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The Policeman’s Your Friend — As Long As He Can Afford to Be

Disturbing news from Occupy circles about NYPD practices these days — I mean, in addition to all those other NYPD practices we were already disturbed about.

David Graeber, a prominent anarchist involved with Occupy since its beginning, recounts seeing a woman friend in New York a few weeks ago, her hand in a cast. A cop had grabbed her breast, she said.

When she raised a fuss and screamed about the groping, the cops dragged her out of sight and started working her over. “Stop resisting!” they continued to shout, as they repeatedly slammed her body into the concrete. At some point she told them she was reaching over to get her glasses, which had come off in the scuffle. In the reptilian police mind, this justified pinning her hands behind her back and bending one wrist until it snapped.

Those familiar with police riots versus anti-globalization demonstrations and the more recent Occupy demonstrations, or who follow Radley Balko and CopBlock, are aware that sexual assault’s the only thing unusual about this case. As Graeber says, “arbitrary violence is nothing new. The apparently systematic use of sexual assault against women protestors is new.”

Of course sexual assault itself is hardly new as a weapon of social control, in historical terms. It appears in the arsenals of most authoritarian regimes — large-scale, premeditated use of rape for ethnic cleansing by Serbian forces in Bosnia, Egyptian troops using “virginity inspections” to humiliate female demonstrators taken into custody, and so on.

But it’s new in the recent American context. Graeber notes he heard no complaints of sexual assault by the NYPD before March 17; but there were several on that day (one woman reported being grabbed by five different officers), and they’ve continued since then. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this is a newly adopted “unofficial policy” of the police rank-and-file — just like covering badge numbers.

What we’re witnessing is the reality behind that Officer Friendly mask. This is what happens when the state perceives the general population as a threat, and drops the pretense that The Policeman is Your Friend.

People in predominantly black and Hispanic inner city neighborhoods — where police hardly bother to hide the fact that they see the local population as an occupied enemy that must be cowed by superior force — have seen this ugly face for decades. But in recent months, the radical upsurge in police violence at Occupy demonstrations, combined with ubiquitous cell phone video, have introduced the naked face of power to many in the white middle class public for the first time.

Lt. Pike of the UC Davis police force, methodically directing pepper spray into the upturned faces of peaceful (and predominantly white) college students, was a revelation to many in the burbs. But while it was the first sight for many, it won’t be the last. Because this is what the state looks like when it can no longer afford to maintain the facade of democracy. All that nasty stuff that used to happen to “those other people” beyond that Thin Blue Line — “It’s Giuliani time!” — is coming soon to “people like us.”

The American state has operated in a manner, if not lawful at least “regular,” toward most white middle-class folks most of the time, because it could afford to. It showed its nasty side to racial minorities and radicals, because they were less successfully socialized into consensus reality — and nobody “who counted” would listen to them anyway. But most of the public absorbed its conditioning in a more-or-less satisfactory manner. They believed this was a “free enterprise society” in which people with great wealth mostly earned it, giant corporations got that way through superior performance, the state represented all of us rather than some “ruling class,” and if you didn’t like the law you should work for change within the system — all that Pleasantville stuff. Constitutionalism and legality’s comparatively no-muss no-fuss — but only so long as the cultural reproduction apparatus successfully manufactures consent.

Now the conditioning’s starting to wear off. A dangerously increasing number of people understand that the system’s rigged in the interest of the 1%, and folks like us are playing in a crooked game. The state and the corporate ruling class that controls it have been stunned as measures that ten years ago would have gone through without a hitch, like SOPA and ACTA, suffered unexpected losses to networked movements. The system can’t work when too many people notice the man behind the curtain.

The state’s functionaries are beginning to realize how high the stakes really are. In response, its shock troops are dropping the Officer Friendly masks. So get ready: The state, before it’s over, will be as nasty as it has to be.

Original Article

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism — Newly Revised!

People raise the question of whether the network revolution, in one area of our common life or another, will be coopted by the old forces of hierarchy. Will the old institutions manage to hang onto life by incorporating network elements, and thus survive the transition to the new society — with themselves in charge of it?

That’s what Christopher Hill and Immanuel Wallerstein argued the landed nobility of the late Middle Ages did. They reinvented themselves as agrarian capitalists, survived the transition, and coopted emerging market forms and the bourgeoisie into the successor system. The new system was defined, despite its market elements, by its structural continuities with the Medieval system. This system, in which feudal privilege and property relations coexisted with market clearing prices, was called “capitalism.”

So are the old hierarchies doing the same thing with network organization? They’ve certainly tried. The first wave of micromanufacturing, which dates back to the Japanese development of affordable small-scale CNC tools suitable for small shops, was incorporated into a corporate framework: Actual production was outsourced to small job-shops in Honduras, Vietnam or China, but corporations retained control of the product and distributed it at astronomical brand-name markups through their control of marketing, finance and “intellectual property.”

More recently, assorted “Enterprise 2.0” or “Wikified firm” fads have become all the rage in business, and the military has tried to replicate the agility of networked movements like Al Qaeda within its own ranks through “Fourth Generation Warfare” doctrines.

The latest example of this sort of thing in the news is the so-called “99% Spring,” in which the previously(?) mainstream liberal organization MoveOn.org plays a central role. A lot of people see the 99% Spring as an attempt by establishment liberalism to coopt the Occupy movement, and reshape it in its own image. The perceived danger is that MoveOn will impose all the conventional features of an establishment Left movement on Occupy — official spokespersons, lists of demands, electoral slates, etc. — just as establishment Left leaders have been pushing the movement to do since the beginning. Or worse yet, it will become the militant arm of the Coffee Party.

The thing is, though, all these attempts to put new wine in old bottles are failing because hierarchies are really lousy at copying networks.

They’re failing in manufacturing because digital machine tools are becoming several orders of magnitude cheaper than those used in the first wave of micromanufacturing; the marketing machinery is irrelevant to a garage factory marketing its wares to an urban neighborhood on a demand-pull basis, the financing is superfluous when any handful of people with the shop skills and a few grand can set up a micro-factory, and branding and other “intellectual property” claims are becoming unenforceable.

Enterprise 2.0 and 4GW are failing precisely because it’s hierarchies who are trying trying to coopt the network technologies. Hierarchies are extremely bad at using such technologies because their particular efficiencies disintegrate under the power interests of managers and bureaucrats. Despite the best intentions of business gurus and the scholars at West Point and TRADOC, the potential of networks is systematically sabotaged by middle managers and field grade officers.

But they’re failing most of all because they’re superfluous in an age of cheap technology, and they can’t effectively suppress the competition.

See, all the power of all these hierarchies, historically, has depended on scarcity and on the high capital outlay requirements for getting anything done. When the basic capital equipment for manufacturing, communication, or fighting a war is extremely expensive, and only a hierarchy can afford the capital outlays, then opportunities for doing these things will be scarce and mediated by hierarchies.

When doing these things no longer requires enormous capital outlays, and when network technology enables people to cooperate outside hierarchies with zero or near-zero transaction costs, the entire material basis for the old hierarchies is obliterated. They may try to suppress competition through “intellectual property” swindles or by using the regulatory state to criminalize independent production — just as the lord of a medieval manor prohibited using a handmill to grind one’s own corn.

But it was a lot easier to suppress ownership of handmills in a village than it is to enforce patent, copyright and trademark monopolies against micromanufacturers and hackers. Networks are many times more efficient than hierarchies at exploiting the advantages of new technologies, because a real network is a lot more agile and resilient than a stupid bureaucrat’s or pointy-haired boss’s attempt at playing network.

So what about the 99% Spring? I have no doubt it’s MoveOn’s baby, and they’d like to do all the things I said earlier, with Van Jones as the public face of the movement. But because of the realities I’ve described, they can’t do it.

Occupy is a networked, leaderless movement. It’s a brand that anyone can adopt for their own purposes, and a platform that any local node can plug into on a modular basis for its own purposes. The basic symbols of 99% and 1%, the basic organizational techniques, are out there for anyone to use. Anyone who hates Wall Street and the big banks, who resents the polarization of wealth and the privileges of the plutocracy, and who wants to put an end to the unholy alliance between big business and big government — whatever their specific agenda — can adopt the symbols and tactics of Occupy without asking anyone’s permission. The symbols and slogans, and the knowledge of technique, are a free good. The network communication technologies are already owned by anyone with a smart phone. The only “entry barrier” is the willingness to link up and start cooperating, and put to use the pool of knowledge and technique that’s already free for the taking.

So MoveOn, as a node — even if it’s a really big one — is free to make its own use of the Occupy brand and platform for its own agenda. They can do this just like the anarchists, the Greens, the Paulistas, and all the other movements in the leadersless Occupy network. More power to them! Let a hundred flowers bloom! But they can’t own the movement’s identity, any more than someone who uses material with a Creative Commons license can copyright it and enclose it against the other users.

So let MoveOn do their thing. They can’t own Occupy, they can’t speak for it, and they can’t stop the rest of us from doing theirs. They’re just — can only be — one more voice added to the chorus.

Emmanuel Goldstein, in the fictional world of Orwell’s 1984, wrote a book called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. He portrayed history as an eternal struggle between the High, the Middle, and the Low. The typical pattern of a revolution was for the Middle to contest control of the dominant institutions with the High, and to enlist the help of the Low under a popular banner. Once they seized control, the Middle became the new High and took their own turn at oppressing the Low.

All that was true — Pareto’s rotation of elites, Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy — so long as hierarchical institutions were universally accepted as the sole means of organizing large-scale cooperative effort. So long as that was true — because large institutions are simply not amenable to direct control by the many — every new revolution was a case of “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

But now that hierarchies are becoming superfluous to organizing cooperative effort, and their attempts at doing so are nothing but an embarrassment, we can throw that 5000-year-old rule book in the garbage where it belongs. This is a revolution that can’t be coopted by the old hierarchies, because the material basis of their power is being destroyed.

Original Article

Another Hero of the Freedom Movement: Jeremy Hammond

While the anarchist, antiwar and information freedom movements focus their attention — rightly so — on Bradley Manning’s torture and detention for exposing U.S. war crimes, let’s also spare some attention for another hero: Jeremy Hammond.

Hammond is allegedly the main hacker behind last December’s LulzSec hack of Stratfor, a quasi-private corporate intelligence and strategic analysis firm with close ties to the national security state. As someone who used to regularly read their analysis (helpfully “pirated” and distributed by a subscriber on an email list I frequented), I can testify to its quality.

Stratfor, although firmly on the side of the bad guys, delivers brutally frank and realistic assessments of the strategic situation for the American national security community and for transnational corporations in need of amoral and honest situational analysis of the countries they’re planning to bleed, rape and pillage.

Stratfor analyses of geopolitical realities, like the coalescence of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a counter to U.S. military hegemony in Central Asia, read like an Inner Party briefing for Big Brother on the balance of power between Oceania and Eurasia. Stratfor earns every dollar it receives from its paymasters.

LulzSec (and allegedly Hammond) hacked Stratfor’s intranet and publicized an enormous cache of internal documents, emails, and subscriber data. This was a near-crippling blow to Stratfor, as well as a revelation into the cynical terms in which the good old boys of the national security state discuss the world when they think the rabble who supply blood and treasure for their wars are out of earshot. No talk about “spreading democracy” and “defending our freedoms,” when the women and servants are in bed and it’s “just us men” sitting in leather chairs with their cigars and brandy snifters.

Of course the response of the mainstream press and establishment liberal commentariat is drivel, ranging in tone from scathing denunciation to concerned hand-wringing about Hammond’s “troubled past.” Some of it, like his marijuana arrests, only an idiot would regard as relevant to anything.

AP correspondent Michael Tarm calls Hammond a “dogged, malicous hacker,” based on an alleged online chat in which he “appears to delight in the damage he caused Stratfor.” In other words, he’s “doggedly malicious” against the corporate state in exactly the same way as Sam Adams against the British Empire and Nelson Mandela against the Apartheid. Hammond’s alleged exultation at the downfall of Stratfor sounds to me an awful lot like Americans cheering the staged pulldown of Saddam’s statue in April 2003.

Tarm may consider the Little Eichmanns in the CIA, Pentagon, State Department and Stratfor the “good guys,” and Hammond and LulzSec the “bad guys.” But that hardly makes Hammond a sociopathic caricature like Leopold and Loeb. Anyone who feels sorry for the Stratfor subscribers whose identities and credit information were publicized should bear in mind that these people included a former Vice President and a former CIA Director.

The FBI had better hope they’ve arrested the six people in the world with skills equal to the Stratfor doxing. I believe such skills are proliferating faster than their possessors can be arrested. The first large-scale doxing, against HBGary, occurred over a year ago, before Sabu was turned — and when who knows how many second- and third-tier hackers were learning under his mentorship.

If the FBI failed to eviscerate the human capital of Anonymous, then when they manage to regroup the FBI will be at the top of the list of institutions that should “be very afraid.” Security analyst John Robb suggests that security in the FBI’s enormous computer infrastructure is about as full of holes as HBGary’s and Stratfor’s. Imagine the goodies: Unredacted files on activists, new identities of participants in the witness protection program, etc. Despite this setback, I believe we’re headed for a near future in which another government agency or large corporation falls victim to a Stratfor-scale hack every week.

Villains and heroes usually switch places in historical accounts when a revolution succeeds. Today’s “insurgents,” “terrorists” and “traitors” become tomorrow’s “freedom fighters.” And today’s “leaders” and “patriots” become tomorrow’s tyrants and state terrorists. We’re in the early stages of a prolonged revolutionary struggle between self-organized networks and hierarchical institutions — a struggle in which I believe the forces of voluntary association and horizontalism are almost certain to win in the long run.  And when that struggle is won, when the Pentagon is leveled and sown with salt and the NYSE is a manure storage warehouse, people like Assange, Manning and Hammond will be remembered as martyrs of the Revolution.

Stratfor is on the side of evil and Hammond’s alleged actions against it were entirely warranted. I condemn his arrest and prosecution.

Original Article

Jackboots Without Borders

More than a year ago, I reported on the mission of Frank “Bagman of Empire” Wisner to Egypt (“Egypt: Let the Looting Begin,” Center for a Stateless Society, February 4, 2011). Wisner, formerly of Enron and AIG, was Obama’s plenipotentiary to Egypt, tasked with managing the post-Mubarak succession in as U.S.-friendly a direction as possible. Wisner’s father, by the way, was another Bagman of Empire; as a founding spook of the OSS and CIA he managed the overthrow of Arbenz and Mossadegh. Wisner had co-chaired (with another noted bagman, James Baker) a commission that developed a post-Saddam vision for the governance of Iraq. Just reading the “100 Orders” issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority, and the corporate looting pursuant to them, should give you a good idea of Wisner’s agenda.

Today’s column is about another Bagman of Empire: John Timoney.

Richard Moore wrote twelve years ago, in “Escaping the Matrix” (Whole Earth Catalog, Summer 2000) about the Empire importing technologies of repression from the imperial Periphery to the Core and using them to manage the domestic population.

It’s nothing new. It’s as old as Caesar bringing the legions from Gaul back across the Rubicon. But now it’s being done in reverse. A high-level maestro of political repression from the American domestic police apparatus has found lucrative employment in Bahrain.

Timoney had already established himself as a notable carpetbagger of repression within the United States. As Philadelphia’s Police Commissioner, he supervised the police riot at the August 2000 GOP Convention. His Gestapo tactics there, and later as police chief of Miami during the anti-FTAA protests, were dress rehearsals for the police repression of Occupy protests in hundreds of cities across America: Gassing and breaking the bones of unarmed people, preemptively arresting organizers, planting evidence — you name it, Timoney’s been there and done that.

From the outset of the Seattle movement, Timoney was its J. Edgar Hoover — warning shrilly of the “International Anarchist Conspiracy” to disrupt meetings of neoliberal institutions. He agitated relentlessly to apply the RICO statute to the anti-globalization movement. Timoney is a close associate of Tom Ridge, going back to the latter’s provision of political cover to Timoney’s police riot, and after the post-9/11 establishment of the US Department of Homeland Security was rumored to have close informal ties to much of the Department’s leadership. Although his prospects for high office in Fatherland Security never materialized, he went on to an extremely lucrative career as lobbyist for the security-industrial complex. And as police chief of Miami, he got a chance to further refine his jackbooted thuggery from the Philly days.

Now Timoney — along with fellow carpetbagger John Yates, assistant commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police — serves the Bahraini royal government. You know, the despotic Bahraini state that’s been engaged in brutal and murderous repression of the Arab Spring uprising there for the past year. Timoney, it seems, is for sale to any petty tyrant with petrodollars burning a hole in his pocket who wants to do a really high-class job (ahem) “using chemical weapons against his own people.”

It’s been said that to a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Give people a bunch of big hammers, and they’ll start looking for new ways to use them. Likewise, if your Empire has a need for torturers, thugs and detention camp guards, you’ll find all the volunteers you need to keep Abu Ghraib, Gitmo or Philly running. But once you have those guys (and gals, pace Lynndie England), they become an established constituency.

Somebody once quipped that the French Empire was built by retired army officers. Marijuana criminalization began, in part, as patronage for G-men unemployed by the repeal of Prohibition. Sometimes, likewise, MPs who get a taste for inflicting pain and domination on the powerless in squalid holes like Abu Ghraib or Baghram AFB come home and decide to become cops or prison guards (remember Dim in A Clockwork Orange?). And sometimes American cops become advisers to foreign despots’ secret police.

All uniformed thugs are brothers under the skin. And repression is becoming an industry without borders.

Original Article

The President Versus Human Rights

Juan Mendez, UN special rapporteur on torture, stated this week that the US Government’s treatment of Bradley Manning “constitutes at a minimum cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of article 16 of the convention against torture.”

Manning is the US Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking (to Wikileaks) classified information: Evidence of corruption and underhanded tactics in promoting US global dominance, as well as video footage of a US helicopter crew murdering two Reuters journalists and shooting up a van with kids in it after its driver attempted to evacuate wounded victims of that attack.

Manning spent eleven months — before his trial even began — in punitive solitary confinement, typically confined to his cell for 23 hours a day and forced to strip naked at night. The Guardian reports that Mendez “could not reach a definitive conclusion on whether Manning had been tortured” because the US military has consistently denied him permission to meet with Manning privately.

US President Barack Obama, who campaigned on change and offered transparency, bears direct responsibility for the abuse, and possibly the torture, of Manning.

Not surprising: This is the same president who signed indefinite detention without trial officially into US law, and who claims the authority to order the murder of anyone anywhere on his personal assertion that they are “enemy combatants.”

This is the President Obama who, as commander in chief of the US military and chief executive of the US government bears direct responsibility for murderous drone attacks, in which powerful missiles mutilate bystanders, then return to rain death on people who come to the scene of previous attacks.

This is the same President Obama who has shown almost complete indifference to voices from the massive populist Occupy movement, or to the violence used against them.

Obama is doing his thing as top politician. In order to make the impact he wants to make he needs to be in power, bending toward whichever interests prop him up. That means picking up where George W. Bush left off, and making deals with other arms of power: The warlords of the American military-industrial complex, the financial executives, the bureaucracy, and so on.

The Republican Party is falling all over itself to show that it can find candidates who would be worse than Obama. They talk about “getting tough,” appealing to people who think doing bad things to people the government says to hate makes them tough.

Anyone else? Ron Paul might at least scale back some of the government’s worst excesses or encourage other politicians to become temporarily less evil to undercut his support. However, it’s doubtful he’ll win because the Republican establishment would rather lose the top post for four years than risk permanent reductions in their power and privilege. In the end Paul is a politician with a shady past; putting a lot of hope in him would be silly anyway. Third Parties have the deck stacked against them on everything from ballot access to exclusion from public debate.

The power structure tends to reward people who are best at climbing over others to reach its top. What they are willing to do for those already on top keeps them in good standing with the ruling club.

Sure, politicians can be more or less evil, but we don’t have to invest our political efforts in helping a lesser evil come to power. We can work independently of politicians, in the short term pressuring them from outside and in the long term dispensing with them altogether.

Abolishing power structures and dispersing power as widely as possible is the ultimate democratic project of bringing power to the people. It is a project of fostering community based in respect for individual liberty and autonomy.

If it sounds like anarchy, that means you are on the right track. Ask what makes the word anarchy scarier than politicians who claim the right to kill anyone anywhere, put those who challenge them in solitary confinement for months, and instruct police to attack people occupying public space instead of upsetting the bankers and bosses that are so important to keeping them in power.

Original Article

To Vote, or Not to Vote?

Electoral politics is among the most contentious topics of discussion between anarchists and liberals or Progressives. In a recent online discussion I told someone that, if my only choice was between the “viable alternatives” available in electoral politics today, I’d be on a chair in the attic, attaching a noose to a rafter. Her response was that there are real, pressing differences between the parties — like reproductive freedom for women — and that, despite her admiration for anarchist writers like Kropotkin, such ideas aren’t even in the picture right now.

Fair enough. I don’t object to voting on principled grounds (like, for example the late Sam Konkin, founder of the Agorist movement and author of the New Libertarian Manifesto, who spelled it “v**e” out of respect for his readers’ sensibilities). I don’t believe voting is immoral, because it somehow sanctions or legitimizes the state’s coercion — any more than not voting means “you don’t have a right to complain.” Be it active buy-in through voting or passive acquiescence through non-participation the state will deem whatever you do “consent” to its rule.

If you see some strategic utility in voting for the lesser evil, out of self-defense, more power to you.  Both major parties share an agenda centered on alliance between big business and big government, and most of the 20% or so of stuff they disagree on has nothing to do with the fundamental structure of the corporate state. Both parties are all about state-forced privilege that redistributes wealth upward in the form of monopoly rents for the super-wealthy.

If you think it’s worthwhile to vote for a party that wants to re-redistribute a larger (but still miniscule) fraction of this wealth back to the underclass, in order to avoid politically destabilizing levels of starvation and homelessness, then knock yourself out. And if you want to vote for politicians who aren’t for trans-vaginal ultrasound or the criminalization of birth control, believe me, I don’t blame you one bit. Heck, I still even vote myself, for all the good it does me.

At the intermediate level, activist campaigns pressure the state from outside. I think these clearly do some good. States frequently retreat in the face of overwhelming public pressure, when they judge the cost in popular resistance to some new coercive inroad on liberty as more than it’s worth. For example I’m convinced that if it weren’t for Internet activism, SOPA would have passed both houses by a 90% margin last year. ACTA would have already passed the EU without a peep in the press.

But no matter how important such action may be, it’s still just secondary action to keep things from getting worse. It shouldn’t be our primary focus. All the things we do that really matter, for building a better society, will be done despite the state. As Howard Zinn said:

“Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes — the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth. But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools.”

People whose agenda for building a better society depends on electoral politics are like rubes in a carnival audience, so distracted by the pretty assistant that they don’t pay attention to the magician’s hands. The real action is the stuff people are doing outside the state, without waiting for the state’s permission, to create the building blocks of a new society. They include proxies and encrypted routers that protect us against surveillance by the state and ISPs, local wireless meshworks and open-source social media that can’t be shut down by the state, cheap neighborhood micromanufacturing facilities, permaculture and other local intensive forms of food production, low-overhead, home-based microenterprises that enable people to meet their needs through self-provisioning and trade with their neighbors, encrypted barter currencies, unschooling and libertarian alternative schooling, distributed power production, solidaristic social institutions for mutual aid and the pooling of costs and risks — and many, many more.

The more we build these things for ourselves, the less the state matters. The more we create the kind of free, fraternal, peaceful and human-friendly society we want to live in, without the state’s permission, and the more we render the state’s commands and prohibitions unenforceable, the more irrelevant the state becomes to us. It increasingly resembles a shrinking man, whose shouts become shriller and angrier the more he fades into insignificance.

So go on and vote, if you think it does any good. And then get back to our real work.

Original Article

Romney’s “Free Enterprise System”: As Statist as Stalin’s Five-Year Plan

The rule of centralized state and bureaucratic machines is one of those things that the cultural reproduction apparatus teaches people to accept as “natural” or “inevitable” (“it must be more efficient, or it wouldn’t be this way;” “the people in charge make these rules for a reason”).

But in fact it is very much the result of human agency. In the U.S., it was deliberate collusion between the state and big business, especially in the 1850s and the Gilded Age, to set up a centralized corporate economy. There simply wouldn’t have been an economy dominated by large manufacturers and wholesalers serving a single national market, were it not for things like railroad land grants and other subsidies to make long-distance distribution artificially cheap, and the pooling or exchange of industrial patents to cartelize markets. Not to mention gunboat diplomacy to make sure overbuilt U.S. industry could operate at capacity.

This was a top-down revolution, in which the state was very much involved. The groundwork for intensifying the process was laid by the “Great Betrayal” of the Hayes election, in which the landed aristocracy of the South acquiesced in Republican corporatism on a national level in return for a free hand to reinstitute Apartheid in their own region.

According to John Curl, in “For All the People,” the Great Betrayal turned into a civil war when labor and farm populist movements — what he calls the “Great Uprising” — tried to reverse the corporate coup. The climax of this civil war came with the Knights of Labor’s nationwide general strike for an eight-hour day (the original, 100% American origin of May Day as a workers’ holiday) and the ensuing post-Haymarket repression.

Grover Cleveland’s military intervention to suppress the Pullman Strike was one of the last big battles in defeating the counter-revolution, after which the alliance between big business and big government was able to fully reshape the country in its own image. The Left attempted rearguard actions on the eve of World War One — most notably the Wobblies’ Lawrence strike — but was liquidated during the War Hysteria and Red Scare.

The managerial/professional New Class of corporate managers was first recruited from industrial engineers after the Civil War, and around the turn of the 20th century the new corporate-state alliance gave rise to other centralized institutions (bureaucratic charitable foundations, universities, large urban public school systems) that served as auxiliaries to the corporate state either by processing human resources for it, or by mitigating the human casualties of corporate rule (e.g., managing the underclass through the welfare and prison systems).

And now, after 150 years of this, people see the administration of every aspect of life by centralized bureaucratic machines as natural and inevitable, the only conceivable way of doing things. But it’s not. It’s not only the creature of deliberate human design; it requires deliberate, ongoing intervention by the state for its very survival.

More importantly, it’s in the process of being dismantled by human action. Despite the system’s attempts to indoctrinate us to the contrary, we are not powerless. We’re in the midst of another Great Uprising — fought by The Pirate Bay, Wikileaks, Anonymous, and a thousand other networked insurrections around the world as in the Arab Spring and Occupy movements. And unlike the last time, this time the technological revolution has put the advantage on the side of the Uprising. This time it’s us building the revolution, and the corporate state finds itself fighting a desperate rearguard action to stop us.

“Other worlds are possible.”

Original Article

Should Occupy Use Violence? I Dunno — Should the Cops?

Back in the mid-1980s, when the African National Congress was still fighting the South Africa’s apartheid regime, I recall Secretary of State George Schultz testifying before some Senate committee. He clutched his pearls at the appearance that “some members of this body are speaking in favor of violence.”

Even then, when I wasn’t an anarchist or anything approaching it, I laughed myself silly. Just what, exactly, did he imagine those American troops were doing in Grenada? “We’re here from the Western Hemisphere Ladies Auxiliary, and here’s a fruit basket with some coupons for discounts at local merchants?” For that matter, what did he think those guys with the flintlocks were doing on Lexington Green?

In the official narrative, the question always concerns whether anyone and everyone but the state should engage in violence. The question of whether the state should engage in violence, or whether state violence should be evaluated in terms of the same standards of reasonableness as violence by nonstate actors, never crosses the threshold of visibility. The legitimacy of violence by the state is never even articulated as an issue.

That’s a shame. The state is not a mystical entity, a sum greater than the human beings making it up. The state is simply a group of human beings cooperating for common purposes — purposes frequently at odds with those of other groups of people, like the majority of people in the same society. And violent actions by an association of individuals who call themselves “the state” have no more automatic legitimacy than violent actions by associations of individuals who call themselves “the Ku Klux Klan” or “al Qaeda.”

The violent actions of the state deserve to be evaluated using the same criteria by which we judge the morality of the violent actions of any other grouping of individuals. Alexander Berkman, in “The ABC of Anarchism,” argued that the death and destruction caused by the institutionalized violence of the state was many times greater than that caused by anarchists or other revolutionaries. Who do you think has thrown more bombs — anarchists, or government military forces?

Despite all the mystification of “national security” and “national interest,” the interests served by the state’s military violence are every bit as particular as those served by any other violent actions carried out by other groups of individuals. The state is nothing but an association for armed violence on the part of those who make money at the expense of other people. As Howard Zinn said:

“In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that — not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor — is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.”

So it is with all the hand-wringing over “violence” in recent confrontations between Occupy Portland and the Portland police.

Andy Robinson, a professor at Cambridge who specializes among other things in networked resistance movements, argues that there’s a very pernicious framing going on in news coverage of the issue. “There’s no mention of the fact that police have repeatedly, violently attacked Occupy protests which consisted simply of sit-downs and camp-outs. … The fact that police use violence routinely and with impunity is not mentioned.  In fact, police violence as such (as opposed to excessive brutality) is treated as uncontroversial. …  Protective moves such as using shields and face coverings are portrayed as proactively aggressive.”

Or as anarchist Occupy activist David Graeber says in response to Chris Hedges’ recent clueless attack, “the US media is simply constitutionally incapable of reporting acts of police repression as ‘violence.’ If the police decide to attack a group of protesters, they will claim to have been provoked, and the media will repeat whatever the police say … as the basic initial facts of what happened. This will happen whether or not anyone at the protest does anything that can be remotely described as violence.”

We saw Oakland mayor Jean Quan, with a straight face, quacking about protestors alleged to have violently invaded a YMCA building, when in fact they were desperately trying to escape through the building after police had “kettled” them and begun the wholesale use of chemical weapons upon them.

Such official lies by politicians and cops, Robinson argues, are a “psyop designed to conceal their own repeated use of violence. … People are quoted as being against ‘all violence’ without the implications for police violence being examined. It’s basically a double standard — we never see it questioned whether supporters of the status quo have a right to use violence (only whether the violence they use is excessive) … a bit like starting a debate, ‘should an invaded country use violence against the invaders,’ without mentioning the violence of the invaders or the act of invasion.”

This last comparison is telling, given the farcical entertainment we get every night on CNN. Iran, a country ringed by military bases garrisoned by a global superpower that spends nearly as much on its military forces as all the other countries in the world combined, constitutes a military “threat” to the country which is besieging it. And the beseiging country, which has military bases in half the countries of the world and has overthrown more governments than any previous empire in human history, is “defending itself.”

What’s more, if you look at the American “Defense” Department’s planning documents, the main “threat” presented by Iran is the horrifying possibility that it might be able to successfully defend itself against an American attack. Which attack, of course, would be entirely justified by the “aggressive” act of defying a direct order by the U.S. (or its UN Security Council proxy).

In this Orwellian conceptual world, the question of whether the state has the right to use violence doesn’t bear looking into. But in the real world, it does. The state is by far the greatest concentration of organized violence, and it almost always employs such violence for evil purposes — whether at Tahrir Square, Hama, or Oakland.

So if you’re arguing over whether Occupy should “use violence,” you’re asking the wrong question.

Original Article

More Conflationism in the News

In a recent column, I referred to Auburn University Professor Roderick Long’s concept of “conflationism”:

“Left-conflationism is the error of treating the evils of existing corporatist capitalism as though they constituted an objection to a freed market. Right-conflationism is the error of treating the virtues of a freed market as though they constituted a justification of the evils of existing corporatist capitalism.”

In a recent interview on Reason.tv, Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, committed the latter fallacy of right-conflationism. She criticized the Occupy movement for focusing its outrage on the 1% richest Americans, whose wealth (she said) is not gained at the expense of the 99% — but rather from providing goods and services that people want to consume.

This is a fundamental non-sequitur. By definition, any economic transaction — no matter how monopolistic — must provide a good or service that someone wants to consume. A man who sells glasses of water in the middle of the desert for a quit-claim on your life savings is, obviously, providing something someone wants — and wants quite desperately. When a robber points a gun at me and says ‘Your money or your life,’ I’m paying for something of immense value to me.

So what? That by no means rules out the possibility that one person is also, at the same time, benefiting at someone else’s expense. Consider how monopoly pricing works:

In a free market, the value of goods is determined by the marginal utility of the last unit produced; with no entry barriers, new entrants will compete to supply needs until the marginal utility of the last unit produced to the buyer equals the marginal cost of production. To translate it from the language of marginalist economics to that of Ricardo, a competitive marketplace normally drives the price of reproducible goods toward the cost of production.

A monopoly short-circuits this process: Absent competition, the seller can target the price so that the utility is just barely worth it to the buyer after paying the price, with the seller pocketing the difference between a sales price targeted to the buyer’s ability to pay and the marginal cost of production.

And for reproducible goods, the latter state of affairs only holds true when there are barriers to entry enforced by the state. Such entry barriers include absentee ownership of vacant and unimproved land, by which the landlord is able to extract rents from the rightful first owner and thus leave the occupant barely enough utility from living or working on the land to make the transaction worthwhile. They include ‘intellectual property,’ by which Microsoft can price at $200 a software CD that cost $5 to make, or Pfizer can mark up a patented drug by 2000%.

Like the robber in the example above, the landlord, Microsoft and Pfizer, with the help of the state, points a gun at you and says “Pay up, and I’ll let you keep — not your life — but some portion of the utility from your land, your software, your medicine. You will either work twice as hard to feed me in addition to yourself, or you will not eat at all.”

In our economy, in fact, the largest concentrations of wealth are earned through entry barriers of this kind. The super-rich have, indeed, gotten rich at the expense of the 99%. They have no more earned their wealth through an uncoerced exchange of value for value with equals, than did the medieval lord of 700 years ago who compelled the peasants to work half the week on his manorial domain as a condition of working their own lands during the other half.

De Rugy’s claim is really an enthymeme — an incomplete syllogism in which one of the premises is unstated. The enthymeme is usually a rhetorical device in which the speaker appeals to the unstated prejudices of the audience. The unstated premise is an unexamined cultural assumption shared by the audience, which is left unstated because to state it might invite critical examination. Her enthymeme is as follows:

Major premise: In a free market, wealth comes from providing useful goods and services, and not at other people’s expense. Minor premise (unstated): The system we live in now is a free market. Conclusion:  The people who got rich under our present system did not do so at anyone else’s expense.

The unstated minor premise, that the present system of corporate capitalism is a free market, takes us back to right-conflationism. De Rugy is defending actually existing corporate capitalism, and the wealth obtained under it, as if it were a free market.

That’s a premise that, if it were explicitly stated and held up for critical examination, would not bear much scrutiny.

Original Article

Why the State Will Fail

To paraphrase the assessment of libertarian socialist Rosa Luxemburg a century ago, we face an imminent choice between freedom and barbarism. There are only two possible outcomes in the present struggle between the authoritarian institutions of state and corporation, and the emergent society of self-organized networks and other voluntary associations of free people:

The state will fail, and be replaced by a society in which people are free to pool their cooperative labor and skills as they see fit, and to exchange the products of their labor with their equals.

Or, the state will succeed — and create a technofascist empire that reduces humanity to serfdom and takes the biosphere down in flames.  Now that the conflict is fairly begun, there is no going back to the status quo ante.

Vinay Gupta, whose many hats include specialist in security issues, argues that the passage of NDAA (with its provisions for indefinite detention without trial) and the shutdown of Megaupload without due process of law signal the emergence of the US as a full-blown fascist state.

And he suggests the possibility that, as governments implode in the face of networked resistance movements in countries like Spain and Greece, free information havens emerge in places like Iceland, and one domino after another in the global South begins to secede from the neoliberal order, the United States will become embroiled in a desperate World War of counterinsurgency, using air strikes, blockades, cyberwar, black ops, hunter-killer drones, and crowd-control technologies to suppress the emerging free order. The street fighting between riot cops and Occupy protesters was just a dress rehearsal, as Spain was for WWII.

Even if it comes to this, I believe the state — and the cluster of authoritarian institutions of which it is the core — will fail.

Because local nodes in self-organized networks are free to take action or innovate without waiting for permission from an administrative apparatus, and every other node in the network is similarly free to learn by example and adopt the innovations without permission, they fully exploit agility advantages of networked communications in ways that authoritarian hierarchies are unequipped to.

We saw this recently with the development of Firefox’s DeSopa circumvention utility before SOPA even came up for a vote, and Anonymous’s massive same-day DDOS attack in response to a federal takedown of MegaUpload that had been months in the planning. Last summer Tor developers released a workaround the very same day Iranian authorities thought they’d shut down the encrypted router network.

Other examples of this agility include the lightning spread of the Arab Spring across the Middle East and into Europe, and the mushroom global proliferation of Occupy camps to hundreds of cities in a matter of days. These networked movements react almost instantaneously to police repression in any one place. Local and national governments are typically so blindsided by the scale of resistance in their own domains, they’re able to offer little if anything in the way of support to other regimes falling victim to the same full-court press. The phrase “Two, three, many Vietnams” comes to mind.

The resistance is further aided by conflict between states, as the advantage shifts from hierarchies to networks. The hegemonic American state’s attempt to suppress networked uprisings comes up against a growing anti-American coalition of smaller states provoked by the Empire’s dominance. The technological advantage accruing to asymmetric warfare means even small states can develop effective hacks against American technologies of global domination, at comparatively little cost. Witness the American security state’s recent obsession with cheap “Assassin’s Mace” and “area denial” weapons that threaten its power projection capability.

As Gupta argues, the fundamentally evil nature of the American state’s counter-insurgency agenda results in cognitive dissonance among the rulers, as many soldiers and police become demoralized from an inability to face the truth of their missions, internal functionaries of the state (like Bradley Manning) become disaffected by the disjuncture between official propaganda and the testimony of their own eyes, and domestic populations’ access to unofficial news and streaming video undermines the official narrative. Because of this, the state leadership cannot trust the motives of its soldiers and other functionaries, or give them the full autonomy and the unfiltered knowledge of reality that effective networked warfare requires.

As Julian Assange points out, when authoritarian hierarchies are attacked from outside they respond by becoming more brittle and internally opaque to themselves.

The combination of networks’ quick adaptation to changing situations with hierarchies’ demoralization and internal opacity means networks generally stay inside what strategist John Boyd called the “OODA loop” of hierarchies: That is, they keep the enemy permanently off-balance, and repeatedly force them to react to situations instead of creating them.

In the long run, it’s no contest.

Original Article