#libertarian exit

[mostlysignssomeportents]

End of the line for corporate sovereignty

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me next weekend (Mar 30/31) in ANAHEIM at WONDERCON, then in Boston with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then Providence (Apr 12), and beyond!

Back in the 1950s, a new, democratically elected Iranian government nationalized foreign oil interests. The UK and the US then backed a coup, deposing the progressive government with one more hospitable to foreign corporations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalization_of_the_Iranian_oil_industry

This nasty piece of geopolitical skullduggery led to the mother-of-all-blowbacks: the Anglo-American puppet regime was toppled by the Ayatollah and his cronies, who have led Iran ever since.

For the US and the UK, the lesson was clear: they needed a less kinetic way to ensure that sovereign countries around the world steered clear of policies that undermined the profits of their oil companies and other commercial giants. Thus, the "investor-state dispute settlement" (ISDS) was born.

The modern ISDS was perfected in the 1990s with the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT). The ECT was meant to foam the runway for western corporations seeking to take over ex-Soviet energy facilities, by making those new post-Glasnost governments promise to never pass laws that would undermine foreign companies' profits.

But as Nick Dearden writes for Jacobin, the western companies that pushed the east into the ECT failed to anticipate that ISDSes have their own form of blowback:

https://jacobin.com/2024/03/energy-charter-treaty-climate-change/

When the 2000s rolled around and countries like the Netherlands and Denmark started to pass rules to limit fossil fuels and promote renewables, German coal companies sued the shit out of these governments and forced them to either back off on their democratically negotiated policies, or to pay gigantic settlements to German corporations.

ISDS settlements are truly grotesque: they're not just a matter of buying out existing investments made by foreign companies and refunding them money spent on them. ISDS tribunals routinely order governments to pay foreign corporations all the profits they might have made from those investments.

For example, the UK company Rockhopper went after Italy for limiting offshore drilling in response to mass protests, and took $350m out of the Italian government. Now, Rockhopper only spent $50m on Adriatic oil exploration – the other $300m was to compensate Rockhopper for the profits it might have made if it actually got to pump oil off the Italian coast.

Governments, both left and right, grew steadily more outraged that ISDSes tied the hands of democratically elected lawmakers and subordinated their national sovereignty to corporate sovereignty. By 2023, nine EU countries were ready to pull out of the ECT.

But the ECT had another trick up its sleeve: a 20-year "sunset" clause that bound countries to go on enforcing the ECT's provisions – including ISDS rulings – for two decades after pulling out of the treaty. This prompted European governments to hit on the strategy of a simultaneous, mass withdrawal from the ECT, which would prevent companies registered in any of the ex-ECT countries from suing under the ECT.

It will not surprise you to learn that the UK did not join this pan-European coalition to wriggle out of the ECT. On the one hand, there's the Tories' commitment to markets above all else (as the Trashfuture podcast often points out, the UK government is the only neoliberal state so committed to austerity that it's actually dismantling its own police force). On the other hand, there's Rishi Sunak's planet-immolating promise to "max out North Sea oil."

But as the rest of the world transitions to renewables, different blocs in the UK – from unions to Tory MPs – are realizing that the country's membership in ECT and its fossil fuel commitment is going to make it a world leader in an increasingly irrelevant boondoggle – and so now the UK is also planning to pull out of the ECT.

As Dearden writes, the oil-loving, market-worshipping UK's departure from the ECT means that the whole idea of ISDSes is in danger. After all, some of the world's poorest countries are also fed up to the eyeballs with ISDSes and threatening to leave treaties that impose them.

One country has already pulled out: Honduras. Honduras is home to Prospera, a libertarian autonomous zone on the island of Roatan. Prospera was born after a US-backed drug kingpin named Porfirio Lobo Sosa overthrew the democratic government of Manuel Zelaya in 2009.

The Lobo Sosa regime established a system of special economic zones (known by their Spanish acronym, "ZEDEs"). Foreign investors who established a ZEDE would be exempted from Honduran law, allowing them to create "charter cities" with their own private criminal and civil code and tax system.

This was so extreme that the Honduran supreme court rejected the plan, so Lobo Sosa fired the court and replaced them with cronies who'd back his play.

A group of crypto bros capitalized on this development, using various ruses to establish a ZEDE on the island of Roatan, a largely English-speaking, Afro-Carribean island known for its marine reserve, its SCUBA diving, and its cruise ship port. This "charter city" included every bizarre idea from the long history of doomed "libertarian exit" projects, so ably recounted in Raymond Craib's excellent 2022 book Adventure Capitalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/14/this-way-to-the-egress/#terra-nullius

Right from the start, Prospera was ill starred. Paul Romer, the Nobel-winning economist most closely associated with the idea of charter cities, disavowed the project. Locals hated it – the tourist shops and restaurants on Roatan all may sport dusty "Bitcoin accepted here" signs, but not one of those shops takes cryptocurrency.

But the real danger to Prospera came from democracy itself. When Xiomara Castro – wife of Manuel Zelaya – was elected president in 2021, she announced an end to the ZEDE program. Prospera countered by suing Honduras under the ISDS provisions of the Central America Free Trade Agreements, seeking $10b, a third of the country's GDP.

In response, President Castro announced her country's departure from CAFTA, and the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes:

https://theintercept.com/2024/03/19/honduras-crypto-investors-world-bank-prospera/

An open letter by progressive economists in support of President Castro condemns ISDSes for costing latinamerican countries $30b in corporate compensation, triggered by laws protecting labor rights, vulnerable ecosystems and the climate:

https://progressive.international/wire/2024-03-18-economists-the-era-of-corporate-supremacy-in-the-international-trade-system-is-coming-to-an-end/en

As Ryan Grim writes for The Intercept, the ZEDE law is wildly unpopular with the Honduran people, and Merrick Garland called the Lobo Sosa regime that created it "a narco-state where violent drug traffickers were allowed to operate with virtual impunity":

https://theintercept.com/2024/03/19/honduras-crypto-investors-world-bank-prospera/

The world's worst people are furious and terrified about Honduras's withdrawal from its ISDS. After 60+ years of wrapping democracy in chains to protect corporate profits, the collapse of the corporate kangaroo courts that override democratic laws represents a serious threat to oligarchy.

As Dearden writes, "elsewhere in the world, ISDS cases have been brought specifically on the basis that governments have not done enough to suppress protest movements in the interests of foreign capital."

It's not just poor countries in the global south, either. When Australia passed a plain-packaging law for tobacco, Philip Morris relocated offshore in order to bring an ISDS case against the Australian government in a bid to remove impediments to tobacco sales:

https://isds.bilaterals.org/?philip-morris-vs-australia-isds

And in 2015, the WTO sanctioned the US government for its "dolphin-safe" tuna labeling, arguing that this eroded the profits of corporations that fished for tuna in ways that killed a lot of dolphins:

https://theintercept.com/2015/11/24/wto-ruling-on-dolphin-safe-tuna-labeling-illustrates-supremacy-of-trade-agreements/

In Canada, the Conservative hero Steven Harper entered into the Canada-China Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement, which banned Canada from passing laws that undermined the profits of Chinese corporations for 31 years (the rule expires in 2045):

https://www.vancouverobserver.com/news/harper-oks-potentially-unconstitutional-china-canada-fipa-deal-coming-force-october-1

Harper's successor, Justin Trudeau, went on to sign the Canada-EU Trade Agreement that Harper negotiated, including its ISDS provisions that let EU corporations override Canadian laws:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-eu-parliament-schulz-ceta-1.3415689

There was a time when any challenge to ISDS was a political third rail. Back in 2015, even hinting that ISDSes should be slightly modified would send corporate thinktanks into a frenzy:

https://www.techdirt.com/2015/07/20/eu-proposes-to-reform-corporate-sovereignty-slightly-us-think-tank-goes-into-panic-mode/

But over the years, there's been a growing consensus that nations can only be sovereign if corporations aren't. It's one thing to treat corporations as "persons," but another thing altogether to elevate them above personhood and subordinate entire nations to their whims.

With the world's richest countries pulling out of ISDSes alongside the world's poorest ones, it's feeling like the end of the road for this particularly nasty form of corporate corruption.

And not a moment too soon.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/27/korporate-kangaroo-kourts/#corporate-sovereignty

Image: ChrisErbach (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:UnitedNations_GeneralAssemblyChamber.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The threat, we are told here this weekend, is existential, biological, epoch-defining. Economies will fail, civilizations will fall, and it will all happen because people aren’t having enough babies.

“The entire global financial system, the value of your money, and every asset you might buy with money is defined by leverage, which means its value depends on growth,” Kevin Dolan, a 37-year-old father of six from Virginia, tells the crowd that has gathered to hear him speak. “Every country in the developed world and most countries in the developing world face long-term population decline at a level that makes growth impossible to maintain,” Dolan says, “which means we are sitting on the bubble of all bubbles.”

Despite this grim prognosis, the mood is optimistic. It’s early December, a few weeks before Christmas, and the hundred-odd people who have flocked to Austin for the first Natal Conference are here to come up with solutions. Though relatively small, as conferences go, NatalCon has attracted attendees who are almost intensely dedicated to the cause of raising the U.S. birth rate. The broader natalist movement has been gaining momentum lately in conservative circles — where anxieties over falling birth rates have converged with fears of rising immigration — and counts Elon Musk, who has nearly a dozen children, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán among its proponents. Natalism is often about more than raising birth rates, though that is certainly one of its aims; for many in the room, the ultimate goal is a total social overhaul, a culture in which child-rearing is paramount.

NatalCon’s emphasis on childbirth notwithstanding, there are very few women in the cavernous conference room of the LINE Hotel. The mostly male audience includes people of all ages, many of whom are childless themselves. Some of the women in attendance, however, have come to Austin with their children in tow — a visual representation of the desired outcome of this weekend. As if to emphasize the reason we’re all gathered here today, a baby babbles in the background while Dolan delivers his opening remarks.

Broadly speaking, the people who have paid as much as $1,000 to attend the conference are members of the New Right, a conglomeration of people in the populist wing of the conservative movement who believe we need seismic changes to the way we live now — and who often see the past as the best model for the future they’d like to build. Their ideology, such as it exists, is far from cohesive, and factions of the New Right are frequently in disagreement. But this weekend, these roughly aligned groups, from the libertarian-adjacent tech types to the Heritage Foundation staffers, along with some who likely have no connection with traditionally conservative or far-right causes at all, have found a unifying cause in natalism.

At first glance, this conference might look like something new: A case for having kids that is rooted in a critique of the market-driven forces that shape our lives and the shifts that have made our culture less family-oriented. As Dolan later tells me in an email, declining birth rates are primarily the fault of “default middle-class ‘life path’ offered by our educational system and corporate employers,” which Dolan says is “in obvious competition with starting a family.” These systems, he believes, have created a consumer-driven, hedonistic society that requires its members to be slavishly devoted to their office jobs, often at the expense of starting a family.

But over the course of the conference, the seemingly novel arguments for having children fade and give way to a different set of concerns. Throughout the day, speakers and participants hint at the other aspects of modern life that worried them about future generations in the U.S. and other parts of the West: divorce, gender integration, “wokeness,” declining genetic “quality.”

Many of the speakers and attendees see natalism as a way of reversing these changes. As the speakers chart their roadmaps for raising birth rates, it becomes evident that for the most dedicated of them, the mission is to build an army of like-minded people, starting with their own children, who will reject a whole host of changes wrought by liberal democracy and who, perhaps one day, will amount to a population large enough to effect more lasting change.

This conference suggests there’s a simple way around the problem of majority rule: breeding a new majority — one that looks and sounds just like them.

In recent years, various factions of the old and the new right have coalesced around the idea that babies might be the cure for everything that’s wrong with society, in the United States and other parts of the developed West.

It’s not a new argument. Natalists made similar claims in the early 20th century, when urbanization drove birth rates down and European immigration kept the U.S. population afloat. Then, too, people attributed the drop in fertility rates to endemic selfishness among young people.

Throughout it all, some religious conservative cultures have continued to see raising large broods as a divine mandate. White supremacists, meanwhile, have framed their project as a way of ensuring “a future for white children,” as declared by David Lane, a founding member of the white nationalist group The Order.

More recently, natalist thinking has emerged among tech types interested in funding and using experimental reproductive technologies, and conservatives concerned about falling fertility rates and what they might mean for the future labor force of the United States and elsewhere in the developed world. The conservative think tanks the Center for Renewing America and the Heritage Foundation — the latter of which was represented at NatalCon — have proposed policies for a potential second Trump administration that would promote having children and raising them in nuclear families, including limiting access to contraceptives, banning no-fault divorce and ending policies that subsidize “single-motherhood.”

Though Dolan opens the conference by talking about the potential economic consequences of a global birth dearth, he and the other NatalCon speakers aren’t primarily concerned with the utilitarian arguments for raising birth rates. “I’m not trying to have grandkids so they can fund Medicare,” Dolan says. “We’re here because we agree that people are beautiful, that life is beautiful, and that it should go on.”

Dolan, a conservative Mormon and a former Booz Allen Hamilton data scientist, resigned from his job in 2021 after a group of self-proclaimed anti-fascist Mormon activists exposed his anonymous Twitter account, which tied him to the far-right Deseret Nationalist movement. Having lost his livelihood and security clearance, Dolan started the EXIT Group, a “fraternity of like-minded men” who are preparing for the supposed collapse of American society — and who, as of recently, have taken on the decline in birth rates as their pet cause.

On his podcast, Dolan says he was first alerted to the problem of demographic collapse by a member of the EXIT Group, which claims to have 171 members. Dolan came up with the idea for NatalCon after watching “The End of Men,” Tucker Carlson’s documentary about “collapsing testosterone levels” in the West. The global drop in sperm concentrations has indeed puzzled scientists for decades and is believed to be one of the factors that has contributed to the global downturn in birth rates. But NatalCon’s organizers and attendees seem more interested in combating social institutions — like corporate employment and the educational system set up to support it — that, in Dolan’s words, have suppressed fertility by being “hostile to life.”

Most of the first day of the conference is spent defining the problem. In a nutshell: Sperm counts are historically low. Our bodies are full of microplastics. Public schools are indoctrinating children against the good Christian values with which they were raised. Dating apps have gamified romance, tricking lonely singles into believing that a better prospect is always around the corner. Women have been convinced that they can have it all — kids and a career and endless vacations and so much more — only to end up unhappy, infertile and alone.

The speakers who lay out this bleak state of affairs are a motley crew of the extremely online right, many of whom go by their X (the website formerly called Twitter) handles rather than their names. Via Zoom, anonymous Twitter user Raw Egg Nationalist warns us about endocrine disruptors in everything from perfume to bottled water. Ben Braddock, an editor at the conservative magazine IM-1776, claims that antidepressants and birth control pills have permanent, detrimental effects on women’s fertility. Together, the speakers paint a dire picture of a society that has lost its way, abandoning fundamental biological truths and dooming itself to annihilation in the process.

The solution, of course, is to have more babies. Peachy Keenan, a pseudonymous writer affiliated with the conservative Claremont Institute, urges attendees to “seize the means of reproduction” — as in, to out-breed liberals, who are already hobbling their movement by choosing to have just a couple children, or none at all. “We can use their visceral hatred of big families to our advantage,” Keenan says. “The other side is not reproducing; the anti-natalists are sterilizing themselves.”

Here lies the project, spelled out in detail: The people who disagree have bloodlines that are slowly going to die out. To speed up that process — to have this particular strain of conservative natalist ideology become dominant quickly in the United States — everyone in this room has to have more kids, and fast.

But it’s only when the speakers get to who should have babies and how they should raise them that their deeper concerns, and the larger anxieties behind this conference, become clear.

The goal, as put by Indian Bronson, the pseudonymous co-founder of the elite matchmaking service Keeper, is “more, better people.”

But the speakers lack consensus on the meaning of the word “better,” as they do on the subject of using technology to encourage the best and brightest among us to breed.

Keenan, who has previously celebrated her sense that it is now acceptable to say “white genocide is real,” says better means conservative. Pat Fagan, the director of the Marriage and Religion Institute at the Catholic University of America, says good children are the product of stable, two-parent Christian households, away from the corrupting influences of public school and sex ed. (Christian couples, he adds, have “the best, most orgasmic sex,” citing no research or surveys to support this.) To protect these households, we must abolish no-fault divorce, declares Brit Benjamin, a lawyer with waist-length curly red hair. (Until relatively recently, Benjamin was married to Patri Friedman — grandson of economist Milton Friedman — the founder of the Seasteading Institute, a Peter Thiel-backed effort to build new libertarian enclaves at sea.) And to ensure that these children grow up to be adults who understand their proper place in both the family and the larger social order, we need to oust women from the workforce and reinstitute male-only spaces “where women are disadvantaged as a result,” shampoo magnate and aspiring warlord Charles Haywood says, prompting cheers from the men in the audience.

Haywood’s final words to the audience elicit raucous applause: “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its progeny are probably the single most destructive set of laws in American history, and all should be wiped forever,” he says before getting off stage. (A few women told me afterward they and others disagreed with Haywood.)

Notably, most of the speakers do not make a case for more immigration to counter the trend of declining birth rates. Immigrants can’t solve our population problem, Dolan says, because they’ll eventually realize they were brought here to pay into Social Security for old white people. (On X, Dolan has used the word “replacement” to refer to immigration.)

Some at the conference are interested in the genetics of the children they believe everyone should be having. Evolutionary biologist Diana Fleischman and writer Jonathan Anomaly argue that genetics are destiny. (“I shouldn’t say Good quality children,” Fleischman says after speaking at length about how people with mental illness are statistically likely to marry other mentally ill people and pass those genes along to their children, suggesting some children are indeed biologically better than others.)

Razib Khan — a geneticist and science blogger who in 2015 was hired and quickly fired by the New York Times opinion section after Gawker reported on his ties to racist far-right publications — illustrates the problem of current demographic trends in the West compared to other regions by pointing to Ethiopia, which had nearly as many births in 2020 as the entire European continent. “This is the future we’re already in,” says Khan, who is Bangladeshi-American. “Many of you have young children. … They will live to see this world.”

Over and over throughout the conference, anxieties over the drop in birth rates — the issue that brought the speakers and audience together — gave way to fears that certain populations were out-breeding their betters. Though few speakers explicitly mentioned race, the conference provided an opportunity for those with genuine concerns about population decline to join forces with, and perhaps be influenced by, those who espouse racist or regressive views. During the second day of the conference — a closed-door, phone-off event dedicated to brainstorming ways to reverse the population crisis — VIP ticket holders mingled with Jared Taylor, the publisher of the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance, according to multiple people in attendance who wanted to remain anonymous because having their name linked to the conference would jeopardize their work.

The following day, I talk with Malcolm and Simone Collins, the husband-and-wife founder of Pronatalist.org who went viral in 2023 after the Telegraph dubbed them the “elite couple breeding to save mankind.” They are entrepreneurs and investors and previously served as co-CEOs of a travel agency company; Simone is also currently running for a seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.

The Collinses tell me they want to promote a plurality of cultures and protect everyone’s right to be “weird.” Malcolm says they want to make their movement a “big tent” and were initially worried about what kinds of people the conference would attract. “Are they going to be like, ‘[No] transgender people reading kids books?’ Are they going to be racist nut jobs? It’s a real concern,” he says.

The Collinses — parents of four children — present themselves as rationalists, techies trying to solve the looming depopulation crisis by any means necessary. (Simone was pregnant with the fourth child during the conference. That baby, Industry Americus Collins, was born in April.) With their third and fourth children, the Collinses used a preimplantation genetic test that allowed them to select an embryo with optimum genetic makeup.

But they, too, are far more interested in the cultural implications of declining fertility rates than their fascination with reproductive technologies might lead you to believe. The couple is committed to fighting the “urban monoculture” that they claim has tricked a generation of young Americans into spending their most fertile years chasing professional achievements and personal fulfillment at the expense of building a family.

“The monoculture is not an evil thing,” Malcolm says over panang curry and pineapple fried rice at a Thai restaurant the day after the conference’s VIP event, but, he continues, it’s built on false promises. “It promises people, if you join us, you can do whatever makes you happy, so long as it doesn’t interfere with other people’s quality of life, and you can be affirmed for whoever you want to be.” In reality, though, they become casualties of an elitist scam.

The urban monoculture, Malcolm explains, breeds childlessness and therefore must poach other people’s children to survive. It lures them out of small towns and into large cities, encourages them to eschew their religious upbringings in favor of hedonistic secularism, and then leaves them to die alone.

Malcolm compares the “urban monoculture” to the boarding schools the Canadian government forced Native children into, in which indigenous children were forcibly assimilated into white culture. (The U.S. government had similar boarding schools.) “It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to convert them to a culture that’s closer to mine — what you’re doing is wrong,” he says. When I tell him the boarding schools were a state program, not a voluntary form of acculturation, Malcolm becomes animated. “This is a state project! What’s going on in the public schools is a state project! The mechanisms that the urban monoculture uses to de-convert people are primarily a state funded educational system,” he says. (In a subsequent email, he describes the urban monoculture as “one of the descendants of European imperialism.”) The most important and effective way to fight the monoculture, Malcolm later tells me via email, is building “school systems not dedicated to cultural genocide.”

The goal, though, the Collinses tell me, is not to convert the childless, or even to counteract the phenomena that contribute to the “unplanned childlessness” that has become endemic among millennials: it’s to encourage people with a lot of children to have even more. “Some people matter less than other people in getting fertility rates up,” Malcolm says. “Helping somebody who has four kids but wants eight is more important than helping someone who has none but wants one.”

Ultimately, this is what unites the Collinses with the more “trad” wings of the natalist movement, from the nativists to the Christian nationalists: pushing back on social and cultural changes they see as imposed on them by outside forces. To do that, these conference attendees have coalesced around a solution that won’t require them to persuade skeptics to join their cause. If everything goes as planned, the competition will go extinct on their own. All the natalists have to do is have enough kids so that, in a generation or two, they’ll be the ones who inherit the earth.

[agnesandhilda]

it has come to my attention that I've inadvertently convinced some of my followers that blue lock is a hidden gem of psychological drama hidden in the sports manga genre and while I take that as a compliment to my brainrotting abilities that is not what it is. blue lock is 80% regular sports shounen 20% campy bullshit, and there's just enough of the bullshit interspersed throughout to make the whole thing fascinating. it's a manga about a team sport except the football is actually a metaphor for libertarianism and the manga is hostile to team sports overall. there's a suicide depicted on-screen. the mass gaslighting of at least a hundred teenage boys kept in a windowless facility that they are not able to exit is a major plot point. someone invented earbuds that can flawlessly translate any language in real time and this, like, hasn't revolutionized global communication. there are multiple guys trying to dattebayo believe it! their way out of their disabilities. football is weaponized against the police. the protagonist and his current rival have some naruto-sasuke shit going on for no reason. a guy said he had a boner during a televised match once

[mysterycitrus]

would you please elaborate on your comment "renowned hack frank miller" ? i haven't read much from him yet but i like to listen to informed people tell me why [thing] sucks because it's funnier than dc wiki

when someone tells me their favourite comic writer is frank miller my response is the same as when someone tells me their favourite films are american psycho and fight club — i immediately prepare for an irish exit from the convo.

both (some of) miller’s work and those films are influential pieces of art with explicit political ideology, but while american psycho and fight club are (frequently) misinterpreted satire, miller is genuine to the point of hilarity.

if u consume batman as a character in any capacity u cannot escape miller’s influence — batman: year one is the pretty definitive starting point for most fans (and filmmakers, like matt reeves with the batman 2022), and miller’s visual style is a cornerstone for modern comics. the dark knight returns effectively changed how comics were viewed by readers, and is credited with kickstarting the modern age of comic books. i cannot emphasise that even if u haven’t read a miller book u have certainly encountered someone else inspired by his work.

with that said — miller writes like how a racist libertarian who believes his own hype would write about superheroes. greta, u must be wondering, that seems like an awfully specific descriptor to assign to someone. and normally u would be right!

the because im batman schtick that every sixteen year old nolan stan with a twitter account ran into the ground circa 2014 started because of miller, and his success in the 80s led to a number of ill advised projects fueled by his own hype. all star batman and robin was an uncritical interpretation of bruce that embodies all the worst misinterpretations of dc characters, including the justice league, that miller then tried to espouse was satire. unfortunately, he is not smart enough to punch up instead of down — the absurd hypersexualisation of women doesn’t become satire just because you’re laughing at readers in the script, frank.

this, in turn, led to one of the most virulently racist comics ever published — 2011’s islamophic nightmare fuel holy terror. he should not be taken seriously as a creative force, and he should not be the foundation of what comics should be. at least alan moore is marginally less obnoxious and fully admits that the killing joke was a bad idea.

[libertineangel]

60 people, 0.0002% of the population, account for 1.4% of the entire country's income tax revenue, and instead of questioning the existence of such a wealth disparity the BBC is straight up pushing the fucking Atlas Shrugged libertarian stance of "what if taxing the rich more makes them leave and they leave a hugely disproportionate hole in the national budget"

[anethara]

Books I read in August

since it's probably the last month I'll do any pleasure reading for the next two years.

Pageboy by Elliot Page Validating, cathartic, triggering, and absolutely fucking beautiful prose. Like, I want to read novels by this guy. His descriptions of internal and external landscapes are stunning and visceral. A great read especially if you're ftm because it's so familiar; especially if you're cis because it really unpacks and lays bare the intricacies of transness that are so difficult to communicate. It loses a bit of momentum in the eleventh hour, but it's a memoir so...you know, sometimes life is like that. Just read the thing.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion I read this book for the first time in seventh grade; for the second time in sophomore year of high school; for the third time at 21. Reading it at 32 is so much more rewarding than all previous readings (I suspect I will feel this way about reading it at 32 when I read it again sometime around 47). The horrors within it feel more profound; the stakes are much higher. There's a tangible sense of dread from that time that feels almost comforting in its familiarity, as if to say, "History rhymes; we have been here before; it's not too late to turn it around." Really interesting examination of political/cultural group think, and the ways in which opposing sides born of the same puritanical cesspool feed one another in perpetuity. And of course, Didion's style of prose is evergreen.

Real Americans by Rachel Khong I picked this up at a Target while on a trip to Idaho and enjoyed it immensely. The characters are compelling and for all my fellow aging millennials, the jokes will land because they are true and we have to laugh at our financial struggles or else we will have a collective nervous breakdown. My only complaint is that it feels like it should have been three separate books, and this is the only time I think I've ever felt that way. We're always complaining that a trilogy could have been condensed into a single work but for once, it would have been nice to get a richer, fuller story of each generation that the narrative follows.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber This is one of those books where the premise feels like, "Yeah, no shit" to anyone who has worked in the service, hospitality, or manufacturing industries, but there's a lot of good here! It's one thing to know something for anecdotal fact, another to be able to articulate it with data and a cohesive argument. Graeber's system of taxonomy isn't perfect, and his grasp of feminism falls short of ideal (his arguments implicitly condemn sex work while tokenizing sex workers), but generally, the concept is there. This is a useful book to have around if you're an undergrad student who needs a library of citation material for research and persuasive papers. I also think this is an excellent 'baby's first critique of economy' read - a good gift for parents who are exiting their late-life Libertarian phase. The holidays are around the corner!

[azspot]

Actual free markets require a state that is both powerful and constrained. Real technological progress is not solely generated by risk-taking entrepreneur-heroes in a social vacuum. It is also the contingent by-product of a fragile set of common social and political arrangements. Without constitutional constraints, voluntary in­teractions tend, as Silk Road did, to degenerate into gangster capitalism. And the trick of creating a vibrant open order is not to try to escape the sordid bargains of politics, or to eliminate your enemies, but to channel disagreement usefully. You cannot escape the company of those whom you detest, however unpleasant you may find it—that is the fundamental premise of the open society. When you try, you discover (as many libertarian schemers looking to improve the human condition have discovered) that you bring the disagreements along with you. You have to figure out ways to live with those who oppose you and whom you oppose, and ideally to derive collective benefit from your mutual vexations.

No Exit Opportunities: Business Models and Political Thought in Silicon Valley

[lesbianyosano]

DROP THE BSD POLITICAL HCS PLS PLS PLS

ok so i dont have them for all the characters but uhhh here's what i got (this got unnecessarily long so im putting this under the cut):

kunikida is a commie for sure, probably an anarchist and the theory reading kind too. he's probably involved with local initiatives and tried to radicalize his coworkers at least once. he got unreasonably exited when kenji joined bc the kid is definitely a commie as well. kenji is still a little young (plus he barely knows how money works) so he's been actively explaining what capitalism is to him

kenji basically lived in a commune all his life and wants everyone to be happy, learning what capitalism is and how it works made him incredibly sad, but he's also really determined and so he's been talking about communism to everyone he meets when running around the city

ranpo is a centrist, thinks people who are legitimately invested in politics are stupid and foolish and always brings up the horseshoe theory, doesn't help that poe is crazy rich and works for capitalism incarnate

dazai, when asked, will claim whatever political ideology he thinks is the funniest in given situation, which in practice means he talks abt being an anarcho capitalist just to piss kunikida off (he's been very succesfull so far, almost convinced atsushi that the whole thing made sense). for real though, he think politics is stupid and doesn't really have that much impact, but he also only thinks of politics as the direct actions of the government, rather than ideas, and he's met enough politicians in his mafia days to consider the whole thing corrupt and not worth his time (also mori used to canonically make his read theory which i think is so so funny)

atsushi was generally cut off from the world for the majority of his life, so he only started getting interested after joining the ada. he likes to talk about it and tries to watch the news and read theory trying to develop an informed outlook. he's very left leaning and partial to communism too (except for that one time dazai almost convinced him anarcho capitalism makes sense. he doesnt like to think about it)

yosano is a marxist feminist, vehemently anti-war, she used to come to feminist reading group at a local uni. her and kunikida talk abt politics a lot in their free time and recommend books and articles to each other. she's been trying to push kyouka and naomi to look into feminism too (succesfully)

chuuya is a libertarian and i refuse to believe otherwise. he really hated rich people when he was still with the sheep but after joining the mafia and spending too much time with mori and kouyou he decided that being rich was fine, actually. also he commits tax evasion bc why not, it's hardly the worst thing he does tbh, free market enthusiast

mori is a classical liberal, also canonically seems to be pretty well versed in economic theory (he mentions henry kissinger, thomas shelling and john forbes nash during the guild arc, funnily enough). his utalitarianism really comes through when he talks about politics, they're very kill or get killed (literally or economically), believes in free market

fukuzawa is kind of weird, he doesn't really subscribe to any ideology specifically. overall he's left leaning socially (all his kids are gay, so is he) but he's never actively questioned how the world works, or looked for an alternative. worth mentioning, he used to be an assasin for the government, and the only reason he stopped was due to personal disguist with how he was starting to enjoy it, he never seemed to wonder who and why is he killing, he just did his job completely uncritically, actively benefiting the state

as ive said before, fukuchi could be a commie if he wanted to, but instead of taking initiative in publicly speaking on the horrors of war and his hatred for national states he decided to become a cop, literally the worst he could have done

ok these are the ones i have like. active thought about, sorry this got so fucking long and i hope it's not unintelligible

[grandhotelabyss]

Could you please expand on Anglo-Zionism, for those who’ve not read Milton deeply?

I don't actually know what Land is talking about; I was half-guessing, half-quipping. But I imagine it goes something like this. Many of the radical Protestant sects around the time of the English Revolution had a "judiazing" tendency, whether because they were millenarians and expected "the conversion of the Jews" as a prelude to Armageddon or because they were trying to purify the faith of Catholic ornament and therefore rooted themselves more strongly in the Hebrew Bible. Cromwell re-admitted the Jews to England in the 1650s (after their banishment in 1290). The Puritans who founded America—archetypal "Exiters" in Land's political vocabulary—saw themselves as typologically recapitulating and fulfilling the escape from captivity, the wandering in the wilderness, and the nation-building of the ancient Hebrews. Milton demotes both Greco-Roman epic and Anglo-Norman romance below Biblical subject matter early in Paradise Lost, with an implicit puritan rebuke to the likes of Chaucer and Spenser, even as he finds biblical precedent in his revolutionary polemics for dispatching the king. In short, English puritanism, one source of the libertarianism Land extols, had a philo-Semitic strain as part of its hatred of "Rome," a sense of affinity between English and Jewish people's history and destiny. Meanwhile, neoreaction's vision of breakaway polities in a global "patchwork" of sovereignties resembles Zionism, since Zionism's opposite, "diaspora," tends to imply not small discrete countries but some kind of empire (again, "Rome") with easy border crossings and no ethnic or religious requirements for citizenship. Now that the present political polarization requires a defense of Zionism from Land's side, if for no other reason than to own the libs, this is a convenient theoretical backing. But I'm not a historian, or even an historian, so I could possibly be off the track. Someone should ask him!

[a-god-in-ruins-rises]

How do you reconcile your authoritarian statism with the founders desires for a small and limited government? It seems kind of unAmerican to me.

good question. i get it a fair bit. it also tells me you're a new follower because this is something i talk about quite a lot. so welcome.

but yeah this is a myth perpetuated by liberals (when i say liberals i am referring to classical liberals, neoliberals, and libertarians).

the constitution was explicitly about giving the federal government /more/ power. the articles of confederation were a disaster which resulted in an impotent federal government that couldn't really do anything. and so our founders strived to create a new government that was more powerful and more effective. and that's what they really wanted. they didn't think in terms of big vs small government. they thought in terms of good government vs bad government.

but yeah, the libertarians who pretend to be the inheritors of the "spirit of 1776" would all be calling our founding fathers fascists and statists if they knew the truth.

also, on the subject of limited government; there is this misconception that limited government naturally entails a "small" government. but that isn't necessarily the case. limited doesn't mean small. it just means limited. and considering our founding fathers were exiting an age where the powers of monarchical governments were basically /unlimited/ the powers given to the federal government, though broad and expansive, were still relatively limited in comparison.

so how do i reconcile my beliefs with those of our founders'? pretty easily. i think my beliefs more closely approximate the founders' actual beliefs than the average "small government" liberal's.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

Tonight (September 12) at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. On September 14, I'm hosting the EFF Awards in San Francisco.

#15yrsago Mom accused of stealing daughter’s identity to attend highschool and become a cheerleader https://web.archive.org/web/20080916071716/http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ipppcZU-H4xC9lQiAOQFSF-cfrdAD935H3G80

#15yrsago DHS: HOWTO stop (other governments’) creepy spooks from reading your hard drive and email https://web.archive.org/web/20080913005403/http://secure.wikileaks.org/wiki/US_DHS:_Foreign_Travel_Threat_Assessment:_Electronic_Communications_Vulnerabilities_2008

#10yrsago Feynman lectures as HTML https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_toc.html

#10yrsago David Cameron appoints a Witchfinder General for copyright https://torrentfreak.com/uk-prime-minister-appoints-new-anti-piracy-enforcement-advisor-130913/

#10yrsago Google’s lobbyists go big on climate change denial, raise money for Inhofe & Competitive Enterprise Insitute https://memex.craphound.com/2013/09/13/googles-lobbyists-go-big-on-climate-change-denial-raise-money-for-inhofe-competitive-enterprise-insitute/

#10yrsago Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel apologizes for decades of police torture https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2013/0912/Chicago-Mayor-Rahm-Emanuel-apologizes-for-two-decades-of-police-torture

#10yrsago Why fingerprints make lousy authentication tokens https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/iphone-5s-thieves-may-mutilate-owners-in-bid-to-gain-access-to-fingerprintreading-handsets-expert-warns-8808577.html

#5yrsago Sony: OK, OK, we don’t own Bach https://www.eff.org/takedowns/sony-finally-admits-it-doesnt-own-bach-and-it-only-took-public-pressure

#5yrsago Machine learning scientist quits Google over plan to launch censored Chinese search tool https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/google-china-search-engine-employee-resigns/

#5yrsago Charter, ordered out of New York State, begs for its life https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/09/charter-negotiating-with-ny-to-avoid-being-kicked-out-of-the-state/

#5yrsago 20% of New York retail space is sitting vacant https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/06/nyregion/nyc-storefront-vacancy.html

#5yrsago Viral road-rage video sparks mob violence in Beijing, revealing deep regional rifts https://www.whatsonweibo.com/fury-and-loathing-in-fengtai-how-one-incident-sparked-chaos-in-beijing-neighbourhood/

#5yrsago Six years ago, North Carolina Republicans passed a law decreeing that the seas weren’t rising https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/12/north-carolina-didnt-like-science-on-sea-levels-so-passed-a-law-against-it

#5yrsago How anarchist organizers in rural Puerto Rico rebooted their power grid after the privatized power company abandoned them https://www.newsweek.com/puerto-ricans-restore-power-after-hurricane-maria-1114070

#5yrsago “Spread Pricing” transparency reveals the millions CVS rakes in by gouging Medicare and prisons on prescription markups https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-drug-spread-pricing/

#5yrsago Trade negotiators are increasingly unwilling to entertain “corporate sovereignty” clauses https://www.techdirt.com/2018/09/13/corporate-sovereignty-wane-as-governments-realize-more-trouble-than-worth/

#1yrago Survival of the Richest: Douglas Rushkoff on the eschatology of libertarian exit https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

[mitchipedia]

Exit.

Libertarians such as Peter Thiel dream of escaping society, and they’re tearing society apart to do it.

Hari Kunzru at Harpers:

If freedom is to be found through an exit from politics, then it follows that the degradation of the political process in all its forms—the integrity of the voting system, standards in public life, trust in institutions, the peaceful transfer of power—is a worthy project. If Thiel, the elite Stanford technocrat, is funding disruptive populists in American elections, it’s not necessarily because he believes in the wisdom of their policy prescriptions. They are the tribunes of the “unthinking demos.” If the masses want their Jesus and a few intellectuals to string up, it’s no skin off Charles Koch’s nose. Populism is useful to elite libertarians because applying centrifugal force to the political system creates exit opportunities. But for whom?

…

Fueled by the pandemic and the crypto boom, such exit schemes have multiplied. Bitcoiners look for an escape from financial oversight and transhumanists look to escape their bodies, while rich preppers design personal lifeboats to escape from social collapse. Some exit evangelists, such as the investor Balaji S. Srinivasan, are still touting the project of a new nation of “cloud first, land last.” Others are just making sure that in the great supermarket sweep of life, they get to fill their shopping carts before their neighbors do.

[penworthy]

“The rise of commercial space travel has not just revolutionized the practicalities of space flight; it has also shaped the way we view space itself. Historically, black holes, hurtling comets, and solar flares have haunted our cultural imagination. The darkness of space has provided a vehicle for our thanatophobic anxieties—eliciting the endlessness, loneliness, and detachment of death—while dying astronauts have been reified in pop culture as symbols of human corporeality and fragility.

Watching films like Gravity or 2001: A Space Odyssey, we see these terrors concretized as our heroes float, umbilical cords severed, toward a silent yet violent demise. Though in fact only three people have ever died in space—Georgy Dobrovolsky, Viktor Patsayev, and Vladislav Volkov—our hyperbolized idea of its danger speaks to a primal desire for control over the chaos of the universe and a need to find meaning within our comparatively small lives.

But as technologist and designer Neilson Koerner-Safrata explains in his research project KOSMOS/NEKROS, the popular understanding of death in space has changed. As he writes, “the cosmologies of the past sacralize space as the site where the divine epilogue of life takes place. Today, space is now being framed on our behalf as a moratorium on EXIT or NO EXIT, where what is at stake for life must be decided up there or down here.”

Put differently, space once seemed to be the ultimate reminder of human mortality and insignificance, but now it seems to represent the opposite—yet another domain for human domination. Koerner-Safrata identifies one reason for the change as the “techno-libertarians and champions of space settlement [who] sermonize on behalf of space: ‘humans need a frontier,’ ‘space is human destiny.’”

Space is no longer the terrain of martyrs and deities but rather that of hubristic billionaires who hope to prolong human life by expanding the landscape of human habitation. The dawn of space tourism and the images it evokes—cruise liners, cut-offs, and caipirinhas—has had a normalizing effect, making even the most inhospitable atmosphere for humans seem approachable.”

-Heavenly Bodies by Olivia Church

[axvoter]

Blatantly Partisan Party Review XI (Victoria 2022): Liberal Democratic Party

Prior reviews: federal 2013, VIC 2014, federal 2016, VIC 2018, NSW 2019, federal 2019, federal 2022

What I said before: “This is a cynical and callous party for people who lack empathy. Its economic and social policies are destructive; its approach to firearms is dangerous; its blinkered hostility to government accepts no possibility it can be used for—or that there even is such a thing as—collective good.” (federal 2022)

What I think this time: Every election, I think to myself that I should simply add this party to the list of parties I do not review. Unfortunately, the only reason I do not review a party is because they are likely to be very well known to my readers. The Liberal Democrats are too obscure for me to justify this.

So, why do I wish I could just skip right past them? They are aggressive right-libertarians, a callous “I got mine” ideology that assumes the worst about everyone. Think of the worst Ayn Rand stans or the most zealous gun nuts. I didn’t think they could get much worse than being intellectually bankrupt ideologues, but then the pandemic happened and they embraced anti-lockdown cooker attitudes. Their MPs pledge to never vote for a tax increase or a reduction in liberties, and it turns out blinkered one-size-fits-all pledges like these are utterly unable to address the complex realities of the world, because guess what! Pandemics sometimes require temporary restrictions for public health and everyone’s long-term liberty and happiness! Instead of explaining that exceptional circumstances require exceptional policies, they decided to bray against every pandemic measure they could.

Not only does the Liberal Democrats’ name routinely mislead people trying to find the Liberals or the Australian Democrats on massive upper-house ballots, but also this party that claims to be so democratic is in fact committed to anti-democratic Group Ticket Voting. Its members have advanced spurious defences of this system, which funnels all above-the-line votes to parties chosen through backroom deals rather than by voters themselves. The Liberal Democrats have benefitted enormously from this anti-democratic lottery: their two current members of the Legislative Council harvested preferences so well in 2018 that they won from primary votes of 0.84% (David Limbrick) and 3.78% (Tim Quilty). Both of these occurred because of completely artificial GTV preference flows that we can verify from other elections would not have happened if above-the-line voters had been able to distribute their own preferences.

On a lighter note, Quilty has peddled “Rexit” or “regional exit”, the creation of a regional state in inland Victoria and NSW separated from the control of Melbourne and Sydney. It is one of the more comical new state proposals of recent years. But he even got Victoria’s Parliamentary Budget Office to do an economic profile for his fever dream. Enjoy.

My recommendation: Give the Liberal Democratic Party a weak or no preference. Remember to vote below the line on the large ballot for the Legislative Council so that your preference goes where you want it to go; all ballots with 5 or more preferences marked below the line are valid votes.

Website: https://vic.ldp.org.au/

[cherry-bot]

Speaking of going without garbage men, exit Libertarians pursued by bears.

tl;dr A lot of them didn't want to pay for garbage removal and refused to live in bear- proof housing. So bears did what bears do best.

(Edit: Now with 100% more links)

[dailyanarchistposts]

I.4.7 What will stop producers ignoring consumers?

It is often claimed that without a market producers would ignore the needs of consumers. Without the threat (and fear) of unemployment and destitution and the promise of higher profits, producers would turn out shoddy goods. The holders of this argument point to the example of the Soviet Union which was notorious for terrible goods and a lack of consumer commodities.

Capitalism, in comparison to the old Soviet block, does, to some degree, make the producers accountable to the consumers. If the producer ignores the desires of the consumer then they will loose business to those who do not and be forced, perhaps, out of business (large companies, of course, due to their resources can hold out far longer than smaller ones). Thus we have the carrot (profits) and the stick (fear of poverty) — although, of course, the carrot can be used as a stick against the consumer (no profit, no sale, no matter how much the consumer may need it). Ignoring the obvious objection to this analogy (namely we are human beings, not donkeys!) it does have contain an important point. What will ensure that consumer needs are meet in an anarchist society?

In an Individualist or Mutualist anarchist system, as it is based on a market, producers would be subject to market forces and so have to meet consumers needs. Collectivist-anarchism meets consumer needs in a similar way, as producers would be accountable to consumers by the process of buying and selling between co-operatives. As James Guillaume put it, the workers associations would “deposit their unconsumed commodities in the facilities provided by the [communal] Bank of Exchange … The Bank of Exchange would remit to the producers negotiable vouchers representing the value of their products” (this value “having been established in advance by a contractual agreement between the regional co-operative federations and the various communes”). [“On Building the New Social Order”, pp. 356–79, Bakunin on Anarchism, pp. 366] If the goods are not in demand then the producer associations would not be able to sell the product of their labour to the Bank of Exchange (or directly to other syndicates or communes) and so they would adjust their output accordingly. Of course, there are problems with these systems due to their basis in the market (as discussed in section I.1.3), although these problems were recognised by Proudhon who argued for an agro-industrial federation to protect self-management from the negative effects of market forces (as noted in section I.3.5).

While mutualist and collectivist anarchists can argue that producers would respond to consumer needs otherwise they would not get an income, communist-anarchists (as they seek a moneyless society) cannot argue their system would reward producers in this way. So what mechanism exists to ensure that “the wants of all” are, in fact, met? How does anarcho-communism ensure that production becomes “the mere servant of consumption” and “mould itself on the wants of the consumer, not dictate to him conditions”? [Peter Kropotkin, Act for Yourselves, p. 57] Libertarian communists argue that in a free communist society consumers’ needs would be met. This is because of the decentralised and federal nature of such a society.

So what is the mechanism which makes producers accountable to consumers in a libertarian communist society? Firstly, communes would practice their power of “exit” in the distributive network. If a syndicate was producing sub-standard goods or refusing to change their output in the face of changing consumer needs, then the communal stores would turn to those syndicates which were producing the goods desired. The original syndicates would then be producing for their own stocks, a pointless task and one few, if any, would do. After all, people generally desire their work to have meaning, to be useful. To just work, producing something no-one wanted would be such a demoralising task that few, if any, sane people would do it (under capitalism people put up with spirit destroying work as some income is better than none, such an “incentive” would not exist in a free society).

As can be seen, “exit” would still exist in libertarian communism. However, it could be argued that unresponsive or inefficient syndicates would still exist, exploiting the rest of society by producing rubbish (or goods which are of less than average quality) and consuming the products of other people’s labour, confident that without the fear of poverty and unemployment they can continue to do this indefinitely. Without the market, it is argued, some form of bureaucracy would be required (or develop) which would have the power to punish such syndicates. Thus the state would continue in “libertarian” communism, with the “higher” bodies using coercion against the lower ones to ensure they meet consumer needs or produced enough.

While, at first glance, this appears to be a possible problem on closer inspection it is flawed. This is because anarchism is based not only on “exit” but also “voice”. Unlike capitalism, libertarian communism is based on association and communication. Each syndicate and commune is in free agreement and confederation with all the others. Thus, is a specific syndicate was producing bad goods or not pulling its weight, then those in contact with them would soon realise this. First, those unhappy with a syndicate’s work would appeal to them directly to get their act together. If this did not work, then they would notify their disapproval by refusing to associate with them in the future (i.e. they would use their power of “exit” as well as refusing to provide the syndicate with any goods it requires). They would also let society as a whole know (via the media) as well as contacting consumer groups and co-operatives and the relevant producer and communal confederations which they and the other syndicate are members of, who would, in turn, inform their members of the problems (the relevant confederations could include local and regional communal confederations, the general cross-industry confederation, its own industrial/communal confederation and the confederation of the syndicate not pulling its weight). In today’s society, a similar process of “word of mouth” warnings and recommendations goes on, along with consumer groups and media. Our suggestions here are an extension of this common practice (that this process exists suggests that the price mechanism does not, in fact, provide consumers with all the relevant information they need to make decisions, but this is an aside).

If the syndicate in question, after a certain number of complaints had been lodged against it, still did not change its ways, then it would suffer non-violent direct action. This would involve the boycotting of the syndicate and (perhaps) its local commune (such as denying it products and investment), so resulting in the syndicate being excluded from the benefits of association. The syndicate would face the fact that no one else wanted to associate with it and suffer a drop in the goods coming its way, including consumption products for its members. In effect, a similar process would occur to that of a firm under capitalism that looses its customers and so its income. However, we doubt that a free society would subject any person to the evils of destitution or starvation (as capitalism does). Rather, a bare minimum of goods required for survival would still be available.

In the unlikely event this general boycott did not result in a change of heart, then two options are left available. These are either the break-up of the syndicate and the finding of its members new work places or the giving/selling of the syndicate to its current users (i.e. to exclude them from the society they obviously do not want to be part off). The decision of which option to go for would depend on the importance of the workplace in question and the desires of the syndicates’ members. If the syndicate refused to disband, then option two would be the most logical choice (unless the syndicate controlled a scare resource). The second option would, perhaps, be best as this would drive home the benefits of association as the expelled syndicate would have to survive on its own, subject to survival by selling the product of its labour and would soon return to the fold.

Kropotkin argued in these terms over 100 years ago:

“When a railway company, federated with other companies, fails to fulfil its engagements, when its trains are late and goods lie neglected at the stations, the other companies threaten to cancel the contract, and that threat usually suffices. “It is generally believed … that commerce only keeps to its engagements from fear of lawsuits. Nothing of the sort; nine times in ten the trader who has not kept his word will not appear before a judge … the sole fact of having driven a creditor to bring a lawsuit suffices for the vast majority of merchants to refuse for good to have any dealings with a man who has compelled one of them to go to law. “This being so, why should means that are used today among … traders in the trade, and railway companies in the organisation of transport, not be made use of in a society based on voluntary work?” [The Conquest of Bread, p. 153]

Thus, to ensure producer accountability of production to consumption, no bureaucratic body is required in libertarian communism (or any other form of anarchism). Rather, communication and direct action by those affected by unresponsive producers would be an effective and efficient means of ensuring the accountability of production to consumption.