Kevin Carson – P2P Foundation

Kevin Carson on vulgar libertarianism and the P2P Revolution

P2P Foundation — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 09:00:00 +0000

One of the biggest drawbacks of thinking in “vulgar libertarian” fashion is that you forget that there were ever alternatives available to people, that the way that we live now or the way we’re used to living is the only way that was ever reasonable or good. The rise of the modern state marks a time in history when authorities began to and continue to control more about people’s lives. The modern state also intrudes on people’s lives in a fashion that is so much greater than before. With that being said, we are still hesitant to look at other society organizational possibilities even though the modern state continues to control us more than most would prefer. Kevin Carson joins us to discuss the depths of capitalism and if the possibility for a post-capitalism world exists.

What is the definition of capitalism? What is the history of the word “capitalism”? Who were the Boston Anarchists? What is “vulgar libertarianism”? Are there alternative social structures that we do not acknowledge because we are stubborn and stuck in our ways? Is post-capitalism occurring?

Kevin Carson on free market anticapitalism

Stacco Troncoso — Wed, 29 Mar 2017 09:15:00 +0000

PRIMO NUTGMEG interviews Center for a Stateless Society senior fellow and P2P Foundation regular contributor Kevin Carson.

From the shownotes to the podcast

Kevin Carson is a left-wing libertarian who supports a free market but opposes “capitalism.” We discuss the differences between various schools of libertarianism and the possibility for collaboration. We also discuss the labor theory of value and how modern political movements in the US have become co-opted by the two main political parties.

www.primonutmeg.com

Like and Follow us on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and Instagram:

goo.gl/2HkMtQ
facebook.com/primonutmeg
twitter.com/primonutmeg
primonutmeg.wordpress.com/
instagram.com/primonutmeg/

Photo by timparkinson

The post Kevin Carson on free market anticapitalism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Podcast: Kevin Carson on Mutualizing the Water Commons

Stacco Troncoso — Sat, 04 Jun 2016 09:32:43 +0000

Kevin Carson was recently interviewed by Andrew Stewart of the Rhode Island Media Cooperative on the issue of corporate water privatization, with an emphasis on commons-based ownership and cooperative management as an alternative. The original interview podcast can be found here, along with a write-up by Stewart that hits on the highlights of the discussion. Stewart’s essay is reproduced below, along with the podcast.

Andrew Stewart: Democratize when they privatize the water system

A recent story published by Dan McGowan about a report by the National Resources Network included the possibility of privatizing the water system in Providence for $372 million. Furthermore, a recent report by The Real News Network emphasized how disaster capitalists, to use a phrase coined in The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, would utilize the heightened awareness about lead plumbing following the disaster in Flint, Michigan to gentrify historic black and brown neighborhoods through a mandatory plumbing replacement ordinance.

Carson

Kevin Carson of the Center for a Stateless Society has been analyzing and writing on these topics recently in these articles:

He has developed a novel concept in dealing with efforts to privatize the water supply that could hypothetically be enacted here in Rhode Island.

“I’m trying to advocate for things like mutualist ownership of former government property, ownership by the consumers or by the workers [by] transforming them into stakeholder cooperatives… Water resources strike me as something that’s ideal for ownership as a public commons and administration through stakeholder cooperatives,” says Carson.

With regards to the costs of renovations to the system including the necessary plumbing replacements, “[Renovations can be financed] by shifting funding to people who impose the most costs on the system that are currently protected from paying their fair share… If you look at Flint and Detroit, for example, and the kind of stuff that’s being done by Emergency Managers, generally the big commercial [and] big corporate water users pay much lower rates. Most of the water purification costs are imposed by industrial users but spread out over the rate payers at large and now that they’re cracking down on accounts in arrears, it’s almost entirely residential water users that are being shut off while there are commercial accounts that are hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in arrears that haven’t been shut down because politically they’re the real owners of the system.”

Would such an operation be complicated for the municipality? “It seems like a fairly straightforward thing to me to transform the representation on the board of directors and the senior management, you just make the management of the local water system responsible to the rate payers with maybe worker representation as well instead of being appointed either by the municipality or by a private corporation… I don’t see any need to purchase to the extent that the water resources themselves are a natural commons already owned by the public rightfully and to the extent that the infrastructure has already been funded by the ratepayers, I consider it legitimately their own property already.”

And how could this cooperatizing be financed? “I’m a big advocate of mutual credit systems… I’m all for larger economic organization where it’s possible to do things like upgrade water systems without paying usurious rates of interest to get it done… Under the system we have now I just say ‘let’s see how much we can do in terms of shifting the payment of rates itself in the direction of fairness and how much that boosts the revenue and, if necessary, set the rates high enough to cover the renovation costs with the people that actually impose the costs on the system, the commercial and industrial users’.”

Click the player below to listen to my full interview with Carson!

Cooperatized utilities are not uncommon in this country. In the South, there are a good number of public utilities that were introduced to the region when the New Deal brought modern plumbing, telephone, and electricity to these states. Some that still exist today, according to Wikipedia, are:

Electric Cooperative Association
Rural Electric Association
Rural Electric Cooperative
Rural Electric Cooperative Corporation (RECC)- Mainly used in Kentucky
Electric Membership Cooperative (EMC)- Used in many states, such as Indiana, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, etc.
Rural Electric Membership Corporation (REMC)
Electric Power Association (EPA)- Mainly used in Mississippi
Power Cooperative
Energy Cooperative

Mutual savings banks are chartered by a central or regional government that has no capital stock and is owned by members that are subscribers to a common fund. Here are several such bank networks in Europe:

The other alternative funding source of such efforts would be your neighborhood credit union. For example, Cranston Municipal Employees Credit Union is made up of that municipality’s workers as members and PGE Credit Union, located across from the central Post Office, serves federal and state government employees. Now if there were only some organized force in Rhode Island, currently engaged in a fight against gentrification, privatization, and other neoliberal austerity measures, that would encourage its worker-members to pool their monies in one financial institute.

It would be important here, after referring to Tom Sgouros’s book Checking the Banks, to create security mechanisms to prevent this from becoming a Ponzi scheme. The union would need to be legally prevented from getting involved in Wall Street-backed retirement and investment instruments that would grow fat cat wallets by hurting members. But cooperative banks have the capacity within their charters to be hindering such activities.

The website of the Rhode Island Secretary of State features two cooperative organization forms, one for consumers and one for producers, who in these contexts would be the utility workers. If churches, mosques, synagogues, and other civic organizations were to aid in a membership drive, it would be fairly easy to get all ratepayers onto the membership rolls rather quickly.

The post Podcast: Kevin Carson on Mutualizing the Water Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Kevin Carson’s Desktop Regulatory State

Stacco Troncoso — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 09:01:32 +0000

C4SS Senior Fellow Kevin Carson’s book The Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing Power of Individuals and Networks, a project of five years work, is now in print. It’s also available online here. Here’s a description C4SS Senior Fellow Gary Chartier — who’s also responsible for the beautiful interior and cover design — wrote for the back cover:

Defenders of the modern state often claim that it’s needed to protect us — from terrorists, invaders, bullies, and rapacious corporations. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, for instance, famously argued that the state was a source of “countervailing power” that kept other social institutions in check. But what if those “countervailing” institution — corporations, government agencies and domesticated labor unions — in practice collude more than they “countervail” each other? And what if network communications technology and digital platforms now enable us to take on all those dinosaur hierarchies as equals — and more than equals. In The Desktop Regulatory State, Kevin Carson shows how the power of self-regulation, which people engaged in social cooperation have always possessed, has been amplified and intensifed by changes in consciousness — as people have become aware of their own power and of their ability to care for themselves without the state — and in technology — especially information technology. Drawing as usual on a wide array of insights from diverse disciplines, Carson paints an inspiring, challenging, and optimistic portrait of a humane future without the state, and points provocatively toward the steps we need to take in order to achieve it.

Photo by snowmentality

The post Kevin Carson’s Desktop Regulatory State appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Essay of the Day: The Decline and Fall of Sloanism

Kevin Carson — Sun, 06 Mar 2016 09:29:49 +0000

If you watch the mainstream cable news networks and news analysis programs, you’ve no doubt seen, many times, talking head commentators rolling their eyes at any proposal for reform that differs too radically from the existing institutional structure of society. That much of a departure would be completely unrealistic, they imply, not only because it is an arrogant imposition on the common sense regular folks who prefer things the way they are, but because “the way things are” is a natural state of affairs that came about by being the most efficient way of doing things.

Download: The Decline and Fall of Sloanism [PDF] or the ready for print zine.

Introduction

I. Babylon is Fallen

Resumption of the Crisis of Overaccumulation
Resource crises (Peak Oil)
Fiscal Crisis of the State
Decay of the Cultural Pseudomorph
(Failed) Attempts to Counteract the Crisis of Value with Enclosure of the Digital Commons

II. Relocalized Manufacturing

Conclusion

In the last C4SS paper, we saw that Sloanist mass production, as a system created by the state, diverted the course of industrial development for a century. In this one, we will see how the unsustainability of the Sloanist model will lead to a resumption of the original decentralist course of development. [1]

If you watch the mainstream cable news networks and news analysis programs, you’ve no doubt seen, many times, talking head commentators rolling their eyes at any proposal for reform that differs too radically from the existing institutional structure of society. That much of a departure would be completely unrealistic, they imply, not only because it is an arrogant imposition on the common sense regular folks who prefer things the way they are, but because “the way things are” is a natural state of affairs that came about by being the most efficient way of doing things.

But in fact the present system is, itself, radical. The corporate economy was created in a few decades as a radical departure from what prevailed before. And it did not come about by natural evolutionary means, or “just happen”; it’s not just “the way things are.” It was imposed from above (as we saw in Chapter One) by a conscious, deliberate, radical social engineering effort, with virtually no meaningful democratic input from below.

All social systems include social reproduction apparatuses, whose purpose is to produce a populace schooled to accept “the way things are” as the only possible world, and the only natural and inevitable way of doing things. So the present system, once established, included a cultural, ideological and educational apparatus (lower and higher education, the media, etc.) run by people with exactly the same ideology and the same managerial class background as those running the large corporations and government agencies.

Anything that fundamentally weakened or altered the present pattern of corporate-state domination, or required eliminating the power of the elites running the dominant institutions, would be — by definition — “too radical.”

The system of power can only be undermined by forces beyond its control. Fortunately, it faces a mutually reinforcing and snowballing series of terminal crises which render it unsustainable.

The present system’s enculturation apparatus functions automatically to present it as inevitable, and to suppress any consciousness that “other worlds are possible.” But not only are other worlds possible — the terminal crises of the present system mean that this world, increasingly, is becoming impossible.

Notes:

1. This paper continues where C4SS Paper No. 3 (“Moloch: Mass-Production Industry as a Statist Construct” ) left off. Both are developments of themes stated, more briefly, in C4SS Paper No. 1 (“Industrial Policy: New Wine in Old Bottles” ).

Download: The Decline and Fall of Sloanism [PDF] or the ready for print zine.

The post Essay of the Day: The Decline and Fall of Sloanism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Podcast of the Day/C-Realm: Kevin Carson on the Functional Equivalent of a Conspiracy

Stacco Troncoso — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 11:24:12 +0000

Another must hear conversation between KMO of the C-Realm podcast, and P2P Foundation contributor Kevin Carson. Here’s the original post on the C-Realm website.

From the shownotes to the episode:

KMO and Kevin Carson, the author of The Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing Power of Networks and Super-Empowered Individuals, met up at the public library in Springdale, Arkansas to record a conversation about radical monopolies, car culture, retrofitting the built environment to compensate for peak oil, and how government and corporations “conspire” to criminalize low-cost living. Kevin explains the problem with literal, simplistic conspiracy narratives and discusses the culture of Northwest Arkansas. Finally, KMO plays a bit of conversation recorded in 2007 with the founder of The Farm, Stephen Gaskin, who died yesterday.

Music by Rising Appalachia.

http://www.c-realm.com/wp-content/uploads/412_Beating_the_Bounds.mp3http://www.c-realm.com/wp-content/uploads/421_Functional_Equivalent.mp3

The post Podcast of the Day/C-Realm: Kevin Carson on the Functional Equivalent of a Conspiracy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This is Not Your Ancestors’ Collapse Scenario

Kevin Carson — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 22:24:34 +0000

[Note: This originally appeared at Center for a Stateless Society] A forthcoming “NASA study” that predicts medium-term collapse has gone viral on the Internet, based entirely on Nafeez Ahmed’s advance writeup for The Guardian (“NASA-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’?,” March 14). To start with we should note, just in passing, that it turns out not to be quite a “NASA study” after all. It was the work of independent researchers at the University of Maryland, using analytical tools that had previously been developed for an entirely different NASA study. It wasn’t commissioned or funded by NASA. And on top of everything else, a lot of the authorities cited to support its premises aren’t all that pleased with the authors’ interpretation of their work (“Keith Kloor, About That Popular Guardian Story on the Collapse of Industrial Civilization“; “Judging the Merits of a Media-Hyped ‘Collapse’ Study.” Discover, March 21; ). The study, a group effort led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei, argues for a cyclical pattern of civilizational rise and collapse in human history, based on the interaction of two mutually-reinforcing variables: 1) the growth of resource extraction to unsustainable levels and 2) the polarization of societies between economically privileged elites and commoners. The latter process insulates economic elites from fully experiencing the real costs of resource depletion, and allows them to externalize the suffering from the crisis onto the lower orders — thus delaying a rational response until it’s too late. First of all, its line of analysis strikes me as fairly simplistic, assuming a handful of very gross variables and playing out a scenario based on a first-order extrapolation from them, with very little taking into account of agile responses to feedback — especially the rapid growth of ephemeralizing technologies that are totally changing the game compared to previous collapses. And oddly enough, it’s being cited by a lot of commentators as evidence for why we need state intervention. But if anything, it’s the state and the model of industrial growth it promoted the past century or two that are pushing us toward collapse. The main function of the state has been subsidizing a model of expansion based on the wasteful use of additional resource inputs rather than boosting productivity through more efficient use of existing inputs. Under the existing model of capitalism, the state does two major things. First, it enforces privileges and artificial property rights that result in large monopoly rents to the propertied classes. The overall effect is to shift income from workers with a high propensity to consume to rentiers with a high propensity to save and invest, so that capitalism is plagued with chronic crises of overinvestment and underconsumption. Second, the state subsidizes a business model based on large-batch production for large, centralized market areas using extremely expensive, specialized machinery — a model of production far higher in overhead and far more capital-intensive than would be sustainable in a genuine free market, without subsidies and barriers to competition. Because of the enormous capital outlays required for this model of production, industry is driven to minimize unit costs by running continually at full capacity, and the capitalist state organizes society around the consumption of this output, which was undertaken without regard to preexisting demand. So we have an economy whose dominant class face an enormous glut of far more capital than it can find profitable investment outlets for, and find themselves in a constant uphill battle against excess industrial capacity and inadequate consumer demand. In short, it’s an economy organized by the state around solving the problems of a ruling class with too many resources, and every incentive in the world to use them as inefficiently as possible. The state’s chief activity has been finding ways to waste capital and soak it up on horribly inefficient blockbuster projects as capital sinks for solving the problem of overaccumulation and idle capacity, to encourage waste investment in inefficient ways of doing things, and pay people to hold land out of use or subsidize the most land-inefficient forms of industrial farming. The automobile-highway complex, mass suburbanization, planned obsolescence and the military-industrial complex all fall under these headings. At the same time, the state preempts ownership of the natural environment and gives preferential access to it to the economic ruling class, effectively turning it into an unorganized and unregulated commons that industry can use as a no-cost, no-liability sink for pollution and a subsidized source of artificially cheap raw materials and fuel inputs. The study argues that “elite power” will protect the ruling classes from the negative effects of looming collapse for some time after commoners begin to experiencing it, thus allowing “business as usual” for the privileged despite “impending catastrophe.” As for the saving potential of technological advances, don’t count on it. The only effect it will have — based on what amounts to a warmed-over appeal to Jeavons’ Paradox — is to temporarily encourage even larger-scale, less sustainable consumption and resource extraction. I’m a lot more optimistic than the authors on both counts. First of all, the legal barriers and subsidies that insulate the elites from the real costs of the decisions they make are rapidly becoming unsustainable. While industry’s demands for subsidized inputs rise exponentially — as you might expect from the basic principles of economics — the state is becoming fiscally exhausted from its inability to keep up with those demands. And crises of Peak Oil, Coal, etc. will likely drive the collapse of long-distance industrial supply and distribution chains, and the relocalization of production, in the near future. Meanwhile, as the revolution in high-tech, ephemeral manufacturing tools makes the means of production increasingly cheaper, smaller in scale and more amenable to relocalized production by individuals and small groups, corporations find themselves forced to resort to legal monopolies and anti-competitive barriers like licensing and “intellectual property” to prevent manufacturing from being undertaken by ordinary workers and consumers outside corporate boundaries. But as the record industry or NSA can tell you, legal barriers to the free use of information and technique are becoming virtually unenforceable. And it’s the “lower orders” themselves, the very people who experience the externalized negative consequences of resource depletion, who are being driven by necessity to develop the new, more efficient technologies that will become the building blocks for the post-capitalist culture. So what we’re really seeing is an old state-corporate economic order, accustomed to achieving its goals by throwing unlimited cheap capital and land at them, experiencing something very much like past collapse scenarios described by Joseph Tainter. At the same time, a new junkyard dog economy of micromanufacturing, open-source hardware, free software, permaculture, vernacular building techniques and passive solar design, household micro-enterprise, cooperatives, etc., is emerging from the ruins of the old corporate dinosaur economy. It has grown up in the face of unrelenting pressure to extract every last drop of value from the merest scraps of land and capital, and will eventually digest the decaying ruins of the system it supplants. So yes, an old system is collapsing. But it’s entirely feasible for a new and better one to take its place. The only thing the state can do, in alliance with the old order, is to obstruct the new one by enforcing the inequalities of wealth and unevenness of resource distribution Motasharrei points to. And the best way to get rid of those inequalities is for the state to stop actively promoting them.

The post This is Not Your Ancestors’ Collapse Scenario appeared first on P2P Foundation.