Without the state

New name, new domain

In a few hours time, you will be able to access this blog using a new domain www.withoutthestate.com. The old typepad domain will still work, but I will be using the new domain in all links etc from now on. This coincides with the new name and strapline.

The inspiration for the name is twofold. First is my strong belief is that the state is taking to much to itself, crowding out what should be the normal activities of civil society, working 'without the state'. That doesn't mean buying in to the empty rhetoric of Cameron's 'Big Society' masking as that does an anti-social agenda of priority to corporate interests over the personal.The second is the related idea of working outside the state - 'outwith' in the Scots usage - as an end in itself in a process of building institutions one by one as in the strap line, which is the old 'Wobblies' slogan.

 COLIN WARD (Image via Wikipedia)

Although I would not describe myself as an anarchist this is all heavily influenced by the work of the late Colin Ward, in particular his book 'Anarchy in Action'' who was in turn influenced by Gustav Landauer.

This will also mean an end to the arts based posts on this blog. These will move to a new blog still under development, which will combine a broad based arts blog with a new sale site for my own artwork. The domain name for that will also be new, although it currently redirects to a site hosted by Clicpic.

The decision to do this has developed out of work on a business plan for my art business which is testing out a process in e-book on business planning for working artists. I'll post details of that site when it is ready.

The other big change will be the removal of many of the sites in the blogrolls here and their move to the new site.

In Egypt, as Everywhere, Anarchy is Order -post at C4SS by Kevin Carson

In press commentary on the recent events in Egypt, there were frequent expressions of concern that Egypt might be falling into “anarchy.”  “Anarchy,” in conventional journalistic usage, means chaos, disorder, and bloodshed — a Hobbesian war of all against all — that occurs when the stabilizing hand of government is removed.  “Anarchy” is the agenda of mobs of kids in black circle-A t-shirts, smashing windows and setting stuff on fire.

But “anarchy,” as the term is understood by anarchists, is a form of society in which the state is replaced by the management of all human affairs through voluntary associations.  Paul Goodman argued that it was impossible, through violence, to impose an anarchistic order on society, or to achieve a free society by replacing an old order with a new one.  Rather, a free society results from “the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life.”  Or to quote Gustav Landauer:  “The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another… We are the State and we shall continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community.”

And we saw a great deal of anarchy in Egypt in recent days, in that sense.  The people of Egypt have made a great start towards extending the spheres of free action, contracting new kinds of relationships between human beings, and creating the institutional basis of a real community.

Despite the poice state’s attempts to promote religious dissension and divide the opposition, Coptic Christians have stood watch over Muslims during their daily times of prayer.  Muslims, likewise, guarded the perimeter of Liberation Square during a Coptic mass.

The resistance organized patrols to safeguard shops and museums from looting, and to watch over neighborhoods from which the security forces had been withdrawn.  Meanwhile, as it turned out, most of the actions of violence and looting were false flag operations, carried out by security forces posing as protestors. So the functionaries of the state were the actual sources of violence and disorder; law and order emerged from anarchy — that is, from voluntary association.

The interim leader, Vice President Omar Suleiman — the object of so much hope on the part of neoconservative partisans of “stability” and “order” — is a torturer and a collaborator with the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program.  Never forget:  For every dubious example of an alleged “bomb-throwing anarchist,” like those at Haymarket, there are a million bombs thrown by governments.    For every innocent person harmed by an alleged anarchist in a rioting mob, there are a thousand people tortured or murdered in some police dungeon, or ten thousand slaughtered by death squads in the countryside.  For every store window broken by demonstrators, there are untold thousands of peasants robbed of their land in evictions and enclosures by feudal elites.

The people of Egypt have managed to throw out one tyrant.  Now they find themselves under a military dictatorship which may or may not wind up reducing the level of tyranny.  But if the Egyptian people find the new boss as oppressive as the old one, says Molinari Institute President Roderick Long, they know how to get rid of him.

If there is any real hope for the future, in the long run, it is in the anarchy that the people have built for themselves on the streets. There’s an old phrase that’s popular among the Wobblies, or Industrial Workers of the World:  “building the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”  The Egyptian people have made a fair start toward doing just that.  May the seeds of anarchy which were planted in the recent uprising continue to germinate and grow.

Originally posted here.

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.

Build Counter-Power, Create an Authority Vacuum - from C4SS

The prospect of a state collapsing brings forth worries about a “power vacuum,” an unrestrained state of nature where chaos rules until the strong take over. But chaotic conflict is produced by efforts to seize power and exert power over other people. It is not the rejection of rulership, but the struggle to achieve rulership, that creates deadly conflict. The negation of authority, as advocated by anarchists, does not necessitate the chaotic mess associated with the phrase “power vacuum.” Anarchy would mean that power is dispersed among individuals who would rather safeguard each others’ freedom than rule over each other. And if power is firmly in the hands of organized people then there is no power vacuum. In politics, the word power generally signifies the ability of an individual or group of individuals to influence the decisions of others. Authority is an attempt to legitimate the exercise of power to compel obedience or allegiance to the higher ranks. Anarchists reject authority in favor of individual autonomy. Anarchy means that individuals have ultimate decision-making power over their own lives, and the only social arrangements recognized as legitimate are those that are based on consensual cooperation. When authority amasses and exercises political power against people, it creates conflict. Hence the axiom that “anarchy is order, whereas government is civil war.” The very concept of having no rulers often encounters fears of a power vacuum – an unsustainable, dangerous situation that can only end in the re-establishment of rulers. But the rejection of authority does not mean that power is up for grabs — it means that power is widely distributed, making it harder for tyrants to usurp. The practice of anarchism fills society with empowered individuals, diffusing power throughout society so that no authority can take it over. Interactions of free individuals – the everyday pursuit of needs and desires combined with the recognition that mutual respect for freedom is the best way to realize needs and desires – build counter-power. Organizations of social cooperation that are established for the mutual benefit of participants, not for the power of some at the expense of others, help keep power dispersed in a fashion that safeguards individual liberty. Institutions of authority can be subverted or seized for the purpose of dispersing power. Certainly, anarchy requires a number of people to accept the idea, but this true of any state of affairs that does not rest on brute force alone. A state can only exist so long as it can muster a significant level of allegiance. Every individual has the decision of whether to obey the decrees of those trying to amass power, or to follow the logic of appeals to disperse power. The creation of dispersed power establishes a basis from which authority can be effectively challenged. When individuals possess power over their own lives, it means they have no personal power vacuum that tyrants could exploit. Power held by ordinary individuals gives them a greater stake in a functioning society as well as a more effective means of preventing social catastrophe. The rejection of authority, as advocated by anarchists, does not mean that a nightmare scenario associated with the phrase “power vacuum” is likely. It means the power that authority monopolizes will be dispersed among the people.

Originally posted at the Center for A Stateless Society by Daniel Worden.

C4SS News Analyst Darian Worden is an individualist anarchist writer with experience in libertarian activism. His fiction includes Bring a Gun To School Day and the forthcoming Trade War. His essays and other works can be viewed at DarianWorden.com. He also hosts an internet radio show, Thinking Liberty.

Philip Pullman on the Public Library service

I love the public library service for what it did for me as a child and as a student and as an adult. I love it because its presence in a town or a city reminds us that there are things above profit, things that profit knows nothing about, things that have the power to baffle the greedy ghost of market fundamentalism, things that stand for civic decency and public respect for imagination and knowledge and the value of simple delight.

Philip Pullman in a speech in opposition to the closure of almost half of Oxfordshire's public libraries

Although I often complain about the degree to which the state attempts to control our lives, I still believe there are some things that can best be done collectively and the Public Library service is one of them. Like him, I am what I am because of the Library service. The only reason I don't use it so much now is because it has been hammered for years to the point where my available branches are pretty useless in comparison to the libraries of my own youth.

I have no ideological commitment to the idea of such a service being provided by the local council, but at the moment I see no alternative. I definitely don't see any market based option. There might be if we really had free markets, but we don't. What we have is a heavily regulated economy where the regulation is for the benefit of big corporates. Unfortunately the history of the last 20 years of library provision in the UK suggests we probably won't be seeing any other usable option either.

Turning the tables - Non-gated communities

Oh I love this!

Bradley Manning: One Soldier Who Really Did “Defend Our Freedom” - from C4SS

When I hear someone say that soldiers “defend our freedom,” my immediate response is to gag.  I think the last time American soldiers actually fought for the freedom of Americans was probably the Revolutionary War — or maybe the War of 1812, if you want to be generous.  Every war since then has been for nothing but to uphold a system of power, and to make the rich folks even richer.

But I can think of one exception.  If there’s a soldier anywhere in the world who’s fought and suffered for my freedom, it’s Pfc. Bradley Manning.

Manning is frequently portrayed, among the knuckle-draggers on right-wing message boards, as some sort of spoiled brat or ingrate, acting on an adolescent whim.  But that’s not quite what happened, according to Johann Hari (“The under-appreciated heroes of 2010,” The Independent, Dec. 24).

Manning, like many young soldiers, joined up in the naive belief that he was defending the freedom of his fellow Americans.  When he got to Iraq, he found himself working under orders “to round up and hand over Iraqi civilians to America’s new Iraqi allies, who he could see were then torturing them with electrical drills and other implements.”  The people he arrested, and handed over for torture, were guilty of such “crimes” as writing “scholarly critiques” of the U.S. occupation forces and its puppet government.  When he expressed his moral reservations to his supervisor, Manning “was told to shut up and get back to herding up Iraqis.”

The people Manning saw tortured, by the way, were frequently the very same people who had been tortured by Saddam:  trade unionists, members of the Iraqi Freedom Congress, and other freedom-loving people who had no more use for Halliburton and Blackwater than they had for the Baath Party.

For exposing his government’s crimes against humanity, Manning has spent seven months in solitary confinement –  a torture deliberately calculated to break the human mind.

We see a lot of “serious thinkers” on the op-ed pages and talking head shows, people like David Gergen, Chris Matthews and Michael Kinsley, going on about all the stuff that Manning’s leaks have impaired the ability of “our government” to do.

He’s impaired the ability of the U.S. government to conduct diplomacy in pursuit of some fabled “national interest” that I supposedly have in common with Microsoft, Wal-Mart and Disney.  He’s risked untold numbers of innocent lives, according to the very same people who have ordered the deaths of untold thousands of innocent people.  According to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Manning’s exposure of secret U.S. collusion with authoritarian governments in the Middle East, to promote policies that their peoples would find abhorrent, undermines America’s ability to promote “democracy, open government, and free and open societies.”

But I’ll tell you what Manning’s really impaired government’s ability to do.

He’s impaired the U.S. government’s ability to lie us into wars where thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of foreigners are murdered.

He’s impaired its ability to use such wars — under the guise of promoting “democracy” — to install puppet governments like the Coalition Provisional Authority, that will rubber stamp neoliberal “free trade” agreements (including harsh “intellectual property” provisions written by the proprietary content industries) and cut special deals with American crony capitalists.

He’s impaired its ability to seize good, decent people who — unlike most soldiers — really are fighting for freedom, and hand them over to thuggish governments for torture with power tools.

Let’s get something straight.  Bradley Manning may be a criminal by the standards of the American state.  But by all human standards of morality, the government and its functionaries that Manning exposed to the light of day are criminals.  And Manning is a hero of freedom for doing it.

So if you’re one of the authoritarian state-worshippers, one of the grovelling sycophants of power, who are cheering on Manning’s punishment and calling for even harsher treatment, all I can say is that you’d probably have been there at the crucifixion urging Pontius Pilate to lay the lashes on a little harder.  You’d have told the Nazis where Anne Frank was hiding.  You’re unworthy of the freedoms which so many heroes and martyrs  throughout history — heroes like Bradley Manning — have fought to give you.

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.

Quote of the Day

People ask, “How would voluntary institutions in a stateless society prevent something like the BP oil spill?”  I don’t know — how did government prevent it?

Kevin Carson at C4SS

Thoughts on 'kettling'

...the police encourage chaos by threatning to kettle people – at every demo now, people are premptively breaking out of agreed protest routes whenever there’s the slightest whiff of a kettle about to be set up. Ironically, the threat of kettling has served to make protests more unpredictable, and less easy to control for either police or organisers.

Paul Sagar in a comment on his own post at Bad Conscience.

I think he is probably right. Detaining people in freezing weather for several hours for no other reason than that they are on a legal protest is not exactly the best way to promote good relations between police and demonstrators. It is pretty clear that in these circumstances, the police see themselves as the last line of defence against the anarchist hordes. Since those 'anarchists' are inside the country they are become more and more an occupying force and not, as Robert Peel would have it, as being members of the same public as the protestors.

Related articles

• If you want to protest, prepare to be kettled | Phil Shiner (guardian.co.uk)
• UK demonstrator challenges legality of "kettling" protestors (boingboing.net)

The State's Corporate Wasteland - from C4SS

The perceived inefficiency of government is often measured against the wholly unsubstantiated myth of the well-oiled corporate machine. The state’s many modules, thought of as shiftlessly unconcerned with the bottom line, are implored by the standard conservative philippic to be “run like a business,” as if real-world businesses are models of sleek efficiency.

 

The binary framework of American political folklore sees business interests as hermetically sealed from state interests, with the cold orderliness of “professionalism” defining our image of the corporate world. The state, by comparison, is thought to be the sanctum of all the good-hearted, underpaid crusaders for social justice, imprudent with the dollar but well-meaning. Just a passing glance at the actual corporation (as opposed to its idealized image), however, begs for a thorough reconsideration of the prevailing narrative.

In a special feature for CNN.com, Jason Fried, author of the book Rework, challenged the notion of corporate order and productivity. He notes that while “[c]ompanies spend billions on rent, offices, and office equipment so their employees will have a great place to work,” those employees nevertheless prefer to work outside of the “interruption factory” of the modern office, a seedbed of waste and misspent hours. It would seem, then, that the corporate world and the state — whatever their differences — operate in much the same way, squandering resources that might have been put to productive use.

Of those features that we, as libertarians, proclaim to admire most about the free market (e.g., innovation, responsiveness, social utility), most if not all of them are conspicuously absent from America’s multinational monsters. Conceding that the United States’ sweep of cubicles is a muskeg of stifling communication barriers and sinkholes for labor, our inquest ought to focus on why this is, on what conditions give rise to these results. After all, aren’t profit motive and the need to account to stockholders sufficient to incentivize some creative solutions from the country’s boardrooms?

It may very well be that these inducements are potentially enough, but — even assuming that’s the case — they are, in today’s corporatist economy, either completely erased or largely alleviated as considerations. In his book Organization Theory, Kevin Carson observes the fundamental difference between the existing corporate economy and the market economy that libertarian anarchists desire. He quotes David Friedman as noting that the American system, the titular situs of “free enterprise,” is actually “largely populated by indigestible lumps of socialism called corporations.”

And as vast, hierarchical institutions defined by a numbness to technological and social change, corporations seem an especially appropriate analogy to the bureaucratic mammoths of state socialism. The largest and most powerful of them, rather than being the most avant-garde or the most reactive to the wants of the humble consumer, are the most inept and incapable of competing in the tempestuous world of untrammeled exchange. In his exhaustive treatise on economics, Human Action, Ludwig von Mises counseled that a “successful corporation is ultimately never controlled by hired managers,” and in a free market that may be true.

In the state-corporate society, though, where status lives in job titles and climbing the corporate ladder, managerial elites enjoy a tight grip on the power. It is no coincidence that they run their companies in much the same way that the state functions, through gradations of authority and arbitrary administrative processes. It isn’t even as though there’s a societal balance between state and corporate interests, implying some polarity between the two. They are very simply elements of the same arrangement, whereby laws like the Williams Act — a securities rule that purports to protect shareholders — regulate away challenges to indolent suits in corner offices.

Just as taxpayers pay and vote for their own bondage, the average corporate nine to fiver finances the bloated salaries of CEOs who drive their companies into the ground only to be salvaged by ever more rule-making that stacks the deck for the Washington-Wall Street cufflink class. It’s no wonder the worker bees of the corporate prison have such low job satisfaction, or that so many seek escape in Big Pharma’s versions of Brave New World’s “soma.”

In this system, with only so many “seats at the table,” human life is defined by meaningless paper-pushing that augments the fortunes of our soi-disant “social betters.” But free markets would besiege corporatism with the energetic inventiveness of an order brought about not by autarchic rules, but by mutual respect and free exchange.

Original post at C4SS by David D'Amato. He is a market anarchist lawyer currently completing an LL.M. in commercial law at Suffolk University Law School. His hatred for superstition and all permutations of political authority manifests itself at www.firsttruths.com.

 

Is your community legal?

Strange question perhaps, but in the nature of bureaucrats everywhere, the Department for Communities and Local Government are apparently faced with the need to come up with a legal definition in order to make progress on the 'Localism Bill'.

Apart from the rather strange spectacle of nationally defined local communities, another issue it seems is the ‘general power of competence’, which is set to give councils the power to act in the best interests of their communities. It appears that this has been changed from a previous wording of ‘power of general competence’.

In that light, Gabriel Chanan, formerly of the Community Development Foundation, has written a letter to theTimes:

Sir, Civil servants preparing the Localism Bill for the government are said to be having difficulty defining what a community is so that it can be given legal powers. This is promising. A community cannot be given legal powers because it is not an entity. It is a description of a certain (or more often uncertain) state of relationships amongst the population of a locality or some other group with interests in common. The only population-based entity to which you can give legal powers in a locality is a community organisation of one sort or another. This ought to throw the spotlight onto the question of the relationship between such an organisaton and the rest of the local population. So when the government, in Big Society mode, says it will enable ‘communities’ to take over a public service, the question should immediately arise of what does that community  organisation need to do to show that it is acting in the interests of the whole local population, and what responsibility necessarily remains with the relevant public authority to ensure this. Communities as a whole do not and cannot take over public services. Community organisations can collaborate with public authorities to deliver the services better.

Gabriel Chanan, www.pacesempowerment.co.uk

I don't know if they published it, but now you have read it anyway.  

[via Neighbourhoods blog]