Smash Capitalism, Comrades!

From comrade Charles “Rad Geek” Johnson comes “Free Market Anti-Capitalism?”, an exploration of, well, what I’m really all about. That’s not to say I agreed with every single thing Charles wrote before I read it — I lernt sum stuff here.

I’m presenting the links to the individual sections here both so my Dear Readers see them and so that reading from start to finish is a perhaps bit easier than just working off the links in the final entry in the series.

This is the final instalment of the remarks that I gave as part of my presentation at the Free Market Anti-Capitalism? panel at the Association of Private Enterprise Education on 13 April 2010.

1. By way of introduction or apology
2. With apologies to Shulamith Firestone
3. Two meanings of markets
4. Rigged markets, captive markets, and capitalistic business as usual
5. The Many Monopolies
6. What about them poor ol’ bosses? What about gains from trade and economies of scale?
7. Is this all just a semantic debate?

Go read, y’all, this is really good stuff. Some day I might be persuaded to do a podcast recording of it.

Carl Watner, who has operated voluntyarist.com for long years, provides a definition of what a voluntaryist is, front and center:

Voluntaryists are advocates of non-political, non-violent strategies to achieve a free society.

Carl has done amazing work in collecting and promulgating anarchist literature. The amount of learning I have obtained and that others have benefited from via his work — as writer and archiver — is incalculable. Carl’s one of the good guys. One of the guys, indeed, who I can count on to wind up on the right side of the barricades, come the revolution. I heart Carl Watner.

Image from headsonpikes.blogspot.com -- that guy's dead. Sorry.

However, I can’t but quibble with this definition. I might well prefer non-violent strategies for the attainment of a free society (and the political will certainly never be acceptable). But I am not going to rule out violent, bloody, homicidal strategies to get there, if such turn out to seem essential.

Perhaps this is not what Carl means with his definition. Perhaps the preference, the advocacy for such does not preclude other paths. But I read this definition, and the words of many other self-proclaimed voluntaryists, and see a commitment to non-violence above all other things.

I am not so committed.

I don’t really advocate the strategies as such. I want the end results. Of course I am keenly aware that ends do not justify means. But when one recognizes that the world is ruled by criminal gangs, one ought take into account all legitimate actions for the elimination of crime and criminals.

If the achievement of a free society is to require that a million bleeding heads of torturing tyrants, damnable dictators, pandering politicians, sadistic generals, privileged policemen, criminal soldiers and psychotic, irresponsible “servants” be hoisted on pikes to surround the palisades of the free cities, count me in for the headsman’s role, for I will not dwell in my ice-cream-and-flying-ponies fantasies so long as to preclude my own action toward the attainment thereof.

Would that neither you nor I ever face such choices. But we should be ready, should our realities eventuate as such, to know what we will do.

Do you?

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The response was staggering. 134 comments on a single blog post here is a record likely to stand for quite a while. The post also spawned an enormous (182 comments) reddit thread on /r/anarchism and a smaller (34 comments) one on /r/libertarian, plus an essay (with footnotes!) by Alex Peak and a point-by-point reply by b psycho of the Psychopolitik 2.0 blog.

I responded to b psycho on his post, but Alex’s site doesn’t allow commenting so I’ll follow up here on two things he wrote there.

First, Alex asks: “But what does it mean to say that private property might be ‘impossible’ in a free society?” Here, my wording was poor. A better formulation would have been to ask about one’s preferences regarding the proposition that private property wouldn’t exist in a free society. I missed the mark with my language, but stimulated the discussion I wanted to create anyway.

I haven't read it either.

Alex then objects to my statement (in a comment) that property is a social construct, bringing in an argument regarding someone going and living off the land by themselves. I suggest that the isolated individual’s notions of property are irrelevant until he or she comes into contact with other human beings. It is only in interactions with other people that claims to property become worthy of consideration, and it is thereby a social process which determines what particular claims will be respected and which will not. Questions regarding Robinson’s property claims absent interactions with others simply vanish from relevance.

I’d now like to ask my dear readers a similar set of questions, again with the necessary caveats: the formulations of the questions also reflect my preferences, may be poorly worded, and are asked given the context that we can’t know what a free society looks like. Additionally, when I refer to “free societies”, I do not mean static, crystalline things never subject to change. Take the term, rather, as meaning “the early stages of a flexible, free society, subject to any number of changes going forward” if that makes you more comfortable.

Comrade Murray ripped Bob good for this one.

• If all things (except people and abandoned or never-owned things) are private property in a free society, do you prefer the state?
• If free societies are such that states never arise from them, even if things are so awful that a minimal state might seem justified, do you prefer retaining the state against that risk?
• If free societies are rife with beliefs and practices you condemn (domineering religion, poison culture, sexism, bigotry, racism), do you prefer the state?
• If living in a free society means that more children than today are beaten, abused, indoctrinated or otherwise harmed, do you prefer the state?
• If free societies are characterized by more crime, random violence and fraud than statist ones, not counting the crimes of states themselves, do you prefer the state?
• If transitioning to a free society requires those you love to change big portions of their lives — in ways perhaps unimaginable now — do you prefer the state?
• If mega-corporations along the Exxon-Lockheed-Monsanto model thrive in free societies, do you prefer the state?
• If intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc.) is stronger than today in a free society, do you prefer the state?
• If wage labor, profit, rent and interest are common and desired by many in free societies, do you prefer the state?
• If pollution of any sort is worse in free societies, do you prefer the state?

I assert, of course without proof, that if you answer “yes” to any of these questions, you’re not really an anarchist. Or a libertarian.

Join the lively discussion by posting your objections, critiques, arguments, disputes and complaints below!

Resist, Rebel, Reclaim!

A month or so ago I conceived — no doubt, not originally — the idea of incorporating a revolutionary anarchist slogan into the traditional logo for recycling. I posted something to my Facebook wall calling for a logo design, and Alex had this put together in almost no time. Bravo, Alex! So, whether you see this plastered all up and down the overpasses on America’s Interstate 95 or spray-painted on half the train cars on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, you’ll know where it came from.

Resist! Resist what? Whatever evil there is in your situation and that of those around you. Could be the state, abusive parents, tyrannical schoolteachers, a smarmy boss, the jealous priesthood of whatever religion got jammed down your throat, stupid laws, uncaring “friends”, racism, sexism, whatever. Push back!

Rebel! Against same.

Reclaim! Reclaim what? Whatever has been taken from you and those around you. Could be your freedom, your identity, your learning, your labor, your mind, your property, your integrity, your emotions, your destiny, your life, whatever. Don’t ask for permission, don’t wait for critical mass, just take it!

Formats available: black-on-white PNG, white-on-black PNG, and for handy cut-out stencils, large-format billboards or whatever: black-on-white SVG, white-on-black SVG.

This interview was published, in Slovak, by Markíza Magazine on 2 July 2009.

The English text here is a loose back-translation of the Slovak text of the published article, which is available at mojacasopis.sk.

This is a translation of a translation of my own interview responses, and a bunch of things inevitably get lost in such a process. In a couple of cases, I’ve footnoted things that I feel I ought to clarify, but, with that, the text:

Verbal Aspect Bothers Me!

Text: Ľuba Kukučková – Photo: Oles Cheresko

Mike Gogulski has a Polish surname, was born an American and today is a citizen of no state. He has worked in the USA and in Belgium. Lately, he’s dropped anchor in Slovakia and has been living in Bratislava for five years.

At the old Slovak National Theater in Bratislava. Photo: Oles Cheresko, Markíza

To the east, he’s been as far as Košice, Guatemala to the south and Vancouver, Canada to the northwest. He doesn’t feel like a globetrotter, and he’s very pleased to be in Bratislava!

Mike’s paternal grandparents emigrated to America at the start of the 1900s. His mother’s ancestors came from Germany. Most of today’s Gogulskis live in the area of Poznań, Poland, but Mike doesn’t know them personally. Like many European emigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century, his ancestors, too, wanted to break their bonds with their motherland and become Americans. They had difficult lives, too, and there remained no time to preserve the Polish language and culture for their children. But now their great-grandchild has come back to Europe after all. He speaks four languages and, thanks to his spontaneous approach to people, has made many friends in Slovakia. In this way, he might be called a true world citizen. Mike Gogulski, however, has no citizenship. He renounced his American citizenship, and for the moment is only considering becoming a Slovak citizen…

School, LSD and Beer

Michael was born on 8 August 1972 in Phoenix, Arizona. His father got a job as an electro-mechanical engineer in Orlando, Florida, and there Mike lived with his family until he was 25 years old. Afterward, he roamed a number of states following jobs, from Minnesota to Connecticut and from California to Wisconsin. Eight years ago, his father died of cancer. His mother, Joan, lives in Florida. Mike’s younger sister, Karen, who works as a nurse, is raising two adorable boys – Cole and Chase – in Orlando with her husband, Billy. Mike sees his nephews only in photos, though. “In 1990 I started studying information technology at a university in Orlando, but then my interest shifted to LSD and beer,” he openly confesses. He quit his studies after the first semester. But he’s found his footing in life quite successfully. He has a ten-year information systems career behind him as a systems administrator, network engineer and IT infrastructure manager. He moved around a large area of the western parts of the US after work.

In 2004, in the wake of many work as well as personal expectations and failures, Mike left America. His girlfriend at the time wanted to teach English in a European country, someplace in the eastern bloc. She sent out inquiries and got a response from right here in Slovakia. They both moved to Bratislava and, though their paths parted later, Mike became fond of Bratislava. Since 2006 he’s begun devoting himself more to language, rather than to computers as in the past. He has become a translator, proofreader and editor.

Slovaks are Quieter

“Bratislava has its good and less-good sides,” the American native muses. “I never lived right in the city in the past, in the US. I thought that I’d hate the city, but that’s not so. I find living here pleasant. I like that Bratislava is small enough to offer a peaceful life while being big enough to have everything you’d expect from a city.” He has friends, lovers, ex-lovers as well as enemies here… He has been to Žilina, Košice, Prešov, Banská Bystrica and Zvolen. He has heard that Slovakia is a beautiful land and looks forward to discovering it over time. Does he sometimes compare Slovaks to Americans? To Mike, good and bad people are found everywhere. As a matter of principle, however, he judges people as individual beings, not as members of some group based on place of birth or the geographical divisions of the world. Mike believes that Slovaks, in general, are quieter than Americans. He’s had some awkward moments, though, with the hazards of Slovak. He’d been in Slovakia barely three months when he approached a group of girls at work with whom he often went to smoke outside the building. He asked: “Would you like to smoke?” And they took this a bit differently… They stopped laughing after a bit and explained the sexual undertone* of the question.

At one time he defended his trouble with the language by saying, “my Slovak is good enough for taxi drivers and waiters,” but since then he’s improved dramatically. He reads well in Slovak, in his humble appraisal, writes like a respectable schoolboy but has trouble, though, understanding responses in conversation. He works as a translator, and so he hasn’t mastered slang; he says his Slovak is more lawyerly. Really understanding a language demands growing up in the country. “I didn’t want to live in some sort of isolated bubble with other Americans and English-speaking people,” Mike says. “I would have felt cut off from reality. Many Slovaks say that Slovak is one of the most difficult languages in the world, but I don’t think so. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s easy. I took two years of Latin in school, so Slovak declension didn’t surprise me. Still, I’m not good at recalling when and how I should use the various cases. And the hardest thing for me – and perhaps for many westerners who come to Slavic lands – is verbal aspect. I want a magic key that would make it clear for me when to use the perfective aspect, but no such key exists!”

Mike is “Polyamorous”

Besides working with Slovak, Mike also translates official documents from Czech into English. He has simplified his lifestyle, and so he’s also living off smaller earnings. If he travels to the Czech Republic, he gets by in Slovak, and says the local people there observe him with interest. He once spoke Spanish very well, but has forgotten a lot. He believes, however, that if he traveled for a month to Spain or Mexico he would speak fluently by the third week. Though he behaves like a world citizen, he hasn’t traveled that much more of it. “In the US I moved from city to city every two years. I have been as far east as Košice, as far south as Guatemala, and as far north and west as Vancouver, Canada. I have been satisfied living here in Bratislava, and I don’t have any urge to move someplace else soon.” Mike got married in the US at 23, but the marriage lasted for only six years. From the marriage he has a nine-year-old daughter, Kyra, who lives with her mother in Georgia. Nobody from his family has visited him in Bratislava yet, though maybe they will come when his nephews grow up. Is he sad to be alone? “No. These days I am polyamorous (author’s note: in love with more than one person) and I’m not interested in an everlasting relationship of the marriage type.”**

Why did Mike renounce his American citizenship? “In its political, governmental essence, the USA appears to be a criminal organization. I don’t want to be connected with it in any way. I’m not against supporting society, but I am against taxes, which the state criminally demands of me from birth, and I don’t want to support others’ privileges. For me, ridding myself of citizenship was a way to bring my legal and social status into harmony with my beliefs. Perhaps later I will apply for Slovak citizenship, but that will be only for practical reasons, so that I can travel. I don’t want to have any sort of connection with the criminal organization known as the state. And, perhaps, I will not be a citizen of any country until the end of my life.”

* The Slovak verb fajčiť means, literally, “to consume by smoking”, as by smoking a cigarette. In slang it also means “to perform fellatio”.

** My actual words: “These days I am openly polyamorous, and not interested in a state marriage of any kind.”

Described simply as “A Novel” in its subtitle, Puck is really something quite more than that. A fictional story, yes, but also a tour of some of the “weirder” aspects of Gene’s universe — and mine.

Pick, pock, puck!

I won’t try to describe much that goes on, save to say that the story takes places in two parallel(?) universes, and sometimes in the spaces between them. You got your swords ‘n’ wizards fantasy adventure, you got your romance, you got your mystery and intrigue, you got your modern psychological drama, you got your science fiction — everything, indeed, that one could ask for in a modern novel.

But there’s more…

Puck is a book on several different levels. It’s loaded with references to mythology, anarchism, religious traditions, history, the odder bits of physics and a whole bunch of classical literature to boot. I consider myself a fairly learned guy, but Mr. Gene has been treading this planet a bit longer than I have, and his learning shines through brilliantly. To paraphrase another great novelist: this book is like a mirror; if a monkey looks in, no Korzybski looks out.

From page 105:

[Doc and Sophia] shared several passion-filled years, but by the time Doc was finishing graduate school — when the loudest political voices in the Village were proclaiming that AIDS was a government plot against the gay and minority communities, and were fighting pitched battles with the police over control of Tompkin’s Square Park — he had grown disillusioned with what he had come to regard as the posturing of bored, rich kids. It wasn’t that he had no sympathy for their grievances, but rather that he now perceived their activism as more a palliative for their own boredom and frustration than as a real attempt to address the injustices that were their purported motivation. He suspected that their protests were a contemporary manifestation of the same impulse that had motivated Uncle Franz’s Cabala studies. The radicals he knew seemed to believe that if only they could arrange their political slogans in accord with some occult formula, then the ruling elite peacefully would release the reins of power, liberate the masses, dismantle the military-industrial complex, and sow flower gardens over the obsolete missile silos.

Read with caution, ready to remember just how flimsy your paradigms are, and just how liable they are to slip, like flimsy masks, off the face of reality.

Puck you! Puck me! Puck everyone!

Needs notes, but … meh. No time.

Powerpoint 2003: Download

There’s at least one meow in the recording, courtesy of Henry, and the mix toward the end is less than perfect. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy.

Download (mp3, 21m37s, 19.7MB)