No war but the style war...

"In making productive use of idle capital assets the average person owns anyway, providing a productive outlet for the surplus labor of the unemployed, and transforming the small surpluses of household production into a ready source of exchange value, the informal economy* has as the cornerstone of its temple the stone which the builders rejected."

- Kevin Carson

I got chills down my spine when I read this.


* not an explanation but an example:
"Consider, for example, the process of running a small, informal brew pub or restaurant out of your home, under a genuine free market regime. Buying a brewing vat and a few small fermenters for your basement, using a few tables in an extra room as a public restaurant area, etc., would maybe require a small bank loan for at most a few thousand dollars. And with that capital outlay, you could probably make payments on the debt with the margin from one customer a day.
...
But that’s illegal. You have to buy an extremely expensive liquor license, as well as having an industrial size and strength stove, dishwasher, etc. And that level of capital outlay can only be paid off with a large dining room and a large kitchen-waiting staff, which means you have to keep the place filled or the overhead costs will eat you alive–IOW, Chapter Eleven. These high entry costs and the enormous overhead are the reason you can’t afford to start out really small and cheap, and the reason restaurants have such a high failure rate. It's illegal to use the surplus capacity of the ordinary household items we have to own anyway but remain idle most of the time."

The last sentence drives the point home. The point of "capitalism" as we know it is to debilitate and destroy capital, on the margins (war is an extreme, obvious example). People have it all backwards, as bibble once brilliantly put it. Capitalism is anti-capital (for all but a few), socialism is anti-social (just look at Europe right now), communism is individualism taken to an extreme (ever really look at those posters?). Anarchism is order, the only possible sustainable, stable order. Because it's a world of nobodies. So everyone is somebody.

(no subject)

In other words, if we take away the means to organize things on a large, centralized scale, people will HAVE to think greener, and be more efficient and more... human and direct with each other. Not because someone with guns is forcing them to, but because they won't have the option to do otherwise.

And "the option to do otherwise" relies on someone with guns forcing people to help them organize things on a large, centralized scale.

In this way, both major political philosophies are similar... not that "there's not a dime's worth of difference" but rather "damned if you do, damned if you don't".

The only way out is to make sure that there is never one single group of people with guns who can force other people, without guns, to do anything at all. Only then can any sort of discussion of "what to do next" mean anything. Until then, we are discussing how best to fuck each other over without dying en masse.

and if proudhon has a problem with that he can rise from the dead

"In short, the state does not protect legitimate property per se, it institutionalizes private property into a legal construct that generally benefits a small elite at everyone else’s expense."

- Brainpolice

also, this is utterly brilliant:
clicky!