Free market mutualist Kevin Carson has recently published an interesting analysis of networked resistance and how it could be applied to contemporary labor struggles. It’s called “the ethics of labor struggle”.

Incredibly, it has been seized by the local police in Minneapolis.

I was not successfull yet in quoting from the pdf document, so in the meantime, please download it here at http://agorism.info/_media/labor_struggle.pdf.

If you value free thought and free speech, thanks for forwarding it.

The blog version of the text is located here.

We quote the part where Kevin Carson explains his rationale for writing it:

“In the military realm, the age-old methods of decentralized and networked resistance have most recently appeared in public discussion under the buzzword “Fourth Generation Warfare.”

But networked resistance against the Empire goes far beyond guerrilla warfare in the military realm. The same advantages of asymmetric warfare accrue equally to domestic political opposition. There is a wide range of ruling elite literature on the dangers of “netwar” to the existing system of power, along with an equal volume of literature by the Empire’s enemies celebrating such networked resistance. Most notable among them are probably the Rand studies, from the late 1990s on, by David Ronfeldt et al. In The Zapatista “Social Netwar” in Mexico, those authors expressed grave concern over the possibilities of decentralized “netwar” techniques for undermining elite control. They saw ominous signs of such a movement in the global political support network for the Zapatistas. Loose, ad hoc coalitions of affinity groups, organizing through the Internet, could throw together large demonstrations at short notice, and “swarm” the government and mainstream media with phone calls, letters, and emails far beyond their capacity to absorb. Ronfeldt noted a parallel between such techniques and the “leaderless resistance” advocated by right-wing white supremacist Louis Beam, circulating in some Constitutionalist/militia circles. These were, in fact, the very methods later used at Seattle and afterward. Decentralized “netwar,” the stuff of elite nightmares, was essentially the “crisis of governability” Samuel Huntington had warned of in the 1970s–but potentially several orders of magnitude greater.

The post-Seattle movement confirmed such elite fears, and resulted in a full-scale backlash. Paul Rosenberg recounted in horrifying detail the illegal repression and political dirty tricks used by local police forces against anti-globalization activists at protests in 1999 and 2000. There have even been some reports that Garden Plot was activated on a local basis at Seattle, and that Delta Force units provided intelligence and advice to local police.The U.S. government also seems to have taken advantage of the upward ratcheting of the police state after the 9-11 attacks to pursue its preexisting war on the anti-globalization movement. The intersection of the career of onetime Philadelphia Police Commissioner John Timoney, a fanatical enemy of the post-Seattle movement, with the highest levels of Homeland Security (in the meantime supervising the police riot against the FTAA protesters in Miami) is especially interesting in this regard.

The same netwar techniques are discussed in Jeff Vail’s A Theory of Power blog, in a much more sympathetic manner, as “Rhizome.”

One question that’s been less looked into, though, is the extent to which the ideas of networked resistance and asymmetric warfare are applicable to labor relations. It’s rather odd labor relations aren’t considered more in this context, since the Wobbly idea of “direct action on the job” is a classic example of asymmetric warfare. My purpose in this article is to examine the ethical issues attending the use of such labor tactics, from a free market libertarian standpoint.”