Can you…
…appreciate the irony?
Blogroll update: delete Titanium Girl’s blog
Suggest deleting the URL titaniumgirl DOT blogspot DOT com from your blogrolls, folks.
From TG:
I deleted my blog and it didn’t take long for someone else to take the name over at blogspot. Now it’s a like a sex finder site and it’s NOT ME, I have nothing to do with it.
You probably want to delete it. Please pass this on to anyone that I do not know.
Counter-economics, bootstrapping a system of stateless law and the revolutionary redistribution of property
On the LeftLibertarian2 email list, I’ve recently corresponded with user Steohawk in response to his question about differences (and common ground) between mutualism and so-called “anarcho-capitalism”. I plan to try to provide a recap of my responses in a later post, which will hopefully be better edited and more extensive than my emails. For right now, though, here are the essential links:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LeftLibertarian2/message/12836
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LeftLibertarian2/message/12848
…followed by this additional blog commentary response to a comment of his. I’m responding on the blog in this case because this leads off on a tangent from the main thread, and one that I’ve been meaning to write about anyway.
Wrote Steohawk:
“My personal theory is that counter-economics will naturally lead to true property rights.”
While I can’t outline with certainty exactly what Steohawk meant by that, I can explain why I agree with his statement as formulated, with some qualifications.
Counter-economics is the essential agorist revolutionary praxis. As I wrote a while back:
Agorism is revolutionary market anarchism.
In a market anarchist society, law and security will be provided by market institutions, not political institutions. Agorists recognize, therefore, that those institutions can not develop through political reform. Instead, they will come about as a result of market processes.
As government is banditry, revolution culminates in the suppression of government by market providers of security and law. Market demand for such service providers is what will lead to their emergence. Development of that demand will come from economic growth in the sector of the economy that explicitly shuns state involvement (and therefore can not turn to the state in its role as monopoly provider of security and law). That sector of the economy is the counter-economy – black and grey markets.
Reading up on agorist revolutionary theory, we come to understand that the anarchist project of revolution is one of bootstrapping a system of Stateless law, one fully capable of suppressing the State (as the criminal gang we rightly recognize it as) while not becoming a de facto State itself. Anarchist theorists thus can be seen as prefigurative of the community of legal scholars that will forever be constantly refining the intellectual basis for the future enterprise of production of law (and security) in a stateless society, much as law professors constantly debate law amongst themselves right now and influence the broader law profession accordingly. If that sounds to hierarchical for some, I should point out that it would be a “hierarchy” built not on force but in specialized expertise and the persuasiveness of the various scholars arguments — a ruthless meritocracy in the study of logic and ethics, rather than rulership.
While thinkers such as Rothbard have emphasized the market’s tendency to weed out bad products and apply this to “law” as a product, tending to narrow “the law” down towards Rothbard’s natural law ideals, it’s also equally valid from that same perspective to note that markets tend to produce an efficient pluralism of consumer choices. Thus, I noted:
“Mutualists advocate a usufruct approach to property law, Rothbardian an-caps advocate Rothbardian property theory (a radically anti-state version of Lockean property theory — call it Lockeanism 2.0) and non-Rothbardian an-caps tend to have no theory of justice in property beyond existing property titles. Then there’s the geoists, but I’m not going there right now…
Mutualists and those Rothbardians that get along well with them tend to look at the two property theories as two seperate legal doctrines that could amicably compete in a stateless free market for arbitration services (i.e. “law” and “courts”). It may be a bit more involved than “metric vs. English”, but you hopefully get the drift.”
Which is not to say that all Rothbardians get along well with Mutualists, unfortunately. As I noted, a lot of the panarchistic attempted reconciliation of anarchist schools of thought that I advocate is in some ways attributable to moving beyond Rothbard’s so-called “anarcho-capitalism” to Konkin’s agorism and the resulting “anti-political” approach. As I noted in a blog comment:
“The slash mark you added between agorism and “anarcho-capitalism” is kind of at odds with the point I make over and over again, which is that they’re not the same thing. The addition of Konkin’s theory of revolution, better developed class theory and anti-political approach allows the incipient anti-capitalist implications of the Rothbardian strain of market anarchism (that agorism is built on and extends) to be more fully realized… I feel comfortable saying that I’m anti-capitalist because if we take Carson’s mutualist exposition “The Iron Fist Behind The Invisible Hand” as an acceptable [libertarian socialist] description of “capitalism”, then that is something I am 100% against and have been all along. I don’t have to agree with Carson about usufruct or the labor theory of value in order to agree with that particular Carson article…”
As I pointed out in the email discussion, Carson actually has done a lot of the intellectual “heavy lifting” for Rothbardians in his article “Libertarian Property and Privatization: An Alternative Paradigm”. It’s not “anarcho-capitalist” ideology per se that’s so messed up, but the existing movement’s culture and the pseudo-Randian tendency toward right-wing class sympathies that aren’t actually justified in the context of awareness of the current state-subsidized capitalist economic order. That doesn’t mean all “libertarian socialist” knee-jerk criticism of Rothbardians is unjustified (or justified), but that we’ve done a really crappy job of educating them about where we’re coming from because we haven’t had our own shit together. Without Konkin’s theory of revolution, refinement of libertarian class theory (agorist class theory), and anti-political approach; the default reformist libertarian electoral approach sabotages the effort to educate people about the important theoretical insights we actually do have to offer. They see you as pot-smoking Republicans because that’s what they see on the outside of the “black box” of your ideology. They see no reason to open the box and discover the treasures within. As Chuck Munson noted, all a cursory glance reveals is an effort to…
“…sell some sexed up crap being concocted at the Cato Institute.”
By standing outside statist libertarian policy debates on how to control the State (beyond perhaps the most obvious, such as “end the war”) and instead concentrating on seeking the destruction of the State, agorists are able to adopt an attitude and style that can be recognized as authentically anarchist.
But, let’s get back to Steohawk…
“My personal theory is that counter-economics will naturally lead to true property rights.”
We agorists are seeking to, ultimately, bootstrap a system of non-state law and thereby destroy the State as a system of oppression. The reformist libertarian, including milquetoast and right-leaning Rothbardians, by contrast is quixotically seeking to reform the State into fitting anti-state ideals. Square peg, meet round hole.
So, yes, the counter-economic revolution is the way to build liberatory protection for authentic property rights — including the revolutionary redistribution of property in accordance with Rothbardian property ethics that can’t be fully applied outside of a revolutionary scenario. That revolutionary redistribution of property and support for a fully free market that can accomodate voluntary cooperatives as a business model makes agorists fully as much “libertarian socialists” in just as much sense as Benjamin Tucker ever had claim to the term, while remaining implacably opposed to “socialism” in the sense that Mises defined the term (which is the sense Konkin was referring to when he said in various places that agorism is not “socialist”).
Some “anarcho-capitalists” might disagree with my advocacy of legalistic pluralism with regard to the matter of usufruct property theory and Rothbardian property theory as:
“…two seperate legal doctrines that could amicably compete in a stateless free market for arbitration services…”
To them, my reply is that they need to grasp that we are attempting to bootstrap a system of stateless law, one provided by the only “free” market — black markets or the “counter-economy“. Do they have confidence in the full ramifications of their own ideology? I do.
- The market can provide arbitration services.
- The market can provide property claim registration/publication services.
- The market can provide peaceful economic means of managing uncertainty about property claims, which uncertainty is fundamentally just the economically familiar matter of risk. That means, which already exists in a basic form, is called title insurance.
Interview: prominent anarchist and Yale Anthropology professor David Graeber
Prominent anarchist and Yale Anthropology professor David Graeber was on the Charlie Rose show recently and acquitted himself very well in my opinion. That’s hardly surprising, though, from the email correspondence I’ve had with him in relation to MDS and other matters. He really is the very smart, friendly and philosophical guy that he comes across as in the interview. While his background isn’t in the hardcore wing of the free-market libertarian movement referred to as market anarchism, mature MA’s with a good sense of our common ground with other anarchists will find little or nothing to object to. Don’t miss this rare treat.
Hat tip: Francois Tremblay
Shove this…
Shove this in the face of every ignorant and amoral wretch who ever dared to ask you if it would be better for Saddam to have remained in power…
Saddam asked Bush for $1bn to go into exile
It wasn’t toppling Saddam the Bushies wanted, but the war itself. They could have gotten rid of him cheaper and with less bloodshed. Bush literally wanted to waste lives and money — and he played to all of the racism, xenophobia, chauvinism and jingoistic nationalism that you bastards possess in order to do it, Republicans. The convenient naivete, cowardice and corruption of the Democrats is no better.
Regardless of one’s thoughts about actual religion, there are few words sufficient to describe such evil as the average war supporter has engaged in and enabled besides this one — “Satanic”.
Questions for Bakunin fans
Questions for Bakunin fans…
If the following excerpt from the summary of Bakunin’s collectivist anarchism on Wikipedia is approximately accurate:
“Collectivist anarchism (also known as anarcho-collectivism) is a doctrine spearheaded by Mikhail Bakunin that advocated the abolition of the state and private ownership of the means of production, with the means of production instead being owned collectively and controlled and managed by the producers themselves. Workers would be paid in democratic organizations based of the amount of time they contributed to production. These salaries would be used to purchase commodities in a communal market.”
1. Is there any reason not to consider each collective a “firm” or “company” for purposes of using the academic understanding of how markets work to bolster the case for the practicality of such a system of production?
2. Is the production of a service potentially just as valid of an economic pursuit for a collective as the production of material goods?
3. Is there any reason not to consider production of security the production of a legitimate service?
Is the Bush admin assassinating USAF airmen at Minot AFB?
The title of this post is an extraordinary question: “Is the Bush admin assassinating USAF airmen at Minot AFB?”
I didn’t expect to be asking any such question today. Even as much as I, an anarchist, despise any form of government; my mind instinctively recoils at the very possibility that question implies — not merely from horror at the notion, but just from natural skepticism. Even so, the potential importance of this matter, if the following report is true, is very, very grave.
Mystery surrounds deaths of Minot airmen [article text follows in its entirety for archival purposes]
Six members of the US Air Force who were involved in the Minot AFB incident, have died mysteriously, an anti-Bush activist group says.
The incident happened when a B-52 bomber was “mistakenly” loaded with six nuclear warheads and flown for more than three hours across several states, prompting an Air Force investigation and the firing of one commander.
The plane was carrying Advanced Cruise Missiles from Minot Air Force Base, N.D, to Barksdale Air Force Base on August 30.
The Air Combat Command has ordered a command-wide stand down on September 14 to review procedures, officials said.
The missiles, which are being decommissioned, were mounted onto pylons on the bomber’s wings and it is unclear why the warheads had not been removed beforehand.
In addition to the munitions squadron commander who was relieved of his duties, crews involved in the incident, including ground crew workers had been temporarily decertified for handling munitions.
The activist group Citizens for Legitimate Government said the six members of the US Air Force who were directly involved as loaders or as pilots, were killed within 7 days in ‘accidents’.
The victims include Airman First Class Todd Blue, 20, who died while on leave in Virginia. A statement by the military confirmed his death but did not say how he died.
In another accident, a married couple from Barksdale Air Force Base were killed in the 5100 block of Shreveport-Blanchard Highway. The two were riding a 2007 Harley-Davidson motorcycle, with the husband driving and the wife the passenger, police said.
“They were traveling behind a northbound Pontiac Aztec driven by Erica Jerry, 35, of Shreveport,” the county sheriff said. “Jerry initiated a left turn into a business parking lot at the same time the man driving the motorcycle attempted to pass her van on the left in a no passing zone. They collided.”
Adam Barrs, a 20-year-old airman from Minot Air Force Base was killed in a crash on the outskirts of the city.
First Lt. Weston Kissel, 28, a Minot Air Force Base bomber pilot, was killed in a motorcycle crash in Tennessee, the military officials say.
Police found the body of a missing Air Force captain John Frueh near Badger Peak in northeast Skamania County, Washington.
The Activist group says the mysterious deaths of the air force members could indicate to a conspiracy to cover up the truth about the Minot Air Base incident.
Now, this is a report from Iranian media, so to give “the devil” (the US government) “his due”, it must be noted that the Iranian government has an obvious potential interest in disinformation campaigns. That alone doesn’t make this disinformation, though.
The group cited, Citizens for Legitimate Government, is an actual US activist group and the report on the Iranian web site is linked to by a headline on the CLG web site. So it would appear that is really what CLG is saying, at the very least.
Beyond that, it’s not clear. Perhaps a little digging can turn up some other reports of the individual deaths. It’s not clear how we might or might not verify that the dead airmen cited were all involved with the misplaced cruise missile nuclear warheads incident (that was so widely considered a potential “black op” gone awry or called off at the last minute).
Even if all of those details are eventually verified, it does not definitely indicate they were “rubbed out” to cover the ass of a high political official — such as Dick Cheney, for instance. Coincidences and weird synchronicities really DO happen.
The problem, though, is that Occam’s Razor potentially cuts both ways. Sometimes, the most sensible explanation turns out to be a conspiracy after all.
Don’t look now…
Everybody, try to act natural. Slowly turn, smile and wave hello at the pachyderminoids.
When warmongers collude…
The ruling class, the political class, use war and statism generally to milk the productive class (the rest of us). Although their politicians compete against each other as gladiators in the political arena, they also exhibit their ruling class loyalties by cooperating in maintaining their system of oppression. For example, Bush is quietly advising Hillary Clinton and other Democrats on how to continue the war they all want:
Washington, D.C. - President Bush is quietly providing back-channel advice to Hillary Rodham Clinton, urging her to modulate her rhetoric so she can effectively prosecute the war in Iraq if elected president.
Vulgar Libertarianism Alert: Rockwell gets it wrong
While I have tremendous respect for Lew Rockwell and, indeed, his life has been one of absolutely remarkable dedication to the advancement of libertarian principles, he gets a fair amount of stuff wrong occasionally, as I see it. Sometimes, he’s very, very wrong. For example:
Another Criminal Strike — Strikes are not mass resignations, which are the workers’ right. Strikes are an attempt to punish employers and customers by temporary mass leavings, combined with violence or the threat of violence directed at “scabs,” people who would like to be workers at the prevailing wage. Thus the strike is entirely illegitimate. Of course, union coercion is backed by state coercion.
So now the UAW, one of the most-rotten of US unions, is striking against GM, complete with typical pro-union press coverage. It all reminds me of the ancient fable of the turtle giving a ride across the river to the scorpion, who then stings the turtle to death, so the scorpion dies as well.
This seems a far cry from Karl Hess’s question in The Libertarian Forum (June 15, 1969):
“What, for instance, might or should happen to General Motors in a liberated society?”
…that Carson noted Rothbard basically answered in Confiscation and the Homestead Principle that same issue.
Rothbard’s enumeration of potential answers spanned from anarcho-syndicalist style workers takeover by the specific workers at the enterprise (under “homesteading” doctrine for unowned property — in that the purported property of state-subsidized business is not legitimate private property), to pro-rata direct distribution of ownership to taxpayers all the way through full-blown Leninist style nationalization (as a prelude to purportedly authentic privatization).
Now, the UAW does use statist methods, as do most mainstream unions. But, then, most mainstream organizations of any sort are run by statists. It’s the default intellectual framework that it is our job as libertarians to undermine. Rockwell’s denunciation of the UAW, to the extent that he serves as a proxy for GM’s point of view in this instance, can be seen as an instance of the pot calling the kettle black. When one considers those UAW methods are used against a stereotypical pillar of the state subsidized corporatist economic order like (oh the irony, Mr. Hess…) General Motors, one can see there’s no true violation of the libertarian non-aggression principle occuring. A Rothbardian analysis, such as the one supplied by Rothbard, shows that libertarians have “no dog in that fight”, at the very least. As for me, I give at least qualified/nominal support to the UAW.
