Ron Paul vs the capitalist agenda of war and torture
Some correspondents have asked for some clarification of what I was writing about in my advice for agorists towards the end of my last major post here:
[C]ritical support means understanding your role as a hardcore revolutionary… You alone among free-market libertarians have a thorough understanding of politics as a class-based system of oppression, deceit and plunder. This understanding provides a social “map” for non-violent monkey-wrenching and sabotage of the sort Konkin advocated — even in an electoral context. Rather than doggedly working for a particular candidate, your time is perhaps best used anonymously seeking and exploiting any available systempunkt in the establishment campaigns.
Well, here’s some background followed by an example…
Agorists understand that government is merely banditry under guise of law. It serves as a mechanism for the unjust transfer of wealth from the productive class to a parasitic elite, the political class that consists not merely of high government officials but also nominal members of the private sector whose wealth derives from state intervention in the market — subsidies and related state-backed market distortions.
In left libertarian revisionist history, we find the tools to understand that politicians are mere gladiators that fight over the spoils of tyranny within the higher circles of the political class. Their puppetmasters, the “powers behind the throne” under state capitalism, are the special interests they represent. Typically, those special interests are quite literally “the capitalists” — not ideological free-marketeers such as myself, and not even just “Big Business” (although there’s a large element of truth there).
No, I mean that toward the pinnacle of the state capitalist pyramid we find those for whom capital itself is their business and state backed cartelism/monopolism their method — the biggest banks, financial services companies and investment groups.
We see this quite clearly in campaign finance reports and analysis of them that bundles the donations according to employer or similar organizational affiliation. Ron Paul’s insurgent anti-war and relatively pro-liberty (for a politician) campaign for the GOP primary nomination is directly at odds with the pro-war and pro-torture agenda of the rest of the GOP contenders, perhaps best symbolized by the chimeric Dark Triumvirate of “Rudy McRomney”.
Who are the backers of “Rudy McRomney” that make them the establishment candidate(s)? Names like:
- Goldman Sachs
- Morgan Stanley
- Merrill Lynch
- Credit Suisse Securities
- Bear Stearns
- Lehman Brothers
- Bank of America
- Bank of New York
- Wachovia Corp
- JP Morgan Chase & Co
Literally, the leading capitalists. Check the contribution information for yourself:
We find further validation of this in observing that the top contributor profiles of Democrats match that of the Dark Triumvirate more or less in proportion to how anti-war the candidate is. Hillary Clinton is arguably the most pro-war Democrat, followed closely by nearly as bad Barack Obama. The very weakly anti-war but thoroughly establishmentarian John Edwards begins to depart from the Rudy McRomney contributor profile, having some capitalist support, a large amount of support from legal firms and many bundled contributions from the Democratic base (often public employees or other lower rungs on the ladder of the political class). With the strongly anti-war but still statist Kucinich, we find a much smaller amount of contributions, with liberal academia the most notable faction. The hardcore anti-war (and even somewhat libertartian on a few issues) Gravel shows up in campaign finance reports as, well, more or less innocent.
Now, all that’s not to say Ron Paul doesn’t have some big names, and companies in the business of capital specifically, on his own contributor list. But the “capitalists” we find there are smaller investment groups that arguably have more to gain from getting the government out of their way so they can compete more effectively against the industry leaders (who back the establishment candidates). In relative terms, these smaller firms are more nearly simply in the business of capital more so than being statist monopolists of capital.
The most recognizable corporate brand names among Paul’s top contribution sources have no great interest at stake in statist domination (let alone war) to the best of my knowledge: United Parcel Service and Texas Instruments. While there’s undoubtedly plenty of dirt that could be dug up on those companies, they ain’t exactly Halliburton.
It’s time for free-market libertarians to recognize that we are engaged in a quite literally anti-capitalist struggle — even those among us who aren’t anarchists and who are merely supporting an anti-war, anti-establishment and relatively pro-liberty Republican (Ron Paul).
For hardcore non-voting libertarians, now is not the time to doubt your position against voting (see also Wally Conger’s recent post on anti-politics). It’s time to “go deep” in critical support of anti-war candidates like Ron Paul and Mike Gravel. Seek out those who similarly see themselves as engaged in anti-capitalist struggle and make the case for activism targeting top “Rudy McRomney” contribution sources. Note carefully that I am not advocating violence or any violation of the libertarian non-aggression principle. There’s a whole lot that can be done to make life difficult for the bad guys without being stupid — boycotts, pickets, maybe a little civil disobedience, email campaigns, etc. Be creative. Be bold.
That’s what I was talking about.
UPDATE: Vote for this story on Digg. This is getting Dugg fast at the moment, so I’ve set up Wordpress caching temporarily in hopes of possibly being able to keep the site running despite a potential Digg onslaught. As a result of page caching, don’t worry if your comment doesn’t show up immediately.
Share This
[...] Ron Paul vs the capitalist agenda of war and torture [...]