School Sucks Podcasts: Episode 1 - Introduction to School Sucks Podcast

(http://schoolsucks.podomatic.com/)

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Critical Thinking Question:
How many things that are good for you, that you will benefit from, need to be imposed on you...with force?

Introduction:
Explanation of title, "School Sucks" and subtitle "The END of Public Education"

Who I am, what I'm doing and why.
This is not a show about public school reform, because that would suck nearly as much as school.

Topic:
The problem with the "business?" of public education. And it's a big one. (An evaluation of the logic and ethics of the American public education system)

Bumper music: "Troublemaker" by Weezer
http://www.youtube.com/user/weezer

Look Closer:
"The Non-Aggression Axiom of Libertarianism"
by Walter Block
http://www.lewrockwell.com/block/block26.html

"The Argument From Morality (Or, how we will win…)"
by Stefan Molyneux
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/molyneux7.html

"For A New Liberty" (Chapter 7: Education)
by Murray Rothbard
http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p119

A Fate Worse Than Religion

Since the beginning of the year I've started using Facebook and through that social networking site and the magical powers swirling through the tubes of the internet I've been able to reconnect with quite a few people. Truth be told, I'm a pretty nosy guy. If you have me over for dinner I will rifle through your medicine cabinet and blog about its contents without remorse. So, upon my new discovery I am flooded with an irresistible impulse to look through all their pictures and read their profile top to bottom. What I found used to send me face-palming every time. Without fail these middle to late twenty-somethings always fill in their religion as either: Christian, Christ-lover, Child of the Son, Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran or, my personal favorite, Jesus Freak.

I'm always amazed at how deeply the disease of religion stays embedded in a person even as they age. It seemed to me that I brushed organized religion away as easily as dandruff but the escape velocity of superstition appears to be stronger for some and weaker for others.

As I kept reading and thinking the real disturbing personal category isn't religion -- it's politics. More often than not my former classmates and colleagues self-apply titles like "Conservative" or even "Maverick" (I shit you not) with the occasional "Liberal" or "Progressive" label rounding out the bunch. This, my friends, is so much scarier than you realize.

Think of all the different concepts you consider as "evil" floating through this world. It could be Corporate Greed, Unions, Religious Faith, Class Conflicts, Illegal Immigration, Gender Inequality, Racism, Tony Danza, etc... The state is like that only on steroids. In fact, the state can take that evil and amplify it beyond any natural level. For example, the corporation. These greedy motherfuckers want to turn a profit out of everything. They'd sell tickets to a puppy-stomping parade if they knew people would queue up, yet, in a free market they're unable to because of social sanctions, voluntary customer support, reputation and so on. If they aren't born with a high amount of altruism in their blood they at least need to fake it in order to be invited to the dance to begin with. Throw all that out the goddamn window when governments get involved. Politicians will just extract property from citizens and subsidize private enterprise willy-nilly. So much for the organic checks and balances that arise from free exchange.

The same can be said of religion. I'm sure you've heard about some tiff in the Middle East recently caused by Muslims. I'm not one to say there aren't demented little fuckers who want to annihilate everyone who won't praise their own fevered delusions, but let's have some perspective. American foreign policy made that wack-job fringe look a whole lot more attractive through years of painting the walls of their Mosques with the intestines of their children (See: Eisenhower Doctrine). Doesn't foster a lot of inter-cultural good will, does it? And why do you think Jesus-Camp Christians started getting political, because they're bored? Hell no! Governments give out goodies, it's as plain as that. It's hard to believe that people still take men like Christopher Hitchens seriously. A man who harangues against the soft target of religion until he pops but then enthusiastically signs the roster of supporters for the War on Terrorism which has killed a million Iraqis, displaced millions more, ethnically cleansed parts of the country and caused four million to become food insecure. --the fuck is wrong with this asshole?

At least with religion, if I can say anything nice about it at all, is that it provides communitarian support. A warm environment, somebody to take care of you when you're sick, a social safety net and a place where everybody knows your name. Let's see a government compete with that with its bloated, lumbering welfare system.

My point is Westernized Christians probably won't go out and kill over their religion except if they join the armed forces, and in today's world other extreme religious viewpoints would only be able to build up a fighting force based on their own moxy. Without the aggression of the state evil loses its backbone.

Freedom Roundtable - 2009 Liberty Forum

What's so great about Agorism?

agora -

n. pl. ag·o·rae (-r) or ag·o·ras

A place of congregation, especially an ancient Greek marketplace.

As any skinny, ink-spattered punk claiming to be an Anarchist will assert revolutionary violence is the only answer against the toxic tentacles of the state. Albert Einstein, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were all woefully wrong. Only the heat from a molotov cocktail or a shattered Starbucks street front window can force Goliath to genuflect. But governments are serpents coiling and squeezing around those who struggle for breath with three heads ready to replace any one that's severed.

From a distance what's a more absurd sight than a handful of hooded vegans taking arms against the largest military power ever amassed. Time to lock away your Schwinns, Mr. & Ms. Anarchist, Lady Liberty is packing heat and she will end you faster than you can say "In God We Trust."

Unless, there's a better way...

In the late '70s and early '80s a germ of an idea wafted through the subterranean corridors of Anarchist philosophy. What if there was a theory of social organization which involved markets that appealed to both the revolutionary left and the revolutionary right. Easier said than done. Right-Libertarians made attempts at reaching across the aisle to their left-wing brothers and sisters for years but alas their arms proved to be much too short. The man responsible for achieving great strides toward bridging this schism was Samuel Edward Konkin III also known as SEK3 on the streets. Konkin devised a concept of Anarchism which brought in the labor-centered, class-intensive focus of the left and married it with the Austrian economics of the right. He named it Agorism after the agora or marketplaces of Ancient Greece.

So, what's so great about Agorism? It recognizes that violence can't be met with violence. Of course by now it's just a cliche but aggression is cyclical. The best way to destroy a rotten idea (i.e. the state) is to replace it with a better one (i.e. voluntary exchange). Never a reformist, SEK3 decided the only logical form this revolution could take would be counter-economic meaning through black and gray markets, barter networks and local currencies. These counter-economies would naturally begin as tiny, grassroots cells then grow organically as they demonstrated they could deliver better quality goods and services cheaper without the burden of state mandated licensure and taxation. Think it's just a pipe dream? Well, think again. Counter-economies existed in the past in the Pacific Northwest in Canada with Indigenous Potlatch Festivals, and are being maintained in the present with Sustainable Communities some of which have their very own monetary system.

Agorism has also refurbished old chestnuts like Marx's and Engels' Class Theory. Everybody knows their views and its faults so they won't be rehashed here. From the ashheap of Marxism, Agorist Class Theory holds on to the two-class divide, yet, where the Communists get a little kookie is when they omit the state as a pestilential force. How odd, it seemed to be right there in front of their noses. The actual partition is between the politically connected and the economically productive. Robber Barons, Military Personnel and Politicians comprise the former while Entrepreneurs and Workers fill the latter. Of course, there are dynamic gradations between the classes all established by one's orientation to the bulbous, dangling teats of the state.

Beyond Agorism's appeal to pragmatism there is a sense of unity between all schools of Anarchist thought as one of its features. Since Anarchism's inception Anarchists haven't even been able to agree on how to change a light bulb let alone agree upon anything else. There are some hardliners on both sides who do readily dismiss this relatively new approach. Little do they realize the serpent cannot be decapitated. Only through non-participation will it eventually starve to death.

Robert Anton Wilson on Anarchism

50 Things to Do Now to Increase Liberty

(http://fau.anarplex.net/?p=26)

Fifty Things To Do NOW!

1. Become a part-time entrepreneur, garage-market-dealer, urban farmer, welder, whatever. Just be productive under your own command. It doesn’t matter what it is; just be directly productive, and directly deal with suppliers and clients. You’ll find it awesomely liberating and it will be highly useful for the free underground market.
2. Switch off the TV. Read books!
3. Socialize with people that share your ethics and that are productive and respectful. Eat together, discuss, challenge each other, help each other, have a good time.
4. Get a safe or safe deposit box. Start moving all the cash you can get in there, convert at least 30% of your cash to silver and/or gold coins.
5. Invest in trust. Do minor deals for people on a trust basis. Taking others at their word, and let yourself be challenged by yours.
6. Start looking for matches. When you talk with people, memorize what they do, and if an opportunity comes up, connect them with someone else for a minor finders fee (a burger, a few beers, whatever).
7. Join your local LIMA house. (We’ll explain this in a future post.)
8. Travel, but don’t go sight-seeing – spend your time getting to know the people there. Think about business opportunities with them.
9. Start using aliases and pseudonyms. Get comfortable using them in real-life situations.
10. Learn to use cryptography.
11. Learn ethics and law (not the government law…).
12. Study logic, especially the fallacies.
13. Put more cash aside. Use your part-time job as the source of saved cash.
14. Start to invest cash with people you know, in off the books projects. Start making micro-loans to people or buy shares in their operations.
15. Learn basic double-entry book-keeping. Don’t waste effort on the account-numbers they teach you – understand the concept and use it.
16. Learn to write in code. We all have to use recordings, bookkeeping, contact books, transaction notes etc. These should be hard to decipher for someone taking a quick glimpse, and even hard for someone taking time to analyze them. Use tricks like date-shifting, shorthand, making up your own terms, etc. Or, if you want to spend a little more effort, learn to use memorized ciphers, such as memorizing some longer text, then apply it as a simple shifting-key to what you write, with the page number or a marker as a keypart.
17. Tell other producers, entrepreneurs, traders etc that you appreciate what they do.
18. Buy primarily from others like you, stay away from the on-the-books market as much as you can.
19. When in conflict, ask someone to mediate. Solve conflicts yourself wherever you can. Use a mutually respected and trusted third party when necessary. Stay away from state “justice” whenever you can.
20. Start respecting secrets. Secrets are good most of the time; transparency is bad most of the time. Detox yourself from the “everything should be in the open” propaganda.
21. Slowly make your part-time, off-the-books business, your main line of income. Things like underground dental hygiene are very cool.
22. Learn that “off-the-books” means that you really have to excel in what you do. You have to provide quality.
23. Don’t invest in single deals; invest in relationships with the market.
24. Get over it: Voting doesn’t help at all.
25. Work with friends to create buying associations and selling associations. This will give you and others lots of money to save and lots of money to hide.
26. Harbor a fugitive. (Good ones, obviously.)
27. Help someone cross a border without documents.
28. Offer small merchants silver or gold rather than fiat currency.
29. Sell your products in silver or gold.
30. Accept and use digital gold, such as Pecunix or C-gold.
31. Start a community currency in your town.
32. Use digital cash, such as eCache.
33. Use Loom, Truebanc.
34. Get serious about protecting your Internet traffic.
35. Get comfortable working your will in the world.
36. Learn how to work your will beneficially. This is not about being “right,” it is about causing benefit.
37. Fix your mistakes (you will make them). Learn not to repeat them.
38. Learn how to communicate effectively. Again, this is not about proving that you are right – this is about getting true ideas into other minds effectively.
39. Stop obeying the state in some new way. Tell your friends about your success doing so.
40. Get comfortable with the term “Economic Civil Disobedience.”
41. Spread the idea that the state is not magic – it is nothing more than a collection of your neighbors – no more ethical and noble than the lamer next door.
42. Learn how to find the false assumptions in arguments. Most public lies sound okay if you don’t find their unspoken assumptions. If they pass too quickly, find the written version and search for the lie it contains.
43. Learn how to disagree with kindness.
44. Accept the fact that most people are confused and are just barely hanging on to their last shreds of self-esteem. Understand that state intellectuals like this condition, as it makes people easier to keep in line – a little shame goes a long way.
45. Don’t waste your energy on the political crisis de jour. Busy your mind with more substantial things. Daily political dramas are a time-sink, and the statists like it. Stop following their script.
46. Use jurisdictional arbitrage to deprive the state of your money. Work with friends if the setup costs are too large for you.
47. Learn to defend yourself, your family, your neighbors and your town. No state means no military. Until you take this upon yourself, your plans will always have a gaping hole in their middle. There is no free lunch here either. Get weapons and be mentally prepared to use them. Decide in advance how and when you would use them – do not leave it to the emotion of the moment – that will make a shipwreck of the whole venture. Learn how to use them safely.
48. Do something nice for your neighbor. The people who live near you are a far more important part of your environment than any other.
49. Help people who suffer undeservedly. No state means you are responsible for charity. Sure, it will be much easier when the state isn’t stealing all your extra money (or chasing you in hope of theft), but do what you can now and get used to the process.
50. Watch over your friends. Notice when they are having a bad day, show some kindness and concern. If they are overloaded, carry some of their burden. We all have bad times, and your bad day may come too. Help one another. Restore one another.

Subversive Anarchist Logo for Government Agency

By Brad Taylor

(http://www.fr33agents.com/233/subversive-anarchist-logo-for-government-agency/)

Anarchists see government as inherently unaccountable. As a monopolistic organization, the state denies consumers of its services the opportunity to vote with their feet. The provision of services we normally associate with government – law enforcement, courts, land zoning, etc – will only be made accountable with the abolition of coercive government, with everything supplied voluntarily by the market and civil society.

Judging by its new logo, Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board seems to agree.

Director of the Board Kevin Kennedy doesn’t see what all the fuss is about, saying that “there are significant differences” between the designs.

I’m afraid I don’t see many differences. That’s an anarchy symbol, alright.

My guess/hope is that some liberty-minded graphic designer made the logo as an attempt to subtly influence the masses. This is one example of working within the system I fully support.

Socialism

The Other Side of the Elephant

(http://freedomainradio.com/board/forums/p/21203/167372.aspx)

Yesterday I went into downtown Philadelphia for the second day in a row---something I never do without a very good reason--to see a political debate. And it was about the only situation I could imagine in which I would want to attend such a thing, because this was not the usual statist-collectivist-versus-statist-collectivist debate.

One side was Michael Badnarik, a devout Constitutionalist. But, amazingly, in this setting Mr. Badnarik was the PRO-state side, because the other side was Stefan Molyneux, who "advocates" no government (www.freedomainradio.com). (Actually, he doesn't advocate doing away with government so much as he points out, just as I do, that "government" doesn't exist.)

I've said before that if I saw anyone else ranting the unpleasant truths about "government" loudly enough, I would happily quit. Well, Stefan has me tempted, and about the only reason I'm not hanging up my rabble-rousing hat quite yet is because, though I think Stefan and I describe the same elephant, we are describing different sides of it. ( For anyone who doesn't understand my "elephant" reference, here is the reason for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Men_and_an_Elephant )

The purpose of this message is mainly just to describe the tusk on the far side of the elephant that Stefan described at the event yesterday, as it relates to a couple points that came up. 1) "Without government, we won't be able to defend ourselves from invaders!" In response to this common concern, Stefan rightfully explained how, if there is no existing "government," there is nothing for invaders to take over, and no incentive for them to try. Without a taxation mechanism already in place, invaders have no way to exploit the people. I would just add that not only would there be no taxing mechanism, but there would also be no SURRENDERING mechanism. One "government" can surrender to another. One authoritarian army can surrender to another. When the guy at the top of the hierarchy says, "we give up," all those below him will stop fighting. In a stateless society, on the other hand, there is no one even CAPABLE of surrendering on behalf of the entire society, even if they wanted to. Therefore, as the invader, you'd have to get every single individual there to surrender, or you'd never have a moment's peace. Lots of standing armies have learned this the hard way, when trying to combat an armed populace. In short, if your enemy can't give up, they can't ever be defeated. 2) "But gangs will take over!" and/or 3) "The new protectors will become oppressors!"

In response to this, Stefan did a fine job of explaining how societal and economic influences would make it impossible for a gang to take over without the state. I would add only one thing, but I think it's a big thing: The PERCEPTION of "authority" is the ONLY thing which allows the oppression we see today. When robberies, assaults, threats and murders are perceived as inherently legitimate, because they are called "taxes" and "law," and are done by those wearing the label of "government," the people will not resist. In other words, when evil is not SEEN as evil, no one is going to fight against it. The entire problem with the notion of "government" is that it amounts to societal PERMISSION for certain people to commit theft, harassment, assault, murder, etc. Could a gang of 100,000 stupid bureaucrats (only a small percentage of which are even armed) successfully rob three hundred million people? To put it another way, could any gang extort a victim base three THOUSAND times as big as the gang itself? Of course not, UNLESS they are called "the Internal Revenue Service," and their demands are somehow viewed as legitimate, and disobedience to their demands is viewed as "criminal." And the only way to do that is to indoctrinate the victims of the theft into believing in "authority." As I've said before, I'd love it if we were invaded by the Red Chinese Army, because if they came here, and threatened to do EXACTLY what "our" "government" is already doing, there would be immediate, universal, self-righteous armed resistance. "You daggum furriners ain't takin half uh MY money!" (As a trivia fact, though there are well over a billion people in China, there are only about three million people in the Chinese Army. If they all invaded here, they would be outnumber 30-to-1 by armed Americans, and that's BEFORE the other 200,000,000+ Americans decided to arm themselves.) And so it would be with any non-government gang, or any protection agency gone rogue. If it wasn't perceived as having the RIGHT to "tax" us and otherwise boss us around, the resistance would be so swift and so severe that, no matter how nasty and evil the gangs might be, they wouldn't gain any wealth or power from trying it, and might very well end up dead. (Ever notice how, whether you're talking about street gangs or the bigger, more organized Mafia crime rings, they always feed off of a state-created market? Whether it's prostitution, gambling, "illegal" weapons, or drugs (or alcohol, back when prohibition was in effect), the ONLY time they can economically compete is when the state CREATES a niche for them, by outlawing a victimless "crime." Have you ever seen a big crime syndicate that makes its money from selling groceries, or cars, or cleaning supplies? No. They always derive their money and power from "illegal" trade, which is only "illegal" because the state declared it to be so. Occasionally, a very small gang will have some success, though usually short-lived, just by extorting local businesses, but even that is only made possible by state actions, such as "gun control" (disarming the victims), or a government police force helping out the thugs, or just BEING the thugs.)

The perception of "authority" is key to understanding why a stateless society, where the people understand self-ownership, could not possibly accidentally revert to a statist society. It's not because everyone is good and noble. It's because long-term forced extortion isn't a viable endeavor if your intended victims: 1) are armed, and 2) don't think you have the RIGHT to extort them. --------------------------------------------

Well, that's about all I have to add to yesterday's event. Stefan is so thorough and so clear, not to mention very entertaining and utterly hilarious, that I don't think much more needs to be said. And, as those on my list know all too well, it's very unusual for me to NOT have an endless list of things to say regarding anything political that happens. So here is Stefan's website. Go check it out: http://www.freedomainradio.com And no, he's not even paying me to say that. (Well, at least he hasn't yet, but I remain hopeful.)

Larken Rose http://www.larkenrose.com

The Political Class Is In Session

by Thomas L. Knapp

(http://c4ss.org/content/707)

Any number of recent political developments would serve equally well as the “news hook” for today’s column:

• The US Senate’s determination to spend $1.75 billion on combat aircraft that the Pentagon has said it doesn’t want.
• The inclusion of punitive tariffs in the Waxman-Markey “cap and trade” climate bill.
• The Obama administration’s decision to purchase arms for Somalia’s “legitimate” government.

In five more minutes, I could probably find five more items, but these three will do.

Do you often find the operations of government confusing and seemingly counterproductive? You’re not alone. It’s not your fault. There’s actually a simple explanation, but understanding that explanation requires you to mentally rebel against a lifetime of “education,” conditioning and propagandization.

Here’s that simple explanation:

The purpose of all, or nearly all, functions of the modern state is to facilitate and maximize the transfer of wealth from the pockets of the productive class to the bank accounts of the political class.

Take a moment to digest that claim, and come back when the room stops spinning.

Are you back? There, there … have a sip of wine, rub your temples a bit, regain your composure. Unless you’re already a proponent of the stateless society, you’re probably either upset by the obvious truth of the claim (and perhaps berating yourself for not having arrived at that truth on your own long ago), or outraged that I’d dare make it.

If the latter happens to be the case, I’m going to say it one more time, just to help you get used to it, and then I’m going to explain it:

The purpose of all, or nearly all, functions of the modern state is to facilitate and maximize the transfer of wealth from the pockets of the productive class to the bank accounts of the political class.

This isn’t a new claim by any means. It goes back more than a century-and-a-half to Comte and Dunoyer, and if you’re a student of political theory you’ve seen it in bastardized form, courtesy of Karl Marx (he asserted a different set of classes — “labor” and “capital” — and was unwilling to give up the state as an instrument in his own attempts to establish a classless society; we’ve seen how well that turned out).

Government usually starts with the sincere enunciation of some high-flown ideals. For example:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed …

But it’s all downhill from the “governments are instituted among men” part. It’s never very long before a political class emerges — a ruling class composed not only of those who seek to wield power as functionaries of the state, but also of those who aim to profit by gaining influence with those functionaries.

The government-affiliated members of the political class curry favor with the profiteer element by dispensing favors: Sweetheart government contracts, for example, and never mind that the goods or services contracted for may serve no particular “public good.”

The profiteering members of the political class reward their government-affiliated counterparts with campaign contributions, the delivery of constituent blocs to the polls, and lucrative employment opportunities after “retirement” from government “service.”

And you? Well, you pay for it, of course. The political class drinks milk, the productive class gets milked.

If you doubt the truth of this simple explanation, no problem — this is something you can test for yourself:

1. Pick up (or point your browser at) any newspaper, and find the first ten most visible articles on legislation under consideration by your Congress, Parliament, state legislature, city council — any level of government, anywhere on Earth.
2. Research those ten pieces of legislation. Look at the alleged “public good” goals … then look behind those goals to where the money’s actually going. For extra credit, research the outcomes of similar past pieces of legislation.

I’m confident that in at least 8 of 10 cases, and probably 10 of 10, you’ll discover that the legislation can’t possibly achieve its stated “public good” (and that past similar legislation hasn’t) … but that as a result of the legislation, a lot of government jobs are secured, and a lot of politically connected companies make money. Come back in five or ten years, and I’m also confident that you’ll find some of that legislation’s political proponents sitting on those companies’ boards.

Kropotkin on ants & mutual aid

The Cure for Layoffs: Fire the Boss!

By Naomi Klein
and Avi Lewis

(http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/21501)

(May 14th, 2009) -- In 2004, we made a documentary called The Take about Argentina's movement of worker-run businesses. In the wake of the country's dramatic economic collapse in 2001, thousands of workers walked into their shuttered factories and put them back into production as worker cooperatives. Abandoned by bosses and politicians, they regained unpaid wages and severance while re-claiming their jobs in the process.

As we toured Europe and North America with the film, every Q&A ended up with the question, "that's all very well in Argentina, but could that ever happen here?"

Well, with the world economy now looking remarkably like Argentina's in 2001 (and for many of the same reasons) there is a new wave of direct action among workers in rich countries. Co-ops are once again emerging as a practical alternative to more lay-offs. Workers in the U.S. and Europe are beginning to ask the same questions as their Latin American counterparts: Why do we have to get fired? Why can't we fire the boss? Why is the bank allowed to drive our company under while getting billions of dollars of our money?

[This week] (May 15) at Cooper Union in New York City, we're [took] part in a panel that looks at this phenomenon, called Fire the Boss: The Worker Control Solution from Buenos Aires to Chicago.

We'll be joined by people from the movement in Argentina as well as workers from the famous Republic Windows and Doors struggle in Chicago.

It's a great way to hear directly from those who are trying to rebuild the economy from the ground up, and who need meaningful support from the public, as well as policy makers at all levels of government. For those who can't make it out to Cooper Union, here's a quick round up of recent developments in the world of worker control.

Argentina:

In Argentina, the direct inspiration for many current worker actions, there have been more takeovers in the last 4 months than the previous 4 years.

One example:

- Arrufat, a chocolate maker with a 50 year history, was abruptly closed late last year. 30 employees occupied the plant, and despite a huge utility debt left by the former owners, have been producing chocolates by the light of day, using generators.

With a loan of less than $5,000 from the The Working World, a capital fund/NGO started by a fan of The Take, they were able to produce 17,000 Easter eggs for their biggest weekend of the year. They made a profit of $75,000, taking home $1,000 each and saving the rest for future production.

UK:

- Visteon is an auto parts manufacturer that was spun off from Ford in 2000. Hundreds of workers were given 6 minutes notice that their workplaces were closing. 200 workers in Belfast staged a sit-in on the roof of their factory, another 200 in Enfield followed suit the next day.

Over the next few weeks, Visteon increased the severance package to up to 10 times their initial offer, but the company is refusing to put the money in the workers' bank accounts until they leave the plants, and they are refusing to leave until they see the money.

Ireland:

- A factory where workers make legendary Waterford Crystal was occupied for 7 weeks earlier this year when parent company Waterford Wedgewood went into receivership after being taken over by a US private equity firm.

The US company has now put 10 million Euros in a severance fund, and negotiations are ongoing to keep some of the jobs.

Canada:

As the Big Three automakers collapse, there have been 4 occupations by Canadian Auto Workers so far this year. In each case, factories were closing and workers were not getting compensation that was owed to them. They occupied the factories to stop the machines from being removed, using that as leverage to force the companies back to the table - precisely the same dynamic that worker takeovers in Argentina have followed.

France:

In France, there's been a new wave of "Bossnappings" this year, in which angry employees have detained their bosses in factories that are facing closure. Companies targeted so far include Caterpillar, 3M, Sony, and Hewlett Packard.

The 3M executive was brought a meal of moules et frites during his overnight ordeal.

A comedy hit in France this spring was a movie called "Louise-Michel," in which a group of women workers hires a hitman to kill their boss after he shuts down their factory with no warning.

A French union official said in March, "those who sow misery reap fury. The violence is done by those who cut jobs, not by those who try to defend them."

And this week, 1,000 Steelworkers disrupted the annual shareholders meeting of ArcelorMittal, the world's largest steel company. They stormed the company's headquarters in Luxembourg, smashing gates, breaking windows, and fighting with police.

Poland:

Also this week, in Southern Poland, at the largest coal coking producer in Europe, thousands of workers bricked up the entrance to the company's headquarters, protesting wage cuts.

US:

And then there's the famous Republic Windows and Doors story: 260 workers occupied their plant for 6 world-shaking days in Chicago last December. With a savvy campaign against the company's biggest creditor, Bank of America ("You got bailed out, we got sold out!") and massive international solidarity, they won the severance they were owed. And more - the plant is re-opening under new ownership, making energy-efficient windows with all the workers hired back at their old wages.

And this week, Chicago is making it a trend. Hartmarx is a 122-year old company that makes business suits, including the navy blue number that Barack Obama wore on election night, and his inaugural tuxedo and topcoat.

The business is in bankruptcy. Its biggest creditor is Wells Fargo, recipient of 25 billion public dollars in bailout money. While there are 2 offers on the table to buy the company and keep it operating, Wells Fargo wants to liquidate it. On Monday, 650 workers voted to occupy their Chicago factory if the bank goes ahead with liquidation.

Left Libertarian Terminology and Strategy: Obama the statist and more

(http://bradspangler.com/blog/archives/1295)

Yesterday a piece by Cato-ite In Chief Ed Crane was published: Obama Is a Statist, Not a Socialist.

I have mixed feelings about this, but I suppose I have to see it as a potential net improvement in terminology. It’s both more accurate and politically smarter, IMO, to call Obama a statist than a socialist. Yet from my perspective, many of the Cato-ites themselves are comparatively statist and the “Red State Fascist” Republican establishment they hope to influence certainly is statist beyond a shadow of a doubt. Even so, one must suppose the inconsistencies of others are their own difficulties to manage and their own responsibility.

The political reality is that calling Obama a socialist sets one up as a Strangelovian buffoon psychologically mired in outdated Cold War paranoia. It doesn’t politically suit the rhetorical needs of those who have an intelligent critique of the status quo that demands serious attention. Furthermore, it ignores the statist side of “capitalism” as it has actually existed as well as the long neglected anti-statist tradition within socialism that radical free market libertarians rightfully belong to (but more on that later).

For years, radical libertarian attempts to publicly use the more accurate term “statist” to describe statists have resulted in puzzled looks and the reply “A what-sit?”. This Crane piece at this moment, with follow-through from Crane and others, can change that if enough libertarians get behind the rhetorical shift. There are plenty of intelligent so-called “fiscal conservatives” at the grassroots level that have been alienated by the jingoistic belligerence and big spending (as long as it’s on stuff that goes BOOM!) supported by the red-state fascist “wingnuts”.

Those “fiscal conservatives” are running away from the disreputable Bushian nutcases as fast as they can. The Cato-ites have a handy catchers mitt to scoop them up with. That mitt is the term the Cato-ites originally started using out of milquetoast reluctance to call themselves libertarians — “market liberal“, in reference to what we would normally call “classical liberal” but in a modern context.

Labeling the statists as statists and the market liberals as market liberals suits the strategic purposes of radical free market libertarians — i.e. market anarchists. You see, my position is that in order for libertarian ideals to triumph, the current broad-spectrum libertarian movement as it currently exists — a fusionist alliance of minarchists and reformist-oriented anarchists or “partyarchs” — must die. Or split, anyway, into two strands with better delineated identities and roles.

Libertarian ineffectiveness is the root of perpetual libertarian anguish. I believe this ineffectiveness comes from the overall conception of the movement amounting to trying to put a square peg in a round hole. Let me explain…

Despite Rothbard’s firm recommendation that libertarians absolutely must distinguish themselves from statist conservatives in his confidential 1961 memo to the Volker Fund, “What Is To Be Done?”, the nuts and bolts of reformist activism have lead to obscuring the message of radical libertarians, as well as rotten conservative contamination of the movement.

The result is that the most passionate radicals are typically the ones that throw themselves most laboriously into the reformist projects that appear to have the best chances of success (because they have the most establishment backing, and are typically the most corrupt). In the case of the Libertarian Party, radical efforts to build an organized political party have only resulted in a “brass ring” — a prize for conservatoid petty tyrants, degenerate factions of the statist ruling class, to capture. The radicals then break themselves like ships on a reef, trying to defend it from them.

Historically, though, effective reform movements have typically been partially a response by establishment interests seeking to stem the loss of support for the establishment flowing to those who pose a radical challenge to the status quo. With radical libertarians throwing themselves into reformism, as opposed to building a revolutionary class consciousness, no challenge capable of truly worrying the ruling class results.

But, one might ask, isn’t libertarian reform good? Isn’t less tyranny good? Isn’t Spangler being impractical and infantile in seeking to make the perfect the enemy of the good?

No. One doesn’t have to oppose reform in order to put one’s own efforts elsewhere. As Konkin noted, there is a spectrum of consciousness among the victims of statism. My remarks are addressed to those who already understand market anarchism. I’m calling them to participate in putting that whole body of ideas, in its most shockingly radical form, into the public discourse. The confused mini-statists will be left to react how they please, which will inevitably change anyway with the drift of politics.

The minarchist critics that make up milquetoast libertarianism have a strategic blind-spot. In their cowardly and reflexive zeal to keep up “respectable” appearances by not deviating to far from the political center, they fail to recognize that the political center itself has no objective location. It’s just the rag tied in the middle of the political tug-of-war rope, and gets yanked all over the place constantly. Radicals have the most “pull” when they are acting like radicals instead of trying to be something they’re not — reformists.

If you dream of genuinely anarchist revolution, the smashing of the state, but would settle for some decent reform, then, it still makes sense to act like a revolutionary. The half-steppers, milquetoasts and establishmentarians will get you your reform, and you might get revolution.

What do I mean by “act like a revolutionary”? As anarchists, revolution is a necessarily very different business for us than it is for statists like minarchists and Bolsheviks. We don’t want to seize state power, but rather make the populace ungovernable by anybody — perhaps especially not by us! We have to delegitimize the state, building a revolutionary class consciousness in order to build the will to defend against the state. We have to offer our ideas for how society can regulate itself as an alternative to violence-based government. We have to get behind building disobedience and alternative, quasi-insurrectionary civil society. It means “coming out of the closet” and being anarchists.

That, and that alone, is how we can pose a radical challenge to the status quo.

Getting back to terminology, we have three points so far:

1. Label our enemies statists, not socialists, to indicate that statism in all forms is what we oppose.
2. Label the reformers “market liberals”.
3. Label ourselves “market anarchists”, or agorists or simply anarchists.

We come then to a fourth point of terminology and strategy: we are socialists! More specifically, we are both free market libertarians and libertarian socialists — and there is no fundamental conflict between the two in their most radical and principled forms. There are differences over theory that could be better addressed if free market libertarians were to shed reformist cultural baggage (e.g. internalization of conservative narratives that flatter the oppressor state) that makes us reluctant to apply our own theory more stringently, such as the understanding that (particularly in the context of Konkin’s agorist theory of revolution) we support the revolutionary redistribution of property!

It’s relatively non-controversial to recognize that classical liberalism was the original left. It’s also widely recognized among libertarians that Rothbard placed free market libertarianism on the far left opposite statist conservatism with Marxism in the confused middle. And that Konkin expanded on that point that we are the real left.

To drive the point that we are the real left home, though, we must reclaim our socialist heritage. Great socialist thinkers like Warren, Proudhon and Tucker all examined “the social question” of what was wrong with classical liberalism. They proposed continuing classical liberal theory to its most consistent form — the abolition of the state and the end of monopoly exploitation through complete laissez faire and resulting unbridled competition. Forget the labor theory of value. Forget everything else we’ve moved past in terms of refining economic theory. By the standards of the great libertarian socialists, we ARE libertarian socialists wanting to end the statist privilege of subsidies and monopoly for all time and achieve justice in property. Marx, by comparison, was the first Cato-ite — offering a ludicrously statist “transition program” to anarchy.

That all gets swept under the rug in the libertarian fusionist eagerness to make nicey-nice with the market liberals in the name of attempting reformism. Positing classical liberal reform as the route to achieving anarchy necessarily de-emphasizes the market anarchist critique of market liberalism. We then have difficulty credibly discussing what was wrong with classical liberalism, which we must do to “answer the social question”, when we’re busy advocating classical liberalism (i.e. market liberalism)!

As a result, the audience for libertarian rhetoric, although they may not put it so explicitly, doesn’t believe the libertarian advocate of classical liberalism (both minarchist and partyarch) — because they know the current social democratic establishment arose because there was something wrong with classical liberalism (and the social democrats managed to position themselves as having the answer, albeit a false answer from our perspective).

Liberty, and liberty alone, truly answers the social question.

Well, one might ask, why do we have to get into the whole confused array of definitions of socialism in order to advocate market anarchism effectively?

We recognize that the mainstream left and right are both factions among supporters of the social democratic state. Not only does explicitly understanding and explaining ourselves as socialists emphasize that we market anarchists have an alternative answer to the social question — as distinguished from the failed answer of the sociali democrats and the lack of answer from the market liberals — it positions us capture the loyalty of the particular people we must necessarily recruit in order to pose a radical challenge to the status quo resulting in either effective reform or revolution.

Why do I say that and who are these particular people?

Libertarians are typically aware that, at least in the U.S., the divide between center-right and center-left is a pretty much the result of an arbitrary divvying up of issue positions between ruling class factions. There is no systematic ideology there, in either spot. Rather, the center-left and center-right are more like tribes or ready made identities that people “try on” and keep if it seems to fit or discard if it doesn’t in their own personal case.

At the root of this, I believe is a difference in personality types or psychographic profiles between what are typically regarded as “right-wingers” and “left-wingers”. While that certainly isn’t true in all cases, and some people don’t fit into either category, it only has to be true enough for enough people in order for it to be a part of the political landscape we must navigate.

These two broad categories of people could be regarded as mirror images, but there is an asymmetry to them as well. That asymmetry is crucial for our purposes as revolutionaries. Right-wingers are “loyalists”. They are psychologically incapable of acting as revolutionaries. They can only act in a rebellious manner when driven into psychosis, examples being Timothy McVeigh and white supremacists. To build a cadre of advocates of revolution big enough to not be disregarded, we must become adept at explaining market anarchism as the answer to the social question and thereby recruiting enough “leftists” with a temperament or personality type suitable for acting as revolutionaries.

How an Anarchist society could function

The author of these videos is an anarcho-capitalist. I would personally tweak a few points and make it much more worker-centric and communal, however, what I'm attracted to in these videos are the problems the left hasn't been able to solve, namely currency and defense/police. I still consider myself very much on the left, but we must stop assuming human nature will change. Whenever we're asked about money or the police in a future, stateless arrangement the best we offer is: "From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs" and "People won't want to commit crimes in the future." Which is just gobbiltygook. No matter how corrupt a person is he or she will respond to incentives and that's what these videos attempt to articulate.

Like it or not a stateless society must be a "free market", a patchwork of communists, syndicalists, agorists, mutualists, capitalists, etc. and that's what will make that future system so beautiful. Don't like capitalism? No problem join a commune, or become a hard-line individualist and journey out into the woods Thoreau style. There can even be a mixing of approaches such as an internally socialistic community with direct democracy and mixed labor roles that sells their commodities on the open market. The concepts are worth your time and merit closer inspection for anyone who upholds liberty as an essential value.


Monopolies

Police

Health Care

Roads

Education

Defense

Courts

Currency

Evilness of Power

From Primitive to Modern

Logical & Historical Arguments

Hierarchical Psychology

Morality, Property & the State

Consumerism, Nationalism & Regale

Propaganda Model p.1

Propaganda Model p.2

Solutions to Capitalist Psychopathy

To Have, To Be, To Die: Wage Slavery

The Triumph of Anarchism

Anarchy is Emergent

Yay Obama

Labor Struggle in a Free Market

Labor Struggle in a Free Market

by Kevin Carson
(View Original)

One of the most common questions raised about a hypothetical free market society concerns worker protection laws of various kinds. As Roderick Long puts it,

In a free nation, will employees be at the mercy of employers?… Under current law, employers are often forbidden to pay wages lower than a certain amount; to demand that employees work in hazardous conditions (or sleep with the boss); or to fire without cause or notice. What would be the fate of employees without these protections?

Long argues that, despite the absence of many of today’s formal legal protections, the shift of bargaining power toward workers in a free labor market will result in “a reduction in the petty tyrannies of the job world.”

Employers will be legally free to demand anything they want of their employees. They will be permitted to sexually harass them, to make them perform hazardous work under risky conditions, to fire them without notice, and so forth. But bargaining power will have shifted to favor the employee. Since prosperous economies generally see an increase in the number of new ventures but a decrease in the birth rate, jobs will be chasing workers rather than vice versa. Employees will not feel coerced into accepting mistreatment because it will be so much easier to find a new job. And workers will have more clout, when initially hired, to demand a contract which rules out certain treatment, mandates reasonable notice for layoffs, stipulates parental leave, or whatever. And the kind of horizontal coordination made possible by telecommunications networking opens up the prospect that unions could become effective at collective bargaining without having to surrender authority to a union boss.

This last is especially important. Present-day labor law limits the bargaining power of labor at least as much as it reinforces it. That’s especially true of reactionary legislation like Taft-Hartley and state right-to-work laws. Both are clearly abhorrent to free market principles.

Taft-Hartley, for example, prohibited many of the most successful labor strategies during the CIO organizing strikes of the early ’30s. The CIO planned strikes like a general staff plans a campaign, with strikes in a plant supported by sympathy and boycott strikes up and down the production chain, from suppliers to outlets, and supported by transport workers refusing to haul scab cargo. At their best, the CIO’s strikes turned into regional general strikes.

Right-wing libertarians of the vulgar sort like to argue that unions depend primarily on the threat of force, backed by the state, to exclude non-union workers (see here and here). Without forcible exclusion of scabs, they say, strikes would almost always turn into lockouts and union defeats. Although this has acquired the status of dogma at Mises.Org, it’s nonsense on stilts. The primary reason for the effectiveness of a strike is not the exclusion of scabs, but the transaction costs involved in hiring and training replacement workers, and the steep loss of productivity entailed in the disruption of human capital, institutional memory, and tacit knowledge.

With the strike is organized in depth, with multiple lines of defense — those sympathy and boycott strikes at every stage of production — the cost and disruption have a multiplier effect far beyond that of a strike in a single plant. Under such conditions, even a large minority of workers walking off the job at each stage of production can be quite effective.

Taft-Hartley greatly reduced the effectiveness of strikes at individual plants by prohibiting such coordination of actions across multiple plants or industries. Taft-Hartley’s cooling off periods also gave employers advance warning time to prepare for such disruptions, and greatly reduced the informational rents embodied in the training of the existing workforce. Were such restrictions on sympathy and boycott strikes in suppliers [not] in place, today’s “just-in-time” economy would likely be far more vulnerable to disruption than that of the 1930s.

But long before Taft-Hartley, the labor law regime of the New Deal had already created a fundamental shift in the form of labor struggle.

Before Wagner and the NLRB-enforced collective bargaining process, labor struggle was less focused on strikes, and more focused on what workers did in the workplace itself to exert leverage against management. They focused, in other words, on what the Wobblies call “direct action on the job”; or in the colorful phrase of a British radical workers’ daily at the turn of the century, “staying in on strike.” The reasoning was explained in the Wobbly Pamphlet “How to Fire Your Boss: A Worker’s Guide to Direct Action“:

The bosses, with their large financial reserves, are better able to withstand a long drawn-out strike than the workers. In many cases, court injunctions will freeze or confiscate the union’s strike funds. And worst of all, a long walk-out only gives the boss a chance to replace striking workers with a scab (replacement) workforce.

Workers are far more effective when they take direct action while still on the job. By deliberately reducing the boss’ profits while continuing to collect wages, you can cripple the boss without giving some scab the opportunity to take your job.

Such tactics included slowdowns, sick-ins, random one-day walkouts at unannounced intervals, working to rule, “good work” strikes, and “open mouth sabotage.” Labor followed, in other words, a classic asymmetric warfare model. Instead of playing by the enemy’s rules and suffering one honorable defeat after another, they played by their own rules and mercilessly exploited the enemy’s weak points.

The whole purpose of the Wagner regime was to put an end to this asymmetric warfare model. As Thomas Ferguson and G. William Domhoff have both argued, corporate backing for the New Deal labor accord came mainly from capital-intensive industry — the heart of the New Deal coalition in general. Because of the complicated technical nature of their production processes and their long planning horizons, their management required long-term stability and predictability. At the same time, because they were extremely capital-intensive, labor costs were a relatively modest part of total costs. Management, therefore, was willing to trade significant wage increases and job security for social peace on the job. Wagner came about, not because the workers were begging for it, but because the bosses were begging for a regime of enforceable labor contracts.

The purpose of the Wagner regime was to divert labor away from the asymmetric warfare model to a new one, in which union bureaucrats enforced the terms of contracts on their own membership. The primary function of union bureaucracies, under the new order, was to suppress wildcat action by their rank and file, to suppress direct action on the job, and to limit labor action to declared strikes under NLRB rules.

The New Deal labor agenda had the same practical effect as telling the militiamen at Lexington and Concord to come out from behind the rocks, put on bright red uniforms, and march in parade ground formation, in return for a system of arbitration to guarantee they didn’t lose all the time.

The problem is that the bosses decided, long ago, that labor was still winning too much of the time even under the Wagner regime. Their first response was Taft-Hartley and the right-to-work laws. From that point on, union membership stopped growing and then began a slow and inexorable process of decline that continues to the present day. The process picked up momentum around 1970, when management decided that the New Deal labor accord had outlived its usefulness altogether, and embraced the full union-busting potential under Taft-Hartley in earnest. But the official labor movement still foregoes the weapons it lay down in the 1930s. It sticks to wearing its bright red uniforms and marching in parade-ground formation, and gets massacred every time.

Labor needs to reconsider its strategy, and in particular to take a new look at the asymmetric warfare techniques it has abandoned for so long.

The effectiveness of these techniques is a logical result of the incomplete nature of the labor contract. According to Michael Reich and James Devine,

Conflict is inherent in the employment relation because the employer does not purchase a specified quantity of performed labor, but rather control over the worker’s capacity to work over a given time period, and because the workers’ goals differ from those of the employer. The amount of labor actually done is determined by a struggle between workers and capitalists.

The labor contract is incomplete because it is impossible for a contract to specify, ahead of time, the exact levels of effort and standards of performance expected of workers. The specific terms of the contract can only be worked out in the contested terrain of the workplace.

The problem is compounded by the fact that management’s authority in the workplace isn’t exogenous: that is, it isn’t enforced by the external legal system, at zero cost to the employer. Rather, it’s endogenous: management’s authority is enforced entirely with the resources and at the expense of the company. And workers’ compliance with directives is frequently costly — and sometimes impossible — to enforce. Employers are forced to resort to endogenous enforcement

when there is no relevant third party…, when the contested attribute can be measured only imperfectly or at considerable cost (work effort, for example, or the degree of risk assumed by a firm’s management), when the relevant evidence is not admissible in a court of law…[,] when there is no possible means of redress…, or when the nature of the contingencies concerning future states of the world relevant to the exchange precludes writing a fully specified contract.

In such cases the ex post terms of exchange are determined by the structure of the interaction between A and B, and in particular on the strategies A is able to adopt to induce B to provide the desired level of the contested attribute, and the counter strategies available to B….

An employment relationship is established when, in return for a wage, the worker B agrees to submit to the authority of the employer A for a specified period of time in return for a wage w. While the employer’s promise to pay the wage is legally enforceable, the worker’s promise to bestow an adequate level of effort and care upon the tasks assigned, even if offered, is not. Work is subjectively costly for the worker to provide, valuable to the employer, and costly to measure. The manager-worker relationship is thus a contested exchange. [Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, "Is the Demand for Workplace Democracy Redundant in a Liberal Economy?," in Ugo Pagano and Robert Rowthorn, eds., Democracy and Effciency in the Economic Enterprise.]

Since it is impossible to define the terms of the contract exhaustively up front, “bargaining” — as Oliver Williamson puts it — “is pervasive.”

The classic illustration of the contested nature of the workplace under incomplete labor contracting, and the pervasiveness of bargaining, is the struggle over the pace and intensity of work, reflected in both the slowdown and working to rule.

At its most basic, the struggle over the pace of work is displayed in what Oliver Williamson calls “perfunctory cooperation” (as opposed to consummate cooperation):

Consummate cooperation is an affirmative job attitude–to include the use of judgment, filling gaps, and taking initiative in an instrumental way. Perfunctory cooperation, by contrast, involves job performance of a minimally acceptable sort…. The upshot is that workers, by shifting to a perfunctory performance mode, are in a position to “destroy” idiosyncratic efficiency gains.

He quotes Peter Blau and Richard Scott’s observation to the same effect:

…[T]he contract obligates employees to perform only a set of duties in accordance with minimum standards and does not assure their striving to achieve optimum performance…. [L]egal authority does not and cannot command the employee’s willingness to devote his ingenuity and energy to performing his tasks to the best of his ability…. It promotes compliance with directives and discipline, but does not encourage employees to exert effort, to accept responsibilities, or to exercise initiative.

Legal authority, likewise, “does not and cannot” proscribe working to rule, which is nothing but obeying management’s directives literally and without question. If they’re the brains behind the operation, and we get paid to shut up and do what we’re told, then by God that’s just what we’ll do.

Disgruntled workers, Williamson suggests, will respond to intrusive or authoritarian attempts at surveillance and monitoring with a passive-aggressive strategy of compliance in areas where effective metering is possible — while shifting their perfunctory compliance (or worse) into areas where it is impossible. True to the asymmetric warfare model, the costs of management measures for verifying compliance are generally far greater than the costs of circumventing those measures.

As frequent commenter Jeremy Weiland says, “You are the monkey wrench“:

Their need for us to behave in an orderly, predictable manner is a vulnerability of theirs; it can be exploited. You have the ability to transform from a replaceable part into a monkey wrench.

At this point, some libertarians are probably stopping up their ears and going “La la la la, I can’t hear you, la la la la!” Under the values most of us have been encultured into, values which are reinforced by the decidely pro-employer and anti-worker libertarian mainstream, such deliberate sabotage of productivity and witholding of effort are tantamount to lèse majesté.

But there’s no rational basis for this emotional reaction. The fact that we take such a viscerally asymmetrical view of the respective rights and obligations of employers and employees is, itself, evidence that cultural hangovers from master-servant relationships have contaminated our understanding of the employment relation in a free market.

The employer and employee, under free market principles, are equal parties to the employment contract. As things normally work now, and as mainstream libertarianism unfortunately take for granted, the employer is expected as a normal matter of course to take advantage of the incomplete nature of the employment contract. One can hardly go to Cato or Mises.Org on any given day without stumbling across an article lionizing the employer’s right to extract maximum effort in return for minimum pay, if he can get away with it. His rights to change the terms of the employment relation, to speed up the work process, to maximize work per dollar of wages, are his by the grace of God.

Well, if the worker and employer really are equal parties to a voluntary contract, as free market theory says they are, then it works both ways. The worker’s attempts to maximize his own utility, under the contested terms of an incomplete contract, are every bit as morally legitimate as those of the boss. The worker has every bit as much of a right to attempt to minimize his effort per dollar of wages as the boss has to attempt to maximize it. What constitutes a fair level of effort is entirely a subjective cultural norm, that can only be determined by the real-world bargaining strength of bosses and workers in a particular workplace.

And as Kevin Depew argues, the continued barrage of downsizing, speedups, and stress will likely result in a drastic shift in workers’ subjective perceptions of a fair level of effort and of the legitimate ways to slow down.

Productivity, like most “financial virtues,” is the product of positive social mood trends.

As social mood transitions to negative, we can expect to see less and less “virtue” in hard work.

Think about it: real wages are virtually stagnant, so it’s not as if people have experienced real reward for their work.

What has been experienced is an unconscious and shared herding impulse trending upward; a shared optimistic mood finding “joy” and “happiness” in work and denigrating the sole pursuit of leisure, idleness.

If social mood has, in fact, peaked, we can expect to see a different attitude toward work and productivity emerge.

The problem is that, to date, bosses have fully capitalized on the potential of the incomplete contract, whereas workers have not. And the only thing preventing workers from doing so is the little boss inside their heads, the cultural holdover from master-servant days, that tells them it’s wrong to do so. I aim to kill that little guy. And I believe that when workers fully realize the potential of the incomplete labor contract, and become as willing to exploit it as the bosses have all these years, we’ll mop the floor with their asses. And we can do it in a free market, without any “help” from the NLRB. Let the bosses beg for help.

One aspect of direct action that especially interests me is so-called “open-mouth sabotage,” which (like most forms of networked resistance) has seen its potential increased by several orders of magnitude by the Internet.

Labor struggle, at least the kind conducted on asymmetric warfare principles, is just one subset of the general category of networked resistance. In the military realm, networked resistance is commonly discussed under the general heading of Fourth Generation Warfare.

In the field of radical political activism, networked organization represents a quantum increase in the “crisis of governability” that Samuel Huntington complained of in the early ’70s. The coupling of networked political organization with the Internet in the ’90s was the subject of a rather panic-stricken genre of literature at the Rand Corporation, most of it written by David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla. The first major Rand study on the subject concerned the Zapatistas’ global political support network, and was written before the Seattle demos. Loosely networked coalitions of affinity groups, organizing through the Internet, could throw together large demonstrations with little notice, and “swarm” government and mainstream media with phone calls, letters, and emails far beyond their capacity to absorb. Given this elite reaction to what turned out to be a mere foreshadowing, the Seattle demonstrations of December 1999 and the anti-globalization demonstrations that followed must have been especially dramatic. There is strong evidence (which I discussed here) that the “counter-terrorism” powers sought by Clinton, and by the Bush administration after 9/11, were desired by federal law enforcement mainly to go after the anti-globalization movement.

Let’s review just what was entailed in the traditional technique of “open-mouth sabotage.” From the same Wobbly pamphlet quoted above:

Sometimes simply telling people the truth about what goes on at work can put a lot of pressure on the boss. Consumer industries like restaurants and packing plants are the most vulnerable. And again, as in the case of the Good Work Strike, you’ll be gaining the support of the public, whose patronage can make or break a business.

Whistle Blowing can be as simple as a face-to-face conversation with a customer, or it can be as dramatic as the P.G.&E. engineer who revealed that the blueprints to the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor had been reversed. Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle blew the lid off the scandalous health standards and working conditions of the meatpacking industry when it was published earlier this century.

Waiters can tell their restaurant clients about the various shortcuts and substitutions that go into creating the faux-haute cuisine being served to them. Just as Work to Rule puts an end to the usual relaxation of standards, Whistle Blowing reveals it for all to know.

The Internet has increased the potential for “open mouth sabotage” by several orders of magnitude.

The first really prominent example of the open mouth, in the networked age, was the so-called McLibel case, in which McDonalds used a SLAPP lawsuit to suppress pamphleteers highly critical of their company. Even in the early days of the Internet, bad publicity over the trial and the defendants’ savvy use of the trial as a platform, drew far, far more negative attention to McDonalds than the pamphleteers could have done without the company’s help.

In 2004, the Sinclair Media and Diebold cases showed that, in a world of bittorrent and mirror sites, it was literally impossible to suppress information once it had been made public. As recounted by Yochai Benkler, Sinclair Media resorted to a SLAPP lawsuit to stop a boycott campaign against their company, aimed at both shareholders and advertisers, over their airing of an anti-Kerry documentary by the SwiftBoaters. Sinclair found the movement impossible to suppress, as the original campaign websites were mirrored faster than they could be shut down, and the value of their stock imploded. As also reported by Benkler, Diebold resorted to tactics much like those the RIAA uses against file-sharers, to shut down sites which published internal company documents about their voting machines. The memos were quickly distributed, by bittorrent, to more hard drives than anybody could count, and Diebold found itself playing whack-a-mole as the mirror sites displaying the information proliferated exponentially.

One of the most entertaining cases involved the MPAA’s attempt to suppress DeCSS, Jon Johansen’s CSS descrambler for DVDs. The code was posted all over the blogosphere, in a deliberate act of defiance, and even printed on T-shirts.

In the Alisher Usmanov case, the blogosphere lined up in defense of Craig Murray, who exposed the corruption of post-Soviet Uzbek oligarch Usmanov, against the latter’s attempt to suppress Murray’s site.

Finally, in the recent Wikileaks case, a judge’s order to disable the site

didn’t have any real impact on the availability of the Baer documents. Because Wikileaks operates sites like Wikileaks.cx in other countries, the documents remained widely available, both in the United States and abroad, and the effort to suppress access to them caused them to rocket across the Internet, drawing millions of hits on other web sites.

This is what’s known as the “Streisand Effect”: attempts to suppress embarrassing information result in more negative publicity than the original information itself.

The Streisand Effect is displayed every time an employer fires a blogger (the phenomenon known as “Doocing,” after the first prominent example of it) over embarrassing comments about the workplace. The phenomenon has attracted considerable attention in the mainstream media. In most cases, employers who attempt to suppress embarrassing comments by disgruntled workers are blindsided by the much, much worse publicity resulting from the suppression attempt itself. Instead of a regular blog readership of a few hundred reading that “Employer X Sucks,” the blogosphere or a wire service picks up the story, and tens of millions of people read “Blogger Fired for Revealing Employer X Sucks.” It may take a while, but the bosses will eventually learn that, for the first time since the rise of the large corporation and the broadcast culture, we can talk back –- and not only is it absolutely impossible to shut us up, but we’ll keep making more and more noise the more they try to do so.

To grasp just how breathtaking the potential is for open-mouth sabotage, and for networked anti-corporate resistance by consumers and workers, just consider the proliferation of anonymous employernamesucks.com sites. The potential results from the anonymity of the writeable web, the comparative ease of setting up anonymous sites (through third country proxy servers, if necessary), and the possibility of simply emailing large volumes of embarrassing information to everyone you can think of whose knowledge might be embarrassing to an employer.

Regarding this last, it’s pretty easy to compile a devastating email distribution list with a little Internet legwork. You might include the management of your company’s suppliers, outlets, and other business clients, reporters who specialize in your industry, mainstream media outlets, alternative news outlets, worker and consumer advocacy groups, corporate watchdog organizations specializing in your industry, and the major bloggers who specialize in such news. If your problem is with the management of a local branch of a corporate chain, you might add to the distribution list all the community service organizations your bosses belong to, and CC it to corporate headquarters to let them know just how much embarrassment your bosses have caused them. The next step is to set up a dedicated, web-based email account accessed from someplace secure. Then it’s pretty easy to compile a textfile of all the dirt on their corruption and mismanagement, and the poor quality of customer service (with management contact info, of course). The only thing left is to click “Attach,” and then click “Send.” The barrage of emails, phone calls and faxes should hit the management suite like an A-bomb.

So what model will labor need to follow, in the vacuum left by the near total collapse of the Wagner regime and the near-total defeat of the establishment unions? Part of the answer lies with the Wobbly “direct action on the job” model discussed above. A great deal of it, in particular, lies with the application of “open mouth sabotage” on a society-wide scale as exemplified by cases like McLibel, Sinclair, Diebold, and Wikileaks, described above.

Another piece of the puzzle has been suggested by the I.W.W.’s Alexis Buss, in her writing on “minority unionism”:

If unionism is to become a movement again, we need to break out of the current model, one that has come to rely on a recipe increasingly difficult to prepare: a majority of workers vote a union in, a contract is bargained. We need to return to the sort of rank-and-file on-the-job agitating that won the 8-hour day and built unions as a vital force….

Minority unionism happens on our own terms, regardless of legal recognition….

U.S. & Canadian labor relations regimes are set up on the premise that you need a majority of workers to have a union, generally government-certified in a worldwide context[;] this is a relatively rare set-up. And even in North America, the notion that a union needs official recognition or majority status to have the right to represent its members is of relatively recent origin, thanks mostly to the choice of business unions to trade rank-and-file strength for legal maintenance of membership guarantees.

The labor movement was not built through majority unionism-it couldn’t have been.

How are we going to get off of this road? We must stop making gaining legal recognition and a contract the point of our organizing….

We have to bring about a situation where the bosses, not the union, want the contract. We need to create situations where bosses will offer us concessions to get our cooperation. Make them beg for It.

But more than anything, the future is being worked out in the current practice of labor struggle itself. We’re already seeing a series of prominent labor victories resulting from the networked resistance model.

The Wal-Mart Workers’ Association, although it doesn’t have an NLRB-certified local in a single Wal-Mart store, is a de facto labor union. And it has achieved victories through “associates” picketing and pamphleting stories on their own time, through swarming via the strategic use of press releases and networking, and through the same sort of support network that Ronfeldt and Arquilla remarked on in the case of the pro-Zapatista campaign. By using negative publicity to emabarrass the company, the Association has repeatedly obtained concessions from Wal-Mart. Even a conventional liberal like Ezra Klein understands the importance of such unconventional action.

The Coalition of Imolakee Workers, a movement of Indian agricultural laborers who supply many of the tomatoes used by the fast food industry, has used a similar support network, with the coordinated use of leaflets and picketing, petition drives, and boycotts, to obtain major concessions from Taco Bell, McDonalds, Burger King, and KFC. Blogger Charles Johnson provides inspiring details here and here.

In another example of open-mouth sabotage, the IWW-affiliated Starbucks union publicly embarrassed Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz. It organized a mass email campaign, notifying the board of a co-op apartment he was seeking to buy into of his union-busting activities.

Such networked labor resistance is making inroads even in China, the capitalist motherland of sweatshop employers. Michel Bauwens, at P2P Blog, quotes a story from the Taiwanese press:

“The factory closure last November was a scenario that has been repeated across southern China, where more than 1,000 shoe factories — about a fifth of the total — have closed down in the past year. The majority were in Houjie, a concrete sprawl on the outskirts of Dongguan known as China’s “Shoe Town.”

“In the past, workers would just swallow all the insults and humiliation. Now they resist,” said Jenny Chan, chief coordinator of the Hong Kong-based pressure group Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehavior, which investigates factory conditions in southern China.

“They collect money and they gather signatures. They use the shop floors and the dormitories to gather the collective forces to put themselves in better negotiating positions with factory owners and managers,” she said.

Technology has made this possible.

“They use their mobile phones to receive news and send messages,” Chan said “Internet cafes are very important, too. They exchange news about which cities or which factories are recruiting and what they are offering, and that news spreads very quickly.”

As a result, she says, factories are seeing huge turnover rates. In Houjie, some factories have tripled workers’ salaries, but there are still more than 100,000 vacancies.”

The AFL-CIO’s Lane Kirkland once suggested, half-heartedly, 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 this proposal seriously. So here it is — a free market proposal to employers:

We give you the repeal of Wagner, of the anti-yellow dog provisions of Norris-LaGuardia, of legal protections against punitive firing of union organizers, and of all the workplace safety, overtime, and fair practices legislation. You give us the repeal of Taft-Hartley, of the Railway Labor Relations Act and its counterparts in other industries, of all state right-to-work laws, and of SLAPP lawsuits. All we’ll leave in place, out of the whole labor law regime, is the provisions of Norris-LaGuardia taking intrusion by federal troops and court injunctions out of the equation.

And we’ll mop the floor with your asses.