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<h1><a href="http://cascadia.anarchoblogs.org" title="Anarchoblogs from Occupied Cascadia">Anarchoblogs from Occupied Cascadia</a></h1>
<p class="tagline">autonomous alternatives to the statist quo in the Pacific Northwest of North America // anarchist blogs in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia</p>
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				<h2 class="blogheading">Posts tagged <q>Anti-capitalism/usury/STV</q></h2>
		  		
	
		
		<div class="post" id="post-20111109204639">
<h3 class="blogheading"><a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/the-borg-are-a-perfect-analogy-for-neo-liberalism/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to The Borg are a perfect analogy for neo-liberalism…">The Borg are a perfect analogy for neo-liberalism…</a>
<span class="dateline"><span class="date">8:46 pm / 09 November 2011</span>
<cite class="feed">by <a href="http://cascadia.anarchoblogs.org/author/francois-tremblay/" title="Posts by Francois Tremblay">Francois Tremblay</a>, at <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com">The Prime Directive</a></cite></span></h3>
<div class="entry">
<p>The Borg, from Star Trek, are a race which can be considered the &#8220;ultimate consumers&#8221;: their purpose is to assimilate (to consume) other races into their collective, to dissolve their identity into a bland, monolithic technological whole. </p>
<p>This is analogous to how neo-liberalism functions around the world. Neo-liberalism, as an outgrowth of capitalism, seek only one absolute measure, profit, much like the Borg, who pursue assimilation as their absolute goal. The Borg seek to consume civilizations; neo-liberals seek to take control of civilizations in order to use them as instruments of production in order to consume. Both pursue growth for growth&#8217;s sake. Neither ideology is built on human scale, but rather is built to put profits/assimilation over people, leading to, for the Borg, geometric ships and rather vampiric methods of assimilation (the vampire being itself a figure of extreme consumption, nourishing itself from the blood of a person thereby killing them), and for the neo-liberals, policies designed to impoverish and kill people in the name of &#8220;stability&#8221;- the stability of Western corporate investments.</p>
<p>When the Borg attack those who refuse to be assimilated, they take over their opponent&#8217;s communication devices and use them to issue a chilling message:</p>
<p>&#8220;We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.&#8221; </p>
<p><em>&#8220;We are the Borg.&#8221;</em></p>
<p>The Borg are a collective. They, in theory, act as a whole (Borg Queen notwithstanding), and the individual is a tool of the whole. As in corporations and neo-liberalism, the individual is stripped of all values and of all moral responsibility. The Borg communicate as a chorus of voices, where each individual voice is lost in the whole. Capitalism has done this one better by reifying the corporation itself as its own voice, which is distinct and transcends the voices of individuals.</p>
<p><em>&#8220;Lower your shields and surrender your ships.&#8221;</em></p>
<p>The Borg offer any species it desires to assimilate only two choices: surrender or die. Likewise, neo-liberalism admits of only two options: adapt your economic system to our needs or be conquered. The United States is a good example of this strategy. Starting from the massacres of the American Indians and the American Civil War to the Cold War and the recent wars in the Middle East, as well as the smaller acts of barbary and murder commited by multinationals, it has always been clear what happens to those who oppose American interests. And those who submit to the neo-liberal agenda, under the form of &#8220;loans&#8221; and &#8220;restructuration,&#8221; such as Mexico, Brazil, Colombia or Haiti, pay a heavy price, in the same way that colonialism ravaged local economies to provide new markets for the industries of the great powers. </p>
<p><em>&#8220;We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us.&#8221;</em></p>
<p>Western capitalism notoriously runs roughshod over alien cultures, co-opting and then steamrolling over them. Distinctiveness is only useful if it can lead to better products, otherwise it is deemed irrelevant. The targeted economies must adapt to serve the West&#8217;s production needs. Culture, which is dependent on economy, must therefore also adapt to service the West&#8217;s production needs. Because the culture is changed so drastically, people who resist against the change become aliens in their own countries, are fought by their own governments, and are pariahs to the new local values of production and consumption for their own sake.</p>
<p><em>&#8220;Resistance is futile.&#8221;</em></p>
<p>This, on the other hand, may be the main difference between the Borg and neo-liberalism. While it seems near-impossible to resist the Borg, neo-liberalism has been fought successfully in the past and continues to be fought. The Zapatistas and other indigenous Mayan groups are one example of this. Communist dictatorships, like Cuba and North Korea, while they are clear evils, are another. The Anarchist movement in Western countries is yet another, although it has not been wholly successful. Neo-liberalism may be backed by tons of weapons and missiles, but there are always humans on the serving end, which gives us hope that man can one day be redeemed and the world can be made a better place without shedding blood.</p>
<br />Filed under: <a href='http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/category/political-theory/anti-capitalismusurystv/'>Anti-capitalism/usury/STV</a>, <a href='http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/category/political-theory/left-libertarian-org-feed/'>Left Libertarian.org feed</a>  <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/9410/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/9410/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/9410/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/9410/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gofacebook/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/9410/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/facebook/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/9410/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gotwitter/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/9410/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/twitter/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/9410/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/9410/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/9410/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/9410/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/9410/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/9410/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/9410/" /></a> <img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=francoistremblay.wordpress.com&amp;blog=315059&amp;post=9410&amp;subd=francoistremblay&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" /></div>

<div class="tagbox">
<div class="tags"><strong>Tagged with:</strong> <a href="http://cascadia.anarchoblogs.org/tag/anti-capitalismusurystv/" rel="tag">Anti-capitalism/usury/STV</a>, <a href="http://cascadia.anarchoblogs.org/tag/left-libertarianorg-feed/" rel="tag">Left Libertarian.org feed</a></div></div>

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<div class="post" id="post-20110926202944">
<h3 class="blogheading"><a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/walter-block-again-defending-nap-in-the-worse-way-possible/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Walter Block, again defending NAP in the worse way possible…">Walter Block, again defending NAP in the worse way possible…</a>
<span class="dateline"><span class="date">8:29 pm / 26 September 2011</span>
<cite class="feed">by <a href="http://cascadia.anarchoblogs.org/author/francois-tremblay/" title="Posts by Francois Tremblay">Francois Tremblay</a>, at <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com">The Prime Directive</a></cite></span></h3>
<div class="entry">
<p>In the comments section of one of Db0&#8242;s entries, someone posted <a href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/block1.html">this delightful article</a>. Witness another of Walter Block&#8217;s logical absurdities:</p>
<blockquote><p>You are standing in the path on an onrushing boulder, completely unaware of your fate. In a second, this massive rock will hit you, and you will die. (Let us stipulate the truth of this supposition). Instead, however, I push you out of its path, and into safety. The only trouble is, as a result of it, although I have saved your life, I also broke your arm.</p>
<p>Now, if you are a reasonable sort of person, you will be grateful to me. Instead, you insist upon sticking to the literal letter of libertarian law, and sue me for damages for the injury you have sustained. After all, I did initiate a violent act upon your person, which resulted in an injury. If this is not assault and battery, you argue, then nothing is. How shall the libertarian judge rule?</p>
<p>One possibility is to hold me innocent of this charge. This could be done by adding up the two acts, the life saving and the arm breaking, and deciding that the former is far more important than the latter. So much so that the one ought to be in effect &#8220;subtracted&#8221; from the other, and since the result would be a &#8220;positive&#8221; (I contributed more to your life by saving it than I cost you through the injury you sustained), I would be let off scott free. The point here is that I committed not two acts, but only one: saving-your-life-and-injuring-you, and that this complex but single act is not one of initiatory aggression.</p>
<p>A difficulty with this line of reasoning is that you might have been standing in the way of the boulder as part of a suicide attempt. You regarded the situation where you are dead far more highly than the one where you are alive, but debilitated. We may assume you wanted to end your life because of bodily malfunctions like a broken arm, and now I have worsened your welfare, not improved it.</p>
<p>Another problem is that these really are two separate acts. It is certainly possible that I could have pushed you out of death’s way without breaking your arm. To call it two separate acts is really to fudge: this would only be done in order to achieve the common sense result we all presumably want: to find me innocent of bodily harm.</p>
<p>No, the only proper libertarian judgment is that I am indeed guilty of a battery upon your person.</p></blockquote>
<p>Here&#8217;s my challenge to all Libertarians and &#8220;anarcho-capitalists&#8221;: prove that Block&#8217;s reasoning is invalid<br />
(while you&#8217;re at it, also prove <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/more-on-walter-blocks-lunatic-ravings/">Block&#8217;s Corollary</a> wrong too).</p>
<br />Filed under: <a href='http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/category/political-theory/anti-capitalismusurystv/'>Anti-capitalism/usury/STV</a>, <a href='http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/category/links/'>Links</a>  <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/12011/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/12011/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/12011/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/12011/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gofacebook/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/12011/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/facebook/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/12011/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gotwitter/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/12011/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/twitter/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/12011/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/12011/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/12011/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/12011/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/12011/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/12011/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/12011/" /></a> <img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=francoistremblay.wordpress.com&amp;blog=315059&amp;post=12011&amp;subd=francoistremblay&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" /></div>

<div class="tagbox">
<div class="tags"><strong>Tagged with:</strong> <a href="http://cascadia.anarchoblogs.org/tag/anti-capitalismusurystv/" rel="tag">Anti-capitalism/usury/STV</a>, <a href="http://cascadia.anarchoblogs.org/tag/links/" rel="tag">Links</a></div></div>

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<div class="post" id="post-20110607172007">
<h3 class="blogheading"><a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/the-trouble-with-time-preference/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to The trouble with time preference.">The trouble with time preference.</a>
<span class="dateline"><span class="date">5:20 pm / 07 June 2011</span>
<cite class="feed">by <a href="http://cascadia.anarchoblogs.org/author/francois-tremblay/" title="Posts by Francois Tremblay">Francois Tremblay</a>, at <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com">Check Your Premises</a></cite></span></h3>
<div class="entry">
<p>&#8220;Time preference&#8221; is a concept used in Austrian economics to rationalize usury in general, so it is useful to take a look at it and whether it holds any water.</p>
<p>In general, time preference represents how much people value receiving a certain amount of goods today as opposed to receiving it later on. Low time preference means that one values getting the goods later, while high time preference means that one values getting the goods right now. Here is an example of <a href="http://www.la.org.au/opinion/050610/liberty-time-preference-and-decadence">Austrian propaganda made on this basis</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>Whatever the particular form, decadence is always a manifestation of extremely high time preference—of the desire for immediate gratification and euphoria at the expense of important longer-term aspirations. As such, decadence is antithetic to moral values, which are rooted in orientation towards long-term prosperity and happiness. Such values are the conceptual embodiment of low time preference, which is manifested in characteristics of thrift, diligence and long-term self improvement, all of which involve forgoing immediate satisfaction in anticipation of gains in the future.</p>
<p>People with high time preference are naturally hostile to moral and intellectual ideas that are designed for long-term planning and welfare. Their focus on the immediate moment means that moral virtues such as rationality, independence, productivity, honesty, and integrity are anathema to them—rather than assisting their endeavour for immediate gratification, these virtues only inhibit them, and are therefore discarded. Similarly, ideas such as objectivity, reason and volition are implicitly hostile to their destructive conduct, and these too are discarded.</p></blockquote>
<p>The basic Austrian principle is simple: low time preference = good, civilized, productive, high time preference = bad, criminal, waster. </p>
<p>You may already have realized the main problem here. Whether you have low or high time preference is heavily influenced by your socio-economic condition. The poorer you are, the higher time preference you will have. So time preference is, like a lot of capitalist doctrine, another attempt at putting guilt on the poor. It&#8217;s their fault that savings have gone down and debt has gone up, if we could only do something about all those stupid poor people, and so on. </p>
<p>This brings us to the subject of this entry, Per Bylund (whom I used to look up to, sadly, although I&#8217;m used to disillusionment by now), and his article called <a href="http://mises.org/daily/2096">The Trouble With Socialist Anarchism</a>. In it, he argues that the trouble with Anarchism is that we don&#8217;t take into account time preference:</p>
<blockquote><p>The analysis, however, is fundamentally wrong, and it is so simply because socialists don&#8217;t understand time preference. It is of value (but not necessarily monetary value) to many a worker frequently to receive a fixed amount of pay for invested labor instead of taking the risks of producing, marketing, and selling a product in the market place (even if the enterprise is not carried out individually but in cooperation with other workers).</p>
<p>It is also true in reverse: the &#8220;capitalist&#8221; values money now more than money later; thus, profits at a later time need to be greater than labor costs now to &#8220;break even.&#8221; The point here is that if a worker would voluntarily choose between multiple different alternatives there is reason to believe employment is sometimes (or, in perhaps often) an attractive choice.</p>
<p>The reason this is so, is because of division of labor, risks in the market place, and so on. But it is primarily because of time preference, meaning a worker might value a fixed wage now and at predetermined intervals more than investing his labor now and gain the full value later. The laborer could therefore be in equilibrium when investing labor generating $100 worth of products a month from now even if he is paid only $95 now.</p>
<p>To some people less money now than more money later is indeed usury, but that is only a fact that strengthens the theory of time preference as put forth by Austrian economists. People have different perceptions of value and do value different things at different times, and therefore one individual may very well find employment is to his benefit while other individuals cannot for the world accept such terms. And the same individuals might think very differently at a different point in time.</p></blockquote>
<p>I quoted the argument in full because I want to make clear <em>that this is all it is</em>. There is no further complexity to Bylund&#8217;s argument beyond &#8220;most people prefer to submit to usury (in a capitalist system) because it is more convenient (in a capitalist system) therefore usury is justified (universally).&#8221;</p>
<p>This is a clear case in point of <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/the-voluntaryist-delusion/">the profound subjectivity of capitalism</a>. Bylund seemingly believes that people&#8217;s time preference overturns facts. To Bylund, it is &#8220;fundamentally wrong&#8221; to believe that usury is invalid because some people may prefer usury to the current alternative. But what does that have to do with it? You cannot counter facts with preferences!</p>
<p>Suppose I counter evolution by saying that &#8220;the analysis [by scientists], however, is fundamentally wrong, and it is so simply because scientists don&#8217;t understand centrality preference. It is of value to many a believer to know for a fact that the human race is central to the universe&#8217;s purpose and design, instead of learning more about the world and finding cures for genetic diseases.&#8221; How did I address the facts of the matter? The mass of evidence for evolution is not denied by the fact that many people may prefer other avenues of belief.</p>
<p>You may say that this is an unfair comparison, but I don&#8217;t think it is. In both cases, preferences are taken to trump facts. To Bylund, we socialists only believe usury is wrong because we have lower time preference. But this is complete nonsense (although this creates an inconsistency: if low time preference is good, doesn&#8217;t that make socialists innately better than capitalists?). I believe usury is wrong because it is factually wrong, not because I prefer to get goods later rather than now. There is such a thing as socialists who don&#8217;t save their money, or even, Heaven forbid, poor socialists (and yes, you should read this sentence very sarcastically). </p>
<p>I may prefer for usury to be justifiable, as that would make the world appear far less evil to me, but that does not make it justifiable. I may prefer to put myself under the yoke of usury, because I have no other viable option, but that does not make it justifiable, any more than a victim complying with an armed robber means that the victim supports armed robbery as justified.</p>
<p>Time preference is not a proof that usury is valid or justified. Time preference is, at best, a way to look at the time frame of people&#8217;s goals, but it is important to remember that this time frame is dependent on socio-economic and psychological factors. Therefore it is pointless to use time preference as a universal principle, and it fails as a proof that socialism is invalid.</p>
<p>In his next section, Bylund confirms the profound subjectivity of his argument by outright stating that all value is by nature subjective:</p>
<blockquote><p>Values are subjective in the sense that the individual alone makes the assessment and makes it according to his or her individual preferential hierarchy. Thus, subjective value does not depend on what is being valued, but rather on how it is perceived!</p>
<p>Therefore, a laborer&#8217;s analysis of whether employment is beneficial does not only involve the monetary value of invested labor and received payment, but also everything else he values. Employment could be of great value to a risk aversive individual, since the risk of losing money is very low, whereas the same deal for someone else, who perhaps gets a kick out of taking risk, is nothing but outright slavery. People are different.<br />
&#8230;<br />
Some people will have high time preference for certain values, while others will have low time preference. Some people will be able to use their time and skill to create a lot of value to others (assessed subjectively), while others create value only recognized by a few. And individual choices will always be individual choices, the decisions made depending on the individual&#8217;s subjective assessment of values he chooses to identify.</p>
<p>Socialism, as commonly defined by the socialists (of both anarchist and statist varieties), fails to realize this fact and therefore categorically dismisses market solutions, functions, and institutions that arise voluntarily and spontaneously.</p></blockquote>
<p>You can see that this is merely the same argument from before, repeated two more times, peppered with the voluntaryist fallacy (see my link above). Everyone&#8217;s different, some prefer usury to the alternative, therefore usury is valid. Still complete nonsense. </p>
<p>It is, on the whole, ridiculously easy to defeat capitalist theories. They are all predicated and founded upon complete subjectivism. This is an ideology of mysticism and complete intellectual chaos, where the endless variation of preferences is taken as more primary than the actual material causes of preferences (which is convenient for the power elite, which manipulates preferences through many channels). </p>
<p>All that one must do to dispel this confusion is to point out that reality works on the basis of principles and laws, and that we can discover those principles and laws. Value is not subjective; it can be determined and measured, and we can evaluate people&#8217;s actions on that basis. We can indeed say that usury is ethically undesirable. Preference has little to do with establishing what is true and what is false, except the agent&#8217;s own epistemic preferences. </p>
<p>Also see db0&#8242;s entry <a href="http://dbzer0.com/blog/exploitation-cannot-be-obscured-in-time">Exploitation cannot be obscured in time</a>.</p>
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<h3 class="blogheading"><a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2011/05/13/refuting-the-arguments-against-equality/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Refuting the arguments against equality.">Refuting the arguments against equality.</a>
<span class="dateline"><span class="date">5:06 pm / 13 May 2011</span>
<cite class="feed">by <a href="http://cascadia.anarchoblogs.org/author/francois-tremblay/" title="Posts by Francois Tremblay">Francois Tremblay</a>, at <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com">Check Your Premises</a></cite></span></h3>
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<p>The arguments against egalitarian wage systems tend to be pretty vague, and there is little formal literature on the subject, with one exception which I will discuss. In general, the popular arguments people use against egalitarianism tend to fall into &#8230; <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2011/05/13/refuting-the-arguments-against-equality/">Continue reading <span>&#8594;</span></a><img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=francoistremblay.wordpress.com&amp;blog=315059&amp;post=9157&amp;subd=francoistremblay&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" /></p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2011/05/13/refuting-the-arguments-against-equality/">Continue reading at Check Your Premises &hellip;</a></p></div>

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<h3 class="blogheading"><a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/the-voluntaryist-delusion/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to The voluntaryist delusion.">The voluntaryist delusion.</a>
<span class="dateline"><span class="date">5:18 pm / 25 March 2011</span>
<cite class="feed">by <a href="http://cascadia.anarchoblogs.org/author/francois-tremblay/" title="Posts by Francois Tremblay">Francois Tremblay</a>, at <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com">Check Your Premises</a></cite></span></h3>
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<p>Voluntaryism is a popular ideology amongst people who like Anarchism but recoil at its leftist implications. By adopting the simple principle, &#8220;whatever is voluntary is ethical,&#8221; they believe that they have found the high ground, the ruler with which all other ideologies must be evaluated.</p>
<p>Some openly advocate a &#8220;rule by landlords,&#8221; a sort of extra-small minarchism where whoever owns the land can impose whatever laws he wishes on anyone who works or lives within his land. This is the &#8220;ultimate decision-making power&#8221; which defines the State: these landowners are effectively rulers over that land. Although they refuse to see this pretty direct deduction (but to be fair, <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2009/08/29/refuting-anarcho-capitalism-by-means-of-anarcho-capitalism/">even Rothbard was too blinded by his pro-property bias to see it</a>), it is clear that the voluntaryists who hold to this ideology have nothing to do with Anarchism. </p>
<p>One famous example from the Mises forum is the question of whether we are justified in shaking off someone who is hanging for his life on a flagpole that we own. Many people there were of the opinion that &#8220;property rights&#8221; alone justified an act which is, to be clear, nothing more than murder. </p>
<p>Most voluntaryists recoil at the idea that their ideology might justify this sort of baseless murder, and as such adopt a &#8220;softer&#8221; position. They then try to draw a line, beyond which their belief in &#8220;property rights&#8221; becomes harmless and does not affect other people&#8217;s rights. But as I have pointed out in my past exposé of &#8220;anarcho-capitalism,&#8221; there is no line beyond which voluntaryism, in its support of &#8220;property rights,&#8221; does not suffer from this sort of contradiction, because &#8220;property rights&#8221; are by their very nature an obstacle to all other, real human rights.</p>
<p>In fact, we don&#8217;t need to go beyond real life to see that this is the case. Voluntaryism, under the form of STV (Subjective Theory of Value, which basically states that any price or usury people agree upon is just, by circular definition), is the core justification for capitalist exploitation. Of course, they strenuously object to the word &#8220;exploitation,&#8221; because they believe that anything voluntary is by definition good and thus cannot be &#8220;exploitation.&#8221; But this is circular reasoning. </p>
<p>In the same way, they object equally strenuously to any attempt to unincentivize or prevent what they see as &#8220;voluntary acts,&#8221; saying things like &#8220;you just want to tell people what they can&#8217;t do!&#8221; And yet no one disputes that we must often &#8220;tell people what they can&#8217;t do.&#8221; We don&#8217;t want to live in a society where people are free to hurt or defraud each other without being stopped, because these actions go against innate morality and go against the free will of the victim. Many &#8220;voluntary acts&#8221; are equally unacceptable (some of which I will discuss in the points below). </p>
<p>Even some crimes, especially clever frauds, can be said to be voluntary, but that does not make them any less criminal; like these &#8220;voluntary acts,&#8221; they rely on false beliefs in order to foster acceptance or even cheerful participation in the harming of the person&#8217;s life. Religion, I suppose, should be added to that category of clever frauds as well. </p>
<p>&#8220;Whatever is voluntary is ethical; whatever is not voluntary is not ethical.&#8221; Like the Golden Rule, this rule is simple and wrong. There are four main reasons why it is wrong.</p>
<p>1. <strong>It reduces ethics to a matter of mere personal opinion.</strong> Because of this, it goes against all other ethical principles ever put forward by man, since one may at any time hold an opinion contrary to them, even if those principles are logically sound and empirically demonstrated.</p>
<p>Voluntaryists, however, do their best to redefine other people&#8217;s terms so they fit within their own worldview. For instance, an Anarchist may rightly points out that the voluntaryist would allow people to form hierarchies, and that this is contrary to our goal of freedom. The voluntaryist will then generally either define freedom as &#8220;doing whatever you feel like&#8221; (omitting the fact that forming hierarchies restricts our desire to &#8220;do whatever we feel like&#8221; later on), or redefine hierarchy so as to exclude willing obedience (as if the willing or unwilling nature of obedience had any relevance to the unethical nature of hierarchies). </p>
<p>Also, when I discussed <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/arguing-against-stv/">the arguments against STV</a>, I briefly pointed out that there can be no &#8220;true subjectivity&#8221; in a world where indoctrination is a constant fact. The same objection can be leveled against voluntaryism in general. The voluntaryist cannot ensure that one&#8217;s opinion is really one&#8217;s personal opinion, and not just someone else&#8217;s attempt at indoctrination that was internalized in the past. And if opinions are molded by whoever has the money or power to make its message heard by the masses, then voluntaryism basically reduces itself to &#8220;might makes right.&#8221;</p>
<p>2. <strong>It does not take into account the coercion embodied by our institutions.</strong> In the same way that we say that commodities embody (give a concrete form to) a certain amount of labor, we can also say that institutions embody coercion. This is ignored by voluntaryists, who examine actions towards any institution in a vacuum, divorced from context, and thus do not acknowledge the coercion that was necessary for the institution to exist. </p>
<p>Let me give you a simple example to illustrate what I mean by this. A group of people goes around breaking people&#8217;s legs. A significant percentage of people&#8217;s legs have been broken, and now they all need crutches. Crutch-makers, who are few (since many people simply can&#8217;t work at all due to having their legs broken, and because we still need people to produce food, potable water, houses, and other vital commodities), are now forming a cartel and are asking for thousands of dollars in exchange for crutches, because there are so few crutches being made and so many people vitally need them.</p>
<p>My example is not an analogy, as I don&#8217;t have any specific system in mind while writing it (I am not making a statement about cartels or health care or anything like that). All I am pointing out is that the system of crutch production is dependent for its power on acts of coercion that were done &#8220;in the past,&#8221; &#8220;by other people.&#8221; The fact that it was done &#8220;in the past&#8221; and &#8220;by other people&#8221; makes voluntaryists say that the system in the present is voluntary, but the system embodies the coercion of the leg-breaking which occurred before the rise of the cartel, and would not exist without it. </p>
<p>This means that voluntaryists are good at identifying institutions which rely on force &#8220;in the present&#8221; and &#8220;by the people in charge,&#8221; but they are very bad at identifying these institutions when time has passed and coercion is no longer directly necessary. </p>
<p>For instance, the fact that land was initially distributed through coercive acts like the extermination of the natives, the enclosure of the commons, the selling of unused land by auction. These acts of coercion are embodied by landlordism, laws against squatting and beggars, &#8220;gentrification,&#8221; and capitalism as a whole, because capitalism everywhere necessitated the creation of a class of people uprooted from their land who would serve as its workers. And of course we cannot dissociate land ownership issues from that of statism, which is a form of ownership claim over a piece of land and its inhabitants.</p>
<p>Therefore, when voluntaryists claim that landlordism and capitalism are voluntary and therefore benign, they are not only omitting the facts of landlordist and capitalist exploitation, but they are also omitting the coercion embodied by those institutions. To take a more concrete example of this, the Zapatista revolutions were brought about because natives were chased from their land and were forced to sell their labor to the new land owners who bought their land at auction. It would do no good for a voluntaryist to point out that the work contract they signed was voluntary: the work contract is merely an extension of the violent acts of enclosure and selling. </p>
<p>If my point is not clear enough, the Scientology &#8220;billion year contract&#8221; might provide for a simpler example. Even though capitalists may scoff at a &#8220;billion year contract,&#8221; the concept is logically acceptable for people who believe that their souls are immortal. That issue aside, the contract is entirely &#8220;voluntary,&#8221; if you refuse to examine the fact that the person was brainwashed &#8220;in the past&#8221; and &#8220;by different people.&#8221; But this is obviously nonsense (although, since most forms of brainwashing are voluntary, I suppose that wouldn&#8217;t bother them anyway).</p>
<p>As a conclusion to this point, it is hard not to consider the fact that all human activity has as its cause a non-voluntary act, the act of being born and the breeding/parenting institution in general.</p>
<p>3. <strong>There are fundamental contradictions between the belief in &#8220;voluntary contract&#8221; and the belief in human rights.</strong> If a &#8220;voluntary contract&#8221; includes clauses which go against a person&#8217;s human rights, such as pretty much all capitalist work contracts ever written, then the voluntaryist is forced to reject human rights in favour of the contract. This can get to rather extreme lengths, as I have shown in my discussions of the <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/more-on-walter-blocks-lunatic-ravings/">Block Corollary</a>. Basically, the voluntaryist response is to call the victims crybabies for complaining about a contract they signed &#8220;voluntarily.&#8221;</p>
<p>In practice, people sign such contracts because they have no viable alternatives, and a lot of this is related to point 2. The background conditions of society are molded by the coercion of the past much more than that of the present. The more power workers have in a given field, the better conditions they get, but businesses have more power than the workers. This is why they end up routinely having the upper hand and are able to demand concession from the workers which would be considered unacceptable or even absurd in any other context.</p>
<p>4. <strong>The term &#8220;voluntary&#8221; is weaker than the term &#8220;consensual.&#8221;</strong> What is consensual is necessarily voluntary, but what is voluntary is not necessarily consensual. For a person to perform a voluntary choice only requires acceptance on the part of the person, but for a person to perform a consensual choice requires a viable possibility of refusal. This means that the concept of consent includes  consideration of structural issues (such as whether a viable alternative exists) which are not part of voluntariness. I have examined the issue of consent in detail in my entry Some considerations on consent (see <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2009/11/15/some-considerations-on-consent-part-12/">part 1</a> and <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/some-considerations-on-consent-part-22/">part 2</a>). </p>
<p>The upshot of all this is that a totalizing system like capital-democracy, or capitalism or democracy alone, precludes the possibility of consent. The same can be applied to any totalizing system whatsoever, since by definition totalizing systems does not accept, or permit the rise of, viable alternatives. Therefore, any such system, or any part of such a system, may be &#8220;voluntary,&#8221; but it cannot be consensual. </p>
<p>This presents a problem for the voluntaryist, as he is either forced to abandon the notion of consent or to trivialize the non-consensual nature of whatever he is defending. Because consensus relies on structural issues which voluntariness does not, the voluntaryist can accomplish the second goal by examining actions and systems in a vacuum. In this way, the voluntaryist joins the right-winger in his stubborn refusal to consider society&#8217;s ever-present influence on people&#8217;s actions (let alone society&#8217;s role in the formation of the self). To the voluntaryist, ongoing coercion alone accounts for all social ills. If there is no coercion present, all responsibility falls on the individual. This is only one step better than the right-winger, and not a big step at that.</p>
<p>If the voluntaryist abandons the notion of consent on the basis that it is too restrictive, then we must conclude that his professed love of freedom is a lie. How can people be free when they are forced to live in non-consensual ways? </p>
<p>It is like saying that surrendering one&#8217;s wallet to an armed robber means you were free to take that decision. There is nothing voluntary about being attacked by an armed robber, but the choice itself is voluntary, in the same sense that voting or paying taxes is voluntary: one can decide to do it, or not to do it. And if we look only at the choice itself, in a vacuum, this analysis might make sense. The same might be said of the decision to surrender one&#8217;s labour or starve. But these are not the choices that make life happy or meaningful or purposeful. There is more meaning in deciding what to eat for breakfast than in any such non-consensual choice.</p>
<p>This is related to the principle of embodied coercion, given that most non-consensual actions or choices are the result of embodied coercion. But in certain cases, they are not. To follow the right-wing stereotype, what if a specific person is poor because he is dumb or lazy? Well, so what? His dumbness or laziness is his responsibility, but this does not turn non-consent into consent by magic. And the dumbness or laziness of any given person surely has a marginal effect on the nature of the structure that frames his choices.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2010/06/19/demolishing-property-rights-again-the-child-renter-argument/">child renter argument</a>, which I posted last year, provides an example of a distinction between a voluntary choice and a consensual choice. One may argue that the child has the voluntary choice of staying, and paying the rent, or leaving, and finding another place to live (or becoming homeless). One may also argue that the scenario as a whole is voluntary, since no coercion was involved at any step of the way. But one cannot argue that the choice is consensual: he never consented to the lease contract, and any choice he makes is surely out of necessity (either because he has no other place to live, or because he doesn&#8217;t have the money to stay). </p>
<p>Voluntaryism is subjectivism run rampant; it is, at its roots, a might makes right ideology, and can only lead to the perpetuation of power relations and all the suffering that comes with them. The fact that an action is voluntary is not a sufficient criterion for calling it moral or ethical. As one part of an ethical worldview, it is essential. As an independent standard, it is pure nonsense.</p>
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<div class="post" id="post-20110205173317">
<h3 class="blogheading"><a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/in-life-there-are-winners-and-there-are-losers/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to “In life, there are winners and there are losers!”">“In life, there are winners and there are losers!”</a>
<span class="dateline"><span class="date">5:33 pm / 05 February 2011</span>
<cite class="feed">by <a href="http://cascadia.anarchoblogs.org/author/francois-tremblay/" title="Posts by Francois Tremblay">Francois Tremblay</a>, at <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com">Check Your Premises</a></cite></span></h3>
<div class="entry">
<blockquote><p>Our life is not really a mutual helpfulness; but rather, it&#8217;s fair competition cloaked under due laws of war; it&#8217;s a mutual hostility.<br />
Thomas Carlyle</p></blockquote>
<p>Our society is built on the principle of generalized competition: that every aspect of life is a game which one must engage at a personal level (internalizing its rules and taboos), that every other person is a competitor or potential competitor (because competition is generalized to most parts of society, including justice, politics, economics, sports, group communications and personal relationships, which all together have a major impact on the rest of our lives), that there must always be winners and losers (with a great deal more losers than winners), and that the losers deserve to be losers (because they didn&#8217;t have what it takes to win).</p>
<p>This spills over to child-rearing as well, in a major way. We have this strange belief that we must force children to compete because they must be &#8220;toughened up&#8221; for their adult life. We believe that, because society works in a dysfunctional way, we must raise dysfunctional children so they can adapt to that society. This manner of reasoning is laughable in its child-like simplicity, but people actually believe this. </p>
<p>And we see the diseased results in a schooling system that fails to engage children and fails to educate them; schools that force children to compete socially, fucking up their self-image and their capacity to relate to others; the shoehorning of children into organized team sports which gives them continuous stress, gets them addicted to the win/lose cycle, turns their parents into raving lunatics, and burns them off true play, all in the name of &#8220;building character&#8221;; the systematic destruction of child naivete and curiosity, and its replacement with the manichean worldview; children who have to compete for their parents&#8217; affection and develop crippling neuroses. I could go on and on in this vein but the basic result is what we can call &#8220;soul murder.&#8221; The basic goal of a competitive society is to kill individuality and kill the true self, to produce robots.</p>
<p>This may seem strange to some people, as capitalism has been often labeled an individualist philosophy. But competition by its very nature is conformist. When you compete to win, you have to perform the same actions as everyone else, or you have to be compared to everyone else on the same grounds. This is a strong pressure to not take risks and follow familiar grounds which are easy to evaluate. Also, when we compete, our focus changes from performing some actions to being better than other people. We lose creativity and become preoccupied by following the rules of the game. We conform to the mold that the game presents to us, we become no longer an individual but a competitor, as our actions are defined not by our own values but by our relation to the game. &#8220;Successful&#8221; people all look, dress, talk and think the same.</p>
<p>It is true that competition is &#8220;every man for himself,&#8221; and that it appeals to a very narrow sort of greed. But this in itself is not individualism. The individual may be driven by his values to enter a game, but while he is within it, he subverts his true desires in order to attempt to &#8220;win&#8221; in the long run. Trying to be an individual by competing is a trap because all competition in our society molds the individual to itself, forces the individual into social roles which he must adhere to, and forces him to see his actions in relation to other people&#8217;s. There is no way to &#8220;win&#8221; except by losing your individuality, the only thing you were supposedly seeking in the first place.</p>
<p>A competitive society is one where everyone must conform to the games they are stuck in. We become game-players, more aggressive, stuck on others and their opinions of us, and the needle of our moral compass starts turning towards &#8220;win at all costs.&#8221; Our thinking is muddled, and we start objectifying people for the sole reason that they are our competitors. The ethical end point of competition is &#8220;might makes right,&#8221; a principle which is reflected everywhere in our society&#8217;s structures: those who &#8220;win&#8221; are the most powerful, and they are the most powerful because they are &#8220;winners.&#8221; </p>
<p>When people are fully engaged by it, competition is a drug. &#8220;Losers&#8221; get desperate for a fix, and &#8220;winners,&#8221; after a brief triumph, start jonesing for their next fix. </p>
<blockquote><p>Winning doesn&#8217;t satisfy us &#8212; we need to do it again, and again. The taste of success seems merely to whet the appetite for more. When we lose, the compulsion to seek future success is overpowering; the need to get out on the course the following weekend is irresistible. We cannot quit when we are ahead, after we&#8217;ve won, and we certainly cannot quit when we&#8217;re behind, after we&#8217;ve lost. We are addicted.<br />
Stuart Walker, speed boat racer</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>&#8230; even after you&#8217;ve just won the Super Bowl &#8211; especially after you&#8217;ve just won the Super Bowl &#8211; there&#8217;s always next year. If &#8220;winning isn&#8217;t everything; it&#8217;s the only thing,&#8221; then &#8220;the only thing&#8221; is nothing &#8211; emptiness, the nightmare of life without ultimate meaning.<br />
Tom Landry, former head coach of the Dallas Cowboys
</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>The longer you stay in it, the highs aren&#8217;t as high and the lows are much lower.<br />
Joe Gibbs, former head coach of the Washington Redskins
</p></blockquote>
<p>Addictions destroy our self-esteem, destroy our free will, and destroy our relationships. Addictions to competition are no different. </p>
<p>Capitalism and democracy are especially important, in that they demand, and require, a heightened level of competition. Not only do they produce winners and losers, but they require massive, structural defeats in order to even function properly. Capitalism requires massive unemployment in order to maintain corporate profits. Democracy requires massive coercion in order to enforce its class-motivated laws and policies. Whatever happens, the survival and flourishing of the capital-democratic system requires massive amounts of losers at all times. We&#8217;re going beyond what we would call a &#8220;dog eat dog&#8221; system or a &#8220;survival of the fittest&#8221; system: these expressions assume a struggle between people, when what we actually observe is a struggle between people and of people against structures. Not only are dogs eating dogs, but PETA is killing them left and right too (which they actually do in reality, sadly enough). </p>
<p>One may reply that I am no longer talking about &#8220;healthy competition,&#8221; but rather about something entirely different. But it is the very definition of competition that some people win and most people lose. Furthermore, if those who win have any power, they will use that power to ensure that they keep winning and that others keep losing. Despite the pretenses of advocates of this competitive worldview, there is nothing egalitarian about competition whatsoever, and thus there is no reason to particularly fault it or call it &#8220;unhealthy&#8221; for not being egalitarian. </p>
<p>There is no such thing as &#8220;healthy&#8221; competition. Even competition in the most innocuous of areas, like children&#8217;s games, changes the psyche and turns individuals into competitors. </p>
<p>The same applies to ideas. People who compete with each other for popularity and agreement do so by parroting what everyone else says and what everyone else approves of. This is why ideological groups are always dens of vipers, no matter their denomination. There are few things more vicious than people trying to prevent others from being accepted. Group-think is never a good substitute for self-think, no matter how benign the group. </p>
<p>No doubt all I&#8217;ve written here can be dismissed as &#8220;loser-talk.&#8221; The belief that anyone who quits a game is just a sore loser is an easy way to dismiss criticism out of hand. It is merely a form of machoist thought-stopping.  Many children drop out of organized sports because they are tired of competing. They are not &#8220;losers&#8221; or &#8220;quitters&#8221;: the &#8220;losers&#8221; are the adults who try to break children&#8217;s psyche in the name of &#8220;building character.&#8221; They are the ones who deserve to be insulted and vilified.</p>
<p>Are you a &#8220;loser&#8221; because you don&#8217;t want to compete? </p>
<blockquote><p>One cannot play chess if one becomes aware of the pieces as living souls and of the fact that the Whites and the Blacks have more in common with each other than with the players. Suddenly one loses all interest in who will be champion.<br />
Anatol Rapoport</p></blockquote>
<p>Competition is an activity which is done for the sake of some external reward. People will do anything they can to get that reward, and who controls the reward controls people. Anarchism is associated with the ludic- play, that is to say, an activity which is done for its own sake- for good reason. Competition is a means of control, play is a means of expression. </p>
<p>The proposition &#8220;there are winners and there are losers&#8221; is an accurate statement about our society, and Anarchism is the ideology which seeks to abolish this state of affairs. Competition does not improve man&#8217;s condition, and neither does it help him become a self-realized individual. Competition sets the individual up to believe that he must eat or be eaten, that this is the way life goes. To disconnect from these systems of corruption is an act of compassion, not desperation. </p>
<p>The fact is that we do not need competition. A common excuse for competition is that resources are scarce and that competition tells us who &#8220;deserves&#8221; more resources than others. &#8220;Winners&#8221; win the right to these scarce resources. But competition creates artificial scarcity in the first place, by restricting access to resources until &#8220;there isn&#8217;t enough for everyone.&#8221; There isn&#8217;t enough for everyone because any monetary system is a rationing system, and if the rationing system bars millions of people from getting what they need, then they won&#8217;t get what they need. This scarcity has nothing to do with whether there are enough resources to provide what everyone wants, but rather has to do with the system not providing an egalitarian access to resources. So the belief in competition as the answer to scarcity is actually a self-fulfilling prophecy.</p>
<p>Competition is hostile to Anarchist goals. The case of early Iceland proves that competition inevitably creates nexus of resources, and subsequently hierarchies (if you want to read about this, the AFAQ has a whole section dedicated to the political devolution of early Iceland). But we don&#8217;t need to look at history to prove it when we see it happening right in front of our eyes. I have discussed how <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/what-are-games-conditions/">games conditions</a> in our social institutions exist to control other people. I&#8217;ve given a lot of quotes in this entry, but the only quote appropriate to end it is the famous line that &#8220;[t]he only winning move is not to play.&#8221; By refusing to engage, we free ourselves to build alternatives.</p>
<br />Filed under: <a href='http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/category/anarchist-theory/anti-capitalismusurystv/'>Anti-capitalism/usury/STV</a>, <a href='http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/category/anarchist-theory/left-libertarianorg-feed/'>Left Libertarian.org feed</a>, <a href='http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/category/anarchist-theory/mechanisms-of-control/'>Mechanisms of control</a>, <a href='http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/category/morality/'>Morality</a>  <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8143/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8143/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8143/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8143/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gofacebook/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8143/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/facebook/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8143/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gotwitter/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8143/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/twitter/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8143/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8143/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8143/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8143/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8143/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8143/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8143/" /></a> <img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=francoistremblay.wordpress.com&amp;blog=315059&amp;post=8143&amp;subd=francoistremblay&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" /></div>

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<div class="tags"><strong>Tagged with:</strong> <a href="http://cascadia.anarchoblogs.org/tag/anti-capitalismusurystv/" rel="tag">Anti-capitalism/usury/STV</a>, <a href="http://cascadia.anarchoblogs.org/tag/left-libertarianorg-feed/" rel="tag">Left Libertarian.org feed</a>, <a href="http://cascadia.anarchoblogs.org/tag/mechanisms-of-control/" rel="tag">Mechanisms of control</a>, <a href="http://cascadia.anarchoblogs.org/tag/morality/" rel="tag">Morality</a></div></div>

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<div class="post" id="post-20110118174717">
<h3 class="blogheading"><a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/the-delegation-of-responsibility-as-fundamental-absurdity-of-hierarchies/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to The “delegation of responsibility” as fundamental absurdity of hierarchies…">The “delegation of responsibility” as fundamental absurdity of hierarchies…</a>
<span class="dateline"><span class="date">5:47 pm / 18 January 2011</span>
<cite class="feed">by <a href="http://cascadia.anarchoblogs.org/author/francois-tremblay/" title="Posts by Francois Tremblay">Francois Tremblay</a>, at <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com">Check Your Premises</a></cite></span></h3>
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<p>In order to &#8220;liberate&#8221; the person to be an obedient subject, to turn a person towards blindly evil-doing and evil-promoting, to turn them against their fellows, it is necessary to convince the person that his responsibility for his own actions has been delegated to someone else.</p>
<p>To understand why this is a logical impossibility, take the example of a hitman&#8217;s crime. Andre hires Bresson with a contract stating that Bresson must kill Andre&#8217;s wife, and that Bresson is delegating all responsibility for his actions in that regard to Andre. Bresson kills Andre&#8217;s wife and is taken to court. Bresson then stands up, and defends himself by saying &#8220;but look here, I have this contract saying that I am not responsible for these actions, and so you must arrest Andre for the murder, not me.&#8221;</p>
<p>I think no one would recognize this as an rational defense: signing a piece of paper which says that you are not responsible for your actions does not magically not make you responsible for your actions. Bresson committed the murder, therefore he is responsible for it, no matter how many pieces of paper he signed to the opposite effect. A contract cannot make a person not responsible for their own actions, or make rain fall upwards, or make it so that three times three is ten. You can state and restate that all these impossible things are factual, as many times as you want and as clearly as you want, but this does not make them any less impossible.  </p>
<p>This &#8220;delegation of responsibility&#8221; is make-believe. The objective of this fake delegation is two-fold. The first is, as I already stated, to &#8220;liberate&#8221; the person from having to follow actual moral or ethical principles, or from being compassionate and loving. The second is to give credit for the person&#8217;s actions to the authority to which they are &#8220;delegated.&#8221; By far the most used is the former, but the latter is generally taken for granted as coming with the former. Whatever subjects do while &#8220;irresponsible,&#8221; if positive, is attributed to the authority they operate under. </p>
<p>The most striking example of this &#8220;delegation&#8221; is the story of Jesus&#8217; death. According to Christianity, the man-god Jesus died so that our sins could be expunged. But this can only be the case if our responsibility for our sins can somehow be delegated to the person of Jesus: otherwise, there is no relevance of this one man-god dying for the individuals who actually committed the sins. It also puts into question the idea that one can redeem sins by being killed, as well as the negative status of sin (which is defined as disobedience to God), but those are separate issues. The main issue is that it is logical nonsense for one person to be punished for someone else&#8217;s actions; of course, the actual reason for this story lies in the notion of sacrificing animals as atonement, which is another logical nonsense.</p>
<p>Another major &#8220;delegation&#8221; in Christianity and all other monotheisms is the belief in God as the creator of good and evil. Because the subject &#8220;delegates&#8221; the attribution of good and evil to God, he is then &#8220;liberated&#8221; from the necessity to make his own moral evaluations; all he has left to do is be an obedient subject. But such a &#8220;delegation&#8221; is logically impossible. Even if we posit that it is possible for anyone to know &#8220;the word of God,&#8221; the individual must still first decide to follow it, a decision which necessarily comes prior to the adoption of Christianity. Therefore there always exists some inner principles, some way of judging good and evil, which come prior to, and sustain, Christian beliefs. But more importantly, it cannot be the case that we are no longer obligated to make moral evaluations, because we are still committing actions on the basis of these evaluations, and we are still responsible for these actions. It does no good to the mother who drowned her children to declare that God did the evaluating for her. All those who abandon their moral compass and voluntarily subjugate themselves to some authority are personally responsible for the actions they perpetrate under that authority (and of course so is the authority as well, for giving the orders). </p>
<p>A capitalist work contract is very similar to the hitman contract I used as an example. In such a contract, the worker &#8220;delegates the responsibility&#8221; for his production to the corporate person in exchange for a wage. But, once again, taking away the worker&#8217;s responsibility for his own production in the name of a contract is logical nonsense. Either he did produce, or he did not: if he did, he is entitled to the full product of his labor, which he may or may not decide to trade in exchange for a wage, and if he did not, then he is entitled to nothing at all. </p>
<p>Note that while, unlike in the religious cases, this &#8220;delegation&#8221; is mainly undertaken to credit the authority, not to &#8220;liberate&#8221; the person, &#8220;liberation&#8221; is also integral to the process. The submission of the worker to the dehumanizing processes of capitalist work is necessary for said work to proceed; moral or ethical evaluation of these dehumanizing processes is not desirable for those who control them. It is also necessary to condition workers to obey orders without thinking of the consequences to their own society, to other societies, and to the environment. Without this conditioning, capitalism would crumble, as it depends crucially on undermining its host society, other societies (esp. in its neo-liberal form), and the environment. </p>
<p>In a less literal sense, the same fallacy can be applied to democracy as well. The act of voting is a &#8220;delegation of responsibility,&#8221; insofar as the voter delegates judgments about right and wrong to the politicians who are elected, as this is the basic nature of democracy. As such, it falls under the same fallacy as delegating decisions about right and wrong to God or to a corporate person. </p>
<p>We observe this mechanism at play in every hierarchy, even if it can remain implicit. Children being blamed for their parents&#8217; reaction to their behavior, and the fact that children are so afraid of their parents&#8217; reaction that they will suppress their own psychological needs, is a good example of an implicit &#8220;delegation&#8221; generated by an authoritarian system. Because the authority has the ability to punish, and an ego to protect, subjects have no choice but to evaluate their actions by what they believe and expect the authority will do in response. </p>
<p>Another example of passing along responsibility happens when we reject responsibility for ourselves and try to pin it on someone or something else. In trying to attribute guilt, we see things like &#8220;it&#8217;s society&#8217;s fault&#8221; or &#8220;it&#8217;s not our fault, it&#8217;s only his fault, we are all victims.&#8221; These are both attempts to reject responsibility. </p>
<p>All of the systems I have targeted claim to emphasize responsibility. I have explained <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2009/06/11/projection-as-a-universal-phenomenon/">the phenomenon of projection</a> before, and this falls squarely within it. It is precisely because these systems are founded on, and depend on, the usurpation of responsibility and the destruction of responsibility that they must misdirect people&#8217;s attention on the issue of responsibility. As in any other projection, those people who tout &#8220;personal responsibility&#8221; the most are generally the ones who believe in it the least. </p>
<p>The net result of such projection is, as it is for many other concepts, that the concept of &#8220;responsibility&#8221; itself is distorted beyond all hope. To really understand it, we have to ignore these self-serving ideologies and look at the actual facts. Who is acting? What is the nature of the action? What are its premises and are they valid? What is the context of the action? How is this context created and maintained? What is this person doing, what is that person doing? Without a thorough, naive examination of a situation, we cannot have any hope of properly attributing responsibility in a world where responsibility is consistently misattributed and destroyed.</p>
<br />Filed under: <a href='http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/category/anarchist-theory/anti-capitalismusurystv/'>Anti-capitalism/usury/STV</a>, <a href='http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/category/anarchist-theory/deconstructing-statism/'>Deconstructing statism</a>, <a href='http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/category/anarchist-theory/left-libertarianorg-feed/'>Left Libertarian.org feed</a>, <a href='http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/category/morality/'>Morality</a>, <a href='http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/category/religious-belief/'>Religious belief</a>  <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8028/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8028/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8028/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8028/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gofacebook/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8028/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/facebook/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8028/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gotwitter/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8028/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/twitter/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8028/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8028/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8028/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8028/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8028/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8028/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/8028/" /></a> <img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=francoistremblay.wordpress.com&amp;blog=315059&amp;post=8028&amp;subd=francoistremblay&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" /></div>

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<div class="post" id="post-20101213174224">
<h3 class="blogheading"><a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/the-case-for-socialist-intellectual-ownership/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to The case for socialist intellectual ownership.">The case for socialist intellectual ownership.</a>
<span class="dateline"><span class="date">5:42 pm / 13 December 2010</span>
<cite class="feed">by <a href="http://cascadia.anarchoblogs.org/author/francois-tremblay/" title="Posts by Francois Tremblay">Francois Tremblay</a>, at <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com">Check Your Premises</a></cite></span></h3>
<div class="entry">
<p>UPDATE: Stephan Kinsella has written <a href="http://c4sif.org/2010/12/the-worst-argument-for-ip-ever/">yet another of his empty rebuttals</a>, this time about this entry (calling it &#8220;the worst argument for IP ever,&#8221; which indicates that he apparently is either a horrible reader or that he thinks a system without property is a system of property). I already addressed the little amount of substance in what he wrote in my comment to it.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p><a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/anti-ip-arguments-can-be-transposed-against-property/">As I&#8217;ve discussed before</a>, the case against IP from the libertarian side is predicated on the fact that IP is a particularly destructive and unjustified form of property. As a libsoc, I do not believe in property, therefore I reject IP on that basis also, although I do not think IP is particularly destructive or unjustified: all rights to property are destructive and unjustified.</p>
<p>But the other side of IP, the premise that intellectual work must be rewarded above and beyond labor, is rarely examined, much in the same way that we don&#8217;t examine usury. The questions that are invariably asked along that line are pragmatic in nature (i.e. does IP actually stimulate innovation and reward innovators?) instead of being ethical (i.e. is it just to stimulate innovation and reward innovators, and if so, how and how much?)</p>
<p>The two issues are linked. IP does not stimulate innovation and it does not reward innovators because it is founded on commodity fetishism; it is the owner of the idea itself, being an abstract piece of property, who is rewarded, not the individual who laboured to discover it (I do not mean to imply that there must only be one discoverer involved, but I am using the singular as a simplification). IP is a failure, not because it recognizes intellectual work, but because it is a form of property. This is why I propose the term IO (intellectual ownership).</p>
<p>My position on IO may seem to contradict my belief in a system of equal wages. I&#8217;ve said before that the justification for equal wages is that our production is only a tiny margin on everyone else&#8217;s production, and that therefore we are no more entitled to an unequal part of society&#8217;s production than everyone else. But this scenario assumes a fixed system where there is no innovation present. If person A invents a new manufacturing process, which is then used by person B, to the exclusion of anything else, to produce some commodity, person B owes more to person A for his production than he does to any other specific person. The same can be said for a publishing business regarding the authors whose work it publishes.</p>
<p>In my IO system, innovation or creative works are first registered in the same way than they are today. The differences start when we look at what this registration implies. In the IP system, holding a patent or a copyright means you hold an artificial monopoly over that property for a long period of time, consumers have to pay monopoly prices combined with a lack of choice, and innovation is blocked because other producers cannot use and improve upon the innovation. </p>
<p>In the IO system, everyone is encouraged to manufacture products which take advantage of the innovation. There is no restriction of the kind we see today. The only limitation is that the cost-price must be raised by a certain percentage, reflecting the added cost of the innovation itself. In the case of artistic works, this percentage might be up to 1%, but in the case of innovations, it would be a range something like 0.1%-0.01%, the specific percentage in each case depending on how significant the improvement is. </p>
<p>So this is a sort of automatic licensing system, but unlike licensing systems, any ideas not licensed can be used without any repercussions whatsoever. There is therefore a strong incentive for people to make their discoveries public instead of hiding them under non-disclosure contracts, especially since the inventor himself, in a system without usury, gets as much more money from other people selling products based on his innovations than if he had a monopoly imposed on it (assuming of course that in both cases supply would be equal: in fact, it is likely that the inventor would gain more from the former case). </p>
<p>In the IP system, which is based on commodity fetishism, the owner of the &#8220;intellectual property&#8221; is rewarded (generally some faceless corporation with the clout to sue anyone who steps on their toes). In IO, it is the individual who performed the labor of discovery who is rewarded, since it is this labor that is recognized as embodied in the innovation. </p>
<p>The IO system, therefore, does everything that the IP system is supposed to be doing as a consequence, but does not actually accomplish: 1. reward inventors properly, 2. stimulate innovation, 3. encourage the sharing of information. On each point, we find that the IP system not only fails, but has effects which are contrary to the objective. The IO system, on the other hand, fulfills each of these points. Not only that, but it also brings with it the massive advantage that consumers no longer have to pay monopoly prices (which can be murderous if you are, say, a sick Ghanaian and the pill you need costs fifty US dollars because there are five patents on it) and suffer lack of choice in the name of protecting innovation. </p>
<p>It also puts an upper limit on the ever-expanding horizon of IP: obviously, if the inventor dies, the royalties have to end as well, since they are tied to him personally. But one would expect that a rational system would limit royalties farther than that. Ultimately, the time interval within which IO applies would have to be dependent on the time it takes for any given innovation to be integrated in the framework of production and become old hat, for example. I would not hazard to guess what a reasonable interval would be, and I assume it would depend on the kind of intellectual output put forward. </p>
<p>IO also makes the issue of &#8220;pirating&#8221; irrelevant, since pirated content is, most of the time, distributed at zero cost-price, and any percentage of zero is zero. Therefore &#8220;pirating&#8221; could never be a crime in any shape or form. </p>
<p>It also eliminates all concepts of making it illegal to play a song in public without paying fees, or any such nonsense. Playing a song in public involves no cost-prices, and therefore is not under the provision of IO. It does not matter that the &#8220;property&#8221; is being infringed, since IO recognizes no such property, only labor. </p>
<br />Filed under: <a href='http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/category/anarchist-theory/anti-capitalismusurystv/'>Anti-capitalism/usury/STV</a>, <a href='http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/category/anarchist-theory/the-principles-of-freedom/'>The principles of freedom</a>  <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/7753/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/7753/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/7753/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/7753/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gofacebook/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/7753/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/facebook/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/7753/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gotwitter/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/7753/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/twitter/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/7753/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/7753/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/7753/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/7753/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/7753/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/7753/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/francoistremblay.wordpress.com/7753/" /></a> <img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=francoistremblay.wordpress.com&amp;blog=315059&amp;post=7753&amp;subd=francoistremblay&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" /></div>

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<div class="post" id="post-20101203171033">
<h3 class="blogheading"><a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2010/12/03/from-morality-to-ethics%E2%80%A6-part-23/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to From morality to ethics… [part 2/3]">From morality to ethics… [part 2/3]</a>
<span class="dateline"><span class="date">5:10 pm / 03 December 2010</span>
<cite class="feed">by <a href="http://cascadia.anarchoblogs.org/author/francois-tremblay/" title="Posts by Francois Tremblay">Francois Tremblay</a>, at <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com">Check Your Premises</a></cite></span></h3>
<div class="entry">
<p>Now to talk about ethics proper. So far, I have kept my language as general as possible, and made it clear that I did not argue for one specific worldview or system over others, because I was talking about general logical consequences, not at all about implementation. But now it&#8217;s time to start talking about implementation, based on the principles derived.</p>
<p>Ethics concerns itself directly with the rules which we believe should regulate society or sub-groups of society (in the latter case, we use a specific term such as bioethics, medical ethics, business ethics, legal ethics, animal rights, etc). However, social rules dictate the kind of institutions and structures that exist in that society, and the institutions and structures that exist dictate the kind of rules that persist within a society. So there is a direct link between the two: we are also talking about ethics when we look at the desirable structure of society. </p>
<p>The role of an ethical system is to provide the context within which our values can (or cannot, as may be the case) be fulfilled more or less fully. This is why it may be a little complicated to distinguish our individual actions from the greater social context, because our actions are always informed by the rules of society. There is a huge difference between &#8220;why should we not permit people to hurt each other?&#8221; and &#8220;how is it not in your interest to hurt others?&#8221;, but the former question informs the latter one, because institutions and structures dictate what is in the person&#8217;s self-interest. In a society where you are allowed to gain power over others, it becomes in your personal self-interest to try to gain that power, and then keep it, regardless of how badly it hurts others or society as a whole. So there is a conflict between one&#8217;s values and what is good for society when that society is structured in a way such as to permit or encourage the existence and accumulation of power. One&#8217;s conception of ethics and one&#8217;s normative views on economics, politics, justice, education, and so on, are really reducible to each other. </p>
<p>When we talk about ethics, we are absolutely certain to run into relativist arguments, so it&#8217;s important to clarify that issue. People will say that, for instance, culture is the only ethical factor that they recognize: whatever is part of the culture is right. But that&#8217;s an authoritarian statement, not really a relativist statement at all, since &#8220;culture&#8221; in our societies is ultimately determined by the people who have the power to dictate what people must or must not do, which ideas are acceptable and which ideas lie beyond the margins of reasonable discourse, where the &#8220;culture&#8221; begins and ends. So we&#8217;re actually not talking about relativism at all. </p>
<p>But even looking beyond that, we find that the argument only holds weight if we posit that ethical evaluations must be detached from their maker. Obviously all thoughts are relative insofar as they are dependent on a specific mind which has a specific nature. All the thoughts we have are our own thoughts, and only make sense within the context of our mind or a mind similar to ours. Ethical evaluations are thoughts, like any other proposition that exists, and as such are not excluded from that necessity. When I say (or any individual says), therefore, that forced circumcision on newborns, racism, sexism, the wearing of the burka, the brutal and stullifying treatment of children, are wrong, I am necessarily saying this on the basis of our own personal values, not anyone else&#8217;s values. How could it be otherwise? Any statement of knowledge is innately personal. </p>
<p>But it would do no good for the relativist to reply that my evaluations are thereby invalid because &#8220;they do not apply to that culture, only to your culture.&#8221; For one thing, the values we are talking about at such a level are universal: we are talking about things which bring physiological or psychological pain, mental or moral retardation, social or economic inequality, which are all verifiable facts, not about one&#8217;s opinion about the best ice cream. For another, it is not at all clear that what I have said so far is culturally accepted: after all, the backbone of my argument is that the desire for freedom and equality necessarily leads to Anarchism, and very few people in my &#8220;culture&#8221; would agree with me. And finally, this sort of objection participates to a common fallacy which I can describe most simply as &#8220;people disagree, therefore there is no actual fact of the matter.&#8221; But this is always a non sequitur. The fact that people disagree about something does not mean it has no universal validity. People are divided about such issues as evolution, economics, the germ theory of disease, whether UFOs are alien spacecrafts, and so on. There are even people who still argue that the Earth is flat. And yet it is unreasonable to claim that there must therefore be no actual fact of the matter in any of these cases. </p>
<p>It is not cultural norms or cultural preferences as a whole that are the problem here. There are a great number of cultural norms or cultural preferences which are not violent and which respect the freedom of the individual; the ones I have listed, don&#8217;t. Of course, one can always reply that I value non-violence and freedom for cultural reasons, and that therefore my evaluation is worthless. This can go on and on forever, because whatever I bring up, no matter how universal, can be dismissed as &#8220;an artefact of culture.&#8221; This is just nay-saying, not an argument. If it can be proven that my specific arguments originate in &#8220;culture&#8221; alone, then there might be an argument to be made. Without this, cultural relativism cannot get off the ground.</p>
<p>I said before that hierarchies have already been disproven by many of the principles I&#8217;ve established. I have <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2008/10/01/why-hierarchies-are-immoral/">already defined</a> a hierarchy as being any system where control (force, the threat of force, indoctrination, manipulation, etc) is systemic and directed. This includes virtually all of our institutions and many relational modes. The net result of any hierarchy is to subordinate the freedom of the individual for the good of the elite within that hierarchy; they therefore are opposite to the principles of freedom, equality and liberty that we have already established. Therefore Anarchism, which is defined as the belief that all hierarchies are undesirable, is validated. </p>
<p>Note that this does not mean that people who are subjects to those hierarchies believe they are not free or equal. Of course it is always in the interest of the elites to make their subjects believe that they are free and equal. But it can never be the case that the subjects of a hierarchy, no matter what it is, are free and equal; it is a logical impossibility. There is no such thing as a free citizen, a free consumer or a free worker, a free religious believer, a free child, a free student or a free prisoner (well, that last one is pretty self-evident). All are subject to restrictions on their freedom, which they generally accept based on a belief in some imaginary higher good or under the threat of force, and none of them are the equals of the elite in the hierarchy.</p>
<p>Another sort of objection, that mostly comes from the voluntaryist and &#8220;anarcho-capitalist&#8221; people, is the &#8220;aren&#8217;t people free to join hierarchies?&#8221; argument. They think that invalidating hierarchies means that one is arguing against freedom in some way. But this is like arguing that people should be free to punch each other in the face; when it&#8217;s consensual, it&#8217;s called boxing, but when it&#8217;s not, it&#8217;s called assault. In our current society, there is no possibility of consent to hierarchies, because we depend on obeying them for our survival and our social status (or in the case of religion, used to).</p>
<p>On the other hand, if some people in an Anarchist society are absolutely nostalgic about being ordered around and being under constant threat, they can reproduce the experience in an egalitarian society, as long as everyone consents and does not try to involve anyone else in their weird domination and submission games. It is doubtful that many would participate, unless they had some serious psychological issues. In an Anarchist society, the hierarchies we know today would become the equivalent of BDSM: crap people used to do in earnest but which today looks more disturbing than anything else, and which speaks badly of the participants&#8217; psyche.</p>
<p>Since all hierarchies are wrong, this includes capitalism as well, since the foundation of capitalism is the hierarchy between employers (who own the means of production and centrally plan production) and employees. Not all features of capitalism are directly hierarchical, although they may be disproven in other ways. Usury, for instance, goes against the principle of equality by being founded on the belief that some people (the owners of capital) should be rewarded without providing any labor. And if usury is invalid, then so are property rights, since property rights include usury by definition. </p>
<p>Some Anarchists rave about &#8220;direct democracy,&#8221; or somesuch, as being better than the representative democracy we have today. But both are totalizing processes, reducing all decision-making to the action of voting, and reducing the complexities of the structure or society to a popularity contest which renders rational discourse irrelevant. All democracies eventually have to nullify consent in some fashion; a consensual democratic system is necessarily unstable because it cannot rationally deal with disagreements, and must rely on coercion to maintain itself. No individual would ever put up with his desires being invalidated two-thirds or more of the time (in a democracy, even if you vote for the winning side, you seldom get what you wanted) if he can just go to another, similar organization where his desires are always taken into account and rarely invalidated. </p>
<p>Now, of course an organization is allowed to have stated goals and general policies, and to exclude people who disagree with them. In a society, for instance, these general policies would be the rights of the individual. But if a person, who agrees with these goals and policies, disagrees with a decision of the group, he should not be forced to either walk in lockstep or get kicked out. That would completely nullify the concept of consent and destroy the point of an egalitarian organization, which is that people can decide for themselves what they want to do, in unmediated relations, with everyone able to look at each other eye to eye, instead of having to walk in lockstep with some kooky leader who controls everyone. Whatever its flavor, democracy is just a somewhat less coercive way, but more mentally damaging way, of controlling people. </p>
<p><a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2010/12/05/from-morality-to-ethics%E2%80%A6-part-33/">Continue to part 3.</a></p>
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<div class="post" id="post-20101107175143">
<h3 class="blogheading"><a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/fuck-society-i-owe-society-nothing-part-22/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to “Fuck society! I owe society nothing!” [part 2/2]">“Fuck society! I owe society nothing!” [part 2/2]</a>
<span class="dateline"><span class="date">5:51 pm / 07 November 2010</span>
<cite class="feed">by <a href="http://cascadia.anarchoblogs.org/author/francois-tremblay/" title="Posts by Francois Tremblay">Francois Tremblay</a>, at <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com">Check Your Premises</a></cite></span></h3>
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<p>The fact that our production is a margin on the production of society as a whole (this network of labor) leads us necessarily to egalitarianism in economics, that is to say some form of equality of outcomes (to be contrasted with equality of opportunities, which is a capitalist conceit). This makes sense if we look at the justifications for inequality of outcomes. People will argue that, say, one person deserves to be paid more than another because they contribute more to society. First of all, the basis of capitalism is that value is subjective, therefore such a statement reduces itself to saying that one person deserves to be paid more because they are being paid more. But more importantly, that contribution itself depends on the labor of society as a whole, therefore the value of one person&#8217;s contribution is almost completely the result of everyone else&#8217;s contributions, making them for all intents and purposes equal. </p>
<p>Furthermore, each person&#8217;s labor is as essential as everyone else&#8217;s, nullifying the belief that their contributions are unequal. One can say that a surgeon (U.S. median salary: 68.98$/h) saves lives, while an automobile mechanic (U.S. median salary: 16.43$/h) &#8220;only&#8221; repairs cars, but by no criteria can we say that the surgeon contributes more or less to society (or for that matter, contributes more or less than a star baseball player who makes thousands of dollars per hour). What we can do is point out that both the surgeon and the automobile mechanic are essential to each other as surgeons and automobile mechanics. The fact that their services are rewarded with more or less money in a capitalist economy merely indicates that their labor is socially necessary, not that one form of labor is more or less necessary than another; their respective hourly wages are actually the product of power disparities all the way down, from the costs of schooling to the degree of concentration of corporate power in any given field.</p>
<p>The same criticisms can be leveled at usury, which is, after all, nothing more than a more unusual way to distribute resources unequally, as the money used for usury is going from someone who is trying to fulfill a need to someone who can already fulfill it. Their production is only a margin upon society&#8217;s production, and there is no reason for us to say that the person providing capital or jobs is contributing more to society. The capitalists can only say this because they assume that the capital or jobs would otherwise not be made available, when in fact they should be available to everyone in the first place. It is true that the person worked to get that capital, and that work should be rewarded proportionally, but it does not warrant special economic privileges. </p>
<p>As for the second criticism, we cannot even say that usurious jobs are equally essential to society as any other job, since they are in fact not socially necessary at all. While we always need people to keep buildings running, manufacture our units of commerce, and help organize production, we can do without the landlord, the banker and the CEO. We are not interested in measures aiming to keep rents from skyrocketing, or to give workers more input within the corporation, or to make the banking system more accountable. We are interested solely in the abolition of these systems, and redirecting the gargantuan amounts of wasted labor and wasted money that they entail.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2009/10/11/without-equality-there-is-no-society-part-33/">a previous entry</a> I also analyzed the arguments that inequality is justified by differences in capacities, and justified by the need to make people work harder.</p>
<p>As libertarians properly speaking, i.e. people who are against hierarchies and their use of force, we are committed to a certain level of egalitarianism, although that level may vary wildly between individuals. American &#8220;Libertarians&#8221; and &#8220;anarcho-capitalists&#8221; tend to be &#8220;thin libertarians,&#8221; meaning that they see libertarianism as a bare-bones ideology which implies no specific ethical commitments beyond the simplest application of the principle of non-aggression. Left-wing libertarians, on the other hand, tend to be &#8220;thick libertarians,&#8221; seeing libertarianism as a whole bundle of entertwined ethical commitments (such as anti-capitalism, anti-racism, anti-fascism, feminism, and so on), within which non-aggression is only one strand. </p>
<p>From the &#8220;thin libertarian&#8221; perspective, any ethical view which goes beyond non-aggression is seen as a violation of rights, especially property rights. Even saying something as non-controversial as &#8220;people shouldn&#8217;t refuse service to someone on the basis of his race&#8221; is seen as an attempt to interfere with the right to choose who one can associate with, and the right to do whatever one wants with one&#8217;s property. The &#8220;thin libertarians&#8221; want us to accept scenarios of widespread racism on the grounds that &#8220;being against racism is not what libertarianism is about.&#8221; His support for freedom ends where his own &#8220;self-interest&#8221; ends. </p>
<p>It is therefore easy to see why they become defensive when ethical commitments to egalitarianism are brought up. They firmly believe that any such commitment implies the use of force, just as the State&#8217;s own professed social commitments imply the use of force. They blindly follow the rule that &#8220;if you are against something, then you must want to use force against it.&#8221; If you owe society something, then other people are justified in using force to take it from you, much like how owing taxes to the State means the State is justified in taking it from you by force.</p>
<p>An ethical commitment to egalitarianism is not about anyone owing anything to anyone. It is about acknowledging the facts and aligning society in harmony with those facts, to desire a society which bases its operations on truth instead of lies. It is not even about &#8220;the rich&#8221; owing anything to &#8220;the poor.&#8221; It is about building a society where there are no classes of &#8220;rich&#8221; and &#8220;poor,&#8221; where resource accretion does not persist from generation to generation, skewing all incentives beyond recognition, making consent and free will impossible. We oppose, not the end results of exploitative behaviour, but the institutions that create and mold that behaviour. These institutions, of course, are constituted of, and supported by, individuals, who inevitably get in the way of change, but we oppose those individuals for getting in the way of changing the world for the better, not because of their specific exploitative acts. Whether the goose or the golden egg came first, the goose will still fight you when you try to snatch it away. </p>
<p>Likewise, we don&#8217;t believe that people who don&#8217;t &#8220;get with the program&#8221; should be forced to agree with us. But an Anarchy cannot survive unless people understand the need for equality. As I pointed out before, freedom and equality are two sides of the same coin, and we cannot have one without the other. A society which consciously abandons equality, necessarily abandons freedom along with it. A society which consciously abandons freedom, necessarily abandons equality along with it. </p>
<p>People who refuse to participate to an egalitarian system are free to live outside of it, as long as they don&#8217;t overtake that system. If they persist in wanting to live within it, then they must not expect others to respect (legally or otherwise) their non-egalitarian arrangements. Ideally, force should never be necessary, but we know the real world is messier than that. </p>
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	</div>
		</div>



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