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 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!

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.

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.

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.”

This brochure was originally written and published for the Movement of the Libertarian Left (MLL) by the late Samuel Edward Konkin III. This new edition has been minimally edited by Wally Conger.

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)