 Welcome back to the Agora cafe for more coffee and philosophy Today, I'm pleased to have joining us Kevin Carson who's a low He's a senior fellow at the Center for Stateless Society and holds their Carl Hess chair and social theory He's the author of studies in mutualist political economy Organization theory libertarian perspective The homebrew industrial revolution the low overhead manifesto the desktop regulatory state the Can't read me on writing Can't read the subtitle. What's the subtitle of the desktop regulatory state? I Don't know. I changed it so many times before I actually It's the countervailing power the countervailing power of individuals and networks. I think that's what I yeah There you go on the sheet you know plus some you know plus some other works and I'll have links to all Of those where you can either buy them or read them online Yeah, the big thing I'm working on now is my forthcoming book exodus And there's a wordpress site with the the manuscripts to date for that It's exodus 875 dot wordpress dot com and that's also that's accessible from kevin acarson dot Is it or for com or whatever? Anyway, I'll have yeah, kevin acarson dot org Yeah, there's a link to it there. I'll have the and I'll have the link to it in my In the description below the video Yeah, you can you can get pdfs of all my books from that side so you know kevin used to have a nice A nice site called mutualist dot org It got taken over by someone else and some of his works are still on there, but have had Ads interpolated into that text in a way that looks as though he wrote them ads for like casino gambling or something so mutualist dot org I've still got the old lycos trellis Website with whatever its url is but uh, I don't own the mutualist dot org domain name And whoever bought the mutualist Dot org domain name and has that instance of the site as Control over it that I have no say over I have no idea who they are and The trellis version I've got uh, I can no longer log into or edit Pretty much all of their their editing software is just totally Defunct it just sort of wreckage on the internet right now, but you can read it Yeah, well yeah, I've got you know, I've had some past sites that have Go and prayed of various sorts of problems as well Well, anyway, so I want to start off by asking you a bit about your background about Growing up and then how you got interested in uh In anarchism and your uh, your political interests were generally Okay, well, uh I was fairly A long in years when I started getting interested in anarchism I was in my mid 30s when I read Human scale by Kirk patrick's sale and it had a lot of Uh Information that got me started on further investigation into economic and political Decentralization I followed up a lot of the sources and his footnotes and read A lot more stuff on things like corporate subsidies economies and Dis economies of scale And so forth and That got me More and more interested in all the ways that the state Artificially promotes centralization and shifts economies of scale upwards And the ways in which the capitalist economy depends on state interventions of one kind or another for its survival the ways in which large organizations are Suboptimal in terms of the efficiency and depend on state intervention ways in which the Incomes of the super rich and the profits of big business depend on state intervention And at some point in that Process, I started thinking of myself as an anarchist and Investigating a lot of different lines of Anarchist thought What did your political outlook been before that? It's kind of embarrassing and starting I guess around 1990 and through the early 90s. I was Into a lot of different different strands of classical conservatism traditionalist conservatism, I think Russell Kirk got me started on that and I Increasingly gravitated towards Decentralist agrarian Distributist and and so forth Models of conservatism Uh With a Fairly strong streak of economic populism, which I guess is what led me to Kirk Patrick sale in the first place Well, I used to be a hawkish Reaganite, so Yeah Yeah, well, it was pretty much a domino chain once I started Moving a left word after reading Kirk sale I Went went left pretty rapidly in economic terms and After that, I guess in the early knots I started Shifting a left word on social Issues and abandoning My previous cringe worthy positions on a lot of those things which I I don't really even want to Discuss they're they're so embarrassing, you know in retrospect, but Once I I guess It didn't take me long once I started investigating anarchism to hit on Tuckerite individualism his theory of the four Monopolies And the dependence of Profit interest and rent on artificial property rights or artificial scarcities enforced by the state And I considered myself an individualist anarchist or a Mutualist for quite a long period of time And then more recently I started shifting again towards Identifying more as an anarchist without Adjectives Rather than specifically being a market anarchist So what uh, what was some of the thinking that began to move you In that direction of you know less of a focus on market anarchism and more of the Adjective less anarchism to use an adjective Well part of it is just I guess the way I see The likely course of post capitalist transition Not as being something Driven primarily by converting a majority of the population to any particular doctrine air Ism, uh, you know like getting everyone to agree on the World socialist movement Model, uh You know where everyone in the world Decides they agree on The Wsm's capital s model of socialism and it's Implemented democratically Everywhere at the same time Or you know Rothbard's libertarian law codes or whatever. I think the transition is actually going to be Driven by the terminal crisis tendencies of Capitalism the tendency of the old Hierarchies of the state and big business To disintegrate Tendency of their Various monopolies and artificial property rights to become unenforceable and their tendency towards Fiscal exhaustion in which case the various common space to institutions and local Economies and the social economy direct production for use And so forth Will be things that people turn to out of Necessity where Survival is is the killer app of people as Unemployment and underemployment Increase people will turn out of Necessity to alternative, you know forms of direct production for use and creating new mutualist mechanisms for pooling income pooling risks and costs providing The social safety net outside the state or employer-based systems and so on And I you know, I think The actual model it takes will just be Based on all of the the little seeds growing within the interstices of the The current system that people turn to out of necessity. It'll be primarily driven by practice and need rather than by ideology and The range of institutions people turn to will be pretty broad and very widely from From one area to the other So, you know to Shorten it I'm extremely skeptical of any monolithic Model of high-sponated Anarchism, you know, whether it's based on Markets or syndicates or whatever Yeah, because you see, you know in the contemporary scene on the one hand, you've got like You know, not just the end caps, though, especially the end caps, but also, you know a number of Of more lefty individualist anarchists, too, they're not as much who You know for whom markets are the be all and end all and they're very suspicious of anything that's commons based But among social anarchists is the other way around They don't see any useful role. Many of them don't see any useful role for markets things. Everything has to be commons And You know each one Is very confident that the preferred form of economic organization of the other is inherently oppressive that And kept people any kind of commons has got to be oppressive and social anarchists often think any kind of market Is inherently oppressive and also unworkable that You know that there's no way of making those things work except in some sort of, you know, horrific way Well, I I see it as kind of an orange's to apples comparison because commons are primarily a Property model and markets are primarily a distribution model and generally Property models are Prior to markets you can have markets coexisting with any number of Of property models and The way I see it commons will be the dominant Property property model across the board either Individual use of fructury property ownership and use of fructury ownership by Small groups, you know co-housing Projects or micro villages or whatever and wider commons based ownership models of natural resources or land trusts or whatever And given that Initial property system Markets are likely to be one of the expedience people resort to and distributing the outputs of these various social organizations I guess my primary objection to the market anarchist label, you know getting back to the The whole You know problem of monolithic organizations is that the word market itself carries strong connotations of the The cash nexus and for a long time when I called myself a Market anarchist I would put in the asterisk that you know being a market anarchist or believing in free markets doesn't mean you want the cash nexus or market exchange to be a hegemonic social model it can You know coexist with the society where A plurality or majority of production takes place outside the the money economy, you know and direct Social production But that just seemed to fall increasingly flat even with me because the very word Market itself mercado mercados In its very roots means Market place place where people engage in money exchange so Referring to it as market anarchism had a lot of the same problems as referring to a market economy as capitalism privileging one Factor of production. I just Finally Decided there were more drawbacks to the term than there were benefits And I don't you know, I don't reject planning horizontal planning outside the cash nexus out of of hand i'm Pretty agnostic on the the feasibility of that versus Versus markets, but you know getting back to what you were What set me off on this the people who Totally reject markets versus the people who lionized them as I guess I take Graber's position that I'm uh, I'm open to Anything that face-to-face groups of people decide to work out between themselves from a position of equality when there's no state and No Armed enforcers at anyone's back imposing their will on anyone else and I really can't see markets not being part of the mix in some places What I really can't imagine is pretty much what graber himself Said he couldn't imagine and that's the majority of people in society Recognizing someone else's decision to just Draw a line around On a map and fence off an area that they Claim for themselves And demand that anyone who works that Piece of ground give them a portion of the product of their labor and return for the right to work at Uh, I just don't see a robins and crusoe scenario working like that in any case where Robinson crusoe is not the only person on the island with the gun. I think people will just Ignore the absentee property titles knock the fences down and And start planting turnips like the diggers did so a lot of uh of your work has been driven by sort of Examining the history of capitalism if that's the term for it and uh And talking about you know, sort of The uh The ways in which what's often presented as presented, you know by both its friends and by its enemies as the natural evolution of Of uh, you know, of free markets and so forth um You know, it was actually You know the product of Uh, you know systematic force and expropriation. Do you see a little bit about that? Yeah, uh, I just uh oddly enough saw someone on uh Facebook not long ago a right libertarian Saying they didn't see how socialism or a communist or non-market society could exist without a State preventing people from having Private property and they seem to be operating from that same assumption that Our current model of private individual property that's uh a fee simple alienable commodity form of property that can can be With titles that can be sold on the market and so forth is just some naturally arising A phenomenon like the The robinson odd scenarios in Locke or adam smith or Or whoever that, you know at some mythical point in the Past uh people just peacefully appropriated Their various hand homesteads by occupying the ground and mixing their Their labor with the the soil when In actual fact, it's it's uh The predominant model throughout history Has been that what right libertarians think of as the natural property model the individual fee simple private property Is the thing that's always been established only by the state and it's always Relyed on states actively nullifying and suppressing pre-existing non-state property models that have tended to Be collective or communal along the The lines of the uh Medieval open field system in western europe or the the mirror and in russia, uh or what marks called Kind of problematically I suppose the asiatic mode of production that That warren hastings suppressed in india The system in Israel where the the clan or tribe or village had uh some sort of Eminent property in the land With you know land that had been mortgaged or sold or whatever or ultimately reverting back to that collective entity periodically But that that seemed that's kind of collective village model seems to have been the predominant model that uh spontaneously arose in most parts of the world uh at the time of the Agricultural revolution and predominated Everywhere in the world until fairly recently No, can you see a little bit about uh, you know the book you're working on now uh exodus Yeah, it's exodus and uh subtitle is general idea of the revolution in the 21st century, which is sort of a play on prude on its uh Overall theme is on the shift from the uh post capitalist transition models favored by traditionally by the old left that were based based on centralized hierarchical organizations Coordinating the overthrow of capitalism and on transition models that involved either Seizure of the state through parliamentary politics by a labor or socialist party or Violent overthrow of the state and seizure of the means of production by The organized working class, you know, whether it's a glen and a span guard party or by uh a federation Of syndicates seizing industrial control and in every case they were They were mass-based. They saw a more or less disruptive eruptural transition model And their transition was based primarily on the seizure of commanding heights institutions Of one kind or another where whether I am now Sorry like where I am now virtually Yeah, yeah, uh Yeah, if you can get a get a uh syndicalist group going to take over auburn university You know more power to you but uh you know, I'm arguing that there's been increasingly a transition to a an interstitial or prefigure of model and I think uh I think I got the the word uh exodus as a label for it from Negry and hearts empire trilogy Can't really remember but uh The idea is that with New technologies that make commons based Production and social organization more feasible and more Efficient and it becomes more feasible to create A new society in the interstices of the present The present one, uh outside the dominant state and corporate institutions, uh And to gradually uh, I think uh, John Holloway called it Making cracks in the system and then linking those cracks up With each other, uh, and that's a model that's been promoted by a lot of anarchists, uh, I'm thinking Colin Ward is the leading figure that Comes to mind linking up all of these different counter institutions and I think he talks about I think maybe he borrows this image from Paul Goodman. He talks about Uh, you know spears of freedom gradually, you know Build up within the existing society and gradually expanding and linking up with each other Yeah, uh, and it was it was uh, Eric Olin right, uh And uh envisioning real utopias He li- elaborated a lot on interstitial transition models But right was uh An open marcus, um open marxist, which among a lot of other things differed from Orthodox marxism and not saying any Uh Definite or strongly likely Crisis tendencies and capitalism that could be counted on to bring it to An end so his approach was almost entirely Voluntaristic in terms of saying, you know, let's build these interstitial things and try to Replace the current system Yeah He uh, Eric Olin right, uh Said, you know, there we shouldn't count on capitalism having any pre-ordained End or being a system with an end as well as a Beginning, you know, we should be uh Promoting interstitial development of post capitalism On the assumption that the system could survive forever if we don't do anything to change that so I I think what i'm adding is Some of the more traditional leftist assumptions about crisis tendencies of Of capitalism and how those will Intersect with interstitial development To promote it and to create room for it And not everyone who calls himself a marxist seems Best understood as a marxist. I mean, I think of william morris who thought of himself as a marxist and very anti anarchist, but But you know the feeling I always get from reading him is is almost always much more anarchist than marxist Um, but on the you know on these you know, these images of spheres Or cracks and so forth there's an image. I like to use it sort of borrowed from Gustaf Landau's idea that the you know, the state is a way of interacting and we abolished by interacting differently uh acting differently toward each other the way I think of it is Sort of you know in a more act there's a more active image than than spheres or cracks is to think of You know, you've got a you know a massive room where everyone's dancing one kind of dance Um, and then you just start some people dancing a different kind of dance. I mean, maybe off in the corners um and then gradually They lure more and more people into dancing That dance instead of the dance that everyone else is dancing and then they start hooking up until gradually enough people are dancing the new kind of dance that You know The people who want to dance the old kind of dance can you know can go off in the corners and do whatever they want But if they're no longer dominating the the story Yeah, I see a lot of vulgar marxist types and you know, I'm not Limiting that specifically to marxist leninists Necessarily but people who really stress Historical materialism as a as a theory of history who say Um Who attach a lot of importance to the distinction between reform and revolution and say that There can be no Meaningful Changes or shifts uh in a post capitalist direction Under capitalism quote unquote with the assumption being that Capitalism is some sort of all or nothing Essence and that you're either under capitalism or you're Outside of capitalism With no transitional point in between the you know the idea You know that angles himself Uh And in and the vulgar marxist discussed of the transition from the transformation of Quantity and equality where there's a long series of incremental changes within an existing system That shift its character in a certain Direction until it finally reaches a critical mass and hits a systemic tipping point it's Something that that they themselves seem to be ruling out, you know I'm I'm stepping into your bailey wick here just based on my Readings of copleston and a a few other other things but and you know in terms of medieval philosophy They seem to be taking a realist Uh position on uh the significance of the word capitalism where it's uh some kind of uh An Aristotelian idea that you know the system either Displays or or does does not display and To me the the very distinction between reform and revolution is meaningless. Would you Would you say that feudalism transitioned into capitalism through reform or through Revolution what does it even mean to ask a thing like that? Yeah, and when I when I teach a history of philosophy and I talk about things like Transition from the ancient period to the medieval period and then to the renaissance and so forth I say Well, you know good luck finding the date where say the middle ages Ended and the renaissance started, you know, whatever it is you think is distinctive about the renaissance you can find the seeds of it running back at least to you know, the year 1000 Whatever you think is is distinctive of the middle ages, you know, it's still a lot of it's still hanging on in the 16th century Likewise at the beginning of the medieval period and you got um You know, you know the western empire fell in 476 ad we say well You wouldn't have noticed anything falling if you'd been there On that, you know the at year it was sort of a long Gradual slide and the same thing with the fall of the eastern empire. I mean constant noble fell all at once but But the But by the time it fell the Byzantine empire had basically Shrunk to just being constant noble in surrounding areas and likewise with intellectual movements like You know the enlightenment and so forth. I mean they're useful categories, but but you can't really You know, you can't really put too much faith in You know precise You know precise boundaries of time were suddenly Suddenly everything changed and people suddenly started thinking and acting differently And in a lot of these cases of these, you know, whether intellectual movements or political movements or whatever You know, the people are doing something differently or just a subset of all the people and other people are doing other stuff like Like, you know during the scientific revolution, there were still lots and lots of people You know pursuing, you know, Aristotelian scholastic science and Some were doing it well and some were doing it badly, but that was all still going on and um Uh, you know an era You know, just there aren't that many sharp transitions Yeah, and there were people still intellectually living in the Ancient or classical model for centuries after Who didn't see it as a fundamental break Justinian, you know attempting to revive the western roman empire as late as The carol engine Renaissance You know being You know very much a You know self-perceived as a As a continuation of the ancient and classical model and you know to take A less vulgar marxist framework the idea that Any particular system Is a number of coexisting Formations the the middle the middle ages at Any given time were included Coexistence of some surviving social formations from the ancient slave economy And nascent its formations Of the future capitalist system developing and the interstices of it and so on as as william gibson Put it the future is already here. It's not distributed evenly so That's the next way of putting it yeah and It doesn't really mean anything to you know to call something a capitalist Institution and say that because it's capitalist it it can't be socialist or take on a socialist character you know Again the the intellectual tools are there and marx himself if these people would Would pick them up the dialectical approach of seeing A part As defined by its functional role in relation to the larger system. It's it's embedded in You know you look at the medieval guilds And there might there you know there might have been a guild in medieval paris or akhen In the 13th century That still had the same Still had the same name still had the same charter Code of arms and regalia and so forth in the 16th century But would have been a fundamentally different institution i i quoted somewhere i may have been in um Desktop regulatory state an extended passage from andrew robinson professor in the uk who described the long-term transition process between Hierarchy based system and a network based system Where he argued that a lot of institutions of corporation and state Might retain nominal institutional continuity from one period To the other and yet Undergo fundamental change in their actual characteristics with the the corporations that managed to Successfully negotiate the transition becoming more network-like employee controlled and cooperative and The state institutions taking on a more platform-like or or partner state character Yeah, we just look at it from you know from the democratic and republican parties to the english monarchy You know you've got things where the You know the names are really the same but the way they actually function has been radically transformed and What they're all about is quite different Yeah, so i mean yeah the not really about anything interesting anymore Used to be about interesting bad stuff now. It's not about anything interesting at all Well, there are still a lot of Theoretical constitutional powers the british monarch has that Someone might actually try to be you know might actually try to Exercise my my guess is that if they did try to exercise them they would be Put under a regency and is the british put in a half no time, but it would be interesting Yeah, no, I suspect it's the The time for a I suspect that the time for a monarch to try and reclaim Those powers has has passed there was a time when they might have gotten away with it but Now and enough time has passed for people accustomed to thinking of them of them as figureheads where They're you know, they're giving their You know their formal permission for legislation and so forth is regarded as so pro forma that If they actually started withholding permission Uh the legislation I think they soon found out that they were you know, me were drawing on a on an empty bank account But it would certainly be interesting to watch it would make You know would make the monarchy interesting again Briefly and yeah, I think it would have to be such a disruptive or a chaotic Well, you can imagine that they would do where if if the if what they were doing was If if what the monarch was trying to do was representative of some popular movement opposing what the legislature was doing that could give them. Yeah It would have to be almost, you know a transitional period where the monarchy became The Nucleus around which the new social organization crystallized or something, but you know, I mean To revert to what the English monarchy used to be No, but you know, what's the old what it was of the saying history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes Like uh, Napoleon crowning himself and was it 1801 Crowning himself holy roman ever anyway, uh, but you know just I guess my overall point is that The really vulgar marxists who say that there can't be Any kind of post capitalist transition Under capitalism quote unquote or yeah, they're they're they're mistaking Words for things and they're mistaking the map for the territory So anything else that you're working on in in in the book exodus is there Anything else you're working on other than just you know, just the this idea of You know the contrast between sort of the old leftist You know cadre party discipline And Radical transition stuff Well the first six chapters And it's it's sort of reached the unwieldy state where chapters six and seven were so Long that I had to break them down into parts one two and three Like I did with some of the chapters in desktop regulatory state, but The first six chapters are You know mainly concerned with contrasting The new exodus based model With the old left Model in terms of uh a number of different Qualities like interstitial development gradual transition A shift away from Workerism or laborism A shift from mass and hierarchy to horizontal organization And so forth and then chapter and I've just about Finished those aside from some polishing up and The main thing I'm working on now is chapter seven, which is So far been broken up into three parts Uh That just describing in detail The various building blocks of post capitalist society that I see Springing up in the interstices of Current capitalist society It's heavily it's heavy on Commons based local counter institutions like Land trusts uh alternative currencies You know municipal broadband Participate or participatory government on the partner state model and so forth and on larger political movements like the the new municipalist projects In barris alona or cooperation jackson or the The cleveland evergreen model and so on And I hope to have it done by the end of this year Look forward to it Sorry go on And you know as I I said the the current manuscripts to date are at exodus 875 dot wordpress.com or you can find And Find it linked from my kevin a carcin.org website as well so looking around at the The rural situation today if you can Bear to what uh, you know, what signs of of uh Of hope or promise Do you see against all the Rather nasty stuff that's going on Well, I guess my main source of hope besides all the unprecedented levels of Resistance I thought I never thought I would See in the near term. I mean people burning a Police police station a precinct Headquarters to the ground in Minneapolis on a majority of the public supporting them or Though they'll just the levels of resistance in the streets all over the country with black lives matter People blocking Courts to stop evictions Actually, you know showing up apartments to block landlords from Evicting people You know, that's that's obviously one source of hope but I I think more than anything it's just how incredibly Fluid things are how many different black swan events are intersecting at The same time As much of a threat of authoritarianism as there is from trump, you know with things like You know threatening to delay the election threatening to send federal troops into Democratic cities and possibly disrupt the election Sabotaging the mail and and that sort of thing it's such an incredibly fluid situation I really just can't imagine anything he did like that even if he went all out having any staying Power because I think the situation would continue to be as fluid afterwards As it is now If he many of his supporters were a bit turned off by the talk about delaying the elections that has creeped out a lot of Republicans Yeah, I mean whatever whatever You know, even if he wanted to go full Right stag enabling act. I think his house would be Build on sand if that man overplays his hand. I think he stands an excellent chance of best case scenario for him Going the route of the Shaw and worst case Going the route of Chow Chesky or Mussolini And in the meantime, we've got all of these interstitial Developments that are just growing like wild wildfire that I think do have staying power He's he trump is one of those monsters that's appearing in the process of Transition because the transition isn't complete, you know to bastardize a quote from Gramsci, but I think there are so many more ace cards up the sleeve of the successor system While the old one is exhausting The last experience it's got We've got so many Sorry, sorry go on I'm you know, I'm thinking that you know, if there's some really serious disruption to the election or whatever Just given the unprecedented scale. We've already seen of people staying in the streets You know, even if the press is paying less attention to it since The end of May, uh I think we would see an order of magnitude increase in the people Out in the streets just absolutely shutting shut down. I I think it would uh quite plausibly spur nationwide rent strike debt strike Uh, possibly, uh, you know general strike of a lot of key transport workers I think, you know, it would be It would be a more than once in a century level of Radicalization and disruption, and I don't think anything resembling the old system could survive it Of course, we have, you know, we have this Sort of duplicated all around the world. We've got, you know, uh, nationalist leaders, uh, coming to the fore and In countries that were, you know, innocent that were before them less less so Uh, that are, uh You know from India to Turkey and so forth with varying degrees of support versus resistance Um, like Modi in India seems to be having a lot of support Uh, Erdogan in Turkey the These supports used to be gradually waning particularly with the rising Uh generation but, uh You know, it's hard to predict how things are going to go in any of those places Yeah, I think there's a good chance that, um And I, you know, I hope this isn't, uh appropriate of her or anything, but, uh figures like, uh Trump and and uh johnson and and bolson arrow and so forth are The uh ghost shirt, uh ghost dance of the old system It's last It's last hurrah. It's uh, you know, in the united states, Trump and his hardcore supporters Represent people who see themselves in radical demographic Decline their whole agenda is framed around taking america back Because they know there's no way they can survive without just, uh Resorting to authoritarian politics gerrymandering vote suppression And so forth and even then I think they see themselves and rather defeatist terms of You know, eat me last, uh postponing The transition until after they're gone Well, and I've been teaching in alabama for 20 years and although alabama remains a solidly Red state I've noticed shift in attitudes in my students over the last 20 years, um both social and economic attitudes uh away from You know, sort of the hard right wing lines that uh used to encounter at the You know at the beginning of that period. So there's definitely shift going on in the younger generation Yeah, Texas and georgia are both very close to A tipping point in terms of party Identification they might have already reached it if it weren't for gerrymandering and I'm I'm not an electoralist in the sense of Seeing electoral politics as the primary driver of change or And biden is not the most firing opponent of front we could imagine either Yeah, that's that's true, but I I guess I think sam smith of progressive reviews said the the point of Electoral politics is not for fighting the war. It's for Creating the least bad battlefield To fight on in the future and I uh That's you know one one way in which I disagree from a lot of the accelerationist types who think You know less or evilism or Compromise on some in some way give life to the old system or Detract from revolution or or whatever. I don't see electoral politics as the way of achieving the revolution or achieving systemic transition in the first place I see it as A way of sort of desperately throwing forces into the breach in order to Do buy time for To buy time and space for all the important things so yeah, if we can Do something to head off the worst of the fascist assault right now Even through some sort of really You know god-awful centrist dnc democratic president, I mean that's basically all I can Hope for is creating a somewhat more benign background Environment and staving off the thread of actual fascism The real the real work to be done is outside the state, but It'll be a lot easier without a fascist in the White House We're held so much of a fascist anyway Yeah, well, I I guess a bureaucratic Caesarist instead of a fascist So switching gears for a bit uh, what are some of the uh What are some works of Art or literature or music or movies that you found particularly Inspiring or engaging well, I uh Recently reread, uh, well not recently last year. I reread Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, I guess you could actually call it recently because reading all three of those books takes one hell of a long time And then I just read uh, new york 2140 for the first time And I I really uh, you know find new things to appreciate in the mars trilogy every time I reread it because um I think his post-revolutionary martian society in the second and third volumes is Probably the closest fictional scenario I've seen to a partner state model the martian planet or a planetary government is really more a support platform for the network of self-governing local communities Then it is a west valiant state in the Classical sense, uh, there are a handful of just fundamental constitutional Rules that are more, uh, organizational precepts for the society, you know in terms of its basic Property rules operating system than anything the idea that the land is a social Commons that can't be permanently alienated to individual ownership and that Residual residual claimancy of the firm is automatically in the hands of its labor force and that You know larger conglomerate firms are to be formed by a federation of self-governing cooperatives and that sort of thing and the planetary government Is uh, primarily just consists of a standing judiciary to enforce these laws against uh legal claims that they've By injured parties that they've been violated and to enforce the rights of the planet against uh Pollution or excessive extraction in the environmental courts, uh, but for the most part it's just a Horizontal network of horizontal Communes that's got a small standing governance Body to keep things Running pretty much, you know Who was it that a Event who was it that originally came up with the phrase Administration of things rather than legislation over human beings as sance. I'm all I think it was sensible. Yeah. Yeah And then that kind of both both by the sort of the august and tiari Mine and thinkers and the Marxist line of thinkers And uh, op and I remember for that matter But yeah, uh, would you think of New York 2140? It seemed a little bit less Less decentralized It is it's it's it's it's more, uh, I guess more of a bernie krat bernie krat book, but it was still, you know It had some real hell yeah moments in there Nevertheless At the climax of the book The submerged parts of lower Manhattan, you know the neo venetian Party part of the island with you know people living in skyscrapers and Taking ferries between them and Living on floating platforms and all that a lot of them were rendered homeless by a super hurricane that forced hundreds of thousands of of people to move and mass northward Initially, you know settling in refugee camps in central park and After a couple of weeks of that when they finally just got fed up with living in those camps they marched into Upper Manhattan, uh, you know into the areas where they had the Thousand-story luxury residential Towers that were almost entirely empty and just you know owned by billionaires around the world is a real estate investment. They attempted to move into these vacant towers and the the mercenary security firms hired by these absentee billionaires fired onto the crowds of people trying to Move into the towers and this was captured on video by the host of a popular Program in the in the cloud that was watched by billions of people and she She showed the empty the tower standing empty while People lived out in the weather. I showed the security firm firms firing with live ammo on the crowds and she said That's enough. We've had it with this shit. You know, I'm calling a rent strike Now wherever you live you join the the tenants Union you go on strike now. You don't pay rent. You don't pay your mortgage payment You don't make payments on your debt or on your student loan Whatever it stops now. We bring this system down. We crash the stock market and You know you contact your representative and And say this time around you better not pull a pulse and this time your bailout it better be a buyout and you turn these banks into you know Under popular control you Redistribute the land you cancel the debt You know all the graver stuff From every peasant insurrection in history And that you know, that's what I said. Yeah, hell yeah That was really like that Gary shorty and I met him and had coffee with him A few years back. Yeah, I remember you saying that. Yeah Yeah, I think he gave him a he spoke at the I forget apparently he spoke at An anarchist book fair. I can't remember it was somewhere in california. I can't remember whether it was san francisco or where it was and William Gillis was there and They got into a debate about the About the the merits of markets and So I forget who came up with the idea whether it was William or gary came with the idea of giving him a A copy of markets not capitalism Yeah, I remember that and then we thought well instead of just mailing it to him although I managed to I managed to track down Both his email address and his mailing address online, which were Which was not easy, but I I did it which probably might be disturbing to him. I don't know but anyway We thought why why not? And this is probably gary's idea. Why not read with him in person and so we we met uh over coffee Coffee the unifying theme of this of this show. Um One of the unifying themes, uh We met in uh davis where he lives at a local coffee house and Chatted a bit and we gave him a copy of markets not capitalism, which I don't think Sweeted him of anything, but anyway, you know, give it to him. He gave us copies of Signed copies of gaolio's dream, which was I think the book that he had Uh a bunch of excess copies of lying around um At the time, uh, but anyway that was uh enjoyable and and by this point I've read almost all of his uh works, um Many of which hook up in In odd ways with the mars trilogy like they're not all strictly in continuity with it. They're like slightly different branching timeline but 2312 Is not quite the same universe, but it's uh very similar Yeah, so I think you know a lot of those um A lot of those a lot of his works are You know and the martians which is a book of short stories based on mars some of them are in continuity with our trilogy and some Aren't some of them involve the the people from the first mars book Never actually getting to mars We we see them, uh, but the whole project is declared a failure and they never go um And here's that was some of his other works too for example, you know, uh Here one of his earliest works was this uh three california trilogy Um, yeah, I I need to read that Yeah, so there's there's one version of it that is you know, it's sort of uh hypercapitalistic uh future there's one version that's sort of post apocalyptic and then there's one version that's sort of uh, you know his ideal utopian future although it's uh You know, it's a restrained utopia. It's not a you know, it's not utopia where everything works perfectly. It's a utopia It's a matter of sort of constant struggle against You know forces that want to undermine it and also certainly not the kind of utopia where everyone is happy in their personal lives And they're new but they're but um, they're sort of links among the three the three books and That was enjoyable Yeah, it's it's uh, it sounds kind of like uh Ken all of ken mcleod's uh fall revolutionary fall revolution books where uh Some of the uh sequels are all in the history Yeah, like the last last book the the sky road seems to be uh, it seems to follow a different uh timeline from It was a good the first three books seem like they could be all one consistent timeline But in the fourth book, so it seems like it's and when he's confirmed mcleod has confirmed that it's a uh different timeline it's an interesting question trying to figure out exactly what the point is If there is just one point and there might not be just one point, but bring out exactly where and why it uh diverges and the cloud is also someone who's Yeah, who's uh, you know written interestingly about sort of Political and economic possibilities outside the usual um The usual framework because he's got you know, and he's in his books. He's got He's got anarcho-communists and anarcho-capitalists and various intermediate things and so forth Um Yeah And it's interesting that you know, none of the systems is perfect But you know a lot of them work more or less. Um, you know, it's it's not the kind of book where Say welcome to our utopia here. So everything works perfectly now and then everyone's happy. It's not that that kind of book And a lot of really horrible puns like Uh, my star is it's full of gods And uh, nearly every page has some kind of In joke or reference or something and all the chapter titles of his books are almost all the chapter titles There's some kind of in joke or reference to something in science fiction or philosophy or politics or something Or the uh The old old guy talking about particle physics who says, uh You know, it would all fields when I were a lot Yeah, that is that's a nice line Yeah, Robinson must have really tracking down his email must have been pretty hard. I remember hearing him on The marooned on mars podcast saying he just wasn't an internet Person, uh, generally, you know, whatever online contact he had was through Indirectly through some staff member. I think Neil Stevenson is uh Pretty much that way also. He's almost has almost no internet presence I'd Kirk Patrick sale about his only presence online is whatever Followers of his of you know posted have keyed in or scanned Some of his work and posted it Well, I managed to track down Kirk Patrick sale at One point, uh, let me see if I'm right in remembering Uh I think he's Yes, he's one of the he's on the uh advisory board of the Uh, Molinari review Um We have a massive advisory board I wanted to get you know a fairly broad range of of people for that so that You know anyone who's who's thinking of publishing on our pages if you look at it and find you know someone they wouldn't find too anything Even if even if they wouldn't like a lot of the people on there they'd find someone they think Oh, well there if they're on the editorial board then this can't be too too awful Anyway Martin does it does he have uh some kind of reactionary or Eco fascist leanings. I remembered he uh, He did a really long review article on the uniformer manifesto a long time ago well if If he does I didn't know about it when I asked him to be on the board, but um Um, but I don't know there's so many so many layers among those different factions, it's hard to Hard to tell Well, have you read the years of rice and salt? Yes That was a really great one great One of the better alternate histories, especially the the whole arc of Of the guy and bag dad that was sort of Uh Galileo and Kepler and Newton all rolled into one as you know as one is Yeah, so um, you know for our viewers the the basic plot of that book is what if the black plague had had wiped out not just a third of Of western european population, but closer to nine tenths Uh, which means that western europe would not have dominated the world in coming centuries and so what might The world have looked like otherwise You know what you know so exploring exploring the ways in which different cultures Dominating it instead for good or for ill and the the moral is not how great things would be Or how terrible things would be if if things have gone this way. It's just Interesting ways in which things would have been better or or worse or just different I uh Remember reading someone who speculated that the you know the primary At the time when uh western european and islamic and the chinese civilizations were the The three main contenders the main reason uh, the islamic civilization wasn't the first to uh Uh Circum navigate uh Africa and reach the americas and and so forth And unify the world commercially was uh The effect that the mongol conquest had on south asia You know until until Persia and mesopotamia fell to the mongols islamic civilization was the most Liberal and and forward thinking on earth and It became much more inward looking and backward looking Just as a result of the trauma of The mongol conquest And that Cleared up space for uh europe to come to the head of the line And I think if you look at uh That's pretty plausible if you look at uh What russia was after it uh fell to the titars Compared to what keavan ruse was like before I think as a matter of fact i think uh wasn't keavan ruse one of the uh Examples uh isler Pointed to is a sort of semi cooperator uh civilization i'm not sure but yeah, just uh That kind of brutal conquest makes a A huge difference and you know it gets back. I guess to uh authoritarian political styles uh In general they're much more likely to come about in periods of perceived scarcity or in hospitable environments Or whatever uh people are more or apt to turn to authoritarianism And see everything in the world as a Zero-sum game where you either beat or are beaten yeah, I've also read that One of the reasons that western europe ended up taking uh Inincreasingly hostile Attitude toward the muslims and jews in their midst Uh was again connected with the black plague um, which of course The muslims and jews bore no responsibility for but it created a kind of of You know heightened paranoia um Oh for that matter the um You know it's often said you when people talk about you know why socrates was executed when Athens had tolerated him for You know such a long time. He lived a he lived a very long life and you know what they they had They had the plague then they had the conquest by sparta. They were kind of demoralized There's a temptation to look for escape quote at that point and So that may be why they It's it's then that suddenly Socrates becomes a problematic figure that needs to be addressed by force of law when Prior to that he was just Whether they liked him or disliked him they no one seemed to have thought that there was anything that should be brought before a law court Yeah, with the anti-semitism in western europe That seems to be a common pattern Not only with jews, but everywhere in the world that there is some sort of an ethnic Diaspora Living intermixed with a larger surrounding population You know that are engaged disproportionately in commercial pursuits You know people take that conspiratorial attitude to some extent towards south asians and east and south africa towards the chinese Diaspora in southeast asia and so on When germany lost the first world war a lot of people decided to blame the jews of all people We're not obviously the ones most most directly responsible for the for the loss, but You know got to blame someone and that part of the dynamic to help to bring the nazis Uh to power is this idea that that oh we would have won the war if we hadn't been stabbed in the back by the jews And if you know if anyone had in 1900 had been Trying to predict Where in western europe there would be an anti virulently anti-semitic Government it probably would have been in france yeah France has a long history of anti-semitism even though it doesn't It hasn't had as exciting in history of anti-semitism as germany um But certainly a long one You know and of course anti-muslim as well Yeah, I guess the anti-muslim thing is uh A lot more recent why just since the uh berlin conference or uh Whatever and the influx of uh former uh Colonial subjects in in northwest africa Yeah, well, you know the french thing they don't conquer algeria and They complain the people from algeria Are coming to the france. Well and uh, and I mean I Like yeah, I've got a lot of room to say this is an american but uh france just has a really Horrible history as a decolonizing country, you know with with uh Haiti paying indemnities for over a century After anyone's being paying indemnities should be the other way around Well, yeah, and you know, uh, algeria and all of the the former west african countries are uh You know part of the condition of independence was joining a trade organization under french control I don't know if it was that or if it was uh indemnities for various colonial debts or Or what but I mean they've they've been paying the equivalent of hundreds of billions of of dollars to france ever since like the 1950s and 1960s And we look at how wealthy france is and how You know how impoverished these other countries are The idea that they're sending these massive payments to france You know as compensation for you know Not being ruled by france anymore. It's just really Pretty repellent I think it kind of uh Gives the lie to uh that quip from uh dead room mcloskey is it that robbing poor people isn't a good profit model Yeah, if you can rob enough of them Yeah, well, I mean that's the I uh That's the study. Uh, I just finished for C4 ss. That's one reason I've been so obsessed lately about Uh, capitalist nursery fables and robins and odds and just so stories about the origin of private property and The origin of specie currency and so forth is as I wrote a Paper on that I that I submitted just a couple of weeks ago and uh Her argument was that um Primitive accumulation either, you know via colonialism or enclosure was not the dominant Reason for western europe's increase in wealth, uh, which To me the that whole question is beside the point, uh It's very much the reason For the imbalance and who the wealth was distributed to And it's it's it may be true that Stealing uh from poor people is not a good Business model in the short term for actually accruing wealth. It's extremely effective in creating future Social structures and differentials of power that can be used for extracting wealth. I mean, uh The landed classes and uh may or may not have gotten a lot richer in 1750 from Uh In closing the common pasture but the role that played in creating the wage system And uh creating a propertyless proletariat Had one hell of an effect on the profit model Of industrial capitalism 50 years later Yeah, it wasn't so much the value of the land that they grabbed As the value of the the workers they displaced Yeah, and uh, it was a lot more valuable to the workers they displaced than it was to the Capitalist farmers who took it over. Um, they You know, I was I remember reading in nissan where she described, uh, just In incredible detail The richness and variety and independence of the social model it enabled, uh Among the land poor and landless peasantry, you know, as one of those, uh one of the best examples of how, uh marginalized populations have the economic incentive to make much more Efficient use of the limited resources they have and to extract maximum value from them, uh whereas, uh, the dominant classes take over these resources and just uh treat them, uh treat land and capital is an almost unlimited resource that they can create growth by Throwing at whatever problem They want to solve and you wind up with With the farmers who own thousands of acres getting Paid by the government to hold it out of use Or a capitalist with more investment capital they then they can find profitable outlets for, uh That buy up, uh Government bonds with a guaranteed return of a few percent a year or people that own Uh Own land that just Hold it out of use that someone else could actually be living on and supporting themselves, but it's not worth it to them because uh You know the person settling on it couldn't Pay a rent to the landlord in addition to supporting themselves. So It just doesn't get used. That's that's the early the growth model capitalism has pursued since the beginning is extensive addition of resource Inputs treating energy or enclosed Colonial minerals or whatever as uh Essentially free goods and then you wind up with the the counter economy Uh vene good. Have you ever been plugged by vene gupta? I have not Okay, it's a uh it's a uh little short story set in the future where uh the uh Working class people start just opting out and seceding from the mainstream economy by taking Advantage of the hyper efficiency of new open source technologies unplugging He the phrase he used was buying out at the top that You know using modular pre fab housing technology Ultra efficient water harvesting and recycling technology open source alternative energy and micromanufacturing and so forth you could Buy into a counter economy Uh To obtain your share of subsistence resources with the equivalent of You know three months factory wages And there were tens of millions of people that had unplugged from mainstream society doing that uh, and it's It's um It's just you know, it's a classic example of the the uh technical technical innovations that marginalized populations Come up with because they don't have unlimited amounts of land and capital to to throw at problems. So they actually have to Hi, that's what I was thinking of the fremen and dune I mean they they came up with something like a stillsuit because they had to and we we've got a counter economy based on Extracting the most efficient use from physical resources while Sharing ideas and techniques as efficiently as possible without intellectual property Toll gates set up to Make people pay tribute For cooperating or or using each other's ideas. So we're you know, we're growing up as a a junkyard dog economy that just Running circles around the old corporate dinosaurs Well on that note, I think they're Probably running short of the amount of Processing time I want to Yeah Do for these videos uh since Because my system is pretty slow, but this has been really a enjoyable conversation any final thoughts I can't think of anything I've rambled On about just about everything that popped into my head, but I really had a good time That was pretty much the idea of these interviews are supposed to be like they're not No, I appreciate you inviting me on here. Yeah, well, I appreciate you coming on How long do you think it'll be before this is uh up online? Um You'll be within the week anyway cool All right, so thanks a lot and uh Farewell All right, take care rudder. Bye. Bye