Posts from May 2010

Comment on Maddow Bashes Anarchism by Rad Geek

truecrimson:

The thing people like you miss about “wage slavery” is that dividing labor and making payment with a medium of exchange is the only successful alternative to grow your own, and barter.

What does “dividing labor” have to do with an objection to the critique of “wage slavery”? Hardly anybody who talks about “wage slavery” — certainly not the communists — is against a division of labor per se. The argument is about how labor ought to be divided, and on what terms. The proposal is not for everybody to do identical work or for the worker-occupied factories to all make the same products. The alternatives to wage slavery that are proposed are for workers to gain ownership of the means of production and exchange goods amongst themselves, rather than mediating their economic relationships through bosses and financiers.

Also, what does “making payment with a medium of exchange” have to do with the critique of wage slavery? Communists generally don’t want much in the way of quid-pro-quo exchange, but it’s not mainly because of their critique of “wage slavery.” (It’s based on some other things, e.g. their critique of commodity fetishism.) And there are many non-communist anticapitalists who oppose wage slavery but have no fundamental problem with payment with a medium of exchange (Proudhon was trying to start a bank, for Pete’s sake). The issue for them, again, isn’t the existence of money; it’s the control of money and property by the State and a select class of capitalists favored by the State. For the mutualists, the upshot isn’t the eradication of exchange, payment, money, or credit; it’s the decentralization of control over exchange, payment, money, and credit. What we’re after isn’t the end of “making payment with a medium of exchange,” but rather patterns of payment and exchange where workers make the decisions and keep the profits, rather than being handed down directives and receiving fixed wages for time served.

HTH.

Comment on Maddow Bashes Anarchism by Rad Geek

Comrade Berkman:

Why does Kevin Carson claim to support the I.W.W. yet defend wage labor and absentee landlordism?

Um.

You’re new here, aren’t you?

Berkman considered mutualism/individualism seriously flawed

Of course he did. That’s why he wasn’t a mutualist or an individualist. But the point of mentioning his reception of mutualism was not to reopen the argument about whether mutualism is a good idea or not. It was to reply to your silly assertion that mutualists and individualists are not part of “actual historical anarchism,” but rather are newcomers “infiltrating” the movement. That’s certainly not how it seemed to actual historical anarchists like Berkman, in spite of very real and deep disagreements.

That said, even if the point of the discussion were to reopen the issue of mutualism and its critics, the arguments you raise here are astonishingly awful arguments. Berkman thought it seriously flawed. Well, so what? You’ve got an appeal to authority, but where’s the argument? (Maybe it’s hiding somewhere next to Kevin Carson’s esoteric tracts defending absentee landlordism.) “Most Anarchists following Bakunin” thought it flawed. Well, so what? I don’t know whether “following” is supposed to mean that you’re referring to Bakuninist Anarchists, or to Anarchists who came, historically, after Bakunin, but in either case, even if true, this at best a crude appeal to the majority. If I wanted to decide arguments based on authority, tradition, and majority opinion, I’d be a fucking Republican.

Re: Economics et al

... Do you really need me to sit here and explain the fallacy of complex question to you, or how the obvious implicature of the "and" in your question is that

Re: Lew Rockwell

... *sigh* Whether or not "presenting as heroes" is the best term to use is actually the least important part of my point. But, since you ask, there's