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Title: Julian Assange Author: By Strategy Date: August 27, 2012 Language: en Topics: capitalism, economics, Julian Assange, neoliberalism, right libertarianism, wikileaks Source: Retrieved on June 23, 2014 from http://by-strategy.tumblr.com/post/30283200728/julian-assange-also-neoliberal-utopian
This week has been an especially depressing time to be on the left. I do
not wish to spill any more bytes on the question of Assange and rape and
the terrible reaction of the wider left to this where others have made
the point so well. What I do want to question a fundamental assumption
made by many of the left that Assange’s personal philosophy which
animates his involvement in the Wikileaks project is “of the left” and
that it should be therefore be embraced. This seems to be the guiding
impression one takes from many of the pro-Wikileaks writings or
speeches, particularly from prominent leftist celebrities like John
Pilger, Tariq Ali, Tony Benn and Noam Chomsky. That Assange is “of the
left” partly by virtue of him being nebulously “anti-imperialist” seems
to be one of the reasons for trenchent support of him and the belief
that since he is “of the left” it is difficult to imagine him so morally
compromised. However, I think it is clear that Assange’s politics are
not recognisably leftist.
It is important to remember that Assange’s opinions on what Wikileaks is
and his person and politics [1] do not exhaust everything Wikileaks is
about. Indeed, the internal political beliefs of figures involved with
Wikileaks other than Assange are opaque considering his own comparitive
public prominence. This also leaves open the question of the political
effect of Wikileaks, quite apart from its co-founders vision.
Additionally, on a wider view, hacker culture and the free and open
source movements often associated with it from which Wikileaks draws
some of its animus are themselves highly politically ambigious. Hacker
culture leans both in the direction of pure market libertarianism [2]
and communism, sometimes doing the latter when it believes it is doing
the former. Yet, the recognition that Assange’s personal politics and
vision for Wikileaks are not recognisably leftist and tend rather
towards endorsement of a utopian vision of the status quo, rather than
an opposition to it, is an important fact to bear in mind. Assange’s
politics are neoliberalism’s ideal image of itself, entirely consistent
with its politics to the extent that it radicalises them. Yet, for the
preceding reasons, in the following Wikileaks should be considered to
stand in for “Julian Assange’s interpretation of Wikileaks”. However, it
should be noted that since Assange’s problems with Swedish authorities
began, the stance which seperates him from the organisation to which be
belongs is something that has
become more and more difficult to maintain
.
Assange’s most lengthy articulation of his own politics comes in a
. Asked “Would you call yourself a free market proponent?”, Assange
replies “Absolutely. I have mixed attitudes towards capitalism, but I
love markets”. The stance that is ambigious to capitalism, but in favour
of markets represents the more extreme variants of neoliberalism,
whereby capitalism (while it actually exists) plays second fiddle to an
idealied vision of how markets function avaliable on a minor scale
within currently existing capitalism. Assange continues: “To put it
simply, in order for there to be a market, there has to be information.
A perfect market requires perfect information…For a market to be free,
people have to know who they’re dealing with”. How does Wikileaks fit
into this scenario? For Assange, through the act of leaking information,
Wikileaks is providing better information in order for the market of
international politics to work better. The question of informational
asymmetry is a complex one in neoliberal circles, with a long history.
Whereas neoliberalism in the variant of the Chicago School of Economics
tends towards a model of equillibrium where actors have perfect
information about the market, the Austrian school of Economics, favoured
by the more radical anarcho-capitalist believe that information is
unevenly distributed throughout a market system, and that to increase
overall information enables better price setting thus improving the
efficency of the market.
Assange’s philosophy here blends Austrian and Chicago School approaches.
Accepting the Austrian approach of informational assymetry as the
current situation, but believing that increased distribution of
knowledge as a result of leaking would tend towards the Chicago
assumption of perfect information. In the situation of perfect
information [3], so runs the theory demonstrated mathematically by Keith
Arrow and Gérard Debreu, then market transactions will tend towards a
, where no actor can be made better off without making another worse off
— a state that is a mathematical formalisation of Adam Smith’s notion of
the “invisible hand”. Hence “WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism
more free and ethical”. “It’s not correct to put me in any one
philosophical or economic camp, because I’ve learned from many”, says
Assange. “But one is American libertarianism, market libertarianism. So
as far as markets are concerned I’m a libertarian, but I have enough
expertise in politics and history to understand that a free market ends
up as monopoly unless you force them to be free”. One could say a deal
about the various mutations of neoliberal theory on monopoly here and
their rejection in certain schools of neoliberalism of the notion of a
tendency toward monopoly. However, Assange comments that setting up
institutions is required. One could perhaps read this in a modern social
democractic manner, that the market is a powerful force that requires
taming for the good of the majority of society. However, Assange’s
stance is essentially neoliberal — that institutions primarily exist to
provide the frameworks for efficient market transaction. To continue to
break monopolies and ensure the market is able to work efficently, as it
is the perfect information processing system and therefore resource
allocation mechanism[4].
Assange’s background prior to Wikileaks included his
with emerging
, whose major interest was the philosophical, political and sociological
impact of strong cryptography. Though with some political diversity, the
major cypher punk e-mail lists leant heavily towards libertarianism and
anarcho-capitalism, particular towards
, their own coinage, a species of market anarchism that uses heavy
cryptography to avoid survilence of the state and conduct market
transactions, the most recent articulation of which being Bitcoin. Tim
May’s cypher-punk FAQ states that he believes the
sociographically ‘will be a form of anarcho-capitalist market system I
call “cryptoanarchy”’. Cryptography essentially means market capitalism
where the state cannot concievably intervene, since its operatation are
totally obscure to it. Tim May writes that “the ‘anarchy’ here is not
the anarchy of popular conception: lawlessness, disorder, chaos, and
“anarchy.” Nor is it the bomb-throwing anarchy of the 19^(th) century
“black” anarchists, usually associated with Russia and labor movements.
Nor is it the “black flag” anarchy of anarcho-syndicalism and writers
such as Proudhon. Rather, the anarchy being spoken of here is the
anarchy of “absence of government” (literally, “an arch,” without a
chief or head)…This is the same sense of anarchy used in
“anarchocapitalism,” the libertarian free market ideology which promotes
voluntary, uncoerced economic transactions”. Though he no longer wishes
to call himself a hacker, Assange’s politics are soaked in this
paradigm.
Apart from Assange’s personal politics, this concern for neoliberal
informational politics bleeds into problematic nature of Wikileaks as a
project in Assange’s articulation. Here, the vital source is Kittens’
entitled ‘WikiLeaks — the state persecutes its idealists’. Rather, I
wish to suggest that it is neoliberalism is the economic and political
philosophy whose politics Wikileaks’ most clearly resemble.
The centre of the critique is that, for Kittens, Wikileaks subscribes to
two false ideas. The first that if something is successfully exposed,
then something will be done about it, that exposure promotes resistance
to the current state of affairs. But the fact remains that Wikileaks
only exposed what was already well known about the war on terror. That
potentially millions of people have died as the result of Western
imperialist excursions particularly in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Wikileaks did nothing more than add more evidence to the substantial
pile that the global ruling class is tightly knit and does not play by
its own self-presented rules in the field of finance. That American
foreign policy is conducted in the nation’s self interest and that its
view of other nation states is rather less than one might summise from
its official communications. And so on, simply put, “most of the data
that reached the public through WikiLeaks only confirmed what everybody
knew already”. This is a common tactic outside of Wikileaks, indeed,
Assange’s defenders on the Left such as Noam Chomsky also subscribe to
this vision — successful exposure of the facts about the situation of
global capitalism will, among other things, lead somehow to its defeat.
In this instance, Kittens correctly highlights that, pace Zizek’s
critique of Chomsky, that facts are not self-interpreting, but read
through ideology. A right winger could happily accept the slaughter in
Iraq but say this was the lamentable consequences of a neccessary war,
indeed, this was the reaction of many right wingers to Wikileaks’
‘revelations’. Certainly there is a value in exposing the contradictions
in ruling class ideology, but exposing contradictions remains at the
level of ideology itself, rather than the battleground of material class
struggle. Moreover, the greatest and most obvious of crimes often occur
openly, sometimes without even a gloss of ideology, and yet do not cause
dissent. Whistleblowing traditionally refers to highlighting a unknown
problem in a supposedly smoothly running system — Wikileaks for the most
part brought no especially new information into circulation.
What Kittens do not do is link this desire for transparency, openess and
avoidance of corruption to their basis in free market ideology. Rather,
Kittens note that Wikileaks’ aims towards transpency are entirely
consistent with the idea of the modern American-style democractic state
— openess, checks and balances, the avoidance of corruption — and that
“WikiLeaks’ fight against corruption indicates support in principle for
those organisations once they are free of corruption”. The US and other
democratic states are “running a campaign against people who have the
highest admiration for its principles”. To which I add: Kittens have
misinterpreted Wikileaks as a project in line with the classical
self-presentation of the liberal democractic state founded on the
balance of powers and so on. In Assange’s reading of his own
organisation, this openess is not animated by a care for the classical
principles of liberal democracy, but rather for the neoliberal
principles of free information on open markets.
[1] The following does not even exhaust even all of Assange’s beliefs
regarding Wikileaks — in particular his beliefs on conspiracy and leaks
as preventing this (though often for the same informational reasons —
the reasoning here could doubtless be extended). For a comprehensive
take on this, see Finn Bruton’s analysis
Keyspace: Wikileaks and the Assange Papers
. Peter Ludlow’s summary
The Political Philosophy of Julian Assange
is also useful. Reference can also be made directly to original papers
by Assange himself, which are mostly relatively short,
,
State and Terrorist Conspiracies
,
and his blogpost
The non-linear effects of leaks on unjust systems of governance
.
[2] Of course,
the founder of Wikipedia is a libertarian and very much a fan of Ayn
Rand and Friedrich von Hayek’s theses on information.
[3] There are of course other factors required for Pareto optimality: no
externalities to markets and no transaction costs and markets are at
full equilibrium.
[4] It is interesting that groups so squarely critical of certain
approaches from the autonomist Marxist tradition for their technological
positivity, mainly Trotskyite parties, should give Assange’s philosophy
a mostly free pass. Whereas autonomist Marxists such as Hardt and Negri
and Paolo Virno theorise the possibilities of antagonism in the reformed
proletariat as a result of the recomposition of capital in post-Fordism,
Assange openly celebrates post-Fordist capitalism as the primary vector
of human freedom if properly improved by becoming more marketised.