#kevin_carson

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C4SS analysts slammed a talk by Lew Rockwell at the Mises Institute, in which open borders were characterized as an attack on private property.

The argument by the anarcho-capitalist activist seemed to be based upon conflating the borders and roads of the states receiving immigrants with "private property", as follows:

...immigration decisions are made by a central authority, with the wishes of property owners completely disregarded. The correct way to proceed, therefore, is to decentralize decision-making on immigration to the lowest possible level, so... individual property owners consent to the various movements of peoples.

The Center for a Stateless Society's antistatist theorist Kevin Carson hit back at this analysis, refuting it by arguing:

...So the basic idea is that all roads are the “private property” of the majority, who can restrict comings and goings on them at will. This is nonsense on stilts... The streets of cities and towns were laid out as a public commons at the time of settlement, by and large, and were never privately owned.

Embracing his fellow C4SS writer's above response, KN@PPSTER wrote that Lew Rockwell will go as low as "he has to go to continue dragging in money from a market niche he considers under-served due to the fact that decent human beings find that niche too sickening to serve."

#Google rationalizes #censorship, blocks ad revenue @SCGupdates @RepPress https://t.co/NTQqYs6uTN @WaveChronicle pic.twitter.com/mep3gAUDql

— The clubof.info Blog (@ClubOfInfo) November 15, 2015

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Antistatist technologies enthusiast and accomplished writer Kevin Carson exposed the real behavior of corporations that claim to triumph latent network-based management and production made possible with new technologies.

In a defiant post called "Uber: NOT the Networked Successor Economy You’re Looking For", Carson pointed out that in reality, corporations such as Apple, Uber and Lyft do not create anything. Rather, they stifle other people's creativity and undermine humanity's yearning for an alternative economy driven by networks and peer-to-peer production. Instead of creating anything, such corporations make network technologies available that could have made corporate hierarchies and the state obsolete, yet then they extract rent from them by getting the state to protect them by enforcing the suffocating idea of intellectual property. According to Carson, intellectual property is being used as a last-ditch defense by management hierarchies who feel that new network technologies will oust them. These organizations spend less time inventing new technologies that could empower networks and individuals and make them independent of hierarchy, than they spend trying to maintain dependency so that people will not be able to use such technologies without going first to such corporations. This situation was not necessary, Carson argues, and it will become increasingly apparent that it is not necessary as a result of new network technologies that shall "render the corporate form entirely superfluous". Carson pointed to "the rise of the open-source hardware, micromanufacturing and peer production movements" as the best observation supporting this conclusion. While today, one cannot obtain the needed technologies to network without first going to a corporation, this is the result of deliberate steps keep to corporations in power. The entire current global mode of production has been corrupted by corporate hierarchies desperate to entrench themselves, in order to extract rent from works that they do not rightfully own - the most apparent of which today is the Internet itself.

Destroy and remake education?: The BlogA recent open response to an email posted by Center for a Stateless Soc... http://t.co/FH2ci32pS1

— The clubof.info Blog (@ClubOfInfo) August 28, 2015

The Blog

The Blog

A recent open response to an email posted by Center for a Stateless Society writer Kevin Carson advocates that rather than guaranteed access to education, there should be a more radical act of destroying present institutions to build an alternative model for education.

Carson argues that the values present in current educational institutions and state-supplied education are wrong, putting corporations and the state above individuals. Education should instead serve the interests of the individual, and new technology, new media and ultimately a radical departure from old values governing education and educational reform would enable this shift of values. Describing corporations (rather than students) as the real customers of current educational institutions, Carson advocated:

Our anarchistic vision involves not simply abolishing the educational system as we know it, but also abolishing all the institutional customers for that system’s product. One thing I constantly emphasize is that, in an economy of self-managed cooperative production, self-employment, and direct production for use in the informal/household sector, the kind of education being demanded for employment wouldn’t be driven mainly by the needs of corporate Human Resources departments. They’d be set by the actual recipients of education, which in turn would be set on an ad hoc basis by individual workers negotiating as equals with small, self-organized production groups.

This type of advocacy fits with Carson's broader recommendation of shifting power away from institutions to individuals, as is increasingly current in some intense political battles such as that of information media and entertainment, as a result of the Internet. Carson sees the world's peoples, creativity and resources being eventually freed from the stifling "radical monopolies" of powerful corporations and the states they govern through lobbying and corruption.

Weirdly @lukeharding1968 insinuates #Assange, @wikileaks, and #Snowden somehow work for #Putin http://t.co/0a6bGmExyz pic.twitter.com/apHLJks4QD

— The clubof.info Blog (@ClubOfInfo) May 10, 2015

The Blog

The Blog

Kevin Carson, antistatist writer at the Center for a Stateless Society, pointed out in a post that the US government has not only supported the dispossession of indigenous peoples in its history but continues to do so in current events.

The US, whose colonial state was founded on the dispossession of Native Americans whose land it stole, is still involved in dispossessing indigenous people to this day. Accusing western civil society entities like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation of involvement in the same practice, Carson wrote:

some 130 million hectares of land (or 500,000 square miles) in the developing world has been bought by foreign investors over the past fifteen years, most of it to produce cash crops for export and a great deal of it involving the dispossession of people previously cultivating it to feed themselves. For example, the Prosavala land grab in Mozambique will evict 500,000 people.

The post concluded that these works, often labelled as a "model investment project", rely on a state enforcing the will of corporations, and that the best solution would be to "smash the state, and with it the parasitic capitalists it serves".

Free trade to be crushed by the TPP: The BlogSo-called "free trade" treaties like the Trans-Pacific Partnershi... http://t.co/gVF5SzQfhJ

— The clubof.info Blog (@ClubOfInfo) August 21, 2015

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The Blog

Antistatist writer Kevin Carson took aim at the weakest link in Ron Bailey's "free market" economics, in a post at the C4SS think tank.

After criticizing Bailey's (who is a transhumanist "liberation biologist" and a strong influence on The clubof.info Blog) attacks on Naomi Klein's theories of "disaster capitalism", Carson draws our attention to weakest and most paradoxical part of Bailey's economics: his paranoid defense of patent law while otherwise insisting that the state is not needed in economics. From Carson's writing:

Speaking of patents, “intellectual property” is the state-enforced monopoly which is most structurally central to global corporate capitalism. The dominant corporate players in the global economy are in industries whose business models center on “intellectual property”: entertainment, software, biotech, pharma, agribusiness, and electronics. And of course the ability of corporations like Nike and Apple to outsource all actual production to independently owned factories in the Third World, while retaining a legal monopoly on disposal of the product at whatever price they care to set, depends entirely on patents and trademarks. 

So Ron Bailey defends a system that depends, completely and utterly, on a boot stamping on a human face, and calls it the “free market.” I tell you this: If I thought the free market meant what Ronald Bailey calls “the free market,” I’d hate it more than a thousand Naomi Kleins and Michael Moores put together could hate it. The system of corporate power Bailey loves, the system he defends, was founded on robbery and enslavement, and couldn’t survive for a single day if it weren’t backed by armed thugs interfering with peaceful trade and cooperation between ordinary human beings.

"Intellectual property", a form of heavy state intervention in the economy, is legal terrorism by companies and individuals that are so lacking in creativity that they need "rights" to stifle the works of others by suing them for petty violations of supposed "ideas" they drew up. While rejecting other types of state intervention in the economy, Bailey sees this particular type of state intervention and attacks on creativity as a necessary part of his so-called "free market" despite it being blatantly prohibitive in nature. Intellectual property is increasingly seen as a farce on the Internet because every other human economic contribution is based upon copying and all other remuneration is based upon labor rather than mere "ownership". Intellectual property, rather than offering monetary incentives to work and create, is instead a type of terrorism that allows companies and states to refuse to share information that could save lives and benefit mankind, and attack other people for their own works. Along with "national security", "intellectual property" is the monarchy of creative works, an assault on freedom, a denial of humanity's right to prosper. It is worthless terrorism that shall enable the perpetuation of economic and power monopolies to be awarded based on nothing other than prior historic theft and possession of such monopolies.

#Snowden's extralegal actions were needed to expose the crimes of the regime: @Jason_M_Farrell http://t.co/zplHDgvEVa pic.twitter.com/Ix1uMfwB5q

— The clubof.info Blog (@ClubOfInfo) August 9, 2015

The Blog

The Blog

The antistatist think tank C4SS has an explanation for the betrayal inflicted on the Greek people in their government's recent surrender to European (and US) financial power.

According to an open letter from C4SS social theorist Kevin Carson, the fault for the betrayal of the Greek people rests not with any person but with a misguided plan by left-wing politicians to achieve state power and revise government and corporate policies in order to accommodate the wishes of the people. History has proven that these actions lead to betrayal of the people, as the state's will can be bent by powerful institutions such as banks and corporations, as well as supranational oligarchy and foreign powers. Ultimately, any people who attempt to vote their way to a more humane and compassionate future using the dead end of the capitalist state will end up betrayed. Syriza's failure to defy the European Union as intended by the Greek people who voted them into power is the triumph of institutions over people: a result that invariably results when one tries to play by the institution's rulebook. The C4SS think tank has an alternative view: Greeks should turn away from the state and focus instead on the development of their own alternative economy, stimulated by a climate of changing technology and increasing individual power. This result is inevitable, but foresight and proactive futurist approaches to Greece's economic oppression could prove to create a real exit for the Greek people from their collective economic misery. As Carson writes, "hierarchical institutions like states and corporations are becoming obsolete", with piracy, encrypted currencies and the growth of micromanufacturing being the strongest evidence of this trend. Rather than seeing the state, courts, corporations and other monolithic institutions as possible allies, the body politic should instead focus more on circumventing them and ultimately destroying them. The institutions ruling Greece today are thoroughly corrupt, as is any politician who attempts to reform or even negotiate with them. Rather than being respected as authorities, these institutions directing Greece's economy should be regarded as backward or even obscene, and one should invest all effort into eliminating them rather than legitimizing them by trying to co-opt such institutions by starting at the ballot box. In the conclusion of the C4SS open letter to the Greek people, an alternative economy for the Greek people and for the whole oppressed world is advocated in the following provocative, futurist-inspired paragraphs authored by Kevin Carson:

New, open-source production technologies like micromanufacturing are making high-tech craft tools affordable for individual workers and small cooperative groups — essentially a reversal of the technological shift from individually affordable craft tools to expensive large-scale machinery that led to the factory system. Raised bed, intensive horticulture can produce many times the ouput per hectare of corporate agribusiness. P2P networks with desktop technology can run circles around the old corporate information industries. 

The old corporate dinosaurs and the rentier classes’ large piles of investment capital rely entirely on state-enforced monopolies to stay relevant, attempting to enclose the new technologies of freedom and empowerment within their obsolete corporate framework. Fortunately, the same production technologies that render their capital and institutions superfluous — like file-sharing and encryption — are also rendering their monopolies unenforceable. 

These weapons for building a new society beyond capitalist control are freely available to you right now. And the Central Banks, the IMF and Angela Merkel are powerless to stop you because, unlike the government in Athens, you are not embodied in an official institution over which they can exert leverage. They are fighting a ghost.

Wallerstein: Lat America creeps right: The BlogThe Latin American left may be in a state of self-destruction, ... http://t.co/2vt4hjLngp

— The clubof.info Blog (@ClubOfInfo) July 7, 2015

The Blog

The Blog

Voters will be "fooled again", if they think Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will lead the US and its mighty armies away from destructive empire-building policies.

This is the warning issued at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) by antistatist political commentator Kevin Carson. The warning was overall aiming to discourage participation in electoral politics, which the antistatist regards as little more than the cynical coronation of a ruling elite that is incapable of fulfilling its word.

#TTIP and #TTP are an assault on the ability of #Democracy to function http://t.co/NYskMaA94F pic.twitter.com/C30YbOifSA

— The clubof.info Blog (@ClubOfInfo) May 2, 2015

People "who think the Red/Blue divide reflects a serious disagreement in principle over issues like corporate power, U.S. military aggression and Empire" are being duped, Carson wrote in a commentary on the coming US presidential election. As a neoliberal and a fanatic for American aggression and encroachment on foreign powers like Russia and China, Clinton is a dangerous warmonger and no different from any of the Republican candidates. Clinton's foreign policy has no progressive character and is based upon demagoguery, hegemony and superpower arrogance, Carson argues. Voting for Clinton would be tantamount to voting for a liar who smeared herself in innocent blood in Bosnia, Libya, Syria and other countries in the name of America's phony revolutions on behalf of international oligarchy. Clinton cannot be described as a "progressive" but a a greedy oligarch from a family of oligarchs serving corporate power, who seeks to spread the US government's greed, self-righteous conquest, and conspicuous trail of international destruction further. In Carson's assessment, Obama, despite his faults and his dwindling popularity, is preferable over the morally illiterate Hillary Clinton:

at least Obama in 2008 could do a plausible impression of someone who actually meant what he said. Hillary Clinton can’t for the life of her. Typically, three days after Clinton answers a question with her “I’m glad you asked me that” smile, news emerges proving it was a lie.

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The US giant digital corporation Google disabled Antiwar.com's Adsense account, for displaying images of torture perpetrated by the American state.

The move was quickly spotted by dissidents, who shamed the corporation as cowardly and subservient to the US government for its decision to side with torture and repression. Related: Google's Treason Against the Internet Writing at the Center for a Stateless Society, Kevin Carson said that the move towards sabotaging dissidents was unsurprising, considering "Google’s history of compliance with censorship demands by repressive regimes around the world, and the craven way that online payment and crowdfunding services colluded with the U.S. government in suppressing Wikileaks". The antistatist activist also mocked the Obama administration's bizarre reasoning that photographs of torture somehow threatened US security:

"President Obama argued against release, saying the photos would “further inflame anti-American sentiment” and thereby endanger U.S. “national security.”"

Carson dissected this reasoning, stating that it amounts to saying "it would be bad for “national security” for the people of the world to find out just how evil [the American government] really is, because they might get mad." The arrogant regime will not survive exposure to the truth and retribution for its crimes against humanity, so it labels the truth a threat to "national security". As explained in Carson's post, US "national security" deserves to be undermined, because this phony concept constantly endangers the American public in order to protect cowering rulers who deserve to be subverted:

"If U.S. “national security” means its ability to engage in wars of aggression and supervise the corporate looting of defeated countries around the world, "that “national security” needs to be undermined."

As Carson describes it, the US regime seems to use the unwitting American public as hostages and human shields to take all the punishment for its witless foreign policy, jeopardizing everyone's lives except its own with its terrorism. Speaking of the best solution, the antistatist suggested a two-front war to crush the US regime's censorship and terrorism, waged by resolute dissidents within the US and foreign governments and actors outside the US:

So that leaves it to a hostile American public to rein in an out of control state. And failing that, we need to fan the flames of outrage until every country in the world with a U.S. military or naval base shuts it down, along with the CIA stations in every U.S. embassy in the world.

As for how to fight Google and other US technology giants that seem to hold disproportionate influence over the Internet, Carson's analysis welcomed the idea of dividing the Internet to enable other poles of power to dominate their own portions of the Internet, to prevent the US serving as an authoritarian hub for the Internet. Google has, in the past, slammed this idea, labeling it as the "balkanization" of the Internet in its fear the US regime's influence would decline as a result. However, in the wake of the Snowden revelations of US mass surveillance via the Internet, increasing numbers of countries including Germany and Brazil have welcomed the possibility.

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