💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › kevin-carson-vulgar-libertarian-smackdown.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 11:49:37. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Vulgar Libertarian Smackdown
Author: Kevin Carson
Date: March 7, 2005
Language: en
Topics: right libertarianism
Source: Retrieved on 3rd September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/03/vulgar-libertarian-smackdown.html

Kevin Carson

Vulgar Libertarian Smackdown

Some good stuff at Our Word is Our Weapon this week.

In a post on water privatization, Jim gets in a good one against the

ASI’s Alex Singleton, who wrote an (obviously) pro-privatization post at

the Globalization Institute blog.

In addition to mysterious memory lapses when it comes to revealing

vested interests, Alex’s post for the Globalization Institute betrays

all the hallmarks of an ASI blogpost: no link to the material being

criticised so that people can actually get the other side of the

argument, no factual evidence to back up your assertions, carefully

phrased generalisations that sound more impressive than they actually

are, and so on. One thing is different, though: the ASI blog is famed

for deleting comments and trackbacks that express dissenting views,

while the Globalization Institute saves time by not allowing any

comments or trackbacks in the first place!

Incidentally, why is it that for people like our friends at the ASI,

“privatization” always equates to “sell-off to a capitalist

corporation”? It’s hardly self-evident. Producer and consumer

cooperatives, commons and other communal property, etc., have just as

legitimate a claim to being “private property” as General Motors or

Wal-Mart. In fact, they’re probably a lot closer to the forms of

property that would predominate in a genuine free market than GM or

Wally World. Here’s what Karl Hess had to say in Libertarian Forum back

in 1970:

Libertarianism is a people’s movement and a liberation movement. It

seeks the sort of open, non-coercive society in which the people, the

living, free, distinct people, may voluntarily associate, dis-associate,

and, as they see fit, participate in the decisions affecting their

lives. This means a truly free market in everything from ideas to

idiosyncracies. It means people free collectively to organize the

resources of their immediate community or individualistically to

organize them; it means the freedom to have a community-based and

supported judiciary where wanted, none where not, or private arbitration

services where that is seen as most desirable. The same with police. The

same with schools, hospitals, factories, farms, laboratories, parks, and

pensions. Liberty means the right to shape your own institutions. It

opposes the right of those institutions to shape you simply because of

accreted power or gerontological status.

And more than one libertarian with the best of free market credentials

has argued that the best way to “privatize” state property is to treat

it as “unowned” property (in the Lockean sense), to be “homesteaded” by

those currently using it (either the labor force or the consumers of its

services). For example, in the same first volume of Libertarian Forum

that the quote from Karl Hess is found, Murray Rothbard argued that

government property is always and everywhere fair game for the

libertarian; for the libertarian must rejoice every time any piece of

governmental, and therefore stolen, property is returned by any means

necessary to the private sector.... Therefore, the libertarian must

cheer any attempt to return stolen, governmental property to the private

sector: whether it be in the cry, “The streets belong to the people”, or

“the parks belong to the people”, or the schools belong to those who use

them, i.e. the students and faculty. The libertarian believes that

things not properly owned revert to the first person who uses and

possesses them, e.g. the homesteader who first clears and uses virgin

land; similarly, the libertarian must support any attempt by campus

“homesteaders” the students and faculty, to seize power in the

universities from the governmental or quasi-governmental bureaucracy.

Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe both proposed “privatizing” state

industry in post-communist societies on a radically different model from

the ASI. To quote Rothbard:

It would be far better to enshrine the venerable homesteading principle

at the base of the new desocialized property system. Or, to revive the

old Marxist slogan: “all land to the peasants, all factories to the

workers!”

Larry Gambone has suggested “mutualizing” social services:

decentralizing them to the smallest possible unit of control, and making

them the cooperative property of those using them. If we take the final

step of funding them entirely with voluntary user fees, we will have

completed the process described by Proudhon in General Idea of the

Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, of “dissolving the state within

the social body.” The state will wither away, its successor organization

being just another form of voluntary cooperation: and there’s no reason

why the “social body” that’s left should have a corporate face.

If anything, water seems to be an ideal candidate for mutualization,

since (as the World Development Movement study Jim links to argues)

local water utilities are a natural monopoly, and insulated from

competition by the nature of things).

For a start, water is a natural monopoly meaning that competition – and

any resulting efficiencies – is impossible. As the European Commission’s

Directorate General (DG) for Competition which, amongst other things, is

working on how to organise the water sector within the European Union,

recently stated, “the liberalisation of water is unlikely to result in

the same benefits as other network industries because a large proportion

of the cost of supply of residential customers is incurred by the

distribution network (which would remain a monopoly) and there is little

scope for supply from distant sources.” In short, this is saying that

there will be no competition and no resulting efficiency gains. [p. 17]

Another interesting point is that “privatization” often saves

governments little if any expenditure, after taking into account the

concessions needed to lure a private buyer or even subsidies to keep the

“privatized” utility profitable. “Crony capitalism” doesn’t do this

phenomenon justice--a better term would be “looting”:

Instead of encouraging investment, privatisation has left governments

offering increased concessions to entice investors to acquire their

assets– often to meet the requirements of donors. For example, between

1991and 1998 the Brazilian Government made some US$85 billion through

the sale of state run enterprises. However, over the same period, it

spent US$87 billion ‘preparing’ the companies for privatisation.

Rather than being a major source of finance, private contractors are

committing little of their own capital and are instead looking to

municipalities, central government or donor governments/institutions to

provide the money....

In fact, in many cases foreign companies are relying on the donor

community to bail them out when they get it wrong. [p. 23]

I do, however, dispute one of the WDM’s criticisms of privatized water:

that it fails to extend water and sanitation networks to the poor. All

public services should be operated on a cost basis, at least as an end

goal. Regardless of whether a water or sewer system is owned by state,

corporation, or mutual, it is unjust to force some people to pay rates

higher than the cost of delivering services, in order to subsidize

costlier services to the unfavorably situated. It seems to me that

outlying areas where the extension of centralized water and sewer grids

is prohibitively expensive are clearly cases in which it makes sense to

do as much as possible with decentralized, intermediate technology:

maximizing capture and storage of rainwater with cisterns, recycling

wash water, using cheap and well-designed composting toilets, mulching

and soil-building to minimize irrigation needs, etc.

In another great post, Jim eviscerates some vulgar libertarian

boilerplate at the ASI blog, also by Alex Singleton. This time, it’s

against Fair Trade coffee.

This part of Jim’s response, in particular, is crucial:

It’s interesting that the ASI makes no mention whatsoever of the

remarkably uncompetitive nature of the world coffee market. As pointed

out by ActionAid and Jacques Morisset of the World Bank, the gap between

the price paid to coffee farmers and the prices paid by consumers has

grown greatly in the last few decades, a process which can be largely

attributed to the increasing concentration of market power among fewer

and fewer giant firms at the processing and retail stages of the

production chain. Farmers are faced with an oligopsony, and consumers

with an oligopoly — with the net result of this grossly uncompetitive

market being a great transfer of wealth from farmers and consumers to

hugely profitable firms.

It’s a point that needs to be brought to Singleton’s attention. The

bulleted point in the latter’s post that struck me most was this:

Mechanization means that only a small proportion of the world’s coffee

producers are actually needed. In Brazil five people and a machine

produce the same amount of coffee as 500 people in Guatemala. We should

help people adapt, not encourage them to stay in outdated jobs.

It’s quite telling that Singleton refers to “mechanization” as some sort

of autonomous process that just happens, and people either “adapt” to or

die. But unless you’re writing a puff piece for the ASI, there are

several questions that seem to spring to mind spontaneously. For

example, which firms decided what the standard model of production would

be? How many of production is controlled by how many firms? How much of

the coffee-growing land do they own or control, and how did they come by

it? In short, how, and by what right, did they come to be in a position

to “outdate” the jobs of people using more labor-intensive production

methods?

Whenever I hear someone attempting to depict globalization or the like

as an impersonal force of nature that just “happens,” to which we all

need to “adapt,” I instinctively turn on my bullshit detector. It

reminds me of the demands in Who Moved My Cheese? that we “adapt” to

“change,” without asking a bunch of insubordinate questions about who’s

imposing the change and who stands to benefit from it. Under state

capitalism, the prevalence of certain organizational cultures and

prodution technologies industry-wide, in any industry, is seldom (if

ever) the result of spontaneous market forces. It usually turns out to

be the result of domination, of revolution imposed from the top-down by

the holders of illegitimate power, and has about as much to do with

“free markets” as Gosplan.

The corporate deadlock on world food production is almost entirely the

result of state intervention in the market.

For example, the new plant varieties (including genetically engineered

varieties) identified with the “Green Revolution” are heavily dependent

on state funding of research and development, and on the state’s

enforcement of so-called “intellectual property rights” (really a state

grant of monopoly privilege). One of the uses of so-called “intellectual

property” is to prohibit the saving and distribution of seeds between

producers, and thus to drastically increase the cost of seed inputs. In

general, patents have huge concentrating and cartelizing effects on the

market structure: and this is particularly true of genetically modified

foods.

The market share of GM foods in the West reflects the imposition of

regulatory controls on the free flow of information in the market. In

the U.S., especially, the FDA acts on behalf of agribusiness to prohibit

processers or grocers from labelling GMO content; food libel laws are

also used to suppress the free flow of information. The market share of

GM foods depends on forcibly preventing consumers from learning of GMO

content.

The state’s transportation subsidies, which externalize distribution

costs on the taxpayer, make it more feasible to offshore food production

to giant agribusiness plantations in the Third World.

The state’s collusion with both quasi-feudal landlords and agribusiness

TNCs has resulted in millions of peasants being robbed of their

traditional rights in the land, their private plots being consolidated

for cash-crop agriculture. As one small example, consider this

description of Unilever’s operation in India (Hindustan Lever, or HLL):

Adivasi villagers say they have been harassed and intimidated, that

their houses have been pulled down and their tea plants uprooted in a

long-running land ownership dispute with estate managers at the

Davershola tea plantation, owned by HLL. Five adivasi tribes of the

Gudalur valley, including the Paniyas, Bettakurumbas and Irulas, are

fighting for their ancestral rights to the land. Villager Vayal Madan

from Kadchinkolly village says his family lived in constant fear of HLL

estate managers. ‘We were terrified,’ he says. ‘They would tear down

semi-permanent huts that we built. Anything we planted was always

destroyed. They would chase us off our land…Unilever is very powerful.

This is a company controlling thousands of acres, yet they are not

ashamed to evict poor adivasis who have a quarter to half an acre of

tea.’

But the current war on peasant proprietors is merely a mopping-up

operation. Given the track record of expropriation by the colonialists

of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the genocidal

actions to thwart land reform like that taken in Guatemala in 1954, it’s

a wonder the landed oligarchies can find any traditional property rights

to abrogate. The past two centuries in the Third World have been a

replay of the English enclosure movement, and the persistence of

traditional property rights is a quaint relic comparable to the

occasional survival of peasant rights of commons in England.

The handful of giant, vertically integrated transnational agribusiness

corporations that control most of the food supply chain, from the

development of genetically engineered seeds through the distribution of

processed food, are enemies of free markets. Consider this quote from

Dwayne Andreas, the former CEO of one of them (Acher Daniels Midland):

There isn’t one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free

market. Not one! The only place you see a free market is in the speeches

of politicians.

Or this one by ADM President James Randall:

We have a saying in our company: “Our competitors are our friends.Our

customers are the enemy.”

It would be hard to find any nominally private industry that’s more of a

state dependency than corporate agribusiness. Indeed, the distinction

between “public” and “private” becomes meaningless at the commanding

heights of the state capitalist economy. The giant corporations occupy

the same position in relation to the state as did the great landlords

under feudalism: they don’t just control the state; they are the state.