In Defense of Anagorism

political economy in the non-market, non-state sector

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  • Quotebag #91

    “Governments are just window-dressing for the major multinational corporations that actually run the world. They, in turn, are already run by computers.”—whlanteigne

    “The sooner we restore a society where work is something we do, and not something we’re ‘given,’ a society where we’re in control of our working lives, the sooner we can do away with fake machismo, commodified rebellion, and going postal.”—Kevin Carson

    “The upper class uses its mass media instruments to paint a picture of an aloof, overly idealistic, left.”—The Working Class

    “Libertarian pretense that the workplace is voluntary would only make sense if people had an equal alternative to the workplace.”—Critiques of Libertarianism

    “So, we do make common cause with liberals on formal equality, but radicals must push further and demand substantive equality against a world system of horrendous inequalities.”—radicalprogress

  • When others know you better than you know yourself, I call that power.

    CBC asks:

    How much data privacy can you expect to have?

    I’d like to see a shift to a debate which treats as the relevant question: How much information asymmetry can you expect not to have?

    Or alternatively: How much machine-readable/queryable/”mineable” data can a consumer or end-user expect to be on the receiving end of? In the case of a $ell phone, this might mean access to raw dumps of one’s own GPS logs, call logs, raw network traffic feeds up & down, etc. Analogously, raw feeds for “smart” meters from Big Utility, etc.

  • Quotebag #90

    “Perhaps this should also serve as proof that the market doesn’t always work in the favor of what’s desirable. Que: “That’s not the TW00 free market capitalism!”,”—Julia Riber Pitt

    “Consumerism is not a byproduct of human nature; it is a disgusting system which turns human actions into malicious transactions.”—Anti Consumerism

    “And while you would not have ‘profits over people,’ I don’t see how a market anarchist society could prevent ‘efficiency over people’ which could act in a very similar way.”—NoMoreSunsets

    “I’ve got news for you: the market matrix is NOT moral. It’s quite possible to screw people over and succeed in business. It’s equally possible, and very common, to try your hardest to be ’employable’ and still get screwed-over. Your Robinson Crusoe acrobatics can’t conceal these simple facts.”—AndyN00bpwnr (h/t Jack Saturday)

  • The trouble with Android

    Or as I’ve started calling it, Spamdroid. Too little sense of open source culture among Android devs. The overall tone one senses at Google Play is reminiscent of the DOS shareware community circa 1990. There is every imaginable combination of beggarware, crippleware [sic], adware, demowarez, etc., but added to all this, data mining, behavioral profiling, black hat SEO and all the newer black arts. One gets the impression that people are grasping at every imaginable straw in pursuit of “monetization.” Part of it is the Google cut on sales of paid app revenues, part is the opening of the dev market to emerging markets where people are unlikely to have the luxury of not “being in it for the money,” but mostly it is network operators absolutely insistent on assigning their retail customers a passive role in the network.

  • Only the good (blogs!) die young

    I am pleased to add to my blogroll the apparently defunct blog No More Sunsets. The most recent post there was titled Back soon and dated July 16, 2012, with the text

    I’m in the process of moving so I’ll be out for the next couple of weeks.

    I hope the author is doing OK.

    I strive to keep my blogroll as on-topic as possible. By this I mean that no matter how small this list turns out to be, I want it to be a catalog of the online offerings of the “non-market, anti-state sector.” By this I mean those who, when push comes to shove, are anti-statist, and who, at least on occasion, suggest that the market mechanism—the price signals, the absolute centrality of voluntarism—might be a contributor to the problem of de facto or de jure statism.

    Putting the left back in left libertarianism is definitely a recurring theme at No More Sunsets. There is an article pointing out differences between Proudhonian mutualists and “neo-mutualists.” Those ridiculously non-credible “primitive” economies in which three persons exist or two classes of economic goods exist are referred to not as Edgeworth boxes but as Imagination Island or Crusoe’s island. Also subject to questioning are such supposedly unalloyed goods as voluntarism, individualism, agorism, efficiency, etc.

    I can’t read anything on this excellent blog without having a lot to say, but it is closed to comments. Apparently this has not always been the case. Perhaps I will start a series of blog posts here that are essentially comments on posts at No More Sunsets.

    At any rate, my purpose in posting this is to offer gentle encouragement to a writer whose work I admire and who I’d like to think of as a fellow anagorist. This is in the spirit of NMS’ own post in that vein:

    Mutualism and Solutions to the Social Problem is a new blog with extremely powerful posts. Hopefully, they continue blogging. All too often, I see people who start on a project and give up shortly after. Please show your support by checking them out.

  • Dollars are not votes

    There seems to be an uptick in businesses being used as soapboxes (Papa John’s, Whole Foods, Chick-Fil-A, ad nauseam); most often conservative soapboxes, since conservatism is the ideology of the business establishment. Time for us non-conservatives to circle the wagons…but one side’s boycott is always the other side’s buycott. At best it’s a wash. Frustration.

    How far do you think I’ll get in life spouting liberal opinions in job interviews, or even doing lunch with management types? Conservative opinions are of course risky in such settings, but you know and I know liberal opinions are career suicide. But of course conservatives make oh so much hay about alleged blockage of the academic careers of conservatives; academia being, what, 1% of the workforce? For most of us, there’s a tacit understanding that it’s wise to check one’s opinions at the door when entering the workplace. I’ve always accepted that as part of the implied social contract. But now business owners are absolutely flaunting the fact that ownership has its privileges, and that one of these is the privilege of mixing commerce and politics.

    Dollars are not votes, and the marketplace is not a form of democracy.  In fact, it is profoundly antidemocratic.

  • Quotebag #89

    “As for the libertarians themselves, we must not be shocked that they re-iterate the Sumerian division between the elect and the debt-bound with the devotion appropriate to a middle born climber.”—Crow Falls Down

    “A hierarchy is a machine — basically a steam engine straight out of the factory age — for compelling people to do what they have no direct rational interest in doing, for the benefit of those with whom they have a fundamental conflict of interest.”—Kevin Carson

    “It is not simply a ‘reward for services rendered’ that I’m supposed to believe. It is life held ransom to illegitimate structures of control called companies, corporations, private industry. Both subjugator and subjugated sing the same song. If ‘Work or die’ is the chorus, then ‘No excuses’ would be the crescendo. ‘If I can do it, you can too’ we mindlessly drone.”—Prodigeek

    “The government/market dichotomy is pervasive in contemporary political and economic debate.”—Unlearningecon

    “The capitalist state is run by capitalists. Tear it down without simultaneously tearing them down, and another one will pop up, and we’ll be playing whack-a-mole for eternity.”—anon.

  • Quotebag #88

    “Just be careful to keep your Hipster Gland in check. You don’t want to do the interview ironically.”—Matthew Benson

    “Revolution is illegal by definition and its adherents are routinely criminalized.”—blackorchidcollective

    “Some cultures used similar terms for ‘ripping someone off’ and ‘profit.’”—Unlearningecon

    “Honestly, the area of economics is still a soft science. Part of what we need to do right now is develope more accurate computer models of how all economies work. It’s still pretty much a black box. We can’t figure out how to control it, if we don’t understand how it works fundamentally.”—Bri

    “Once I started to dig deeper in that subject matter, I came to realize that markets don’t exist in the absence of states (regulations) and that the struggle isn’t people versus state; or business versus state; or people versus business and state, but people versus institutions.”—Todd S

    “Charter advocates talk a good game about freedom and school choice, but private institutions which control public goods have plenty of incentives to be authoritarian—even tyrannical.”—Ed Schultz

    “I think one of the differences between anarchism and panarchism is that anarchism draws on shared principles encompassing liberal values and moving beyond liberal values into socialist values, while panarchism rejects shared principles and all too often means cooperating with nasties and neo-Nazis who want the right to create a white cis hetero male supremacist dystopia in their county.”—Marja Erwin

  • Getting tired of the blowhards who say “I’m not against unions, just public sector unions”

    I’m left first and libertarian second. Why? Quite simply, I consider that combination of priorities to be an under-served market. The opposite set of priorities has enough spokescritters and doesn’t need the addition of my voice to their choir.

    I’m also, nominally, an American. In my country the word “libertarian” has been distorted to mean “laissez-faire capitalist,” so maybe instead of saying I’m “a libertarian second” above, I should just call myself an antilibertarian. My reasons for identifying with the older, more authentic idea of what libertarianism is, are rooted not in anti-statism, but in anti-authoritarianism, which is a completely different set of emphases.

    With the exception of anarcho-syndicalists, I am very skeptical of people who claim to be simultaneously for (or even not against) the unions and against the public sector. Disingenuous at best. Doesn’t pass the smell test.

    I am not bothered by the fact that a democratic electorate offers better job security and bennies to its employees than does their country’s business community, which will not waste any opportunity to lean on the contingent workforce, or better yet, desperately cheap labor in/from the developing world. The public policies of a democracy reflect the people’s values, so of course the public sector ends up being the people’s idea of an “exemplary employer.” I just know someone is now waiting in the wings to roll out the “republic not democracy” canard. There’s a Bircher or two in every issues discussion, it seems. Just stuff it, already.

    The current situation is that the private labor market has more or less completely decimated the tacit social contract of post-war America, that gainful employment should be the norm, and the public sector has managed to dodge that bullet, largely, I think, because the voters (due to their basic decency and humanity) don’t want to play the role of managerial hatchet-person. The question isn’t why public employees are over-paid, but why private employees are under-paid.

    At the risk of being called a fan of post-war America, please allow me to point out that I’m only pointing out that it had at least (perhaps at most!) one thing right. Think “mend it don’t end it.” Make gainful employment as social norm inclusive for minorities and women, rather than dismissing job security itself as a racist and sexist institution.

    That’s all for now.

  • Engagement with the anagorist(s?) on free markets

    This is my take on Kevin Carson’s Engagement With the Left on Free Markets recently re-posted at C4SS.

    The left-styled libertarians seem to see themselves as the best of two worlds; those being “statist leftists” and “libertarian rightists,” which can also be referred to as “vulgar socialists or liberals” or “vulgar libertarians.” The implication often seems to be that either of these ideologies, minus vulgarity, equals left libertarianism. Thus, if they are effective enough with both vulgarities in their message that “you’re really one of us,” they can form a coalition of three quarters of the Political Compass™. I wish them well with that. I really do.

    I’m neither a statist leftist nor a libertarian rightist. The most concise description of what I am, in plain English, is probably that which is represented by “PE>$” in the Geek Code: “Distrust both government and business.”

    Carson opens with a reference to a comment by Anthony Gregory on The Market Shall Set You Free… in the NY Times? at George Mason University’s “History News Network” website:

    If libertarians can explain that the right actually opposes free markets, but instead embraces corporatism and state capitalism, the battle to win them over will be half-won. One reason they don’t like markets is because people like Bush pretend to like them, but I think the left is catching on.

    It’s true that one reason I don’t like markets is because people like [George W.] Bush pretend to like them, but another reason I dislike markets is because people like Bryan Caplan like them. Too many of the actually-principled right libertarians who (to their credit) actually define free-market as synonymous with voluntary, also have disgustingly elitist attitudes, such as believing that IQ is real, or that poverty is a symptom of lack of conscientiousness, or that businesspeople are more valuable members of society than intellectuals, or that American conservatives (in public opinion, not necessarily in political careers) are more commonsensical than American liberals. Would it absolutely kill left-styled libertarians and libertarians-without-adjectives to publicly distance themselves from people who brazenly declare “inequality of results” (which I believe to be a straw-man, anyway) to be a feature rather than a bug?

    Mention is also made to jeanine_ring’s comment:

    And there’s a *cultural* side to this too: what many leftists oppose in their antagonism to corporations into just mercantilist exploration but the heirarchical, conformist structure and “Dilbert” culture of corporate modernity.

    I was never much into Dilbert, but one thing about that comic strip spoke to me quite directly—the character Catbert, the evil HR director. The idea that there’s something evil about human resources resonates very strongly with me. I am offended by the idea that competition (making the sale; HR is the most visible symbol of that) is a prerequisite for work…which in turn is a prerequisite for independence, and then solvency, de-facto political freedom, and on down the line. This appears to me to be a consequence not of “a world where corporations aren’t the specially priviledged [sic],” but of a world that recognizes the moral authority of negative liberty. The former is in inevitable, almost axiomatic, consequence of the latter. Perhaps inclusivity and freedom really are a “pick one” proposition. Perhaps I, if push comes to shove, will prioritize inclusivity over freedom. Or perhaps I’ll sacrifice myself in the name of freedom, demonstrating the fatal flaw in Objectivism.

    Mention is made in Carson’s post of Robert Anton Wilson. Robert Anton Wilson managed to direct my attention to a number of subjects I usually avoid. Wilson had a sense of humor, and one of those would probably be the single most important strategic asset to those libertarians seeking engagement with non-libertarians in general.