Market Anarchist Blogs

Sooo, Congress is bothered by a little corruption? Hah! Also, will there be war with North Korea and/or Iran? (9:30):

Stefan Molyneux runs Freedomain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web. His books, podcasts, and videos are available free on the web. Mr. Molyneux accepts donations with the utmost gratitude.

Filed under: International Affairs, National News, Philosophy, Political Science Tagged: Af-Pak War, Afghanistan, anarchism, appeal to prejudice, bribery, Bush Administration, Cambodia, Charlie Rangel, economics, economy, ethics, Freedomain Radio, George Bush, Henry Kissinger, human rights, indoctrination, international law, Iran, Iraq War, Kosovo, libertarian, lobbying, morality, Nixon Administration, North Korea, parenting, Philosophy, Reagan Administration, Stefan Molyneux, US, US Congress, Vietnam War, virtue ethics, War, war crimes, War on Terror

My online friend, George Donnelly, whom I blogged about previously (here, here, and here), posts an update about his situation and the efforts by the state to punish him for the heinous crime of filming his friend being assaulted by U.S. Marshals. Though his situation has improved, he’s not out of the woods yet. Spread this around so that people begin to learn the true nature of the state: it’s a criminal organization that obtains its funding and seeks its goals through initiatory violence rather than civilized, peaceful exchange and persuasion. It should be viewed not as a ‘necessary evil’ but as an unecessary and unfortunate detour on humanity’s journey toward civilized society. Stop defending it.

Those who choose to mock anarchists by holding up Somalia as the sort of situation that comes about in the absence of the state are missing a lot of really important pieces of the story. A friend of mine (thanks, Donovan!) reminded me of one of the biggest the other day: that Western statism, in the form of foreign aid money violently expropriated from states’ subject populations and transferred to Third World state rulers, results in a violent struggle for control of Somalia. The warring factions each know that whoever comes out on top will stand to gain untold riches from the United States and other Western states. To make matters worse, the factions know that the U.S. sends even larger amounts of aid to regions plagued by al-Qaeda; so they have a serious incentive to invite al-Qaeda into their territory.

And, of course, states like the U.S. have a vested interest in ensuring that Somalia doesn’t become too peaceful prior to the establishment of a strong central state, because such a society would be highly threatening to the illusion that the state is necessary for peace and prosperity.

Julian Assange, Daniel Ellsburg and Nic Robertson discussed “The Afghanistan War Logs” leak, Monday evening.

Part One (7:16):

Part Two (5:33):

Part Three (5:23):

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, discussed the whistleblowing site’s most recent leak of over 90,000 U.S. military records on “Larry King Live” at CNN, Monday evening.

Sunday evening, The New York Times (NYT), the London Guardian and German weekly Der Spiegel revealed WikiLeaks granted them access to the documents spanning from 2004-09. It is being called the largest leak since Daniel Ellsburg leaked the Pentagon Papers, which exposed U.S. government secrets of its war in Vietnam.

Mr. Assange, earlier today, said the leak exposes “evidence of war crimes” committed by the U.S.-led coalition under the Bush and Obama Administrations. Mr. Ellsburg later joined the broadcast in support of WikiLeaks.

Nic Robertson, senior correspondent at CNN International, referenced an intelligence source saying the leak is “old bad news in a new bad time”—mainly of Pakistan intelligence puppeteering the Afghan militant resistance networks. Later in the episode, Mr. Ellsburg remained to participate in a panel discussion with former NATO Europe Supreme Allied Commander and retired U.S. General Wesley Clark, former military intelligence officer and fellow whistleblower Anthony Shaffer and Rolling Stone contributing editor Michael Hastings—whose recent exposé of the counterinsurgency doctrine in Afghanistan displayed its only foreseeable result as “perpetual war“.

In response to the common red herring question as to WikiLeaks’ being ‘allowed’ to leak documents, Mr. Assange responded to a reporter at an afternoon London press conference:

Well, it’s a matter about whether the coercive power of the state should be used to stop people sharing information, who have no direct connection to the source of the information. You can’t use the coercive power of the state to stop people spreading rumors, to stop people discussing political life, and sophisticated U.S. jurisprudence understands that. And that is why you have things like the First Amendment, which takes the press outside the legislative process, because in the end it is the communication of knowledge which regulates the legislature, which creates the Constitution.

Earlier in the day at Democracy Now!, Rick Rowley—an independent journalist with Big Noise Films who just returned from a trip to Afghanistan, embedded with a division in the extended Marja Surge—summarized the progression of Washington’s mission toward a secret war of extrajudicial assassinations, night raids and mass kidnapping:

Well, I mean, what these documents show—prove—is that the U.S. military has been whitewashing the war in Afghanistan for years and that most of the media has been along for the ride. They’ve systematically covered up civilian casualties. They’ve covered up the successful attacks by the Taliban and their significance. And they’ve covered up the violent criminality of the security forces that we’ve created there, security forces that are preying on Afghan civilians. I mean, the picture that emerges from these documents is, on the one hand, of an insurgency that is resilient and adapting and that is winning the war on the ground, and, on the other hand, of an Afghan state that we’ve constructed there that looks less like a government and looks more like a patchwork of warlords and criminal gangs that’s extorting the local population and that has become more hated in many parts of the country than the Taliban who they replaced.

A third interesting thing that these documents do is they put flesh on a process that we’ve been tracking, along with reporters like Jeremy Scahill, for some time, of a transition to what some people call a special forces war, an entirely covert and classified war that’s conducted with drone strikes and midnight raids and targeted assassinations, where everything is classified, there are no media embeds, and there’s very little accountability. I mean, I think that is the trajectory that this war is taking right now.

Now, the White House has responded. They haven’t denied anything here. They haven’t even denied the conclusions that people are drawing about how terrible the war has been there. Their response has been that this is old news, we knew about this a long time ago, and that, in fact, Obama’s war, Obama’s surge, the new war that began in December 2009, has changed everything. Well, I came back from Afghanistan ten days ago. And while I was embedded with the Marines in Marja and elsewhere in the country, I can tell you that this picture matches perfectly with what’s going on on the ground there right now. In Marja, which was supposed to be the poster child of this new campaign, Marja—you know, it’s a small farming community where two Marine divisions were sent in to try to prove that this war was still winnable. Those two Marine divisions have been pinned down for months. We were there at the beginning of an operation called Operation Cobra that was sending in reinforcements, a couple extra Marine companies, to try to, you know, push out their security perimeter. But it’s the—Obama’s surge has completely derailed. They haven’t brought security to Marjah. They have one to three kilometers of security around their forward operating bases.

And the biggest disaster is that the government that they were—that they’ve brought in and tried to stand up, the famous government in a box that was going to roll out right after the Marines cleared the ground, has disappeared. The officials refused to deploy from Kabul and disappeared. Only the mayor comes in, Mayor Haji Zahir, who’s brought in by helicopter by the Marines and, like, set down in the middle of shuras and meetings that they set up and then bundled back into a helicopter and flown out. And this guy, Haji Zahir, he’s an expat who lived in Germany for years and spent five years in jail for attempted murder in Germany. I mean, that’s the caliber of people who we’ve brought in to make the leaders of this new—of the Afghanistan that we’re building. I mean, it is an abject failure, as far as a nation-building operation on the ground. And, you know, whether you’re talking about the last ten years of the war or 2010, I mean, the picture doesn’t change.

Gareth Porter, investigative journalist at Inter Press Services and scholar on geopolitics, highlighted the confirmation of Pak intel’s role in the insurgency as “the most politically salient issue”.

As for general rundowns of media and White House reaction, the NYT’s “At War” blog, Greg Mitchell at his Nation blog and Andrew Sullivan at his Atlantic blog put together solid rundowns, if one is so compelled, but beware—as there’s plenty of premature hyperbole yelled around.

Filed under: Af-Pak War, National News, Political Science Tagged: Af-Pak War, Afghanistan, anarchism, Andrew Sullivan, Anthony Shaffer, anti-Statism, Bill of Rights, Bush Administration, CIA, civil liberties, Constitution, covert ops, Daniel Ellsburg, embed journalists, First Amendment, free press, free speech, Gareth Porter, Germany, Greg Mitchell, Haji Zahir, IED's, ISAF, Jeremy Scahill, journalism, Julian Assange, Kandahar Surge, Larry King, libertarian, liberty, Marja Surge, media, Michael Hastings, NATO, NY Times, Obama Adminsitration, Operation Cobra, Rick Rowley, SOF, Special Operations Forces, Task Force 373, UK, Wesley Clark

Just a quickie, for me at least...

On Friday night, in the ten minutes to nine slot on Radio 4 after Any Questions, thee was someone talking about British Somaliland and its place at the start of the main batch of decolonisation of the British Empire.  And it got me thinking; change, and change on a big scale at that, can be achieved much more quickly than people generally perceive of.  

In the fifty years following the end of World War Two the greatest empire the world has ever seen was rapidly dismantled.  Seventy-odd countries were carved out of the remains of that empire and given independence.  Momentous change, at a breakneck speed.  Post war Britain was broke, and the empire had transformed from being a supplier of exploitable resources to a drain on the British taxpayers.

With the state welfare Ponzi schemes now also pretty well broke, how about such an emancipation of the British people here at home with a similar rapidity?

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WaPo’s “Top Secret America” investigation is crafted to form Orwellian conclusions. The political and intellectual classes are biting the bait to reel us in.

“Top Secret America“, a special investigation by Dana Priest and William Arkin at The Washington Post (WaPo), highlights the “concentration of top-secret government organizations and the companies that do work for them” that includes over 850,000 people with top secret clearance—over a quarter-million in the ‘private sector’—and an annual $10bn National Security Agency regime within the $75bn Big Brother black hole.

The reaction from Capitol Hill and the mainstream media is strikingly uniform: that the problem is the cumbersome inefficiency of the Big Brother regime, not that Big Brother is watching us.

Today’s addition to the report highlights the extention of the National Surveillance State without limits to ‘Main Street’. “In some parts of the cluster, they occupy entire neighborhoods. In others, they make up mile-long business parks connected to the [National Security Agency] campus by a private roadway guarded by forbidding yellow ‘Warning’ signs,” Ms. Priest and Mr. Arkin reported, adding later: “Six of the 10 richest counties in the United States, according to Census Bureau data, are in these clusters.”

The investigation has identified 45 governmental organizations with 1,271 sub-units and 1,931 non-governmental corporations “engaged in top-secret work for the government”—categorized in 23 types of spying, datamining and execution.

The narrative that has become of this investigation hasn’t scratched the surface of privacy rights, free speech or the moral authority of government to criminalize every human being. The National Surveillance State shifts the burden of proof from the State to the citizen. The very nature of “this behemoth” is immoral, let alone unconstitutional.

David Ignatius at the WaPo is the one who calls this system a “behemoth”, but his criticism—like most—is against the size, the cost, the inefficiency. The danger of this dominating the narrative is that it quickly monopolizes the narrative—and it has. “The paradox here is that a smaller, better-controlled intelligence community will actually make the country safer than the unmanaged sprawl we have now,” he wrote yesterday.

He notes that “this complex features many of the old Cold War giants” and goes on to list the beneficiaries within the military-industrial complex, but supports the government turning these corporations into welfare queens, though he adds: “The war on terrorism has been a magnet for spending, just as the Cold War was.”

Mr. Ignatius is taking this report and criticizing, not the Big Brother violations, but that it’s “bloated” and calls for it to be “leaner and meaner”.

What these line-pushers are hiding is that the smaller these programs become, the more centralized the data collection becomes and the less likely whistleblowers come out to shed light on the rights abuses of Washington. By definition, there will simply be less people capable of whistleblowing, less with access to evidence of abuses and in reality the “bloated” government bureaucracy is outsourced to corporations replacing the people with technology. Technology incapable of identifying when it’s undeniable that government has gone too far. Technology without a weighed conscience.

The paradox is that a “leaner and meaner” spying complex, this investigation at the WaPo would’ve hit so many brick walls that it wouldn’t exist. The functions would remain the same; just deeper in darkness.

The 1,931 corporations will just dwindle down to the “Cold War giants” monopolizing the contracts and threatening employees with losing their jobs if they violate confidentiality.

What’s missing from the overall discussion is that this places the so-called ‘progressives’ is a spot with shit in their faces. They can’t strike the root of the Big Brother conundrum without conceding it as the inevitable lovechild of big government and mass consent, as Justin Raimondo wrote at AntiWar.com:

Government programs have many more lives than the mere nine attributed to cats: efforts to kill them off or even trim them down meet with defeat a great deal of the time. This hardiness is rooted in their very existence, which automatically creates a made-to-order political constituency. Once a government program is created, a pressure group—consisting of the economic beneficiaries of the program—inevitably arises which lobbies to extend and expand it. This applies in spades to those “private” companies whose sole “customer” is the U.S. government, and it is one of the chief energizing factors behind the exponential growth of “Top Secret America.” It is also the classical libertarian explanation for the growth of Big Government, not only in America but everywhere the State exists.

The core mainstream defense for the State is blown away by this reality that delegitimizes the loyalists even more, as Mr. Raimondo added:

Conservatives who question the utility of multiple layers of bureaucracy, and even cite Hayek, usually fail to apply the same principle to the realm of national security, where they’re all for what they would otherwise denounce as “big government.” Yet the general principles governing economic science are equally applicable to all the realms of human action, including intelligence-gathering and the defense of the nation. Indeed, it is precisely here, where failure to understand those principles can lead to mass death, that they must be applied most stringently.

To be more precise, a middle class family paying a couple hundred dollars within the same federal health care program as politicians is a socialist welfare program where we’re supposed to fear that it means Stalin gives us our next prostate exam or pap smear; but some corporation that creates nothing but the resources and manpower to destroy lives and liberty being handed billions every year become untouchable issues.

In The General Idea of the Revolution (1851), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon aptly reasoned:

To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue.

Filed under: International Affairs, National News, Political Science Tagged: anarchism, anti-Statism, Bush Administration, civil liberties, Cold War, corporatism, Dana Priest, David Ignatius, fascism, Justin Raimondo, libertarian, liberty, military industrial complex, National Surveillance State, Newspeak, Obama Administration, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, privacy rights, Top Secret America, US, War on Terror, Washington Post, William Arkin

So this man took the initiative to “establish property rights to abandoned land through [his] own sweat equity,” offered a service to willing customers, got rid of an eyesore, and hurt no one? And the response of the state is to call him a “transient” and put him in jail? (CHT Brad Spangler)

Why shouldn’t I take the message to be “We will not tolerate it when ‘poor people do the things that poor people naturally do, and always have done, to scratch by.’“? It’s almost like they want poverty, isn’t it?

Oh, and if you’re already an anarchist and you don’t grok why what this man did was OK, you don’t grok anarchism. I’ll take my licks.

Filed under: Agorism, Anarchism, Left-Libertarianism, Mutualism Tagged: Brad Spangler, Charles Johnson

Highlighting U.S. intervention in the further destruction of Somalia and as Ugandans mourn a terrorist attack from Somali militants, Fareed Zakaria noted the non-threat of ‘failed states’ and the imminent blowback induced by the failed missions of nation building.

Continue reading at Little Alex in Wonderland …

Kevin Carson on capitalism’s destruction of markets.

17 July 2010 | C4SS

It’s pretty much standard for the chattering classes—both liberal and conservative—to refer to something called ‘our free market system’, also known as ‘free market capitalism’.  To the extent that the right-wingers at Fox and CNBC or on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal advocate some purer form of “free markets” in contrast to the existing economy, what they mean is essentially the present model of corporate capitalism without the regulatory or welfare state.

But the form taken by the existing capitalist system that we live under owes precious little to free markets.  From its beginnings in the late Middle Ages, it has been shaped by massive and ceaseless intervention and enforcement of privilege—much of it breathtakingly brutal—by the state.  To adapt a phrase from Orwell, the past has been a boot stamping on a human face.

The state played a central role in creating the defining characteristic of capitalism as we know it:  the wage system.  Had free markets been allowed to develop peacefully, with the peasant majorities remaining in control of their land and with free access to the means of subsistence, labor markets would likely have taken a much different form.  Employers would have had to compete with the possibility of self-employment, available to the vast majority of the population.  But thanks to Enclosures and similar land expropriations over a period of several centuries, the majority of the population was turned into a landless proletariat totally dependant on wage labor for its subsistence.

As if this weren’t enough, the British state imposed totalitarian social controls on the working class in the early days of the Industrial Revolution to reduce the bargaining power of labor.  The Laws of Settlement, for example, acted as a sort of internal passport system, forbidding workers to leave their parish of birth in search of better terms of employment without permission.  The Poor Law authorities then came to the rescue of employers in the underpopulated industrial North, by auctioning off laborers—cheaply—from the parish workhouses of London.

Over a period of several centuries the European powers brought most of the Earth under their subjection and imposed similar land expropriations and social controls on the peoples of the Third World, and looted the mineral resources and raw materials of most of the world.

A wide range of thinkers, from the free market anarchist Lysander Spooner to the Marxist Immanuel Wallerstein, have pointed out historic capitalism’s continuities with feudalism.  Capitalism, as a historic system of political economy, was really just an outgrowth of feudalism with markets grafted in and allowed to operate in the interstices to a limited extent.

The state also played a central role in the rise of corporate capitalism from the late 19th century on.  The railroad land grants created a single national market in the U.S., externalizing the costs of long-distance distribution on the taxpayer, and led to industrial firms and markets far larger than would otherwise have existed.  Patent law and assorted regulations passed during the Progressive Era served to cartelize markets under the control of a handful of oligopoly firms.

In the twentieth century, the state played a growing role in absorbing the surplus output of overbuilt industry or guaranteeing an overseas market for it.  The leading industrial sectors were state creations:  the automobile-highway complex, civil aviation, the miliitary-industrial complex and outgrowths like miniaturized electronics and industrial automation.

The neoliberal economy of the past twenty years is overwhelmingly dependent on the draconian enforcement of “intellectual property” law.  The dominant sectors in the corporate global economy—software, entertainment, biotech, pharma, agribusiness, electronics—are all almost entirely dependent for their profits either on “intellectual property” or direct subsidies from the state.  The central function of the U.S. national security state since WWII has been to make the world safe for corporate power through the overthrow of unfriendly governments.

Both the statist right and the statist left, for their own reasons, equate the “free market” to corporate capitalism, and promote the myth that corporate capitalism as we know it is what would naturally have emerged from a free market absent state intervention to prevent it.  The statist right want to defend the legitimacy of big business, and the statist left want to make you think you need them to defend you against big business.

But the exact opposite is true.  Big business has been a creature of the state from the beginning.  And genuinely free markets would operate as dynamite at the foundations of corporate power.

And that’s exactly what those of us on the free market left want to do.

Kevin Carson is a research associate at the Center for a Stateless Society, contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective. Mr. 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.

Filed under: Political Science Tagged: anarchism, capitalism, copyright, corporate capitalism, corporatism, freed markets, history, Immanuel Wallerstein, Industrial Revolution, intellectual property, Kevin Carson, libertarian, Lysander Spooner, market-anarchism, media, Newspeak, patents, state capitalism

Interesting links for the Week of July 11th, 2010:

• Joel Johnson from Gizmodo is forced to defend himself, after he discusses intentionally following someone on Twitter to learn more about the cultural differences between he and that person; apparently discussing race, gender, sex, and religion in an introspective fashion makes you some sort of bigot.
• The term ‘collateral damage’ has a new application in the realm of Copyright enforcement… because helping Hollywood is more important than free speech.
• Everyone who hates America points out that while people are starving everywhere, some American gourmet foodies are fighting over a pigs citizenship status.
• More and more datasets agree: copyright is a failure, and the RIAA are batshit crazy.
• And finally, fuck rock throwing and molotov’s, bubbles are the new danger that anarchists are directing at police.

-Matt C

Filed under: General Tagged: anarchism, weekly links