Silly Libertarians:

So here's a scenario: private firefighting companies where you pay them before they put out your fire. You could argue that multiple firefighting companies could compete for your business and thus the price would be driven down. So a bunch of fire trucks would show up at your house and you haggle with them over which one is willing to put out your fire for the lowest price. Or not. Because house fires are somewhat rare (supply and demand) in your area there is only one fire company and it is in the next town over. They charge a high fee because they don't put out fires as often and must charge more to cover overhead. If you cannot pay (probably because your reserve of silver was in your house, which is now on fire, or you could use bitcoin except that your computer is also currently burning) your fire just spreads to the neighbor's house. They can pay, but the fire is only doused on their property so they must pay extra to run the water continually until your house burns completely (you can pay them later for the water that accidentally splashed onto your house). Of course, even if you could pay, you've spent too much time working out the details of the transaction that your house burns anyway.

Also, if a Libertarian has to park on the street and pay a meter they are pissed.  If they have to park in a private lot and pay a business they swell with pride.



Finally, check this out:

It Only Took Half The Wikipedia Entry On Libertarianism To Convince Me It Was The Right Political Ideology For America

#agitpop : 

2) Music as a liberating force. without getting too spiritual music is the soundtrack to ecstasy. militaries use music to rally their troops. sufis Use music to bring them closer to divine oneness. Punk rock kids use music to rock the fuck out. That is a sacred pursuit. Catharsis. It is both sacred and profane. this paradox makes it a valuable tool. it has the power to separate the individual from their ego, thus freeing one from oneself. once this process has occured it is possible for a feeling of being part of something bigger. Thus the individual, whether musician/vanguard or audience, can achieve a communal understanding. music is the object to this subjective understanding. the dialectic between musician/vanguard and audience thus gives birth to a third meaning. Eisenstein Understood this in the context of film, but in a different way. for him the juxtaposition of two images created a third meaning when filtered through the viewer's gaze. music is different in one respect. The creator of music has the ability to respond to feedback by virtue of the fact that music does not take as long to make as a film. this is especially true in live situations. thus music is participatory and democratic.

Meme Blast

This was a response to a friend of mine who posted this on a popular social media website and then proceeded to defend it by saying that feminism is divisive.

First (among other things that are better iterated below) my response was:

By declaring your opposition to feminism you are being divisive, insisting that the particular ways in which one group or another is oppressed is greater than the oppression that women face. Empowerment movements (such as feminism, black power, red power, gay pride ad nauseum) exist in order to change the conditions of oppression under which these groups suffer. What could be wrong with that?

Of course, after much internet nonsense, I finally wrote this:

Read [your response], still don't understand what your problem with the term feminism is. Was going to leave well enough alone, but I'll oblige this rather specific request for my two cents, or dollar or whatever. My response is basically what I said before: 1) feminism is an empowerment movement for an oppressed group the same way black power, red power, gay pride etc. are. 2) there is not one feminism, but many feminisms. what historians call the first wave was primarily concerned with suffrage and was also very much linked to the abolition movement. you argue that feminists betrayed abolitionism, but the reality is that abolitionist men betrayed feminism as they felt that the sight of liberated women in the abolition movement would turn more conservative men who might be sympathetic to abolition (industrialists mostly) against the abolitionist cause. the second wave I do have problems with. basically it was in the 1970s and women were bossing other women around telling them that they shouldn't have children or do house work, but instead focus on their careers. this was particularly beneficial to capitalists as they were able to pay lower wages (adjusted for inflation) to both men and women (although there is still a pay gap between the sexes to this day, women making 70 cents on every man's dollar) as now heterosexual households were expected to collect dual incomes. the third wave started in the 1990s and concerned connecting struggles of oppressed peoples. unfortunately, some feminists in the current era seem to have reverted back to second wave and also justifications of female separatism and misandry have become accepted by some (especially radfems/terfs). 2a) the radical justification of misandry (which is a form of prejudice, but not sexism i.e.: systemic, institutionalized discrimination) is not all feminism. The Black Panther Party opposed the Nation of Islam's anti-white doctrine, but both can be described as black power movements. Again, I am an anti-Stalinist communist, but I do not say that Stalinism is not communism, just not a form of communism that I subscribe to. I would like to add this quote from bell hooks and encourage you to read the book that it is from (linked below - pdf).

Most men find it difficult to be patriarchs. Most men are disturbed by hatred and fear of women, by male violence against women, even the men who perpetuate this violence. But they fear letting go of the benefits. They are not certain what will happen to the world they know most intimately if patriarchy changes. So they find it easier to passively support male domination even when they know in their minds and hearts that it is wrong. Again and again men tell me they have no idea what it is feminists want. I believe them. I believe in their capacity to change and grow. And I believe that if they knew more about feminism they would no longer fear it, for they would find in feminist movement the hope of their own release from the bondage of patriarchy.

Also, check this out.

Finally, allow me to give you a personal anecdote as to why feminism is something that I (although I am a man, and although I have endured the occasional (in my mind undeserved) ad homenim attack of "oppressor," "partiarch," "sexist" ad nauseum from self-described feminists) not only subscribe to, but also identify with. When I was a kid I was into poetry, art and music. I was vegetarian at the age of 10. I never played with toy trucks as a kid nor was I interested in the least in sports. In fact, I hated my gym teachers. Not only did I have to face being called a "girl," "faggot," and "pussy" from the other kids in school, but my teachers, those in authority, made the same complaints about me, although in perhaps less vulgar language. I was actually in a fist fight in the locker room once because another boy on my soccer team felt I didn't perform soccer manly enough and that was why we lost the game. I never was really hurt by being called a girl (even though I knew I was not) or gay (which I also knew I was not) because those things were not bad in my eyes. I always enjoyed the company of girls. I often sat with them at lunch. I sometimes felt that I related better to the girls in my class than I did to the boys. Of course, I realized that this must not be something natural. I believed that probably many of the boys in my class felt the same way I did, but just weren't courageous enough to stand up the sexism they were confronted with and instead lived in this fictitious role of the masculine male. Now, there's not necessarily anything wrong with masculinity, per se. Some of us have more aggressive, more utilitarian personalities. I have known many women with these traits. It's not wrong, it's just not inherently male.

The Orchestration of the Soviet Collapse

Twenty years ago, on March 17, 1991, the first and only national referendum in Soviet history was held. Citizens of the Soviet republics were offered the opportunity to express themselves on the matter of the preservation of the union state in “an updated form.” And although six of the union republics refused to participate, the majority of the remaining population voted in favor of the preservation of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, only a few months later, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
- Russia and India Report

Why did the Soviet Union "collapse" if the majority of Soviet citizens favored reformed-socialism, but not all out capitalism?

Be sure Milton Friedman had something to do with it.

In the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union millions of people died as a result of Friedman's neoliberal doctrine.

In addition to deaths, a significant social decline ensued in Russia including a decline in life-expectancy, a rapidly deteriorating privatized healthcare system, economic crises in 1992 and 1998, one of the highest suicide rates in the world, reversal of Gorbechov's anti-alcoholism policies resulting in one of highest rates of alcohol related death in the world, and an exponential increase in HIV/AIDS diagnoses.

Organized crime and oligarchy dominate today's Russian economy.  Shock therapy has given rise to gangster capitalism.  Are Russians better off now?

US vs. Denmark: or how we're not the greatest country in the world

US vs Denmark

July 24, 2011 at 9:15pm

Denmark, with a mixed market capitalist economy and a large welfare state, ranks as having the world's highest level of income equality. Denmark has frequently ranked as the happiest and least corrupt country in the world.  Here's how the happiness/economic equality numbers break down according to Forbes:

Denmark:

Ranking: #1
Percentage thriving: 82%
Percentage struggling: 17%
Percentage suffering: 1%
Daily experience: 7.9

US on the other hand:

Ranking: #14
Percentage thriving: 57%
Percentage struggling: 40%
Percentage suffering: 3%
Daily experience: 7.3

Mental illness numbers compare thusly:
United States: 12-month prevalence of any mental disorder: 26.2% of adult population, 5.8% of adult population are diagnosed with severe mental illness.
46.3% of adolescants and young adults age 13-18 years experience a lifetime prevalence of any mental disorder (that's almost half!!!)!  21.4% of the whole 13-18 year old population are diagnosed with a severe disorder!
(source: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/statistics/index.shtml)

Denmark:
It was very hard to find information in English on general mental health statistics in Denmark.
Here's what I did find: 16.5% of Danish youth 12-18 were diagnosed with a mental disorder.  That's a difference of 29.8%! (source: Gosden N, Kramp P, Gabrielsen G, Sestoft D. Prevalence of mental disorders among 15–17-year-old male adolescent remand prisoners in Denmark. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica [serial online]. February 2003;107(2):102-110. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed July 24, 2011.).

The afformentioned study mainly focused on juvenile prisioners.  Of the sample group only 2% were found to be psychotic.  Of adult prisioners only 3.7% were found to be psychotic.

Compare this to US prisioner mental health numbers:
"Among inmates with a mental condition ever treated
with a psychiatric medication, only 25.5% (SE =7.5%) of federal, 29.6% (SE = 2.8%)
of state, and 38.5% (SE = 1.5%) of local jail inmates were taking a psychiatric
medication at the time of arrest, whereas 69.1% (SE = 4.8%), 68.6% (SE = 1.9%),
and 45.5% (SE = 1.6%) were on a psychiatric medication after admission"
(source: Wilper A, Woolhandler S, Himmelstein D, et al. The Health and Health Care of US Prisoners: Results of a Nationwide Survey. American Journal of Public Health [serial online]. April 2009;99(4):666-672. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed July 24, 2011.)

The same study found that there was a chronic incidence of untreated physical illness amongst US prisioners.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) 7,225,800 people at yearend 2009 were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole — about 3.1% of adults in the U.S. resident population.  2,292,133 were incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails at year end 2009.

Whereas Denmark has a low incarceration rate with a total of 3774 inmates in the country.  Denmark has 59 people in prison for every 100,000 citizens or .00059%, a difference of 3.09941% from the US.

Crime rates for Denmark can be found here: http://www.nationmaster.com/country/da-denmark/cri-crime
For US go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States

What are we doing wrong that Denmark is doing so damn right?

In the United States the highest tax bracket is US $373,651+ at only 35%, whereas in Denmark the highest bracket is US $138,050 at as high as 57% or as low as 43% depending on the amount of interest you pay annually.

Denmark is a constitutional monarchy with democratic aspects.  They have a strong welfare state.  Denmark has 20 weeks of paid parental leave and 32 of unpaid compared to the US which has 24 weeks of unpaid leave for mothers only (source: http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/parental_2008_09.pdf).  Denmark ensures that all Danes receive tax-funded health care and unemployment insurance.  The United States is stingy with these benefits limiting them only to the very poor.  The average worker in Denmark makes US $5,464, monthly gross and US $3,226 net according to a 2006 survey.  Sales tax is 25% compared to 8% in the most of the United States (some places like Montana are 0%).

In 2009 trade union density was 6.66 in Denmark as oppsed to 11.8 in the US.

Finally, Denmark has a strong socialist movement.  In the 2007 election, the Socialist People's Party (SF) went from 11 to 23 seats in the Folketing (National Parliament) out of 179 members.  That is 6.1%.
There is currently one socialist representative in the United States, Bernie Sanders, I-VT of 435 House seats.  That is .22%.  There are 100 senators and no socialists occupy any of those seats. 

What do Danes get out of their monarchistic nanny state with high taxes?  Peace of mind, knowing that they don't have to face beggars on the street or rampant crime.  Less depression.  More satisfaction with their jobs and their lives.

morality, God, autonomy and praxis

The passage in Matt. 19:26 where Jesus states, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible,” renders the autonomous (i.e. : possessing of free will), human individual powerless. It is much like the Alcoholics Anonymous mantra, “...accept the things I cannot change....” i.e.: powerless against alcoholism, only through Higher Power can the “disease” be conquered. This “disease” ideology comes direct from a Judeo-Christian paradigm, especially the puritanical Protestant ethic on which Plymouth Rock was founded. “Sin” is supposedly moral corruption. Anton Lavey would have us believe that sin is what makes life worth living. Let us get one thing straight, sin is a product of ideology, nothing more. It has nothing to do with morality. Karl Marx said that religion serves the interests of the ruling class. This is clear when we examine the “Ham's curse” argument for racist slavery. Economic imperatives are the driving force behind religious ideology. The concept of sin, therefore (a product of ideology), was invented for one purpose; to keep the peasants from revolting. That is not a new concept, and perhaps not even a surprising one.

Sin's, the evil twin, has a “good” counterpart: virtue and a promise of a heavenly (or restored paradise Earth as in the Jehovah's Witness case) reward. Matt. 6:20 says to “store treasures in heaven.” This is directly opposed to the dialectical materialist notion of “heaven on Earth, now!” Joe Hill wrote in the song the Preacher and the Slave, “You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky; Work and pray, live on hay, You'll get pie in the sky when you die” followed by the dialectical response, “THAT'S A LIE!” Joe Hill then makes a plea for individuals/communities to take responsibility for their own lot in life in the final chorus, “You will eat, bye and bye, When you've learned how to cook and how to fry; Chop some wood, 'twill do you good Then you'll eat in the sweet bye and bye”

By declaring oneself an individual with moral autonomy one takes responsibility for one's actions; as opposed to the “all in God's plan/God works in mysterious ways” cliché of the religious Christians. That is not to say that the individual is the central unit by which society must be structured. Or more specifically that one can really do anything by oneself (the old cliché “no man is an island”). On the contrary, the greatest achievements of mankind have only been through cooperation with one another. Even the animals have learned this according to Kropotkin. In Billy Bragg's version of There is Power in a Union, “...it all amounts to nothing if together we don't stand....”

The moral atheist is an anomaly to the devout because they assume that without a concept of God there are no morals. Vladimir Bartol was right in pronouncing that if “nothing is true everything is permitted.” However, atheists do not dismiss truth. The question the dialectical materialist would ask is “who's truth?” To many atheists the truth is that God inhibits moral praxis. Slavoj Zizek writes that when the apostle Paul stated in Gal. 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” he was not being inclusive. On the contrary, he was expressing exclusive universalism. A comment should also be made here regarding the “many Gods objection” to Pascal's Wager. Again, the question arises, “who's truth?”

Back to praxis, Gramsci wrote in the Prison Diaries that those who engage in religious praxis, that is work such as the Catholic Workers do, are far removed from transformative, productive, revolutionary praxis. He writes that most Christians who engage in work with the poor believe that there should remain at least one or two poor people in the world at all times so as not to prove Jesus wrong when he stated that there will always be rich and poor. Again, this is exclusivism.
Finally, I would like to make a note about anthropology. Franz Boas' concept of ethnocentrism is perhaps the best contribution the study of anthropology offered to the 20th century. This is relevant because religion is steeped in ethnocentrism. Atheism is not innocent in this either. Nor is Marxism. Any IDEOLOGY that seeks the moral high ground is guilty of ethnocentrism. However, cultural relativism only goes so far. One cannot simply accept exploitation and violations of human rights on the grounds of cultural relativism. This argument is not new, nor is it surprising. The relevance of this argument to the above discussion is this: once again - “who's truth?” Each person has a lens through which we see the world. 1 Corinthians 13:12 says we see “through a glass darkly.” Nobody is absolutely right because nobody has all the answers. However, that does not mean that one cannot proceed as though one is right. Confidence wins friends and isolates the enemies. There is also nothing wrong with having enemies. However, one must remember that we are none of us free of hypocrisy or the occasional lapse in moral judgment.

Are we really allowed our little pseudo-revolunionary idiosyncracies in industrial-capitalist society under the Google regime?  As long as we work and consume, albeit in a quasi-counter-cultural form?  Hot Topic is a hot topic.  Let us find out.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Barry Goldwater 

4. Universal arming of the people. In future armies shall at the same time be workers’ armies so that the armed forces will not only consume, as in the past, but produce even more than it costs to maintain them.

In addition, these shall be a means of organising work

Marx and Engles - Demands of the Communist Party in Germany

Tolerance as an Ideology Category - Slavoj Zizek

S.C.U.M. Manifesto - Valerie Solanas 

 Industrial Society and Its Future - Ted Kaczynski

Situationist International Journal 

Manifesto of the Communist Party - Marx and Engles

Socialist Gun Review

They don't need to burn the books, they just remove them.
- RATM

The Hegemony of Freedom: Power as a Finite Resource

This story begins with the Law and Disorder Conference in Portland, Oregon and the chaos that descended upon it.  It should be seen as somewhat of an embarrassment for today's left.  However, not necessarily for the reasons one might imagine.  It was not a matter of anarchy gone awry, necessarily.  It was more a cognitive dissonance within anarchism between individualist libertarianism and collective democracy.

The melee ensued as a result of Kristian Williams' status as a panelist in a forum about the role of agent provocateurs in the anarchist movement.  However, his stated purpose for being there was not the bone of contention that caused the feud.  The disruption arose from his insistence that issues of sexual assault have become off limits to anyone other than abuse survivors.  These sentiments were stated in an essay entitled "The Politics of Denunciation."  The most controversial of the statements made in the essay are as follows:

Under this theory, the survivor, and the survivor alone, has the right to make demands … one obvious implication is that all allegations are treated as fact. And often, specific allegations are not even necessary.... It may be enough to characterize someone’s behavior … as ‘sexist,’ ‘misogynist,’ ‘patriarchal, ‘silencing,’ ‘triggering,’ unsafe,’ or ‘abusive. (additional source)

Earlier this year a blog post entitled "The Rise of the Post-New Left Political Vocabulary" by Stephen D’Arcy was published, which analyses more precisely "calling out" culture in today's left circles.  D'Arcy's article approaches the problematic more sensitively and is a more rounded critique, centered on historicity.

One major concern is that I and others have expressed is that this "calling out" culture uses humiliation as a tactic. It is a strategy of the defeated.  If we are to win in the broader struggle for liberation, we cannot shoot ourselves in the foot this way.  We are embarrassing and thus alienating our allies.  The problem arises when privilege is unconscious. Suddenly individuals new to today's leftism are being called out for things they don't understand. The cry then becomes:  My privilege has been checked. I'm still not liberated. What next?

Many of these current left tendencies arose at a point where damage control was necessary after a particularly reactionary period (Regan, Bush, Bush Jr.).  Perhaps the way to proceed is to be liberation oriented as opposed to doing constant damage control. I understand this means different things to different demographics, but I would advocate a return to the orthodox Marxist critique of political economy, whereby these particular oppressions can be linked though economic imperatives of the ruling class. I'm not suggesting, however, that all dialectical struggle arises from class antagonism. Certainly sexism was around much longer than capitalism or feudalism. I'm saying the reason these oppressions continue to be very real today is because they benefit the ruling class.

However, the embarrassment at the Law and Disorder Conference, was not necessarily an overly self-reflexive left. Perhaps the precise critique lies not in defending the correctness of Kimberly William's statements regarding the hegemony of abuse survivors, but in the failure to reconcile dissent from those statements within a "libertarian" framework. "Libertarian" socialism fails in its marriage to individualist freedom as a fundamental precept. In this arena "anarchism" is rendered impotent in its ability to appropriately respond to theoretical questions of privilege.

Recently, Mark Bray wrote a critique of what he deemed "liberal tendencies that plagued Occupy."  The first he discusses is what he deems "liberal libertarianism."  However, why does he necessarily adhere to "left libertarianism" while denouncing "liberal libertarianism?"  Much of what he criticizes in "liberal libertarianism" in inherent to libertarianism/anti-authoritarianism itself, particularly, the aspect of idiosyncratic individualism.  This liberal tendency arises from multiculturalism, which states that all points of view are valid, and so censorship, on whatever basis, is reproachable.  The "mic check" phenomenon at occupy exemplified this.  The collective voice of the movement could become whatever idiosyncratic rant whomever had the moxy to yell out "mic check" determined it to be.

Bray defines the "liberal libertarian" thusly:

The Liberal Libertarian is the person who has learned enough about the potentially heinous repercussions of coercion and exclusion to renounce authoritarian organizing structures, but takes this in such an individualistic direction that they also often dismiss even directly democratic structures and reject collective attempts to prevent boisterous individuals from completely disrupting assemblies, meetings, actions or any other collective endeavor.

So why define the prevailing tendency in today's left as "libertarian socialism?"  I understand that this has a historical significance in the history of the IWW and other proposed libertarian socialist movements in America, but why not, instead, demand direct democratic socialism?  Here is an example of how the tolerant libertarianism of Occupy could go wrong when a reactionary throws a monkey wrench in the gears:



The incident(s) this wing-nut is referring to occurred because of OWS's reluctance to have any safety measures in place, what so ever, such as a kind of "people's security" like they did in Tarhir Square.  Why give these individuals fodder to attack our movement?  Self-conscious leaderlessness gives individuals whose will is opposite from the leftist values we espouse not only a platform for their idiotic rantings (and why give them one of ours when they have so many already?), but also creates an opportunity whereby oppressors can exploit the weaknesses of our movement, including, but not limited to physical and even sexual violence.

A discussion of the film The Act of Killing is relevant here.   It's international title was "Free Men" because the Indonesian word for gangster sounds like the English term "free men." As is a plague for foreign films, the title was changed to the more moralistic "Act of Killing" for ideological reasons. This concept of freedom is something that we should respect as a myth but beware of as a reality. Mussolini said "Every anarchist is a baffled dictator." There is perhaps some truth in that. Are not the stars of this postmodern film personifications of freedom gone wrong? Were they not free to live out their darkest fantasies with no consequences?  

Passolini's sado-masochistic film Salo also comes to mind, where at one point the sadists say, "The true anarchist is the fascist, because true freedom comes only from power."

An intriguing current in cyber-politics has arisen from these lines of thinking.  Moldbuggian neoreachtionarism has arisen from counter-intuitive roots: voluntarism, anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism.  Neoreactionism is a high-tech, Silicon-Valley based brand of techno-fascism pushed by nerd-blogger Mencious Moldbug and Google engineer Justine Tunney.  Tunney touts herself as an Occupy Wall Street activist, but her recent endorsement of Moldbug makes one wonder if she really "gets" OWS or how sincere her motives are for being involved with OWS in the first place.

OWS's triumph was its distinction between the "99%" and the "1%."  On Tunney's Twitter page she has a picture of her holding a sign that says "Give Class War @ Chance."  Which class does she want to win the war, one must wonder?  I like the slogan "we are the 99%" precisely because it creates an "us vs. them." Because we are not the 1%! Some sentimental people have perverted it to be "we are 100%" but I feel this deludes the power of the message. 

Power is a finite resource and it must be meted out equally for liberation to be possible. That means some must lose some power/freedom. I'm okay with that. I'm okay with losing my white-male-hetero privilege if it means a more complete liberation in the end. I'm just interested in actually achieving emancipation, and not simply sitting at the cool kid table in the lefty club.

It is incredibly baffling to those less theoretically inclined to decipher the link between vonluntaryism/anarcho-capitalism and neoreactionary techno-fascism.  It appears that fascism hegemonically becomes its opposite, unrestrained freedom. Of course this is not new. See the trajectory of Georges Sorel from syndicalist to fascist, or even Mussolini (prominent in the Italian Socialist Party early in his political career) for that matter. What is clear is that radicalism for radicalism's sake is not enough. 

Seeing power and freedom as interrelated and from there seeing power as a finite resource that must be distributed with an interest to egalitarianism is a necessary step.  A revival of Gramsci is incredibly important in these times. The concepts of praxis and hegemony have taken on renewed relevance. How creepily appropriate that Gramsci was executed by the ultimate left wing traitor, Mussolini.

For all our hope that things will continually get better and better, it is an unfortunate fact that in politics (as in physics) for every action (in the pursuit of emancipatory progress), there is an equal and opposite reaction.  The rise of the Nouvelle Droite in France, the participation of Svoboda in the recent Ukrainian revolution and the fascist character of their current regime, the current democratically elected regime in India, and the anti-Bolivarian protests in Venezuela make it clear that those of us on the left have a continuing responsibility to be ever vigilant against all forms of reactionarism and fascism that threaten to undue the progress already done.

Liberation is necessary before any kind of liberty can be pronounced.  One can declare a space a Beyian "Temporary Autonomous Zone," but until we have a society where the autonomy of all is respected, it is premature to declare universal freedom.

Dare to struggle!  Dare to win!

Commodity mysticism

Commodity fetishism is perhaps one of the most insightful and groundbreaking concepts from Karl Marx's tour de force of economic philosophy Kapital, first published in 1886. For those not familiar with commodity fetishism it is somewhat of a magical mystique around a particular physical thing (commodity) that determines its social value, expressed by Marx as exchange-value. An example of this in the current state of capitalism would be branding. Slavoj Zizek uses Coke vs. generic cola beverage as an example in his 2011 book Living in the End Times. A consumer may be willing to pay more for the Coca-Cola brand soda than the generic simply because of the magical gravitas of the Coke name/logo and all other psycho-social associations that go along with.  According to Zizek, this marks a departure by Marx from Marxism.  He thus deems Marx's writings from after 1850 to be the post-Marxist Marx.

Of course, there are other ways to determine the value of a commodity apart from fetishism. The labor theory of value posits that a commodity is worth the amount of labor (labor = time spent working + rigorousness of work (this is perhaps an over-simplification, but let's use this rudimentary definition for the sake of argument)) it takes to make something. Adam Smith also subscribed to this idea. This is the first element of a materialist conception of capital.

The second factor is use-value. Since labor is required to fashion a commodity that suits human wants or needs, the value of a commodity also reflects its usefulness. This is a bit more of a complex formula than labor-value as the determination of use-value is often a combination of social relations and material concerns.

Commodity fetishism comes in at the level of exchange-value. Exchange-value under capitalism involves profit. Zizek eloquently defines profit as "the price of the 'nothing' we pay for when we buy something from a capitalist. The capitalist economy counts with the price of nothing, with reference to a virtual Zero which has a precise price (2011: 210)."  It has perhaps become almost a cliche when a communist insists that wage labor under capitalism is always robbery because if the boss were to pay the worker what her/his labor was really worth the boss would make no profit. However, it is precisely the mystical element of the fetish that the boss provides. In this sense the bourgeois capitalist (boss) acts as a kind of priest; a gatekeeper to the heavenly realm of the transcendal commodity fetish.

So how then does the concept of commodity fetishism inform us that Marx has disavowed Marxism in Kapital? The philosophical writings of the young Karl Marx were primarily based on Hegelian dialectics. However, Marx differentiated his dialectical materialism from Hegel's dialectical idealism.

In Marx's materialism, ideology, society, civilization, our species' entire symbolic culture arises from material conditions that are clearly discernible by science. Those conditions are most often those which Charles Darwin had identified as being traits of a species "fit" for survival in On the Origin of the Species. Primary among those would be subsistence and reproduction. One also may note that in nature, a species' evolutionary trajectory is often determined by these factors. For example, opposable thumbs in the great apes may have been a mutation that stuck around because those who could pick things up with one hand were more likely to be able to feed themselves. Another extreme example from the other side is the flamboyant plumage of a male peacock. Even though these bright colors may make them more susceptible to predators, they also make the most brightly colored males more likely to be noticed by potential mates and thus more likely to have offspring.

Certainly this materialist theory is sound when we look at things zoologically (although we do now know that some of the great-apes such as chimpanzees do display ritualistic behavior, which one could argue is in some ways symbolic). And it is even consistent when one considers those human cultures that had or have hunter-gatherer type subsistence (again, the existence of animism in these societies also displays a kind of symbolic culture).

Where this theory of materialism breaks down, however, is when it comes to those human societies that have a complex symbolic culture. Ethnologically speaking, symbolic culture (i.e.: not only language, but abstract meanings (signifiers) given, at times seemingly arbitrarily, to certain symbols (signified)) tends to arise with consolidation of political authority (from loose egalitarian bands into tribes, chiefdoms, kingdoms, states, empires) and also a change in the mode of production (from kinship to tributary, mercantile, capitalist, industrial capitalist, monopoly capitalist). Interestingly enough, a change in religiously seems to coincide with these apparent phases in political-economy. The trajectory seems to go from animism (spirits in all things) to polytheism (many gods), to monotheism (single God) and then perhaps even to atheism (no god) or nihilism (nothing at all). There is a corresponding localist versus universalist approach to religiosity as well here: animism and polytheism being more localist, and monotheism, atheism and nihilism more universalist.

Zizek points out an interesting paradox in Marx's Katpital.  It is expressed by Marx himself in the following passage, "... the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things...."  I would even make a more bold paraphrase, saying that persons are treated like things, and things are treated like persons under capitalism.

Another paradox can thus be extrapolated.  Capitalism takes on the character of a sort of universalist animism, whereby commodities are possessed with a spirit, akin to Hegel's geist, but involving things rather than persons.  If we were to compare capitalism to vodou, the capitalist then takes on the status of a bokor: a black-magic priest involved in the business of creating zombies.  A zombie would here be a person who becomes a thing; un-dead: the Hegelian negation-of-the-negation.  Additionally, a thing (here a commodity) then is given a spiritual dimension, a soul.  Also, like vodou, capitalism allows interchanges between the spiritual realm of the fetish and the physical world through liaisons: bokor (hougan or mambo) in vodou, marketeer in capitalism.  These liaisons must become possessed by the spirit in order to communicate its message.  They must fully identify with the myth in order to propagate the myth.

Parallels come to mind with the fictional House of Fetish cult from Albert Camus' short story "The Renegade", of his collection entitled Exile and the Kingdom, published in 1957.  An unnamed missionary renounces his Christian faith and follows the deity known as "the Fetish," after a period of being tortured, culminating in the cutting out of his tongue.  The House of Fetish follows a sado-masochistic philosophy of spirituality.  Pain, suffering, destruction, hate and unchecked power are celebrated as sacraments of this religion.  Isn't this akin to the masochism of the proletariat class under capitalism?

Marx's son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, argued against the masochistic nature of the proletarian work ethic in his critique of capitalist conceptualization of efficiency entitled The Right to be Lazy, from 1883. He there explains that the drive to over-produce, a result of the profit motive, has lead to a puritanical work ethic where efficiency is a virtue and sloth a vice. Is not this crisis of over-production what has lead to the imminent ecological and financial crises we face today?

For Lafargue the crucified Christ is the ultimate symbol of this masochism. He makes note that in pre-Christian societies work was the duty of lowly slaves, whereas the philosophers of ancient Spain and Greece praised laziness.

At the end of Camus' "The Renegade", the apostate missionary again renounces his faith, this time the faith of the House of the Fetish. As he lay dying next to the high priest of the fetish from a wound inflicted by the Christian colonialists who came to exterminate the House of the Fetish he expresses a Hegelian negation-of-the-negation, put forth by the following passage:


Who is speaking, no one, the sky is not opening up, no, no, God does not speak in the desert, yet whence comes that voice saying: 'If you consent to die for hate and power, who will forgive us?' 
Is it another tongue in me or still that other fellow refusing to die, at my feet, and repeating: 'Courage! courage! courage!'? Ah! supposing I were wrong again! Once fraternal men, sole recourse, O solitude, forsake me not! Here, here who are you, torn, with bleeding mouth, it is you my beloved master! Cast off that hate-ridden face, be good now, we were mistaken, we'll begin all over again, we'll rebuild the city of mercy, I want to go back home. Yes, help me, that's right, give me your hand...."

A handfull of salt fills the mouth of the garrulous slave.

(1957: 60-1)

At first glance, it appears as though Camus' unnamed protagongist may have reverted back to Christianity here, but I would posit that he is merely expressing his religious status as a Hegelian negation-of-a-negation. To Hegel this double negative does not make a positive as it does in grammar. Rather it puts the individual (here Camus' "renegade" protagonist) in a third, liminal category. Just as the undead zombie is neither living, nor dead, the "renegade" here is neither Christian, nor zealot for the Fetish. He has renounced both faiths.

Implicit in the above passage is that the "renegade" protagonist has come to understand that the cruelty of the Fetish has been defeated by the cruelty of the Christians. He has come to understand that the perceived dialectic between Christian mercy and the cruel sadism of the Fetish is not necessarily so black-and-white as he had assumed all along.

In the religion of capital, money is the transubstantiated sacrament with which we create meaning out of nothing.  Capital's dualistic nature can thus be described in Christian terms.  The commodity is the person - of a dualistic nature itself, possessed of both flesh (thing) and soul (fetish). Money is the Holy Spirit, the vehicle through which commodities are transubstantiated from soul (fetish) to "fleshly" object. One cannot buy the fetish directly. It is physically nothing.  The fetish must come as part of a package: physical thing (shoes, food, electronics etc.) plus fetish (symbolized by the "brand" - Nike (athleticism), McDonalds (fun), Apple (innovation) etc.).

Finally, I would insist that commodity fetishism must be ethnographically and ethnologically studied as a form of religiosity.  Michael Taussig's book The Devil and Commodity Fetishism approaches this category, specifically in relation to the connection between capitalism and Satanism in South America.  Historian Patrick Geary's paper entitled "Sacred commodities: the circulation of medieval relics" published in Arjun Appadurai's (ed) The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective from 1986 is another.  However, these studies primarily explore capital and the commodity's relationship with preexisting religiosity.  To get to the heart of the matter, economic anthropologists must also approach capitalism as a religion in-and-of-itself: a black-magic, universalist animism that has dominated the entire world.

Kevin Rose: Parasite

From [kevinroseisaterribleperson.wordpress.com]


Kevin Rose: Leech
We are here to tell you about Kevin Rose, an employee of Google. At a glance, he might appear to be any other hipster techie walking down the street, but there is something deeper and far more sinister at play below his well-manicured hair. But first, we have to give you some background.
Behind every gentrifying hipster techie there is a tech company. In the beginning, each of the tech giants was nothing more than a startup, and behind every startup there is always a venture capitalist. Ram Shriram once invested in a startup called Google, the love-child of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two Stanford students with a search algorithm for the internet. This venture capitalist gambled on the Google startup in 1999 and now he is on the board of a company currently worth around 400 billion dollars. Without venture capitalists like Shriram, there would never have been a Google.
As a way of honoring the system that brought them their wealth, Brin and Page created Google Ventures, the venture capital wing of the corporation. The employees of Google Ventures select startups and existing companies to either fund or acquire. Many of these investments are located in the Bay Area and the employees of these newly funded or acquired startups have moved to San Francisco and parts of Oakland.
It has now come to the point where even Diet Coke advertisements are referencing the influx of techies and their startups. With venture capital in their pockets, these wealthy professionals with few attachments are able to pay hyper inflated rents and property prices, displacing long time residents and increasing the cost of living. Tech-workers on average earn four times the wages of a normal service worker.
Venture capitalists enable these tech-workers by funding their startups. With the success of each startup, more and more ambitious tech-workers flock to the city and displace underemployed service workers to the cities at the far reaches of the BART line. These workers must then commute back to San Francisco or Oakland every morning, in most cases to perform menial tasks for the entitled scum who drove them out in the first place.
Which brings us back to Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com and current venture partner at Google Ventures. He has already helped Google acquire Nextdoor.com and invested his own money in Foursquare, hoping to cash out when a giant buys it. We are here today because a few of the thousands low-paid, underemployed service workers got fed up with Kevin Rose treating them like the shit one scrapes from their boot, not even worthy of eye contact or the basic pleasantries generally taken for granted in our culture.
Recognizing that Kevin Rose is not just another techie asshole, but rather a meta-leech funding and profiting off the gentrification of San Francisco, we chose to bring the class war to his doorstep on our own terms. Rather than be subservient and do his bidding in exchange for the currency we need to commute home and back, we are here today in uncompromising solidarity with every person forced out of the city by the insane hyper-gentrification created through the tireless efforts of people like Kevin Rose.
Kevin Rose: Serial Entrepreneur
Kevin lives in an expensive duplex atop Potrero Hill. His address is 2004 19th Street in San Fracisco.
Kevin calls himself a ‘serial entrepreneur’ and is very proud of his business accomplishments. In 2004 he helped establish Digg.com, a website that ranked news stories according to number of reader “diggs”. From this, he created a spinoff video podcast called Diggnation, a show he hosted for six years that is widely considered to be the first clear articulation of the current tech-bro culture.
For example, in 2008, Kevin and his cohost began sermonizing on when it would be appropriate for a man to hit a woman. It was determined that if a woman kicked a man in the balls, it was okay to punch her “tit.” Kevin took it all a step further when he connected the expression tit-for-tat to their discussion and then announced, while making a cutting motion, “it hurts them, it does too – or take a scissors to the tit.” His comment was met with widespread criticism and Kevin became the poster boy for tech-misogyny, even after he apologized by saying, “obviously, violence against women is serious and something we don’t advocate in any way.”
Eventually the world forgot all about Kevin Rose and Digg and Diggnation. Around that time, Kevin and some of his bros started a company called Milk. This company in turn created an app called Oink. This app allowed anyone to take out their smart-phone and see a map of every nearby restaurant, café, and bar with ratings of specific items at each establishment. In essence, Oink allowed people to consume more according to their own specific tastes and needs, allowing them to browse prices and rank establishments.
Oink meant to capitalize on the way people tend to listen to the recommendations of friends by convincing them to use an ad-laden platform, rather than go out together or discuss favorite restaurants in conversation. Through mechanisms like Oink, Yelp, and Foursquare, people can now drive down business in establishments that no longer serve their luxurious needs by mobbing them with unfavorable reviews and rankings.
And then one day in March 2012, it was announced that Kevin and half of the Milk team were to become Google employees. The Oink app was terminated and Kevin briefly worked at Google+ before moving on to Google Ventures. Based on the various startups that he has funded through Google Ventures or on his own, we can see more disturbing evidence of Kevin’s technological derangement.
Nextdoor.com is a website that helps alienated urban and suburban home-dwellers learn about their neighbors and network their private surveillance feeds together. Like some of Kevin’s other investments, Nextdoor allows residents who use the website to gang up on anyone they do not like (or who does not have a Nextdoor account) and hound them into compliance or eviction. It allows the alienated to connect with others like them who would rather electronically complain than speak to an offline neighbor in real life. Nextdoor.com is a major new platform for the snitch-world, a bubble machine for people who never learned social skills. And it is something Kevin Rose and Google think is a really good idea.
But let’s take another one of Kevin’s investments, the popular app Foursquare. A previous manifestation of it, Dodgeball, was bought by Google in 2005 but then terminated in 2009. That year, the creators of Dodgeball started their new Foursquare app and by 2012 they had collected over 45 millions users. The app allows disconnected and alienated smartphone users to check-in to restaurants, hotels, and bars and in the process alert other Foursquare users of their location. In the world of this app, people can become the “mayor” of an establishment based on how often they check-in and how many “badges” they earn.
After performing fellatio on Foursquare for ten ridiculous pages in his book Smart Cities, Anthony M. Townsend writes, “the city of Foursquare might look like a lattice, but is it becoming an elaborate tree traced by hidden algorithms? Instead of urging us to explore on our own, will it guide us down a predetermined path based on what we might buy?” The answers to his questions are an undeniable yes. Foursquare gathers isolated and unimaginative people and gives them a way to connect without having to think beyond a glance at the food rankings on their smartphones. The system through which Foursquare enables people to connect is called the capitalist system and thus Foursquare will always connect people as consumers, customers, and tippers. It was designed to do this and nothing else.
Kevin Rose: OK Glass, Now Take Over The World!
Unfortunate people like Kevin Rose have never known a world without capitalism and in their ignorance they only know how to fortify it. Everything they do helps to extend the suicidal reign of this world system that renders all life into a commodity and replaces real life with digital distractions that lead people into narcosis, gluttony, and sociopathic greed. Kevin Rose and his employers at Google represent one part of a larger structure that keeps people enslaved to this single economic system that is literally killing the planet and decreasing the chances of continued life.
Tech entrepreneurship is not a harmless or benevolent force. The industry is built directly on the exploitation of millions of faceless people in the global south who are driven off their land and forced to do the dangerous and thankless work of extracting (at great ecological cost) the precious metals and other raw materials that enable the tech world to exist. Once the technology has been shoved down our throats through merciless advertising campaigns, mandatory cell phone upgrades, and jobs requiring instant connectivity of smartphones, we find ourselves tied to their world.
Unlike us, this beast has a head that can be targeted. Kevin Rose and other venture capitalists like him literally design and implement this entire exploitive system. They do it because they are drunk on their own power, caught up in a sense of importance bestowed upon them by the type of wealth most of us will never interact with. Kevin Rose will rise and fall with the elites of the dominant order. While we struggle to be included in the trickle-down of wealth through dehumanizing menial labor, these techies, entrepreneurs, and capitalists take over the world. Knowing that at the vanguard of this tech invasion are people like Kevin Rose only increases our desire to completely stop the current insanity.
Taken as a whole, Kevin Rose invests in startups that perpetuate the process of alienation under the guise of social technology. It is, admittedly, genius: create the technological conditions of alienation that drive people to desperately consume technological products that claim to combat the alienation produced by contemporary technological society. Tech is now about creating and selling the new indispensable commodity that everyone must have in order to be less bored, less lost, less ridden with anxiety. We want no part of this disgusting and creepy game being played by a bunch power deranged man-children.
To this end, we now make our first clear demand of Google. We demand that Google give three billion dollars to an anarchist organization of our choosing. This money will then be used to create autonomous, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist communities throughout the Bay Area and Northern California. In these communities, whether in San Francisco or in the woods, no one will ever have to pay rent and housing will be free. With this three billion from Google, we will solve the housing crisis in the Bay Area and prove to the world that an anarchist world is not only possible but in fact irrepressible. If given the chance, most humans will pursue a course towards increased freedom and greater liberty. As it stands, only people like Kevin Rose are given the opportunity to reshape their world, and look at what they do with those opportunities.
We know that your security advisors are taking our analysis seriously, so if you are confident that your system is the best, it would be wise to give us three billion to see if we fail. Our wager is that you are scared of the viable alternative we would create. If you are not scared, contact us at our WordPress website. Send us a message and we can go from there. Otherwise, get ready for a revolution neither you nor we can control, a revolution that will spread to all of the poor, exploited, and degraded members of this new tech-society and be directed towards you for your bad decisions and irresponsible activities. We advise you to take us seriously.
For a world without bosses, rulers, or cops! Down with the Empire, up with the Spring!
-The Counterforce
PS: The following devices and programs were used in this action: Microsoft Word (for Mac) MacBook Samsung Nexus (powered by Google) Gmail Youtube Electrical Socket

The Korea Conundrum

North Korea is a conundrum for apologists of "actually existing socialism" regimes.  There aren't a whole lot of Communist countries left.  China is too capitalist, Venezuela is too pink (read: not revolutionary/radical), it's too soon to judge the Maoist movement in Nepal, CCCP fell, FARC is a bunch of gangster drug lords.  Cuba seems to be doing alright, but years of sanctions have inhibited their ability to progress as a nation.  North Korea, supported mainly by the new economic boogy-man - China, stands out as a big middle finger to Western imperialism.  They have nukes, which forces superpowers like the US to take them seriously, but also to leave them alone.  Saddam Hussein never had WMD's so it was safe enough for the US to invade his country and lynch him.  Kim Jong-Il made it clear that they had a nuclear program and his son, Kim Jong-Un, has threatened to use them.

For some of us this morbid prospect is intriguing.  Of course no one wants nuclear war.  There's a slim chance that Un is just reckless enough that it might seem like a good idea to him, but I think the reality is much different.  Nuclear weapons are an ace in the hole.  The threat of using them is a powerful bargaining tool, and his wild card has been effective.  In exchange for promises to decrease the scope the N. Korean nuclear program Un has been able to secure foreign aid for his country.

However, Un is hardly a benevolent dictator.   A recent Frontline episode has exposed the hypocrisy in N. Korean pseudo-Marxism where classless socialism is the official line, while orphan children are forced to live on the streets and starve.  The episode makes the argument that a black-market of foreign cinema and television has made the people aware that there is another way.  However, they seem to argue that the emergence of a limited free market in N. Korea is a sign of hope.  As any good socialist knows, capitalism and democracy are not necessarily married.  Zizek has made clear that China is a prime example of the estrangement of capitalism and democracy (See Zizek on "Capitalism with Asian Values").

What is clear is that the N. Korean experiment has become a veritable Jonestown: a dystopian project headed towards destruction.  The buffoonery of the Kim dynasty reveals the last three "great-and-powerful-leaders'" ineptitude and has rendered them as caricatures to the outside world (See "customer reviews" on Amazon's On the Art of the Opera page).  Unfortunately, for the people of N. Korea the situation is all too real.