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As I was jogging in the woods today I remembered the weirdest dream I had last night.

In my dream I was in the woods with a buch of friends. For some reason we decided to apply the homesteading principle to that place and, soon, everybody started digging holes in the ground and doing stuff. There was no interference with one another. I picked some seeds I wanted to plant and put them into a flowerpot, where I wanted to grow them first. I added some fertilizer. And then the weird thing happened. I suddenly started adding ice cream. Vanilla ice cream. I stuffed the pot with vanilla ice cream! After a while, I switched to stracciatella ice cream. After a while there was probably three times as much ice cream in the pot as I thought I could fit in.

Then I woke up.

What's really disturbing is that there wasn't any chocolate ice cream in my dream although, usually, I'm all for chocolate ice cream!

So, what does this mean? That I think that there's going to be lots of ice cream in a hypothetical libertarian future because we're all going to be much richer but there's not going to be any chocolate ice cream because there's going to be less globalization? One thing is certain, I'm reading way too much libertarian stuff and I'm not going jogging often enough lately. What do you think? What about your weird anarcho-dreams?

Tags: ice cream, dreams

Sheldon Richman thinks so. In his on-going and invaluable attempt to wake libertarians from our dogmatic slumbers, Richman argues that current debates over real wages, total compensation, the general status of the “middle class,” and other such issues miss the forest for the trees—and miss opportunities better to communicate with the mainstream Left. Here’s Richman:

We live in a corporate state, not a free economy. What are we arguing about? Whether the corporate state treats workers better than the left says it does? Big deal! What does that do to advance the cause of liberty?

It seems to me that all it does is make us look like corporate-state apologists. No thanks. There are enough of those.

These two statements are consistent:
1) the middle class is doing better than ever (leaving aside the scary debt question);
2) it's not doing as well as it should be doing.

Regarding 2) the question is why. If the lord of the manor comes into some money and raises the living standard of his serfs, we would hardly tout that fact to show that feudalism is fine. I know the analogy is overdrawn, but many libertarians are doing something similar. They debate the numbers without pointing out what those numbers paint a picture of. It's not a picture of a laissez-faire economy; it's a picture of a corporate state -- the systematic intervention largely on behalf of incumbent business interests that tamps down competition and squelches alternatives, including self-employment, for many workers.

When I say that the middle class, and those below, are not doing as well as should they be doing, I mean simply that if competition were truly free -- if all transactions were voluntary -- these classes would be wealthier.

I often think that our state capitalist (corporate statist, monopoly capitalist, quasi-fascist, pick your term) system is like one of those multi-stable objects, such as the Necker cube or Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit. Because it is a combination of liberal-market and statist-authoritarian elements, it is very difficult to discern clearly its real nature. When one understands and foregrounds the truly liberal aspects of our society—voluntary cooperation, wealth creation, respect for individual freedom, tolerance, rule of law—one will tend to see the authoritarian elements—statism, racism, sexism, militaristic nationalism, technocratic paternalism—as inessential, or at least less important. And vice versa.

In developing a dialectical libertarian account of exploitation (for the up-coming Molinari Society meeting), part of what I’m trying to do is sketch a libertarian account of exploitation that takes into consideration both the libertarian and the authoritarian aspects of our society. More on this topic later.

For now, let me point out that Richman hits on part of the answer. He writes, “When I say that the middle class, and those below, are not doing as well as should they be doing, I mean simply that if competition were truly free -- if all transactions were voluntary -- these classes would be wealthier.” When we have (relatively) independent reasons to believe that a different social order will be more just than the present one, and we have further reason to believe that that social order would be one in which most people (including the least advantage in our current society) would be better off, then we have at least the beginnings of a vantage point from which to discuss issues of class exploitation. In other words, even if, on the whole, things keep getting better, it can still be the case that the Man is keepin’ us down.

By the way, this kind of counterfactual approach to issues of exploitation is also used by analytical Marxists such as John Roemer. Obviously, I think the Marxist alternative to the current system is a non-starter—and I also think that Roemer’s approach won’t give us a full theory of exploitation—but comparing the current system to possible alternatives is definitely part of the picture.

Happy Labor Day.

Via the impeccably relevant Brad Spangler, I’ve learned that there is a Rails project to build a web application for social organizing and direct democracy called Crabgrass. If you’re a Rails developer who wants to see the web become a more productive venue for political activism, I strongly urge you to volunteer. And if you’re experienced in web development but haven’t given Rails a try yet, here’s your chance (this video should pique your interest).

Social movements have grown more adept at using the web to communicate publicly. However, we could still use a lot of help in communicating amongst ourselves. In particular, we need the ability to communicate securely; the ability to make decisions between groups and networks that are geographically disbursed; and the ability to have a decision process that is easy to understand, transparent, and directly democratic.

The things they want to do, including building mechanisms for networked relationship tracking and decision making, sound awesome and quite worthwhile. Actually, the group should also make sure they take advantage of Rails’s features to roll out functionality as it becomes available, agile-style, because it will be vital to make sure this really streamlines the activist’s workflow to fully empower people. Hopefully I’ll be able to contibute to this (and make time for it).

But really, they had me at this sentence: “The social networking phenomenon holds much promise, but it is clear that the revolution will not be hosted by myspace.” Word.

Tags: activism