En cualquier movimiento político decidido a cambiar radicalmente la sociedad, siempre surge un debate sobre cuál es la mejor manera de alcanzar esos objetivos. ¿Deberíamos organizarnos en sindicatos hacia una huelga general? ¿Deberíamos retirarnos del sistema imperante y vivir de recursos recuperados, robados y obtenidos mediante estafas, al estilo de la propaganda clásica de CrimethInc? ¿Deberíamos crear cooperativas y colectivos siguiendo el espíritu del comunismo de riesgo?

¿Deberíamos seguir la vía de la propaganda del hecho y empezar a volar edificios gubernamentales y asesinar políticos? ¿Qué tal una combinación de todo lo anterior?

Pues bien, el agorismo parece ser precisamente esa combinación. Al combinar elementos del ilegalismo, la teoría del doble poder, la secesión económica, el sindicalismo y el anticapitalismo de libre mercado (pero sin muchos de los extremos de la propaganda de los hechos), el agorismo propone una estrategia que consiste en utilizar la contraeconomía como vía para alcanzar una sociedad anarquista. Pero ¿Qué es la contraeconomía?

Samuel Edward Konkin III, fundador del agorismo, define la contraeconomía en su obra Contraeconomía: qué es, cómo funciona:

La contraeconomía es la suma de todas las acciones humanas no agresivas que están prohibidas por el Estado. La contraeconomía es el estudio de la contraeconomía y sus prácticas. La contraeconomía incluye el libre mercado, el mercado negro, la “economía sumergida”, todos los actos de desobediencia civil y social, todos los actos de asociación prohibida (sexual, racial, interreligiosa) y cualquier otra cosa que el Estado, en cualquier lugar o momento, decida prohibir, controlar, regular, gravar o someter a aranceles. La contraeconomía excluye toda acción aprobada por el Estado (el “Mercado Blanco”) y el Mercado Rojo (la violencia y el robo no aprobados por el Estado).

Esta es la definición básica con la que han trabajado los agoristas desde entonces y, por lo tanto, el agorismo siempre ha estado vinculado a los mercados negros y grises, excluyendo los mercados blancos, rojos y rosas (la violencia y el robo aprobados o no por el Estado). ¿O acaso no es así? Porque, en realidad, parece que el “agorismo de mercado blanco” es mucho más común y menos contradictorio de lo que uno pensaría.

Por citar una vez más a Konkin:

A medida que más personas rechazan las mistificaciones del Estado (tales como el nacionalismo, la pseudoeconomía, las amenazas falsas y las promesas políticas incumplidas ) la contraeconomía crece tanto vertical como horizontalmente. Horizontalmente, involucra cada vez a más personas que orientan cada vez más sus actividades hacia lo contraeconómico; verticalmente, significa que surgen nuevas estructuras (empresas y servicios) creadas específicamente para servir a la contraeconomía (vías de comunicación seguras, árbitros, seguros para actividades específicamente “ilegales”, primeras formas de tecnología de protección e incluso guardias y protectores).

Derrick Broze define con más detalle los conceptos de agorismo horizontal y vertical en su ensayo, acertadamente titulado “Agorismo Vertical y Horizontal”. En dicho ensayo, explica que el agorismo horizontal “está relacionado con la decisión audaz de llevar a cabo acciones que el Estado considera ilegales o inmorales. Al adentrarte en este terreno, te unes a las filas de los contrabandistas, los destiladores clandestinos, los traficantes de cannabis, los jardineros guerrilleros, los cortadores de césped sin licencia, los vendedores ambulantes de comida o los barberos, los traficantes de armas y los criptoanarquistas”. Esto es, en esencia, el agorismo tal y como lo definió Konkin, pero desde entonces se ha convertido en mucho más.

Es en el agorismo vertical donde descubrimos una desviación respecto al rechazo tradicional de los agoristas al mercado blanco. El agorismo vertical se inspira en gran medida en la obra de Karl Hess, como sus experimentos en materia de sostenibilidad a nivel de barrio y sus libros que resumen esas experiencias, “Community Technology” (Tecnología Comunitaria) y “Neighborhood Power” (Poder Vecinal). Como tal, se centra en la sostenibilidad y la autosuficiencia comunitaria y no se limita únicamente a los mercados negros y grises.

Más adelante en su ensayo, Broze continúa explicando que:

“El agorismo vertical incluiría participar y crear redes de intercambio comunitarias, la agricultura urbana, la horticultura doméstica, los mercados de agricultores, apoyar alternativas a la policía y respaldar tecnologías descentralizadas entre iguales. Aunque estas medidas verticales podrían implicar potencialmente el uso de la moneda del Estado (y, por lo tanto, no serían completamente contraeconómicas), siguen siendo significativas para cuestionar la dependencia del Estado y de las clases empresariales.”

Ahora bien, me atrevo a discrepar de Broze en que estas acciones no sean contraeconómicas simplemente porque no utilicen los mercados negros y grises, tal y como afirma anteriormente en su ensayo.

Por supuesto, aclara que, aunque no sean contraeconómicas, “las acciones verticales son extremadamente valiosas y necesarias”. Pero si estas tácticas desafían directamente el poder del Estado y de las grandes empresas, ¿cómo es posible que no sean contraeconómicas?

Entonces, ¿qué es el “agorismo del mercado blanco”?

Pues bien, incluye muchas de las cosas que Broze ya enumeró al describir el agorismo vertical: redes de intercambio comunitarias, agricultura urbana, huertos domésticos, mercados de agricultores, alternativas a la policía y tecnologías descentralizadas entre pares (P2P). Pero es mucho más que eso.

Las criptomonedas son, en gran medida, una iniciativa del mercado blanco y, sin embargo, se defienden como un ejemplo paradigmático de agorismo. El propio Konkin elogia a los Trabajadores Industriales del Mundo como un ejemplo perfecto de sindicato agorista y, sin embargo, están registrados legalmente ante el Estado y, en la mayoría de los casos, se organizan dentro del marco legal. Las redes sociales descentralizadas como Minds y Steemit, las fuentes de energía renovable descentralizadas, el biohacking, la permacultura, los espacios para hackers y creadores, los programas comunitarios de intercambio, los modelos alternativos de intercambio incluidas las economías del regalo, los sistemas de intercambio local (LETS), la banca mutualista, los vales de trabajo y los metales preciosos, las medicinas alternativas y complementarias, la desescolarización y la educación en el hogar, Tor, las tiendas gratuitas, los medios de comunicación alternativos y las empresas que son propiedad de los trabajadores son todos ejemplos de agorismo de mercado blanco.

Y sí, algunas formas de agorismo del mercado blanco pueden solaparse con el agorismo del mercado gris y pueden contribuir a facilitar el agorismo del mercado negro. Al fin y al cabo, la contraeconomía debe trabajar unida para derrocar el control del Estado y de las grandes empresas. De hecho, deberíamos impulsar muchas de estas iniciativas del mercado blanco hacia acciones propias del mercado gris y negro cuando sea oportuno, como animar a esas iniciativas a operar sin licencia o a no declarar todos los ingresos obtenidos al Estado, pero no deberíamos excluir estas acciones de la contraeconomía cuando no lo hagan.

La contraeconomía consiste en ir en contra de las estructuras de poder existentes. Así, en un sistema económico de jefes y esclavitud salarial, las empresas gestionadas por los trabajadores y los sindicatos democráticos de base son contraeconómicos. En un sistema alimentario monopolizado en gran medida por un puñado de corporaciones que utilizan prácticas nocivas asociadas a la ganadería intensiva y la agricultura industrial, cultivar tus propios alimentos o comprarlos a agricultores locales es contraeconómico. En un panorama mediático dominado en gran medida por un puñado de corporaciones de noticias, los medios independientes son contraeconómicos. En un panorama tecnológico dominado por unas pocas empresas tecnológicas, la tecnología libre y de código abierto es contraeconómica.

El mero hecho de que no se trate del mercado gris o negro no significa que no sea contraeconómico y, desde luego, no significa que no sea agorista. Ya es hora de que aceptemos abiertamente y debatamos el potencial que tiene el agorismo del mercado blanco para contribuir a nuestra causa.

Si te ha gustado este articulo y quieres apoyar a esta comunidad, puedes donar a través de este link: https://c4ss.org/apoyo

It’s hard to convey the actual experience of listening to a Larken Rose podcast, or the sheer level of stupidity, because so much of its unique quality lies in the delivery. His main shtick is pure Rush Limbaugh. First, voice dripping with contempt, he paraphrases the statements of an imaginary leftist interlocutor (one who, of course, “doesn’t understand economics”), in a whiny baby voice. He then responds with an authoritative statement of what passes for “economics” in his mind: i.e., the sort of mediocre and predictable talking points usually found in a Thomas Sowell column.

He starts out with the classic right-wing cliche “that’s not capitalism, it’s corporatism!” (or “crony capitalism”):

If you don’t appreciate capitalism, you have no idea what capitalism is. . . .

Most of the people who bash capitalism and complain about capitalism point to the basically corporatism of giant companies usually using the violence of the state to get preferential treatment and enrich themselves and steal resources from other countries and stuff like that. And that, especially in the mainstream media…, is what gets labeled capitalism. If you’re against that, cool, me too — because of the coercion involved with government violence that gives them their benefits.

He then proceeds, without a pause, to claim that we have “capitalism” to thank for virtually all of the technologically advanced goods we own.

You’re listening to me because capitalism exists. That screen in front of you exists only because capitalism exists. The wires in between exist only because capitalism exists. The electricity running along those wires, everything involved, everything in this room, this building.

This, despite the fact that being connected with the state is central to the profit model of the corporations that produced all those things. Miniaturized electronics, cybernetics, and networked communications infrastructure were developed almost entirely through state-funded R&D, especially military R&D, and are heavily reliant on patent protection — in other words, what Rose calls “crony capitalism” if the term means anything at all. But they’re also examples of the benefits of capitalism. Schroedinger’s Capitalism, I guess. Apparently the man is incapable of making two consecutive statements that don’t directly contradict each other.

What Rose said about the origin of electronic technology — that it exists because of a “capitalism” that didn’t involve the state — simply could not have come from someone who knows anything at all about the actual history of the industry.  I’m sorry, but it’s not even a debatable point.  The state’s actual role in the development of the tech industry was ably described by David Noble, in America by Design. The development of cybernetics, miniaturized electronics, and what became the backbone of the Internet, all got their start from Defense Department R&D.

But in fairness to Rose, this logic fail is one he shares with virtually all right-libertarian polemicists. These people will deny that businesses whose profits result from state subsidies, protections, or artificial property rights exemplify “real capitalism” — and then turn around and celebrate as an “accomplishment of capitalism” a product like the iPhone, created by a corporation whose entire profit model depends on intellectual property, government subsidies, and neoliberal foreign policy.

Rose goes on to restate an entire mishmash of right-libertarian talking points about the indispensable role of the capitalist. The reason why intricate technology, or a level of existence above that of the cave man, is able to exist, he says, is

as much as people want to point to some [begin contemptuous baby voice] evil multi-billion dollar corporation and put them in a movie as the bad guy who’s polluting the environment and being evil and greedy [end contemptuous baby voice], the actual concept is somebody can own stuff that you don’t own so it’s not equal they can own stuff that you don’t have and they can use that stuff to make other stuff for example a computer or a computer monitor or the camera I’m talking into. How the hell do you think anybody is ever going to make that or one little chip in any of these things without a big freaking factory that makes computer chips?

 * * *

Think of the things you wouldn’t have unless somebody with way more money and capital than you decided to create something….

The moment you have the equipment to make a vacuum tube you’re an evil oppressor cuz [begin contemptuous baby voice] you’re owning the means of production why don’t you stop oppressing the people and give it back to the people [end contemptuous baby voice]. The number of people who are just spoiled out of their gourd compared to most of human history and have no understanding of what it is that enabled that is just amazing basically everybody who votes Democrat and 99% of the people who vote Republican they don’t get how these things came into into being. They came into being because people with a crap ton of money said if we invest a crap ton of money into inventing and building factories and paying people to design research and development and all that we can probably make a thing that we can then sell a whole bunch of to all those people with not tons of money but some money….

And the thing that people forget while they’re [begin contemptuous baby voice] hating the rich [end contemptuous baby voice], you are rich because other people are richer. You are rich because other people are way richer than you…. If there weren’t people way richer than you you wouldn’t have a laptop you wouldn’t be looking at the screen you’re looking at you wouldn’t have the electricity that is making this possible because other people with more money and more capital invested it to try to make things they could sell to people with less money and less capital and that made you richer because now you have those things….

Of course, all of the things Rose celebrates came into being because of investments from people with a “crap ton of money” in the same sense that everything people consumed in the USSR came into being because of state-owned industry and Gosplan.

That “big freaking factory,” and every single machine or material input in it, is 100% the product of human labor operating on the free gifts of nature — as was every machine or good produced under the slave economy, feudalism, or Soviet “communism.” None of them was built by the capitalist, any more than the machinery used by Soviet workers was built by a central planner. None was constructed using bundles of cash brought in by the capitalist, like Lego blocks. Every tool or machine a worker uses was built by other workers. The capitalist’s “investment” is nothing but a set of socially constructed claims on the right to allocate the raw materials and producer goods created by human labor acting on nature. Every class society in history has had a stratum of people who interposed themselves into this intermediary position between different groups of producers, and then called themselves “indispensable.”

He also makes quite a few non sequiturs along the way:

“Well, we’ll have collective ownership.” No we won’t; first of all that always works horribly unless there’s somebody in charge who says “Yeah I have the actual understanding of how to make this.” Second of all if you have ten or a hundred people that own a a company and then do it that’s still capitalism it’s just one hundred instead of one but those one hundred people still have an exclusive right to decide what is done with the thing that makes something.

Rose might be surprised to learn that the people “in charge” in the corporate C-suites don’t “have the actual understanding of how to make this.” They’re in a position to boss around the people who have the actual understanding of how to make this because they have the ear of someone who has money. He would probably also be surprised that virtually every society in history that practiced commons-based or collective ownership, going back to stateless peasants and hunter-gatherers, has had a set of rules governing who had priority of access to scarce resources. The USSR had people with the “exclusive right to decide what is done with the thing that makes something.” I’m pretty sure these things, as such, are not “still capitalism.”

He also drags out this chestnut:

If you buy something it’s because you value the thing more than you valued the money you gave up and if somebody else sells you something they valued your money more than the widget that they sold to you you both got richer through the transaction this is something that in our crappy education system few Americans seem to understand. [Begin contemptuous baby voice] “Oh the rich got rich by stealing from the poor.” [End contemptuous baby voice] No they didn’t — that’s a stupid claim. “You got that Ferrari by stealing it from people who didn’t have Ferraris.” But how the hell did they do that? No, they got the Ferrari by paying people to work at a factory that builds Ferraris, and all those people got a paycheck and made a living and can now go out and buy stuff. This idea that wealth comes from taking it from somebody else is just economically stupid and government constantly pushes this stupidity because they want you to be envious of the people who made it so you could be rich.

In this, he’s typical of the sort of ancap or “voluntaryist” who is incapable of perceiving structural or background violence, and sees any transaction where a gun is not immediately present as “voluntary.” Yes, any economic transaction where a gun is not present is “voluntary” in the sense that both parties prefer the outcome of the transaction, given the available alternatives. The proper question to ask is, who determines those available alternatives. If you buy stamps from the United States Post Office, it’s because you value those stamps more than the money they cost. And the Post Office values your money more than the stamps. Anyone who buys from a monopolist, or from a seller in a position of privilege, prefers the thing purchased to the money they spent. Obviously, absent direct coercion, a monopolist or privileged seller has to set the price low enough that the utility obtained by the purchase is at least slightly greater than the cost — that’s how monopoly pricing works. Even when the buyer does so willingly, the party who is in a position to unilaterally set the range of alternatives and the available supply will be extracting a rent — i.e. taking it from somebody else.

The video could easily have been cut by two-thirds, because he goes through multiple minor variations on the same extended rant — pointing to some high tech thing, challenging people to make that thing for themselves starting from dirt without some rich guy to provide tools and knowhow, and sputtering with rage about the economic illiteracy of people who don’t appreciate the good things rich people have given them, etc.

And of course, his outrage over people’s envy toward their betters, and ingratitude for all the good things they’ve made possible, wouldn’t be complete without the authoritarian “Good times make weak men, weak men make hard times, etc.” trope.

And here we are, weak men make crappy times because a bunch of entitled twits who don’t know where wealth comes from they don’t know what value is they don’t know anything about economics but they’re here bitching about the capitalism that allows them to sit on their ass all day playing video games and they don’t even grasp the fact that you’re literally bitching you’re literally biting the hand that feeds you you’re bitching about the people people who allowed you a ridiculously easy type of existence and pretending that you’re noble and brave because you’re sitting there on your butt bitching about people who actually made this level of prosperity possible.

(I quoted this entire rant unedited without any sanewashing, complete with three or four restatements of the “bitching about people who made your prosperity possible” talking point, just to give you some idea of how much filler is in the podcast.)

This sort of boot polish poisoning is common on the libertarian right, likely attributable to having read Atlas Shrugged as an adolescent. A classic example of the genre can be found in Mises’s letter to Ayn Rand: “You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.” Likewise George Reisman: “innovation is the product of exceptional, dedicated individuals who must overcome the uncomprehending dullness of most of their fellows, and often their hostility as well.”

The truth is that innovation and progress are the creation of collective intellect and cooperative labor. The wealth of the plutocracy comes from enclosing land, enclosing the credit mechanism, enclosing ideas, etc., and then — having interposed themselves between the groups of producers who have actually brought everything into being, and using their position to collect tribute — presenting themselves as benefactors and geniuses. And sycophants like Larken Rose are their accomplices.

Il radicalismo infantile

Maturo è chi ha superato le pulsioni emotive infantili, conosce se stesso e il proprio ambiente tramite l’esperienza personale ed ha sviluppato la capacità di controllare la propria emotività razionalmente. Maturo è chi è uscito dal protettivo mondo onirico dell’infanzia per affrontare la realtà. Le sue reazioni davanti agli altri e davanti ai fatti della vita così come le sue idee acquisiscono senso, diventano riflessive e contemplative. Come si dice, è cresciuto, è diventato adulto.

Una crescita ritardata da un’infanzia viziata, da paure e speranze illusorie instillate o da ostacoli traumatizzanti spingono a rifugiarsi nel mondo sicuro dell’infanzia, in una condizione psicologica che gli psicologi chiamano infantilismo.

Quando vediamo che tutti aspirano istintivamente ad una società in cui ognuno pensa che sarà protetto, capiamo subito che si tratta di un desiderio utopico, con la sua voglia di “abolire” tutto ciò che non si capisce. Il desiderio di essere tutti (i tanti io) “liberi” di fare ciò che si vuole, “liberi” di soddisfare i propri “bisogni”, affonda le radici nella “società” di cui si è parte.

Ciò premesso, davanti all’idea che libertà significa anche proprietà privata, commercio, concorrenza, denaro e salari, molti socialisti e comunisti reagiscono significativamente di pancia.

Ma cosa significa? La proprietà privata garantisce all’individuo il diritto all’indipendenza. Il commercio implica reciprocità e equità (in contrasto con la benevolenza dei genitori). Concorrenza è libertà di servirci da chi ci soddisfa maggiormente. Denaro significa pagare il giusto per ciò che si ottiene. E salario significa essere pagati per ciò che si fa.

In contrasto con queste espressioni di maturità, tutti i collettivisti vorrebbero abolire la proprietà privata perché sono contro il presupposto dell’indipendenza. I comunisti odiano il commercio perché significa proporzionalità tra beneficio e impegno. E odiano il denaro, a cui preferiscono la “distribuzione gratuita”. Odiano la concorrenza perché comporta un confronto tra impegni di diverso valore. E non gli piacciono i salari perché vogliono che ognuno abbia il sostentamento in quanto essere umano, non in proporzione a ciò che produce.

Il motto dei comunisti è: da ognuno secondo le sue capacità, ad ognuno secondo i suoi bisogni. Cos’è questo se non l’aspirazione a vivere sulle spalle dei capaci, che viene dal senso di incapacità infantile? Perché non si vuole che ognuno abbia in proporzione a quanto dà, che è contro l’economia della famiglia dove i genitori soddisfano tutti i bisogni del figlio incapace?

Il comunismo, la separazione totale tra capacità e impegno da un lato e corrispondenti benefici (con il benevolente paternalismo dell’autorità) dall’altro, è la relazione obbligata tra genitori e figli. La vita del figlio incapace dipende unicamente dalla benevolenza e dall’affetto. Il processo di maturazione consiste in un graduale rovesciamento di questa relazione. Una relazione economica razionale tra adulti significa reciprocità, equità, fornitura di servizio per servizio attraverso un processo selettivo che promuove la responsabilità individuale, la competenza e il valore personale.

Il bambino è incapace e irresponsabile. La crescita è semplicemente il superamento di queste incompletezze. Nasce da qui il disprezzo delle menti comuniste per la proprietà, lo scambio, la concorrenza e così via, ovvero per tutte quelle condizioni tramite le quali, o sotto le quali, agisce il calcolo che unisce proporzionalmente e naturalmente beneficio e impegno; è sostanzialmente una reazione profonda contro la responsabilità. Il soggetto non porta a termine il processo di crescita. La repressione genera complessi e nevrosi, blocca e deforma la psiche impedendole di arrivare allo stato adulto.

L’analogia tra infanzia e aspirazioni dei comunisti è evidente. La società diventa la mamma collettiva da cui gli individui traggono sostentamento attraverso la benevolenza. L’autorità dello stato è analoga a quella del padre.

È incredibile l’influenza che il bambino subisce in famiglia, a scuola e dalla chiesa. La nostra società si rivolge con solerzia alla carità e a una presunta benevolenza dello stato paternalistico per alleviare i propri mali.

E che dire dell’antipatia emotiva verso l’individualismo? Per inciso, più i nostri riformatori e rivoluzionari dicono di seguire la “scienza” e più sono evidenti le loro paure e speranze profonde. Questo arresto emotivo della maturità, questo infantilismo, dimostra la sua pericolosità quando, al culmine e a prescindere dalle aspirazioni, ricorre inevitabilmente all’autorità di una società presunta benevola (lo stato). Quali sono le basi psicologiche di questa superstizione universale che è la necessità della macchina dello stato? Perché questa corsa ad eleggere nuovi e migliori papà da cui farsi accudire? La monarchia, la democrazia, il socialismo e tutto il resto cos’altro sono se non dimostrazioni dell’usucapione universale di una “civiltà” bolsa, l’infantilismo di un gregge sfrenato?

Non varrebbe la pena prendere sul serio questo chiacchiericcio economico se non fosse che la diffusa insicurezza economica mondiale spinge le persone verso il ritorno ad un’infanzia di speranze e di sogni. Famiglia, chiesa e scuola contribuiscono a rendere il bambino docile e obbediente. Questi sono gli strumenti con cui le menti immature vengono condizionate e asservite. Sono loro che diffondono quel comunismo che spinge gli uomini a implorare il conforto di quelle mostruosità distruttive che sono dio e lo stato, che hanno le più recenti controparti nella società e nella comunità!

Il comunismo è lo stato infantile della società; la sua maturità è l’individualismo.

Nota aggiuntiva

Non è possibile in questo spazio angusto elaborare e illustrare, ed è questo che espone l’articolo a malintesi e, ovviamente, a critiche. Anche senza queste difficoltà, però, i fattori e i problemi sono talmente tanti da riempire tutto lo spazio disponibile e io credo che la redazione non sia disposta ad accettarlo. Mi limiterò pertanto ad aggiungere questa nota.

Io penso che il comunismo, autoritario o libero, distrugga intrinsecamente la responsabilità individuale. Il comunismo autoritario, del tipo russo, nega deliberatamente all’individuo quell’attività indipendente (fonte unica di responsabilità vera) che permette di cogliere i frutti delle proprie azioni, rendendolo responsabile davanti ai voleri, arbitrari e fallibili, della burocrazia.

Il comunismo cosiddetto libero divorzia impegno e beneficio a livello dell’individuo, teme che la responsabilità si disperda indebolendosi nel suo complesso. Il concetto di responsabilità assume così una sfumatura morale, religiosa che l’individuo dà per scontata. In questo senso, ricorda il concetto di obbligo morale.

In un’economia funzionale, qualunque tentativo di evitare responsabilità individuali (distinte dalle responsabilità di gruppo) non può che portare all’autoritarismo. Io credo che l’esperienza di quasi tutti i tentativi di istituire comunità di tipo comunista ne sia un esempio. Quasi il fallimento è giunto per disaccordi interni. Non c’era un sistema che permettesse l’accordo sulle decisioni da prendere. Questo perché un tale sistema non esiste se non con la costrizione.

Mi pare ovvio pertanto che l’assenza di responsabilità è insita nel comunismo e in tutti i collettivismi e sistemi politici. Lo stesso tipo di relazione implicito nel comunismo, attribuendo responsabilità in modo indiscriminato, tende a bloccare la crescita dell’individuo e incentiva un inedito comportamento parassitico (infantilismo). Se l’infantilismo sia una conseguenza del comunismo, o se quest’ultimo ne sia lo strumento, è questione fortemente speculativa che va oltre gli scopi di questo articolo.

Da notare il titolo: “Radicalismo infantile”. Non conservatorismo infantile, reazionarismo infantile o infantilismi di altro genere. Questo è solo un contributo al superamento del pensiero infantile in qualunque forma, con un particolare accento sulla necessità di avere le idee chiare.

Anche i sedicenti amanti della “libera impresa” di istituti e fondazioni propagandistici sovvenzionati da imprese e interessi finanziari, se sono sinceri e non venduti, dimostrano molta paura infantile. Ma questo è un altro discorso.

Commento di Eric Fleischmann

Pubblicata a dicembre 1949 sul volume VIII nº 3 della rivista anarchica Resistance, quella che abbiamo visto è una critica (in forme pseudo nietzscheane) del comunismo e di altri “spettri” (per usare un termine di Stirner) come “dio” (in senso platonico) e “comunità”. Labadie estremizza la parte del vecchio brontolone che dice: “siamo tutti sostanzialmente infantili tranne io e chi la pensa come me”. Non c’è molto da aggiungere se non chiarire che, sulla base di altri suoi scritti sullo stesso argomento, Labadie per “proprietà privata” intende il “possesso” mutualista tramite l’usucapione e l’utilizzo, mentre per “salario” non intende l’attuale sistema che deruba il lavoratore ma semplicemente una ricompensa per un servizio.

E ribattendo alla sua teoria secondo la quale l’esperienza collettiva non aveva “un sistema che permettesse l’accordo sulle decisioni da prendere”, rispondo che sulla base delle mie conoscenze (vedi Governare i beni collettivi per cui Elinor Ostrom ha ricevuto il nobel) e della mia esperienza in una comune, sono quasi certo che non sia una caratteristica inerente o esclusive dell’esperienza collettiva ma un problema da risolvere comune a tutto il cooperativismo. Buone intese e una buona pianificazione di base sono di grande aiuto.

Quanto al mio aggiornamento, non noto piccoli errori ortografici o grammaticali. Ho però usato le parentesi laddove possibile, e non tutte le correzioni sono riportate visto che ho perso le mie annotazioni.

Le nostre traduzioni sono finanziate interamente da donazioni. Se vi piace quello che scriviamo, siete invitati a contribuire. Trovate le istruzioni su come fare nella pagina Sostieni C4SS: https://c4ss.org/sostieni-c4ss.

Selama ini kita sama-sama sepakat bahwa sistem kapitalisme negara (state capitalism) yang dominan bergantung pada pemeliharaan kelangkaan buatan (artificial scarcity). Namun tampaknya masih ada sedikit kekaburan mengenai bagaimana kelangkaan tersebut sebenarnya diciptakan. Secara khusus, masih muncul pertanyaan apakah kelangkaan buatan pada akhirnya menyebabkan produksi industri meningkat atau justru menurun. Sekilas, tanpa mempertimbangkan faktor-faktor lain, jawabannya tampak sederhana. Cara paling mudah menciptakan kelangkaan adalah dengan mengurangi produksi. Namun, dalam banyak kasus, justru sebaliknya yang terjadi. Kelangkaan buatan sering kali hanya dapat tercipta melalui peningkatan produksi dalam jumlah besar.

Faktor penentunya terletak pada pilihan teknologi produksi dan peran negara dalam mempertahankan kondisi yang membuat pilihan teknologi tertentu tetap layak digunakan. Teknik produksi massal bersifat sangat spesifik terhadap suatu model produk sekaligus membutuhkan investasi modal yang besar. Karena itu, teknik ini hanya memberikan keunggulan dibandingkan produksi skala kecil (artisanal production) atau metode lainnya apabila volume produksi cukup besar untuk menutup seluruh biaya yang terlibat. Dengan kata lain, penghematan biaya per unit yang diperoleh harus, setelah dikalikan dengan jumlah unit yang diproduksi dalam periode tertentu, mampu melampaui biaya-biaya khas yang melekat pada teknik tersebut. Inilah yang lazim dikenal sebagai skala ekonomi (economies of scale).

Persoalan mulai muncul ketika permintaan pasar tidak cukup besar untuk membenarkan penggunaan teknik produksi massal. Dalam situasi seperti ini, industri pada dasarnya hanya memiliki dua pilihan. Pertama, kembali menggunakan teknik produksi yang berskala lebih kecil. Kedua, menciptakan permintaan yang diperlukan secara artifisial.

Pada pilihan pertama, kelangkaan buatan diciptakan dengan memastikan bahwa jumlah produksi selalu lebih kecil daripada permintaan. Namun strategi ini akan sangat sulit dipertahankan apabila terdapat persaingan bebas, kecuali jika negara turun tangan melindunginya. Bahkan ketika negara berhasil menyingkirkan para pesaing, jumlah kelangkaan buatan yang dapat diciptakan tetap dibatasi oleh besarnya permintaan yang memang sudah ada.

Sebaliknya, pada pilihan kedua, kelangkaan buatan justru diciptakan dengan membangun struktur kebutuhan baru, sehingga permintaan menjadi jauh lebih besar daripada kapasitas produksi yang sebenarnya sudah sangat tinggi dan membuat teknik produksi massal menguntungkan. Strategi seperti ini hampir mustahil dijalankan tanpa campur tangan negara. Namun setelah struktur kebutuhan tersebut berhasil dibangun, ia dapat terus diperluas dari waktu ke waktu hingga mencapai skala yang sama sekali tidak sebanding dengan kebutuhan awal masyarakat. Dengan demikian, jumlah kelangkaan buatan yang dapat diciptakan praktis menjadi hampir tidak terbatas.

Karena itu, cukup jelas bahwa apabila memiliki kesempatan, industri kapitalis akan jauh lebih memilih menciptakan kelangkaan dengan terus-menerus memperbanyak dan menggandakan permintaan secara artifisial, daripada sekadar mengurangi jumlah produksinya.

Yang juga penting dipahami adalah bahwa keberadaan teknik produksi tertentu dalam berbagai industri sejak awal telah mengandaikan adanya mekanisme yang mampu menciptakan tingkat permintaan artifisial tersebut. Tanpa monopoli koersif negara, mekanisme seperti itu hampir mustahil dipertahankan. Oleh sebab itu, adalah kekeliruan jika kita mengira tingkat permintaan seperti sekarang akan tetap bertahan tanpa keberadaan negara, kecuali mungkin hanya untuk waktu yang sangat singkat.

Sepanjang sejarah memang terdapat beberapa contoh kolusi yang dilakukan secara terang-terangan. Salah satu yang paling terkenal adalah Great American Streetcar Scandal yang dimulai sekitar tahun 1936. Namun dalam banyak kasus, kondisi tersebut tidak dibangun melalui konspirasi yang begitu gamblang. Yang lebih sering terjadi adalah munculnya visi tentang masa depan, yang kemudian dengan antusias diwujudkan oleh negara melalui penyediaan infrastruktur, perangkat teknologi, serta kerangka regulasi yang diperlukan.

Dalam proses inilah gagasan mengenai kemajuan teknologi yang bersifat spontan dan linear, beserta cara pandang dunia yang menyertainya, memainkan peranan besar. Masa depan kemudian dipresentasikan sebagai sesuatu yang sekaligus tak terelakkan dan menggairahkan. “Beginilah cara kita akan hidup di dunia masa depan!”

Akibatnya, pembangunan sistem yang pada akhirnya menciptakan struktur kebutuhan yang bersifat kontingen—yakni kebutuhan tidak langsung yang bergantung pada sistem yang telah dibangun sebelumnya—tidak pernah benar-benar dipahami sebagai proyek untuk menciptakan permintaan ekonomi secara artifisial. Sebaliknya, ia tampil sebagai proyek pelayanan publik yang mulia. Setelah sistem tersebut berdiri, ia mulai menghasilkan proyeksi permintaan masa depan yang tampak masuk akal. Dari situlah muncul anggapan bahwa kita harus terus menambah infrastruktur, teknologi, dan produksi, tanpa pernah lagi mempertanyakan mengapa semuanya dianggap perlu.

Dengan demikian, menciptakan permintaan akhirnya berubah menjadi bagian normal dari aktivitas industri. Semakin terkonsentrasi kekuatan industri, semakin besar pula volume produksi yang dihasilkan. Namun anehnya, produksi yang terus meningkat itu tetap saja dianggap tidak pernah cukup untuk memenuhi “kebutuhan” kita.

Di sinilah letak inti dari ekologi libertarian. Memang benar bahwa industri menghasilkan terlalu banyak barang. Namun penyebabnya bukan karena konsumen memiliki hasrat yang tidak pernah terpuaskan terhadap barang-barang konsumsi. Tidak adil menyalahkan orang karena menginginkan sedikit kenyamanan ketika sistem telah membuat mereka membutuhkan jauh lebih banyak. Bahkan keinginan paling berlebihan yang dimiliki seseorang mungkin sebenarnya masih jauh lebih sederhana dibandingkan struktur kebutuhan artifisial yang dipaksakan kepada mereka.

Seandainya kita mampu menghapus sebagian besar konsumsi yang dipaksa menjadi kebutuhan, maka dunia masih memiliki ruang yang lebih dari cukup untuk menampung seluruh konsumsi yang benar-benar kita inginkan. Kesimpulan ini justru bertolak belakang dengan narasi yang terus-menerus kita dengar, yaitu bahwa hanya penghematan ekstrem dan hidup serba kekurangan yang dapat menyelamatkan bumi.

Dengan kata lain, kita memproduksi terlalu banyak dibandingkan dengan kesenangan yang benar-benar kita peroleh dari proses produksi tersebut. Kreativitas manusia tersebar terlalu tipis karena harus memenuhi volume produksi yang begitu besar. Padahal, mencipta seharusnya merupakan sebuah keistimewaan. Namun ketika setiap gagasan baru mengharuskan kita memproduksi jutaan salinan yang sama hanya agar permintaan yang dibutuhkan sistem tetap bertahan, maka kreativitas justru kehilangan maknanya.

Seharusnya tidak seperti itu.

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The story is set in the 2080s, following a mid-century Time of Troubles, when the world is emerging from the ruins of capitalism and creating a new, humanly tolerable society.

The dominant governing institution is the watershed network, a federation of self-managed local institutions more or less equivalent to bioregions, which incorporates most of the world’s population and resources. The balance of power is the result of a mostly non-violent mid-century revolution beginning a generation or two earlier, in which a combination of boycotts, sabotage, and other direct action forced the corporations into offshore enclaves. The viewpoint character, who inhabits the Chesapeake Watershed, reminisces about the days when her parents “helped place the first illicit sensors in the Potomac and barricaded factories to enforce the first crowdsourced decisions of the nascent Dandelion Revolution.”

The corporations, as is typical for this genre, consist of “billionaire lords and serf-employees huddled behind their fencelines on their artificial islands.” Their inhabitants, aside from “a few converts and visitors,” are “only the descendants of the people who’d arrived with their founder — allies and employees who’d prioritized fleeing apocalypse over creating community to stop it.”

Corporate enclaves were bounded by “fencelines,” apparently imposed from outside by the networks during the course of the Dandelion Revolution. “As for the corporations, eventually we didn’t allow it. People like my parents organized to stop them, and created the first watershed networks.” Actions taken during the Revolution ranged from “setting limits on their carbon production to get warming under control, to blocking their shipping if they went over their carbon budgets.” The corporations, “which couldn’t bear the transformation, …eventually… barricaded themselves behind their own fencelines on a few artificial islands….”

The corporations, since their relegation to island enclaves, have mostly refused any official recognition of the watersheds’ existence, and for their own part “lost any legal existence outside their own territory a long time ago.” They send observers to carbon talks, tacitly obey the carbon and other pollutant budgets the watersheds, as dominant actors, lay down for them, and cheat when they think they can evade detection. Their relative lack of power means they must file impact reports for approval by neighboring regional watershed consortia in cases where projects might have an impact beyond the fencelines.

Most of the corporations’ former economic functions, aside from a dwindling number of areas in which they still possess a monopoly on the necessary technical expertise, have been taken over by the watersheds. Some pre-watershed industrial resources have been absorbed by the watersheds — e.g. “MIT and the Pan-Asian Maker Collective” are “hooked into the dandelion networks.”

Overall, relations between watersheds and corporations amount to a cold war.

“We still buy from them, sometimes….. Things we need that we haven’t been able to back-engineer yet, or exchanges that someone thinks will eventually incentivize them to join us. And they’re allowed out among the watersheds as long as they promise to behave.”

The watersheds’ primary focus in dealing with the corporations is managing their decline — taking over their remaining indispensable functions, and in the meantime maintaining contact to encourage internal culture change and preventing any desperate rear-guard action that will get a lot of people killed.

“They’re not going to disappear any time soon — someone has to keep talking to them, or they’ll never change enough to join the rest of the world….

“We still need them. They almost broke the world, when they had power — but the corporations still make key parts of our network infrastructure. They think they need us because without those exports, they lose any justification for their continued existence. But really, that tenuous connection is their last chance to find a new justification. Every time we interact, it reminds them that there’s another way. Every freelance contract keeps the window open. When we finally take over the last of the manufacturing, the opportunity to change them vanishes — and we might need to fight the dandelion revolution all over again. I’d rather take them into the future with us.”

Nation-states still persist, but with significantly less power as the result both of the Dandelion Revolution and of their own fiscal and material exhaustion. Although most production, distribution, and governance is handled by the watersheds, nation-states still claim territorial sovereignty over the watersheds and their inhabitants (which themselves apparently comprise most of the earth’s land area). The mostly hollowed-out states (referred to at one point as “fossil states”) carry out a major share of their functions through the watersheds, with some minimal recognition of their sovereignty by the latter, in much the same way the later western Roman Empire did through German tribal authorities.

In response to a visiting extraterrestrial’s question “So how does the United States of America relate to the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Network,” a NASA representative replies, “Technically, this is U.S. territory. A national park.”

The watersheds function internally as a sort of digitally networked hybrid of direct democracy, consensus, and the sort of p2p ad hocracy depicted in Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Walkaway.

The dandelion communications network was designed from the ground up during the mid-century Blackouts, with an architecture aimed at facilitating such a communication style.

The dandelion networks had been created in the wake of massive malware and malinformation epidemics, first as a way to maintain communications while preserving data, then as a way to reshape and reclaim those data as tools for justice and survival.

To take one example, the Chesapeake Watershed Network put together a contact team for the alien spacecraft in their territory by putting out calls for people with previous negotiating experience with other networks, and with corporations or states, as well as biologists, and then up- or down-voting the selectees.

More generally, policy and governance questions are addressed in a stigmergic or wikified way by members posting problems or proposed solutions to the network, followed by an open-ended process of debate and up- and down-voting. Network “weighting and aggregation algorithms” coordinated decisionmaking by “threading, …constantly picking out key ideas and sorting possible approaches and marking the valence and weight of our responses.”

The interaction between the dandelion communication platform, individual members, and local economies is reminiscent of the Acquis in Bruce Sterling’s The Caryatids and D-Space in Daniel Suarez’s Freedom(). As the viewpoint character describes her interface with the network:

Then I got up and retrieved my mesh from its stand, settled the cool smartmail back over my bare scalp, and let the Network flow back into my lenses….

I eased in, catching up on half-deserted policy decisions. Streambed restoration for the Paint Branch, a proposal for using a new algae species in water treatment, the carbon budget for importing tea and coffee. There were still a few people working on those threads, refining options and adding weight to their favorites.

As I said, I review science fiction primarily for the future history timelines and other worldbuilding, rather than for the plot. But the latter is also quite engaging. Like Emrys’ Innsmouth reboots, this story wraps up — spoiler alert — with a satisfying inter-species entente.

If you’re a fan of fiction set in a better world the day after tomorrow, as an escape or source of inspiration in the face of an increasingly scary tomorrow, I highly recommend this book. In many ways it reminds me of both the utopian alternative in Marge Piercy’s Woman On the Edge of Time, and the Walkaway society in Cory Doctorow’s novel of the same name, and has earned itself a space beside them as one of my favorites of the genre.

“อิสรเสรีนิยมฝ่ายซ้าย” (left-libertarianism) คืออะไร คำคำนี้ (ตามความหมายในบทความนี้) สื่อถึงสายธารความคิดกว้างๆ ที่เป็นทั้งอิสรเสรีนิยมแบบถึงรากถึงโคนและเป็นฝ่ายซ้ายแบบถึงรากถึงโคนในเวลาเดียวกัน แนวคิดนี้ครอบคลุมองค์ประกอบที่ถึงรากถึงโคนที่สุดของแนวคิดเสรีนิยมสายอังกฤษ (เช่น โธมัส ฮอดจ์สกิน และงานเขียนในยุคต้นของเฮอร์เบิร์ต สเปนเซอร์) แนวคิดอนาธิปไตยสายปัจเจกชนนิยม (individualist anarchism) จากยุคศตวรรษที่ 19 พันธมิตรระหว่างกลุ่มอนาธิปไตยสายตลาดกับกลุ่มซ้ายใหม่ในทศวรรษ 1960 และแนวคิดอนาธิปไตยสายตลาดฝ่ายซ้าย (left-wing market anarchism) รูปโฉมใหม่ในยุคปัจจุบัน

คำว่า “อิสรเสรีนิยมฝ่ายซ้าย” ยังถูกใช้อธิบายแนวคิดคอมมิวนิสต์สายอนาธิปไตย (anarcho-communism และอนาธิปไตยที่ไม่ได้สนับสนุนตลาดเสรีกลุ่มอื่นๆ) รวมถึงกลุ่มนักทฤษฎีในวงการปรัชญาการเมืองที่ยอมรับหลักการเป็นเจ้าของตนเอง (self-ownership) แต่ปฏิเสธกรรมสิทธิ์ในทรัพยากรธรรมชาติ ตลอดจนความพยายามที่จะผสมผสานอิสรเสรีนิยมสายกลางกับแนวคิดก้าวหน้านิยม (progressivism) และเสรีนิยมสายอเมริกันสมัยใหม่ อย่างไรก็ตาม คำว่า “อิสรเสรีนิยมฝ่ายซ้าย” ในกรณีเหล่านี้เป็นเพียงคำพ้องเสียงและไม่มีความเกี่ยวข้องใดๆ กับ “อิสรเสรีนิยมฝ่ายซ้าย” ที่จะพูดถึงในที่นี้

คงเป็นไปไม่ได้ที่จะให้คำนิยามอันกระชับ รัดกุม และครอบคลุมทุกแง่มุมของกลุ่มแนวคิดที่เรียกว่า “อิสรเสรีนิยมฝ่ายซ้าย” เพราะไม่ว่าจะพยายามอย่างไรก็ย่อมมีตัวอย่างที่โต้แย้งได้เสมอ กระนั้น ต่อไปนี้คือลักษณะสำคัญสามประการของแนวคิดดังกล่าว

ความยึดมั่นในปัจเจกชนนิยมอย่างลึกซึ้ง

วิธีการหนึ่งในการนิยามอิสรเสรีนิยมฝ่ายซ้ายคือการบอกว่ามันคือการผสมผสานมุมมองเรื่องการไม่รุกราน (non-aggression) แบบอิสรเสรีนิยมสายถึงรากถึงโคนตามมาตรฐาน กับมุมมองเรื่องการไม่ครอบงำ (non-domination) แบบฝ่ายซ้ายสายถึงรากถึงโคนตามมาตรฐานเข้าไว้ด้วยกัน แนวคิดปัจเจกชนนิยมที่สมบูรณ์แบบจริงๆ จะเชื่อมโยงการต่อต้านสถาบันต่างๆ (เช่น รัฐ) ที่กดขี่ปัจเจกบุคคลผ่านการขู่ใช้กำลังบังคับ เข้ากับการต่อต้านการจัดวางทางสังคมในความหมายอย่างกว้างซึ่งกดขี่ปัจเจกบุคคลผู้หนึ่ง (หรือกลุ่มปัจเจกบุคคลกลุ่มหนึ่ง) ให้ตกอยู่ใต้อำนาจของปัจเจกบุคคลอีกคนหนึ่ง (หรือกลุ่มปัจเจกบุคคลอีกกลุ่มหนึ่ง) [ไม่ใช่ต่อต้านแค่ “รัฐ” เพียงอย่างเดียว – ผู้แปล]

พูดให้เป็นรูปธรรมมากขึ้น สิ่งนี้หมายถึงการต่อต้านโครงสร้างอำนาจที่ค่อนข้างไม่เป็นทางการทั้งหลาย เช่น การเหยียดเพศ การเหยียดเชื้อชาติ และทุนนิยมแบบบริหารจัดการ (ที่จะกล่าวถึงต่อไป) ฉะนั้น ชาวอิสรเสรีนิยมฝ่ายซ้ายจึงมักเน้นย้ำถึงความสำคัญของตลาดในฐานะพลังทางวัฒนธรรมที่สามารถรองรับความหลากหลายทางสังคมได้มากมาย ทั้งยังบ่อนทำลายพลวัตแห่งการกดขี่เหล่านั้นได้ด้วย

แนวคิดปัจเจกชนนิยมที่คำนึงถึงการกดขี่ในหลายมิติ (intersectional individualism) นี้สามารถสืบย้อนกลับไปได้อย่างน้อยในหนังสือ Social Statics ของเฮอร์เบิร์ต สเปนเซอร์ ซึ่งโจมตีว่า “เผด็จการในรัฐย่อมสัมพันธ์อย่างหลีกเลี่ยงไม่ได้กับเผด็จการในครอบครัว” นักอนาธิปไตยสายปัจเจกนิยมก็มีทัศนคติในลักษณะเดียวกัน พวกเขาไม่เพียงเป็นผู้สนับสนุนตลาดเสรีที่หัวก้าวหน้าที่สุดในอเมริกาศตวรรษที่ 19 แต่ยังอยู่แถวหน้าของขบวนการสตรีนิยมอีกด้วย ตัวอย่างที่ชัดเจนคือ โมเสส ฮาร์มัน ซึ่งถูกจำคุกภายใต้กฎหมายว่าด้วยสิ่งลามกอนาจาร เพราะตีพิมพ์บทวิพากษ์การข่มขืนภายในชีวิตสมรสอย่างเปิดเผยและตรงไปตรงมา ทั้งที่ในเวลานั้นการกระทำดังกล่าวยังถือว่าชอบด้วยกฎหมาย โวลแตร์รีน เดอ แคลร์อภิปรายถึงเหตุการณ์นี้ไว้ในบทความของเธอเรื่อง “Sex Slavery”

การต่อต้านทุนนิยมแบบตลาดเสรี (Free Market Anti-Capitalism) และการวิเคราะห์ชนชั้นแบบเสรีนิยม

เมื่อพิจารณารูปแบบความสัมพันธ์ทางสังคมต่างๆ ที่นักอิสรเสรีนิยมฝ่ายซ้ายคัดค้านในฐานะที่พวกเขาเป็น “ฝ่ายซ้าย” คำว่า “ทุนนิยม” อาจดูแปลกประหลาดเป็นพิเศษ เพราะถึงอย่างไรนักอิสรเสรีนิยมฝ่ายซ้ายก็ยังคงเป็นนักอิสรเสรีนิยมอยู่ดี กระนั้นก็ตาม สำหรับนักอิสรเสรีนิยมฝ่ายซ้าย คำว่า “ทุนนิยม” ไม่ได้หมายถึงระบบเศรษฐกิจแบบตลาด เสรีภาพทางเศรษฐกิจ การประกอบการ กรรมสิทธิ์ส่วนบุคคล หรือสิ่งอื่นใดที่นักอิสรเสรีนิยมที่นิยามตัวเองด้วยคำคำนี้มักนึกถึง ที่จริงนักอนาธิปไตยสายปัจเจกนิยมอย่างเบนจามิน ทักเคอร์ ยังเห็นว่ากรรมสิทธิ์ส่วนบุคคลมีความสำคัญต่อเสรีภาพเป็นอย่างยิ่ง ถึงขนาดที่เขาไม่ยอมรับว่านักอนาธิปไตยสายคอมมิวนิสต์อย่างปีเตอร์ โครพอตคิน และโยฮันน์ โมสต์ คือนักอนาธิปไตยอย่างแท้จริง เนื่องจากทั้งสองคนปฏิเสธหลักกรรมสิทธิ์ส่วนบุคคล

กลับกัน “ทุนนิยม” ในบริบทนี้หมายถึงปรากฏการณ์อย่างการกระจุกตัวของความมั่งคั่งในมือคนกลุ่มเล็กๆ และการครอบงำทางสังคมของบรรดาผู้จัดการและนายทุนเหนือแรงงานและสังคม ด้วยเหตุนี้ การปฏิเสธทุนนิยมของนักอิสรเสรีนิยมฝ่ายซ้ายจึงมีรากฐานส่วนหนึ่งมาจากค่านิยมพื้นฐานแบบปัจเจกนิยมที่กว้างขวางกว่า แต่อีกส่วนหนึ่งมาจากความเชื่อที่ว่าองค์กรที่มีโครงสร้างแบบสั่งการจากบนลงล่างและมีลำดับชั้นต่ำสูงนั้นไร้ประสิทธิภาพเป็นอย่างยิ่ง

องค์กรลักษณะนี้ต้องเผชิญทั้งปัญหาด้านความรู้และปัญหาเรื่องความเป็นผู้กระทำการ (agency) ด้วยเหตุนี้ การแข่งขันในตลาดเสรีอย่างแท้จริงย่อมบดขยี้องค์กรที่มีโครงสร้างส่วนบนที่เทอะทะ (top-heavy organizations) ได้อย่างง่ายดาย ผลที่ตามมาคืออำนาจครอบงำของบรรษัทจะลดลงอย่างมาก และถูกแทนที่ด้วยองค์กรรูปแบบอื่นๆ ที่มีโครงสร้างในแนวราบมากกว่า เช่น สหกรณ์และการทำงานในฐานะผู้รับจ้างอิสระ เควิน คาร์สัน (Kevin Carson) นักอิสรเสรีนิยมฝ่ายซ้ายร่วมสมัยได้อธิบายข้อโต้แย้งนี้ไว้อย่างละเอียดในหนังสือ Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective

แต่ถ้าหากโครงสร้างอำนาจในที่ทำงานไร้ประสิทธิภาพถึงเพียงนั้น เหตุใดมันจึงยังแพร่หลายอยู่ได้จนถึงทุกวันนี้ คำตอบอย่างย่อก็คือ เป็นเพราะรัฐบาล

สภาพแวดล้อมทางเศรษฐกิจที่เราอาศัยอยู่นี้ไม่ใช่ตลาดเสรี แต่เป็นระบบที่องค์กรบางจำพวกถูกทำให้มีประสิทธิภาพอย่างเทียมๆ ขณะที่องค์กรบางจำพวกถูกทำให้ไร้ประสิทธิภาพอย่างเทียมๆ อันเนื่องมาจากโครงสร้างเชิงสถาบันที่ตั้งอยู่บนการแทรกแซงอย่างมหาศาลโดยรัฐบาล

นักอิสรเสรีนิยมฝ่ายซ้ายปฏิเสธมุมมองที่ถือว่าธุรกิจขนาดใหญ่กับรัฐบาลเป็นศัตรูกันหรือไม่มีความเกี่ยวข้องกัน ตรงกันข้าม พวกเขาเน้นย้ำว่าทั้งสองฝ่ายพึ่งพาอาศัยกันในระดับพื้นฐาน โดยธรรมชาติแล้ว รัฐบาลย่อมเปิดช่องให้ผู้ที่มีความมั่งคั่งหรือมีอำนาจทางสังคมอยู่แล้วใช้มันเป็นเครื่องมือดึงทรัพยากรจากประชาชนส่วนที่เหลือ

ในช่วงที่เมอร์เรย์ รอธบาร์ด (Murray Rothbard) มีจุดยืนแบบฝ่ายซ้าย แนวคิดเรื่องชนชั้นนำผู้กุมอำนาจ (power elite theory) และการวิเคราะห์ชนชั้นจากมุมมองอิสรเสรีนิยมเป็นประเด็นที่สำคัญเป็นอย่างยิ่ง ด้วยอิทธิพลจากนักประวัติศาสตร์สายซ้ายใหม่อย่างกาเบรียล โคลโค (Gabriel Kolko) นักคิดตลาดเสรีสายถึงรากถึงโคนจึงหันมาโจมตีความเชื่อผิดๆ ที่ว่ากฎระเบียบของรัฐมีไว้เพื่อปกป้องประชาชนจากการครอบงำของคนร่ำรวย ดังที่รอย ชายล์ส (Roy Childs) เสนอไว้ในบทความ “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism” ความจริงแล้ว การขยายตัวอย่างรวดเร็วของกฎระเบียบทั้งหลายเกิดขึ้นเพื่อเป็นเครื่องมือคุ้มครองสถานะทางสังคมของผู้มั่งคั่ง

มุมมองต่อการเปลี่ยนแปลงทางสังคมผ่านปฏิบัติการซึ่งหน้า

หากนักอิสรเสรีนิยมฝ่ายซ้ายวิเคราะห์ได้ถูกต้องว่า รัฐมีแนวโน้มโดยธรรมชาติที่จะค้ำจุนการครอบงำและการมุ่งแสวงประโยชน์ การกระทำการทางการเมืองอาจดูไม่ค่อยมีหวังนัก ซึ่งก็คงจริง หากการกระทำการทางการเมืองในมุมมองของคุณหมายถึงการลงแรงทำกิจกรรมที่เกี่ยวข้องกับการเลือกตั้งและการมุ่งเปลี่ยนแปลง “นโยบาย” เป็นหลัก

ตรงกันข้าม นักอิสรเสรีนิยมฝ่ายซ้ายมีแนวโน้มจะให้ความสำคัญกับการเข้าไปมีปฏิสัมพันธ์โดยตรงกับสิ่งที่พวกเขาพยายามจะเปลี่ยนแปลง (สังคม) มากกว่าจะร้องขอให้สิ่งที่พวกเขาต้องการจะล้มเลิก (รัฐ) ดำเนินการให้ แนวทางดังกล่าวไม่เพียงครอบคลุมถึงการลงแรงในด้านความรู้และการศึกษา แต่ยังหมายถึงการแสวงหาหนทางในการหลีกเลี่ยงการปราบปรามของรัฐ และสร้างสถาบันทางเลือกเพื่อรับมือกับปัญหาที่รัฐเป็นผู้ก่อหรือปัญหาที่รัฐไม่สามารถแก้ไขได้

ในอดีต แนวทางเหล่านี้รวมถึงการทดลองทั้งหลาย อาทิ บริษัท American Letter Mail Company ของไลแซนเดอร์ สปูนเนอร์ การลงแรงต่อสู้ของกลุ่มแรงงานสายถึงรากถึงโคนโดยดายเออร์ ลัม และแนวคิดเรื่อง “เศรษฐกิจต้านอำนาจรัฐ” (counter-economics) ของแซม คอนคิน ปัจจุบัน เราสามารถมองเห็นแนวทางเดียวกันนี้ได้จากความสนใจของนักอิสรเสรีนิยมฝ่ายซ้ายต่อโครงการอย่างคริปโตเคอร์เรนซี การเคลื่อนไหวแรงงานสายถึงรากถึงโคน (radical labor activism) เทคโนโลยีการพิมพ์สามมิติ การแบ่งปันไฟล์ เครือข่ายช่วยเหลือเกื้อกูลระดับรากหญ้า (grass-roots mutual aid) และการเฝ้าติดตามตรวจสอบการปฏิบัติงานของตำรวจโดยประชาชน (cop-watching)

ดังที่เควิน คาร์สันอธิบายไว้ เป้าหมายของอิสรเสรีนิยมฝ่ายซ้าย “ไม่ใช่การโค่นล้มรัฐ แต่คือการมองข้ามมันไป ใครก็ตามที่ต้องการสนับสนุนรัฐและเคารพกฎเกณฑ์ของรัฐต่อไปย่อมมีเสรีภาพที่จะทำได้ตราบเท่าที่พวกเขาไม่มายุ่งวุ่นวายกับเราด้วย เป้าหมายของพวกเราคือการสร้างสังคมที่เราต้องการ และป้องกันไม่ให้รัฐทำลายเราระหว่างที่กำลังสร้างสังคมนั้นขึ้นมา รัฐจะหมดความหมายไปเมื่อไม่มีใครเหลืออยู่ในระบบนั้นอีกต่อไป”

มีอีกหลายประเด็นที่ทำให้อิสรเสรีนิยมฝ่ายซ้ายแตกต่างจากแนวคิดอื่นๆ และประเด็นทั้งหลายที่พูดถึงในที่นี้เป็นเพียงการพิจารณาอย่างคร่าวๆ เท่านั้น.

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The story, written in 2020, begins in 2025. Climate change has progressed to the point that heat domes in the Global South reach deadly wet bulb temperatures of 35 Celsius. The one narrated at the outset, in India, lasting two weeks, results in an estimated 20 million deaths.

Around the same time the COP, hoping to kick-start some momentum in climate policy which has been so far absent, creates a standing committee — colloquially named the Ministry For the Future — to direct ongoing climate efforts in between conferences. Its chief, Mary Murphy, is the viewpoint character of the novel.

For the first few years, the Ministry encounters little but bureaucratic stonewalling, with the same meaningless debates and unenforceable promises that had previously characterized the Paris process.

Meanwhile the Children of Kali, an environmental terrorist organization, was galvanized into existence by the trauma of the killer heat wave. At one point Mary, frustrated by the lack of any concrete progress, floated the idea of a “black wing” of the Ministry, semi-autonomous, a somewhat softer version of the Children of Kali, doing illegal or semi-illegal things with plausible deniability. But when she floated the idea with Badim, a member of her staff from Nepal who had actual ties to organizations engaged in such activities — she was taken aback by the implications.

“So what has this black wing of yours done!” she exclaimed, suddenly frightened.

“I really can’t say.” He saw her face, temporized. “Possibly some coal plants have experienced problems. They’ve had to go offline, and the investment crowd has seen that and understood that they won’t ever be good investments again. In a sense you could say that worked.”

“How do you mean worked?”

“The plants stayed shut, and solar’s gotten another investment boost. And new coal plant construction worldwide is down eighty percent since these things started happening.”…

“Has anyone been hurt or killed?”

“Not on purpose.”

“Has anyone been terrorized?”

“You mean scared away from burning carbon?”

“Yes.”

“I think it might be good if that had happened, don’t you?”

“But how?”

“Well, you know. What really scares people is financial… access to their money, if people get cut off from that, they are definitely scared.”

Although she initially fails to explicitly embrace their efforts or sanction Badim’s participation in them, over the years she comes to tacitly acknowledge Badim’s connections as a black wing of the Ministry, and to some extent even encourage its activities.

The Children of Kali’s actions continued to escalate, with or without unofficial aid from the Ministry.

So it was not really a surprise when a day came that sixty passenger jets crashed in a matter of hours. All over the world, flights of all kinds, although when the analyses were done it became clear that a disproportionate number of these flights had been private or business jets, and the commercial flights that had gone down had been mostly occupied by business travelers. But people, innocent people, flying for all kinds of reasons: all dead. About seven thousand people died that day, ordinary civilians going about their lives.

Later it was shown that clouds of small drones had been directed into the flight paths of the planes involved, fouling their engines….

One message was fairly obvious: stop flying. And indeed many people stopped. Before that day, there had been half a million people in the air at any given moment. Afterward that number plummeted. Especially after a second round of crashes occurred a month later, this time bringing down twenty planes. After that commercial flights often flew empty, then were cancelled. Private jets had stopped flying. Military planes and helicopters had also been attacked, so they too curtailed their activities, and flew only if needed, as if in a war. As indeed they were.

It was noticed that none of the experimental battery-powered planes had been brought down, and no biofuel-powered planes, also no blimps, dirigibles, or hot-air balloons; no airships of any kind. But in that period there were so few of these, it was hard to tell at the time if they had been given a pass or not. It looked like they had, it seemed to make sense, and the surge in airship manufacture, which had already gotten a small start, has never ceased to this day.

The War for the Earth is often said to have begun on Crash Day. And it was later that same year when container ships began to sink, almost always close to land. Torpedoes from nowhere: a different kind of drone…. They ran on diesel fuel, of course. Loss of life in these sinkings was minimal, but world trade was severely impacted. Stock markets fell even lower than they had after Crash Day. A worldwide recession, a feeling of loss of control, price spikes in consumer goods, the clear prospect of the full-blown depression that indeed followed a few years later … it was a time of dread.

Two months after Crash Day a group called Kali, or the Children of Kali, issued a manifesto over the internet. No more fossil-fuel-burning transport. That was about twenty to twenty-five percent of civilization’s total carbon burn at this point, and all of it vulnerable to disruption, as the manifesto put it.

* * *

“It killed the airline industry, more or less. That was ten percent of the carbon burn, gone in a single day.”

The parallel growth of civil society organizations is quite similar to that in New York 2140 and Red Moon. Like those other novels, this one features a Householders Union and other debtors’ organizations that engage in strikes and boycotts against the financial system and landlordism. To quote a character in NY2140:

So you know what? I’m sick of the rich. I just am. I’m sick of them running this whole planet for themselves. They’re wrecking it! So I think we should take it back, and take care of it. And take care of each other as part of that. No more table scraps. You know that Householders’ Union that I was telling you about? I think it’s time for everyone to join that union, and for that union to go on strike. An everybody strike. I think there should be an everybody strike. Now. Today….

What I mean by a householders’ strike is you just stop paying your rents and mortgages … maybe also your student loans and insurance payments. Any private debt you’ve taken on just to make you and your family safe. The daily necessities of existence. The union is declaring all those to be odious debts, like some kind of blackmail on us, and we’re demanding they be renegotiated … So, we stop paying and call that the Jubilee? … That’s an old name for this kind of thing. After we start this Jubilee, until there’s a restructuring that forgives a lot of our debt, we aren’t paying anything.

You might think that not paying your mortgage would get you in trouble, and it’s true that if it was just you, that might happen. But when everyone does it, that makes it a strike. Civil disobedience. A revolution. So everyone needs to join in. Won’t be that hard. Just don’t pay your bills!

And as we shall see below, they wind up doing just that. The development of all these civil society organizations gets its initial boost from the creation of an open-source social media platform intended to starve Facebook and Twitter of resources and then supplant them.

“The AI group is making open source instruments that mimic the functions of all the big social media sites.”

“So people can shift over to this new set?”

“Yes. And it will protect their data for them using quantum encryption.”…

“How many do you think will shift?”

“Maybe half. After a few years, everybody.”

“So, the decapitation of Facebook.”

“And all the rest like it.”

“Replaced by a system owned by its users, in effect.”

“Yes. Open source. A distributed ledger. The Global Internet Cooperative Union. GICU.”…

“Then if it works, it will serve as the operating platform for ICU…. International Credit Union. A people’s bank. The team has set that up too. Lots of bank mirroring, and credit unions are already a thing. This won’t be quite like a credit union, because it would be an open network of people who make a distributed issuance of credit, issuing carbon coin fractions to each other on proof of good action on carbon. People deposit their savings and create new value in a customer- and employee-owned distributed ledger. Their bank, as one function of their YourLock account. It invests mindfully as a group mind, a kind of planetary mind, that has to always be funding biosphere-friendly activities. Also, a place to go if everyone removes their deposits from current private banks at the same time. Those banks are so over-leveraged that they will immediately crash. Then individuals have to have a safe harbor.

As in Red Moon, the ongoing economic crash results in the rise of mass populist movements swarming Beijing and Paris by the millions, along with virtually every large city in the world.

Something then caused us to all converge on Paris. In France, that’s where you go….  Of course once we got there we couldn’t take on the police or the army, that would be suicide, we had to overwhelm them with numbers. And eventually there were so many of us we couldn’t be contained, everything ground to a halt…. Now we had to show what could happen in our time. So we took over the city, Paris was ours by way of sheer bodies jamming the streets. And of course some of us had read about the Commune and realized if we didn’t win decisively we would be hunted down and killed, or at best jailed for life. So at that point it was win or die, and we buckled down to making it work as an alternative system of life, a kind of commons that was post-capitalist, even post- money, just people doing what it took to keep everyone fed. And I must say, so many Parisians came out and helped us, cooked food, provided rooms, manned the barricades in every way, that again we had to realize that it wasn’t just those of us in the streets, it was all France, maybe even the world, we couldn’t tell. But for sure what happened then was the most intense and important feeling I could ever live in this existence. Here’s what it was: solidarity. We could see so many others with us, all on each other’s side. Paris was a commons, France was a commune.

Another subplot involves various geoengineering projects. Among the most interesting was an effort to forestall the melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps, by drilling down to the melt water below the glaciers and pumping it up to refreeze on the surface, in order to reseat the ice on the bedrock and slow glacial flow to historically normal levels.

Another one was the development of rewilded habitat corridors — major stretches of contiguous territory restored to wild nature without permanent human settlements. Considering the sparsely populated nature of much of the world and the willingness of the few residents to be bought out, they expanded rapidly despite a slow start. In North America in particular, by the end of the book, most of northern and central Canada, and a strip including most of the Rockies and US northern plains, had been converted to such corridors — often with Indigenous stewardship.

Mary met with the heads of the world’s central banks, proposing the issue of “carbon-coins” backed by sequestration of CO2 or abstention from burning fossil fuels. They initially refused, since it was so far outside their understanding of their institutional missions. But as periodic heat waves recurred, environmental terrorism against carbon-burners intensified, and the global depression worsened, the previously reluctant central banks agreed to issue the coins.

In the late 30s, following a military coup in Saudi Arabia (thereafter simply “Arabia”), the new republic committed to keep all its petroleum in the ground, in return for an annual revenue stream in carbon-coin equal to their expected revenue from oil production. This further drove up the price of fossil fuels and heightened the cost advantage of renewable energy.

The Ministry for the Future began to imitate the “shadow government” tactic of minority parties in parliamentary regimes, formulating detailed reform proposals and legislative agendas for friendly governments that came to power — sort of an ALEC, except not run by Nazis.

The terrorist threat was kicked up a notch by the development of “pebble-mob” weaponry, cheap swarms of small guided missiles that travelled faster than sound and converged on their target only at the last minute. They were unstoppable, and not only made armored vehicles and military aircraft obsolete but rendered virtually any other target chosen completely vulnerable. Their production still required state-level resources, which lessened the potential chaos considerably, but their availability to a host of poorer nations enraged by heat waves and continued climate damage by the industrialized countries made fossil fuel production, and carbon-intensive forms of energy, industry, and travel, even less tenable.

In the meantime the radical states forming the African Union encouraged further radical changes of government on the continent, culminating in a majority of African governments repudiating their “odious debts” to the World Bank and China, and nationalizing all mines and other extractive industries — including rare earth extraction formerly worked by slave labor — and putting them under worker-ownership.

And student unions in Western countries voted for a payment strike on student loan debt. In the face of this and debt strikes by the Householders Union, combined with the other financial volatility, much or most money on paper “turned to vapor,” as banks paused most lending in hopes the state would reestablish trust, and debtors suspended payments against the possibility their creditors wouldn’t exist in a week. “In other words, liquidity freeze.”

Local currencies took up part of the slack, with at least some fraction of the larger-scale need for liquidity at the regional level provided through microlending and other forms of coordination on YourLock. But the vacuum was such that only central banks could address the full need, by taking over banking systems and issuing new money.

And the ongoing ecoterrorist war continued to destroy the profit model of centralized global capitalism.

Stores are bottlenecks, being distribution centers and not that numerous. You kick them in the balls when you attack their distribution centers. Their stock price drops at news of such attacks, and they have no way to counter that…. A hundred thousand dollars of physical damage can leverage a hundred million dollars in lost asset value. Big pension funds notice there’s a problem and move their monster assets elsewhere, then endowments and trusts and universities and non-profits and hedge funds all notice the big dogs moving, and they try to get out of the house before it falls on their head. And suddenly a big famous corporation, which is also of course a legal person, has suffered something like a stroke, and is now lying there paralyzed in a hospital bed, on life support, his heirs arguing over who gets the last of his stuff.

So stores were torched, sure. In the past that would have been the end of it. People like direct action because it’s quick, and afterwards you don’t have to face any real change. But around this time the Householders’ Union backed the Student Debt Resistance in support of its payment strike. That was non-compliance in action, meaning stay-at-home for almost every job. It’s a form of general strike.

The result was that a sort of global tipping point or paradigm shift occurred, as a majority of people for the first time began to think in terms of systemic transition.

Then on July 16th big parts of the internet, the online store of stores, stopped working. That felt freaky. And we had done it. Was it smart? Wasn’t the internet like our nervous system now? It was like that guy who cut his arm off to get out of a canyon in Utah. A very desperate measure. We had cast ourselves out into an interregnum, the chaos between dynasties. The Crisis, Year Zero: oh my fucking god.

In a situation like this, there has to be a plan. You can’t make it up on the fly in the middle of the breakdown. Not in the modern era of hyper-complexity. Say the internet stops working, your savings suddenly vanish and money doesn’t work anymore…. Can you make up a new society from scratch at that point? No, you can’t. Things just fall apart and next thing you know you’re eating your cat. So take this in: there has to be a pre-existing Plan B. And it can’t be a secret plan, popped on the world in the time of chaos…. So it’s in that spirit that Plan B has to be a known plan…, like the shadow government of an opposition party, putting out all its plans for citizens to consider and hopefully vote for. All of the proposals on the table and argued for. Step-by-step assembly instructions.

…[C]onsider this one example, which is actually an example of how the lack of a Plan B can stop a revolution from even starting in the first place, despite the crying need for one, so it’s especially relevant for us now: meaning Greece and the failure to Grexit, back in the early years of the century….

So who was going to lose here, the Greek population or international finance? Syriza put the question to its people in the form of a poll. The Greek people voted by a large majority to defy the Troika and refuse austerity. Syriza then promptly accepted austerity and the EU’s leash, going belly-up and begging for a bail-out.

Why did Syriza do that, why did they betray the wishes of the people who elected them? Because they had no Plan B. What they needed at that moment was a plan that would get them out of the EU and back to the drachma. They would have needed IOUs of some sort to stand in and do the job of money while they printed new drachmas and made all the other necessary changes as they transitioned back to a country in control of its own currency and sovereignty. And in fact there were people in Syriza working furiously to design that Plan B, which they called Plan X, but this turned out to be a case of too little too late, as they couldn’t convince their colleagues in government to risk trying it.

So, in the absence of such a plan ready to be enacted, Syriza had to cave to the EU and global finance. It was that or chaos, which could have meant starvation….

This time, our time, when the whole thing broke all over the world, there had to be a Plan B.

What was it? Big parts of it have been there all along; it’s called socialism.

As in the other two Robinson books I’ve repeatedly referenced, his understanding of “socialism” is relatively blindered:

Or, for those who freak out at that word, like Americans or international capitalist success stories reacting allergically to that word, call it public utility districts. They are almost the same thing. Public ownership of the necessities, so that these are provided as human rights and as public goods, in a not-for-profit way. The necessities are food, water, shelter, clothing, electricity, health care, and education. All these are human rights, all are public goods, all are never to be subjected to appropriation, exploitation, and profit. It’s as simple as that.

Democracy is also good, but again, for those who think this word is just a cover story for oligarchy and Western imperialism, let’s call it real political representation….

One scary thing, there has to still be money, or at least some exchange or allocation system that people trust, which means the already-existing central banks have to be part of it, which means the current nation-state system has to be part of it. Sorry but it’s true, and maybe obvious. Even if you are a degrowth devolutionist, an anarchist or a communist or a fan of world government, we only do the global in the current world order by way of the nation-state system…. It is what we’ve got now, and in the crux, when things fall apart, something from the old system has to be used to hang the new system on, hopefully something big and solid. Without that it’s castles in air time, and all will collapse into chaos. So yes: money, meaning central banks, meaning the nation-state system. It’s a social agreement, nothing more.

Note the portions I highlighted in the paragraph above. “We only do the current world order” is doing a lot of heavy lifting — especially in a book recounting systemic change on the scale of this one. The best I can say, in charity to KSR, is that in a world where the nation-state has preempted and coopted most avenues of large-scale coordination, people’s daily survival depends on institutions that are intimately intertwined with the nation-state, and a new ecosystem of post-state counter-institutions has not yet coalesced on a scale sufficient to take over the burden of keeping people alive, it might be impossible to bring the necessary changes about sufficiently fast through a single rupture event that entailed the destruction of the state. A transition period, as between feudalism and capitalism, might be necessary, combining a number of major non-reformist reforms within the structure of a nation-state system which was itself rapidly evolving in a non-state direction.

But no, money — simply an accounting system — does not as such require a nation-state framework to function. Nor does any other form of coordination. The nation-state system is only a few centuries old; although they functioned according to very different rules, money and land tenure nevertheless existed under a polycentric medieval order without anything like territorial sovereignty or a general police power in the modern sense. An ecosystem of Greco’s mutual credit systems, land trusts, fiber optic and rail infrastructures, etc., can function based on non-sovereign, functionally oriented institutions coordinated by standing federative bodies, themselves likewise functionally oriented and possessing no general police powers, relations between them governed by a sort of common law derived from their mutual interactions as equals.

And Robinson’s own fictional Martian government in the Red Mars trilogy is arguably closer to the non-state than the state end of the spectrum; most of the egalitarian goals of the Martian polity are achieved through pre-distribution (see here, pp. 14 et seq.), or the initial definition of property rules, rather than through ongoing state redistribution and regulation. Land is defined as a social commons, and all economic enterprises are defined as the property of their workers. The Martian state itself is little more than a standing administrative body (in the Saint-Simonian sense of “administration of things”) that judicially enforces these property rights.

At any rate, the actual transition scenario in this story was much more an emergent development, coalescing from self-organized, counter-institutional building blocks on the ground, than his adamant statements quoted above would suggest.

Thus the shadow government devised by the Ministry for the Future in Zurich, Switzerland, became one template for a new plan. Not completely new, of course. In fact it was a rearrangement of various elements of old plans, in many ways. Mondragón, Kerala, MMT, blockchain, Denmark, Cuba, and so on: all the elements had been out there working all along. Which made the new methods easier to implement.

* * *

Details can be arranged on a case-by-case basis, and even though the devil is in the details, they are still details, a matter of making the pieces of the puzzle fit. These details can be worked out, and often they already have been. The Zurich plan, the Mondragón system, Albert and Hahnel’s participatory economics, communism, the Public Trust plan, the What’s Good Is What’s Good for the Land plan, the various post-capitalisms, and so on and so forth; there are lots of versions of a Plan B, but they all share basic features. It’s not rocket science. The necessities are not for sale and not for profit.

Under the combined effects of eco-terrorism, technological advance, and carbon coin incentives, de-carbonization continued apace.

After several years of container ships being sunk on a regular basis, taken out by drone torpedoes of ever-increasing speed and power, the shipping industry had finally begun adapting to the new situation. It was adapt or die; there were only about eleven thousand container ships afloat, only two hundred of them in the Very Large class, and after forty of those were sunk the verdict was clear, the writing on the wall….

So the first attempts at transitioning to ships the saboteurs wouldn’t sink involved altering the ones that already existed. Electric motors replaced diesel engines to spin the props, and these motors were powered by solar panels, mounted as giant roofs over the top of the cargo.

But because these ships were massive, the solar power was only sufficient to drive them slowly.

Fairly quickly there emerged specialized shipyards devoted to taking in container ships and cutting them up, each providing the raw material for five or ten or twenty smaller ships, all of which were propelled by clean power in ways that made them as fast as the diesel-burners had been, or even faster.

These changes included going back to sail. Turned out it was a really good clean tech…. The new versions had sails made of photovoltaic fabrics that captured both wind and light, and the solar-generated electricity created by them transferred down the masts to motors that turned propellers. Clipper ships were back, in other words, and bigger and faster than ever.

News came sometime in the early 2040s that atmospheric CO2 levels had not only stopped rising but, thanks to sequestration efforts — reforestation and ocean regreening via phytoplankton feeding and the like chief among them, but also carbon-negative concrete, regenerative agriculture, and a host of other things — had fallen from 275 to 254 ppm over a four-year period. And the drop continued, at an accelerating rate.

By the end of the book, we get the sense of a transition survived, and of — to paraphrase Alasdair Gray — living in the early days of a better world. The new world has been born, if still red-faced and screaming with effort, and most of the monsters successfully fought off.

One of my very favorite genres of science fiction is a medium-future utopia of libertarian socialism and post-scarcity emerging from the present and near-future Time of Troubles. Considering the times we actually live in, this meets a great psychic need — or at least it does for me, anyway. If you have a similar need, I highly recommend Ministry For the Future.

La Ostrom parte dal problema del depauperamento delle risorse, che lei chiama “risorse comuni”, e prosegue illustrando tre importanti teorie, in gran parte complementari (“concetti strettamente correlati”), che cercano di illustrare i “numerosi problemi a cui vanno incontro le persone nel tentativo di arrivare al bene comune”: La “tragedia dei beni comuni” di Hardin, il dilemma del prigioniero, e la “logica dell’azione collettiva” di Olson.

Si tratta purtroppo di modelli fossilizzati in un dogma, che più che dare uno spunto alla riflessione si sostituiscono al pensiero. Ancora oggi, vent’anni dopo la pubblicazione dell’opera fondamentale della Ostrom, è normale far passare come ovvietà, sostenuta da un accenno a Hardin o al dilemma del prigioniero, la teoria secondo cui, in assenza di un sistema di governo o di qualche autorità superiore, si finisce inevitabilmente per distruggere le risorse. La stessa Ostrom, in un articolo sulla pesca pubblicato su The Economist, cita la superficialità di chi dice:

“lasciati a se stessi, i pescatori esaurirebbero il pescabile… [S]e si vuole evitare il disastro, occorre che un responsabile eserciti un potere efficace su di loro.”

È così che affronta la gestione delle risorse comuni tanto i fautori delle normative statali quanto quelli della privatizzazione imprenditoriale. Lo stesso Garret Hardin, rivedendo il suo articolo sulla tragedia dei beni comuni, disse che il problema dell’esaurimento delle risorse avrebbe dovuto essere affrontato o da “un sistema imprenditoriale privato” (diventando proprietà di imprese per il profitto) o dal “socialismo” (proprietà dello stato che impone le regole). Il fatto che l’“impresa privata” e il “socialismo” richiedano una qualche gestione piramidale e siano incompatibili con le istituzioni orizzontali autogestite la dice lunga  sui valori interiorizzati dallo strato intellettuale della nostra società.

La Ostrom spiega come sia lo stato che il mercato diano risultati insoddisfacenti.

Da notare, per inciso, che mettere a contrasto “proprietà comune” e “proprietà privata”, come fa gran parte dei libertari capitalisti, è futile. Cosa significa “privato” quando è impossibile dividere una risorsa comune tra singoli individui, spiega la Ostrom. I campi aperti e i pascoli comuni possono essere divisi in lotti e distribuiti tra le singole persone; ma un allevamento ittico? Data la loro natura, le risorse comuni devono appartenere ed essere gestite da una qualche istituzione collettiva, che sia lo stato, un ente o un’associazione di fruitori autonoma e gestita orizzontalmente.

La proprietà di un’impresa a fini di lucro non è più “privata” (o “collettivistica”) di un bene comune amministrato dai suoi fruitori. Secondo il diritto societario, la proprietà di un’azienda appartiene, ed è gestita, da una personalità creata ai termini dello statuto societario. Gli azionisti, singolarmente o in gruppo, non hanno alcun diritto di proprietà sui beni della società e nessuna autorità sulla sua gestione.

Al netto delle finzioni giuridiche, la “privatizzazione” e la “regolamentazione statale” tradizionali sostituiscono i fruitori con un gestore che opera per conto di un’autorità assenteista centrale. Si hanno, com’è prevedibile, gli stessi problemi di conoscenza e incentivi dell’esternalizzazione di costi e benefici, quando proprietà e controllo sono separati dalla conoscenza diretta della situazione.

Per contro, affidando il controllo diretto a persone con una hayeckiana conoscenza locale della situazione, il probabile risultato sarebbe migliore rispetto ai due approcci precedenti basati su verticalità e controllo assenteista.

Ipotesi suffragata dalle conclusioni della Ostrom.

Invece di partire dall’assunto che gli utenti delle risorse comuni non saprebbero gestirsi senza un’autorità che li protegga da se stessi, la Ostrom suppone che “la capacità degli individui di cavarsela varia da caso a caso”, e mette a confronto empiricamente “i tentativi riusciti e falliti di risolvere situazioni tragiche”.

Ai due modelli tradizionali, proprietà statale e aziendale, la Ostrom contrappone una gestione del bene comune basata su un contratto vincolante tra fruitori “che li impegni a cooperare.”

Certo molte cose possono andare storte: i proprietari di bestiame “possono sovrastimare o sottostimare la capacità di pascolo di un terreno”, oppure il monitoraggio fallisce. Ma si tratta di problemi che troviamo anche, e forse in misura maggiore, nella gestione assenteista fatta da un’istituzione centralizzata. Il sistema di controllo si basa sugli stessi fruitori, che sono a contatto tra loro e che, in quanto fruitori, hanno un forte incentivo a evitare i cedimenti con il controllo diretto, un sistema molto più efficace, si direbbe, delle tipiche ispezioni di un’autorità normativa statale (mia madre, che lavorava in uno stabilimento avicolo ed era in contatto quotidiano con gli ispettori della sanità, potrebbe confermarlo). Quanto alla stima di una capacità di pascolo, per quanto non infallibile, se non altro “non dipende dall’accuratezza delle informazioni date da un remoto funzionario governativo [o aziendale, aggiungo io].”

È ragionevole pensare che, a parità di condizioni, una gestione cooperativa delle risorse comuni sarebbe molto più efficiente nel formulare e imporre le regole rispetto a una gestione statale o aziendale. “Le persone coinvolte, dato che gran parte del loro rientro economico è dato dalle risorse comuni, hanno un forte interesse a cercare di risolvere i problemi comuni e migliorare la produttività.”

Al centro dello studio della Ostrom è “la ricerca dei principi fondamentali delle istituzioni utilizzate da chi ha gestito le risorse comuni con successo per lunghi periodi…” In particolare, quali provvedimenti sono stati adottati per affrontare problemi reali come “il parassitismo, l’opportunismo e l’evasione dai propri doveri”? La parte centrale del libro spiega come 1) i fruitori hanno sviluppato, applicato e monitorato regole sull’uso del bene comune, e 2) come il sistema delle risorse e le sue istituzioni sono riusciti a durare a lungo. Le istituzioni analizzate più recenti hanno già più di un secolo. Il sistema più antico supera i mille anni.

Le regole alla base della gestione delle risorse comuni, nei casi esaminati dalla Ostrom, risultavano efficaci proprio in quei casi che secondo la teoria dei giochi avrebbero dovuto incentivare l’abbandono con scarse conseguenze negative (come la gestione comune dell’acqua per l’irrigazione nelle Filippine spagnole, in cui controlli scarsi e sanzioni deboli incentivavano l’abbandono e il furto di acqua in periodi di siccità, causando la perdita del raccolto).

Lungi dall’essere “un anacronistico retaggio del passato”, la gestione delle risorse comuni trae spesso insegnamento dalla propria esperienza. Nel caso dei pascoli comuni, negli ultimi cinquecento anni almeno, gli abitanti dei villaggi svizzeri hanno imparato i pro e i contro della gestione privata o comune delle terre, e per ogni utilizzo particolare hanno sviluppato un sistema ad hoc.

Basandosi sulle sue ricerche, la Ostrom stila un elenco di principi comuni a molte istituzioni di successo:

1. Confini chiari. Occorre definire esattamente chi ha diritto ad estrarre risorse dal bene comune, i cui confini devono essere stabiliti con esattezza.

2. Le regole che regolano il possesso variano secondo le caratteristiche del posto. Le regole che stabiliscono cosa, per quanto tempo, con che mezzi e in quale quantità un bene comune può essere appropriato dipendono dalle caratteristiche del posto e dalle regole riguardanti il lavoro, i materiali e/o il denaro.

3. Scelte collettive. Gran parte delle persone soggette a norme operative hanno il diritto di contribuire alla modifica di quelle norme.

4. Controllori. Ovvero chi controlla lo stato del bene comune e il comportamento dei fruitori, che può essere un delegato dei fruitori o un fruitore.

5. Sanzioni variabili. I fruitori che violano le regole operative sono sottoposti a sanzioni variabili (secondo la gravità e il contesto dell’infrazione) da parte di altri fruitori, delegati o entrambi.

6. Meccanismi per la risoluzione dei conflitti. I fruitori e i loro delegati hanno diritto a risolvere i conflitti tra fruitori o tra fruitori e delegati rapidamente e a basso costo.

7. Un minimo di riconoscimento del diritto di autoorganizzazione. Lo stato non interferisce con il diritto dei fruitori di istituire istituzioni proprie.

Per quei beni comuni che fanno parte di sistemi più ampi:

8. Imprese a scatole cinesi. Fruizione, fornitura, controllo, applicazione delle regole, risoluzione dei conflitti e attività gestionali sono organizzati secondo un sistema a scatole cinesi a più livelli.

Queste sono alcune mie considerazioni sul libro. Contrariamente a quanto auspicato al punto 7, la gestione di molti beni comuni storicamente ha fallito a causa di interferenze esterne da parte dello stato o di élite terriere. Vedi il caso delle riforme di Stolypin e della collettivizzazione forzata di Stalin, che facevano carta straccia del diritto all’autogestione del Mir. Inoltre la politica terriera di Stolypin violava sostanzialmente il punto 1 in quanto permetteva a singoli fruitori di disporre della propria parte di bene comune senza il consenso di tutto il Mir. Questo viola l’intesa sociale insita nel bene sociale fin dalla sua fondazione.

Per dirla in termini comprensibili a chi come i libertari di destra godono alla parola “privato” e strillano solo a sentir parlare di “comune”, immaginiamo un potere legislativo che stravolga i termini di uno statuto aziendale consentendo ai singoli azionisti di irrompere nelle fabbriche e prendersi la loro quota di macchinari. I piani produttivi diventerebbero carta straccia. Questo fu l’effetto delle politiche di Stolypin applicate alla pianificazione del Mir riguardo i campi aperti. Vedi anche il punto 3: il diritto degli interessati di dire la loro sulle norme è, al di là delle teorie sulla democrazia partecipata, uno dei prerequisiti di un’istituzione funzionante. O, come dice la Ostrom…

Le istituzioni del bene comune che seguono questo principio hanno maggiori possibilità di adattare le norme alle circostanze locali, in quanto gli individui che interagiscono direttamente tra loro e con il mondo fisico possono cambiare le regole per adattarle meglio alle caratteristiche specifiche.

La separazione del potere decisionale dalla conoscenza diffusa e dall’esperienza è alla base di tutti i problemi di conoscenza e incentivo delle istituzioni gerarchiche e autoritarie, stati o imprese private. L’autorità gerarchica è un meccanismo che serve ad appropriarsi dei benefici del lavoro altrui esternalizzando costi e fastidi su chi sta in basso.

Dato che separare autorità e conoscenza genera ovvi problemi di incentivo e conoscenza, non si capisce perché il potere gerarchico è così diffuso se non per via di assunti inconsci per cui “noi” o la “società” ci diamo istituzioni in vista di un vago “benessere comune”. Il potere gerarchico esiste perché chi governa le istituzioni statali o aziendali più importanti ha un conflitto di interessi di fondo con i detentori della conoscenza situazionale: i primi non possono lasciare che i secondi agiscano secondo il proprio giudizio. Come il proprietario di una piantagione schiavista, chi governa un’istituzione gerarchica non può permettere ai propri subordinati di usare il proprio giudizio se non vuole finire impiccato. E i subordinati sanno benissimo che se si servissero della propria conoscenza situazionale per massimizzare l’efficienza, i guadagni verrebbero fatti propri da chi governa e convertiti in esuberi, intensificazione della produzione e dividendi per i dirigenti.

I sistemi di controllo del tipo 4 raggiungono l’optimum quando “le persone più interessate a prevenire gli imbrogli sono [messe] a contatto diretto tra loro.” Ad esempio, in un sistema di irrigazione a rotazione nessuno può allungare il proprio turno perché c’è qualcun altro che preme per subentrare. Un esempio analogo è quello di mia madre che faceva tagliare a metà la torta ad un figlio e lasciava che l’altro decidesse quale pezzo prendere. In molti casi, controllare l’uso che gli altri fanno del bene comune è “un naturale effetto secondario dell’utilizzo del bene comune”. Il controllo è incentivato anche da sanzioni e premi informali, o anche da un semplice gesto di approvazione o disapprovazione sociale.

È per questo che nelle cooperative che producono compensato nel Nordovest degli Stati Uniti i controlli costano un quarto rispetto ai produttori convenzionali: perché sono i lavoratori stessi che si controllano.

Ovviamente, ci sarà sempre una minoranza insensibile alle sanzioni morali, ma il controllo della maggioranza sensibile contribuisce ad abbassare i costi del controllo.

Tutta l’opera della Ostrom è attraversata da una verità di fondo: le istituzioni collettive, che si chiamino stati, imprese o comuni, sono ricavate tutte dallo stesso contorto legno umano. Sostenitori dello stato, critici o scettici dell’anarchismo troppo spesso presuppongono un certo livello di onniscienza nello stato, o minimizzano le difficoltà nell’individuare e punire le infrazioni. Una società astatuale, ad esempio, agirebbe per prevenire fatti come la fuoriuscita di petrolio della Deepwater Horizon, che le agenzie statali con le loro normative non sono riuscite ad evitare.

Ma ufficializzare la collettività non cambia il fatto che si tratta di esseri umani che fanno qualcosa insieme. Se un pezzo di carta dice che agiscono in nome del popolo o degli azionisti, questo non li rende infallibili e le loro prospettive restano limitate e soggette all’interesse personale.

Certo io non so se i gestori dei beni comuni hanno risolto i loro problemi in maniera ottimale. Ne dubito fortemente. Probabilmente, hanno risolto i loro problemi alla stessa maniera in cui gran parte dei singoli risolve problemi complessi: entro le proprie capacità, caso per caso, con le informazioni disponibili, con gli strumenti con cui operare, analizzando i costi delle varie opzioni e le risorse disponibili.

Le nostre traduzioni sono finanziate interamente da donazioni. Se vi piace quello che scriviamo, siete invitati a contribuire. Trovate le istruzioni su come fare nella pagina Sostieni C4SS: https://c4ss.org/sostieni-c4ss.

Selama bertahun-tahun, pasar gelap dan agorisme telah menjadi bagian yang tidak terpisahkan dari cara masyarakat bebas melawan penindasan ekonomi yang tak kunjung usai sekaligus kerusakan lingkungan. Namun apa sebenarnya yang dimaksud dengan aktivitas pasar gelap? Apa itu agorisme, dan bagaimana ia dapat menggerogoti kekuasaan negara? Lalu bagaimana agorisme dapat mendorong keberlanjutan ekologis? Pertanyaan-pertanyaan tersebut paling baik dijawab dengan menengok pemikiran salah satu tokoh besar libertarian kiri, Samuel Edward Konkin III.

Konkin pertama kali memperkenalkan istilah agorisme pada dekade 1970-an. Agorisme merupakan sebuah filsafat anarkisme pasar radikal yang menekankan aksi langsung dan pembangunan institusi-institusi alternatif melalui pasar gelap (black markets) dan pasar abu-abu (gray markets), sebagai tandingan terhadap apa yang ia sebut sebagai pasar putih (white markets) dan pasar merah (red markets).

Pasar gelap adalah aktivitas membeli, menjual, atau mempertukarkan barang dan jasa yang dinyatakan ilegal oleh negara. Misalnya membeli obat-obatan psikedelik, atau memperjualbelikan jasa seksual.

Sementara itu, pasar abu-abu adalah aktivitas membeli, menjual, atau mempertukarkan barang dan jasa yang pada dasarnya legal dan diatur oleh negara, tetapi diperoleh melalui mekanisme pasar yang tidak diatur atau tidak disahkan oleh negara. Contohnya membeli obat-obatan legal tanpa resep dokter, membayar pekerja secara tunai untuk membangun sesuatu di atas tanah milik sendiri tanpa mengikuti izin bangunan maupun kode konstruksi, dan berbagai praktik serupa.

Sebaliknya, pasar putih adalah aktivitas jual beli barang dan jasa yang sepenuhnya legal menurut negara. Misalnya membeli mobil dan membayar pajak penjualan, atau membeli obat dari apotek menggunakan resep dokter.

Adapun pasar merah adalah aktivitas jual beli barang dan jasa yang berlangsung secara legal serta berada di bawah regulasi negara, tetapi dijalankan melalui kekerasan. Contohnya intervensi militer, penyitaan harta oleh polisi, transaksi bisnis yang dikendalikan kartel, maupun industri peternakan (factory farms).

Pasar putih maupun pasar merah sama-sama berkontribusi terhadap lahirnya kekerasan, baik secara langsung maupun tidak langsung. Sebaliknya, pasar gelap dan pasar abu-abu justru memperluas ruang kebebasan selama pertukaran yang terjadi berlangsung secara damai.

Memang benar bahwa sebagian pelaku pasar gelap menggunakan kekerasan, seperti kartel narkotika atau kelompok kriminal bersenjata. Namun ketika mereka bertindak demikian, sesungguhnya mereka sedang beroperasi layaknya sebuah negara dalam pasar merah. Posisi dominan kelompok-kelompok tersebut sebagian besar justru lahir karena negara mengkriminalisasi barang dan jasa yang mereka perdagangkan. Kriminalisasi inilah yang memungkinkan pelaku pasar gelap mengenakan harga jauh lebih tinggi dalam proses distribusi.

Dalam banyak kasus, terutama pada kartel narkotika, mereka sebenarnya tidak beroperasi di dalam pasar yang bebas, melainkan di pasar yang sangat diatur. Bahkan tidak jarang mereka ikut mempertahankan regulasi tersebut dengan menggunakan kekerasan terhadap calon pesaing baru agar monopoli mereka tetap terjaga.

Pembedaan antara empat jenis pasar ini merupakan bagian dari pandangan agoris Konkin yang lebih luas mengenai kelas-kelas dalam masyarakat, yaitu para produsen, para parasit, dan mereka yang berada di antara keduanya.

Konkin memahami bahwa hanya individu-individu yang bebas dan produktif lah yang benar-benar menjaga roda ekonomi tetap berputar demi memenuhi kebutuhan masyarakat. Sebaliknya, menurutnya, pihak yang mencuri hasil kerja orang lain dan mempertahankan penindasan adalah mereka yang berada di pemerintahan beserta sekutu-sekutunya di kalangan korporasi besar.

Karena itu, agorisme menempatkan dirinya dalam tradisi kiri yang radikal. Ia berbeda dengan pembacaan anarkisme yang kurang peka terhadap persoalan kelas, seperti anarko-kapitalisme, yang menurut Konkin sering kali gagal melihat bagaimana kelas kapitalis dapat menjadi kekuatan yang sama koruptifnya dengan negara.

Karena pemerintah memonopoli hukum dan keamanan, para pelaku di pasar-pasar ilegal tidak memiliki tempat untuk mencari keadilan ketika hak-hak mereka dilanggar. Kebutuhan yang terus meningkat akan mekanisme penyelesaian sengketa di luar negara pada akhirnya akan melahirkan berbagai institusi alternatif, mulai dari organisasi seperti Mafia hingga berbagai lembaga penyelesaian sengketa yang dibangun oleh komunitas etnis maupun keagamaan.

Anda Seorang Pelaku Pasar Gelap dan Bahkan Tidak Menyadarinya

Mungkin terasa mengecewakan ketika mengetahui bahwa salah satu jalan menuju kebebasan justru melalui aktivitas di pasar gelap. Pasar gelap sering dibayangkan sebagai sesuatu yang berbahaya, sembrono, bahkan tidak perlu. Padahal, tanpa disadari, banyak orang sebenarnya sudah berpartisipasi dalam pasar gelap maupun pasar abu-abu dalam kehidupan sehari-hari.

Beberapa contohnya antara lain berbelanja di pasar tani atau pasar loak, membayar secara tunai, bekerja dengan sistem upah tunai tanpa melaporkannya kepada otoritas pajak (under the table), menyewakan kamar kosong di rumah atau apartemen tanpa melaporkannya kepada pemerintah, maupun menyewa kamar dengan cara yang sama.

Contoh lainnya adalah para tukang cukur, penata rambut, montir, seniman tato, teknisi pembuka kunci telepon seluler, teknisi servis gawai, tukang listrik, tukang ledeng, pekerja bangunan, pengemudi Uber, taksi independen, pedagang kaki lima, hingga pengasuh anak yang kerap bekerja secara tunai tanpa tercatat secara resmi (off the books). Membeli barang menggunakan Bitcoin, membeli obat-obatan yang dilarang, membawa pulang barang yang dilarang dari luar negeri (penyelundupan), saling bertukar barang dan jasa tanpa menggunakan uang (barter), berkebun di halaman rumah, hingga memelihara ternak tanpa izin zonasi maupun perizinan resmi juga termasuk di dalamnya.

Berpartisipasi dalam pasar gelap dan pasar abu-abu memberi masyarakat kemandirian ekonomi sekaligus memperluas akses terhadap berbagai barang dan jasa. Harga di pasar-pasar tersebut sering kali lebih murah dan lebih mudah dinegosiasikan. Semakin banyak persaingan, semakin banyak pula pilihan yang tersedia. Kondisi ini tidak hanya menguntungkan konsumen, tetapi juga para produsen karena mereka dapat menjangkau lebih banyak pelanggan.

Pasar gelap dan pasar abu-abu juga memungkinkan masyarakat memperoleh barang maupun jasa yang sulit diakses melalui jalur resmi. Penulis bahkan memberikan contoh seseorang yang dapat membeli senjata api tanpa harus melalui masa tunggu dan pemeriksaan latar belakang yang diwajibkan oleh negara. Terlepas apakah seseorang setuju atau tidak dengan contoh tersebut, poin yang ingin ditekankan adalah bahwa pasar di luar kontrol negara sering kali menyediakan akses yang tidak dapat diberikan oleh mekanisme resmi.

Sebagai sebuah filsafat, agorisme memang relatif baru. Namun semangat yang melandasinya sesungguhnya merupakan bagian dari tradisi panjang perlawanan yang telah muncul berulang kali sepanjang sejarah, dan dapat ditemukan dalam banyak contoh yang menarik.

Mengikuti penjelasan sejarawan libertin Thaddeus Russell dalam bukunya A Renegade History of the United States, salah satu alasan mengapa klub-klub gay pertama dapat beroperasi di banyak kota di Amerika Serikat justru berkaitan dengan keberadaan Mafia Italia. Contoh yang paling terkenal adalah Stonewall di New York.

Stonewall juga dikenal sebagai ruang yang sangat beragam secara etnis. Klub tersebut menjadi tempat berkumpulnya warga kulit hitam, Latino, Italia, dan berbagai kelompok lain setelah dibeli pada tahun 1966 oleh Fat Tony, seorang anggota Mafia yang berafiliasi dengan keluarga Genovese. Bagi para pengusaha dari keluarga kriminal Gambino maupun Genovese, insentif ekonomi jauh lebih penting daripada stigma sosial yang melekat pada komunitas LGBTQ+. Karena itulah mereka bersedia membuka ruang-ruang tersebut. Ironisnya, justru melalui motif ekonomi inilah sebuah komunitas yang selama ini dimarjinalkan akhirnya memperoleh tempat yang aman untuk mengekspresikan identitas, budaya, dan individualitas mereka.

Anarki Pasar Hijau sebagai Konsekuensi Logis

Jika kesimpulan Konkin mengenai para produsen dan para parasit ditarik hingga konsekuensi logisnya, maka kita juga perlu memikirkan implikasinya terhadap persoalan ekologi. Sebagaimana dijelaskan Konkin, terdapat entitas-entitas yang mampu menopang dirinya sendiri secara ekonomi, dan ada pula yang hanya dapat bertahan hidup karena terus disokong oleh pihak lain. Salah satu tujuan anarkisme pasar adalah membangun masyarakat di mana entitas-entitas yang secara ekonomi tidak berkelanjutan hanya dapat dipertahankan melalui cara-cara yang sukarela dan damai. Tentu saja hal ini tidak mencakup negara, tetapi tetap membuka ruang bagi jaringan bantuan timbal balik yang menyediakan berbagai layanan kesejahteraan sosial.

Dalam pandangan penulis, berbagai praktik yang menjadi ciri kapitalisme modern, seperti subsidi kepada perusahaan-perusahaan besar maupun privatisasi atas sumber daya bersama (enclosure of the commons), justru memungkinkan entitas-entitas yang bersifat parasitis terus bertahan hidup dan menghamburkan sumber daya. Sebaliknya, apabila anarkisme benar-benar mengarah pada masyarakat di mana kegiatan produksi sepenuhnya ditopang oleh mereka yang secara langsung bertanggung jawab mengelola sumber daya tersebut, maka secara logis masyarakat itu juga akan berkembang menjadi masyarakat yang mampu menopang dirinya sendiri secara ekologis. Inilah yang oleh penulis disebut sebagai anarki pasar hijau (green market anarchy).

Menurut penulis, kondisi tersebut bukan hanya merupakan kecenderungan alami dari pasar yang benar-benar bebas, tetapi juga tujuan yang layak diperjuangkan oleh kaum anarkis. Masyarakat yang bebas semestinya berusaha memulihkan sumber daya alam sejauh mungkin agar bumi tetap menyediakan kehidupan yang layak bagi generasi berikutnya. Dengan kata lain, kebebasan tidak dapat dipisahkan dari tanggung jawab terhadap lingkungan.

Sebagai seorang anarkis, penulis berpendapat bahwa kita patut mencurigai siapa pun yang begitu nyaman menguras sumber daya bumi yang terbatas tanpa berusaha memulihkannya kembali. Jika mereka bahkan tidak menghormati keberlangsungan sumber daya yang menjadi dasar kehidupan mereka sendiri, mengapa kita harus percaya bahwa mereka akan menghormati hak-hak orang lain? Inilah salah satu alasan mengapa penulis juga menentang negara. Menurutnya, negara bukan hanya mencemari lingkungan melalui aktivitasnya sendiri, tetapi juga memungkinkan pencemaran dalam skala besar dilakukan oleh sektor swasta.

Penekanan agorisme terhadap aksi langsung juga memiliki arti penting bagi gerakan lingkungan. Alih-alih menunggu perubahan melalui proses politik yang lamban, kita seharusnya mulai bertindak sekarang juga. Ekonomi Austria mengingatkan bahwa waktu adalah sesuatu yang bernilai. Dan jika ada satu sumber daya yang paling banyak disia-siakan oleh negara, menurut penulis, maka itu adalah waktu. Waktu yang hilang tidak dapat dikembalikan maupun dipulihkan. Satu-satunya hal yang dapat kita lakukan adalah memanfaatkan sisa waktu yang kita miliki seefisien mungkin.

Anarki Pasar Hijau sebagai Konsekuensi Logis

Jika kesimpulan Konkin mengenai para produsen dan para parasit ditarik hingga konsekuensi logisnya, maka kita juga perlu memikirkan implikasinya terhadap persoalan ekologi. Sebagaimana dijelaskan Konkin, terdapat entitas-entitas yang mampu menopang dirinya sendiri secara ekonomi, dan ada pula yang hanya dapat bertahan hidup karena terus disokong oleh pihak lain. Salah satu tujuan anarkisme pasar adalah membangun masyarakat di mana entitas-entitas yang secara ekonomi tidak berkelanjutan hanya dapat dipertahankan melalui cara-cara yang sukarela dan damai. Tentu saja hal ini tidak mencakup negara, tetapi tetap membuka ruang bagi jaringan bantuan timbal balik yang menyediakan berbagai layanan kesejahteraan sosial.

Dalam pandangan penulis, berbagai praktik yang menjadi ciri kapitalisme modern, seperti subsidi kepada perusahaan-perusahaan besar maupun privatisasi atas sumber daya bersama (enclosure of the commons), justru memungkinkan entitas-entitas yang bersifat parasitis terus bertahan hidup dan menghamburkan sumber daya. Sebaliknya, apabila anarkisme benar-benar mengarah pada masyarakat di mana kegiatan produksi sepenuhnya ditopang oleh mereka yang secara langsung bertanggung jawab mengelola sumber daya tersebut, maka secara logis masyarakat itu juga akan berkembang menjadi masyarakat yang mampu menopang dirinya sendiri secara ekologis. Inilah yang oleh penulis disebut sebagai anarki pasar hijau (green market anarchy).

Menurut penulis, kondisi tersebut bukan hanya merupakan kecenderungan alami dari pasar yang benar-benar bebas, tetapi juga tujuan yang layak diperjuangkan oleh kaum anarkis. Masyarakat yang bebas semestinya berusaha memulihkan sumber daya alam sejauh mungkin agar bumi tetap menyediakan kehidupan yang layak bagi generasi berikutnya. Dengan kata lain, kebebasan tidak dapat dipisahkan dari tanggung jawab terhadap lingkungan.

Sebagai seorang anarkis, penulis berpendapat bahwa kita patut mencurigai siapa pun yang begitu nyaman menguras sumber daya bumi yang terbatas tanpa berusaha memulihkannya kembali. Jika mereka bahkan tidak menghormati keberlangsungan sumber daya yang menjadi dasar kehidupan mereka sendiri, mengapa kita harus percaya bahwa mereka akan menghormati hak-hak orang lain? Inilah salah satu alasan mengapa penulis juga menentang negara. Menurutnya, negara bukan hanya mencemari lingkungan melalui aktivitasnya sendiri, tetapi juga memungkinkan pencemaran dalam skala besar dilakukan oleh sektor swasta.

Penekanan agorisme terhadap aksi langsung juga memiliki arti penting bagi gerakan lingkungan. Alih-alih menunggu perubahan melalui proses politik yang lamban, kita seharusnya mulai bertindak sekarang juga. Ekonomi Austria mengingatkan bahwa waktu adalah sesuatu yang bernilai. Dan jika ada satu sumber daya yang paling banyak disia-siakan oleh negara, menurut penulis, maka itu adalah waktu. Waktu yang hilang tidak dapat dikembalikan maupun dipulihkan. Satu-satunya hal yang dapat kita lakukan adalah memanfaatkan sisa waktu yang kita miliki seefisien mungkin.

Pajak Karbon Bill Gates versus Solusi Agoris

Beberapa waktu lalu Bill Gates menjelaskan mengapa, menurutnya, energi alternatif berkembang jauh lebih lambat daripada yang diharapkan.

“Tidak ada keuntungan besar yang bisa diperoleh. Sekalipun Anda berhasil menemukan sumber energi baru yang biayanya sama dengan energi saat ini dan tidak menghasilkan emisi CO₂, teknologi tersebut tetap akan menghadapi ketidakpastian dibandingkan teknologi yang sudah teruji, telah beroperasi dalam skala luar biasa besar, dan berhasil melewati seluruh hambatan regulasi. Tanpa adanya pajak karbon yang cukup besar, tidak akan ada insentif bagi para inovator maupun pembeli pembangkit listrik untuk beralih.”

Bagi penulis, pernyataan Gates hampir tidak mungkin terdengar lebih kapitalistis daripada itu. Tanpa disadari, Gates sebenarnya sedang menunjukkan bagaimana subsidi politik, skala ekonomi yang diciptakan negara, dan berbagai hambatan regulasi telah membantu industri minyak mempertahankan dominasinya, sekaligus membuat biaya awal pengembangan energi alternatif menjadi jauh lebih mahal dibandingkan bahan bakar fosil.

Seluruh intervensi negara tersebut, menurut penulis, justru merupakan syarat agar minyak tetap menjadi sumber energi utama. Namun menariknya, meskipun Gates menyatakan bahwa energi alternatif sulit berkembang, pasar sesungguhnya terus melahirkan berbagai inovasi di bidang tersebut, bahkan di tengah begitu banyak hambatan yang sengaja diciptakan negara.

Ironisnya lagi, solusi yang diajukan Gates justru berupa pajak baru, alih-alih menghapus subsidi yang selama ini dinikmati industri minyak.

Dalam pandangan penulis, Gates tampaknya percaya bahwa pemerintah hanya membutuhkan lebih banyak uang dan lebih banyak kekuasaan. Padahal, menurutnya, semakin besar kekuasaan dan pendapatan negara, semakin besar pula peluang negara menjual sumber daya penting kepada penawar tertinggi.

Karena itu, penulis berpendapat bahwa solusi atas persoalan lingkungan tidak akan pernah datang dari Washington D.C., ataupun ibu kota negara mana pun.

Di berbagai belahan dunia, para wirausahawan telah mengembangkan berbagai solusi karena persoalan-persoalan tersebut memang menciptakan insentif ekonomi. Kebutuhan dunia akan mata uang yang bebas dari kendali negara melahirkan Bitcoin. Kebutuhan universal akan perlindungan diri mendorong lahirnya teknologi pencetakan senjata tiga dimensi. Demikian pula, meningkatnya kebutuhan terhadap solusi yang ramah lingkungan pada akhirnya akan dipenuhi oleh pasar. Selama regulasi negara masih terus menghambat inovasi tersebut, sangat mungkin berbagai solusi itu justru pertama kali berkembang melalui pasar-pasar gelap.

Dalam perang antara rakyat melawan imperium, penulis menilai rakyatlah yang perlahan mulai unggul. Teknologi, pengetahuan, dan modal terus mengalami desentralisasi. Ketika perekonomian semakin terdesentralisasi, perlindungan terhadap lingkungan juga akan menjadi lebih efektif. Kerusakan lingkungan dalam skala raksasa akan semakin sulit terjadi ketika dominasi kapitalisme kroni mulai memudar, sementara berbagai solusi baru akan bermunculan dalam kondisi pasar yang benar-benar bebas.

Pada akhirnya, transisi menuju keberlanjutan ekologis merupakan konsekuensi logis dari strategi agoris dan cita-cita masyarakat anarkis.

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