Anarchoblogs in English

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

Thanks to bile, the History of Anarchism presentation I did at AltExpo 6 is now available as an mp3 download.

Grab it below:
A History of Anarchism.

A few weeks ago, British QUANGO the Parades Commission gave the go-ahead to a “Cultural Demonstration” by the Blue Man Group followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh the Orange Order (LOL No 647 Earl Of Erne) in Ardoyne, Belfast.

And the rest, as they say, is over 400 years of History.

And ah, screaming headlines.

And er, riot pr0n.

Anyway, the media is doing its bit to bring about a peaceful resolution to the centuries-old conflicts in Northern Ireland/The Six Counties. (Paola Totaro, Fairfax corporation’s Europe correspondent, summarises the political situation as follows: “The great majority of the British Army, seemingly ever-patient and self-controlled, stood for years as Irish kids baited and yelled, shoved and provoked. A handful of soldiers used well-placed butts while guns were fired only in response to the vandalism.”) Thus ‘The Mirror describes it as “wanton violence for the sake of it”. The Irish News calls it “shameful”. For the News Letter, the blame lies with dissident republicans “who have nothing to offer this community”.’

Otherwise, The Guardian’s reportage on the mere fact that police intend to publish photos of persons of interest (Northern Ireland police chief to publish images of Ulster rioters, Henry McDonald, July 13, 2010) singularly fails to match the enthusiasm with which The Age undertook the task in 2006. On the other hand, the devastation the G20 protests brought to Melbourne that year easily overshadow the 82 police injured in 48 hours in rioting in Belfast and Co Armagh (Belfast police, Catholic rioters clash over parade, Shawn Pogatchnik, The Washington Post (The Associated Press), July 12, 2010).

See also : Ardoyne Sit Down Protest Attacked by PSNI | A personal account of the annual Orange Order parades from Belfast to Bangor (2009) | The Orange Order & sectarianism in Ireland.

• Ninth Circuit Panel: Innocence, Schminnocence. We Have Rules, You Know. Radley Balko, Radley Balko: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-07-07). A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has rejected an Oregon man's petition for habeas corpus relief (PDF). This despite acknowledging that the man has established actual innocence for the crimes for which he's being imprisoned (sexual abuse and sodomy of a four-year-old). The... (Linked Wednesday 2010-07-07.)

• To serve, protect, and/or scare the hell out of. The Superfluous Man (2010-07-08). Be afraid. Be very afraid. (Linked Thursday 2010-07-08.)

• With enemies like these, who needs friends? John Markley, The Superfluous Man (2010-06-23). Paul Craig Roberts has a nice article at Counterpunch on the Left and gun control. This is something that has had me shaking my head for years. I find myself baffled by the mentality of someone who believes that: 1. The government is controlled by a malevolent cabal of greedy... (Linked Thursday 2010-07-08.)

• History of Anarchism Presentation. DarianW, DarianWorden.com (2010-06-29). At this year’s Porcfest, I did a presentation at the AltExpo on the history of anarchism. I was overly ambitious with what I could fit into an hour, and really ran through some things that I would have liked to explain more. Particularly a lot of the post-WWII history was... (Linked Thursday 2010-07-08.)

• Almost Getting Away With Murder. Darian Worden, Center for a Stateless Society (2010-07-09). Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer Johannes Mehserle was given a slap on the wrist for his January 1, 2009 murder of Oscar Grant. A jury found Mehserle guilty of involuntary manslaughter, and not guilty of the second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter charges he faced. It is sad that the... (Linked Friday 2010-07-09.)

At this year’s Porcfest, I did a presentation at the AltExpo on the history of anarchism. I was overly ambitious with what I could fit into an hour, and really ran through some things that I would have liked to explain more. Particularly a lot of the post-WWII history was not given the depth it could have used.

But it was a good introduction to a lot of the concepts and names that have shaped the history of anarchism. Audience members said they liked it and I think many of my readers will enjoy it too.

Much thanks to Bile for filming the presentation and posting it online so quickly.

http://2010.mediacoop.ca/

Reads like the usual tactics are on display in Toronto this weekend. See also : Pittsburgh beefs up security to greet G20 (September 21, 2009). And do read Canada’s brewing ‘insurgency’ by Jon Elmer (Al Jazeera, June 26, 2010):

In Manitoba, 71 per cent of prisoners are native, although natives represent only 15 per cent of the province’s population; in Saskatchewan, the number is even higher, with natives accounting for 80 per cent of prisoners but only 11 per cent of the population.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police recently characterised the prison system as “community colleges for [native] gangs”.

These “gangs” are increasingly politicised and some of Canada’s leading military planners are warning that a full-blown uprising is gathering.

The groups operate in what the military calls “ungoverned spaces” that are increasingly difficult to police.

They are also sophisticated, operating under the “Robin Hood” principle of robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, say military planners.

When combined with their tangible grievances, “you have the root causes which can be the fuel for an insurgency. It’s entirely feasible,” said Bland.

Fingers crossed!

State authorities have developed and continue to implement (and to revise) a fairly standard repertoire of repressive tactics inre (anti-)summit protests. In addition to reinforcing otherwise routine forms of infiltration and surveillance of protest movements, authorities:

i) conduct propaganda campaigns — in conjunction with state/corporate media, selected public figures and media and political commentators — aimed at transforming the image of the ‘good’ protester into that of the ‘bad’ terrorist, raising expectations of ‘protester violence’, and thus justifying and providing a pretext for paramilitary-style policing;
ii) introduce new or augment existing laws in order to provide for a wider range of offences and greatly increased penalties inre protest activities;
iii) ensure police are able to perform their duties either with virtual legal immunity for their actions or in the reasonable expectation of having the responsibility for any unfavourable legal outcomes assumed by the state;
iv) identify and target for arrest presumed ‘leaders’ (either before, during or after protest activity);
v) construct (temporary) walls and establish perimeters around summit locations, often including the designation of particular areas as being under special laws;
vi) conduct pre-emptive strikes upon convergence spaces, frequently involving mass arrests, and invariably the identification of those present and the collation of (other) materials leading to the identification of (other) participants;
vii) sever, on the basis of tactical differences, links between groups operating in coalition;
viii) destroy and/or seriously damage and/or confiscate materials intended to be used in the course of protest or during its organisation;
ix) obstruct the activities of independent media, legal monitoring and medical aid in particular.

Otto Skorzeny (1908–1975) was a Nazi, a member of both the (Waffen) SS and the Gestapo. He took part in Kristallnacht (Pogromnacht) in 1938 and, after being injured while fighting in the Soviet Union in December 1942, joined the foreign intelligence service of the SS. His most (in)famous wartime exploit, however, was taking part in the rescue of Mussolini in September 1943; this, or his subsequent role in quashing the attempted coup of July 1944 (which underwent a Hollyweird revision *ing Tom Cruise in 2008). Following the end of WWII, like many other Nazis, Skorzeny found employment with US intelligence, and enjoyed a long career as a businessman, spy, and Nazi stalwart. On June 12, neo-Nazis in Ungarn, Budapest, organised a gig in tribute to his memory, *ing ‘Tar Had’, ‘Szebb Napok’, ‘Vérvád’ and ‘Revizorok’. The gig was held at a club called ‘Bluehole’.

In the US, Forrest Fogarty, a leading member of the Florida-based Confederate Hammerskins, has, inter alia, been accused of being… a stoner! Fogarty’s previous claim to fame was being nominated as one of ‘A Few Bad Men’ to have joined the US military. “There are some dirty Arabs enjoying their 70 virgins because of my actions and that of my fire team,” Fogarty boasted in the Winter 2005 issue of Resistance.

Skorzeny, on the other hand, became wealthy selling guns to “dirty Arabs”; so that they could kill “filthy Jews”, presumably.

*sigh*

Plans to produce a Pioneer Little Europe in Perth have been interrupted recently by shenanigans involving shotguns. Be that as it may, Paul Innes’ mates on Stormfront have come under some further scrutiny lately, with John Harold Browne’s Tip of the Spear Consulting Services possibly being less than — shall we say — kosher. According to Larry Keller (‘Charismatic’ Felon is Top Advertiser on Major Racist Website, Intelligence Report, No.138, Summer 2010): In the end, it’s hard to say exactly what motivates John Harold Browne. What is known is what he told a skeptical Stormfront member during the exchange about his credit repair service last fall. “I do not,” Browne said, “run a scam.” LOL. Writing in the Broward Palm Beach News (Advertiser on Local White Supremacist Site May Not Be Legitimate Racist, June 14, 2010), Thomas Francis notes that:

In addition to the financial sleight of hand, Tip of the Spear’s web banner offers “intellectual and physical protection.” In that latter capacity, Browne attended the October 2009 speech by Nazi Holocaust denier John [sic] Irving at the Ritz-Carlton in Manalapan [Florida]. After a fracas led to one neo-Nazi stabbing another, Irving blamed Browne for being slow to react. Browne is the surname of the “John” we referenced in this November 17 Juice post about hackers who leaked Irving’s emails, including those the historian had with Browne.

Note that the person stabbed at Irving’s speech — John Kopko — was reportedly a member of Crew 38, the junior burger version of Fogarty’s Hammerskins.

Speaking of fraud, Dr James Saleam’s party Australia First had a crack at winning a seat on local council (Hawkesbury) on the weekend, as well a seat in State parliament.

Pitted against a Green, a Liberal and two independents, AF’s Tony Pettitt managed to score almost 1 in 10 votes (3,003), coming fourth and almost doubling the vote received by the Christian, Extropian, Monarchist, Triumphalist and patriotic optimist Nathan Zamprogno. Mick Saunders, meanwhile, had neither the advantage of the donkey vote or the AF banner. This helps to explain why he attracted just 764 votes in Penrith, with 98% of voters preferring one of the (seven) other candidates. On the bright side, Saunders proved to be more attractive than the ‘Outdoor Recreation Party’, the expansive nature of AF’s vision for Australia ensuring that Mick can also take heart from the fact that his support for Nepean Hospital (“Turning to local issues, Mr Saunders said Nepean Hospital needed more nurses. He suggested changing nurses’ training so that they spent half of their year at university and the other half in hospital, learning the latest medical procedures.”) ensured he won the heart of at least one voter at the Hospital.

Bonus Steele!

“I’m coming back soon … and now I’m really pissed off …” stated neo-Nazi crazy person law-talking guy Edgar (J.) Steele on April 25. As of June 22, he’s now able to sing “Hello Dad… I’m In Jail”. Steele is alleged to have paid a man to murder his wife and mother-in-law. He’s also known for his legal advocacy on the part of neo-Nazi groupuscule the Aryan Nations.

Bonus Reagan!

Anxious about rising nationalist sentiment, the West German chancellor decided that, at the very least, a symbolic gesture was necessary to placate his right-wing critics. Kohl’s riposte came when President Reagan ventured to West Germany to participate in a solemn wreath-laying ceremony on May 5, 1985, at a military cemetery in Bitburg, where forty-seven SS men were buried along with two thousand Wehrmacht soldiers. Its ostensible purpose was to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II, but Reagan used the occasion to get in his digs at the Evil Empire — not the Third Reich, of course, but the Soviet Union. German war veterans who insisted that Hitler should not be judged too harshly, because he fought the Red Menace, felt vindicated when Reagan restricted his comments on human rights abuses to only those occurring in Communist countries. The president’s one-eyed view of history transformed Nazi culprits into victims. He depicted the Third Reich not as a system of mass terror but as the work of a single maniacal despot. The fallen SS fighters were Hitler’s victims “just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps”, Reagan asserted. Absolving Germany of its wartime sins was the president’s way of thanking Kohl for backing the unpopular nuclear missile buildup in Europe.

Not surprisingly, Jewish organisations were outraged. So, too, were U.S. veterans groups. The American Legion, usually a staunch supporter of the president, reminded Reagan that the Waffen SS had murdered more than seventy unarmed American prisoners at Malmedy, just thirty miles from Bitburg. “Are these the same SS troops buried beneath the stones of Bitburg?” a Legion spokesperson asked. Other veterans recalled that the city of Bitburg was a staging area for German soldiers — including Otto Skorzeny’s notorious SS units — who fought against the Allies in the Battle of the Bulge. Bitburg also contained the graves of men from the Second SS Panzer Division, which massacred 642 French civilians in Oradour-sur-Glane in June 1942.

~ Martin A. Lee, The Beast Reawakens, Little Brown & Co., 1997, p.220. Note that credit for Reagan’s speech at Bitburg has been given to multi-millionaire neo-conservative hack Pat Buchanan.

See also : nutzis are W E I R D : Arthur Kemp / BNP (August 30, 2009) | nutzis are W E I R D : Tina Greco / CNKKKK (August 26, 2009) | nutzis are W E I R D : Sheppard & Whittle Go to Jail (July 11, 2009) | nutzis are W E I R D : Kyle Chapman. The Mormon. (May 3, 2009) | nutzis are W E I R D : David Lane’s Ashes (February 13, 2009)

ALSO! The BNP, EDL & Violence, Malatesta, Norfolk Unity, June 20, 2010: “As the BNP continue to implode the EDL are siphoning off support for their own brand of racism.”

This post is dedicated to Ron Edwards. (And the KKK.)

See also : Ozzy Osbourne – “Scream” (CD), EdgeoftheWorld, metalunderground.com, June 12, 2010. Collingwood The FIFA World Cup is on. Best chant: “Somos los hinchas, más anarquistas, los mas borrachos, los más anti-fascistas … (“We are the fans, the most anarchist fans, the drunkest, most anti-fascist fans …”). [...]

Continue reading at slackbastard …

“Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.” ~ Buddha Brisbane-based soldiers Darren Smith [...]

Continue reading at slackbastard …

The Kate Sharpley Library has re-published Albert Meltzer’s autobiography I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels: Sixty Years of Commonplace Life and Anarchist Agitation.

I thought this was pretty funny (note that culture-jamming was invented by sound-collage artists in the 1980s, or possibly by French intellectuals in the 1950s):

The one in the Freedom Group most in touch with Bohemia was Charles Lahr, a German anarchist who had come to London to avoid military service and stayed forty years. At first there was a suspicion by the police that he had come to shoot the Kaiser, who had unwittingly decided to pay England a visit at the same time, though he did not stay so long. Charlie was shadowed by Special Branch until one cold night he took pity on the detective staying outside the bakery where he worked, and came out to explain to him that the baker himself took sufficient precautions to see none of his nightworkers got away before time either to go playing cards or shoot visiting potentates according to their taste. A few years later the war broke out and he was interned in Alexandra Palace as an enemy alien and was interviewed by the same detective. ‘You thought I’d come to shoot the Kaiser,’ chuckled Charlie. ‘Pity you didn’t,’ said the detective in a decided change of position.

In his Bloomsbury bookshop in the twenties and thirties, Charlie had been a focus point for the literary set, a few of whom lingered on when I first met him. Charles Duff was one of them. I think he worked in the Foreign Office at the time but he was an authority on the Castilian (and possibly the Catalan) language, like Allison Peers. Both of them had written school textbooks I was using. He was intrigued at my passing on my Castilian lessons to Billy Campbell so he could talk with his Basque girl friend in her own tongue without either of us realising it was a separate language.

In those days newsbills used to announce the startling events of the day more prominently than they do now and they were mass printed. Charlie had a trick of slicing them in the middle and sticking them together again — to make up some such headline as Pope to Abdicate or The King to Marry Mae West. On the 20th anniversary of the Zeppelin shot down at Cuffley, there was to be a memorial service to which distinguished local German residents were invited. Some less than knowledgeable or perhaps cynical Embassy official had sent an invitation to Charlie. He turned up as the herrenvolk had solemnly entered the church, top hats on arms, and set up a soapbox newsstand with a saucer full of coppers, and the banner headline Hitler Assassinated — needless to say, with no papers to back it.

As the procession solemnly came out, von Ribbentrop among them, they looked at the bill and dashed helter skelter for the railway station. When the train came in with the evening paper every copy was grabbed by Embassy officials to the protests of the station master, while indignant shouts came from people pulled out of telephone booths by impatient Nazis wanting to use the phone, but the news of that happy event did not appear for another ten years or so.

Bonus!