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      "body": "Congratulations @chrisshaw! You received a personal award!\n\n<table><tr><td>https://steemitimages.com/70x70/http://steemitboard.com/@chrisshaw/birthday3.png</td><td>Happy Birthday! - You are on the Steem blockchain for 3 years!</td></tr></table>\n\n<sub>_You can view [your badges on your Steem Board](https://steemitboard.com/@chrisshaw) and compare to others on the [Steem Ranking](https://steemitboard.com/ranking/index.php?name=chrisshaw)_</sub>\n\n\n###### [Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness](https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=steemitboard&approve=1) to get one more award and increased upvotes!",
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      "author": "as-king",
      "body": "Anyone from any country can take back their power, under common law for free at http://www.commonlawcourt.com/",
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      "body": "This sounds like a brilliantly sensible and rational way forward. Which means it has no chance whatsoever of being implemented. I mean, how would connected people be able to make fat commissions out of it?",
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      "body": "Congratulations @chrisshaw! You have received a personal award!\n\n[![](https://steemitimages.com/70x70/http://steemitboard.com/@chrisshaw/birthday1.png)](http://steemitboard.com/@chrisshaw)  Happy Birthday - 1 Year on Steemit Happy Birthday - 1 Year on Steemit\nClick on the badge to view your own Board of Honor on SteemitBoard.\n\nFor more information about this award, click [here](https://steemit.com/steemitboard/@steemitboard/steemitboard-update-8-happy-birthday)\n> By upvoting this notification, you can help all Steemit users. Learn how [here](https://steemit.com/steemitboard/@steemitboard/http-i-cubeupload-com-7ciqeo-png)!",
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      "body": "Originally published here: https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2016/10/05/full-employment-useful-idiots/\n\nThe modern economy is stuck in a major rut. Productivity gains have not matched wage inflation, and productivity itself is relatively stagnant, particularly in the UK. Job provision is being increasingly concentrated in low-pay sectors, with temporary work and part-time contracts creating a modern precariat of working class individuals, students and other members of a general lumpenproletariat. Mechanisation and technology gains are captured by capitalist interests through IP rights and state-funding of corporate research, meaning that increasingly people are not just being made precarious, but are simply losing their jobs as well as any state-support. Such an existence is both undesirable and extremely distressing. Rather than markets freeing entrepreneurial spirits and creating a class of Konkinite contractors, free from the vagaries of state-capitalism, they have been wrought by the demands of that system and have created what I’ve described.\n\nThus obviously there need to be alternatives which can combat this system as well as develop an alternative methodology and praxis which supersedes it. There are innumerable such ideas floating on the internet and in policy and journal papers. One, however, seems to have really stuck its head above the parapet: a jobs guarantee which creates the conditions for full employment. This idea has been around for years, and had been inculcated in elements of the Bretton Woods system by giving national governments significant room for manoeuvre when it came to economic decision-making. Nowadays, in a financialised world where speculation provides more economic growth than manufacturing in most Western countries, this idea has gained significant traction. What better to unlock the productive potentials of the unemployed and underemployed. What better to provide a workforce for “necessary” infrastructure projects and home-building programs.\n\nUnfortunately the proponents of such ideas generally tend to act as useful idiots for the generalities of capitalism and its systemic creation through the state. Capitalism has relied on these myriad infrastructure projects to increase their levels of capital valorisation and expand the means through which it is realised. Artificial economies of scale are effectively subsidised by state projects, whether that be the railway land grants of the 19th century, the mass enclosures of common land in Britain, or the interstate programs of the 50s and 60s. All have served the purpose of capital centralisation, land speculation and the glorification of profit. Further, with the myriad crises of capitalism, there is nothing more useful than a state that can soak up both excess labour and excess product. From this, we see the military-industrial complex (which provides outlets for information technology and research funding) and the prison-industrial complex (which provides one method for the distribution of surplus labour).\n\nMore systemically such job guarantees ingrain the main method of capital accumulation, that of the wage labour relation and the alienation of the labourer from the means of production. Simply giving such means over to the state does not limit this fundamental social relation. Rather, it gives it legitimacy and furthers the means of centralisation of capital as labour can be used for multiple productive outlets rather than those of individual capitals. You simply end up with a stratified Marxian nightmare. Meanwhile, the things that actually provide economic prosperity (good capital access, the freeing of entrepreneurial capacities, autonomy in the workplace, the limitation of monopolisation through free market competition) are crushed under the corporate-state nexus. Job guarantees are not an alternative to the current means of capitalism. If anything, they may provide a stop-gap to the internal dynamics of capitalism, which necessitate crises. State action simply gives stabilisation. The real problems are the wage labour relation and the monopolisation of the means of production, not that there aren’t enough piecemeal jobs to pass around.\n\nReal, radical change will only come from the ground-up, in civil society and communities. It will not come from any action created by the state or any of its parasitic organisations and interests. It will be developed out the destruction of the major capitalist monopolies, those of land, money, intellectual property, tariffs and transport subsidies. No state will ever achieve such as it has historically acted as the benefactor of these monopolies. Only concerted action through agorist and syndicalist lenses will provide radical alternatives to the current system. Struggles through the prism of the state, as seen in the fights for trade unionism and a welfare state, have now failed. The antagonistic relation of state and civil society is not reparable, and nor has it ever been. Alternatives need to be created, as they have been and continue to be all the over the world. Whether those be the time banks and alternative currencies that exist in Greece, the alternative production systems in hackerspaces and small production outlets (which show the uselessness of mass production) or the cooperative economic systems that exist in Spain or South America, it does not matter. Only when such alternatives can be constructed continually and successfully will we see the plethora of systemic action which can combat capitalism. This will never come from “full employment” ideologies and the useful idiots whom infect radical discourse.",
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      "body": "@@ -1,12 +1,109 @@\n+https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2016/09/16/general-equivalences-and-the-freed-market/%0A%0A\n The capitali\n",
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      "body": "The capitalist market system is defined by the strictures of wage labour relations and the regulatory mechanisms, which are the used for the valorisation of capital and the commodity production which maintains, expands and homogenises this valorisation. These are the inevitable products of capitalist exchange relations and the creation of a general equivalence in which generic commodities, produced by capital through the wage labour relation, are circulated. For the purpose of these exchanges (some of which maintain the manufacturing and production bases of the classes of capital, and others which engender the final movement of commodities into their form as consumables) markets are used as mechanisms of distribution and sale. The extent of capitalist relations becomes universalisable in such an homogenised, controlled system. States, through their capacity to regulate market transactions and mediate the class relations of wage labourers and the owners of the means of production, create regulatory apparatuses which engender the recreation and revaluation of capital through a series of metamorphoses where relations are changed, markets are restructured and the fundamental germ of capitalism, that of the dominance of capital and its control of the means of production, are maintained and even boosted.\n\nCapitalism is therefore the creation of equivalence within commodity production and the use of labour-power, with a basic hierarchy of control of the wage-earning classes maintained via systematised state intervention and control. The intermixing of the classes of capital and the bureaucratic classes of government becomes an inevitability which pushes for more control through capitalist means, and for the uprooting and destruction of various forms of traditional modes of life and alternative forms of socio-economic relations. There develops “the separation of labour-power from all its conditions of existence. The mode of life of the wage-earning class then suffers a deep degradation”[1]. Such exigencies shape the historical character of capitalism and the development of private property as a reality rather than an intellectual abstraction. Whether it be the enclosures throughout much of Europe from the late Middle Ages to the creation of huge infrastructure in America which expanded capitalist economies of scale, processes of accumulation have sucked huge areas of socio-economic relations into the homogenous field of value and the field of general equivalence.\n\nFreed markets in the anarchist sense have a distinct relation to the processes of general equivalence. While capitalist markets have the need to constantly expand to re-engender the valorisation of capital through generating movements away from the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the dynamics of freed markets generate the natural decentralisation of economic activity and the value it creates. Profit is the not the guaranteed means of economic activity, nor even its most desired faculty, while capital as an economic reality is varied, truly heterogeneous and almost impossible to concentrate outside the mechanisms of state regulation. Monopolised capital in its monetary form or in its concentration amongst the wage-earning class becomes untenable when the general equivalence of capitalist relations is ended by the ability for individuals (removed from their class structures) to act on their innate desires and subjective preferences. “Freed from the oppressive tensions of capitalism we would surely prefer to turn such focus on say crafting baskets or writing poems rather than neurotically calculating and re-calculating the week’s remaining expenses or the quickest trip across town”[2].\n\nThrough this essay I intend to contrast the existence of the dynamics of general equivalence within capitalism with the theoretical and interstitial potentials of freed markets. Freed markets encompass so much more than the conceptions of capitalism. They can be seen as the totality of voluntary socio-economic relations which require reciprocal exchange and the movement of subjective values. Further from this, freed markets can act as a dynamic variable in opposition to both the objectivities of the state and the coercive power of existing capitalism. “It is precisely through not simplifying our desires into a form parsable by CEOs, politicians, and general assemblies, but instead embracing their infinite diversity and potency that we can begin to make traction against the forces that need visibility and human interchangeability to control us”[3]. Humanity’s needs and preferences are extremely variable and complex, open to a multitude of value judgments that aren’t codified into simple concepts like profit or capital. But it is precisely capitalism and its socio-economic energies, through the homogeneous field of value and the systems of general equivalences, that produces these simplistic tendencies. Instead of a variable, dynamic economic system that provides complex relations of abundance and scarcity and produces individualistic and collective productive arrangements, there is a Weberian “struggle for economic existence, whereby the formation of prices is a struggle for dominance, with money as the main weapon for such a struggle”[4].\n\nParticular advocates of capitalist markets will declare that the idea of a general equivalence pervading the exchanges and transactions of capitalism is an impossibility due to the fact that human desires and beliefs are subjective in their capacities. Yet such a view is tending to the position that in unfree markets the actual subjective desires of individuals in all their multiplicity is in any way possible. In the unfree markets that exist in the capitalist framework, the Weberian axioms of action (which defined some of the basic concepts of purposive human action) become defined by one of their parameters, that of the economistic view. Weber identified four particular types of action within an economic society. “Value-rational actions, whereby action is taken because it leads to a valued goal, and ignores other consequences of attaining this goal; affectual action, which is an action driven by emotion; traditional action, where something is done because it is what is usually done”[5] and instrumentally rational action, which is the “exercise of an actor’s control over resources which is in its main impulse oriented towards economic ends”[6]. Under capitalism, instrumentally rational action, defined by “the conception of the profit motive and the idea that goods are bought based on a rational, cost-benefit analysis”[7], becomes the dominant mode of economic thinking and acting. Resources come to mean the genericism of capital, both as constant capital (resources, raw materials, etc.) and as variable capital (wage labour), which come together to form the basis of the wider socio-economy.\n\nWithin this wider field of value defined by the economistic view of action as seen under the capitalist conceptions of capital, the homogeneous field of value and the idea of the general equivalence are developed as mainstays of capitalist social relations. “In order for the commensurability of commodities to be completely defined, it is necessary to know the unit by which value is measured”[8]. Such a measure of value comes from the capacity for commodities to fuel continued economic growth and with it the valorisation of capital, and for other commodities to be consumed by the wage labourers whose value is extracted in the production process.\n\nThe wage is generally conceived as the marker of said value as it is the ability through which final-end products are able to be consumed, thus validating the capitalist production process. However, in the fluid economic relations which have developed between the wage-earning classes and the classes of capital, debt has developed as another force of value equivalence through mechanisms of privatised Keynesianism. In modern capitalism, with wages having stagnated relative to both productivity increases and the inflationary increases in living costs, there has been an amplifying need to maintain the valorisation of capital through the consumption of final-end products. New forms of monetary capital have been created which rely on the presence of debt instruments to continue to uphold current levels of consumption, pushing wage-earners into using mortgages, credit cards and other debt-and-interest instruments which, as well as maintaining consumption ratios, provide a new regulatory force that recreates the wage labour relation and provides new avenues of profit which capital can exploit. These new relations of production will be fleshed out later in the essay.\n\nThe homogeneous field of value is thus defined by the dynamics of wage-earning and profit-making, with the production of commodities being one capacity through which such antagonistic relations are regulated and maintained. The heterogeneity of values which inform freed markets in their production and distribution decisions are quashed under the regulative auspices of capitalist production and control. Further, this homogeneous field of value leads to particular nuances which favour the preservation of capital over that of wage labour.\n\nCapital perceives value not in the destruction of the end-product through consumption, but through a “metamorphoses of value”. “For the capitalist the pattern of metamorphosis is inverted. It is transformed from C-M-C into M-C-M”[9], with the social relations of capital needing constant regulatory intervention to maintain this procedure. For the owners of the means of production to maintain their dominance, there is a consistent need to valorise capital, as well as allow for processes of devalorisation and revaluation which allows for the reconstruction of the dynamics of capital. Without the market being able to act competitively by destroying profit and equalising relations of capital and labour, the capitalist classes use the state as a tool of accumulation and valorisation. Through the state, the wage labour relation and all its contradictions are maintained. A huge set of regulatory apparatuses are constructed, aptly defined by Tucker and Carson in the five monopolies which maintain the power of capitalist firms and capital-owners. The monopolies of money, land, intellectual property, protectionism and communications and transport infrastructures serve to maintain the dominance of capital. Such monopolies construct these fields of general equivalence by continuously expanding the means of capital accumulation and removing alternative forms of productive capacity from the realms of reality. Entry barriers are erected which limit the actual processes of capital from reaching the wage-earning classes, with distribution of income being a relation of capitalism which furthers its valorisation instead of being a true market distribution which opens competitive avenues and rewards innovation instead of monopolisation.\n\nWage labour becomes a cog in the valorisation of capital, itself affected by the homogenisation of value. The wage-earning classes are treated as another commodity, adding to the value of production. This division between capital and labour “arises from a qualitative difference in the positions of the two social classes vis-a-vis the conditions of production”[10], with labour as the subordinate element which has no access to either the true regulative powers of the state or the transformational capacities of markets and capital movement. However certain regulations do trickle down to the working classes, as in some of the legislation that developed out the New Deal. Yet the effect of this is not the transformation of the positions of the working classes but rather the maintenance of capitalist social relations. “Capital is not a thing because it is a definite social relationship and the standpoint of capital and wage labour is the same because both are perverted forms of social reproduction”[11].\n\nThe processes of general equivalence then comes out of these relations. General equivalence is defined by capitalist production processes and the ability for wage labourers to access commodities through consumption. “The law of value, or the general law of equivalence, is the formal representation of the process of homogenization of economic objects. Its field is the general circulation of commodities as the homogeneous social space”[12] of wage labour and its concomitant social relations. Commodities are the result of productive capacities where the economistic value (as defined through instrumentally rational action) is the most prized part of any production process or the consumables it produces. The spaces of capitalist value that are defined around this specific conception of action produces an economic reality from which social relations and the collectivisation of labour by capital are produced. The state acts as the arbiter of these social relations, allowing for their maintenance and recreation through multiple cycles of accumulation. General equivalence is fundamentally the capability for alternative socio-economic relations to be crushed under the dominance of economistic conceptions of action which are defined by profit and the wage labour relation. Commodities are stripped of any value judgment, and homogenously defined in relation to their capacity to be consumed or to valorise capital. The productive relations which Colin Ward saw developing in a self-employed society of worker ownership are unable to be realised as wage labour is codified into the regulatory mechanisms which maintain capitalism. General equivalence is the means through which subjective value is simplified, codified and destroyed, as productive relations are made evermore strict and immovable. Even during crises, capital acts to allow for the recreation of production systems and wage labour relations so as to recreate surplus value extraction and the maintained field of homogeneous value.\n\nBut how does such value, and the productive systems which come from it and create commodities in a system of general equivalence, develop. As already mentioned, productive systems have a fluid character which allows for their recreation. Capitalism is defined as a morphological system, “in other words a space structured by relationships subject to the principles of qualitative difference and unequal influence”[13]. Ruptures and reconstructions are a necessary part of this system as without them the antagonistic character of labour and capital becomes too much. Ruptures are needed as a pressure valve. Through these ruptures there is also the requirement of regulatory systems which maintain the basic wage labour system and the field of general equivalence in commodity production. The state, as an arbiter of relations, is a major factor in the creation of these regulatory systems and the forms of accumulation they allow for. Whether it be from early primitive accumulation, through to the extensive regime of accumulation and its productive systems, and onto periods of intensive accumulation which specifically relied on a significant paradigm of consumption, the state has played a massive role in concentrating the interests of capital and creating new productive capacities which soak up excess product and maintain the variables of varied wage labour relations.\n\nThe most obvious and earliest form that this state-capitalist intervention took was in the relations and actions of primitive accumulation. “Primitive accumulation is a constantly reproduced accumulation, be it in terms of the renewed separation of new populations from the means of production and subsistence, or in terms of the reproduction of the wage relation in the ‘established’ relations of capital”[14]. Historically speaking this was the process of disenfranchisement, where agricultural labourers and those with access to common lands were subsequently made into urban labourers for the developing factory systems of the Industrial Revolution. It can be seen as the early development of both extensive and intensive forms of accumulation in the processes of capital valorisation. The extensive land monopolies of states which led to massive transport and communications infrastructures, skewing economic relations away from petty commodity production and decentralised, variable market activity and pushing these relations into the realm of national and international economies of scale, can be seen as a more modern form of primitive accumulation, as it soaks up existing capital and allows for its transformation and metamorphoses into new forms of economic activity.\n\nThe early English enclosures, being the most prescient form of historical primitive accumulation, expropriated huge amounts of land, in particular common land, into the hands of established landowners who had preferential access to both parliamentary representation and the English court system. What developed was a huge class of landless labourers who were dispossessed of common rights to land. “A Parliament of landowners was naturally tender of landed property…. The landed class, taken as a whole, and Parliament as its legislative body, failed to ensure that the essential modernization of a large part of English agriculture did not leave in its wake a trail of dispossessed”[15]. The parliamentary actions which helped engender the early enclosures were almost entirely on the side of established large landowners, many of whom were created out of the effective expropriation and nationalisation of monastic lands during the Tudorian era. Cottagers, farm labourers and those who relied to a huge extent on the existing common lands became “a trail of dispossessed”, removed from their natural rights to subsistence and survival. “The old communal system kept many small men in being, but with the prop of the common removed, numbers must have found it very difficult, and in some instances impossible, to survive”[16].\n\nDuring the early period of the Industrial Revolution, such enclosures were extremely profitable for the developing factory system. With 2 million acres of land becoming enclosed under the Enclosure acts of 1850, the privatisation of land and open fields by and through the state led to an early landless proletariat. Poverty increased substantially, with poor relief expenditure swelling, and access to survival which the commons represented was cut-off. “The laboring people” became “crowded together in new places of desolation, the so-called industrial towns of England; the country people had been dehumanized into slum dwellers; the family was on the road to perdition; and large parts of the country were rapidly disappearing under the slack and scrap heaps vomited forth from the ‘satanic mills'”[17]. According to Ashton, “there was, especially in London and the South, a large supply of unskilled, unemployed people who were a charge on the parishes”[18] whom became the backbone of factory labour, particular in the cotton mills of the North of England. As Albert Jay Nock noted, the state was the primary conduit for such land expropriations and enclosures. Populations of individuals were removed from common land, and made cheap and available as labourers to be regulated and strictly controlled by the relations of capitalism. Thus not only is there the early use of state power for the development of capitalist economic expansion, but also the early use of said power for the regulation of wage labour relations. Wage labourers were placed under the control of the poor laws and an internal passport system, which regulated a labourers’ movements and their ability to choose work. The choice now became either the factory mills or the workhouses. ““The traditional unity of a Christian society,” writes Polanyi even from his secular Jewish perspective, “was giving place to a denial of responsibility on the part of the well-to-do for the condition of their fellows.” Or, as the Hammonds had put it: “the spirit of fellowship was dead””[19]. The traditional mores that defined the socio-economic relations of agricultural labour and the commons was utterly destroyed through the mechanisms of the state to benefit established landowners and the burgeoning capitalist systems of factories and intensive labour.\n\nMuch of later capitalist accumulation developed on the back of this system of land monopolisation and early wage labour regulation. European states also went through periods of enclosure and land accumulation, and in America there was the use of the state to develop massive transportation infrastructure which provided new outlets of economic growth, ending alternative relations of production and entrenching the wage labour relation in a country that didn’t have a European history of aristocracy and common land use. Instead, as Aglietta notes, America has a deep history of individualist political and economic thought, where the role of political economy is assigned this ideological baggage. Aglietta further goes on to theorise that the rapid rise of capitalist social relations in America is due to this individualist tendency. “All social activities were conceived as exchange relationships formed and unformed by the will of the contracting parties”[20]. Aglietta may well be right in his description, but I don’t believe he is in his theory. Rather, individualist doctrine was used and in many cases abused by centralised US court systems and political machines which relied on the legitimation of Jeffersonian rhetoric, much as Aglietta later points out. But such individualist tendencies do not explain the meteoric rise of the centralisation of capitalist relations into the wider political economy. Rather, it was the Hamiltonian mercantilist realities constructed by US governments and the industrial interests of the North, much of which were originally codified in the Constitution. State structures were always close-by and even integral in the development of American capitalism, whether in its legitimation through particular discourses or its destruction of alternative praxes of economic functioning. The Jeffersonian principles of independent agricultural labourers situated within local market structures and decentralised economies was fundamentally lost with the ratification of the Constitution, and the development of Hamiltonian economic constructions in the form of a central bank and widespread tariff system.\n\nDuring the latter half of the 19th century, American capitalist relations gained a massive expansionary force in the form of mass infrastructure projects, in particular the construction of railways throughout much of the Midwest and South, dragging in economies previously defined by petty commodity production. Small-scale distribution systems were crushed by monopolistic distribution companies who could piggyback on the land monopolies granted to rail companies by the US government. Large industrial capacities and the ability to further regulate wage labourers for the interests of developing manufacturing and factory systems meant a move away from pure primitive accumulation to a system of extensive accumulation. Previous modes of production, such as a local foodstuffs system and small factories using independent labourers were transformed into an extensive expansion of infrastructure, factories and the mobility of labour. “The division of society (is) effected by classificatory and identificatory logic (which) operates on working time in production”[21]. Thus there is a move from classic conceptions of time, where labour-time is defined by natural characteristics of agricultural seasons and the needs of commoners and wage-earners, toward a systematised concept of time where things are done in relation to the demands of commodity production. In such a system industry is able to expand massively, usually on the back of huge state robbery through enclosures of land and transport monopolisation. Kropotkin noted such occurrences when large monolithic factory systems and manufacturing industries began to dominate smaller production outfits in the many industrialised economies of Europe and America. Primitive accumulation was overtaken by extensive accumulation.\n\nUnder general accumulation and previous primitive accumulation, the system of general equivalence begins to define both the production of commodities as homogeneous goods whose value is economistically determined through early mass production and the development of ever-expanding market economies, and the system of wage labour where labourers are treated as a collective whole, to be classified, hierarchalised and moved based on the demands of particular industries and capitals. However such a system meets natural limits due to the pre-existing social relations of wage labourers, which, while being transformed, have not wholly been removed as a construction of reality. Primitive accumulation had produced massive structural transformations but had only created and germinated an industrial system. Workers still held the knowledge of things like the commons and petty commodity production which provided more dignity and control. Such pre-existing relations limit the effectiveness of a consumer economy while there still remains the germ of resistance in the form of different socio-economic praxes.\n\nA system of intensive accumulation is thus constructed which builds on the systems of industrial infrastructure developed under extensive accumulation. “The predominantly intensive regime of accumulation creates a new mode of life for the wage-earning class by establishing a logic that operates on the totality of time and space occupied or traversed by its individuals in daily life”[22]. A fundamental transformation of the wage-earning classes is enacted, with their productive relation to commodities fitting into the consumption relation which valorises capital. The field of general equivalence is fully enacted as the relations of capitalism, that of wage labour and capital, become emplaced within the generalities of capitalism and its production systems. The limits of extensive accumulation are overcome as wage labour is placed under the full regulative power of capital and entrenched in mass production systems which require constant inputs of capital and consumption, as witnessed in the production systems which developed around the time of the move toward intensive capital accumulation. These are Taylorism, Fordism and their successors.\n\nSuch forms of productive organisation enforce a new regulatory system on workers, building on past forms of accumulation and re-enforcing the system of general equivalence in the wider capitalist system. Wage labourers are fully subjected to the relations of capital and the needs of industry for constant consumption. Under Taylorism, there was the early development of the technical division of labour as wage labourers were increasingly individualised in their task roles and collectivised within workgroups under the supervision of bolstered management networks and team leaders. This form of organisation reached new heights under the systems of Fordism, as mechanisation was introduced leading to a further division of labour and an increase in the use of departmentalisation and management power. Worker autonomy, and collective working, were turned on their heads as the technical division produces a dialectical relation of increasing worker individualisation on the one hand and a collective realisation of wage labour on the other. Under these systems, productivity gains realised by labour are used for the purposes of capital valorisation and an increase in the extraction of surplus value. Wage labourers themselves are further homogenised as tools of capital accumulation, subject to the vagaries of capitalist discipline with no alternative modes of existence even provisionally available.\n\nLater developments in production systems further such a dialectical relation of workers, with individualisation within the wage-earning classes and collectivisation under the auspices of capital both increasing. Productivity gains are increasingly divorced from wages and the collective means of labour organisation are destroyed by state intervention, limiting their influence and capabilities. Such was witnessed under Thatcher and Reagan during periods of deindustrialisation in Western countries. Under deindustrialisation, productivity has been completely divorced from wages, and the methods of production divorced from their consumption. Workers in developed countries are fully subjected to the consumption paradigm, and through new mechanisms the huge levels of internationalised overproduction are soaked up by forms of financialisation and state intervention. The forces of wage labour now inhabit an economy of services and minimal industry, with their wages determined by the output of international industry and the ability of workers to continue consumption patterns. Now with financialisation this also means the introduction of new methods of wage labour regulation in the form of a debt relation between banks, employers and labourers. Employers can afford to pay minimal wages completely divorced from productivity and even from living costs, with banks and other financial firms making the shortfall through forms of privatised Keynesianism. Mortgages, credit cards and other debt instruments maintain the consumption paradigm (and with it the valorisation of capital) and introduce another method of regulatory control as debt relations overtake industrial relations. “For the working and middle classes, they (mortgages) represent increased indebtedness due to a belief in homeownership. For global elites, they represent an opportunity for the continuation of the extraction of surplus value through financial markets”[23]. These classes of indebted individuals are now a widespread precariat, of part-time and low-wage workers and a class of unemployed surplus labour.\n\nFrom the early interventions of primitive accumulation, through the expansion of capitalist relations under extensive accumulation, and onto the systems of intensive accumulation which reshaped wage labour relations and created huge regulatory machinery, there was constant recreation of the capitalist socio-economic order. Throughout out these systemic transformations, which invariably relied on the use of state power for their creation, there was the continual renewal of the field of general equivalence and the wage labour relation. The wage-earning class are increasingly homogenised as a tool of capital valorisation and regulated into dialectical relations of production. Any form of independence from the consumption paradigm and the wage labour relation are eliminated by the increasing stringency of regulative action by the classes of capital and the conduit of the state. Conceptions of time are homogenised around the concept of the wage. Time wages become the norm as agricultural work and the guilds are outmanoeuvred by large factory owners and the general classes of capital. When the factory system enlarges and internationalises, the division of labour is increased and entrenched and the autonomy of the wage labourer is quashed. During the periods of deindustrialisation, wage labour was implanted with new regulative relations in the form of debt and privatised Keynesianism, removing agency and ending the relation of wages to productivity. In these modern dynamics, the state intervenes both on behalf of capital, through subsidies which maintain monopoly and soak-up excess product, and on behalf of wage labour through things like the minimum wage and workplace regulation which limit the desire for radical change and maintain the antagonistic relations of capital and labour.\n\nThese are the fundamental relations of capitalism and its continual recreation and metamorphoses. The state plays a huge role in regulating, coordinating and systematising the mechanisms which reproduce capitalism. However such a conception does not define the theoretical definitions and interstitial realities of free, or freed, markets. Rather a distinction must be made between the regulative methods of existing capitalism in all its forms, and the definitions and realities of freed markets, which encompass a much higher level of social and economic interactions and relations.\n\nThe most obvious difference is the role and mechanisms of regulation within the freed market. Freed markets rely on a huge level of operationalised, nested forms of regulation which interact in polycentric ways with market actors and socio-economic relations. This can be as simple as attempting to maximise value through good relations with customers and other firms, giving a particular firm or entrepreneur the ability to maximise their subjective value preferences. Further from this, there is the ability for collective organisations (such as trade unions, consumer groups, etc.) to create levels of regulation which fit conceptions of particular rights, demands and necessities in their economies. Already, international social movements have created forms of social regulation through labelling movements and Fairtrade contracts[24].\n\nSuch regulatory mechanisms act as an alternative praxis to state regulation, which effectively subsidise externalities and favour largesse. As well as this, in the capital-labour dialectic the state fundamentally favours and acts on behalf of the classes of capital. As Manuel DeLanda would put it, under modern capitalism there exist anti-markets which emphasise monopoly power and extreme regulative control of all modes of production under the firm’s command via state bureaucracies. However, freed markets are the opposite, acting interstitially and relying on the bottlenecks of disaggregated information and imperfect market conditions. Under capitalist anti-markets, entrepreneurial spirits are nowhere near as important as the maintenance of regulated class relations between capital and labour. Things like competition, falling profits and an autonomy in work are a veneer on the general capitalist system. If such things were able to dynamically exist, capitalist social relations would be untenable. The antagonistic relations of capital and labour, regulated via the state, would be outcompeted by new forms of capital creation and access and the ability for wage labourers to operate in different socio-economic systems of action. In a truly freed market, rather than a system of general equivalence where all commodities’ value are measured relative to the wage labour relations’ ability to reproduce consumption patterns and capital valorisation, there would exist a plethora of value maximisation systems and subjective value preferences. A praxeological system where values and desires are met by heterogeneous forms of both capital and market systems. A freed market is not simply determined by economistic rationalism. Instead it is “only one denotation of praxeological understanding. It is based around seeing the market as a particular institution of economic praxis. But of course there exist other systems that may well sprout up in conditions of freedom and the unlocking of human desires and actions from the coercive state. This could include production for direct use, collective decentralised planning systems for public goods, primitivist economies, recommoning (as seen in Zomia and some of the right to repair movements) and economies of abundance, as are developing in filesharing and 3D printing. The market need not be “turned into an idol”, but rather understood and codified as a major area of human activity and value creation and maximisation. Markets and capital are heterogeneous due to their subjective valuation by individuals. In the same way one chooses between different products or services in a market, and leads oneself to different bargaining strategies and forms of price discovery, in a freed market one could and should have the ability to subjectively value and choose different economic governance structures and different forms of market and capital”[25].\n\nAnd these are simply the theoretical possibilities. Where such freed market structures exist interstitially, there are decentralised systems of micro-firms and direct economy production, with high levels of competition and cooperation depending upon the socially-developed regulatory mechanisms. In the Shanzhai economy, black market production in micro-technologies and handheld-computer goods are produced through micro-manufacturers, with high levels of innovation in things like smartphones and tablets. In the Third Italy system, there are cooperative firms producing by order rather than relying on subsidised mass production. The Greek people, since the destruction wrought by the financial crisis, have begun to construct their own alternative economy through city-based cooperatives, local currencies and collective forms of consumption[26]. Finally, the Piqueteros of Argentina have constructed a gift-market hybrid economy where there is production for petty commodity exchange as well as production for direct use. Variable and intensive economies of scale, with significant independence from wage labour and autonomy for worker-entrepreneurs, are developed and honed in[27]. Something akin to Konkin’s entrepreneuriat is being developed in all of these examples. Nothing akin to a field of general equivalence is witnessed in these systems as value maximisation is not simply boiled down to an economistic relation of production and consumption.\n\nWithout the state, there is the ability to return to the relations developed from petty commodity production and common ownership of land and foodstuffs, as well as new advantages brought by the capitalist collectivisation of wage labour. Modern variants, like tool exchanges, capital formation alternatives and different conceptions of time which effect the dynamics of work and end the homogenisation of wage labour, can become existential realities. A distributist system of independent property holders, or a reinvigorated commons of unused capital are also possible. The realities of capitalism, those of regulated, enforced capital-labour relations, a huge imbalance between exchange and use value and a system of entry barriers and statist monopolies are simply the construction of one praxis among many alternatives, with the capitalist praxis being extremely fragile and far too homogeneous. The anti-markets of capital rely on state intervention, and the construction of complex regulatory apparatuses which need constant expansion and growth. Enforced scarcities and monopolies are the inevitability of such a system, with wage labour being the outlet for valorisation and consumption. In a world of declining resources, increasing abundance of information and technology, and new alternative praxes sprouting up, this system is neither viable nor desirable.\n\n“Some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen’s guilds were abolished in the last [the eighteenth] century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition”[28]. Freed markets encompass such a range of opportunities for the freeing of the wage-earning classes from the tyranny of capitalism and the state. An independence in property holding, a range of spontaneously-ordered regulatory systems and an end to the antagonistic and fragile relations of capital and labour are entirely possible under a pluralistic system of socio-economic relations. A field of general equivalence cannot be constructed when the subjective, multitudinous desires of independent people and voluntary collectives are fully met in heterogeneous economic systems which meet demand, not through state subsidy and mass overproduction, but through variably scaled economies and principles of freedom, subsidiarity and pluralism.\n\n[1] Aglietta, M. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience, 2015, 81\n\n[2] Gillis, W. Debt: The Possibilities Ignored, 2014\n\n[3] Gillis, W. Debt: The Possibilities Ignored, 2014\n\n[4] Shaw, C. Money’s Perimeters of Freedom, 2016\n\n[5] https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2015/02/06/the-limits-of-economic-action/\n\n[6] Weber, M. Economy and Society, 1978, 63\n\n[7] https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2015/02/06/the-limits-of-economic-action/\n\n[8] Aglietta, M. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience, 2015, 40\n\n[9] Aglietta, M. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience, 2015, 48\n\n[10] Aglietta, M. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience, 2015, 49\n\n[11] Bonefeld, W. The Permanence of Primitive Accumulation: Commodity Fetishism and Social Constitution, 2001, 3\n\n[12] Aglietta, M. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience, 2015, 41\n\n[13] Aglietta, M. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience, 2015, 19\n\n[14] Bonefeld, W. The Permanence of Primitive Accumulation: Commodity Fetishism and Social Constitution, 2001, 11\n\n[15] Ferrara, C. The Austrian Version of the English Enclosures Part II, 2011\n\n[16] Ferrara, C. The Austrian Version of the English Enclosures Part II, 2011\n\n[17] Ferrara, C. The Austrian Version of the English Enclosures III, 2011\n\n[18] Ferrara, C. The Austrian Version of the English Enclosures III, 2011\n\n[19] Ferrara, C. The Austrian Version of the English Enclosures III, 2011\n\n[20] Aglietta, M. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience, 2015, 73\n\n[21] Aglietta, M. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience, 2015, 71\n\n[22] Aglietta, M. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience, 2015, 71\n\n[23] Shaw, C. Redefining Money: The Praxis of Local Currencies, 2016\n\n[24] Shaw, C. Creating the Seeds of Capitalism’s Death, 2016\n\n[25] Shaw, C. Praxeology: The Importance of First Principles\n\n[26] Shaw, C. Redefining Money: The Praxis of Local Currencies, 2016\n\n[27] Shaw, C. Rethinking Markets: Anarchism, Capitalism and the State, 2016, 27-29\n\n[28] Ferrara, C. The Austrian Version of the English Enclosures III, 2011",
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      "body": "https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2016/08/30/the-real-question-anarchism-must-face/\n\nAnarchism is a broad and deep ideology with huge historical roots and much investigation and conceptualisation which has fleshed out many interlocking theories and systems of power. It has a large range of intelligent thinkers behind it, ranging from Proudhon and Kropotkin through to Rothbard, Carson and Hoppe. However, it has never truly caught on from outside its theoretical abstractions, remaining on the fringes of both political ideology as well as political reality.\n\nThis gives much ammunition to the ideologies of statism, who can simply say that our theories and ideas are pulled from the minds of intelligent fools and have no bearing on the realistic politico-economic relations that currently shape the world. Going one step further, they usually assert that one cannot find any truly anarchistic society which has functioned peacefully for any significant period of time, except for their childish arguments concerning Somalia.\n\nBut of course this is statist thinking for you. It requires no introspection and the simple pulling up and batting down of straw men. Anarchist societies have both existed and prospered throughout history. Whether it be the decentralised Tuatha of Ireland, the Icelandic legal system of private juries, judges and law courts or the quasi-anarchistic systems of law and politics within the Hanseatic League. All of these societies prospered for long periods of time, usually being brought down by the outside action of imperialistic states or through the coercive reforms of their own polities. At an economic level, anarchistic relations of voluntary contracts, duties and obligations have existed interstitially within both the feudal and capitalist systems of economic governance, determining outcomes and creating new strands of socio-economic organisation. The Hanseatic League was one such example which I’ve already mentioned. There also exists the cooperative economic systems of voluntary capital-labour relations found in the Mondragon Cooperative group and the Salinas cooperatives in Ecuador, and the freed market systems of the Third Italy and the Shenzhen economy in China. Then there is the deregulated Taiwanese marketplace of pop-up vendors.\n\nGoing more substantially into sociological relations and systems, anarchism can be seen in the non-coercive activities of individuals negotiating, creating contracts, using property or developing collective systems of political and economic governance. Fundamentally, all non-coercive activity engaged in by consenting individuals and groups can be seen as the workings of an anarchic order. Such actions do not constitute a peripheral space like much larger examples (Ireland, Iceland, etc.) do.\n\nIn this sense, the arguments of statist ideology have little basis. Their inability to conceive of a realistic ideological alternative to the totalities of the state means they cannot truly engage with anarchist ideology. Instead, they bleat on about how realistic it is or isn’t, or how it’s never truly been implemented.\n\nHowever, this does not leave anarchism as some untouchable ideology removed from criticism. The major problem with the questions statists raise is that they are the wrong questions. Anarchist societies and polities have existed and will most likely always exist so long as there is an innate desire to escape coercive power relations. The more important question which anarchism must face is why anarchism and anarchists have consistently failed to move their ideological and concrete structures away from the peripheral and the interstitial. There are blatant anarchistic tendencies amongst individuals who act. Simply look at a free market, or the many constructions of non-coercive political institutions. But these tendencies never seem to expand to encompass a truly new polity. Why is this?\n\nSuch a question is too long to answer in a short blogpost, and outside the parameters of my current knowledge. The one thought I have is that while anarchists have sometimes been excellent at overthrowing order in an existing political construct, they haven’t been nearly good enough at constructing a new order which helps structure the society and the community. Revolutionary zeal only lasts so long before the wider community desires a return to normality. If an anarchistic polity cannot create that, the desire for statism returns. At an abstract ideological level, a similar thing can be seen among different anarchist groupings. They have a seeming inability to construct a shared ideological and political front which recognises voluntaryism and pluralism, the most basic of concepts. Instead each becomes more exclusionary and inward-looking, concentrating on criticising other anarchist sects while the corporate state continues on unabated.\n\nA strategy such as Keith Preston’s pan-anarchism and pan-secessionism seems the most likely form of success in both of these areas. Without it, that most fundamental of questions that anarchists seem unable to answer will continue to plague the wider movement.",
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      "body": "https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2016/08/25/qe-is-simply-reactionary/\n\nThe Bank of England has recently announced a new round of quantitative easing alongside an interest rates cut, pushing £100 billion into banks, with the prerequisite they use this money “to pass on the low interest rate to households and businesses”. This could, potentially, reinvigorate business lending and lead to new firm creation as well as existing firm expansion. At least, this is the hope. Unfortunately, it seems that this is purely hope over expectation.\n\nThe last round of quantitative easing seems to have entirely concentrated in inflating underlying asset prices as well as fuelling housing and mortgage demand. According to Standard & Poor’s in 2015, “the central bank’s gilt-buying £375bn ($546bn, €485bn) quantitative easing programme… fuelled a rise in financial asset prices as investors poured money into stocks, driving up prices and making the rich richer”. Alongside unprecedentedly low interest rates, this has contributed to house price increases of 7.7% across the UK, and a 9.8% increase in London alone. An acute housing crisis has followed, with rents and house prices increasing exponentially. Even with a Brexit vote in late June, house price increases have dropped but continue to grow generally.\n\nRather than QE reinvigorating the economy with flows of cheap credit, it has moved money and investment back into fragile asset markets, fuelling a potentially new crisis in the near future. Combined with UK growth mainly created through consumer spending, as business growth and trade stagnate, we see increasing levels of private debt, as well as the taking of housing debt by governments looking to create more home ownership. For example, the UK government has begun to effectively nationalise Housing Association debts, and involve themselves in mortgage markets through help-to-buy schemes. Increasingly, this is becoming unpayable, creating the cyclical effect of encouraging more debt to afford rents and mortgages, as well as to grow the economy through more unstable consumer spending.\n\nAnd all of this was during the first round of QE and state-encouraged spending. This new round has apparently come from the necessity of combating the risks of Brexit. But of course this is a just convenient proxy for the need to encourage investment and capital movement into the real economy, which has been dying within the UK as well as internationally since the Great Recession. Instead, money has flown into the housing markets, with “home prices now exceeding the 2005 peaks in most major markets“. “Commercial real estate is also at bubble levels. Every asset class is overvalued”. In US markets alone, “valuation measures most reliably correlated with actual subsequent market returns pushed to the third most offensive extreme in history at the May 2015 market high, eclipsed only by the 2000 and 1929 peaks”. Money is flying into asset prices, allowing for overvaluation. Low interest rates and credit pumping are only fuel to fire, with black swans like Brexit being catalysts for a crash at best rather than a major turning point in financial markets.\n\nIn this sense, QE is reactionary. It is the attempt by central banks to rescue a dying system of financialisation and the pure monetisation of debt. Banks, through their regulatory mechanisms (such as the Basel Accords), have increasingly favoured asset and land investment. Central banks, unwittingly, have allowed this to continue and develop, financialising house prices and mortgage debts into tradable commodities and allowing for new capital flows which are provided with signals of misallocation in the form of artificially low interest rates and the provision of subsidies and guarantees, such as deposit insurance and bank bailouts. The Geo-Austrian business cycle theory, as theorised by Fred Foldvary, encapsulates this issues succinctly. “The cause of cyclical fluctuations is that because of the elasticity of the value of money, the rate of interest is not always equal to the equilibrium rate, but is in the short run determined by banking liquidity”. The main part here is the interest rate, the effective valuation of monetary flows and credit. In a free market economy, where money production is left (at least to an extent) to market forces and private actors, interest rates for monetary valuation spontaneously appear. Such interest rates allow for investment decisions and time preferences to be developed in the realm of the production of capital goods. “The level of the natural rate of interest is limited by the productivity of that lengthening of the period of production which is just justifiable economically and of that additional lengthening of the period of production which is not justifiable”.\n\nA natural rate of interest developed through price discovery and forms of competitive currencies (provided by political units or private actors) can allow for the efficient allocation of capital goods and the development of proper flows of production and consumption in economies of dispersed knowledge. However, when political interests through the money monopoly of central banks and treasuries artificially lowers interest rates to generate more consumption or investment, the market must respond by trying to increase production outputs and consumption flows by other means than the general purpose of value creation and wealth generation. Upsetting this balance means altering time preferences and changing the dynamics of market exchange.\n\nLand plays an important function in these business cycles of artificial credit creation. As land is an integral part to all economic activity, credit creation affects the ways in which land is valued and used. Credit creation artificially inspires new time preferences and the encouragement of increased production and investment over and above the market clearing rate of such products and stocks. As a result, land must be used to both allow for this production and better create new forms of distribution and consumption which satisfy. The construction industry acts as a “‘transmission mechanism’ by which the land market impacts ‘the factory, office and corner retail store'”. Forms of transport infrastructure are invested in and built to accommodate these above-market rises in production, thus facilitating both more consumption and the need to increase production to meet the increasing costs and debts of new infrastructure. Again, we see a cyclical nature, as this increase in infrastructure subsequently increases land values and with it speculation, fuelling further needs to fill in the gaps of this increase in investment and speculation.\n\n“Integrating the two theories, the geo-Austrian theory of the business cycle is as follows. At the beginning of the expansion, the banking system expands credit by an amount greater than in is warranted by available savings. This artificially reduces interest rates; the skewed market rate is lower than the normal natural rate. Low interest rates induce investment in higher-order capital goods, much of it consisting in real estate construction, related infrastructure and durable goods.\n\nAs the expansion turns into a boom, land speculation sets in, fuelled by still cheap credit. Land rent and prices then rise higher than is warranted by current use. Meanwhile, since consumer time preference has not changed, the demand for consumer goods continues as before, and prices rise. When the money expansion providing cheap credit ceases and when inflationary expectations affect the market for loanable funds, interest rates rise, especially affecting the interest-sensitive real-estate market. Higher costs (which can include higher taxes and labor costs along with higher interest rates and more expensive land) now reduce the rate of increase of new investment. The higher-order investments, chief among them real estate, turn out to be malinvested, as there is insufficient demand for the extra capacity, with vacancies in shopping centers, hotels, office buildings, and apartments.”\n\nSay’s law gets thrown out the window as the market is infected with cheap credit and altered time preferences. Productive capacity and new investment cannot keep up with this new rise in cheap credit, thus fuelling speculative bubbles and the need for quick returns on investment to meet new supply-demand ratios. This is, in effect, what central banks are currently doing with QE. They are attempting to encourage new time preferences and productive capacities in an economy that just has not got this. QE is an attempt to paper over the cracks rather than tackle the political and economic decisions and consequences which have brought us this mess in the first place. “In the panicky haste of blind expediency, central bankers drop interest rates to zero and unleash unlimited liquidity to save the bubbles they inflated. Instead of flushing the system of bad debt and speculative leverage and allowing the market to reprice impaired assets, central bankers push the perverse incentives that inflated the bubble to new highs”.\n\nUnfortunately central banks and their QE experimentation will not address the fundamental underlying problems of the economy, whether nationally in the UK or internationally. The UK itself is experiencing anaemic business growth, poor wage growth and a massive productivity puzzle. A significant proportion of current UK job growth and creation is within the low-pay sector, increasing issues of underemployment and badly structured compositional factors. I believe there are two major reasons for this. One, the UK has an overregulated labour market. “Measures such as the National Living Wage, pension auto-enrolment and the apprenticeship levy, amongst others” are contributing to non-fluid and badly-responsive labour markets. Secondly, entrepreneurial activity is significantly dampened due to pathetic business investment from established banks and the increasing stringency of venture capital in an economic environment of large uncertainty.\n\nThe best reforms that can be taken are for government and central bank intervention in financial markets and banking structures to end. The strict regulations of the FCA and FSA have contributed to banking monopolisation, and limited the capacity for new lenders and forms of capital to develop and expand. Secondly, by freeing up capital, new entrepreneurial activity can be funded, creating new avenues within the real economy for productive investment and limiting the need for speculative finance. Thirdly, freeing up labour markets from unnecessary top-down regulations can mean a move away from underemployment and towards productive employment ventures coming from increased entrepreneurial activity. Such basic reforms allow for new economies of scale to develop around different economic and financial structures, such as those in hi-tech manufacturing and local infrastructure projects. Finally, and most fundamentally, the end to state and central bank’s money monopoly. As Vishal Wilde has pointed out, there are a lot of benefits that can come with competitive currency regimes. Optimising trading preferences for particular regions by allowing exporting or importing networks or economic units to use weak or strong currencies respectively, creating variable interest rates between different currencies and monetary networks (thus allowing for multiple forms of expectations-management and subjective preferences) and potentially minimising the impact of speculative finance through increasing the avenues of productive investment and financial market construction and regulation.\n\nHowever, in writing this, there is neither the economic will from central bankers or the political will from governments to do any of this. They would rather fuel credit crises through quantitative easing and politically-influenced interest rates as they simply react to events they’ve helped create. Thus, it is simply a matter of time before the next big economic crash.",
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      "body": "https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2016/06/26/decentralised-common-law-post-brexit/\n\nOne of the most challenging elements to a post-Brexit order is the organisation and understanding of law. Since our accession into the EEC, our laws have been increasingly harmonised with and even led by European Union directives and court judgments. Thus we’ve moved into the position of having legislation more dominant in legal acquiescence than precedent. This is not just the direction of the European Union, it has also been the direction of the British Parliament. Through parliamentary statutes and legislated actions, economic regulation has been led by the idea of one-size-fits-all legislation rather than its acceptance through the particularities of common law and the creation of contracts. Such a direction can also be seen in the dominance of human rights law in legal discourses. Instead of precedence taking the predominant position in questions of legality, human rights are defined a priori, thus leading to the situation of legal abstractions of equality of access and inalienable rights, all of which are ill-defined and based on the fluid decisions of particular judges.\n\nDue to this settlement, certain experts of EU law have made the claim that by leaving the EU, our disentanglement from EU laws and regulations will require a massive transference of political power from parliament to the executive, as only they can take on the mammoth task of running through applicable and non-applicable legislation. Certainly that is one way of looking at it, particularly considering the dominance of legislation over common law precedence.\n\nHowever, another way of passing through this quagmire could be through a decentralised common law system of varying court systems and nested systems of governance. In this system, all legislation is treated relative to preceding cases, subjective judgments and the idea that all regulations have variable elements around contractual agreements and trade.\n\nAlready, English common law contains within it a multitude of different legal precedents and court systems with their own procedures. We have tort law, contract law and property law, all of which contain elements of precedence shaping their legal consensus. Applying these to existing regulations, whether EU, UK or jointly related, would not be hugely difficult. They would simply be applied to particular economic transactions between firms when developing contractual relations, specifically in areas such as the production of particular products, and their use and sale in different market and national contexts. Eventually, this could develop into a system of local regulatory apparatuses created by juries and local judges, with regulation being applied to subjective contexts or even being scrapped if former precedents become irrelevant in the circumstance of a dynamic, fluid economy and society.\n\nIn these instances, the principle of subsidiarity is upheld in legal and regulatory matters. This is something the EU already proclaims to uphold on matters of governance and local government spending. “The idea of subsidiarity is that the higher level of government (the EU in this case) should only intervene if the lower level is not capable of acting”[1]. “To give an example of how this might be operationalised, consider the example of labour market regulation. The policy objective might be decent working conditions. If the principle of subsidiarity applied, we would ask whether this objective was already achieved via market and civil society mechanisms (for example, through trade unions, mutual aid societies, 28 and so on). Insofar as market mechanisms did not suffice, local or national government could intervene”[2]. These systems of government can be developed in such a way as to have nested levels of legal and regulatory agencies, going from neighbourhood councils to city/county local governance to voluntary regional or national parliaments. Again, existing legal systems already have these principles with courts that deal with specific legal principles and forms of law, that slowly go up to appeals and supreme courts. Elinor Ostrom has documented such systems developing in the California governance of water collection and provision[3], whereby collective contractual agreements are decided through local and state governance systems and enforced through the hierarchies of the legal system, with penalties applied to violation and the failure to meet contractual obligations.\n\nPlacing this within a libertarian society, much of what I’ve described can easily fit within a competitive court and legal system where laws are developed through consensus, precedence and contractual agreement. For example, the issues of trade between the different nations and localities of the European Union could eventually evolve into a system of trade courts and varied trade law, as was the case with the Hanseatic League and other such voluntary trade bodies.\n\nEU law then becomes something that is not rigid and one-size-fits-all, but rather variable through a system of decentralised common law. In a system of subsidiarity, decision-making need not be centralised through top-down directives and ECJ judgments, but rather by local juries and smaller regulatory systems that include employment associations, guilds and trade unions in the decision-making process of creating and enforcing regulations. When necessary, decisions can be moved upward to appeals courts and agreed upon supreme courts, or even to regional and national forms of governance who can decide on the application of particular laws and regulations.\n\nThis system requires a radical rethink of how our economy and society are governed, and how our legal systems operate. It requires the full acceptance of the principle of subsidiarity by all relevant governance institutions, and a move back toward common law and popular litigiousness. Fundamentally, it would gut the coercive, centralised power of the state. With the recent Brexit vote, and other European populations growing more and more distressed with the centralising direction of the EU, a system of decentralised common law could be the answer to superfluous regulatory mechanisms, poorly decided legal frameworks and the continual dominance of legislation over precedence and the jury system.\n\n[1] Booth, P. & Bourne, R. Making the Pieces Fit, 2016, 27\n\n[2] Booth, P. & Bourne, R. Making the Pieces Fit, 2016, 27-28\n\n[3] Ostrom, E. Governing the Commons, 1990",
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      "body": "https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2014/12/04/an-overarching-authority-is-no-arbiter-of-the-economy-why-hayek-was-right-and-why-we-must-go-further/\n\nWithin Hayek’s Individualism and Economic Order, we see an excellent explanation of the problems of allowing a central planner or any overarching authority to direct the economic actions of individuals and business. It’s succinct in demonstrating why economic actions cannot be centrally directed, explaining that economic decision making is a microcosm of individual actions that cannot be predicted by a central authority, and as a result giving justification for the market economy as the most efficient economy. However, we must take Hayek’s premise further and refute his neoliberalism which still justifies government action in the economy and ignores the social relations which further justify the market and its functions. To do this, we need to look at the works of Rothbard and Granovetter, who show us the framework of government-less, anarchist society where the market and individuals can function without the authority of neoliberal structures and social relations still exist within an individualist, market framework.\n\nHayek’s vision of economic functions being directed, not by an overarching authority but rather by the market and its pricing system seems to me to be the best function of the economic within society at large. The market is a collection of individual tastes and needs and is thus shaped by individuals and the entrepreneurs that respond to such needs. This then gives a certain equality to the market system whereby humans are not necessarily equal in terms of accrued wealth or resources, but rather as Flew puts its “our equality as creatures possessing the essential and peculiar characteristics of human beings”[1], meaning our equality is actually an equality of chance to achieve some form of material and social gain. It is also because of the microcosm of different knowledge’s and prices within the market system that gives us this equality as none are possessed with perfect information and thus cannot truly manipulate the system, as elements such as competition and the ability to votes with one’s feet make it difficult to work around it. As Hayek states, “the “data” from which ‘the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society “given” to a single mind which could work out the implications and can never be so given.”[2] demonstrating the inability for economic data to be given to any particular authority or set of authorities that can govern the economy with it.\n\nIf we take the opposing view to Hayek’s position of economic freedom within a market-based context, we normally see planned, centrally directed economies where resources are allocated by a central authority. This central authority must, as a result of its control over the economy, have some form of overarching knowledge of different economic actions so as to best solve the “problem of how to allocate “given” resources”[3]. This concept however is replete with issues, in particular because of its reliance on perfect knowledge, which within the economy is practically impossible. The microcosm of different economic knowledge’s that Hayek identified cannot be pinned down by a planner or even mathematical models. As Hayek states, “Any approach, such as that of much of mathematical economics … systematically leaves out what is our main task to explain”[4], the main task being to show that central planning based on mathematical theorems isn’t possible in determining the wants and needs of individuals and providing supply for demand. Rather we need a price system that can give distribute resources in a competitive environment. However despite this, Hayek still supported the role of government in society, and thus allowed for a pervasive institution to effect individual choice and exchange.\n\nAs Hoppe notes, “According to Hayek, government is ‘necessary’ … in an advanced society government ought to use its power of raising funds by taxation to provide … cannot be provided by the market”[5]. Here we then see the neoliberalism of Hayek’s argument, where there is a belief that government can provide services outside of the market, or in other cases inject competition into markets. However this view allows for what is fundamentally an involuntary, monopolist system that, as Rothbard makes clear, has “attempted—usually successfully—to gain a compulsory monopoly of the commanding heights of the economy and the society”[6]. Further, the conception of a non-voluntary market has been forced onto society as a result of the rise of neoliberalism, proving predictions similar to those of Polanyi. However Polanyi’s conception of the market as an aberration I believe to be wrong, as a truly free market is a choice of society. Thus we must take Hayek’s economic model of price systems and combine with the concept of choice as Rothbard theorised, such as by completely allowing for voluntary exchange and removing society’s main monopolist, the state. We must also accept the role of the social in the economy and accept social and irrational actions within an economy, such as Polanyi’s conceptions of reciprocity and redistribution and Granovetter’s idea of networks being fundamental to the functioning of business actions in an economy. These conceptions of choice and society have been ignored in neoliberal society, and need to be brought back to the fore so as to allow for a society based on voluntarism and choice.\n\nThe neoliberal paradigm which currently exists has in some way adopted the Hayekian price system and placed it within the corporatist, government-controlled system we see. Conceptions of choice and society are seen as unimportant, as Thatcher’s famous epithet of there being no such thing as society sums up nicely. And while Hayek’s conception of price system working in a free market is in my opinion correct, his belief in the state as a viable institution means that a free market cannot exist as the state as it is itself a monopolist of power. Thus we must take Rothbardian concepts of choice in the market as well as anarchist ideas of choosing to function within the market at all, thus preserving individual choice and allowing for different forms of free societies.\n\n[1] Flew, A. (2001). Locke Versus Rawls on Equality. Available: http://mises.org/daily/810. Last accessed 16th Nov 2014.\n\n[2] Hayek, F (1958). Individualism and Economic Order. London: The University of Chicago Press. P. 77\n\n[3] Hayek, F (1958). Individualism and Economic Order. London: The University of Chicago Press. P. 77\n\n[4] Hayek, F (1958). Individualism and Economic Order. London: The University of Chicago Press. P. 91\n\n[5] Hoppe, H. (1994). F. A. Hayek on Government and Social Evolution: A Critique . The Review of Austrian Economics. 7 (1), 67-93.\n\n[6] Rothbard, M (1998). The Ethics of Liberty. New York: New York University Press. P. 161-162",
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      "body": "https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/libertarians-shouldnt-celebrate-the-rich/\n\nLibertarians, particularly those found in the Libertarian Party or within the major “libertarian” think tanks, always seem determined to glorify the rich as the creators and progenitors of the modern world. Whether it be by celebrating CEOs or defending the stupid, inefficient acts of corporations, many “libertarians” have a firm belief that modern wealth and its subsequent creations are somehow indicative of the magic of market processes and spontaneous order. But on economic and political fronts, this is just simply untrue. The modern rich as they exist predominantly maintain their wealth through networks and systems of rentierism.\n\nWhether it be preferential access to debt and capital markets, the ability to rely on overly-inflated assets, the capacity for owning intellectual property “rights” or the use of influence in political networks and governance, the rich of today have acquired vast amounts of influence and power not through entrepreneurialism and economic success, but rather from political lobbying and having the capability to influence regulatory decision-making which creates entry barriers and restricts access to heterogeneous forms of capital. As Oxfam has reported, 75% of the world’s wealthiest acquire the majority of their wealth from these political avenues and rentier schemes. This can effectively be described as non-productive entrepreneurial activity[1], as at the individual level such political manoeuvring makes sense to an established corporation. They can limit competition and solidify their economic position. However, the systemic effects are wide-ranging, monopolising the economy and concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands.\n\nBy celebrating modern wealth, these libertarians are denigrating genuine entrepreneurship, and ignoring systemic state intervention which has invariably led to the monopolised capitalism of today. Markets naturally decentralise and destroy profit through their competitive mechanisms and limitation of regulatory entry barriers which are coercive. However, modern markets are not even remotely free, but are instead a collection of disenfranchised entrepreneurs and labourers and a capitalist class which happily holds wealth and maintains their own hegemony.\n\nHistorically, this has also been the case. Many small-scale industries and entrepreneurial desires existed during the Industrial Revolution. As David Graeber has pointed out, innovation came not from established manufacturers and industrialists but from cottage industries, family-owned firms and the eccentric inventors and aristocrats who helped develop new technology. Kropotkin noted similar occurrences throughout much of Europe where even in the unfree, statist markets of the early 20th century industries were naturally decentralising and were reliant on a vast network of interconnected workshops and small-scale manufacturers.\n\nWhat changed this phenomenon. The state. Small manufacturers could not curry favour in the political establishments of parliamentary governments, and lost out when it came to protectionism, and the fake free trade that was implemented in the latter half of the 19th century. Small-scale industries didn’t have access to colonial economies of scale and their markets, and didn’t have access to the disenfranchised labourers which came about from the enclosure of common land and the smashing of the guilds and trade associations by the state. Kevin Carson has shown that during the days of the Industrial Revolution, there were two paths that could have been followed. The interstitial small-scale manufacturers that were the backbone of industrial economies (and were actually products of semi-free market forces) could have developed into networked, variably-scaled economies alongside empowered agricultural and city labourers. Even with the massive state intervention which tried to limit such empowerment, it still existed in the early Industrial Revolution. On the other hand, the actual path that was taken was the continued subsidisation of mercantile elites who could dominate their smaller competitors. Transport and communication infrastructures, and the disempowering of labour, was what flowed from this political decision.\n\nMuch of the modern rich rely on similar systems of power. Cheap labour is cherry picked from countries who suppress any attempts at collective bargaining and trade union establishment. Modern protectionism flows from regulated trade agreements which create stringent regulatory apparatuses of complex trade law and intellectual property regimes.\n\nIf libertarians are serious about developing a genuinely free economy internationally, they should not celebrate the rich. Modern wealth is not the product of genuine innovation. The iPhone, the erstwhile hero of pro-capitalist libertarians, relies on taxpayer grants and intellectual property subsidies to be developed and to stop competitors innovating with it, as Varoufakis and Mazzucato have both pointed out. Unfortunately, many libertarians, such as Mises, seem to see wealth in its modern guise as the apotheosis of market forces. Rather than cultivating truly open economies, they’re more interested in giving a free pass to rentiers to ideologise their political wealth. For libertarians to advocate for freedom, they should advocate for the rich to have their wealth outcompeted and destroyed, not held up as a godlike figure of “free” markets.\n\n[1] https://c4ss.org/content/45245",
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      "body": "https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/the-tenets-of-schizophrenic-foreign-policy/\n\nModern foreign policy discourses, particularly those found in the US, revolve around what I call a form of schizophrenia, whereby decisions are made reactively in relation to perceived and existing circumstances. Long term decision making and the cultivation of diplomatic relations are shunned in favour of a militaristic stance which favours aggressive posturing and a belief in strength via dominance.\n\nSuch a discourse seems to run through US foreign policy circles. Whether it be the stupidities of the Cold War, the failed interventions in the Middle East or the attempts at establishing liberal democracies across the world, American foreign policy seems determined at instituting particular governance structures despite the repeated failure to do so previously. Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria all testify to this. The old epithet of Einstein, that of madness being the act of doing the same thing but expecting different results, comes to mind when seeing this track record.\n\nHowever this madness does not fully constitute schizophrenic foreign policy. Rather, the schizophrenic element can be seen in the supposed foreign policy successes of Western aggression and the expansion of the American empire. Here we see that far from constituting any real success, they are the reactive response of previous foreign policy mistakes and decisions, usually revolving around arming particular groups for the short-term outcome of maintaining hegemonic power against Soviet domination during the Cold War, and maintaining said power against Chinese hegemony and Islamist networks. The major part of schizophrenic foreign policy then is not its innate stupidity, which can be a characteristic of imperial relations or regional power blocs, but rather its ideological commitments which trump any major reform or proper diplomacy. By promoting political abstractions like humanitarianism and liberal democracy which require economic and political hegemony, foreign policy becomes schizophrenic because of its nonsensical commitments to abstract philosophies, which mean short-term outcomes are desired over long-term policies which promote international equality among political actors and units.\n\nThe first such example is the most obvious, that of the arming of the Mujahedeen by America during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It was seen as an intelligent counter movement against Soviet expansion, allowing for the Soviets to bankrupt themselves fighting an unwinnable war. In that sense it worked, as the Soviets were pushed back with the knowledge that they had wasted vast amounts of money and resources in this region. It also showed the burgeoning power of guerrilla tactics and fourth generation warfare against hegemonic empires. With this fourth generation warfare there was the unleashing of powerful new forces of radical, militant Islamism, as seen in the development of both al Qaeda and the Taliban. America’s shortening of the inevitable demise of Soviet imperialism and its own desires to develop hegemony in the region led to the creation of new bulwarks of Islamist power. Many of the funds and weapons from America eventually went to groups like the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, who were both as brutal as each other. And of course this led to the ability of the Taliban to establish power and act as a base for terrorist activity, which led to the humanitarian intervention in 2001 by America to remove such terrorism. As a result, huge portions of Afghanistan are still controlled by the Taliban, and the need for America to negotiate a significant disintermediation from the region is seen as necessary today. Further, large elements of the military police hold allegiance or sympathy to the Taliban, and there has also been destabilisation in Pakistan near the Waziristan area of Afghanistan. Amazingly, but without irony, the US is now committing to a similar policy in Iraq with Islamist groups, ranging from the “certified rebels” of the FSA through to al-Nusra, due to the belief in American hegemony in the Middle East amongst its foreign policy establishment. By having stigmergic organisations of Islamists rather than the more centralised, anti-American states of Iran and Syria means greater US control over the region. “Raising the ‘possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality’, the Pentagon report goes on, ‘this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran)'”[1]. Thus we see American foreign policy being short-termist, and having to react to their ill-thought decisions, whether that be as a reaction to Soviet hegemony or as a means of maintaining their own regional power bases.\n\nThe NATO bombings and subsequent intervention in Yugoslavia are also an example of a supposed foreign policy success that came with much cost and baggage. In the first place, America armed and funded the Tito regime as a regional power that could rival Soviet domination during the 50s and 60s. This effectively prolonged the life of the fake multiculturalism that existed, disallowing a peaceful Balkanization of the Yugoslav regions and maintaining Tito’s iron grip over the country. Ethnic tensions were left to fester under the surface. Such processes of artificial multiculturalism have fixed life spans, yet American funding and support aimed to prolong these processes. However, when it became noted after the death of Tito that it was the beginning of the end for Yugoslavia, American officials began funding and arming secessionist movements and governments[2], paving the way for increasing ethnic tensions and the massacres, genocides and displacements that followed. By doing this America could maintain their dominance in the region, thus encircling Russia, and hone in processes of primitive accumulation which allowed for resource extraction and the enclosure of Yugoslav economies by mining the rich minerals of the region and taking control of the Caspian Sea[3]. America’s short-term goals took precedence over long-term diplomacy and an intelligent policy of economic engagement, favouring supposed dominance and imperial hegemony instead. The schizophrenia shines through.\n\nThe third and final example is that of US funding for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War. The Reagan and Bush administrations encouraged the funding and training of Iraqi weaponry, technology and troops, giving over chemical weapons and industrial developments as well as dual use technology and significant troop training. Intelligence was also provided that allowed Iraq to target Iran with chemical weapons. Such use of weapons was not seen as a concern by American officials as it contributed to the Iraqis winning the war[4]. Of course they didn’t, and as a result Hussein used such weapons in suppressing the Kurds during the Iran-Iraq War to stop them rebelling against his rule[5], as witnessed in the Halabja massacre. The use of chemical weapons by Hussein was a central reason for intervening in Iraq in 2003. When there are those who talk of how evil Hussein was, as many Labour MPs do when defending their shameful decision to vote for the Iraq War, they should remember that the US made a significant contribution to such evil.\n\nThus the tenets of schizophrenic foreign policy are laid bare. Rather than the exposition of simple stupidity or consistent failure, which are also present within US foreign policy outings, a schizophrenic foreign policy contains the essential ingredients of extreme short-termism combined with reactive policies which ignore long-term consequences and the ability to develop complex and intelligent diplomacy. Rather than the US and other countries, particularly those of the West, adopting Jeffersonian principles of diplomatic prudence and the avoidance of entangling alliances, many nation-states have followed the opposite path of entangling foreign relations through institutions like NATO.\n\nThe examples I’ve provided are only a small glimpse into the extent of this schizophrenic foreign policy. Many others abound, from the origination of ISIS through the destabilisation of Iraq after its invasion to the funding of Liberian regimes by the CIA, in particular Samuel Doe’s and Charles Taylor’s regimes[6], which led to the use of weaponry and funding provided to Liberia to be funneled into the Sierra Leone conflict, which itself then required intervention by Britain in 1998.\n\nThis schizophrenic foreign policy is costly, both in innocent lives and in monetary terms. Through debts acquired by maintaining a hegemonic American empire, with hundreds of bases around the world and the use of force in enforcing economic and political agendas, America is witnessing a fiscal crisis of the state, which is beginning to severely limit its economic capabilities. Hopefully, such economic crises can rein in the American foreign policy establishment, and make them realise that continual intervention is neither desirable nor intelligent. The main thing that hegemonic empires like the US need to do is make massive disengagements with the rest of the world. They need to scale back their commitments, allow for decentralisation of both their military capacity[7] and their international nuclear arsenals[8], and allow for a more pluralistic world order of regional blocs and confederal governance systems, with a more equal world system of heterogonous political units and voluntary foreign engagements with diplomacy rather than intervention being the important, central factor.\n\n[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isis-syria-iraq?CMP=share_btn_tw\n\n[2] http://iacenter.org/folder04/myths.htm\n\n[3] http://www.midnightnotes.org/pamphlet_yugo.html\n\n[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq_during_the_Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_war\n\n[5]http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-prove-america-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran/\n\n[6]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/liberia/9021153/Liberian-despot-Charles-Taylor-worked-with-US-intelligence.html\n\n[7] https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2016/08/08/decentralize-the-military-why-we-need-independent-militias/\n\n[8] https://mises.org/blog/decentralize-nuclear-arsenals",
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      "body": "https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/the-tenets-of-schizophrenic-foreign-policy/\n\nModern foreign policy discourses, particularly those found in the US, revolve around what I call a form of schizophrenia, whereby decisions are made reactively in relation to perceived and existing circumstances. Long term decision making and the cultivation of diplomatic relations are shunned in favour of a militaristic stance which favours aggressive posturing and a belief in strength via dominance.\n\nSuch a discourse seems to run through US foreign policy circles. Whether it be the stupidities of the Cold War, the failed interventions in the Middle East or the attempts at establishing liberal democracies across the world, American foreign policy seems determined at instituting particular governance structures despite the repeated failure to do so previously. Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria all testify to this. The old epithet of Einstein, that of madness being the act of doing the same thing but expecting different results, comes to mind when seeing this track record.\n\nHowever this madness does not fully constitute schizophrenic foreign policy. Rather, the schizophrenic element can be seen in the supposed foreign policy successes of Western aggression and the expansion of the American empire. Here we see that far from constituting any real success, they are the reactive response of previous foreign policy mistakes and decisions, usually revolving around arming particular groups for the short-term outcome of maintaining hegemonic power against Soviet domination during the Cold War, and maintaining said power against Chinese hegemony and Islamist networks. The major part of schizophrenic foreign policy then is not its innate stupidity, which can be a characteristic of imperial relations or regional power blocs, but rather its ideological commitments which trump any major reform or proper diplomacy. By promoting political abstractions like humanitarianism and liberal democracy which require economic and political hegemony, foreign policy becomes schizophrenic because of its nonsensical commitments to abstract philosophies, which mean short-term outcomes are desired over long-term policies which promote international equality among political actors and units.\n\nThe first such example is the most obvious, that of the arming of the Mujahedeen by America during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It was seen as an intelligent counter movement against Soviet expansion, allowing for the Soviets to bankrupt themselves fighting an unwinnable war. In that sense it worked, as the Soviets were pushed back with the knowledge that they had wasted vast amounts of money and resources in this region. It also showed the burgeoning power of guerrilla tactics and fourth generation warfare against hegemonic empires. With this fourth generation warfare there was the unleashing of powerful new forces of radical, militant Islamism, as seen in the development of both al Qaeda and the Taliban. America’s shortening of the inevitable demise of Soviet imperialism and its own desires to develop hegemony in the region led to the creation of new bulwarks of Islamist power. Many of the funds and weapons from America eventually went to groups like the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, who were both as brutal as each other. And of course this led to the ability of the Taliban to establish power and act as a base for terrorist activity, which led to the humanitarian intervention in 2001 by America to remove such terrorism. As a result, huge portions of Afghanistan are still controlled by the Taliban, and the need for America to negotiate a significant disintermediation from the region is seen as necessary today. Further, large elements of the military police hold allegiance or sympathy to the Taliban, and there has also been destabilisation in Pakistan near the Waziristan area of Afghanistan. Amazingly, but without irony, the US is now committing to a similar policy in Iraq with Islamist groups, ranging from the “certified rebels” of the FSA through to al-Nusra, due to the belief in American hegemony in the Middle East amongst its foreign policy establishment. By having stigmergic organisations of Islamists rather than the more centralised, anti-American states of Iran and Syria means greater US control over the region. “Raising the ‘possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality’, the Pentagon report goes on, ‘this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran)'”[1]. Thus we see American foreign policy being short-termist, and having to react to their ill-thought decisions, whether that be as a reaction to Soviet hegemony or as a means of maintaining their own regional power bases.\n\nThe NATO bombings and subsequent intervention in Yugoslavia are also an example of a supposed foreign policy success that came with much cost and baggage. In the first place, America armed and funded the Tito regime as a regional power that could rival Soviet domination during the 50s and 60s. This effectively prolonged the life of the fake multiculturalism that existed, disallowing a peaceful Balkanization of the Yugoslav regions and maintaining Tito’s iron grip over the country. Ethnic tensions were left to fester under the surface. Such processes of artificial multiculturalism have fixed life spans, yet American funding and support aimed to prolong these processes. However, when it became noted after the death of Tito that it was the beginning of the end for Yugoslavia, American officials began funding and arming secessionist movements and governments[2], paving the way for increasing ethnic tensions and the massacres, genocides and displacements that followed. By doing this America could maintain their dominance in the region, thus encircling Russia, and hone in processes of primitive accumulation which allowed for resource extraction and the enclosure of Yugoslav economies by mining the rich minerals of the region and taking control of the Caspian Sea[3]. America’s short-term goals took precedence over long-term diplomacy and an intelligent policy of economic engagement, favouring supposed dominance and imperial hegemony instead. The schizophrenia shines through.\n\nThe third and final example is that of US funding for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War. The Reagan and Bush administrations encouraged the funding and training of Iraqi weaponry, technology and troops, giving over chemical weapons and industrial developments as well as dual use technology and significant troop training. Intelligence was also provided that allowed Iraq to target Iran with chemical weapons. Such use of weapons was not seen as a concern by American officials as it contributed to the Iraqis winning the war[4]. Of course they didn’t, and as a result Hussein used such weapons in suppressing the Kurds during the Iran-Iraq War to stop them rebelling against his rule[5], as witnessed in the Halabja massacre. The use of chemical weapons by Hussein was a central reason for intervening in Iraq in 2003. When there are those who talk of how evil Hussein was, as many Labour MPs do when defending their shameful decision to vote for the Iraq War, they should remember that the US made a significant contribution to such evil.\n\nThus the tenets of schizophrenic foreign policy are laid bare. Rather than the exposition of simple stupidity or consistent failure, which are also present within US foreign policy outings, a schizophrenic foreign policy contains the essential ingredients of extreme short-termism combined with reactive policies which ignore long-term consequences and the ability to develop complex and intelligent diplomacy. Rather than the US and other countries, particularly those of the West, adopting Jeffersonian principles of diplomatic prudence and the avoidance of entangling alliances, many nation-states have followed the opposite path of entangling foreign relations through institutions like NATO.\n\nThe examples I’ve provided are only a small glimpse into the extent of this schizophrenic foreign policy. Many others abound, from the origination of ISIS through the destabilisation of Iraq after its invasion to the funding of Liberian regimes by the CIA, in particular Samuel Doe’s and Charles Taylor’s regimes[6], which led to the use of weaponry and funding provided to Liberia to be funneled into the Sierra Leone conflict, which itself then required intervention by Britain in 1998.\n\nThis schizophrenic foreign policy is costly, both in innocent lives and in monetary terms. Through debts acquired by maintaining a hegemonic American empire, with hundreds of bases around the world and the use of force in enforcing economic and political agendas, America is witnessing a fiscal crisis of the state, which is beginning to severely limit its economic capabilities. Hopefully, such economic crises can rein in the American foreign policy establishment, and make them realise that continual intervention is neither desirable nor intelligent. The main thing that hegemonic empires like the US need to do is make massive disengagements with the rest of the world. They need to scale back their commitments, allow for decentralisation of both their military capacity[7] and their international nuclear arsenals[8], and allow for a more pluralistic world order of regional blocs and confederal governance systems, with a more equal world system of heterogonous political units and voluntary foreign engagements with diplomacy rather than intervention being the important, central factor.\n\n[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isis-syria-iraq?CMP=share_btn_tw\n\n[2] http://iacenter.org/folder04/myths.htm\n\n[3] http://www.midnightnotes.org/pamphlet_yugo.html\n\n[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq_during_the_Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_war\n\n[5]http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-prove-america-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran/\n\n[6]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/liberia/9021153/Liberian-despot-Charles-Taylor-worked-with-US-intelligence.html\n\n[7] https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2016/08/08/decentralize-the-military-why-we-need-independent-militias/\n\n[8] https://mises.org/blog/decentralize-nuclear-arsenals",
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      "body": "https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/the-tenets-of-schizophrenic-foreign-policy/\n\nModern foreign policy discourses, particularly those found in the US, revolve around what I call a form of schizophrenia, whereby decisions are made reactively in relation to perceived and existing circumstances. Long term decision making and the cultivation of diplomatic relations are shunned in favour of a militaristic stance which favours aggressive posturing and a belief in strength via dominance.\n\nSuch a discourse seems to run through US foreign policy circles. Whether it be the stupidities of the Cold War, the failed interventions in the Middle East or the attempts at establishing liberal democracies across the world, American foreign policy seems determined at instituting particular governance structures despite the repeated failure to do so previously. Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria all testify to this. The old epithet of Einstein, that of madness being the act of doing the same thing but expecting different results, comes to mind when seeing this track record.\n\nHowever this madness does not fully constitute schizophrenic foreign policy. Rather, the schizophrenic element can be seen in the supposed foreign policy successes of Western aggression and the expansion of the American empire. Here we see that far from constituting any real success, they are the reactive response of previous foreign policy mistakes and decisions, usually revolving around arming particular groups for the short-term outcome of maintaining hegemonic power against Soviet domination during the Cold War, and maintaining said power against Chinese hegemony and Islamist networks. The major part of schizophrenic foreign policy then is not its innate stupidity, which can be a characteristic of imperial relations or regional power blocs, but rather its ideological commitments which trump any major reform or proper diplomacy. By promoting political abstractions like humanitarianism and liberal democracy which require economic and political hegemony, foreign policy becomes schizophrenic because of its nonsensical commitments to abstract philosophies, which mean short-term outcomes are desired over long-term policies which promote international equality among political actors and units.\n\nThe first such example is the most obvious, that of the arming of the Mujahedeen by America during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It was seen as an intelligent counter movement against Soviet expansion, allowing for the Soviets to bankrupt themselves fighting an unwinnable war. In that sense it worked, as the Soviets were pushed back with the knowledge that they had wasted vast amounts of money and resources in this region. It also showed the burgeoning power of guerrilla tactics and fourth generation warfare against hegemonic empires. With this fourth generation warfare there was the unleashing of powerful new forces of radical, militant Islamism, as seen in the development of both al Qaeda and the Taliban. America’s shortening of the inevitable demise of Soviet imperialism and its own desires to develop hegemony in the region led to the creation of new bulwarks of Islamist power. Many of the funds and weapons from America eventually went to groups like the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, who were both as brutal as each other. And of course this led to the ability of the Taliban to establish power and act as a base for terrorist activity, which led to the humanitarian intervention in 2001 by America to remove such terrorism. As a result, huge portions of Afghanistan are still controlled by the Taliban, and the need for America to negotiate a significant disintermediation from the region is seen as necessary today. Further, large elements of the military police hold allegiance or sympathy to the Taliban, and there has also been destabilisation in Pakistan near the Waziristan area of Afghanistan. Amazingly, but without irony, the US is now committing to a similar policy in Iraq with Islamist groups, ranging from the “certified rebels” of the FSA through to al-Nusra, due to the belief in American hegemony in the Middle East amongst its foreign policy establishment. By having stigmergic organisations of Islamists rather than the more centralised, anti-American states of Iran and Syria means greater US control over the region. “Raising the ‘possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality’, the Pentagon report goes on, ‘this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran)'”[1]. Thus we see American foreign policy being short-termist, and having to react to their ill-thought decisions, whether that be as a reaction to Soviet hegemony or as a means of maintaining their own regional power bases.\n\nThe NATO bombings and subsequent intervention in Yugoslavia are also an example of a supposed foreign policy success that came with much cost and baggage. In the first place, America armed and funded the Tito regime as a regional power that could rival Soviet domination during the 50s and 60s. This effectively prolonged the life of the fake multiculturalism that existed, disallowing a peaceful Balkanization of the Yugoslav regions and maintaining Tito’s iron grip over the country. Ethnic tensions were left to fester under the surface. Such processes of artificial multiculturalism have fixed life spans, yet American funding and support aimed to prolong these processes. However, when it became noted after the death of Tito that it was the beginning of the end for Yugoslavia, American officials began funding and arming secessionist movements and governments[2], paving the way for increasing ethnic tensions and the massacres, genocides and displacements that followed. By doing this America could maintain their dominance in the region, thus encircling Russia, and hone in processes of primitive accumulation which allowed for resource extraction and the enclosure of Yugoslav economies by mining the rich minerals of the region and taking control of the Caspian Sea[3]. America’s short-term goals took precedence over long-term diplomacy and an intelligent policy of economic engagement, favouring supposed dominance and imperial hegemony instead. The schizophrenia shines through.\n\nThe third and final example is that of US funding for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War. The Reagan and Bush administrations encouraged the funding and training of Iraqi weaponry, technology and troops, giving over chemical weapons and industrial developments as well as dual use technology and significant troop training. Intelligence was also provided that allowed Iraq to target Iran with chemical weapons. Such use of weapons was not seen as a concern by American officials as it contributed to the Iraqis winning the war[4]. Of course they didn’t, and as a result Hussein used such weapons in suppressing the Kurds during the Iran-Iraq War to stop them rebelling against his rule[5], as witnessed in the Halabja massacre. The use of chemical weapons by Hussein was a central reason for intervening in Iraq in 2003. When there are those who talk of how evil Hussein was, as many Labour MPs do when defending their shameful decision to vote for the Iraq War, they should remember that the US made a significant contribution to such evil.\n\nThus the tenets of schizophrenic foreign policy are laid bare. Rather than the exposition of simple stupidity or consistent failure, which are also present within US foreign policy outings, a schizophrenic foreign policy contains the essential ingredients of extreme short-termism combined with reactive policies which ignore long-term consequences and the ability to develop complex and intelligent diplomacy. Rather than the US and other countries, particularly those of the West, adopting Jeffersonian principles of diplomatic prudence and the avoidance of entangling alliances, many nation-states have followed the opposite path of entangling foreign relations through institutions like NATO.\n\nThe examples I’ve provided are only a small glimpse into the extent of this schizophrenic foreign policy. Many others abound, from the origination of ISIS through the destabilisation of Iraq after its invasion to the funding of Liberian regimes by the CIA, in particular Samuel Doe’s and Charles Taylor’s regimes[6], which led to the use of weaponry and funding provided to Liberia to be funneled into the Sierra Leone conflict, which itself then required intervention by Britain in 1998.\n\nThis schizophrenic foreign policy is costly, both in innocent lives and in monetary terms. Through debts acquired by maintaining a hegemonic American empire, with hundreds of bases around the world and the use of force in enforcing economic and political agendas, America is witnessing a fiscal crisis of the state, which is beginning to severely limit its economic capabilities. Hopefully, such economic crises can rein in the American foreign policy establishment, and make them realise that continual intervention is neither desirable nor intelligent. The main thing that hegemonic empires like the US need to do is make massive disengagements with the rest of the world. They need to scale back their commitments, allow for decentralisation of both their military capacity[7] and their international nuclear arsenals[8], and allow for a more pluralistic world order of regional blocs and confederal governance systems, with a more equal world system of heterogonous political units and voluntary foreign engagements with diplomacy rather than intervention being the important, central factor.\n\n[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isis-syria-iraq?CMP=share_btn_tw\n\n[2] http://iacenter.org/folder04/myths.htm\n\n[3] http://www.midnightnotes.org/pamphlet_yugo.html\n\n[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq_during_the_Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_war\n\n[5]http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-prove-america-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran/\n\n[6]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/liberia/9021153/Liberian-despot-Charles-Taylor-worked-with-US-intelligence.html\n\n[7] https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2016/08/08/decentralize-the-military-why-we-need-independent-militias/\n\n[8] https://mises.org/blog/decentralize-nuclear-arsenals",
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      "body": "https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2015/11/16/monetary-institutionalism-against-the-state/\n\nAn institutional approach in monetary political economy means understanding that money and its antecedents are shaped by institutional arrangements. Looking back, we see the Fei of Yapp and Sumerian credit systems, where money was not known, and instead claims were made via credit. Social relations were a significant element of these monetary systems, making institutional characteristics the lynchpin of credit and money. This means that this approach is better compared to the other well-known theory, the barter myth and the double coincidence of wants, as it is grounded in historical evidence as shown by Graeber and Martin. However what must be kept in mind is how institutions are defined, and their centrality to certain power relations in relation to monetary structures.\n\nTaking on the last point of how we define institutions, the definition given today is that states are the main monetary institution. We see this with the concept of primordial debt, where debt in the form of taxes is the price we pay for society[1] (of which there “is no actual proof that money emerged in this way”[2]). This is interesting, but hardly conclusive. It takes an a posteriori position, back tracking monetary arrangements to seemingly justify state control of money. It can be seen with the story of the Bank of England giving a loan of £1,200,000 to the king and gaining the sole right of issue. However, this occurred in the 17th century, and cannot explain previous arrangements. For example, were the Fei state-based money, or the Sumerian credit system? Can the city-states of Sumer be called states? Their monetary arrangements were wrapped up in the religious-temple bureaucracies, not in modern state-individual relations. And what of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies seen today? The state doesn’t control these.\n\nRather, I see the state as an expropriator and destroyer of institutions. It expropriates social relations for the privilege of vested interests. Tucker noted this with his idea of the credit monopoly. By the state restricting credit to certain groups and interests, entry barriers are created in banking and the general market which benefits established banks and the interests of capital. Thus its status as an institution I believe is questionable, both in terms of who it serves and its relevance historically and in the modern economy.\n\nKeynes noted there were two institutions that encompassed money, “state or community”[3]. Community is the focus here, as it provides a different institutional perspective that goes against the state-based view. The concept of community is that of genuine social relations such as trust, with ground-up governance. As Graeber notes, in a community “pretty much anything could function as money, provided everyone knew there was someone willing to accept it to cancel out a debt”[4]. Carson further shows this, noting “currency is issued by the buyer by the very act of buying, and it’s backed by the goods and services of the seller” and “money is simply an accounting system for tracking the balance between buyers and sellers over time”[5]. However, a criticism of this view is that this only allows for community economies, and that larger economies of scale require larger institutions i.e. the state. The Irish example noted by Martin[6] seems to counter this. The closing down of banks in Ireland in 1970 for six months did not impede economic growth, as credit arrangements through the use of cheques developed that actually maintained economic growth at the national level.\n\nHowever, even accepting this criticism, Keynes’ other radical insight was that of endogenous money creation, or that banks are the major creators of money through loans and deposits. As McKay stated to me in correspondence, it is seen among Post-Keynesians “that commercial banks essentially control issuance viz. volume, whereas govt / CB controls ‘price’ of money”[7]. What I’m suggesting is that if we take the insights of institutional monetary theory, as posited by Keynes, we see institutions as fluid and even intangible, as in the Irish case, and the state is not the epitomical institution.\n\nWith this evidence, the institutional approach is the most concise and superior to the other main theory, the barter myth. This economistic view is based on erroneous history, such as Smith’s theorisations of cod being used as money in Newfoundland, which leads to the absurdity of fishermen catching cod being paid in cod. The institutional approach is actually historical, with examples ranging from Yapp to Sumer and even to stateless monies, such as the Irish example and credit clearing systems as mentioned by Carson. The other issue with the barter theory is mentioned by Ingham, that being the neutral veil[8]. This position ignores the social relations and power dynamics that play out in money, and the way money is used to privilege some and impoverish others, with the credit monopoly and the maintenance of what Carson calls the cash nexus, with all relations being put through monetary relations and other relations being restricted. However, if we see the state as an institution that creates money as unquestionable, as some institutional theorists do, we ignore power relations and monetary relations in diverse contexts.\n\nThe institutional approach has relevance today, with continued slow economic growth and the commodification of debt within the modern economy. There’s the stagnation of real wages in the US, with dollar manipulation by the US government and Federal Reserve playing a major role. Sites of resistance are developing in Greece and on the internet, with state-based currencies being rejected in favour of community and market alternatives. The institutional approach allows us to understand these systems as fluid reactions against financialisation and commodification and in favour of restoring the social relations of credit and money.\n\nBibliography\n\nCarson, K (2010). The Homebrew Industrial Revolution. United States: BookSurge.\n\nGraeber, D (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville House Publishing.\n\nIngham, G (2004). The Nature of Money. Cambridge: Polity Press.\n\nMacesich, G (2000). Issues in Money and Banking. Westport: Praeger Publishers.\n\nMartin, F (2013). Money: The Unauthorised Biography. London: Bodley Head.\n\nMcKay, C. @DerorCurrency. Post-Keynesian Free Banking. 28th Oct 2015.\n\n[1] Graeber, D. 2011, 58\n\n[2] Graeber, D. 2011, 59\n\n[3] Macesich, G. 2000, 10\n\n[4] Graeber, D. 2011, 74\n\n[5] Carson, K. 2010, 277-278\n\n[6] Martin, F. 2013\n\n[7] McKay, C. 2015\n\n[8] Ingham, G. 2004",
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      "body": "https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2016/07/31/no-need-to-reject-markets/\n\nAnarchists of many shades have tried to show the destructiveness of markets by pointing to capitalism as the exigent system of extreme markets and the construction of a market society. According to these anarchists, markets engender destructive competition and a race to the bottom with firms inevitably monopolising and thus imposing high costs and artificial scarcity upon populations. “Market economies are based on an all out economic war, where a game of economic musical chairs(artificial scarcity) is created”[1]. Of course, this is based on two false propositions: that markets are defined by modern capitalism and that scarcity is something inevitably escapable rather than being a complex of multitudinous social and property relations.\n\nMarkets efficiently allocate resources in a system, or systems, of scarcity. When a resource or good is scarce, markets are used to allocate ownership, price and thus production and consumption. However, such a system does not fundamentally exist under actually existing capitalism. What we see today instead is a large series of regulated and effectively rigged monopoly systems where pricing is decided internally among “competitive” firms. Many costs are externalised on the taxpayer, ranging from social and environmental costs in the form of transportation and pollution, to entry barriers which restrict competition from meaningfully existing. This can be seen in intellectual property, licensure laws and planning laws.\n\nThe state has a huge role in shaping and creating modern capitalist economies, with markets being used as a tool of price production and mechanisms for consumption. Monopoly firms control nearly every process in production and consumption, with the market being used as a distribution mechanism. Mass production as a paradigm dominates the modern world not because of market mechanisms, but because of systemic and consistent state intervention on behalf of vested interests, described by Roy Childs as big business. Whether it be with transport and communication infrastructure, the maintenance of regulated stock and capital markets, the maintained scarcity of land and capital, or the development of international economies of scale in manufacturing and energy, the state has played a huge part in constructing and maintaining these systems. Free markets by any definition have no part in such a system except as either an ideological justification or a tool of distribution.\n\nHowever, interstitially freed markets already operate according to natural scarcities and extremely varied price and production systems. They also negate the mass production paradigm. Whether in Shenzhen or central Italy, systems and markets are developing where production is relative to the direct economy and multiple firm-types are able to proliferate and compete in different economies of scale and through different mechanisms, whether that be small batch production or order-based production.\n\nIn a truly competitive system, many of the products and economies of scale that exist today would be so capital-intensive as to be value-negative. Their actual price when including externalised costs would rise exponentially relative to consumer demand, meaning smaller, decentralised options would become necessary to outcompete corporate monoliths. All types of firm, and with it many types of value maximisation, are able to develop and proliferate in such a system, as subjective value is maximised among wide-ranging groups of people. In some areas, barter and basic monetary relations would exist as it serves the needs of particular public goods and systems. Already in Greek cities such systems are becoming important in creating medical services and local market systems. In others, complex economic relations with hierarchic and non-hierarchic firms are able to develop as those are desired relative to the socio-economic values individuals and collectivities desire.\n\nAs a result, conceptions of scarcity come with freed markets as the system to adjudicate value and production amongst multiple firms and consumer demands and subjectivities. Where scarcity becomes irrelevant, as it is beginning to be with music technology and filesharing, markets can develop around the best systems of delivery. So with filesharing, there are a wide variety of TORs, torrents and other sites where different file formats exist for similar products and services. Going further from this, new developments in Blockchain technology allow for a proliferation of community building and contractual services. Scarcity in the sense of a need for extensive division of labour does not negate the development of markets. Rather new markets can develop relative to new technological movements, or can still exist as a marker of particular subjective valuations among networks and communities of consumers and producers. In this sense, communities can compete (or collaborate) in the creation of regulatory structures and delivery and distribution systems, with better systems becoming more able to satisfy subjective demands among groups of individuals. However, this does not naturally monopolise as everyone has different preferences. Rather such markets constantly evolve and change shape and direction.\n\nIndividuals who produce goods have a subjective preference in not only what they produce, but also in what systems of regulation and distribution they choose to use. Thus direct production for use as well as markets in particular goods become equally possible. There is no need for overarching systems either in the sense of a Polanyian market society or a confederal community that governs economic relations. Already, such can be seen in the Argentine Piquetero movement where firms have produced both for local markets as well as directly for use in their particular communities.\n\nFundamentally, markets are the product of social relations and conflicts that create meaningful systems of distribution and production. Efficiency and price are defined relative to the socio-economic values of particular individuals and communities. “The market and the assignment of property titles within it is a garden we grow. A tool”[2]. Meshworks and networks of individuals and settled (as well as adhoc) communities develop their understanding of economic and social value, and as a result define and create systems of property and governmentality.\n\n“The foundation of property shouldn’t hinge on what rocks you’ve poked some point in the past or even what you’ve chosen to extend your cybernetic nervous system into, but what best satiates your desires or aspirations in balance with everyone else’s. This is after all what markets at their best promise: The notion that everyone’s subjective preferences will be satiated more efficiently than would be possible attempting to talk them out in a global consensus meeting”[3]. The same can be said for markets. Carson similarly describes such subjective market systems. “Bodies — governed as cooperatives, or on Ostrom’s common pool resource model — will coexist as parts of a polycentric framework, with a body of common law arising to adjudicate relations between them. This body of common law, worked out by local juries or arbitration bodies, or by agreement negotiated between the various commons and cooperatives, will be binding internally on the members of the associations which agree to them”[4].\n\nBy rejecting markets, anarchists are simply rejecting a realm of socio-economic organisation that they themselves subjectively dislike. If they dislike markets, fine. Let them create and/or live in systems that are reliant on production for use and the elimination of all forms of scarcity. They may proliferate, they may not. But one cannot deny the ability for markets to similarly proliferate in systems of anarchism. Such is a tacit acceptance of coercive force to limit particular objectives. If we are anarchists, we should accept, and celebrate, the capability of markets to exist and prosper.\n\n[1] https://postscarcityeconomics.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/listen-mutualist/\n\n[2] https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2016/04/29/the-organic-emergence-of-property-from-reputation/\n\n[3] https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2016/04/29/the-organic-emergence-of-property-from-reputation/\n\n[4] https://c4ss.org/content/36761",
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      "body": "Follow my blog The Libertarian Ideal. I'll cross post new and existing posts on my Steemit account too.\n\nhttps://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/",
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      "body": "@@ -1,16 +1,117 @@\n+https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2016/08/01/praxeology-the-importance-of-first-principles/%0A%0A\n Praxeology maint\n",
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      "body": "Praxeology maintains its importance precisely because it implies fundamental principles as the guiding action in scientifically studying human action and understanding its dynamics and relations. From coming from these principles, human actions can be understood as having particular reasoning’s and laws which inform how further understandings of human action can be qualitatively determined and mapped.\n\nThe two most fundamental principles are that of seeing human action as purposive, rather than as purely instinctual or reactive, and of seeing non-aggression as a moral axiom of human relations. Thus coercive activity perpetrated by individuals or groups cannot be seen as legitimate socio-economic relations. This helps underpin a conception of society as removed from government. Understanding these principles as the basis of reasoning and action allows one to see the illegitimacy of the state and the importance of voluntary action in creating positive outcomes relative to the robbery and theft of the state. “An individual reflects, discovers the concept of action and its applicability to all human individuals, analyzes its components, and then sets it forth orally or by the written word”[1]. Individual action is the basis of human response. These of course can be shaped by particular customs and learnt activities, as well as surrounding structures of governmentality which shape individual behaviour. However, purposive human action still can trump such influences if so decided so long as one lives in a society free of enforced, legitimised aggression (as represented via the state).\n\nArguments against this usually take the form of understanding different conceptions of value and ownership, such as those stated by Lewis[2], that deny the capacity for understanding praxeological axioms. Because of innately social obligations and customs which develop and evolve from spontaneous order and the dynamics of institutions and little platoons, one cannot truly have a society free of institutionalised coercion. However I think Rothbard excellently negates this here:”Man’s necessity to choose means that, at any given time, he is acting to bring about some end in the immediate or distant future, that is, that he has purposes. The steps that he takes to achieve his ends are his means. Man is born with no innate knowledge of what ends to choose or how to use which means to attain them. Having no inborn knowledge of how to survive and prosper, he must learn what ends and means to adopt, and he is liable to make errors along the way. But only his reasoning mind can show him his goals and how to attain them”[3]. Human action is purposively brought about by individual choices that are shaped by subjective values both learned innately and purposefully. Thus the social contract argument, that of future generations caught in the obligations and debts of custom and law that are slowly developed by linked and overlapping institutions[4], does not deny the ability of individuals to purposefully decide their actions in a society and economy. In the conception of an anarchistic society, that of true freedom and the ability to decide on how oneself is governed, people make decisions on how customs and law shape them. They make subjective valuations that can adapt existing customs toward newer understandings and forms of governance.\n\nOf course some may reject the impressing of such customs upon themselves and thus outright reject them. But of course that is the right of free individuals in a truly free society. However it is not something to really worry about when understanding human evolution and the development of particular advantageous ways of allowing for evolution to continue. Kropotkin’s understanding of mutual aid shows that the continuation of customs and the maintenance of systems of mutual governance actually further those in-groups’ evolutionary development and adaptability. “The mutual protection which is obtained…, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay”[5]. Natural evolutionary progress effectively necessitates in-group behaviours which maximise sociability and mutuality.\n\nTherefore, the idea that is suggested, particularly by Lewis, that the development of socially contractual arrangements which bind generations is the initiation of coercive institutionalisation really doesn’t hold up. Rather, social obligations, customs and duties, as codified de jure in common law and de facto in particular rights and legal understandings, are both unofficial codifications as well as adaptable understandings of surrounding society. They are not truly set in stone as such, but rather open to changes in precedence and the evolving oscillations of societies and economies. Such can be understood in my conception of decentralised common law which has the capacity to reinterpret legal precedents and rulings[6]. If anything, such customs and binding settlements are always open to change, and do not fundamentally violate the tenet of purposeful human action as they can be adapted.\n\nReturning to the understanding of fundamental axioms as the way of understanding human action and therefore society, we also begin to see the direction of secondary principles which evolve from the first ones. Rothbard shows this in seeing how the laws that govern markets, from “uncertainty, time preference, the law of returns, the law of utility”[7] to Gresham’s Law and the laws of supply and demand under conditions of a market removed from coercive institutions, are praxeologically determined as a result of human actions on free markets. This then allows us to see subjective valuation as direct result of human action, as best represented by price discovery, consumption patterns and firm ownership on the market.\n\nHayek denotes a similar praxis. “For example, Hayek’s ideas of praxeology and catallactics show us the microcosm of economic knowledge that exists within an economy. Hayek specifically used the term catallaxy to describe ‘the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market’, showing that the idea of an economy is primed by individual needs and desires”[8]. However Weber “showed us that the development of these individual needs and desires are developed through cultural and ethical elements, and that pure economic rationalism can take a back seat to the social influence on our economic habits. We can fundamentally see this in Hayek’s price system, whereby prices are set by our desire for certain products. Hayek saw this as based on economic rationalism, however because of his belief in dispersed knowledge in the economy, it can be logically concluded that people couldn’t always act on pure economic rationality in their decision making, and instead social factors would become involved”[9].\n\nThis economic rationalism is only one denotation of praxeological understanding. It is based around seeing the market as a particular institution of economic praxis. But of course there exist other systems that may well sprout up in conditions of freedom and the unlocking of human desires and actions from the coercive state. This could include production for direct use, collective decentralised planning systems for public goods, primitivist economies, recommoning (as seen in Zomia and some of the right to repair movements[10]) and economies of abundance, as are developing in filesharing and 3D printing. The market need not be “turned into an idol”[11], but rather understood and codified as a major area of human activity and value creation and maximisation. This also expands to concepts of value and ownership. How an individual determines the ownership of his body and labour are subjectively decided by his or herself, as is how one values particular objects and commodities in an economy. Out of this, many different social relations and value axioms can be developed which codify different types of ethics and economic dynamics.\n\nEffectively, this is a weak reading of praxeology, expanding its definitions along the lines of a radically subjective form of deduction which sees multiple economic systems as created by purposive human action. Markets are simply one form of these actions and systems. Whether it be the complex market systems of Shenzhen, the black markets that overlap and intersect the world, or the decentralised planning which communities in India and Brazil use, successful economic systems such as these require (and have) decentralised knowledge, true freedom and the capability to be free of institutionalised coercion when developing and honing human action.\n\nIf we take the praxeological view that human action is purposive, and value is fully subjective, we arrive at the idea that the governance of economies, as well as their internal characteristics, are shaped by individual economies interacting and creating particular forms of governmentality, as well developing complex price and legal systems. By using these praxeological axioms, we can deduce forms of human action and see their wider applicability as well as their capability to provide subjective quantities of happiness and efficiency. This is why such first principles are important, as they allow us to understand particular human actions and dynamics. Rather than inductive ratiocination which denies any movement away from specific and engendered ideological positions, the power of praxeology is in its simplicity and capability to understand multiple forms of human action and how they govern and create positive and negative effects. Markets and economic rationalism need not be the defining characteristic of praxeology, but rather a wide range of economic systems can be seen to have different outcomes relative to their innate coercion and creation of utility and efficiency.\n\n[1] Rothbard, M. Praxeology: Reply to Mr. Schuller, 2005, 943-946\n\n[2] https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2016/07/15/contra-the-self-ownership-principle-the-nightmare-of-libertopia/\n\n[3] https://mises.org/blog/what-proper-way-study-man\n\n[4] https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2016/07/15/contra-the-self-ownership-principle-the-nightmare-of-libertopia/\n\n[5] Kropotkin, P. Mutual Aid, 1972, 176\n\n[6] https://c4ss.org/content/45704\n\n[7] Rothbard, M. Praxeology: Reply to Mr. Schuller, 2005, 943-946\n\n[8] https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2015/02/06/the-limits-of-economic-action/\n\n[9] https://thelibertarianideal.wordpress.com/2015/02/06/the-limits-of-economic-action/\n\n[10] https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/commoning-adaptive-reuse-context-failing-civilization/2016/06/26\n\n[11] http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/the-austrian-delusion",
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