Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

 
The tone of petulant annoyance that the right-wing can adopt utopian ideas similar in kind to his own in China Mieville's article on a floating libertarian tax haven, the freedom ship, is amusing to say the least, but the article does make some rather good points:

"It is one of countless recent dreams of a tax-free life on the ocean wave: advocates of "seasteading" are disproportionately adherents of "libertarianism," that peculiarly American philosophy of venal petty-bourgeois dissidence.... Of course, visions of floating state evasion cannot always be explained by a hankering for tax evasion. There have been other precursors. Ships have allowed groups ranging from cheerfully illicit pirate radio stations to socially committed abortion providers, like Women On Waves, to avoid local laws. Not surprisingly, this use for ships has been enthusiastically adopted by businesses, such as SeaCode, which promotes locating outsourced foreign software engineers three miles off the coast of Los Angeles to avoid pesky immigration and labor laws.

It is the less instrumentalist iterations that inspire the imagination. Occasionally, in a spirit of can-do contrarianism, some offshore spit or rig has been designated an independent country, such as Sealand, a sea-tower-based nation with no permanent inhabitants on Britain’s Suffolk coast. The startling notion of coagulated ship-city has unsurprisingly been featured in fiction, as in Lloyd Kropp's Sargasso-based The Drift and Neal Stephenson's "The Raft," in Snow Crash.

Utopianism has always had two, usually though not always contradictory, aesthetic and avant-gardist gravitational pulls: toward a hallucinatory baroque or, alternately, a post-Corbusier functionalism. In seasteading, these iterations are represented by Tsui's hallucinatory organicism on one hand and Buckminster Fuller's extraordinary, floating, ziggurat-like Triton City on the other.

The libertarian seasteaders are heirs to this visionary tradition but degrade it with their class politics. They almost make one nostalgic for more grandiose enemy dreams. The uncompromising monoliths of fascist and Stalinist architecture expressed their paymasters’ monstrous ambitions. The wildest of the libertarian seasteaders, New Utopia, manages to crossfertilize its drab Miami-ism with enough candy floss Las Vegaries to keep a crippled baroque distantly in sight. Freedom Ship, however, is a floating shopping mall, a buoyant block of midrange Mediterranean hotels. This failure of utopian imagination is nowhere clearer than in the floating city of the long defunct but still influential Atlantis Project.

This is no ruling class vision: it is the plaintive daydream of a petty bourgeoisie, whose sulky solution to perceived social problems is to run away—set sail into a tax-free sunset. None of this is surprising. Libertarianism is not a ruling-class theory... untempered by the realpolitik of Reaganism and Thatcherism, the anti-statism of "pure" libertarianism is worse than useless to the ruling class. Libertarianism, by contrast, is a theory of those who find it hard to avoid their taxes, who are too small, incompetent or insufficiently connected to win Iraq-reconstruction contracts, or otherwise chow at the state trough. In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy."


I tend to think that libertarianism is probably best described as right-wing anarchism, a philosophy that assumes that dissolving the state in favour of free market arrangements will remove distorting influences that impede economic development. As with conventional anarchism, it goes without saying that its record of being sucessfully implemented is decidedly scant, with the closest to it in ideological terms, those of Reagan and Thatcher, invariably having left office having substantially extended the power of the state. Some of this ineffective character can also be seen in the rather less than succesful attempts of the Free State Project to persuade sufficient believers to move to New Hampshire in order to sway the outcome of that state's elections (collective action clearly has not been their forte, if one is to judge from the rather low number of people to take up this offer). On the other hand, it should also go without saying that being accused of being political irrelevance by a committed Marxist is essentially akin to being accused of ignorance of geography by a member of the flat Earth society. If nothing else, projects like the data havens at Sealand do have a reasonable business model.

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posted by Richard 1:17 pm