I’m usually pretty optimistic about the day after tomorrow, but sometimes when I get depressed by NSA surveillance, drones and the corporate state’s manufactured aura of inevitability, I need a story to cheer me up.
Here it is: A Canadian artist copyrighted his land as a work of art to thwart construction of the Northern Gateway Pipeline across it.
Think about it: “Intellectual property” is the single most important state-enforced monopoly at the core of corporate capitalism.
And here’s a guy using it to sabotage a pipeline, which exemplifies the other major structural component of state capitalism: massive state subsidies and land theft to promote energy and other extractive industries.
He’s using state capitalism to fight state capitalism. I’m still laughing.
Sometimes the capitalist state’s internal rules and procedures, created to serve an economic ruling class, in specific cases wind up sabotaging the very interests they were created to serve.
Much like the Catholic doctrine of concupiscence (the “war within my members” St. Paul wrote about), the legal framework and administrative machinery created to maintain capitalism takes on a life and internal logic of their own.
Or if you’re more familiar with Ghostbusters, when the destructor assumes a form it’s limited by all the weaknesses the laws of its own nature impose on that form.
Authoritarian hierarchies will die because they’re built on conflict of ?interest.
They can’t trust their subordinates with discretion to use their own judgment or situational knowledge, so they create standard operating procedures, “best practices” and Weberian work rules that degrade everybody’s ?effectiveness.
In order to limit the discretion of subordinates to harm the system, they must limit their discretion to use their own knowledge most effectively.
The system doesn’t know what the system knows; the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
At the same time, as Vinay Gupta once argued, the same kind of internal concupiscence, or what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance,” means subordinates carrying out the system’s dirty work cannot be trusted with full awareness of the real nature of what they’re doing and the purposes they serve. And many of those who suspect the nature of the system suppress their knowledge for their own peace of mind, as a defense mechanism that enables them to keep doing their jobs.
The networked resistance, on the other hand, is made up of people who fully understand the nature of the system they’re fighting and that of the system they’re trying to supplant it with.
We fight a system whose very nature is defined by exploitation, extraction and conflict of interest, which can therefore only function by deceiving its component members, threatening them with force or impeding their use of their own full knowledge and ?judgement.
We, on the other hand, fight to supplant it with a system based on reciprocity, solidarity and self-determination and on the willing and fully informed participation of everyone involved.
Who will win?
It’s no contest.
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society
