I notice I've attracted at least one comment from an anarcho-syndicalist. I love this, because it's my obscure opposite. I'm an anarcho-capitalist. This is the political equivalent over a debate like "Which is more disgusting, blood sausage or vegan 'hot dogs?'"
Normal people shy away from both.
But despite my loathing of socialism, I have a soft spot for the Wobblies. A century ago, I'd probably be one, as we didn't have the illustrated history of socialism as practiced beyond an oddball commune.
So what's the difference? The difference is how you view humans and how you define 'government.
Humans are flawed. Very flawed in some cases, not so much you'd notice in other cases, but that's only if you look at them as individuals. In groups, they do well to order lunch without injuring someone.
And government is the use of force or fraud to get someone to act in the interest of another person or persons.
For the first part, I'm not Utopian enough to think that a group larger than an Amish colony can even come close to sane governance. I live in a town of 12,000 and the municipal government is idiotic, inadequate, wrong-headed and overbearing. But only a little. It's not like living in Ceausescu's Romania.
For the second part, the Mafia is a government. It levies taxes (called 'protection'), provides services (gambling, dope, prostitution rings, cheap cigarettes). Unlike the 'official' government which claims to provide 'protection' while charging taxes to provide services like gambling, and the imprisonment of people who like dope, prostitution rings, and cigarettes that haven't been taxed as much.
A mugger in an alley is a government of one over one. 'Your money or your life,' that's government. 'I'm thinking about it,' Jack Benny's famous comeback to the proposition is the kind of thing that really pisses governments off.
So I'm all for the private sector over the public as long as it's not coercive or fraudulent, which rules out roughly 900 of the companies in the Fortune 500.
This is why almost any school district that's not an act of child abuse to enroll your child in consists of, at most, one high school and its tributaries. At most.
Because when there's a $600 million annual budget, you don't get interested parents on the school board, you get politicians. Politicians are a blight on humanity, but one, like influenza, that can at best be held to a merely irritating level.
The best immunization against politicians is to keep taxes so low the government can barely function at it's basic services. And broken into little, tiny, ineffectual pieces. It's not like the alternative makes you safer: the Department of Homeland Security actually made the response to Katrina/Rita less effective than it would have been in a pre-9/11 run.
As for the global corporation, it's just an arm of government that has to get its revenue from voluntary sources. Wal-Mart's cheap jeans are a sort of arbitrage, where Bangladesh gets to go through the exact same growing pains every industrialized country went through while industrializing. Wal-Mart profits from the 'backward' conditions in Bangladesh, liberals in industrialized countries get to suck their teeth and wag their fingers that Bangladesh should do better by Bangladeshis (while wearing their Faded Glory jeans to a rally).
And Americans will look a bit French or Italian in a few years, when the two superpowers of the world focus on their own rivalry and we're left to pretend at being more sophisticated while India and China run the show. I wonder if India and China will have a nuclear bomb-building contest, build up ridiculous militaries and tax themselves out of prosperity like us.
8 comments:
As an Anarcho-Syndicalist I too am opposed to Socialism, because it relies on the state for it's implementation, and like all Anarchists I believe in the abolition of the state. As a Syndicalist I believe that all property should be held in common by society (not the state), with society managed by democractically elected workers organisations.
The important distinction between socialism and syndicalism is where the change comes from; in socialism it comes from above, the state, and like all things imposed by the state it becomes corrupted, while with syndicalism the changes come from below, the people.
Capitalism is always by it's nature about the exploitation of the majority, by a minority for their own benefit, not the benefit of the majority. This is the way they make their profits. It is thus about the oppression of the many by the few, for the benefit of the minority only, which is in stark contrast to anarchism which believes in the freedom and equality of all.
Your reply gets to the nut of what I was driving at, which is that I suspect you and I agree quite a bit about the desired end result. The main areas of disagreement have to do with how you define terms and how you implement change.
As a recovering Socialist, I have read a good deal of Socialist theory, as well as a good deal of Mises and Hayek, Bastiat's 'The Law' (talk about prophetic, he predicted the 20th Century based on the fucking French Revolution), and so on.
Capitalism doesn't have to be exploitative, that's the beautiful thing. As I define the term, a truly private sector outfit cannot be exploitative in the sense you mean. Yes, you exploit resources, I'm exploiting a computer, a cable system, etc., right now, and I'm not even making a profit.
But the employment relationship not only can be voluntary and mutually beneficial, but companies run on that philosophy tend to outperform companies that try to cut corners with fraudulent and coercive practices (in other words, companies that try to act like governments).
And in the case of my employer of the past nine years, in addition to the best compensation package I can get with my skills, the employees own shares in an ESOF, which is basically a mutual fund that owns shares in the company. The longer you stay, the more of a stake you have in the company, the more incentive you have to look out for the interests of the company.
And how do I look out for the interests of my employer? By doing everything I can to make our customers glad they exploited us as a resource instead of a competitor. And unlike a 401(k) match (which would be cheaper for my company to do), the ESOF shares come to you whether you're in a position and disciplined enough to participate in a 401(k). Plus, what you lose in diversification (the ESOF actually does own some assets outside shares in the company, but the bulk of the value is under our roof), you gain in the ability as one of 120 or so employees to make a difference in the performance of the company. Unlike a mega-entity like Enron, where a front line employee could do fuck-all about the value of his shares. For that matter, knew fuck all about what they were really worth. In a small, privately held firm, it's easier to see inefficiencies and harder for management to dissemble about them.
Obviously some industries are hard to do on a small scale, but size makes a company unwieldy and inefficient (and thus more and more like a government as it grows).
The other thing I probably disagree with you (and most syndicalists about) is the notion of things being held in common and managed democratically. A few things, very few, can truly be held in common and governed sanely by democratic means. Democracy has an Achilles heel that dooms it as soon as the electorate realizes they can vote largess for themselves. This is why Congress spends more than it steals and always will as long as the government can legally, openly, borrow money. Or print it.
And Capitalism is very democratic in its own way: when you spend money you are voting with dollars. When you buy $10 Faded Glory jeans from a Bangladeshi manufacturer through Wal-Mart instead of seeking out the product of an American textile mill (good luck, but I bet there's still one or two of them) even if the jeans are inferior and cost $200 a pair, you're 'voting' for the industrialization of Bangladesh over the excessive taxes and regulations, and maybe even overpaid wages associated with the latter.
In both Socialist and Capitalist systems, there tends to be a sort of 'alpha male' (granted, sometimes it's a woman) who rises in a given organization. Depending on how the organization is set up, and its size, this person will either be good at it or bad at it. The great thing about a free market is, if my boss was an asshole, I'm a free agent and can hire my services elsewhere.
I know, despite my lack of a college degree, I'm relatively well educated and white, so in America I've got it easier than I would if I was a high school dropout and black, but I still voluntarily hire my services after weighing the cost/benefit of doing so to the best of my abilities.
Illegal immigrants to the United States are at the other end of the spectrum, constantly taken advantage of by employers of all sizes. See also blacks on parole for non-violent drug violations (a black male is MUCH more likely to be prosecuted for non-violent drug violations than a white guy). I can fix that with the stroke of a pen.
Quit setting quotas on immigration, and quit trying to legislate sobriety or proscribe specific intoxicants. Solved.
At the border, if we must have a government and a border at all, the most that should happen is the immigrant in question might check in and give his name, maybe some sort of evidence that he's not lying about his name. Why he's coming is his own business, how long he's planning to stay is also up to him/her.
Likewise, if you prefer to fry your liver with Oxycontin instead of Evan Williams, it's your liver. Arguably, Rush Limbaugh did his job better while eating synthetic opiates by the fistful than John Madden does his job on a three martini breakfast.
Which gets to the 'pragmatic' (don't laugh too hard) side of my anarchism. Since power vacuums are inevitably filled by people who don't share my lofty ideals, I accept that there will be government in human affairs. I just want to hobble it as much as possible, and make it as sensible as possible. The main reason the American Revolution was more successful than its French counterpart is America did not try to remake man in the image of the revolutionary. This is a mistake made by practically every revolution.
America, flawed as it was, was the closest we've come to a 'come as you are' revolution in human history. Jefferson & Co. may have been hypocrites about slavery, poltical opportunists, and brutally ruthless, but they at least made an attempt at figuring out what sort of governance was, to use the green term, 'sustainable.'
You will never get people to universally act against their own interests as they understand their interests. The best you can do is set up a framework where people working in their own interests don't infringe on the interests of those around them, and where if they do there's a halfway rational redress to be had.
That means small units, partly impotent governments. I think the state should have the power to execute child molesters, for instance, but I don't think it has the right to know how much money you earn, or how you spend it, provided you're not earning it and spending it to advance, say, sexual molestation of children.
This Lobster is eloquent!
I am glad you are in a job where you employer rewards you for your good work, and as such you work hard for him/her. But that is what Syndicalism is all about. When all property is held in common, the harder and better you and everybody else works, the greater the reward for you and everybody else, because the "profits" go back to everybody, not disproportionately to a few people who for whatever reason (not usually a good one) happen to own more "capital" than the vast majority.
You might not think it, but the relationship you are working under is still exploitative, because one or a small group of people are disproportionately benefiting from the labour of others. And in most cases the reason they are able to do this is because they have inherited wealth earned in dubious circumstances, or they have earned their wealth in dubious circumstances.
As for things being unable to be held in common and things managed democratically, I recommend you watch the documentary "The Take". It shows how factories can be democratically run as cooperatives. You fall into the mistake of saying that because something is currently not happening, then it cannot work. If that was the case we would still be living in a society like Ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome.
Also, a "revolution" does not have to be violent and quick. The gradual "revolution" in the Scandinavian countries that saw them become Welfare states is a perfect example. As an Anarchist I would like to see the state abolished, but as far as states go, they were, and still are the best. They have extremely high taxation rates, but this has not been a disincentive to work and innovation. They have very strong and militant unions, but again this has not hindered industry. The government provides free education, health care, dental care, child care etc, and it has proven to be much more sustainable than the US system. That is why if we must have a state, then yes it should know how much you earn, and tax you so that it can provide such services. You unfortunately fall into the trap of thinking that, though the US is flawed, it is still better than anywhere else.
As for executing child molesters, I a totally opposed to the death penalty, even in the case of brutal murderous dictators. Why? Because when you give the state to say that certain crimes are deserving of being able to take somebody’s life as a punishment, where does it stop? The logic is that child molesters or murderers are a threat to society/people, that is why they deserve to be executed. But cannot the same be said about Anarchists who wish to overthrow the state? Remember, this has been used as an excuse in US history to execute Anarchists.
If I let the kiddie touchers live, do I get to keep my income and financial activities private?
North Sea Oil is what has made Scandanavia into a Fools Utopia. They do not have a sustainable welfare state, they only have one that benefits (like certain Middle Eastern States) from having to face up to their ineffiencies.
Short term, a worker bee might do better in some respectsin Norway than in Wisconsin, but long term, no.
The U.S. is too socialistic as it is. Congress spends money like a sailor on leave without regard to the fact that the children their whores have are entitled to 150% of their father's income.
The death penalty question is an interesting one. I believe life begins at conception, thus that aboriton is premeditated homicide for hire.
Done right, the death penalty deprives someone of life after due process But if life is so sacred that political entities can't be trusted with it in a Ted Bundy type case, then what makes you think the state has enough wisdom to manage anything financial?
And while the taking of life by the state is not a good thing, it's worse, IMO, to send out the signal that even Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein have the right to die of old age no matter how many mass graves they are responsible for. Better to let them be summarily shot by a mob like Ceausescu.
The commonly held property bit: the ESOF where I work becomes a defacto common property, but on a very small and somewhat limited scale. Quite a different thing from a very large organization like the State of Kansas or Xerox. That all property should be held in common creates the worst case sceneario of 'too big to manage' systems.
Labor unions are not friends of the workers, in my opionion. They impose a tax on the workers (they call it dues) and then expect a voice in how a company they have no capital at risk at is run. This is analogous to having a guy from down the road come into your house and instruct you on how to manage your household because he represents your wife's or children's union.
As for the inherited money bit, I grew up with a guy who's Dad built a multi-million dollar company that used to give out Xmas bonuses over 20% of the employees annual income. The son has not only taken that from the workers but run the business into the ground in less than a decade.
In contrast, the company I work for was founded by a farmer facing bankruptcy in the 1980s 'Farm Aid' climate. He had borrowed over a million dollars to start what appeared to be a profitable farm in the late 1960s, to have mechanization put him further in debt and shrink his profits steadily until his million dollar farm was worth less than the $400,000 he owed on equipment.
So he started a business instead of filing for bankruptcy. Is he a millionaire now? Yes, but the first five years of that company he lived in a trailer court with a wife who bailed as soon as a lucrative settlement was probable. I've met her, she's one of two vets in my town and I won't submit my animals to her care (a decision I made before they divorced).
Interitances are easier to squander than build. Read 'The Milionaire Next Door' for starters. To the extent that wealth is worth anything, the ability to accumulate it is on its own about as noble as lung cancer.
But like it or not, states do not create wealth. They can transfer it (at a cost), they can leave it alone (a good idea) or they can prevent it (Cambodia), but they can't create it.
A state can print money or set low interest rates, but even then all they're doing is changing the rules of wealth accumulation.
Hitch has been pimping a bio of Jefferson and talking about what a wonderful nation builder he was. By Hitch's account, the U.S. would be liek Chile, a powerless sliver of land bound by ocean and mountains.
I have to marvel, wonder what a great world it would be if there was no such thing as a 'nation builder.' Not just America, but get rid of Peter the Great, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc, then by default you rid yourself of Pol Pot, Castro, Franco, Hitler, FDR, Klan Kennedy, etc.
As a point of clarification, I realize that syndicalists do not champion the state, but when you say all property hed in common, you're talking about remaking man in the image of the syndicalist's ideal.
Can't be done. People will not act against what they perceive as their own interests. The reason a small company like the one I work at has competitive advantages over companies that treat their employees less as partners, is that we can command highly skilled, professional workers who won't play slacker. The fact that the incentives built in to the compensation package motivates me does not mean it motivates anyone who walks in off the street.
If the company was not as free to select its employees (as I am free to sell my labor to another company), no way we'd be able to do the things that have made the company successful. We have managed to increase employee compensation and the value of the company because we have been able to increase efficiency. The 'speeding up' that the IWW rails against is one of the things we're always looking for ways to do. It means we can make more product per hour of equipment time, and more for the hour that someone's on the clock.
I Actually posted a comment similar to the one below yesterday but it disappeared…
You say that North Sea Oil made the Scandinavian countries rich. It may have helped Norway, but not Sweden, Denmark or Finland. Besides, couldn’t you say the same about the US, that it’s natural resources made it rich?
You say "Short term, a worker bee might do better in some respects in Norway than in Wisconsin, but long term, no" By what measure? There is much less crime and poverty in Norway, and income is distributed much less evenly, and the government provides free health care, education, child care etc so there is no logical way you can say this. Go read the book "Nickel and Dimed" by Barbara Ehenreich, it will show you how well a "worker bee" is treated in the US.
Your big problem, even though you criticise it, is you love of the US, and your lack of understanding that not all the world is like the US, and that everybody is not as self-centred as Americans. Your government may not provide free healthcare to everybody, while spending Billions of dollars bombing civilians in third world countries. Thankfully most, if not all, first world countries are like this.
What you are putting forward is a return to the master/serf relationship, where "free enterprise" can do what ever it wants with regards to how it treats and pays labour, without any government intervention. Sure some masters may treat their serfs nicely, paying 20% bonuses. However don’t forget they can take this away at any time, and most masters don’t treat their serfs this way, because they will try to squeeze every drop of blood out of their serfs to increase their profits.
Thus given the choice between a socialist/semi-socialist states or an "anarcho-capitalist" one I will atke the socialist one anyday, even though what I really want is an anarcho-syndicalist society. This is because what you are advocating is a return to the law of the jungle, where nothing restrains the self-interest of the few. The use of the term anarchist in such cases is inherently wrong; Anarchism as a political philosophy has always advocated the economic equality of all people and the communal ownership of property.
You also say "That all property should be held in common creates the worst case sceneario of 'too big to manage' systems." Again, I say watch "The take". What the workers are doing in Argentina the political/economic right has said could not be done. Guess what? They are wrong. Thus who is to say that it can’t be done on a bigger scale? Only those with a vested interest in maintaining inequality, poverty and oppression.
As for your point about people working only for their own interests, to an extent this happens in a syndicalist society; because everybody owns the factory/farm/shop etc they work in THIS is the incentive for them to work hard, because they will benefit from it. However they will also realise that others will benefit from their labour, and you know what, for most people in the world, maybe with the exception of the US, this will not be a disincentive, so long as their needs are met.
Unions, collectively represent the most important part of any business; labor. They thus represent human capital and as such are not only entitled, but should be required to have a say in how a business is run. However to do this they must impose dues, which tend to be only a small amount which is more than off-set by the additional wages a union wins for it’s members. In all first world countries, unionised workers get paid significantly more than non-unionised workers.
Lastly, how do you define a "mass murderer"; Stalin, Hitler, Sadaam, Nixon, Ronald Reagan? Ask the people of Chile or Nicaragua, and to them Nixon and Reagan are mass murderers. Should they be executed? Which brings me to my point; it is always subjective as to who is "evil" enough to warrant the death penalty, as such it can be misused by regimes to eliminate their political opponents, or to make themselves popular. Thus to stop this from happening, the death penalty should never be used. Yes, even in the case of Hitler or Stalin, and I say this as somebody who had family killed by both of them.
Norway is the posterchild of socialism. The rest of Scandanavia, last I heard, was in the same fix as Germany and France: good unemployment benefits are a bad substitute for actual employment. Norway gets around it by virtue of North Sea Oil.
I'll read 'Nickel and Dimed' if you'll read 'Losing Ground' by Arthur Murray, a committed liberal who studied America's welfare state and was appalled to find that it was almost without exeption producing results contrary to its intentions.
Not bombing poor countries is not at the cost of socializing medicine. We sould quit using 500 lb bombs as letters of introduction, and that is a sepeate issue. The one thing we exceed all standards at is medical innovation. Sometimes at a rate the FDA won't approve. Why? Profit motive. Pure and simple, and like it or not, that's a good reason for people to sink big bucks into R&D for medicine.
At the same time, politics has created a scenario where some tremendously beneficial drugs like opium and cocaine are marginalized because they are cheap to produce and no major campaign contributor owns a patent on them.
I do not see anarcho-capitalism as a step to the master/serf relationship. Rather, both master and hire must be free to negotiate their best deal, and that means that you have to own your labor and you have to own your capital. Whatever you bring to the table, it has to be yours, and you must bring it on a voluntary basis.
Property held in common is NOT voluntary. It belongs to the laziest, greediest member if there is no check on its common hold. Orwell understood this. Anyone who's lived part of their college years in a house where the fridge was common property learned to never put beer or pizza in the fridge if they wanted any of it.
As far as Americans being greedy, Americans are humans. All humans share the same traits as a group, and if you think our prosperity has changed us at a fundamental level, read Hasek's 'The Good Solder Svejk,'which predates American emergence as world power.
The fine print reads differently, but people are people, and a substantial portion will loaf with no effort if it's an option.
A person in a union job (Frau Lobster used to be one), is to me a person with two bosses: the capitalist one and hte union one. Who loses? The serf to those bosses.
And as prosperity increases, it becomes at a point nearly impossible for a union, even with state protection, to offer a better deal than employers voluntarily offer.
Prosperity is directly derived from free enterprise and private property. Prosperity is reduced entirely by the state and by entities such as labor unions which want to divorce production from income.
I define mass murder very, very differently (apparently). You blame Nixon for Vietnam? Kennedy and Johnson had that clusterfuck going full force before Nixon got in. Nixon is no hero, but he's not responsible for the worst atrocities of that war.
Reagan, what, Grenada? Quadafi's house? Lebannon is Reagan's worst, and it's chump change compared to Stalin or Hitler's average day at the office.
I'm no champion of American presidents, but be serious. Stalin signed, personally, at least 80,000 death warrants, often simply writing on a list, 'Yes, kill them all.' Hitler tried to systematically kill all the Jews of Central Europe along with a few pesky groups like the Romany and queers.
Not even Jackson with his small-pox blankets can compete with the 20th Century's big dictators. The Cultural Revolution was bloodier than our Civil War, and it's aftershocks are killion millions even today.
Chile, Nicaragua, show me the killing fields that comapre with Pol Pot. I'm not saying our hands are clean, I'm just saying America is not the leading cause of death of innocent people if you rule out American babies in utero.
If you want to stop the death penatly, fine. If we can quit spending $400+ billion on defense, quit jailing nonviolent drug offenders, etc., we could probably warehouse the people who deserve the death penalty in our existing jails and let them die of old age.
Traditionally, polital assassins have been executed. What's the deterrent to Garfield's assassin if he knows he'll be fed and sheltered free for the rest of his life?
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