kevin on hess
Karl Hess: A Life on the (Right) Left (and Right) by kevin carson (2024) via fb share [https://c4ss.org/content/59407]
karl hess – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Hess
Karl Hess (born Carl Hess III; May 25, 1923 – April 22, 1994) was an American speechwriter and author. He was also a political philosopher, editor, welder, motorcycle racer, tax resister, and libertarian activist. His career included stints on the Republican right and the New Left before embracing a mix of left-libertarianism and laissez-faire anarcho-capitalism, a term which is attested earliest in his 1969 essay “The Death of Politics”. Later in life, he summed up his role in the economy by remarking “I am by occupation a free marketer (crafts and ideas, woodworking, welding, and writing).
kevin carson – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Carson
Kevin Carson is an American political writer and blogger. While he originally identified as a mutualist, he now describes himself as an anarchist without adjectives. He works as a Senior Fellow and Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory at the Center for a Stateless Society. Carson coined the pejorative term “vulgar libertarianism” to describe the use of free market rhetoric in defense of corporate capitalism and economic inequality
notes/quotes:
Introduction. Focus of This Paper
Over the past decade or more, I’ve done a considerable number of C4SS studies on particular anarchist thinkers. Since my formal titles at Center for a Stateless Society include Karl Hess Chair of Social Theory, it’s probably well past time to do one on Hess.
For anyone familiar with my own previous work, it should come as no surprise that I associate Hess’s most valuable contributions with his middle period; it will, accordingly, be the focus of this study.
I. Rumspringa
Libertarian Alliances… spread to every major campus during 1970.
It was in this general period, March 1969, when his article “The Death of Politics” appeared in Playboy. It contributed immensely to the ideological culture of the early Libertarian Party..
In Dear America, he states that in the 1968 election year he was already a member of Students for a Democratic Society,
II. Shift to the Left
Libertarianism is a people’s movement and a liberation movement. *It seeks the sort of open, non-coercive society in which the people, the living, free, distinct people may voluntarily associate, dis-associate, and, as they see fit, participate in the decisions affecting their lives. This means a truly free market in everything from ideas to idiosyncrasies. It means people free collectively to organize the resources of their immediate community or individualistically to organize them; it means the freedom to have a community-based and supported judiciary where wanted, none where not, or private arbitration services where that is seen as most desirable. The same with police. The same with schools, hospitals, factories, farms, laboratories, parks, and pensions. Liberty means the right to shape your own institutions. It opposes the right of those institutions to shape you simply because of accreted power or gerontological status….
* need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
because ‘participate in decisions ness .. voluntarily associating ness.. et al.. are all cancerous distractions
…It is possible that the specter of Robin Hood today haunts so many conservative dreams not because of their pure thoughts on property rights so much as because of the possibly impure origins of the property dearest to their own hearts
In the existential struggle between liberty and authority there also are many rooms, indeed, a thousand flowers bloom on either side of the dividing line.
My own summary of the matter is known as The Oink Principle. It states that if it oinks it is your enemy. If it does not oink it may not be your best friend but it is, at least, not your enemy.
I have consulted lately with my very dear friend, Murray Rothbard, on this matter and he tells me that although he will continue to criticize my, and others’, left wlng adventurism, that he has not detected a single oink from my room. I have not, in turn, heard any such sound from his.
What I have learned about state socialism, roughly, is that it is an act of betrayal through which aspirations for a humane and cooperative way of living together and in peace are sacrificed to or stolen by bureaucrats who have contrived a new synthesis of capitalism’s obsessive bookkeeping with feudalism’s top-down, absolute authority. It seems the worst of all possible worlds, a mirror image of corporate capitalism, reflecting the same ultimate purpose: to produce a social order in which docile, carefully taught people follow, without whimper or shout, the commands of a ruling class.
…[S]o long as a class of owners controls industry, whether that class is the moneyed plutocracy of America or the political oligarchy in the Soviet Union, then the people generally will be extensions of the machines, extensions of the ledger, and not truly human at all in the eyes of the owners.
none of us human (legit free) to date.. but rather caged whales
His critique focused on the centralization, hierarchy, artificial complexity, and all-around undemocratic nature of their organizational styles.
any form of democratic admin as cancerous distraction
We hear that the reason we cannot control our own lives is that “‘society’”’ is just too big and too complex for that. It must be “run.” We can’t do it….
myth of tragedy and lord ness et al
what we need: infinitesimal structures approaching the limit of structureless\ness and/or vice versa .. aka: ginorm/small ness
Common sense could view it this way: If, indeed, society is too big and too complex for people generally to control it…, then maybe it is too big and too complex.
The commonsense alternative would be: Make it smaller. Make it less complex. Return to people, in the process, the practical possibility of controlling their own lives….
but for the dance to dance.. actually has to be bigger.. in terms of people.. because.. has to be all of us
The corporate managerial class, as much as the political class, was largely parasitic and unproductive, engaged in what David Graeber would later call “bullshit jobs.”
bs jobs from birth.. david on batshit ness.. et al
In his critique of managerialism, Hess anticipated Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification” — the process by which venture capitalists, private equity and the financial sector hollow out actual productive capability, degrade quality, and either hinder technological development or divert it into trivial or purely cosmetic channels. “With fewer people actually competent to design, repair and build tools, every managerial mistake has more lasting effects, waste becomes less tolerable, and real innovations less likely.”
Hess also echoed a principle, variously known as the second watershed or counterproductivity, formulated by Ivan Illich.
And there were the Panthers.
Even more, the Black Panthers were neighborhood-oriented! They did not even at the outset preach a doctrine of global communism or world government or even set as a goal the assumption of national power. They wanted, instead, freedom where they lived, freedom to have communities rather than colonies.
The right should have cheered. Instead, it called the cops
If what he hated was managerialism and concentrated power, what he ardently desired, conversely, was for ordinary people to have full control over every aspect of their lives.
need to let go of any form of m\a\p
III. Alternative Technology and Localism
According to Hess, it was as a result of his increasing affinity for tinkering in the immediate post-Goldwater period that he eventually “became, by default, the resident expert in appropriate, community-based technology at the Institute for Policy Studies.”
His interest in local self-rule and community economies was also intensified by his association at IPS with Milton Kotler, the author of Neighborhood Government.
need.. city sketchup ness for that dance to dance
His thinking at this time reflected the same broad currents of technological and industrial thinking that produced the Whole Earth Catalog, Colin Ward’s neighborhood workshops and reworking of Kropotkin, and the Radical Technology group; it also reflected the municipalism of Murray Bookchin and others.
colin ward.. pëtr kropotkin.. murray bookchin..
I recall standing in front of a church in Washington and hearing a Panther speak of why he did not want the Panthers to be involved in an “international movement.” International, he said, meant something between nations. He was not interested in nations, he said. He wanted a world where relations were between communities. Intercommunalism was the phrase he used.
need to let go of labels ie: discrimination as equity
As he became increasingly disillusioned with New Left organizational politics and the authoritarian hijacking of its institutions — albeit not with leftist analysis — Hess intensified his focus on alternative technology as a way of substituting direct action for politics. Despite his alienation from the institutional politics of the New Left, he celebrated the continuation of its principles in the communitarian and decentralized technology movements.
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
New Left firebrands who once thought they could organize people just on the basis of a bullhorn and book-learned slogans have reemerged as artisans and craftspeople, doctors, lawyers, nurses, biologists, physicists, you name it—still working in local political settings but now more a part of the general working population, possessing new hard skills to go along with their rhetoric, and infinitely more respected as a result. Counter-culture survivors have undergone a similar growth. Food faddism, for some, has been modified into skillful farming. Hallucinations have dimmed and arts have grown. Crafts abound, and not just artsy-craftsy ones but earthier skills such as plumbing, carpentry and masonry. Graduates of the counter culture now operate thriving repair shops, garages, stores, and even community financial development funds, all sustained by the work of participants who enjoy full equality of voice and responsibility.
none yet problem deep enough.. so.. cancerous distractions
The general principles of a decentralized and *human alternative technology, he stated as:
*oi.. mufleh humanity law: we have seen advances in every aspect of our lives except our humanity– Luma Mufleh
(1) It would not increase the incidence of death, disease, or nervousness.
(2) It would conform to, rather than attempt to defy, the widest possible array of physical principles, and would not be evaluated just in terms of its own operation. It would, in other words, exist in nature and not in isolation from it.
(3) Its application would be organized by those who would operate the tool or process in consultative conjunction with anyone affected by the tool or process. They would be accountable for their work because they could be absolutely identified with it. There would be no right of ownership which would prevent the use of the tool or process by anyone else capable of operating it and willing to be accountable for it.
(4) It would mainly use resources that could be renewed, replaced, or recycled. If such virtually irreplaceable resources as fossil hydrocarbons (petroleum, coal) were used, they should be used in ways with the least possible impact on the environment.
(5) It would be appropriate for widespread community participation and understanding. It could be operated nonhierarchically, would encourage productive involvement and discourage consideration of itself solely in terms of consumption.
(6) Its availability to small human communities would be an important measure of its effectiveness. This contrasts with the current technological standard of effective support of large institutions.
(7) It would foster a culture in which the applications of scientific principles would always be guided by such tests as these:
Is the application such that if everyone in the world were individually availed of its use, or involved in its operation, no human life would be threatened by it, no community destroyed by it, no future threatened by it?
this is the piece we have not yet tried.. we have not yet allowed the nonjudgmental expo labeling ness of tech to facil for us.. that everyone ness..
He also speculated that the human-scale technological ecosystem of the future would embody a principle essentially the same as what Lewis Mumford called “polytechnic,” or the coexistence of what are conventionally labeled “high-technology” and “low-technology,” adapted respectively to their most appropriate uses.
we just need one tech first/most.. ie: tech as nonjudgmental expo labeling
In such a life-style, technologies would be applied not simply because they were known but only because they were prudently needed. It would be a world of diversity, not frantic conformity. Physicists undoubtedly would pursue the deeper meanings of material particles, but perhaps with accelerators made by themselves, rather than in remote factories by government grant. Medical researchers undoubtedly would chase the virus into its molecular lair, but health care might be more a matter of everyday community activity than an exotic performance in a marble hall. Gravity might be conquered for some purposes, and yet the horse might serve perfectly well to carry a person for other purposes.
can’t do this till we grok legit needs..
His thinking on alternative technology and community economics in this period is reflected in Dear America (written in 1975, when he was still actively involved in the Community Technology project), his book Neighborhood Power, coauthored with David Morris in the same year, and his retrospective account Community Technology, written in 1979.
Its purpose was simply to demystify technology so that instead of seeming a mysterious force it could become a part of everyday life, a catalyst to community self-reliance, a way to give people greater control over their individual destinies, and a servant in direct service to human needs in a local setting.
ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
That local setting was the Adams-Morgan neighborhood. It spanned some seventy blocks in the center of Washington, D.C., and, at the time, had a population that was 58 percent black, 22 percent Latin American, 18 percent white, and the remainder mostly Middle Eastern. It was a neighborhood in transition, economically quite poor but culturally diverse and exciting. *It was, we believed, the perfect place to try an experiment in participatory community that would make technology accessible and understandable to those who choose to use it. There was, we believed, a need for Community Technology. While neighbors, citizens, and community leaders worried about every other aspect of the neighborhood, there **seemed to be no one very concerned about its material base — how it could produce things.
*suggested cities ness.. for a people experiment
**oi.. tech for norton productivity law vs.. tech for nonjudgmental expo labeling (non hierarchical listening)
we need a problem deep enough to resonate w/8bn today.. a mechanism simple enough to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough to set/keep 8bn legit free
ie: org around a problem deep enough (aka: org around legit needs) to resonate w/8bn today.. via a mechanism simple enough (aka: tech as it could be) to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough (aka: sans any form of m\a\p) to set/keep 8bn legit free
Our answer was inexpensive, available, and decentralized technology — giving local residents the tools, and the scientific understanding, to produce what they needed and where they needed it most: at home and in community.
need to grok our needs first (detox leap).. so we can org around legit needs.. and gershenfeld something else law.. rather than around non legit needs because of ie: hari present in society law et al..
Hess began the book Community Technology by contrasting the giant, centralized institutions that were failing to adequately perform their functions, that were “creaking, crackling, and even crashing under their own weight” to an alternative way of doing things:
I am convinced now that there are other possibilities. I have worked enough at the practical development and deployment of them to see them as wholly available as alternatives here and now.
but none of those legit diff/alts.. if no detox first.. otherwise.. spinning our wheels.. aka: wack-a-moling.. same song
It is possible for us – working together in social situations of various sizes according to our preferences – to spend our time almost exactly as we want to. The rules and imperatives that conventional wisdom fasten on us are not binding except to the extent we let them be.
if we legit know what we want/needs
Technologies, ways of working, kinds of tools, can be developed, deployed, and maintained at the community level.
yeah.. see.. that.. but also has to be global.. has to be both.. simultaneous.. infinitesimal structures approaching the limit of structureless\ness and/or vice versa .. aka: ginorm/small ness.. for the dance to dance
Communities, founded upon ways of life that reflect the values and aspirations of the people who compose the community, can take long steps toward exactly the degree of self-reliance that will best serve the purposes of the community. Communities can, without complex social controls, *cooperate with other communities to provide things not locally available, to enlarge cultures, to do anything that will enhance the community without destroying it.
*cancerous distraction.. rather.. need to try art (by day/light) and sleep (by night/dark) as global re\set.. to fittingness (undisturbed ecosystem)
1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen
2\ if we create a way to ground the chaos of 8b legit free people
There are *no shortages of anything on the face of the earth that would prevent any community from surviving healthily and happily…. This book is an argument for community participation, with **all of the diversity and resultant flexibilities that that implies..t
haven’t legit tried *this (all of us ness) .. so haven’t yet seen **this.. so keep perpetuating myth of tragedy and lord ness..
The kind of technology that is possible, and which would suit the old yearnings of the American Dream, is exactly the kind that would undermine the sort of spectator-sport politics we have come to play. It would be a technology in which ordinary people participated very actively. It would be a tool to serve their purposes and make possible the kinds of lives they (and not Madison Avenue fantasists) want to live. Having a role in the development, deployment, and maintenance of technology. *Wouldn’t people also want more of a role in politics? Wouldn’t they want a politics that makes possible a democratic life rather than a politics that makes necessary a life subordinated not to politics but to politicians?
*oi oi oi .. black science of people/whales law.. any form of democratic admin.. any form of m\a\p.. keeps on blinding us to us
To be merely a consumer of technology is always to accept and take what is and never to shape what could be.
in that sense.. we have all been ‘consumers’ to date..
Besides technology narrowly defined, clearly, Hess was deeply committed to broader issues of community economic independence, self-reliance, and resilience. But for communities of people to run their own affairs, they must have a material base..t A self-governing community whose material needs are controlled from outside is a contradiction in terms.
perhaps let’s try/code money (any form of measuring/accounting) as the planned obsolescence w/ubi as temp placebo.. where legit needs are met w/o money.. till people forget about measuring..ie: sabbatical ish transition
The purpose of Community Technology was to organize such a material base.t. In response to skeptics who dismissed relocalized production based on “economies of scale” and the like, Hess gave a general overview of the possibilities.
A city neighborhood, seen as a concrete-bound ghetto, scarcely seems worth considering agriculturally. True enough. Agriculture and city spaces are apparently incompatible. Gardening and city spaces are not. Can gardening produce ample food for a neighborhood?
cancerous distractions to a global detox leap (what we need in order for all the rest to be part of the dance and/or irrelevant s)
Hydroponic .. rooftop spaces,..Aquaculture..sewerage system.. cybernated plant.. small workshop
As for the raw materials required for production, it’s true as far as it goes that they “are not usually appropriate to neighborhood production….” But they can be obtained by trade or federative relationships with the “neighborhoods” — arguably an anticipation of Elinor Ostrom’s natural resource commons — that produce the resources.
ostrom 8 et al
Nowhere has the potential for small-scale organization left Hess’s predictions so far behind as in the case of communications.
Communications and information systems are already involved in technologies which are adaptable without any question to the most localized uses. Virtually every neighborhood in America has within it amateur communications technicians of reasonably high skill: ham radio operators. Citizen-band radios further democratize the use of radio communications. Further, the very scale of the neighborhood makes it adaptable to communications of the most traditional kind – bulletin boards, wall posters, signs, even town criers or sound trucks. Newspapers on a community scale can be produced in small spaces and with wise recycling of materials or even substitutions of materials (for instance, material that can be quickly erased and re-used) or they can be in electronic forms. Even the raw materials for print media could be held fairly close to the possibilities of neighborhood self-sufficiency and responsibility. The point is not that a neighborhood would thus close itself off from all other communications. The point is simply that the neighborhood can have internal communications sufficient to a fully developed politics of internal freedom and could thereafter enjoy any extended communications with a world of other communities that might be desired.
not till detox leap so can org around legit needs
As a program for implementing the vision of a relocalized economy, Hess recommended starting from something very much like the “community resource mapping” described by more recent municipalist thinkers like J.K. Gibson-Graham and others.
need rather.. gershenfeld something else law.. via city sketchup ness.. otherwise limiting/oppressing people
A community skill-resource inventory should be useful. It would involve a systematic door-to-door canvassing of the entire community (the way a dedicated church goes about it, for instance) to discover what social and tutorial skills are held by people in the community. At the same time you could raise the question of the extent to which the people are willing to commit those skills to community projects.
just one ie of ginormous oi ness.. invited vs invented.. spinach or rock.. because we can’t let go of the supposed orderly ness of a finite set of choices et al.. so we keep on perpetuating same song
Such community mapping should include the resources of local government and the public schools.
yeah.. make sure those cancerous distractions are included.. oi
Resource mapping also includes the use of bulletin boards, neighborhood newspapers, and electronic means of communication to inform neighborhood residents of the outside interests exercising power over them.
perhaps until now.. now cancerous distractions since have means of nonjudgmental expo labeling
Besides all this Morris and Hess speculated on forms of currency that simply served as units of account for coordinating flows of goods between producers, rather than being issued against stockpiled wealth.
oi.. any form of m\a\p.. as cancerous distraction
Next on the neighborhood agenda are crime prevention actions (neighborhood patrols, youth programs run by and not for young people, and whatever else the apparently endless ingenuity of the neighbors can come up with).
oi.. huge red flag
Although the Community Technology project fell apart for lack of a sufficient base of local support, it demonstrated “that an urban neighborhood could be self-sufficient in the production of food and wealth.”[108]
Having failed to sell alternative technology to a majority of people in a neighborhood, Hess next shifted to an informal project with a distributed membership consisting entirely of self-selected participants who had already bought in to the idea.
Conclusion
Over a period of several years, some time back, I wrote a series of studies for C4SS on the common theme of “anarchists without adjectives.” My descriptions of Colin Ward and David Graeber in terms of that ethos will, I hope, give some idea of what I mean by it:
David Graeber chose, as the epigraph to his book Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, a quote from Pyotr Kropotkin’s article on Anarchism for the Encyclopedia Britannica. In it Kropotkin stated that, in an anarchist society, harmony would be
“obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free arrangements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.”
for that to be legit.. need tech as nonjudgmental expo labeling
The interesting thing about this is that it could serve as an accurate description of virtually any anarchist society, including the libertarian communist sort favored by Kropotkin, Goldman, or Malatesta, the kind of anarcho-syndicalism favored by most of the Wobblies and CNT, the anarcho-collectivism of Bakunin, the mutualism of Proudhon, or the market anarchism of Thomas Hodgskin and Benjamin Tucker. And it’s appropriate that Graeber chose it as his epigraph, because his affection for “freely constituted groups” and the “free arrangements” concluded between them is bigger than any doctrinaire attempt to pigeonhole such groups and arrangements..t as business firms operating in the cash nexus or moneyless collectives.
Graeber… is characterized above all by a faith in human creativity and agency, and an unwillingness to let a priori theoretical formulations either preempt his perceptions of the particularity and “is-ness” of history, or interfere with the ability of ordinary, face-to-face groupings of people on the spot to develop workable arrangements — whatever they may be — among themselves..t Graeber is one of those anarchist (or anarchist-ish) thinkers who, despite possibly identifying with a particular hyphenated variant of anarchism, have an affection for the variety and particularity of self-organized, human-scale institutions that goes beyond ideological label. These people, likewise, see the relationships between individual human beings in ways that can’t be reduced to simple abstractions like the cash nexus or doctrinaire socialism….
Graeber’s anarchism is, above all else, human-centered. It entails a high regard for human agency and reasonableness. Rather than fitting actual human beings into some idealized anarchist paradigm, he displays an openness to — and celebration of — whatever humans may actually do in exercising that agency and reasonableness. Anarchy isn’t what people will do “after the Revolution,” when some sort of “New Anarchist Man” has emerged who can be trusted with autonomy; it’s what they do right now. “Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of *behaving in *a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to.”
*oi.. who decides that?
If that were still a going project, I might have included this study of Karl Hess in it. Certainly in his middle phase, his New Left and communitarian periods, it’s beyond dispute that Hess perfectly fit the anarchist-without-adjectives paradigm. His vision was not so much of any “ism,” as of a world of a thousand and one homely, human-scale institutions by which people managed their own lives. For him corporate capitalism of both the conservative and liberal-managerialist variety, and state socialism of the Soviet variety, were acts of violence against this flesh and blood humanity. As he wrote in Dear America:
People, as individuals, may disappear from view in various social theories, but they never disappear in social practice. They persist. They have names, or at least identities. They have passions, quirks, size, shape, hands and heads. They can be attached to the punched cards of a time clock or the identity cards of a police state, or the chains of a slave system. But they remain in reality.
My vision of freedom, then, is formed around the rights of natural association, of people coming together in community for perhaps varied reasons, even for accidental geographic reasons. It is formed from the observed ability of people to decide for themselves, in such a natural association, how best to get along together, how to work, how to play, how to make divisions between those things which are wanted to be done alone and those wanted to be done together, and so forth.
the dance
The vision emphasizes being a person and doing things in a specific time and place.
And beyond that he was also, to a great extent, an anarchist without adjectives in his earlier and later right-wing phases as well — if only in spite of himself.
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- kevin on anarchism w/o adj
- kevin on communal property
- kevin on credit
- kevin on democracy
- kevin on hess
- kevin on 100 flowers
- kevin on justifiers of ineq
- kevin on transition
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be you. 