Rad Geek People's Daily

State socialism is the cooptation and consumption of popular energy and liberation movements into a brutal and exploitative structure of party control, self-feeding state structures and authortarian power politics. It is the graveyard of social change, and the human costs that it exacts range from waste and malinvestment to degenerative, systemic social and economic collapse. What has happened in Venezuela is a long, slow-motion horror show illustrating how state socialism feeds on itself, and eventually subdues any aspiration of popular empowerment under the weight of a brutal, desperately feeding vampire of bureaucratic state-capitalism.

Venezuela's epic shortages are nothing new at this point. No diapers or car parts or aspirin — it's all been well documented. But now the country is at risk of running out of money itself.

In a tale that highlights the chaos of unbridled inflation, Venezuela is scrambling to print new bills fast enough to keep up with the torrid pace of price increases. Most of the cash, like nearly everything else in the oil-exporting country, is imported. And with hard currency reserves sinking to critically low levels, the central bank is doling out payments so slowly to foreign providers that they are foregoing further business.

Venezuela, in other words, is now so broke that it may not have enough money to pay for its money.

. . . Last month, De La Rue, the world's largest currency maker, sent a letter to the central bank complaining that it was owed $71 million and would inform its shareholders if the money were not forthcoming. The letter was leaked to a Venezuelan news website and confirmed by Bloomberg News.

It's an unprecedented case in history that a country with such high inflation cannot get new bills, said Jose Guerra, an opposition law maker and former director of economic research at the central bank. Late last year, the central bank ordered more than 10 billion bank notes, surpassing the 7.6 billion the U.S. Federal Reserve requested this year for an economy many times the size of Venezuela's.

–Andrew Rosati, Venezuela Doesn’t Have Enough Money to Pay for Its Money
Bloomberg (27 April 2016)

The Venezuelan Boli-Bureaucracy survives by feeding off oil revenues and redistributing part of the take to popular subsidy programs for basic goods (especially food and gasoline). But as they’ve become increasingly unable to find the money to keep those programs functioning, they’ve responded by escalating state confiscation of businesses and inflating the currency to pay off looming bills. As the value of the bolivar has cratered, prices on those basic goods have skyrocketed; since the legitimacy of the Boli-Bureaucracy depends on keeping basic goods affordable to the poor, they responded by blaming greedy merchants and instituted rigid price controls on food, medicine, batteries, deodorant, diapers, etc. etc. etc. Predictably, the effect of price controls in the midst of sky-high inflation was that people rushed to buy everything they could before their wages became even more worthless, and stores sold what they had but couldn’t afford to import any more.^[1] So now the government inflicts massive shortages on the people it claims to be aiding, and it responds by enacting increasingly draconian efforts to force more goods to be brought to market and to monitor shopping and limit the quantities that people can buy. The degenerative process has gotten so bad that even the government’s ability to pay for its own inflation is breaking down. The spiraling, swallowed-the-goat-to-catch-the-cat, swallowed-the-cat-to-catch-the-bird process of complete systemic breakdown would be comical, if its human costs weren’t so grimly, horribly real. From a recent overview article in The Atlantic, whose contents are as horrifying as they are predictable to anyone who has been following the situation over the last few years:

… In the last two years Venezuela has experienced the kind of implosion that hardly ever occurs in a middle-income country like it outside of war. Mortality rates are skyrocketing; one public service after another is collapsing; triple-digit inflation has left more than 70 percent of the population in poverty; an unmanageable crime wave keeps people locked indoors at night; shoppers have to stand in line for hours to buy food; babies die in large numbers for lack of simple, inexpensive medicines and equipment in hospitals, as do the elderly and those suffering from chronic illnesses.

But why? It's not that the country lacked money. Sitting atop the world's largest reserves of oil at the tail end of a frenzied oil boom, the government led first by Chavez and, since 2013, by Maduro, received over a trillion dollars in oil revenues over the last 17 years. It faced virtually no institutional constraints on how to spend that unprecedented bonanza. It's true that oil prices have since fallen—a risk many people foresaw, and one that the government made no provision for—but that can hardly explain what's happened: Venezuela's garish implosion began well before the price of oil plummeted. Back in 2014, when oil was still trading north of $100 per barrel, Venezuelans were already facing acute shortages of basic things like bread or toiletries.

The real culprit is chavismo, the ruling philosophy named for Chavez and carried forward by Maduro, and its truly breathtaking propensity for mismanagement (the government plowed state money arbitrarily into foolish investments); institutional destruction (as Chavez and then Maduro became more authoritarian and crippled the country's democratic institutions); nonsense policy-making (like price and currency controls); and plain thievery (as corruption has proliferated among unaccountable officials and their friends and families).

A case in point is the price controls, which have expanded to apply to more and more goods: food and vital medicines, yes, but also car batteries, essential medical services, deodorant, diapers, and, of course, toilet paper. The ostensible goal was to check inflation and keep goods affordable for the poor, but anyone with a basic grasp of economics could have foreseen the consequences: When prices are set below production costs, sellers can't afford to keep the shelves stocked. Official prices are low, but it's a mirage: The products have disappeared.

When a state is in the process of collapse, dimensions of decay feed back on each other in an intractable cycle. Populist giveaways, for example, have fed the country's ruinous flirtation with hyperinflation; the International Monetary Fund now projects that prices will rise by 720 percent this year and 2,200 percent in 2017. The government virtually gives away gasoline for free, even after having raised the price earlier this year. As a result of this and similar policies, the state is chronically short of funds, forced to print ever more money to finance its spending. Consumers, flush with cash and chasing a dwindling supply of goods, are caught in an inflationary spiral.

There are many theories about the deeper forces that have destroyed Venezuela's economy, torn apart its society and devastated its institutions, but their result is ultimately a human tragedy representing one of the most severe humanitarian crises facing the Western hemisphere. . . .

–Moisés Naím and Francisco Toro, Venezuela Is Falling Apart: Scenes from daily life in the failing state
The Atlantic (May 2016)

Under the name and banner of a socialist and revolutionary movement, the emerging Boli-bureaucracy has used subsidy, co-optation, conversion, and violent repression to devour any and every independent project or association, whenever, wherever, and however it could get them into its ravenous maw. All too many Potemkin-tour Progressives and authoritarian Leftists deluded themselves into believing that this process of the endlessly self-aggrandizing State bureaucracy engorging itself on the living remains of industrial and civil society, was something that Leftist, grassroots, and populist tendencies ought for some reason to support. For years the discourse on the Left has responded to Anarchistic voices criticizing the Bolivarian regime by trying to bully them out of the conversation with charges of neo-liberalism and golpismo. But it is too obvious at this point to be worth continuing the debate on terms like these. Bolivarian government has produced nothing more than a grotesque, slow-motion train wreck that keeps happening and happening.

Government! Ah! we shall still have enough of it, and to spare. Know well that there is nothing more counter-revolutionary than the Government. Whatever liberalism it pretends, whatever name it assumes, the Revolution repudiates it: its fate is to be absorbed in the industrial organization.

–Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Reaction Causes Revolution
From General Idea of the Revolution in the XIXth Century (1851).

The promise of revolutionary government is nothing but a mirage; and the problem is not with the revolution, but with the government. In Anarchy there is another way. Que se vayan tod@s.

See also.

• GT 2008-03-12: Que se vayan todos.
• GT 2013-03-11: Hugo Chávez in 4 questions (Rafael Uzcátegui, from Peri?@c3;b3;dico El Libertario)
• GT 2014-02-21: Translation of Caracas, 15-F: Impressions from the street (Humberto Decarli, in El Libertario)
• GT 2014-02-21: Translation of Report from San Cristobal, Tachira (Anonymous, reprinted by El Libertario)
• GT 2014-02-22: Translation of Message from CDH-UCAB: on torture and cruel and inhuman treatment of the detainees from 12-F (Centro de DDHH de la UCAB, reprinted in EL LIBERTARIO)
• GT 2014-02-22: Translation of "Quick Overview of the Situation in Venezuela for the Curious and Ill-informed" (Rafael Uzcategui, El Libertario)
• GT 2014-02-22: Translation of "One comrade sounds off: What's happening now in Venezuela?" (Victor Camacho, in El Libertario)
• GT 2014-02-23: Translation of "From Chile, a pitch for the foundation of anarcho-Madurism" (Armando Vergueiro, from El Libertario)
• GT 2014-02-26: Translation of "One comrade from Mérida sounds off: Oh I've got the desire" (Viento sin Fronteras, in EL LIBERTARIO)
• Elsewhere 2014-08-26: Venezuela “to fingerprint shoppers”
• Elsewhere 2015-09-02: Venezuelan farmers ordered to hand over produce to state

1. ^[1]Almost the entire consumer economy in Venezuela is now import-dependent, because the economic chaos makes it impossible to produce almost anything domestically.↩

Back in December, I posted about an original argument against the legitimacy of the state, which I called The Self-Confidence Argument for Philosophical Anarchism. Here’s the argument, again:

1. This argument is a valid deductive argument. (Premise.)
2. If this argument is a valid deductive argument and all of its premises are true, then its conclusion is true. (Premise.)
3. Its conclusion is No state could possibly have legitimate political authority. (Premise.)
4. If No state could possibly have legitimate political authority is true, then no state could possibly have legitimate political authority. (Premise.)
5. All of this argument’s premises are true. (Premise.)
6. This is a valid deductive argument and all of its premises are true. (Conj. 1, 5)
7. Its conclusion is true. (MP 2, 6)
8. No state could possibly have legitimate political authority is true. (Subst. 3, 7)
9. ∴ No state could possibly have legitimate political authority. (MP 4, 8)

Q.E.D., and smash the state.

The problem, of course, is that if this argument is sound, then it seems like you could construct another argument that must also sound, simply by substituting Some states have legitimate political authority everywhere in lines 3, 4, 8 and 9 that No state could possibly have legitimate political authority. And then you’d get an apparently perfectly sound Self-Confidence Argument for the State. It’s easy enough to figure out that there has to be something wrong with at least one of those arguments. Their conclusions directly contradict each other, and so couldn’t both be true. But they are formally completely identical; so presumably whatever is wrong with one argument would also be wrong with the other one. But if so, what’s wrong with them? Are they invalid? If so, how? Whichever argument you choose to look at, the argument has only four inferential steps, and all of them use elementary valid rules of inference or rules of replacement. Since each inferential step in the argument is valid, the argument as a whole must be valid. This also, incidentally, provides us with a reason to conclude that premise 1 is true in both. Premise 2 seems true by definition, under any standard definition of deductive validity. Premise 3 is a simple empirical observation. If you’re not sure it’s true, you can just look down the page to line 9 and find out. Premise 4 is a completely uncontroversial application of standard disquotation rules for true sentences. That seems to leave Premise (5). And premise (5) may seem over-confident, perhaps even boastful. But what it says is that just all the premises of the argument are true; so if it’s false, then which premise of the argument are you willing to deny? Whichever one you pick, what is it that makes that premise false? On what (non-question-begging) grounds would you say that it is false?

On my first post, a commenter named Lexi made the following observation, in order to suggest that you might nevertheless be able to reject Premise 5 — they noted that Premise 5 makes a statement about the truth of all the premises in the argument. But one of the premises it makes the claim about is Premise 5 itself. And perhaps that allows you to cut the knot:

Premise 5 is, at least, unsupportable. In order for all the premises to be true, premise 5 must also be true. The only way to justify premise 5 is by circular reasoning. Given that, maybe it's not so surprising that you can support any conclusion X with the argument, since circular reasoning can establish any proposition as true.

–Lexi, comment (23 December 2015)

They’re certainly right to observe since premise 5 itself is among the statements premise 5 is quantifying over, its truth conditions would have to be something like:

(T₅) Premise 5 is true ≡ Premise 1 is true & Premise 2 is true & Premise 3 is true & Premise 4 is true & Premise 5 is true

That might seem curious, and it involves a certain sort of circularity, but I can’t say I see how it makes the premise insupportable, if that is supposed to mean that you couldn’t give non-circular reasons to believe that Premise 5 is true.

After all, statements like this really are a part of ordinary language in non-philosophical cases. For example, Marco Polo begins his Description of the World by making the following statement in the Prologue:

. . . We will set down things seen as seen, things heard as heard, so that our book may be an accurate record, free from any sort of fabrication. And all who read this book or hear it may do so with full confidence, because it contains nothing but the truth.

This is a pretty common conceit in traveler’s tales: the author frequently assures the reader that everything they say — incredible as it might seem — is true.

But that statement is among the statements in Polo’s book; if he asserts that it contains nothing but the truth, then that sentence, inter alia, asserts that it is itself true:

(M) Marco Polo and his brothers traveled the Silk Road to China, and there he befriended the Emperor Kublai Khan, and along the way they observed the decadent customs of Lesser Armenia, and along the way they traveled among the Turkomans, and . . ., and (M) is true.

Which makes its truth-conditions something like:

(T_M) (M) is true ≡ Marco Polo and his brothers did travel the Silk Road to China, and there he did befriend the Emperor Kublai Khan, and along the way they did observe the decadent customs of Lesser Armenia, and along the way they did travel among the Turkomans, and . . ., and (M) is true.

But here’s the thing. It doesn’t seem to me like (M) is insupportable or viciously circular. In ordinary cases, wouldn’t we determine whether it’s true or not by going through the book and checking out the other statements? I.e., some people reading the book might take everything else Marco Polo says there as true; and if so, then they’d take (M) as true as well. Call someone with this attitude towards (M) and its truth-conditions the True Believer. On the other hand, some people doubt parts of his tale — some people for example doubt that he even went to China at all. If so, they typically think not only that the first conjunct is false, but also the last one — if one of his statements is an assurance that all the statements are true, and any of the other statements are false, then that makes at least two falsehoods in total. Call someone with this attitude towards (M) and its truth-conditions the Normal Skeptic.

But now imagine a reader who insisted that they were a skeptic about Polo’s claims — but then, when asked one-by-one, signed off on every one of his other statements, except that they denied the statement that the book contains nothing but the truth. Call someone who takes this attitude towards (M) and its truth-conditions the Degenerate-Case Skeptic. Would Degenerate-Case Skepticism even make sense, as a position you might take with respect to the truth value of the claims in the book? Would it be a supportable claim? If so, how? If anything, it seems like the fault of circular here is most easily attributed to someone who denies (M), or who mutatis mutandis denies Premise (5), based solely on Degenerate-Case skepticism. If (M) or (5) is false for no other reason that you even in principle could give other than its sui generis falsity, then that seems like a particularly radical form of question-begging.

Of course, you might say that it is insupportable, but so is the alternative, the True Believer’s claim that all the statements are true. So there’s no non-question-begging reason you could give to say that (M) or (5) is true, and there’s no non-question-begging reason you could give to say that (M) or (5) is false. Since the function of an argument is to give reasons to believe that its conclusion is true, if one of the premises cannot have any non-question-begging reason given either for its truth or falsity, then it seems like the argument can’t provide reasons for any conclusions that depend logically on that premise. (As the conclusion of any Self-Confidence Argument does; the Conj. in the first inferential step cites Premise 5, and everything else follows from that.) So you could say that. But now the question is, why say that? Isn’t it normally possible to give reasons for being a True Believer, and reasons for being a Normal Skeptic, even if there are no reasons you can give for being a Degenerate-Case skeptic? Is this kind of claim of radical insupportability the way we normally read texts that make assurances about themselves, like Marco Polo? Should it be?

If it’s not, and it shouldn’t, then should it be the way that we read Premise 5 here, even though it’s not the way we read Marco Polo? If there’s some difference between the two, that suggests reading Marco Polo in this way but not reading Premise 5 in this way, then what if any reason (preferably a principled reason that’s not question begging, and not simply ad hoc) could we give for the difference in semantic treatment?^[1]

1. ^[1]Or is it a difference in their semantics? Or a difference in something else, e.g. the pragmatics of their use?↩

I had some far-off hopes that the general atmosphere of backstabbing chaos currently reigning within the state GOP might have derailed the awful abortion bills pending in the Alabama legislature from moving forward. Unfortunately not; the majorities managed to put everything else aside and force through a vote before the end of the session, and just sent the governor two bills directly intended to obstruct abortion access in the state of Alabama. They haven’t yet been signed into law, and are awaiting the governor’s approval. Here is the latest in Alabama Republican reproductive regulation:

• SB 363 is a procedure ban on Dilation and Evacuation (D&E) abortions. Since 2015, a number of state anti-abortion outfits have been pushing these bills (here called Dismemberment Abortions, a propagandistic phrase coined by anti-abortion activists, parallel to the coining and use of Partial Birth Abortion to push Intact Dilation and Extraction procedure bans over the last two decades). Since they already won a federal prohibition on the most common procedure used for second-trimester abortions after 20 weeks, they’re now pushing for state prohibitions on the most common procedure used for second-trimester abortions before 20 weeks.^[1] If they have their way, some day it will be technically legal to get an abortion in the state of Alabama, it’ll just be illegal to use any actually existing medical technique to get one.

• SB 205 is a bizarre TRAP law that would prohibit the Alabama Department of Health from issuing or renewing licenses to abortion clinics located within 2,000 feet or less of a public school. This is the same perimeter that the state uses to exclude convicted sex offenders from living or working near a school. The bill’s sponsor claims that it is intended to prevent children from seeing the chaos that surrounds abortion clinics. By chaos, he means anti-abortion protesters; when a howling crowd of anti-abortion protesters harasses your building every business day, Republican state legislators decide that instead of convincing the anti-abortion to move, you have to pick up and move your building. The bill appears deliberately designed to force two of the five clinics in the state (Huntsville and Tuscaloosa) to shut down temporarily and undergo the expense of relocating. The Huntsville clinic in particular is in its current location, near a public middle school, because two years ago the state legislature forced it to close down and relocate there from its former downtown location with a previous TRAP law mandating special building standards for abortion clinics which were impossible to meet in their downtown location. So forcing them to shut their doors for months and relocate to their present location near a Huntsville middle school, the state legislature turns around and says Ha, nope, not there. Some day, if they have their way, you’ll technically be legally permitted to get an abortion in Alabama, it’s just that there will be not a square inch of land left in the state where anyone can actually operate a clinic.

These bills continue years of a deliberate policy of harassment by constant, ever-changing, unpredictable, ever-more-invasive hyperregulation of clinics, by anti-abortion legislators who pile on layer after layer of invasive hyperregulation, with an overt intent to destroy de facto access to abortion in Alabama without ever enacting a formal de jure ban that would be overturned in court. While politicians continue to pretend that abortion rights aree primarily a political battle conducted between those who favor permissive policies and those who favor restrictive policies, in real life, on the ground, the most dangerous threat to abortion and reproductive healthcare is the ever-growing, ever-shifting expansive power of the state to harass and regulate providers out of existence through licensure requirements and invasive, micromanaging targeted regulation.

The ACLU has a petition up urging the governor to veto these invasive laws:

1. ^[1]There are no exceptions to the ban for pregnancies that resulted from rape or incest, there is no general exception for abortions necessary for the health of the mother; the only exception is that the procedure is allowed only if necessary to prevent serious health risk, defined in the text as meaning a condition that so complicates her medical condition that it necessitates the abortion of her pregnancy to avert her death or to avert serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.↩

For nearly a decade, the Conservative government in Canada enforced formal rules and a byzantine censorial bureaucracy deliberately intended to control the time, manner and content of any and all public statements by every one of the many scientists working for branches of the Canadian government. Of course this policy destroyed open communication, hampered research, and damaged the careers of promising scientists. It was often used heavyhandedly to censor scientists’ discussion of their own research to comply with political priorities and even to muffle public criticism of the governments’ communications procedures or censorship policies.

The basic liberal response is to look at this horrible situation and say, This is why it’s important to elect governments that won’t try to control what the scientists that work for them can say to the public. Just think of what might happen in Canada if the political winds reverse.

The radical response is to look at this horrible situation and say, This is why it’s important for scientists to be independent of government funding. If scientists work for the government, then their jobs are dependent on a political process and they are subject to political control. But scientific shouldn’t be subject to the direction of the political winds.

The original article from Nature follows below.

Nine years of censorship

Early one Thursday morning last November, Kristi Miller-Saunders was surprised to receive a visit from her manager. Miller-Saunders, a molecular geneticist at the Canadian fisheries agency, had her reasons to worry about attention from above. On numerous occasions over the previous four years, government officials had forbidden her from talking to the press or the public about her work on the genetics of salmon — part of a broad policy that muzzled government scientists in Canada for many years. At one point, a brawny minder had actually accompanied her to a public hearing to make sure that she didn't break the rules.

But the meeting last autumn was different. Miller-Saunders' manager at Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) in Nanaimo walked in with a smile and gave her advance notice that the newly elected government would be opening up scientific communication: she and other federal researchers would finally be free to speak to the press. . . .Canadian scientists celebrated the move far and wide. . . . Six months later, the government is loosening its grip on communications but the shift at some agencies has not been as swift and comprehensive as many had hoped. And with the newfound freedom to speak, the full impact of the former restrictions is finally becoming clear. Canadian scientists and government representatives are opening up about what it was like to work under the former policy and the kind of consequences it had. Some of the officials who imposed the rules are talking about how the restrictions affected the morale and careers of researchers. Their stories hint at how governments control communications in even more politically repressive countries such as China, and suggest what might happen in Canada if the political winds reverse.

The crackdown on government scientists in Canada began in 2006, after Stephen Harper of the Conservative Party was elected prime minister. During the nine-year Harper administration, the government placed a priority on boosting the economy, in part by stimulating development and increasing the extraction of resources, such as petroleum from the oil sands in Alberta. To speed projects along, the administration eased environmental regulations. And when journalists sought out government scientists to ask about the impacts of such changes, or anything to do with environmental or climate science, they ran into roadblocks.

For decades before the Harper administration, reporters had been free to call up government researchers directly for interviews. But suddenly, all requests for interviews had to be sent to government communications offices, which then had to get approval from multiple tiers of bureaucrats higher up. "It was an incredible rigmarole to try and get the most innocuous bit of information to media or the public," says Diane Lake, who was a communications officer with the DFO at the time.

Lake had been a newspaper reporter for a dozen years before joining the department in 1992, so she knew what journalists needed to produce stories. She has fond memories of her time as a communications officer before the Harper years, but after he took office, her job became less about communicating science and more about censoring it. When journalists called her trying to reach scientists, she was required to get approval for scripted answers that researchers could give, but she found the authorization process opaque and arbitrary. There were never any written protocols on what would pass muster and what wouldn't, she says. I would always say, can you write that down? to folks in Ottawa. No one ever did. . . .

–Lesley Evans Ogden, Nine years of censorship
Nature (03 May 2016)

Good. Let’s re-impeach Judge Roy Moore.

For the second time in his career, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore faces charges before the Alabama Court of the Judiciary and potential removal from office.

Until that court hears and rules on those charges, Moore will be suspended with pay from his position atop the state’s highest court.

On Friday, the Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission forwarded charges to the commission, accusing the chief justice of violating judicial ethics in his opposition to same-sex marriage.

— Roy Moore suspended from office: Alabama chief justice faces removal over gay marriage stance

Abolish the Chief Justice. Impeach everybody. One branch down, two more to go.^[1]

1. ^[1]Roy Moore is (or, I hope, has been, was) Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Governor Robert Bentley, head of the executive branch of government in the state of Alabama, is currently facing possible impeachment proceedings in the Alabama legislature. Alabama Representative Mike Hubbard (R-Auburn), Chair of the State GOP and Speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives, one of the most powerful men in the legislative branch, has been indicted on numerous ethics violations and is scheduled to go on trial in just over a week. Qué se vayan todos.↩