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Title: Insurrection in Omelas Author: William Gillis Date: April 3rd, 2019 Language: en Topics: Ursula K. Le Guin, book review, insurrection Source: https://c4ss.org/content/51849
In Ursula K Le Guin’s classic short “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”
she considers a prosperous and happy society whose success is somehow
purchased through a dark bargain — the torture and abject immiseration
of a single child. Despite the positive good won for the many, a few
starry-eyed children of Omelas refuse to temper their hunger for a
better deal, and reject this otherwise utopian society, albeit with no
alternative blueprint in hand. Simply insisting that there must be
something better, or that their lives should be devoted to at least
searching for it.
To opponents of markets they pose an equivalent faustian bargain; no
measure of background wealth and technological advancement is worth the
price of social hierarchies of wealth or even a single person in
poverty. Many would rather live in an “equality of the mud” with no
economic benefits beyond subsistence farming if it avoided even a single
person, disabled and without friends, starving or being forced to
prostrate themselves before a charity. Never mind the feasibility of
their alternate proposals, I am deeply sympathetic to this evaluation.
In fact I have always been more of the mind that those merely walking
away are abdicating a moral responsibility to do more. Mere exit is no
more than the gutless wiping of one’s own hands. The anarchist cry is
that so long as even a single person in the universe is oppressed we owe
them active resistance. And oppression can obviously look like
impoverishment in material freedoms, as well as severe differences in
relative capacity or status.
The central problem with liberalism is that it constructs “good enough”
societies, so locally optimal that no easy transition can be undertaken
to improve them except through titanic catastrophe. To secure some
advances or benefits, liberalism builds up walls against future
improvements, a tradeoff it calls pragmatism. And inevitably these walls
allow what positives it secures to be eroded away internally.
So how would we avoid Omelas situations in some utopian anarchist
market? If we were able to equalize wealth in some magical revolution
and for the first time launch an actual freed market, how might we avoid
getting accidentally locked in at some stable point — some local optimum
— with an underclass? There are many norms and institutional
configurations or distributions possible in a market. Path dependence
might be a thing and, by quirk of random trajectories, we might end up
in a decidedly less than egalitarian configuration. Perhaps even one
where the immiseration of a few is quite sharp, and yet the whole
economy “pareto optimal.” Even if a situation is not technically pareto
optimal a market may have such a warped ecosystem as to make the gradual
resolution of this inefficient satiation of desire involve prohibitively
long timescales. What does it matter to the de facto slaves in a company
town that they could slowly save enough over centuries to eventually
liberate themselves and compete against the company enslaving them?
Well I think the answer depends on going back to the differences between
market prescriptions and non market prescriptions and analytically
extending our existing solutions to certain problems.
Part of the anarchist argument for markets is that they provide a
counterpressure to a persistent problem of oppression in non-market
societies. In a gift economy your social standing and ties play a
critical role in determining your livelihood. Embedded in a community or
social landscape you are at risk of being dependent upon games of social
capital. To be a pariah, to have a different brain architecture, or even
to simply be less gregarious than others, could mean death or exclusion
from the means of production or basic needs. Whatever egalitarian values
an institution or community might proclaim, there’s nothing objectively
forcing them to stick to such. Small towns and hippie communes often end
up looking a lot like Omelas. Further, even if no one denies you food,
the implicit status hierarchies of charity can be all the more
pernicious in a society where they constitute the final word on
everything — whether through the centralized commune or a decentralized
web of friends you are expected to maintain.
To resolve this issue we can expand what is possible in our anarchist
economy by permitting people to make spot transactions, that is to say
exchanges, thus facilitating collaboration between strangers or
untrusting associates. You may become a pariah in the neighborhood
association/commune for your fashion sense or uncut lawn but you will
still be able to benefit from economic collaboration/competition on the
market, the network of exchanges, thus providing a pressure valve to
check the pernicious abuses of social capital(ism).
It’s important to note here that a gift economy can be considered a
market — albeit deformed from its full potential — limited to a stark
subset of possible feedback loops and information flows. Proponents of
gift economies often object to exchange itself as unethical because it
arguably allows, encourages, or fundamentally involves competition,
something seen as less than “friendly” and thus objectively unethical.
One common refrain from the Graeberians is, “If you fully trusted one
another there’d be no point to do a spot transaction.”
What’s fascinating to me is the degree to which most anarcho-capitalist
“walmart minus the state” models of a supposedly ideal market themselves
depend upon cutting out a vast variety of possible feedback loops on
ultimately similar rationales.
By taking property titles as a given — as an objective ethical reality,
as natural law — they suppress the haggling over which titles people
feel inclined to respect.
Just as the advocates of gift economies would suppress the autonomous
emergence of exchange, the advocates of “walmart minus the state”
markets require the suppression of theft, sabotage, assassination, etc.
That is to say issues emerging from contested claims. The polycentric
legal system of such ancaps is just assumed to reach and maintain a near
perfect equilibrium (heeding closely to some supposed “natural law”).
But it is in fact an important component of austrian arguments that,
while markets have equilibrating tendencies, they are never in
equilibrium. And things like theft and sabotage can themselves be
critical market functions — in the more primordial reputation market
prior to the emergence of any consensus on titles. There will probably
always be a few people on the margins who see little or no reason for
mutually beneficial detentes to recognize the claimed titles of certain
other people, or even their lives.
While there are reasons we should expect and encourage broad settlement
on market norms and peaceful cohabitation — and thus impede some of
these reputational dynamics to some degree — to exclude them entirely is
to remove feedback mechanisms by which the market can course-correct
itself. Just as accepting at least some measure of trade and rivalrous
competition allows for greater prosperity (and thus the capacity to gift
more), so to does accepting some measure of theft, sabotage,
assassination, etc allow for greater prosperity by tearing down and
disincentivizing centralized cancerous monopolies of wealth, power, etc,
thus allowing the broader economy to run smoother.
If even one person is truly trapped and immiserated in Omelas there is a
pressure valve: they can revolt. The destitute can steal from the rich.
Those subject to negative environmental externalities can sabotage the
factories of those responsible. The oppressed can eliminate those
holding power. If, despite the best intentions of anarchists, a freed
market goes awry for some reason and starts to develop cancerous
accumulations of wealth and power, or just the catastrophic immiseration
of a few, as a solution we would not require some binary revolution,
some universally disruptive jubilee that once again resets the playing
field to try a freed market again, rather resistance can be much more
nuanced and gradual. Rather than a “permanent revolution” a permanent
insurrection, at least at the margins.
It’s worth noting how much smoother this is than conflicts within
communes, or the “townships” that Kropotkin said would be able to
somehow collectively decide to deny specific people food, etc. If a
single person starts monopolizing title over a resource to the detriment
of everyone, other individuals can start autonomously disregarding their
claimed title. Insurrectionary forms of resistance thus remain an
option, and are likely to smoothly increase in frequency and strength as
a concentration grows more pernicious. This individual-to-individual
resistance is much more gradual and fluid than the resistance necessary
to overcome the edicts of a collective entity.
Mild perturbations of wealth are not objective, because value is not
objective, especially in an actually-existing market that never
perfectly clears and/or a freed market that doesn’t collapse its
transmitted information to prices in a single universal currency. It’s
thus a bad idea for those around the median wealth to disrespect each
others’ property claims. General upheaval or contestation of titles
doesn’t benefit anyone, even if your house is somewhat smaller than your
neighbors. The risk is too high, the possible payout too small,
stability a general good. And thus profit signals can actually work,
exchange happen, etc. But in the face of severe inequality the
cost-benefit ratio changes.
Note that this puts caps on maximum wealth without turning to the
arbitrary and dangerous means of the state. No state planner can know
what the maximum wealth should be, or how hard to disincentivize wealth
accumulation past a certain point, but the market can know. The
aggregate knowledge and needs of poor thieves being yet another market
pressure, far more dexterous than some central planner. And note also
that this would enforce a cap on wealth, not really a cap on income. An
insightful but poor entrepreneur would have more to gain than a
similarly insightful entrepreneur quite comfortably situated, thus
further encouraging a churn of wealth. After all it is typically those
on the bottom who have more insightful entrepreneurial ideas, being
closer to the particulars that need solving.
Marxists have long sneered that anarchism is an alliance between the
petite bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat, and so it is with some
relish that I have long noted this notion of a freed market that
embraces insurrection constitutes their worst nightmare. Of course I
doubt any petite bourgeoisie would accept such an expanded market,
giving relative license to the poor to raid the coffers of the rich so
long as the “middle classes” are left alone, and a few class war
ideologues in anarchist circles have derided me a lumpen and traitor for
not wanting to cleave the heads off middle class snots, but I’m
uninterested in the paroxysms of full revolutionary violence and think
this proposal strikes a fair balance.
Beyond irritating marxists, it is also here that the two most common
libertarian arguments radically break with one another. The
consequentialist argument that the decentralization and feedback
channels provided by markets (leveraging the accuracy of revealed
preference through exchange) assures greater dexterity and wealth for
all than centralized systems grinds into conflict with the deontological
argument for respecting property as some kind of a priori “natural law.”
I’ve argued this position several times before, underlining that
reputation and interpersonal relationships are inalienable to minds in a
way that physical goods are not, but it’s also worth emphasizing the
unity this offers between the two historical branches of individualist
anarchism: insurrectionary and market.
Many anarchist admirers of markets for their dynamism have long also
admired the dynamism at play in insurrection and fourth generation
warfare, but the theoretical synergy on this front is insufficiently
examined. It may even be the case that in an anarchist society some
background measure of “theft” may come to serve as an indicator of the
health of our economy, in the same way that certain neoclassicals think
some measure of unemployment secures the health of (the capitalist class
in) a capitalist economy.
Today’s neoreactionaries fetishize the notion of “exit” from a society,
playing the “if things get bad enough you can always just leave” card,
and many anarchists advocating strong and persistent collective bodies
have the same flippancy to concerns about what to do if things start to
go bad in their utopias. But not only is such “exit” all or nothing, it
implicitly accepts the legitimacy of those collective entities, or at
least certain “democratic processes” for appealing against capricious or
oppressive collective edicts. But why should you have to leave? They’re
the assholes. Similarly if there are just a few things going wrong in
ways unfixable through the collective process, why should you have no
choice besides tolerance or total cataclysmic revolution?
Markets provide much more fluid means of detaching yourself from
dependence, and the union of insurrectionary and market anarchist
insights provides much smoother and less destructive means to rectify
any creeping accumulations of power.
If in an anarchistic society a Robber Baron tyrant or similar instance
of oppression were to somehow start to emerge without the helping hand
of state power as all prior have, we need not give up and flee, and
indeed should not.