Do mp3's promote to slavery?

I have a little electronics business designing and making audio electronics. It's a one-man outfit that just brings in enough to pay the bills. I was toying with the idea of making a small mp3 player but found that this is nigh on impossible if I am to make any money.

Mp3 is of course a patented technology which means that the decoder chips required for any circuit are stupidly expensive for what they are (the cheapest option is around 13 pound for a single STA013 chip, whereas the actual cost of producing one is less than a few pennies). This means that the only way to make an mp3 player profitable is to produce them in bulk using cheap Chinese labour and hope to god that enough are sold that the investment can be made back. Needless to say, this is not feasible for the little guy such as me (not that I would want to stoop so low as to engage in what is effectively slavery).

So to what extent does the patent system slant the market in favour of big corporations who are in a position to take advantage of these 'economies' of scale? How many small businesses and individuals could be making a living from producing such products if this patent did not exist? To what extent are poor working conditions abroad perpetuated by intellectual property? My feeling is that the impact is great

On Trade Unions

The right-wing media are in a tizzy over the recent bout of strikes. I wish they would read a bit of genuine free-market literature and educate themselves to the fact that unions are ESSENTIAL market mechanisms.

"We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combination of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate[.] When workers combine, masters ... never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combination of servants, laborers, and journeymen." - Adam Smith on Trade Unions

Common Sense Isn't Common Anymore

Last Tuesday, an ex-soldier called Paul Clarke was convicted of possessing a firearm and may now face a minimum sentence of five years. One day Mr Clarke was standing on his balcony when he spotted a black bin liner at the bottom of his garden, and on closer inspection he found that the bin liner contained a sawn-off shotgun. The reaction of Mr Clarke was instinctual – he went to the local police station and handed it in. Since he had technically ‘possessed’ the weapon on the journey to the station, he was deemed to be in breach of the law and will now be banged up for half a decade.

Also last week, there was Lorraine Elliot, the lawyer who lost her job after it was disclosed she had been wrongly arrested for forging her husbands signature on a nursery application form. Her DNA was taken and placed on the National DNA Database and the record of her arrest kept on file despite her being found innocent of any crime.

Then there was Mary Cooke, a pregnant lady from Staffordshire who was almost ran over by a speeding motorist. After reporting the incident to the police and inviting a policewomen into her home to take a statement, Mrs Cooke was reported to social services for the half-finished state of the wallpapering in her home – it seems that failing to decorate a home to the standards of the police is now indicative of potentially bad parenting.

Even worse is the case of a women from Nottingham who had her newly born child taken away because social services deemed her ‘too stupid’ to be able to look after the baby. Psychologists who assessed the woman disagreed, but non of this made a difference, and a similar case in Scotland has seen a young couple with an unborn child flee from their home town in order to escape the grasp of the local authorities.

There was Sherif Abdel-Fattah, the doctor who was given a speeding ticket whilst rushing to the hospital to save a bleeding womans life after her Cesarean Section went wrong. There was Demetrios Samouris, the Student who was fined £80 for dropping a matchstick. There was the Mother that was followed home by an off-duty policeman, interviewed by police and investigated by social-service Nazis after she threatened to smack her misbehaving children in a supermarket. Finally, (this one I quite enjoyed) there was the police car that was filmed being given a parking ticket for illegal parking.

But why is it that as individuals we seem unable to stop ourselves being Stasi-like jobsworths with a compulsion to enforce the line of the law whilst ignoring the spirit of it? Why do so many ‘public servants’ feel it necessary to leave at home their natural tendencies for common sense when they set off for work in the morning? Put simply, why is common sense not common anymore?

One answer is that we have a state that believes it can improve society through a plethora of centrally dictated targets for arrest, conviction, education, equality, morality, parenting and any other number of things. All noble aims, but all unachievable when the state is the driving force behind them.

The more a government legislates on our day to day activities, the less we take ownership of those activities ourselves. We begin to lose the ability of self-determination in our responsibilities, and as a consequence we have nothing else to fall back on apart from the rigid framework of state diktat. The disempowerment suffered by individuals under the thumb of the state leads to a stupefaction of social intercourse, and a learned helplessness that infects an ever increasing number of our daily interactions.

These observations do not lead me to a negative conclusion in regards to the human condition and our potential for creating autonomous order in a stateless society. Far from it, the same human characteristics that lead to seemingly defeatist and subservient social patterns, are the very characteristics that will enable our liberation from this malaise.

Humans are not fixed moral beings with an unchanging socio-psychological makeup; we are adaptive and complex. We are programmed as individuals to survive at all costs, but the survival methods we adopt are dependent on the environment we find ourselves in. When the state creates an environment where survival of the individual is best served by adopting an ‘it’s more than my jobs worth’ attitude, then community – which is an emergent property of our need to survive in nature – begins to fade away.

In this light, the characteristics of officiousness and subservience that we observe in many walks of life, can be seen as the evidence that individuals have adapted their behaviour to fit in with a social protocol distorted by government. Take away the artificial order of the state however, and society will begin once more to self-order. People will regain their motivation to engage in patterns of reciprocal behaviour and mutual support, and common sense will become common once again.

The BNP – A Party for the Fashion Discerning Fascist

Angry at the world? Suspicious of foreigners? Looking for a scapegoat? In need of a racist ideological movement to follow but don't think a skinhead haircut will match your wardrobe? If so, then why not take a look at the new Autumn range of clothing and fashion accessories from the British National Party.

Bomber Jackets, Doc Martens and a Hitler tattoo on your arse cheeks are soooo last season. That's why when you join the BNP you are free to don snazzy suits, corporate ties and smart yet comfortable leather shoes. Get out that Giorgio Armani shirt and feel just divine whilst secure in the knowledge that your natural penchant for style is aiding the cause of racial purity.

In the European elections last year, we at the BNP won our first two seats in the European Parliament (not bad for an organisation who's constitution has recently been ruled as illegal due to its restrictions on non-white membership wouldn't you say?). We failed miserably to win seats in the previous set of Euro elections, but through low turnout and voter apathy we have this time triumphed, acquiring the seats without increasing our share of the vote.

But don't think that we are just an obscure, irrelevant minority party with a support base consisting of toothless hicks and 11 fingered inbreds. Far from it - as the recession has set in our popularity has soared. Our fat, toad-faced chairman Nick Griffin is a TV hit, pulling in an audience of almost 8 million viewers last week on the BBC's flagship political debate program, Question Time. The following day a poll revealed that 22% of the population are now 'seriously considering' voting for us at the next general election. So it's confirmed, this years 'in-thing' is thinly veiled fascism and bigotry – forget 'Springtime for Hitler and Germany', this is Autumntime for Griffin and England.

But if you're an old fashioned sort of racist, with a longing for the good old days when 'bashing a paki' and knifing a Jew or two was considered a good evening out, then don't feel as if you have no place in our party. The BNP has its origins in violent militias such as the National Front and Combat 18, and our current policy of dressing like highstreet insurance-salesmen is really just a dubious ploy to convince people that we are no longer thuggish criminals.

If you don't believe me then why not do a quick search on YouTube for the video of our chairman making a speech with white-supremacist David Duke to a KKK meeting, in which Mr Griffin spells out a strategy for gaining power by cynically moderating the message in order to dupe the masses? Truly, we are all things to all men (apart from Jews, Homosexuals, the 'Liberal Elite', those funny looking 'coloureds', and Extremist-Terrorist-Islamofascist-Marxist-InsertRandomDerogatoryPrefixHere-Muslims of course).

Be quick with filling in that BNP application though, because sooner or later the economy might fix itself and people might stop looking for scapegoats. Worse still, some bright spark might figure out that our main base of support is non-racist working class folk who just feel frustrated after being consistently disenfranchised by the state-monopolised political process. If that happened then efforts might be made to re-empower people with control over their own lives, workplaces and communities - and god forbid we could ever allow that, because support for our piddling little party would collapse overnight.

No, it is much better that we preserve the current state-capitalist system that subsidises industry and thus causes the market to produce too much. It is much better that we soak up this excess product via the use of central banks to print money that doesn't really exist. It is much better that the resulting boom-bust cycle is used as a way of creating a pool of constantly unemployed labour. It is much better that we deprive opportunities for working class self-dependence by leaving in place laws that enclose the commons of land, capital and Intellectual property. It is much better that the inevitable migration of workers is used to divide society into opposing groups of foreign and 'indigenous' labour. It is much better that anti trade-union laws are left in place so that wages can be forced constantly downwards and then blamed on the influx of migrants.

Yes, it is much better that the current setup of so-called 'democracy' and 'free-trade' is left in place so that filthy, fascist, authoritarian scumbags such as us can take advantage of peoples insecurities to make a grab at the controls of the whole shitty system. Vote for us and ruin your country whilst causing misery for everyone that doesn't fit the mold of an 'Indigenous Brit'. Yes, go ahead and destroy any chance that the lives of ordinary people can ever be bettered.

Yours Insincerely,

Twatty McTwatface, Head Propagandist for the British National Party

Defend the Free Market - Support the Strikers

This week the Communication Workers Union (CWU) announced that 120,000 postal workers at the Royal Mail have voted to go on a two day strike over "outstanding problems of job security, work levels, bullying, and reward”. A persistent belligerence on behalf of management, such as the rejection of CWU proposed compromises earlier this week, led to strike action being confirmed.

Furthermore, a leaked Royal Mail document makes clear that if management does not get what it wants then things have already been “positioned [..] in such a way as there is shareholder, customer and internal support for implementation of changes without agreement”. It should be noted here that the Royal Mail is a nationalised industry and so the word 'shareholder' actually means 'state'.

Now don't get me wrong, I am a believer in the free market and do not want to see the continued existence of state-owned firms - even if they treated their workers like kings. But Socialist ideals run just as deep in my veins as Libertarian ones, and as such, I will defend to the hilt any attempt by my peers to collectively organise for improved conditions regardless if those attempts take place by workers within in state ran enterprises.

These beliefs however, put me at odds with conventional wisdom, and I have been told many times by traditional right/left statists that it is impossible to reconcile Socialism with the free market. But conventional wisdom is founded on a number of incorrect assumptions and claims.
To demonstrate how a libertarian society is in complete accordance with the interests of organised labour, I shall go over a few of the claims made by the statist left/right regarding industrial disputes, and shine light on where they are going wrong.

Claim 1: The strike only serves to damage ordinary people/customers. By disrupting public services, strikes hit the small businessman, cooperative enterprise, and self employed tradesman the hardest. Think of all those Ebay and Bargain Pages traders who will suffer by this action.

Response: The key to understanding why this might be the case is to pay attention to the word 'public' – i.e. state ran. By subsidising, or fully owning, an industry, the state creates a monopoly which restricts alternatives to that organisation.

In a free market, setting up alternative structures of service provision becomes far easier. Without government regulations, taxes and zoning laws etc, the start-up costs are far lower and so within the reach of individuals/community organisations. Without the unfair advantage that government subsidy provides, a newly formed small enterprise would have an even playing field to compete on.

Minus a state cartelised economy, alternatives to the postal system in times of industrial dispute would be freely available, and the damage to the independent trader would be barely perceptible.

Claim 2: Striking only hurts the strikers because it causes damage to the company that employs them. This could eventually lead to the business failing or employees being laid off. Unionism hurts the working class.

Response: This is half true, striking favours working people but does indeed cause damage to the company that employs them - thats the point! I do not say this because I enjoy watching people lose their livelihood, I say this because I am a Libertarian who wants to see the people that create wealth receiving that wealth back – i.e. those that operate the sorting machines, deliver the parcels, clean the floors and run the canteens etc.

Let us consider for a second what a market economy actually is. It is essentially a system of comparing efficiencies – those forms of organisation that provide services in the most efficient manner are the ones that will prevail. A company that routinely craps on its employees would, in an economy that permits freedom to unionise, face many more disruptions to its production than a company that treats its employees well.

The most efficient form of organisation would therefore be the one that has the happiest workers, and research shows that implementing participatory practices in the workplace is the most successful route to achieving this. So genuine free markets favour employee-controlled business, and the prospects of a company failing due to strike action only really persists in our current system of restricted unionism – in a genuine free market it is unlikely that these exploitative business models would even be set up, let alone survive long enough to cause serious damage when they fall by the wayside.

Claim 3: These strikers only ever have power when a government monopoly exists. Just look at the low rate of unionisation in the private sector, that demonstrates how organised labour could never survive in a free market and is at root a statist construct.

As mentioned above, we do not have complete freedom to organise for collective action. For example, it is illegal for workers to engage in solidarity striking, there is a ban on closed-shops, and there are legal requirements to vote before a strike takes place. Unions then, are not statist in nature. In reality their powers are curtailed by state legislation that encourages a balance of power in favour of hierarchical capital.

Claim 4: Unionism is anti free-market because is disrupts commerce. I remember the 1970's when unions had so much power that the economy went down the pan. These union types are all Commies. Bring back Thatcher!

The situation in the 1970's was that the state had co-opted the power of organised labour. The nature of a statist union is completely different to the nature of a free-market union, which is the natural expression of an unmet need. In this context, collective bargaining is a process akin to the interplay of supply and demand in which needs and abilities are matched through the market mechanism.

It does not matter who is at the controls of the state apparatus or who they claim to be controlling it for. The Soviet Union was no more worker-owned than corporatist Italy under Mussolini, or current day China. The state will always operate in its own interests, and in the interests of a ruling minority. Thatcher was similar in this respect to a soviet apparatchik, the only difference is that she chose the capitalist class to be the ruling elite rather than the union bosses.

The limits that she imposed on union activity created a situation of 'sticky contracts' that are analogous to the notion of 'sticky prices'. For markets to operate freely, there needs to be real-time flexibility for labour to renegotiate the terms of employment at any given moment (similar to the way that there needs to be a responsive price mechanism to prevent unequal exchange).
Without this flexibility, the equal exchange of payment for labour is replaced by the exploitative exchange of payment for labour power. That is to say, an ability for an employer to refuse to pass on gains in productivity to the worker - hence the extraction of surplus value. The Thatcher/Reagan model of a 'free-market' is no more about genuine free-markets than a state-socialist model.

Given all these points I hope it is a little clearer why I believe that the only route to genuine Socialism is via the genuine free-market. The value that organised labour can provide for a society is as vast as the value provided by free enterprise. Given the current system in which the power of labour is suppressed by the state, support for striking workers is an anti-statist position and so should be encouraged by anyone with a Libertarian streak.

The King Is Dead, Long Live The King

The last few weeks here in the UK have brought us the entertaining spectre of party-political conference season. It is the time of year when the media provide constant coverage of a mixture of; sycophancy, confusion, Shakespearean power plays, awkward speeches by baby-faced politico's in the puberty of their political career, and displays of arrogant demagoguery by political dinosaurs at the end of their own. It has also marked the start of what looks likely to be a particularly hyped-up race for next years general election.

First, it was the turn of our third largest party, the Liberal Democrats, to provide the bulk of the confusion:- bungled policy announcements, in-fighting and backtracking on issues were expected... and then swiftly delivered.

Second, came the Labour conference (providing the sycophancy), and the sickening sight of loyal party members giving Emperor Gordon Brown a standing ovation for seemingly no other reason than being the 'dear leader'

Finally, this week we had the Conservative Party conference, with smug-faced Tory's parroting the same old vacuous lines about 'public spending efficiency' (an oxymoron if you ever heard one) and 'personal responsibility' (code for; “we're going to cut all those welfare services that make capitalism bearable for you dirty, feckless peasants. Now where's that massive farm subsidy that entrenches feudal distributions of land, and 'charitable status' for my child's private school that only the privileged can afford?”)

But I'm not really interested in writing about what this corrupt and hypocritical lot have to say in their desperate attempts to gain power. No; what interests me most is what they tried their best not talk about. For this very same week we witnessed the the full force of the EU propaganda machine in action against our cousins over the sea in Ireland.

Having once already rejected the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in a referendum last year, the Irish people fell out of favour with their political overlords in Brussels, and as a consequence were kindly given another chance to vote on the issue.

This time round, the campaigners in the 'Yes camp' had the bogey man of economic ruin to let loose on the public. And, in the sheer panic of wanting to avoid a return to the bad times of 1980's style unemployment and general existential bleakness, the Irish people voted to ratify the treaty.

Briefly speaking, the Lisbon Treaty is a repackaged version of a proposed European Constitution, which, in it's original incarnation, was rejected by a number of countries in 2005. Since then, the powers-that-be have changed its name and forced the issue again. Unlike the US constitution, however, that at least plays lip-service to ideals of freedom and democracy; the EU constitution is merely an attempt to streamline the monopoly-capitalist state.

The EU's origins lie in the 'European Coal and Steel Community', an institution that was set up in the post-WW2 period to effectively control the markets, and since then has grown, treaty after treaty, into a monster of a bureaucracy that culminates with the constitution. In fact, the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution is essentially 3000 pages of amendments to previous treaties, and it is easy to understand why the constitution is so verbose when you realise that the the EU is just a governmental arm of the corporate nexus.

With a bewildering array of councils, commissions, committees, working groups, advisory panels, a 'parliament' and god knows how many other back room civil servants; the structure of the European Union seems to be designed with obfuscation in mind. In reality, this hodge-podge arrangement is a natural reflection of it's origins in hierarchical, cartelised capital.

So whilst the provincial masters of UK Inc. squabble over who is to 'lead' us after the next election, the Lisbon Treaty provides the means through which localised power will be usurped by the state-capitalist centre. What is more, under the newly reformed EU, a new Emperor will be crowned as 'President of Europe', and the name of this latter-day Caesar is rumored by many in the media as being non-other than Antonius Charlemagne Lynton Blair. You heard it folks, the prince of darkness is back from the wilderness to rule again, and may be doing so before the month is out.

Media conjecture aside, whoever is appointed to this post will assume the role of spokesman for half a billion people – non of which will actually have voted for him. Welcome to democracy kids – the biggest lie that was ever told.

Imagine a Sandal stamping on a human face forever

It's a sad day when doing a favour for a friend garners the attention of local authority snoops intent on criminalising you for nothing other than being a good person. But this exactly what happened to two young mothers from Milton Keynes, Bedfordshire recently.

Leanne Shepherd and Lucy Jarrett, who are both Detective Constables at Aylesbury Police Station, were on a job sharing arrangement in which they both worked around each other - so allowing the mothers to spend precious time with their children.

Being good friends, they did what parents have been doing since children were invented (I'm told this was in 1981 when Cliff Richard accidentally discovered sexual intercourse whilst roller-skating. He subsequently patented the invention and still receives royalties now), which is to take it in turns to look after each others nippers when the other parent was working.

For this outrageous act of blatant common-sense, they were reported by a neighborhood busybody to the Office of Standards in Education (OFSTED), who subsequently visited DC Shepherd to inform her that without the appropriate permits she was breaking the law. According to the Telegraph newspaper;

"There was no rigid pattern to the arrangement – its virtue was its flexibility – but it was reciprocal: each woman received a benefit in the form of [...] free child care during most weeks of the year. This supposedly violates the Childcare Act of 2006, which prohibits adults not registered as child-minders looking after other people’s children for more than two hours a day for reward – the reward being the free care."

“I was in shock the whole time,” remembers the police officer. “I couldn’t imagine I was doing something wrong – I thought I could clear it up if I told her everything. She talked about reciprocal care; I argued that it was an arrangement based on friendship.”

Just over a fortnight later the women were sent a letter telling them that they must cease the child-minding arrangement, and that they could be "subject to surveillance and unannounced visits by Ofsted inspectors". That's right SURVEILLANCE!! Forget about bomb plotters, mafia bosses or gun-runners, it is apparently the well-meaning citizenry who are deserving of the excesses of state intrusion.

Incidents like this are all too often a regularity these days – under the guise of protecting us from ourselves, the authorities in this country regularly (mis)use anti-terror legislation to tap phone calls, secretly film us and gather information in order to enforce petty regulations.

Combine this with existing or proposed legislation such as the need for ISP's to monitor connections for illegal file-sharing, the biometric ID card, the 'Gulags for Slags' policy and the scarily high number of CCTV cameras, you don't need to imagine some fictional oppressive society ala 1984, we already have it in the form of the nanny state.

George Orwell described a society ruled by force and bureaucracy, we have one ruled by both of these with an unhealthy dose of sandal wearing Social-Workerism thrown in for good measure. Don't bother imagining a boot stamping on a human face, imagine a sandal doing so instead.

But what effect do these sort of state intrusions have on society at large? And why have we gotten to this position anyway? Well in this specific case, the effect has been that Mrs Shepherd, who has a take home pay of £1000 a month, is now paying £487 a month in childcare costs. Unable to pay these costs, she is forced into the position of having to accept supplemental benefits from the state to survive. Also, she now has to work less flexible hours in order that she can pick up her children from the childminders at a given time. In Mrs Jarrett's words, “This is crazy, ridiculous. What was our gain, our reward? Being allowed to return to work to pay tax?”.

A commentator on the article at the telegraph comments that one effect is that the nanny state creates jobs, and indeed this is true in a direct sense; the heightened demand for 'professional' childcare arrangements creates a need for those paid childcare jobs to be created (more often than not by the state itself). But whilst a 'job' may have been created, no extra wealth has been produced for society.

All that has happened is that the use-value created by the mothers in the act of child-minding, and exchanged directly through reciprocation, has been monetised and transformed into exchange value that can be exploited by capitalists for profit. If anything, value has been destroyed in this process by introducing bureaucratic and organisational inefficiencies – regulators, administrators and tax inspectors all have to be paid for extra, unproductive work that was previously unnecessary.

Looking at it like this, an unfortunate logical imperative emerges. In a state-capitalist society which has finite resources but depends on geometric growth curves just to maintain itself, more and more sources of use-value need to be tapped into in order to fulfill that growth expectation. New snooping laws and over the top regulations have the effect of tapping into the previously unexploited use-values found in reciprocal and informal exchange, and once in place, make it very difficult for them to be removed without serious disruption to employment figures.

Now, whilst I don't believe for a second that the state is self-conscious or competent enough to have this as a deliberate policy, the fact remains that it is economically easier to increase nannyism than it is to reduce it. Hence we move towards greater and greater government control as time goes by. But a contradiction exists in this trend, and the process of centralisation cannot last forever.

I mentioned briefly how organisational inefficiencies creep into the system when we monetise use-values previously exchanged through reciprocation, and these inefficiencies can only increase as the centralisation occurs. Ultimately, the admin costs involved in state snooping will rise above the amount of surplus value that can be squeezed from those areas being snooped on. When that point comes, we will get another nudge in the direction of a new crisis in capitalism -and one of these days, a crisis is what will bring the state to its knees.

This may sound like a pessimistic end to my first blog, but actually it is the most optimistic I could contrive. It is a comfort to me to know that authoritarian states have an automatic end-stop built in. When the time comes that the state is due to fall from grace, I for one will welcome its demise