[p2p-research] Fwd: [fcforum] Fw: iPad DRM is a dangerous step backward. Sign the petition!

[Kevin Carson]

On 2/3/10, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Sure we do.  We know they want to not be poor.  Every chance they get they
> leave families, home lands and social structures to get an education to earn
> money.  So much so that we literally have to wall them off from moving en
> masse to opportunities.  China has the largest urbanization in history.  I
> agree people don't like domination; they dislike poverty even more.

This sounds almost exactly like the right-wing "best available
alternative" defenses of sweatshops, and of the Dark Satanic Mills in
the Industrial Revolution.  It's true as far as it goes (as Lionel
Hutz said, it's  the best kind of true--technically true).  But it
leaves out the fact that states are in the business of restricting the
range of available alternatives, in the interest of those who profit
from ordinary people having to choose the alternatives, as the best
available ones, that the privleged classes see fit to offer.

People did indeed flock from the countryside to the factories in early
industrial  Britain.  But when they had access to comfortable
subsistence on their own land, they stayed away in droves.  The whole
point of Enclosures was to guarantee a situation in which working for
wages was the only remaining acceptable alternative.  In China,
"market reform" has shifted over the past thirty years from Deng's
original peasant-friendly policies to foreign capital-friendly
policies in the '80s and '90s, and providing cheap labor to foreign
capital  on the employer's terms.  This has included collusion between
village authorities, the state, and foreign capital in turning village
communal lands into subsidized industrial parks, suppressing free
labor organization, and the like.   Western employers in Third World
countries are very good at acting through the state to break people's
legs, and then kindly offering them "crutches" in the form of
80-hr/week jobs for 20 cents an hour.

> Of course they do.  People aren't perfect.  But they like governance.  Just
> look at failed states like Somalia or even Jamaica and you'll see people who
> live in abject misery for want of a working state.  States are typically
> flawed in huge ways, but they alternative is, to me, far less appealing.
> I've seen lots of utopian efforts.  Haven't seen one work.

The problem with this is that states, for most of their history since
their origin in the riverine civilizations, have served the primary
purpose of enabling economic exploitation.  They enable a privileged
class to extract surplus wealth from society.  The idea that the state
represents the "common interest" or "general welfare," as a claim made
with a straight face, and that it's accountable to the people in
carrying out some sort of "social consensus," is at most a few
centuries old out of about five hundred years.  And over that five
thousand year history, one of the main things the state has done is
crowd out voluntary, self-organized alternatives, and cause civil
society to atrophy.

Kropotkin, very much a historian of the real world,  pointed to the
richness of self-organized institutions in the civil societies of the
late medieval free towns--instittuions which were suppressed by the
new absolute monarchies when their gunpowder enabled them to batter
down town walls for the first time.

So I don't find it convincing at all when someone points to the sudden
collapse of centralized, authoritarian states, and the fact that
they're succeeded by chaotic power vacuums or the seizure of power by
kleptocracies and mafias, as some normal and inevitable state of
affairs.

It's a case of the state breaking legs and then giving out crutches,
and your pointing to the fact that people fall down when the crutches
are snatched away as some sort of evidence that the state was
necessary in the first place.

> Undoubtedly so.  The US imprisons ridiculously too many people in my view.
> But a democratic society chooses those outcomes continually.  It isn't fair
> and it is racist.  Those are things that need hard work to repair.

I think this, a narrative that recurs throughout many of your posts,
is the core area of our disagreement:  your taking at face value the
self-justifications of the system of power as some sort of
ideologically neutral or objective state of affairs that reflects a
"social consensus" or "public interest," etc.  An earlier example was
your taking at face value the legitimizing rhetoric of U.S. foreign
policy in promoting peace, stability, democracy and free markets
around the world.

> DRM a violation of the right to privacy?  By who's legal interpretation?
> Any court so find?  In any nation?   You are certainly entitled to your
> opinion. But the rest of us are entitled to our legal frameworks.

Again, "the law" is not some neutral body of principles that "society"
agrees on.  It's protects a system of  power relations in which some
benefit at the expense of others--and then frames itself as "neutral"
and "objective" in the dominant legitimizing ideology.

> No one needs a phone.  If you don't like the system, don't participate.  If
> you can implement a better system, I'm with you.  Certainly complain, rail,
> protest, do all that is reasonable and legal to change injustices.  But
> don't expect support when you decide what the rules should be without due
> process and the instruments of society unless you are willing to suffer the
> consequences when society finds you anti-social.   You say you want a
> revolution?  Well, we all want to change the world.

Sure.  And if you don't like slavery, don't own a slave.  Sit down and
reason with people, and try to persuade a legislature full of people
representing the plantation owners who  benefit from slavery (oops,
sorry, I mean who represent "society") that slavery's a bad thing.
But don't just take matters into  your own hands and start helping
people break the law.

To me, the main beauty of the kind of stigmergic organization Eric
Raymond writes about is that people are able to "change the world"
without first getting everybody on the same page.  If changing
copyright law meant persuading a Congress elected with campaign money
from the RIAA/MPAA/Microsoft that the current digital copyright regime
was a bad thing, the DMCA and ACTA would be in place a thousand years
from now.  It's the technical means of circumventing copyright law
that will destroy it.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html