Communism? In Berkeley?
I was in Berkeley on Tuesday. I picked up a copy of MIM Notes, the newsletter of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which is a revolutionary Communist party.
There are all sorts of interesting things in MIM Notes. The biggest headline is about AIDS drugs and patents -- one of several examples in the newsletter of issues where I agree with MIM. These just go to show that political issues don't "belong" to a particular political ideology. (I have to accept that someone might think that the DMCA is terrible but not actually care about free software.)
The newsletter also includes (in the section about how "MIM differs from other communist parties") a claim that most workers in first world countries aren't the real proletariat because they're "bought off" with an artificially high standard of living based on exploitation of more genuinely oppressed workers in other countries. I hadn't actually heard that one before; most Marxist writers I've run across in the past did think that there was a real proletariat in the U.S. But MIM says not really -- that the interests of U.S. workers aren't really aligned with those of workers in other countries.
(Here I'm using "workers" in the left sense which doesn't just mean someone who works. For example, I would probably not be considered a worker in this sense, notwithstanding that I have a job. This is also the sense in which most people mean the word in International Workers' Day -- the people in my office aren't being celebrated by that day, nor are the financial industry folks downtown who were the targets of protests.)
One of the most interesting:
The border also prevents the development of a real "free market" in labor power. The internationalist section of the Amerikan bourgeoisie complains about barriers to the free movement of capital, but you rarely hear them complain about barriers to the free movement of labor (i.e. people). This is because they -- and the privilege enjoyed by oppressor nations generally -- depend on the depressed wages in Third World countries. [...] In this context, the border is a tool to keep the vast majority of workers in a situation of most brutal exploitation.
I thought this was an interesting point. It seems clear to me that all supporters of free trade would be critical of borders in general and also expect free immigration (in some sense "as the other side of the coin"). But I'm afraid MIM Notes is right here in that probably most people who say they support free trade do think that countries have a right to prevent the free movement of people. And many of them think that that right should be exercised.
I'm interested in how these correlation work. A lot of libertarians have attacked "isolationism" and suggested that there is a connection between opposing trade and opposing immigration. But there must be four possible combinations.
Interestingly, I associate those combinations to some extent with the four corners of the Nolan Chart -- much as I think the Nolan Chart is not very reliable. The correlation in my mind with the Nolan Chart runs something like this:
- No free trade, no free immigration (no economic freedom, no social freedom): populist (Nolan "authoritarian")
- No free trade, free immigration (no economic freedom, social freedom): left-liberal
- Free trade, no free immigration (economic freedom, no social freedom): right-conservative
- Free trade, free immigration (economic freedom, social freedom): libertarian
I'd be glad to hear opinions on subtleties of these issues.
The U.S. government has the Customs Service, which tries to prevent or tax movement of goods across borders, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which tries to prevent or regulate movement of people across borders. It seems strange to me that somebody would be offended by only one of these functions, but possibly most people are.
MIM Notes also featured a review of an anthology on violence and non-violence edited by a philosophy professor who's a friend of my father's. So that was an interesting co-incidence. MIM's conclusion was that most of the essays in the book are deficient because they fail to recognize that capitalist property is violence. (In libertarian notation: they fail to realize that defending property is coercive, so they don't realize that infringing property rights is not an initation of force.)
Here, again, MIM Notes makes me think. MIM is making an argument that, in carrying out the revolution by force, they wouldn't be violent aggressors; they'd just be using the force necessary to prevent people from upholding property by force. ("Now we see the violence inherent in the system." This extends -- from MIM's perspective -- to apologetics for the actions of the former Soviet Union and of the Chinese Communist Party, because many of the opponents they were fighting were quite willing to try to fight back. "No free speech for fascists", anybody?)
An important theoretical question: what if libertarian ethical ideas are correct (e.g. everyone has the right to act as he or she pleases as long as he or she doesn't infringe on anyone else's equal rights), but there is no such thing as a right to property? One idea is to become a geolibertarian, but it's not quite clear to me that solution can be justified (even though it sounds very appealing).
David Friedman's response to Mike Huben's Non-Libertarian FAQ contains the following statement:
Early in [Huben's] FAQ he points out, correctly, that there are problems with private claims to unproduced resources. But the implication of that, insofar as there is an implication, is not government ownership but commons--if I can't get ownership of the land, and you can't, then we can't, so the land remains unowned.Insofar as there are justifications for ownership, they start with private actions and private ownership.
So, what ethical principles describe how people should behave towards one another in connection with unowned land? That might not be a hypothetical question, because maybe nobody owns land, so it would be a very real problem that faces everyone.
