At Strike the Root, Per Bylund has made one of the most salient points about anarchism one can make:
It seems many anarchists can't think out of the box: they want something "instead of" the state, and so they put a lot of thought into making plans and defining what society they would want to see. The problem is that they think so much about this dream of theirs that they get stuck in the system they call anarchism. But anarchism isn't a system, it is non-system. Anarchism is spontaneous order, not contrived order.This is the terrifying part of the story: the system approach many anarchists subscribe to is a product of their inability to get rid of their boxed thinking. They are stuck with a statist mindset. They have managed to get rid of thinking of the state as some kind of guarantee, but they still can't get rid of the idea that there must be a guarantee. But as we all should know: there are no guarantees!
Understanding that there are no guarantees means you are an anarchist, and it is liberating in the way that you don't have to replace systems with other systems. If there is no guarantee, there is no reason for a state (since it cannot guarantee anything anyway), and there is also no reason for replacing it with some other system.
This is such an important point that it bears repeating: anarchism is the absence of the State. Period. It is not a replacement system any more than atheism is an alternative diety to God. The simple fact that we have to have a philosophy that is defined by the lack of some other philosophy demonstrates how pernicious this fiction of the State is.
It's similar to a point I made earlier last year, but Bylund has made the point much plainer and penetrating. The question of how we convince people to abandon the trap of systems thinking and replace it with nothing still exists, though I do have some thoughts on leveling the field of conceptual possibilities.
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(UPDATED 1/12/07 - go to update) Well, folks, Right Thinking Girl is at it again. She's been at it all along, more or less, but there's only so many bloggable hours in a day (and I needed a break). As a matter of fact, she actually makes a novel point in her latest: ridiculing Bush as a fascist totalitarian actually implies a particular history of fascism and totalitarianism. That's a valid (if somewhat obvious) point.
It's sad that a concept pregnant with possibilities for better understanding human nature and current events suffers the same fate as all her barely conscious kneejerk posts. This unwritten rule RTG invariably follows, as best I can understand it, is to make some salient observation, followed by haphazardly projecting abstractions or free associations onto it (in other words, to rant). Thus, a somewhat thoughtful idea becomes yet another excuse to channel crude Coulter-esque nationalism masquerading as reflective observation. Even her best ideas have to be clumsily shoehorned into her fascist framework.
Case in point: she points out that direct comparisons between 20th century totalitarians and Bush are not justified. Since Bush hasn't killed as many people as Hitler or Stalin, comparing them on ANY terms is in bad faith. The source of this bad faith, of course, is typical: moral and mental weakness / depravity. Us liberals just can't wrap our heads around the conservative morality because we see everything as symbols disconnected from the weightiness of actual reality.
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Battlepanda is embarrassed by us on the radical fringe who - GASP - actually realize that Democratic politicians share responsibility for the war in Iraq. And it's not that we disagree on outcomes, but rather on tactics:
However, when it comes down to tactics, I have to say I cannot stand the radical left. I've been to one anti-war protest only, in Boston. At the time it left me with a reasonable warm-fuzzy feeling even as I realized that it accomplished nothing. But there were elements of the protest that made me cringe. The homemade "no blood for oil" and generic George W. = Dumb type signs, the floats, the "hey hey, ho ho" chants. Now I look upon the protest with some measure of embarrassment. The whole protest culture which Sheehan is perhaps the premier participant in leaves me utterly cold. I understand how somebody who grew up during times when protests proved to be more momentous would disagree violently, but in this day and age, they are the sideshow.
But it's not like her alternative - going along to get along - is doing much good. The newly installed Democrat majority, it turns out, isn't so far from Bush on Iraq. A lot of the anti-war momentum for Democrats was an exercise in classic straw man politics, according to AntiWar.com's Justin Raimondo:
...the President is not proposing an "open-ended commitment" - at least, explicitly. He still maintains that we can begin to withdraw as soon as the Iraqi military is up to par. If you sweep away the rhetorical flourishes, and the political posturing, the Democratic position of "phased redeployment" isn't much different than the course we're already on.
And why is it only the President's responsibility to come up with a new "plan" for Iraq? Didn't more than a few Democrats vote for this war? Okay, so the Democrats are against an "open-ended commitment" - what do they propose, instead? "Phased redeployment" is phrase-making pure and simple, but what does it mean, concretly?
This gives a new twist to the frequent Republican screeches of not "having a plan". We've just been assuming that the Democrats don't have a plan at all, ignoring the possibility that maybe their plan just isn't original.
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It always excites me to find a new blog to read, especially when it covers a variety of topics and is well written. Something tells me that a brand new blog from X. Trapnel will be just that. I found it via a recent post at the Technology Liberation Front blog in which Tim Lee critiques Trapnel's argument that intellectual property apologism is a version of Bastiat's "broken window" fallacy:
Just as in the Bastiat story, you have the helpful onlooker who says "But everyone must live, and what would become of innovation if every innovator could have his insight copied by the first free-rider who came along?" Just as in the Bastiat story, this is wrong. What is seen is the way in which the protected firm uses his IPR to generate monopoly profits, some of which are then plowed back into R&D, generating a pleasant stream of innovation. What is not seen is what would happen in the absence of this protection: the innovator would have to keep innovating in order to maintain his market, leveraging his expertise into further productive developments, while newcomers would be able to experiment on their own with the knowledge produced by the first. Money that once went to monopoly rents would go instead to other, more productive things--including further innovation.
The neo-Schumpeterian retort is that this is hopelessly naive: innovation requires large capital investment and the reasonable hope of monopoly rents to recoup it. But this is mere question-begging, and its plausibility lies, again, with the distinction between What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen: when we give innovators monopoly privileges of this sort, we thereby tilt the playing field dramatically towards heavily capitalized firms by jacking up the costs of the inputs (eg., prior innovations, a skilled legal team, insurance against lawsuits) to production. As a result, What Is Seen is capital-intensive innovation; What Is Not Seen is the less capital-intensive innovation that the legal regime has stamped out. (my emphasis)
Indeed, this argument parallels Kevin Carson's position on patents and intellectual property: the State intervenes to purposely distort the economy towards capital-intensive production in order to ensure big business controls the avenues to technological innovation:
The patent privilege has been used on a massive scale to promote concentration of capital, erect entry barriers, and maintain a monopoly of advanced technology in the hands of western corporations. It is hard even to imagine how much more decentralized the economy would be without it. (my emphasis)
Of course, "What Is Not Seen" is no easier to demonstrate in this day and age than it was in Bastiat's. It is this failure of the imagination that I believe partially motivates Lee's critique. Failing to identify the "broken window" at play in Trapnel's argument, he misidentifies the losses expended on maintaining intellectual property.
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Via the Agonist, this post by Angry Bear brings up a good point about institutional political speech:
I'm no attorney, but my understanding is that political campaign donations are largely considered to be speech. If I understand correctly, the idea is that the First Amendment not only gives me the right to speak, it also gives me the right to let someone else speak for me. Since I can use my resources to publicize my own speech, I should be able to use my resources to publicize speech someone else makes in my stead.
There's a problem with that… There are costs to speech. For example, I can say I think Greg Mankiw is a hack and there will likely be no consequences. However, if I outright call Greg Mankiw a hack, I can be sued for libel.
Similarly, if a PAC calls a Jack a hack, the Jack can whack the PAC with a suit. But, I, as a donor, am not subject to the suit. So if donating money to a PAC is free speech, it seems to be a very strange kind of free speech, one with no consequences. I would think it makes sense to either put limits on money in politics, or to open up donations to the same sort of libel laws to which regular speech is subject.
Indeed. Now, I'm not arguing that the ACLU and PACs should be barred from politics. However, we must understand that in a political climate where corporations and other institutions with agendas and limited liability dominate, the only way to systemically combat them is through yet more institutions. As these institutions direct the game more and more, the individuals who are affected by their actions have less and less participatory say. They become amoral functions in a system, abstract "interests", rather than actors with rights and responsibilities to balance in the course of their lives with other human beings.
The domain of politics is irretrievably out of scale with the kinds of interests an individual can authentically comprehend in any moral sense - the only sense in which "rights" have any consequence. Perhaps we should worry less about whether both sides of any given issue have institutional advocates and ask: can meaningful politics can occur through these abstract mechanisms? Or is there something about an individual that is irreducible and intimately connected with the rights articulated by the authors of our Constitution?
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From the LeftLibertarian mailing list, Kevin Carson summarizes a key element of his economic and political philosophy that I think some don't grasp: mutualism endeavors to describe an individual's natural and self-directed patterns of production and consumption.
...the main thing is that when some significant level of productive labor is required, there is need for equating the disutility of the labor of production with the utility of the good consumed. As a market socialist in the old individualist anarchist tradition, I believe that economic privilege has destabilizing effects on capitalism precisely because it breaks the link between effort expended and consumption. It shifts part of the laborer's rightful product to a rentier, so that the laborer has to produce more than he otherwise would to achieve a given level of consumption, while the rentier's superfluous income unconnected to effort piles up (see also J.A. Hobson). With the kind of market price mechanism the old free market anti-capitalist envisioned, labor's wage would be its full product and would tie effort and consumption together, thus preventing destabilizing crises of overproduction/underconsumption.
And these observations don't require a crude economic man model. They simply presume that, no matter how much the laborer enjoys his work, the enjoyment will probably reach the point of diminishing returns before he produces the equivalent of what he consumes. And on the other hand, people will be just a little less constrained in their consumption when it isn't tied to the exchange of their own labor.
Without acknowledging this central argument of mutualism, many critiques fail to address the heart of the philosophy. This vital balance between consumption and production that is irreducibly struck within the individual's purposeful actions comprises the bread and butter of mutualist thought. Criticize the economic models and historical scholarship of Carson if you must; but to ignore the assertion of a natural, intuitive equilibrium is really to miss the point, regardless of whether or not you think that point is correct.
So one can see why mutualists insist upon the labor theory of value. It is not, in fact, some devious plot to introduce creeping statism. When the market is seen as a way of balancing individual production and consumption over the long run, it is the labor theory that informs the long term workings of the political economy best. In the short term, where immediate market conditions demand explanation, it is the subjective theory of value that fits best (which not only Carson, but other labor theorists have conceded). It really comes down to which dynamics of human behavior do you want to explain over what period of time - not which view is absolutely right and which is absolutely mistaken! The true fear of the vulgar capitalist libertarian is that the market might be the best way of achieving an egalitarian balance between consumption and production - far better than the easy target of the socialist state.
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Happy New Year, y'all. Just want to check in and say hey.
On Friday the 29th I attended the Molinari Institute symposium at the APA Conference in DC. It was relatively painless to take the train from Richmond, and it gave me a chance to play with my new iPod. It's amazing how easily you can get around if you're close to an Amtrak station. Reminds me of my time in Germany, where I could literally take my bike anywhere in Europe via the train.
Anyway, Roderick Long has a nice, succinct retrospective on the event. I must say I enjoyed the presentations very much - the first by Matt MacKenzie on a libertarian understanding of exploitation; the second by Geoffrey Plauche on the statist cult's reliance on the myth of "founders." Also, I got to meet Long, MacKenzie, and Plauche as well as Charles Johnson, Laura, and Nick Manley in the flesh. That's, like, half the left libertarian blogosphere right there.
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When I first heard of Barr cozying up to the Libertarian Party, I thought I was trapped in the twilight zone. According to Reason's Hit and Run blog, though, Bob Barr - former drug zealot in Congress - has come around on the drug war. There's talk of him assuming a leadership position within the party apparatus. Even Ron Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project has come out in favor of him, and those guys went at it pretty hard when Barr was in office. So now he's talking about states rights on drug laws and research into medical marijuana only years after having fought those proposals tooth and nail. He also acknowledges that the War on Drugs is a failure.
I don't have any problem with people reassessing their beliefs and principles, reflecting on their actions, and having a change of heart. But the LP orchestrated a campaign during his final election to get him thrown from office. I find it hard to believe that a politician (an incurable condition if there ever was one) is willing not only to forgive that but to convert to their positions. If the LP has any sense whatsoever, they will throw Bob out on his ass.
Sorry I've been so sparse lately... there's not really any good excuse for it. I've noticed that my blogging is governed by a cycle of sorts, and I have to go through a down time to get back to where I feel I have something worth saying. Right now I'm pretty immersed in John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education, which is such a profound work that I'm really trying to absorb it all. I'm also trying to work through a reread of Carson's book to inform discussions with my friend Brady. In addition to that I've been working my ass off since I came back from the place at which I was contracting. Now I'm working closely with one of my bosses on a Ruby on Rails web application and I'm having a blast. It feels good to really be enjoying work, though.
So we just had Christmas dinner with Tasha's family and right now she and I are watching Rushmore. Since I got some down time I thought I'd just say Merry Christmas and, well, I'm not dead. I'm going to try to make the Molinari Society symposium on Friday, so if you're into market anarchism you should check it out.
Peace.
The laugh-a-minute just continues: Right Thinking Girl has made some revealing comments lately as she laments the loss of her politicians to other politicians. Once again, in trying to say something actually interesting, she reveals her true nature as a bigoted idiot.
Check out some of the whoppers she's been slinging lately, like this one:
Attempting to minimize casualties sounds wonderful. It sounds ‘enlightened' and noble - but when you do that, you're transfering the enemy's deaths to our death rolls. If the opponent hides behind children - it pains me to say this - but we should shoot the children. It disgusts me, just as I am sure that disgusts you. But if they know that they can hide behind children and Americans won't shoot, guess where they will hide. They will shoot us from protected positions, resulting in more of our deaths.
Aww, it disgusts her. How touching. And please - let's not talk about the reasons we're over there shooting kids or the underlying context for grown men hiding behind children (assuming this strategy is actually employed and is not simply a convenient cover story for errant weapons).
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This weekend I'll be at in Mathews to attend the annual kiln opening at the Poddery, the studio where my wife works. I usually just drink beer and direct cars, but if you like ceramics you should definitely check it out.
This is just disgusting. In a post entitled Rise of the Libertarian Left in the Mountain West, Kos makes left libertarianism sound like orgiastic fawning for the regulatory State. Instead of observing that meddling in private moral issues, waging wars, and corruption cost Republicans the election, he draws a sweeping conclusion intended to redefine libertarianism into a pet project of the progressive liberal family:
The other half [of the argument for the libertarian Democrat] is the realization that global capitalism is now just as much a threat to personal liberties as is government, and that judicious governmental regulation will oftentimes be the only thing separating us from heavy corporate intrusion, be it on privacy issues, property rights issues, or whatever. Privacy, self-determination, opportunity, fairness, the cultivation of an entrepreneurial small-business environment. We cannot have personal liberties without those values.
The problem here is that he's turning libertarianism - and left libertarianism in particular - on its head. Left libertarians do oppose the particular form of globalization we're experiencing. Some of us even voted for Democrats this past election cycle (or on a regular basis). And we certainly don't see Republican hypercorporatism as any help in the matter.
But there's more to us. When we look at the situation, we see supranational, ueberstatist bureaucracies like the WTO running the game, undercutting domestic self determination and strong arming less developed nations. We see an IMF bent on keeping corrupt third world countries in continual debt. We see tax policies and accounting pressures that encourage outsourcing overseas. We see businessmen using the corporate structure enshrined in U.S. law to bully people at home and abroad. From where I'm standing, it looks like regulations and various government intrusions in the market are the problem, not the solution.
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Inspired by Jim, I should let you guys in on what I've been reading lately.
- Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country by William Greider: anybody who wants to really understand the subtle nature of power in this country needs to read this book. I think it's a very fair treatment of the economic hegemony the financial elite exert over the otherwise innocent, productive masses. It poses the right questions and reads very easily and actually dovetails with Carson's book in several important ways, including his theory of overaccumulation. Throughout the book Greider builds a running metaphor of monetary policy as a religious endeavor, complete with priests, faith in mystery, and a curious "morality" which I found very engaging (Jim less so).
- New Libertarian Manifesto (PDF here) by Samuel Edward Konkin III: this is to agorism what the Communist Manifesto was the Marxists and the Port Huron Statement was to the New Left. While it seems like more of a breadth first survey of Konkin's new libertarianism (as does Agorist Class Theory - PDF here) it contains profound ideas about the full revolutionary and subversive potential of countereconomics. I get the feeling that Konkin fully intended to flesh this stuff out more than was previously done, and I'm keen to find his other writing.
- The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto: I've been reading this book online but the print edition is worth the money. In order to understand the predicament of today's schools and attempt an authentic reform, Gatto finds he must challenge the full historical orthodoxy of the managerial, centralized, corporatist state - along with the convenient culture they've semi-purposefully engineered over the past 150 years. By analyzing the people behind the scenes of the development of compulsory schooling, Gatto paints a picture that will shake your belief in America's founding principles to its very core. I will certainly be blogging more about this book in the future; it's implications are absolutely revolutionary.
- The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy by Charles R. Morris: I just started reading this because I'm very interested in the climate that changed America from the agrarian, individualist, entrepreneurial nation it was into the consolidated corporatist state we now occupy. I've heard so many conflicting accounts of the late 19th century history concerning the "robber barons" that I really can't take anything for granted. I'd appreciate any other suggestions for reading on this period as well.
So looks like the Democrats picked up some major street cred the other night. Yay for them.
I'm still not entirely comfortable with the fact that I voted a straight Dem ticket, mostly because I feel I lack a sufficiently rigorous philosophical basis for doing so. I feel that voting undercuts my spiritual separation from the State. Also, while there's no doubt that rejecting Republicans was the moral way forward and that divided government is likely better than a one-party legislative and executive branch, Democrats still agree on far too much with them: corporatism, drug laws, substantive change in Iraq, police militarization, etc. Their disagreements are either trivial or procedural.
So don't let down your guard yet. I'm hopeful Dems will roll back some of the more egregious offenses of the Bush Admin, but I'm not holding my breath. Such a development would fly in the face of American political history.
We'll see. In the meantime: AGORA! ANARCHY! ACTION!
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