This week, I’ve submitted 8,107 Center op-eds to 2,762 publications worldwide, and have identified seven “pickups” of those articles in the “mainstream” media or on large news-oriented web sites.

• India’s Goa Herald published my piece, “Paging Dr. Sous,” on May 2 (it only started showing up in Google search results this week).
• Infoshop News published “Occupy: Nucleus of the New Society?” and “So Long as Government Exists, a Governing Class is Inevitable,” both by Kevin Carson, on May 20 and May 23 respectively.
• Infowars published my “Marriage: Politics vs. Society” on May 20 and Kevin’s “The Government is Lying to Us — What Else is New?” on May 22.
• David D’Amato’s “State and Capital: A Love Affair” ran in The Deming, New Mexico Headlight on May 20.
• David’s “The IP Wars as ‘Competition,” appeared (as “So-called ‘IP wars’ reveal rigged ‘competition’”) in Taiwan’s China Post on May 21.

That makes 550 pickups/reprints/citations of C4SS material in the mainstream media or reasonable facsimile thereof — that we’ve found, anyway.

This week’s pseudo-random reciprocal blogospheric link love goes out to Everything Voluntary, The Rule of Freedom, and Tully’s Page.

Have a great weekend … and Support the Center!

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society

Another source of vivid imagery is the Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World. Consider this:  “… we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”

These two phrases brilliantly describe the predicament of state-fostered corporate capitalism. Capitalism as an historic system is five hundred or more years old, and the state was intimately involved in its formation and its ongoing preservation from the very beginning. But the state has been far more involved, if such a thing is possible, in the model of corporate capitalism that’s prevailed over the past 150 years. The corporate titans that dominate our economic and political life could hardly survive for a year without the continuing intervention of the state in the market to sustain them through subsidies and monopoly protections.

This system is reaching its limits of sustainability. Here are some reasons why:

1) The monopolies on which it depends are increasingly unenforceable. Especially “intellectual property.”

1a) Copyright-based industry has already lost the fight to end file-sharing.

1b) Industrial patents are only enforceable when oligopoly industry, oligopoly retail chains reduce transaction cost of enforcement — unenforceable against neighborhood garage factories using pirated CAD/CAM files.

2) Cheap production tools and soil-efficient horticulture are

2a) increasing competition from self-employment

2b) reducing profitable investment opportunities for surplus capital and destroying direct rate of profit (DROP)

3) State-subsidized production inputs leads to geometrically increasing demand for those inputs, outstripping the state’s ability to supply and driving it into chronic fiscal crisis. For centuries the state has provided large-scale capitalist agribusiness with privileged access to land stolen from the laboring classes. For 150 years, it has subsidized inputs like railroads, airports and highways for long-distance shipping, and irrigation water for factory farming. But as any student of Microecon 101 could tell you, subsidizing something means more and more of it gets consumed. So you get agribusiness that’s inefficient in its use of land and water, and industry that achieves false economies of scale by producing for artificially large market areas. Each year it takes a larger government subsidy to keep this business model profitable.

4) Worsening tendencies toward overaccumulation and stagnation increase the amount of chronic deficit spending necessary for Keynesian aggregate demand management, also worsening the fiscal crisis. The state has built a massive military-industrial complex and created entire other industries at state expense to absorb excess investment capital and overcome the system’s tendency toward surplus production and surplus capital, and sustained larger and larger deficits, just to prevent the collapse that otherwise would have already occurred.

In short, capitalism depends on ever-growing amounts of state intervention in the market for its survival, and the system is hitting the point where the teat runs dry.

The result is a system in which governments and corporations are increasingly hollowed out. And meanwhile, growing up within this corporate capitalist “integument,” things like open source software and culture, open-source industrial design, permaculture and low-overhead garage micromanufacturing eat the corporate-state economy alive. An ever-growing share of labor and production are disappearing into relocalized resilient economies, self-employment, worker cooperatives and the informal and household economy. In the end, they will skeletonize the corporate dinosaurs like a swarm of piranha.

C4SS Web Administrator and a Founding Member of the Bradley Manning Support Network, Mike Gogulski, participates in an interview the Citizens of Nowhere blog.

Gogulski discusses his life as a stateless ex-American. His decision to formally renounce his citizenship, what lead up this decision and how he did it.

Mike Gogulski, “Why would you want to be part of the largest and most criminal organizations in the world? Because that is what nation states are in my eyes. “

Els Duran and Evelien Vehof traveled around the world to see how stateless people live. Today in the latest episode: a guy who is stateless on purpose.

In the past 2 years we interviewed around 50 stateless people. Every one of them would have loved to have citizenship. During the investigation we stumbled across the remarkable tale of Mike Gogulski, former American in Slovakia. Through his weblog we came in contact with him.

Gogulski wants to share his story with us so we visited him in Bratislava. He picked us up at a cafe in the center. It is 15 degrees below zero, there is nobody on the streets, that’s how cold it is. On the way to his apartment he buys a little stash of cigarettes. Mike became stateless in 2008. “I would recommend this to anyone, really” he tells us surrounded by noisy computers and full ashtrays in the living room “Why would you want to be part of the biggest and most criminal organizations in the world? Because that is what nation states are in my eyes.”

In 1997 Mike realized for the first time he wanted to leave America. “I was planning to emigrate, to ask for a different nationality and then give up my American citizenship. When in 2003 the US invaded Iraq for the first time, I was sure: I wanted to break myself free from the American nation in every possible way. I wanted to lose my citizenship, regardless of whether or not I would get citizenship in a different country.”

Mike investigated the procedures and laws surrounding nationality. He decided after a trip through Europe not to go back to the US and settled in Slovakia. In the US it would have simply been impossible to give up his citizenship. “With all the filled out papers under my arm I went to the American embassy here in Bratislava. They of course asked me if I was sure of my decision and tested to see that I wasn’t crazy, or under the influence. I came through all of the tests fine, luckily.” Two weeks after this Mike received a certificate that said he was no longer an American citizen, together with his blacklisted passport.

Mike was relieved. “I was finally not bound to the state that does such horrible things in the world. I was no longer an American and an citizen of no country! Those nation states we have to get rid of anyway. Call me an anarchist.”

How the world should be organized instead, he doesn’t know yet. “I would prefer to see that there was a state for every person separately. But people could also organize themselves per block or neighborhood. There is always a doctor, handyman, a teacher without a group like that. You take care of each other without interference from a state.”

Unfortunately for Gogulski, he has to have a recognized form of identity to be able to survive in this world. He applied for a passport for the stateless at the Slovak immigration office. “Now I have an official ’1954 Convention’ travel document for the stateless, with which I can at least freely travel within the Schengen area. Outside of that area I need to apply for a visa, for America too. I don’t know if I will ever want to go back to my old country, because I don’t trust that state at all. What if they arrest me for the fact that I turned my back to them?”

In 2007, when he decided to become stateless, Mike started a website “First of all because I wanted to share my choice and how it would all end up going, but also to sort of have a foot in the door. I couldn’t go back any more, because the whole world could read on my website I was really going to do it.” He even now gets a lot of reactions through his website. From Americans who want to give up their citizenship to questions from people who are thinking about becoming stateless. “I help them as best I can. The first thing I advise people to do it to investigate the situation in their country. Can they, for instance, even get a travel document for the stateless? Because without papers you are nowhere in this world, you have to stay realistic.”

Mike lights yet another cigarette. “I want to make clear that you definitely shouldn’t compare my situation to the majority of the 12 million stateless people. Most of them didn’t pick to be stateless, are treated really badly and can’t go anywhere. In that way I am privileged. I have a permanent residence, a house, I work as a freelance translator, and can easily look after my own livelihood. It is for me one of the best choices I have ever made.”

What’s more, Brett argued, it was questionable whether the state bureaucracy would really be a new ruling class at all:

“English history is full of the chameleon qualities of the rich. How quickly the feudal Baron is metamorphosed into the landed aristocrat, and the landed aristocrat into the mine owner and the railway director. We find often the same family names cast for these varied parts across the centuries. And these people will control the new bureaucracy. They know which way the wind is blowing, and they are preparing for the change of direction.”

Brett was part of a larger current, in the early years of the 20th century, of writers who applied Pareto’s “circulation of elites” theory to the state socialist movement. It included writers on the Left, like Robert Michels and William English Walling, who drew pessimistic conclusions from the socialist parties’ growing tendencies toward authoritarianism and collusion with the state and capital.

Michels argued that genuine majority or rank-and-file control of a large hierarchical institution was impossible, because it would be subverted by the “Iron Law of Oligarchy”: Representatives or delegates would transform their full-time inside control over information and agenda-setting to reduce the de jure authority of those they represented into a mere rubber-stamping function.

Walling argued (as did the Distributist Hilaire Belloc in “The Servile State”) that state socialist parties like the Social Democrats and Fabians were being coopted into the service of capital. Democratic socialist movements would by and large give up on the herculean political task of actually seizing control of industry, and would instead choose to leave the industry in capitalist hands while regulating it “in the popular interest.”

In practice, those “progressive” regulations would serve mainly to stabilize the economy in the long-term interests of big business, and use a minimalist welfare state and labor regulations to clean up the worst (and most politically destabilizing) forms of destitution left by the capitalists. As Belloc put it, if only the Fabians’ lust to manage and regiment the underclass were satisfied, they would be quite accommodating about capitalist ownership. So the de facto role of the “democratic socialist” state would be to oversee the economy on behalf of big business.

The historic continuity of the ruling class is another theme that has appeared in many guises. Immanuel Wallerstein and Christopher Hill, both Marxists, argued that a significant minority of the landed ruling class under the late Medieval political economy managed to reinvent itself as agrarian capitalists and negotiate the transition to capitalism, where they survived in such forms as the Whig landed oligarchy in Great Britain. The persistence of bastard feudal forms of concentrated land ownership, through such expedients as large-scale enclosure of the Open Fields, common pasture and waste, and the mercantile system of state finance and chartered monopoly, ensured a great deal of structural continuity between the medieval and early capitalist systems.

A similar continuity bridged agrarian and industrial capitalism, as silent partners in the landed classes provided much of the capital for industrialization and the most successful capitalists bought titles or married into noble families. That continuity between the European landed nobilities and industrial capitalists in the modern era was the thesis of Arno Mayer’s book The Persistence of the Old Regime.

Wallerstein, like Brett, feared either that the giant finance-capitalists would manage to install themselves as the new ruling class in control of the postcapitalist state, or that the bureaucratic apparatus would use its control over the economy to live in privilege. The same has been true of left-libertarian critics like Emma Goldman and the post-Trotskyist Frankfurt School, who used terms like “bureaucratic state capitalism” and “bureaucratic collectivism” to dismiss the USSR as a new form of class society.

If there’s anything to such analyses — and I believe there is — we should take a long, hard look at whether state socialism (i.e., a system in which genuine working class political and economic power is exercised through the state) is even possible.

Murray Bookchin, in his multivolume work The Third Revolution, presented a historical typology of revolution in which, in the course of a revolution, popular struggle by working people themselves gave birth to all sorts of decentralist, self-managed, liberatory institutions like soviets and workers committees. But in every case, once a revolutionary party had firmly established itself in the capital and purged the state of its rivals, it proceeded either to suppress working class organs of self-management or to coopt them as top-down transmission belts for state policy.

That’s what happened when Lenin liquidated the other parties of the Left in his governing coalition, suppressed the Workers’ Opposition, and put down the Kronstadt mutiny. It’s what happened in Spain, when the Communist-dominated government in Madrid set up its own Soviet-trained OGPU unit and showed its willingness to lose to Franco in preference to tolerating anarchists in Catalonia.

In essence, it’s the cyclical phenomenon described by Orwell’s fictional “Emanuel Goldstein”: The high and middle eternally jockeying for power over the low, with the middle in each revolution enlisting the help of the low long enough to oust the old ruling class and set themselves up as the new one.

Since the rise of the state as an instrument of economic exploitation on behalf of a ruling class, there have been endless attempts to achieve justice through revolutionary seizure of the state — each one ending in failure and disillusionment. Ending injustice and exploitation through machinery which is purpose-built for injustice and exploitation is doomed. To repeat Brett’s observation: “So long as government exists, a governing class is inevitable.”

So maybe we need to do it different this time.

Exactly! You might be forgiven for thinking “the enemy” our ruling circles always talk about is somebody with a strange language and religion on the other side of the world. But in fact “the enemy,” for the ruling class, is anyone capable of disrupting its goals or undermining its power — including us. The American people are potentially a far greater threat to their power than any foreign government.

Australian scholar Alex Carey argued, in a book of that title, that the purpose of the corporate-state propaganda machine was “Taking the Risk Out of Democracy.” The modern institutions of concentrated corporate power and universal suffrage democracy, he said, both date from the late 19th century. This meant the most concentrated system of economic power in history faced an unprecedented danger of disruption from the caprice of a majority.

That power structure wasn’t willing to leave its power to chance. Alongside corporate power and mass democracy, a third modern phenomenon arose in the early years of the 20th century: Propaganda as the science of “engineering consent.” People like Edward Bernays in the US, and their counterparts in Britain, oversaw Anglo-American propaganda efforts during WWI (remember those bayoneted babies in Belgium?). Afterward, Bernays went on to found the modern discipline of public relations.

The corporate economy, with its monstrous concentration of political and economic power, was no spontaneous or inevitable outgrowth of modern technology. It resulted from massive top-down social engineering by the state. But a system of power can only survive if it’s seen as natural and inevitable by the ruled.

So since the beginnings of mass democracy, there have been carefully orchestrated efforts to ensure that, by the time the public plays out the ritual of its “sovereign” power in electoral politics, most everything of importance has already been decided. In 1991, for example, by the time Operation Desert Storm began, the prior deployment of troops under Bush’s claimed authority as “Commander-in-Chief,” combined with a relentless barrage of propaganda about Kuwaiti “incubator babies,” guaranteed the actual launch of the war as a given.

You may be tempted to think that’s mainly a practice of the Bad Old Republicans, that Democrats and Progressives are “different.” You may believe, with Thomas Frank, that the unsavory aspects of government under Republican control are an aberration, and that “the government” normally — in Soccer Mom parlance — “is just us.”

Not quite. Back in 2004, Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger said of the growing unpopularity of Bush’s war in Iraq: “We have too much at stake in Iraq to lose the American people.” If the allegedly sovereign American people are not “us” — if the corporate-state nexus constitutes a separate “us” — well, that really says it all.

But what about Saint Barack? Obama, who last year greenlighted Bahrain’s crackdown on its own pro-democracy movement while simultaneously grandstanding over Libya’s Gaddafi, has actively supported the regime’s detention of Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye for the “crime” of photographing crashed drones stamped “Made in USA” — thereby revealing American complicity in extra-legal, unaccountable assassinations by remote control and the hundreds of innocent civilians murdered in the process.

You might think, after all this, that explicitly legalizing the use of propaganda to manipulate the domestic public would be redundant. After all, as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman pointed out, the American mass media adhere for the most part to a state propaganda model of reporting foreign news (did you get even the slightest whiff, from news coverage in August 2008, that Georgia might have done something to provoke “Russian aggression?”).

Nevertheless, they’re doing it. A bipartisan amendment proposed by Mac Thornberry and Adam Smith would repeal the Smith-Mundt Act of 1947, which prohibits State Department and Pentagon propaganda services from disseminating messages for domestic consumption. Thornberry complains that existing law “ties the hands of America’s diplomatic officials, military, and others by inhibiting our ability to effectively communicate in a credible way.” What sort of “credible ways” does he have in mind? They include US government sock puppets participating in online social media discussions, under false pretenses, to prop up support for failed US foreign and security policies.

What new levels of crudeness and mendacity can we expect from state propaganda, once it’s explicitly authorized in law? Your safest strategy, as before, is to continue assuming everything you hear from the state is either a misleading partial truth or an outright lie. You can’t go far wrong that way.

But on the off chance that this was really intended as a serious factual claim, rather than a liberal version of Stephen Colbert’s shtik, I’d like to point out a few things: Digital Millennium Copyright Act. SOPA. ACTA. The FBI seizing dozens upon dozens of torrent download sites and issuing press releases from Disney headquarters. There, that should do it.

See, my first impression must have been correct: Only a comedian would claim Hollywood wants nothing in return for its campaign contributions.

Draconian digital copyright law and Gestapo-like enforcement of same, so beloved of Vice President Biden and former Senator Chris Dodd, are central to the business model of the big movie corporations.

When you think about it, Hollywood’s special affinity for the Democratic Party makes perfect sense. So-called “cognitive capitalism” (or “progressive” or “green capitalism”), which Progressives see as a paradigm for reindustrializing America, is utterly dependent on “intellectual property” for its business model. It’s basically the same as what economist Paul Romer calls “new growth theory”: A model of economic growth based on enclosing ideas as a source of profit.

If you want to see this model in action, just compare the retail price of a pair of trademarked Nike sneakers to the $5 a job shop in Asia got paid to produce them. Or look at Tom Peters’ Minolta camera — nine-tenths of whose value, he gushed, was “intellect” rather than actual parts and labor. Or the 2000% markup over production cost on patented drugs. Or a $200 CD of Microsoft Office that cost $5 to burn.

When you see the likes of Bill Gates, Bono, Sting and Warren Buffet jet-setting around the world, it may look like they’re talking about something like AIDS in Africa. But it’s this business model they’re really promoting. Their progressive/cognitive/green capitalist business model is just as caught up with the Democratic wing of the corporate ruling class as the business model of Rockefeller, Morgan and Gould was with the Republican wing a century ago.

We live in a world where the cost of physical means of production is imploding. A desktop computer can do work once requring a million-dollar press or music studio, and a garage shop with a few thousand dollars worth of machine tools can replace a million dollar factory. Making a big profit by controlling the physical means of production — and actually producing stuff — is pretty much obsolete.

Penny ante wealth — the fortunes of a few million dollars examined by Thomas Stanley in “The Millionaire Next Door” — comes from making things. Giant fortunes, in the billions of dollars, come from controlling the terms on which other people are allowed to make things.

Actual manufacturing, for the most part, takes place in independent job shops and sweatshops that produce on contract for transnational corporations. The actual sneakers are produced in these shops for almost nothing. Nike slaps a Swoosh on them and marks them up 4000% for retail sale. Nike, a typical global corporation, doesn’t actually produce anything. It makes its money erecting toll gates between the people who produce and the people who consume.

Thorstein Veblen called this “capitalized disserviceability”: Obtaining wealth not by producing things, but by charging rent for not obstructing production by other people. Henry George, Jr. described it as making money by controlling access to natural opportunities.

The central role of the state, at a time when technologies of abundance threaten to destroy all the scarcities and rents on which the wealth of the privileged depends, is to protect the rentier classes from the threat of abundance. At a time when the means of production themselves are cheap and there’s no reason why people can’t produce for themselves and each other without a middleman, the state makes these technologies artificially scarce by giving the rentier classes legal control over the terms on which they can be used.

So when Meathead says Hollywood doesn’t expect anything in return for its contributions, he’s just making a funny. Hollywood expects something, all right. And it gets its money’s worth.

I apologize for the tardiness of this update — I thought I had posted it, but hadn’t! So I’m doing it now, including only material through Friday, May 18th, when it should have been published.

During the week ending May 18th, I submitted 6,325 Center op-eds to 2,763 publications worldwide. I’ve identified four “pickups” of that material, and two prominent media mentions of C4SS.

• On May 2 (it only turned up in search engines later), the University of New Mexico Daily Lobo published David D’Amato’s “Musings on May Day” as “Market anarchy best serves human nature.”
• On May 12, Iowa’s River Cities’ Reader published Kevin Carson’s “Shikha Dalmia: Half-Right on ‘Right to Work.’”
• The Deming, New Mexico Headlight ran David D’Amato’s “Don’t Worry About Occupy” on May 16.
• On May 18, the St. Joseph, Missouri Telegraph ran my own “Marriage: Politics vs. Society” [PDF].

The mentions I mention both occurred on the popular Op-Ed News web site. Joe Gambrione cites C4SS in “The Anarchist Delusion” (May 9) and “Delusional Anarchists, part two” (May 16). As you might guess from the titles, Gambrione takes exception to our ideas. Check out his pieces and weigh the arguments for yourselves!

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society

In American political dialogue, it’s common to hear left-leaning talking heads paint a picture of the 2008 financial crisis as the free market gone awry. Rightly condemning the major banks, they reason that a lack of state oversight and regulation of the financial sector led to a high-risk environment that allowed ordinary people to be taken advantage of.

The “End the Fed” crowd has had its own response to the financial disaster, one that in the United States is associated almost exclusively with a particular brand of right-wing populism. They pin the catastrophic booms and busts epitomized by the crisis on the Federal Reserve System and the malinvestments it encourages.

What is seldom remarked upon is how well the right and left populist narratives at play regarding the financial crisis fit together and indeed strengthen one another. Market anarchists point out the connivance of the state — through institutions like the Fed — and Wall Street, building on the tradition of American anarchists like Benjamin Tucker.

For libertarians like Tucker, steadfast in attacking state-granted economic privilege, it was the idle capitalist who most benefited from state meddling in the economy, the boss who lived off of and profited from the industry and ingenuity of others. Market anarchists contend that it is not any “free market” that allows the baleful dominance of giant banks, but rather a catalog of crucial state interventions.

In the struggle against the economic elite, therefore, working people haven’t ever needed the assistance of the state; they require only that it cease intervening on behalf of the rich, powerful and politically connected “captains of industry.”

Along with tall barriers to entry such as special permits and capitalization requirements, it is the Federal Reserve System, the US central bank, that most releases the banks from true competition. Under the Fed’s centralized system, the big banks are allowed to lend what are really imaginary dollars without limit, discharged from worries about depositors being startled by their lack of discipline.

From its birth, the Fed was designed as a mechanism for precluding legitimate competition within the banking class. It would serve the purpose not only of bailing the banks out were they to go over the cliff, but of encouraging and imposing a debt-dependent economic system wherein Wall Street would enjoy a commanding position over all of industry.

The radical anti-capitalist, anti-state message has far more explanatory power and clarity when it acknowledges that the class interests of the Federal Reserve System are aligned with those of the Wall Street banking elite. As Benjamin Tucker argued, “It is useless to look to the State for remedy or punishment. Capital rules every department from legislature to court. It is through the State that capital wields its power.”

The one route to genuine “reform” is the complete and permanent separation of the economic from the political, a real free market of voluntary trade and cooperation replacing the present system of coercive collusion. And that’s an answer that will never get much play in the Wall Street-Federal Reserve den of thieves.

Sure, liberals are free to use the Occupy label to promote their agenda. That is, after all, what Occupy’s all about: A brand, or platform, ready-made for adoption on a modular basis by anyone who sees fit to use it. The more different groups using the Occupy brand, each with its own anti-corporate agenda, the better. It’s not a zero sum game.

The beauty of Occupy is that its module/platform architecture, and its openness to anyone who wants to create a new node for their own purposes, make it an ideal laboratory for experimentation in revolutionary praxis. Any local node is free to try out new ways of doing things, and to share its experience with others; the new techniques are freely available to any other node in the network that finds them useful. No permission, no administrative coordination to make sure everybody’s on the same page, is needed at any step in the process.

It’s the same kind of stigmergic platform as Wikipedia, a Linux developer group … or Al Qaeda Iraq. Self-selected individuals and local groups make contributions to praxis entirely on their own initiative, the smallest contribution can be leveraged with no transaction cost, and all contributions immediately become the common property of the entire movement.

I’ve hoped for some time that Occupy would cease to be mainly a protest movement and instead become mainly a school of living. That is, that — like the neighborhood assemblies in Argentina ten years ago — it would become a venue for local communities to disseminate the skills and technologies for building counter-institutions and a counter-economy that could flourish outside the decaying neoliberal system.

Some early signs in this direction were teach-ins like those of Juliet Schor (author of Plenitude) and Michel Bauwens of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives. Another was the “Occupy Our Homes” campaign, which offered some promise of evolving into a nationwide squatter movement to reclaim vacant housing. The term for things like this is “prefigurative politics”: That is, rather than attempting to pressure the power structure of the existing society for reforms, they exemplify the successor society in formation.

This spring, we see renewed occasion for hope. For example Occupy the Farm has occupied the Gill Tract, a vacant five-acre tract of land near the UC Berkeley campus slated for commercial development, and is cultivating it to raise food for the community.

All kinds of other counter-economic projects are available for Occupy to adopt. One of them is the kind of repair cafe that’s being pioneered in Amsterdam, as a way for low-income people to keep their broken appliances in use. The same general idea, neighborhood workshops and repair centers using the members’ shared tools and skills as a base for subsistence outside the cash nexus for the unemployed and underemployed, has been around at least since Colin Ward and Karl Hess.

Another variant of the same idea is the hackerspaces in many communities around the United States. Local digital barter currencies, on the same basic architecture as Tom Greco’s mutual credit clearing systems, are springing up all over the country. Open source machine tools, like those under development by the hardware hackers at the Open Source Ecology project, can produce factory quality goods at a two-order-of-magnitude reduction in cost. Soil-intensive horticultural techniques can feed one person on a tenth of an acre.

The human capital built up by Occupy in local communities has great potential as a clearinghouse for sharing and promoting such projects, and as a seed around which the new society and the new economy can crystallize.

As my friend Rose Anderson stated in a recent discussion:

“The unmitigated greed of the 1% unintentionally forced a paradigm shift while no one was looking…. The jobs aren’t coming back, but as this situation drags on the number of people figuring out they don’t have to wait on the government and corporations will be the most perfect storm of societal change ever inadvertently created … Occupy is just the beginning.”

Exactly. The real potential of Occupy is not to pressure Congress to adopt Obama’s infrastructure program, or the Buffett Rule, or any of the other shiboleths of “Progressive” politics. It is, rather, to serve as the nucleus of the new society in being.

Carson, a C4SS senior fellow, is the author of three books—Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution—as well as C4SS research studies on topics including land ownership and intellectual property and articles in publications including The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty. Studies in Mutualist Political Economy was the focus of a symposium in the Journal of Libertarian Studies.

The chair honors Karl Hess, who played a key role in fostering the alliance between libertarians and the New Left that briefly flourished in the 1960s. Hess’s writings on topics ranging from appropriate technology to the reconfiguration of the political spectrum have helped to shape the left-libertarian project to which the Center is committed.

“Kevin Carson is one of the most creative and influential thinkers on the contemporary anarchist and libertarian scene,” said C4SS board chair Sheldon Richman. “I can’t think of a better occupant for this chair.”

“Being able to appoint Carson to this chair is an honor for the Center for a Stateless Society,” said Center director Brad Spangler. “We’re proud of him, and we believe this appointment will highlight the importance of his work to all aspects of the freedom movement.”