Life, Love, and Liberty

(A person interested in Kevin Carson’s book, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, can view it online at this link. It’s the source for my quotation below)

Bravo! For Brad Spangler’s attempt at innovation and subsequent libertarian reconciliation with the left in the controversial realm of the nature of wage work. I try to paint myself as a guy whose been influenced by the dialectical way of looking at things, so I hope to prove my credentials on that score by pointing out that Brad’s analysis is a dialectical one. If we employ the definition of dialectics as “the art of context keeping”, for which the New Yawker Chris Matthew Sciabarra is to be forever thanked for bringing to my attention, then the dialectical nature of Brad’s take becomes ever more clear. The point of Brad’s post was to point out the conflation of context with casualty. A leftist will typically assert that the “market” is to blame for the phenomenon of individuals having little choice in their place of employment, while the libertarian will say “Silly leftist! There is no need to complain because you are still choosing between a number of employment options, even if said opportunities are not so great”.

Well, I thought I was a wordy guy, but Brad makes a bid for the top spot of wordiness by making use of the word oligopsony which describes a situation where there are few buyers but loads of sellers. This is the word that he believes provides an accurate description of the current U.S. labor market. He makes a plea to libertarians and leftists alike to recognize the current labor market is artificially tight; due to regulatory cartelization on the part of the state that makes it harder to start a money-making business or productive endeavor. A dialectical thinker would be keen to keep this state tainted context in mind when examining these issues, and thus see that the current marketplace is not as conducive to choice as alleged orthodox “free market” thinkers might have you believe.

I wish to extend Brad’s analysis beyond the context of the limited number of opportunities of employment by others due to state intervention in the economy and focus on the limitations on the ability to be self-employed due to an artificial shortage of capital. The contemporary mutualist anarchist, Kevin Carson, has written on this issue and thus is worth quoting here:

In every system of class exploitation, a ruling class controls access to the means of production in order to extract tribute from labor. The landlord monopoly, which we examined in the last section, is one example of this principle. And until the nineteenth century, the control of land was probably the single most important form of privilege by which labor was forced to accept less than its product as a wage. But in industrial capitalism, arguably, the importance of landlordism has been surpassed in importance by the money monopoly. Under that latter form of privilege, the state’s licensing of banks, capitalization requirements, and other market entry barriers enable banks to charge a monopoly price for loans in the form of usurious interest rates. Thus, labor’s access to capital is restricted, and labor is forced to pay tribute in the form of artificially high interest rates.

If you are forced to pay high rates of interest when seeking to obtain capital for which to go into business for yourself than the likelihood of being able to do so is drastically decreased. Furthermore; a smaller number of individuals will have the ability to work for themselves and thus self-employment will not be as realistic of an alternative to being employed by someone else. This context is also a creation of the state and must be overcome; if people are ever to have a more reasonable ability to be self-employed.

An awareness of these two state created contexts should be kept in mind when reading leftist literature that is replete with the loaded term “wage slavery”. It may not be the apex of intellectual preciseness to identify the term wages — since you can receive wages without being in the bondage of slavery — with the horror of slavery, yet it does capture the rotten emotional state that many individuals may feel when they are faced with one drudgery after another, as a means of making a living. It’s a term suited for people who want to express passionate outrage; if there ever was one.

Here’s an effort to update Sam Konkin’s classic MLL pamephlet War or Liberty: The Real Choice.

Times of war often bring smears to those who dissent. Liberty is said to be under attack and war critics its detractors. Necessity allegely dictates that government “defend” your freedom. This is a false choice between preserving freedom and war you have been given.

Where has the real threat to freedom often come from in wartime? The state!

Just look at American history.

Civil War brought the military draft on both sides and Linclon’s 1861 suspension of habeas corpus.

World war 1 saw censorship, conscription, and the Palmer raids of 1919.

World War 2 continued conscription and left us the legacy of Japanese American concentration camps.

Cold war produced the Kent State shootings and peacetime draft

Wartime state enroachment upon liberty continues today with the unending “war on terror’s” Patriot Act and illegal NSA wiretapping.

Think of the above as the first page of the brochure with the second page below.

What can you do to resist the state’s warmaking? The Movement of the Libertarian Left has some suggestions for interested individuals.

Tax Rebellion (not just “avoidance”)

Draft Resistance

Smuggling (increase Free Trade!)

Wage and Price Control Breaking

Censorship Evasion

Networking with like-minded freedom fighters and peace activists

Disseminating the revelations of Revisionist History that expose manipulations to drag us into war after war.

Let go of the false dichotomy between peace and security. Enter the agora (true, open free market) via Counter-Economics. Educate yourself and your friends about the anarchist alternative to statism.

My approach was to take the best from the old brochure and slim it down.

Brad Spangler lets us know that a Movement of the Libertarian Left activism oriented site has gone public.

I previously mentioned that I’d have a couple of new projects to announce soon. The first of those announcements is the welcome message at a new MLL activism oriented site I’ve put together — MLL Online. There are still some rough edges and it is meant to supplement rather than replace the Left Libertarian Yahoo! Group (an indispensable resource).

Give it a look!