A Freer Market

A FREE-ER MARKET
       One of the perpetual myths of our so-called capitalist society is that we have the closest approach to a "free market", and that this is all to the good as it connects with our other freedoms. Is this true ? Certainly some like the left libertarians who are in favour of an actual free market would disagree with the idea that our present system is approximating an such thing. The left libertarians are actually quite the dissidents as not just apologists for the present order but "critics" such as academo-Marxists assume that free market describes the present state of things. The proof of the assertion that we don't live in a free market I will leave to the left-libs with their criticism of the many monopolies that states grant to certain insitutions and individuals but not to others. I can do more better than recommend the works of Kevin Carson, an outstanding modern exponent of their views.

     How a real free market differs from what we call it today can be found in what is called dynamic pricing. This goes along well with internet marketing as it consists of constantly chaging prices to reflect an actual "market in the here and now". Obviously not all goods can be sold in such a way, and the ability of this much closer representation of marginal utility to the purchaser says nothing about the various advantages (monopolies) granted to some venders but not others prior to placing the commodity on the market.

     I came about this interesting development in a recent (Jan 21/2013) issue of Time Magazine. The article was titled 'This Offer Won't Last: Why Sellers are Switching to Dynamic Pricing' (page 56). I strongly recommend this article on how our version of a "market" is evolving back to how town markets used to be and still are in many minor ways

AMERICAN LABOUR - WEST VIRGINIA:

MINE COMPANIES AND OTHER CORPORATE CRIMINALS:








Back on the 9th Molly presented several articles about the recent West Virginia coal mine disaster. Here are a couple more commentaries, these more radical than the first. leading off is an item from the Trial by Fire blog. This came Molly's way via the Anarkismo website.
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25 Dead in West Virginia Mining Disaster
by John E Jacobsen
For the original article, and for further coverage, please visit: http://www.thetbf.wordpress.com/

This week, 25 miners lost their lives in a mine explosion at the Performance Coal Co. in Raleigh County, West Virginia. The explosion was the worst mining disaster in over two decades, if you don’t count the 10,000 who have died from black lung in the past decade.

Rescue workers are still working around the clock to find an additional 4 miners who are still missing.

The news comes only days after five workers died at an oil refinery in Anacortes, Washington.

Massey Energy Co., the company which owns the mine, is no stranger to mining disasters. The company has been cited for hundreds of mine safety violations in recent years, and last month, they were fined three times for ventilation problems which may have led to this disaster.

In March alone, the Mine Safety and Health Administration cited the company’s Upper Big Branch mine, where the disaster took place, for 53 safety violations.

These violations have come at a high price for the workers. In 2008, one of Massey’s subsidiary companies paid the largest settlement in the history of the coal industry. They plead guilty to safety violations that killed two miners in a fire, who suffocated and died partly as a result of the company removing needed ventilation controls.

At the Upper Big Branch Mine in Raleigh County, conditions were far worse. In an interview with the New York Times, miners told reporters that in the two months preceding the disaster, workers had been evacuated three times because of dangerously high methane levels.

Andrew Tyler, an electrician who worked at the Upper Big Branch said “no one will say this who works at that mine, but everyone knows that it has been dangerous for years.”

Although it is still unclear what exactly led to the explosion, Kevin Stricklin of the Mine Safety and Health Administration said of the disaster: “something went very wrong here. All explosions are preventable. It’s just making sure you have things in place to keep one from occurring.”

Regulation of the Mines:

It was long known by regulators and workers alike that the conditions of the UBB mine were hazardous. Hundreds upon hundreds of violations had been found by inspectors, and workers were being evacuated monthly because of dangerously high methane levels.

As it turned out, the company’s chief executive, Don L. Blankenship, was writing memo’s to his staff to ignore the warnings. A 2005 memo which has resurfaced as a result of the disaster appears to encourage his deep mine superintendents to “run coal” at any cost:

“If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e., build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever), you need to ignore them and run coal.”

Indeed, the Mining Industry, in particular Massey Energy Co., has done everything in its power to flaunt safety, environmental and health regulations.

To do so, mining companies have joined together in an effort to appeal as many violations as they can,as fast as they can. In so doing, they are, as Representative George Miller of California said, “[rendering] the federal efforts to hold mine operators accountable meaningless.”

Their strategy is simply to overwhelm regulators with appeals.

The strategy is working. One in four citations issued against coal mines are now appealed. The result is an overflow of 18,000 appeals waiting to be reviewed and $210 million in contested penalties.

But simply overwhelming regulators isn’t their only tactic. Mr. Blankenship also spent millions of dollars in a campaign to elect Chief Justice Brent D. Benjamin to the West Virginia Supreme Court. In return, the Chief Justice twice helped throw out $50 million cases against Massey Co., leading the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that from now on, judges must dismiss themselves from cases involving people who have spent large amounts of cash in their elections.

Further inquiries have been launched into a series of photographs released in 2008 showing Mr. Blankenship dining on the French Riviera with another court justice. The photographs were taken while several other cases were being heard by the judge, all involving Massey Co.

According to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, Mr. Blankenship has also contributed more than $100,000 to political campaigns in West Virginia. Associates of the company, as well as its political action committee, have spent an additional $307,000 on federal candidates.

Conclusions:
It’s a simple fact of life in our economy that to own and run a successful business, you have to prioritize profit. That priority, however, is going to have different effects on different industries.

To the Barista in the downtown coffee shop, it’s going to mean precarious scheduling.

To the farm laborer, it’s going to mean more ICE raids.

And to the coal miner, it’s going to mean increased safety risks.

Business owners must prioritize profit. Mr. Blankenship, the owner of Massey Co., demonstrates for us with great clarity the kind of sociopath that the business world sometimes creates – a man so consumed with the desire to “run more coal,” that he will sacrifice 25 lives.

Large business owners like Blankenship, moreover, are more than capable of taking on both the courts and the regulators. He quite literally owns the judges who oversee his cases, and his political contributions all but guarantee tolerable legislation.

Blankenship, far from being an exception in the business world, is one of many business owners with a callous disregard for the lives of their workers.

So long as we operate in an economy based on profit instead of on human needs, we will continue to suffer these disasters, like the miners, from one generation to the next.

Hazel Dickens put it better than I could when she sang:

“How can God forgive you, you do know what you’ve done?

You’ve killed my husband now you want my son.”

Related Link: http://thetbf.wordpress.com/2010/04/07/safety-at-work/
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Here's another point of view from Kevin Carson at the Center for a Stateless Society. Carson makes an excellent point from the anarchist perspective that such tragedies cannot be avoided by more and more government regulation, a point of view all too common on the "left".
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Corporate Welfare Queen Kills 25
By Kevin Carson
Watching recent news on CEO Don Blankenship of Massey Energy — renowned for falling spectacularly short of industry safety standards which are themselves almost nonexistent, and most lately for hosting the site of the worst mining disaster in decades — I got the feeling I’d heard of this guy before.

Sure enough, several months ago Alternet listed Blankenship and Massey in a rogue’s gallery of corporate malefactors. Massey’s mountaintop removal operation was fined $50 million by West Virginia courts for polluting its neighbors. But hey, if you can afford to spend $3 million replacing an unfriendly justice with your own stooge, running attack ads (he “released sexual deviants”) that would make Lee Atwater or Karl Rove proud, those pesky fines are easy enough to deal with. (Blankenship was spotted in Monte Carlo a few months later partying with yet another buddy on the Supreme Court.) $3 million to buy a Supreme Court justice, to overturn a $50 million fine from a lower court — that’s what I call a pretty good return on your money. It reminds me of all those colorful stories about railroads buying legislators and Congressmen wholesale back in the Gilded Age.

Blankenship also opined, by the way, that it’s perfectly OK for elementary school kids to inhale coal dust from his operations while playing on school grounds. You see, Massey “already pays millions of dollars in taxes each year.” Ever see that episode of The Simpsons where a young Monty Burns ran down workers in the street for the sheer joy of crippling them, and then tossed money out the window?

Blankenship, it seems, is also a major corporate Tea Party sponsor, appearing at last year’s Labor Day Tea Party with the charming duo of Sean Hannity and Ted Nugent.

Blankenship also seems to collect unpaid fines for unsafe working conditions the way some people collect parking tickets in their glove box.

Interestingly, an Alternet commentator on the Tea Party story wrote: “I’m sure those people cheering every insane thing he said at that rally will blame the government for failing to stop him, thus proving once again that it can’t do anything right.”

Well, yeah. The mine safety and anti-pollution regulations, in this case, are a good illustration of why the corporate state replaced traditional tort liability standards under the common law with a regulatory state in the first place.

Mountaintop removal is just what the name implies. It involves clearing areas of thousands of acres, in the process filling nearby valleys and stream beds with debris and destroying entire watersheds. It also involves showering surrounding areas with coal dust from silos — you know, the dust Blankenship’s taxes pay the schoolkids to breathe. And then there’s the multi-billion gallon sludge ponds full of coal mine waste. The dam enclosing one such Massey pond gave way several years ago, with its contents wound up in the Big Sandy River. A number of towns lie in the flood path of other such ponds, should they give way.

Now, you’d think tort liability for the full damages of wholesale devastation of the entire countryside, the poisoned water and coal dust, the deaths from gross negligence, and all the rest of it, would seriously undermine the profitability of mountaintop removal. And you’d be right.

That’s exactly what the regulatory state was created to avoid. Let’s look at a little history. I can’t recommend strongly enough “The Transformation of American Law,” by Morton Horwitz. According to Horwitz, the common law of tort liability was radically altered by state courts in the early to mid-19th century to make it more business-friendly. Under the traditional standard of liability, an actor was responsible for harm that resulted from his actions — period. Negligence was beside the point. Courts added stricter standards of negligence and intent, in order to protect business from costly lawsuits for externalities they might impose on their neighbors. The regulatory state subsequently imposed far weaker standards than the traditional common law; the main practical effect was to preempt what remained of tort liability. A regulatory standard amounts to a license to commit torts below the threshold of that standard, and lawsuits against polluters and other malfeasors can be met with the defense that “we are fully in compliance with regulatory standards.” In some cases, as with food libel laws or product disparagement laws, even voluntarily meeting a more stringent standard may be construed as disparagement of products that merely meet the regulatory standard. For example, Monsanto has had mixed success in some jurisdictions suppressing the commercial free speech of those who advertise their milk as free from rBGH; and conventional beef producers have similarly managed in some cases to prevent competitors from testing for mad cow disease more frequently than the law mandates.

So a class action suit against a coal mining company for the public nuisance created by mountaintop removal could be thwarted by simply demonstrating that the operation met EPA regulatory standards, even if such operations caused serious harm to the property rights and quality of life of the surrounding community.

I think it’s fair to say that Mr. Blankenship is one of the most loathsome pigs ever to contaminate the Earth with his presence. And the dumbed-down regulatory state — by offering wrist-slap fines worth a tiny fraction of the harm caused by his terrorism, as a substitute for free juries of his neighbors nailing his scrotum to the wall for his crimes — has played a key role in enabling him.


C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, both of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

ANARCHIST THEORY:

INTERVIEW WITH KEVIN CARSON:

The following interview with American left libertarian theorist Kevin Carson of the Mutualist Blog first saw the light of day at the Isocracy website. Molly reprints it here from the Mutualist Blog. One of the "privileges" of sitting in the hospital recovering from surgery was that I was able to begin reading Carson's first book, 'Studies in Mutualist Political Economy', and I hope to review it here at Molly's Blog when I am finished. Aside from the people gathered around Z Communications Carson is the only anarchist in North America doing what I would consider serious theorizing in economics. Not that I agree with everything he says, but he definitely says it very well, and makes a far more scholarly case for his views than the half-hearted borrowings from Marxism so common amongst anarchists or, worse, total ignorance of economics.

In any case it is refreshing for a more or less traditionalist anarchist socialist like myself to read about the case for "free market socialism/anarchism". Once again, I have my differences, particularly around the concept of "externalities" and the ability of a market to accommodate them in cost. I still think, however, that those of us who have more traditional (outside the USA) views have a lot to learn from people like Carson. Personally I am a "pluralist" when it comes to economic forms of some future libertarian society, and I have a hard time accepting any of either the traditional or newer anarchist economic theories as being sufficient in themselves. But more of that in the planned review. For now check out Carson's blog and purchase his books there. Here's a taste of what he thinks.

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Mutualism: An interview with Kevin Carson:
Kevin Carson Interview
Kevin Carson, an American political theorist and a contemporary leader in discussions concerning mutualism and author of three extremely important books on co-operation, mutualism and capitalism (Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand). Describing his politics as being "the outer fringes of both free market libertarianism and socialism", he certainly will find a welcoming audience among our group - which is why he's been asked several difficult questions.
The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand is available in html format and Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective are both available as PDF files.
Q.Firstly, thank you Kevin for agreeing to this interview with The Isocracy Network.
A.Thanks for inviting me.

Q.Could you begin by giving a description of mutualism from the initial definition offered by the anarchist Proudhon to contemporary examples and your own involvement in this sort of analysis of political economy?
A.Well, first of all, it's important to distinguish between mutualism as a general form of praxis, and mutualism as a theory. Mutualist practices (friendly societies and lodges, guilds, arrangements for mutual aid, etc.) are probably old as the human race. Proudhon, Owen, Warren, et al simply created a theoretical framework that emphasized such forms of organization as a building block of society. It's a bit like the centipede trying to figure out how it's been walking all this time, or the man who was astonished to learn he'd been speaking in prose all along and didn't even know it.

For that matter, there have been important anarchist thinkers like Kropotkin who emphasized mutual aid and other mutual organizations, without in any strict sense being mutualists. Cooperatives and mutuals have been central to the counterinstitution-building of much of the decentralist Left in the U.S. since the 1960s, but their thought is not explicitly mutualist either.

I n fact, I'd go so far as to say that most of the important examples of mutualist practice (the cooperative movement, the local currency and alternative credit movements, etc.) are not explicitly or self-consciously mutualist in ideology.

Having read Proudhon for some years, his thought is so complex and at times even seemingly self-contradictory, that I still hesitate to summarize it. But I'd venture to say, as an approximation, that his programme centered on 1) abolishing artificial property rights in land and artificial scarcity of credit, so that the working class could secure cheap access to the prerequisites of production; and 2) organizing the economy around associations of producers. Of course Proudhon was an important founding thinker for anarchism as a whole as well as for mutualism; so these ideas, in modified form, have heavily influenced later collectivist, communist and syndicalist variants of anarchism.

Mutualist praxis was central to the Owenite movement in the UK (e.g. Owenite craft unions organized cooperative production and distribution by strikers in their own shops), as well as such things as the Rochedale cooperatives, the Chartists, and land colonization movements. Owenism, by way of Christian socialism and guild socialism, probably had a significant (if indirect) influence on distributism.

In the U.S. mutualism's primary founder was the Owenite Josiah Warren. Warrenism, cross-pollinated with J.K. Ingalls' occupancy-and-use view of land ownership and William Greene's mutual banking theories, together led to the plumbline individualism of Benjamin Tucker. Tucker focused almost entirely on the abolition of artificial property rights and privilege in land and credit, assuming that when the legal props to rent and interest were removed and cheap land and credit were universally available, the forms of organization would take care of themselves. He displayed almost no interest whatever in cooperatives, associations for mutual aid, etc., as such.

Dyer Lum, John Beverley Robinson, and Clarence Swartz, all heavily influenced by Tucker, supplemented his focus on eliminating monopolies with some positive speculation on cooperative forms of organization; in so doing, they represented a partial fusion of Tucker's version of individualism with the older cooperativist tradition of Proudhon and Owen. Lum, in particular, was also friendly to the radical labor movement and had fairly close ties to the I.W.W.

Q.Would a highly successful large worker's cooperatives, like the John Lewis Partnership in the UK, and the Mondragón Corporation in Spain [centered in Basque Country] serve as evidence that mutualist economics can and does work in the large scale? Are credit unions evidence that mutualist economics can replace capitalist banking?
A.Although I'm quite friendly to both Mondragon and credit unions, and consider their influence to be decidedly positive, I believe their form is still distorted considerably by the capitalist milieu within which they exist. I like Mondragon's federated system of cooperative producers, distributors and banks within a single umbrella organization. But it's much too centralized a system in my opinion, with worker representation only effected at the level of the board of directors for the system as a whole; below the level of the Mondragon system as a whole, it's a fairly top-down system of conventional management, with no significant self-management at the level of individual departments or factories.

I would greatly prefer local markets with lots of stand-alone cooperative manufacturing shops on the Emilia-Romagna model, integrated with cooperative banks in some sort of barter or local currency network of the sort promoted by Tom Greco.

Most credit unions, unfortunately, have adopted the culture of the conventional banking industry, and have almost no ideological affinity for the larger cooperative or counter-economy movement. Of course they are still greatly preferable to capitalist banks; being controlled by many small, local depositors, they are far less prone to the excesses of the capitalist banking system that we've seen in recent years.
Q.Proudhon, although arguing that he opposed the idea of individuals deriving an income through rent and investments, said that he never wished "to forbid or suppress, by sovereign decree" such activities. A contemporary mainstream economist may argue that Proudhon's position here would be particularly utopian in those markets that have high barriers to entry or other monopolistic features, that a worker's cooperative versus an entrenched capitalist enterprise in such a market would require a miracle on the scale of David vs Goliath for success.
A.That sounds a bit like Tucker's pessimistic view of things in his later years, when he seemed resigned to the idea that the large industrial trusts had grown to the point that their market power would persist even after the Four Monopolies were removed.

I think such a view neglects the extent to which capital-intensiveness is a source of high overhead cost and inefficiency, and is only made artificially profitable by the state's subsidies and protections. In fact production as such has become far less capital-intensive over the past three decades, with the old mass-production core outsourcing increasing shares of total production to flexible manufacturing networks and job-shops, and some of them retaining little more than control over marketing and "intellectual property." The development of cheap, small-scale CNC tools in the 1970s meant that the capital outlays required for manufacturing imploded by one or two orders of magnitude. That was the beginning of a long shift from older mass-production industry to Emilia-Romagna, the Toyota supplier network, the job-shops of Shenzhen and Shanghai, etc.

The process continues even further in the same direction with the desktop manufacturing revolution of recent years: cheap, homebrew CNC machines scalable to the small shop and garage.

When physical capital costs are so low, most of the financial role of the old industrial core is becoming redundant. And with small-scale production driven by local orders on a lean, demand-pull, JIT basis, marketing is similarly redundant.

"Intellectual property" is the main surviving buttress to the old corporate walls, and it's becoming increasingly unenforceable.
Q.A follower of Henry George would argue in the realm of natural resources it would be impossible for success and that land-rents should be socialised. How would you respond to these claims?
A.I'm quite friendly to George, and think the lines between individualism and Georgism are a lot less harsh than (say) Tucker would have believed. But I believe a great deal of rent could be eliminated simply by removing subsidies to economic centralization and positive externalties created by taxpayers--not to mention by removing state enforcement of title to vacant and unimproved land. If as much urban infrastructure as possible were funded by user fees, and cities broken up into lots of mixed-use neighborhoods in which residential areas had their own miniature "downtown" cores, differential rent would be far less significant. I think a majority of George's aims could be achieved by Tucker's means, or even by a throughgoing application of Rothbard's means.

Q.With examples of worker's self-management in the former Yugoslavia, and modelling by economists such as Jaroslav Vanek and Benjamin Ward, it has been shown in some cases (especially in critical infrastructure) it is advantageous for labor-managed firms, in their objective of increasing income per worker, to either lay-off workers or - like a monopolistic capitalist firm - to reduce productivity and thus derive monopoly profits. How would a contemporary version of mutualism prevent these problems?
A.It's been a long time since I read Vanek's work on worker-managed economies, but my immediate reaction is that there's probably no fool-proof set of governance rules. When the firm is controlled by capital-owners, they'll behave in such a way as to maximize returns on capital; when it's controlled by managers, as in most large Western corporations, they'll maximize benefits to management at the expense of both labor and capital. At least in a worker-managed firm, the decisions will reflect the interests of a bare majority, which can't be said of the other two mechanisms. Beyond that, I think the answer to the kind of behavior you describe lies in exit as much as in voice: the lower the capitalization requirements and the lower the barrier to entry for most forms of production, and the lower the cost threshold for comfortable subsistence, the less catastrophic changes in employment will be. I'd like to see an economy where a much larger share of total consumption needs are met through production for subsistence or barter in the household/informal sector, and the average time spent in wage employment is much less than at present.

That would mean a significantly larger share of the population would be self-employed than at present, a very large share would work hours that we would regard as "part-time," household arrangements for pooling wages and hoarding labor-time would be much more resilient, and even wage-earners would tend to accept as normal prolonged periods of unemployment during which they lived off subsistence resources while waiting for a job to their liking.
Q.Pro-capitalist neoliberals, such as George Reismann, Roderick T. Long have criticised your advocacy of mutualism. Reisman and Long both argue that you do not support John Locke's ownership of landed property that has been mixed with labour or, to use the peculiarly U.S. vernacular, "homesteading". It seems that both this critics have fundamentally misunderstood Locke's concept of land ownership, which recognises a public cost for exclusion and use in addition to the right of added value. How do you respond to these criticisms?
A.To be frank, I can't say with any degree of confidence what Reisman understands about anything. But I think Long acknowledged Locke's Proviso and explicitly characterized his own position as "non-Proviso Lockeanism." I'm not a Georgist myself, although I'd be well-disposed to a local property rules system based on some form of common ownership and community collection of rent. In any case, justifiably or not, when answering Lockean critics I tend to tacitly work from the premise that "Lockean" means "non-Proviso Lockean." And for the most part, I think a radical and consistent application of non-Proviso Lockean rules would go most of the way toward achieving the aims of the Tucker-Ingalls land theory.

... all the fruits it naturally produces, and beasts it feeds, belong to mankind in common, as they are produced by the spontaneous band of nature: ... Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property... For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.John Locke: Of Civil Government - Second Treatise

For that matter, over time I've come to see the bounderies between the Tucker-Ingalls and non-Proviso Lockean systems as less distinct, and to perceive some practical problems with the Tucker system (at least the more radical variant--he seems to promote different versions of the system at different times). At times Tucker himself seemed to concede the existence of house-rent, but to argue that the nullification of titles to vacant land would (through market competition) cause the land-rent component of rent to disappear and overall rent to fall to the value of rent on buildings. Now, to me, that seems to imply that Tucker wasn't necessarily (at least at times) dead-set against absentee ownership in principle. That variant of his land theory, at least, seems to imply that the important thing was to eliminate large-scale absentee title to vacant and unimproved land.

In any case, I tend to think that doing so would go a long way to eliminating landlord rent through market competition.
Q.Another critic, Walter Block argues that you are actually some sort of Marxist because you use the labour theory of value for deriving a theory of exploitation. It would seem that (a) Block is unaware that Adam Smith and David Ricardo also used the labour theory of value and (b) using it to calculate a rate of exploitation is hardly the same as using it as an anchor to exchange values.
A.I think the Austrians also, for the most part, exaggerate the extent to which marginalism/subjectivism is a radical departure from classical labor and cost theories. It's closer to the truth to say that marginalism provides a mechanism for explaining the tendency that Ricardo et al described. The marginalist/subjectivist claim that "utility determines value" is true in a technical sense, if you add the qualification "at any point in time given the snapshot of supply and demand in the spot market." But it's not true in the ordinary way we use those words. If you allow changes in supply over time to enter the picture, then supply alters until the utility of the marginal unit reflects the cost of producing it--i.e., exactly what Ricardo said.

It makes far more sense to treat marginalism as a complement or fulfillment to classical political economy, rather than as supplanting it.
Q.Politically, where do you think mutualists should align themselves. Should they spend their efforts in building cooperative organisations, like Proudhon's advocacy of dual power? Or is there some mileage to be made in being involved in existing political organisations, such as the Labour Party - Cooperative Party groups in the U.K.? What about in the United States; is the Libertarian Party salvageable?
A.I think by far the most important, and the most interest, of our tasks is actually building the kind of society we want, and doing so so far as possible without regard to the state. But there's something to be said for putting external pressure on the state, and participating in political coalitions to remove as much state interference with our activities as possible. Of course the primary emphasis of such coalition-building should be forming pressure groups, rather than attempting to become part of a governing coalition.

A lot of this parallels Daniel DeLeon's disputes with the anarchists in the I.W.W. DeLeon argued that "building the structure of the new society in the shell of the old" (i.e. building industrial unions to serve as organs of self-management) would not be enough by itself. So long as the capitalists controlled the state and its armed force, and the significant minority of people whose class interest was tied up with it, there was the danger of the "Iron Heel" being brought to bear against counter-organizations. On the other hand, political victory alone wasn't sufficient; he gave the example of threats by Jay Gould to organize a national capital strike and lockout if the socialists ever captured the national government. Workers, DeLeon argued, should be focused on building counter-institutions, but also be prepared to seize the commanding heights of the state long enough to dismantle them and prevent them from being used against themselves.

What we need is a primary focus on institution building, without entirely neglecting the need for a political movement to run interference for the counter-institutions.

What's more, there's the very real danger an authoritarian state might make a concerted effort to stamp out the counter-economy through (for example) the kinds of totalitarian surveillance Richard Stallman described in "The Right to Read," intensified licensing and zoning to suppress low-capital producers, etc. It's a waste of effort and probably corrupting to seriously run our people for Congress or the White House. But it's perfectly sensible to carry out propaganda against legislation like the DMCA, to support lobbying campaigns organized by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and NORML, etc.
Q.Proudhon argued that through a society of contracts between individuals, a federal structure could arise. This of course must presume that individuals have the capacity to engage in uncoerced contractual arrangements. What other political requirements do you think have a particular priority in breaking down authoritarian elements in statist rule?
A.Well, it could be that the authoritarian elements of statist rule will persist on paper right up to the point at which they become irrelevant. But in my opinion it's at least worth a shot to pressure the state from outside, and form ad hoc alliances to pressure the state, in order to minimize its interference and fend off attempts at intensified interference. That includes local efforts against licensing and zoning that impede household microenterprise and micromanufacturing, local pressure to defend peaceful squatters and vagrants, pressure against the regulatory suppression of self-organized mutual-aid efforts, pressure at the national level against further expanding "intellectual property" law, and so forth.
Q.Kevin, thank you for your time and views.

AMERICAN POLITICS/ANARCHIST THEORY:

TRANSITION TO AN ALTERNATIVE ECONOMY:

Molly has long been a fan of Kevin Carson's Mutualist Blog. While not "going all the way" with his 'free market anarchism', Molly still fells that he is one of the best of that American breed. He always has something interesting to say. Thus, a little notice on his blog led Molly down the path to Barack Obama's Citizen's Briefing Book. This is a creation of the Obama machine which acts as a continued polling site, taking the pulse of what Americans think is important. This is obviously not some sort of participatory democracy, though the new American Administration would not be displeased if this illusion became common.

Carson has presented his own set of proposals at that site, a proposal for less government protection of the corporation and for decentralized, small scale, industry to replace the failing corporate models. Here's his brief. You can vote proposals on the Obama site either up or down. Consider going over and making your voice heard, at least in terms of supporting a truly alternative idea.

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Easing the Transition to an Alternative Economy:
If we want to replace the present centralized economy of waste production and planned obsolescence, it's an inescapable fact that a great deal of excess manufacturing capacity cannot be saved. In my opinion it's a mistake to try to prop it up through expedients like the Detroit bailout.

Corporate capitalism has been plagued from its late-19th century beginnings with chronic crises of overaccumulation and overproduction, which would probably have destroyed it in the Great Depression (despite the New Deal) had WWII not postponed the crisis for a generation by helpfully blowing up most of the plant and equipment in the world outside the U.S. and creating a permanent war economy for absorbing surplus output. But Europe and Japan rebuilt their industrial capital by 1970, and since then the chronic crises have been back with a vengeance. Before the current downturn, America's overbuilt industry couldn't dispose of its full output running at capacity, even with everybody tapping into home equity and maxing out their credit cards to replace everything they owned every five years. And we'll never see those levels again. So there's no escaping the fact that much of our plant and equipment, in a few years, will be rust.

The goal should be a shift from the present system of overaccumulated, centralized, oligopoly industry, and its business model of planned obsolescence and "push" distribution, to a decentralized economy of small-scale manufacturing for local markets. This means, among other things, a switch from capital-intensive production methods based on product-specific machinery, to production with small-scale, general purpose machinery. It means, in place of the old Sloanist production model, something like the present-day economy of Italy's Emilia-Romagna region: networked small manufacturers producing for the local market, with a high degree of cooperative ownership. Such an economy, based on a "pull" distribution model with production geared to demand on a just-in-time basis, will be insulated from the boom-bust cycles of the old national "push" economies. And we need a new model of user-friendly, modular product design aimed at cheap and easy repairability and recycling.

Your main focus, in my opinion, should be to ease the transition by eliminating present policies (market-distorting subsidies, privileges, and cartelizing regulations) that impede it and protect the old economy from the new one.

This means, for one thing, eliminating differential tax exemptions that favor firms engaged in centralized, large-scale, capital-intensive production: e.g., the depreciation allowance, the R&D credit, the deductability of interest on corporate debt, and the exemption of stock transactions involved in mergers and acquisitions from capital gains tax). Then lower the corporate income tax enough to be revenue-neutral.

It means, especially, eliminating the biggest subsidy to economic centralization, and to artificially large market area and firm size: i.e., subsidies to long-distance transportation. The Interstate should be funded entirely by weight-based user fees on trucking, which causes virtually all of the roadbed damage. All subsidies to new airports or to expanding old ones should be eliminated, including all federal guarantees of local bond issues.

Perhaps most important of all, it requires radically scaling back the present strong "intellectual property" regime. IP (through patent pooling and exchange, monopolies on current production technologies, etc.) is probably the single most powerful cartelizing force, which enables each industry to be concentrated in the hands of a few players. It impedes the transfer of skills and new technology from the old manufacturing dinosaurs to the kinds of small, local producers we need. It also serves as a powerful bulwark to planned obsolescence, imposing legal restrictions on the manufacture of cheap generic replacement parts.

Scaling back IP law (a good start would be repealing the DMCA, the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and the Uruguay Round's TRIPS accord) would eliminate the barriers to the diffusion of skill and technology that currently prop up the old corporate dinosaurs of the software and entertainment industries, and facilitate their replacement by networked production on an open source model. Please cut loose the MPAA, RIAA, and Bill Gates, and do so yesterday!

Finally, we need to eliminate all subsidies to large-scale agribusiness. The result will be a flourishing sector of community-supported agriculture, replacing the old agribusiness dinosaurs as fast as new ground can be cultivated.

INTERNATIONAL ANARCHIST MOVEMENT:

ANARCHOBLOGS IS BACK:

A tip of the Molly hat to Kevin Carson's Mutualist Blog for this one. Anarchoblogs is a blog aggregator for the sort of blogs described below.

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Anarchoblogs is back:
Thanks to the efforts of Charles Johnson (aka Rad Geek). From the "About" page at Anarchoblogs.Org:

Anarchoblogs is a collection of blogs from self-identified anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, anarcha-feminists, anarchists without adjectives, libertarian-socialists, autonomists and other assorted anti-statists. We use free software to syndicate our weblogs, in order to raise awareness, bring together anarchist voices, promote cross-linking and discussion between anarchist bloggers, and to archive and index anarchist materials on the Internet, while we’re at it.

Anarchoblogs began life in September 2004. It was founded by Evan Rabble Henshaw-Plath, and run with a Planet aggregator at anarchoblogs.protest.net. Technical difficulties caused anarchoblogs.protest.net to disappear from the web in late 2008, so Anarchoblogs contributor Charles Rad Geek Johnson contacted former contributors about establishing a new Anarchoblogs aggregator at anarchoblogs.org, with new software and some new features (including localized hubs, archiving and indexing of posts by date, tag, and author, and a updated, semantically-richer set of aggregated feeds). The new Anarchoblogs has been live since December 2008.There are some new features in Anarchoblogs 2.0:
Comunity hubs — the new setup will make it easy to create and manage multiple community hubs, which aggregate blogs for specific communities, instead of simply dumping everything into one global aggregator. (But if you want everything dumped into one global aggregator, you can still get at that easily enough.) Communities can be defined geographically, ideologically, linguistically, organizationally, or along any other lines which become useful. Currently, there are three hubs up and running, for their own sake and as examples for the future — the language-specific hubs Anarchoblogs in English and Anarchoblogs auf Deutsch, and the ideology-specific hub Market Anarchist Blogs. Soon I hope to get some other ideological community hubs up (syndicalist blogs, green anarchist blogs, that sort of thing) and to roll out community hubs for geographical communities for various countries, cities, provinces, bioregions, etc....
Indexing anarchist discussions — the new Anarchoblogs runs on top of a standard WordPress (MU) installation, and so takes advantage of WordPress’s features to index content by date, tag, and the full text of the posts, so that if you want (for example) to see what anarchist bloggers were talking about in January 2009, or to findposts tagged Feminism on anarchist blogs, or to search for posts where anarchist bloggers mention Greece, you can do all those things, and it’ll work about the same as it works on any individual blog, but will search across all the anarchist blogs we index.
Archiving anarchist discussions — Lots of anarchist writers write only one or two things and then disappear; lots of anarchist distros pass out small runs over a small area for a few years and then disappear; lots of anarchist works are cheaply printed, done on the fly, and get out to only a handful of people. Anarchist media has always been grassroots, usually seat-of-your-pants, and typically ephemeral: imeo sheets, xeroxed zines, tiny runs of amateur pamphlets or movement papers with microscopic circulations. When most of our materials were printed this was a problem but not a crisis: an author or a distro might disappear, but the physical pamphlet or the zine would still exist, and people who took a professional interest could find old copies and preserve them for others to find. But when blogs or websites disappear (as they often do), they disappear forever. Unless someone has archived the material elsewhere, there’s no physical copy left for some future Labadie Collection to dig out of someone’s attic. Just how important this is was really driven home for me when I went through the old Anarchoblogs contributor list to try to get in touch with folks about the new project. Out of over 100 former contributors, I was able to find a still-active blog for less than 30 blogs. The others blogs were no longer being actively updated, or had simply disappeared from the Internet. The old Anarchoblogs just aggregated the most recent content on contributing blogs, and discarded old posts; the new Anarchoblogs archives posts over time in a database where they can be indexed, searched, and re-read, even if the original blog disappears from the Internet. I think that as we spend more years working on building a grassroots, D.I.Y. culture, we are going to find that these kind of archiving efforts are going to be more and more important for our ability to preserve what we have built in media where people come and go quickly, constantly change addresses, drop out, get yanked off, or otherwise disappear from the web.

The Geological Evolution of Links:One Layer At a Time:
I've added four more links to the links section of this blog. Two are under the 'Blogs' section, and they are both from my comrade Kevin Carson. One is the 'Ozark Blog', and the other is the 'Uncapitalist Journal'. Kevin is a tireless blogger, and his posts are always well worth the time spent.
Both of the others are under the general 'Links' section. One is 'Spiritual Anarchy' (http://www.uark.edu/adsanders/anarchy.html ) and it contains a personal view of anarchism as well as a treasure trove of links- though I must admit that some of them are dead links. The other is the website of OCAP- The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (http://www.ocap.ca ). This is Canada's most experienced and best example of integrating radical activism with union organization in challenging the powers that be. It's a NGO with a difference. Look at it and support them if you can. It integrates everyday action for reform with a broader vision of social change.
Molly

The Best of the Blogs:
There's a couple of interesting articles on two of the blogs noted in our contact section. First of all, under Larry Gambone's 'Porkupine Blog' ( http://porkupineblog.blogspot.com ) there's an update of Larry's campaign against the banking industry via an ad for a DVD about same. It also contains references to his previous articles on debt and the banks. Then at the Mutualist Blogspot ( http://mutualist.blogspot.com ) there's an article by Kevin Carson on 'Levelling the Playing Field for Local Enterprise' that goes through various ways that the corporate economy avoids real competition. Well worth looking at.
Molly