Like corporations, militaries also are, as you say, “creatures of the state,” and yet most canonical and popular market libertarian discourse inevitably functionally supports them, too. Whenever libertarians declare as the sole proper sphere of government to be police/armies to protect property rights and contracts, for example, this amounts, in the real world in which “defense” and “policing” are vast capital-intensive industrial information-gathering enterprises to a de facto endorsement of a planned economy and welfare state stealthed as that “Defense,” and all to the wildly disproportionate benefit of the already rich and powerful.

No doubt, as you protest, you can direct our attention to a few photogenic theoretically-pure libertopian specimens (there’s one, a coddled earnest middle-class white kid in his freshman philosophy class, how cute, he has a copy of Atlas Shrugged in his pocket and he’s not yet been kissed, let’s check back on him in three years, shall we?) who really would abolish all armies and corporations together with all those detestable welfare entitlements that make life the least bit worth living for the overwhelming majority of people in modern societies and install some purely Somalian hell in the name of their pure principle, but the fact remains that market libertarian discourse has as its principle life the endless release into the world of ideological utterances deployed by Republicans to justify deregulation, privatization, militarization, corporate spending sprees in the service of elite-incumbent interests. If it weren’t for the hypocritical recourse of Republicans (and corporatist Democrats) to market libertarian/neoliberal pieties they would have no life to speak of at all, at least not in the US (and its European counterparts, especially in the UK).

The guiding assumptions of those few pure anarcho-capitalists out there who do not indulge in such hyprocrisies are perfectly nonsensical in their own right — that to institute alternatives for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes demands artifacts the legitimacy of which has a different character than that of conventionally exclusive/competitive instruments, a different character that makes them vulnerable to special abuses whose amelioration must be part of the institutions themselves seems to me the starting point of an actually adult conversation of the governmental aspect of the political, and after a wider reading in the literature than most its adherents can boast of I am sad to report that this basic understanding is woefully lacking among even the luminaries of neoliberal and anarcho-capitalist discourse, in my opinion.

Now, precisely because, as you say, corporations are indeed chartered by the state, I personally think it would be a fine thing to re-introduce into those charters characteristics all of which have already been part of the institutional identity of limited liability associations at various moments in the long life of that legal/financial instrument, for example, strict definitions of a corporation’s purpose which cannot alter without the dissolution of the charter, limits of the term of the association, insistence that since the public takes on certain risks and costs in granting such an association limited liability that it should be required as part of the compact always to act in ways that serve the public interest, and I personally would like to see strict guidelines limiting the income and perqs of the officers at the top of a corporate hierarchy in respect to the income and perqs of workers at the bottom. As I said, all of these elements have been part of the story of the corporation and could be part of the story again. Of course, one needs a state to enforce such stipulations, and one needs a democratically-responsive and accountable state to have any hope of instituting regulations that would benefit majorities rather than armed minorities like these would do, and as you say I quite agree that corporate power predominates in the world’s notional democracies at the moment to the devastation of equity, diversity, consent, sustainability. I believe we must re-mobilize such hard-won still-available legal instruments of our democratic institutions to fight the threats of corporate-militarism, and I believe it is doubly nonsensical to fancy either a blanket dis-invention of the state as such is possible (I personally don’t consider such an aspiration even to be conceptually coherent) or would do anything if it were possible to fight corporate-militarism, such as it is, and hence, I must say, I consider such talk a distraction from good work and derangement of good sense. Obviously, your mileage may vary.

As for Marcel, forgive me for being blunt, but you need to demonstrate an understanding of and willingness to actually engage with the arguments of mine to which you are presumably responding before I can believe that this is a good-faith exchange of a kind that justifies the time required to pursue it.

While I would be the last one to denigrate the personal distress to which Marcel testifies, I must protest that it is not a denial of “real world” realities for me to question the assumptions, aspirations, conceits, figurations, narrativizations through which he proposes to make sense of these “real world” realities.

I was simply saying that someone tries to make me do something, and I don’t really have to do it, in truth. That seems to fit the definition of tyranny. Do you have another one?

[…] hence the emancipatory undermining of investor-professionals limiting consumers in their affordable enjoyments in order to profitably maintain the unwieldy organizations through which such goods are provided is a desirable state of affairs, but cannot extend to those governmental organization tasked with establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for common defense, and promoting general welfare not competitively but for all, not in order to return a profit but by the consent of the governed.

Actual governmental organizations do not provide any of those things, indeed they most often engage in activities that directly contradict several of them, and most particularly they permanently violate the consent of a substantial part of the governed. Considering that, how is their undermining not desirable?

There are several other things to which I should reply. But it would take hours. I will simply note that you are taking up vulgar libertarian arguments to which I have never subscribed. And while you pin the error of them on idealist thinking, I think they are true in theory, but wrong in the context of the current world. Those arguments are therefore not idealistic, but rather they simply do not apply. We do not currently have market outcomes. Uninformed consent is not consent. And the context does matter, no matter how formally consent is given.

First, your overbroad assertions about “market libertarians,” which are belied by the fact that there’s a sizable community of left-wing market libertarians who see the large corporation as a creature of the state, and who see the state’s primary functions as protecting and subsidizing big business.

Second, your implication that the existence of powerful large corporations in actually-existing capitalism is some sort of indictment of market libertarianism as an ideology, and specifically of its focus on the coercive state as the primary evil.

Behind this is still another implication, that market libertarianism is primarily a defense of actually existing capitalism using “free market” language. While there are certainly many right-wing libertarians who do follow this pattern — and they may well even constitute a majority of mainstream libertarians — their position is far from uncontested within the market libertarian movement.

I would contend that the large corporation the currently predominates wouldn’t exist at all without the state to externalize its operating costs and suppress competition.

I could raise a third point about the role of pre-commercial social mores, conventional rules of the game, etc., as background conditions within which any market operates. But in fact I don’t dispute the existence of such factors — I’d just quibble, on a semantic basis, by saying that I don’t see their existence as at odds with a free market. Generally speaking, I use the term “market” in a broad sense to include all consensual, voluntary arrangements — including voluntary communism, common property, gift economies, and also primary social units governed by non-monetized gift relations (e.g. cohousing projects, extended families, intentional communities, etc.).

The planetary precariat — illegal immigrants, temporary and informal workers, insecure indebted citizens in neoliberal post-welfare states, dwellers in peri-urban slums and refugee camps are profoundly limited in their capacity to engage in acts of consent.

The struggles for democratization (ensuring that ever more people have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them) and for consensualization (ensuring that the scene of consent is ever more informed and nonduressed) together drive the interminable struggle for equity-in-diversity on which the figure of the peer, the planetary successor to the nation-state’s citizen-subject in my view.

What I am stressing is that the political legitimacy of the democratic state — that is to say, the normative-institutional order that justifies its existence by reference to the standard of equity-in-diversity, by providing nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes (including, recall, crucially, disputes as to what qualifies as violence) and by providing for a legible scene of reliably informed, nonduressed consent (by means of a suite of legal and welfare administration) — derives from a profoundly different set of standards than the ones that are typically discussed by p2p-new media theorists.

I regard as indispensable, say, Clay Shirky’s discussion of the way digital networks have flooded subcultures with suboptimal but satisfactory free content and so undermined the gatekeeper-credentializing role through which capital has rationalized hitherto its role as censor, or his discussion of the way digital networks have flooded organizations with amateur innovation and so undermined the investment in professionalism through which capital has rationalized hitherto its central-hierarchical control of institutions. However, I disapprove the way in which such insights are taken up and glibly misapplied via spontaneist-anarchist-market libertarian figurations to political phenomena.

But subculture is a moral concept (moral, from mores, yields an identification that depends on dis-identification with a constitutive outside for sense, the “they” excluded from the moral “we”), whereas culture is an ethical concept (ethics, from ethos, yields a formal-universality that solicits identification putatively indifferent to differences, substantiated against the grain of moral intuitions, via strategic recourse to, say, posterity, the good opinion of mankind, government of laws and not men, the principle of nonviolence, universal declarations of human rights, and the like), and hence the emancipatory undermining of gatekeeper-censors standing between people and their subcultural enjoyments and parasitically skimming rents for the privilege is a desirable state of affairs, but cannot scale from subculture to culture to provide a route through which to “smash the state” maintaining a democratically accountable rule of law or administering the services on which a legible scene of consent depends. It is usually only a prior investment in the false and facile figure of spontaneous order that provokes such misreadings in the first place.

Similarly, the maintenance of the legal order and administration of services on which the scene of consent depends in democratically-identified societies is legitimated by recourse to equity-in-diversity and not simply to profitability, and hence the emancipatory undermining of investor-professionals limiting consumers in their affordable enjoyments in order to profitably maintain the unwieldy organizations through which such goods are provided is a desirable state of affairs, but cannot extend to those governmental organization tasked with establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for common defense, and promoting general welfare not competitively but for all, not in order to return a profit but by the consent of the governed. Given the vulnerability to abuse that obviously inheres in the investment of any parochial worldly actors or institutions with ethical mandates, endlessly many institutional experiments have been devised to ameliorate these risks, from horizontal separation of powers and vertical subsidiarity, to jury trials, to declarations of inviolable rights, to extensions of the franchise, to extensions of welfare entitlements, to subsidization of citizen participation in government. I regard the p2p-democratization of broadcast-media, of political parties and of organized labor as extraordinary and encouraging developments, but it is important not to misread these developments as providing a route through which eventually “to smash the state” rather than democratize participation in that state and render the state more accountable to the consent of the governed. If the rights of minorities can be denied by the vote of a majority, there are no rights, if individuals can consent to violation or enslavement there is no consent, if functionaries can lie or mislead with impunity there is no possibility of contract, promise, or forgiveness. Education, agitation, and organization facilitated by p2p-formations are efforts to reform and better administer the apparatus of the democratic state, not intimations of “spontaneous order” except for those who have a prior investment in such figures.

I propose these formulations to encourage a more useful discussion in this moment, one that does not re-enact the usual joyless ritual of arguments with market libertarians who believe it is wholesome to let “markets decide” outcomes despite the fact that markets are artifacts whose historical forms are determined by human decisions, not transhistorical tidal forces of supply and demand which, alas, radically underdetermine the contingent legal structure of commerce and production from polity to polity, from epoch to epoch, not primordial predilections for barter elevated to the neglect of no less primordial predilections to mutual-aid, fair-dealing, and sharing. While I would be the last one to denigrate the personal distress to which Marcel testifies, I must protest that it is not a denial of “real world” realities for me to question the assumptions, aspirations, conceits, figurations, narrativizations through which he proposes to make sense of these “real world” realities. He is not the only one who suffers, and for all those who do suffer, I propose that finding our way to a better understanding of the civitas without which we can find no justice or experience true freedom, as well as the possibilities inhering in emerging p2p-formations for the facilitation and frustration of that civitas is a useful thing for at least some of us to be doing right about now, especially those of us whose temperament and training lends itself to this sort of thing.

But here’s something strange: I was happy finding free food that was edible, and no one was hurt from me finding and eating it. I only hurt the feelings of those who hold bourgeois standards as a law to be obeyed by everyone. I think you see now that the optimal outcome is not when a given optimum outcome has been reached by everyone, but when everyone has reached his own optimum outcome, defined by him or herself.

This is why you do not trust the free market would ‘work,’ and this is why I do not care much about that doubt.

Needless to say, actually-existing democracies relentlessly fail to live up to their guiding ideals, but there is all the difference in the world between those who respond to this failure by relinquishing the ideal of civitas altogether and those who are spurred to reform what actually-exists in the direction of those ideas.

Actually-existing democracies are based on the principle that everyone within a territory must obey a given legislation. It is obvious that on any area of land, you will find people who irremediably disagree on very important points. Hence the failure to yield consensus, under actually-existing democracies, is not an accident, it is necessary.

Rather than grounding government on territory and majority rule, then, anarchists have rule based on the consent of those concerned. The civitas altogether that you pretend we relinquish, is actually what we destroy the State for. I see it as preferable that there would be several real altogether’s rather than a giant fake one based on territory.

The unifying thread between the two parts is a critique of the metaphor of “spontaneous order” which figures so prominently in the arguments of so many techno-centric commentators to this day, from both the right (which, contra many of its proponents, is where I properly locate the politics of market libertarian ideology) and the left, enabling in endless variations what amount to superficially anti-political arguments most of which typically function to support elite-incumbent politics in substance. Although the re-posted piece is a rather old one, it seems to me that a lazy recourse to such spontaneist and anarchist figurations has gotten no better in recent years, and fatally suffuses quite a lot of otherwise indispensable work on p2p-networks, activism, net neutrality (so-called), and more general discourse on online sociality, creative expressivity, organization.

It is crucial to remember that every norm, custom, pricing convention, institution, subcultural trait, architectural feature, however monolithic, stubborn, inertial it may seem is a product of historical struggle, that things have been otherwise, things could be otherwise, things surely will be otherwise, and at least part of what politics means is the collective contestations and collaborations that yield the vicissitudes in the career of apparently only natural, that is to say, naturalized conventions. If it makes sense to say such a thing, then it follows that there is always a politics in the declaration that some actually-contingent outcome is not political, is beyond contestation, is natural, neutral, technical, autonomous… there is a politics of the de-politicizing gesture, the taking off from the table that which could be otherwise.

For one thing: That this is a gesture that will tend to the benefit of incumbency — the acceptance as natural, inevitable that which is given in the status quo, deserves special note.

For another thing: Also deserving such note is that technoscience has no politics (in making this point I leave to the side the ethnography of political strife in lab settings, funding battles, publication histories, figuration of paradigm shifts, marketing appropriations, and so on), that is to say that the warranted descriptions arising from consensus science have no inevitable politics but are nonetheless always only deployed in the world according to the different politics of those who take them up. This makes technodevelopmental questions particularly susceptible to facile determinisms, autonomisms, reductionisms, technocratic elitisms premised on such de-politicizing naturalizations of the play of their changes in history.

I am personally very interested in what I describe as p2p-democratization, the taking up of p2p-formations within the normative, legal, institutional context of reasonably representative democratic-identified societies by those who would educate, agitate, and organize for more equitable, consensual, diverse, convivial political outcomes and culture.

It is crucial to grasp that these efforts do not in my view express an underlying ethos of p2p-interaction or e2e network architecture, but represent historically specific, politically opportunistic, ethically mandated efforts that should be documented, facilitated, celebrated (just because my own politics are of the democratic consensualist left, devoted to equity-in-diversity), but which are far from inevitable, natural, more structurally “apt” to the forces at hand than antithetical elite-incumbent or authoritarian deployments also afoot in this changing landscape.

Crucial to ensuring that democratizing and consensualizing deployments of p2p-formations prevail is an awareness, in my view, not only of the actual contingency and artificiality of democracy and the scene of consent, but a better understanding of what is conceptually unique to the spheres of the ethical and the political in which these struggles and outcomes make their way and make their home. That is why I am very pleased that Michel has also re-posted here several texts in which I take up these issues very specifically, among them recently Peer to Peer Democracy and the State and older pieces like Defining Left and Right and Democratizing the State Rather Than Smashing It.

Given that the democratic state is rightly imagined to be a space facilitating the non-violent adjudication of inevitable disputes (including fraught disputes about what should count as violence and non-violence), a space in which the diversity of peers who share the world can come together despite their differences, and none get left behind for good, it is important to grasp how different such a role and such a space is in its legitimacy from “optimal outcomes” presumably yielded by comparative advantage, positional advantage, competitive advantage and the other mechanisms that figure so prominently in so many non-political (technocratic and determinist) and anti-political (spontaneist and libertopian) delineations of the organizational terrain of p2p-formations.

Needless to say, actually-existing democracies relentlessly fail to live up to their guiding ideals, but there is all the difference in the world between those who respond to this failure by relinquishing the ideal of civitas altogether and those who are spurred to reform what actually-exists in the direction of those ideas (reforms in which p2p-democratization figures centrally, hopefully, in this moment, in my view). But worse than resignation to inertial pull of incumbency and authoritarianism and the cynical or interested relinquishment of democratization and consensualization in my view, is the widespread ignorance of the distinctive substance and promise of democracy and consent as political phenomena and hence the blindness to and heedless loss of both among good-intentioned people who should know better but simply don’t because we are so abysmally uninformed and misinformed about political matters on which our worldly lives nonetheless depend for our survival and flourishing.

By way of conclusion, I am interested that though Mr. Carson affirms that he differs from my assessment of market libertarian ideology (as I already happen to know many scores of people obviously do), he actually doesn’t say much as to why he does or respond to any of the points I made in the piece at hand, which leaves me bereft of his reasoning from which I am sure I and others would benefit enormously. I am also intrigued by the spectacle in which Marcel assures me how very facile and wrong and behind-the-latest-libertopian-times I am to impute to market libertarians the attitude that even apparently nice public servants are little better than jack-booted thugs and yet with the passage of scarcely a sentence is driven by his market libertarian logic to assert, with what I would propose is perfectly predictable robotic behavioral inevitability, “they’re not jack-booted thugs, they’re smiley-tyrants who just want to ‘help’ you get back on your feet. By finding you a boss.”

Hi Kevin,

there seems to be a divide between those that see the state as creatures of corporations, and focus on the latter as the enemy force, and anti-statism. It iseems to me, your brand of anticapitalist free-market libertarianism, sits on the border between the two, and unlike ‘royal libertarians’, never justifies corporate repression and power.