On the other hand, [neither did violent insurgency](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising). Turns out there weren't a lot of good strategies available at the time for beating the Nazis. On the third hand, there are [instances of successful nonviolent resistance to the Nazis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenstrasse_protest). Anyway, my own view is that either response is morally legitimate but you shouldn't prejudge the strategic issue by presuming that a method is going to be more practically successful just because it kills more people.

Thanks for the note! I'm glad to see this work coming to print, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my co-editor, Gary Chartier, who is certainly the real reason that this book exists, was successfully completed, and found such a wonderful publisher. Also, I should mention that those who want to get a taste of the book can also read as much as they can stand (to read PDFs on a computer screen) from Minor Compositions' website at http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=230

> I didn't read the book. . . . The title of the book just seems crazy to me. Well. Anyway, as you may know Anarchists have often historically used titles and slogans that were designed to seem paradoxical at first glance. ("Anarchy: A Journal of Order," "Anarchy is Order / Government is Civil War," etc.) It is not because the slogan is really confusing, but because people's ideas about anarchy, government, order, war, markets, capitalism etc. etc. etc. have been systematically confused by ideological mystifications (such that people typically think that, for example, the constant, pervasive violence of the state counts as "order," not as civil war, because that violence is hidden under the cover of law). The purpose of the paradoxical slogan is to broach the subject of those mystifications, and to introduce the work of clearing them away. Whether that work is successful or not is of course a separate question, but it's one that you can only answer by reading the book, not by reading the title. > I agree, markets are not capitalism. But, isn't capitalism the ideology of markets? I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Certainly capitalists claim to be all for markets. And Barack Obama claims to be all for peace and democracy in the Middle East. But their endorsement is in practice more selective than they might care to let on; people in positions of incredible privilege often lie about what they want, and promote their ends selectively, only insofar as it benefits their privilege rather than endangering it. But part of the point of the book is that capitalists' economic privileges really have nothing to do with market forms, or with skill or efficiency in market exchange, and everything to do with the immediate effects and downstream ripple effects of political privilege. Freed exchange and competition would in fact be profoundly threatening to the interests of bail-out grifting, IP-holding, sweetheart deal-cutting corporations, and that is why capitalists so constantly work to reinforce the idea that "free markets" means stupid things like selective deregulation (relaxing government controls on formal businesses while keeping or escalating much more rigid controls on the poor), neoliberal "privatization" (really just the contracting out of political privilege), actually expanding government-protected monopolies through copyright and patent law, or permitting polluters to pollute more freely no matter how many people's health or homes they may ruin: in order to convince the rest of us to go along with the ridiculous lie that social and economic freedom would be more or less like what we've got, except with business being even bigger, and having a bit easier time of getting what they want. The point of the book is to try to introduce an alternative model, and to explore a kind of freedom that would be threatening to the entrenched interests of capitalists. > Private security forces in this world, at this time, sounds like Wackenhut and Blackwater. Government "security" contractors are horrible creatures, to be sure. That specific issue is discussed (albeit briefly -- the book isn't mainly about theories of defense or protection) in Ch. 4, "Markets Freed from Capitalism" (in the section on the "Security Monopoly") and Ch. 30, "Two Words on 'Privatization.'" Roughly, the message of the book is: frag those guys. > But how do we get to there, from here? The book doesn't have much on strategy in it, but speaking for myself, what I advocate is essentially building social counter-power, withdrawing from state-capitalistic economic relations wherever possible, getting together networks for personal and community mutual aid and self-defense at a grassroots level, and organizing militant antipolitical unions toward the General Strike against state and capital. Admittedly this makes me an odd duck even among left-wing market anarchists. But not as odd as you might think. The lefty agorists I know generally think of it as just one more form of counter-economics, and to the extent that they are doing similar things I'm happy to work with them on that score.

Oh Tarzie: And as I said, they were under constant attack from capitalism.

... which may explain something. But it doesn't explain why the Che Ka spent its first month in Moscow imprisoning hundreds and murdering dozens of anti-capitalist Anarchists.

spoiled entitlement-minded kids

You must be new here.

You cant begin to complain until you have even voted,

What I want does not come on a ballot. In any case, I don’t know why you think that people should have to wait until November of every other year to be able to speak about the things that they care about.

Only concerned about you trying to tear us apart as a union.

Well, OK. You’re right about that. So perish all compromises with tyranny. But keep in mind that nobody here speaks for all the Occupiers. Occupy is a conversation and a process for addressing things at a community level. It’s not a political party with a platform or talking-points.

He’s a daggum outside agitator!

. . . back when there were more jobs with bennies and more job security all around; say 1946-1979 (give or take) . . .

More for whom? Not for women. Or for Black men. Or immigrants.

That said, I can give you half of what you are asking for: I do not think that the 1980s represented any kind of significant net progress towards freed markets. And the myth of the “Reagan Revolution” is one of the most idiotic myths in the vulgar libertarian / small-government conservative compendium. Of course there are some things that got freer, and other things that got less free (as always happens when policies change), but state control and capitalist domination remained constant. On net, Reagan’s policies, and the Clintonian neoliberalism that followed it, represented a shift in the strategy of state-capitalist control, not a rollback — a shift towards multibillion dollar bail-outs rather than ex ante controls, towards subsidized multinational trade rather than tariff-protected domestic industry, towards privately-owned government-protected monopolies rather than direct nationalization, and all with a heavy dose of tax hikes (*), police statism, mass incarceration and confrontational hyper-militarism. So while I am a lot less fond of 1946-1979 than you seem to be, I hardly see 1980-present as a noticeable improvement over it.

(* Reagan’s big hike of FICA taxes was one of the biggest tax increases in American history. He is remembered as a tax-cutter because political commentators only give a shit about what happens to millionaires.)

Me:

… apriori reasoning from a set of conceptual distinctions

Cal:

Um if the concepts are empirically-informed a posteriori ones, it’s not “a priori”…

Well, no; or, at least, you are not using these terms as they are standardly used in philosophy. Perhaps there is another use of them that would make sense of this claim, but if so, you’ll have to explain what it is. According to the standard uses of these terms within the discipline it is of course possible to engage in apriori reasoning using empirical concepts: for example, in the syllogism: “All dogs are mammals; all mammals are warm-blooded; therefore all dogs are warm-blooded.” Here the major and minor premise both employ empirical concepts (“dog,” “mammal,” “warm-blooded”) and are in fact aposteriori judgments (it was only through experience that we found that dogs are mammals, and that all mammals are warm-blooded). But the inference from the major and minor premise to the conclusion is still a matter of apriori, not aposteriori, reasoning. The argument depends on a background of empirical concepts and aposteriori judgments that you need in order to make sense of what the argument says, but that doesn’t make the argument an aposteriori argument, any more than the fact that you need a functioning computer to read the argument as I’ve presented would make it an argument about computer science.

Cal:

I’m saying they’re not because private corporations are not the state and empirically can’t do what the state can do.

OK. I know that you are saying that. But the point is that this doesn’t adequately answer the question that you were supposedly saying it to answer. (Which was, remember, “Can you state a criterion that will have state universities and the post office turn out to be part of the state, and Walmart not?”) The U.S. Postal Service “empirically can’t do” what the state as a whole can do, either. Nor are they “causally responsible” (in any global sense) “for the statism in the market in which it exists.” (The USPS is of course “causally responsible,” in part, for the specific statist measures that it lobbies Congress to pass. But then, so is Walmart.) So while you have repeatedly restated your view that Wal-Mart is indeed not part of the state, because it is a private corporation and private corporations are (just as such?) not part of the state, you have not actually given the criterion that you were asked to give.

Cal:

Walmart is not causally responsible for the statism in the market in which it exists: the state is and thus the masses are by one remove …

Oh, well, “the masses.” Well, as you may know, most left-libertarians do not tend to believe in starry-eyed utopian theories about the responsiveness of democratic states to “the masses.” Rather, most of us are of the view that the direction of corporate-statist economic policy has very largely been shaped by the lobbying and policy-crafting efforts of the concentrated interests who most benefit from it. Maybe you dissent, but if so, it might be more useful to give the reasons for your dissent rather than simply insisting on it as if all reasonable people knew that “the masses” and not, say, well-connected lobbies are “causally responsible” for what the state does.

Cal:

By “is just,” I’m talking about when the defining characteristic of the state, what differentiates it from other human institutions and informs its function, is reduced to “just” those kind of things …

Cool beans. So, who’s doing that?

Keep in mind that making the claim that the state does X; or that doing X is the ethically or politically salient fact about the state from the standpoint of the current discussion is not the same thing as treating X as “the defining characteristic of the state.”

dennis:

I interpret as coming from many left libertarians; which is the idea that any business which in any way profits from something that wouldn’t exist in a truly free market is morally compromised.

Well, maybe we just differ in our experiences with, or our interpretations of, what most left-libertarians say.

My impression is that very few of us care about the issue of assigning moral blame one way or the other for something as broad and general as “participating in the statist economy” or “profiting from political privilege.” I don’t really care whether or not that makes Mike Duke a scoundrel; that is, as far as I’m concerned, between him and his pastor. The questions that get asked at this level of generality are more typically structural questions: whether a particular business practice would or would not be sustainable in a market free of political privilege; whether it would even be possible in a market free of political privilege; whether an organization operating politically ought to be understood as a constrained private actor, or as an effective part of the state, or some third term — e.g. as an autonomous ally of the state or as integrated within a structure of coercive power but distinct from the state as such or…, or…, or…. Of course all of this involves some ethical reasoning and all of it presumably has some important ethical consequences, but I don’t see these questions primarily as ethical questions. They are rather empirical questions about how a given set of real-world social institutions relate to each other and what roles they play in various systems of social power.

As to the protestors, I don’t doubt that many of their targets are deserving of scorn. But a good number of them, maybe the majority, endorse something far worse than our present corporatist system.

Maybe. (Although it seems to me like you’re overestimating the uniformity of opinion among the protesters.) But that seems to me like a good reason to criticize the specific shitty things that specific folks suggest as solutions or alternatives. It doesn’t seem like a good reason to criticize them for the mere fact of protesting against the guys that they are protesting against.