no third solution

Blogging about liberty, anarchy, economics and politics

Category Archives: Left Libertarian

Wages, Revenue & Labor

August 10th, 2010

Without ‘owners’ the workers collect revenue from sales. What the workers keep we might consider “wages” in an accounting sense, but strictly speaking, there are no “wages”, there is just “revenue”.

We might suppose that, in addition to probably cutting out the ‘middleman’ (the capitalist-entrepreneur), worker-owners would allocate revenues over their costs of production differently than would the capitalist ‘owners’. For starters we expect that they would either have, or aim to have, vastly different cost structures in the first place. But that’s a digression we need not follow.

So for the moment let’s forget about this and imagine that the workers have just wrested control from the hands of the “capitalists”, and that the cost structures (imperfect as they are) remain at least for the short- and probably for the medium-term.

Aside from beginning to pink-slip all the bureaucrats (how you identify and defenestrate the bureaucrats, I don’t really care) and turning those dividend checks (previously distributed to absentee shareholders) in to coin in the workman’s pockets, what else do they do differently?

The entirety of disagreement between cappies/commies, boils down to what is essentially a difference of opinion with regard to how sales revenues should be allocated.  Is it really that simple?

Maybe, but probably not. Stay tuned.

Pentagon vs. WikiLeaks: The Big Picture

August 6th, 2010

wikileaksThe other day, an obnoxious Pentagon spokesperson issued formal threats (essentially: destroy everything, or else!) against WikiLeaks, the organization which received thousands of classified documents from Bradley Manning and has since made many of those available for public consumption.

WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, responded in an interview on Democracy Now. Amy Goodman, conducting the interview, quoted Admiral Mike Mullen from a news conference earlier in the week

ADM. MIKE MULLEN: Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is, they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family. Disagree with the war all you want, take issue with the policy, challenge me or our ground commanders on the decisions we make to accomplish the mission we’ve been given, but don’t put those who willingly go into harm’s way even further in harm’s way just to satisfy your need to make a point.

Hear? We’re allowed to “take issue with the policy” and “challenge” the tactical decisions made by the commanders, as long as we leave “the mission” out of the equation, because, you see, they’re just following orders (and so should you). But following orders isn’t an excuse.

“Following orders was not an excuse for anyone put on trial in Nuremberg, and it will not be an excuse for you or your superiors, either.” — Andrew Williams (addressing Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, legal advisor to Guantanamo Bay prison)

About those who “willingly” go in to harm’s way? They would rather be driving their kids to soccer practice, finishing college, working their 9-to-5, etc.  How many would’ve “willingly” gone to fight for Empire if the Pentagon had put a C-130 at every airport in the country with suitable runway and said, “Anyone who wants to go to Afghanistan and fight, the door is open!”? My guess: they wouldn’t fill a high school gymnasium.

Assange points out that when, e.g., Robert Gates or Mike Mullen implies that WikiLeaks and its collaborators might have blood on their hands, that these statements “all together, are designed to distract from the big picture,” which is of course the same big picture which Mullen craftily sidesteps in the blockquote above. The big picture is “the mission” itself, the objective consequences of which include the deaths of 20,000 civilian, non-combatant Afghans.

Mr. Mullen can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his forces are doing, but the truth is, they already have on their hands the blood of 4,000 American soldiers, some 20,000 innocent Afghans, and (conservatively) over 100,000 innocent Iraqis. Including “accidents” wherein 150+ children were bombed to death.

Collateral murder, indeed.

Assange and WikiLeaks are exposing the crimes and the criminals like Mullen, Gates, et. Al, who are responsible. If you want to pretend that all that shit never happened, then I guess you can get on your high horse and start spouting off about the “potential” blood Assange might someday be responsible for.  But you’re definitely light-years ahead of him in terms of destroying human lives.

Mr. Mullen & Mr. Gates, You pay lip-service to keeping the troops out of harm’s way, you may fret over tactics, the specific actions you take towards the accomplishment of “the mission you’ve been given”, but tactics do not exist in a fucking vacuum. They exist only in the context of “the mission.”  Every second of your pitiful existence which passes without questioning the morality of the orders you’ve been given, the orders you’ve accepted to undertake, is another second in which you are responsible for the harm those people face, and the harm they may commit.  And if “the mission” is rotten (to the goddamned core), then nothing else matters.

Releasing “secret” military files does not endanger the troops. Putting them in unconstitutional wars and keeping them there for a decade does.

The Real Problem

August 1st, 2010

In my estimation this is the only problem that really matters. It’s all encompassing, and it’s practically insurmountable. Commenter Don sums it up succinctly:

These monsters have done things that can never be undone and the total consequences will never be known.

You’re right, Don, but I will go one further: It’s not just depleted uranium or agent orange or Nigerian oil spills that nobody in the developed world ever hears about or the other explicit (albeit hidden) costs of imperialism. The stockpiles of nuclear and other weapons of mass- and indiscriminate destruction; the use of such weapons including depleted uranium, etc., the de facto strip-mining of the Earth’s resources — these are globally existential threats to peace and humanity.

Most people are probably aware of nuclear stockpiles, that cold war remnant with which nobody knows exactly what to do. But there is a reason you’ve probably never heard about the Nigerian oil spills or countless other exploitations of a people and an ecosystem; a reason you’ve probably never heard much about depleted uranium or white phosphorous. They do not want you to know.

And so you don’t.

These aren’t naturally occurring, rather the people at large were manipulated in to sowing the seeds (which will probably one day become the source of our collective destruction), all of these threats had their genesis in the ruling classes’ interests, as a means towards achieving some outcome they desired, consequences be damned.

The issue is this: There are simply no means available to deal with or to mitigate the loss or potential for loss attributable to  many of the problems that the State has created.  Even if we could abolish the state tomorrow, these problems they created which nobody wanted in the first place, remain.

no third solution

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