“. . . Capitalism, over the past few centuries, has mostly followed an extensive growth model based on the addition of more material inputs, rather than an intensive one based on making more efficient use of existing inputs. This is why corporate agribusiness is so inefficient in terms of output per acre, compared to small-scale intensive forms of cultivation: it treats land as a free good. So Latin American haciendas hold almost 90% of their ill-gotten land out of cultivation, while neighboring land-poor peasants must resort to working for them as wage laborers. And the U.S. government actually pays farmers to hold land out of use, so that sitting on unused arable land becomes a real estate investment with a guaranteed return.

Over the past century or so, the socialization of corporate inputs has become the primary expense of the state. The state subsidized the railroad and interstate highway networks, built the civil aviation system at taxpayer expense, gives oil and other extractive industries priority access to public lands, fights wars for oil, and uses the Navy to keep sea lanes open for oil tankers and container ships (See Carson, Organization Theory, pp. 65-70).

Capitalist industry follows a model based on subsidized waste and planned obsolescence, in order to avoid idle capacity. The very accounting models used by corporate management and econometricians treats the expenditure of resources as the creation of value.

On the other hand capitalist property rights make ideas, techniques, and innovations artificially costly, erect barriers and toll-gates against their adoption, and make cooperation artificially difficult.

Intellectual property causes gross price distortions, so that owners can charge monopoly rents for the replication of information (songs, books, articles, movies, software, etc.) whose marginal reproduction cost is zero. And in the case of copying new designs for physical goods or techniques for producing them, the majority of a product’s price often comes from embedded monopoly rents on patents rather than actual material and labor costs.

Copyrights on scientific research and patents on new inventions also impede the “shoulders of giants” effect, by which technological progress results from ideas being aggregated or combined in new ways. For example, according to Johann Soderberg (Hacking Capitalism), further refinement of the steam engine came to a near stop until James Watt’s patent expired.

Patents enable transnational corporations to control who is and is not allowed to produce. As a result, they’re able to offshore production to independent contractors in low-wage countries, retain a legal monopoly on the right to sell the product, and charge enormous markups over actual production cost.
Similar irrationalities result from the way ownership and governance rights are drawn for the business firm. Because governance authority is vested in a hierarchy of managers who (at least theoretically) represent a class of absentee shareholders, rather than in those whose efforts and distributed knowledge are actually needed for production, the firm is riddled with information and incentive problems and fundamental conflicts of interest.

For example, although most improvements in efficiency and productivity result from workers’ distributed knowledge of the work process and the human capital they’ve built up through their relationships on the job, they have a rational incentive to hoard knowledge because they know any contribution they make to productivity will be expropriated by management in the form of bonuses, and used against them in the form of speedups and downsizing. And even though workers’ knowledge of the production process is the primary source of efficiency improvements, management cannot afford to trust workers with the discretion to use that knowledge because their interests are fundamentally at odds with those of management. With information flow so grossly distorted by authoritarian hierarchy, management lives in a bubble and is forced to reduce its reliance on workers’ knowledge, simplifying the work process from above to make it more “legible” (see James Scott, Seeing Like a State) through dumbed-down Taylorist work rules. And management is forced to devote enormous resources to internal surveillance and enforcement of discipline, compared to self-managed enterprises.

Mises dismissed Oskar Lange’s market social model as “playing at capitalism,” because enterprise managers would be risking capital that they themselves did not own or stand to lose. So they would be rewarded on the upside for returns on investment without suffering personal consequences for losses.
But corporate managers under American capitalism are playing at markets every bit as much as the managers in Lange’s proposed model. Shareholders are the residual claimant of the enterprise only in theory, and even then actual legal ownership is vested in a fictional person distinct from any or all shareholders, either severally or collectively. In reality, corporate management has the same relation to the corporation’s capital (which it claims to be administering in the name of the shareholders) that the Soviet bureaucracy had over the means of production it claimed to administer in the name of the people: That is, it’s a self-perpetuating oligarchy in control of a large mass of capital which it has absolute discretion over, but did not itself contribute and does not personally stand to lose. In this environment, corporate managers’ standard approach is to hollow out long-term productive capacity and gut human capital in order to massage the short term numbers and game their own compensation, leaving the consequences to their successors after they move on….

In short, if any environment could be seen as conducive to “calculational chaos,” it’s the environment created in the capitalist economy Mises and Hayek defended. In every one of these cases, a more “socialistic” set of property rules — commons-based land and resource governance, free information, worker ownership and management of the enterprise — would result in more rationality than we have now.

In every case, property rights are assigned not only to someone other than those with the most stake in increasing efficiency, but to someone whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of actual producers and whose wealth and income derive from extracting rents from them.”

#KevinCarson

“Networked organization is based on a principle known as stigmergy—a term coined by biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse in the 1950s to describe the process by which termites coordinate their activity. Social insects coordinate their efforts through the independent responses of individuals to environmental triggers like chemical markers, without any need for a central coordinating authority. It was subsequently applied to the analysis of human society.

As a sociological term stigmergy refers primarily to the kinds of networked organization associated with wikis, group blogs, and “leaderless” organizations configured along the lines of networked cells.

“Networked organization is based on a principle known as stigmergy—a term coined by biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse in the 1950s to describe the process by which termites coordinate their activity. Social insects coordinate their efforts through the independent responses of individuals to environmental triggers like chemical markers, without any need for a central coordinating authority. It was subsequently applied to the analysis of human society.

As a sociological term stigmergy refers primarily to the kinds of networked organization associated with wikis, group blogs, and “leaderless” organizations configured along the lines of networked cells.”
Social negotiation, according to Mark Elliott, is the traditional method of organizing collaborative group efforts, through agreements and compromise mediated by discussions between individuals. The exponential growth in the number of communications with the size of the group, obviously, imposes constraints on the feasible size of a collaborative group, before coordination must be achieved by hierarchy and top-down authority. Stigmergy, on the other hand, permits collaboration on an unlimited scale by individuals acting independently. This distinction between social negotiation and stigmergy is illustrated, in particular, by the contrast between traditional models of co-authoring and collaboration in a wiki. Individuals communicate indirectly, “via the stigmergic medium.” He makes a parallel distinction elsewhere between “discursive collaboration” and “stigmergic collaboration.” “… . [W]hen stigmergic collaboration is extended by computing and digital networks, a considerable augmentation of processing capacity takes place which allows for the bridging of the spatial and temporal limitations of discursive collaboration, while subtly shifting points of negotiation and interaction away from the social and towards the cultural.”

Stigmergic organization results in modular, building-block architectures. Such structures are ubiquitous because a modular structure:

“transforms a system’s ability to learn, evolve and adapt… . Once a set of building blocks… . has been tweaked and refined and thoroughly debugged through experience… . then it can generally be adapted and recombined to build a great many new concepts… . Certainly that’s a much more efficient way to create something new than starting all over from scratch. And that fact, in turn, suggests a whole new mechanism for adaptation in general. Instead of moving through that immense space of possibilities step by step, so to speak, an adaptive system can reshuffle its building blocks and take giant leaps.

A small number of building blocks can be shuffled and recombined to make a huge number of complex systems.

If you start with a large number of modular individuals, each capable of interacting with a few other individuals, and acting on other individuals according to a simple grammar of a few rules, under the right circumstances the modular individuals can undergo a rapid phase transition, according to systems theorist Stuart Kauffman: “The growth of complexity really does have something to do with far-from-equilibrium systems building themselves up, cascading to higher and higher levels of organization. Atoms, molecules, autocatalytic sets, et cetera.”

Gus diZerega’s discussion of spontaneous orders is closely analogous to stigmergy. Spontaneous orders:

“arise from networks of independent equals whose actions generate positive and negative feedback that help guide future actors in pursuing their own independently conceived plans, thereby continuing the feedback process. Each person is a node within a network and is linked by feedback, with each node free to act on its own. The feedback they generate minimizes the knowledge anyone needs about the system as a whole in order to succeed within it.

All spontaneous orders possess certain abstract features in common. Participants are equal in status and all are equally subject to whatever rules must be followed to participate within the order. All are free to apply these rules to any project of their choosing. Anything that can be pursued without violating a rule is permitted, including pursuing mutually contradictory goals. Finally, these rules facilitate cooperation among strangers based on certain broadly shared values that are simpler than the values actually motivating many people when they participate. Compared to human beings, spontaneous orders are “value-thin.”

In netwar, say Rand theorists John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt:

“many small units “already know what they must do”, and are aware that “they must communicate with each other not in order to prepare for action, but only as a consequence of action, and, above all, through action.”

Far from submerging “individual authorial voice” in the “collective,” as Jaron Lanier and Mark Helprin claim, stigmergy synthesizes the highest realizations of both individualism and collectivism, and represents each of them in its most completely actualized form, without qualifying or impairing either in any way. Michel Bauwens uses the term “cooperative individualism”:

“this turn to the collective that the emergence of peer to peer represents does not in any way present a loss of individuality, even of individualism. Rather it ‘transcends and includes’ individualism and collectivism in a new unity, which I would like to call ‘cooperative individualism’. The cooperativity is not necessarily intentional (i.e. the result of conscious altruism), but constitutive of our being, and the best applications of P2P, are based on this idea.

Stigmergy is not “collectivist” in the traditional sense, as it was understood in the days when a common effort on any significant scale required a large organization to represent the collective, and the administrative coordination of individual efforts through a hierarchy. But it is the ultimate realization of collectivism, in that it removes the transaction cost of concerted action by many individuals.

It is the ultimate in individualism because all actions are the free actions of individuals, and the “collective” is simply the sum total of individual actions. Every individual is free to formulate any innovation she sees fit, without any need for permission from the collective, and everyone is free to adopt it or not. In this regard it attains the radical democratic ideal of unanimous consent of the governed,..”

#KevinCarson “The Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing Power of Individuals and Networks”

“In this regard, despite all his criticism of the Old Left for its emphasis on centralization and hierarchy, Bookchin himself is very much in the tradition of the Old Left insofar as he lionizes organizational mass and coordination, and envisions a future society organized around a schematically imposed template rather than an organic mixture of diverse institutions. For Bookchin, the city, rather than being an emergent ecosystem made up of many different types of horizontally linked institutions, is simply a set of institutions all owned and managed by the popular assemblies. By requiring deliberation and majority votes even when agreement on common policy is unnecessary, his model effectively destroys the very basis of networked institutions’ superior agility over the dinosaur hierarchies they’re replacing.

Bookchin strawmans anarchism as somehow ignoring the middle realm between “a workaday world of everyday life that is properly social” including the home and workplace, and all the individual counter-institutions like the cooperatives and such that he lists above, on the one hand, and the state on the other. At the same time, he accuses anarchists of conflating the political realm—which amounts to what most people would call “governance” and involves the coordination of social life—with the state. But he himself conflates the middle realm of civil society, and the governance function, with the particular organizational form of the municipal assembly, and pretends that the only choice is between his Rosetta Stone model of popular assemblies and the atomism he attributes to the anarchists. Municipal assemblies are the one, true, only possible form that coordination and governance can take; either they do it, or it doesn’t get done. “Either municipalized enterprises controlled by citizens’ assemblies will try to take over the economy, or capitalism will prevail in this sphere of life with a forcefulness that no mere rhetoric can diminish.”

Contrast Bookchin’s monoculture of “municipalized enterprises controlled by popular assemblies” with a polycentric governance model characterized a wide variety of overlapping commons-based institutions, cooperative enterprises, community-owned enterprises and so forth, with partially interlocking memberships and a loose “common law” of governance rules worked out horizontally between them.

A good example of this can be found in the fictional northern New England society of the 22nd century, which has emerged from the 20th century “Time of Troubles,” in Roy Morrison’s Eco Civilization 2140. Some, but nowhere near all, local economic functions in Warner, N.H. are carried out by community stakeholder cooperatives; some are socially owned rather than being municipal government property (community-based), while others are actually municipal property (town-based). The people of Warner meet as owners of Warner Community Enterprises to make business decisions for the cooperatives on the same week the annual Town Meeting is held. The dividing line between community-based and town-based is really not very sharp; some community-based cooperatives are fairly closely intertwined with town governance, while some town-based cooperatives have charters that grant them a high degree of autonomy in their operations.

And the community-based and town-based cooperatives coexist with a wide variety of other local consumer or worker cooperatives. In some cases, the municipal cooperatives or socially-owned stakeholder cooperatives have partial ownership stakes in private cooperatives.

Beyond institutions for pooling costs and risks and providing common access to productive resources on the retail level—like the multi-family cohousing arrangements, micro-villages and sharing institutions we looked at in the previous section—cities as a whole can provide commons infrastructures and platforms at the municipal level to support the variety of smaller projects within their bounds.

And this does not by any means have to be done under the auspices of official municipal government—even one domesticated as a Partner State. Urban- based resistance movements have a long history of providing alternative infrastructures for social support. Consider, for example, the school lunch programs, daycare centers and community patrols organized by the Black Panthers Party. Or—as David Harvey notes—the construction by Hamas and Hezbollah “of alternative urban governance structures, incorporating everything from garbage removal to social support payments and neighborhood administrations.”

Commons-based institutions—platform cooperatives for sharing spare capacity of assets like cars and housing, community gardens, Fab Labs, community land trusts, information commons, and community currencies—can integrate horizontally to form an interlocking, mutually supporting post-capitalist ecosystem for the city as a whole.
Bollier envisions commons-based urban economies with components like:

Creative Commons Licensing, which enables people to share and freely use creative works

FabLabs and Makerspaces, which are new social forms for creating valuable stuff through a commons-based collaboration
Platform Cooperatives, which create shared platforms “as an antidote to the so-called death stars” of the sharing economy

Alternative Currencies as a way to retain some of the value created regionally as opposed to having it siphoned away”

Non-digital commons projects, including land trusts, urban agriculture and community gardens, and participatory budgeting projects which empower citizens to work with city leaders to create budget priorities.”

#KevinCarson “Exodus: The General Idea of The Revolution”

https://www.academia.edu/resource/work/47513528

"And as Reason's Jesse Walker points out, even the most “progressive” healthcare proposals, right up to and including single payer (or even direct government delivery of service, along the lines of the British National Health), leave the basic institutional culture of healthcare entirely untouched. A single-payer system, far from being radical:

"would still accept the institutional premises of the present medical system. Consider the typical American health care transaction. On one side of the exchange you’ll have one of an artificially limited number of providers, many of them concentrated in those enormous, faceless institutions called hospitals. On the other side, making the purchase, is not a patient but one of those enormous, faceless institutions called insurers. The insurers, some of which are actual arms of the government and some of which merely owe their customers to the government’s tax incentives and shape their coverage to fit the government’s mandates, are expected to pay all or a share of even routine medical expenses. The result is higher costs, less competition, less transparency, and, in general, a system where the consumer gets about as much autonomy and respect as the stethoscope. Radical reform would restore power to the patient. Instead, the issue on the table is whether the behemoths we answer to will be purely public or public-private partnerships.” "

#KevinCarson #Healthcare

https://c4ss.org/content/2088

Before we were dependent on a capitalist or political class for our #healthcare, the vast majority of the poor and working class in Europe and the U.S. organized it through their unions or fraternal societies.They also organized child care, vocational training, unemployment insurance, life and disability insurance, and even an HMO-type healthcare insurance program sometimes called “lodge practice.”

Average annual cost for member healthcare was $1 to $2, or a day’s wage. The average cost of care for a single private doctor visit was $1 to $2. Many doctors competed vigorously among one another for the attention of these for these worker cooperatives. Lodge Contracts offered predictable income. For Ivy League doctors, the institution of lodge practice in which doctors bid for a chance to ‘serve as employees to uneducated laborers,’ or in which ‘tradesmen’ judged the work of doctors, was seen as degrading, and a practice that would bankrupt the industry. They eventually lobbied congress to regulate it from existence.
#KevinCarson has some great modern day examples and analysis in his paper “The Healthcare Crisis: A Crisis of Artificial Scarcity,” such as Dr. John Muney, the Qliance clinic in Seattle, and the Ithaca Health Alliance.

https://c4ss.org/content/2088

The IWW really is a living monument - a monument to the truth that unions do not rely on state violence or force. If anything states limit union and labor power. Don’t every let anyone tell you unions use state force to get what they want! The history and narrative in the second half of #KevinCarson ’s “The Ethics of Labor Struggle” sums it up well. A lot of good quotes in it, but I like the ending best:

"In short, the labor regime created by Wagner and Taft-Hartley compelled labor to fight by management’s rules. It was the moral equivalent of telling the farmer militiamen at Lexington and Concord to come out from behind those rocks, put on red uniforms, and march in formation—in return for a promise that they wouldn’t lose all the time.

…The AFL-CIO’s Lane Kirkland, at one point, half-heartedly suggested that things would be easier if Congress repealed all labor laws, and let labor and management go at it “mano a mano.”

It’s time to take up Kirkland’s half-hearted suggestion, not just as a throwaway line, but as a challenge to the bosses:
We’ll gladly forgo federal certification of unions, and legal protections against punitive firing of union organizers, if you’ll forgo the court injunctions and cooling-off periods and arbitration. We’ll leave you free to fire organizers at will, to bring back the yellow dog contract, if you leave us free to engage in sympathy and boycott strikes all the way up and down the production chain, to boycott retailers, and to strike against the hauling of scab cargo, etc., effectively turning every strike into a general strike. We give up Wagner (such as it is), and you give up Taft-Hartley and the Railway Labor Relations Act. Instead of hiding behind the skirts of state bureaucrats, we’ll embrace the potential of on-the-job direct action, and exploit all the possibilities of the Internet in exposing the filth of you cockroaches to the light of day.

You people who have whined about “class warfare” for so long will get a taste of what class war is really all about, when the other side starts fighting back for a change.”

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kevin-carson-the-ethics-of-labor-struggle-a-free-market-perspective

“An interesting experiment in restoring the "circuit of labor" through barter exchange was Depression-era organizations like the Unemployed Cooperative Relief Organization and Unemployed Exchange Association:

“...The real economy was still there—paralyzed but still there. Farmers were still producing, more than they could sell. Fruit rotted on trees, vegetables in the fields. In January 1933, dairymen poured more than 12,000 gallons of milk into the Los Angeles City sewers every day.

The factories were there too. Machinery was idle. Old trucks were in side lots, needing only a little repair. All that capacity on the one hand, legions of idle men and women on the other. It was the financial casino that had failed, not the workers and machines. On street corners and around bare kitchen tables, people started to put two and two together. More precisely, they thought about new ways of putting two and two together....

In the spring of 1932, in Compton, California, an unemployed World War I veteran walked out to the farms that still ringed Los Angeles. He offered his labor in return for a sack of vegetables, and that evening he returned with more than his family needed. The next day a neighbor went out with him to the fields. Within two months 500 families were members of the Unemployed Cooperative Relief Organization (UCRO).

That group became one of 45 units in an organization that served the needs of some 150,000 people.

It operated a large warehouse, a distribution center, a gas and service station, a refrigeration facility, a sewing shop, a shoe shop, even medical services, all on cooperative principles. Members were expected to work two days a week, and benefits were allocated according to need....

The UCRO was just one organization in one city. Groups like it ultimately involved more than 1.3 million people, in more than 30 states. It happened spontaneously, without experts or blueprints. Most of the participants were blue collar workers whose formal schooling had stopped at high schools. Some groups evolved a kind of money to create more flexibility in exchange. An example was the Unemployed Exchange Association, or UXA, based in Oakland, California.... UXA began in a Hooverville... called "Pipe City,” near the East Bay waterfront. Hundreds of homeless people were living there in sections of large sewer pipe that were never laid because the city ran out of money. Among them was Carl Rhodehamel, a musician and engineer.

Rhodehamel and others started going door to door in Oakland, offering to do home repairs in exchange for unwanted items. They repaired these and circulated them among themselves. Soon they established a commissary and sent scouts around the city and into the surrounding farms to see what they could scavenge or exchange labor for. Within six months they had 1,500 members, and a thriving sub-economy that included a foundry and machine shop, woodshop, garage, soap, factory, print shop, wood lot, ranches, and lumber mills. They rebuilt 18 trucks from scrap. At UXA's peak it distributed 40 tons of food a week.

It all worked on a time-credit system.... Members could use credits to buy food and other items at the commissary, medical and dental services, haircuts, and more. A council of some 45 coordinators met regularly to solve problems and discuss opportunities.

One coordinator might report that a saw needed a new motor. Another knew of a motor but the owner wanted a piano in return. A third member knew of a piano that was available. And on and on. It was an amalgam of enterprise and cooperation—the flexibility and hustle of the market, but without the encoded greed of the corporation or the stifling bureaucracy of the state.... The members called it a “reciprocal economy.””

#JonathanRowe "Entrepreneurs of Cooperation” via #KevinCarson “Society After Capitalism: Resilient Communities and Local Economies”

"We have more means than they can enclose."

#KevinCarson

In “Market Anarchism,” #KevinCarson provides a chronological summary of the figures most influential in shaping the American Mutualist or Individualist Anarchist tradition, and in so doing also explicates the political economy of market anarchism (Mutualism, Mutualist). Carson’s conclusion also briefly summarizes the appropriation of some of the Left’s mutualist traditions by right wing so called “anarcho-capitalists” during the postwar era.

For those not familiar with mutualism, it is a political-economy which defines capitalism as a system in which capital receives special legal privilege over other factors in production, namely labor. These privileges are evinced most notably in the state’s political monopoly and imposed artificial scarcity of land, money, technology, work licensing and labor relations, as well as healthcare. Mutualists argue that capitalist relations such as housing rent, interest banking, royalties, stock markets, wage slavery or the boss-employee dynamic will be eradicated with the political monopolies which created them. Mutualist frequently advocate for solutions such as pluralistic and open source mutual credit currencies, horizontal community organizing, open source technology, eliminating land enclosures and occupational licensing monopolies. Mutualists also have a long tradition of supporting labor organizations and movements such as the IWW and Knights of Labor, as well as standing in solidarity with anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists. For more on mutualism, consider reading:

https://www.academia.edu/resource/work/35759571

Interview with Kevin Carson on his new work:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ISDESJz-6Kg&feature=share

#anarchism #statecapitalism #kevincarson

📄 #MunicipalismoLibertario: Ciudades en Red como Plataformas Resilientes para la Transición Post-Capitalista. #C4SSorg #KevinCarson 🌬
https://confoederatio.noblogs.org/post/2020/04/12/municipalismo-libertario-ciudades-en-red-como-plataformas-resilientes-para-la-transicion-post-capitalista-k-carson/ via @confoederatio

📄 #MunicipalismoLibertario: Ciudades en Red como Plataformas Resilientes para la Transición Post-Capitalista. #C4SSorg #KevinCarson 🌬
https://confoederatio.noblogs.org/post/2020/04/12/municipalismo-libertario-ciudades-en-red-como-plataformas-resilientes-para-la-transicion-post-capitalista-k-carson/ via @confoederatio