This classic text is drawn from the Introduction to individualist anarchist Charles T. Sprading’s anthology Liberty and the Great Libertarians (1913). Sprading’s anthology was a key early source for popularizing the term “libertarian” among American antistatists.

“THE NATURAL LAW OF EVOLUTION, OF DEVELOPMENT, IS VARIATION, DIF­FER­ENT­IA­TION; statute law is intended to produce similarity and uniformity. . . . In the animal world, when the law of variation produces an animal differing somewhat from its kind, whether it be in different physical characteristics, to more perfectly adapt it to its environment, or in the addition of new organs to adapt it to a different environment, it is permitted by others of its species to live and propagate its kind, and often produces an entirely new and higher type of animal. But how do upholders of statute law act towards those who differ from them? Let the treatment accorded a Jesus, a Bruno, a Ferrer, be the answer. Statute law is not based on natural law; they are the antithesis of
each other. . .

“THE DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTIC OF THE MILITANT CLASS IS PARASITISM: the power and the ability to destroy, to wage war and levy tribute, to impose arbitrary restrictions and collect taxes, to take and to consume; in short to govern. For countless ages the industrial class has been oppressed and despoiled by the militant class, but now it is coming into its own, and holds the future of the race in its hands. The industrial class possesses one power that is distinctively and exclusively its own: it is an economic power: the industrial class produces all, builds all, exchanges all. The realization of its irresistible power and the knowledge of how to use it will bring its emancipation. When the workingman realizes that war does not benefit him, but robs him, the militant class will not be able to hire him or force him to go to war; and if the industrial class refuses to use its economic power for the benefit of militant parasites, one of these classes must disappear—and it will not be the industrial!”

The introductory essay reprinted in this booklet is the Introduction to Charles T. Sprading’s anthology, Liberty and the Great Libertarians: An Anthology on Liberty, a Hand-book of Freedom (1913). The text in this booklet, originally written in 1913, is based on the public-domain copy of Sprading’s first, self-published edition, in the Internet Archive at archive.org. Charles T. Sprading (1871-1959) was a transitional figure in American libertarian writing. Born a generation later than leading individualists and mutualists such as Benjamin R. Tucker (1854-1939) and Dyer D. Lum (1839-1893), it fell to Sprading, along with Clarence L. Swartz (1868-1936), Laurance Labadie (1898-1975), and a few other writers of their cohort to keep the torch of individualist anarchism alight during the dark years of the interwar period. Sprading, working together with Swartz, joined a series of Anarchist discussion groups in Los Angeles, including the Los Angeles Liberal Club and the Libertarian League. Liberty and the Great Libertarians, one of his earliest books, was an anthology collecting arguments, shorter quotations, and biographies, on about thirty thinkers whose work touched on anarchism, individual liberty, or freethought, including William Lloyd Garrison, Tucker, Spooner, Kropotkin, Josiah Warren, and William Godwin, alongside quotes from Paine, Jefferson, and Lincoln. His book, along with the activity and publishing of the Libertarian League, played a major role in keeping the literature of anti-statism active after the retirement of Tucker and the death or exile of many other leading Anarchist figures; they also played a major role in popularizing the term “libertarian” among American anti-statist writers. Sprading continued writing and publishing until his death in 1959, with works such as Equal Freedom and Its Friends (ca. 1920), Mutual Service and Cooperation (1930), and Real Freedom (1954).

Support C4SS with Charles T. Sprading’s “Liberty Against Authority”

When we read in the newspaper that a child in New Jersey has died from neglect from an untreated broken leg, or that a child in Florida’s protective services could just disappear without a trace, or that molestation of children has been covered up in yet another diocese of the Catholic Church, we do not say there is prejudice against children at work. Abuse, neglect, sanctioned pedophilia — we don’t put these together in our minds with stories about child abduction and enslavement, child trafficking, inadequate schooling, malnutrition and junk-food-induced obesity, cigarette advertising to minors, child pornography or the rising numbers of child soldiers worldwide. But we should. …

What if everything you thought you knew about education was wrong?

What if students learn more quickly on their own, working in teams, than in a classroom with a teacher?

What if tests and discipline get in the way of the learning process rather than accelerate it?

Those are the questions Sugata Mitra has been asking since the late 1990s, and for which he was awarded the $1 million TED Prize in February at the TED2013 conference.

Mitra, professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, won the prize for his concept of “self organized learning environments,” an alternative to traditional schooling that relies on empowering students to work together on computers with broadband access to solve their own problems, with adults intervening to provide encouragement and admiration, rather than top-down instruction.

Watch Sugata Mitra’s TED Prize talk …

How Much Money is There on Earth?

[Particularly liked the section describing the “Tinkerbell” and “Reverse Tinkerbell” effects.]

For every copy of Charles T. Sprading’s “Liberty Against Authority“ that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage.

… Unlike the state and other authoritarian institutions, self-organized networks can pursue their real interests while benefiting from their members’ complete contribution of their abilities, without the hindrance of standard operating procedures and bureaucratic rules based on distrust. To put it in terms of St. Paul’s theology, networks can pursue their interests single-mindedly without the concupiscence — the war in their members — that weakens hierarchies.

So we can game the system, sabotaging the state with its own rules — what’s called “working to rule” in labor disputes — but we can do much more. …

… The US government arguably has a conscious interest in promoting this kind of authoritarianism. From the standpoint of the American ruling elite, it was far preferable to have the anti-American Third World dominated by authoritarian regimes subject to discipline by the white male three-piece-suited bureaucrats in Moscow (the kind of people Nixon and Kissinger were quite sympatico with), than a liberal anti-American regime providing the demonstration effect of successful economic development outside the global capitalist system.

In “Empire of the Rising Scum,” Robert Shea observed that, regardless of their ostensible mission, hierarchical institutions tend to be headed by people whose primary skills are careerist climbing and bureaucratic in-fighting. As I’ve said before, you simply cannot become a President of the United States, or a Fortune 500 CEO, unless there’s something fundamentally wrong with you. The same is true of the intellectual capacity of those who manage to advance upward within hierarchies. Being a team player, engaging in groupthink, demonstrating an ability to shut off critical thinking when evaluating the communications of a superior — these are qualities that authoritarian institutions select for.

But in addition to selecting for stupidity and meanness, such institutions impress those traits even on those who didn’t previously possess them. Hierarchies are systematically stupid. No matter how intelligent the people running them are as individuals, the internal dymanics of the hierarchy make them functionally stupid. That’s because power distorts communications, rendering them incapable of conveying accurate information. The reason, as R.A. Wilson pointed out, is that nobody tells the truth to someone with a gun — or with the power to fire them, or any other kind of unaccountable and unilateral power over them. The result is one-way communication flows, the utter isolation of institutional leadership from accurate feedback about the effects of their decisions. When an individual’s perceptions are so distorted that she receives no accurate feedback on the effect of her actions on her environment, she’s mentally ill. And hierarchical institutions, likewise, are functionally psychotic.

Authoritarian institutions tend to be governed by “best practices” and management fads based entirely on what their leadership hears from the leadership of other authoritarian institutions — people who are as clueless regarding the actual effects of these practices as they are. The reason is that the people at the tops of the pyramids — in the C-suites — communicate much more effectively with people at the tops of other pyramids than they do with those at the base of their own pyramid.

As organization theorist Kenneth Boulding said, those at the tops of hierarchies tend to live in almost completely imaginary worlds. Hierarchies are mechanisms purpose-evolved to tell naked emperors how great their clothes look.

A similar process, based on the distorted incentive structure when one possesses unaccountable authority over others and can externalize unpleasantness on subordinates while appropriating rewards for oneself, takes place in the ethical realm as well. Many simulations of authority relationships — perhaps most notably the Stanford Prison Experiment — have shown the nasty things that happen when subjects are randomly divided into those with and without authority. People who are randomly assigned the role of guard or master, and put into a position of exercising unaccountable authority over fellow subjects assigned the roles of prisoners and slaves, quickly grow into their role. The “guards” in the Stanford Prison Experiment, given authority to impose unpleasantness and otherwise make decisions affecting others without the latter having any feedback, soon so dehumanized the “prisoners” and so enjoyed brutalizing them that the two-week experiment had to be terminated after only six days.

So if you wonder why your CEO has no qualms about collecting a $20 million bonus while downsizing half the workforce and increasing the workloads of everyone else, the answer is simple. On an emotional level, she’s long ago convinced herself that you aren’t even human. People in authority, in their organizational roles, tend to experience the functional equivalent of a psychotic break with reality, and to act like sociopaths toward their subordinates.

Power over others, by its very nature, degrades those who wield it, turns them into monsters, and poisons their every relationship with their fellow human beings. There’s no “reform” that can change that, short of abolishing authority itself. And that’s what we anarchists want to do.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, O Poder Não Apenas Atrai Pessoas Mesquinhas e Estúpidas — Ele As Torna Assim

Original Article

In one of the most bizarre displays of authoritarianism since Filmer’s Patriarcha traced the divine right of the Stuart absolutist monarchs back to Adam, David Brooks (“The Follower Problem,” New York Times, June 12, 2012) recently launched into a wholesale diatribe against the “adversarial culture” and its skepticism toward “just authority” — a phrase which he uses no fewer than six times.

Oddly enough, the alleged trigger for this outburst — I say “alleged” as we should consider the possibility Brooks is just off his meds — is the quality of public monuments in earlier days compared to today.

“If you go to the Lincoln or Jefferson memorials in Washington, you are invited to look up in admiration. Lincoln and Jefferson are presented as the embodiments of just authority. … The monuments that get built these days are mostly duds. That’s because they say nothing about just authority. The World War II memorial is a nullity. It tells you nothing about the war or why American power was mobilized to fight it. … Why can’t today’s memorial designers think straight about just authority?”

Um, because earlier generations were better at polishing turds? No, obviously that’s not it — at least not if you’re David Brooks. The reason, as stated by Brooks in his “O tempora O mores!” outburst, is that “We live in a culture that finds it easier to assign moral status to victims of power than to those who wield power,” further complicated by “our fervent devotion to equality” and inability “to hold up others who are immeasurably superior to ourselves.”

Americans, in these days of “Question Authority” bumper stickers, no longer “attempt to distinguish just and unjust authority,” but rather just oppose authority altogether.

Brooks himself doesn’t really explain his criterion for distinguishing just from unjust authority. His examples of “just authority” generally coincide with the liberal or neoconservative list of Great Presidents — American civic gods analogous to Aeneas, Romulus and Numa Pompilius in the books of Livy. So perhaps one might reasonably suspect Brooks of the same lack of critical judgment he attributes to the anti-authoritarians. It’s a fair guess that for Brooks “just authority” simply means “authority,” minus a handful of nasty characters like Nebudchadnezzar, Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler who are recognized as unjust because — ahem — our authorities say so.

But blanket skepticism toward authority — the assumption that all authority is unjust — is arguably more justifiable than the contrary assumption on Brooks’s part. Brooks complains that “[t]he old adversary culture of the intellectuals has turned into a mass adversarial cynicism. The common assumption is that elites are always hiding something.” Well, Golly — how could anyone have arrived at an assumption like that? Perhaps by being burnt one too many times?

To egalitarian Americans, Brooks laments, the people at the top “are nowhere near as smart or as wonderful as pure and all-knowing Me.” Instead of hierarchies run by “just authority,” these Liliputians believe that “[t]he whole world should be like the Internet — a disbursed semianarchy in which authority is suspect and each individual is king.”

Whatever else Brooks’s conservatism may amount to, he certainly isn’t a Hayekian. By definition, those at the top of large hierarchical institutions are stupid. It has nothing to do with the native abilities of the individuals running things, and everything to do with the nature of hierarchy itself.

Authority relations make people stupid, and institutions are horrible at aggregating the knowledge of their members. Hierarchies filter the upward flow of information, because (in the memorable words of R.A. Wilson) nobody tells the truth to a man with a gun. Power creates one-way communications — a cyberneticist’s nightmare, to quote Wilson again — so that people in authority operate without the environmental feedback on the effects of their actions necessary for sanity. As organization theorist Kenneth Boulding put it:

There is a great deal of evidence that almost all organizational structures tend to produce false images in the decision-maker, and that the larger and more authoritarian the organization, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds.

What’s more, those in power are likely to be sociopaths because, as Robert Shea pointed out in “Empire of the Rising Scum,” institutional hierarchies select for it. Regardless of the original purpose of an institution, it will tend to be run by the kinds of people whose primarily skills are bureaucratic infighting and ruthless climbing. You simply cannot become a President of the United States, or a Fortune 500 CEO, unless there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.

And the possession of power itself further pathologizes those who possess it. Power is the ability to externalize the cost and unpleasantness of decisions upon others. Economists will tell you that externalization — the decoupling of costs from benefits, so that decisionmakers reap the benefits of their decisions while others bear the costs — creates perverse incentives. That’s the environment that those in authority live in every waking moment. Exercising unaccountable power without experiencing the consequences makes one — anyone — morally insane.

Brooks complains that “Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions. That’s not mostly because our institutions perform much worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted.”

True. But Brooks ignores the possibility that those institutions didn’t really perform so well back then. Maybe the fault lies with the gullibility of our grandparents and great-grandparents, rather than with our skepticism.

Brooks’s complaint of loss of faith in institutions is almost a direct restatement of Samuel Huntington’s forty year ago in The Crisis of Democracy. The United States had functioned after WWII as “the hegemonic power in a system of world order” only because of a domestic structure of political authority in which the country “was governed by the president acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the Executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private establishment.”

If you like the world we live in today, which was shaped by that establishment, may God have mercy on your soul.

Scratch the official schoolboy’s history of Rome, with Romulus and Numa and all those other demigods, and there’s a real history below the surface. Livy’s history of the early Republic is an account mainly of a class war between plebians and patricians: Grasping nobles and landlords attempting to expropriate the land and transform the ordinary people into tenants crushed by rent and usury, and peasants fighting back.

The same holds true in American history. Those Founding Fathers and Great Presidents look mighty dignified up there on their pedestals, but take a peek up their skirts and their behinds look pretty much like everybody else’s. The actual deeds of our Great Presidents don’t bear much looking into. Official ideologies, Great Leader cults and all, exist to legitimize systems of power. And systems of power exist to benefit some people at the expense of others.

Historians like Charles Beard and Merrill Jensen have done a pretty good job of showing just what interests plaster saints like George Washington really served. And Gabriel Kolko has done the same for FDR. George Washington was only greater than our politicians because, through the telescope of history, things look bigger. He served the interests of the big land barons and Continental war bond speculators in exactly the same way recent presidents have served those of Goldman-Sachs. FDR fought WWII to preserve a system of corporate power, and colluded with Churchill to establish that system of power on a global basis.

Noam Chomsky characterized the Cold War, “as a first approximation,” as a war by the Soviet Union against its satellites and by the United States against the Third World, justified on each side by the useful spectre of the other superpower as official threat. As with the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, the American corporate system of global power has been maintained by a boot stamping on a human face: endless invasions, genocides, coups and death squads, with a toll of millions of lives. Just read William Blum’s “Killing Hope.”

People believe those in authority are in it for themselves because they are. They were back in the Good Old Days, too. Although Brooks misses it, there’s an odd symmetry between “victims of power” and “those who wield powe.” That’s because power is always wielded in a way that creates victims. There’s good reason for it. People generally don’t have to be coerced into  doing stuff that’s in their own interest. You exercise power over other people when you want to rob them.

Human history, from the rise of the first states and the first class sytems, has been a war between the people who own the world and those who live in it — and the object of that war has been to compel the latter to work for the benefit of the former. If you don’t think that’s as edifying as the Little Red Schoolhouse version of American history, or that there’s some loss of innocence involved in finding out that American institutions are (in George Carlin’s words) “a big club, and you and I aren’t in it” — well, tough. You don’t believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny any more, either.

Original Article

A Twitter friend facetiously raised the question today of whether the Constitution is America’s “Terms of Service,” following up with “[Expletive]. I knew I should have read the fine print instead of quick scrolling down to the bottom and hitting ‘Agree.’”

Soon after, I read an account of a lecture in which Doc Searles referred to the rules govering most online experiences — EULA agreements, placement of cookies, and other one-sided relationships — as “contracts of adhesion.” In legal terminology, a contract of adhesion is any contract drafted entirely by one party in an unequal power relationship, which the other party is “free” to take or leave — but in practice really can’t afford to leave. Pretty much any “standard contract” or boilerplate used by an entire industry is a contract of adhesion.

Our relations with the powerful institutions that control our lives are largely governed by contracts of adhesion. Instead of individually negotiated contracts, whose terms we play a role in defining, we’re faced — in Searles’s words — with “contracts we never made,” that “one side built and the other side was required to accept.”

This observation applies, obviously, to the “Social Contract” so often cited versus libertarianism. By continuing to reside on the state’s territory, governed by laws created pursuant to a “contract” already in being between the people living here — so the argument goes — we consent to the state’s authority. This is an exercise in question-begging, assuming what is to be proved (the state’s right to issue such an ultimatum in the first place). If I walked into your living room and said “by continuing to reside here, you agree to comply with my rules,” you’d notice that problematic unstated premise right off the bat.

But it also applies to our relations with the large “private” institutions that govern our daily lives. As Roderick Long points out (“How Inequality Shapes Our Lives,” Austro-Athenian Empire, September 17, 2010)  with regard to a rental agreement:

“Did you write it? Of course not. Did you and your landlord write it together? Again, of course not. It was written by your landlord (or by your landlord’s lawyer), and is filled with far more stipulations of your obligations to her than of her obligations to you. It may even contain such ominously sweeping language as ‘lessee agrees to abide by all such additional instructions and regulations as the lessor may from time to time provide’ (which, if taken literally, would be not far shy of a slavery contract). If you’re late in paying your rent, can the landlord assess a punitive fee? You betcha. By contrast, if she’s late in fixing the toilet, can you withhold a portion of the rent? Just try it.”

The same is true of workplace relations: “[I]f you try inventing new obligations for [your employer] as she does for you, I predict you will be, shall we say, disappointed.” And your utility providers can much more easily dock you for late payment than you can claim a refund for service interruption. This principle permeates every part of our lives governed by large institutions. “They’re cases in which some people are systematically empowered to dictate the terms on which other people live, work, and trade.”

The right wing of the free market movement sees nothing problematic in this. It takes such contracts at face value, treating them as genuine examples of the free, uncoerced contracts between equals so dear to libertarianism. That every aspect of our lives is dominated by giant, powerful, hierarchical institutions is just how things turned out in the “free market;” such institutions are more efficient, see?

Those of us on the left who advocate freed markets beg to differ. The power of these giant authoritarian institutions, whether nominally “private” or not, didn’t “just happen.” It results from a rigged game, an unholy corporatist alliance between big business and the state dating back 150 years or more. Our society and economy came to be dominated by an interlocking directorate of government and corporate oligarchies through the deliberate use of power.

As libertarian blogger “thoreau” says of homeowners associations at Unqualified Offerings (“wHOA,” June 19, 2012), “We certainly don’t need libertarianism if we’re just looking for a way to justify the fact that somebody is telling you what sort of flowers to plant in your yard.”

The whole point of libertarianism, at least a libertarianism that appeals to actual human beings who want more liberty in their lives, is to increase the autonomy of individuals against arbitrary rules made by institutions of all kinds. As anarchist artist Shane Thayer says, “I don’t want a society that ‘liberates’ itself by replacing the flag on the police uniform with a company logo.”

We left-wing market anarchists want to level out these unequal power relationships, dissolving concentrations of power both public and nominally “private,” so that freedom of contract becomes reality rather than mockery and smokescreen. We see the state, in alliance with privileged classes and plutocratic interests, as the root cause of these asymmetries. The state’s subsidies, artificial property rights and regulatory cartels midwifed the corporate economy in the first place. It has since grown into an entire interlocking eco-system in which even nominally “private” and “voluntary” parts are fundamentally coercive.

By striking at the root of this power — coercion — we anarchists want to destroy the state-corporate complex.

Original Article