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.

The Star Fraction by Ken MacLeod

See, what we always meant by socialism wasn’t something you forced on people, it was people organizing themselves as they pleased into co-ops, collectives, communes, unions. Now look at this place. Look at space, come to that. It’s crawling with them! And if socialism really is better, more efficient than capitalism then it can bloody well compete with capitalism. So we decided, forget all the statist shit and the violence: the best place for socialism is the closest to a free market you can get!

– Logan to Janis, in Ken MacLeod’s The Star Fraction, 1995

A real brain-twister of a book. Gotta read the rest of the series now.

Thanks to Arto Bendiken for the loan!

Aren’t Black Markets and Free Markets mutually Exclusive?

Free markets don’t exist in any real sense anywhere today. State prohibitions, subsidies, taxes, regulation, privilege and the rest make them impossible on any substantial scale.

“Black market” as commonly understood is a problematic term, since it encompasses both harmless things that governments ban (the cannabis trade, for instance) in most places, as well as harmful things that governments also ban (murder for hire, for example).

I personally favor the market analysis given by agorist theory, which breaks down things along two axes:

• White market: State-approved, moral (i.e. non-rights-violating) (e.g. on-the-books employment)
• Gray market: Banned unless done in state-approved manner, moral (e.g. off-the-books trade)
• Black market: State ban, moral (e.g. drugs)
• Red market: State ban, immoral (e.g. murder for hire)
• Pink market: State-approved (and largely state-conducted), immoral (e.g. taxation, conscription, compulsory education)

Visual illustration on slide 7 of a powerpoint I made for a presentation to a libertarian meeting this summer at http://www.nostate.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/What-Sort-of-Libertarian-Are-You1.ppt (reproduced for readers of this blog below).

The five markets

What’s the official anarchist position on the Zombie Apocalypse?

I suspect that all of my loyal readers will agree that this is an important question, and one worthy of a detailed response from Dr. Anarchy and other philosophers and legal scholars who have had things to say about zombies in the past.

The answer depends on the type of zombies we’re talking about. If the zombification is reversible, then we may have to consider them as moral actors under temporary undue influence. This would not mean you can’t chop their heads off if they’re threatening to eat you, in full consistency with any rational concept of self-defense, but it does introduce a dimension of complexity to the moral calculus.

Milla Jovovich demonstrates her approach to the zombie apocalypse through ACTION!

Now, there are some anarchists who are very much into animal rights as well as human rights, who would likely have a range of opinions beyond mine on this topic. To me, an irreversibly zombified human could not be considered a moral actor, and could therefore be treated like any dangerous animal in the event that it threatens humans.

A topic of particular interest to propertarian anarchists like myself is the question of property within the broader context of zombification, without even needing to go to the extreme of any prospective zombie apocalypse. If a person who owns property becomes zombified, what of their property? From my libertarian perspective, this question turns on whether or not they are still capable of being a moral actor.

For the irreversibly-zombified human, libertarian theory tells us that zombies — not being moral actors — cannot own property. This means that any property held by a person becoming irreversibly zombified becomes unowned, and is therefore subject to immediate homesteading by the first comer. So long as no other non-zombified legitimate claimants exist, unlimited expropriation of formerly-just, now-unowned property from zombies is morally defensible. The same is of course true of the material of the zombie’s body, leaving open the possibility of the assemblage of a zombie slave army by a sufficiently skilled and motivated propertarian anarchist.

However, what of the new zombie’s heirs? As irreversible zombification is not typically provided for in wills (i.e., it’s not really “death”), perhaps a variant of a living will could be used to ensure that the zombified’s property passes to their regular heirs in the case of such an eventuality. We might call this new legal instrument an “undead will”.

For the reversibly-zombified human, I’m really not quite certain. I suspect, though, that in a truly free market (which we don’t have today) it would be possible to purchase zombification insurance at competitive rates which would provide for a sort of trustee custody relationship over the property of the insured, should same become reversibly zombified. Insurers providing this type of coverage should be strongly motivated to find a cure for zombification so that the time and resources expended in the defense of zombie property is minimized, and profits thus maximized. Existing contracts referencing Acts of God or the Acts of the Apostles might need to be re-written in order to provide exclusions from force majeure provisions in the event of widespread zombification.

In any case, the potential of a zombie apocalypse provides agorists, anarchists of all adjectivial stripes as well as such degenerates as vulgar libertarians, minarchists and Republicans to build community and make common cause with such people as Milla Jovovich, whose demonstrated abilities in both combating and managing zombie crises should serve as inspiration to us all.