The Witch Questionnaire!
I am taking a course this semester called “Witches: Myth and Reality”. Included in the course material is this entertaining little 
questionnaire, indicating many of the ways that one could have proven oneself a ‘witch’ in the early modern period. Much like the term ‘terrorist’, in our modern vernacular, the term ‘witch’ seemed simply to be a convenient euphemism whose definition included basically any person or behavior, real or imagined, that was perceived as threatening in any way to the established order.
As you probably know, the inquisition of witches beginning in the late 15th century was the function of a cozy relationship between church and state, where the church would identify the ‘witches’ and the state would dispatch them. Interestingly enough, Ireland, which had no central state during the better part of this time period, but was in the constant process of staving off the formal imposition of one, engaged in no such persecution of supposed witches.
ATTENTION: New Featured Essay!
“Why the Poor are Leaving Organized Religion”
Excerpt: An article published yesterday, 8/21/11, on the Huffington Post reported that a recent study has found church attendance among “less-
educated whites” to be on the decline in recent decades.
According to the study, in the 1970s, 51 percent of college-educated whites attended religious services monthly or more, compared to 50 percent of moderately educated whites and 38 percent of the least educated whites. In the 2000s, 46 percent of college-educated whites attended on at least a monthly basis, compared to 37 percent of moderately educated whites and 23 percent of the least educated. The study defines the “least educated” as people without high school degrees.
And,
The study also shows that Americans who make more money attend religious services more frequently, and that Americans who have been unemployed at any point in the past 10 years attend services less frequently.
These seem like a highly counter-intuitive phenomena, given that we tend to associate religiosity much more with the uneducated and poor than with the educated and rich, especially during times of turmoil and upheaval. And, in the past, this probably would have been a well founded association. So, why are the uneducated and poor turning away from religion, and why are they doing it now. I’d like to go over a few theories and correlations to see if this can’t be pieced together in a constructive way. Keep in mind, I do not suggest that any of these are necessarily primary causes, but that the compounding interactions of these and other factors have collectively served to produce the result we wish to analyze
One very strong and obvious correlation between this demographically specific decline in church attendance and the time frame during which it took place is with the rise of the evangelical right, or, I should say, the reemergence of fundamentalist Christianity on the stage of American politics, most notably with the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. In the aftermath of the scopes trial in 1925, despite the victory of dogma over science in trial itself, the subsequent loss of public support drove the fundamentalist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries off the political scene. However, with the rapid ascent of such figures as Jerry Falwell, and the collective outrage of conservative Christians following the results of Roe v. Wade in 1973, the evangelical right reemerged as a serious political force. More
A Slightly Less Brief Response to Steve Horwitz
It is ironic that I made an argument claiming that certain types of libertarians draw distinctions that shouldn’t be drawn, while failing.jpg)
myself to draw a distinction that should have been. So, first off, I’d like to clarify that my recent video “Are the poor getting poorer”: A Response was not meant as any kind of a critique of Steve Horwitz, himself or his body of work, but rather as a critique of an inclination among certain libertarians to attack the state, as a political entity, while not dealing with the market technologies that were created under and sustain the conditions for the administration of state functions. Dr. Horwitz assumed correctly when he implied that I am unfamiliar with his work. Given this, I would never want to suggest that he is any particular kind of libertarian, let alone unlibertarian, and I understand that this point was neglected in my video.
In Dr. Horwitz’s response, which is posted below this entry, he did successfully identify the basic point I was attempting to make, and helped to clarify his own position, drawing a constructive distinction between the two major approaches to a) the acceptance of libertarianism, broadly speaking, and b) the advocacy thereof. These are the ends based vs. the means based approaches, which is to say, the absolutist vs. the consequentialist. As I’m sure the reader is aware, the consequentialist ethic is essentially that the good of any particular action, policy, set of circumstances, etc… is to be judged according to what produces the most preferable outcomes, whereas the absolutist ethic proposes that there are certain moral absolutes that should not be broken in any circumstance regardless of the outcome. My libertarianism is of the latter sort. So, while I do care about the material conditions of the poor, given that I happen to be situated on the poverty end of things myself, my estimation of their current material conditions has no bearing on my opinion concerning the moral status of the state. Unlike Dr. Horwitz, even if I believed, in my limited knowledge and even more limited psychic capacities, that a properly administered state was, first, possible, and second, able to produce superior outcomes as compared to a stateless society, I would still promote the stateless society on moral grounds. As far as I am concerned, the distance between myself and anyone else, politically, is defined by the extent to which they are willing to use coercion, aggression, exploitation, or violence to achieve their social preferences. No other factors influence my moral alignment with other people’s political opinions.
Another point made in Dr. Horwitz response is that dispelling the “myth” that the poor are getting poorer is supportive of libertarianism because:
“those who accept that myth are NOT LIBERTARIANS WHO WISH TO TEAR DOWN THE STATE TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM. Those who accept the myth want to use the myth to expand the reach of the state and even further restrict our freedoms. Call it a “defensive maneuver” if you wish, but the point is to head off the statists from making matters worse.”
Though I think that this is generally true, I still disagree with the approach for a number of reasons. First, I’d rather have to argue about less points than more. I happen to believe that the future of libertarianism, specifically the future of libertarian anarchism, is to be found on the left. You are never going to convince the left that things are working out for the poor. A four minute video based on income statistics over time, and neglecting issues such as inflation, relative tax burdens, access to the means of production, distribution of government money and services, and if I am remembering correctly, using data updated to the mid 1990′s (a boom period) is simply not going to make a leftist think that everything is working out A O.K in the new world. This approach shuts down the left before even getting to the point of libertarianism. It also doesn’t do anything to convince the poor, who do believe that things are worse for them than they have been in the past, and who tend to rate their level of contentment according to how much money they are making and how many things they own relative to the next guy (read: the next rich guy), and not relative to how many things people like them owned forty years ago. As far as the right goes, they already think that corporate America is great anyway, and thus are in no need of convincing. So, if I bypass the supposed myth that the poor are getting poorer, which really only serves as an argument for the structure that spawned the circumstance, and go straight to the conversation about how the current system is ineffective and immoral, I don’t get stuck arguing about statistics for the rest of my life, and might actually convince some conscientious people of the merits of libertarianism/voluntaryism. (This is, of course, not to say that Steve Horwitz has never convinced anyone of the merits of libertarianism.)
The second reason I disagree is this: arguments that seem to favor modern capitalism, if only insofar as it can be analytically ‘disentangled’ from the state, still serve to reinforce either the institution of capitalism or of the state or both, when, in fact, such institutions are unique manifestations of a very particular set of conditions, and that in the absence of the state and, more importantly, the statist mindset, capitalism as we know it would most likely completely disintegrate and reform into something unrecognizable. In this sense, I do not think of the state as a set of weights around society’s arms and legs, but as the binding around a foot that is unrecognizable as such because it has become warped, distorted, and disfigured from decades of unyielding restriction. Even this, however, does not go far enough as an analogy, because society has not only warped and adapted by curling under itself, as it were, it has evolved such that its interactions, institutional forms, patterns of distribution, arrangement of the built space, and so forth, are all designed to function well in a specific way under the system to which they have constantly adapted, the state and society have created a symbiosis to some extent and are therefore vitally linked. This is not to say that society will die without the state, but that society as it is will transform just as totally as does its systemic context. In short, sweeping defenses of modern markets don’t seem to make sense from a libertarian perspective because they are defenses of a form of organization that probably won’t exist after the evolution beyond the state, and are just as likely to promote liberty as create a class of economic bullies trying to hold on to the remnants of a market form they are convinced is superior to all others.
His next point is:
If Patrick were correct that we can never disentangle the market from the state for analytical purposes, all of us social scientists better go home and Patrick better never make use of any of the arguments of libertarian economists in defending the free society.
I don’t think that this is the case. I think that the social sciences have a vital role to play in explaining how and why things are as they are. They help us to discern subtleties of the social world and its spaces, and in the libertarian or revolutionary context, to discern the technologies of power and how they might be countered. But, just as the study of animals in captivity is useless to gaining knowledge of the behavior of animals in the wild, so the conclusions drawn from the study of societies under oppression, which is the universal condition and has been for centuries, are probably not all that helpful in predicting how people will arrange themselves given an alternative social reality. This is not to say that suggestions cannot be made as to what should be done in the future given current knowledge, but simply taking society as it is, dropping the state from it, and promoting the glorious world of corporate oligarchy as the alternative is likely not a clear representation of libertarian principles. Again, I am not saying that Dr. Horwitz is a promoter of corporate oligarchy, what I am saying is that there is a reason why people think that libertarians are, when it comes to economic policy, republicans on crazy pills.
I suppose there is always more to say, but I have already gone on too long, and ultimately there are 37 flavors for a reason. In any case, I hope this has been a helpful clarification of my position.
A Brief Response to Patrick Coleman
by Steve Horwitz
This is in response to this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OKhhgHQXwo
Well you know you’re doing something right when the right-libertarians think you’re a crazy left-libertarian because you want to throw out the word capitalism and you favor all kinds of social freedoms that they are skeptical about, and the left-libertarians think you’re a conservative because you appear to be defending the status quo of state capitalism. You know you’re REALLY doing it right when they doubt that you’re a libertarian, despite 30+ years of evidence to the contrary.
First, let me note that Patrick offers no criticisms of my actual data or the basic claim that the poor are better off than they used to be. His chief complaint is that I appear to be defending the status quo rather than trying to tear down the entire edifice of state capitalism. He also suggests that we shouldn’t care if the poor are better off because all of this is taking place in a “context of coercion.”
As a consequentialist (bleeding heart) libertarian, what I care about is how well social systems treat their least well-off members. IF I were convinced that statism generated a higher standard of living for everyone, especially the poor, I’d favor it. I am a radical libertarian because I think a free society does BEST by the least well-off among us. So it DOES matter to me how well off the poor are.
Second, the main point of the video was to dispel the myth of growing income inequality because those who accept that myth are NOT LIBERTARIANS WHO WISH TO TEAR DOWN THE STATE TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM. Those who accept the myth want to use the myth to expand the reach of the state and even further restrict our freedoms. Call it a “defensive maneuver” if you wish, but the point is to head off the statists from making matters worse. It seems to me that’s an important role for libertarians to play. I don’t think that we always have to be on the side of rejecting “the system.” We should be on the side of the facts and the facts are that the poor are doing better than they used to and most the arguments about increasing inequality are statistical mirages. The best arguments for liberty are the ones that use the facts.
If Patrick were correct that we can never disentangle the market from the state for analytical purposes, all of us social scientists better go home and Patrick better never make use of any of the arguments of libertarian economists in defending the free society. Maybe, as a rights guy, he’s okay with that. I’m not. We DO know enough about how markets work to be able to say that it IS markets that are responsible for the improvements in the poor and dynamism in the economy that enables most Americans to work their way up the income ladder.
In a really free society I think all of these good forces would be even stronger. To use an analogy of my friend Pete Boettke’s, it’s as if we’ve put arm and leg weights on Michael Phelps. He’s still a hell of a swimmer and he’d still out-swim a lot of people because of his underlying skills. If we took the weights off, those skills would make him even faster and more powerful. Same with the US economy. We have enough theory and evidence about markets to understand the power of the underlying processes at work, even in a screwed up mixed economy like ours. To take Patrick’s view would mean we could never say anything about much of anything other than “smash the state”…. not that there’s anything wrong with that.
But in the real world of education and the media, we need to use every rhetorical tool at our disposal to smash not just the state but the myths that support statism. That’s what that video is about.
In 4 minutes, I could not possibly get into all the subtleties of the argument, but Patrick might wish to check out my other, longer videos at Learn Liberty. He might want to friend me on Facebook. He might want to check out my web page and read some things I’ve written. Then maybe he can see the larger context of my work into which that video fits and decide whether what I’m up to is either “right-libertarianism” or “unlibertarian.”
“Are the Poor Getting Poorer?”: A Response
Libertarian’s need to start rejecting all aspects of immoral structures, not just the primary ones. I suggest that you first see Steve Horwitz’s very short video before watching this one.
On Strategic Counter Economics (1:3): Power, Submission, and the City (part 1)
Introduction; (1:1) Foucault on “the Sovereign” and Security; (1:2) Exporting Scarcity
I want to start roughly outlining some of my thoughts concerning cities. Over the past couple of posts to this series I have claimed or
implied that cities are spaces that are uniquely well suited to the consolidation and exercise of state power, but I have not in any clear fashion, explained why I think such is the case. So I will begin to do so here by attempting to identify and describe what I believe to be some of the most important features and qualities of cities as centers of power.
The first idea I would like to cover is that of concentration. The concentration of people, buildings, commerce, ideas, etc… What are some of the effects of the extreme concentration that we see in cities? First, as to the concentration of people, the city seems to create a kind of abstract solidarity, which is distinct from, say, rural solidarity, having to do with familial, communal, neighborly, or friendly relations, in that each of these types is the result of a personal, individual connection. We care about, feel connected to, and associate our own identities and personal well being with individuals and groups in our own small communities because we are familiar with these individuals on a personal level. That is, our caring for friends and family members is not an abstract caring, but one associated with unique, specific characteristics that are localized to the actual individuals possessing them. No individual, therefore, is replaceable or interchangeable with any other, and is, in that sense, indispensable.
Whereas, city solidarity seems to be much more centered around the notion of being part of a population, as distinct from a community. The city dweller identifies him or herself with a set of ideas. S/he thinks of the city itself as possessing an intrinsic character, which is formed and informed by an interlocking series of parts, which are further composed of their own set of institutions, and these institutions are ultimately composed of individuals. However, the individuals themselves have no defining characteristics, except as they are categorized broadly by one stereotype or another. People are important only insofar as they are necessary to the cohesion of spaces and institutions that make up the character of the city. No particular person is necessary to the continued functioning of the city, to its vital character, a population is necessary, but each person is more or less interchangeable with the next.
It might be interesting to note that a correlative of this altered, impersonal perception of ‘the other’ may be an altered perception of ‘the self’. If others are interchangeable, if others are dispensable, does the same not apply to oneself? If, abstractly, I am willing to accept the sacrifice of others for the sake of institutions with which I closely identify, then what am I willing to sacrifice myself for? One would likely be willing to sacrifice oneself for very close personal relationships. But on another level, depending upon one’s, for lack of a better word, patriotism, or one’s fidelity to the city as a concept, one might feel morally obligated to sacrifice oneself for the sake of the city, but not necessarily for any of its component parts, the city being indispensable to one’s sense of self.
What does this notion of sacrifice, not for people, but for institutions, look like in practice? I am reminded immediately of the execution of Socrates, and the arguments he made to Crito in defense of his choice to submit himself to the death sentence and not to escape.
[Socrates speaking from the perspective of the state, a perspective with which he agrees]:
What complaint have you to make against us which justifies you in attempting to destroy us and the state? [...] ‘Well then, since you were brought into the world and nurtured and educated by us, can you deny in the first place that you are our child and slave, as your fathers were before you? And if this is true you are not on equal terms with us; nor can you think that you have a right to do to us what we are doing to you. [...] And because we think right to destroy you, do you think that you have any right to destroy us in return, and your country as far as in you lies? Will you, O professor of true virtue, pretend that you are justified in this? Has a philosopher like you failed to discover that our country is more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of understanding? also to be soothed, and gently and reverently entreated when angry, even more than a father, and either to be persuaded, or if not persuaded, to be obeyed? And when we are punished by her, whether with imprisonment or stripes, the punishment is to be endured in silence; and if she lead us to wounds or death in battle, thither we follow as is right; neither may any one yield or retreat or leave his rank, but whether in battle or in a court of law, or in any other place, he must do what his city and his country order him.1
Immediately and throughout, the concept of obedience is central, as well as the implication that individual disobedience is tantamount to the destruction of the state. That is, the state is not merely the source of what is good in life, but of life itself, and just as we are created by and within the laws of nature, the citizen is created by and within the laws of the city, and existing counter to such laws is to cut off the source of one’s life, to destroy life as one knows it. There is also the acknowledgment and acceptance of a total lack of personal freedom, that the preservation of the state, which is the source of life and happiness, requires a type of slave obedience, an almost total repudiation of the will. There is no equal relationship between the state and the individual, what is done to the individual cannot be done to the state in turn. And further, it is made clear that fidelity and obedience to the state overrides any other claims to loyalty, including family and friends.
So, what we see is a kind of transference, though I use this word with some hesitation, where one ceases, to some extent, to define oneself in relation to a set of individual relationships, and the specific qualities of those relationships, and begins to define oneself in relation to a set of ideas and institutions, such as population, commerce, the state. Of these the most important, referring strictly to perceived importance, is the state, in that it mediates, regulates, and defines the space for the other two. In this case, the state should be understood as the institution, or set of institutions, that concerns itself with the administration of political government. In short, fidelity to one’s family, friends, neighbors, to one’s immediate community in general is superseded by patriotism, by fidelity to the state as the originator of everything else.
I think that this has a lot to do with the lack of empathy for the plight of one’s fellows that is often seen in the context of the city as compared to rural settings. Whereas, and I am speaking very generally of course, the rural psychology has a tendency toward, first, self reliance, and where that fails, direct action through systems of mutual aid, family support, etc… the urban psychology emphasizes reliance upon the system, on the state apparatus, where self-reliance fails. This is likely because the city is an extraordinarily impersonal setting. While we might, and probably do, care in an abstract way about the suffering of other people to whom we are not directly connected, the city creates a setting where such social problems as poverty, homelessness, theft, violence, and so on, are so drastically magnified, and probably exacerbated, that a) the problem becomes very distant and impersonal, b) the sheer size of the problems naturally incline us toward indirect, system-based ‘solutions’ and c) toward a utilitarian calculus.
Are these not the very inclinations that a state requires? If a problem is impersonal and if it is sufficiently daunting in size, then we will naturally care less about how it is being solved, that is, by what means, or even whether it is being solved, so long as we believe that someone or something is indeed working to solve it. The state inserts itself as a sort of middle man, and thrives on the preference for indirect contact.
So that is one effect of the heavy concentration of people in a relatively small area. Another effect, of course, is that a concentrated people are somewhat easier to manage, so long as there is a general order. Instead of having to go from distant home to distant home, as one would have to do in the country, exerting direct force on individuals and families, in order to enforce certain modes of behavior, regulations, lock-downs, or whatever, the city performs the function of ’rounding up’ all of those people for you into a central, manageable location. This way the state has only to exert a single effort of force in a well defined space in order to achieve general control. However, to go much further on this point I would have to start dealing with the actual physical layout of the space itself, and I am going to save such considerations for other posts. In the next post I will continue with the idea of concentration, and hopefully begin to write about exclusion.
1http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/plato/p71cro/
The State vs. The State
Granted, I don’t know much about these matters, but I’ll go ahead and juxtapose the following statements and see if they mesh anyway:
These first excerpts are from torrentfreak.com
District Court Judge Harold Baker has denied a copyright holder the right to subpoena the ISPs of alleged copyright infringers, because an IP-address does not equal a person.
Among other things Judge Baker cited a recent child porn case where the U.S. authorities raided the wrong people, because the real offenders were piggybacking on their Wi-Fi connections. Using this example, the judge claims that several of the defendants in VPR’s case may have nothing to do with the alleged offense either.
“The infringer might be the subscriber, someone in the subscriber’s household, a visitor with her laptop, a neighbor, or someone parked on the street at any given moment,” Judge Baker writes.
And this is from rawstory.com:
The House Judiciary Committee approved legislation on Thursday that would require Internet service providers (ISPs) to collect and retain records about Internet users’ activity.
CNET reported the bill would require ISPs to retain customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses for 12 months.
The bill passed by a vote of 19 to 10, and is aimed at helping law enforcement track down pedophiles.
Of course, the ruling reported upon in the first excerpts is only from a district judge, but it does set a sort of precedent, and is also a damn good point. Why would the government want this information saved if they may not, and should not, even be able to use it as evidence in court? Doesn’t this legislation assumes that the use of IP addresses as evidence is a settled legal precedent? Sounds like an unspecific national fishing expedition to me. Its also just kind of ironic that, on the one hand, the judge made his decision partially based upon the fact that the wrong people had been raided in a child-porn investigation, while, on the other, the legislation claims that its benefit will be in ‘tracking down pedophiles’.
On Strategic Counter-Economics (1:2): Exporting Scarcity
1:1 : Foucault on “The Sovereign” and Security
This is sort of a continuation and augmentation of the thoughts outlined in the last entry to this series, “(1:1): Foucault on “The
Sovereign” and Security”. The question I’d like to pose and explore a little here is this: by what methods do nation states ensure general security, particularly security against material scarcity, in the regions to which they have laid claim and therefore have an interest in maintaining? The specific method I will attempt to briefly outline today is the exportation of food scarcity and famine, that is, the maintenance of populations whose material requirements are in excess of the output capacities of their local region by the exploitation of otherwise unrelated regions and peoples.
The rise of large centralized, centralizing regimes, even, one might say, the rise of formal, post-tribal state-like power structures in general, are coincident with the rise of modern agricultural methods of land cultivation and farming. The reasons for this are varied, but a few of the primary contributing factors are:
- That the immediate, or short term outputs of agricultural farming far surpassed the outputs of previous food production methods. This facilitated a) rapid population expansion, and b) the freeing up of large sectors of the population from concerns of food production.
- That this increase in output and consequent population expansion and labor availability had, for state formation, the dual advantages of, on the one hand, making sustained, monopolistic, regional domination worthwhile for state entities that could now count on consistent extraction of ‘excess’ product through taxation and tribute; and on the other, the ability to redirect underutilized labor to the maintenance of the functions of state.
- That the concentration of food production, especially mono-crop food production, in the hands of a relative few, as well as the very geographically defined, confined, and artificial nature of agricultural spaces, made food production a uniquely easy target upon which to impose systems of surveillance, administration, storage, taxation, redistribution, and exchange regulation.
- That the relatively sudden influx of people to ‘the market’ encouraged the production of and migration to cities, that is, state centers where the space itself is designed to facilitate and encourage systems of centralized control, where the flow of people and circulation of goods is directed not primarily by immediate violent force, but by largely predetermined channels, designed to incentivize certain ‘desirable’ types of movements, exchanges, and interactions, while disincentivizing or excluding the possibility of ‘undesirable’ ones.
In short, the rise of agricultural farming formed the conditions that allowed for would be states to gain control and influence the spacial logic of relatively large territories by making the rural areas and, subsequently, urban one’s highly susceptible to methods of institutional administration.
So, again we see the development of a kind of feedback loop, where one type of security, food security by the agricultural method, enters into a relationship of mutual reenforcement with another type of security, the security of the state in its interests. The one creates the market for the other or, more accurately, the former creates the market for the latter, and the latter sort of designs and directs the market of the former.
Of course, this symbiosis is not without its own contradictions. Agricultural farming, while it is one method of preventing food scarcity, a very common catalyst for insurrection, it is also a comparatively temporary method, in that its practices are ultimately unsustainable in a territorially confined space over the long-term. This is because the pace of outputs required from the soil for agricultural food production far exceeds restorative inputs, resulting in soil erosion and ultimately total infertility.1 However, the conditions for this contradiction have built-in mechanisms for their solution. By the time regional infertility and the accompanying food scarcity come to bear on a state, the state has likely already developed the military capacity and wealth reserves necessary for colonial expansion. This is where we come to the method which I have somewhat ironically termed ‘exporting scarcity’.
By taking advantage of the military power of the state to annex new, unexploited people and land, and incorporate them as sources for the extraction of food and other goods, the colonial state is able to, at once, expand its purview and postpone the problem of scarcity in its original territory. However, as always, such expansion cannot take place without its own costs. For one, the artificial imposition of new orders, and of non-traditional food production methods, which displace traditional techniques that were developed to serve local needs and mitigate local scarcity, and realigning them for the purpose of supporting the distant needs of the occupational power, creates a series of conditions that lead to severe insecurity for the occupied people.
Some extreme examples of this are described in Mike Davis’ superb, heart-wrenching book, “Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World”,2 where he writes about the effects of colonialism in India, China, and Brazil. The local economies of these countries had been tampered with and reorganized to such an extent, and with such a bias toward the export of food to the power centers of colonial states, that, if I am recalling correctly, over one hundred million people unnecessarily died of hunger or hunger related issues between the early 1870′s and the beginning of the 19th century. In a cruel irony, many starved to death lying at the base of containers packed with grain, slated for export to the ‘first world’. This during a time that many economists describe as the ‘hay day’ of western style laissez-faire capitalism. The Holocausts of Davis’ book, of course, followed close on the heels of a similar holocaust in Ireland, commonly know as the Irish potato famine. Here too, millions of people starved to death while shiploads of food goods were exported to their oppressors in England.3
Obviously, such methods allow powerful states to literally externalize scarcity, to shift it somewhere regionally removed from the center of power, allowing them to avoid insurrection at home and move it somewhere that it is significantly less likely to impact the state’s core. However, as we have seen again and again, such methods are ultimately unsustainable and always result in the overextension and collapse of the institutions using them.
Further, states can, to some extent, obscure their own intimate involvement in these processes by linking them with capital markets. They can make it seem as though the atrocities resulting from their actions are actually the consequence of unforeseen ‘glitches’ in market function, and not as inevitable and predictable evils that are the direct consequence of the state system, as such.
To sum up and tie this in with the theme of the previous post in this series, what I have been identifying is a basic paradox of state security: that on the one hand the state’s primary goal or incentive is its own survival. In order to gain and sustain such survival, it must provide a type of predictable security to its subjects, but only by means that are extremely unstable if not for the state’s own existence, otherwise it would be made functionally obsolete. It must make sure that there are no alternatives to itself. Thus, the state system is one that functions by postponing, not eliminating, insecurity, by transferring, not solving, problems of scarcity, crime, discord, etc…
Next- Power, Submission, and the City (part 1)
Notes:
1Montgomery, David R. Dirt: the Erosion of Civilizations. Berkeley: University of California, 2007. Print.
2Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso, 2002. Print.
The Video Recorder is to the State as Science is to Religion
When scientific minds came along and proved that the earth was not flat, when they showed that the ‘heavenly bodies’ may not be and
function in perfect circles, when they demonstrated that modern man very likely evolved from a progression of simpler organisms, when they proved that the earth was not, in fact, 6,000 yrs old, and when they developed the theory of the big bang, to lesser and greater extents, religion reacted with aggression, violence, and censorship. The obvious reason for this is that truth through science was and is a direct challenge to the previously accepted ‘truths’ of religion, ‘truths’ that provided religious leaders and functionaries with the power to literally rule the world. Every time religion comes in contact with reality, every time the evidence of science is compared against the dogma of religion, the dogma is discovered to be false, even ridiculous, and after spending the last of its potency on a childish and reactionary rage, it scatters into the dark corners of society, leaving only a shell of its former self. We see this even now with the new evangelical right, with their irrational hatred for science, academia, intelligence in general, any manifestations of the rational mind, the very thing that sets us apart as human.
The same is true of the dogma of statism. Growing up I was trained practically to deify the founders of the U.S. government, to cherish and revere the founding documents. I was taught that we lived in a democratic-republic, a nation bound by the rule of law, a nation of transparency, one that protects the freedom of information, freedom of thought, freedom of action, one where the people in charge are ultimately answerable to ‘we the people’, and one where we have the right to revolution when they become unanswerable. Most people believe this, or some variation on this. In any case, they believe that the people of the U.S. are generally free, that the police are here to protect us, that the judicial system has anything to do with justice, and that the invocation of our rights constitutes some sort of magic spell that stops tyranny in its tracks. All of these dogmas, of course, are completely false.
This morning, for example, I was reading an article from copblock.org, recounting the story of Michael Allison, an Illinois man who is facing “75 years for recording public officials on duty”. That is, he was arrested for ‘invading a Judge’s privacy’ by bringing a video recorder with him into a public courtroom in order to document his own trial. His is by no means an isolated case. Whether on the street or in the courtroom, government people are absolutely terrified of having their public activities accurately captured by any manner of recording device. Never mind that they attempt to track every move we make. They record us with cameras on the street, in government buildings, in police cars, etc… The so-called ‘private citizens’ seem no longer to have a right of privacy, whereas the so-called ‘public servants’ seem to have a right of privacy that they will enforce with an iron fist. If you doubt this, go ahead and try to record your next traffic stop.
Why would this be? Why would people who purportedly work in our interests, are supposedly open and available to scrutiny, and who are ostensibly accountable to us, guard their public privacy with such rabid jealousy? It is because they understand that their power, like religious power, is built on a foundation of well constructed lies. They know that if our reality, so well sheltered by the cocoon of indoctrination crafted by over a decade of public ‘schooling’, were ever to come in contact with their’s, their facade of beneficence would likely crumble, along with their power. Just as religious functionaries have reacted violently to scientists who would shed the light of reality on dogma, so do those of the state react with violence to cut down any activist who would use a camera to uncover the reality of the state. And as religion wages war on the primary feature of what makes us human–rationality–the state wages war on what allows us to be human, which is freedom, the ability to express the product of our rationality.
On Strategic Counter Economics (1:1): Foucault on ‘The Sovereign’ and Security
The following are a few excerpts from the second lecture of Michel Foucault’s ‘Security, Territory, Population’. 
For government, for the French government in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at any rate, scarcity is exactly the type of event to be avoided for a number of obvious reasons. I recall only what is clearest and, for the government, most dramatic. The immediate and most perceptible consequences of scarcity appear first of all, of course, in the urban milieu, since it is always relatively less difficult to withstand food shortage–relatively–in a rural milieu. Anyway, it appears in the urban milieu and, with great probability, almost immediately leads to revolt. (p. 30)
[...]what action action will be taken against scarcity in the techniques of government for the political and economic management of a society like that of seventeenth and eighteenth century France? For a long time scarcity was countered by a system that I would say was both juridical and political, a system of legality and a system of regulations, which was basically intended to prevent food shortage, that is to say, not just to halt it or eradicate it what it occurs, but literally to prevent it and ensure that it cannot take place at all. (p. 31)
What Foucault is briefly outlining here is the basic incentive of government’s to provide a general environment of security. One of the interesting things to note about this is that while the state does have an interest in avoiding any and all conditions that might catalyze revolt, it is an extremely narrow interest. That is, the state as an institution runs exactly counter to the logic of real security, being that it is singular, central, and mostly unaccountable.
The market teaches us that having only one element to handle any given issue would be extremely unstable. It is important to have a series of independent elements that are at once dealing with a need or problem in concert, but that if one falls to the vicissitudes of things, then there are already any number of alternative systems in place to fill the gap. A more concrete example of this can be seen in one of the principles of permaculture, which attempts to mimic the genius of natural ecology to build largely self-sustaining food systems:
Each job to be done in a design–each system or process–should be performed or supported by more than one element. In other words, always have backups in place. Once again, gardeners already follow this rule more or less unconsciously. We plant several varieties of vegetables in case one fails, or different fruits or flowers to yield over a long season. And every gardener has an array of sprinklers, drip irrigation gadgets, soaker hoses, special hose nozzles, and watering cans, all for the single purpose of delivering water to our plants. Multiple, layered systems such as these are more effective at doing the total job than any one device would be. [...] most important functions in organisms and ecosystems have backups, often several layers deep. (Hemenway, p. 34)
So the incentive of governments is to sustain ‘security’, but only insofar as it promotes their own continued existence. In other words, what they need is an extremely insecure space to superimpose a fragile security upon. In the first chapter of the book, Foucault talks about the logic of towns and cities, that they are broken down into easily surveilled spaces, where people can be concentrated, and circulation can be easily directed, tracked, and controlled as needed. However, these same qualities that allow for nearly effortless state dominance also present with higher rates of disease, higher susceptibility to scarcity/famine, poverty, and so forth, which are the very same problems that the sovereign has an interest in mollifying in order to avoid revolt. In the process of creating spacial security for itself, the state creates social insecurity that must be contained. The state, then, sews the seeds of its own demise, and its job ultimately becomes to keep those seeds from ever growing.
To some large degree, governments have learned to make markets do their work for them. Modern capitalism conforms nicely to the needs of the state, in that it devises at least partial solutions to many of the problems of state security (disease, famine, poverty, etc…) while working within the context of state control. All the state has to do, then, is maintain a general kind of dominance, where it inserts itself at various vital points, directing the circulation of society in such a way that it naturally conforms to state interests, and otherwise leaving it alone. This is what Foucault identifies as the transition from the mercantilist economy to the capitalist economy, I think he might have even used the word ‘freedom’ for the latter manifestation. The mercantilist economy was one of extreme collusion between the sovereign and business, where every detail is micromanaged to produce a certain result. This approach, of course, was an extreme failure, whereas the capitalist approach can largely be left to its own devices, and the state takes on a primarily surveillance and regulatory function.
On Strategic Counter-Economics: Introduction to the Series
This will be a series of commentaries developing my own thoughts concerning counter-economic theory and reflecting upon various
other people’s analyses of the forms and technologies of power that I find relevant to that pursuit. These commentaries are meant to start setting the framework for what I hope will be a substantial contribution to counter-economic theory, as such they will include reference to as yet unidentified contributors whose insights concerning the form, function, necessary features, goals, and maintenance of government and otherwise oppressive power apparatuses I find useful. The idea being to envision counter-economic tactics and structures that do not merely ‘replace’ the functions of state, but by their nature discourage and prevent any and all environmental conditions that might be conducive to the reemergence of a state or any equivalent institution or set of institutions.
While I would add the strong caveat that the form that this study will ultimately take may very well evolve as it progresses, the broader work should break down into three basic parts:
I: A thorough systems analysis
Libertarian-Anarchist theory tends to have a strong, but narrow focus on what is perceived as the primary institutional evil faced by modern society, nation states. Especially in popular libertarianism, when a social problem is identified, a line of logic is erected that leads directly to the state, and usually no further. Where it does go further, it is usually to lambaste the subjects of the state for their apathy in defense of their ‘rights’, or for their ignorance, or what have you. Though the state is certainly the most apparent social evil, and though it would be preferable if more people were to make a principled stand for liberty, institutionalized evil is enabled by many subtle features that come together to create a system that is conducive to a particular type of control.
This is not to discount the work of many brilliant people who have gone beyond ‘the state’, as such, exploring issues of education, propaganda, parenting, private-public collusion, etc… As mentioned above, I intend to draw upon the previous work of those who have engaged in systems analysis. What I envision is a synthesis. I hope to bring together disparate insights in order to create a broad and accurate picture of the interdependencies that form the foundation for modern systems of oppression.
II: Identifying the Points of Entry
Once a broad picture has been established, it should be possible to identify the various economic, social, and spacial features that are most necessary to the rise and continuation of oppressive institutions, particularly monopoly governments. We can start to recognize the points that oppressors or would be oppressors insert themselves into the ‘circulation’ of things such that a sort of closed loop of control can be maintained with minimal effort from its beneficiaries.
III: Closing the Points of Entry
Finally, I will address the issue of revolutionary strategy. By Identifying the points of entry, certain strategic suggestions can hopefully be made concerning how to break the loop, as well as how to close off, or make inaccessible the points that government has historically inserted itself to create the loop to begin with. This section will include examples of radically different approaches to systems of security and exchange than those typically used within the context of modern states.
It is important to remember that society as we know it has been influenced on every level by a set of incentives, assumptions, and tactics that have formed fully within a context of pervasive state control. It is false to assume that there is any strong distinction in reality between the public and the private, or that the one is at odds with the other. It is more accurate to understand the one as reinforcing the other, so both must be fundamentally reexamined. Unless this is understood, counter-economics is liable to simply create ‘alternative’ structures that largely mimic prevailing current structures minus the relatively unimportant (by itself) feature of monopolization, and may for that reason ultimately tend toward monopolization, inefficiencies, and abuses in the long run.
