I find work?)...

Arguably the biggest thing that has changed in countries like the UK since there was last a major recession is that most people are networked by the internet and have some experience of its potential for self-organisation... There has never been a major surge in unemployment in a context where these ways of "organising without organisations" were available.

As my School of Everything co-founder Paul Miller has written, London's tech scene is distinctive for the increasing focus on applying these technologies to huge social issues... Agility and the ability to mobilise and gather momentum quickly are characteristics of social media and online self-organisation, in ways that government, NGOs and large corporations regard with a healthy envy.

So, with that, the conversations I've been having keep coming back to this central question: is there a way we can constructively mobilise to respond to this situation in the days and weeks ahead?...

Information sharing for dealing with practical consequences of redundancy or job insecurity. You can see this happening already on a site like the Sheffield Forum.

Indexes of local resources of use to the newly-unemployed—including educational and training opportunities—built up in a user-generated style.

Tools for reducing the cost of living. These already exist—LiftShare, Freecycle, etc.—so it's a question of more effective access and whether there are quick ways to signpost people towards these, or link together existing services better.

An identification of skills, not just for potential employers but so people can find each other and organise, both around each other and emergent initiatives that grow in a fertile, socially-networked context.

If the aim is to avoid this recession creating a new tranche of long-term unemployed (as happened in the 1980s), then softening the distinction between the employed and unemployed is vital. In social media, we've already seen considerable softening of the line between producer and consumer in all kinds of areas, and there must be lessons to draw from this in how we view any large-scale initiative.

As I see it, such a softening would involve not only the kind of online tools and spaces suggested above, but the spread of real world spaces which reflect the collaborative values of social media. Examples of such spaces already exist:

Media labs on the model of Access Space or the Brasilian Pontos de Cultura programme, which has applied this approach on a national scale

Fab Labs for manufacturing, as already exist from Iceland to Afghanistan

studio spaces like TenantSpin, the micro-TV station in Liverpool based in a flat in a towerblock—and like many other examples in the world of Community Media

Again, if these spaces are to work, access to them should be open, not restricted to the unemployed. (If, as some are predicting, we see the return of the three day week, the value of spaces like this open to all becomes even more obvious!)

Nathan Cravens of the P2P Foundation took the ball and ran with it, elaborating Hine's basic idea into a Triple Alliance:

The Triple Alliance describes a network of three community supported organizations necessary to meet basic needs and comforts.
The Open Cafe, a place to have a meal in good company without a price tag
The CSA or community supported farm
The Fab Lab, a digitally assisted manufacturing facility to make almost anything

The Fab Lab, he explained, was intended to be based on something like the Open Source Ecology project in rural areas, and hackerspaces in urban areas.

The one thing I felt was lacking—which ties in with Troxell's mention of the old YMCAs—was cheap housing as a fourth leg of the stool. Here's my proposal for the housing leg from The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, which was based on my discussions with Cravens on the P2P Research email list (and which incidentally also used the old YMCA as a model):

Open-source housing would fill a big gap in the overall resiliency strategy. It might be some kind of cheap, bare bones cohousing project associated with the Cafe (water taps, cots, hotplates, etc) that would house people at minimal cost on the YMCA model. It might be an intentional community or urban commune, with cheap rental housing adapted to a large number of lodgers (probably in violation of laws restricting the number of unrelated persons living under one roof). Another model might be the commercial campground, with space for tents, water taps, etc., on cheap land outside the city, in connection with a ride-sharing arrangement of some sort to get to Alliance facilities in town. The government-run migrant worker camps, as depicted in The Grapes of Wrath, are an example of the kind of cheap and efficient, yet comfortable, bare bones projects that are possible based on a combination of prefab housing with common bathrooms. And finally, Vinay Gupta’s work in the Hexayurt project on emergency life-support technology for refugees is also relevant to the housing problem: offering cheap LED lighting, solar cookers, water purifiers, etc., to those living in tent cities and Hoovervilles.

Cravens, in turn, raised the possibility of providing something like the YMCA model in the same building used for the hackerspace or open cafe.

Vacant public buildings or military bases would be obvious candidates for such complexes. As cash-strapped local governments find themselves increasingly short of enforcement funding and looking for creative ways to deal with the rising tide of underemployment and poverty they may well—as some already have—relax their restrictions on such informal arrangements.

C4SS Second Quarter Fundraiser

2011-04-16T20:24:00.000-07:00

Well, once again our readers came through for us and our expenses are paid through the middle of January. Thanks to all who contributed for your generosity.

That's the good news. Now guess what? That's right: we're beginning our 2nd quarter fundraiser to pay the C4SS writers and staff through the end of March.

You'll notice that our budget is significantly more modest -- just about $1600 or so per month, down from two or three thousand a month in the second half of last year. I think we're operating on a sustainable basis now, and shouldn't have any more trouble matching our income to our activities at this level. I've done my part by cutting back my writing to help lower expenses.

C4SS probably has more bang for the buck, and for the staff, than just about any think tank out there. I think it's a pretty good deal. If you think the material we put out is worth it, please consider contributing. Just use the widget on any page of the C4SS site, or use the one over there to the left in my sidebar.

At C4SS: America's Peculiar Institution

2011-04-15T15:19:00.000-07:00

At C4SS--Libya: A Pig in a Poke?

2011-04-11T19:41:00.000-07:00

At C4SS: The Hypocrisy at the Heart of the Police State

2011-04-05T21:00:00.000-07:00

Carson in The Idea Room

2011-04-04T18:15:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow (April 5) I'll be the guest in The Freeman's online chat room, The Idea Room. It starts at 2PM Eastern. Hope to see you there!

At C4SS: Progressives Need to Rethink the Corporate Income Tax

2011-04-01T22:16:00.000-07:00

Open Source Government

2011-03-30T15:25:00.000-07:00

Very rough drafts of a work in progress.

C4SS Fundraiser: One More Day

2011-03-30T08:30:00.000-07:00

Well, we've got one more day left in the C4SS fundraiser and still need a little less than $1800 to pay our writers and staff through December.

As Director Brad Spangler says, if we don't raise enough money by the end of the First Quarter to pay our expenses through December 2010, "our operations are going to have to be cut back." I've already voluntarily cut back my writing pace as my part of an effort to scale back out output to fit our income. But my income from writing is occupying an increasingly important place as a source of livelihood for me right now, and I've cut back to about the minimum I can afford to get by on. I've been signed up for a $20 monthly subscription of my own, but if we don't settle into a reliable and consistent income stream soon I won't be able to keep paying $20 out of nothing.

So I'm watching the outcome of this fundraiser with interest.

At C4SS: Beware of Humanitarians with Bombs

2011-03-29T21:48:00.000-07:00

Thaddeus Russell. A Renegade History of the United States

2011-03-29T21:27:00.000-07:00

Thaddeus Russell. A Renegade History of the United States (New York: Free Press, 2010).

Unlike many dissident histories of the United States, which attempt to portray racial minorities, sexual subcultures and subordinate classes as “worthy victims” in terms of the social mores of the white middle class, Thaddeus Russell celebrates the kind of people that your parents may have warned you about: the low-down, no-count, not-respectable people. You know, the folks who “never amounted to anything”—and neither would you if you didn't steer clear of them.

Against the austere “republican virtue” of the “Founding Fathers” as we usually encounter them in public school American history classes, Russell juxtaposes the urban populations of the colonies and the taverns that served them. Those bluenose marble gods were obsessed with “license,” “luxury” and “degeneracy of manners” with good reason, if you look at the taverns that stood on just about every street corner in the towns of British America. There you could see the rabble kicking up their heels and drinking at just about any hour, see blacks and whites dancing (and “dancing”) together, and hear the f-word being shouted with wild abandon. To a large extent the sumptuary laws of the early republican period, with their goal of encouraging Spartan simplicity and self-control, were a social engineering experiment by “Founding Fathers” who regarded the population of their country with horror.

Russell works from a considerable scholarly apparatus on the topic of the artificiality of whiteness, and focuses in vivid detail on the ways of European ethnic minorities like the Irish and Italians before they were officially incorporated into the white race.

He prefers the “unworthy” to the “worthy” victim: freed slaves who didn't want to internalize the WASP work ethic, gays who didn't want to create respectable mirror-images of the monogamous heterosexual nuclear family, and blacks who didn't want to march quietly and decorously in suits with Dr. King.

Russell makes it clear he wouldn't like to live in a society composed mainly of the kind of people he celebrates—a sort of Hell's Kitchen writ large, as he sees it: “No one would be safe on the streets, chaos would reign, and garbage would never be collected.” But the Mrs. Grundys and Comstocks, the Carrie Nations, are “enemies of freedom.” If their instinct to regulate and “reform” weren't resisted, we'd be as miserable as Huck Finn in the Widow Douglas's drawing room. Even people who regard themselves as “conventional” and “middle class” enjoy a range of freedoms—freedoms that are part of what they now consider a normal lifestyle—that would never have existed without the constant struggle of the “no-counts” against respectability.

Throughout the book, Russell expresses a general distaste for social engineering and paternalism of all kinds. This comes through clearly in his picture of New Deal hero Rex Tugwell. Tugwell was fully immersed in the managerialist culture of the Progressive Era, eugenics and all, and lost himself in totalitarian utopias like those of H.G. Wells. He saw the planning regime instituted during WWI as an opportunity to turn the U.S. into “an industrial engineer's utopia.” His dream under FDR was to replace “the dead hand of competitive enterprise” with central planning, and turn America into a big factory.

Although Russell is a writer of broadly libertarian sensibilities, I was unable to pigeonhole him into any specific stereotyped libertarian orientation of right or left.

He expresses a generally friendly attitude toward the market (“...the market economy has always been a friend of renegades and an enemy of moral guardians.”). And he attacks left-wing criticisms of the “culture of consumption” (like Stuart Ewen's Captains of Consciousness) in the sort of language readers of this blog would normally associate with right-wing defenses of corporate capitalism at Mises.org. But he implicitly treats “market” as equivalent to “cash nexus” (for example, he contrasts “the market” to the subsistence lifestyle of isolated farmers who lived by self-provisioning and barter).

On the other hand Russell discusses workplace culture and work discipline in terms that are most decidedly not right-wing, making it abundantly clear his is not the kind of libertarian analysis that would appear at Mises.org. He describes, in the kind of friendly language we would normally associate with E.P. Thompson, the culture of “St. Monday” that wage employers found so objectionable in the eighteenth century. And he treats attempts by the Radical Republicans of the Reconstruction Era to overcome “shiftlessness” and impose a culture of “patient, honest work” on freed slaves as morally equivalent to the sumptuary laws of Revolutionary era bluenoses. Take, for example, this exhortation from Clinton Fisk's Plain Counsels for Freedmen:

Now free labor does not imply that you may perform your work irregularly, carelessly, and dishonestly; and that your employer must put up with it, and say nothing about it. When you were a slave, it may have been your habit to do just as little as you could to avoid the lash. But now that you are free, you should be actuated by a more noble principle than fear.

Russell's treatment of Freedmen's Bureau propaganda is quite similar to—say—E. P. Thompson's treatment of Wesleyanism in The Making of the English Working Class. And the Freedmen's Bureau writers for whom he reserves such mockery sound almost exactly like Puritan commentators complaining of the large number of holy days celebrated by English peasants, or Methodists complaining about “St. Monday.”

Perhaps more suggestive, he equates such calls, in language very much comparable to his attacks on the cultural Left's criticisms of the “culture of consumption,” as an attempt to impose bourgeois sensibilities on people who value leisure and autonomy. He argues, in response to such attempts to inculcate the “work ethic,” that there is “nothing natural about a life devoted to labor.” And he celebrates Freemen's resistance to attempts to impose work discipline. For example one northerner managing a confiscated plantation, in attempting to impose northern ideas of work discipline on black sharecroppers, was thwarted by their demands to—as they did under the old owner—“take their guns into the field and stop their work whenever a game animal happened by.” Russell also celebrates both organized strikes and informal work stoppages—simply taking a holiday when they considered it necessary for their health—against employers by freedmen all over the South. Likewise the wildcat strikes during WWII, which were generally in response to speedups and mandatory overtime.

The same is true of his treatment of the white working class's resistance to the imposition of work discipline in the early days of the factory system. “When the first factories were built, with their regimented work rules and long hours, many of the white people employed in them proved to be terrible workers.” Russell writes, in a clearly favorable tone, of the high rates of turnover by workers discharged for acts of petty disobedience in a New England textile mill, and of attempts to institute an Americanized version of “St. Monday.”

It's clear, also, that Russell is no conventional right-wing defender of the prerogatives of employers (“after all, you chose to work there!”) of the sort that you typically see in mainstream “libertarian” circles, from the fact that he takes the Freedmen's side in attempts by employers to mandate regularizing their slave marriages as a condition of employment.

I think Russell, in rejecting left-wing analysis of the “culture of consumption,” throws the baby out with the bathwater. In stressing the left-wing critics' areas of commonality with bourgeois paternalism and prudery, he neglects the extent to which the rise of the “culture of consumption” was itself part of a deliberate strategy of imposing work discipline by corporate capitalist elites. Capitalist ideologues of the post-WWI period, in their praise for the effects of consumer culture on the working class, used language very much like that of their counterparts two hundred years earlier who proposed the Enclosures as a remedy for “Saint Monday.” It's ironic that Russell, who celebrates American workers' choice of leisure over work and attacks left-wing critics of mass consumption for their alleged “elitism,” ignores the relationship between the two issues. Corporate elites of that period deliberately and explicitly promoted a mass consumption economy as a way of preventing the choice of leisure over work, and undertook a project of cultural engineering to equate the consumption of store-bought goods with “Americanism” and “respectability” and to equate homemade with “old-fashioned” and “rural.”

Although Russell repeatedly alludes to arguments in writings like Captains of Consciousness, that the culture of consumption was imposed from above, he never addresses any of the actual evidence presented in them. The paper trail of commentary by the propertied classes, expressing their desire to impose work discipline through “easy monthly payments,” is as voluminous as that of Enclosure advocates two centuries before.

Although Ewen et al no doubt had their puritanical side, they also had a great deal to say about consumerism as an instrument of social control of the very sort that Russell generally finds so abhorrent. In focusing so strongly on one aspect of their work at the expense of the other, I think he does them a disservice and overshoots into the same one-sided faux populism as the right-wingers at Mises.org. The left-wing critics of consumer culture have at least as much in common with Russell as they do with the bluenoses of the 1770s.

In celebrating the liberatory aspects of the consumer revolution, I believe Russell neglects the extent to which consumer culture undermined autonomy. Specifically, he neglects the extent to which the ratio of wage labor to a given unit of consumption is itself a contingent matter. To the extent that high costs of marketing and distribution, brand name differentiation, and planned obsolescence reflect a business model toward which the state artificially tipped the balance, they artificially inflate the costs of a given quality of life. Consider, for example, the quadrupled costs of brand-name package dry goods, compared to virtually identical generic bulk goods, as described by Ralph Borsodi in The Distribution Age.

In dismissing criticisms of the culture of consumption for their alleged puritanism or elitism, Russell neglects the extent to which increased dependence on wage labor for a higher volume of waste consumption also reduces the bargaining power and increases the precarity of working class life. It's a hell of a lot harder to engage in spontaneous work stoppages of take off for Saint Monday, when you're one paycheck away from being evicted or having the repo man take your car and washing machine.

Sean Gabb. The Churchill Memorandum

2011-03-27T18:56:00.000-07:00

Sean Gabb. The Churchill Memorandum (Lulu.com, 2011).

Although I don't write about it much, I'm an alternate history geek.

I've got a whole shelf of them, ranked according to what genre fans call the "Point of Divergence" (POD). Among my favorites are Harold Waldrop's Roll Them Bones, which starts from the premise that Rome lost the Second Punic War and Mother Carthage inherited the Hellenistic culture of the East, and Poul Anderson's short story "In the House of Sorrows," which posits that Jerusalem fell to Sennacherib and that the fall of Rome and the Dark Ages occurred without the Church to preserve classical culture and literacy.

My favorite of all time is probably Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch. In that story our own timeline is the result of historical engineering, undertaken by scientists from the original timeline in order to avert the catastrophe in which their history culminated. In the original timeline, Columbus' life's work was traveling among the royal courts of Christendom whipping up support for a new Crusade to smash the power of the Turk and liberate Constantinople and Jerusalem.

With the discovery of the New World delayed by almost a century, a Mesoamerican people managed to supplant the Aztecs (much as the Persians did the Medes) and reinvigorate their dying empire. They expanded to incorporate a people far to the northwest whose smiths were quickly advancing from copper smelting to working with iron, and another people on the Caribbean coast who were developing the first true ships built on a keel. Equipped with firearms and gunpowder, whose secrets they tortured out of the first shipwrecked Portuguese crews.

But the most popular points of divergence, by far, are the American Civil War and World War II. The Churchill Memorandum, by Libertarian Alliance Director Sean Gabb, falls under the second heading. In his alternate timeline, Hitler died in a car wreck in the Spring of 1939 and was succeeded by Goehring.

Goehring quickly instituted a revisionist version of National Socialism. Among the more unlikely "revisions" was the announcement that the general hostility toward the Jews was all a "misunderstanding," and that National Socialism properly understood opposed only the big international financiers -- who were no longer a threat in any case.

During the Polish crisis Goehring and Chamberlain sewed up a stable peace which amounted to a de facto condominium between Germany and the British Empire. The pact guaranteed the independence of France and the Low Countries, in return for a free hand in Eastern Europe. Stalinist Russia and Japan, as second-rate powers, rounded out the balance.

The main unknown was the United States, which the Germans feared would tip the balance toward the British Empire. Hence the Chamberlain-Goehring agreement included a secret codicil, key to the cloak-and-dagger plot, which guaranteed geopolitical stability by removing America as an independent force in world politics. The British arranged the assassination of FDR, followed by a succession of other presidential assassinations, finally resulting in a coup which established a sort of deranged fascist regime under Harry Anslinger (just Google the name). America at the time of the story's setting was an authoritarian hellhole, completely withdrawn from the rest of the world.

At the time of the setting, twenty years after the POD in 1959, Nazi Germany's government pursues what we would regard as a neoliberal agenda, with Mises and Hayek dominating the Cabinet. Britain is under a Conservative government, with what would be regarded as relative economic freedom in conventional politics (although without such obviously central prerequisites to genuine economic freedom as a land reform based on thoroughgoing attention to the principle of justice in acquisition). As a result, technology has advanced at a much faster rate in the Empire than it did in our timeline. Casette recorders and cheap home energy generators are common, and electric cars have mostly replaced the IC engine. That old alt hist standby the airship makes its appearance as the primary means of long-distance travel -- quite plausible, given the unlikelihood that jumbo jets would ever have come into existence absent a superpower arms race. Germany is a sponsor of the Jewish Free State in Palestine against Britain's protectorates in the Arab world.

The plot centers on a scheme by Harold MacMillan and Communist Party chief Michael Foote to track down and publicize the Churchill Memorandum, and thereby expose the secret skullduggery between Goehring and Chamberlain which is at the foundation of the geopolitical order. Their hope is that public outrage in Britain will lead to a rupture with Germany, that a revanchist movement in America will lead it to reenter world politics on the side of the new Labour coalition, and that Britain will be thrown into the arms of Soviet Russia. With the British war against Germany that is likely to ensue, in alliance with Russia and America, MacMillan and Foote intend to restore the "progressive" course of history which was thwarted by Chamberlain.

I've had my issues with Dr. Gabb in the past over his view of the beneficence of the British Empire. Frankly, if our only choice is between benevolent British imperialism and the kind of "liberation" promoted by American Cold War policy, it's a pretty dismal prospect.

But what I find especially appealing about the story -- aside from an afficionado's curiosity about how an alternate timeline turns out -- is its treatment of power. There really are no good guys. The world order enforced by London, no matter how much less of an evil Gabb considers it, is built on betrayal and murder. Chamberlain removed America as an inconvenience, in the process handing over its entire population to totalitarian rule, as casually as most of us would swat a mosquito.

Perhaps most intriguing is the way that, with all the major actors and world powers reshuffled like the bits of colored paper in a kaleidoscope, the lines of political power automatically link them together in the same way that an arc of electricity in a lightning bolt follows the shortest path. In a radically different world, with radically different alignments, political leaders and states nevertheless gravitate toward power just as water flows downhill. This is a universal law of history that seems to hold regardless of which specific figures are in power, so long as power exists at all. So long as political power exists, it will be abused by those who hold it in the interest of aggrandizing their own power.

At C4SS: Hillary Clinton Lets the Cat Out of the Bag

2011-03-24T22:55:00.000-07:00

C4SS Fundraiser: Down to the Wire

2011-03-23T14:44:00.000-07:00

The good news is, we've almost been holding our own -- collecting almost a month's worth of operating expenses per month -- in the past three months off fundraising. The bad news is, we're still three months behind.

We've got about a week left in the current fundraiser, and are just halfway to meeting our target of paying for all writing and other services performed for C4SS through the end of 2010. That means we still need to collect almost $1900 in the coming week to meet the goal.

C4SS readers and supporters have done an amazing job kicking in so far, but we're coming down to the wire. If you value the content we produce, please consider contributing.

Thanks to all who have contributed, and thanks also to those who contribute in the coming days.

At C4SS: It Doesn't Matter What "the Law" Is

2011-03-23T14:42:00.000-07:00

At C4SS: How to "Ban" Nuclear Power

2011-03-17T20:37:00.000-07:00

At C4SS: Mr. Obama, Tear Down This Wall

2011-03-16T21:11:00.000-07:00

At C4SS: To Solve the Problem of Money in Politics, Just Get Rid of the Politics -- And the Money

2011-03-11T23:21:00.000-08:00

Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Reader...

2011-03-10T14:35:00.000-08:00

is now for sale at AK Press. As I described it in my blurb:

From Iain McKay, principal author of the standard anarchist educational resource An Anarchist FAQ, comes Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology. Besides replacing Stewart Edwards' Selected Writings as the definitive Proudhon reader after several decades, it is clearly superior to Edwards' collection. First, instead of Edwards' unsatisfactory approach of compiling snippets of text under subject headings in a sort of Bartlett's Quotations format, McKay's anthology provides complete digests of Proudhon's texts with important passages in unbroken form. Second, this collection includes a wide variety of new texts, many of them translated especially for the present effort. This new anthology may well serve as the definitive reference source for as long as Selected Writings did. This should be cause for excitement and eager anticipation among Proudhon enthusiasts everywhere.

At C4SS: Thank You, Bradley Manning, for Your Service

2011-03-09T15:58:00.000-08:00

C4SS Needs Your Help

2011-03-07T18:18:00.000-08:00

[The following is a message from C4SS Director Brad Spangler. Brad just disbursed the last of the payments for the November writing and other services of the C4SS staff. As Brad says, he's revised the fundraising goals downward to paying the Fourth Quarter 2010 expenses by the end of First Quarter 2011. If we don't meet that goal, or "drastic cutbacks in our operations will have to be considered."

We've already got our monthly budget back down to under $2,000, which is roughly what it was before we started falling increasingly further behind on our fundraising goals from one month to the next. As I announced earlier, I've already scaled back my own writing output (from three to two columns a week and from four to two research papers a year) with a view to bringing our activities into line with what people are willing to contribute.

Speaking just for myself, and not for C4SS, it looks like our operations began to exceed people's willingness to contribute in the second half of last year. The present scaled-back level of expenses is probably about what contributions will cover for the time being. So if we can just get through the backlog of unpaid expenses -- with your help -- I think we can get back to running in the black on a steady basis. So please, if you value what we do and have the means and inclination, please give by clicking the widget on any page at C4SS.org.]

Dear Supporters of the Center for a Stateless Society,

Will you please help us keep the Center going? During the current fundraiser, donations have not come in at a pace that can meet our goal by the end of March. That goal was set in order to get us in the financial position we need to be shooting for. We’re revising that goal downward, pushing January pay expenses forward to the next quarterly fundraiser and seeking to build less of a financial reserve.

I just got done paying C4SS staff for all remaining pay that was due for the month of November 2010. What remains, what needs to be covered by the end of this month, are our labor costs for the month of December 2010.

By the end of the first quarter of 2011, I want to get everybody paid for work they performed in 2010. My thoughts are that falling any further behind than that on pay is just simply not right. Either we can accomplish that or drastic cutbacks in our operations will have to be considered.

DECEMBER LABOR

Research Associate: Carson — $400 (3 weekly articles + 1/3 of 1 quarterly study)
News Analyst: Worden — $200 (2 weekly articles)
News Analyst: D’Amato — $300 (3 weekly articles)
Social Media Specialist: Litz — $320
Media Coordinator: Knapp — $640
Director: Spangler — $120

TOTAL: $1980

We also have a domain renewal coming up and we ought to shoot for at least an additional $200, both just to have on hand and as a start on raising money to cover January 2011 pay.

So, I’ve added $2200 to the amount showing that we’ve raised so far on our fundraising widget and made that total our new, revised goal that we basically MUST meet by the end of March.

$1,445 + $2,200 = $3645 [GOAL]

In the three weeks remaining in March, can we raise that $2,200? I believe so.

Please support our work. Click on the “Contribute!” button in the fundraising widget you’ll find on any page of our web site.

http://c4ss.org/

Regards,

Brad Spangler,
Director, Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS)

Letterman Questions His Betters

2011-03-04T09:49:00.000-08:00

At C4SS: Libertarian Mixed Feelings on Wisconsin

2011-03-02T21:53:00.000-08:00