Anarchist SF and economics

Well, now it is 2009. The holidays were quiet for us, but fun. Started working on getting volume 2 of AFAQ done for 2010. I’ve started revising section I, with the aim of it going live by March – probably March 18^th (the Paris Commune and all that).

Well, now it is 2009. The holidays were quiet for us, but fun. Started working on getting volume 2 of AFAQ done for 2010. I’ve started revising section I, with the aim of it going live by March – probably March 18^th (the Paris Commune and all that). I often release FAQ releases on important dates in anarchist history (July 19^th, May 1^st, November 11^th, 18^th March and so on). I wonder if anyone has noticed?

Of course, I release it on non-significant days too (it depends on the schedule!) but I like to mark important dates in our history. Talking of which, next year marks the 170^th anniversary of anarchism as a specific named socio-political theory – the publication of Proudhon’s What is Property? It really is an important text, laying down key ideas for all sections of the socialist movement, anarchist and non-anarchist alike. For example: what Proudhon called “property”, Marx called “capital” and he utilised the Frenchman’s distinction between possession and property in his discussion of primitive accumulation in America and elsewhere. Ultimately, you really cannot be an anarchist if you disagree with its analysis of how property is both theft and despotism. I really need to email AK Press about doing a Proudhon Reader to mark the event…

Over the holidays I did some reading, a bit of Chomsky and such like. I flicked through Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers in an Oxfam charity shop just to remind myself how bad it was. I particularly liked his extremely stupid “critique” of what Heinlein calls Marx’s labour theory of value (as if it were not considered the main economic theory of most of the 19^th century!). His characters attack Karl Marx as a “pompous fraud” and dismiss the labour theory of value using the fallacious mud-pie attack (“All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart”). He then discusses how the correct value theory is rooted in subjective determinations of use value (without mentioning how this makes generating market-wide demand curves impossible).

of course Marx was aware that use value was subjective and that labour did not automatically create or increase exchange value. As if Marx would have disagreed! As discussed in the unfinished appendix on economics, for something to have an exchange value it must have a use value! It needs to be exchangeable! So a mud pie would not have the same price as an apple pie, regardless of the labour that went into it. The same can be said of his other example, namely that a bad cook can turn the ingredients of an apple pie into something which is disgusting. Yes, labour can be wasted – a fact which Marx was hardly blind to. So, at least Marx (for all his faults, and they were many) did at least understand the theories he was critiquing.

Unlike Heinlein. And talking of which, I have other reasons to dislike him. In his The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (which I tried to read once, before giving up because of its general awfulness) he inflicts on the world a certain Professor Bernardo de la Paz, whom describes himself as a “Rational Anarchist.” Apparently, according to the Professor, Thomas Jefferson the “first of the rational anarchists” – so making being the head of a state and a slave-owner compatible with anarchism! But, of course, it may be objected that some “anarcho”-capitalists do support voluntary slavery, but that does not make Jefferson any more libertarian. I should note that debt-slavery is still with us (Brazilian taskforce frees more than 4,500 slaves after record number of raids on remote farms)

Yes, as pointed out in section A.4.2 of AFAQ, Jefferson’s anti-capitalist democratic liberalism has links with certain themes of anarchism, but that is about it. So some aspects of Jefferson’s ideas are libertarian (for example, his support for the independent farmer-proprietor and opposition to concentrations of wealth such as banks and corporations) but he was not an anarchist of any sort. Perhaps unsurprisingly, “anarcho”-capitalist David Friedman considers Heinlein’s novel vital to his intellectual evolution (Heinlein is one of the four people to whom his book The Machinery of Freedom is dedicated).

I am a big SF fan. And I do like anarchist SF, the best being Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed – an absolute classic (as is most of her work). Closely behind is Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. Her Body of Glass is also excellent, not to mention her brilliant historical novel City of Darkness, City of Light which is set during the French Revolution (which got me fired up to read Kropotkin’s Great French Revolution, which I think should be read by every anarchist). I also like Iain Banks, in particular his Culture novels (no surprise there!). I read Ken Macleod’s The Fall Revolution series a few years back and they were a massive disappointment. Only the Cassini Division was a real page-turner, and while the Stone Canal started well (mostly because of its references to Glasgow) it became a bit of a drag in part because the “anarcho”-capitalist utopia was so uninspiring (surprise!) and in part because the hero was not that interesting. I also dislike hard-SF where everything is solvable by technology (hence my liking of Philip K. Dick).

Another writer I like is Michael Moorcock, from whom I first discovered this thing called anarchism and Nestor Makhno. As he also dislikes Heinlein, I think I’ll quote from his classic essay of anarchist themes in SF, Starship Stormtroopers:

“In Starship Troopers we find a slightly rebellious cadet gradually learning that wars are inevitable, that the army is always right, that his duty is to obey the rules and protect the human race against the alien menace. It is pure debased Ford out of Kipling and it set the pattern for Heinlein’s more ambitious paternalistic, xenophobic (but equally sentimental) stories which became for me steadily more hilarious until I realised with some surprise that people were taking them as seriously as they had taken, say, Atlas Shrugged a generation before — in hundreds of thousands!”

In terms of good SF movies with an anarchist theme, may I suggest John Carpenter’s They Live. It is great attack on the top-down class war of the Reagan years. It does degenerate into mindless shoot-outs towards the end (it is about half-an-hour too long which is bad for an-hour-and-a-movie!), but the moment our hero puts on the sunglasses and sees the hidden-messages makes up for that!

And talking of SF, I see that some neo-classical economists have crawled out of the woodwork and made fools of themselves (see Chicago Economist Claims Homeowners Choose to Default on Their Mortgages And Quit Their Jobs). It really staggers believe that anyone with a brain could claim that unemployment is rising because people want to quit their jobs, but that is what neo-classical economics does suggest. And, of course, the usual calls for workers to get paid less to end a crisis they did not start are being raised by the same idiots. Steve Keen discusses why this is a bad idea, but if you have read my article on the same subject it will contain nothing that new. Keen is not the only person echoing my analysis (unsurprisingly, as both Keen and me are repeated Keynes!). Here is Paul Krugman on how the current crisis is showing how wrong Milton Friedman was and why having one of his followers in charge of the met is not a good idea:

“Milton Friedman, in particular, persuaded many economists that the Federal Reserve could have stopped the Depression in its tracks simply by providing banks with more liquidity, which would have prevented a sharp fall in the money supply. Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, famously apologized to Friedman on his institution’s behalf: ‘You’re right. We did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.’

“It turns out, however, that preventing depressions isn’t that easy after all. Under Mr. Bernanke’s leadership, the Fed has been supplying liquidity like an engine crew trying to put out a five-alarm fire, and the money supply has been rising rapidly. Yet credit remains scarce, and the economy is still in free fall.”

That is what I pointed out in a recent blog, when I quoted from my obituary of Milton Friedman. But enough of this…A couple of interesting interviews with Howard Zinn. The first one discusses his vision of anarchism:

“Anarchism to me means a society in which you have a democratic organization of society—decision making, the economy—and in which the authority of the capitalist is no longer there, the authority of the police and the courts and all of the instruments of control that we have in modern society, in which they do not operate to control the actions of people, and in which people have a say in their own destinies, in which they’re not forced to choose between two political parties, neither of which represents their interests. So I see anarchism as meaning both political and economic democracy, in the best sense of the term.”

The second is from 2001 (which, in so many ways, seems like another world) and is entitled "Bush drives us into Bakunin’s arms!". I have to take issue with this part, though:

“It depends on which anarchists you’re dealing with. For example, there’s a difference between Bakunin, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman. One of the reasons that Bakunin was in conflict with Marx in the First International was because Bakunin didn’t accept Marx’s class analysis. Bakunin didn’t see a cohesive working class as being the makers of revolution. Instead, he saw a kind of generalized dissatisfaction in society amongst people whom Marx probably would not have considered working class — all sorts of alienated and marginalized people. Theywould create some kind of great force that would overthrow the old order. It wasn’t a class analysis. On the other hand, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who did not consider themselves Marxists, were closer to Marxist thinking. Without using the language of class analysis, their actual thinking about American society was a thinking which incorporated the idea of ‘there are the capitalists, there are the employers, here are the workers.’”

I’m surprised to see Zinn argue this, as it goes totally against what Bakunin actually argued. While it is a common myth (particularly in Marxist circles), I would expect better of Zinn. As discussed in section H.2.7 (with appropriate evidence), Bakunin’s position was identical to that of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and focused on the working class, supplemented by the peasantry and artisans (in the appropriate countries). But as I noted in my review essay on Voltairine de Cleyre as regards Paul Avrich, even the best historians make mistakes (Avrich, it should be noted, makes a similar mistake with regards to Kropotkin as well, suggesting on a few occasions that he did not support the class war).

Finally, I should mention I saw 30 Rock over the holidays. Very funny! I became aware of it after seeing Tina Fey turn Sarah Pain into laughing stock. I’m looking forward to seeing the second series.