leftlibertarian.org

Here’s a great post from a bit more than a year ago at Anomalous Presumptions (2007-02-26), which I just got around to reading:

I was responding to this key point:

[P]eer production isn’t an assault on the principles of a free society, but an extension of those principles to aspects of human life that don’t directly involve money. ….

[A] lot of the intellectual tools that libertarians use to analyze markets apply equally well to other, non-monetary forms of decentralized coordination. It’s a shame that some libertarians see open source software, Wikipedia, and other peer-produced wealth as a threat to the free market rather than a natural complement.

Since peer production is an entirely voluntary activity it seems strange to view it as a threat to the free market. (My interlocutors in the comments demonstrated that this view of peer production is alive and well, at least in some minds.) So how could this opinion arise? And does it indicate some deeper issue?

I think viewing peer production as a threat is a symptom of an underlying issue with huge long-term consequences: In peer production, the interests of capitalists and entrepreneurs are no longer aligned.

[…]

For example, Linus Torvalds is a great entrepreneur, and his management of the Linux community has been a key factor in the success of Linux. Success to an entrepreneur is coordinating social activity to create a new, self-sustaining social process. Entrepreneurship is essential to peer production, and successful entrepreneurs become rock stars in the peer production world.

A capitalist, by contrast, wants to get a return on something they own, such as money, a domain name, a patent, or a catalog of copyrighted works. A pure capitalist wants to maximize their return while minimizing the complexity of their actual business; in a pure capitalist scenario, coordination, production and thus entrepreneurship is overhead. Ideally, as a pure capitalist you just get income on an asset without having to manage a business.

The problem for capitalists in peer production is that typically there is no way to get a return on ownership. Linus Torvalds doesn’t own the Linux source code, Jimmy Wales doesn’t own the text of Wikipedia, etc. These are not just an incidental facts, they are at the core of the social phenomenon of peer production. A capitalist may benefit indirectly, for a while, from peer production, but the whole trend of the process is against returns on ownership per se.

Profit

Historically, entrepreneurship is associated with creating a profitable enterprise. In peer production, the idea of profit also splits into two concepts that are fairly independent, and are sometimes opposed to each other.

The classical idea of profit is monetary and is closely associated with the rate of (monetary) return on assets. This is obviously very much aligned with capitalist incentives. Entrepreneurs operating within this scenario create something valuable (typically a new business), own at least a large share of it, and profit from their return on the business as an asset.

The peer production equivalent of profit is creating a self-sustaining social entity that delivers value to participants. Typically the means are the same as those used by any classical entrepreneur: creating a product, publicizing the product, recruiting contributors, acquiring resources, generating support from larger organizations (legal, political, and sometimes financial), etc.

Before widespread peer production, the entrepreneur’s and capitalist’s definitions of success were typically congruent, because growing a business required capital, and gaining access to capital required providing a competitive return. So classical profit was usually required to build a self-sustaining business entity.

The change that enables widespread peer production is that today, an entity can become self-sustaining, and even grow explosively, with very small amounts of capital. As a result it doesn’t need to trade ownership for capital, and so it doesn’t need to provide any return on investment.

As others have noted, peer production is not new. The people who created educational institutions, social movements, scientific societies, etc. in the past were often entrepreneurs in the sense that I’m using here, and in their case as well, the definition of success was to create a self-sustaining entity, even though it often had no owners, and usually produced no profit in the classical sense.

—Jed Harris, Anomalous Presumptions (2007-02-26): Capitalists vs. Entrepreneurs

The only thing that I would want to add here is that it’s not just a matter of projects being able to expand or sustain themselves with little capital (although that is a factor). It’s also a matter of the way in which both emerging distributed technologies in general, and peer production projects in particular, facilitate the aggregation of dispersed capital — without it having to pass through a single capitalist chokepoint, like a commercial bank or a venture capital fund. Because of the way that peer production projects distribute and amortize their costs of operation, entrepreneurs can afford to bypass existing financial operators and go directly to people with $20 or $50 to give away and take the money in in small donations, because they no longer need to get multimillion dollar cash infusions all at once just to keep themselves running: the peer production model allows greater flexibility by dispersing fixed costs among many peers (and allowing new entrepreneurs to easily step in and take over the project, if one has to bow out due to the pressures imposed by fixed costs), rather than by concentrating them into the bottom line of a single, precarious legal entity. Meanwhile, because of the way that peer production projects distribute their labor, peer-production entrepreneurs can also take advantage of spare cycles on existing, widely-distributed capital goods — tools like computers, facilities like offices and houses, software, etc. which contributors own, which they still would have owned personally or professionally whether or not they were contributing to the peer production project, and which can be put to use as a direct contribution of a small amount of fractional shares of capital goods directly to the peer production project. So it’s not just a matter of cutting total aggregate costs for capital goods (although that’s an important element); it’s also, importantly, a matter of new models of aggregating the capital goods to meet whatever costs you may have, so that small bits of available capital can be rounded up without the intervention of money-men and other intermediaries.

The article also has an excellent coda on the way that Intellectual Protectionism threatens to give a government-backed prop to lingering capitalistic modes of production, by hobbling the emergence of entrepreneurial peer production based competition:

The conflicting incentives of entrepreneurs and capitalists come into sharp focus around questions of intellectual property. One commenter complained about open source advocates’ attacks on software patents, … the DMCA and … IP firms. These are all great examples of the divergence between ownership and entrepreneurship.

The DMCA was drafted and lobbied into existence by companies who wanted the government to help them extract money from consumers, with essentially no innovation on their part, and probably negative net social value. In almost every case, the DMCA advocates are not the people who created the copyrighted works that generate the revenue; instead they own the distribution systems that got those works to consumers, and they want to control any future distribution networks.

The DMCA hurts people who want to create new, more efficient modes of distribution, new artistic genres, new delivery devices, etc. In general it hurts entrepreneurs. However it helps some copyright owners get a return on their assets.

The consequences of patents and other IP protection are more mixed, but in many cases they inhibit innovation and entrepreneurship. Certainly patent trolls are an extremely clear example of the conflict — they buy patents not to produce anything, but to sue others who do produce something. Submarine patents (like the claimed patents on MP3 that just surfaced) are another example—a patent owner waits until a technology has been widely adopted (due to the work of others) and then asserts the right to skim revenue from ongoing use.

[…]

All of these issues, and other similar ones, make it harder for small companies, individuals and peer production projects to contribute innovation and entrepreneurship. Large companies with lawyers, lobbyists, and defensive patent portfolios can fight their way through the thickets of intellectual property. Small entrepreneurs are limited to clearings where they can hope to avoid IP problems.

Conclusion

Historically many benefits of entrepreneurship have been used to justify capitalism. However, we are beginning to see that in some cases we can have the benefits of a free market and entrepreneurship, while avoiding the social costs imposed by ensuring returns to property owners. The current battles over intellectual property rights are just the beginning of a much larger conflict about how to handle a broad shift from centralized, high capital production to decentralized, low capital production.

—Jed Harris, Anomalous Presumptions (2007-02-26): Capitalists vs. Entrepreneurs

30 May 2008

I’m jumping the gun in posting today’s and tomorrow’s entries, as I’ll be off the grid this weekend.

In Lillian Schlissel’s Conscience in America: A documentary history of conscientious objection in America, 1757-1967 (1968) is an excerpt from a letter to the Pennsylvania Assembly from 1795 that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere, and the author of which remains unknown to me.

That the infliction of fines, or other punishments, would be as ineffectual in reconciling quakers in America, to carry arms, as they proved in prevailing upon them in England to make oath, there is no reason to doubt.

It is therefore, with much uneasiness, that I learn from the 17^th clause of the militia bill, which is postponed until the next session of congess, that such citizens as are conscientiously scrupulous of bearing arms, are to be exempted from doing so, upon paying a fine — to pay a fine, in lieu of bearing arms, would be as repugnant to the principles of friends, as the performance of the service, from which it were to exempt them; and for reasons synonymous to those, which deter them from contributing to the support and maintenance of hireling ministers — to collect these fines, therefore, the subordinate magistracy of the country must interpose their authority, which will put it in their power (and their inclination to exercise it in general cannot be denied) to impose upon and distress the unfortunate victims of their rapacity, to a degree far beyond every benefit, which the country could derive from such a source of revenue.— It is a maxim, that the law ought not to require impossibilities; and it is the language of reason, and religion, that a man should not be forced to wrong his own conscience: and a quaker must either do the latter, or be incapable of complying with the requisites of this clause of the bill — it would be tantamount to the taxing the opinions of one class of the citizens, in exclusion of every other. To tax a man for not doing a particular service, which his conscience forbids him to do, in order to make up for that omission, is as unreasonable, as it would be to extra-tax the members of a community, who possess one kind of property, to make their contribution equivalent to that, which the public coffers receive from those who possess another kind of property.

This is another interesting attempt to explain why Quakers were unwilling to pay militia exemption fees, though it still leaves me wondering.

It also mentions the Quaker resistance to “hireling ministers” — mandatory tithes to support an official establishment church — which predated and formed the template for later Quaker war tax resistance, but which I haven’t dealt with much here.

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Taxpatriate satyagrahi Jeff Knaebel has another manifesto posted at LewRockwell.com: “I Rise to Speak — On This Memorial Day — In Refusal of Murder.” His advice, in a nutshell:

• Keep this in mind: what we vote for, and what we pay for, we are responsible for. It is us.
• The only ways to have clean hands are not to participate, or actively resist.
• Quit tax payments, and thus quit supporting organized crime.
• Boycott the State. Do not vote. Do not ask it for anything. Do not petition it. Give it no energy.
• To extent possible, abstain from all interaction with the State. Try to become self employed so you are out of the paper trail corporate-State surveillance net.
• Quit credit cards and all financial operations that are easy for the State to surveil.
• Avoid doing business with banks to the extent possible. They are spies and bag men of the State.
• One cannot be free so long as he uses credit cards and banks.
• To extent possible, create a livelihood based upon work trade and barter exchange.
• Look for a piece of land in a wholesome and supportive community and nourish yourself from a garden.
• If there is a secessionist movement in your state or nearby, join it. Check the website of The Middlebury Institute.
• In every way possible, become a moral sovereign and join in voluntary cooperation with like minded others.
• Educate and promulgate the ethics, values, and truths of Liberty.
• Read The Mad Farmers Liberation Front by Wendell Berry, a great poet. Practice resurrection.

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Thanks to the Market Anarchist Carnivale for plugging The Picket Line.

I am not making this up!

MILAN, Italy (AP) — First it was the film and the book. Now the next step for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is opera.

La Scala officials say the Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli has been commissioned to produce an opera on the international multiformat hit for the 2011 season at the Milan opera house. The composer is currently artistic director of the Arena in Verona.

OK…tomorrow, I begin working on Man, Economy, and State: The Musical.

Libertarian is an ethical term for the recognition of (and advocacy for recognizing) individual rights. When acted upon consistently, it overlaps with the political term “anarchism”.

Watch this presentation.

Why not a new party? I’ll tell you why.

In my case, the answer to that question is because I’m against all political parties. I’m an anarchist. I am against the state.

I believe that there is no way to govern, no program of public policy, that is consistent with the libertarian non-aggression principle. Thus, I can’t endorse attempting to gain control of (or participating in) the government.

I believe that all governments are merely glorified criminal gangs, and I’m not interested in making better behaved gangs in an effort to ensure their longevity. I believe that the system of privately provided (i.e. non-state) law and security services described in market anarchist texts can potentially arise from underground as a set of black market enterprises, ultimately suppressing government as criminal activity rather than futilely attempting to reform it.

See here: http://agorism.info/

Scott Bieser provides an excellent analysis of the futility and counter-productive nature of the Libertarian Party.

I endorse his call for a campaign to convince the LP to change their name to something else; something other than “Libertarian” as a “truth in advertising” thing.

Furthermore, I also suggest we make it easier for them to determine to make this change by agreeing among ourselves what they ought to call themselves, making the choice in a way that suits our objectives and then assertively inserting the term into the ongoing discourse ourselves by using it as an insulting epithet against them. That may sound strange, but I believe that constant hectoring with the term as part of a determined harassment effort will inevitably result in their eventual latching onto it themselves in a sort of “reclaimed word” fashion. The way to pull this off would be to sort of self-consciously ape the way Marxist-Leninists used to relentlessly criticize and sneer at bourgeouis “liberal” Social Democrats.

My proposed umbrella term for neo-libertarian conservatoids, minarchists and partyarchs is also the term favored by the Cato Institute, so there is some appropriate precedent there. It’s “market liberal”.

I believe this serves our purposes by complementing the term “market anarchist”, potentially reinforcing the frame of the future “moderate left” being variations on “market liberal” and the future “radical left” mostly being or containing versions of “market anarchism” (until eventually the “market” part gets dropped because it’s just taken for granted and goes without saying).

Ironically, one of our best tools in this effort may be the neo-cons and their desire to label everything slightly less warmongering than General George S. Patton on a heavy meth binge as “left” or “liberal”.

Jeremy Weiland takes a stab at this important question on his blog, and I think it prudent to offer my own thoughts as well.

Before reading Francois Tremblay's response, I immediately thought of Richard Dawkins' memetic analysis of religion, as Francois apparently also did. A meme need not benefit all of those it affects in order for it to propagate; indeed, we often see the opposite effect. A meme may benefit only a certain class of people, not necessarily the whole, if the other classes are indoctrinated well enough.

I generally agree with the rest of Francois' analysis. The state began "as a consequence of war," as Francois puts it. This is pretty commonly accepted by anthropologists, both statist and anarchist, today. I think the standard Marxian analysis gives us some valuable insight as well; as agriculture develops and a certain class of people are able to acquire an oligopoly on the means of production, it uses its power to subjugate others in order to maintain its privilege and the state rises in tandem with capitalism. The state thus serves the interest of the capitalist class (or bourgeoisie, to use Marx's terminology), exercising its coercive power on behalf of this elite. Once the vast majority of the world is ruled by state governments, it's easy to see how states maintain power. Jeremy makes a good point about the common belief in delegation of power: people believe that delegating power to others is often the most effective solution. (I partially agree with this belief, actually; if specialization is seen as delegation of power, then that does often seem to be a good solution.)

Nowadays, anarchy has become such a bad word that it is synonymous with "chaos," pundits pointing toward Somalia and Iraq as examples of what would happen without a strong state. Without the state, there is no organization, assert the pundits. Without laws, people will just go around murdering each other for pocket change. The propaganda machine is effective. If you all haven't read Hobbes, I encourage you to do so. Chapter XIII of Leviathan is a good place to start, and it's available online for free. It provides valuable insight into the statist mind.

The time for mutual aid is now, comrades. Infoshop.org, the "nexus for anarchism online," to use Brad Spangler's words, has been down for a while due to lack of funding. Brad makes the case for donation eloquently:

There are a variety of libertarian and anarchist-aligned efforts that continually need your financial support. While we all would like to think that the big donations from donors better off than ourselves can carry the weight, the awkward truth of these matters is that the non-corrupt organizations that refuse to sell out to the ruling class MUST raise their money by getting lots of small donations from ordinary folks like you and me. That’s just economic reality.

Infoshop.org is the nexus for anarchism online. Not “market anarchism” but simply anarchism — including commies, syndicalists, primitivists, surrealists, Groucho Marxists and more. I support the Alternative Media Project and its “ecumenical” approach to building a diverse and polycentric anti-authoritarian left. I want to make free market libertarianism, properly understood, a part of that left.

The project needs our help. Please join me in supporting Infoshop.org and the Alternative Media Project.

Personally, I might have never become a libertarian socialist if not for Infoshop.org and the Anarchist FAQ, which it hosts. I'm sure that I'm not alone in thanking the website for my enlightenment. Most of us probably have it to thank for the enhancement of our understanding of anarchism and other leftist currents of anti-authoritarianism (or anti-authoritarian currents of leftism, if you wish). So please, donate to the project along with me. I've just donated $20. Even if you can't spare that much, a mere $5 goes a long way. If each of us donates that much, we'll all be able to enjoy the site for a good time to come.

You can donate here at Little Black Cart, or you can donate via Paypal to chuck [at] mutualaid.org.

Prove that mutual aid can work; prove the egoists' view of human nature wrong! If the libertarian socialists of the web cannot band together to maintain one website, how can we expect to maintain a libertarian socialist society some time in the future? This could really be cause for doubt in the possibility of anarchy.