Life, Love, and Liberty

It’s socialism without the state!

“What should the stance of the anarchists in regards to the welfare state be?

          For starters, we should follow the advice of the late Sam Dolgoff who maintained that workers should demand their entire pay without deductions of any kind ( income taxes, social security, corporate insurance programs) and instead create our own health care, old age, disability, etc. programs under our control through our own mutual aid and solidarity organizations ( unions, cooperatives, clubs, community groups). We need to organize claimants’ unions for the recipients of “public” assistance and demand direct cash payments to the beneficiaries themselves rather than vouchers, coupons and stamps issued by government agencies. “Public” schools, institutions created for the purpose of indoctrinating children with elite class ideology, should be scrapped in favor of progressive educational services established by our own working class oriented revolutionary organizations ( perhaps modeled after Summerhill or the Modern School). Workers organizations should demand the expulsion of both corporate overseers and government sponsored “regulatory” bureaucrats from our workplaces in favor of direct self-management and self-regulation by the workers themselves. “Public” housing authorities should be scrapped, their offices destroyed, and tenants should assume direct management of their own housing facilities. These same principles would, of course, apply to tenants renting from “private” landlords, the self-employed and farmers dealing with state-supervisory agencies, consumers’ interests and so on. The final aim, of course, should be the dismantling of the false dichotomy between the “public” and “private” sectors and the socialization and communalization of state and corporate resources under the direct control of our worker, consumer, tenant and community organizations.

          As I mentioned, current “antigovernment” rhetoric employed by elite class mouthpieces represents, I believe, a certain laziness and complacency that the “powers that be” have sunken into. So successful have their efforts of the past thirty years to coopt and subjugate the people through social democratic welfare state policies that they no longer think it is worth the bother. They no longer see the need to even put on the charade of maternalistic government, which they view as costly and not generating enough profits for corporate interests in the same way that the rapidly expanding prison-industrial complex and other recently emergent forms of repression are doing. Consequently, we see renewed attacks on our class in every area. Gentrification and “urban revitalization” are displacing the traditional urban poor. “Welfare reform” is displacing those enslaved to the state via “public assistance”. Nearly ten million people have been dispossessed of their traditional lands across the farm belt of the American heartland. Three million people, perhaps more, are living in the street and repression against the homeless is rising. One in thirty people, perhaps more, are in the direct clutches of the state by means of the prison-industrial complex and the repressive apparatus of so-called “criminal justice”. The availability, affordability and quality of health care has declined due the centralization of health care services under oligopolistic HMO’s. Now that U.S. warmongering and imperialism can no longer be justified with shallow Cold War rhetoric, the American regime simply undertakes violent assaults on other societies on whatever whim it fancies at the moment or for no apparent reason at all. The elite class is creating a powder keg that will eventually erupt in a rather big way.”

- Keith Preston

“Perhaps the whole thing can be summed up by a sign carried by some of the kids at an anti-war march in New York City on April 5. The sign read simply: “Death to the State. Power to the People.” How can you fault a movement having that as a slogan?”
-Murray Rothbard

I’ve spoken of Kevin Carson’s influence upon me before and recently obtained a bound copy of his book Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. After having revisited the third part of the text that deals with action, thoughts for a post sprang to mind. Similar ideas had been brewing since taking a look at some essays from Problems of Market Liberalism that dealt in how to effectively spread libertarian ideas. Basically, the strategic outlook should be a populist one. As Kevin puts it:

“Not all reductions in state power are equally important, and it could be disastrous to dismantle state functions in the wrong order.”

Exactly! As an example, a priority should be placed on ending corporate welfare — and translating the savings into tax cuts for those at the bottom of the bracket — over ending welfare statism. There should also be a promotion of cooperative grassroots schemes like Ithaca Health Insurance and the revigoration of mutual aid societies.
Not only are they just — not resting on taxation– but promote a sense of community and control that is lacking in bureaucracy. Radical libertarianism should be a people’s movement seeking to widen the sphere that individuals have for control over their lives. That and an ethical opposition to state aggression combined with a fear of the destruction that centralized coercive state power can wreak — and has! — is what made me an individualist anarchist after a hiatus from the creed. In closing, I’d like to throw out one of my favorite quotes that really speaks to the idea of a populist movement.

“After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt.”
-John Taylor Gatto

Amen! Encouraging that spirit of self-confidence in one’s intelligence is key to crafting a genuine people’s movement against the state.