An American Libertarian is nothing more than an anarcho-capitalist without the courage of his convictions.

And I use "his" advisedly.

If you hate the government but love the police and military, you don't hate the government. You love fascism.

The Unfinished Business of the War Between the States

  The American Civil War never really ended, did it? The South was destroyed, the spoils parceled out not to the victims of the South's tyranny, but to the victors and their carpetbagging capitalist brethren . . . but then, such is often the lot of war.

  The losers, meanwhile, held on best they could: many of the rich who ran the South were allowed to remain in place at a somewhat diminished status, though with much of their "heritage" (riches, land) intact. As long as they behaved and played along with their new masters, they by and large maintained the lifestyle accorded them by their class affiliation. Those who did not have the privilege of class, whatever their racial affiliation, ended up in a tougher spot: many African ex-slaves traded the legal oppression of slavery for the capitalist oppression of sharecropping . . . and, in fact, it wasn't only black folk who "owed [their] soul to the company store". For those of the proletariat who lost their taste for scratching a living from the worn clay of the South - be they white or black - there was the migratory path to the factories of the North, where a somewhat more sophisticated model of oppression was practiced.

  And here we are, over 150 years later, still in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. The political geography is a little bit diluted - pockets of white working class in the rural North can trace roots to the south, thanks to the working class northern migration - but the outlines remain. And, beyond any political geography, there is still persists the shadow of unfinished business, as if the South were going to rise again, as popular imagination among many white Americans would have it.

  The shadow of unfinished business exists because there was indeed unfinished business after the war, and it remains unfinished to this day. The proponents of the Union cause will tell you that the Civil War was about slavery, and they are correct. The proponents of the Confederacy will tell you that it was about States' rights, and they are correct. The American Civil War was, like most wars, a war about economic determinism. The Union opposed slavery: they wanted the rule of federal law to set a uniform code of labor that would eliminate the advantages that Confederate farming and small manufacturing enjoyed from the (virtually) free labor that they got from slaves. The Confederacy, of course, didn't want to give up this source of free labor, so they advocated self-determination. While there certainly were United States citizens of the time who did care about the racial oppression of slavery, the average white American cared about slavery only insofar as it affected their personal fortune. The Union victory did solve a problem, but not the problem the history books teach us (i.e., the battle to "free the negro"): slavery was done, but white supremacy remained unaddressed. The Civil War was about slavery, but it was not about racism.

  Still we cling to this ideal of the virtuous North fighting the racist South, as if settling the economic question of slavery had anything to do with racism and white supremacy. This sort of deluded abstract binary thinking underpins virtually the entire American political landscape, starting with the largely fictitious philosophical opposition between Republicans and Democrats. All these years later, the Civil War remains unfinished business, because the mainstream of the United States refuses to stand up to white supremacy and white supremacists.

  So we have those who attack "subjectivists" for the idea that all sex differences are socially constructed (as part of a larger attack on archaeologies of truth) . Well, difference between beings is not socially constructed - there are differences between every single being - but sorting based on those differences is certainly socially constructed. Sex difference is socially constructed not because difference is socially constructed but because the systems of differentiation are socially constructed. And so it is with any system of differentiation.

I'm Workin', But I Ain't Workin' For You

  I bought the 7" for "Slack Motherfucker" after I heard it blasting in a record store way back in '89. I was spotty on the lyrics (I never have put in much work for pop song lyrics), but to me, it sounded like an ass-kicking "FUCK YOU" to bosses everywhere. Turns out I was wrong: "Slack Motherfucker" is actually a song bagging on a lazy coworker for not pulling his weight on the shift (I don't feel too bad; Watt made the same mistake).

  Back in the day, that was the retail/restaurant/service industry code: you're not working for your boss, you're working for your comrades. So: Jimmy does a good job closing the grill, Sue does a good job closing the dining room. Everything is clean and in the right place, all the trash is out, the place is buttoned up tight. Dotty and Clem come in to open in the morning and everything is good, and they are able to quickly and efficiently get the joint opened up & breeze through breakfast, not to mention get a proper start on lunch prep. Janey and Joe come in to do the lunch rush, and since Dotty and Clem got a start on the prep, lunch is a piece of cake. Janey and Joe power through the afternoon, and since things have been going smoothly, they get the dinner prep done no problem. Jimmy and Sue have no problem running dinner, and since things went well, they manage to do another solid close, leaving a tight ship for the crew next morning. The idea was simple: everyone does their job the best they can, and everybody has an easier time of it.

  But it really doesn't work that way, does it? Mortimer the manager is riding the wave with his crew for a while, and Rex the owner is cool because things are going well - his restaurant is well run and successful, and his crew is happy - but at some point, he thinks "hey, we can always do better, right?", and he starts thinking about things like productivity. Why? Well, maybe he read it in a book, maybe he fancies himself a super businessman whose ego swells with his bottom line, maybe he's just greedy. For whatever reason, he decides he needs his workers to be more productive, so he teams with Mortimer to make some changes, some "upgrades". Now, Morty may or may not be down with the project - he may have been perfectly happy with the way things are, or he may have his ego as much into the bottom line as Rex - but if he wants to keep his job, he gets on board.

  So, Morty and/or Rex examine the situation, and they notice that right before they open the doors at 6 am, Dotty and Clem take a break for coffee and a smoke before the day starts. The super management team obviously pegs that as a waste of time (AND TIME IS MONEY AS EVERYONE ALWAYS SAYS AD INFINITUM). They further notice Janey and Joe spending a little time lollygagging after lunch, and that Jimmy and Sue don't really have too much to do when they first get in. There is all kinds of space to tighten up, to increase productivity: instead of bringing both Dotty and Clem in at 5 am and paying two hours of labor to open, maybe they only bring one in, or bring them both in at 5:30, so there is only one hour of labor for opening the store. Of course Dotty and Clem will have to give up their coffee and cigarette break, but if they do that and pick up the pace a little bit, they will double their productivity. They can always get those breaks in when Janey and Joe get in. Along the same lines, maybe they bring Jimmy and Sue in an hour later, since they usually have no problems on their shift. And maybe they send Janey and Joe home an hour earlier. Making those changes, Morty and Rex have managed to extract practically the same amount of work for 5 hours less, saving about 12.5% in labor costs. And most days, this works out fine.

  Most days, that is. Morty and Rex's new productivity changes start to fall apart when things don't go exactly to plan: maybe breakfast rush is a little bigger than normal, or maybe a fryer goes on the fritz, generating more labor for the same product. Before, the store was running with enough capacity in the system to absorb the occasional unplanned inefficiency: for instance, if Dotty and Clem have a breakfast rush that puts them behind on lunch prep, even though Janey and Joe have to scramble a bit through lunch, they are a little bit less behind by the time Jimmy and Sue get in. Jimmy and Sue in turn put a little more effort to get dinner together, and by the time they are almost ready to close the doors, they are exhausted, but pretty much where they normally are, and they manage to close the store just like any other night. But, under the new "efficient", "higher production" model, the excess capacity is taken away, so if things go wrong, they stay wrong, until extraordinary measures are taken to correct the problem. Of course, from Rex's point of view, excess capacity is wasted money, so he is more than willing to sacrifice it even if it means he will occasionally have to take extraordinary measures to deal with unusual circumstances.

  For the workers, though, the equation is simple: increased productivity = more work for the same amount of money. And, under American business management practice, efficient systems are squeezed until they become inefficient. Which means that if you are working hard to make the job a little easier for all your coworkers, eventually the slack that you generate for your coworkers will be absorbed by your boss instead. So really, no matter how much you think you are working hard for your coworkers, you are actually working hard for your boss*. Your hard work, your increased productivity, just puts money in your boss's pocket. Management's job is to always be increasing productivity, which means that management's job is to always make your job harder. Eventually, your company ends up being modeled after Amazon's efficiency system, wherein things like the time it takes you to walk from point A to point B, or how long it takes you to use the bathroom, are things that are monitored, critiqued, and regulated.

  I don't have a problem when a worker occasionally loses their shit with another worker for doing a lousy job. It is, after all, completely natural to get pissed whenever your workload is increased. I would kindly ask, however, that whatever your reaction to what you believe to be the immediate cause, that you do not forget who is really making your life more difficult: your boss.

  I heard one of the Superchunk dudes in an interview talking about how "Slack Motherfucker" was really about a coworker, and not a boss: I lost interest in the song after that. It's sort of like how a friend of mine talked about how much he loved "Kill Yr Idols" until he found out it was a diatribe against rock critics. I wanted it to be an anti-boss rant, but it wasn't, so I lost interest. I ended up trading it to a friend, and not too many years later, it ended up becoming a collectible. I hope that he managed to turn it for a tidy profit on ebay: that would be the best blow "Slack Motherfucker" would strike for the working class.
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*  "Boss" is not always interchangeable with "management" anymore: one of the tricks of the service/retail/food industry is to turn as many workers into "managers" as possible, even if the vast majority of these "managers" do not get significantly higher material rewards, and are essential workers who are co-opted to management's side by nothing other than a job classification. When we use "bosses" here, we are talking about owners, those who would truly stand to profit from the business.

The End of History

Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of individuals united. Its organization is, therefore, essentially economic, the material production of the conditions of this unity; it turns existing conditions in to conditions of unity. The reality, which communism is creating, is precisely the real basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals, in so far as things are only a product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves.   -- Karl Marx, The German Ideology

  "The end of history" . . . theoretical, ephemeral, abstract . . . reads like a hipster intellectual riff, a thing imposed: to impress, to establish authority, to get laid, whatever. But history itself is a thing imposed, "a story told by winners", as they say, and please note that the existence of "winners" implies there are also "losers" who are on the bottom of that equation.

  We have so many histories: great seismic movements, the fiats of supermen, gods propelling the fate of nations, grand cataclysmic accidents. These histories present as natural law, leitmotif, the mask of object, transcendent authority . . . of course, the very existence of "histories" as opposed to "history" gives lie to objective fact. History is indeed "a story told by winners", and the winners are always changing.

  We have been forced to consume weaponized books of history as part of our socialization from the time we were tots. The histories of these books propose to align us under a structure imposed from without, to indoctrinate us with a parade of events properly arranged under the banner of those who would control us . . . of course they propose this as sacred law, and of course they erase our individuality by mobbing us in with a greater whole, a whole consecrated by the "rulers of the universe", those who write our histories. And these histories are consecrated by . . . whom?

  So many histories are written as erasure of the individual. Our current American reality-film directors would have you believe that communism is the great erasure of the individual, but is there anything that more completely annihilates the individual than a script imposed from above? We are cast as actors in some immense cosmic film, where even the most humanistic of histories casts us as bit players, puppets whose strings are expertly manipulated by the GREAT MEN of the history. Communism, on the other hand, "overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of individuals united." Communism focuses on the relations between individuals, and the material conditions which dictate those relations. So, while there indeed may be great actors, they are not great because of some power of divinity, will, blood, genetics, talent, etc.; they are great actors by way of the material conditions which put them in position to be great actors. They are great actors because they have been ordained by a set of relations that puts them there. They are great actors because they are members of the class that enjoys the privilege of rule. Communist history is the history of groups of individuals organized by the world around them, and the relations that these groups have with each other. Stripped of all externally imposed structures, Communist history is the history of class struggle. And when that struggle ends, so ends history:

This subsuming of individuals under definite classes cannot be abolished until a class has taken shape, which has no longer any particular class interest to assert against the ruling class. -- Marx, TGI

When culture sheds the detritus of the previous ages, when the individual breaks the shackles of history that restrain them, when their class no longer is at war - indeed, when their class dissolves because the relations of the previous age have disappeared - then history too has ended.

  This then is the equality that a Marxist desires: not the crass capitalist-materialist equality where if one person has a Mercedes and a pool, then everyone has to have a Mercedes and a pool . . . rather, it is when no class holds dominion over another, when no individual lords over another. It is this dissolution of class that is the end of history.

  There is nothing ephemeral or abstract about the end of history . . . our American Dream Overlords know this, and insist that we have already reached this particular historical cul-de-sac by pointing at the extinction, in our American culture, of class and privilege . . . but of course, we know better. America's "classless, privilege-free culture" is one of the most transparent of myths. And even if the vaunted "class mobility" did exist here, class mobility is not equality; the erasure of class, the end of history, is the only measure of true equality. When there is no struggle, when artificial scarcity - the motor of capitalism - is shown for the lie that it is, when we finally have moved beyond class, when history finally is at an end, that is when full communism has arrived, that is when we will be equal and free.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Politically, the capitalist and socialist refusal of autonomy takes the form of the centrist demand that all particular projects be subordinated to the general interest of development. Among capitalists diverse autonomous demands must not be allowed to challenge or undermine the central processes of profit making, investment and growth. Among socialists, such demands must not be allowed to impede the realization of the general interests of the working class, which in practice turn out to be the party's plans for realizing surplus, investment and growth. Thus the autonomous activities of women, blacks, peasants, students, industrial workers, and so on, must be either integrated within the overall development process (which eliminates their autonomy) or suppressed.

Harry  Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically

Red November, black November,
Bleak November, black and red.
Hallowed month of labor’s martyrs,
Labor’s heroes, labor’s dead.

Labor’s wrath and hope and sorrow,
Red the promise, black the threat,
Who are we not to remember?
Who are we to dare forget?

Black and red the colors blended,
Black and red the pledge we made,
Red until the fight is ended,
Black until the debt is paid.

— By Ralph Chaplin
author of Solidarity Forever

Gun Control

Civil laws develop simultaneously with private property out of the disintegration of the natural community.  -- Karl Marx, from The German Ideology

  I do not oppose gun control laws in America, but neither do I support them.  I do not support them because I do not see that they will do any good. I understand the impetus behind the drive for gun control, and I appreciate that it seems like a no brainer that fewer guns = fewer bodies, but it seems to me more and more grasping at straws in the face of the horror of our violent US culture. Like so many mainstream solutions to intractable problems, we seem content to understand the aspirins we take to assuage the pain of our cancers as the chemotherapy that will kill the cancers. Sometimes, we can't even understand what the cancer is: violence is the cancer, not guns, and any solution that does not directly address violence is bound to fail. Besides, even if gun control laws could significantly lower the numbers of guns, how long before knives, arson, acid, and car bombs become all the rage in our violent country?

  The last thing that this country needs is a "War on Guns": as has been coughed up ad infinitum by the second amendment crowd, the War on Drugs only barely affects the availability of said illegal drugs, and we can assume that guns would be the same. Unlike drugs, which are consumables, guns would remain around for a long time before they start deteriorating* . . . and as the flow of drugs into the US continues barely abated, so would the flow of guns continue. Banning assault weapons, high capacity magazines, and conversion kits may hold down death tolls somewhat; but even as every life is significant, pardon me for being troubled by any accounting which finds solace in 15 deaths instead of 20, or 30 deaths instead of 50.

  And let's not forget, per John Ehrlichman, how the War on Drugs was conceived as a racist/anti-left gambit. The history of gun control too has a whiff of racism wafting around it: the NRA, who supported many gun control initiatives in its history, was all in with Governor Ronald Reagan when California passed the Mulford Act in 1967. This legislation, which essentially prevented citizens from carrying weapons in public, was authored directly in response to the Black Panthers. The pivot toward free and open access to guns for all citizens, for both Reagan and the NRA, came later, after the threat of armed African American revolutionaries was somewhat diminished**. There is absolutely no reason to believe that, if we add another major prohibition for our existing law enforcement regime to enforce, that its outcome with regards to race (and class!) would be any different than our disastrous, racist drug war. Our police have shown an overt tendency to use laws and initiatives as tools of control (as opposed to mediation), and those tools are always wielded disproportionally against certain populations.  Does it seem wise to further empower institutions which have demonstrated, over and over again, the inability to execute governance in a consistently just way?

  Again, it is violence that we seek to eliminate, not guns. We can outlaw acts of violence, we can do our best to regulate the tools of violence, but violence itself exists beyond definition of the law. Law exists to institutionalize and legitimize the state, which in turn institutionalizes the violence of the class for whom the state functions. Capitalism, the religion enshrined in our country (and by the west in general), is based on competition and inequity, and violence is a natural condition of this inequity. Of course, any mainstream discussion of violence in our country almost exclusively assumes that violence is anti-social (be it resistance or simply the white-hot explosion of our culture's id) while explaining away state violence as something other than violence. The intransigence of the problem lies in the fact that to erase violence, you must destroy the very foundation of our culture, a culture that is built on violence. Considering the magnitude of that task - not to mention the fact that such an act would be considered revolution - it's clear why so many want to substitute gun control for real substantive change.

  We are educated to believe the laws protect the underclass and powerless in our culture . . . and ultimately they do, somewhat, but only to the degree that protecting the underclass serves the state, not the underclass itself***. It is (obviously!) not a bad idea to enact good laws; but laws serve the state (which, per the Marx quote above, is interchangeable with private property in our culture), and what we really want to do is to change our culture. To this end, we need to rebuild what Marx calls "natural community" . . . you could, for instance, begin with the idea that access to healthcare is the right of every person (not "every citizen" - break away from the chauvinism of arbitrary borders, build a community of humanity worldwide). You could follow up with the idea that everyone is owed a living, and that everyone has equal access to the riches of the world. You could see to it that no one stands on another's shoulders. You could turn these concepts into laws, if you are able, but most importantly, you want to build these values: our laws, good and bad, ultimately serve a corrupt master. It is the culture we are trying to change, so that is where we must start. Building a natural community in this manner will do more to end mass killings than any law we could pass.

  Again, I don't necessarily oppose gun control. If it were up to me, every woman would have free and open access to any gun she wanted, while every man would be completely banned from owning any guns****. And Lord knows that I am not aligning myself with second amendment types; as I've said for years, guns don't kill people, idiots who think think their rights to guns supersede the safety of our citizens do. Besides, the whole idea of trying to control guns is quickly becoming technologically moot: it will take years for liberals to regain anything resembling control of the Congress and the White House, which is an absolute minimum requirement for passing gun legislation. By that time, it is likely that home production of guns will be easily accessible with the latest 3D printers and computer machining equipment, and the patriots of the US will be flooding the countryside with guns for no other reason that to support their reactionary ideology. Gun control will very soon be an impossibility; only changing the culture will save us.
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*  This is not, in and of itself, a reason to oppose gun control, and I do not suggest that it is. If I believed that gun laws now would drastically reduce illegal weapons even 50 years from now, that would be a reasonable result. I do not, however, believe that to be the case.
** Note that Reagan supported the Brady Bill, as well as an assault weapons ban, which would put him right in line with current Democrat gun control efforts. It is also worth noting that he supported these initiatives well after he had to worry about gathering votes for public office (1991 and 1994, respectively).
*** See Adam Smith's defense of welfare: he understood that a free market economy required a buy-in, both literally and figuratively . . . and if nothing else, he understood that it was in the free market's interests to keep its workers from revolting (or, you know, dying of starvation).
**** Yeah, I know, gender's bullshit: let's go with any less physically capable being can own a gun, any physically capable being can't.

Labor Day

Labor Day’s a sop
tossed out by the bosses
like a dry husk
Joe Hill didn’t die for Labor Day
Joe Hill just died

When Joe Hill rises again
we'll see who takes his place
in the cold ground

                             -- Wm. Zink

Look Out Your Window

  Watch what's going on. The cries for UNITY! are peaking, the vilification of VIOLENCE! as the ultimate evil is surfing along just behind. The new marching chant: CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG? But, I have to ask: under what flag shall we march?

  Who is making this appeal to unity? Is the (overwhelmingly white) mainstream of the country going to be comfortable holding hands with 45 on this? Are they comfortable with the fact that his cries for unity include the torch bearers who marched Friday night in Charlottesville? Are they comfortable with the fact that this amounts to the erasure of white supremacist evil? Are we really going to ask our oppressed comrades to unite with those who would oppress them? Again I ask: under what flag shall we march?

  I'm totally fine with the old "love the sinner, hate the sin" bible shtick, but it is not clear to me at all that that is what is going down . . . looks much more to me like "love the sinner, tolerate the sin" all for the sake of UNITY . . . because when UNITY becomes the primary force in all our efforts, then TOLERANCE raises its fair weather head to erase anything that may stray outside the lines, to build the tent big enough to include any ideology, no matter how repugnant.

  Again, I would remind you, infinite tolerance is an impossibility. At this point surely someone on your social media feed who orbits in the galaxy of militants (or even some progressives!) has hipped you to Popper's "Paradox of Tolerance"*. This Unity the masses are calling for comes at a price, and the price is too high. We can not tolerate the bullshit of these racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, elitist-worshiping assholes and still have a country that honors justice. As they say: NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE.

  "So fine, no unity without justice, blah blah blah. But you're all as bad as they are, reducing everything to violence. That is the reaction they want. Just ignore them, don't dignify them with a response." Yeah, how's that been working for you? Again, I'm not going to call anyone out for non-violent resistance, as long as it really is resistance, and not just avoiding the problem. The thing is that, without active resistance (AND NOT JUST IGNORING IT!) the problem will not go away. So, if you are going to follow the pack and denounce violence, you fucking well better have another solution . . . because, I tell you what, militant resistance is having an effect: the white supremacist assholes are cancelling rallies left and right. For that, you can thank your local antifascists.

  Until the oppression which defines our country is vanquished, free speech is a luxury. Until everyone is treated equally, unity is a dream. It is time to cure the disease, not treat the symptoms.
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*   "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant." -- Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies