On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 09:45:40PM -0300, juan wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Jul 2016 13:43:12 +0300
> Georgi Guninski <guninski@guninski.com> wrote:
> > Anyway, I meant that in a free market (FM), you will still have
> > corporations (possibly under more politically correct term like FM
> > corporation).
>
> 'corporations' are a legal fiction created by the state, so no.
When > 1 humans associate for the purposes of shared economic activity/
incentive in what we may as well term "business", it is in their
interests to face the world as a named entity.
Agreed.
I think this is Georgi's point - in a FM we are free to associate with
one another as we so choose. So in Georgi's case here,
FM corporation ~= business ~= economic activity association
And of course, where there is no government, there shall be no
"corporations" as created by governments. Any group calling themselves a
"corporation" would have a meaning different from the current meaning,
thus "FM corporation".
Even without a government, I think an anarchic society will still need institutions to function, even if those institutions are entirely voluntary. I can imagine sets of institutions that would allow corporations in a similar sense to how they exist now, i.e. limited liability and some form of "personhood." The most likely such institution would be some kind of court system where, in order to have access to the court as a means of seeking restitution, you must agree not to go outside it to go after any other participant, and must not have done so before.
This leads to perhaps an interesting question:
Today there are many businesses, companies, corporations etc. which
entities represent their owners (possibly in the form of share holders)
and controllers (possibly just the owners, and/ or part owners, or the
directors/ managers employed to control certains aspects of the
business).
Share holders/ owners can include other entities - trusts, hedge funds,
pension funds etc.
These entity owners have actual interests - economic interests, and any
other contractable/ name-able interest which might be written, but may
not be written, including for example:
- simple economic interests - share dividends, perceived future share
price for future sale etc
- maturity of an estate, vesting from the estate holder to the named
beneficiaries in a will
- power and control structures as manifested by the CIA, FBI, NSA,
North American BISMIC (banking intelligence surveillance/ spying
military industrial control complex)
Contracts (explicit/ implied) - entities - interests (or rather
"beneficiaries").
(Of course some interests would not be considered "lawful" or acceptable
to an average direct democracy/ anarchic voter (assuming that particular
interest were up for a vote) for example.)
THE QUESTION:
The question I think always shall be, is how to transition to an
anarchic society, in consideration of existing interests. I.e. how to
peacefully transition existing entities/ structure/ interests into an
anarchistic/ truly free market reality.
This is a question I think about all the time.
I am implying evolution. Revolution - we see how well that went after
the fall of the Tzar, to the various CIA instigated revolutionary coups
from Lybia to Syria, Ukraine to Yugoslavia, none of which resulted in
nor were intended to result in an actualisation of an anarchistic
society.
Agreed.
The problem with revolution, is that it is ideological extremists who
give enough of a shit to pick up a gun and start shooting (for example)
police, citizens and government officials, and the outcome is that the
ideological extremists end up holding the seats of power and institute
something -other- than anarchism. Such extremists as our world's history
have seen, tend to sociopathy, rather than the benevolent, side of
dictatorship.
I see revolutions as a symptom of a broken society. Reform, or evolution, is certainly preferable.
We must always remember it is never the arm chair pundit ("oh I wish our
democracy elected representatives actually represented us") crowd who
will change the world.
So historically, revolutions seem to be more a devolution than an
evolution of the status quo. If you have counter examples, please
highlight them now.
The French and English revolutions both resulted, after a while, in better societies than they started in, as far as I can tell. The Haitian revolution ended slavery there. I don't consider the American revolution, on the other hand, to be a counter example, though it clearly inspired the French revolution. Not to say that the French revolution and other reforms of European monarchies wouldn't have happened anyway.
So it is that I hold far greater hope for a better/ anarchistic/ direct
democracy type of future, via the pathway of evolution, and not
revolution.
Same here.
And so it is also that we owe it to our future generations to consider
pathways to peaceful transition of existing interests, into that better
future.
Agreed.
While I think agorism's approach ("grow the counter-economy and the state will eventually whither away") is provably ineffective, I do think it has a lot to teach us here. Its main problem is that government is always "just good enough" that people will continue to resort to it, and people are forced to pay for it whether or not they make use of it, and they may not opt out of its jurisdiction. One must not only create alternatives to government services, they must be alternatives people actually use.
One of the pieces of evidence used against Ross Ulbricht was a post of his in which he stated, "I
am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand
experience of what it would be like to live in a world without
the systemic use of force." Whether or not Silk Road was that "simulation", the general statement is exactly what we need to do, in my opinion. Create systems of "law" and "governance" that do not require the use of force. These systems do not have to be all-encompassing; they can be small and narrow in scope. They just have to make it so people don't feel like they have to resort to government (i.e. force) to achieve their ends.
Just like they do with the "wild west", I think people drastically underestimate the amount of spontaneous order in black markets. Hollywood certainly feeds of it with post-apocalyptic movies & TV shows that depict everything going straight to "anarchy" the moment there's a hiccup in government. But history demonstrates that in fact the exact opposite is true. The only time things descend into "anarchy" when the government falls is when the collapse of the government was caused by violence in the first place, or where the government's failure had left society "hollowed out." Somalia is probably the best known example of this happening. I think Russia after the collapse of the USSR is probably a more typical example of what I believe to be the common case.
Security of property and computer systems is an area that's pretty ripe for non-government solutions. I doubt most readers of this list assume that they can just rely on police to prevent their car from getting stolen or house from getting broken into, or think the police will come along and investigate after the fact, then catch the thief and get their stuff back. No, we all have insurance, locks, good passwords with two-factor and/or public key authentication, probably cameras, safes, crypto, etc. A lot of that is pretty hard to use, though, so maybe we should be focusing on making the solutions we use available to the masses.
Thanks for this post, by the way. One of my favorites on cpunks to date.