Here’s Jim Barnett, writing for the Nieman Journalism Lab at establishment pillar Harvard University:

“If WikiLeaks really wants to promote transparency, it should start with its own operations.”

John “WikiLeaks > Cryptome = sour grapes” Young, quoted in a rather insane article suggesting, among other things, that WikiLeaks is a CIA/Mossad front organization, says:

“The principal deficiency of Wikileaks is its lack of transparency about its operators and funds, characteristics of spies and secret societies up to no good and whose main purpose is to hide from public accountability and conceal corruption and criminality.”

Into the midst of an otherwise decent-looking piece of journalism, Jeanne Whalen and David Crawford, writing for establishment mouthpiece The Wall Street Journal, inject:

“WikiLeaks’s lack of financial transparency stands in contrast to the total transparency it seeks from governments and corporations.”

It’s hard to separate out the stupid from the evil here, and I’m not going to try. But let’s break it down. What’s being said here is that since it represents itself as a champion of transparency among governments and giant corporations, WikiLeaks ought to eat its own dog food and be transparent itself.

Has a nice sort of happy-symmetry ring to it, doesn’t it? But it’s wrong.

What WikiLeaks (and sites like it, including, to his credit, John Young’s cryptome.org) brings to the world is a mechanism for subjecting the most powerful, wealthiest and least accountable institutions on the planet to the merciless light of public scrutiny so that they cannot continue enjoying the benefit of secrecy in exploiting people and planet.

It should be blindingly obvious to these and other like-minded commentators that the “transparency” logic simply does not apply to such an organization. The public has no need whatever to know the internal workings of a volunteer, donation-funded organization that heroically stands up to the world’s greatest powers. Additionally, the more information that’s public about such a group’s inner workings, the more opportunity for those powers to subvert, corrupt, disrupt, discredit and destroy it.

Maybe that’s just not obvious to them, in which case I call them stupid. But maybe it is obvious to them. If so, that strongly suggests to me that they’re in the service of evil, if not evil themselves.

smashzaxlebax @ youtube

It seems that a rather kind foamer-at-the-mouth going by the handle “smashzaxlebax” has turned my podcast of Kevin Carson’s The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand: Corporate Capitalism as a State-Guaranteed System of Privilege into a 12-part YouTube playlist.

You rock, sir! What is that thing, anyway? A cyanide cigar?

Without further ado, here’s the playlist!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Preferences? What preferences?

A few questions for you, gentle reader, with my own comments upon them. Note that these, too, reflect my own preferences.

Given the context that we can’t presently know what a free society would look like, how it would self-organize, etc., consider the following:

Against Intellectual Property by Stephan Kinsella

• If private property is impossible in a libertarian society, do you prefer the state? If so, you’re not a libertarian or anarchist.
• If minimal states always collapse either into truly free anarchic or grow to monstrous proportions but never remain minimal, do you prefer a non-minimal state? If so, you’re not a libertarian or anarchist.
• If achieving a free society means that you must give up all legal and societal privileges flowing from state and other crooked institutions today (religion, poison culture, patriarchy, heteronormativity), would you do it? If not, you’re not a libertarian or anarchist.
• If living in a free society means that you can’t beat, abuse, indoctrinate or otherwise harm your children, do you prefer the state? If so, you’re not a libertarian or anarchist.
• If transitioning to a free society means you must change big portions of your life, would you? If not, you’re not a libertarian or anarchist.
• If a free society is nothing like you ever imagined, will you cling to the state? If so, you’re not a libertarian or anarchist.
• If Wal-Mart, Tesco and other mega-corporations are impossible in a free society, do you prefer the state? If so, you’re not a libertarian or anarchist.
• If intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc.) is impossible in a free society, do you prefer the state? If so, you’re not a libertarian or anarchist.
• If wage labor, profit, rent and/or interest are impossible or widely loathed in a free society, do you prefer the state? If so, you’re not a libertarian or anarchist.

There are any number of other questions like these that I could ask. How do you reply?

Are you so chained to your own preferences that the unknowable unknown of what a free society might look like scares you right back into statist servitude?

Your comments, answers, complaints, curses, death threats, etc., all welcome below.

From Network, 1976:

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale… and I won’t have it!
Is that clear?
You think you merely stopped a business deal.
That is not the case.
The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country… and now they must put it back!
It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. It is ecological balance!
You are an old man… who thinks in terms of nations and peoples.
There are no nations. There are no peoples.
There are no Russians. There are no Arabs.
There are no Third Worlds. There is no West.
There is only one holistic system of systems!
One vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variant, multinational dominion of dollars!
Petrol dollars, electro dollars, multi-dollars.
Reichsmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels!
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet.
That is the natural order of things today.
That is the atomic, and subatomic, and galactic structure of things today.
And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature!
And you will atone!
Am I getting through to you?
You get up on your little 21-inch screen and howl about America and democracy.
There is no America.
There is no democracy.
There is only IBM and ITT, and AT&T, and Du Pont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon.
Those are the nations of the world today.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state? Karl Marx?
They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions and compute price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale.
The world is a college of corporations… inexorably determined by the… immutable bylaws of business.
The world is a business, Mr. Beale.

Even more important now than then. You know that’s true, both because I said so and because I’m older than you are.

I’m looking forward, sadly, to a day when YouTube — and that is to say, Google — caves to pressure from some group or another to take this video and all other versions of this song off the intertube forever. Perhaps then people will wake the fuck up. Save your copy to encrypted storage today!

Last call for alcohol.
Last call for your freedom of speech.
Drink up. Happy hour is now enforced by law.
Don’t forget our house special, it’s called a Trickie Dickie Screwdriver.
It’s got one part Jack Daniels, two parts purple Kool-Aid,
and a jigger of formaldehyde
from the jar with Hitler’s brain in it we got in the back.
Happy trails to you. Happy trails to you.

I am Emperor Ronald Reagan
Born again with fascist cravings
Still, you made me president

Human rights will soon go ‘way
I am now your Shah today
Now I command all of you
Now you’re going to pray in school
I’ll make sure they’re Christian too

California Uber alles
Uber alles California

Ku Klux Klan will control you
Still you think it’s natural
Nigger knockin’ for the master race
Still you wear the happy face

You closed your eyes, can’t happen here
Alexander Haig is near
Vietnam won’t come back you say
Join the army or you will pay

California Uber alles
Uber alles California

Yeah, that’s it. Just relax.
Have another drink, few more pretzels, little more MSG.
Turn on those Dallas Cowboys on your TV.
Lock your doors. Close your mind.
It’s time for the two-minute warning.

Welcome to 1984
Are you ready for the third world war?!?
You too will meet the secret police
They’ll draft you and they’ll jail your niece

You’ll go quietly to boot camp
They’ll shoot you dead, make you a man
Don’t you worry, it’s for a cause
Feeding global corporations’ claws

Die on our brand new poison gas
El Salvador or Afghanistan
Making money for President Reagan
And all the friends of President Reagan

California Uber alles
Uber alles California

Hey there,

You know, it’s funny, after reading your recent interview, I feel as though essentially you and I believe in the same (or a very similar) ideal world. I never realized that might even remotely be the case. I guess that could be because we rarely if ever engaged in political debate with one another, assuming the other felt very differently.

One day not too long ago, I was describing my ideal ‘political’ system and basically it hearkens back to my teenage fascination with communes and dropping out of society at large in order to live with like minded people who create their own guidelines to live by – growing their own food, caring for one another’s children – communally. Ideally, small groups/communities would ‘govern’ themselves: everyone could sit in a room together and have a vote and the group would be small enough that each voice would be heard. I think that’s what government was meant to be (or at least should have been), but it got all fucked up when it grew – it wasn’t scalable.

Although, you’d likely leave out all the warm fuzzy hippy-sounding bits of what I’ve said, I think we seem to essentially have very compatible ideal visions of the future.

And I respond:

Okay, I’m stunned by the synchronicity here, because literally at the same time you were likely writing this I was playing a video game and thinking to myself that it’s a pity that we find ourselves so divided on political questions, and that if you understood more of the background – or if I were better at explaining it to you – that we would find we have much more common ground than we thought.

Agorism is a revolutionary strategy for achieving a voluntary society. Intellectually, it grew out of the anarcho-capitalism of Murray Rothbard. The principles of that philosophy are not entirely compatible with more “socialist” forms of anarchism, in that anarcho-capitalism rejects almost everything which flows from economics based on the Labor Theory of Value in favor of Austrian subjective value theory (marginal utility), rejects the notion that hard titles to land are immoral or indefensible, and rejects the propositions found in many schools of thought which say that profit, rent and interest are either immoral or would disappear in a stateless society.

What is interesting is that the ancap model, I believe, is capable of subsuming all of the other models within itself, and serving as an overall framework under which any given philosophy of property and economics could be freely tried out within areas inhabited by people who wanted to adopt their own, so long as agencies for resolutions of disputes between communities with different philosophies could be agreed upon.

Within the anarcho-capitalist panarchy communities could choose to organize themselves along whatever lines they wanted to. Communes? Fine, have at it. Rugged individualists? Great, just don’t come stuffing it at the rest of us. Worker self-management and a society of independent contractors? That’s permissible. Syndicalist communes where the workers control the means of production? Fine, so long as they acquire their property legitimately. Corporations? Absolutely, but good luck maintaining anything even remotely like the predatory corporate forms of today or the past without State-backed limited liability, corporate personhood and the massive subsidies and externalizations of costs granted to big businesses by States today. Any or all of these could exist side by side – and of course, there’s a lot more to it than just a general permissiveness.

Overall, and perhaps of great interest for you, who I believe approaches questions of what ought to be in society more from a “harmonious human systems” approach than from an egoist individual rights approach, is that a society of this nature would naturally entail the disappearance of the corrupt, predatory, coercive and downright evil practices used by today’s ruling classes and wealthy elites via today’s States against poor and repressed people all over the world and throughout the horrible history of humanity. Revolutionaries everywhere want to overthrow their ruling class, but usually seek to replace it with their own familiar personal despotism, and let there be blood. The Agorist seeks to subject the bloated, loathsome carcasses of State and ruling class to the merciless creative destruction of the marketplace.

Agorism implies a great many things which challenge the ruling classes and what is called today by many “the Capitalist system” (though it ought better be called something like “the neo-Mercantilist system”) at fundamental levels. People who make money smuggling human beings from one country to another ought to be celebrated as heroes provided they are not selling people into slavery and they take necessary safety precautions. The real crime is that since the activity of smuggling people across artificial State borders is illegal, there’s no effective way to drive evil or careless operators out of the business. If the evil ones could be identified and excluded, the remainder are the Agorist’s allies if they are susceptible to an Agorist ideological conversion.

Likewise the drug dealers of today. Not the top layers of the extremely violent organized crime rings and their State accomplices, but the far more numerous minor dealers who form perhaps the one or two levels of connection to the ultimate drug user and who are rarely involved in violence or fraud. The same with the pimps and the whores and the bookies and the loan sharks and all the tradesmen willing to do a household repair job “under the table” and all those unlicensed day care centers operating in suburban homes and all other people engaged in nonviolent activities which are prohibited by States or done in ways States do not permit. All of these people are allies against the State if they accept the basic contract: Don’t tread on me, honor your agreements, and, if we fall into dispute, pledge to find a non-State solution. The Agorist is anyone who, at least part of the time, trades in markets the State prohibits, or does so in manners which aren’t permitted by States – such as without complying with ridiculous regulations that serve to create barriers to market entry for the benefit of existing participants and/or wealthier entrants, or without reporting the activity for taxation.

I’m attaching two fairly brief and highly influential works [ed: attached were Konkin's New Libertarian Manifesto and Agorist Class Theory]. Keep in mind that Agorism is a theory of revolution. Though it grew out of anarcho-capitalism and is grounded in that theory, it is quite distinct. You will not find a description of Utopia here (though I can tell you where to find plenty). In my mind, the Agorist praxis can be employed by a social revolution toward pretty much any Utopian vision, so long as the State and all of the privilege connected to it is eliminated along the way.

Enjoy

YES, I am anti-American.

But let’s clarify a few things. I don’t think that the words “I” or “am” or the prefix “anti-” need any clarification. What does need to be cleared up is what is meant by the word “American”.

“American” means many different things. Let’s take them in turn.

• “America” the country — This, ultimately, is a set of lines drawn on a map, a geographical segment of the world. Do I oppose drawing lines on maps? Hardly. Marking roads, towns and rivers is useful. Even marking places where one might be subject to arbitrary violence is useful. But am I “anti-” the particular lines drawn to separate “America” from “the rest of the world”? YES. And I’m against all the other national and sub-national lines as well.

• “America” the land — Is it possible to hate a land? Perhaps, but I don’t. Mind you, there are plenty of places within those artificial map lines that I’d never recommend anyone to go, but there is nothing wrong with the land itself, the place, the landscape or its features. Do I hate the Grand Canyon, the central plains, the Adirondacks, or the Jersey shore? Not in the slightest. There are some southeastern swamp areas I wouldn’t recommend, but that doesn’t mean I hate those places any more than I could hate the moon.

• “America” the people — First of all, I don’t know these people. Sweeping generalizations about “a people” are often wrong and sometimes used to make the most horrifying collective judgements. As with any set, there are some people within the “American” boundaries who are good and some who are evil, some who are thoughtful and some who are mindless, some who are kind and some who are cruel. I can’t hate the “American people” any more than I can hate the “Congolese people” or the “Finnish people”. Mashing large numbers of human beings into collectives in order to pass judgement on them is ultimately a futile exercise.

• “America” the ideal — Ah, now we’re getting closer. America has a great mythology attached to it. A nation of migrants fleeing downtrodden lives in the old world settle a new, vast and fertile territory, bringing with them the finest ideals of liberal society and a vision of a bright tomorrow, and eventually giving birth to a society of freedom and prosperity. Gosh that sounds great, until you look at the history. The ideal is beautiful. Waving the ideal around today as some sort of excuse for what America has become is rank hypocrisy. And I really hate hypocrisy.

• “America” the historical national entity — From the extermination of native tribes through slavery, the “Civil” War, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, all the other bogus wars of the 20th century, the War on (Some) Drugs, Jim Crow apartheid, the US-led global abandonment of sound money in favor of fiat currency and predatory central bankers, McCarthyism, New Deal socialism and the entire narrative of American exceptionalism up to the present three wars (Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia) and the endless bullying of the American state on the world stage, I hate America.

• “America” the system of government — “Democracy, hooray!” This one’s easy; I hate all existing systems of government.

• “America” the state, comprised of people currently running around in clown suits, their masters in the political class, the plutocrats who own the political class, plus the bureaucracy and the shareholders, employees and managers of all those corporations that exist for little reason other than to serve the aforementioned filth — Well, let’s just say I won’t miss you when you’re gone.

So, am I anti-American? Yes and no. On balance, and for the sake of argument, let’s say yes, yes I am anti-American. And I believe my heart — and my hate — are in the right place.

Workers in general do not care about profits nearly as much as they care about their own wages and well-being.

I’m not sure whether or not you fell off the definitional rails here. To the worker, his profit is his wages. More specifically, his profit is his subjective value of his wages minus the subjective value of the opportunity cost and the time+labor he forfeited to obtain them.

Let’s go through a likely and probable scenario for the creation of a new business in an Anarchist system:

1. A group of investors, be they relatively rich people, managers of a planned community or people interested in the boom of a town or neighbourhood, or a private bank acting for millions of normal people looking for a way to make some interest, see an opportunity, and pool their resources together.

With you.

2. These investors attract workers, who become the first owners of the new business. The investors give these workers a starting capital (as well as perhaps an ideal location or new ideas to use) in exchange for a set return on their investment.

Breakdown. Who are these investors? Santa Claus? They just come around and give the “workers” a whole bunch of money AND a great idea, in exchange for a “set return”? I’ve met banks that work that way, but never investors. Is it possible for “workers”, as you go on to describe more in what follows, to become investors? If so, why would their values and motivations change so much?

3. The workers get to work and pay off the investment and interest.
4. Having paid off the investment and interest, the workers are now working solely for themselves (self-management). They decide of their own working conditions and wages. They decide of their management and the future of their business.

The non sequitur just deepens here. Let me try to get this straight, for my own understanding. The investors come together around a great idea which can create a self-sustaining and profitable business for those who own it, and then they just give it away to the people they need twisting knobs, pulling levers and bashing on keyboards to make it real. Why? Would you, if you were one of those investors with the brilliant idea to create wealth and the connections to bring an organization into being that could realize that idea just give it away for a “set return” on investment? If so, sir, you are a true saint and a man of great virtue, one to be admired and sung of down the ages. Funny, I can’t find anyone matching such a description in the phone book or my history texts.

In the world that I live in, investors want to become part-owners. Yes, they want others to perform the labor. But they provide the capital to make that labor possible, especially within the window where success or failure is not known and all money invested may be lost. I doubt very seriously that this dynamic would change in any substantial way minus the state, or that it ought to. To me, it’s simply an observation of human nature, and I believe that it is not human nature that we ought to elect to contest.

The workers would have a strong incentive to make the business grow so they can pay off the initial investment faster, and thus have free reign. But when that’s done, the workers (the only people who legitimately own the business) have a much stronger incentive to secure better wages and work conditions for themselves than they do of making more profits. So businesses (not corporations, obviously, since the corporate status is a creation of the State), as organizations, would seek to improve the quality of their work environment and their service, instead of trying to expand or make more profit.

If we accept a ridiculous premise, we can arrive at all sorts of ridiculous conclusions. I’m using forceful language here because I know you respond to it and because I believe you are a person with his eyes open. The workers in your scenario might or might not be motivated as you suspect. They might be motivated not by potential future security in the maintenance of a self-sustaining and growing business, but rather by the grim necessity of earning a wage to feed their children. They might be motivated instead by a cultural diktat which says that hard work is virtue. They might be motivated by the continuing chance to steal from the cash drawer. They might be motivated by the need to maintain a certain wage in order to maintain a gratifying lifestyle. They may know nothing of economics, and nothing of political theory. They may have extremely short time horizons which renders speculation about their incentives meaningless or at best questionable. They may be insane!

That was a response to the first sentence. Now the parenthetical, “the workers (the only people who legitimately own the business)”: Huh? I do understand there is a historical and moral critique which suggests that those “employed” today ought rightly seize and legitimately own the means of production put at their disposal through employment. I also understand there is a position which states that workers “should” own their means of production. The reality of things is much different, though, even if we imagine starting from a utopian genesis in which all property titles were legitimate and in which coercion were never employed except in legitimate defense. Inequalities of wealth will still occur. They will be based upon such factors as natural resources available in the starting areas and the intelligence of the economic actors, and become amplified over time. Eventually there arises a group of people with the capital to become investors. You or I or the lowliest of our brothers might be members of that class. But they rise from the same stock! They are not going to look around with superhuman virtue, seeking places where they can offer to advance the species for something as shitty as a “set return”! Were you or I in their place, we would rightly and honestly seek better than that.

To the second sentence, I say again that there is a fuzzy barrier here between the concept of “wages” and the concept of “profit”. It’s made even worse now in that the workers have taken over the ownership of the business. What then is to be the logical blade which separates “wage” from “profit”? If I am a co-owner with a few others of the means of our production — and thereby the means of sustenance of our selves, our families, our values, our political philosophies and our blogs — how could this division even exist at all? I will certainly not appoint one of my comrades in the industrial collective as he who shall determine what is “wages” and what is “profit”, especially being that “profit” as defined is that which shall be swallowed up by those who exploit us. The enterprise has input costs and it receives sales revenues. That difference is called net income, or something similar. From that income, that excess, that “gross profit” in a broader sense than the accounting textbooks define, must be derived the fixed wages of all employees (shareholders/members/comrades), plus the amount to be reinvested in expansions (via marketing, territorial growth, hiring, product diversification, etc.), plus the amount that should be disbursed to investors as compensation for their interest, plus amounts to be employed in improving efficiency, etc.

Would the fully-vested co-owner of such an enterprise sit around trying to draw lines between “profit” and “wages”? Surely not! These categories have become meaningless to his calculations, whether those calculations serve only his own aggrandizement or some nobler ideal of group advancement. “Profit” as bogeyman has become meaningless.

Your essay’s title: “Can a Libertarian Society be Described as ‘Tesco minus the State’?” (geographically-challenged readers may substitute “Wal-Mart” for “Tesco”).

Entries are due by 10 October 2008. The sole judge of the entries and the person who awards the prize will be Sean Gabb, Director of the Libertarian Alliance.

Ban Tesco? What?

My personal essay follows:

Can a Libertarian Society be Described as ‘Tesco minus the State’?

by Mike Gogulski
submitted for consideration for the 2008 Chris R. Tame Memorial Prize

No.

As you can see, I am missing some 2,999 words as well as footnotes and bibliographic material.

A slightly expanded, but ultimately no more nuanced version:

Can a Libertarian Society be Described as ‘Tesco minus the State’?

by Mike Gogulski
submitted for consideration for the 2008 Chris R. Tame Memorial Prize

Perhaps, but not one in which right-thinking people would choose to live.

It’s still a bit light, really, but that’s the essence of it right there. Convinced yet of my thesis?

And finally, my actual contest entry…

Wait… “File Not Found”? What????!

Seriously now, heavy cogitation desired here. I’m off to go think.