Date: July 22, 2009

Greetings, again,

Hogeye Bill:
"I agree with you that big corporations and unions and established politically connected entities are more likely to utilize and participate in State aggression - as a heuristic. But just as I would not accuse an individual black teenage male of being a criminal just because of his demographic class, I do not accuse a large entity of aiding and abetting State aggression just because of its size. I require evidence of participation."

     The analogy of discriminating against a black youth is inapplicable. By calling someone a human being, we are discriminating, because we are applying all the attributes of a human being to someone who only appears to have them. Likewise, calling someone a black teenage male is also discrimination, because you are applying attributes to them that may not be actual. In fact, this is the exact cornerstone to all human language -- discussing anything requires categories. When I describe something as a tree, am I not describing it then as a continuation of the trend of trees? I refer you to the most essential, sociological work by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Every general idea is purely intellectual; if the imagination meddles with it ever so little, the idea immediately becomes particular. If you endeavour to trace in your mind the image of a tree in general, you never attain to your end. In spite of all you can do, you will have to see it as great or little, bare or leafy, light or dark, and were you capable of seeing nothing in it but what is common to all trees, it would no longer be like a tree at all." [*1]

     When one says tree, one is naturally referring not to the IDEAL tree, as it would no longer be a tree at all, except one is referring to the gathered knowledge one has concerning trees. This, alone, does not disprove someone's argument, "Taking an axe to a tree will cut it down." Tell a lumberjack that his understanding of trees is illogical because of its based on the demographics of trees -- and I'm quite certain, this isn't going to stop him from cutting them down or knowing how to do it. You seem quite content to talk about "human nature," but of course, you are doing the same thing as me: applying a general understanding of concepts to specific cases. If you draw out concepts of "human nature," and apply them to individuals, you will end up constantly expanding the idea, to where it means nothing, or you will end up excluding humans. And you especially generalize in terms of the states, as you seem to have no preference between elective and authoritarian, Representative and Genocidist. Either way, language and communication fairly rely on generalized ideas; and,a generalized idea (like gravity) isn't inherently wrong, just because it's a generalized idea.

     Applying this to economics... The essentials of all rational economic theory is based on these two premises: (1) people have wants, (2) people respond to their wants in a logical way; while it may not actually bring them closer to their wants, they weren't unreasonable in thinking it would bring them to their wants. (For instance, someone wants bread, and buys bread, but instead is ripped off by a merchant. They are still fulfilling both of these premises.) If you doubt either of these, allow me to refer to you a book I wrote on Economics about five or six years ago. The title is "Class Conscious: The Injustice of Poverty," but for the time being, I'll refer to it as My Economicon. : http://www.punkerslut.com/books/classwar2/chapter2.html I'll quote just one of the economists whose research I draw upon. William Stanley Jevons, in 1866...

"A true theory of economy can only be attained by going back to the great springs of human action - the feelings of pleasure and pain. A large part of such feelings arise periodically from the ordinary wants and desires of body or mind, and from the painful exertion we are continually prompted to undergo that we may satisfy our wants.

"Economy investigates the relations of ordinary pleasures and pains thus arising, and it has a wide enough field of inquiry. But economy does not treat of all human motives. There are motives nearly always present with us, arising from conscience, compassion, or from some moral or religious source, which economy cannot and does not pretend to treat. These will remain to us as outstanding and disturbing forces; they must be treated, if at all, by other appropriate branches of knowledge."

     Both Capitalist and the workers have prejudices, or attitudes about the social organization of humanity. There are a million things that could influence their attitudes, in terms of religion, culture, family or friends, etc., etc.. In terms of economics, we just want to know what motivates them in their trading activities -- whether it's buying commodities, or exchanging labor for wages.

     Examine a laborer that owns nothing but the commodity value of their labor. Their interest is to live and to feed their families. Some of them certainly have higher aspirations, but this seems to be one of the most essential. Their reaction to this interest is to trade their labor in exchange for sustenance. There is the economic interest, there is the action responding to it. And, while it is true that there is an endless amount of ways to produce wealth, the masses are dependent upon wage labor.

     Examine then the capitalist, whose sustenance is provided for simply by the act of owning property. There interest is simple: maintain the mode of their sustenance, their business, and keep it functioning. Their reactions, then, tend to be against anyone who might try to upset this order. If workers organize, they might use their wealth to hire the state and oppress the laborers, or they might create a blacklist with other employers to prevent employment to unionists. If competitors are threatening their market, they'll buy them out or enter into a cartel with them. If the state's taxes are landing on them, and not enough on the poor masses, they'll buy out the government, either with bribes or just by supporting their own candidate. The self-interest of the Capitalist is very clear, and the wide-range of actions they've take on their own behalf is also very clear.

     I may have simplified my argument by saying that all Capitalists are responsible for exploitation and oppression. What I really meant to say was... All Capitalists have the same, economic interests, and they all react to their self-interest by using their wealth-based power. And any action they could take, from blacklisting workers to bribing government, necessarily is a form of exploitation or oppression against the common masses.

Hogeye Bill:
"So when you write about Ben and Jerry's actions, we are on the same page. However, simply giving money to an extortionist doesn't qualify IMO as aiding and abetting aggression. I don't blame a taxpayer for paying the State extortionist (though I try to convince him to resist as much as he can). In the same way, I don't blame a corporation or other entity for paying off one or the other wing of the War Party. Both of those can be seen as self-defense. I'm more concerned with, e.g. corporations using governments to get land by eminent domain, or getting government to injure or outlaw their competition.

"Yes, firms do attempt to create cartels. But such cartels are unstable since (without govt force) there is incentive to defect. In practice, cartels tend to break down, usually rather quickly. The railroad cartels of the 19th century were remarkably unsuccessful in price-fixing - until the US government stepped in and created the ICC which cartelized it. Cf: Big Business and the Rise of American Statism by Roy A. Childs. (The popular myth on both the left and right is that such "trust-busting" was anti-business. In fact, as Gabriel Kolko on the left and people like Rothbard have shown, the big established firms fully supported the cartelization, as they were the main beneficiaries. See my piece Progressivism is Closet Fascism.)"

[...]

"I'm not sure what prejudices you refer to here. All men, whether in a capitalist or worker role, prefer more to less OTBE. That is a fact of human nature. You write, "Also, you can't argue that these are exclusive to Statist-Capitalism'. Yet, the paragraph preceding this statement specifies that the bad effects are due to "the want of freedom in the market of labour" - clearly applying only to statist capitalism. They are due to government imposed "parish laws," to "combinations" (i.e. cartels) which we've seen are rather innocuous without government power to enforce them. It also cites monetary inflation, also a product of the State. So contrary to your assertion, these are exclusive to the statist perversion of capitalism."

     There is no point in injuring or outlawing competition when the vast amount of lands, mines, natural resources, and the like, are in the hands of an extreme few. Who's going to compete with a farm that owns all the land? Very few. According University of California, Santa Cruz, "In terms of types of financial wealth, the top one percent of households have 36.7% of all privately held stock, 63.8% of financial securities, and 61.9% of business equity. The top 10% have 85% to 90% of stock, bonds, trust funds, and business equity, and over 75% of non-home real estate." [*2] If someone starts a farm, it's going to be local, and it certainly won't be able to compete economically with megacorporations. It's share of the market will be very dismal. The US, market structure is an oligopoly: two to three firms control the majority of all markets' industries, from batteries to cereal to apparel to manufacturing and electronics. What is preventing the little business from starting up is this type of market structure, but this type of market structure rises without the interference or knowledge of government.

     President Gowen, of the Reading Railroad in the late 1800's, described exactly how Capitalists organize themselves:

"Every pound of rope we buy for our vessels or for our mines is bought at a price fixed by a committee of the rope manufacturers of the United States. Every keg of nails, every paper of tacks, all our screws and wrenches and hinges, the boiler flues for our locomotives, are never bought except at the price fixed by the representatives of the mills that manufacture them. Iron beams for your houses or your bridges can be had only at the prices agreed upon by a combination of those who produce them. Fire­brick, gas­pipe, terra­cotta pipe for drainage, every keg of powder we buy to blast coal, are purchased under the same arrangement. Every pane of window glass in this house was bought at a scale of prices established exactly in the same manner. White lead, galvanized sheet iron, hose and belting and files are bought and sold at a rate determined in the same way." [*3]

     This was, in fact, a trial against the Reading Railroad for running a monopoly. You seem certain that all states prop up Capitalists, and that the hapless little Capitalist is completely unable to do anything about it. Why, then, do states and governments prosecute and outlaw these monopolies? Beyond bribing a governor, or a the captain of the police, there has been virtually no government involvement in these monopolies. There are plenty examples of this type of monopoly, or what is better called a Capitalist-Planned Oligopoly. Quoting one encyclopedist, "The investigation revealed that the companies had worked together for some time to divide the market in line with the market shares each company had at the onset. Executives met secretly to discuss bids, leading all companies to tender exactly the same dollar bid. For instance, when the TVA asked for bids on 4,200 insulators, it received eight bids -- all for exactly $12,936." [*4] The investigation, which sent several wealth Capitalists to prison, revealed absolutely no government involvement.

     Archer Daniels Midland corporation was fine $100 million for collusion and price-fixing with other businesses. [*5] Did an investigation reveal the defense of the government? Nope, not there, either. ABN Amro, [*6] Balfour Beatty, Kier Group and Carillion, [*7] Sainsbury's, Asda, Safeway, Dairy Crest, Robert Wiseman Dairies and The Cheese Company, [*8] Siemens, Alstrom, Areva, Schneider and Japanese firms Fuji, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, Toshiba and Japan AE Systems, [*9] Heineken , Grolsch and Bavaria, [*10] -- these are all clear-cut examples of collusion and price-fixing. However, none of them had any serious interference from the government, until they were charged and fined. Without the government, they had organized the oligopoly and kept it functioning perfectly well. For the most part, the actions of these companies can be explained using the interest-and-reaction, economic model I provided above. It seems, then, particularly odd, that you would seriously consider the oligopoly model as only possible with massive state intervention -- because this has very rarely been the case in the past.

     Furthermore, there is no demonstration whatsoever that cartels tend to break down, nor is there any evidence or argument for it. The word applied to these cartels by economists is "Natural Monopoly." This is because one firm, managing things for everyone, is capable of keeping production costs significantly low, when compared with multiple firms competing with each other. Consider fifty companies making electricity and providing their own sets of telephone poles; it's very easy to see the tremendous cost of multiple companies, compared to one company that is owned by the consumers. This is generally regarded as the text-book example of natural monopolies, but it applies to all types of monopolies.

     It is redundant and misleading to say that companies, when they reach too large a size, become inefficient. There are economies of scale, and diseconomies of scale. Increasing or decreasing, for an economic unit, can produce more efficiency, or less efficiency, but it is not the direction they are going in that determines the result. A firm that upgrades from hand tools to turbines is increasing the scale of production -- and they are becoming efficient. But that same firm, hiring a bunch of middle managers, will become inefficient. It is not increasing the scale of production, or reducing it, that determines the efficiency of a firm. Absolute centralization, or decentralization, will mean ruin. If you reduce a turbine to hand tools, this is decentralizing, just like taking apart the hammer and giving away its pieces to individual workers, is also decentralizing. It doesn't necessarily mean that efficiency grows or declines. If there is something our economy has been certain of, it is that a certain degree of centralization is essential.

Hogeye Bill:
"All your examples of 'successful' general strikes seem to have resulted in an increase in the power of the State. Did any succeed is abolishing the State, or even setting up parallel structures independent of the State? No. Some apparently even legitimized the State ('elective rights'). Others replaced one ruler with another (Bolivia, Uruguay). The fall of the Soviet Union had more to do with imperial overstretch and the contradictions of a controlled economy than any general strike. So I'm not convinced of the efficacy of general strikes, except for perhaps some short-term concessions. No revolutionary results occurred."

     An increase in the power of the state? Well, in Uruguay the people went from secret police murdering people in the street to a multi-party system. Then consider Poland -- which was liberated by the Polish Round-Table Talks, and not the internal collapse of the USSR. You might be able to argue that the failings of the Soviet Union contributed to Polish independence; but, likewise, you could just as well argue that the Polish Strikers contributed to the collapse of the authoritarian empire.

     Would you prefer a Soviet magistrate of the Dictatorship, or an elective government? Of course there are still social problems in Republicanism; but if I have to choose between having the right to read whatever books I want, and being forced into massive state censorship, I'll take the first. The Bolivian Cochabamba Strike forced out a Capitalist that was trying to bribe the government and buy up the municipal water supply. The French Caribbean General Strikes of this year? Well, for a centuries-old colony, they are now allowed to vote in a referendum for autonomy, and increasing the wages of the workers. Far from "increasing the power of the state," the effect of the General Strike was to give more self-rule to every single person in the colony. Is it not progress when the people move away from authority and towards liberty?

     In the words of Mikhail Bakunin, "It is true that the most imperfect republic is a thousand times better than the most enlightened monarchy, for at least in the republic there are moments when, though always exploited, the people are not oppressed, while in monarchies they are never anything else." [*11] There are worse states and there are better states; but this doesn't change the fact that we still want to abolish them all. One government responds to their people's pleas with gunshot, the other responds with courts. If you had a choice, what response would you prefer? And very quickly, you should realize, that it is not really a preference of response, but a preference of government type. That is to say, a preference towards the most libertarian government -- that state that comes closest to anarchy.

     Of course, I am grouping together people into classes based on their prejudices and bigotries. Those who rule by militaries, prisons, and police will think and exchange with the people very differently. That is, when compared to those who rule by political parties, elections, and campaigns. I group Stalin with Hitler, the Han and Ming Dynasty, Pinochet, Mussolini, Lenin, the House of Bourbon and the House of Hohenzollern, and every dictator throughout history: certainly, they each have their own individual contributions, but they each follow an amazingly similar trend. And, it is certain, that this trend is different from Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, or Thomas Jefferson. Examine these empires for the amount slaughtered, imprisoned, and oppressed by the government; you will find trends, where the libertarian governments produce much less misery and suffering, than the authoritarian governments. All governments, in fact, are evil; but some are much more so than others. And we can generally make this judgment not based on this or that type of ruler, but on this or that type of government.

Hogeye Bill:
"Agorism helps people avoid the depredations of the State. It is also scalable. IMO all attempts to live while avoiding government plunder, all attempts to provide goods and services outside the control of the State is a step in the right direction. Free market (non-statist) protection agencies come in the final stages. The mafia organizations you cite prosper mainly due to the State, taking advantage of demand due to State aggression (e.g. prohibitions against drugs, prostitution, etc.) Put another way, the State subsidizes the mafia with its inane laws. I don't see mafias in a statist society as indicative of how protection agencies would work in a free market. I see Classical Iceland or the not-so-wild Wild West to be more like what would occur."

     Naturally, of course, a mafia is not the libertarian "underground market" that you seek. My only point was that this is the most prominent type of underground market structure that has existed in the past few centuries. And if the mafia prospers and grows because of state prohibition, what is to say that this wouldn't have the same exact effect on the agora? Also, the problem with the Wild West and Classical Iceland is that they were territories colonized by a people; there was no need for a revolution against the government in those areas. So, their tactics in overthrowing the government -- which didn't exist -- are completely useless and inapplicable to our current situation.

     The majority of people need to work, and in our industrialized age, they need to work for a Capitalist, becoming alienated from their terms of production. They are exploited by the owner of wealth, and they are oppressed by the state -- both the state and the Capitalist live off of our hard labor. If we want to organize people who have an interest in changing their world, then it is the worker we need to go to. As it is going to be the most common, and the poorest, who benefit from a Social Revolution -- and, given their strength in a General Strike, it is also going to be this group that overthrows the state. That is Anarchist-Syndicalism -- applied to the interest-and-reaction economic model!

Andy Carloff,

Resources

*1. "A Dissertation on the Origin of Inequality Among Men," by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, First Part.
*2. "Wealth, Income, and Power," by G. William Domhoff, September 2005.
*3. "The Lords of Industry," by Henry Demarest Lloyd, North American Review 331 (June 1884).
*4. "Encyclopedia of White-collar & Corporate Crime," By Lawrence M. Salinger, page 377.
*5. Hunter-Gault, Charlayne (October 15, 1996). "ADM: Who's Next?". MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour (PBS).
*6. ABN fined £900,000 for price rigging, Indepedent.co.uk
*7. OFT issues statement of objections against 112 construction companies, OFT.gov
*8. Supermarkets fined £116m for price-fixing, ThisIsMoney.co.uk
*9. "Vote call by Siemens shareholders". BBC.
*10. "Heineken and Grolsch fined for price-fixing". The Guardian.
*11. "Rousseau's Theory of the State," by Mikhail Bakunin.