Well, folks, you were warned — by, among others, my friend Neal Reynolds, who wrote as the IPO rolled out that “likely within a few days the stock will settle down far below whatever peak it hits today — especially since GM just pulled all their advertising from Facebook” … hold that thought, will ya?

And I’m viscerally sympathetic to the opinion of e.g. columnist Tibor Machan, that a stock falling after its introduction is just the market at work, versus which “[a]ll this pining for a sure thing just gives the politicians an excuse to butt in.”

But the real problem, I think, is that the politicians already had butted in, in many ways, both structurally and at, so to speak, “point of sale.”

I’m surprised that more people haven’t commented on General Motors’ decision to pull millions of dollars worth of Facebook advertising mere days before the IPO. The punditry seems to be generally treating that decision as a market act … but the timing looks less related to advertising efficacy than to a desire to tank the stock price. While it could have been routine (if large-scale) gamesmanship on the part of higher-ups at GM who wanted to short the stock, I seem to recall that GM’s single largest shareholder is the government of the United States.

Could there be a political dimension here? Why would the Obama regime lean on a company it owns 3/5ths of to help torpedo Facebook’s IPO? Possible reasons range from the petty (to punish Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin for renouncing his US citizenship to keep the taxman’s grubby hands off his new fortune) to the sinister (not wanting a new tech bubble, with possible gooey explosion, playing out over a contentious election cycle to unknown effect; or perhaps just getting some leverage on Facebook by creating a “situation” that could then be made to “go away” given cooperation on things like user surveillance).

Even absent the GM hijinks, one can’t help but notice that the IPO’s backers were the usual suspects — Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, et. al, the state-privileged players whose collective motto is “privatized profits, socialized risks, anything goes, and Uncle Sugar will save us if we need him to” — or that those usual suspects acted in the usual way, doing their damnedest to deceive investors into buying or holding shares not on the basis of their real value, but by propping up the stock price with massive buys as it began to sink.

And finally, there’s Facebook itself, now “under investigation” by the Securities and Exchange Commission … the government bureaucracy whose paperwork requirements theoretically protect investors, but which somehow always seems to do exactly the opposite. Did Facebook present one set of information to the public and another to “select investors” (the usual suspects named above)? If so, does that information differential (and/or the actions taken based on the “select investor” information) constitute fraud?

Can’t keep track of the players without a scorecard. Can’t trust the numbers ON the scorecard. But to the extent that skulduggery is playing out in the Facebook saga, one can’t help but notice that the politicians seem to be looking over every major player’s shoulder and whispering instructions into those players’ ears.

Nor can one reasonably write off that set of facts as mere coincidence. This, my friends, is actually existing capitalism. And if you think that’s the same thing as a free market, I’ve got some shares in a bridge I’d like to sell you. At $38 a pop.

Another source of vivid imagery is the Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World. Consider this:  “… we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”

These two phrases brilliantly describe the predicament of state-fostered corporate capitalism. Capitalism as an historic system is five hundred or more years old, and the state was intimately involved in its formation and its ongoing preservation from the very beginning. But the state has been far more involved, if such a thing is possible, in the model of corporate capitalism that’s prevailed over the past 150 years. The corporate titans that dominate our economic and political life could hardly survive for a year without the continuing intervention of the state in the market to sustain them through subsidies and monopoly protections.

This system is reaching its limits of sustainability. Here are some reasons why:

1) The monopolies on which it depends are increasingly unenforceable. Especially “intellectual property.”

1a) Copyright-based industry has already lost the fight to end file-sharing.

1b) Industrial patents are only enforceable when oligopoly industry, oligopoly retail chains reduce transaction cost of enforcement — unenforceable against neighborhood garage factories using pirated CAD/CAM files.

2) Cheap production tools and soil-efficient horticulture are

2a) increasing competition from self-employment

2b) reducing profitable investment opportunities for surplus capital and destroying direct rate of profit (DROP)

3) State-subsidized production inputs leads to geometrically increasing demand for those inputs, outstripping the state’s ability to supply and driving it into chronic fiscal crisis. For centuries the state has provided large-scale capitalist agribusiness with privileged access to land stolen from the laboring classes. For 150 years, it has subsidized inputs like railroads, airports and highways for long-distance shipping, and irrigation water for factory farming. But as any student of Microecon 101 could tell you, subsidizing something means more and more of it gets consumed. So you get agribusiness that’s inefficient in its use of land and water, and industry that achieves false economies of scale by producing for artificially large market areas. Each year it takes a larger government subsidy to keep this business model profitable.

4) Worsening tendencies toward overaccumulation and stagnation increase the amount of chronic deficit spending necessary for Keynesian aggregate demand management, also worsening the fiscal crisis. The state has built a massive military-industrial complex and created entire other industries at state expense to absorb excess investment capital and overcome the system’s tendency toward surplus production and surplus capital, and sustained larger and larger deficits, just to prevent the collapse that otherwise would have already occurred.

In short, capitalism depends on ever-growing amounts of state intervention in the market for its survival, and the system is hitting the point where the teat runs dry.

The result is a system in which governments and corporations are increasingly hollowed out. And meanwhile, growing up within this corporate capitalist “integument,” things like open source software and culture, open-source industrial design, permaculture and low-overhead garage micromanufacturing eat the corporate-state economy alive. An ever-growing share of labor and production are disappearing into relocalized resilient economies, self-employment, worker cooperatives and the informal and household economy. In the end, they will skeletonize the corporate dinosaurs like a swarm of piranha.

Exactly! You might be forgiven for thinking “the enemy” our ruling circles always talk about is somebody with a strange language and religion on the other side of the world. But in fact “the enemy,” for the ruling class, is anyone capable of disrupting its goals or undermining its power — including us. The American people are potentially a far greater threat to their power than any foreign government.

Australian scholar Alex Carey argued, in a book of that title, that the purpose of the corporate-state propaganda machine was “Taking the Risk Out of Democracy.” The modern institutions of concentrated corporate power and universal suffrage democracy, he said, both date from the late 19th century. This meant the most concentrated system of economic power in history faced an unprecedented danger of disruption from the caprice of a majority.

That power structure wasn’t willing to leave its power to chance. Alongside corporate power and mass democracy, a third modern phenomenon arose in the early years of the 20th century: Propaganda as the science of “engineering consent.” People like Edward Bernays in the US, and their counterparts in Britain, oversaw Anglo-American propaganda efforts during WWI (remember those bayoneted babies in Belgium?). Afterward, Bernays went on to found the modern discipline of public relations.

The corporate economy, with its monstrous concentration of political and economic power, was no spontaneous or inevitable outgrowth of modern technology. It resulted from massive top-down social engineering by the state. But a system of power can only survive if it’s seen as natural and inevitable by the ruled.

So since the beginnings of mass democracy, there have been carefully orchestrated efforts to ensure that, by the time the public plays out the ritual of its “sovereign” power in electoral politics, most everything of importance has already been decided. In 1991, for example, by the time Operation Desert Storm began, the prior deployment of troops under Bush’s claimed authority as “Commander-in-Chief,” combined with a relentless barrage of propaganda about Kuwaiti “incubator babies,” guaranteed the actual launch of the war as a given.

You may be tempted to think that’s mainly a practice of the Bad Old Republicans, that Democrats and Progressives are “different.” You may believe, with Thomas Frank, that the unsavory aspects of government under Republican control are an aberration, and that “the government” normally — in Soccer Mom parlance — “is just us.”

Not quite. Back in 2004, Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger said of the growing unpopularity of Bush’s war in Iraq: “We have too much at stake in Iraq to lose the American people.” If the allegedly sovereign American people are not “us” — if the corporate-state nexus constitutes a separate “us” — well, that really says it all.

But what about Saint Barack? Obama, who last year greenlighted Bahrain’s crackdown on its own pro-democracy movement while simultaneously grandstanding over Libya’s Gaddafi, has actively supported the regime’s detention of Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye for the “crime” of photographing crashed drones stamped “Made in USA” — thereby revealing American complicity in extra-legal, unaccountable assassinations by remote control and the hundreds of innocent civilians murdered in the process.

You might think, after all this, that explicitly legalizing the use of propaganda to manipulate the domestic public would be redundant. After all, as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman pointed out, the American mass media adhere for the most part to a state propaganda model of reporting foreign news (did you get even the slightest whiff, from news coverage in August 2008, that Georgia might have done something to provoke “Russian aggression?”).

Nevertheless, they’re doing it. A bipartisan amendment proposed by Mac Thornberry and Adam Smith would repeal the Smith-Mundt Act of 1947, which prohibits State Department and Pentagon propaganda services from disseminating messages for domestic consumption. Thornberry complains that existing law “ties the hands of America’s diplomatic officials, military, and others by inhibiting our ability to effectively communicate in a credible way.” What sort of “credible ways” does he have in mind? They include US government sock puppets participating in online social media discussions, under false pretenses, to prop up support for failed US foreign and security policies.

What new levels of crudeness and mendacity can we expect from state propaganda, once it’s explicitly authorized in law? Your safest strategy, as before, is to continue assuming everything you hear from the state is either a misleading partial truth or an outright lie. You can’t go far wrong that way.

But on the off chance that this was really intended as a serious factual claim, rather than a liberal version of Stephen Colbert’s shtik, I’d like to point out a few things: Digital Millennium Copyright Act. SOPA. ACTA. The FBI seizing dozens upon dozens of torrent download sites and issuing press releases from Disney headquarters. There, that should do it.

See, my first impression must have been correct: Only a comedian would claim Hollywood wants nothing in return for its campaign contributions.

Draconian digital copyright law and Gestapo-like enforcement of same, so beloved of Vice President Biden and former Senator Chris Dodd, are central to the business model of the big movie corporations.

When you think about it, Hollywood’s special affinity for the Democratic Party makes perfect sense. So-called “cognitive capitalism” (or “progressive” or “green capitalism”), which Progressives see as a paradigm for reindustrializing America, is utterly dependent on “intellectual property” for its business model. It’s basically the same as what economist Paul Romer calls “new growth theory”: A model of economic growth based on enclosing ideas as a source of profit.

If you want to see this model in action, just compare the retail price of a pair of trademarked Nike sneakers to the $5 a job shop in Asia got paid to produce them. Or look at Tom Peters’ Minolta camera — nine-tenths of whose value, he gushed, was “intellect” rather than actual parts and labor. Or the 2000% markup over production cost on patented drugs. Or a $200 CD of Microsoft Office that cost $5 to burn.

When you see the likes of Bill Gates, Bono, Sting and Warren Buffet jet-setting around the world, it may look like they’re talking about something like AIDS in Africa. But it’s this business model they’re really promoting. Their progressive/cognitive/green capitalist business model is just as caught up with the Democratic wing of the corporate ruling class as the business model of Rockefeller, Morgan and Gould was with the Republican wing a century ago.

We live in a world where the cost of physical means of production is imploding. A desktop computer can do work once requring a million-dollar press or music studio, and a garage shop with a few thousand dollars worth of machine tools can replace a million dollar factory. Making a big profit by controlling the physical means of production — and actually producing stuff — is pretty much obsolete.

Penny ante wealth — the fortunes of a few million dollars examined by Thomas Stanley in “The Millionaire Next Door” — comes from making things. Giant fortunes, in the billions of dollars, come from controlling the terms on which other people are allowed to make things.

Actual manufacturing, for the most part, takes place in independent job shops and sweatshops that produce on contract for transnational corporations. The actual sneakers are produced in these shops for almost nothing. Nike slaps a Swoosh on them and marks them up 4000% for retail sale. Nike, a typical global corporation, doesn’t actually produce anything. It makes its money erecting toll gates between the people who produce and the people who consume.

Thorstein Veblen called this “capitalized disserviceability”: Obtaining wealth not by producing things, but by charging rent for not obstructing production by other people. Henry George, Jr. described it as making money by controlling access to natural opportunities.

The central role of the state, at a time when technologies of abundance threaten to destroy all the scarcities and rents on which the wealth of the privileged depends, is to protect the rentier classes from the threat of abundance. At a time when the means of production themselves are cheap and there’s no reason why people can’t produce for themselves and each other without a middleman, the state makes these technologies artificially scarce by giving the rentier classes legal control over the terms on which they can be used.

So when Meathead says Hollywood doesn’t expect anything in return for its contributions, he’s just making a funny. Hollywood expects something, all right. And it gets its money’s worth.

In American political dialogue, it’s common to hear left-leaning talking heads paint a picture of the 2008 financial crisis as the free market gone awry. Rightly condemning the major banks, they reason that a lack of state oversight and regulation of the financial sector led to a high-risk environment that allowed ordinary people to be taken advantage of.

The “End the Fed” crowd has had its own response to the financial disaster, one that in the United States is associated almost exclusively with a particular brand of right-wing populism. They pin the catastrophic booms and busts epitomized by the crisis on the Federal Reserve System and the malinvestments it encourages.

What is seldom remarked upon is how well the right and left populist narratives at play regarding the financial crisis fit together and indeed strengthen one another. Market anarchists point out the connivance of the state — through institutions like the Fed — and Wall Street, building on the tradition of American anarchists like Benjamin Tucker.

For libertarians like Tucker, steadfast in attacking state-granted economic privilege, it was the idle capitalist who most benefited from state meddling in the economy, the boss who lived off of and profited from the industry and ingenuity of others. Market anarchists contend that it is not any “free market” that allows the baleful dominance of giant banks, but rather a catalog of crucial state interventions.

In the struggle against the economic elite, therefore, working people haven’t ever needed the assistance of the state; they require only that it cease intervening on behalf of the rich, powerful and politically connected “captains of industry.”

Along with tall barriers to entry such as special permits and capitalization requirements, it is the Federal Reserve System, the US central bank, that most releases the banks from true competition. Under the Fed’s centralized system, the big banks are allowed to lend what are really imaginary dollars without limit, discharged from worries about depositors being startled by their lack of discipline.

From its birth, the Fed was designed as a mechanism for precluding legitimate competition within the banking class. It would serve the purpose not only of bailing the banks out were they to go over the cliff, but of encouraging and imposing a debt-dependent economic system wherein Wall Street would enjoy a commanding position over all of industry.

The radical anti-capitalist, anti-state message has far more explanatory power and clarity when it acknowledges that the class interests of the Federal Reserve System are aligned with those of the Wall Street banking elite. As Benjamin Tucker argued, “It is useless to look to the State for remedy or punishment. Capital rules every department from legislature to court. It is through the State that capital wields its power.”

The one route to genuine “reform” is the complete and permanent separation of the economic from the political, a real free market of voluntary trade and cooperation replacing the present system of coercive collusion. And that’s an answer that will never get much play in the Wall Street-Federal Reserve den of thieves.

Sure, liberals are free to use the Occupy label to promote their agenda. That is, after all, what Occupy’s all about: A brand, or platform, ready-made for adoption on a modular basis by anyone who sees fit to use it. The more different groups using the Occupy brand, each with its own anti-corporate agenda, the better. It’s not a zero sum game.

The beauty of Occupy is that its module/platform architecture, and its openness to anyone who wants to create a new node for their own purposes, make it an ideal laboratory for experimentation in revolutionary praxis. Any local node is free to try out new ways of doing things, and to share its experience with others; the new techniques are freely available to any other node in the network that finds them useful. No permission, no administrative coordination to make sure everybody’s on the same page, is needed at any step in the process.

It’s the same kind of stigmergic platform as Wikipedia, a Linux developer group … or Al Qaeda Iraq. Self-selected individuals and local groups make contributions to praxis entirely on their own initiative, the smallest contribution can be leveraged with no transaction cost, and all contributions immediately become the common property of the entire movement.

I’ve hoped for some time that Occupy would cease to be mainly a protest movement and instead become mainly a school of living. That is, that — like the neighborhood assemblies in Argentina ten years ago — it would become a venue for local communities to disseminate the skills and technologies for building counter-institutions and a counter-economy that could flourish outside the decaying neoliberal system.

Some early signs in this direction were teach-ins like those of Juliet Schor (author of Plenitude) and Michel Bauwens of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives. Another was the “Occupy Our Homes” campaign, which offered some promise of evolving into a nationwide squatter movement to reclaim vacant housing. The term for things like this is “prefigurative politics”: That is, rather than attempting to pressure the power structure of the existing society for reforms, they exemplify the successor society in formation.

This spring, we see renewed occasion for hope. For example Occupy the Farm has occupied the Gill Tract, a vacant five-acre tract of land near the UC Berkeley campus slated for commercial development, and is cultivating it to raise food for the community.

All kinds of other counter-economic projects are available for Occupy to adopt. One of them is the kind of repair cafe that’s being pioneered in Amsterdam, as a way for low-income people to keep their broken appliances in use. The same general idea, neighborhood workshops and repair centers using the members’ shared tools and skills as a base for subsistence outside the cash nexus for the unemployed and underemployed, has been around at least since Colin Ward and Karl Hess.

Another variant of the same idea is the hackerspaces in many communities around the United States. Local digital barter currencies, on the same basic architecture as Tom Greco’s mutual credit clearing systems, are springing up all over the country. Open source machine tools, like those under development by the hardware hackers at the Open Source Ecology project, can produce factory quality goods at a two-order-of-magnitude reduction in cost. Soil-intensive horticultural techniques can feed one person on a tenth of an acre.

The human capital built up by Occupy in local communities has great potential as a clearinghouse for sharing and promoting such projects, and as a seed around which the new society and the new economy can crystallize.

As my friend Rose Anderson stated in a recent discussion:

“The unmitigated greed of the 1% unintentionally forced a paradigm shift while no one was looking…. The jobs aren’t coming back, but as this situation drags on the number of people figuring out they don’t have to wait on the government and corporations will be the most perfect storm of societal change ever inadvertently created … Occupy is just the beginning.”

Exactly. The real potential of Occupy is not to pressure Congress to adopt Obama’s infrastructure program, or the Buffett Rule, or any of the other shiboleths of “Progressive” politics. It is, rather, to serve as the nucleus of the new society in being.

If we extend that analogy to other areas of political ideology, it’s reasonable to think of political progressives as firemen on a train rolling down those tracks toward Buckley and his compatriots, building up a head of steam to run right over their barricade and bust through pursuant to a theory of where those tracks must necessarily lead.

Buckley’s take on things is not a bad metaphor, and I think my addendum works with it, but it does leave out a couple of key factors: The passengers on the train — in other words, all of us — and the guns in the hands and holsters of conservative and progressive alike. If the tracks are history and the train is society, the competing gangs trying to control its course through politics are not helpful, useful engineers or brakemen or switchmen as they’d have us believe, but bushwhackers, hijackers and train robbers.

Let’s dispense with rose-colored glasses here: No, it is not obvious that, absent the state, society would magically find itself relieved of controversy, tumult, even violence. Those things are probably part and parcel of the human condition.

On the other hand, it’s fairly obvious — to me, anyway — that roving gangs of malcontents waving guns and flashing shiny badges (they call themselves “governments”) as they demand in turn that society apply the brakes or mash the accelerator to the floor, exacerbate rather than ameliorate those problems.

Which brings us to marriage — and, in particular, same-sex marriage. Over the last decade or so, conservatives and progressives have done battle in America’s political institutions — its legislatures, its courts, its polling places — over whether or not it should be “allowed.”

It’s impossible to sort out what an historical progression untainted by politics might have looked like, but I confess to feeling that the progressives have a better handle on where society’s going here. In my lifetime, Americans have slowly moved down the tracks from a general horror of homosexuality, to a grudging tolerance of it, to majority or near-majority sentiments against discrimination over it.

If progressives are, as some might think, overbearing in their fight to take things further, faster, they at least seem to be in sync with where things are actually going, while conservatives mistakenly think the train can be stopped or even put in reverse.

But, progressive versus conservative cultural instincts notwithstanding, it didn’t and doesn’t have to be this way.

Absent the state, the topic would likely still be controversial (or have been so at some point in the past). But that controversy, no matter how harsh, would be far less damaging to society and to society’s component parts (people).

Families, friends, entrepreneurs and mediators/arbitrators would accommodate (or not) changing societal mores over time, transmuting the controversial into the conventional (or not) bit by bit. Good ideas would eventually find widespread acceptance (or at least acceptance in easily accessible niches). Bad ideas would fade away with far less heartbreak for all involved, and for innocent bystanders.

It is the state which brings the equivalent of nuclear weapons — laws privileging some relationships and prohibiting others, both at gunpoint — to what would otherwise be a series of desultory fistfights.

Marriage has existed, in one form or another, for as long as humankind. Monogamous, (theoretically) life-long heterosexual marriage with property equality between partners is only one such form. If that form was truly superior to all conceivable others in all ways, it wouldn’t need a politician with a tin badge and a .44 Magnum to “protect” it from competing alternatives.

Government screws up everything it touches. It’s past time we told it to get its grubby hands off marriage.

The first story, featuring tech firms Nvidia and Intellectual Ventures, highlights the defensive role of patents as a strategic investment. Nvidia’s general counsel, David Shannon, remarks in the article that “[t]he acquisition of IP is a strategy every company is using right now.”

Elsewhere, in the litigation theater of the intellectual property wars Shannon cites, Apple and Samsung skirmished in a federal appellate court over whether Samsung could market its Galaxy tablet in the U.S. The case is just one in the constant and frenzied volley of IP-related lawsuits within the technology industries, whose most important assets are no longer physical goods, but special legal protections.

These stories and many more just like them hint at something at the core of the way that the economic ruling class employs the power of the modern state.

The role of the state in the economy is and always has been to allow a small elite to create gates and tolls around wealth and natural resources, to monopolize them and the products of labor. As a particular medium for this operating principle, the modern state is somewhat unique, built upon quite specific thinking as to roles and capabilities of bureaucrats working within centralized, hierarchical organizations.

It is in that way very similar, in both its philosophical assumptions and in its functioning, to the modern corporation. Narratives that position business and government as rivals ignore not only the similarities of the two, but their mutual interdependence. Indeed it would be practically impossible to neatly separate the two from one another in the history of the modern, total state.

Technology represents the proverbial double-edged sword within such a paradigm. On the one hand, in its relation to the do-it-yourself realm, technology has thrown wide potentialities of self-sufficiency and independence that few could have imagined, new ways to live and to thrive in a world outside of the state-corporate economic and social structure.

At the same time, the emergence of new industries and new technologies must be regarded as central in the evolution of the kind of state we know today, the reach and scope of authority seeming to lengthen and expand daily.

Discussing the international law framework around “intellectual property,” specifically the TRIPS agreement, economist Donald G. Richards notes the ways that international IP rules “reflect the real and perceived interests of cross-national classes.” Richards argues, as do market anarchists, that worldwide protection of patents and copyrights “facilitates the expansion of global capitalism while reinforcing the currently prevailing hierarchy of production and power relations.”

On a fundamental level, patents and copyrights dictate the ways in which people are allowed to use their own tangible property, from pens and paper to scrap metal and computer chips. They thus represent the kinds of coercive, monopoly privileges that genuine free markets stand against in principle. Using the restrictive power of the state to limit competition raises the prices of our computers, automobiles, food and clothing — virtually all of the good and services we buy.

“Competition” today is no more than a clash between rich, monolithic global corporate titans who would rather use the legal system to ban competitors than actually compete. Competition between Samsung and Apple may be fierce enough in the courtroom, but what would happen in a real free market, one where no one was entitled to special privileges through IP?

Then the consumer might not be merely a consumer; she might just be an autonomous individual with more capacity for self-sufficiency than we can imagine in a today shackled to millions of pieces of paper housing corporate patents.

Over time the privileged classes have experimented with various expedients for determining the share of the product left to the laborer in order to maximize the rentiers’ total income in absolute terms. They’ve been quite willing, for the most part, to increase the producers’ relative share and with it the incentives for making a larger pie — so long as the absolute size of the slice appropriated by the rentiers didn’t decline. But when increasing the size of the pie has meant a smaller slice for them, they’ve never wavered in choosing productive inefficiency as a condition of efficient exploitation.

Under serfdom and other medieval labor regimes, the ruling class politically appropriated the land and forced its rightful owners — those who cultivated it and mixed their labor with it — to pay a portion of their labor product as a condition of access to the land. Producers were given a fixed rent, either as a percentage or in absolute terms, and left with the remainder of their output for themselves.

In the capitalist era, in both its early modern agrarian variants and the later industrial system, the ruling classes allowed market mechanisms to operate within a framework of medieval property forms and class monopolies. Throughout the capitalist era, the state has encouraged as much market activity, within the framework of state-enforced monopoly, as was compatible with maximizing exploitation. Under the classic form of capitalism, as it existed through the mid-19th century on, the market applied mainly to consumption. The realm of production was still governed by power, with the propertied classes controlling access to opportunities to produce.

Under the monopoly capitalism which arose in the late 19th century, exploitation extended to the realm of consumption, with the rentier classes using artificial scarcities like “intellectual property” and assorted regulatory cartels to extract surplus from consumers via unequal exchange.

Today, in the dying days of monopoly capitalism, the state’s role in surplus extraction is specifically to protect the rentier classes against competition from the technologies of abundance. A good example is public library ebooks, designed to self-destruct after 20 readings.

Another way of protecting the rentiers from abundance is compelling us to purchase waste output as condition of buying what we actually need. For example, as recounted by Jessica Mitford in “The American Way of Death,” at one time the law in many states required the purchase of a casket even for cremating a body, thus compelling grieving families to support an industry they had no need of as a condition for burying their dead.

At all times and all places, since the beginning of the state and of class stratification, it has been the same basic idea: By erecting a tollgate between labor and consumption, to force us to support a parasitic rentier class in addition to ourselves, as a condition for being allowed to support ourselves at all.

This is what the state does. This is what the state always does. The state is the political means to wealth. Every state has been, and every state will be, a class state that enforces transactions in which one privileged party benefits at the expense of an unprivileged other. The state puts a majority of us in a position of accepting exchange on terms which nobody would willingly accept absent restrictions on the alternatives available to us.

The state, in short, forces us to feed a monkey on our backs in return for the right to live at all, in return for the right to feed ourselves.

And if you think the agenda promoted by Social Democrats, liberals and “Progressives” the past century or so has been a fundamental departure from this principle, don’t delude yourselves. Capitalists have been at the heart of liberal and Social Democratic coalitions. Liberalism, Social Democracy, is still capitalism. All the modifications of capitalism that make exploitation less harsh and unpleasant, from the perspective of the exploited, are equivalent to adaptive modifications in a parasite that stabilize and enable its parasitism in the long run by making it more tolerable for the host organism.

The only real alternative is to dump the monkey off your back altogether — to eliminate the state and the system of class exploitation it enforces, so that all exchanges and relationships are mutually beneficial ones between equals.

Once Julia comes off the human resources assembly line, she’ll look for work in an economy where most employment opportunities are controlled by hierarchical, authoritarian institutions. She’ll spend her work life selling her labor in a system designed to minimize the competition employers face from self-employment — in which the state’s avowed macroeconomic policy is to keep the bargaining power of labor (aka “inflationary pressure”) within manageable bounds.

If she tries to escape the reservation, she’ll confront a host of state-enforced artificial scarcities whose main effect is to make the means of production artificially expensive for labor, and impose artificial entry costs and overhead on self-employment. Until Julia turns 65, she’ll exist in a system where wage labor is the only alternative for all but the rich. The President, Democrat or Republican, will accept the basic presupposition of the “jobs culture” as a fact of nature.

Under market anarchy, Julia would live in a society where education was self-organized by her neighbors, her studies were shaped by her needs rather than those of future employers, and economic power was distributed and decentralized. She’d spend her working life in a market without entry barriers to using her skills in self-employment or in a cooperative shop, and where if she did consider wage employment she’d encounter potential employers as an equal rather than as a commodity pre-shaped to their needs.

As a consumer, Julia will pay prices consisting largely of rents on artificial scarcity enforced by the state. She’ll spend $200 for proprietary software CDs that cost $5 to print out, and pay a 2000% markup on medications under patent. She’ll buy sneakers with a $195 brand-name premium over the $5 the sweatshop charged to make them, and a camera whose price comes mainly from embedded patent rents rather than actual parts and labor. She’ll pay a markup of about 20% as the result of price-fixing on goods manufactured in oligopoly industries.

Local goods and services will be far more expensive because of zoning laws that protect brick-and-mortar shops by requiring the rental of commercial space as a condition of doing business, high licensing fees, and regulatory codes that criminalize small-batch production by mandating industrial-scale machinery. Both Obama and Romney strongly support all these policies.

Under market anarchy, there’d be no state-enforced cartels, entry barriers, or artificial scarcity. Competition would drive the prices Julia pays down to the actual cost of production. Julia would far more easily purchase home-grown, -baked, and -sewn goods, as well as unlicensed daycare and cab service — all of which would involve near-zero overhead because they were provided out of her neighbors’ homes with ordinary household capital goods they already owned.

Whether Julia buys or rents her home, the price of the land it sits on reflects enormous tracts of vacant and unimproved land being held out of use by state policy, so that landlords are protected from competition. Neither Obama nor Romney can even imagine an alternative to this state of affairs.

Under market anarchy, there would be no enforceable title to vacant and unimproved land. Competition from freely available vacant land would reduce landlord rent, driving down Julia’s housing costs.

Throughout her life, Julia’s travels in the United States will be restricted by an internal passport system in which boarding a plane, and soon maybe a train or bus, will require submission to being either scanned or groped. Her phone and Internet history and her purchases will be constantly monitored by a government for which the Fourth Amendment is a quaint relic of history. Every business where she shops will be spying on her for the government. She’ll be liable to indefinite detention without charge, or perhaps even murder by drone, based on an arbitrary and unilateral finding that she’s a “terrorist.” If there were ever any lingering hopes that the party controlling the presidency would make a difference in this regard, Obama dashed them long ago.

Under market anarchy … Well, you get the idea.

Under either party, Julia will be a means to the ends of people utterly unaccountable to her, a tool for enriching a ruling class. Under anarchy, Julia will be an end in her own right, free to build any life she chooses in peaceful cooperation with her neighbors.