anarchist

 Well, I've been fretting for a few days about the bits I missed out of my talk at the Oxford "Speak Easy" last week.  Those who were there early enough heard me begin with a few lines from my notes, before I went rambling off elsewhere and lost my place, so whilst I mentioned that I'd like people to disassociate for the purposes of the discussion the (big-m) "Mutualism", the successor to the Individuality Anarchist movement, and the (small-m) "mutualism" that describes the use of a particular co-operative business form.  For whilst there are similarities, especially in their theoretical basis, there are also differences, especially in the way the Co-operative Movement in the UK operates.

But I think it is important to compare and contrast them, and I intended to do this on Wednesday night, but didn't get to that.  At the moment, politicians from all the main parties are talking about embracing mutualism, using co-operative businesses to deliver certain public services and so on.  And what worries me is that people will get the wrong idea about both co-operative businesses and about "Mutualism" and if these attempts to use co-ops in public policy do not work out as well as they are now being touted will be disillusioned with the idea of mutualism, and Mutualism, itself.

There has also been much discussion of this around the blogs and media recently, so I thought I would add my tuppence worth.

So some thoughts...

First the Co-operative Movement is innately anti-statist.  This may not appear to be the case in the UK where the Co-operative has established a political party, called, unsurprisingly, the Co-operative Party, and which many years ago now hitched itself to the party of the big state, the Labour Party.  But in its early years and, as some would say its hey-day, in which co-operative business forms were founded from the ground up, by ordinary people wanting to meet all sorts of their needs, for food, for insurance, for health care, housing and so on they worked in spite of the state which most often seemed to grant privilege to those who would rip them off.

Indeed, the first of the seven Co-operative Principles, based on those set down originally by the Rochdale Pioneers and now guarded and promoted by the International Co-operative Alliance reinforced that a co-operative is based on voluntary, open membership, for all people who are able to make use of the benefits the society is created to deliver.  It is inherently voluntarist - anarchist - the complete opposite of which is the sort of compulsory collectivist state socialism engages in.  Even when that state is apparently "democratic", it is still not voluntary in the same sense.  If you really don't like a democratic decision of your fellow co-op members, you can, ultimately part company; go and get whatever services or goods they deliver from somewhere else, or start another co-op.  Try doing that if you don't like the "democratic" decision that leads to one party running the country however they like.

So in this sense, the co-operative business form is a very useful one for those of us who see co-operatives and social enterprises not as a way of delivering government policies, but as a way to develop truly voluntarist means of doing what the state often does by coercive collectivism.  But it is only one business form of many, and to a large extent Mutualist-anarchists are agnostic about what business form should be used in any particular instance, just so long as it is not coercive.  

That said, there are some areas in which the co-operative form seems to me to give particular benefits; where for example a good or service is too big or difficult to procure individually, or where the different interests in an organisation, the workers, consumers, financiers and so on want to align their interests in the ongoing management of the organisation because of the nature of the sort of transaction they are involved in.  And schools might very well be a good example of this.  It's not something you want to change your supplier of every day.  You can buy your newspaper or groceries from a different person every time, but you will want some stability for your children's education.  So you may want to agree to participate in setting policy and direction in your chosen school alongside teachers and managers.  

Second, a co-operative business or a social enterprise is not a "not-for-profit".  I know that people have qualms about things they perceive as public services being delivered by organisations that aim to make a "profit", but it is simple fact that you cannot run a business without aiming to make a "profit" - to aim for "break even" is to fail.  What matters is what you do with that profit, perhaps.  And sure, in a shareholder owned limited company, the whole purpose of the business is to make financial gain for its investors.  But the same could be true of a co-operative.  There is nothing that prevents a co-operative business distributing its surplus to its owners.  In the case of the ubiquitous Co-operative Group retail businesses this usually involves sending us members discounts off our future purchases, but there's no reason why it should not be a cash dividend if that is what the co-operative membership decided.

But there are lots of other things that could be done with "profits" - there could be a policy to help finance other co-operatives start up, or local community activities or charities, or to reinvest everything into the profit generating organisation itself.  The really key thing about a co-operative is that it is owned by the members who join it because they benefit from the goods or services it delivers, as opposed to it merely being a financial investment where shareholders may have little interest or intention, or even ability, to use what their limited company produces.

And so, finally, to the various noises being made by political parties about "embracing mutualism", "encouraging co-operatives" and so on.  Of course, as someone who does not believe the state has legitimate roles in delivering what they call public services in any case, I also do not believe it has the right to control who delivers them, or to whom to devolve responsibility for some of them to.  The most state-collectivist activists would not accept a co-operative as a compromise in any case.  They would say that it is wrong in principle to incorporate what is currently delivered by a unique sort of an organisation - public custodians elected by everyone - because it creates an organisational form that is itself vulnerable to take-over.  Even if you establish your public service delivery co-operative as, to start with, a business whose rules say they must reinvest surpluses and so on, they will point to the demulualisation of our former mutual financial services sector as an example of where member/owners can be tempted out by big money and big business.

But more importantly, as in my first point above, co-operatives are about voluntarism and grass roots action by people who want to work together to secure some kind of a benefit more difficult or less satisfying to achieve on their own.  They are not, and should not, be agents of state policy, of top down devolution of something in which the state will then, inevitably, want to retain a significant amount of control.  

It has been incessant growth of state action in the spheres in which very many people were already making their own voluntary arrangements that has extinguished much of the thriving co-operative and mutual self-organised culture that previously flourished.  When Lloyd-George promoted unemployment insurance for example, he quoted in his budget that 90% of the people likely to benefit from the proposed state system were already covered through friendly societies and so on - so his state action was to replace all of this voluntary co-operation in order to fund a statist way of ensuring the other 10% had cover.

Whenever I was asked, such as in those "go round the table and introduce yourselves" moments, as a director or chair of Oxfordshire Social Enterprise Forum, or as a director of Social Enterprise South East, I would make the point that I was not a promoter of social enterprise for delivering on government commitments, but as promoting self-organised social market alternatives to government action.  And I hope other would be co-operators and social entrepreneurs will sup with a long spoon when the man from the government comes along offering them the chance to "run their own public services".

See, as I'm not interesting enough to do podcast thingies of my own opinions, and to try and get me out of the habit of dipping into a book rather than reading the whole work, I started reading to my computer whenever I picked up an interesting work on political-economy.  I don't know what the computer thinks of it all, but judging by the reaction from one author whose book I gave the treatment to recently, others seem to like it, and so I have today knocked off an audiobook version of Albert Jay Nock's "Our Enemy The State" (a .pdf file of the complete work).

Nock was a friend and follower of Henry George and quite a libertarian heavyweight in his day (he died in 1945); even Rothbard cited him as a big influence on him.  He and his friend Frank Chodorov were probably the last major libertarians who, in common with many libertarians and anarchists of the preceding nineteenth century (as well as the British Liberals till somewhat later), had viewed the special privileges attached to land ownership as one of the major nuts to crack in moving toward a fairer, freer society.

In "Our Enemy..." Nock distinguishes first "social power" from "State power", where "social power" is, as described by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the last sections of "What is Property?", all the (good, voluntary) associations and obligations that bind us to each other, and is constantly being predated upon by "State power".  The book is essentially a warning, somewhat in the same vein as Spencer's "The Man Versus the State" and Hayek's "Road to Serfdom", that this "State power" will take over so much of what had previously been the purview of "social power" to the extent that people will no longer have the will to do anything for themselves and will always look to the State to "do something" in any eventuality.

And he distinguishes also between "government" and "the State" after the fashion of Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, in which he sees "government" as something set up by mutual consent and only to secure the negative rights of "freedom and security" when the social power proves inadequate.  This leads him to an interesting "take" on the American Revolution.  The Declaration of Independence, upon which Paine's influence was clear and formalised by Thomas Jefferson, for whom Nock has a soft spot as more or less the one person in the revolutionary band who did understand the dangers of allowing "government" to become "State", was essentially ditched just as soon as it came into being. 

Whilst the ideals of "natural rights" and "individual sovereignty" were useful for galvanising everyone, of whatever class, against the British "common enemy", just as soon as the United States was founded, these groups naturally fractured and battled with each other for access to the exploitative power of the State.  The winners were those who had been top of the pile before the revolution, the land speculators and exploiters of others' labour who deliberately framed the Constitution to be as protectionist as possible as against Jefferson's idea of widely distributed individual sovereignty where the "highest" level of political organisation was to be the township level (not entirely dissimilar to the idea of "Cellular Democracy" about which I have blogged previously).

And it is this, he says, that has marked out the State as far back as history records: that the State is founded by conquest and confiscation; that it is always a vehicle of economic exploitation by one class over another.  Man will always seek to meet his needs with the least possible effort.  There are only two ways of meeting those needs: either by work and trade - the "Economic Means" and naturally involving the most effort; or by conquest and confiscation, and economic exploitation of others, in a word, robbery - the "Political Means" which, if you happen to have influence over the people who administer that State, is the easiest way, since it does not involve work for yourself, but feeding off the work of others through State granted privilege and protection.

The catalyst for the book is Franklin D. Roosevelt's accession to power in 1932 which accelerated the progress of the State power's predation over social power, in much the same way as Nock had observed had happened for forty years or more in Europe, and, by implication at least, had led to the great global threats of Fascism, "Hitlerism" as he called it, and state Communism, each of which had promised to be different from what had gone before in their respective countries, but which were just as centred on conquest of the access to the "Political Means" as any other State before them.

And, as we are in an election year here, it is worth noting Nock's view that essentially it doesn't matter who you vote for, at each stage in the State's advance over social power, the politicians tend to accept what has already been done (after all, it gives them, as actual or putative administrators of the State, all the more power) and will never truly roll back that State.  They are the State, or want to be; they are the very people who desire most to have access to the "Political Means"; how could they do otherwise?  That every appearance of the State's receding is actually in itself an exercise in State power - temporarily offering concessions in order to maintain a semblance of actually having the interests of the people at heart.

The book ends on a depressing note: Nock says he didn't write it in the hope of changing minds, or of fomenting any kind of change in direction; the State will only change when it collapses, having taken all power to itself and still found itself insatiable with no more to confiscate.

Feel free to download my Audiobook reading of "Our Enemy, The State" if you think you can bear my dulcet tones for the best part of four hours.

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Even many who are relatively sympathetic to free market minarchist and mutualist ideals where as much as possible is done through voluntary rather than coercive statist mechanisms often have a problem envisaging a system in which no state apparatus exists.  Two of the most common objections are that we at least need a state to administer "justice" and to ensure "national defense".  Even intellectual heavyweights such as Robert Nozick felt that a de facto "state", at least at a local level, would emerge from private law enforcement agencies.

So I'm often on the lookout for literature that explains how a private law based society would work, indeed would vastly improve upon the current predominant state run model, and so I am delighted to point my reader to "Chaos Theory", a pair of short essays, one on "justice" and the other on "national defense" by Robert P Murphy.  It is available as a freely downloadable PDF at the Mises.org site.  You can also buy a dead tree version (though I find delivery costs too high at Mises.org to justify having these sent to the UK).

It also provides further illustration of the point I was making in my previous piece on how respect for private property and contracts frees us from the need for a state.

I have also prepared an MP3 audiobook version, which is attached to this post.  It's mainly just for me to listen to again on the way to work, but if you'd prefer to listen than to read, and can face my dulcet tones, feel free to use it, Robert Murphy has given his permission.  It's only an hour and a half long, so you can judge how long it will take you to read this very accessible introduction to some of the ideas involved.

Particularly on the "justice" side, I can see ways in which the Mutualist ideal of creating such institutions and mechanisms within the current system could be successful.  Since the non-aggression principle would not rely on the same ability conferred on state agents (i.e. the police) to arrest someone, there is no reason why such mechanisms could not operate successfully on private property at present.

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Now lots of people baulk at a perceived notion that libertarianism is fixated on private property.  They feel that it is indicative of an incessant right wing-ish obsession with accumulation of wealth and devil take the hind-most (who will, obviously, they assume, have no such private property: wrongly of course - for we want everyone to be able to accumulate enough property to enable them to gain financial security and so on).

In fact of course the statement in the title, "property is freedom", comes from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with whom most people associate a. anarchism (which many seem to think of as somehow not "right wing-ish" - if libertarianism is "right wing-ish" - which it is not but never mind; I don't want to get into a left-right debate here), and b. the more famous dictum that "property is theft".

And it struck me the other day, while listening again to Murray Rothbard's "For a New Liberty" (of which you can listen to an excellent free audiobook version in individual chapters at the Mises Institute), that actually the really important thing about property and why it occupies such an important place in libertarian is little to do with material wealth accumulation.

Actually it's two big reasons, the first of which I don't really want to get into here - that private property, as opposed to communal property in particular, creates the right sort of economic incentives for individuals to want to work to support themselves and keep their property in good order - if they get to keep the product of their efforts, the property which results, they are incentivised to do well. 

But it is the second big reason that I want to highlight now in the context of "property is freedom":  respect for private property rights and the voluntary contracts that give rise to them is key to eradicating the state's (often contradictory) interference through legislation.

Take, for example, the right to free speech.  A right in theory at least at the very root of liberalism - for if you cannot be free with your thoughts, and with expressing them in speech or publication, is not the state constraining your very being?  But we've all heard, and many accept, the idea that there must be some kind of "limit" on free speech, such as not being allowed to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre because of the harm that may cause to panicking patrons.  Well, libertarians do not need such a contradictory limitation; because of our respect for property and contract.

To yell "Fire!" in that crowded theatre is a breach of contract of the basis and conditions on which you and the other patrons are permitted in that theatre by the owner - to watch a performance.  Any harm caused by your actions will either be breaches of their contracts, or damage to their property, and properly actionable through private actions on their behalf.

By the way, you can hear more about the "Person who yells "Fire!" in a crowded theatre" from Walter Block's book, "Defending the Undefendable", also at the Mises Institute.

Many think that anarchy means a complete lack of order, or a lawless world in which the vulnerable for whatever reason will be preyed upon by all those vicious racists, homophobes or whomever that we have created many dubious restrictions on free speech to curtail.  But let's say I own a particular street, I charge my customers for using the street, and they, in turn expect me to provide a safe environment for them to traverse.  So I get to set the rules; the protection agency contracted by my insurance firm makes sure everyone feels safe, ,is not intimidated by racist thugs or whatever.  After all, I may be liable to my customers if they are hurt while in my care, on my property.

Proudhon called all these associations developing civil society "spontaneous order", driven not by what a few people who solicit your votes every so often want, but by you and everyone else going about the myriad of transactions of your every day lives.

Oh, and while I'm at it, I'd probably want to make sure my street was gritted and safe for my customers in the snow too, maybe even get a few more customers if other street owners didn't bother so much.  I can't say my local authority is a "customer focused street owner" at the moment, can you?  It is because of respect for property and contract that all this can happen and, just as important when compared with the state's way of doing things, that the money flows to the services that people actually need, because, well, they're paying for it and can demand what they've paid for.

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So that's it, holidays are over and I'm back at work later today - booo!

And whilst I haven't actually been to family over Christmas, nevertheless I've been to a couple of dinners with various friends in the "liberal" family. And as so frequently happens, there have been "family arguments". Well - invite an anarchist and there's bound to be some fun amongst politically aware adults!

First, for New Year's Eve, indeed, seeing in the New Year itself I had a little argument about money. Someone was claiming that money, currency, was one of those things that you had to have a state to guarantee, protect and manage. To be fair, someone else, a long time supporter of my idea for a local currency, agreed that we could have competing currencies, but only for such local applications and that there would still have to be a government/state backed national or common currency, otherwise how would we know what things, from prices to whole economies, were worth.

Then, a couple of nights ago, it was time for round two, this time about whether an anarchic society could handle crime and justice.

And I found in both cases that it was I that was on the back foot in the argument, having to find examples to counter peoples' objections and so on, and, as usual, they usually came to me about five minutes after leaving the parties to head home!

So, my New Year's Resolution, if I have to have one, will be to be a better apologist for anarchism, to be able to answer such criticisms more easily. And, when I got back the other night, I looked around for some inspiration and fell back on the good old Tannehills' book, "The Market for Liberty". For those who want to learn the core principles behind market anarchism, I cannot recommend this too highly.

There is an easy to listen to audiobook version of it you can dip into available at Podiobooks split into MP3 files that last around half an hour each, so they're convenient for travelling, lunch breaks and so on.

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I'm cold. There's no doubt about it, it is cold. But that's no good reason to deny what seemingly everyone else is saying - that it's getting warmer, and dangerously so - is it? But the fact is, I'm not a climate scientist; I suspect if I were I would probably be little the wiser. But since I'm not, I do not have the evidence to say whether they are right or wrong on global warming: is it different this time from previous warming or cooling events; if it is, is it man-made; can we stop it; should we stop it; what happens if we don't. Clearly a few scientists in one of the world's newest sciences has made the case, and we're all, or nearly all at least, listening, and scared. And yes, we want to do something about it, well, lots of us anyway.

However, watching the very few snippets of news coverage from Copenhagen I have seen just makes me realise how wrong headed all this is. It's just like that G8 lot that turns my stomach so. Look, if such a great proportion of people have voted to elect people around the world on the basis of their promises to do something about climate change, if global warming and the environment more generally are so high on peoples' priorities, why on earth, in the name of all that is holy, do they think politicians and state, or supra-state, action is going to do anything about it.

Look, it is the state that has got us into this problem of anthropogenic global warming, if that's really what is going on. As any good mutualist will tell you, exploitation is only possible when the owners of capital and the appropriators of natural scarce commodities harness the power of the state in the defence of their interests. That goes for the exploitation of labour, just as much as the ability to externalise costs.

Everyone moans that libertarianism scarcely has anything to say about the environment. and it often seems that way, and even when it does its primary response is to talk about privatising the "commons" so that owners have a clear interest and a clear responsibility for the bits of it they use and if they abuse that in such a way as affects others' parts of it they can be held accountable. But I've now realised that that answer is merely touching on the symptoms, not the problem itself. And the problem is that it is the state that has created the very circumstances in which not only does such exploitation thrive, but that it is actually necessary just for economic actors to be able to deal with the economic disaster that is state "management" of macro-economic factors.

It is the state that fails, time and time again, to maintain a stable currency, resulting in great tsunamis of inflation against which producers have to swim just to stand still. It is the state that takes so much of its constituent economic actors' production that they have to double, literally, their production in order to turn an ordinary profit. And it is states that have given away huge swathes of "the commons" for virtually nothing, at the behest of the corporations who can best afford to persuade them to do so, without those corporations having to put a real value on those goods and account for them properly.

And all you folk think that states, even states working together - or herding cats as it is known - can put an end to all the environmentally destructive consequences of their previous folly? Utter codswallop. States can no more switch off the economic treadmill they have created and on which we must all run ever faster, unsustainably faster, than their leaderships appear to understand how it got started - for it is that treadmill that powers those same states, and their leaderships.

The power we need to learn to stop using, stop wasting, is that state power, which is so dependent on unsustainable economic activity to keep itself alive. It is not too late: people may claim that we have "reached the tipping point" and that things are now moving so fast that even if the real answer was once more "human scale production" and such mutualist niceties that would have meant we would have never got so far towards destroying the planet it's gone so far we need to reverse it, not merely slow down. But it's none of the sort - pull the plug on all the state protection of capital and we'd very quickly be able to shift our productive and innovative capacities into things other than the "thneeds" that economies (especially developing ones but certainly not exclusively) chuck out in unsustainable quantities because they are an easy way to maintain one's place on the treadmill.

No, I'm not a "climate change denier" - I just...don't...know. But what I am is deeply sceptical of "movements" demanding we all have to do this or that, especially when the thinly veiled, and at times over the last week or so not so veiled as the world-wide movement has become more and more shrill in its demands, calls are for some kind of world government action. If we, as individuals, really put this issue right there at the top of our concerns, then we, as individuals, will find ways, spontaneously, in a genuinely free market, one in which the actors cannot exploit either labour or nature because there can be no government to assist them in that, to respond to our demands.

And what I am sure about is that more state action is not the answer. It is that which got us to this point, and it is not that which will get us out of it, even if they can agree on anything meaningful. "Light Greens" know all this - inherently anarchist of the "human scale technology" school, brothers and sisters of mutualism and sensible liberal economics. But we are in the grip of the "Dark Greens" who appear to be nothing of the kind - a bunch of authoritarian crypto-communists who crave nothing more than some kind of world power pushing their message and the "initiatives" we will have to take to respond to that message. Let us not forget that it was and indeed is the most state controlled economies whose labour was forcibly cheap that belched out commons destroying pollution in unmatched quantities whilst doing absolutely nothing for the overall wealth of their citizens. Do we want to return to that sort of poverty - I suspect some would like us to, though they won't say so, because they know the prospect of their Green Dark Age is not one that will win them favours. They must not be given the opportunity to force us to do so.

All the emails, all the messages I've received over the last month, from demanding I get involved in something called "The Wave" to the endless e-mails from Avaaz and their likes claiming that our incompetent fool of a Prime Minister asked them to organise a world wide demo to show support for their negotiating position, have but created a movement feeding the ego-mania of a few individuals who see opportunities for themselves in global mandated action. They could have been used to create genuine democracy, operating through free markets, to create demand for the sort of innovations we will need if this "crisis" if that is what it is, is to be solved.

Okay, so it should now be clear and out in the open that my preferred society would not have a politically organized coercive state government of any kind. It should be equally clear that this is not because I don't care about the least well off in society, but precisely because I do. And because I believe, in a creed consistent with that of some of the great thinkers of the "individualist left" of the past two centuries, that the state actually makes things worse for the people whom, nowadays at least, it (and therefore most of those active in the political "scene") claims it most wants to help. This alone should be enough to want to find an alternative solution to the questions of "social order" than the coercive state, setting aside all the questions about whether the mechanisms the state uses in its failure to achieve it stated aims are themselves just, and let alone the possibility that there are powers the state takes for itself that are almost inevitably unjust, such as waging war.

So, how can an avowedly anti-state campaigner work with those who not only accept and promote the need for a state but who also seek power for themselves or their associates within that state? Chris Mounsey, communication director of the Libertarian Party of the UK (LPUK) and blogger "Devil's Kitchen", said in his talk to the Libertarian Alliance Conference last weekend that LPUK would say that they seek power to get into the position of being able to abolish themselves and the structures they fight against. The same cannot be said of parties who, as one Lib Dem put it the other day, "see a positive role for an activist state". That is, after all a point of fundamental difference. They want a state: they are statists. I am a non-statist: I do not want a state. They believe a state can be inherently a force for good; I believe a state is inherently evil but at stages on the journey to eradicating it, it may appear to be a necessary one.

Well, here my own journey to my current anti-state position might be illustrative. My Mutualism did not spring fully formed in a political vacuum. I was a Liberal Democrat first, a Georgist second and lately an Individualist Anarchist. Indeed, it is worse: I was an active politician. A city councillor, no less. And rose to the dizzy heights of Deputy Satrap for Housing and Economic Destruction, as I put it last week. Hell, I even used to believe that if only, as a city council, we did things better, more efficiently and more business like, we could even make profits to use on other desirable projects instead of continually tapping up the tax payer for them. I could hardly have been more "statist" in some ways!

And yet, I know as I write that that does not tell the whole story. I had always been a civil libertarian (there is something about growing up gay in the 1980s I think that made me realize very personally the effects of the state interfering in private lives and people's emotions). And I was a vocal advocate of co-operatives and social enterprise, even for delivering what had been "state" provided goods. So I was the first to try and propose establishing a social enterprise to take over the city's underfunded leisure services. And I attempted to build a case for co-operative housing being included in the options available to local councils for housing stock transfer. I was the city council's rep on both the Oxford Credit Union and the Oxfordshire Social Enterprise Forum.

Two things happened when the good people of Risinghurst decided they no longer wanted my services as a city councillor. First, I was asked to go along to the first meeting after the elections of the scrutiny committee I had chaired in case there were odds and ends to pass on to the new committee. And, for the first time viewing a city council meeting from outside their little bubble around the big table, I had this overpowering sense that it was all one big talking shop. And often a talking shop with the least appropriate inexpert lay people on it. Second, a number of messages of commiseration from city officers said that my ideas would be missed, and I thought "well, if my ideas are really that good and so obviously beneficial why should the people of Oxford be deprived them by the political whim of a few hundred voters in one corner of the city?" Why should I not try and carry on to do them anyway. And so, by a variety of routes comes my involvement with Community Land Trusts, local financial initiatives, promoting social enterprise and so on.

Becoming, if you will, a businessman, albeit a "social entrepreneur" (I hope that's not stretching the term too far to fit what I am, which is hardly, thus far, terribly successful in that respect) has further entrenched my growing realization of how state interference can disrupt even the most socially necessary projects for which there is virtually unanimous community consent. And in getting to understand the property development business, its costs and practices and so on, has created a very powerful and practical understanding of how state protection of interests causes more problems that it then needs to try and solve - tight planning and housing regulation for example meaning that we end up subsidizing landowners even more to provide "affordable" housing whilst landing those who can lobby the best extraordinary profits for being the one site allowed for housing or whatever the case may be.

Couple all of that with a decade in which the role of the state in generating international hatred against us has been debated endlessly as a result of wars and foreign policy; in which spin has outshone substance at home, in which despite massive investment in public services changes for the better seem to have been few and far between whether you judge that by health outcomes, education outcomes, homelessness, social mobility, personal indebtedness, wealth imbalances or whatever; in which civil liberties have been eroded and our lives catalogued and pried into more than ever; and now, at the end of which it seems like few if any in public positions could see what some of us said was staring us in the face - the financial tsunami, and even now don't acknowledge their own part in the creation of it is it any wonder one might turn more than a little cynical about the ability of government actually to do anything about all of this?

So, all else aside, I rather hope that this "testimony" of my political journey might prompt a few people to think about their own expectations of the state and how it might have fulfilled them or not or whether the supposed benefits of the state are worth the "collateral damage" state action often leaves in its wake (as the decade's most repugnant euphemism for state perpetrated destruction would put it). And I want them to ask themselves whether, if they ever had a good policy idea for some much needed commodity or service, they really feel that the probability of them seeing that idea to fruition would be enhanced by being done by government and so called democratic decision-making or diminished through red tape and the best intentions of "planners."

But even if it leaves you unmoved, you can yet play an important part in the "Mutualist revolution". For this is where I feel that working within our local political networks can achieve change faster than trying to influence an entire party's policy all at once. When we have a good idea, and especially when it is up and running, we need to be publicising such things through those networks, hoping that they in turn will spread the message "upwards" to others in their parties and "outwards" to their colleagues elsewhere.  Regularly the single most common question when one proposes something new to councillors seems to be "where has it been done previously?  They may want to innovate but appear scared to do so.  Also, spreading the news upward can reach policy makers quite quickly.  For example in the Lib Dems it always seems like there is a bit of a scramble for good, worthwhile policy motions to go to regional conferences. All these get reported up to Federal Policy Committee, and so a small successful local initiative could soon get the attention of people in a position to make policy nationwide.

Perhaps we could call it "viral-anarchism".

"State intervention distinguishes capitalism from the free market." So writes Kevin Carson in the preface to his "Studies in Mutualist Political Economy" (2004).

In the rather broad and straggly family tree of the children of liberty, I have come to describe myself as being on the "Mutualist" branch. In fact I really married, or perhaps was adopted, into the Mutualists somehow, having started out as one of its first cousins, a "Georgist". Hence my use of that slightly affected double barreled description on this blog - a "Geo-Mutualist". But, apart from the vague notion that this denotes a position somewhere on the spectrum of views variously described as "classical liberal", "radical liberal", "libertarian" or "anarchist" - or simply "liberal" by those brave enough to face down the howls of derision from some people in certain modern soi-dissant liberal political parties not so far from here - most people react somewhat quizzically to the term "Geo-Mutualist", if at all.

So it's about time I think I tried to explain it a little. Indeed, the name having been suggested to me a couple of years ago following a previous attempt on here to put a label on my political position, it is probably only now anyway that I capable of beginning to tell you what it all means. And even now my thoughts are continually developing and changing: which is, of course, a jolly good reason for insisting on the freest of free markets in which we can express our millions of daily changes of mind every time we need to trade with someone, rather than the once every four years or so we might get to change our minds about our elected dictators.

Mutualism is, most simply, a form of anarchism. We want no political state. Not a small state, a minimal state, a night-watchman state. Just no state. It is no exaggeration to say that we believe that the state is the root cause of all inequity in the world and all coercion in an unfree market. We believe that the truly free market - all the voluntary, non-coercive, co-operative, mutually beneficial transactions between free individuals - delivers the maximum and most just distribution of economic benefits to all its participants. We believe that it is the state that by its interventions (often, admittedly, with the best of intentions but always inept at best and downright, deliberately and inhumanely destructive at worst) makes markets unfree and unable to deliver a just outcome for all its participants. That in the language of the factors of economic production "capital" and "land" can only exploit "labour" by "harnessing the power of the state in their interests" (Carson, ibid., Preface).

Put more simply it is because of state favours on their behalf that capitalists and landowners get disproportionately rich and workers remain disproportionately poor. We note that this has been the case throughout the history of the state and in all types of state, notwithstanding that some of them, such as contemporary "liberal democracies" profess to act, because elected by them, in the interests of all "the people". And, partly at least, precisely because it has this observably inevitable tendency, whichever type of state or epoch of state one looks at, we believe the state has, ultimately, no possibility of rehabilitation - and because those who set themselves up for positions of power in those states, so obviously also personally benefit from their ineptness and downright criminality.

Now most of this creed could be cut and pasted into that of most libertarians and anarchists I have come across. Hell, even Kevin himself said that he thought the major strands of the anarchist-libertarian family were often quite "porous". I have spent more time reading and listening to Austrian school thinkers over the last year and othre than emphasis, there's little, at least in the "ends" of what I have written here that they could not subscribe to, even if they differ in approach and emphasis. Mutualism's pedigree, for sure, would be described as the "left" wing of the family tree:

In the mid-nineteenth century, a vibrant native American school of anarchism, known as individualist anarchism, existed alongside the other varieties. Like most other contemporary socialist thought, it was based on a radical interpretation of Ricardian economics. The classical individualist anarchism of Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner was both a socialist movement and a subcurrent of classical liberalism. It agreed with the rest of the socialist movement that labor was the source of exchange-value, and that labor was entitled to its full product. Unlike the rest of the socialist movement, the individualist anarchists believed that the natural wage of labor in a free market was its product, and that economic exploitation could only take place when capitalists and landlords harnessed the power of the state in their interests. Thus, individualist anarchism was an alternative both to the increasing statism of the mainstream socialist movement, and to a classical liberal movement that was moving toward a mere apologetic for the power of big business. (Carson, ibid., Preface)

But Mutualism is also a mechanism by which we hope to reach our ideal society. Like the nineteenth century radicals - both liberal and later in the labour movement - we want to do something about it. We want to build alternative, voluntary, non-coercive, institutions which can then be shown to produce the sort of "public goods" people currently seem to believe only the state can provide. We also want to build and encourage alternatives to the corporate hierarchical system to show that a multitude of different types of economic actors can compete in that ultimate free market - after all, there must also be a free market in the types of organization that operate in the free market!

So in my case, this may be grand objectives, such as Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts, aiming to develop affordable housing without state subsidy, controlled by the communities they are part of and the occupants who will be buying a stake in them. Or Community Finance Partnerships attempting to reduce the relaince of local businesses and households on the mainstream state-capitalist banking sector. It may also mean things like the recently reported idea of an estate in Portsmouth (a copy of which I cannot now find) to hire its own private security force, exasperated by the lack of performance of the state police. But it is certainly also applicable to small initiatives such as the Braziers Park community in Oxfordshire. And obviously this goes hand in hand with campaigning for the state to stop doing things that simply do not need doing too - pursuing the war on drugs, erecting artificial borders and so on.

So that is my quick and dirty introduction to Mutualism. I can hardly do better though than Kevin Carson's own introduction at the Mutualist website:

INTRODUCTION

   Mutualism, as a variety of anarchism, goes back to P.J. Proudhon in France and Josiah Warren in the U.S. It favors, to the extent possible, an evolutionary approach to creating a new society. It emphasizes the importance of peaceful activity in building alternative social institutions within the existing society, and strengthening those institutions until they finally replace the existing statist system. As Paul Goodman put it, "A free society cannot be the substitution of a 'new order' for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life."

   Other anarchist subgroups, and the libertarian left generally, share these ideas to some extent. Whether known as "dual power" or "social counterpower," or "counter-economics," alternative social institutions are part of our common vision. But they are especially central to mutualists' evolutionary understanding.

   Mutualists belong to a non-collectivist segment of anarchists. Although we favor democratic control when collective action is required by the nature of production and other cooperative endeavors, we do not favor collectivism as an ideal in itself. We are not opposed to money or exchange. We believe in private property, so long as it is based on personal occupancy and use. We favor a society in which all relationships and transactions are non-coercive, and based on voluntary cooperation, free exchange, or mutual aid. The "market," in the sense of exchanges of labor between producers, is a profoundly humanizing and liberating concept. What we oppose is the conventional understanding of markets, as the idea has been coopted and corrupted by state capitalism.

   Our ultimate vision is of a society in which the economy is organized around free market exchange between producers, and production is carried out mainly by self-employed artisans and farmers, small producers' cooperatives, worker-controlled large enterprises, and consumers' cooperatives. To the extent that wage labor still exists (which is likely, if we do not coercively suppress it), the removal of statist privileges will result in the worker's natural wage, as Benjamin Tucker put it, being his full product.

   Because of our fondness for free markets, mutualists sometimes fall afoul of those who have an aesthetic affinity for collectivism, or those for whom "petty bourgeois" is a swear word. But it is our petty bourgeois tendencies that put us in the mainstream of the American populist/radical tradition, and make us relevant to the needs of average working Americans. Most people distrust the bureaucratic organizations that control their communities and working lives, and want more control over the decisions that affect them. They are open to the possibility of decentralist, bottom-up alternatives to the present system. But they do not want an America remade in the image of orthodox, CNT-style syndicalism.

   Mutualism is not "reformist," as that term is used pejoratively by more militant anarchists. Nor is it necessarily pacifistic, although many mutualists are indeed pacifists. The proper definition of reformism should hinge, not on the means we use to build a new society or on the speed with which we move, but on the nature of our final goal. A person who is satisfied with a kinder, gentler version of capitalism or statism, that is still recognizable as state capitalism, is a reformist. A person who seeks to eliminate state capitalism and replace it with something entirely different, no matter how gradually, is not a reformist.

   "Peaceful action" simply means not deliberately provoking the state to repression, but rather doing whatever is possible (in the words of the Wobbly slogan) to "build the structure of the new society within the shell of the old" before we try to break the shell. There is nothing wrong with resisting the state if it tries, through repression, to reverse our progress in building the institutions of the new society. But revolutionary action should meet two criteria: 1) it should have strong popular support; and 2) it should not take place until we have reached the point where peaceful construction of the new society has reached its limits within existing society.

And finally, a note on the "Georgist" side of my political family tree.  As I said, I came to Mutualism through Georgism.  I saw that Henry George's "Single Tax" was a way, not least for George himself, of significantly reducing the size and reach of the state.  Ultimately I got to the position where the state might only collect and redistribute land rent as a community dividend.

Obviously within the Mutualist ancestry with Proudhon and Tucker there are strident views also of the place of land in creating and perpetuating an inequitable society.  Tucker and George indeed had a long running correspondence and though they disagreed on George's remedy to the "land question" there can be no doubt that all the main stream branches of libertarianism put addressing this "land question" as a high priority until the second third of the twentieth century.

As I mentioned, I have been reading a lot more Austrian school stuff lately and am gaining an appreciation of their logic for a strong ethos of private property, and whilst I can see that some of the measures the Austrians would implement would reduce the inequities in land ownership substantially (different means and emphasis to similar ends again) I still think there will always be a "scarcity rent" to land that deserves a system such as Henry George's to mitigate it best.

It's a matter of emphasis really: if one day I am persuaded that the biggest economic hurdle we face is the fiat money system, perhaps my more strident Georgism would recede a little, but for the moment I certainly still believe that these problems are at least as important as each other, and because land is something over which we have ultimately less control - we have one planet after all, for now and we cannot base economic policy on the possibility that we will one day find another one suitable - I tend to say that the land issue is the more important one to solve.  So to that end, I still maintain the moniker "Geo-Mutualist".

I have, happy days!, managed to find my copy of Nozick's "Anarchy, State and Utopia" and have started reading it.  I found him quoting a lovely piece from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's "General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century" - an analysis which, I think you will agree, stands even today, indeed in many aspects unimagineably more so:

To be GOVERNED is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.... To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality. And to think that there are democrats among us who pretend that there is any good in government; Socialists who support this ignominy, in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity; proletarians who proclaim their candidacy for the Presidency of the Republic! Hypocrisy!

In the run up to 1997, I remember that one somewhat better, the Iron Lady was gone, love her or hate her, and the Tory government had become mired in "sleaze" and policy-wise had run out of steam, full of the second division of ministers that had emerged under Thatcher. Tony Blair and his New Labour project was another "Big Idea" whose time had come. Labour without the socialism. Economically responsible. With a plan.

And so we've had Thatcherism and Blairism over that past thirty years. But I think we will not get Brownism or Cameronism. Now, even moreso than in 1979, and certainly moreso than in 1997, we need a "Big Idea". Not merely a change of management. And, for all the coverage, I cannot see any "Big Idea" coming out of Old Queen Street. To prove their management credentials, they present, at their big show case conference before likely victory, a managerial mock-budget. Talk of freezing public sector pay, of everyone working for an extra year before retirement; these are not going to solve the terminal systemic problems in the anglo-saxon pensions system or the bloated state, unable to sap any more out of a shattered and second class productive economy.

And today's "Big Idea" ought to be not looking at how the State can be tweaked here and there or managed differently, but to look at the very nature of the State itself. As I quoted Albert Jay Nock in me previous post, here he is again, also from "Our Enemy The State":

The condition of public affairs in all countries, notably in our own, has done more than bring under review the mere current practice of politics, the character and quality of representative politicians, and the relative merits of this-or- that form or mode of government. It has served to suggest attention to the one institution whereof all these forms or modes are but the several, and, from the theoretical point of view, indifferent, manifestations. It suggests that finality does not lie with consideration of species, but of genus; it does not lie with consideration of the characteristic marks that differentiate the republican State, monocratic State, constitutional, collectivist, totalitarian, itlerian, Bolshevist, what you will. It lies with consideration of the State itself.

[...]

It appears to me that with the depletion of social power going on at the rate it is, the State-citizen should look very closely into the essential nature of the institution that is bringing it about. He should ask himself whether he has a theory of the State, and if so, whether he can assure himself that history supports it. He will not find this a matter that can be settled off-hand; it needs a good deal of investigation, and a stiff exercise of reflective thought. He should ask, in the first place, how the State originated, and why; it must have come about somehow, and for some purpose. This seems an extremely easy question to answer, but he will not find it so. Then he should ask what it is that history exhibits continuously as the State’s primary function. Then, whether he finds that “the State” and “government” are strictly synonymous terms; he uses them as such, but are they? Are there any invariable characteristic marks that differentiate the institution of government from the institution of the State? Then finally he should decide whether, by the testimony of history, the State is to be regarded as, in essence, a social or an anti-social institution?

Nock, of course, concludes as I too conclude; that the State is an anti-social institution - the enemy of social power that it unremittingly destroys. And so the "Big Idea" for today is, in fact a "socialist" revolution. A complete reversal of the centuries' old process of State power usurping Social power and never giving it back. Not the "socialism" corrupted by the coercive statist tendencies of the twentieth century "left", or of the "social democratic" tendency. But the confidence that social power can achieve what the do-gooders believe their states can do only much better.

It is an irony that in our own party what we think of and term "social liberalism" reflects a belief that the state should help liberalism flourish by its supposedly judicious interventions. For true "social liberalism" ought to be the belief, expressed by Nock, or Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon or Gustav de Molinari that through genuine liberalism social power does not need the coercive state.

As David Boaz puts it in his "Libertarianism: A Primer":

The right term for the advocates of civil society and free markets is arguably socialist. Thomas Paine distinguished between society and government, and the libertarian writer Albert Jay Nock summed up all the things that people do voluntarily--for love or charity or profit--as "social power," which is always being threatened by the encroachment of State power. So we might say that those who advocate social power are socialists, while those who support State power are statists.

State Power is created by conquest and confiscation. From what Paine described as the "French bastard landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives" the state has exploited. It was no less exploitative from the seventeenth century Commonwealth's installation of mercantilist power - merely a different group was exploited. Nor, for all the talk that the universal franchise was the zenith of democratic achievement, has that exploitation ceased just because everyone now has a theoretical say - again, just another group, or groups, exploited from time to time. State power is the true "opium of the masses" with its ability to whisper softly, intoxicatingly to us that "the State will provide".

For those managerial politicians, those would be state exploiters, who cannot get away from their amateur management-speak, what we need is to "zero base" the state. For the state is no defier of the laws of the universe: for every state action there is an automatic and most likely undesirable reaction. It is state created privilege that enables some to exploit others' natural competitiveness in the market. And then the state says it needs to intervene and "redistribute" what would be more naturally distributed if that privilege had not been granted in the first place: more coercion, more exploitation, more state power. Every intervention of the state needs to be examined for the usually detrimental effects it has elsewhere and which it then claims as reason to usurp yet more social power to fix.

And we will find, invariably, that left well alone, without the depredations of the state in the first place, social power would have worked better. Social power, the power of all the associations we make one with another, even the ones we don't know about, such as my relationship with the forger of the brass ferrule in Leonard Read's "Pencil" whom I cannot know, is the only thing that can end this spiral of managerial, coercive, exploitative and ultimately futile statism. And its resurgence needs to start now, before George and Dave, and all that seek to come after them, manage to destroy it utterly. And with our now massively increased ability, through modern technology and communication, to organize for ourselves, for "people [to] have more to do with each other and governments less" there has never been a better time than now.

Socialism: it's not what you think!