Market Anarchist Blogs

I am happy to announce that Markets Not Capitalism is coming to Austin, Texas next weekend. I will be appearing at Brave New Books near the UT campus, and MonkeyWrench Books in North Austin, for a talk / reading / Q&A / market anarchist shindig on Saturday, February 4, and Sunday, February 5. Books will be available for purchase, I’ll be available for discussion and signing, caffeine will be available for consumption; spontaneously-ordered sociality to follow. Come on down; invite yr friends!

I’ll be giving a brief talk at both events, and then a reading from the collected essays on the nature of capitalism, role of the State in creating and propping it up, the place of mutual exchange and individual ownership in a radical, bottom-up alternative, the radical possibilities of freed-market social activism, and the individualist and mutualist tendencies within the anticapitalist tradition. Q&A, discussion and book-signing will ensue.

Many, many thanks are due to Crystal of the Austin / Central Texas A.L.L., for suggesting and organizing both of these events. And many thanks also to the spaces that have generously agreed to host us. Brave New Books is an underground radical libertarian bookstore, located one block from the University of Texas. In addition to fiction and nonfiction about a wide variety of topics, they also host community events including film showings, community meetings, music, speakers, book signings, and more.

MonkeyWrench Books is an all volunteer, collectively-run radical bookstore in North Austin. They provide an extensive collection of radical literature and media, prioritizing books, magazines, movies and zines that you won’t find at your average corporate bookstore; they also provide a place for meetings, film screenings, workshops, benefits, book readings and performances. The store facilitates greater interaction among individuals and organizations working toward social and economic justice. It’s a place where both experienced organizers and people new to political activism can find support, information, and a range of progressive viewpoints. It’s also a relaxed space to network and make connections over a cup of organic coffee or tea.

I’ll see you there!

Obvious trigger warnings. Further this is gonna be an abstract conversation on concepts. If you’re one of those rare folks who feels the war against patriarchy can’t ever afford side conversations for the sake of curiosity/clarity that aren’t rhetorically perfected weapons pointed towards teh enemy or if you figure there’s nothing new under the sun to be heard from cis-ish male-bodied people I totes understand and sympathize and I hope you will take my disagreement for what it is. I abhor speaking to a choir and try not to write until I’m assured I can at least contribute something at least moderately original and challenging, but c’est la vie.

No one would disagree that porn is a major site of importance in modern patriarchy. And there are usually three broad categories of critique leveled against it: 1) That the means of its production are exploitative. 2) That it pushes narratives and perspectives reinforcing of patriarchy. 3) That the very act of getting off to or sexualizing visual stimuli mentally reduces other people to objects.

It’s this last critique, rarely addressed head-on or in good faith, that’s the most fundamental. The first two, while undoubtedly significant, are ultimately just matters of detail. There are folks who produce porn through egalitarian collectives just as there are now literally millions of exhibitionists who freely share images/video of themselves in open forums, repositories and networking sites. So to is there queer porn. Indeed even the most cursory overviews would reveal the last decade has seen the exponential spread into the mainstream of increasingly complicated and diffuse presentations of gender and desire. At this point the conventional for-profit “Porn Industry” is basically a tiny antiquated sideshow dwarfed by a hundred million digital cameras and sketchpads. (In this piece I’ll stick with a more Dworkin-esque definition of porn as inclusive of things termed ‘erotica’ because any distinction between the two either begs the question or is wildly arbitrary not to mention usually classist. Plus it would be more than a little haughty to completely ignore how the term is actually used.)

To be clear however just because porn is a wide category growing more diverse daily doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of freaking evil shit out there. Recognizing complexity shouldn’t mean throwing up our hands and failing to critically engage, nor should it temper the intensity of our rage. Rapists are being made. And porn is a medium used to champion this in a variety of ways. Sometimes deliberately and explicitly, but at the very least huge swathes of what’s produced today still effectively contributes to, buffers, and insulates rape culture. This is no small issue and pretty much every other conversation on porn pales before it. Yet having our priorities in line shouldn’t equate disregarding those complexities. True ‘radicalism’ means exploring concepts down to the roots rather than settling for totalizing banners, no matter how generally adequate they seem. Individuals engage with things in a variety of ways with a variety of effects; done right analytical nuance and strategic dexterity doesn’t have to lead to equivocation or lost momentum. In fact, for those of us outside institutional power such precision and nimbleness is arguably our greatest natural asset.

What I find attractive about the notion that pornography is innately objectifying is not its obvious intuitive resonance but the promise of an inarguable underlying reality leading to clear-cut prescriptions. Yet there are actually quite a variety of arguments leveled in practice, working from significantly differing fundamentals. One can argue, for example, that sexual objectification derives from any divorce between desire regarding another’s physical body and desire regarding their mental existence, while alternatively one can argue that objectification stems from any desire regarding another’s physical body fullstop. Those are obviously very different approaches and frankly I find the latter far more secure. Most of us would surely find the former more pleasant or at least lenient in prescription but it reeks of unjustifiable arbitrariness. It’s not at all clear what would constitute such a divorce, nor what degree we should recoil from.

The fact is our minds change focus all the time. Does spending a minute or two reveling in some aspect of physical sensuality or desire mean hardening our neural pathways to perceive the existence of a partner more exclusively those material terms? Obviously there is a risk present, but how innately or concretely can we speak of it? If we spend a masturbation session primarily remembering a partner’s body/touch rather than anything specifically related to their character will that necessarily have any lasting effect upon us? What if it’s a child trying to imagine what sex would be like? Or a sickly person? Or a deformed person? It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the danger in focusing on the physical nature of sexual pleasure and desire is entirely dependent on things like the awareness, vigilance, and plasticity of a given mind — a conclusion that would lead to wildly variant prescriptions and significantly problematize any uniform social policy or campaign. If we can ever temporarily shift the focus of our desires/pleasure towards physical attributes/actions of a person and avoid generating any tendency to think of them as objects then the same would be true when it comes to pornography of one another.

One response is to turn the focus explicitly on whether a physical desire initially arises in response to personal associations or narratives predicated on the other’s existence as an agent. (eg ‘I only became in any way physically attracted to them after I got to know them.’) This might still allow forms of pornography to slip by when tied to a substantive narrative (the already large field of romance novels / pornographic comics offering many noteworthy candidates) yet at least allows us to critique the characterizations, etc presented. Unfortunately at the end of the day it’s not clear what could justify holding the original prompts of a given physical desire in such significance. The argument seems to be saying implicitly that what matters is what perspective or desire is ultimately prior or more fundamental in someone’s head than a momentary perspective/desire. And surely this is a matter of choice for anyone with even the most basic vigilance or agency in the construction of their own thoughts. We frequently choose to dabble in limited perspectives and focuses in ways that avoid overwriting our more core and motivating perspectives. Certainly corruption is a danger, and the social context of patriarchy can contribute significantly, but that’s no more innate a threat with one versus the other. Momentary desire for physical aspects of a partner can lead to ingraining objectifying patterns of thought just as easily as focus on those feelings more abstractly. There’s no straightforward reason to disallow taking such a risk in the one set of cases but not the other.

So what are we left with? Well, as previously mentioned, the other major approach is to reject sexual desire of physical things (at least in any way relating to people) wholesale.

I should note that at its greatest extreme this can even mean rejecting all sexual desire (arguing that surrendering one’s mind to desires arising from one’s own body counts in some sense as objectification of oneself). Frankly, I’ve always found anti-sexual positions kinda cool. I have a lot of admiration for people who bite bullets and in my mind the audacity of the proposition speaks positively of it. Plus I spent my teenage and young adult years seriously debating whether to go on chemical libido suppressants just to get by, so suffice to say I have an appreciation of how sexual desire can subjugate and reduce one’s own mind. But the same holds true of practically anything. The fact that one can get lost compulsively surfing Wikipedia for the dopamine fix of new information, while worth consideration, obviously shouldn’t speak to its proper utility. Sexual desire and sensuality interface socially, pharmaceutically, and psychologically in a host of ways, providing a vast array of tools that can be extraordinarily useful. Chucking it out would be akin to chucking any other field of technology. Sadly, to get started on anything even approximating an appropriate overview would require its own blog post so let’s skip that for now and just press on under the working assumption that sex is acceptable in certain forms.

What we can still at least conclude is that sexual titillation by compassion, mathematical aptitude, or say pine trees clearly wouldn’t involve preferences directed at anyone else’s body. There are still valid concerns to be had about the preformative aspect of mental actions (‘dance monkey dance‘ is obviously objectifying in any form), but I think we’ve clearly achieved enough distance from concerns about objectification to stop and take a look back. Does this resemble what hardline opponents of pornography within feminism are actually saying?

In almost every case, no. (The exceptions, insofar as they’re honest about it, are really cool. But again as above I will avoid exploring that direction in depth here for space.) Instead it’s almost universally conceded that the biological prompts of sexual desire are just too strong overall. We get turned on by certain forms of touch and smell for example without conscious choice. There are a wealth of hardwired physiological circuits capable of triggering chemical responses. Some, possibly even all, can be fiddled with or cut but the effort required can be functionally unfeasible and there are a multitude of them. That’s not, obviously, to throw up our hands in surrender (some of us are transhumanists after all). But it does generally seem to prescribe a certain pragmatism towards sexual desire that allows us to embrace the positives while staying alert to the negatives. It’s okay, in short, to do things like turn one’s focus to a lover’s body or fantasize about a fictional character or imagine what a certain experience would be like.

So what then is such a fundamental problem with pornography?

In practice it seems to be centered around an objection to the visual (as opposed to tactile or aromatic) component of the sensation. While most feminists left the Porn Wars with a nuanced perspective on porn as a medium capable of conducting good as well as bad (with effects dependent on a vast array of context both social and individual), the horrified lot that wrote us off as heinous apostates didn’t seem to do so just because they were wedded to rhetorical trenches or sumsuch; there was a notable tone of alienation and disgust at the very notion of visual desire. It was declared obviously suspicious because it was ‘unnatural.’ Anecdotal evidence can only go so far but time and again I’ve found an exceptionally strong correlation between my stridently anti-porn friends (of different genders) and ‘just not really getting the whole visual attraction thing‘.

Which makes a lot of sense. A straightforward experience-gap would explain in a sympathetic light why so many discussions on pornography within feminism, even when approached in good faith by both sides, so often grind up against a wall of mutual incomprehension. Well no freaking duh. If there was an entire avenue of physiological desire other people experienced that you didn’t (or didn’t experience with anything approaching the same intensity) and intersected with patriarchy the way porn does you’d be overwhelmingly inclined to write it off as a construct of patriarchy too. I mean good god! It’s a neat hypothesis at least in regard to some anti-porn feminists because experience-gaps don’t speak to intelligence, and over the decades I’ve encountered more than a few brilliant people with incomprehensibly absolutist stances on pornography. Sending pictures to your partner? Objectification. A pubescent kid drawing boobs? Objectification. An incredibly popular porn site consisting of user-submitted videos of the faces they make during masturbation and orgasm? Objectification. (Because getting off solely to indications of someone else’s pleasure is clearly… wait, what?) The line drawn is always between visual and tactile sensation. Dildos and even fleshlights no matter how evocative are almost always given a pass by the same people who assume any reasonable person would be grossed by the notion of getting off to imagery.

There may not be hope of persuading everyone stuck in such a trap. At this point the paranoia and war-effort frame of mind probably runs too deep for some and that’s perfectly understandable. But it’s at least another opportunity to drive home the so easily forgotten reality that people’s physical and neurological experiences can be quite different; our own are not necessarily a good baseline by which to judge others. Is it really so weird to consider that just as most brains are built with certain circuits tailored to recognizing and responding to faces there might also be circuits that automatically recognize and respond to other bodily details? Are we really so scared of the “but that’s just the way biology is babe” bros that we can’t allow ourselves any explorations in empathy?

At the end of the day the only question that matters is What Is The Mechanism? Because statistical correlation isn’t enough. There’s unbelievable diversity to how people think, what frames of mind they inherit or choose in approaching a given thing in a given context, and we’re not going to win by going around voting up or down on aggregates. I’m not saying, for example, that the societal and cultural effects of pornographic saturation aren’t significant or something that we should in any way shirk from attacking. But things are rarely cut and dry. Nor would it necessarily be better if they were. Complexity allows us a lot of directions from which to attack things, just as, in conjunction with our agency and proper vigilance, it allows us room to maneuver. Porn is just a medium and even Mein Kampf can be read for diverse reasons without corruption. Over the last decade various mainstream cultural ecosystems of porn (from imagefap to deviantart) have acted as virulent contagion vectors for a number of incredibly positive perspectives on consent and queered notions of gender/sexuality as well as broadly countering patriarchal narratives through direct interaction and omnipresent diversity. They’ve also served as vectors for the standard horribly fucked up shit, but in many cases the payloads have been subverted or partially neutralized as play made less potent by the surrounding free-wheeling context. Folks can no longer avoid recognizing the complexity of desire and identity in society and with less and less uniform social pressure a particular fetishization coming from a fucked up place no longer feels the obligation to form a totalizing counter-narrative and push it fascisticly. Porn as a whole has taken the form of a conversation.

That doesn’t make it anything close to a utopia yet. We still live under patriarchy and a diffuse post-modern fascism is still fascism. But it does make pornography a hugely dynamic and vital theater of conflict. And it does mean that the agency of the various speakers is creeping to the fore in undeniable ways among even those realms of kink that its hard at the outset to see any excusable mindset for. We can exploit this. And indeed a good many folks have rolled up their sleeves to get their hands dirty. So it’s sad to see a tiny remainder of otherwise brilliant feminists filled with right and glorious rage still bashing their heads together with sweeping practically deontological 70s-era frameworks. (Incidentally calling ourselves “sex-positive” is in most cases just incredibly underhanded and douchey and not making things any better.) This isn’t about some whiney liberal appeal to ‘free speech’ or chucking core principles out to win over bros. As I’ve picked apart there simply isn’t any root principle that pornography falls afoul of inherently; getting off to imagery relating to other people isn’t magically objectifying because people both differ and have agency in their self-construction. Socialization is anything but uniform and it certainly doesn’t create mechanistic people with mechanistic perspectives. Treating people like it does is itself objectifying.

A couple of weeks ago George Monbiot argued that libertarians must deny climate change at guardian.co.uk If he gets anything at all right in this article, it is merely implied: that libertarian types do not appear to articulate often enough our thoughts about how a stateless world might deal with environmental issues.

But the main argument of his article betrays a failure of logic that, in his determination to have a pop at what he thinks of as libertarianism again, leads him to reject one of the simplest and most just mechanisms for preventing, or ultimately punishing, environmental damage.  And in thus blindly attacking libertarianism on false premises, he dismisses an entire ideology that offers more hope than the statist quo of creating a sustainable economy with better and more adaptable stewardship of apparently finite natural resources.

His logically challenged argument goes thus:

1. Libertarians (as if we all are of one opinion - a generalisation he'd probably denounce shrilly if it were levelled at any "right on" heterogenous group he happens to approve of) hold property rights as near sacred.
2. Libertarians would not presume to circumscribe the uses to which any individual or organisation puts its property.
3. Consequently libertarians can have nothing to say about people using their property to pollute their neighbours' property, the planet as a whole or to cause any other environmental degradation.

And on the back of this deduction he complains that libertarians can have no coherent response to any sort of environmental concerns such as climate change because we cannot both hold property as sacred and reserve the right to tell people what they can or cannot do with it.

Logically challenged?  Surely not, someone as clever and erudite as George?  Well yes, you see the very thing he attacks, the sanctity of property rights, is the simplest bastion against environmental destruction you could find.  Because the inescapable (and quite obvious with a minute's thought) corollary to me not being able to curtail your "enjoyment" of your property is that you cannot use that property to harm my enjoyment of mine, or my property in myself.

Private property and equity

The ancient legal (Justinian I believe) doctrine of "sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas" meaning something like "one should use his own property in such a manner as not to injure that of another" had established the principle that one could sue another for damage done to yourself or your property or nuisance caused by another's property for centuries.  And it appears to have worked pretty well at least until around the middle of the nineteenth century.  There are lots of cases on record of firms being shut down or forcibly moved because of the pollution they caused, for example to people living nearby.

What appears to have broken the system a little is that the polluting effects of traditional "nuisance" industries such as slaughterhouses, renderers, tanners and the like was well known, whereas the Industrial Revolution brought challenges people, including courts did not understand.  You could tell the horrible smell of a tallow plant was a nuisance, but the science wasn't up to deciding whether that cloud of odourless vapour coming out of your plant was actually responsible for damage to others and their property.  In the US at least, it appears that the courts started to take a view on the economic benefits of a new industry and not having the evidence to prove it was dangerous sided with the businesses more than they had previously with the "|traditional" polluting industries.

But it's what happened next that shows that government mechanisms are less up to the job than the courts could be.  Once science caught up with the idea that some of these new industries did in fact have damaging effects, government stepped in and imposed limits.  But those limits tended to be roughly what the contemporary pollution problems were - i.e. that you could carry on doing what you had been doing but not pollute any more than that.  Courts of equity would likely have taken a different view.  Even though most propertarian libertarian types would say that if you owned the property before anyone moved into your area new arrivals would be "late comers" and caveat emptor would apply - you could continue running your polluting business as you had done - if something was later discovered to be damaging that wasn't known about before, there could still be a case to answer.  Or if the business intensified its pollution or changed its pollution there would be a case to answer.

Perhaps just as important is to look at the environmental degradation in countries where personal property rights are not well defended.  In Kenya, for example, source of many of our more frivolous horticultural products like mange tout peas, cut flowers and salad, which gets a lot of criticism for wasting badly needed water, most indigenous farmers can only rent either from the state or large land owners protected by the state.  They all too often find that when someone appears with some kind of export revenue generating idea such as growing roses the government are quick to revoke tenancies and force people off their land to make way for these environmentally destructive uses.  Same goes for gold and diamond mining in west Africa - tenuous property rights allow states to kick people off the land to make way for massively polluting extractive industries.  At the very least if they had strong property rights these farmers could hold out for a decent price for their land.

The state promotes environmental profligacy

But libertarian environmentalism is not restricted to private actions for specific damage to the property of another.  Apart from the problem mentioned above that when the state set limits they tended to become "targets" within which companies could operate more or less as they had previously, many state programmes actually promote or reward a certain level of environmental carelessness.  The BP Deepwater Horizon disaster is a case in point - as is the entire oil industry.  Governments have aggressively promoted exploration, have gone to war to acquire and protect oil supplies, and indemnified firms against losses or limited their liability.  In the BP case they also insisted that BP only drill at the edge of their technological ability rather than in shallower waters that might have prevented such an accident becoming a disaster.

State run monetary systems too promote unsustainable production, built in obsolescence and so on, so that firms stand a chance, not only of making enough money to pay their taxes, but to keep up with the monetary devaluation caused by the state run inflation mechanism.  They have to run faster, sell more, to stand still.  Inflation erodes savings, so people will tend to consume more and invest less.

Private law makes change easier

But probably just as important as any of these, for hard core stateless society types like myself, is that with a private law society, people at large, the "demos" if you will, or its equivalent, could bring about more change, more quickly, than the tortuous process of international treaties and policing them.  We've had Kyoto, Copenhagen, Durban and all the rest and still have no binding international agreement, let alone ways of policing them.

Under a private law society, where so much would be handled on behalf of owners by competing insurance and litigation organisations those who wanted could demand and probably pay for their insurer not to do business with proven polluters.  Steadily a market consensus would grow, polluters would find their insurance against environmental claims became too expensive.  Add this to the idea above that there would be no state to be in thrall to polluting businesses and there's nothing stopping the private, competitive insurance and litigation system putting a pretty swift halt to identifiably environmentally damaging business processes.

So, all in all George (not that you'll ever find this, but my International Relations lecturer might and pass it on to you I guess), I think you'll find that without the power of the state to promote and protect polluters and to prevent private property owners taking action against them by issuing them rights to pollute and so on, we'd have a much more sustainable economy and better stewardship of the planet.  If that's what people want.  And people like you keep telling us that that is what people want.

Advertisement:

read more

I recently came across the following video. I would like to see a transcript of the full speech and know when this was delivered.

A number of things are misleading here.

It’s misleading to cast Lysander Spooner as a Confederate-apologist. Spooner was a militant abolitionist who had advocated the expropriation of slave estates by slaves and partisan warfare against slaveholders. He was also involved in a failed plot to capture the governor of Virginia to exchange him for John Brown. Spooner’s No Treason doesn’t honor the Confederate government but criticizes the Northern government’s priorities in carrying out the war to keep the South in the union. It’s not exactly the kind of thing that should have a Confederate military flag flown behind it without further explanation.

Paul mentions that slavery elsewhere was abolished without war – as if it didn’t require two to make a war, that the whole thing was the north’s fault, and had nothing to do with the entrenched power of the Southern slaveholding elite.

Paul brings up the concept of compensated emancipation – to bribe slaveowners to free the humans they had kept as property. Besides inferring that it would be less costly than war he doesn’t go into the ethical concerns here. He also doesn’t address the practical concerns of how free labor could be implemented without re-organizing a society based on racial hierarchy. (Paul does not say it here, but Confederate apologists frequently exclaim “but the north – including Lincoln himself – was racist too!” It is true that racism was not limited to the South but there are certainly degrees in racism and degrees to which it defines society].)

A typical defense that Paul does employ is to highlight differences in economic organization and advantages given to northern manufacturers, without acknowledging that Southern industry, including sugar manufacturing centers, was based on slave labor. Federal enforcement of slavery was a massive subsidy to the big business of slaveholding.

Paul insists that Northern elites cynically used the issue of slavery to “cancel out individual choice” yet what individual choice did slaves have? There is a major difference between consent of the people and consent of the states, and coming down on the side of states is not very libertarian.

The political elite of the Confederate states didn’t secede just to see if they could, but because they were worried about the institution of slavery. See the statements made by Confederate elites worried that the national government would restrict slavery too much.The political elite of the North was more concerned with keeping the Union together and building their political power than they were with the freedom of black people, yet pressure from refugee ex-slaves, abolitionists, and international politics eventually brought the north largely on the side of abolition, though a struggle over what emancipation would mean continued.

That's a tweet sent Monday from the official account of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, noteworthy not only for its cocksure hypocrisy -- it's Israel that continues to produce nukes without so much as a strongly worded email  from the alleged international community -- but for its casually bold new charge against the Islamic Republic of Iran: that it not only desires a nuclear weapon, but is already busy making them.

Coincidentally, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports today:

"The intelligence assessment Israeli officials will present later this week to [top U.S. general Martin] Dempsey indicates that Iran has not yet decided whether to make a nuclear bomb."

Someone ought to send that there assessment on over to the prime minister's office.

What is the “Plan” for accomplishing liberty? How do we get it done?

This question, posed often by those both sympathetic and hostile to full human liberty and its implications, is one that sadly reveals to a great degree the success of our societal pro-government conditioning. Even after the realization of the moral incumbency of free action by each individual, we still instantly think in terms of imposing such a condition through hierarchical edicts from the top down. Since liberty is, itself, the absence of any such coercive external imposition this makes going about it tricky and counter-intuitive.

Using the political process to accomplish reductions of government violations of natural rights is completely acceptable from a moral point of view, even when deceptive. This is because doing so can not be reasonably construed to constitute consent for the system itself, and the implementation is merely that which is morally incumbent (a condition of free exercise of rights). Therefore, voters being deprived of the violations of individual rights to which they are accustomed as resulting from the political processes have not been deprived of any valid expectation. Ultimately, however, such a strategy for ending or reducing the state and its crimes against rightfully free individuals will fall short of accomplishing a lasting solution. It will fail because of the way the process itself is at odds with the ideals of liberty.

It is important to understand that the operating capability of the state does not rest purely on implemented or threatened force. If it did, it would be very limited in the scope of its effective control, and it would have to operate out of the public eye. The real “lynch-pin” for the state is that it rests on the widespread perception of its legitimacy, and the expectations of the people all around us in our churches, businesses and families. They spring into its service as enforcers (knowingly or not) with social reprisals against anyone who questions not just a particular government action, but the validity of our being subject to its rule at all.

That’s why the path to complete liberty is to undermine this concept and perception. We must do so slowly but surely until it becomes the same as a “flat earth” idea. Like the truth-based advances in human progress that preceded this one, it is a huge uphill battle against all of the weight of tradition and institutional inertia. However, once the social reprisals faced by the average person for supporting the use of state violence outweigh the social risks for opposing the state, it’s “game over” and we’ve won. We can see an example of this dynamic in the recent past with the example of racial segregation.

Encouraging People to Choose to Be Free

That understanding presents a much different long-term strategy, and one that requires uncomfortable conversations in our personal lives. To move the evolution of humanity forward toward liberty in a lasting way, we can all do a great deal without ever stepping in a voting booth or holding a campaign sign. People’s relationships with others are incredibly important to them. We can point out tactfully and calmly the reality of government force in a very personal way. We can explain to them that the schemes of state solutions with which they agree, are being imposed upon millions who do not … at the barrel of a gun. We can point out that among these millions is the person with whom they are speaking at that moment and profess to care for. Does this friend or family member really believe men with guns should be permitted to force you to fund their solution to a problem, or to put you in a cage if you refuse?

People are not accustomed to having to answer for this in their individual interactions. When people start facing this reality and its individual implications more often, then those social risks that come with supporting the state will start to outweigh those that accompany its rejection. Once the point is reached when the average person has more social fear attending support for the state than they do about denying its purported legitimacy openly, then the war will have been won. No amount of threats, subversion or naked force will be able to stem the tide of human progress away from this archaic means of social organization at that point. The idea of the state will be relegated to the dustbin of history with the other outmoded and pre-scientific solutions that proceeded their well-deserved demise.

Credit: Spencer Morgan, “How Do We Accomplish Liberty?” with a Creative Commons license

The spontaneous emergence of oligarchies from egalitarian markets is a reoccuring fear to communists of all stripes and while the historical prompts of this fear can be easily shown to be horribly misinterpreted, the concern itself is not entirely without merit. Every so often a mathematical model comes along that bears some metaphorical resemblance to actual markets under certain conditions/assumptions and demonstrates a disturbing emergence of oligarchal tendencies. Markets, like ecosystems, are richly dynamic systems and the dangers exposed by toy models can speak to real ones, but they also tend to ignore emergent meta-complexities to the market that are in reality fundamental mechanisms of course-correction. Markets work precisely because they’re not simple and can evolve around problems by taking into account more context, moving into a higher-dimensional phase-space and generating new feedback loops to suppress lower level ones.

Today’s big hit is a cute little paper by a couple econophysicists in Bremen. They built a toy model where a whole bunch of limited agents each have two types of interactions: they decide a ‘trustworthiness’ value for themselves [0-1] as well as who all to contract with, and strategize to maximize the number of folks contracting with them times those folks’ trustworthiness and minimize their own trustworthiness in the contracts they initialize with others (each agent is forced to initiate said contracts/interactions with a set number of people per round). This asymmetry between initiated interactions and responsive interactions is intended to mirror a distinction between selling and buying and I’ll stick to that metaphor from here on out although it’s not unproblematic. Who to buy from in this model is decided by a straight comparison of prices while sellers set prices (quality/trustworthiness) by comparing the immediately preceding prices and resulting payoffs of their competitors. Long story short there were three major environmental variables, the set number of people the buyers were forced to buy from, a randomness factor localized to a single agent each iteration and the relative speed at which buyers updated their strategies versus sellers. The resulting system behavior revealed that this market had only two stable points: extreme competition (selling with next to no profit above marginal costs) or extreme cartelization (sellers get ridiculous profit).

No freaking duh. Said runaway cartelization is a direct result of the defining obligations imposed upon buyers. The number of sellers one’s obliged to sell to [K] is explicitly recognized as a big one, if the whole market is raising prices like crazy and one person deviates a little to undercut their competitors they don’t get appropriately flooded with payoffs from buyers because those buyers are obliged to buy from K sellers (of which the undercutter is just one). But most importantly K isn’t a strategic choice that can be set to 0 (through savings, austerity, DIY, etc) for extended periods by the buyers or lowered via model-external tradeoffs. Essentially what’s being modeled is forced consumption. It should be intuitively obvious that forced consumption will have a tendency to drive up prices as if sellers were operating as a cartel, if only because whatever’s artificially forcing buyers to buy no matter what IS usually in reality a cartel. The authors repeatedly emphasize gas prices as the best example and it doesn’t take unusual knowledge of history or political economy to recognize the role the state has plated in establishing the fixed demand there.

Predictably, coverage of this paper has largely played to the popular myth that free markets inexorably lead to oligarchies, which is a little sad because the best part of the paper is the quantitative analysis of response time in determining the critical point between competition and cartelization.  How fast sellers and buyers pick up on market changes and adapt their strategies relative to one another is obviously of huge importance in the fight over what emerges.  And this is actually a left-libertarian point: insofar as situations arise where smaller market actors are forced to consume rigidly they can leverage their well-known calculational advantages against larger more sluggish actors (usually the ones responsible for the situation).  And in the other direction, where larger firms typify the position of buyer and individuals typify sellers (as with labor), such “cartelization” effects would be positive. Whether through solidarity unionism or more diffuse mechanisms like RateMyBoss.com, we want to drive them out of business after all.

Of course while this provides further impetus for the development of information technologies empowering consumers, there are obvious difficulties in practice for unrestrained market mechanisms alone when our existing “market” is already so far gone to cartelization (precarity, etc), but that’s what molotovs and pikes are for.

(Via Facebook, originally published in Alternative Press Review, Fall 2000.)

More juvenilia: some unfinished stories from the 1970s.

Wow, it’s amazing how much Sophia Myles looks like Karen Gillan. Still, if you can’t trust the Daily Star, who can you trust?