As a libertarian anarchist, I will most likely vote to leave the EU on June 23rd. The EU, with its supranational corporatism and affirmation of legislation writ-large, goes against my fundamental principles, that of popular litigiousness expressed through common law and a belief in freed markets and radical decentralism. However, none of these principles are captured in the prevailing debates and discourses that currently surround the question of whether the UK should leave the European Union. Continue reading →

In a recent conversation in the comments section of a blogpost that got published with the Libertarian Alliance[1], the individual I was conversing with believed that markets as a system naturally descended into capitalist organisation. I reprint here:

Tom Rogers says: I think we’re on the same page. Where I differ is that I believe such a society cannot function for very long on market principles. The market leads to capitalism, and capitalism leads inevitably to social disintegration. While I accept that market /=/ capitalism, I believe that one leads to the other. That, as I see it, is the main flaw with National Anarchism. However, I believe what you have outlined could be achieved within a global system of co-operative, non-market socialism.

The concept of a libertarian party should be simple. A collection of multiple strands of libertarian and anarchist ideologues, thinkers and activists coming together to present multiple alternatives to the current statist world. Simple, right? Not so for the modern Libertarian Party of America. It seems, looking at its origins, it had the goal that I’ve just set out. A collection of differing viewpoints but with a core libertarian ideology at the centre of it all. But then came the low tax liberalism, and the lack of radicalism in pushing a message of political and non-political action. That was bad enough. But now it’s gone one step further in diluting more to becoming some Beltway Republican outfit for all those disaffected by Trump and Clinton. Continue reading →

Advertising and big data act as two elements with the capacity to end corporate dominance if the necessary steps can be taken. They act as the quasi-independent creations of the government scourge of mass production, born of the system of the factory, emplaced in the wider social factory of commercial neoliberalism that surrounds the modern world. The fundamental need to push products into the hands of more consumers necessitates the creation of allure, of spectacle. An iPhone would be generic without its characteristic apple. Yet such constructs have a fatalistic quality, that being the genericism inherent that leads to lower quality, higher production and more genericism. Mass production as a system leads to large-scale waste, and a continual reliance on surrounding economic structures. Highly regulated financial markets with fortress-like entry barriers, government creation of massive transport infrastructure (highways and transnational rail networks) and authoritarian regimes in the East and Global South who can eliminate any whisper of trade unionism or worker solidarity. These are all children of the state, built from its core ideology of centralising managerialism. Advertising and big data are the children of the children, nominally independent of direct subsidy, yet all the same creations of it.

With Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton being the effective candidates for the major parties, the real question now is when will they both coalesce around similar sets of issues like all other presidential candidates, eventually leading to another election based on rhetoric rather than substance. While it may be said Trump’s rhetoric is more incendiary, anyone truly affected by his nonsensical, impossible-to-implement ideas is most likely stupid, and must view minority individuals and communities as some sort of homogeneous blob of Democratic voters. Equally, while Trump has u-turned on a huge number of issues, Clinton herself can hardly claim to be consistent. In the 90s, she happily stood behind her husband’s Trump-esque rhetoric on immigration and the drug war[1]. In 2005, she claimed to be adamantly opposed to illegal immigration[2]. In 2014, she thought immigrant children should be sent back to their country of origin[3]. She, like Trump, doesn’t know if she’s up or down on a wide variety of issues. Continue reading →

By a weak reading, I mean viewing a concept as overdetermined, revealing a ream of constituent dialogues and discourses which destroy a particular conceptual framework surrounding said concept. By implanting one discursive form upon such a concept, an ideological system is created which hides the truth of what underlies something. In the case of private property, capitalist definitions provide a concept as something privately owned, yet the reality is that much of modern private property came out of the enclosures, of feudal and modern eras, and large tracts of private property have been gifted to vested interests by the state. The capitalist discourse of private property is an ideological lie masking systemic theft.

While my economic views put me on the trajectory of left-libertarianism, with my belief in wider, distributed ownership and the return of mutual aid associations and voluntary, even democratic, structures, I’ve always maintained a cultural conservatism in my outlook, coming from the ideas of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk. In combining the two, I come to an idea of left-wing Paleolibertarianism, rejecting the cultural libertinism of elements of the libertarian left and supporting pastoral, paternal structures which are voluntary and decentralist. I respect the multitude of different communities and respective traditions that exist, desiring their maintained existence, and have no inherent problem with hierarchy so long as mutuality is maintained.

The corporation as a concept can easily be summed up by Rothbard, describing it simply as pooled capital among entrepreneurs and other stakeholders. However, the distinction then must be made with this libertarian conception, and the modern reality of corporations as subsidised leviathans that require massive subsidisation through transport subsidies, intellectual property monopolies and limited liability and corporate personhood through state granted charters. All of these limit the market from destroying the modern corporate form, which has huge diseconomies of scale and internal calculational chaos. Continue reading →