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Capitalism versus Capitalism

While reading the symposium on Kevin Carson’s book, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, in the latest Journal of Libertarian Studies, I was struck by how upset people can get when someone uses a term differently from how they use it — even if he makes his usage perfectly clear and explicitly draws on legitimate historical precedent. This comes up on at least two occasions in the commentary on Carson. I’ve read Carson’s book, and I had no trouble seeing how he uses the word “capitalism.” Much of the book is devoted to showing that historical capitalism — the real-life mercantilist political-economic system that most people attach that word to — bears only superficial resemblance to the laissez-faire free market, which he favors. Indeed anyone who does not quickly see this in Carson’s work is not paying attention. It is not some obscure point buried under other material. It is the point! Moreover, Carson shows the historical precedent — in the work of Thomas Hodgskin and Benjamin Tucker, for example — for such usage. It shouldn’t be hard to grasp.

Yet two critics can’t or won’t see it. Drs. Walter Block and George Reisman go for Carson’s jugular in retaliation for his alleged confusion of laissez faire with (state) capitalism. Carson handily disposes of the criticism and needs no help from me, but I can’t restrain myself from jumping into the fray. …

'Major' IBM breakthrough breathes new life into Moore’s Law

Silicon is dead. Long live, carbon nanotubes.

In transistors, size matters — a lot. You can’t squeeze more silicon transistors (think billions of them) into a processor unless you can make them smaller, but the smaller these transistors get, the higher the resistance between contacts, which means the current can’t flow freely through them and, in essence, the transistors and chips built based on them, can no longer do their jobs. Ultra-tiny carbon nanotube transistors, though are poised to solve the size issue.

SEE ALSO: IBM announces functioning 7-nanometer chip breakthrough

In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Science, IBM scientists announced they had found a way to reduce the contact length of carbon nanotube transistors — a key component of the tech and the one that most impacts resistance — down to 9 nanometers without increasing resistance at all. To put this in perspective, contact length on traditional, silicon-based 14nm node technology (something akin to Intel’s 14nm technology) currently sits at about 25 nanometers.

“In the silicon space, the contact resistance is very low if the contact is very long. If contact is very short, the resistance shoots up very quickly and gets large. So you have trouble getting current through the device,” Wilfried Haensch, IBM Senior Manager, Physics & Materials for Logic and Communications, told me. …

Plastic-eating worms may offer solution to mounting waste, Stanford researchers discover

Consider the plastic foam cup. Every year, Americans throw away 2.5 billion of them. And yet, that waste is just a fraction of the 33 million tons of plastic Americans discard every year. Less than 10 percent of that total gets recycled, and the remainder presents challenges ranging from water contamination to animal poisoning.

Enter the mighty mealworm. The tiny worm, which is the larvae form of the darkling beetle, can subsist on a diet of Styrofoam and other forms of polystyrene, according to two companion studies co-authored by Wei-Min Wu, a senior research engineer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford. Microorganisms in the worms’ guts biodegrade the plastic in the process – a surprising and hopeful finding.

“Our findings have opened a new door to solve the global plastic pollution problem,” Wu said. …

Minnesota Man Arrested, Sentenced to 6-Months in Jail for Having a Windmill On His Property

Orono, MN – For more than a year, we have been following the story of a Minnesota man, Jay Nygard, who is routinely risking jail time because he refuses to remove a wind turbine from his property. Nygard has been in and out of court over the years, and despite a short-lived victory in October, he was recently back in front of a judge facing a contempt of court charge for refusing a court order to remove the turbines from his property.

He did eventually remove the turbines, leaving only the cement bases because removing them would cause structural damage to their house. This was not good enough for the local government, who ignored the advice of three different engineers and demanded that they remove the bases, despite the risk of damaging the home. …

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “‘Peace Through Strength’ and Other Lies” read by Tony Dreher and edited by Nick Ford.

Maybe we should ask ourselves, though, whether America really is the good guy — or whether it’s the power that needs to be deterred. And if you look at its record of invasions, coups and support for terrorist groups and death squads since WWII, the United States is the hands-down winner as most aggressive power in the world. The overthrow of Arbenz, Mossadeq and Sukarno; the installation — and subsequent overthrow — of Diem, along with war crimes in Vietnam; support for Mobutu, for Central American death squads, and for Shell’s death squads in Nigeria and Indonesia; the wave of military dictatorships that swept South America with the help of the CIA and Operation Condor; the East Timor invasion; the destabilization of Afghanistan (the primary factor in the rise of Al Qaeda); the criminal aggression in Iraq (the primary factor in the rise of AQ Iraq and ISIS) … Someone should write a “Black Book of American Imperialism” as a companion volume to the one on communism.

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C4SS Feed 44 presents Chad Nelson‘s “Lessig Would Use a Scalpel Where a Machete is Necessary” read by Mike Godzina and edited by Nick Ford.

Lessig isn’t wrong to detest the baldly corrupt American political system. In the 2016 presidential race, less than 400 of the country’s wealthiest families will contribute nearly half of the overall money raised. The well-known billionaire business magnates that make up that list (the Schwabs, Larry Ellison, and Norman Braman, to name just a few) have a lot riding on the success of their presidential racehorses. Knowing that their houses of cards depend largely on political protection, these corporate pigs feeding at the political trough understand that elections are of paramount importance.

Nineteenth century French radical Frederic Bastiat described this symbiotic relationship aptly when he wrote, “the state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” No group benefits more from this parasitism than the upper echelons of the business class, who will spare no expense to purchase a cadre of politicians in order to keep their already well-oiled profit machines running smoothly.

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$1.00 for the first copy. $0.75 for every additional copy.

This collection includes two provocative essays by contemporary mutualist writer Kevin Carson. “Who Owns the Benefit? The Free Market as Full Communism,” explores the radical possibilities for market exchange and competition freed from capitalistic privilege and the burdens of artificial scarcity. “Capitalism Without Capitalists?” asks whether mutualistic markets will be driven to recreate the capitalist model by competitive logic, or whether peer production, decentralized ownership and unprivileged market exchange can bring about alternative incentives, and dynamics that disperse, rather than concentrating, wealth and progress.

“Just about everything we identify as problematic about corporate capitalism … results from the socialization of cost and risk and the privatization of profit. Why haven’t the cybernetic revolution and the vast increases in productivity from technological progress resulted in fifteen-hour work weeks, or many necessities of life becoming too cheap to meter? The answer is that economic progress is enclosed as a source of rent and profit… .

“As surprising as it might seem, there’s a strong parallel between this free market vision of abundance and the Marxist vision of full communism. Commons-based peer production is the core around which the post-capitalist economy will eventually crystallize… .”

“Bill also underestimates the different competitive dynamic that would result from a radically decentralized market. We are currently at one extreme of the pole: a centralized economy with production for large, anonymous commodity markets. A mutualist free market would be much closer to the other pole: a decentralized market of production for local use… .”

Kevin A. Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and a prolific writer on subjects including free-market anti-capitalism, the individualist anarchist tradition, grassroots technology and radical unionism. He keeps a blog at mutualist.blogspot.com.

Support C4SS with Kevin Carson’s “The Free Market as Full Communism”

Source: distro.libertarianleft.org

Did the Early Factory Workers Welcome Their Fate?

Kevin Carson has an interesting post in his occasional “Vulgar Libertarianism Watch” series. This time he critiques Thomas Woods’s comments on distributism, the Catholic-related idea, associated with Belloc and Chesterton, that the means of production should be widely dispersed, rather than concentrated in the hands of a few bureaucrats or capitalists. A distributist economy would presumably be filled with single proprietorships and worker co-ops. Carson quotes from Woods’s article “What’s Wrong with ‘Distributism,’“ in which he states that for family reasons, “it is by no means obvious that it is always preferable for a man to operate his own business rather than to work for another.” To which Carson responds,

This makes the unwarranted assumption that working for someone else is the only way of reducing risk, as opposed to cooperative ownership, federation, etc. It assumes, as a basic premise, the very thing that distributism objects to: that capital is concentrated in the hands of a few owners who hire wage labor, instead of widely distributed among the general population who pool it through cooperative mechanisms.

He then adds,

The proper contrast is between a laborer making a subsistence living off a small family plot with access to a common, and supplementing his income when necessary with wage labor, versus that … [nineteenth-century] factory worker. To compare the hours and quality of work of a genuine subsistence farmer with the mind-numbing 12- or 14-hour days in a dark satanic mill is a joke.

To Woods’s claim that the people who flocked to the factories after 1750 had no tools with which to start their own businesses and would have starved had they tried to stay in agriculture, Carson responds that land expropriations put those workers in that dire position, which was one of the points of expropriation in the first place. …

Source: c4ss.org

Gun Control: Race, Gender, Class, and Liberty

Following the tragic event at Umpqua Community College, where a 26-year-old gunman opened fire in a classroom leaving 10 people killed and another 7 injured, it is understandable that U.S. gun culture and state gun control are fresh on people’s minds. When moving forward after events like this, I believe it’s important to avoid reactive measures that could potentially have even greater consequences than the tragedies themselves (ex. War on Drugs, PATRIOT Act, etc.). What follows is a selection of articles over the years from across the political spectrum that touch on the usually ignored topic of gun control and discrimination in its many forms.*

The Secret History of Guns by Adam Winker

Gun Rights Benefited Black Americans During the Civil Rights Movement and Still Do by Sheldon Richman

Yes, Please by Charles W. Johnson

Gun Control, Surveillance and Trans Resistance by Dean Spade

Seen and Unseen by Rodrick Long

Gun Control: A Left Libertarian Critique by Nathan Goodman

Is There a Right to Own a Gun? by Michael Huemer

The Panthers Were Right and Reagan Was Wrong on Gun Control by Anthony Gregory

An Anarchist Case Against Gun Control by Chris Cararra

Shaneen Allen, Race and Gun Control by Radley Balko

Gun Control, Mental Illness, and Black Trans and Lesbian Survival by Gabriel Arkles

Arm the Mentally Ill by Kelly Vee

Some Observations on the Gun Control Debate by Kevin Carson

Feel free to comment with additional material I may have missed relating to these topics.

*Note: This is NOT meant to be a case for or against certain measures of gun control. This is meant to shed light on specific factors that are usually absent from this discussion.

Possible U.S. airstrike hits Afghan hospital

KABUL — An airstrike apparently carried out by U.S. forces heavily damaged a charitable hospital in northern Afghanistan on Saturday, killing at least 19 people — three of them reportedly children — in an incident that a senior U.N. official equated to a war crime.

The airstrike occurred before dawn when a Doctors Without Borders trauma center in war-torn Kunduz was struck while doctors were treating dozens of patients. Hospital officials said they were assaulted from the air for 30 to 45 minutes, resulting in a large fire that burned some patients to death in their beds. Among those killed were 12 of the charity group’s staff members, the group said. …