BradSpangler.com

In response to news of the arrest of 17 students at the University of Virginia…

Perhaps the worst victims of statism are rank and file employees of state-owned enterprises. State monopolization of social services and community institutions is the flip side of the coin accompanying the cartelization of the private sector on behalf of plutocratic forces. As opportunities for the common person to do for themself and each other are constrained within the monopolistic framework of state capitalism, some are tragically faced with little realistic choice but to sell their labor to the state. Soul-crushing regimentation within the dry and sterile bureaucracies of government or government-allied corporations are not the way human beings are meant to live and work.

Agorists provide a framework for less consistent libertarians to understand why not every government employee is our enemy, despite implacable opposition to government. That framework is Agorist Class Theory. To accept that the state is banditry but simultaneously deny that the poorest among us are undoubtedly among those who have been stolen from the most (in one fashion or another) is not rational.

Against that backdrop, libertarians ought to re-evaluate their historic hostility to labor organizing. In a genuinely free market, all would rightfully have the opportunity to seek and negotiate the best deal for themselves and their associates that they can. If whatever price the market will bear is good for the plutocrat, it’s just as good for the worker negotiating wages. Personally, I’m proud to be a dues paying IWW member.

With regard to state-owned enterprises in particular, the diversion of state funds into paying rank and file workers greater wages saps the resources the state has available to put to more destructive uses. To the agorist revolutionary, this has the added benefit of hastening the meltdown of the state, based on the financial strains from its own internal contradictions. Those contradictions are namely, that it seeks to provide “services” via stolen money while limiting opportunities for those services to be mutualized or provided through other non-state means. As Austrian economics informs us, it’s not genuinely a service without voluntary, willing payers.

Let me now draw your attention to the University of Virginia, where SDS members have been supporting the campaign to seek a living wage for rank and file University workers. From the UVA Living Wage Campaign web site:

Our Demands:

Our basic demand remains the same as always: All University employees, whether directly employed or hired through outside firms, must be paid a living wage of at least $10.72 per hour before benefits, adjusted at least annually to inflation and the cost of living in Charlottesville. Complete implementation also requires the following:

*Prioritization of currently employed workers. In implementing the living wage policy and in related organizational changes, no jobs, wages, or benefits will be eliminated or decreased as a result. Ultimately, the University has a responsibility to all members of its Community of Trust, and if contractors prefer to disengage from the University rather than respect our commitment to social justice, the University has an obligation to prioritize the employment of any workers who work under those contractors, and ensure that their job status at the University will not be eliminated as a result.

*Creation of an oversight committee. A committee should be formed to ensure fair and complete implementation of the agreed upon policy. This committee must include workers, students, faculty and administrators, and must work within the timeline of implementing this living wage policy by the first day of the 2006 Fall Semester.

Because our sit-in has been seriously considered and undertaken with the best interest of the University deeply at heart, we also demand that no one suffer disciplinary consequences or civil liability as a result of participation in these acts of peaceful civil disobedience. These immunity guidelines have routinely been demanded and met in the dozens of student sit-ins that have taken place nationally during the last decade.

The administration takes responsibility for ensuring that the University is a leader in terms of the students it produces, the faculty it attracts, and the research it does, but fails in the moral vision that it offers to the world. We will take that responsibility for this University that we love, and will continue to sit-in until our conditions are met.

Heroic student activists are paying a price for their support of University workers, though.

Urgent Support Needed for Arrested UVA Students!

At around 7PM today, all 17 of the students who have been participating in the sit-in for living wages at UVA were dragged by police officers from Madison Hall and arrested. This was the end of the fourth day of the sit-in. Students had been denied food during the sit-in, and after a grueling evening of negotiation with President Casteen that lasted until almost 4am, all their demands were denied during the day. They were informed that Casteen would be gone until Tuesday, and the arrests began after he left.

To make matters worse, the food that was provided by students and faculty, that had finally been allowed inside Madison Hall late last night was with withheld from the students and thrown out after their arrest, much of it untouched or unopened. The Living Wage Team recovered this food and will take it to a local food pantry.

President Casteen would rather put the physical and academic well-being of his students in jeopardy than consider paying decent wages to UVA workers. This is an outrage! Demand that President Casteen support living wages NOW.

That page ends with a borderline reformist appeal, urging readers to use the form provided to protest the arrest of the students and ask the university to meet the demands of the living wage campaign. It occurred to me that since agorists would not lobby the state — as we want it to do nothing but die (in its incarnation as an institution of coercion and oppression, anyway) — that perhaps one could split the difference and just edit the form to protest the arrest. While that remains an option for some, there is a more genuinely revolutionary approach available — the counter-economic approach.

I call upon UVA students on the ground to form a Movement of the Libertarian Left (MLL) cell to carry on the propaganda struggle locally at the UVA campus.

I urge them to educate themselves on matters of revolutionary doctrine, as outlined in New Libertarian Manifesto and Agorist Class Theory.

I urge them to educate their peers on the subtleties and complexities of the agorist defense of property rights as they arise in a Radical Lockean context, application of the homestead principle to unowned property. State assignations of property title are fraudulent when they contravene that principle and both State property and property of State allies are morally forfeit, as the State is merely a bandit gang. All state assets are in actuality unowned property, as is that of close state allies that are obviously members of the political class, as explained in Agorist Class Theory.

In short, President Casteen may or may not be more likely to negotiate if, suddenly, everything on campus that isn’t nailed down starts disappearing. That is irrelevant to the matter of whether or not “five-fingered homesteading” is ethically justified when we’re talking about state property. It is.

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