How to deal with violent action is a fundamental concept for anarchists, both in philosophical and practical terms. The principle of non-aggression is the key axiom on which the anarchist paradigm builds upon. And one of its most important applications is the anarchist approach to the problem of revolution.

Contrary to popular belief, advocates of violent revolution have historically been a minority within the anarchist movement. Although it could be argued, that in a narrowly logical sense, violence against the state would be justified philosophically by the anarchist as a direct application of the principle of non-aggression (the state is by definition the institutionalization of aggressive violence against the people), anarchists are, in their great majority, opposed to the idea of violent revolution.

The most obvious examples are anarcho-pacifists, with towering, historical intellectual figures like Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy prominently among them. But take, for example, what other anarchists not considered to be pacifists per se, have to say about the issue:

David D. Friedman argues in The Machinery of Freedom that “[c]ivil disorder leads to more government, not less. It may topple one government, but it creates a situation in which people desire another and stronger. Hitler’s regime followed the chaos of the Weimar years. Russian communism is a second example, a lesson for which the anarchists of Kronstadt paid dear. Napoleon is a third.”

In The Market for Liberty, Linda and Morris Tannehill argue that “[n]ot only is violent revolutionary action destructive, it actually strengthens the government by giving it a ‘common enemy’ to unite the people against. Violence against the government by a minority always gives the politicians an excuse to increase repressive measures in the name of ‘protecting the people.’ In fact, the general populace usually join the politicians’ cry for ‘law and order.’”

The Tannehills fear the tendency of revolutionary leaders to seize power: “…revolution is a very questionable way to arrive at a society without rulers, since a successful revolution must have leaders. To be successful, revolutionary action must be coordinated. To be coordinated, it must have someone in charge. And, once the revolution has succeeded, the ‘Someone in Charge’ (or one of his lieutenants, or even one of his enemies) takes over the new power structure so conveniently built up by the revolution. He may just want to ‘get things going right,’ but he ends up being another ruler. Something like this happened to the American Revolution, and look at us today.”

Libertarian and anarcho-capitalist professor Bryan Caplan argues that “when terrorism succeeds in destroying an existing government, it merely creates a power vacuum without fundamentally changing anyone’s mind about the nature of power. The predictable result is that a new state, worse than its predecessor, will swiftly appear to fill the void.”

The approach to anarchist revolution that I personally feel most identified with is that proposed by the mutualist branch of anarchism, or at least the version that Kevin Carson puts forward:

Mutualism is not “reformist,” as that term is used pejoratively by more militant anarchists. Nor is it necessarily pacifistic, although many mutualists are indeed pacifists. The proper definition of reformism should hinge, not on the means we use to build a new society or on the speed with which we move, but on the nature of our final goal. A person who is satisfied with a kinder, gentler version of capitalism or statism, that is still recognizable as state capitalism, is a reformist. A person who seeks to eliminate state capitalism and replace it with something entirely different, no matter how gradually, is not a reformist.

“Peaceful action” simply means not deliberately provoking the state to repression, but rather doing whatever is possible (in the words of the Wobbly slogan) to “build the structure of the new society within the shell of the old” before we try to break the shell. There is nothing wrong with resisting the state if it tries, through repression, to reverse our progress in building the institutions of the new society. But revolutionary action should meet two criteria: 1) it should have strong popular support; and 2) it should not take place until we have reached the point where peaceful construction of the new society has reached its limits within existing society.

As I write this post, a bloody wave of rebellions against tyrants is sweeping the Middle East, Lybia being the latest and most violent case so far.

Having immersed myself in the anarchist worldview during the last few weeks of this introductory course at C4SS, I can’t help seeing the conflict in Lybia as tragically doomed. Gadhafi’s murderous response to the insurrection was the perfect excuse for Western dogs of war to intervene. If the rebels manage to oust Gadhafi under these circumstances, they will have, at best, to be as responsive to the demands of their imperial benefactors as to those of their own people. At worst, the “democratic transition” process will be totally hijacked by the powers that be, and a new, yet western-friendly puppet-tyrant will be installed. All that besides the civilian deaths that will engross the massive “collateral damage” caused by the US-led “pro-democracy” military adventures in the region.

Despite the obvious ethical and strategic disaster that violent revolution can bring about, I am sure that defensive violence is perfectly justified, and I am careful not to discard any argument for violence without previously making sure I understand if it is based on a defensive stance.

I guess anyone who realizes that state capitalism is inherently violent towards humanity struggles with this issue at some point. In this regard, although I don’t share their views, I pay attention to what primitive anarchists such as Derrick Jensen say about violence, and I think I understand at a very fundamental level where their anger comes from. If anything, listening to them assures me of the crucial importance of advocating the non-aggression principle and aligning my whole life with it. Aggression is bound to provoke violence sooner rather than later, it is plainly and simply inevitable.

I give credit to people like Jensen for being aware of the basic truth that we have become dependent creatures of a system that is inherently aggressive towards the environment, and that sustains itself on perpetuating a state of war among us.

At some point, any of us might find ourselves losing a family member due to imperialist “collateral damage”, seeing our communities deprived of drinking water due to industrial poisoning, or being physically prosecuted for discussing and promoting ideas that undermine the “legitimacy of the state.”

If that time comes, all we might have left is to resist through violent means. We might have to kill and be ready to die for what we stand for.

And paradoxically, the realization of that basic fact strikes me as a necessary condition for being able to claim that one is truly alive.

In his epic essay “War is the Health of the State”, Randolph Bourne identifies the gregarious impulse (“the tendency to imitate, to conform, to coalesce together, [which] is most powerful when the herd believes itself threatened with attack”) and parent regression (“There is… in the feeling toward the State a large element of pure filial mysticism… the desire for protection, sends one’s desire back to the father and mother, with whom is associated the earliest feelings of protection”), as two basic instincts that the state exploits to strengthen its grip on people’s minds. And war as the primary tool the state uses to exacerbate those instincts.

The pervasiveness of consumerism in modern societies is often blamed on free markets, due to the brainwashing that corporate monsters effect through advertising campaigns. But consumerism is firmly rooted in the gregarious impulse, one of the two enablers of what Bourne calls “the health of the state.” And the market anarchist would tell us that this is not a coincidence.

First, the market anarchist would point out that the capacity to brainwash a large amount of consumers is a direct function of advertising budget size, which itself depends on firm size. And today’s multi-national corporate behemoths would simply be economically inviable in a genuinely free market — that is, in an economy where the state doesn’t foster monster-size corporate growth through subsidized transport and communications infrastructure, patents, cartelization of costs and incorporation laws. The same could be said about the size and power of our modern media conglomerates, which contribute to turning us into conformist cattle at least as much through their editorial content than through the advertisers they serve.

The state participates in the parade with its own propaganda campaign, selling its image as the great moderator of consumerism (the parent-regression technique in action) through its regulations — written hand in hand with corporate lobbyists, and passed/executed by politicians whose careers depend as much on advertising campaigns as our attachment to useless corporate-produced trifles.

If daily life in modern consumption societies feels like a struggle for survival in a fiercely aggressive environment, where competition among firms, co-workers and status-seeking consumers feels pretty much like war, it is the permeation of state-influence and intervention in all areas of our lives what we have to blame, not the supposedly chaotic influence of “free markets”.

Collectivist systems, by definition, are sustained by gregarious impulse on steroids and therefore engender frenetic, wasteful status-seeking behavior.

In the West, it fuels mindless consumerism and destructive competition for governmental connections and privilege. In the more soviet-like regimes of the world, it bolsters only the latter.

Which doesn’t mean that Kim Jong-il’s obsession with hollywood movies, or the penchant of Chavista ministers for Louis Vuitton ties, makes any of them inconsistent.

***

In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky, perhaps the most famous anarchist alive, made a statement that would make his market anarchist cousins cringe:

“Let’s move towards a kind of society where April 15 [the day on which individual income tax returns are due to the federal government in the US] is a day of celebration.”

“The reason we cringe,” the market anarchists would, in unison, say, “is because Mr. Chomsky, despite being a linguist, fails to see the contradiction in asking someone to enjoy being forced to do something. The dictionary says taxes are compulsory contributions to state revenue, which means the state forces people to pay them. People will never enjoy being taxed, because people don’t enjoy being robbed of the fruits of their labor. Even a child can understand that.”

But the contradiction that market anarchists see in Chomsky’s statement has more to do with economics than language.

Despite his own research systematically showing that the state has been the chief enabler of concentration of private power throughout history, Chomsky is of the view that before doing away with it, we the people ought to somehow reform the state to make it truly further our interests, and thus use its power as a bulwark against that of the corporate elite.

But the market anarchist is adamant on the impossibility of reforming the state due to its fundamental incentive structure, of which taxes are a crucial element. The members of any organization able to forcibly extract resources from the people whose interests it is supposed to serve, have a strong incentive to use those resources for their own benefit, for the people simply cannot choose to stop giving their resources to them. Furthermore, democracy doesn’t quite solve the problem: People can only vote their representatives out of office at multi-year intervals, and only if they convince 51% of their neighbors to do likewise.

The possibility of sharing the resources forcibly extracted from the people with large private corporations, gives politicians the capacity to offer them the equivalent of a captive customer base in exchange for campaign contributions, revolving doors, and all the goodies involved in the perverse symbiosis that Chomsky has so rightly denounced over the years.

The economic argument against taxation put forward by market anarchists is also squarely at odds with that held by most mainstream economists, according to which taxes are a necessary evil that people agree to submit themselves to in order to overcome the free-rider problem inherent in the provision of public goods. A fundamental tenet of the market anarchist movement is their massive body of research in support of the view that the free-rider problem can either be overcome by voluntary, rather than coercive, collective action; or that the problems for competitive private provision of public goods arise themselves from governmental intervention, rather than market failure.

But the relationship of market anarchists to the problem of taxation is somewhat more complicated than simply pushing unconditionally for their elimination under any circumstance. Market anarchists don’t buy the argument behind a reduction of taxes à la Dubbya and Neocon company. If they would have had to fund their imperialist wars of aggression and corporate welfare with taxes instead of debt, the immediate financial pain would perhaps have spurred people into a popular revolt against the regime. Or at least they would have been much less easily persuaded by WMD baloney.

Or, to use an example from a regime that supposedly is at the opposite extreme of the ideological spectrum, market anarchists would perhaps prefer the Venezuelan state to be funded by run-of-the-mill tax revenue rather than by the profits from its oil monopoly. That perhaps would give people a stronger incentive to demand minimal transparency and accountability from Hugo Chavez’s regime, who currently relies on not one, but ten para-fiscal funds to spend as much as it pleases, on whatever it pleases, in favor of whomever it pleases – without reporting absolutely anything to anyone.

Go back a bit on Venezuelan contemporary history though, and you will find more than one market anarchist, Kevin Carson prominently among them, that despite being acutely aware of the evils of transportation subsidies, would have opposed with equal vehemency the IMF-sponsored, shock-treatment elimination of fuel price controls that were part of Carlos Andrés Pérez’s late 80′s fiscal reform package, which sparked the Caracazo and legitimized Chavez’s attempt to overthrow him. In Carson’s own words:

The strategic priorities of principled libertarians should be just the opposite: first to dismantle the fundamental, structural forms of state intervention, whose primary effect is to enable exploitation, and only then to dismantle the secondary, ameliorative forms of intervention that serve to make life bearable for the average person living under a system of state-enabled exploitation. As blogger Jim Henley put it, remove the shackles before the crutches.

In this sense, a proposal to distribute oil revenue among the Venezuelan poor in a more transparent and efficient way, through a conditional cash transfer scheme similar to Brazil’s Bolsa Familia, would probably resonate with the market anarchyst as a necessary palliative, at least until the fundamental forms of state intervention that are the root causes of poverty are dismantled.

***

Any economics textbook will tell you that monopolies are bad things. They rip off customers, charging high prices for sub-optimal quality goods. They exploit workers, paying them less than their labor would truly be worth in a competitive market.

But most textbooks will also tell you that monopolies or oligopolies are sometimes inevitable: That there are industries where somehow, they emerge as the result of the competitive dynamics in a free market. And the only way to correct this situation, the textbook version goes, is to have government regulate these “natural monopolies” on behalf of customers and workers.

On the other hand, the market anarchist sees monopolies and oligopolies as creatures that cannot survive without government intervention. They encourage us to look a bit more carefully into what we usually assume are “free markets,” and discover the subtle, yet powerful forms of government intervention that pervade modern societies, and that systematically rig the competitive game in favor of large, established firms within each industry.

It is usually assumed that governments should subsidize the construction of roads, highways, and other forms of transportation infrastructure as an indispensable pre-requisite for “economic development.” But the anarchist perspective on this issue turns the argument on its head. Kevin Carson points out that by making distribution costs artificially low, transport subsidies allow incumbent firms to grow in size far beyond the point where economies of scale would be offset by increased distribution costs in the absence of these subsidies.

So while market anarchists coincide with the mainstream left in denouncing the WalMartization of society, they radically differ in the prescribed remedy for it: eliminating transport subsidies, instead of subsidizing local shops, is the truly sustainable way to solve the problem.

Furthermore, market anarchists have put lots of effort in researching the particular forms of organizational inefficiency and irrationality that arise in large organizations, and the diseconomies of scale they create. In this regard they contradict both neoclassical and Austrian economists like Ludwig von Mises, who despite being a prominent attacker of the soviet organizational nightmare, denied the existence of these very same problems in the capitalist mega-corporation; and go much farther in their analysis of the problem than other Austrians like Murray Rothbard, who limited his criticism to the problems of internal transfer pricing in large firms.

The state’s intervention then is what allows for the growth of a corporate culture that closely resembles that of the state’s own bureaucracy. And that is just natural when understood through the paradigm of the market anarchist, who sees government as the quintessential form of monopoly.

Ultimately, the symbiotic relationship between corporate behemoths and the state creates a perverse dynamic of economic growth that necessitates imperialist wars in order to sustain itself. Corporations benefit as providers of military equipment, from the expansion of their system of privilege to foreign markets, and the disposal of over-accumulated capital. The state benefits by appeasing its electorate with the mitigation of chronic unemployment, and by institutionalizing an atmosphere of fear among citizens that allows it to enormously expand its powers – at their expense.

Next time you hear a talking head say that by funding transportation infrastructure the state promotes “economic development,” remember that according to the market anarchist perspective, it might as well be subsidizing apocalypse.

***

My very first assignment in the Introduction to Anarchism course at C4SS that I am taking is a reflection on the concept of aggression.

For me, aggression is the initiation of violent action against a person or their property. Initiating a fist fight, robbery, fraud, and wars of conquest are all obvious forms of aggression, and they are obviously different from other forms of undesirable influence on others. I might be annoyed by my neighbor’s playing loud music at night, disgusted by the bad table manners of a dinner companion, or dismayed by someone else’s addiction to porn. But I wouldn’t say any of these are aggressive actions against me. This is how I have always seen the issue, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that it matches the anarchist stance.

What constitutes an aggression is influenced by culture. Let’s suppose that the members of a hypothetical nation, for religious reasons, unanimously consider adultery as an aggression, and therefore condone anyone’s violent action against his/her adulterer spouse.

This practice would be clearly unacceptable from an anarchist perspective. Moreover, the anarchist would urge us to take a closer look at that nation and determine whether aggression against adultery is truly embraced unanimously by its citizens, or is it a case of a group of them controlling the state and therefore aggressively imposing it on the rest.

Furthermore, an anarchist would say that despite being a morally unacceptable practice, the intervention of a foreign state in such a nation with the stated objective of stopping the practice is bound to cause more problems than it can solve. In particular, the venture can easily be politically co-opted by those who control the state of the invading nation, turning it into an aggressive adventure of conquest bound to benefit them at the expense of the citizens of both the invaded and the invading nation. Faced with an extreme case, like the Nazi holocaust during World War II, an anarchist might have found herself supporting the allied invasion of Hitler by purely pragmatic reasons: in a world where states have overwhelming military power, they might be the only entities that can stop the horrendous massacres perpetrated by any of them. But even then, the anarchist would tend to be particularly vigilant of the invading states’ use of the situation for less noble political ends.

There is an even more fundamental way in which the concept of aggression is related to a community’s culture in which anarchists are particularly interested – the propaganda machines that states use to shape the way in which people perceive certain aggressive actions as non-aggressive. The current US-led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan was aggressively publicized by the invaders as a legitimate defense against an imminent wave of terrorist attacks to be sponsored by the states of the invaded nations – a message that the public was particularly receptive to due to the shock produced by the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York city.

Crony capitalists all over the world work hand in hand with politicians to promote the neo-liberal idea of “free markets”, when in reality what they impose is an aggressive system of subsidies, licenses, patents and other forms of statist privilege that concentrates economic power in a few firms in each industry at the expense of workers, consumers and tax-payers. For a particularly poignant example that illustrates the state’s use of propaganda to hide its aggressive imperial and crony-capitalist policies simultaneously, see this recent piece by Glenn Greenwald on the American role in the ongoing political crisis in Egypt.

Hat tip: AmericanGoy

As the deficit grows so does the national debt, which is currently more than $13.3 trillion, according to official figures.

But the situation is actually much, much worse, according to Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff.

“Forget the official debt,” he tells Aaron in this clip. The “real” deficit – including non-budgetary items like unfunded liabilities of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the defense budget – is actually $202 trillion, the professor and author calculates; or 15 times the “official” numbers.

“Congress has engaged in Enron accounting,” says Kotlikoff, who recently penned an op-ed for Bloomberg entitled: The U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don’t Even Know It.

Yet, the debt market continues to have an insatiable appetite for U.S. Treasuries; heading into Monday’s session, the yield on the 30-year Treasury bond (which moves in opposition to its price) was at its lowest level since April 2009.

Continue reading here.

Hat tip: G. Edward Griffin’s Unfiltered News.

Leaving aside the crucial Brave New World argument, Balog nevertheless touches upon an issue that I find is also of critical importance for the discussion of the ethical desirability of transhuman immortality:

Aside from these issues about the desirability of immortality there is a larger perspective from which the very desire for immortality is questionable – irrespective of whether eternal life would be a good thing. The idea can be found in virtually all the religious traditions of the world including the most ancient, shamanic traditions; it is, to put it very succinctly, that striving itself is the source of suffering. The mentality, by now utterly dominant in the developed parts of the world, of seeking control and power in every sphere, of not putting up with any disruptions in the smooth routines of our lives (“Elevator doesn’t work? Unacceptable!”) is itself the problem. We are terrified of our vulnerability and impermanence and try to overcome it by increasing our power and efficiency. But in doing so, we lose connection to a deeper sense of ourselves. Our world, instead of a living presence, becomes an object to manipulate. You can get around if you are carried in a litter, or drive a car or plane but you are not going to make contact with the ground. It takes the fun out of things when you look at them merely instrumentally as we often do. The same thing applies to our own minds. If you give up striving, say these traditions, you’ll finally get to know yourself. Of course, the point is not to stop doing anything and drop dead. There is a middle way I suppose that steers between the extremes of asceticism and high-powered striving. So, yes, I’d like to live forever. But I shouldn’t allow my life to be driven by this wish.

“If you give up striving, say these traditions, you’ll finally get to know yourself.”

That’s the very key insight I gained during my Year of Nothing. And if that’s any guide, my two cents to these discussion would be that the insight is impossible to grasp from just reflecting upon the concept of non-striving. You have to live the process somehow, truly disconnect from striving, if not for a whole year as I did, for long enough for you to arrive at a spontaneous aha! moment that is perhaps impossible to achieve otherwise.

Hat tip: David Pearce.

The foundation’s recently announced purchase of 500,000 Monsanto shares for 23.1 million USD might dismay but not surprise anyone who has a clue about the eugenicist agenda that drives the power-hungry globalists behind the Allaince for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). Hopefully, now that the links are becoming ever so blatant, more people will wake up to the reality of this mess.

Human gene patenting works on the logic that if a patent applicant has “isolated and purified” genetic material, it constitutes an invention on their part – even if the strand is identical to the DNA sequence found in nature. Proponents of gene patenting (i.e. generally, the companies or their patent lawyers) argue that patent protection is essential to retaining strong investment in genetic research, which speeds up progress in the field. It’s true that patents are important to the biomedical industry’s ability to attract capital – Myriad stock took a nose dive after the Supreme Count shot down their BRCA patents. But the claim that a world without gene patents would stifle genetic research (or even make it unprofitable) seems overstated at best, and disingenuous at worst.

For years, the logic of purification and isolation has held up legally as a justification for human gene patenting – that’s what made the Myriad case such a landmark decision. We recently interviewed Dr. David Koepsell, both a J.D. and a Ph.D. in Philosophy, about the fallout from Myriad, the ethics of gene patenting, and intellectual property. Koepsell is an author and educator whose work centers on how ethics and public policy are shaped in emerging science and technology. His book Who Owns You? is currently being adapted into a documentary film, including interviews with experts like James Watson and Tim Hubbard. Check out the preview:

Who Owns You? – A Documentary – Trailer from Taylor Roesch on Vimeo.

Continue reading Halley’s article here>.