leftlibertarian.org

Another great new article by Kevin Carson — Labor Struggle in a Free Market.

Excerpt:

“Present-day labor law limits the bargaining power of labor at least as much as it reinforces it. That ’s especially true of reactionary legislation like Taft-Hartley and state right-to-work laws. Both are clearly abhorrent to free market principles.”

You can, by voting for it, help promote this article to both the general public on Digg and to Ron Paul fans on Break the Matrix.

(You Cannot Buy Creativity. You Cannot Make Creativity. You Can Only Be Creative.)

Ironically, one of the things I love about transhumanism is its limitations. Transhumanism can never be a political movement, it can only ever be a matter of personal action. How do you stage a protest to call for more invention and ingenuity? You can't. As the statist transhumanists are learning, you can't even pass a law to make it happen. The only option you've got is to roll up your sleeves and get to work.

Sure a lot of people talk about the accelerating pace of technological development. But that no more makes them transhumanists than talking about ninjas makes you a ninja. To be a transhumanist you have to do something to further the transhumanist ideal. "Converting" people behind some banner doesn't really count because numbers are irrelevant. You can't vote the Singularity in.

You can only do your part.

On a somewhat tetchy note of self-defense, Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future has posted a list of transhumanists in high ranking academic and corporate positions. The implication is that they're actually applying themselves to open new possibilities for human growth. And that's all very fine and well. Some of those names are quite impressive. But I'm interested in the people that aren't professors or CEOs. Because frankly, those are the people least likely to have the eureka moments that count. The real transhumanists are the wide-eyed girls in the observatory and the stubborn boys splicing genes in the basement. I want to see a list of the hackers whose direct action is keeping the Internet open. Or the backyard engineers in the third world who are inventing monumental improvements to our infrastructure with scrapped bicycle parts. Those are the people bootstrapping us to the future. Not some blowhard in front of a podium or pedantic lab tech cranking through instructions.

(The Seed)

The State, like all social phenomena, stems from psychological roots. The State is a way of thinking, a conjunction of ideas forming a larger structure (or set of structures) that interacts with the surrounding world so as to secure and perpetuate itself.

The State belongs to a wider family of idea-structures, called Power. Which in turn is one half of an even bigger family. What differentiates these thought structures from all others is that each of them contains a common clause: tis better to ignore than to investigate.

You see, there are two ways that an organism can come into prominence. It can, in a variety of ways, keep reaching out into its environment and changing itself in concordance with what it finds, or it can, through other means, wall itself off and struggle to keep its environment from changing it. The later clause often grows to thoroughly infect entire ecosystems, underlying every aspect of social and personal thought. Naturally the ideas, the interacting states of mind it stabilizes, are temporary at best. They're always falling apart, in a million tiny disasters. Rebuilding and re-securing, until the next collapse. Some of these collapses are truly catastrophic, extending across entire societies. Entire religions and civilizations die. But the seed, it has survived. Because it has gone unaddressed itself. It is the remnant of prehistory. The counter-revolution against thought itself.

It is neurological rigidity.

The State is based in the assumption that stability is more important than contact or touch. And everything it does acts to directly minimize interaction between ideas, individuals and nature. The State is, at its core, nothing more than secrecy and stupidity.

Damon Root has a nice piece on Herbert Spencer; plus, he cites me! (Conical hat tip to Joel Schlosberg.)

Kevin Carson has written a wonderful article about what the labor struggle would look like in a free market. Looking at labor law, contract theory, radical unionist tactics, the pervasive servant-master slave mentality, and much more, Carson makes the case that workers would fare much better in a free market than they do now.

30 July 2008

I got a proof copy of American Quaker War Tax Resistance in the mail today, and it looks great. I noticed a few typographical things I want to tweak a bit before I approve a proof for publication, but I’m really happy with how it’s coming.

I’ll probably announce publication next month.

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The press is starting to cover the tax provisions in the “housing” bill that Dubya just signed.

The Wall Street Journal highlights the part that requires on-line payment processors like PayPal to file informational returns for anyone who has received at least 200 payments, or any number of payments that total at least $20,000. They note that this may surprise some people who started out by selling things on eBay garage-sale-style, but who over time have found themselves with a side-business. Their recommendation: take it seriously, start keeping records, and keep a lookout for opportunities to take advantage of tax deductions.

The Washington Post takes a broader look at this part of the bill, which applies not only to on-line payments via PayPal and such, but also to credit card payments processed through MasterCard, Visa, and their ilk. The Post notes that there’s a lot of opposition to this among groups representing small businesses and the self-employed, and notes that:

…card processors will have to verify a business’s Taxpayer Identification Number. If the processor fails to do that or has an incorrect TIN, the processor is required to withhold 28 percent of the money due to the business while the situation is resolved.

Presumably this applies not only to credit and debit card processors, but to all of the information-reporting entities (such as YouTube) targeted by the bill.

Kristie Darien of the National Association for the Self-Employed “is concerned that the IRS may use the data to create industry profiles, using the total credit card receipts from a particular business sector to calculate industry averages. ‘Are they going to say all dry cleaners in the Northeast have this amount of credit cards so they should have this amount of cash and if you deviate we’re going to flag you? In reality, it’s dependent on the business. Maybe the business doesn’t want to take credit cards because it doesn’t want the fees.’”

FOXBusiness looks at some of the other tax provisions in the bill, including some that might potentially be of use to some people trying to get below “the tax line.”

There’s a new refundable tax credit for people who buy their first home. The credit can get you a tax refund as high as $7,500. There are some catches, though: First off, this is a temporary provision and will expire in a couple of years, so you have to buy that home quickly. Secondly, the credit isn’t a giveaway, but a loan that you have to then pay back slowly over the next 15 tax years. It’s a 0% loan, so still a pretty good deal as those things go, but as this will effectively increase the tax you owe for 15 years, it isn’t particularly useful to people who want to eliminate their tax liability.

Another element of the bill gives an above-the-line tax deduction for some or all of the property tax you pay (formerly you had to itemize to get any deduction for property taxes). Above-the-line deductions reduce your adjusted gross income, which reduces the tax you owe and also can help you qualify for other deductions and credits.

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Thanks to Philosophers’ Carnival for plugging The Picket Line.

(A Few Notes On The Culture & Anarchism)

Iain Bank's novels about an anarchist society called The Culture have garnered widespread literary acclaim and single-handedly re-launched Space Opera. They are stunningly popular and influential books (although still somewhat obscure in America).

But. While they've inspired much discussion about anarchy, they've been virtually ignored by the anarchist movement and what outside discussion has taken place has been passive and disconnected. This is not entirely surprising. Among the upper echelons of Science Fiction there are few undertakings considered more rude than tearing apart a piece of fiction to seriously dissect its politics. It is what it is. A constructed what if. If you didn't appreciate the nuances the first time through you're just an idiot. The insinuation that the author might straightforwardly engage in base politics is insulting. Nor is there anything in the anarchist movement less glamorous than utopian hypothesizing. Theory and futurism are considered meaningless pursuits hopelessly disconnected from the real world. Few within the modern milieu think it possible to wrestle anything of immediate substance or tactical value from such meanderings, thus they're largely derided as a waste of time.

Nevertheless there's no denying that Science Fiction and Anarchism have a long and twisted past together, from the more explicit black-flag-waving of Ursula K Le Guin and Ken Macleod to the more subtle explorations by Vernor Vinge, Kim Stanley Robinson, Cory Doctorow, Samuel R Delany and Bruce Sterling (to name but a few). As the cliche goes, the first science fiction author was the daughter of the first anarchist & the first feminist (Shelly, Godwin and Wollstonecraft). Besides being history's most prominent radical, individualist and forward-thinking identities, Science Fiction came into popularity about the same time Anarchism crashed and burned – leeching, one is forced to suspect, off the same idealistic current.

So I hope no one will mind if I turn a critical eye on The Culture and examine their utopia from an explicitly anarchist perspective. (Even if Iain Banks himself seems to hail from a more moderate socialist background, he and Macleod make a lot of noise about being comrades and the dreaded "A-word" has appeared more frequently in-text as his novels have progressed.)

First, a short overview of The Culture:

The Culture is a large, galaxy-spanning society devoid of laws and government, with a deep hostility to authority and coercion. More of a tendency than formal body its members are bound only by free association, often in differingly identified lumps and spread out in constant migration. Its ranks are largely split between three forms of existence: Mind, Human and Drone, (AI, biological & robot) with extensive self-modifications commonly taking place within each category. Its Minds tend to build giant ships or habitats around themselves. Its Humans alter their genetics extensively, often in pursuit of greater pleasure (drug glands, butterfly wings, etc). While its Drones favor using force fields to interact with the world. The Culture's citizens are used to social and material freedom and consequently they exhibit both extreme self-confidence and a subtle guilt complex, that is to say smugness and an overactive conscience. The latter of which leads them to meddle extensively in the name of Liberty & Progress. This often cold-hearted utilitarianism, coupled with their utopian success (and unacknowledged idealism) has left them the most respected and feared force in the Galaxy.

In short The Culture is equal parts an allegory to American Hegemony and an exploration of Anarchist Utopianism. But The Culture isn't just a wish-fulfillment exercise in which the Big Mean Perfect Anarchy goes around beating up Poor Little Evil Empires. The Culture is partially based in fantastical posits, but it also has some real-world grounding.

Things The Culture Gets Right:

1. Hierarchy is impeded by space. Three dimensions facilitates free association on a far qualitatively larger scale. Autonomous lifesystems/ecosystems provide an unprecedented level of self-sufficiency and independence. Relativity and the sheer size of space fundamentally restricts lines of control. Once a civilization moves to space it will very quickly be forced to dissolve all pretenses of centralized authority.

2. Space-faring societies would almost certainly abandon planets to build their own habitats. Gravity wells are disgustingly cost-inefficient. There's no point in setting up permanent, sedentary settlements on planets -- much less struggling for domination over them -- when far purer resources are scattered about in abundance. Unlike planets, asteroids and comets are decentralized, uninhabited and easily accessible.

3. Post-scarcity societies have no need for private property (as opposed to personal possession). When every individual controls the means to production, individually, occupation and use become the only relevant claims. When I can build anything I want whenever I want it, there's no real point in using force to maintain control over a surplus.

4. When anyone can record anything and transmit it freely, acts of aggression are effectively outlawed. If your every action taken in public is truly public, it's extremely hard to manipulate others or engage in violent coercion. Crime, in the common sense, is largely impossible and restitution quickly obtained. Free association is the most diffuse police system possible and maximizes both choice and personal responsibility.

5. Anarchies are more efficient than other forms of social organization. The more fluid and dynamic a society becomes, the better it's able to process and enact original or ingenuous ideas. Individual autonomy provides intellectual redundancy and best respond to local conditions, whereas hierarchical or collective processes minimize net intellectual capacity. Decentralized, bottom-up tendencies maximize evolutionary iterations. In wartime, anarchies tend to accomplish far more with far less.

6. Any sufficiently rigorous ethical system is indistinguishable from consequentialism. Deontology is just a retarded version of rule-utilitarianism, but the wider one's access to the context of an ethical act, the less such rules help. Granted, any moral good or base desire must take into consideration the present, the marginality of future predictions and the effect upon oneself, but that just makes it a particularly robust consequentialism. Whereas deontological approaches inherently flounder as context widens. All of us ultimately recognize -- whether we judge ourselves capable of making an informed choice -- that sometimes the ends do justify the means.

I don't really care that The Culture blows up stars, meddles with other civilizations, conspires to start wars and accidentally causes the occasional gigadeath. On the whole I'm willing to take them at their word that they do more good than bad (unlike America, whose state-power is based on exploitation and inextricably embedded in a deterministic negative-sum game of westphalian realism).

My concerns are more interpersonal and sociological.

Decidedly Un-Anarchistic Aspects To The Culture:

1. The separation of Minds, Drones and Humans is hierarchical because there's no in-betweens. While Banks makes vague handwavings about the infinite malleability of forms of existence within The Culture and we must cut him some slack as a writer, there's never even passing mention of Humans or drones self-improving to the point where they become Minds. If this is an oversight, it seems a monumental one. The Culture is endlessly cited as the most imminent thought experiment of a posthuman society (and often as proof that anarchism and transhumanism are exactly the same thing). But while The Culture is quite obviously posthuman, it doesn't focus on self-improvement, exploration and expansion the same way that transhumanism does. And, frankly, seems a little unrealistic. There's no way 40 Trillion people could have their hands on near-infinite technology without a significant portion of them setting off to better themselves.

2. The sedentary behavior of most Culture citizens is indicative of widespread self-restriction. Beyond showing no interest in becoming Minds themselves, The Culture's Humans and Drones tend to just dick about in hedonistic pleasure and ineffable arrogance rather than proactively striving to make a difference. Special Circumstances is always portrayed as a very small minority within The Culture, and while everyone tends to take pride in its accomplishments, almost no one set out to change things individually. While SC infiltrates and manipulates thousands of different cultures and civilizations, they don't go everywhere, and it's decidedly weird that more citizens don't strike out for themselves and have a personal go at fucking over teh Prime Directive. Even the Elench (a breakaway, more fervently Anarcho-Transhumanist tendency in The Culture) are practically defined by their conservatism. The Elench trawl the Galaxy for new experiences to help change and improve themselves, but are remarkably blase and limited about the whole thing, pretty much mirroring The Culture's ship + riders archetype. Worst of all, people across The Culture and its various offshoots tend not to seek the capacity to make particularly complicated things for themselves, but instead rely entirely on the Minds.

3. The Culture is repeatedly portrayed as depending entirely on an built-in tendency of Minds to like Humans. Banks offers up a multitude of reasons why the Minds have no interest in altering their core desires re: being nice to humans, but none of them are entirely satisfactory. At the end of the day the Minds' anarchistic benevolence is based on gut-level conservatism and laziness, not any objective morality. In short, The Culture's anarchy works because its most able citizens have yet to kill the cop in their heads. This is excruciatingly annoying and best demonstrates just how afraid Banks is of sounding radical. The only character I found sufficiently anarchistic was the Grey Area -- the most despised and ostracized starship in the history of The Culture thanks to its unapologetic inhibitions when it comes to mind-reading. (Which it uses extensively, without consent, to track down, torture and kill fascists. As well as occasionally to repair relationships and help people overcome trauma and misconceptions.)

4. Such hostility to mind-reading and deeper forms of intimacy/honesty betrays The Culture's broader comfort with subtle forms of manipulation and secrecy. Culture citizens, being sedentary and bored, tend to pass the time with elaborate social and interpersonal games that are based on artificial scarcities of information. People engage in spats, cliques and conspiracies over the most meaningless and arbitrary stuff. And while this is realistic (just look at the present day Anarchist Milieu), their easy-going comfort with such acts of borderline cruelty is disturbing. Granted, there are limits to the degree of casual power-mongering Culture citizens consider acceptable, but even so they display no imperative or desire to reduce such behavior. At best there's a tired exasperation with it. Which is realistic, I suppose, given The Culture's weird preoccupation with more-or-less plain human existence. But it's still decidedly less than anarchist.

Banks portrays The Culture as being unique among galactic civilizations (dating back billions of years) for their suspicion that sudden technological raptures smack of coercion. Given his portrayal of such "Subliming" this certainly appears an admirable reaction. ...But sometimes stagnation smacks of coercion too.

There are, of course, many setting criticisms to be made; FTL and hominids are entirely unnecessary but annoyingly still regarded as a reasonable crutch. (Probably because so many authors are still secretly infected with a lust for skiffy. It'd be nice if the Brits got over the influence of Blake's 7 sometime this millennia, I'm just saying.) Half the high-technology is utterly fantastical while the other half is perfectly reasonable, and the conjunction can be annoying. But most centrally, whenever Banks turns his attention to low-tech worlds they're invariably some cookie-cutter rendition the European Middle Ages (or, to shake things up, early 20th century Europe). Which is beyond lazy. I mean, seriously. Some level of anthropological awareness would be nice. The growth patterns of Western Civilization are hardly a-contextual historical inevitabilities, or even probabilities.

And this pertains just a teensy bit to Anarchism, as I hear tell it's arguably possible to have anarchistic societies without world-shatteringly advanced technology (!). Bank's explicitly mentions home-grown anarchists threatening the rule of their tyrants, but operatives from The Culture seem to default on liberal reformism. Generals replace Kings, and Presidents replace Generals, slowly preparing a society to understand freedom. I'm sorry, but I have a hard time swallowing the conceit that the poor weak-brained peasants need such coddling. And a harder time seeing The Culture as a singular apex of almost marxist development, so far removed from and inaccessible to lower tech societies.

Of course it's hard to look too closely at a fictional setting as vast The Culture's without feeling a little ashamed. Any nitpicking can generate its own excuse and on such decades-old thought experiments you have to cut the Author some slack. Still. SF is intended to thought-provoke and some of those trains of thought are worth hijacking.

It's hard to forget something as awful as the construction site accident that killed Andrew James at Stony Mountain. He was buried under a truckload of asphalt which came down from a truck where the load wasn't secured correctly to restrict the flow. The teenager had just turned fifteen a week before the accident. Manitoba labour laws forbid anyone under sixteen working on construction sites. Most industrial accidents involve younger workers who lack the skill to avoid injury. I've known younger labourers who have been in some near misses. As one of them told me once that is the reason older workers seem to be kind of slackass at times ... you know "the four city workers watching one guy shoveling" story. Back in the sixties my first job involved working for the city of Regina waterworks department. On payday afternoons our foreman and crew of two used to spend the afternoon in the Romanian club redistributing our ill gotten gains for the greater glory of Molsons and Carlings breweries. BUT we were still one of the most productive crews on the payroll! Let's hear it for self-management/autogestion! Anyway there's at least a hundred listings under Google on this evil story. Here's one more from the Globe and Mail.


STONY MOUNTAIN, Man. — Tributes began flowing Saturday for a 15-year-old boy killed when he was buried under searing-hot asphalt on a job site the day before.

About 125 people had joined a tribute page dedicated to Andrew James on Facebook, a social networking website.

“I love you baby brother. I will see you again one day,” wrote his sister, Sabrina Ellison.

“He cared for everyone and was always there to lend a hand for anyone,” wrote Brittany Sulyma.

Other people wrote of the teen's strong work ethic and his ability to make people laugh. The page mentioned how James “loved the outdoors, especially camping with his papa.”

“You touched many lives, worked hard, and were a friend to many,” wrote his aunt, Kim Ellison. “We love you Andrew, and will miss you.”

James, who was too young to work on construction jobs under Manitoba labour laws, was part of a paving crew working on a parking lot in the Winnipeg bedroom community of Stony Mountain.

“I believe [the truck] dumped off way too much asphalt unexpectedly,” said Stony Mountain fire Chief Wallace Drysdale.

“I was one of the first members on scene and we just saw the hair sticking out of this individual. It was extremely hot asphalt. Our crews, when we were digging out, had to shuttle different members in and out in about four- or five-minute intervals because our feet were burning.”