Without the state

Give away food and end up in handcuffs - it's the America Way.

 

A group in Orlando Florida giving out food in a local park are being regularly arrested by the police. 

Related articles

• "Orlando Food Not Bombs" and related posts (blogs.alternet.org)

links for 2011-06-18

• Critiques Of Libertarianism: Environmentalism.
  (tags: libertarianism environment critique)

On George Orwell

Orwell’s most famous works are not in fact an abandonment of socialism at all. George Orwell remained until his death in 1950 an adherent to the socialist cause, stating that “every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly and indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.” Attempting to write off socialism by equating the idea with Soviet communism is nothing new of course, as anyone who has ever had an argument with a simple-minded conservative will be aware. “It didn’t work” or “you didn’t learn anything from Russia” they will say, as if there was ever a prolonged period in the former USSR when the workers really were in control.

From Orwell was one of us at Obliged to offend

“Public Service”? I’m Taking My Business Elsewhere - post at C4SS by Kevin Carson

I keep reblogging stuff from C4SS - that's because they are damn good. Most of them, especially Kevin Carson, the author of this one, don't fall for the millennialist delusion that all can change overnight if only [insert your own fantasy here].

Steven Cohen, writing at Huffington Post (“We Need to Respond to the Attack on Public Service,” June 13), writes that “the profound and intensifying attack on government and public service” is cause to be “frightened.”

Let me start by saying I’ve fallen afoul of many libertarians by defending public sector employees like those in Wisconsin against reflexive charges of parasitism.  If they’re engaged in a legitimate function like teaching kids or delivering mail that would still exist on a voluntary basis even in a stateless society, and the state currently crowds out voluntary alternatives, they’re no more blameworthy than the workers in Soviet state-owned factories.

And I’ve argued that public sector unions frequently empower such workers against those at the top rungs of the state, and might be a useful tool for genuine privatization — i.e., Proudhon’s vision of devolving state functions into voluntary social relationships.  That means, instead of the right-wing “privatization” agenda of auctioning off government functions to crony capitalist corporations, mutualizing them as consumer cooperatives owned by the recipients of services. Anyway, I’ll proudly back a teachers’ union local against a superintendent of schools, any day of the week.

Nevertheless, the term “public service” really activates my gag reflex.  Like “statesmanship” and “reaching across the aisle,” it belongs in the kind of drinking game you play when you see managerial centrist hacks like David Gergen, Chris Matthews and David Brooks gathering to feed on a cable news talking head show.

On any given day, if you follow Radley Balko’s blog, you can see stories of “public servants” planting evidence on suspects, launching no-knock home invasions in which they shoot pets and wave guns at children (all over the peaceful ingestion of substances the state decided to “forbid”), and sending people to prison on testimony from jailhouse snitches coerced into perjuring themselves.  The “public servants” in the prison guard and police unions lobby the state for ever more draconian and invasive extensions of the Drug War.  The “public servants” in airports subject their public “clientele” to degradation and humiliation on a daily basis.

Every “public servant” in the Oval Office in my lifetime has launched wars of aggression that murdered innocent civilians by the thousands or hundreds of thousands, and the “public servants” in the military-industrial complex spend hundreds of billions maintaining garrisons in an empire of thousands of bases around the world, all to “defend” us against countries on the other side of the world that couldn’t possibly project military force more than a few hundred miles beyond their own borders.  And all these wars are case studies in the kind of “public-private partnership” Cohen lionizes, fought in the interest of the esteemed Generals Motors, Electric and Mills.

Cohen does admit that the federal government is “too far removed” from much of what it deals with, and recommends federalism — decentralizing a large part of policy to local governments — as a remedy.  Most of us on the Left have seen the sausage-making process in action in local government, especially as regards Cohen’s much-vaunted “infrastructure,” and it ain’t pretty.  The average local government may be “responsive” to the Rotary Club yahoos who run things (they’re real fond of phrases like “public service” there, as well), but certainly not to us.  The typical local government is a showcase property of local real estate developers, and its primary function is to provide below cost roads and utilities to the new cul-de-sacs and big box stores that spring up at every cloverleaf of the new government-subsidized freeway.

Cohen’s red herring about the big ideological war between “capitalism” and “communism” is beside the point.  It presupposes some sort of rivalry between government and business, when in fact big government liberals have been — in the words of Roy Childs — “the running dogs of big businessmen.”

As far as I’m concerned, most of the rivalry between the so-called “public” and “private” sectors in American political discourse is about as genuine as that between the “good cop” and “bad cop” in a police interrogation room.  What’s referred to as the “private sector,” by the sort of right-wing corporate apologists who typically pass themselves off as “libertarian,” is so state-cartelized and state-subsidized that the boundary between the giant corporation in the monopoly capital sector and the giant government agency is, at best, quite blurry.

The big business interests to whom self-proclaimed “free market advocates” like Dick Armey want to hand over the country are virtual creations of the state.

So Cohen’s aside that he “taught management to future public managers for about thirty years” sets off alarm bells for me.  I’ve worked in both the “public” and “private” sectors, and seen deskbound parasites in both places downsize service staff while sending themselves to cushy management retreats.   One pointy-haired boss is pretty much the same as another.

In fact Cohen is an advocate for just the kind of government-corporate collusion that has defined actually existing capitalism for the past 150 years or more.  He argues that “[T]he economic powers of the 21st century will be those that figure out how to develop a productive and sophisticated relationship between government and the private sector.”

That’s certainly true, all right.  The “economic powers” we have right now — several hundred transnational corporations that dominate the global economy — owe their size, if not their very existence, to a “partnership” with government.  It’s the kind of partnership where government subsidizes their basic operating expenses and allows them to externalize the inefficiency costs of large size on taxpayers, severely limits price and quality competition through regulatory cartels, and enforces so-called “intellectual property” laws as entry barriers from behind which privileged corporate pigs can extract rents on artificial scarcity.

Just look at Cohen’s examples.  There’s the USDA-agribusiness complex, which (parroting Cargill propaganda) he says made America “the world’s breadbasket.”  And of course, beloved of all true liberals, the Interstate Highway System — built under the direction of DOD Secretary Charles “What’s good for General Motors” Wilson, and which is now the basis for the big box “warehouses on wheels” business model that has destroyed Main Street.

In short, government at all levels provides the kind of “public service” you have a hard time escaping if you don’t want it.  It’s understandably popular with the “public” of corporate fat cats and coupon-clipping rentiers.  But whoever the customer is for such “public service,” it’s not you and me.

C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

 

Battleground God

Battleground God.

A drug on the market...

 

Image via Wikipedia

There are four ways of distributing drugs. One is licensed premises, one is just ordinary retail markets, one is through the doctor, and the other one is through organised crime. Why all the3 governments have decided on this last option as the way to do it, I don't know.

 

Howard Marks in an interview in The Philosophers' Magazine 54

links for 2011-06-05

• Japanese Woodblock Prints from Toshidama Gallery.
  (tags: woodblock, japanese japanesewoodblock gallery)

If This Is the Free Market, Why Do I Feel So Unfree? - post at C4SS by Kevin Carson

It’s remarkable, considering how frequently our politicians and cable news commentariat remind us of the “free market” we live in, just how existentially unfree things seem down here where the rubber meets the road.  We constantly see the Washington Consensus and the neoliberal order equated to “our free market system.”  But as I always understood it, a free market was simply a system of free exchange.  So why does this so-called “free market system” seem to require, for its survival, a regime of totalitarian lockdown that resembles Verhoeven’s take on “Starship Troopers”?

Never mind stuff like the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, and the United States government’s perpetual wars to make the world safe for corporate domination.  What I’m more interested in is the forms of authoritarianism we encounter on a daily basis, as a direct adjunct of maintaining what the neoliberals consider a “free market” as such.  We see increasingly draconian restrictions on the most basic rights of free speech, an upward ratcheting of the surveillance state, and all sorts of other forms of authoritarian intrusion we’d normally associate with something like the old communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union — and all in the name of “our free market system.”

Take, for example, “intellectual property” — a state-granted monopoly which is central to the corporate neoliberal order falsely called “the free market,” but which has precious little to do with anything remotely resembling an actual free market.  Your internet service provider isn’t a business firm that performs a service for you — the paying customer — so much as an adjunct of the RIAA and MPAA and their lackies in government.  Your ISP spies on you on behalf of Big Content to make sure you’re not making any big torrent downloads.

Ever get a threatening phone call from your ISP?  You might as well be hired by them, rather than the reverse.  Ever get a DMCA takedown notice?  Ever have a website taken down by your host in response to a mere unsubstantiated complaint?  Welcome to “our free market system.”

Remember the Pinkertons, the uniformed private thugs the bosses used to hire to bust union organizers’ heads?  Now Monstanto hires them to snoop around private farms, testing the DNA of farmers’ crops to see if they contain any genetic material from genetically engineered seeds under patent.  For example the Runyons, an Indiana farm family, were invaded in 2008 by Monsanto’s hired goons in response to an “anonymous tip” that their farm hosted Roundup-ready soybeans.  Sounds almost like — ahem — the Drug War, doesn’t it?  Never mind that the Runyons never planted Monsanto’s seed.  Never mind that their crops were contaminated — very much against their will — by GMO pollen blowing over from a neighbor’s farm.  You might think it was the Runyons who had a cause of action for the contamination of their crops with frankenfood DNA.  But not in our so-called “free market system.”  In this thing the neoliberals call a “free market,” being contaminated by Monsanto DNA — even against your will — is prima facie evidence of “piracy.”  You’re guilty until proven innocent.

Orwell once observed that after 1914, the states of the 20th century were resurrecting forms of torture and atrocity that had been largely unknown since the Inquisition.  Likewise, under “our free market system,” we’re seeing a resurgence of — believe it or not — debtors’ prison.  In the “old days” — as recently as the 1990s — creditors would attempt to collect debts in-house, and then write them off.  Now debt collection agencies buy up debts for pennies on the dollar.  After serving process at an address where you lived three moves ago, they get you declared in contempt in absentia and jailed.  Or you might just find your bank account cleaned out by your bank in collusion with the creditors, without any warning.

And then there’s “food libel laws” and FDA restrictions on commercial speech.  If you label your milk rBGH-free, you can expect to be muscled by Monsanto’s lawyers.  The very act of informing your customers your milk lacks rBGH constitutes disparagement of the frankenmilk from those factory dairies, you see.  If you advertise that you inspect your meat for Mad Cow Disease more frequently than the USDA requires, you’re disparaging your competitors by implying that simply meeting the regulatory standard — a standard based on SOUND SCIENCE! — is somehow inadequate.  And somebody’s feelings might get hurt.

Never mind all the rhetoric you hear about “our free market system” on CNBC or read on the WSJ editorial page.  If it requires the kind of statist authoritarianism we used to associate with the Soviet Union, it’s not a free market.

C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.