Anarchoblogs

Gosh! What if substantial portions of the pro-IP lobby aren’t motivated by a passionate concern for property rights after all?

Next I expect we’ll hear that copylefters are violating their own rights. Or, um, something.

Charles Johnson’s excellent essay “Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism,” which appeared in the anarchism/minarchism anthology that Tibor Machan and I edited, is now available online.

Read it now, or the statists win.

I was going to write something about CPAC and the tea parties. But then I remembered that I’d already written this last spring.

It takes the perspicacity of a Glenn Beck to detect them.

• Help Noam Chomsky Find His Inner Anarchist. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-10). A reader tipped me off that Noam Chomsky has agreed to answer the top-rated questions submitted via this reddit page; the reader suggested that I condense my “Chomsky’s Augustinian Anarchism” gripes into a question. So I did. Here’s my question for Chomsky: Although as an anarchist you favour a stateless... (Linked Wednesday 2010-02-10.)
• DAVID T. BEITO: Rand Paul is No Libertarian. Liberty & Power: Group Blog (2010-02-10). "This first advertisement for his U.S. Senate campaign ... is quite simply terrible. It not only panders to the darkest side of American conservatism but to the basest emotions of voters." Like pappy, Ron's boy Rand has chosen to emphasize absolutely the worst parts of his platform in his early campaign advertisements. Here, the current poster-boy for Chairman Ron's Great Libertarian Electoral Revolution comes out for "strong national defense," an immigration police state, and overseas legal black holes for "enemy combatants." (Linked Wednesday 2010-02-10.)
• How to split up the US. pwarden, PeteSearch (2010-02-06). As I've been digging deeper into the data I've gathered on 210 million public Facebook profiles, I've been fascinated by some of the patterns that have emerged. My latest visualization shows the information by location, with connections drawn between places that share friends. For example, a lot of people in... (Linked Wednesday 2010-02-10.)
• Bear Becomes Mushroom; Trout Implicated. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-11). So the picture on the left of a girl leaning against a bear is an image that appears on merchandise produced by independent artist Hidden Eloise; and the picture on the right of the same girl in the same pose, leaning against empty air in the vague vicinity of a... (Linked Friday 2010-02-12.)

So the picture on the left of a girl leaning against a bear is an image that appears on merchandise produced by independent artist Hidden Eloise; and the picture on the right of the same girl in the same pose, leaning against empty air in the vague vicinity of a giant mushroom, is an image that appears, more recently, on merchandise produced by the British stationery company Paperchase.

In Thoreau’s words: “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

Without IP laws, what would prevent this blatant appropriation of artists’ ideas?

Oh, wait. Britain has IP laws, doesn’t it? So what’s gone wrong?

Well, apparently Paperchase has been ignoring Eloise’s complaints, and she hasn’t felt prepared to lay out the thousands in court costs needed to pursue legal remedies.

This example reveals a certain asymmetry in IP’s vaunted protection for artists; it turns out to be a lot more useful to large businesses than to individuals.

But Eloise (if she has a last name I haven’t located it) recently got some unexpected help. Yesterday Neil Gaiman mentioned the case in passing on Twitter; and Gaiman’s Twitter feed has about 1.5 million followers. Overnight a firestorm of publicity erupted, talk of a boycott was floated, and now Paperchase is running scared and whining about how “dangerous” Twitter is. (You and Ahmadinejad both, guys.)

Now admittedly the case isn’t over, but Twitter has clearly done more for Eloise in one day than IP laws have done in four months. This suggests that IP proponents have not only overestimated the effectiveness of IP laws as protection for artists, but they’ve likewise underestimated the usefulness of voluntary alternatives such as boycotts and bad publicity.

It could be objected, of course, that Gaiman is a big name with a rather fanatical following, making it difficult to generalise from this case. But an institutionalised version of this response might be able to make up in organisation what it lacks in star power. Remember the Law Merchant, which secured compliance solely through organised boycotts.

A reader tipped me off that Noam Chomsky has agreed to answer the top-rated questions submitted via this reddit page; the reader suggested that I condense my “Chomsky’s Augustinian Anarchism” gripes into a question.

So I did. Here’s my question for Chomsky:

Although as an anarchist you favour a stateless society in the long run, you’ve argued that it would be a mistake to work for the elimination of the state in the short run, and that indeed we should be trying to strengthen the state right now, because it’s needed as a check on the power of large corporations.

Yet the tendency of a lot of anarchist research – your own research most definitely included, though I would also mention in particular Kevin Carson’s – has been to show that the power of large corporations derives primarily from state privilege (which, together with the fact that powerful governments tend to get captured by concentrated private interests at the expense of the dispersed public, would seem to imply that the most likely beneficiary of a more powerful state is going to be the same corporate elite we’re trying to oppose).

If business power both derives from the state and is so good at capturing the state, why isn’t abolishing the state a better strategy for defeating business power than enhancing the state’s power would be?

Users can vote comments upward or downward on the list; so if you’d like to see Chomsky answer the above question, go here and try to boost it up the list. (Or ask one of your own, of course!)

• Anarchists in Space. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-07). Paul Raven reviews Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic novel The Dispossessed, a tale of the confrontation between an anarcho-syndicalist culture and a state-capitalist culture. (CHT François.) Though Le Guin’s personal sympathies were with the anarchists, she doesn’t stack the deck (unlike most political science fiction): the anarcho-syndicalist culture is actually... (Linked Monday 2010-02-08.)
• Comment on Anarchists in Space by Roderick. Roderick, Comments for Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-08). Back in 1980, when Broach came out, perhaps Kolko’s Triumph of Conservatism or Railroads and Regulation, and then follow it up with stuff from Left & Right and the early years of Libertarian Forum. If it were nowadays, Kevin Carson’s books would obviously be essential. The crucial point is this:... (Linked Monday 2010-02-08.)

Paul Raven reviews Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic novel The Dispossessed, a tale of the confrontation between an anarcho-syndicalist culture and a state-capitalist culture. (CHT François.) Though Le Guin’s personal sympathies were with the anarchists, she doesn’t stack the deck (unlike most political science fiction): the anarcho-syndicalist culture is actually pretty sucky. But the state-capitalist culture is even suckier. (I didn’t say it was a cheerful book. But it’s a very good book.)

Related whereunto, some random items:

• There’s a book of essays titled The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. I haven’t read it; but apparently Le Guin liked it and contributed an essay herself.
• L. Neil Smith semi-dedicated his anarcho-capitalist novel The Probability Broach to Le Guin and The Dispossessed. (At least that’s true of the first edition; I don’t have the revised edition handy.) He also commends Hayek’s Capitalism and the Historians to Le Guin’s attention in order to nudge her toward a more favourable attitude to property. (I gotta say, that’s not the book I would have picked for that purpose.)
• I’ve long suspected that Ken MacLeod’s The Cassini Division, with its confrontation between a flawed but functional anarcho-capitalist society and a flawed but functional anarcho-communist society, was partly inspired by Le Guin’s book.
• One of Le Guin’s last works, The Telling, deals with Taoist-inspired communities struggling under an oppressive system variously described by reviewers as a “tightly controlled capitalist government” and a “soulless form of corporate communism.” I haven’t read it yet either.

Addendum: I remembered something else I’d intended to mention: in addition to Ken MacLeod’s The Cassini Division being partly inspired by The Dispossessed in its theme, I’ve wondered whether MacLeod’s earlier novel The Stone Canal might be partly inspired by The Dispossessed in its narrative structure, with one storyline being told through the odd-numbered chapters while a “flashback” background story, featuring the same viewpoint character – in both cases an anarchist scholar – runs through the even-numbered chapters (though of course other writers have done such things as well).

My contribution to Cato Unbound’s Rand symposium is now online. Not many surprises for readers of this blog: I do my Aristotelean eudaimonist dance, my labortarian/anti-conflationist dance, my anarchist dance, and my thick-libertarian dance. (And I drop in links to lots of my friends.)

Here’s Cato’s summary:

In his reply to Rasmussen’s lead essay, Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long sets out to sort the wheat from the chaff in Ayn Rand’s moral and political thought. Long maintains that “Rand sets out to found a classical liberal conception of politics … upon a classical Greek conception of human nature and the human good,” and he goes on to defend the plausibility of this project.

In particular, Long stands up for Rand’s reliance on a naturalistic teleology to ground her neo-Aristotlean ethic theory, pointing to contemporary philosophical work that supports Rand’s view.

Long is less happy with Rand’s political thought and criticizes her ideas of the “pyramid of ability” and of big business as a “persecuted minority.” Long credits Rand for her trenchant analysis of corporatism, but argues that she was mistaken to deny that corporatism and capitalism go hand in hand. According to Long, Rand’s ideal of voluntary interaction not only implies a radical departure from historical capitalism, but also a more thoroughly anti-statist social order.