Market Anarchist Blogs

Some noble soul has labored to put the two most important history books on Individualist Anarchism’s first wave in America online — and in very accessible condition.   Anyway, I felt I had to pause in my projects and distractions to let you know.  This is the shit.

Eunice Minette Schuster’s Native American Anarchism (1932)

Rudolph Rocker’s Pioneers of American Freedom (1949)

Back in August last year Magpie asked me to review his book and I promised I would, albeit with the caveat that I’d wait while I reestablished my blog.  Back in August.  The problem, the actual reason I’ve postponed posting anything, is that while I wish Magpie success 1) I feel morally obliged to share any copyrighted material I get access to online and 2) in an honest review I don’t feel that Mythmakers & Lawbreakers was that deserving of publication.  The notion of bringing explicitly anarchist strands in fiction (and particularly SF) to the foreground is nice and some of the interviews are enviable scores (Le Guin, Moore), they never really go anywhere.  There’s simply not much content in Mythmakers & Lawbreakers.

My lengthy original review has been lost on one hard drive or another.  But a summary is easy:  Few of the authors are actually all that recognizably anarchist or noteworthy.  Several of them are laughable or deplorable (Starhawk, Jensen).   And few of them end up saying anything particularly interesting.  I recognize that an AK Press compendium allows for distribution to a wider audience — particularly the sort of bleh liberals that most of the interviewed authors seemed to be speaking to, but at the end of the day I preferred Mythmakers and Lawbreakers as a zine series.

The only bit that stuck with me was one of the minor authors talking about how they’re no longer drawn to fiction the way they used to be because the intensity, stakes and adventure of the anarchist struggle eventually puts everything else imaginable to pale.  This.

UPDATE:  Magpie just put the book’s entire content online as the original zine series.  Much approval.

Incidentally I think that Primitivism offers the perfect counterpoint to the thin-libertarian crowd’s singleminded focus on nonaggression.  Freedom is not purely voluntarism.  We can imagine a child born into chains and left there.  They are not coerced, all the pertinent actions are voluntary, but they are decidedly less free than they could be.

Material conditions matter.  And are, in fact, inextricably bound up with societal considerations.  The simple truth is that I have more options, more capacity to do things in a technologically advanced society than I do in a primitive society.

A culture that turns against information technology for example or destroys antibiotics seriously impedes me in comparison to our own.  It’s not necessarily true that I could develop such on my own (or with whatever circle of likeminded folk I might have access to).  And a world in which mortal disease is rampant because of cultural prohibitions is quite obviously and intuitively less-free.  The decision by a great many people to internally suppress, turn away from and refuse to participate in the struggle for material developments is not by any sense an aggression (they didn’t invent or distribute the pre-existing plague), but not living past 17 is still pretty goddamn oppressive.

There’s a lot of talk in anarchist circles about abolishing work.  Some of it in line with the dream of a high-technology path to post-scarcity.  But a lot of it takes an alternative route and settles for simply building a ludic society — that is to say a culture that adapts its tasks into “play”.  Like a lot of romantic, boundary-pushing, post-leftish notions it’s purposefully detached from precise conceptual formulations, but the general notion is that the exertion fundamentally necessary to, you know, keeping us alive should be fun rather than drudgerous.  Appealing to the dichotomy of association we distinguish between “work” and “play.”

But while this is an intuitive bundling, I think there’s an analytical weakness worth noting, or at least a reality getting glossed over.  Ignoring all the vectors of drudgery that plague the modern world there’s still a fundamental conceptual distinction between projects that we undertake that have serious consequences and projects that do not.  Drudgery and alienation — in short *disinterest* — can be eliminated, but stress is a different beast.  A game of calvinball for instance is an undertaking of pure (random) process divorced from results.  There’s nothing to invest in and/or nothing we might invest.  Roughhousing, shenanigans, fiddling, aimless exploration.  These allow us to engage in action without belaboring ourselves with concern.  Naturally they carry with them an immense sense of freedom and relief.  But while the process of undertaking projects with real-world consequences can be fun, enjoyable and a chance to scratch personal itches.  Their very synchronicity with our driving desires can instigate a radically different experience.  While it’s perfectly rational to talk of a world in which we are no longer forced to take actions we’d rather not, eliminating all perception of weightiness to those actions is a different and much stronger type of impossible.  There are plenty of actions we ultimately want to take that at the same time inspire trepidation and tension.

Duh, right?  But in the succulent rhetoricism of dismissing work I think there’s been an insipid conflation between these negative associations.  Stress has somewhat paradoxically gotten bundled with disinterest.  And liberation implicitly set in opposition to both.

Now don’t get me wrong, there’s value to consequence-less play — it helps us practice process and overwrites the klaxons ringing in our brains.  Play frees up mental space, allowing us to reboot while at the same time charging up our minds or at least to keep rolling rather than go dead.  But its value is in balancing and augmenting our stressful pursuits.  The danger is that in certain circumstances the easy, investment-minimal repetitive action found in such play can invoke empty illusions of productivity.  Because this gratifying sensation of pseudo-accomplishment comes without the stress of substantive commitment and concern it can fast become a sinkhole ultimately just as alienating as wage-slavery.

It’s not hard to see examples throughout the milieu of people intuitively appealing to this bundled notion of liberation choosing incredibly unproductive patterns of action.  This isn’t the time or place to call out specific embarrassments, but in illustration we’re obviously all familiar with occasions of rhapsodic “we did such and such lame thing and it felt so liberating” where strategic vigilance is intentionally thrown out the window.  (I’m just grabbing a common touchpoint.  Insurrectionary approaches can have very good arguments — even for not being particularly rational on some levels — but y’all can’t argue that sometimes shit claimed as such ends up just stupid.)

Relieving stress is great, but when it’s set in artificial either/or conflict with caring enough to get wrapped up in an undertaking — vigilantly struggling to affect some consequence — what results isn’t a liberation of our desires, but a broadening flatness to our lives.  Pursuing desires is part and parcel of being human, and it’s ridiculous to presume that that won’t occasionally require investments, risk and the attentive concern that comes with that.  Don’t get me wrong, meetings suck.  There are a great many components to the psychologically taxing projects we undertake in this movement that could seriously stand some massive revision/abolition.  But the mere fact that such projects can be a stressful, taxing commitment is not proof that they’re dismissible reproductions of the forms of labor we seek to abolish.

Communism Reconstituted as Psychotherapy:
The Coming Insurrection

Everyone knows.  It’s really nothing new.  Their attack on Green Capitalism is delicious, while their advocacy of “communes” is without substance, tacked on and arguably specious.  There’s a lot of language in it specific to the European intellectual scene.  Honestly, it’s a bit pretentious.  If it doesn’t live up to the hype it’s their own fault.

The Coming Insurrection is actually pretty good.  But it’s ‘pretty good’ on par with Crimethinc’s Days of War, Nights of Love.  A fun read, a few well-delivered points, the sort of thing you’d loan a friend’s little sister.  If that’s a devastating takedown it shouldn’t be.  The Coming Insurrection is hugely ambitious.  Not just in the material it covers — for to even speak of hope we must all be hugely ambitious these days — but rather in the repackaging it attempts.  No, what’s troubling about The Coming Insurrection is the conservatism and stodginess it betrays in this audacious approach.  Ultimately The Coming Insurrection is just the latest of many attempts to slip the philosophical baggage of Communism in the lingerie of modern anti-authoritarianism.  It is unarguably the most pithy.  Every page is full of imminently quotable turns of phrase.  A potent, modern sexiness that certainly smacks of anarchist romantics.  But take it as anything more than a series of loose aphoristic appeals and old structures emerge.

The fundamental difference at heart between the approaches of Communism and Anarchism has been their treatment of agency.  Where anarchism makes ethical appeals, communist theorists invariably leap on assertions of inevitability. This is because Communism has positioned itself not as an immortal declaration, but as a mechanical response and reaction to specific conditions.  While Anarchism treats our desires and aspirations as forces struggling to act upon the world, the communist tradition has oriented itself around attempts to *fix* specific broken structures.

In this light, despite its many anarchist trappings, The Comming Insurrection simply signifies the completion of a shift in communist thought from a focus on economic crises to neurological ones.

No longer dying in the factories, we are now suffocating in the alienation wrought by the goods those factories produced.

Rather than examine the desires this holds back, The Coming Insurrection instead postulates a resolution to the resulting conflict.  Its battlecry is not an appreciation of what drives us to struggle but a nebulous appeal to peace of mind and cohesion in life.  In the present this means fire in the streets, elsewhere it prescribes a more tangible and absolute attachment with the qualia of our lives.  It’s prescription to alienation is not self-actualization but self-situation.  They must know where they are.  Even the most common of language is twisted to support such osmosis.  So they laboriously make sure to speak of a STATE of joy rather than the act or motion that gives it reality.

But we are not simply a tension mediating the spider web of our experience, we are the fire burning the world brighter with the sharing of our passion.  It’s the difference between being and becoming.  Atomic point particles bound in contextual bonds rather than living vectors.

The Coming Insurrection is Communism boiled down and adapted as close to anarchism as it can get.  The gulf is still vast.

“Moloch: Mass-Production Industry as a Statist Construct”

by Kevin Carson

“The decentralizing potential of small-scale, electrically powered machinery was a common theme among many writers from the late 19th century on. That, and the merging of town and village it made possible, were the central themes of Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops. With electricity “distributed in the houses for bringing into motion small motors of from one-quarter to twelve horse-power,” it was possible to produce in small workshops and even homes. Freeing machinery up from a single prime mover ended all limits on the location of machine production. The primary justification for economy of scale, as it existed in the nineteenth  century—the need to economize on horsepower—vanished when the distribution of electrical power eliminated reliance on a single source of power.”

[Download PDF]

“Let The Free Market Eat The Rich”

by Jeremy Weiland

“In a stateless society, institutions for business and personal organization must derive their permanence from their usefulness not just to an elite few, but from the respect of the entire community – customers, suppliers, neighbors, etc. An entity that can operate efficiently and deliver a steady stream of income, whether an estate or a corporate business, becomes less viable the larger it grows because internal transaction and maintenance costs start to skyrocket. This is a function not of wealth itself, but rather of the difficulty wealthy individuals experience in convincing others to honor and defend their estate. The more people benefit from a body of wealth, the more people will support it.”

[Download PDF]

“How an Argument Against Authoritarian Socialism Became an Argument Against Authoritarian Capitalism”

by Roderick Long

“Everyone knows about economies of scale; after all, that’s why we have firms in the first place. What Rothbard’s analysis shows is that there are also diseconomies of scale, and that these grow more severe as vertical integration increases.  What happens when a firm grows so large, its internal operations so insulated from the price system, that the diseconomies of scale begin to outweigh the economies? Well, that depends on the institutional context. In a free market, if the firm doesn’t catch wise and start scaling back, it will grow increasingly inefficient and so will lose customers to competitors; markets thus serve as an automatic check on the size of the firm.  But what if friendly politicians rig the game so that favoured companies can reap the benefits associated with economies of scale while socialising the costs associated with diseconomies of scale?”

[Download PDF]

“Security Culture: A Handbook For Activists”

“Governments in the western industrialized world have targeted groups that have advocated sabotage and groups that have not, movements that have been militant and movements that have been markedly pacifist. The government’s security machinery serves political and economic objectives, and there are over 250 political prisoners in Canada and the US that can testify to this from firsthand experience. By adopting a security culture, we can defeat various counterintelligence operations that would otherwise disrupt both mainstream organizing and underground resistance.

It is important that as a movement in we need to learn to practice security at all points in the movement’s development. Remember that the State is interested in knowing about activists’ beliefs, not just in “hard evidence”. Learn and practice security to protect ourselves and our peoples. Don’t be afraid. Remember – If an agent comes knockin’, do no talkin’.”

[Download PDF]

“Economic Fascism and the Bailout Economy”

by Gary North

“The American conspirators have lost the one thing that they thought they had: control over the nation and the nation’s finances by means of the fractional reserve banking system. That system is coming unglued, just as Ludwig von Mises said it would, just as Murray Rothbard said it would, and just as those other Austrian economists who understand the enormous weakness of the fractional reserve system had said would eventually take place.

I wonder sometimes if there is anything coherent remaining in what is generally called the conservative movement. Do any of these people have a clue as to what has been taking place? We are seeing the disintegration of the fractional reserve banking system all over the world. It is being held together by bailouts, which are the government equivalent of bailing wire and chewing gum.”

[Download PDF]