Dual Paths: Tensions, Complimentary Concepts, and Finding an Orientation Toward Liberty.

There are many ideas to navigate on the course to liberty. Examining the relations between several sets of seemingly unrelated or contradictory concepts can provide a clearer picture of the way forward to a libertarian society. The following ten explorations are both philosophical and action-oriented. They will hopefully help establish a stronger foundation to the pursuit of liberty.

Individual and community.

Sometimes the essential conflict of social philosophy is framed as that of individualism versus collectivism, or egoism versus community. Those who speak of reconciling the two can be regarded with suspicion as seeking to subsume one under the other. But there is no reason this has to be so.

Assuming that the individual and the community are involved in a conflict that is irreconcilable, or at best able to be only somewhat mitigated, neglects the idea that the best community is that which is best for individual flourishing, and the most flourishing individual exists in the most functional community. So liberty is both about individuals and about the communities where free individuals interact for mutual benefit.

 Individual Empowerment and the Dispersal of Power.

Different uses of the word “power” can lead to confusion. On the one hand, we have “liberty versus power,” government serving “the powerful,” the evils of the pursuit of power, and calls to “abolish power.” On the other hand, when people are “powerless,” that generally doesn’t mean that they are living in equal freedom, but that they are helpless, without autonomy, entirely at the mercy of others.

Liberty is harmed by power relations where people with vastly unequal amounts of power rule over others. However, anarchy does not necessitate a “power vacuum,” but the dispersal of power as widely and equally as possible. Doing so is both a project of widespread individual empowerment – helping individuals gain decision-making power over their own lives – as well as the breakup of authoritarian power centers.

Evolutionary and Revolutionary Political Change.

The evolutionary approach and the revolutionary approach to changing the political and social situation are sometimes contrasted and framed as irreconcilable. Such a framing is detrimental. On the one hand, focusing exclusively on The Revolution as a massive overturning of power sets up an all-or-nothing pursuit of a millenarian cataclysmic event. And if the revolution doesn’t come or doesn’t turn out right, then disillusionment or defense of the status quo sets in. Similarly, if The Revolution is something that happens every day, then revolution loses its meaning as it is difficult for people to live in constant upheaval.

On the other hand, revolutions happen. A movement needs to prepare for them to be relevant enough to influence the course of the revolution. An exclusively evolutionary approach can be easily confused as accommodating the status quo, or as a non-threatening nuisance to the authorities.

A better approach would be the dual path – an evolutionary approach of building libertarian alternatives that also have revolutionary capability. Pushing people into revolution is vanguardist and unlikely to be effective, but informing popular dissent, demonstrating libertarian alternatives, and being ready to provide guidance to popular insurrections is valuable. In this way, revolution is viewed more as an event that is sometimes necessary in the evolution toward greater liberty.

Rejection and Direction.

Sometimes it is best to try to steer something in a libertarian direction, and sometimes it is best to reject it altogether. For example, consider a local neighborhood association. It might be valuable for the libertarian to get involved in the organization and make it a vehicle for local autonomy that respects individual liberty. But the association might be so full of authoritarian values that it would be better to reject it altogether and focus on building other networks and organizations.

The decision to reject or direct depends on the situation. Dogmatic rejectionism leads to irrelevance or living as a hermit, but over-direction leads to tyranny or being viewed as a busybody.

Exploring rejection and direction reveals another tension: subversion versus co-option. One can subvert the intentions of authority by moving an institution in a libertarian direction. But by participating in that institution there is a risk of being co-opted into merely perpetuating its current function. This is a tension to be mindful of.

Inroads and Outreach.

It is necessary to make inroads into communities and networks. Interpersonal relations are essential to living, and of course you are going to bring your values and skills to any social situation. But are you going to relentlessly agitate or argue the finer points of theory to friends? Only when the occasion calls for it.

However, outward agitation and disseminating libertarian views are important. This is the function of impersonal outreach, where one seeks to reach as many people as possible with a message, and generalizations are used to do so.

Outreach without inroads has less grounding in lived reality and shows less demonstrable value to people for whom the ideas are only abstractions that nobody they know lives by. But inroads without outreach means less differentiation, fewer people getting the message, and possibly to the communities where you’ve made inroads being co-opted by more dominant ideologies.

Publicity and Anonymity.

When engaging in outreach, it is sometimes best to put a public face behind what you are doing, and sometimes best to sit back and let information be digested without the distractions of personality or a broader ideology.

It is also essential to consider publicity versus anonymity in the context of personal security. It is often assumed that one will be safer in anonymity, and many times this is the case. If the authorities don’t know who you are they can’t get you, and even when anonymity isn’t perfect one can at least present oneself as a smaller fish, not worth the resources to catch. However, publicity can be protective. It might be more difficult to quietly disappear or assassinate someone if they are a well-known figure with respect and roots in a community. The public will only believe that so many “accidents” are possible. Similarly, if a person known to a large, active social network is arrested, they can expect support in the form of calls to jail, resources for defense, and public scrutiny directed at the behavior of the authorities.

Local and Global.

Libertarians should think and act globally and locally (though obviously individual action will emphasize different activities depending on specialties).

Acting locally enables the face-to-face interaction that can create true, experienced alternatives to authoritarianism. But without a global perspective, the local community can become insular, isolated, and more easily defeated. Worse, when there are no other options available for libertarian community, then the single option is more likely to stagnate and devolve into a fight over unifying dogma.

A global approach releases the pressures that are built up in the course of the necessary local approach. Also, organizing on a broader geographic basis can help the message spread to more areas, defying authority globally and inspiring new action locally. Examples of global networks valuable to liberty are WikiLeaks and Anonymous. Examples of organizations that inspire local action are the Industrial Workers of the World, the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, and Students for a Stateless Society.

 Participation versus Specialization, Letting People Alone to Their Interests.

It’s generally good for decision-making to be participatory – everyone involved gets a say, and everyone involved has an actual stake in how things operate. However, not everyone is going to be interested in getting involved in every decision to be made, and it’s unlikely that any person has the time to get involved in all the meetings and events that would be necessary to make everything run. This would of course be mitigated by many necessities being satisfied by smaller worker cooperatives whose meetings would only involve a few people. However, for things like road repair, garbage cleanup, and park maintenance, not everyone is going to be that interested. Certainly, freeloading behavior can be discouraged by mechanisms of reciprocity – someone who doesn’t help much doesn’t get much help. But people will have a range of interests, and not all disinterest is detrimental.

Indeed, most people seem tonot care about politics so long as they have sufficient autonomy to do what they are actually interested in. This principle could stand to be examined more by myself and others. If it holds true, then action should take it into account. For example, if anarchy caused savings in living costs that brought significant improvements in living quality for significantly less work hours, and much more control of things you are interested in, is that worth the tradeoff for several hours a year attending meetings, pruning plants, or fixing potholes?

Encouraging an attitude of participation and problem-solving can be helpful, but it can only go so far, and it should only be pushed so far.

Common Defense and Professional Defense.

It seems unlikely that anarchist society would emerge simultaneously in all regions of the world. Therefore the anarchist society would need to deter, or defend itself against, a variety of imperial ambitions. At one level we have the common defense – the armed individual, the neighborhood watch, the militia. At another level we have professional defense – the aircraft operators, the special operations forces. The specifics of how they would operate would of course need to be worked out. But they would be unlikely to make war on and conquer each other because 1) to get to an anarchist society would require sufficient libertarian sentiment to make the re-establishment of authority prohibitive, and 2) not many people want their neighborhood to be a warzone or to see their families’ livelihoods burning. The relation between a hard defense of weaponry and armed maneuvers, and a soft defense of solidarity actions and subversion, shed light on how to best increase the potential costs for governments to intervene against an anarchist society.

Network and Confederation.

Social networks and the confederation are two precedents for (not necessarily examples of) anarchist organization.

The network can be formal or informal, and operates on some combination of trust, affinity, and purpose. It can be geographically concentrated or dispersed. A network can be hierarchical, but in the case of the anarchist network it should be as egalitarian as practical.

The confederation is a way for different actors to identify with a common set of allegiances – a certain political cohesion, a certain set of rules. If sets of rules are established on a voluntary and participatory basis with the goal of mutual benefit and individual empowerment, then it is possible that anarchist societies might look something like a series of confederations. The libertarian confederations would be expected to take a peacemaking approach to relating with each other and in resolving disputes among members, including the process of secession.

The network and confederation model is a mix of description and prediction, but is not meant to be a prescription that must be adhered to. We will understand the organization of a free society better as we refine our theory with practice.

Conclusion.

Achieving the right balance among different approaches to pursuing liberty is not an all-or-nothing affair, but acting with a greater degree of accuracy will be helpful. Sometimes, things that at first seem contradictory are instead complimentary, and even the tensions between opposites can be useful in creating a viable path. Pursuing liberty is a process that requires many different approaches and talents. Liberty is where numerous personalities and tendencies interact to create a society of individual empowerment and social reciprocity. 

— This essay is based on a session I led at the 2011 Alternatives Expo, part of the Porcupine Freedom Festival in Lancaster, NH.
By Darian Worden

Darian Worden is a graduate student of history, a news analyst at Center for a Stateless Society, and a host of the internet radio show Thinking Liberty. His essays and other works can be viewed at DarianWorden.com.

Paths to Liberation, or What if they built a factory and no one came?

"They can't stop us."

A lot of people in the broader anarchist movement seem to focus more on goals or endpoints, and ignore or underemphasize the means to achieving them. This is understandable, in that statists are constantly challenging us to identify what a stateless society will be like. (Statists are generally concerned much more with outcomes than the means to get to them, or most of them would be horribly shamed by the programs they advocate.) This creates a great deal of internecine squabbles that I think are unnecessary. Existentially, intentions are much less important in determining someone’s character than actions. Now there are many, many varieties of anarchist individuals and organizations with their own characteristics and philosophy, but I think, in terms of their program to achieve anarchism, we can divide them into 5 basic groups. I will attempt to explore these groups and their means, and see what their impact would be.

First off are the insurrectionary anarchists. Though they come in different flavors, most of them would consider themselves revolutionary anti-capitalists. Though dormant for a long time, the insurrectionary mode of anarchism was one of the oldest varieties, right alongside anarcho-syndicalism as anarchism became defined as a unique offshoot of the labor movement. The insurrectionary anarchists often get a lot of criticism from the rest of the “left” at large, criticism that I believe is un-deserved. This criticism, I believe, points to how much most people have been tamed by the powers that be, which have absorbed and co-opted their ostensible “opposition”. While I have a different “most preferred” strategy, they are certainly useful allies. When I saw the pictures from Greece, of the crowds *successfully* attacking riot police, my heart swelled.

Basically the insurrectionary anarchists follow a program of confronting capitalism when and where it exposes its major coordinating events, and of finding techniques to reclaim the abandoned or easily re-expropriated parts of the system for the use of the people. It is largely not a “productive” strategy, but rather a negative force, attacking state-capitalism while providing nothing for the capitalists to consume. In the beginning, food, shelter and clothing for the IAs comes from refuse or unused property, though ideally, as the revolution advances, they will be in position to make bold strikes into re-expropriation of actual exchange value. Now, this will be considered “stealing” by vulgar libertarians. But the IAs argument goes that the capitalists already stole their capacity to produce these goods from us. It would be no different than robbing the vaults where the IRS keeps their ill-gotten tax gains.

In terms of dialectical materialism, the IA movement could be seen as the revolution of the sub-proletariat, taking place in the midst of the incomplete revolution of the proletariat. For this reason, many statist Marxists see IAs as a counter revolutionary force… in a sense they are considered “too radical for the times”. As far as I can tell though, the IA movement, to the extent that it succeeds, provides quite a few boons to the working class.

First off, it reduces the “reserve army of the unemployed”, placing upward pressure on wage rates, by giving the workers a viable alternative to submission. Secondly, it removes goods from availability, increasing effective demand, which, while inflationary, also adds upward pressure on wage rates from the bottom up. Plus it gives psychological relief to the bottom, marginal strata of the working class by giving them a concrete viable alternative to their situation which is not submissive but defiant and proud, not alienated but passionate.

In theory this combined pressure on the capitalists should yield shocks and amplify the basic contradictions in the system… in some areas capitalism will collapse or be forced to withdraw. In these spaces the IAs will build a new way of life (somehow), rinse, repeat.

So far the most successful IA movement in recent times has been the EZLN, the Zapatistas of Chiapas. In many areas of Oaxaca there have been large pockets of success, but a lot of backlash as well.

Then there are the Philosophical anarchists. They come in both anarcho-capitalist and anarcho-socialist varieties. Their essential idea is to eschew political activism largely, but to make attempts to convince people far and wide of the essential rightness of their position. In theory, this will undermine the power and prestige of the state at all levels of society. Fewer and fewer individuals will actively take part in the various workings of the state, until one day the last bureaucrat turns the lights out in the last office. Though they tend not to openly advocate the other paths, their methodology requires people to pursue them, lest this method take 100s of years. They tend to be the most pessimistic about the short term prospects for anarchism. Many anarchists will combine philosophical outreach with other strategies, though the IAs often seem to be a bit less sanguine about this, seeing it as a diversionary waste of time.

There are the “Parliamentary” anarchists. These types also come in both anarcho-capitalist and anarcho-socialist varieties. They want to “work from the inside” to undermine the state through direct engagement with its machinery. They will field candidates, vote, agitate for specific laws, etc. In theory, by pressuring the state they will force it to act against the ruling classes’ wishes, weakening them step by step until the state itself is easily abolished altogether.

Anarcho-capitalists who follow this path are often indistinguishable from minarchist “libertarians” except in their idea of the endgame, and possible radicalism of their proposals. Anarcho-socialists who follow this path are often indistinguishable from Fabian social-democrats except in their idea of the endgame, and possible radicalism of their proposals.

The weakness of this position is that it tends to yield a very stable state. As the radical left and right parliamentarians collide, the economic positions will stabilize around a sort of mixed economy capitalism, while civil liberties will be high and militarism low. Very much like Western Europe actually. This sort of state will eventually collapse under its own economic contradictions but if both parties are dedicated to advancing their positions it could take a very long time.

Then there are the anarcho-syndicalists, or labor-anarchists, and the agorists. Despite evolving from very different positions, these two strategies have the most in common with each other, and are capable of co-existing with insurrectionary anarchism, at least in theory. They are not political revolutionary strategies, but economic revolutionary strategies, that employ force primary as a last ditch self-defense tactic.

Anarcho-syndicalism is one of the oldest varieties of anarchism, basically evolving out of the labor movement of the 19^th century. They seek to find ways to use direct action in the workplace to disrupt the employing class, while also developing alternative forms of production (often called syndicates, thus the name) that are worker-owned and often not tied into a profit motive. (Since the laborers would be receiving the full product of their labor, there would be no profit per-se, no excess revenue going to a third party.) Anarcho-syndicalism is not confrontational with “capitalism” as a unified force, but confronts the capitalists inside the workplace. The IWW, while not officially “anarchist” in name, is basically a model of how this sort of method works. They did not seek to engage the state directly, but to pressure the state to concede to their demands as workers.

In theory the employers will be pushed back and gradually replaced, until independent workers collectives will control the means of production and the state will cease to have any meaning or power.

Kevin Carson’s “Labor Struggle: A Free Market Model” has a lot of historical and speculative ideas about this path in detail.

The major advantage of this strategy is that it is productive and immediate. Using the techniques of direct action gets immediate, tangible results for the working class, which empowers them to engage in further action. The major disadvantage is that it tends to draw the fire of the state, literally and figuratively. As the conditions of production are moving away from large-scale material outlays, this methodology is becoming more and more practical again. At the same time, it is becoming more and more similar to agorism.

Agorism is the idea of counter-economic production with a philosophical underpinning of anarchism. Counter-economic production is production that exists outside of the purview or approval of the state. The black and grey markets, so called. In a sense, agorism could be seen as freelance anarcho-syndicalism. One difference is that agorism is something that can be practiced by individuals, small business owners and workers alike. The basic idea is to operate outside the eye, and thus control, of the state. Stealth, exile and cunning, as James Joyce put it, are required. This strategy is also productive and immediate, it is also direct action, only outside an official workplace.

The website agorism.info has a great deal of information about agorism and its possibilities as a revolutionary economic anarchist strategy.

As each of these paths advance, we can expect that there will be an overlap between an-syn and agorism. Unofficial unions, syndicates and labor associations will form their own production firms not dependent on a capitalist owner and in ways unauthorized by any state, thus being equivalent to agorist firms. Profit taking agorist firms and syndicates will trade with each other for parts and material and services. Both agorism and anarcho-syndicalism remove laborers and a marginal number of unemployed from the market for state-capitalist labor, thus providing upward pressure on wage rates. They are both deflationary forces, by adding goods and services to the market at lower prices than a statist firm which must absorb the costs of the state’s taxes and regulation. This puts state-capitalist firms in a vice. The state will have to expend more and more resources to fight these unauthorized mills of production, while at the same time dealing with a larger and larger insurrectionary movement. It is quite reasonable to expect that at least some anarcho-syndicates and agorist firms will donate materials and services to the insurrectionary anarchist movement, perhaps in exchange for labor or crafts, as each of these movements grow. The insurrectionary movement will develop, perhaps, into the “sword” of the anarchist movement while agorism and anarcho-syndicalism will serve as the “plowshare”.

Each of these movements can co-exist and synergize each others activities if they can get over their philosophical differences at least for strategic purposes. That may seem like a big “if” right now, but as the state in its desperation grows more authoritarian, exposing the iron fist from below the velvet glove, the pragmatic benefits may bring all of these “direct action” movements together, at least at the margins.

ALLiance Contributing Writer Anna O. Morgenstern has been an anarchist of one stripe or another for almost 30 years. Her intellectual interests include economic history, social psychology and voluntary organization theory. She likes piña coladas, but not getting caught in the rain.

“… Marx does not consider that certain human situations are, in themselves and absolutely, preferable to others.  It is the needs of people, the revolt of a class, which define aims and goals.”¹

                                        – Simone de Beauvoir

I spent the bulk of my intellectual energy this past year trying to integrate my understanding of the left-libertarian perspective into my understanding of the broader right or standard libertarian tradition I knew fairly well.  However, I had been unable to synthesize the divide down to its purest essence.

While there are some significant policy and predictive differences looming between left and standard libertarians my chin grew chaffed from the pensive stroking.  Was the divide purely the result of secondary ideological preferences for how our decentralized communities should look;² a penchant for progressive culture, localism or using ten dollar words like ‘dialectical’³ and ‘patriarchy?’⁴ These philosophical departures certainly exist, but after becoming acquainted with many activists and thinkers within the left-libertarian niche I began to suspect that their ideology may have been firmly rooted within their economic particulars, and cast that analysis back upon the broader libertarian movement at large.

Left-libertarian divergences from standard libertarian politics are potentially more than earnest ideological reinterpretations of the world as we know it.  Libertarian politics are expressed in a different manner by perennial wage laborers than they are expressed by libertarians who own or expect to own some means of production. These alternative perspectives are valid and rational for their possessors to hold and are in fact an astute grasping of their role within the existing political economy. Mindful of the risk of committing economism, this essay will explore the thesis that differences in politics between these two libertarian camps are at least partially due to the conflicting economic interests of their proponents.

This paper aims to improve one’s understanding of libertarianism and the American libertarian movement by deciphering one of the most pressing sources of internal libertarian disagreement: class struggle.  However, this essay is absolutely not meant to be taken as a normative endorsement of either camp.  It is merely a description of current political reality.

I. Methodological Limitations

King Arthur: “Camelot!”

Sir Galahad: “Camelot!”

Sir Lancelot: “Camelot!”

Patsy: “It’s only a model.”

King Arthur: “Shhh! Knights, I bid you welcome to your new home.  Let us ride… to Camelot!”

- Monty Python and the Holy Grail

The question of how to analyze phenomena is foundational to any inquiry, social or otherwise.  While I find methodological individualism, the attempt to analyze all human behavior from the perspective of the individual as utilized by Austrian economics, to be very useful it is extremely limited in the explanatory power it can provide for the social sciences if used strictly.  Speaking meaningfully in terms of groups is virtually impossible because, as Margaret Thatcher crooned, “there is no such thing as society.”  Strict individualism is a methodological scalpel.

Class analysis is the inverse of methodological individualism.  It allows for individuals to be absorbed into assumedly meaningful and organic groups for the purpose of analysis, as epitomized by its most famous incarnation wherein the proletariat work the means of production owned by the bourgeois as described by Marxism.  Class analysis is a methodological club, in that by constructing these models useful nuance is disregarded for the sake of broader vision and description.

We attempt to understand reality and truth through modeling, but modeling is not reality or truth. The broader the model’s net is cast the fewer the number of groups are necessary to describe social phenomena and thus the simpler the model becomes.  The more exceptions and groups one allows within a model the less ability it has to deliver succinct analytical statements. Not everything will fit inside of these models well, but if we allow for cases on the margin to pass without disturbing the model as a whole they have the potential to guide us in profound ways.

This essay will not be incorporating any data because none relevant exists to my knowledge.  This essay is primarily a reflection upon my personal experiences in the United States, and as with all analysis of class, identity and groups, it is foggier than we would all like it to be.  Ultimately, class interest is only one of the many determinants which as a whole create ideological preferences.

In this manner I will cautiously and in full knowledge of its inherent limitations utilize aspects of Marxian class analysis in order to unearth insight regarding how one’s place within the political economy affects libertarian political expression.

II. What We’re Most Familiar With:
The Politics of Libertarians Who Own or Expect to Own

“[Murray Rothbard in Power and Market] defends a libertarian class analysis derived from an early-nineteenth-century American vice president, congressman, and political philosopher – John Calhoun: the idea that the real classes in contemporary society are not boss and worker, but taxpayer (those who are mulcted by the state) and tax consumer (those who gain through the state’s organized theft).”⁵

- Brian Doherty

Viewing from where we are now, there was clearly a sea change in even radical libertarian politics away from the 19^th century pro-labor sentiment possibly as a result of classical liberal alliances with conservatives during the Progressive Era, interwar period and the Cold War.  Whatever it was, it is safe to say that modern American libertarians have generally been hostile to labor activism and unions.  Ask a libertarian today about a specific or hypothetical workplace conflict and the smart money rides on the odds that they reflexively side with the business owner. The burden of proof for convincing an average libertarian that the boss is at fault is generally far higher than the converse.

One compelling explanation for this phenomenon below the superstructure of ideology regards the fact that most of the libertarians I know are the talented college-educated offspring of professionals middle class and above, usually occupying or planning to occupy a similar station in life.

I came of age in a well-to-do family.  I experienced an upper middle class upbringing with the combined guarantee and imperative of a college education, family vacations that left the borders of the United States and a reasonable expectation of a future niche to be filled as a junior member of the intelligentsia or business elite.  Any wage labor I performed had been a temporary way to earn some extra money during the summer or part-time during the school year.  There was always a point in the future, clearly visible, where I could see that I would be able to quit, fall back on loans, family and study, and then graduate and head into a line of work where I could experience comfort and fulfillment in using my brain in some creative way. I have never been, nor do I expect to be, anything but a temporary member of the working class.  I have only been a tourist to assemble funds for beer and road trips before returning to more stimulating pursuits.

Libertarians of similar backgrounds have generally built an enterprise from within the statist political economy (or are working their way up to the higher echelons of the workplace hierarchy) and have developed a class interest which faces an onslaught from three sides: it must defend against uppity rabble from below, direct taxing from the state and competition from businessmen who more proficiently adapt to a marketplace subject to the state’s roving influence. They see themselves as the primary group being mulcted by the state, and any sniff of class warfare from below, real or perceived, invariably implicates their direct interests in the political economy. Simply put, what superior wants their authority challenged by their subordinates, especially when their paycheck and relative autonomy is on the line?

They already are, or, with luck, are eventually going to be the relative masters and shapers of their own domain; or at the very least they don’t imagine that they will be outside of the upper ranks of the managerial class forever.⁶

 III. Working Class Libertarianism

Peter Gibbons: You see, Bob, it’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.

Bob Porter: Don’t- don’t care?

Peter Gibbons: It’s a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don’t see another dime, so where’s the motivation? And here’s another thing, I have eight different bosses right now.

Bob Porter: Eight?

Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That’s my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.

- Office Space

Left-libertarians argue that we live inside of a statist political economy which fosters inequity, truncates autonomy and funnels people into an unimaginative and bureaucratized economic landscape.   They posit that the basic costs of living are artificially expensive, distantly-produced goods which compete with more local and less alienating forms of production are artificially inexpensive and horizontal alternatives to the plutocratic model are discouraged if not totally excluded by purposeful state action.7  Unless one is daring enough to live as an agorist we must all find ways to sustain ourselves while upon our thoroughly unlibertarian planet.⁸

My dear friends, colleagues and instigators of profound intellectual influence upon me, James Tuttle and Kevin Carson, have different backgrounds from myself.  James didn’t find the structured and modular style of university to his liking and didn’t finish his undergraduate degree.  To get by he has been working in retail though he is as of now heroically attempting a second pass at academia as a seasoned autodidact.  Kevin finished his undergraduate degree but didn’t find a solid fit as a graduate student, instead ending up as an orderly at a hospital as he documents in his excellent writings on the subject.⁹

They show up at jobs in which they see themselves as generally objects to be acted upon, who don’t have much say in the terms of their employment or much bargaining power to speak of.  They, like countless generations of working people before them, see themselves as staring headlong into a lifetime of being managed and ruled from above.  Choice exists within our oligarchical confines but it is far diminished compared to that which a freed market society would provide.  In other words, left-libertarians see members of the working class as the primary victims being mulcted by state power.

If they were motivated to do so, they could attempt to climb the workplace pyramid.  However, they believe that progress toward the role of a foreman or overseer, a member of the working class whose interests are made to align with management in an attempt to better control laborers, would still leave them excluded from substantive autonomy.  This sort of upward mobility by bending one’s will better to the wishes of the employer, while surely an improvement for the direct beneficiary, would do nothing to challenge the class relationship as seen from the perspective of the left-libertarian.

As a working class libertarian, the primary class conflict is between the wage earner and the boss whom they believe is generally more in cahoots with the state than any member or (alleged) representative of the working class.  They believe that in the absence of state intervention the natural and more favorable balance between Labor and Capital would be restored or entirely overcome by a new system of workers’ self-management.

The Work Contract

“Oh, a trooper will get away with what he can; any private with enough savvy to mark time to music can think up reasons why he should not clean compartments or break out stores; this is a soldier’s ancient right.”¹⁰

- Starship Troopers

For working class libertarians, the work contract is a document in dispute.  They believe that it can not specify precisely how hard one ought to work as that information is generally unquantifiable.  Standard libertarians often support Ayn Rand’s virtue of selfishness, but generally think that laborers should humbly accept all that is demanded of them rather than viewing labor activism toward better conditions and higher wages as part of the discovery process for market prices.¹¹  Carson writes:

 Anyone who takes the binding authority of contracts at face value, and who also considers altruism (in the strict Randian sense) as morally repugnant, will pay careful attention to the issue of what one actually agrees to in the labor contract. The concrete details of a labor contract, as an incomplete contract, are very much determined by actual local usage in the same sense that implied warranties rely on local “reasonable person” standards.  The idea that anyone should work any harder than they’ve strictly obligated themselves to, by a narrow reading of the implied contract, is suspiciously close to a call for the worker to sacrifice herself for the interests of the boss.¹²

In addition, since working class libertarians perceive themselves as being in an artificially disadvantaged position of bargaining relative to Capital it is easy to see why they might resist their treatment in some ways which right libertarians will condemn as contractual breach.¹³

But this sort of politickin’ is not unique to left-libertarians.  Ask a garden variety libertarian if they support ‘right-to-work’ laws, which preclude legitimate closed shop union agreements from being made between workers and employers.  To limit this action is a clear breach of the freedom of association and contract so heralded by libertarians but they often support such laws because unions allegedly have so much power within the statist political economy that to allow them nominal freedom of association is to lose ground against them.  This principle of situational tactics can effectively be generalized as when we have an unfree society the sphere of acceptable behavior shifts and now permits nominally unlibertarian action so long as it serves a genuine libertarian outcome.

The tactics of the Industrial Workers of the World don’t all violate standard libertarian ethics, but it should now be clearer as to why Kevin, James, Charles Johnson, et al, and many of their academic allies are members of the IWW.  If the state creates structural barriers in favor of business at the expense of the workers, then left-libertarians argue that the sphere of acceptable behavior has shifted in favor of labor. They perceive their social position to be significantly trapped under the boot of the corporatist state.  They aren’t battling for the commanding heights of politics, nor are they waiting for the intellectual climate to shift as per Hayek’s model;¹⁴ they are taking rational and immediate steps at the point of production to make their lives better.  Carson writes:

If libertarians like to think of ‘a fair day’s wage’ as an open-ended concept, subject to the employer’s discretion and limited by what he can get away with, they should remember that ‘a fair day’s work’ is equally open-ended. It’s just as much in the worker’s legitimate self-interest to minimize the expenditure of effort per dollar of income as it’s in the employer’s interest to maximize the extraction of effort in a given period of time.¹⁵

If one is a working class libertarian, anti-state labor struggle can be and often is a rational pursuit of the betterment of one’s material conditions.¹⁶ This, however, pits the class interests of working class libertarians against standard libertarians and is thus the source of much conflict within the libertarian movement.

IV. Class Consciousness and Political Ideology

“It is idiotic that those who have figured things out are forced to wait for the mass of cretins who are blocking the way to evolve.  The herd will always be the herd. So let’s leave it to stagnate and work on our own emancipation (…) put your old refrains aside.  We have had enough of always sacrificing ourselves for something. The Fatherland, Society and Morality have fallen (…) that’s fine, but don’t contribute to reviving new entities for us: the Idea, the Revolution, Propaganda, Solidarity; we don’t give a damn. What we want is to live, to have the comforts and well-being we have a right to. What we want to accomplish is the development of our individuality in the full sense of the word, in its entirety. The individual has a right to all possible well-being, and must try to attain it all the time, by any means…”

- Hegot, Les Temps Nouveaux, 1903.¹⁷

If one views one’s interests as more closely aligned with libertarians who own or expect to own some means of production then on a purely existential level one probably perceives less urgency in the fight for a free society. It is easy to patiently attempt to win the long term battle of ideas while sequestered in a comfortable office, think tank or academic chamber.

Working class libertarians don’t believe that they can afford this approach financially and/or shouldn’t have to wait for economic justice.  They urgently perceive the need for freed markets now, and their only realistic option may be to turn their local economic tables against those whom they believe benefit more from the state than they themselves do.

This paper does not take a normative stance on the libertarian battle of the workplace; it seeks only for libertarians to understand the various class interests which define the struggle. By understanding each other perhaps libertarians can become more nuanced in their conception of American political economy and the employer-employee relationship.¹⁸

The divergent libertarian class consciousnesses discussed above are within the range of their wearers’ rational self-interest but this divide is ultimately undesirable.  Libertarianism insofar as it is a utopian philosophy aims to eliminate the fundamental social antagonisms of society and to solve the problem of humanity.  By striking the root of privilege, the State, its detrimental imbalances of wealth and power will hopefully no longer be able to be sustained and more wholesome processes can be allowed to become.  Then, the true cost of action can be internalized, every act of production will be a net positive for humanity and people will be rewarded more justly by the marketplace for their actions.

In these parting words I humbly submit the reader to examine to what degree one’s class interests have determined what one currently believes about political philosophy. To some extent, economics may always be the base of any social order with ideology, law, culture, politics, etc. forming the superstructure above it. No one likes to think of the grand ideas they hold about how the world ought to operate as being formed from within oneself as an egoistic expression of material desire and personal gain.

By no means are class interests everything, however.  I favor a more robust and dialectical view of ideology; giving people the benefit of the doubt and not degrading them to the point of vulgar economism, though I do posit that class interest as ideological motivation has been unfairly ignored by libertarians and exists beyond dispassionate and noble analysis.

The truth, as in all things, probably lay in the brackish water between.  Class interests to some degree determine political ideology, and libertarians are certainly not exempt from this phenomenon.

Endnotes

1.         Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Citadel Press, 1976), 18.

2.         Ross Miller Kenyon, “Anarchists for Gun Control: Methodology and Ideology from within a Monopolistic Legal Order,” The Social Rationalist, May 17, 2011 <http://www.jacobroundtree.com/2011/05/17/anarchists-for-gun-control-methodology-and-ideology-within-a-monopolistic-legal-order/>.

3.         Charles Johnson, “Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism,” Rad Geek People’s Daily, 2008 <http://radgeek.com/gt/2010/03/02/liberty-equality-solidarity-toward-a-dialectical-anarchism/>.

4.         Charles Johnson and Roderick T. Long, “Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage be Saved?,” Charles W. Johnson, 2004 <http://charleswjohnson.name/essays/libertarian-feminism/>.

5.         Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007), 269.

6.         There are working class libertarians who mistakenly identify themselves as middle class. Being middle class does not refer to one’s standard of living but to one’s relation to the means of production and the relatively enhanced subjectivity and control of one’s fate that accompanies upward mobility.

7. Much has been written about this topic, with its most comprehensive treatment on these issues will most likely be found in Kevin Carson’s The Homebrew Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto.

8. An agorist is someone who practices counter-economics by participating in the informal economy, avoiding taxation and regulation which favors larger more well-connected firms and financially supports policies which agorists find to be undesirable and/or immoral. Visit http://www.agorism.info/ for more information.

9.         Kevin A. Carson, “The Healthcare Crisis: A Crisis of Artificial Scarcity,” Center for a Stateless Society, March 24, 2010 <http://c4ss.org/content/2088>.

10.         Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers (New York: ACE Books, 1987), 164.

11.       Kevin A. Carson, “Contract Feudalism,” Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Captialism, February 25, 2005 <http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/02/contract-feudalism.html>.

12.       Kevin A. Carson, private email correspondence, July 21st, 2011.

13.       Kevin A. Carson, “The Ethics of Labor Struggle,” Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism, April 19, 2007 <http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2007/04/media-print-projection-embossed-body.html>.

14.       F.A. Hayek, “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” Mises Daily, August 16, 2008 <http://mises.org/daily/2984>, originally printed in The University of Chicago Law Review (Spring 1949).

15.       Kevin A. Carson, “The Wobblies and Free Market Labor Struggle,” On ALLiance: Rational Review, 2011 <http://alliance.rationalreview.com/2011/02/the-wobblies-and-free-market-labor-struggle/>.

16.       Kevin A. Carson, “Labor Struggle: A Free Market Model,” Center for a Stateless Society, September 29, 2010 <http://c4ss.org/content/4163>.

17.       Doug Imrie, “The ‘Illegalists,” Anarchy: a Journal Of Desire Armed, Fall-Winter, 1994-95 <http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Doug_Imrie__The__Illegalists_.html>.

18.       Ross Miller Kenyon, “Free Market Base or Superstructure: An Open Inquiry Regarding Resultant Political Economies & the Moral Culpability of Current Beneficiaries,” Liberty Forum Online, March 29, 2011 <http://studentsforliberty.org/news/liberty-forum-online-presents-ross-kenyon-free-market-base-or-superstructure/>.

Photo by Matthew Stolte

Originally published at Social Memory Complex

I support the public sector unions opposing Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s agenda. While I’m neither a fan of government nor the civil service, it’s clear that the so-called lavish benefits and salaries public sector unions defend against Republican encroachment represent not entrenched privilege but merely the last vestiges of a minimally fair employment deal. The last forty years have seen this deal eviscerated in the private sector, and it is only in comparison to the current paltry influence of contemporary labor that public sector unions seem pampered. One need not single out individual teachers to critique public schooling, for instance – in any case, the idea that a school teacher is grifting me provokes involuntary laughter.

As a Wobbly, however, the ideology of class struggle informs my activism on labor. Solidarity is never unconditional, as my friend Chris Lempa pointed out to me in a letter. True common purpose in the struggle against bosses must be framed in terms of legitimate class theory in order not to degenerate into the business-as-usual, reformist, junior-partner-in-the-ruling-class unionism that has prevailed since the Wagner Act. And so while I support public sector unions in this conflict, I find it difficult to place them in the traditional model of class struggle.

In the private sector the class dynamics are clear: workers and bosses can be easily seen as in zero-sum competition. One gains at the expense of the other, the prize is effective control over the means of production, and the players line up along the party whose control they favor. Customers and suppliers represent the third parties who, while not powerless in the equation, tend to deal with the organization as a whole on a voluntary basis. The adversarial relationship is more centered inside the organization, and market pressures from the third parties are accepted as a given. Much of the decline in labor power has arisen from capital’s superior marketing of the narrative that union gains come at consumer losses.

This analysis falls apart when applied to the public sector. The government has no equivalent market pressures to which it is compelled to respond. As a monopoly producer, government has every incentive to pacify its workforce by delivering higher wages and benefits. The taxpaying consumer of these services is without recourse. Politicians cannot be seen as perfect analogs of the boss class, nor can civil service management be viewed in the same sense as private sector management. Indeed, to invoke the oft-cited preamble to the IWW constitution, does the public sector working class and the public sector employing class really have nothing in common?

As a former public school teacher, my wife offered me an example of organizational dynamics in the public sector that might better explain the class disposition of the various players. Who is the favored class within the public schooling institution? Surely not teachers – they are serially overworked and underpaid, but even more importantly from a radical labor perspective, they enjoy little control over the workplace. In fact, the history indicates that teachers have been viewed by the establishment as nearly as much in need of control and discipline as the students they teach. Curricula are designed not merely to guide student learning but, to the greatest extent possible, make classrooms teacher-proof. The fear has always been that a genuine relationship between teachers and students would be harmful to the institution as a whole, and so a factory model guided the development of modern pedagogy.

So, who is exploiting teachers? Who is denying them control of work conditions? Who is playing them off against the end consumers (students and parents) to limit their power and influence?

It would easy to say: the public, through their designated politicians, from the Governor down to the School Board. However, the public has very coarse control over the schools (or any government function) through political means. The public is not the “boss class” in any meaningful way, least of all because they desire maximum effort from teachers at a minimum wage. They are imprisoned customers given a modicum of choice but no exit, and as they work for a living just like teachers they are more likely to see their interests aligned than opposed.

What about the politicians? Surely they have outsized control, at least as the managers. They seek to maximize their own control over the institution and position themselves for personal political advantage in the larger establishment. While market pressures may not factor in directly, they still have to deal with budget pressures, balancing interests among the entire government. The relative competition may not originate in the market so much as among the interest groups of the state: those seeking to grow one department’s budget at another’s expense, or those who favor capital over government power and fight taxes.

But even if politicians are the boss class, that is still insufficient to explain organizational dynamics within the school. Where is the class managing affairs on a daily basis on the boss’s behalf? Who implements the control over workers? Who sees their interests as more aligned with the bosses than with the workers? The answer is obvious when you think about it.

The school administration is the management class of public schooling. They are the class with fat salaries, minimal work to do, and an interest in running the school as a factory. They prefer stability to true empowerment and education. They hold both teachers and students in check. Their class actually grows pretty steadily, soaking up funds from those who actually teach, while implementing stupid policies like zero tolerance to subsume more and more of the classroom under their direct management.

I’ve focused on public schooling, but I imagine this model could apply to just about any civil service field. You have the people who do the work – in a zoning office, for instance, it’s the clerks and surveyors and those who actually effect the end product. Then you have the city administration and the Mayor / Board of Supervisors / etc., who use the institution as a means to a political career focused on directing others and taking credit for it. They don’t care about zoning per-se; their interest is in stabilizing the organization so they can grow the parasite administrative class and pursue their agenda of personal aggrandizement and its ideological trappings (set aside your feelings about zoning laws in general for a moment).

As a Wobbly and a mutualist, then, I’d like to see radical labor take a stand that does not simply provide unconditional solidarity to public workers, but pushes them to take increasingly radical stances on issues of workplace control. What do we want: state-recognized and -enforced collective bargaining rights, or a movement so powerful it can operate without the state’s permission? Are we fighting for a bit higher wage and benefits for public workers, or an end to the wage system? Do we want civil servants to be treated with slightly more respect by their overlords, or do we instead demand worker control of these capital-serving institutions?

After all, we’ve established that public sector unions are the last vestiges of something approach a fair deal between labor and capital. Perhaps we should remind capital why they sought to give us that deal to begin with, thus securing a better position for labor in all sectors. To accomplish this, Wobblies and all radical unionists must reassert the primacy of the class struggle and creatively compose the narrative that frames the public and private sector worker grievances in class terms. Only a rebirth of class consciousness will push the center of the labor movement leftwards and secure our interests. It’s not enough to defeat Governor Walker or even to respond to these periodic crises in labor relations with solidarity: we have to resurrect the class struggle.

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At first glance, the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) might strike you as an odd subject for a consideration by libertarians. Most self-described free market libertarians and market anarchists are more likely to condemn unions than to praise them.

But in a stateless society, or at least in a society where labor relations are unregulated by the state, the Wobblies’ model of labor struggle is likely to be the most viable alternative to the kinds of state-certified and state-regulated unions we’re familiar with.

And for those of us in the libertarian movement who don’t think “God” is spelled B-O-S-S, or instinctively identify with employers and gripe about how hard it is to get good help these days, the question of how labor might negotiate for better terms is probably of direct personal interest. Some of us, working for wages in the state capitalist economy, have seen precious little evidence of marginal productivity being reflected in our wages. Indeed, we’ve been more likely to see bosses using our increased productivity as an excuse to downsize the work force and appropriate our increased output for themselves as increased salaries and bonuses. And many of us who are employees at will aren’t entirely sanguine about the prospect that our bosses will be smart enough to have read Rothbard on the competitive penalties for capriciously and arbitrarily firing employees.

In fact, I have a hard time understanding why so many right-leaning free market libertarians are so hostile in principle to the idea of hard bargaining or contracts when it comes to labor, in particular.

It’s not in the rational interest of a landlord, competing with other landlords, to capriciously evict tenants at will for no good reason. But I still like to have a signed lease contract specifying under exactly what conditions I can be evicted, and enforceable against my landlord by a third party. It’s probably in the long-term competitive interest of banks not to raise interest rates without limit on existing balances, if they want to get new borrowers—but they seem to do it, anyway, and if you don’t consider it a comfort to have contractual limits on the interest they can charge you’ve got a lot more faith in human nature than I have.

Contracts are accepted with little question or thought by libertarians, in most areas of economic life, as a source of security and predictability—in all areas except labor, that is. When it comes to labor, Hazlitt or somebody has “proved” somewhere that the desire for contractual security is a sign of economic illiteracy.

Likewise, the labor market is apparently the one area of economic life where bargaining by the selling party is not considered a legitimate part of the price discovery process. Apparently the dictum that productivity determines wage levels means that you’re supposed to take the first offer or leave it—no haggling allowed.

I doubt many of us who actually work for wages find the right wingers’ labor exceptionalism very convincing. Most of us, in the real world, find that the credible threat to walk away from the table gets us higher wages than we would otherwise have had. Most of us, in the real world, would rather rely on a labor contract specifying just causes for termination than to rely on the pointy-haired boss having the sense to know his own best interests.

And most of use who have some common sense can see how ridiculous it is to assert, as do many right-wingers, that strikes are only effective because of the forcible exclusion of scabs. Such people, apparently, have never heard of turnover costs like those involved in training replacement workers, or the lost productivity of workers who have accumulated tacit, job-specific knowledge over a period of years that can’t be simply reduced to a verbal formula and transmitted to a new hire in a week or two.

And when mass strikes did take place before Wagner, the cost and disruption of employee turnover within a single workplace was greatly intensified by sympathy strikes at other stages of production. Before Taft-Hartley’s restrictions on sympathy and boycott strikes, a minority of workers walking out of a single factory could be reinforced by similar partial strikes at suppliers, outlets, and carriers. Even with only a minority walking out at each stage of production, the cumulative effect could be massive. The federal labor regime—both Wagner and Taft-Hartley—greatly reduced the effectiveness of strikes at individual plants by transforming them into declared wars fought by Queensbury rules, and likewise reduced their effectiveness by prohibiting the coordination of actions across multiple plants or industries. The Railway Labor Relations Act, together with Taft-Hartley’s cooling off periods, enabled the federal government to suppress sympathy strikes in the transportation industry and prevent local strikes from becoming regional or national general strikes. The cooling off period, in addition, gave employers time to prepare ahead of time for such disruptions by stockpiling parts and inventory, and greatly reduced the informational rents embodied in the training of the existing workforce. Were not such restrictions in place, today’s “just-in-time” economy would likely be even more vulnerable to such disruption than that of the 1930s.

Far from being a boon to workers, or making effective unions possible for the first time, Wagner suppressed the most effective tactics and in their place promoted the kind of union model that benefited employers.

Employers preferred a labor regime that relegated labor struggle entirely to strikes—and strikes of decidedly limited effectiveness at that—and coopted unions as the enforcers of management control on the job. The primary purpose of unions, under Wagner, was to provide stability on the job by enforcing contracts against their own rank and file and preventing wildcat strikes.

Far from being a labor charter that empowered unions for the first time, FDR’s labor regime had the same practical effect as telling the irregulars of Lexington and Concord “Look, you guys come out from behind those rocks, put on these bright red uniforms, and march in parade ground formation like the Brits, and in return we’ll set up a system of arbitration to guarantee you don’t lose all the time.”

Bargaining with the boss over the terms on which one enters into the employment relationship is only a small part of the bargaining process, and is arguably less important than the continual bargaining over terms that takes place within the employment relationship.

In fact the labor movement’s dependence on official, declared strikes as the primary method of labor struggle dates only from the establishment of the Wagner Act regime in the 1930s.  Before that time, labor struggle relied at least as much on labor’s bargaining power over conditions on the job.

The labor contract is called an “incomplete contract” because, by the necessity of things, it is impossible to specify the terms ahead of time. As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis describe it,

The classical theory of contract implicit in most of neo-classical economics holds that the enforcement of claims is performed by the judicial system at negligible cost to the exchanging parties. We refer to this classical third-party enforcement assumption as exogenous enforcement. Where, by contrast, enforcement of claims arising from an exchange by third parties is infeasible or excessively costly, the exchanging agents must themselves seek to enforce their claims….

Exogenous enforcement is absent under a variety of quite common conditions: when there is no relevant third party…, when the contested attribute can be measured only imperfectly or at considerable cost (work effort, for example, or the degree of risk assumed by a firm’s management), when the relevant evidence is not admissible in a court of law…[,] when there is no possible means of redress…, or when the nature of the contingencies concerning future states of the world relevant to the exchange precludes writing a fully specified contract.

In such cases the ex post terms of exchange are determined by the structure of the interaction between A and B, and in particular on the strategies A is able to adopt to induce B to provide the desired level of the contested attribute, and the counter strategies available to B….

Consider agent A who purchases a good or service from agent B. We call the exchange contested when B’s good or service possesses an attribute which is valuable to A, is costly for B to provide, yet is not fully specified in an enforceable contract….

An employment relationship is established when, in return for a wage, the worker B agrees to submit to the authority of the employer A for a specified period of time in return for a wage w. While the employer’s promise to pay the wage is legally enforceable, the worker’s promise to bestow an adequate level of effort and care upon the tasks assigned, even if offered, is not. Work is subjectively costly for the worker to provide, valuable to the employer, and costly to measure. The manager-worker relationship is thus a contested exchange.[1]

In fact the very term “adequate effort” is meaningless, aside from whatever way its definition is worked out in practice based on the comparative bargaining power of worker and employer. It’s virtually impossible to design a contract that specifies ahead of time the exact levels of effort and standards of performance for a wage-laborer, and likewise impossible for employers to reliably monitor performance after the fact. Therefore, the workplace is contested terrain, and workers are justified entirely as much as employers in attempting to maximize their own interests within the leeway left by an incomplete contract. How much effort is “normal” to expend is determined by the informal outcome of the social contest within the workplace, given the de facto balance of power at any given time. And that includes slowdowns, “going canny,” and the like. The “normal” effort that an employer is entitled to, when he buys labor-power, is entirely a matter of convention. It’s directly analogous the local cultural standards that would determine the nature of “reasonable expectations,” in a libertarian common law of implied contract.

If libertarians like to think of “a fair day’s wage” as an open-ended concept, subject to the employer’s discretion and limited by what he can get away with, they should remember that “a fair day’s work” is equally open-ended. It’s just as much in the worker’s legitimate self-interest to minimize the expenditure of effort per dollar of income as it’s in the employer’s interest to maximize the extraction of effort in a given period of time.

For the authoritarian “libertarians” who believe “vox boss, vox dei,” this suggestion is scandalous. The boss is the only party who can unilaterally rewrite the contract as he goes along. And it’s self-evidently good for the owner or manager to maximize his self-interest in extracting whatever terms he can get away with. Oddly enough, though, these are usually the same people who are most fond of saying that employment is a free market bargain between equals.

For most of us who know what it’s like working under a boss, it’s a simple matter of fairness that we should be as free as the boss to try to shape the undefined terms of the labor contract in a way that maximizes our self-interests. And most of the Wobbly tactics grouped together under the term “direct action on the job” involve just such efforts within the contested space of the job relationship.

Further, these are the very methods a free market labor movement might use, in preference to playing by Wagner Act rules.

The various methods are described in the old Wobbly pamphlet “How to Fire Your Boss,” and discussed by the I.W.W.’s Alexis Buss in her articles on “minority unionism” for Industrial Worker. The old model, she wrote—”a majority of workers vote a union in, a contract is bargained”—is increasingly untenable.

We need to return to the sort of rank-and-file on-the-job agitating that won the 8-hour day and built unions as a vital force….

Minority unionism happens on our own terms, regardless of legal recognition….

U.S. & Canadian labor relations regimes are set up on the premise that you need a majority of workers to have a union, generally government-certified in a worldwide context[;] this is a relatively rare set-up. And even in North America, the notion that a union needs official recognition or majority status to have the right to represent its members is of relatively recent origin, thanks mostly to the choice of business unions to trade rank-and-file strength for legal maintenance of membership guarantees.[2]

How are we going to get off of this road? We must stop making gaining legal recognition and a contract the point of our organizing….

We have to bring about a situation where the bosses, not the union, want the contract. We need to create situations where bosses will offer us concessions to get our cooperation. Make them beg for it.[3]

And workers make bosses beg for cooperation through the methods described in “How to Fire Your Boss”: slowdowns, working to rule, “good work” strikes, whistleblowing and “open mouth” sabotage, sickins and unannounced one-day wildcats at random intervals, etc. The beauty of these methods is that, unlike regular strikes, they don’t give the boss an excuse for a lockout. They reduce the productivity of labor and raise costs on the job—rather than “going out on strike,” workers “stay in on strike.”

Workers are far more effective when they take direct action while still on the job. By deliberately reducing the boss’ profits while continuing to collect wages, you can cripple the boss without giving some scab the opportunity to take your job. Direct action, by definition, means those tactics workers can undertake themselves, without the help of government agencies, union bureaucrats, or high-priced lawyers.

Some of the forms of direct action described in the pamphlet, especially—e.g. working to rule—there’s no conceivable way of outlawing ex ante through a legally enforceable contract. How would such a clause read: “Workers must obey to the letter all lawful directives issued by management—unless they’re stupid”?

The old Wobbly practice of “open mouth sabotage,” better known these days as whistleblowing, is perhaps the single effective weapon in the Internet age. As described in the pamphlet:

Sometimes simply telling people the truth about what goes on at work can put a lot of pressure on the boss….

Whistle Blowing can be as simple as a face-to-face conversation with a customer, or it can be as dramatic as the P.G.&E. engineer who revealed that the blueprints to the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor had been reversed….

Waiters can tell their restaurant clients about the various shortcuts and substitutions that go into creating the faux-haute cuisine being served to them.

The Internet takes possibilities for such “open mouth sabotage” to a completely new level. In an age when unions have virtually disappeared from the private sector workforce, and downsizings and speedups have become a normal expectation of working life, the vulnerability of employer’s public image may be the one bit of real leverage the worker has over him–and it’s a doozy. If they go after that image relentlessly and systematically, they’ve got the boss by the short hairs. Given the ease of setting up anonymous blogs and websites (just think of any company and then look up the URL employernamesucks.com), systematically exposing the company’s dirt anonymously on comment threads and message boards, the possibility of anonymous saturation emailings of the company’s major suppliers and customers and advocacy groups concerned with that industry…. well, let’s just say that labor struggle becomes a form of asymmetric warfare.

And such campaigns of open mouth sabotage are virtually risk-free, and impossible to suppress. From the McLibel case to the legal fight over the Diebold memos, from the DeCSS uprising to Trafigura, attempts to suppress negative publicity are governed by the Streisand Effect (named after Barbra’s attempt to suppress online photos of her house generated publicity that caused a thousand times as many people to look at the photos than otherwise would have). It is simply impossible to suppress negative publicity on the Internet, thanks to things like encryption, proxies, and mirror sites. And the very attempt to do so will generate more publicity beyond the target’s worst nightmares. Consider, for example, the increasing practice of firing bloggers for negative comments about their employers. What’s the result? Rather than a few hundred or a few thousand readers of a marginal blog seeing a post on how bad it sucks to work at Employer X, tens of millions of mainstream newspaper readers see a wire service story: “Blogger fired for revealing how bad it sucks to work at Employer X.”

Some of the most effective labor actions, in hard to organize industries, have involved public information campaigns like those of the Imolakee Indian Workers’ boycott of Taco Bell and pickets by the Wal-Mart Workers’ Association.

Rather than negotiating on the bosses’ terms under the Wagner rules, in order to negotiate a contract, we should be using network resistance and asymmetric warfare techniques to makethe bosses beg us for a contract.

Kevin Carson is a C4SS Research Associate and a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

[1] “Is the Demand for Workplace Democracy Redundant in a Liberal Economy?” in Ugo Pagano and Robert Rowthorn, eds., Democracy and Effciency in the Economic Enterprise. A study prepared for the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) of the United Nations University (London and New York: Routledge, 1994, 1996), pp. 69-70.

[2] “Minority Report,” Industrial Worker, October 2002 <http://www.iww.org/organize/strategy/AlexisBuss102002.shtml>

[3] “Minority Report,” Industrial Worker, December 2002 <http://www.iww.org/organize/strategy/AlexisBuss122002.shtml>.

Related and Relevant Works:

Labor Struggle: A Free Market Model by Kevin Carson

The Ethics of Labor Struggle by Kevin Carson

The Iron Fist Behind The Invisible Hand by Kevin Carson

How to Fire Your Boss by Zabalaza Books

Stateless University Registration begins January 16th for its first term of 2011.

Term 1: Monday, February 6 – Friday, March 18; registration begins Monday, January 16; the final date to obtain a tuition refund is Monday, February 13

I would like to take this opportunity to talk about what Stateless U. can do for you and this plucky movement of ours.

The Stateless U., Introduction to Anarchism, takes great pride in being able to offering a varied and versatile introduction to anarchist theory and practice. Our principle goals: to familiarize the student with the basic political-economic-ethical vocabulary of anarchist theory, build up your enthusiasm for and understanding of how a stateless society would/could work, and prepare you for Brad Spangler’s Law and Order in a Stateless Society.

But this is all pretty standard stuff, so what?  What makes Stateless University different?

What makes Stateless U. different and interesting is its long-run objective: to create a network of alumni, versed in anarchism generally and Agorism specifically, that can begin dispute resolution and arbitration for Agorist agents and agencies.  This alumni network is just one infrastructural step in the creation and maintenance of a counter-economy.  (Other possible steps would be the creation of insurance and security networks to further reduce the risk of total loss in the event of State disruption and confiscation.)

Counter-Economics is an abbreviation for Counter-Establishment-Economics and, as Samuel Edward Konkin III points out, it was formed the same way as Counter-Establishment-Culture (Counter-Culture).  Both are not the repudiation of culture or economy, per say, but the rejection of the established/entrenched culture and economy.  I think this is an important connection between both Counter-Establishment movements and points to an area of mutual support.  The Counter-Economy can support and build the efforts of a Counter-Culture; while the Counter-Culture can support and build the efforts of a Counter-Economy.

Stateless University also has plans for offering more scholarships, expanding our methods of communications, improving our teaching techniques, creating essay contests with prizes and creating Campus Liberation outreach materials.

Please join our Alumni Network and invite your friends to take a look.  We need your feedback to improve and expand this project; no critique is too small for liberty.

ALL the best. ]]> http://alliance.rationalreview.com/2011/01/stateless-u-and-you/feed/ 1 http://alliance.rationalreview.com/2011/01/stateless-university-registration-begins-tomorrow/ http://alliance.rationalreview.com/2011/01/stateless-university-registration-begins-tomorrow/#comments Sat, 15 Jan 2011 18:51:11 +0000 James Tuttle http://alliance.rationalreview.com/?p=280