As of Late, Kevin Carson

Here are some selections from The Mutualist Blog from recent weeks. Some very good points have been made there lately by our friend and ally Keven Carson.

In recent columns I’ve examined how the extraordinary powers granted to the national security state post-9/11 for “fighting terrorism” have been used for much broader purposes: namely, increasing the state’s control over its own citizenry, and suppressing economic threats to the corporate interests that control the state. As we’ve already seen, this mission creep includes the use of police state powers to suppress anti-globalization activism, and the use of the “Drug War” to control the domestic population while protecting the black market drug profits of the terror state and its allies.

Yet another example is enforcement of so-called “intellectual property” law (which is not a legitimate form of property at all and is in fact utterly repugnant to the principles of a genuinely freed market).

As before, we take the scholarship of USAF Col. Jennifer Hesterman as a paradigmatic case. Col. Hesterman treats “intellectual property crime” as an important component of the phenomenon she studies: the intersection of transnational crime with the funding of terror networks. In her monograph “Transnational Crime and the Criminal-Terrorist Network,” she defines “intellectual property crime” as “the counterfeiting and pirating of goods that are then manufactured and sold for profit without the consent of the patent or trademark holder.” IPC, she says, “is more lucrative than drug trafficking, is less pursued by law-enforcement agencies, and the penalties if caught and prosecuted are far less severe than those for other criminal activities.”

On her personal blog, Counter Terror Forum, she celebrates the increased dedication of federal law enforcement resources to combating IPC.

“IPC,” she writes, “is a lucrative criminal activity with low initial investment and high financial returns, possibly even higher than drug trafficking. For example, a Nintendo game costs $0.20 to duplicate and is resold for $20 at flea markets on online, thus recognizing enormous profit for the criminals.” Hence “IPC… generates unbelievable amount of profit.” She quotes figures estimating counterfeit goods trade at $450 billion annually, resulting in US business losses of $200 to $250 billion.

I believe she’s getting it backwards. As with the drug trade, the main reason “IPC” is so lucrative is IP law itself. The real “intellectual property crime” is that Nintendo, with the help of coercive enforcement of monopoly privileges by the state, is able to charge an enormous sum of money for a game whose marginal cost of reproduction is twenty cents. The seller of “pirated” goods or knockoffs makes money by arbitrage: they compete by eliminating a major portion of Nintendo’s markup, but can still (thanks to competing with Nintendo’s price) charge a significant — if lesser — markup. As with the drug laws, if copyright law were eliminated, both Nintendo’s markup and the markup on the knockoff goods would evaporate, and the game would sell for marginal production cost.

So if the U.S. national security state really wants to eliminate black market funding of terrorism, all it has to do is repeal the drug laws and “intellectual property” law. But when it comes to this, the U.S. government, Disney and Al Qaeda are all on the same side.

In any case, the primary focus of U.S. copyright enforcement — and particularly recent increases in enforcement efforts — is against digital “piracy,” on behalf of such parties as the RIAA and MPAA. Such “piracy” is not lucrative at all — in fact the copyrighted work is downloaded free of charge. So the claim that crackdowns on file-sharing will result in less money for terror networks just doesn’t meet the smell test.

However transparently self-serving the “counter-terror” rationale, though, the national security state is indeed ramping up its enforcement efforts against (primarily digital) “intellectual property crime.” Following a “piracy” summit in December at which Joe Biden (formerly Senator from MBNA and now Vice President from Disney) compared digital file-sharing to a “smash-and-grab” at Tiffany’s, in February Attorney General Holder announced a new “IP task force” at the Justice Department. And last month Biden announced the dedication of fifty FBI agents to anti-piracy enforcement, while Homeland Security boasted (from Disney’s offices!) of raids on nine movie-sharing sites.

Al Qaeda must be shaking in their boots.

...

It’s pretty much standard for the chattering classes — both liberal and conservative — to refer to something called “our free market system,” also known as “free market capitalism.” To the extent that the right-wingers at Fox and CNBC or on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal advocate some purer form of “free markets” in contrast to the existing economy, what they mean is essentially the present model of corporate capitalism without the regulatory or welfare state.

But the form taken by the existing capitalist system that we live under owes precious little to free markets. From its beginnings in the late Middle Ages, it has been shaped by massive and ceaseless intervention and enforcement of privilege — much of it breathtakingly brutal — by the state. To adapt a phrase from Orwell, the past has been a boot stamping on a human face.

The state played a central role in creating the defining characteristic of capitalism as we know it: the wage system. Had free markets been allowed to develop peacefully, with the peasant majorities remaining in control of their land and with free access to the means of subsistence, labor markets would likely have taken a much different form. Employers would have had to compete with the possibility of self-employment, available to the vast majority of the population. But thanks to Enclosures and similar land expropriations over a period of several centuries, the majority of the population was turned into a landless proletariat totally dependant on wage labor for its subsistence.

As if this weren’t enough, the British state imposed totalitarian social controls on the working class in the early days of the Industrial Revolution to reduce the bargaining power of labor. The Laws of Settlement, for example, acted as a sort of internal passport system, forbidding workers to leave their parish of birth in search of better terms of employment without permission. The Poor Law authorities then came to the rescue of employers in the underpopulated industrial North, by auctioning off laborers — cheaply — from the parish workhouses of London.

Over a period of several centuries the European powers brought most of the Earth under their subjection and imposed similar land expropriations and social controls on the peoples of the Third World, and looted the mineral resources and raw materials of most of the world.

A wide range of thinkers, from the free market anarchist Lysander Spooner to the Marxist Immanuel Wallerstein, have pointed out historic capitalism’s continuities with feudalism. Capitalism, as a historic system of political economy, was really just an outgrowth of feudalism with markets grafted in and allowed to operate in the interstices to a limited extent.

The state also played a central role in the rise of corporate capitalism from the late 19th century on. The railroad land grants created a single national market in the U.S., externalizing the costs of long-distance distribution on the taxpayer, and led to industrial firms and markets far larger than would otherwise have existed. Patent law and assorted regulations passed during the Progressive Era served to cartelize markets under the control of a handful of oligopoly firms.

In the twentieth century, the state played a growing role in absorbing the surplus output of overbuilt industry or guaranteeing an overseas market for it. The leading industrial sectors were state creations: the automobile-highway complex, civil aviation, the miliitary-industrial complex and outgrowths like miniaturized electronics and industrial automation.

The neoliberal economy of the past twenty years is overwhelmingly dependent on the draconian enforcement of “intellectual property” law. The dominant sectors in the corporate global economy — software, entertainment, biotech, pharma, agribusiness, electronics — are all almost entirely dependent for their profits either on “intellectual property” or direct subsidies from the state. The central function of the U.S. national security state since WWII has been to make the world safe for corporate power through the overthrow of unfriendly governments.

Both the statist right and the statist left, for their own reasons, equate the “free market” to corporate capitalism, and promote the myth that corporate capitalism as we know it is what would naturally have emerged from a free market absent state intervention to prevent it. The statist right want to defend the legitimacy of big business, and the statist left want to make you think you need them to defend you against big business.

But the exact opposite is true. Big business has been a creature of the state from the beginning. And genuinely free markets would operate as dynamite at the foundations of corporate power.

And that’s exactly what those of us on the free market left want to do.

...

In a recent column (“Homeland Security Mission Creep: ‘Intellectual Propety Crime’“), I wrote that file-sharing had apparently become the latest “terrorist threat” targeted by the national security state. Against this background, the immediatelty following shutdown of 73,000 blogs using the blogetery Wordpress platform hosted by Burstnet is especially alarming. Burstnet announced that, in compliance with an urgent and extraordinary request by “law enforcement officials,” it was shutting down blogetery. Their motivation is suggested by the tens of thousands of hits if you Google the blogetery site for “rapidshare” and “megaupload.”

Maybe this is what Holy Handwringing Joe Lieberman meant by an Internet “kill switch” to protect against “terrorism.”

This is just the latest example of a growing phenomenon: businesses treating their own customers as criminal suspects, while serving “the Authorities” as their primary actual clientele. That’s why your bank informs the Feds of large money transactions, Home Depot reports purchases of chemicals used in meth labs, and the drug store keeps track of the amount of Sudafed you buy.

The first question that comes to mind is: Who pays Burstnet’s bills — “the Authorities” or the customers?

A friend at work recently had a relevant experience with her broadband ISP, Cox Communications. Apparently her grandkids had downloaded a movie from some torrent site and Disney had leaned on Cox (with Cox presumably rolling over and giving them customer records without due process). The lady at the cable office called her up and began warning her “You need to monitor your grandkids more closely,” and assorted other things she “needed to do.” Normally I’d expect that kind of condescending lecture from someone who was paying ME money, not the other way around.

If you haven’t had your daily dose of irony, Secretary of State Clinton recently warned other countries against the dangers of imposing burdens on civil society: “progress in the 21st century depends on the ability of individuals to coalesce around shared goals, and harness the power of their convictions. But when governments crack down on the right of citizens to work together, as they have throughout history, societies fall into stagnation and decay.”

Clinton added that “Democracies don’t fear their own people.” I imagine the guy in the Guy Fawkes mask would get a big laugh out of that. For a government that doesn’t fear its own people, the U.S. “democracy” spends an awful lot of time obsessing over whether we’re ingesting prohibited substances into our own bodies, downloading songs, and other “terroristic” activities that it’s made its business. Talk about paranoia! “Now nothing will be withheld from them, which they have imagined to do.”

The shutdown of file-sharing sites will probably backfire, I’m afraid. Such authoritarian actions by the Copyright Nazis and their government spear-carriers will, I fear, lead to an outcome that should alarm all good citizens. Sadly, denial-of-service attacks against the websites of various government agencies, the RIAA and MPAA, have become increasingly frequent in recent years. If you’re the kind of juvenile person who takes misguided pleasure in seeing bad things happen to some of the most wicked people in the world, just Google “DOS+attack RIAA+website.” Shocking.

At one time the cat and mouse game between hackers and the RIAA got so intense that for a while the RIAA was constantly shifting its site around between low-profile servers, to protect itself from hackers (kind of like Saddam randomly sleeping in a different palace every night as an anti-assassination precaution).

The latest such incident was “Operation T*tstorm,” a distributed DOS attack by the hacker group “Anonymous” on the sites of the Australian Parliament and Ministry of Communications in retaliation for increased censorship of porn websites.

Thank God these poor misguided anti-social saps have mitigated the potential harm by focusing up till now on the public websites of organizations they hate, instead of on the intranets on which their actual functioning as organizations depends. I greatly fear that someday soon some utterly reprehensible sociopath will manage to do this, and when someone like Mitch Bainwol shows up at work and logs on to check his email, he’ll see nothing but a blank screen.

...

...What the Chamber of Commerce means by “free enterprise” is exactly the same thing that people like Naomi Klein and Michael Moore are attacking under the name of “capitalism.” As a result, most people hear the words “free enterprise” and “free markets” emanating primarly from the same interests that want to protect the system as it is, and that depend most heavily on the suppression of the free market for their livelihood. No wonder establishment libertarianism has such negative “pot-smoking Republican” connotations for so many people.

Believe it or not, though, there are some of us on the free-market left who genuinely believe in free enterprise, and who see truly freed markets as the enemy of corporate capitalism. Far from seeing the Robber Baron capitalism of the Gilded Age as some laissez-faire utopia, we see it as the beginning of a corporate-state system of power which has lasted for 150 years, upheld by massive collusion between big government and big business. The primary function of the state during that time has been to subsidize the operating costs of big business and to protect it against competition. And the interests that talk the most about “free enterprise,” generally speaking, are the very ones most tightly hooked into the corporate state.

A genuine free enterprise system, without state-enforced artificial scarcities, artificial property rights or subsidies, would be like dynamite at the foundations of corporate power. It would be an economy of far more evenly distributed property ownership and decentralized production, looking a lot more like something imagined by Ralph Borsodi than by Alfred Chandler.

So I’d love to issue a challenge to those “free enterprise” hucksters in the Chamber of Commerce: Let’s have genuine “free enterprise,” and let’s have it now. That means repealing the DMCA, WIPO Copyright Treaty, drug patents, and all other “intellectual property” law — and telling the RIAA, MPAA and Microsoft where to get off. It means cutting the automobile-highway complex, the military-industrial complex and agribusiness off from the taxpayer teat. It means eliminating all regulatory barriers to the competitive issue of low-interest credit through mutual banks, against people’s own property or their future earning power. It means ceasing to enforce all absentee titles to vacant and unimproved land. And it means an end to an American foreign policy whose main goal is to make the entire planet safe for corporate power...

...

In 1919 Frank Crane pointed out (in “Justice,” one of his Four Minute Essays) that charity was a poor substitute for justice. Charity, he said, is a palliative which leaves injustice — privilege — in place, while helping the most unfortunate. Charity makes it possible for the poor and unemployed to scrape by, thus enabling the system of privilege to continue. But justice makes charity unnecessary by removing the root causes of poverty and unemployment.

Today, we could say of the welfare state and Keynesian fiscal policy what Crane said of charity.

A whole host of statistics indicate that the current recession is unlike any other since the Great Depression. The number of long-term unemployed, and the number of people competing for each available job, are both more than double their levels in the recession of the early 1980s. While I think Obama’s stimulus package probably stopped the free-fall in job loss that occurred in First Quarter 2009 — just barely — we can see that as soon as the money stops being spent the economy stagnates again. So we’re probably headed either into the second leg of a W-shaped recession, or into a long-term period of stagnation and zero job growth.

Our old ideas on what it takes to overcome the state capitalist economy’s inherent tendencies toward excess capacity are becoming obsolete. And the causes go back to Frank Crane’s understanding of justice.

Injustice is at the heart of our economic problems. By making capital and land artificially scarce and expensive, the state forces workers to sell their labor in a buyer’s market and thereby reduces the bargaining power of labor. The owners of land and capital are thereby enabled to collect scarcity rents.

The economic effects are destabilizing. Income shifts from workers, who work mainly to meet their consumption needs, to rentiers with a high propensity to save and invest. The result is a chronic tendency toward overaccumulation and underconsumption.

At the same time, the state subsidizes the most centralized, capital-intensive forms of production, leading to mass-production industry with overbuilt plant and equipment that’s constantly plagued with idle capacity.

The problem was “solved” for a while by World War II, which blew up most of the plant and equipment outside the U.S. and created a permanent war economy to absorb a major part of the destabilizing economic surplus. But by 1970 the industrial capacity of Europe and Japan had been rebuilt, and the old tendencies toward chronic stagnation were resumed.

Since then the tendencies toward stagnating economic growth, excess capacity, and jobless recoveries have increased from one decade to the next. The economy has become increasingly dependent on speculative bubbles to soak up surplus capital, and on growing consumer debt to absorb excess industrial output.

Given state capitalism’s inherent tendencies toward stagnation, the welfare state and Keynesian demand management are absolutely necessary parts of it.

State intervention creates maldistribution of purchasing power and excess production capacity. Government attempts to remedy the resulting destabilizing tendencies by taxing a small fraction of what was originally shifted from the producing classes to the rentier classes, and giving it to the most destitute portion of the exploited classes, in order to prevent politically destabilizing levels of unemployment and homelessness. It runs a deficit during economic downturns in order to provide sufficient demand to compensate for the shortfall in purchasing power.

The problem is that the relative periods of downturn keep getting longer, and the deficit spending required to correct for the chronic demand shortfall keeps getting larger.

Once the state substitutes privilege for justice, it inevitably creates destabilizing tendencies that must be met by one of two possible courses of action. One is to remove the privileges and allow the natural operation of justice, so that the chronic instabilities don’t arise. The other is to add secondary interventions like the welfare state and Keynesian fiscal policy, so the destabilizing tendencies don’t get too bad — and to keep increasing the level of such intervention when it no longer works the way it should.

So to the “conservatives” who want to “cut spending” and “balance the budget,” I give this warning: Understand the implications of what you demand. If you will not have a welfare state and deficit spending, you must have a free market — a genuine free market, not the kind of fake “free market” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, AEI and Heritage Foundation call for. You must cease to enforce monopoly rents to the owners of land, capital and “intellectual property.”

If you go only halfway, removing the palliative measures without removing the injustice — if you choose a fake corporatist version of the “free market” — you will only give us another Great Depression worse than the last one.

The choice is clear. If you will not have justice, you must have welfare and Keynesian stimulus spending. There is no third way.

...

Neoconservative Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer has been exercised lately (“Terror and Candor,” National Review Online, July 3) about the “cowardice” of the Obama administration in refusing to identify “Islamic extremism” as the enemy in the War on Terror.

When we survey the destruction inflicted on this country by terrorism, Krauthammer says, we should look the enemy square in the face and pronounce him guilty by name.

Fair enough.

Reporting after the earthquake in Haiti revealed a massive toll of death and homelessness (230,000 and a million, respectively), and the immense damage to transportation and utility infrastructure. When power, sanitation and clean water supplies are cut off, water-borne epidemics ensue quickly. With a population weakened by hunger from a breakdown of the food distribution system, the rider on the pale horse gets busy.

Let’s compare the toll on human lives and infrastructure from that natural disaster to those of a couple of entirely manmade disasters. NATO deliberately targeted power and water infrastructure in Serbia, in order to demoralize the civilian population. As NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said, “If President Milosevic really wants all of his population to have water and electricity all he has to do is accept NATO’s five conditions and we will stop this campaign.” And in Iraq, the death toll from two decades of strategic bombing, sanctions and infrastructure damage is into the millions. The United States unleashed the equivalent of two Haiti earthquakes on two defenseless countries. The penalty for disobedience to the new hegemon is death from the skies.

The neoconservatives of the Project for a New American Century agitated for both wars with everything they had. The organization’s name says it all: Their goal is to lock the United States permanently into place as the world’s sole military superpower, and destroy any nation that challenges that supremacy. In the case of Iraq, despite all the lies about WMDs and ties to Al Qaeda, all the neocons really cared about, in the words of Michael Ledeen, was a demonstration effect: To “pick up a crappy little country” — any country, it didn’t matter which one — and “throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Well, I guess a million people who died from incineration, starvation, or excreting their collapsed intestines with dysentery, know those guys meant business.

So if we’re naming enemies, neoconservatism’s death toll stacks up pretty favorably against that of “Islamism.”

But neoconservatism is just a more virulent, more explicit and shameless, version of the bipartisan “national security” policy that’s dominated the American state since WWII. Just as much as the neoconservatives, the “moderates” and “liberals” agree that — in Noam Chomsky’s words — “we own the world.” They all agree that the United States should be the sole military superpower, enforcing a system of world order. They all agree that the U.S. has legitimate “national security” interests that extend to telling countries all over the world what to do, and maintaining an Empire of hundreds of military bases in dozens of countries. Like the “liberals” in Vietnam, they think Iraq was a “mistake.” But they don’t dispute the “right” of the United States to initiate such wars when it’s “necessary.”

It’s as true of Hillary Clinton, Madeline Albright, and John “Plan Colombia” Kerry as it is of Dick Cheney and Richard Armitage. When liberals talk about “putting the grownups back in charge,” those are the kinds of people they mean. People who are just as willing to inflict megadeaths when “necessary,” but don’t quite — you know — get into it so much.

The real enemy behind the untold millions of deaths inflicted by Empire are what C. Wright Mills called “Crackpot Realists”: The sane, sensible, serious people who know what needs to be done to keep the only world they know running, and just quietly do it. As C. S. Lewis put it, the greatest crimes in human history were committed by men with clean fingernails and pleasant, well-modulated voices, sitting in tastefully appointed offices. For these people, a global system of corporate neoliberalism enforced by the United States, the G20, the World Bank and UN Security Council is the only conceivable way of doing things. And to keep this system going — as the only possible basis for what they call “peace and prosperity” — they do what’s “necessary.” When there’s “collateral damage,” they regret it. But they don’t flinch from the task. Because, after all, America is the indispensable nation.

To quote science fiction writer Ken MacLeod: “You know how this stuff ends? It ends with your cities in rubble, your capital occupied, and your leaders hanged.”

Krauthammer says “the first rule of war is to know your enemy. If you don’t, you … ignore the real causes that might allow you to prevent recurrences.”

Indeed.

...

If it were up to me, TV news stories on Wikileaks’ release of Afghanistan war documents would have used the opening strains of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” as a lead-in. This is arguably the biggest story in the war for human freedom in the past decade.

It’s common in the United States to praise soldiers for “defending our freedom.” But as Obama’s reaction to the Wikileaks story demonstrates, the most effective defenders of freedom are more likely to be condemned by governments for “putting the lives of Americans at risk” and “threatening our national security.” (Never mind that starting the stinking war in the first place put quite a few American lives at risk.)

I cover the defenders of freedom in this column, primarily those involved in the networked world, on a regular basis. They include the Falun Gong, the world leaders in proxy server technology, who share their technical know-how with dissidents all over the world. They include the torrent sites all over the world, which wage war on the increasingly totalitarian copyright lockdown the proprietary content industries would like to put us under. Anonymous freedom fighters swarm the websites of government censors and the Copyright Nazis at the RIAA and MPAA with denial-of-service attacks.

And now this. It’s too bad the Nobel Peace Prize went to a bloody-handed guy who’s waging two wars, instead of to people like Julian Assange and Bradley Manning who’ve weakened his ability to fight them.

It’s impossible to overstate just how big this is. This is a giant leap forward for the kind of networked resistance I constantly advocate in this column: Not lobbying or begging the state for permission, but bypassing it and treating it as irrelevant. This is a monumental contribution to the ability of free people to organize the kind of society they want here and now, below the state’s radar and beyond the reach of its enforcement apparatus.

The importance of the event itself — a publication of leaked documents on the scale of The Pentagon Papers — is hard to exaggerate. But more important is the significance of Wikileaks itself, and of this as a milestone in its development.

One of the most powerful weapons against the power of the state and its allied corporations is what the Wobblies call “open-mouth sabotage,” backed up and reinforced by the Streisand Effect (a term Techdirt editor Mike Masnick’s coined for the inability of old-style bureaucratic hierarchies to suppress embarrassing information online, and the counterproductive results when they attempt to do so). States, corporations and other authoritarian bureaucracies, like cockroaches, don’t like having the kitchen light turned on.

And make no mistake: This is the Streisand Effect on steroids. Assange has created a highly visible vehicle for publicizing leaked documents from states and corporations and other authoritarian entities all over the world — and removed it beyond the power of states to shut down. As Jay Rosen says (Press Think, July 26), “Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system.”

Someday soon a file-sharing operation like The Pirate Bay will adopt a similar worldwide infrastructure beyond anyone’s ability to shut down. And then encrypted e-currencies. And then … And then … Well, to quote Cat Stevens, I’ve been smiling lately, thinking of the good things to come.

(Also, take a look at this wikipage on Crypto-Anarchism in relation to Wikileaks.)