I'm currently writing a book (Exodus: General Idea of the Revolution in the XXI Century) on the transition from 20th century organizational models on the Left centered on organizational mass, insurrection and workerism, to horizontalist models based on counter-institutions and Exodus. I regularly post the latest revised drafts at http://exodus875.wordpress.com
Like virtually every book I've written since Mutualist Political Economy, this is an expanded tre... more Like virtually every book I've written since Mutualist Political Economy, this is an expanded treatment of a topic I dealt with in passing in my previous book. Writing the section on engagement with the state in Exodus left me wanting to write a lot more, especially considering how prominently the issues in that section figured in intra-Left debates in the 2016 and 2020 U.S. election cycles. Just about everything I've written from 2010 on, this book involves some aspect of postcapitalist transition. And while Homebrew Industrial Revolution and all the books since were meant to be timely and influential (at least as influential as realistically possible), this is more true of The State than any of the others. I wrote Desktop Regulatory State in the heady atmosphere of Occupy and other movements of the 2011 cycle, and that momentum sustained me through the beginning of Exodus. But the Left has lost much, if not most, of its dominant position in networked resistance since then. GamerGate and its alt right offshoots on social media were the beginning of an upsurge in memetic warfare by the Right. For the last six years the United States has existed under the shadow of fascism; each election brings another chorus of pundits asking whether this will be our last. A substantial minority of the public lives in the alternate reality defined by QAnon, and "election theft" and anti-vaccine conspiracism, and right-wing paramilitaries are in the streets on levels reminiscent of Weimar Germany. So the whole question of playing to win is, perhaps, more urgent now than when my previous books went into print. It would be presumptuous of me to think this book might have a significant effect on the world; but I hope whatever effect it does have is for the good. Thanks to all I have engaged with online and in the media, on all sides, who helped me develop the arguments in this book. There were many times when I could have been more civil or charitable, but I hope my framing of the debates here is accepted as in good faith. And as always, thanks to my dear friend Gary Chartier for his work in formatting this book for publication. 1 Origin and History of the State At the outset of his magisterial four-volume metahistory, The Sources of Social Power, Michael Mann divides "evolutionary" theories of the state's origin-i.e., theories which argue that "the transition to settled agriculture and herding heralded a slow, prolonged, connected growth in stratification and the state"-into four broad categories: "liberal, functionalist, Marxist, and militarist." Rightly, they see as connected the two most important and baffling questions: (1) How did some acquire permanent power over the material life chances of others, giving them the capacity to acquire property that potentially denied subsistence to others? (2) How did social authority become permanently lodged in centralized, monopolistic, coercive powers in territorially defined states? The nub of these issues is the distinction between authority and power. The evolutionary theories offer plausible theories of the growth of authority. But they cannot explain satisfactorily how authority was converted into power that could be used either coercively against the people who granted authority in the first place or to deprive people of the rights of material subsistence. Indeed, we shall see that these conversions did not happen in prehistory. There were no general origins of the state and stratification. It is a false issue. Liberal and functional theories argue that stratification and states embody rational social cooperation, and so were originally instituted in a kind of "social contract." Liberal theory sees these interest groups as individuals with livelihoods and private-property rights. Thus private property preceded and determined state formation. Functional theories are more varied. I consider only the functionalism of economic anthropologists, with their emphasis on the "redistributive chiefdom." Marxists argue that states strengthen class exploitation and thus were instituted by the first property classes. Like liberalism, Marxist theory argues that private-property power preceded and determined stateez formation, but orthodox Marxism goes farther back and claims that in turn private property emerged out of originally communistic property. Finally, militarist theory argues that states and pronounced social stratification originated in conquest and the requirements of military attack and defense. 1 Mann uses Locke as a stand-in for the liberal category. According to the liberal account, the state arose to serve the needs of a preexisting civil society. Hobbes and Locke provided a conjectural history of the state in which loose associations of people voluntarily constituted a state for their mutual protection. The main functions of their state were judicial and repressive, the maintenance of domestic order; but they saw this in rather economic terms. The chief aims of the state were the protection of life and individual private property. 2 Writing of the four categories of theory in general, Mann observes they "were originally advanced when writers had little empirical evidence. Nowadays we have a wealth of archaeological and anthropological studies of early and primitive states, ancient and modern, all over the world."
The implosion of capital outlays associated with the desktop revolution, and the virtual disappearance of transaction costs of coordinating action associated with the network revolution, have (as Tom Coates has said) eliminated the gap between what can be produced within large hierarchical organizations and what can be produced at home in a wide range of industries: software, publishing, music, education, and journalism among them.
The practical significance of this, which I develop in this book, is that many of the functions of government can be included in that list. The central theme of this book is the potential for networked organization to constrain the exercise of power by large, hierarchical institutions in a way that once required the countervailing power of other large, hierarchical institutions.
Traditionally, the power of the large corporation was explained by the large amounts of capital required for manufacturing, broadcasting or publishing. Such large amounts of capital meant that only the very rich, or a very large aggregation of rich people, could afford the outlays to undertake production, and that these people had to hire wage laborers to actually work the machinery for them. Such outlays also required a large, hierarchical, bureaucratic institution to administer the plant and equipment. And these large institutions, in turn, required other large institutions like regulatory agencies, big establishment unions, and the big establishment media, to act as watchdogs.
Unfortunately, despite Galbraith’s theory of countervailing power, in practice government agencies, corporations and media outlets tended to cluster together in complexes of allied institutions in which the ostensible regulators and regulated were actually on the same side. Rather than the liberal “interest group pluralism” model implicit in Galbraith’s analysis, what we actually had was an interlocking Power Elite of the sort described by Mill and Domhoff. The large size and small number of institutional actors, and the enormous entry barriers erected against ordinary people attempting to compete with them, made such a clustering of interests based on shared bureacuratic culture inevitable.
The desktop and digital revolution, the network revolution, and the forms of stigmergic organization that they make possible, together destroy the material basis for the old mass production/bureaucratic/broadcast model described above. Instead — just as, in my previous book, I described the increasing ability of micromanufacturers with a few thousand dollars in capital to undertake forms of production previously requiring million-dollar factories — individually affordable capital goods for information production and network organization are leading to what John Robb calls “individual superempowerment.” The individual increasingly has at her disposal the means of taking on large, powerful bureaucratic institutions as an equal.
Networked consumer, environmental and labor activism, with its ability to subject corporate malefactors to boycotts or tort actions, and to expose them to humiliating scrutiny, offers the potential to control and punish bad corporate behavior at least as well as did the regulatory state or the traditional press, and — insofar as they are not prone to the same sorts of cross-institutional collusion — to do an even better job of it.
This includes “culture jamming” of the sort employed by the McLibel defendants and by Frank Kernaghan against Kathie Lee Gifford. It includes labor-led boycotts and information campaigns based on “open mouth sabotage” like those of the Imolakee Workers and the Wal-Mart Workers Association, and a whole host of online “employernamesucks.com” websites. It includes targeted campaigns to embarrass such corporate malefactors in the eyes of their suppliers, outlets, major stakeholders, and labor and consumer interest organizations. It includes networked activism through umbrella movements of labor, consumer and social justice organizations linked together for ad hoc single issue campaigns against a particular corporate criminal. It includes efforts like Wikileaks to promote whistleblowing and provide secure platforms for circulating embarrassing information about corporate misbehavior. It incorporates a large element of what John Keane calls “monitory democracy.”
Networked organization offers, as well, to supplant the regulatory state’s old licensing, authentication and quality certification functions. If Consumer Reports was pithecanthropus in this evolutionary schema, and Angie’s List is homo erectus, then the future lies with full-blown networked civil societies, organized on a voluntary basis, providing a context within which secure commercial relationships and other forms of cooperation can take place. The future of this model has been described variously as neo-Venetianism or phyles (fictionally in Stephenson’s The Diamond Age and non-fictionally in de Ugarte’s work), the Darknet in Suarez’s Freedom, and “economies as a social software service” by John Robb.
In short, networked activism offers to do to the state and the large corporation what the file-sharing movement has only begun to do to the record industry, and what Wikileaks has barely even begun to do to the U.S. national security community.
Kevin Carson lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He works as a hospital orderly and operates a lawn-... more Kevin Carson lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He works as a hospital orderly and operates a lawn-mowing service. He belongs to the Voluntary Cooperation Movement (a mutualist affinity group), and the Industrial Workers of the World. He also maintains the Mutualist.Org website and recently published the book Studies in Mutualist Political Economy.
Anarchism is a critique of the principle of authority and its negative effects on society. In the... more Anarchism is a critique of the principle of authority and its negative effects on society. In the popular understanding of anarchism this is most commonly associated with the anarchist critique of the state. But the anarchist critiques of the authority principle as it involves the state are just as applicable to authority relations within institutions. Just as in society as a whole, authority within hierarchical institutions serves primarily to promote the interests of those who possess it at the expense of those who do not. Authority shifts costs, effort and negative consequences downward, and shifts benefits upward; as such, it is a form of privilege. And like all forms of privilege, it creates fundamental conflicts of interest. These conflicts of interest, in turn, result in all sorts of related inefficiencies and irrationalities. They take the form, in particular, of distorted information flows and perverse incentives. I. Distorted Information Flows and Irrationality When power intrudes into human relationships it creates a zero-sum relationship between superiors and subordinates. In such an environment, it is impossible in principle for those in authority to receive accurate information about the state of affairs within an organization from those subject to their command. According to anarchist writer Robert Anton Wilson, A civilization based on authority-and-submission is a civilization without the means of self-correction. Effective communication flows only one way: from master-group to servile-group. Any cyberneticist knows that such a one-way communication channel lacks feedback and cannot behave "intelligently." The epitome of authority-and-submission is the Army, and the control-andcommunication network of the Army has every defect a cyberneticist's nightmare could conjure. Its typical patterns of behavior are immortalized in folklore as SNAFU (situation normal-all fucked-up).... In less extreme... form these are the typical conditions of any authoritarian group, be it a corporation, a nation, a family, or a whole civilization. 1 Wilson, writing with Robert Shea, developed the same theme in a fictional format in The Illuminatus! Trilogy. "A man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger." Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs.... The result can only be progressive deterioration among the rulers. 2 This inability of organizational leadership to obtain sufficient or accurate information from below, and the hostile perception of superiors by subordinates, mean that those in the lower echelons of an institution hoard information and use it as a source of rents. The zero-sum relationship resulting from the power differential means that the organizational pyramid will be opaque to those at its top. 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
THIS IS NOT, PROPERLY speaking, a rejoinder—obviously, since Rothbard’s article predates my book.... more THIS IS NOT, PROPERLY speaking, a rejoinder—obviously, since Rothbard’s article predates my book. But since it was chosen to set the tone for this symposium issue, and includes some comments on individualist anarchism in general, I’ll make a few remarks anyway. On the land issue, I reserve comment, since that is also the focus of Roderick Long’s review. I merely observe that characterizing the Ingalls-Tucker doctrine as a limit on the landlord’s right to dispose of his “justly-acquired private property” begs the question of just how property is justly acquired. On money and banking issues, Rothbard made the mistake of interpreting the Greene-Tucker system of mutual banking as an attempt at inflationary expansion of the money supply. Although the Greene-Tucker doctrine is often casually lumped together (in a broader category of “money cranks”) with social crediters, bimetallists, etc., it is actually quite different. Greene and Tucker did not propose inflating the money supply, but r...
My contribution to The Dialectics of Liberty anthology (2019). The prevailing tendency in mainstr... more My contribution to The Dialectics of Liberty anthology (2019). The prevailing tendency in mainstream libertarianism is to look at particular proposals for "free market reform" atomistically, based on whether they reduce formal statism, and without regard to their role in the statism of the overall system. But to ascertain whether they constitute a net reduction or increase in statism, we must first examine their function within the greater whole. This means looking at the class nature of the larger system, the identity of the forces controlling it, and whether particular measures-regardless of formal statism-increase or reduce the state-conferred privilege of the ruling class in real terms.
DECENTRALIZATION of cities and the miniaturization of technology will alter the centerperiphery d... more DECENTRALIZATION of cities and the miniaturization of technology will alter the centerperiphery dialectic of traditional civilization and make a whole new cultural level possible. What will take place in the metaindustrial village will be that the four classical economies of human history, hunting and gathering, agriculture, industry, and cybernetics, will all be recapitulated within a single deme. We will look back to where we have been in history, gather up all the old economies, and then turn on the spiral in a new direction.
Protest Culture. The so-called "cargo cults" of New Guinea, Micronesia and Melanesia evolved in r... more Protest Culture. The so-called "cargo cults" of New Guinea, Micronesia and Melanesia evolved in response to the influx of American manufactured goods during World War II. Native islanders identified the goods-at least in the received version of the story-not with any material process of production in the countries it came from, but with the proliferation of air bases and air fields in their own countries. The cargo cults, accordingly, operated on the principle of sympathetic magic to stimulate the further delivery of Western manufactured goods by building airplanes and air control centers out of woven bamboo.
Like virtually every book I've written since Mutualist Political Economy, this is an expanded tre... more Like virtually every book I've written since Mutualist Political Economy, this is an expanded treatment of a topic I dealt with in passing in my previous book. Writing the section on engagement with the state in Exodus left me wanting to write a lot more, especially considering how prominently the issues in that section figured in intra-Left debates in the 2016 and 2020 U.S. election cycles. Just about everything I've written from 2010 on, this book involves some aspect of postcapitalist transition. And while Homebrew Industrial Revolution and all the books since were meant to be timely and influential (at least as influential as realistically possible), this is more true of The State than any of the others. I wrote Desktop Regulatory State in the heady atmosphere of Occupy and other movements of the 2011 cycle, and that momentum sustained me through the beginning of Exodus. But the Left has lost much, if not most, of its dominant position in networked resistance since then. GamerGate and its alt right offshoots on social media were the beginning of an upsurge in memetic warfare by the Right. For the last six years the United States has existed under the shadow of fascism; each election brings another chorus of pundits asking whether this will be our last. A substantial minority of the public lives in the alternate reality defined by QAnon, and "election theft" and anti-vaccine conspiracism, and right-wing paramilitaries are in the streets on levels reminiscent of Weimar Germany. So the whole question of playing to win is, perhaps, more urgent now than when my previous books went into print. It would be presumptuous of me to think this book might have a significant effect on the world; but I hope whatever effect it does have is for the good. Thanks to all I have engaged with online and in the media, on all sides, who helped me develop the arguments in this book. There were many times when I could have been more civil or charitable, but I hope my framing of the debates here is accepted as in good faith. And as always, thanks to my dear friend Gary Chartier for his work in formatting this book for publication. 1 Origin and History of the State At the outset of his magisterial four-volume metahistory, The Sources of Social Power, Michael Mann divides "evolutionary" theories of the state's origin-i.e., theories which argue that "the transition to settled agriculture and herding heralded a slow, prolonged, connected growth in stratification and the state"-into four broad categories: "liberal, functionalist, Marxist, and militarist." Rightly, they see as connected the two most important and baffling questions: (1) How did some acquire permanent power over the material life chances of others, giving them the capacity to acquire property that potentially denied subsistence to others? (2) How did social authority become permanently lodged in centralized, monopolistic, coercive powers in territorially defined states? The nub of these issues is the distinction between authority and power. The evolutionary theories offer plausible theories of the growth of authority. But they cannot explain satisfactorily how authority was converted into power that could be used either coercively against the people who granted authority in the first place or to deprive people of the rights of material subsistence. Indeed, we shall see that these conversions did not happen in prehistory. There were no general origins of the state and stratification. It is a false issue. Liberal and functional theories argue that stratification and states embody rational social cooperation, and so were originally instituted in a kind of "social contract." Liberal theory sees these interest groups as individuals with livelihoods and private-property rights. Thus private property preceded and determined state formation. Functional theories are more varied. I consider only the functionalism of economic anthropologists, with their emphasis on the "redistributive chiefdom." Marxists argue that states strengthen class exploitation and thus were instituted by the first property classes. Like liberalism, Marxist theory argues that private-property power preceded and determined stateez formation, but orthodox Marxism goes farther back and claims that in turn private property emerged out of originally communistic property. Finally, militarist theory argues that states and pronounced social stratification originated in conquest and the requirements of military attack and defense. 1 Mann uses Locke as a stand-in for the liberal category. According to the liberal account, the state arose to serve the needs of a preexisting civil society. Hobbes and Locke provided a conjectural history of the state in which loose associations of people voluntarily constituted a state for their mutual protection. The main functions of their state were judicial and repressive, the maintenance of domestic order; but they saw this in rather economic terms. The chief aims of the state were the protection of life and individual private property. 2 Writing of the four categories of theory in general, Mann observes they "were originally advanced when writers had little empirical evidence. Nowadays we have a wealth of archaeological and anthropological studies of early and primitive states, ancient and modern, all over the world."
The implosion of capital outlays associated with the desktop revolution, and the virtual disappearance of transaction costs of coordinating action associated with the network revolution, have (as Tom Coates has said) eliminated the gap between what can be produced within large hierarchical organizations and what can be produced at home in a wide range of industries: software, publishing, music, education, and journalism among them.
The practical significance of this, which I develop in this book, is that many of the functions of government can be included in that list. The central theme of this book is the potential for networked organization to constrain the exercise of power by large, hierarchical institutions in a way that once required the countervailing power of other large, hierarchical institutions.
Traditionally, the power of the large corporation was explained by the large amounts of capital required for manufacturing, broadcasting or publishing. Such large amounts of capital meant that only the very rich, or a very large aggregation of rich people, could afford the outlays to undertake production, and that these people had to hire wage laborers to actually work the machinery for them. Such outlays also required a large, hierarchical, bureaucratic institution to administer the plant and equipment. And these large institutions, in turn, required other large institutions like regulatory agencies, big establishment unions, and the big establishment media, to act as watchdogs.
Unfortunately, despite Galbraith’s theory of countervailing power, in practice government agencies, corporations and media outlets tended to cluster together in complexes of allied institutions in which the ostensible regulators and regulated were actually on the same side. Rather than the liberal “interest group pluralism” model implicit in Galbraith’s analysis, what we actually had was an interlocking Power Elite of the sort described by Mill and Domhoff. The large size and small number of institutional actors, and the enormous entry barriers erected against ordinary people attempting to compete with them, made such a clustering of interests based on shared bureacuratic culture inevitable.
The desktop and digital revolution, the network revolution, and the forms of stigmergic organization that they make possible, together destroy the material basis for the old mass production/bureaucratic/broadcast model described above. Instead — just as, in my previous book, I described the increasing ability of micromanufacturers with a few thousand dollars in capital to undertake forms of production previously requiring million-dollar factories — individually affordable capital goods for information production and network organization are leading to what John Robb calls “individual superempowerment.” The individual increasingly has at her disposal the means of taking on large, powerful bureaucratic institutions as an equal.
Networked consumer, environmental and labor activism, with its ability to subject corporate malefactors to boycotts or tort actions, and to expose them to humiliating scrutiny, offers the potential to control and punish bad corporate behavior at least as well as did the regulatory state or the traditional press, and — insofar as they are not prone to the same sorts of cross-institutional collusion — to do an even better job of it.
This includes “culture jamming” of the sort employed by the McLibel defendants and by Frank Kernaghan against Kathie Lee Gifford. It includes labor-led boycotts and information campaigns based on “open mouth sabotage” like those of the Imolakee Workers and the Wal-Mart Workers Association, and a whole host of online “employernamesucks.com” websites. It includes targeted campaigns to embarrass such corporate malefactors in the eyes of their suppliers, outlets, major stakeholders, and labor and consumer interest organizations. It includes networked activism through umbrella movements of labor, consumer and social justice organizations linked together for ad hoc single issue campaigns against a particular corporate criminal. It includes efforts like Wikileaks to promote whistleblowing and provide secure platforms for circulating embarrassing information about corporate misbehavior. It incorporates a large element of what John Keane calls “monitory democracy.”
Networked organization offers, as well, to supplant the regulatory state’s old licensing, authentication and quality certification functions. If Consumer Reports was pithecanthropus in this evolutionary schema, and Angie’s List is homo erectus, then the future lies with full-blown networked civil societies, organized on a voluntary basis, providing a context within which secure commercial relationships and other forms of cooperation can take place. The future of this model has been described variously as neo-Venetianism or phyles (fictionally in Stephenson’s The Diamond Age and non-fictionally in de Ugarte’s work), the Darknet in Suarez’s Freedom, and “economies as a social software service” by John Robb.
In short, networked activism offers to do to the state and the large corporation what the file-sharing movement has only begun to do to the record industry, and what Wikileaks has barely even begun to do to the U.S. national security community.
Kevin Carson lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He works as a hospital orderly and operates a lawn-... more Kevin Carson lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He works as a hospital orderly and operates a lawn-mowing service. He belongs to the Voluntary Cooperation Movement (a mutualist affinity group), and the Industrial Workers of the World. He also maintains the Mutualist.Org website and recently published the book Studies in Mutualist Political Economy.
Anarchism is a critique of the principle of authority and its negative effects on society. In the... more Anarchism is a critique of the principle of authority and its negative effects on society. In the popular understanding of anarchism this is most commonly associated with the anarchist critique of the state. But the anarchist critiques of the authority principle as it involves the state are just as applicable to authority relations within institutions. Just as in society as a whole, authority within hierarchical institutions serves primarily to promote the interests of those who possess it at the expense of those who do not. Authority shifts costs, effort and negative consequences downward, and shifts benefits upward; as such, it is a form of privilege. And like all forms of privilege, it creates fundamental conflicts of interest. These conflicts of interest, in turn, result in all sorts of related inefficiencies and irrationalities. They take the form, in particular, of distorted information flows and perverse incentives. I. Distorted Information Flows and Irrationality When power intrudes into human relationships it creates a zero-sum relationship between superiors and subordinates. In such an environment, it is impossible in principle for those in authority to receive accurate information about the state of affairs within an organization from those subject to their command. According to anarchist writer Robert Anton Wilson, A civilization based on authority-and-submission is a civilization without the means of self-correction. Effective communication flows only one way: from master-group to servile-group. Any cyberneticist knows that such a one-way communication channel lacks feedback and cannot behave "intelligently." The epitome of authority-and-submission is the Army, and the control-andcommunication network of the Army has every defect a cyberneticist's nightmare could conjure. Its typical patterns of behavior are immortalized in folklore as SNAFU (situation normal-all fucked-up).... In less extreme... form these are the typical conditions of any authoritarian group, be it a corporation, a nation, a family, or a whole civilization. 1 Wilson, writing with Robert Shea, developed the same theme in a fictional format in The Illuminatus! Trilogy. "A man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger." Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs.... The result can only be progressive deterioration among the rulers. 2 This inability of organizational leadership to obtain sufficient or accurate information from below, and the hostile perception of superiors by subordinates, mean that those in the lower echelons of an institution hoard information and use it as a source of rents. The zero-sum relationship resulting from the power differential means that the organizational pyramid will be opaque to those at its top. 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
THIS IS NOT, PROPERLY speaking, a rejoinder—obviously, since Rothbard’s article predates my book.... more THIS IS NOT, PROPERLY speaking, a rejoinder—obviously, since Rothbard’s article predates my book. But since it was chosen to set the tone for this symposium issue, and includes some comments on individualist anarchism in general, I’ll make a few remarks anyway. On the land issue, I reserve comment, since that is also the focus of Roderick Long’s review. I merely observe that characterizing the Ingalls-Tucker doctrine as a limit on the landlord’s right to dispose of his “justly-acquired private property” begs the question of just how property is justly acquired. On money and banking issues, Rothbard made the mistake of interpreting the Greene-Tucker system of mutual banking as an attempt at inflationary expansion of the money supply. Although the Greene-Tucker doctrine is often casually lumped together (in a broader category of “money cranks”) with social crediters, bimetallists, etc., it is actually quite different. Greene and Tucker did not propose inflating the money supply, but r...
My contribution to The Dialectics of Liberty anthology (2019). The prevailing tendency in mainstr... more My contribution to The Dialectics of Liberty anthology (2019). The prevailing tendency in mainstream libertarianism is to look at particular proposals for "free market reform" atomistically, based on whether they reduce formal statism, and without regard to their role in the statism of the overall system. But to ascertain whether they constitute a net reduction or increase in statism, we must first examine their function within the greater whole. This means looking at the class nature of the larger system, the identity of the forces controlling it, and whether particular measures-regardless of formal statism-increase or reduce the state-conferred privilege of the ruling class in real terms.
DECENTRALIZATION of cities and the miniaturization of technology will alter the centerperiphery d... more DECENTRALIZATION of cities and the miniaturization of technology will alter the centerperiphery dialectic of traditional civilization and make a whole new cultural level possible. What will take place in the metaindustrial village will be that the four classical economies of human history, hunting and gathering, agriculture, industry, and cybernetics, will all be recapitulated within a single deme. We will look back to where we have been in history, gather up all the old economies, and then turn on the spiral in a new direction.
Protest Culture. The so-called "cargo cults" of New Guinea, Micronesia and Melanesia evolved in r... more Protest Culture. The so-called "cargo cults" of New Guinea, Micronesia and Melanesia evolved in response to the influx of American manufactured goods during World War II. Native islanders identified the goods-at least in the received version of the story-not with any material process of production in the countries it came from, but with the proliferation of air bases and air fields in their own countries. The cargo cults, accordingly, operated on the principle of sympathetic magic to stimulate the further delivery of Western manufactured goods by building airplanes and air control centers out of woven bamboo.
Zionism had its origins in the wave of European ethnonationalisms that followed the French Revolu... more Zionism had its origins in the wave of European ethnonationalisms that followed the French Revolution. Before the rise of Zionism in the 19th century, Ilan Pappe writes, the traditional Jewish attitude was far different: Eretz Israel, the name for Palestine in the Jewish religion, had been revered throughout the centuries by generations of Jews as a place for holy pilgrimage, never as a future secular state…. Zionism secularised and nationalised Judaism. To bring their project to fruition, the Zionist thinkers claimed the biblical territory and recreated, indeed reinvented, it as the cradle of their new nationalist movement. 1 What became the dominant strain of Zionism, in contrast, and predominated in the settlement of Palestine, mirrored other such nationalisms in Europe, insofar as it involved 1) an essentialist view of its ties to the land of Palestine as a homeland to the exclusion of other peoples and 2) an artificially constructed national identity, to the extent of eventually requiring the erasure of actual Jewish identities. As Mahmood Mamdani describes it, the purpose of Zionism is precisely to make this translation: to make the experience of being Jewishhistorically a matter of religious practice, upbringing, and lineage -into an experience of nationhood and to tie this nation to a state. A central tenet of political modernity as it emerged from Europe is that the state exists to protect and further the interests of the nation; in Israel, the state exists to protect and further the interests the Jewish nation, which constitutes Israel's permanent majority identity. Zionism arguably is the most perfected expression of European political modernity in a colonial context. Zionism is both a product of the oppression of Jews under European modernity and a zealous enactment of European modernity under colonial conditions. Nationalism made the European Jew an impossible presence in Europe, yet, steeped in the same ideology that denied them dignity and equality in Europe, Zionists decided that Jews' only option was a state of their own, so they went elsewhere to build it. When they did, they became the oppressor, for in the nation-state, one can be only][ the oppressor or the oppressed, the majority or the minority, the nation or the other. 2 Hannah Arendt, writing in 1948, highlighted the parallel between Zionist ethnonationalism's implications for Palestinian Arabs, and how European Jewry had previously fared at the hands of European ethnonationalisms. Regarding the nature of ethnonationalism in Europe, she remarked on the inevitable conflict within the framework of a national state whose fundamental identity between people and territory and state cannot but be disturbed by the presence of another nationality which, in whatever forms, wants to preserve its identity. Within the framework of a national state there are only two alternatives for the solution of nationality-conflicts: either complete assimilation -that is, actual disappearance -or emigration. 3
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The implosion of capital outlays associated with the desktop revolution, and the virtual disappearance of transaction costs of coordinating action associated with the network revolution, have (as Tom Coates has said) eliminated the gap between what can be produced within large hierarchical organizations and what can be produced at home in a wide range of industries: software, publishing, music, education, and journalism among them.
The practical significance of this, which I develop in this book, is that many of the functions of government can be included in that list. The central theme of this book is the potential for networked organization to constrain the exercise of power by large, hierarchical institutions in a way that once required the countervailing power of other large, hierarchical institutions.
Traditionally, the power of the large corporation was explained by the large amounts of capital required for manufacturing, broadcasting or publishing. Such large amounts of capital meant that only the very rich, or a very large aggregation of rich people, could afford the outlays to undertake production, and that these people had to hire wage laborers to actually work the machinery for them. Such outlays also required a large, hierarchical, bureaucratic institution to administer the plant and equipment. And these large institutions, in turn, required other large institutions like regulatory agencies, big establishment unions, and the big establishment media, to act as watchdogs.
Unfortunately, despite Galbraith’s theory of countervailing power, in practice government agencies, corporations and media outlets tended to cluster together in complexes of allied institutions in which the ostensible regulators and regulated were actually on the same side. Rather than the liberal “interest group pluralism” model implicit in Galbraith’s analysis, what we actually had was an interlocking Power Elite of the sort described by Mill and Domhoff. The large size and small number of institutional actors, and the enormous entry barriers erected against ordinary people attempting to compete with them, made such a clustering of interests based on shared bureacuratic culture inevitable.
The desktop and digital revolution, the network revolution, and the forms of stigmergic organization that they make possible, together destroy the material basis for the old mass production/bureaucratic/broadcast model described above. Instead — just as, in my previous book, I described the increasing ability of micromanufacturers with a few thousand dollars in capital to undertake forms of production previously requiring million-dollar factories — individually affordable capital goods for information production and network organization are leading to what John Robb calls “individual superempowerment.” The individual increasingly has at her disposal the means of taking on large, powerful bureaucratic institutions as an equal.
Networked consumer, environmental and labor activism, with its ability to subject corporate malefactors to boycotts or tort actions, and to expose them to humiliating scrutiny, offers the potential to control and punish bad corporate behavior at least as well as did the regulatory state or the traditional press, and — insofar as they are not prone to the same sorts of cross-institutional collusion — to do an even better job of it.
This includes “culture jamming” of the sort employed by the McLibel defendants and by Frank Kernaghan against Kathie Lee Gifford. It includes labor-led boycotts and information campaigns based on “open mouth sabotage” like those of the Imolakee Workers and the Wal-Mart Workers Association, and a whole host of online “employernamesucks.com” websites. It includes targeted campaigns to embarrass such corporate malefactors in the eyes of their suppliers, outlets, major stakeholders, and labor and consumer interest organizations. It includes networked activism through umbrella movements of labor, consumer and social justice organizations linked together for ad hoc single issue campaigns against a particular corporate criminal. It includes efforts like Wikileaks to promote whistleblowing and provide secure platforms for circulating embarrassing information about corporate misbehavior. It incorporates a large element of what John Keane calls “monitory democracy.”
Networked organization offers, as well, to supplant the regulatory state’s old licensing, authentication and quality certification functions. If Consumer Reports was pithecanthropus in this evolutionary schema, and Angie’s List is homo erectus, then the future lies with full-blown networked civil societies, organized on a voluntary basis, providing a context within which secure commercial relationships and other forms of cooperation can take place. The future of this model has been described variously as neo-Venetianism or phyles (fictionally in Stephenson’s The Diamond Age and non-fictionally in de Ugarte’s work), the Darknet in Suarez’s Freedom, and “economies as a social software service” by John Robb.
In short, networked activism offers to do to the state and the large corporation what the file-sharing movement has only begun to do to the record industry, and what Wikileaks has barely even begun to do to the U.S. national security community.
Papers by Kevin Carson
The implosion of capital outlays associated with the desktop revolution, and the virtual disappearance of transaction costs of coordinating action associated with the network revolution, have (as Tom Coates has said) eliminated the gap between what can be produced within large hierarchical organizations and what can be produced at home in a wide range of industries: software, publishing, music, education, and journalism among them.
The practical significance of this, which I develop in this book, is that many of the functions of government can be included in that list. The central theme of this book is the potential for networked organization to constrain the exercise of power by large, hierarchical institutions in a way that once required the countervailing power of other large, hierarchical institutions.
Traditionally, the power of the large corporation was explained by the large amounts of capital required for manufacturing, broadcasting or publishing. Such large amounts of capital meant that only the very rich, or a very large aggregation of rich people, could afford the outlays to undertake production, and that these people had to hire wage laborers to actually work the machinery for them. Such outlays also required a large, hierarchical, bureaucratic institution to administer the plant and equipment. And these large institutions, in turn, required other large institutions like regulatory agencies, big establishment unions, and the big establishment media, to act as watchdogs.
Unfortunately, despite Galbraith’s theory of countervailing power, in practice government agencies, corporations and media outlets tended to cluster together in complexes of allied institutions in which the ostensible regulators and regulated were actually on the same side. Rather than the liberal “interest group pluralism” model implicit in Galbraith’s analysis, what we actually had was an interlocking Power Elite of the sort described by Mill and Domhoff. The large size and small number of institutional actors, and the enormous entry barriers erected against ordinary people attempting to compete with them, made such a clustering of interests based on shared bureacuratic culture inevitable.
The desktop and digital revolution, the network revolution, and the forms of stigmergic organization that they make possible, together destroy the material basis for the old mass production/bureaucratic/broadcast model described above. Instead — just as, in my previous book, I described the increasing ability of micromanufacturers with a few thousand dollars in capital to undertake forms of production previously requiring million-dollar factories — individually affordable capital goods for information production and network organization are leading to what John Robb calls “individual superempowerment.” The individual increasingly has at her disposal the means of taking on large, powerful bureaucratic institutions as an equal.
Networked consumer, environmental and labor activism, with its ability to subject corporate malefactors to boycotts or tort actions, and to expose them to humiliating scrutiny, offers the potential to control and punish bad corporate behavior at least as well as did the regulatory state or the traditional press, and — insofar as they are not prone to the same sorts of cross-institutional collusion — to do an even better job of it.
This includes “culture jamming” of the sort employed by the McLibel defendants and by Frank Kernaghan against Kathie Lee Gifford. It includes labor-led boycotts and information campaigns based on “open mouth sabotage” like those of the Imolakee Workers and the Wal-Mart Workers Association, and a whole host of online “employernamesucks.com” websites. It includes targeted campaigns to embarrass such corporate malefactors in the eyes of their suppliers, outlets, major stakeholders, and labor and consumer interest organizations. It includes networked activism through umbrella movements of labor, consumer and social justice organizations linked together for ad hoc single issue campaigns against a particular corporate criminal. It includes efforts like Wikileaks to promote whistleblowing and provide secure platforms for circulating embarrassing information about corporate misbehavior. It incorporates a large element of what John Keane calls “monitory democracy.”
Networked organization offers, as well, to supplant the regulatory state’s old licensing, authentication and quality certification functions. If Consumer Reports was pithecanthropus in this evolutionary schema, and Angie’s List is homo erectus, then the future lies with full-blown networked civil societies, organized on a voluntary basis, providing a context within which secure commercial relationships and other forms of cooperation can take place. The future of this model has been described variously as neo-Venetianism or phyles (fictionally in Stephenson’s The Diamond Age and non-fictionally in de Ugarte’s work), the Darknet in Suarez’s Freedom, and “economies as a social software service” by John Robb.
In short, networked activism offers to do to the state and the large corporation what the file-sharing movement has only begun to do to the record industry, and what Wikileaks has barely even begun to do to the U.S. national security community.