leftlibertarian.org

Matt sent me a link via del.icio.us to our hometown paper on the recommendation of a mutual high school friend. There’s an interesting article in there by one David Kerr in which he takes a pretty bland and weak stance on Iraq, I suppose just to stay relevant. One line strikes me as particularly cliche:

The one thing I will never do, certainly not in this circumstance, is criticize our Armed Forces. The press and the protestors recklessly did enough of that in Vietnam.

Contrary to his claims, I question the quality of personal reflection with which he affords this topic. Take as centrist and nuanced a position as you like, but one point cannot be brushed aside: if the Iraq war was so wrong, yet we still allowed a President to shove it down our throats (or at least wave his hands in a hypnotic fashion), then it’s not enough to confine our criticism of power to the President or the hawks. We need to consider that in our society and in each of us we have something that demands examination and reflection.

If Kerr ignores the need for examination and reflection, he should not be singled out for blame. The mainstream media’s absence from this discussion underscores its irrelevance as a institution of public welfare, of course. In this spirit Kerr’s heartfelt sentiments serve as yet more of the same old yellow journalistic theater, where even the smallest and most transparent observations are accepted as “fresh” and “balanced”. The question isn’t whether we get the news media we deserve, but rather whether we even want to pay attention. Indulging in Kerr’s op-ed with any credulity is no different, as I see it, than simply watching American Idol and zoning out to the suffering halfway around the world.

I typically have a lot of compassion for the average citizen’s “apathy”. In my opinion, such cynicism is a reasonable response (if not a vital defense mechanism) to the loss of self-determination we’ve experienced over the last sixty years - institutionalized learned helplessness, if you will. Between being stretched thin by a cartelized, planned economy which views people as mere resource units and depressingly futile attemps to cope with the endless social spasms stemming from the consolidation of culture and top-down regimentation, most people simply don’t have the time or resources to take care of both their personal lives and their political interests. Vigilance against what is increasingly a monolithic and authoritarian power elite carries a high price tag, especially for families.

Of all people, anarchists should understand the primacy of the personal. This truth about human nature simultaneously empowers our position as it weakens solidarity against our rulers and exposes us to systemic exploitation. The fat cats are nothing if not clever: they understand human nature to the point that they feel comfortable committing the most brazen crimes in front of our faces. They’re counting on apathy because they’ve cobbled together a system that engenders it (whether by design or accident, I cannot be certain) as the password for living a “normal” life with any hope of quiet or privacy.

In lieu of genuine citizen solidarity against emergent fascism, it seems reasonable, however, that certain positions in society have unique potentials for effecting change due to their influence over the mechanisms of policy and management. While occupants of these positions have no less moral responsibility than anybody else, their acquiescence or resistance has a practical impact on the effectiveness system of governance.

Among many other people I count soldiers in this group, not least because of the oath they take to defend our best institutional hope against tyranny: the Constitution. They are “on the ground” prosecuting this war, and with regard to the morality of the operation and mission they register their morals. If their actions speak louder than civilians’ it is only because the stakes are so much higher in their day-to-day lives.

So if the war is wrong, those who serve in the armed forces are at least as culpable as us for not standing up to it - if for no other reason than because the evil of this war operates within their primal personal sphere in a way they can’t simply disavow. It is possible that in the worst cases these soldiers are criminally negligent or complicit for not questioning certain orders, premises, and superiors. But it is not at all necessary for them to be evil to be in the wrong, anymore than it is necessary for civilians to outwardly support imperialism in order to empower it.

While in the final analysis soldiers are no more morally cuplable than us civilians at home, it is their persons who are executing order by disasterous order. They are undeniably imbued with a more immediate connection to the war machine. In other words, they are actually close enough to stop it. These personal weaknesses and frailties compound in society somehow till we are helpless, literally helpless, to speak and act upon plain truths, and only in that sense is any collective moral failing visible.

If my analysis of the moral situation is anywhere close to accurate, then let’s make sure we don’t arbitrarily exempt those who, in many cases, are most vital to its continuation - least of all out of some shallow and spineless political correctness. There’s plenty of blame to go around between our leaders, our fellow citizens, and - yes - even soldiers.

In reality there are no imports and exports. There is only what I make and what everyone else makes. Few people would want to live just on what they themselves could make.... The case for free trade is conceded the moment someone eschews self-sufficiency. After that, we're just haggling over the size of the trade area. But if free trade (read: division of labor) is good, then the bigger the free-trade area the better. Globalization should be the worldwide removal of all barriers to the exchange of goods and services -- rather than trade managed through state capitalism and multinational bureaucracies. Unilateral, unconditional free trade is the smartest policy.

Read the rest of this week's TGIF column, "Made Everywhere," at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

On the news, it was reported that in response for an alleged rape by a Shiite cop on a Sunni girl, 300 Sunnis have volunteered to go on suicide missions of revenge.

Considering the number of American atrocities against Sunnis (plus the number of perceived atrocities), and if similar numbers of Sunnis volunteer to fight after each one, how do can we possibly defeat them?

I wish to associate myself with these remarks by Brad Spangler about the fallacy-induced wedge between libertarians and the left. Well put! My only reservation is his call to join the IWW. I'll need to see some good argument on that. Here is the IWW's mission statement. It seems to me the One Big Union makes the same mistake Brad identifies in his post.

Hat tip: Roderick Long.

This is my latest at the Partial Observer.

9/11 Press for Truth asks the questions the mainstream media did not.

One of the ongoing roadblocks to left and libertarian reconciliation, one which deserves more of our attention, is the matter of conflation of context with causality, an intellectual error committed by most on both sides.

Leftists typically blame markets for state-caused injustice that takes place in markets.

Free-market libertarians often apply a shallow analysis that causes them to defend state-caused injustice merely because its visible manifestation is in the marketplace.

Both fail to recognize that the market is the context, the cause is the state.

Let’s look at the topic of wage slavery, for example.

Every marginalized worker viscerally knows wage slavery to be a very real phenomenon — yet libertarians typically bury their heads in the sand and leftists typically fundamentally misunderstand the problem.

Most libertarians deny the existence of wage slavery, seeing only the voluntaristic nature of the concept of wages in principle rather than the real world of state-tainted injustice in practice.

Most radical leftists attack the voluntaristic nature of the concept of wages, assuming there is something inherently evil about wages for reasons that are mirror images of the intellectual errors commonly committed by libertarians.

They’re both right and both wrong.

A deeper libertarian analysis, a left libertarian analysis, points to the role of the state in artificially concentrating capital in the hands of state-allied big business — giving statist plutocrats far more bargaining power in the labor market than is their natural due. Injustice happens to play out in the marketplace, but the cause is the state.

I urge, and challenge, free-market libertarians to show their solidarity with labor by supporting radical unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), rather than establishment unions in league with big business and the state. Click here to join the IWW.

When trying to dissect and examine the nature of overlapping government and corporate power, it’s difficult to not overlook so many aspects of it. Many so-called “private companies” are not merely state-allied in the class analysis sense of agorist class theory, but literally state-owned in varying degrees, often quite substantial.

For example, research credit to Andy commenting at Last Free Voice:

• Asset Listing of the New York State and Local Retirement System, 2006. It took 66 pages just to list companies in which stock is owned.
• The Illinois State Investment Board and New York City Pension Fund are major shareholders of Wal-Mart.
• And so on.

The result is a system not all that different in principle than the Soviet model.

There are numerous cities and towns in the Rust Belt that need to stop deluding themselves that they will regain past glory. Cities that once had significant manufacturing bases have seen a flight by not only those who became unemployed, but also by the next generation from the families that stayed. For cities [...]