Showing posts with label Center_for_a_Stateless_Society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Center_for_a_Stateless_Society. Show all posts

16 August 2016

Mont society includes Kevin Carson

The Blog


The Mont Order society includes Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) writer Kevin Carson on its lists as of 14 August. Writings by Carson are henceforth a key part of the feeds promoted by several Mont services and pages.


Kevin Carson's "free market anti-capitalism", the mission of the Center for a Stateless Society, combines hopes for popular social and technological liberation as captured in books such as The Homebrew Industrial Revolution.

Among the demands advised by the anti-statist commentator is the view that artificial scarcity, intellectual property and mandatory high overhead enforced by states to benefit monopoly capitalism must all be abolished. The state colludes with capitalists, liberals and the "vulgar libertarians" of the political right to create an environment in which a leaner, more efficient economy cannot develop.

Of course, such abolition need not be imposed from above. The people in general can circumvent corporate monopolies, in much the way pirated software is shared and movies uploaded to online services such as Putlocker.

It isn't hard. Thanks to the widespread adoption of personal technologies, apps, and internet sites, everyone's lives are connected. Creators are connected without the need for owners and masters.


Even better, the costs for success in media have declined so substantially that, starting in this "immaterial" realm people can already reject and build alternatives against large brands. Networked organizations can outmaneuver hierarchic ones, and even the costs of physical production are declining so rapidly that eventually a real-world economic revolution in manufacture and delivery of goods will take place.

With the lies and pillars of modern industrial civilization being gnawed at by the "smart rats" once described as such by Julian Assange, governments in the West will descend further into crisis. As they rot away, they will be replaced by a stateless, tolerant and anti-authoritarian culture.

While not all Mont Order friends are likely to endorse such ideas, they boost the existing counter-state dissident credentials of the Mont Order in a Western context.

Visit Kevin Carson's articles at the Center for a Stateless Society


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12 August 2016

Opinion: NATO "ought to be disbanded"

The Blog


US presidential candidate Donald Trump thinks NATO membership costs should be paid by European states rather than the US. Sheldon Richman reminds readers that NATO serves US goals, not European goals, in the first place.


NATO is often taken as some kind of protector of Europe, with American soldiers acting as knights in shining armor who do nothing but make Europe safer. This myth captures the imaginations of some European puppets eager to please their masters in Washington, despite the fact the US troops are the targets of Russian nukes in the first place.

Commenting on the misconception at the center of Trump's views regarding NATO, Richman noted in a recent analysis published by the Center for a Stateless Society that "NATO is America’s tool. The member states don’t need it". Rather, Richman says, "America’s ruling elite does. That elite got rather upset in 1966 when French President Charles de Gaulle, resenting US overbearance, withdrew his country from NATO’s military structure".

Richman concludes NATO should be disbanded. "Of course, the US should not really pay NATO’s members. Rather, the alliance ought to be disbanded", he wrote, "It was never just a defensive alliance, and the defensive mask fell away entirely when the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union disbanded. Since that time it has been openly aggressive".


Obviously referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin's military preparations against NATO, Richman notes "any sober Russian leader" would be concerned by the constant aggression, despite it being sanitized in the media as the act of concerned democracies worried about human rights.

US presidential candidates have been unable to resist the fact that the US is in decline against Russia and China and have been constantly referencing the 'old days' when the US was not weak. Richman offers the view that "American strength" has killed enough babies and a weakness would be better.


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9 August 2016

The Homebrew Industrial Revolution

The Blog


The following are selections from the foremost global transhumanist publication H+ Magazine's review of Kevin Carson's book, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution (2010).


If you don't have time to read books or even reviews, at least read these few observations.

With the technology of individual creativity expanding constantly, the analysis goes, “increasing competition, easy diffusion of new technology and technique, and increasing transparency of cost structure will – between them – arbitrage the rate of profit to virtually zero and squeeze artificial scarcity rents” (p. 346)...

“The worst nightmare of the corporate dinosaurs”, Carson writes of old-fashioned mass-production-based and propertied industries, is that “the imagination might take a walk” (p. 311). Skilled creators could find the courage to declare independence from big brands...

But “as the system approaches its limits of sustainability”, “libertarian and decentralist technologies and organizational forms” are destined to “break out of their state capitalist integument and become the building blocks of a fundamentally different society” (p. 111-112)...

 The decentralization brought by computers has meant “the minimum capital outlay for entering most of the entertainment and information industry has fallen to a few thousand dollars at most, and the marginal cost of reproduction is zero” (p. 199).

 If the “transferrability” of individual creativity and peer production “to the realm of physical production” from the “immaterial realm” is a valid observation (p. 204-227), then the economic singularity means one thing clear. “Knowledge is free” shall become “everything is free”.

 Abolish artificial scarcity, intellectual property, mandatory high overhead and other measures used by states to enforce the privileges of monopoly capitalism, the author tells us (p. 168-170). This way, a more humane world-economy can be engineered, oriented to benefit people and local communities foremost. Everyone in the world may get to work fewer hours while enjoying an improved quality of life, and we can prevent a bleak future in which millions of people are sacrificed to technological unemployment on the altar of profit.

 Inspired? Go and read the full review by Harry J. Bentham at H+ Magazine


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28 June 2016

Evidence 'US regime is now police state'

The Blog


Aligned with a similar commentary by the Garrison Center director Thomas Knapp, one post argues that a recent US Supreme Court ruling is "admissible evidence of police state".


Addressing the ruling, in which any arbitrary arrest and detention by US police can be later justified by finding any unrelated outstanding warrant, Kelly Vee wrote, "Should we be angry? Absolutely. Should we be shocked? Absolutely not. Americans should not feel reassured or secure by the final arbiter in the U.S. justice system."

Vee's post appeared at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) website on 23 June. Relating the problem to large numbers of the American population, Vee wrote, "The scope of this ruling is not limited to some small subset of violent criminals. Millions of Americans have outstanding arrest warrants. That speeding ticket you forgot to pay is enough to excuse an officer that stops you illegally."

Concluding that US authorities are now privileged to commit any abuse, Vee's conclusion argues that "The Police State, the Prison State, and the Court System are all a part of the same twisted, monopolized justice system run with perverse incentives at the expense of its constituents. Police abuse their power, the Court affirms their mistakes, and people end up behind bars."

Vee also pointed out that the United States imprisons more of its own people than any other regime in the world. Despite this, US shallow propaganda portrays it as the most "free" country in the world.


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17 June 2016

Democracies kill with your tacit consent

The Blog


Most theories of government taught today suggest that by paying taxes and merely living in a country, a citizen gives tacit consent for the state to do whatever is needed, including for their "national security".


This argument is even extended to warfare and assassinations. "Democratically elected" politicians are more than capable of killing millions of innocent people in wars, and are likely to be even more arrogant about it, reminding us that they won democratic elections.

Politicians like Tony Blair and George W. Bush viewed themselves as "legitimate" rulers, and viewed others like Saddam Hussein as "illegitimate". Nevertheless, their actions arguably killed more innocent people than the Iraqi dictator. Their crimes are rendered even more offensive by the fact they would like to cite "democracy" as an argument for shifting the blame away from their own bloody and arbitrary hands onto their people.

Writing at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) on 10 June, Tommy Raskin counters the view that voters really approve of the actions of even a "democratic" government. He states, "many citizens do not vote for government action but are forced to facilitate it nonetheless. Citizens who endorse losing candidates, for example, still have political obligations. So do the millions of citizens who choose not to vote".

Noting that when the state does something good, it is merely a gift, because it goes out to people who never requested it or specifically donated funds for it but were instead taxed, Raskin concludes that "Simply living under a democratic government does not count as requesting government action". While Raskin's article does not specifically address the bloody conflicts and genocidal actions by western democracies, the anti-statist's comments are useful in uncoupling the people from their rulers when it comes to understanding who should be held accountable.


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31 May 2016

US regime "corporate rule" to continue

The Blog


With the final contest for the seat of United States President likely to be fought out between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the outcome will only be more continuous "corporate rule" by a hideous regime driven by endless greed.


This is the picture drawn by Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) writer Kevin Carson. Immanuel Wallerstein holds a similar position on electoral politics, viewing it as unavailing as any means of transforming the world-system.

Other political writers similarly diagnose the US "democratic" political system to be fake, much as its press freedom is a fraud and any meaningful criticisms of the regime's barbarism and war crimes are continuously redacted from newspaper and television by government cronies. The revolving door between all US corporations, "NGOs" and government departments makes them essentially fronts for the regime in Washington.

As concluded by Carson at the end of a clever analysis authored on 28 May:
...on all the issues most fundamental to keeping us from having [human-friendly economy of small-scale]  — the transportation subsidies, “intellectual property,” the global Empire and permanent warfare state — the two parties are almost indistinguishable. I don’t know — one party may give us a form of corporate rule that’s somewhat more bearable than the other. But either way it will be corporate rule, without a doubt.
Predicting none other than a continuation of endless war and the subsidizing of greedy corporations by the US regime no matter who wins the White House, Carson states of the Democratic and Republican parties respectively, "American politics isn’t divided between a Party of Working People and a Party of Big Business. It’s always been divided between two Parties of Business that serve two somewhat different but overlapping segments of the capitalist class."


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27 May 2016

Intellectual property, secrecy, and death

The Blog


Known for likening the use of patents to exploitation, murder and terrorism, C4SS writer Kevin Carson points out that Monsanto is hiding behind intellectual property to conceal its responsibility for deaths. Desperate to prevent consumers knowing about deadly ingredients in its herbicides, the company needs secrecy.


Most opponents of Monsanto's Roundup chemical product believe glyphosate is carcinogenic - a claim refuted in various scientific studies. The scientific community believes glyphosate is safe, although this says nothing for the safety of Roundup itself, which still accompanies a high rate of cancer among workers.

As reasoned by Kevin Carson at the Center for a Stateless Society website:
legally, Monsanto is required to make public only the active ingredient — glyphosate — itself. In fact the “inert ingredients” are all trade secrets, legally protected by so-called “intellectual property.”
Carson also writes, "the existence of legally protected trade secrets is a weapon against the health and welfare of the public, depriving them of any knowledge of the nature of toxic chemicals they may be exposed to". He compares this with the behavior of companies and governments surrounding shale gas production, writing that in this industry various proprietary ingredients are "also kept secret from the potentially affected public by “intellectual property.”"

In this analysis, libertarian "free market" advocates such as Ronald Bailey at Reason who defend Monsanto's freedom from the apparent cruelties of consumer rights, labeling and transparency are acting hypocritically. While supposedly triumphing individual rights, such libertarians are effectively cheer-leading the state while it crucifies individuals, blindfolding them and refusing them any right to know what is harming their health.

Carson writes such immoral rules do not constitute a "libertarian legal order", where, "given the prevalence of cancer like non-Hodgkin lymphoma among agricultural workers exposed to Roundup, there would long ago have been lawsuits in which Monsanto was compelled to disclose the full list of ingredients in Roundup".

Whether or not glyphosate is the danger, Roundup and the quantities it is used in should be suspected for as long as the apparent connection to cancer still exists.


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24 May 2016

Tech leads to anti-statism: 2015 at TED

The Blog


A fascinating TED talk recently re-posted by the Center for a Stateless Society relates weakening governments with accelerating social change and popular liberation by technology.


Originally from 2015, the TED talk by William Gillis equates the state with control, and control with building perfect defenses and security measures. All of these become impossible because the spectrum of disobedience, disruption and vandalism by people increases through technology and popular access to it (just ask hackers).

"The more means by which people can act the easier attack becomes and the harder defense becomes" the speaker argued. Using a Star Wars (image courtesy) reference that would be enjoyed by fans of the sci-fi series, Gillis states, "It’s a simple matter of complexity. The attacker only needs to choose one line of attack, the defender needs to secure against all of them. This isn’t just true of small thermal exhaust ports, it’s true in our software ecosystems today and any other system with many dimensions of movement."

The thermal exhaust port is a weakness in the Empire's deadly Death Star battle station featured in Star Wars. In the film, rebel hero Luke Skywalker destroys the planet-killing weapon by firing a proton torpedo through the thermal exhaust port, causing a chain reaction that destroys the Death Star.

Edward Snowden could perhaps be likened to Luke Skywalker, one man able to bring the colossal machine of tyranny down by being in the right place, at the right time, with the right technologies. Advanced technology, Gillis believes, adds concrete facts to support a form of anarchism and super individualism that previously had only been possible in theory.

In his conclusion, Gillis identified the idea of a stateless society with the posthuman society predicted by transhumanism, stating "transhumanism represents yet another arm of anarchism: a focus on expanding freedom in physical terms and a critique of timid retreat to some stultifying “human nature.""

According to Gillis and others at Human Iterations, we need a "social singularity" thinking about a post-state society filled with superempowered individuals equipped with the ultimate personal technologies, who no longer need governments to take care of themselves. It is hard to deny such a conclusion, as "The arc of human history is an arc bent by our creativity and inquiry towards more options, more ways of existing and acting."


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20 May 2016

"Obama should celebrate" US atrocities

The Blog


While President Obama's planned Japan visit was reported, C4SS writer Kevin Carson wrote to remind us the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 was nothing but a act of murder directed intentionally at civilians.


Carson's article counters an earlier article, relating to a prospective visit by President Obama to Japan. Writing on 14 May, the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby had suggested Obama should actually tell the Japanese people he is glad about the nuclear bombing of their people as it allowed Japan to be "free" and enjoy "friendship" with the United States.

While the 1945 nuclear terrorism against Japanese civilians is praised by Jacoby for transforming Japan into what the US sees as a puppet state at only the cost of immolated women and children, Carson provides a rather different picture for you to consider. Rejecting Jacoby's view that other intensive bombing attacks on civilians in different countries were also justified to end the war, Carson writes that all "Attempts to terrorize a country into surrender through wholesale murder of its civilian population [are] a crime against humanity — no exceptions."

Carson's article concludes that the US decision to destroy cities was an act of utter barbarity, and finds little parallel anywhere except in primitive genocides committed thousands of years ago:
In fact, there’s no moral difference between Truman’s order of the massacre of the civilian population of two cities amounting to hundreds of thousands of people, and the massacres of civilian populations with which the Assyrians similarly terrorized enemies into surrendering over two thousand years ago. 
Deliberately killing civilians is murder. It’s that simple.
As of this post's creation, Obama is not expected to either apologize for or seek to justify the US regime's extensive and horrific war crimes from 1945 to present when he visits the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.


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10 May 2016

Millennials hate capitalism and greed

The Blog


In a May 1st article appearing at the Center for a Stateless Society website, anti-statist writer Kevin Carson explains why Millennials tend to respond positively to the term "socialism" in poll results. Capitalism gets a much more negative reaction.


This is especially relevant now as people wonder why the "democratic socialist" Bernie Sanders was able to go toe-to-toe with corporate backed Hillary Clinton for Democratic Party nomination as President of the United States. It happened despite many Americans (likely older generations) despising anything called "socialism" and assuming it to be solely the work of North Korea or Joseph Stalin.

Carson explained that the Millennial generation is distressed by the greed and oppression brought about by modern corporate capitalism. Many young people are familiar with the ideas of academics who try to explain just how disfiguring and tyrannical current capitalism is. Rampant capitalism is is actually coercing even the capitalists' favorite bogeyman - the regulatory state - just for its own profit.

Alluding to sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein's theory (read all our coverage of Wallerstein) of the expansion of capitalism across the world, Carson writes that Millennials have got it right if they associate capitalism with greed and power rather than freedom:
Historical capitalism began five or six centuries ago, not with free markets, but with the conquest of the free towns by the absolute states and the mass expropriation of peasants from their traditional rights to the land by the landed oligarchy, and continued with the colonial conquest of most of the world outside Europe. Since then capital has continued to rely heavily on the state to socialize its operating costs, erect barriers to competition, and enforce illegitimate title to all the land and natural resources engrossed in previous centuries. This history of conquest, robbery and enslavement is in the basic genetic code of contemporary corporate capitalism.
Some writers have tried to explain away Millennials' positive views of socialism with the condescending assertion they are "confused" about dictionary definitions. Carson dismissed this assertion as "dumb" and devoid of any comprehension of history.


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8 April 2016

US isolated by its own savage aggression

The Blog


Responding to the idea that US libertarians are "isolationists" because they oppose the repeated acts of aggression by the US regime against other countries, Thomas Knapp wrote that in fact libertarians believe in an interconnected world.


The claim that politicians who oppose US and western wars of choice are "isolationists" is commonly repeated in political debates and rhetoric. Knapp, as always, has an effective counterargument to such nonsense.

Knapp wrote at the Garrison Center website on 2 April, "we support, as Thomas Jefferson put it, “friendship and commerce with all nations, entangling alliances with none,” where real isolationists have historically opposed not just foreign wars but foreign commerce, calling for protectionist trade and immigration policies". This is, of course Knapp's idea of libertarianism, more closely aligned with the views expressed at the Center for a Stateless Society and less the bulk of members of the Libertarian Party.

In addition, Knapp quotes John McAfee, who is once again quoted below:
“I think isolationism is taking on the role of world policeman, making us a separate entity from the rest of the world. We’re the policemen and you guys are the people that we police. … Dropping bombs on families where mothers and fathers are killed, or brothers and sisters. I would be angry too. You would be angry too. So it is not isolationism to say that we need to bring our troops home, or that we need to stop interfering in the affairs of foreign nations. It is reality and practicality.”
With the above effectively summing up how the US regime is stupidly isolating itself and constantly creating and refining its own enemies with its continuous aggression, Knapp concludes Hillary Clinton and other presidential candidates "with their Caligula-style approach to foreign policy — “let them hate us so long as they fear us” — are the real isolationists."

The disastrous effects of America's self-imposed isolation can even be seen in Europe, where badly conceived US-led sanctions to suppress Russia's resurgent economy are failing, cause more harm and multiplying resentment towards the US in Europe now bordering on revolt against US control of Europe.


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17 November 2015

Rockwell talk dismantled by antistatists

The Blog


C4SS analysts slammed a talk by Lew Rockwell at the Mises Institute, in which open borders were characterized as an attack on private property.


The argument by the anarcho-capitalist activist seemed to be based upon conflating the borders and roads of the states receiving immigrants with "private property", as follows:
...immigration decisions are made by a central authority, with the wishes of property owners completely disregarded. The correct way to proceed, therefore, is to decentralize decision-making on immigration to the lowest possible level, so... individual property owners consent to the various movements of peoples.
The Center for a Stateless Society's antistatist theorist Kevin Carson hit back at this analysis, refuting it by arguing:
...So the basic idea is that all roads are the “private property” of the majority, who can restrict comings and goings on them at will. This is nonsense on stilts... The streets of cities and towns were laid out as a public commons at the time of settlement, by and large, and were never privately owned.
Embracing his fellow C4SS writer's above response, KN@PPSTER wrote that Lew Rockwell will go as low as "he has to go to continue dragging in money from a market niche he considers under-served due to the fact that decent human beings find that niche too sickening to serve."


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27 October 2015

Jurors in US are racially biased, govt-led

The Blog


The use of juries in trials is obviously intended to ensure a trial by one's peers, or by a fair representation of one's country. But what if the jurors are overwhelmingly white, in the trial of a Black man?


Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) think tank commentator Roderick Long slammed the use of jurors selected by government-appointed prosecutors as a way of ensuring biases and unfair trials rather than preventing them.

In a society as heterogeneous as the US, there is a constant risk of interference from racist prejudices in any search for justice. As Long emphasizes, "the government’s practice in many southern jurisdictions of excluding blacks from juries is especially troubling, and raises questions about the practice of peremptory challenge itself", when one considers how Black people have consistently been disproportionately targeted by US law enforcement.

Referencing the ideas of US abolitionist Lysander Spooner, Roderick Long advocates in his 22 October post that the solution is an autonomous legal system in the US, independent of the influence and control of government-appointed prosecutors. Trial by one's peers should be maintained as a function of civil society, therefore, instead of the state.

Further emphasis is placed on making juries perhaps more representative of the larger society, including representing views and ethnicities that government may not have been comfortable with.

An example of such reform may be to appoint jurors who hold an unfavorable view of law enforcers or who do not recognize the US regime's authority (who may in fact account for the majority of Americans). A further reform may be to ensure that the proportion of Black people appointed on any jury must be roughly analogous to their proportion in the state or neighborhood in question.


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23 October 2015

TPP is big govt propping up big business

The Blog


Right-wing libertarians at the magazine Reason have a chauvinist, statist interpretation of what "free trade" means. They recognize it only in the expansion of US corporate hegemony and the enslavement of poor people.


Kevin Carson, writing at the antistatist think tank Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS), offered that characterization of so-called "free trade" as it was articulated in a recent op-ed found at Reason. The op-ed had praised the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as an accomplishment in free trade, and this was refuted in Carson's responding post at C4SS.

It is Orwellian to call the TPP "free trade", Carson argued. In actual fact, the TPP supports intellectual property (IP) which suppresses legitimate competition and innovation in order to privilege CEOs who ultimately needed no intellect in order to gain possession of such property:

"The draconian IP provisions of contemporary "free trade" treaties serve the interests of global corporations the same way high industrial tariffs served American corporations a century ago."


IP enables corporations to suppress commercial competition in poverty-stricken countries, where the poorest of the poor in the world are contracted to work as sweatshop laborers. Also in the retort to the Reason op-ed, Carson wrote that IP is:

"a form of protectionism that still gives them [corporate stakeholders] a monopoly over selling a particular product in a particular market - but operates at corporate boundaries rather than national ones"


The TPP, and the "free trade" it represents, are effectively then a shift from one (national corporate) protectionism to another (global corporate) protectionism.

Carson sums up his criticism of the TPP and other so-called free trade deals by pointing out the contradiction in the supposed anti-statism of right-wing libertarians. What they are arguing for is necessarily heavier state intervention in the economy. State subsidizing and protecting big business from competition is the object of all IP law, and such intervention has become the basis of most global corporate profit.

Corporations are leeching on the US state, only for right-wing libertarians at publications and bodies like Reason to portray their success as an example of free markets with zero state intervention. As such, Carson mocks, someone who thinks "free trade" agreements reduce the intervention of the state in the economy might as well believe in Santa Claus.


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20 October 2015

Antistatist think tank on Jeremy Corbyn

The Blog


How should left-wing antistatists and anarchists see Jeremy Corbyn, current Leader of the Opposition in the UK, who is considered "hard-left" in the media?


Looking at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) for commentary on Corbyn, you'll find only three articles mentioning his name right now. This is understandable, considering that Corbyn is a fairly new political animal for most people in the information media since his rise to leadership of the Labour Party.

Views at the the think tank, however, vary between quite enthusiastic support and expectations of severe disappointment to come if Corbyn doesn't turn out to be as radical as his supporters and detractors both claim him to be. The character of Jeremy Corbyn as someone who continually maintains his principles and fights for the public good against all the odds is not questioned, however, by either of these two competing viewpoints.

C4SS commentators Derek Wall and Kevin Carson both concurred that Jeremy Corbyn's success was a sign of progress. On 4 October, International Coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales Derek Wall, who knows Jeremy Corbyn, wrote at C4SS that he was "amazed" by Corbyn's success, pointing out that Corbyn was far from a mainstream figure and was "more popular with Greens than his own party".

Also mentioning Corbyn in his response to Wall - which was not directly concerned with Jeremy Corbyn but with points of political theory - Carson gave the following commentary:
I see a great deal of promise in Corbyn’s distinction between state and social ownership — perhaps even some hope of a partial move back towards Colin Ward’s vision of public services organized around mutuals and friendly societies instead of government and corporate bureaucracies.
An earlier article published at C4SS, however, quotes another anarchist blog at length, questioning whether Corbyn will really change anything in Britain's political landscape. Blogger Pete James from Whatever-ism had predicted that Jeremy Corbyn would disappoint his supporters in the way Syriza had disappointed the Greek people after promising to defeat austerity.

The above skepticism mirrors a similar view advanced by leading American social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein, stating that elections have little impact on the world-system. Wallerstein also weighed in on the inherent weakness of national governments in challenging a historical social system like capitalism, which is ultimately how Greece was defeated by the interests of European and international bankers.

However, with the UK being a major financial player in the world-economy and linked integrally to the US, the threat from a Corbyn-ruled Britain to the capitalist historical system would be much more severe than anything from a peripheral European country like Greece. Wallerstein himself also described Corbyn's success as part of a global revival of the political left.


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9 October 2015

Reason gets schooled by C4SS... again

The Blog


Anti-statist commentator and theorist Kevin Carson has once again gone after Reason for the magazine's dogmatic adherence to neoliberal ideology. This ideology plagues the publication's understandings of innovation and competition, conflating them with American chauvinism and the asinine claims to "intellectual property" advanced by corporations that lack any merit or intellect.


In an op-ed at Reason, writer Stephanie Slade appealed to the increasingly politicized 'people's Pope' Francis to "embrace capitalism" if he really wants to improve the lot of the world's poor. Commenting upon this in a response at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS), Carson ridicules Slade's assertion that “markets and globalization have lifted billions out of poverty and lessened global inequality”, correcting Slade that what exists is not a market but a system of global expropriation, conquest and chauvinism advanced by governments.

Carson contends that Slade is as ignorant of basic economic facts as she accuses the much-praised Pontifex. The global corporate economy is no free market, he points out. Rather, it is the end result of five hundred years of what Carson calls "colonialism, robbery and enslavement". This is perhaps a reference to the theory of the capitalist world-economy advanced by historical social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein, which sees the start of the conquest of the Americas by European armies as roughly the beginning of modern-day capitalism.

Far from being based upon freedom or real innovation, current "capitalism" is based instead on ruthless ownership and protection of property by gangs of thugs and brutal armed regimes masquerading as "democracies". No-one actually earned such property, and instead such ownership can solely be traced back to criminality, racism and class antagonism, Carson implies.

In Carson's own dramatic phrasing, we may understand the historic truth as follows:
Most of the minerals, farm land and petroleum reserves of the world continue to be held by the heirs and assigns of the original robbers — a giant, bleeding, arterial wound on the body of the global South that transnational corporations feast on like vampires. So global capitalism as we know it was founded on the violation of property rights. Talk of “inviolability” amounts to the robber saying “No more stealing, starting — NOW!”
Even supposing Pope Francis' ignorance of economics is fact, Carson concludes, an economics columnist like Stepahnie Slade at a publication as respected as Reason should know better than to recycle fallacies about intellectual property being somehow responsible for freedom. In reality, intellectual property is a form of protectionism, which does nothing more than slow down and prevent innovation.

If we assume that Slade is right about capitalism uplifting a billion from poverty, it remains a fact that it could be done faster if we had removed the suffocating and retarding enforcement of intellectual property laws by states.


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2 October 2015

Dissolve borders to help Syria refugees?

The Blog


The solution to the suffering and inhumane treatment of Syria's refugees fleeing into Europe is to dissolve the borders of nation-states, an anarchist writer argues.


In his short post published via the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS), Dylan Delikta urged humanity to move beyond the "tyranny of borders". Delikta wrote, "Borders create feelings of animosity that cause people to turn their backs on fellow humans simply because they come from a different region and don’t share their customs".

Added to this, the anarchist accused Western states of "decades (arguably centuries)" spent promoting war, exclusion and poverty in poorer regions of the Middle East, giving rise to these refugee flows.

Blaming the ideology of the inviolability of nation-states for justifying the use of "humiliation, detainment or outright slaughter" of whole populations who don't look or sound like us, Delikta expressed longing for a civilization without borders and constraints on the flow of humans. Much of what Delikta argues is already established liberal thinking in the West, but government leaders refuse to apply this ideology of liberty and equality during times of political crisis. Instead, at times of crisis affecting their own security, Western leaders tend to abandon their high humanitarian rhetoric revert back to archaic Nineteenth Century thinking about national integrity and sovereignty.

Delikta's argument to dissolve the borders for the Syrian refugees is mainly an antistatist theoretical one rather than a humanitarian one, with the end goal of antistatists being the dissolution of all current regimes. In practice, however, border dissolution is spreading the Takfiri Islamist violence to other countries and increasing suffering on the ground, with Lebanon and Iraq being existing examples of this cross-border spread of terrorism.

Of grave concern to many Europeans is the threat of infiltration by Takfiri militants from Syria into Europe. Western powers have constantly insisted on heavy counter-terrorist screening of Syrians before giving any help to them within Syria but no such screening is used on thousands of refugees actually entering Europe.


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25 September 2015

Big government vs big tech?

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Responding to Robert B. Reich's New York Times article "Big Tech Has Become Way Too Powerful", an antistatist writer blamed big government for the very problems Reich was suggesting the government should solve.


Writing at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) Joel Schlosberg rejected Reich's claim that the government must intervene in free markets in order to maintain them. Reich claimed that "There can’t be a market without government", which Schlosberg considers ignorant of abundant examples ranging from international trade (considering there is no world-government) to trade among individuals in the anarchic spaces of the Internet.

Also rejected by Schlosberg was the need for intellectual property as the pillar upholding innovation - by creating artificial scarcity in order to guarantee the existence of high-tech markets. Schlosberg instead advocated an alternative economy, saying "A full-fledged mutualistic economy of the digital age would instead be like the bazaars of eBay and Etsy, but for everything.".

Schlosberg concluded by pointing out that Reich contradicts himself in the New York Times op-ed, at first rejecting the way corporations aggressively use intellectual property to shut down competition (and thus innovation), and then parroting the fallacy that intellectual property is the fuel of innovation. Intellectual property, like national security and protectionism, is one of several legal constructions used by political and corporate oligarchs to slow innovation and inhibit the spread of new technologies.


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18 September 2015

Encryption, anonymity as human rights

The Blog


In May of 2015, a UN report asserted that secure encryption and anonymity on the Internet are human rights.


From the UN report:
Encryption and anonymity, today’s leading vehicles for online security, provide individuals with a means to protect their privacy, empowering them to browse, read, develop and share opinions and information without interference and enabling journalists, civil society organizations, members of ethnic or religious groups, those persecuted because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, activists, scholars, artists and others to exercise the rights to freedom of opinion and expression. 
The US regime has vowed and sought to implement a so-called "golden key" that will allow it to break through all encryption, contrary to the UN's above recognition of encryption as a human right. As of Edward Snowden's revelations in 2013, they were making significant gains against such protection, but they had not yet succeeded.

Dan Froomkin at The Intercept had written on the month of the report's release:
Encryption is not the refuge of scoundrels, as Obama administration law-enforcement officials loudly proclaim – it is an essential tool needed to protect the right of freedom of opinion and expression in the digital age, a new United Nations report concludes.
More recently, at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) in September, Jason Farrell concluded, "Governments do not have a right to see every communication on the web", and dismissed the so-called national security arguments of the White House. He wrote that "Even if the battle against terrorism, drug cartels, hackers, spies or other criminals becomes more difficult, “going dark” remains the right of all human beings."

A "golden key" to thwart encryption will not just allow the US regime to aggressively monitor and follow its own citizens without any legal justification, but will allow repressive regimes all over the world to do the same once they get access to US government information. Therefore, what the US is doing has become an example of what Martin Luther King Jr called 'an injustice anywhere being a threat to justice everywhere', potentially allowing the entrenchment of dictatorships all over the world.

However, the US's development of the ultimate tools of dictatorship and the repression of opposition should not be surprising. In all international conflicts, the US has proven repeatedly that it is on the side of armed coups and repressive dictatorships, using their territory to extra-judicially torture and murder its opponents over decades.


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15 September 2015

Terror against US regime is a reprisal

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What the media try to describe as unprovoked terrorist attacks against Americans are actually reprisals against a barbaric and warlike US regime that has left a trail of death and destruction across the world. The US is the world's most dangerous terrorist state, massacring civilians on a daily basis, and pretends to be shocked that anyone would try to retaliate.


This was the tone of antistatist writer Chad Nelson, writing recently at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) market anarchist think tank based in the US. Highlighting the secrecy under which President Obama's drone wars thrive in order to protect his sensitive image as a dove rather than a hawk, Nelson offered the following commentary on how Americans are tricked about why they are targeted by terrorists:
When retaliation for these actions arrives at our shores or against Americans abroad, as it inevitably does, the American public is shocked and appalled, wondering what could possibly prompt such heinous actions. Hungry for answers, Americans are then fed simple explanations by politicians, such as, “they hate our way of life,” or “their religion commands them to commit such acts.” Never are we provided the context in which such reprisals occur.
Americans go on to tolerate a monstrous, intrusive police state which invades their own lives supposedly to hunt down the militants who are only reacting to the same undemocratic regime's aggression around the world. Americans are subjected to 24/7 surveillance and the bulk collection of all their correspondence, and have no guarantees that they too won't be arbitrarily detained or assassinated by their criminal regime in Washington without trial.

In Afghanistan, the US-led NATO aggression has reached its most sordid and illegitimate scale, with children confined to home and unable to go to school for fear of being hit by Obama's criminal drone attacks. As a result of this, the remote-controlled aggression goes beyond merely creating resentment among the people affected by them, but can even inflame regional or global resentment of the United States for its endless aggression.

Obama will never be remembered as a man of peace, Nelson argues, because he has escalated his drone program to a scale ten times greater than George W. Bush. It is worth noting that none of the current leading candidates for the 2016 Presidential election in the US opposes drone strikes, and even Bernie Sanders has called merely for the strikes to be conducted with more caution, despite their record of failure.


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