What has now become the old model (the J.O.B. as the usual means of support) was a factory sweatshop partially humanized by several generations of intense activism and reform. Perhaps the precarious “freelancer” model that is rapidly replacing it can similarly be modified. The new rules seem to be that successful self-employment is a necessary but not sufficient condition for basic dignity. We can and should do better. I suspect the boycott will be more relevant than the strike this time around. I particularly like replacing the idea of “general strike” with “general boycott”–instead of “buy nothing day”, how about “live like a monk for a month”?
Category: Uncategorized
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Exploring, as always, possible end-runs around market omniscience
Maybe “letting go and letting the Invisible Hand” is more or less guaranteed to result in an allocation that lies at rather than within the production possibility frontier (PPF), but maybe no point on the present PPF represents the best of all possible worlds. Ideally, the road to there will involve some non-market activity on someone’s part. It’s hard to imagine the best of all currently possible worlds not being on the PPF, but that leaves open certain other questions: Does the pursuit of a better-than-currently-possible world necessarily involve pushing outward the envelope that is the PPF, or are there other avenues? I’ll admit that growth as a prerequisite for everything that is good (human rights, poverty alleviation, a smarter humanity, etc.) is a doctrine I find particularly depressing. It almost implies that to be poor is to be part of the problem, or at least precludes the poor from being part of the solution. Contrast this with sustainability principles, steady-state economics and the kind of thinking around “affluenza,” which actually honor the lean life rather than the mean life. This tonal contrast has played a big role in shaping my tribal and ideological allegiances, and is also why I am rooting for the affirmative in the global warming debate.
Maybe the ability of the Invisible Hand to solve the calculation problem is definitively superlative when it comes to local optima, but discovery of non-local (but maybe preferable) attractors can be effected by shocks to the system from other-than-market forces.
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Quotebag #86
“Values plus Socialism tends to oppression. Socialism plus Liberty without Values tends towards an aimless mediocrity, Liberty plus Values without Socialism leads to injustice.”—John Madziarczyk
“I have long felt that one cannot be sure that a person has offered him- or herself voluntarily for work or a service if that person does not have an acceptable alternative; i.e., the means to cover his or her basic needs.”—Edward S.
“If you echo the belief in Christianity, saluting the flag, and pro-business beliefs of your superiors, you can get ahead fast in certain places.”—John Madziarczyk
“Apart from a handful of artistic careers, the sad truth is that deeply satisfying work for pay is squeezed-out toothpaste that can’t be coaxed back into its tube.”—Solidarity Economy editors
“It is a sad thing that anarchism is beeing [sic] distored from it’s original sense, but only by definition capitalism and anarchism is contradictions. It is very simple. The state and private property rests in the same principle of unpersonal property. If the master/ruler of the property is a king, dictator, CEO or elected president, it is still a form of government. Call it whatever you want- capitalism/statism.”—MrAnhape
“Derived from the adage that ‘we cannot trust an honest man,’ we (aka ‘society in general) institute flawed, unworkable or Catch 22- like social standards in a deliberate fashion.”—locumranch
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Quotebag #85
“If freedom means non-frustration of the exercise of one’s legitimate property rights, you can be made perfectly free by being relieved of all property, including the right to your own body and life.”—John Holbo
“The truth is, frankly, that there is only one war left to fight; the war against our own baser nature, the war against those primitive impulses which compel us to wage war.”—voxcorvegis
“Libertarians like to suggest great disanalogies between the coercive law-imposing competition of rising and falling states and the seemingly more peaceful and mutually beneficial competition of rising and falling business enterprises.”—Dan Kervick
“So lorraine you pathetic freaks actually have the occasional “crisis of faith” wow now I really know that leftism is a pseudo religion. So pretty much you guys don’t even believe in your own bullshit? The problem I have with leftism is that it really is a blank canvis there is no structured dialogue all it is is a bunch of retarded miscreants attributing their own personal desires unto this blank canvis. ”—the truth
“The fungibility of work, the reduction of demand for long-developed special skills, the impossibility of virtuosity in one’s limited job, has made work less and less a source of reliable, positive information about the increasing value of the self — because it has ceased to truly improve people. But people still desire to work at what they love, and to improve themselves. The market will sell them the feeling of this, but will not commonly supply them with food in exchange for pursuing virtuosity.”—Sister Y
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It’s not always the fake free-marketeers
The portions of the apparent free market package that disturb me the most are not the obvious distortions. It’s the frank anti-egalitarian attitudes of certain individuals who clearly do understand that not all pro-business politics is pro-market.
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“Freedom from arbitrary authority is a consumer good”
So says Gary Chartier. I’m inclined to agree that it’s a consumer good, at least in the actually existing economy. If freedom is doomed always to be an economic good, then there will always be constraints on freedom. Either freedom is impossible, or freed markets are an incremental step toward actual freedom, or freed markets can actually bring the cost of freedom all the way to zero.
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Steve Horwitz on libertarianism of the left and left libertarianism
Steve Horwitz has been known to refer to himself as a “libertarian of the left.” He’s critical of those who call themselves “left libertarians” for at least two things:
- The claim that management/labor and rich/poor inequities will take care of themselves once the markets are “freed”
- The refusal to defend those aspects of the status quo which are market-oriented
As is usual in these cases where a post opens a larger floodgate of my emotions than will fit in a comment, I present excerpts from the original, with my commentary:
Left-libertarians often seem to argue that even just a little bit of statism so distorts markets that the results produced by the mixed economy bear little relationship to what a freed economy would produce.
I’ve never seen it stated this explicitly in the left libertarian literature, but one does get that impression from their pitch.
Ironically, the “one drop” theory that the existence of even one non-defense government program constitutes SOCIALISM!!! is the one-size-fits-all tea party talking point. Tea party Americans also lecture us critics of commerce that what we’re really against is “corporatism, not capitalism.” Apparently they know us better than we know ourselves. I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again, libertarianism offers nothing in the way of rhetoric that isn’t also part of conservatism.
Even as I agree with them that we should end the subsidies, I wish left-libertarians would more often acknowledge that firms like Walmart and others have improved the lives of poor Americans in significant ways and lifted hundreds of thousands out of poverty in some of the poorest parts of the world.
Regarding this variant on Walmart’s “live better” slogan, please understand that a penny saved is emphatically NOT a penny earned. I’m not religious, but I recognize one recurring strand of authentic economic wisdom in the Old Testament. Those who are happy to sell to you, and maybe not so much about buying from you, are not your friends. Don’t kid yourself, first world labor is being boycotted. A counter-boycott is definitely in order.
Call me a utopian if you must, but I say if it ain’t euvoluntary it ain’t voluntary.
The increase in consumption possibilities tends to be in non-essentials like electronics. In every group discussion in which the “absolute poverty” red herring arises there’s always some snarky “market defender” who follows a chain of logic that goes from, the poor are alive, therefore the poor are eating, sometimes to the face of someone claiming to be poor. I’ll grant that things could be worse, but a more apropos question for me is how hard it is to be solvent a lot more often than not. “Failure” at this has severe quality of life consequences.
If inequality is explained in terms of the characteristics of the persons involved, I’d say what’s happening here might not be vulgar, but definitely looks to be a defense of the status quo.
Granted, state intervention can alter the incentive structure within firms, but there are also very good reasons why workers might strongly prefer employment arrangements in which they don’t have to take on additional responsibilities or spend time engaging in collective decision making processes.
Why must people infantilize the role of non-managerial labor? Oh, they just want a lower level of responsibility. Riiiiiight.
Well, I’m critical of the left-styled libertarians from the left. I’m also skeptical that freed markets will automagically level the playing field between the economically privileged (which, like politically privileged, is a thing) and the rest of us. Even if economy of scale turns out to be a feature of political rather than economic privilege, the left-styled libertarians seem to be willing to live with the co-existence of relatively independent (or as Mr. Horwitz might say, “more responsible”) self-employed petty bourgies and supposedly empowered employed-employed who will supposedly encounter a seller’s market for their labor.
To sum it up:
My own view is that this distinction is best captured by the contrast between “markets” and “planning” rather than “capitalism” and “socialism,” but I could be persuaded by other terminology.
Mine too. I just happen to prefer planning. I appreciate that Horwitz has used “markets” and “planning” without adjectives (although in an earlier paragraph he described it as “free markets” and “social planning”). I’ve long thought “market” vs. “command” was a false dichotomy. Besides, money is used as a backer-upper of commands every day and in every way, and people worry constantly about what their goods and services will “command” in the marketplace. I hold out the possibility of planning that isn’t central planning; decentralized planning, if you will. The most visible movement for this seems to be Parecon, although I have been messing with the parameters of “Angel Economics”, too. I find arbitrary the assertion that hierarchy is a solvable problem and “coordination” an utterly unsolvable one. Like “freed markets,” it’s simply an untested hypothesis, or a case of nobody trying hard enough.
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Quotebag #84
“If the concept of the Unconditional Basic Income encourages laziness, why would any right minded parent pass on an inheritance to their children?”—bstard4bristolmayor, h/t Jack Saturday
“Not asking out Ayn Rand girl. I will not date her in a boat, I will not date her with a goat, I do not like Objectivism and won’t permit my brain to schizm, she’s awfully cute, but understand, I will not tolerate Ayn Rand.”—Garrett Cook
“If you think about it, the concept of a free-market economy itself is a kind of gamification of human production. Yes, we’re all happy when we make more money, but we’re happiest when we make more money than others. Just ask any CEO.”—Don Peppers
“Talk to me about how to have the freedom to pursue my dreams without leaving a mountain of young, old, sick, and dying to fend for themselves and I’ll listen.”—Melanie Pinkert
“Anarchists might break a window, but capitalists will take your whole house, medicine from the hands of the sick, and rights from the poor.”—Hope
“The solution to the need for competition isn’t to eliminate the idea of a middle class that doesn’t have to compete so hard, but to socialize that situation so that everyone benefits from it. ”—John Madziarczyk
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Maybe not Classics Club material, but a stack of 50 boooks to put on my to-read list.
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Should we refuse grants from institutions in service to empire?
The Center for a Stateless Society advises us not to worry about DARPA’s involvement in what are otherwise projects with wholesome bottom-up implications.
The Internet itself was spawned in the dark corridors of DARPA. I’m still undecided as to whether I consider the Internet itself to be a Trojan horse upon society. I’m not especially worried, but there’s a remnant of worry in the back of my head. In any case, I always take the most interest in those activities that can be pursued on a micro-budget (if not yocto-budget) as where I come from, even if DARPA (or some other spook) is on the ropes and not positioned to claim a controlling interest in whatever it bankrolls, there’s the (perhaps not purely) emotional matter of “not having so-and-so to thank” for such-and-such.
Academia, for example, is utterly economically dependent on outside parties. In this place and times, this is a mixture of business, government, fees for services rendered (tuition, etc.) and individual donors. Assuming business and government are the lion’s share, it would appear that academia has historically been adept enough to “play mommy against daddy” well enough to retain a semblance of independence, which can in turn be invested in institutions such as tenure, academic freedom and the Pursuit of Knowledge for its Own Sake. These traditions (in the western world, anyway) date back to the Middle Ages, when mommy and daddy were church and state, and may still be a factor for some sectarian institutions. It’s looking more and more like the jig is almost up for academia. Most of those in the anarchist movements deride academia as a source of social control and favor autodidactics and unschooling. I’m not affiliated with academia, but am openly supportive of it, because it’s become a de facto sanctuary where non-conservatives can be both out and employed. We civilian supporters are finding ourselves more and more in the uncomfortable position of defending the indefensible, as the ways of academia begin looking more and more to us outsiders like either frank credentialism or frank surrender to the business model.
Then there’s my pet project, pubwan, which has noncommercial in its definition. Perhaps this (and this alone) is why pubwan-as-defined has not been implemented.