Received in my e-mail inbox this past Monday, from someone who has not yet learned that half of all human decency in political thinking is just learning to keep your personal pronouns straight.

From: fuck you
To: AnarchistCafe.org working group
Subject: Message for AnarchistCafe.org working group
Date: 05/03/2010 09:47 AM

You fuckers started a riot in Santa Cruz!!! Why would you have a site like this???? You cased tens of thousands of dollars in damage!

In order:

1. No, I didn’t.

2. Because some people evidently don’t understand the ideas of Anarchism or what Anarchism stands for as a social movement. So, I think it’s cool for Anarchists, and people curious about Anarchism, to have places where they can meet each other in an informal environment and talk about what anarchy might mean.

   That, or I’m trying to make it easier for people to organize riots in Santa Cruz, California. You decide.

3. No, I’m pretty sure I didn’t.

I’m sorry to hear that rioters smashed up some stores in downtown Santa Cruz and spray-painted some circle-As around the place. But I, fucker that I may be, had nothing in particular to do with that. Neither, incidentally, did most Anarchists in and around Santa Cruz. Some Anarchists believe in street riots as a worthwhile tactic for social transformation; others don’t. In any case, those who want to holler about property damage ought to holler at the individual people who went out and committed it, not at any random stranger who happens to wear the same symbols or read the same books.

Anyway, Comrade You did not provide an e-mail address with the message, so I can’t reply directly. However, they seem to have written me because they had me confused with the SubRosa Cafe in Santa Cruz — which is currently being bearing the brunt of an increasingly nasty campaign of black-baiting, scapegoating, harassment, and direct threats from local Chamber of Commerce types, based solely on their political beliefs, on the assumption that, since they are part of the International Trotskyist-Anarchist Conspiracy, the riot is obviously their fault, even though they had nothing to do with it. In light of which I can only say that I regret that I have no affiliation with the fine folks behind such a wonderful community space. However, the message did inspire me to add a new Spaces section to the AnarchistCafe.org website, where I’m happy to include a listing for the SubRosa project. If you’re in the Bay Area, I encourage you to drop in and show your support. The SubRosa organizers also have a list of Ideas for creating a supportive atmosphere in Santa Cruz.

Fellow Workers:

In my allotted time, I hope to drill down a bit, and to say something about the structural features, and some of the mechanisms of what we might call state capitalism — of how, in this actually existing economy, the political structure of capitalism₂ (to use Gary Chartier’s threefold distinction) tend to produce and sustain the material conditions of capitalism₃ — how state corporatism promotes the bosses’ economy. Most of my remarks will be broadly historical and economic in character — although necessarily of a sketchy or programmatic sort, given the constraints of time and format. So consider this an outline of directions for inquiry and discussion; an attempt to show you briefly where key landmarks of the free market anti-capitalist analysis are at, rather than an attempt at a full guided tour. I think it important to at least sketch out the map because the chief obstacle that free market anti-capitalists confront in explaining our position is not so much a matter of correcting particular mistakes in political principles, or economic analysis (although there are particular mistakes we hope to address and correct). It is more a matter of convincing our conversation partners to make a sort of aspect-shift, to adopt a new point of view from which to see the political-economic gestalt.

The need for this shift is pressing because (with apologies to the feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone)^[1] the political economy of state capitalism is so deep as to be invisible. Or it may appear to be a superficial set of interventions, a problem that can be solved by a few legal reforms, or perhaps the elimination of bail-outs and the occasional export subsidy, while preserving more or less intact the basic recognizable patterns of capitalistic business as usual. The free market anti-capitalist holds there is something deeper, and more pervasive, at stake than the sort of surface level policy debates to which pro-capitalist libertarians too often limit their discussions. A fully freed market means the liberation of vital command posts in the economy, reclaiming them from points of state control to nexuses of market and social entrepreneurship — transformations from which a market would emerge that would look profoundly different from anything we have now. That so profound a change cannot easily fit into traditional categories of thought, e.g. libertarian or left-wing, laissez-faire or socialist, entrepreneurial or anti-capitalist, is not because these categories do not apply but because they are not big enough: radically free markets burst through them. If there were another word more all-embracing than revolutionary, we would use it.

1. ^[1]See the opening paragraph of Chapter 1 of Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex.↩

It’s been a while since the APEE panel on Free Market Anti-Capitalism. I said, a few Sundays ago, that I’d have more to say, soon. I’ve been meaning to publish my remarks, but it’s taken me a while to think about how I want to present them. I have a prepared text that I used for most of the talk (with the usual ad-libbing and skipping), and then a minimal set of notes that I used to speak off the cuff at the end of the talk. But the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to post the whole text as a long blob of text on the general topic of Free Market Anti-Capitalism. I’m happy with how the talk turned out — but talks are one thing, and blogs are another. There’s something to be said for the long essay (at least, given my own output, I sure hope that there is), but there’s already a number of long essays and lectures on left-libertarian economics and free-market anti-capitalism that are already out there. And looking back over my talk, as a general thing, what I was aiming to do was to anchor on the (really excellent) overviews of the salient issues which were provided by Steve, Gary, and Sheldon in their (excellent) earlier talks, and then drill down a bit — to get into some specifics about the mechanisms of political economy that free market anti-capitalists want to call attention to when they say that they are against actually-existing capitalism, and also to get into some moderate meta-discussion about why we feel the need to take the approach we do, and what the important upshot of a seemingly semantic point (like whether to use the letters c-a-p-i-t-a-l-i-s-m to identify what you’re for, or what you’re against) might really be. The points that I made along these lines were structured in such a way that, while a lecture is all of a piece, the material easily divides into a series of smaller, interrelated, but distinct remarks on a series of smaller, interrelated, but distinct questions. Smaller questions which might help separate out issues in the telling; smaller questions which might be a bit more digestible for reading and a bit more useful for referencing in future discussions; and, perhaps most importantly, smaller questions which might do more to help inspire some conversations in the comments.

So instead of simply posting my prepared text, or a reconstruction of my talk from the notes, as one big blob, what I’m going to do over the next several days is to split things up a bit, and publish a series of bits & pieces, ad seriatim. I’ll be covering ground that a lot of us have scouted before; some of the pieces (or bits?) will be nothing more than a quick attempt to clearly mark out something that just about every left-libertarian already knows or has read or has written herself. I can only say that I’m trying to accurately represent the ground that I covered in my talk, even if I am serializing and subdividing it. And I do also think there’s something to be said for clear maps, even if the territory has already been surveyed elsewhere. I hope that a survey of the landscape might help to make some journeys more pleasant, to help collect some thoughts, and to move along some conversations.

After I’ve finished serializing the remarks that I made at the panel itself, I hope also to follow up with a few remarks on points that were raised by my co-panelists, which I didn’t have the time to get into at the event itself. And I look forward to seeing how the conversation goes on from there.

Anyway, all this is by way of introduction, or apology, and that’s enough of that.

The first bit (or piece) will be coming out tomorrow.

• If the TSA Were Running New York. John Gruber, Daring Fireball (2010-05-03). James Fallows: All vans or SUVs headed into Midtown Manhattan would have to stop and have their contents inspected. If any vehicle seemed for any reason to have escaped inspection, Midtown in its entirety would be evacuated. And: The point of terrorism is not to "destroy." It is to terrify…. (Linked Tuesday 2010-05-04.)

Here’s an e-mail I received in my inbox yesterday, thanks to the actions of one of my market Anarchist friends on Facebook:

From: Facebook
To: Charles Johnson
Date: 05/04/2010 12:57 PM
Subject: Dominik Hennig suggested you become a fan of Omnipotent Government, by Ludwig von Mises…

Dominik became a fan of Omnipotent Government, by Ludwig von Mises on Facebook and suggested you become a fan too.

To see more details and confirm this invitation, follow the link below: . . .

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

Awkward!

I like Ludwig von Mises alright, but, man, I’m not going to sign on as a fan of omnipotent government, no matter who’s in charge.