Lone wolf attack

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_attack

A lone wolf attack, or lone actor attack, is a particular kind of mass murder, committed in a public setting by an individual who plans and commits the act on their own. In the United States, such attacks are usually committed with firearms. In other countries, knives are sometimes used to commit mass stabbings. Although definitions vary, most databases require a minimum of four victims (including injured) for the event to be considered a mass murder.

Lone actor attacks have become the subject of academic research. Studies have found that some lone actor attacks are committed because of personal grievances and a desire for revenge, while others are acts of terrorism, intended to induce fear and influence the way people think.

The academic definition of lone actor mass shootings means they occur in a public setting and excludes the killing of multiple people if those deaths occur during the commission of other crimes, such as bank robberies or during gang warfare. The definition also excludes killings such as familicide, where the perpetrator kills the rest of their family in a private setting. Criminologist Grant Duwe identified 845 mass shootings in the United States between 1976 and 2018. However, only 158 of these met the criteria for a lone actor shooting which occurred in a public setting.

The descriptor 'lone wolf' is derived from the notion of a lone wolf, a pack animal that has left or been excluded from its pack. This particular term is more likely to be used by American law enforcement than by academics who study this phenomenon.

Definition

The term lone actor or lone wolf is not a legal term or a social science concept. It is an ill-defined and academically contested construct, manufactured by the media and by radical political actors. For academics, the definition requires that:

• the perpetrator acts alone without direction from an outside group. In some cases such as the Columbine High School massacre, two students shot and killed 12 students and one teacher. This still meets the academic definition of lone actor shooting, because the perpetrators carried out the killings without direction from anyone else
• the shootings occurred in a public situation. Mass murders such as familicides where one member of a family kills all other members in the family home are not considered as lone actor shootings.
• the murders were not committed as part of some other criminal act such as a robbery or as part of gang conflict in which multiple individuals are shot.

Minimum number of victims

In the United States in particular, lone actor attacks are associated with mass shootings in which multiple people are shot – although the definition of a mass shooting is also contested. Different sources describe the minimum number of victims as between three and five, with most authorities describing four as the minimum. Some sources include injured victims in the total while other definitions specify the victims must be dead in order to be counted.

Motives

Academic studies tend to distinguish between grievance driven lone actors and lone actor terrorists.

Ideological (terrorist)

Lone actor terrorists are ideologically driven, with political or religious motives, and are intended to create fear and influence public opinion. Lone wolf terrorists may sympathize with and consider themselves part of larger groups, but they are usually not active participants. The links between lone wolves and actual terrorist groups tend to be informal and conducted online. These individuals tend to become radicalized online and through media outlets.

There have been cases of terrorist attacks conducted by individuals which were later found to have been directed remotely by terrorist organisations. Thus they were technically not lone wolves.

Non-ideological (grievance driven)

Most lone actor shootings are committed by individuals with a grievance against an institution, such as their former school or workplace, with no ideological motivation. In the United States, the perpetrators generally use guns, whereas in other countries where the public have less access to guns (such as China), knives may be used to commit mass stabbings.

History

Historian Richard Jenson says the years 1878–1934 were the era of anarchist terrorism and should be considered the classic age of ‘‘lone wolf’’ or leaderless terrorism. Anarchists rejected authoritarian, centralized control over acts of planned violence as well as over anything else. Jenson says there were hundreds of violent anarchist incidents during this period most of which were committed by lone individuals or very small groups without command structures or leaders.

Since 1940, there have been around 100 successful lone wolf attacks in the United States. The number of attacks is increasing, however, and has grown each year since 2000. As compared to those on the far right, lone wolf attackers who become inspired by al-Qaeda and ISIS tend to be younger and better educated. According to studies, lone wolves have more in common with mass murderers than they do with members of the organized terrorist groups that often inspire them. The FBI and San Diego Police's investigation into the activities of a self-professed white supremacist, Alex Curtis, was named Operation Lone Wolf, "largely due to Curtis' encouragement of other white supremacists to follow what Curtis refers to as 'lone wolf' activism".

While the lone wolf acts to advance the ideological or philosophical beliefs of an extremist group, they act on their own, without any outside command or direction. The lone wolf's tactics and methods are conceived and directed solely on their own; in many cases, such as the tactics described by Curtis, the lone wolf never has personal contact with the group they identify with. As such, it is considerably more difficult for counter-terrorism officials to gather intelligence on lone wolves, since they may not come into contact with routine counter-terrorist surveillance. A 2013 analysis by Sarah Teich, a research assistant at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, found five emerging trends in Islamist lone wolf terrorism in North America and western Europe between 1990 and 2013:

• An increase in the number of countries targeted by lone wolves from the 1990s to the 2000s.
• An increase in the number of people injured and killed by lone wolves.
• Increased effectiveness of law enforcement and counter-terrorism.
• Consistency in the distribution of attacks by "actor types" (loners, lone wolves, and lone wolf packs).
• An increase in the number of attacks against military personnel.

In the United States, lone wolves may present a greater threat than organized groups.

According to the Financial Times, counter-terrorism officials refer to "lone individuals known to authorities but not considered important enough to escalate investigations" as "known wolves".

Some groups actively advocate lone wolf actions. Anti-abortion militant terrorist group the Army of God uses "leaderless resistance" as its organizing principle. According to The New York Times, in news analysis of the Boston Marathon bombing, the Al-Qaeda activist Samir Khan, publishing in Inspire, advocated individual terrorist actions directed at Americans and published detailed recipes online.

Mental health factors

Compared to the general population, lone wolf terrorists are significantly more likely to have been diagnosed with a mental illness, although it is not an accurate profiler. Studies have found that roughly a third of lone wolf terrorists have been diagnosed at some point in their life with a mental illness. This puts lone wolves as being 13.5 times more likely to suffer from a mental illness than a member of an organized terrorist group, such as al-Qaeda or ISIS. Environmental factors such as relationships with those belonging to a terrorist group, social isolation, and various stressors mediate the relationship between mental illness and lone wolf terrorism.

Mental health challenges are thought to make some individuals among the many who suffer from certain "psychological disturbances", vulnerable to being inspired by extremist ideologies to commit acts of lone wolf terrorism. An alternative explanation is that terrorist groups reject those with mental illnesses as they pose a security risk, creating a selection bias.

Forms of indirect incitement

Narratives of insecurity

Professor Abdelwahab El-Affendi has developed a theory that suggests lone wolf attacks and similar mass violence events occur as a result of "narratives of insecurity", where the aggressor(s) are motivated out of a sense of cataclysmic impending danger to their culture, race, religion, or way of life.

Scripted violence

The phrase "scripted violence" has been used in social science since at least 2002.

Author David Neiwert, who wrote the book Alt-America, notes:

Scripted violence is where a person who has a national platform describes the kind of violence that they want to be carried out. He identifies the targets and leaves it up to the listeners to carry out this violence. It is a form of terrorism. It is an act and a social phenomenon where there is an agreement to inflict massive violence on a whole segment of society. Again, this violence is led by people in high-profile positions in the media and the government. They're the ones who do the scripting, and it is ordinary people who carry it out. Think of it like Charles Manson and his followers. Manson wrote the script; he didn't commit any of those murders. He just had his followers carry them out.

Stochastic terrorism

See also: Incitement to terrorism

Since 2018, the term "stochastic terrorism" has become a popular term used when discussing lone wolf attacks. While the exact definition has morphed over time, it has commonly come to refer to a concept whereby consistently demonizing or dehumanizing a targeted group or individual results in violence that is statistically likely, but cannot be easily accurately predicted.

The term was initially used to suggest that a quantifiable relationship may exist between seemingly random acts of terror and their intended goal of "perpetuating a reign of fear" via a manipulation of mass media and its capacity for "instant global news communication". For example, careful timing and placement of just a few moderately explosive devices could have the same intended effect as numerous random attacks or the use of more powerful explosives if they were shrewdly devised to elicit the maximum response from media organizations. It was theorized by Gordon Woo in a 2002 paper that "the absolute number of attacks within a year, i.e. the rhythm of terror, might ultimately be determined as much by publicity goals and the political anniversary calendar as by the size of the terrorist ranks".

A variation of this stochastic terrorism model was later adapted by an anonymous blogger posting on Daily Kos in 2011 to describe public speech that can be expected to incite terrorism without a direct organizational link between the inciter and the perpetrator. The term "stochastic" is used in this instance to describe the random, probabilistic nature of its effect; whether or not an attack actually takes place. The stochastic terrorist in this context does not direct the actions of any particular individual or members of a group. Rather, the stochastic terrorist gives voice to a specific ideology via mass media with the aim of optimizing its dissemination.

It is in this manner that the stochastic terrorist is thought to randomly incite individuals predisposed to acts of violence. Because stochastic terrorists do not target and incite individual perpetrators of terror with their message, the perpetrator may be labeled a lone wolf by law enforcement, while the inciters avoid legal culpability and public scrutiny.

In their 2017 book Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism, criminologist Mark S. Hamm and sociologist Ramón Spaaij discuss stochastic terrorism as a form of "indirect enabling" of terrorists. They write that "stochastic terrorism is the method of international recruitment used by ISIS", and they refer to Anwar al-Awlaki and Alex Jones as stochastic terrorists.

Hamm and Spaaij discuss two instances of violence. In the 2010 Oakland freeway shootout, Byron Williams was said to be en route to offices of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Tides Foundation, planning to commit mass murder, "indirectly enabled by the conspiracy theories" of Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. As a left-wing example, they cite the 2012 shooting incident at the headquarters of the Family Research Council.

Some^[who?] also describe the 2009 murder of George Tiller to be an example of stochastic terrorism, as many conservative news opinion shows and talk radio shows repeatedly demonized him for his administration of postviability abortions. For example, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, during his evening opinion show The O'Reilly Factor referred to Dr. Tiller as "Tiller the Baby Killer" on various occasions.

In the wake of escalating attacks on the LGBT community in the early 2020s, including bomb threats on children's hospitals and the Colorado Springs nightclub shooting, right-wing activists such as Matt Walsh and Chaiya Raichik of Libs of TikTok have been accused of stochastic terrorism.

Leaderless resistance

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Leaderless resistance, or phantom cell structure, is a social resistance strategy in which small, independent groups (covert cells), or individuals (a solo cell is called a "lone wolf"), challenge an established institution such as a law, economic system, social order, or government. Leaderless resistance can encompass anything from non-violent protest and civil disobedience to vandalism, terrorism, and other violent activity.

Leaderless cells lack vertical command links and so operate without hierarchical command, but they have a common goal that links them to the social movement from which their ideology was learned.

Leaderless resistance has been employed by a wide range of movements, including animal-liberation, radical environmentalist, anti-abortion, military invasion resistance, anarchist organizations, colonialism resistance, terrorist, and hate groups.

The non-hierarchical, decentralized organization is simple and difficult to stamp out. However, with the absence of a formal hierarchy and formal criteria for membership and affiliation, they are vulnerable to appropriation, false flagging or hostile takeover from the outside, since anyone can declare oneself a member of and affiliate with the group.

General characteristics

A covert cell may be a lone individual or a small group. The basic characteristic of the structure is that there is no explicit communication between cells that are acting toward shared goals. Members of one cell usually have little or no information about who else is agitating on behalf of their cause.

Leaderless movements may have a symbolic figurehead. This can be a public figure, a multiple-use name, or an inspirational author, who picks generic targets and objectives, but does not actually manage or execute plans. Media, in this case, often create a positive feedback loop: by publishing declarations of a movement's role model, this instills motivation, ideas, and assumed sympathy in the minds of potential agitators who in turn lend further authority to the figurehead. While this may loosely resemble a vertical command structure, it is notably unidirectional: a titular leader makes pronouncements, and activists may respond, but there is no formal contact between the two levels of organization.

As a result, leaderless resistance cells are resistant to informants and traitors. As there is neither a center that may be destroyed, nor links between the cells that may be infiltrated, it is more difficult for established authorities to arrest the development of a leaderless resistance movement than it is with movements that adopt more conventional hierarchies.

Given the asymmetrical character of leaderless resistance, and the fact that it is often strategically adopted in the face of a power imbalance, it has much in common with guerrilla warfare. The latter strategy, however, usually retains some form of organized, bidirectional leadership and is often more broad-based than the individualized actions of leaderless cells. In some cases, a largely leaderless movement may evolve into a coherent insurgency or guerrilla movement, as with the Yugoslav partisans of World War II.

Leaderless resistance often involves resistance by violent means, but it is not limited to them. Non-violent groups can use the same structure to author, print, and distribute samizdat literature, to create self-propagating boycotts against political opponents via the internet, to maintain an alternative electronic currency outside of the reach of taxing governments and transaction-logging banks, and so forth.

History

The concept of leaderless resistance was developed by Col. Ulius Louis Amoss, a former U.S. intelligence officer, in the early 1950s. An anti-communist, Amoss saw leaderless resistance as a way to prevent the penetration and destruction of CIA-supported resistance cells in Eastern European countries under Soviet control.

The concept was revived and popularized in an essay published by the anti-government Ku Klux Klan member Louis Beam in 1983 and again in 1992. Beam advocated leaderless resistance as a technique for white nationalists to continue the struggle against the U.S. government, despite an overwhelming imbalance in power and resources.

Beam argued that conventional hierarchical pyramidal organizations are extremely dangerous for their participants, when employed in a resistance movement against government, because of the ease of disclosing the chain of command. A less dangerous approach would be to convince like-minded individuals to form independent cells without close communication between each other but generally operating in the same direction.

More contemporary examples of social movements such as the gillets jaunes (yellow vests) in France, Extinction Rebellion, or the #MeToo movement seem to have spontaneously arisen as leaderless movements, perhaps due to the prevalence of social media that bring together individuals with common grievances even in the absence of organized leadership.

In practice

Animal liberation

Further information: Animal rights movement, Abolitionism (animal rights), Veganarchism, and Anarchism and animal rights

The first recorded direct action for animal liberation which progressed (after a considerable delay) into a movement of leaderless resistance was by the original "Band of Mercy" in 1824 whose goal was to thwart fox hunters. Inspired by this group and after seeing a pregnant deer driven into the village by fox hunters to be killed, John Prestige decided to actively oppose this sport and formed the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA) in 1964. Within a year, a leaderless model of hunt-sabotage groups was formed across the United Kingdom.

A new Band of Mercy was then formed in 1972. It used direct action to liberate animals and cause economic sabotage against those thought to be abusing animals. Ronnie Lee and others changed the name of the movement to the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in 1976 and adopted a leaderless resistance model focusing broadly on animal liberation.

Earth First! and the environmental movement in the 1980s also adopted the leaderless resistance model. An animal liberation movement advocating violence emerged with the name Animal Rights Militia (ARM) in 1982. Letter bombs were sent to the then British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Two years later the name Hunt Retribution Squad (HRS) was also used.

The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) formed in 1992, breaking from Earth First! when that organization decided to focus on public direct action, instead of the ecotage that the ELF participated in. A violent group called the Justice Department was established in 1993, and in 1994 sent razor blades to hunters such as Prince Charles and to animal researchers.

In 1999 the leaderless resistance strategy was employed by animal liberation organisations like Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), which was formed from the Consort beagles campaign and Save the Hill Grove Cats to close down Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS). Despite claiming successes leaderless animal liberation and environmental movements generally lack the broad popular support that often occurs in strictly political or military conflicts. The Revolutionary Cells--Animal Liberation Brigade (RCALB) appeared in 2003 and sent pipe bombs to Chiron Corporation and used incendiary devices against other targets, whilst a year later on the south coast of Dorset, the Lobster Liberation Front (LLF) was founded.

Within a few years of the victories claimed by the SHAC, other campaigns against animal testing laboratories emerged. At the same time, SPEAK Campaigns and the more radical ALF militants, Oxford Arson Squad began their campaigns towards the same goal: to end Oxford University's animal research.

In April 2009, the Militant Forces Against Huntingdon Life Sciences (MFAH) became active. With the ALF, they began targeting HLS customer and financial Directors, as well as company property. Since then, groups have reported over a dozen actions in Europe, including painting homes, burning cars, and grave desecration. Militants, however, oppose ALF ideology, instead believing in any necessary action to prevent suffering at HLS's laboratories.

Radical Islamists

Leaderless resistance is also often well-suited to terrorist objectives. The Islamist organization Al-Qaeda uses a typical figurehead/leaderless cell structure. The organization itself may be pyramidal, but sympathizers who act on its pronouncements often do so spontaneously and independently.

Given the small, clandestine character of terrorist cells, it is easy to assume they necessarily constitute leaderless resistance models. When there is bidirectional communication with external leadership, however, the label is inappropriate. The men who executed the bombings of the London Underground on July 7, 2005 constituted a leaderless resistance cell in that they purportedly acted out of sympathy for Islamic fundamentalism but under their own auspices. The hijackers involved in the September 11 attacks, by contrast, allegedly received training, direction, and funding from Al-Qaeda, and are not properly designated a leaderless cell.

Neo-Nazis and White nationalists

The concept of leaderless resistance remains important to far-right thinking in the United States, as a proposed response to perceived federal government over-reach at the expense of individual rights. Simson Garfinkel, however, found in his research that for the most part the far right seldom used this tactic. Timothy McVeigh is one example in the United States. McVeigh worked in a small cell which based its attack on motivations widespread among far-right anti-government groups and the militia movement.

Leaderless resistance has been advocated by white supremacist groups such as White Aryan Resistance (WAR) and the British neo-Nazi Combat 18 (C18). The modern Ku Klux Klan is also credited with having developed a leaderless resistance model. Troy Southgate also advocated forms of leaderless resistance during his time as a leading activist in the National Revolutionary Faction and a pioneer of National-Anarchism. James Mason a former American Nazi Party member and neo-Nazi was a proponent of the idea of "leaderless resistance" as detailed in SIEGE a collection of writings from the defunct National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF) which advocated violence against political opponents, Jews and non-whites of which he deemed to be the supposedly Jewish controlled entity he referred to as "The System" which has since been embraced by the terrorist group Atomwaffen Division (AWD) in the modern day.

Stormfront, Aryan Nations, and Hammerskin Nation (HSN) link to Beam's Leaderless Resistance. These groups promote lone wolf actions. While nominally decrying violence, the sites praise the man who "practices what he preaches, and who backs up his words with his deeds."Stormfront, while regretting the loss of life, explains how Benjamin Nathaniel Smith's 1999 killing spree was compelled by circumstances. The World Church of the Creator (WCOTC) gave a mixed message, calling Smith "a selfless man who gave his life in the resistance to Jewish/mud tyranny," but noting "the Church does not condone his acts."

Examples of modern-day leaderless resistance/lone-wolf terrorism include:

• 1999 Columbine High School massacre
• 1999 Los Angeles Jewish Community Center shooting
• 1999 murders of Gary Matson and Winfield Mowder
• 2008 Knoxville Unitarian Universalist church shooting
• 2009 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting
• 2011 Norway attacks
• 2012 Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting
• 2014 Overland Park Jewish Community Center shooting
• 2015 Charleston church shooting
• 2015 Lafayette shooting
• 2016 murder of Jo Cox
• 2017 Quebec City mosque shooting
• 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting
• 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings
• 2019 Escondido mosque fire and Poway synagogue shooting
• 2019 El Paso shooting
• 2022 Buffalo shooting

Radical environmentalism

Main article: Radical environmentalism

Further information: Ecotage, Eco-terrorism, and Earth liberation

Leaderless resistance emerged in the environmental movement in 1976 when John Hanna and others as the Environmental Life Force (ELF) (also known now as the original ELF) used explosive and incendiary devices. The group conducted armed actions in northern California and Oregon, later disbanding in 1978 following Hanna's arrest for placing incendiary devices on seven crop-dusters at the Salinas, California airport on May Day, 1977. A decade and a half later this form of guerrilla warfare resurfaced using the same acronym.

The symbol of Earth First!: a Monkey wrench and stone hammer.

In 1980 Earth First! was founded by Dave Foreman and others to confront environmental destruction, primarily of the American West. Inspired by the Edward Abbey novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, Earth First! made use of such techniques as treesitting and treespiking to stop logging companies, as well as other activities targeted towards mining, road construction, suburban development, and energy companies.

The organization was committed to nonviolent ecotage techniques from the group's inception. Others split from the movement in the 1990s, including the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) in 1992, which named itself after the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) which had formed in the 1970s. Three years later in Canada, inspired by the ELF in Europe, the first Earth Liberation direct action occurred, but this time as the Earth Liberation Army (ELA), a similar movement who use ecotage and monkeywrenching as a tool.

A series of actions earned ELF the label of eco-terrorists, including the burning of a ski resort in Vail, Colorado in 1998, and the burning of an SUV dealership in Oregon in 1999. In the same year the ELA made headlines by setting fire to the Vail Resorts in Washington, D.C., causing $12 million in damages. The defendants in that case were later charged in the FBI's "Operation Backfire" with other crimes; this was later named by environmentalists as the Green Scare, alluding to the Red Scare periods of fear over communist infiltration of U.S.

Following the September 11, 2001 attacks several laws were passed increasing the penalty for ecoterrorism, and the U.S. Congress held hearings on the activity of groups such as the ELF. To date no one has been killed as a result of an ELF or ALF action, and both groups forbid harming human or non-human life. It was announced in 2003 that "eco-terrorist" attacks, known as "ecotage", had increased from the ELF, ELA, and the "Environmental Rangers", another name used by activists when engaging in similar activity.

In 2005 the FBI announced that the ELF was America's greatest domestic terrorist threat, responsible for over 1,200 "criminal incidents" amounting to tens of millions of dollars in damage to property. The United States Department of Homeland Security confirmed this with regards to both the ALF and ELF.

Plane Stupid launched in 2005, an attempt to combat the growing airport expansions in the UK by using direct action. A year later the first Camp for Climate Action was held, with 600 people attending a protest called Reclaim Power and then converging on Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire in an attempt to shut it down. There were thirty-eight arrests, with four breaching the fence and the railway line being blocked.

Movements/organizations

• Camp for Climate Action
• Earth First!
• Earth Liberation Army (ELA)
• Earth Liberation Front (ELF)
• Environmental Life Force
• Plane Stupid
• Antifa

Anti-abortion militancy

Anti-abortion militants The Army of God use leaderless resistance as their organizing principle. As of 2009, The Army of God's webpage hosts a reprint of an article entitled "Leaderless Resistance" from a publication called The Seditionist.

Countermeasures

Network analysis in classical setting

Leaderless resistance social networks are potentially vulnerable to social network analysis and its derivative, link analysis. Link analysis of social networks is the fundamental reason for the ongoing legislative push in the U.S. and the European Union for mandatory retention of telecommunication traffic data and for limiting access to anonymous prepaid cellphones, as the stored data contain important network analysis clues.

See also: MAINWAY

Network analysis was successfully used by French Colonel Yves Godard to break the Algerian resistance between 1955 and 1957 and force them to cease their bombing campaigns. The Algerian conflict may be better described as guerrilla in nature rather than leaderless resistance (see Modern Warfare by Col. Roger Trinquier), and this illustrates the weakness of cell-structured insurgents when compared to leaderless ones. The mapping data were obtained by the use of informants and torture and were used to obtain the identities of important individuals in the resistance; these individuals were then assassinated, which disrupted the Algerian resistance networks. The more irreplaceable the individual is in the adversary's network, the greater the damage is done to the network by removing them.

Advantages of leaderless resistance

Traditional organizations leave behind much evidence of their activities, such as money trails, and training and recruitment material. Leaderless resistances, supported more by ideologies than organizations, generally lack such traces. The effects of their operations, as reported by the mass media, act as a sort of messaging and recruitment advertising.

Paul Joosse argues that leaderless resistance movements can avoid the ideological disputes and infighting that plague radical groups. They do this by limiting interaction to the virtual realm.

The internet provides counterinsurgents with further challenges. Individual cells (and even a single person can be a cell) can communicate over the internet, anonymously or semi-anonymously sharing information online, to be found by others through well-known websites. Even when it is legally and technically possible to ascertain who accessed what, it is often practically impossible to discern in a reasonable timeframe who is a real threat and who is just curious, a journalist, or a web crawler.

Despite these advantages, leaderless resistance is often unstable. If the actions are not frequent enough or not successful, the stream of publicity, which serves as the recruiting, motivation, and coordination drives for other cells, diminishes. On the other hand, if the actions are too successful, support groups and other social structures will form that are vulnerable to network analysis.

In fiction

• The 1970 novel A Piece of Resistance, re-published in the US in 2004 under the title Never Surrender by Clive Egleton depicts resistance to a Soviet occupation of England.
• The 1996 novel Unintended Consequences by John Ross portrays a successful rebellion by the American heartland after decades of bullying by faraway Washington.

Capital accumulation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation

Capital accumulation is the dynamic that motivates the pursuit of profit, involving the investment of money or any financial asset with the goal of increasing the initial monetary value of said asset as a financial return whether in the form of profit, rent, interest, royalties or capital gains. The aim of capital accumulation is to create new fixed and working capitals, broaden and modernize the existing ones, grow the material basis of social-cultural activities, as well as constituting the necessary resource for reserve and insurance. The process of capital accumulation forms the basis of capitalism, and is one of the defining characteristics of a capitalist economic system.

Definition

The definition of capital accumulation is subject to controversy and ambiguities, because it could refer to:

• a net addition to existing wealth
• a redistribution of wealth.

Most often, capital accumulation involves both a net addition and a redistribution of wealth, which may raise the question of who really benefits from it most. If more wealth is produced than there was before, a society becomes richer; the total stock of wealth increases. But if some accumulate capital only at the expense of others, wealth is merely shifted from A to B. It is also possible that some accumulate capital much faster than others. When one person is enriched at the expense of another in circumstances that the law sees as unjust it is called unjust enrichment. In principle, it is possible that a few people or organisations accumulate capital and grow richer, although the total stock of wealth of society decreases.

In economics and accounting, capital accumulation is often equated with investment of profit income or savings, especially in real capital goods. The concentration and centralisation of capital are two of the results of such accumulation (see below).

Capital accumulation refers ordinarily to:

• real investment in tangible means of production, such as acquisitions, research and development, etc. that can increase the capital flow.
• investment in financial assets represented on paper, yielding profit, interest, rent, royalties, fees or capital gains.
• investment in non-productive physical assets such as residential real estate or works of art that appreciate in value.

and by extension to:

• human capital, i.e., new education and training increasing the skills of the (potential) labour force which can increase earnings from work.
• social capital, i.e. the wealth and productive capacity that the people in a society hold in common, rather than as individuals or corporations.
• etc.

Both non-financial and financial capital accumulation is usually needed for economic growth, since additional production usually requires additional funds to enlarge the scale of production. Smarter and more productive organization of production can also increase production without increased capital. Capital can be created without increased investment by inventions or improved organization that increase productivity, discoveries of new assets (oil, gold, minerals, etc.), the sale of property, etc.

In modern macroeconomics and econometrics the term capital formation is often used in preference to "accumulation", though the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) refers nowadays to "accumulation". The term is occasionally used in national accounts.

Measurement of accumulation

Accumulation can be measured as the monetary value of investments, the amount of income that is reinvested, or as the change in the value of assets owned (the increase in the value of the capital stock). Using company balance sheets, tax data and direct surveys as a basis, government statisticians estimate total investments and assets for the purpose of national accounts, national balance of payments and flow of funds statistics. Usually, the reserve banks and the Treasury provide interpretations and analysis of this data. Standard indicators include capital formation, gross fixed capital formation, fixed capital, household asset wealth, and foreign direct investment.

Organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, UNCTAD, the World Bank Group, the OECD, and the Bank for International Settlements used national investment data to estimate world trends. The Bureau of Economic Analysis, Eurostat and the Japan Statistical Office provide data on the US, Europe and Japan respectively.

Other useful sources of investment information are business magazines such as Fortune, Forbes, The Economist, Business Week, etc., and various corporate "watchdog" organisations and non-governmental organization publications. A reputable scientific journal is the Review of Income and Wealth. In the case of the US, the "Analytical Perspectives" document (an annex to the yearly budget) provides useful wealth and capital estimates applying to the whole country.

Demand-led growth models

In macroeconomics, following the Harrod–Domar model, the savings ratio (${\displaystyle s}$) and the capital coefficient (${\displaystyle k}$) are regarded as critical factors for accumulation and growth, assuming that all saving is used to finance fixed investment. The rate of growth of the real stock of fixed capital (${\displaystyle K}$) is:

${\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{\Delta }K}{K}=\frac{\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }K}{Y}}{\frac{K}{Y}}=\frac{s}{k}}$

where ${\displaystyle Y}$ is the real national income. If the capital-output ratio or capital coefficient (${\displaystyle k=\frac{K}{Y}}$) is constant, the rate of growth of ${\displaystyle Y}$ is equal to the rate of growth of ${\displaystyle K}$. This is determined by ${\displaystyle s}$ (the ratio of net fixed investment or saving to ${\displaystyle Y}$) and ${\displaystyle k}$.

A country might, for example, save and invest 12% of its national income, and then if the capital coefficient is 4:1 (i.e. $4 billion must be invested to increase the national income by 1 billion) the rate of growth of the national income might be 3% annually. However, as Keynesian economics points out, savings do not automatically mean investment (as liquid funds may be hoarded for example). Investment may also not be investment in fixed capital (see above).

Assuming that the turnover of total production capital invested remains constant, the proportion of total investment which just maintains the stock of total capital, rather than enlarging it, will typically increase as the total stock increases. The growth rate of incomes and net new investments must then also increase, in order to accelerate the growth of the capital stock. Simply put, the bigger capital grows, the more capital it takes to keep it growing and the more markets must expand.

The Harrodian model has a problem of unstable static equilibrium, since if the growth rate is not equal to the Harrodian warranted rate, the production will tend to extreme points (infinite or zero production). The Neo-Kaleckians models do not suffer from the Harrodian instability but fails to deliver a convergence dynamic of the effective capacity utilization to the planned capacity utilization. For its turn, the model of the Sraffian Supermultiplier grants a static stable equilibrium and a convergence to the planned capacity utilization. The Sraffian Supermultiplier model diverges from the Harrodian model since it takes the investment as induced and not as autonomous. The autonomous components in this model are the Autonomous Non-Capacity Creating Expenditures, such as exports, credit led consumption and public spending. The growth rate of these expenditures determines the long run rate of capital accumulation and product growth.

Marxist concept

Marx borrowed the idea of capital accumulation or the concentration of capital from early socialist writers such as Charles Fourier, Louis Blanc, Victor Considerant, and Constantin Pecqueur. In Karl Marx's critique of political economy, capital accumulation is the operation whereby profits are reinvested into the economy, increasing the total quantity of capital. Capital was understood by Marx to be expanding value, that is, in other terms, as a sum of capital, usually expressed in money, that is transformed through human labor into a larger value and extracted as profits. Here, capital is defined essentially as economic or commercial asset value that is used by capitalists to obtain additional value (surplus-value). This requires property relations which enable objects of value to be appropriated and owned, and trading rights to be established.

Over-accumulation and crisis

The Marxist analysis of capital accumulation and the development of capitalism identifies systemic issues with the process that arise with expansion of the productive forces. A crisis of overaccumulation of capital occurs when the rate of profit is greater than the rate of new profitable investment outlets in the economy, arising from increasing productivity from a rising organic composition of capital (higher capital input to labor input ratio). This depresses the wage bill, leading to stagnant wages and high rates of unemployment for the working class while excess profits search for new profitable investment opportunities. Marx believed that this cyclical process would be the fundamental cause for the dissolution of capitalism and its replacement by socialism, which would operate according to a different economic dynamic.

In Marxist thought, socialism would succeed capitalism as the dominant mode of production when the accumulation of capital can no longer sustain itself due to falling rates of profit in real production relative to increasing productivity. A socialist economy would not base production on the accumulation of capital, instead basing production on the criteria of satisfying human needs and directly producing use-values. This concept is encapsulated in the principle of production for use.

Concentration and centralization

According to Marx, capital has the tendency for concentration and centralization in the hands of richest capitalists. Marx explains:

"It is concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into few large capitals.... Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many.... The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities demands, ceteris paribus, on the productiveness of labour, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production which Modern Industry has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages.... It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish."

Rate of accumulation

In Marxian economics, the rate of accumulation is defined as (1) the value of the real net increase in the stock of capital in an accounting period, (2) the proportion of realized surplus-value or profit-income which is reinvested, rather than consumed. This rate can be expressed by means of various ratios between the original capital outlay, the realized turnover, surplus-value or profit and reinvestment's (see, e.g., the writings of the economist Michał Kalecki).

Other things being equal, the greater the amount of profit-income that is disbursed as personal earnings and used for consumption purposes, the lower the savings rate and the lower the rate of accumulation is likely to be. However, earnings spent on consumption can also stimulate market demand and higher investment. This is the cause of endless controversies in economic theory about "how much to spend, and how much to save".

In a boom period of capitalism, the growth of investments is cumulative, i.e. one investment leads to another, leading to a constantly expanding market, an expanding labor force, and an increase in the standard of living for the majority of the people.

In a stagnating, decadent capitalism, the accumulation process is increasingly oriented towards investment on military and security forces, real estate, financial speculation, and luxury consumption. In that case, income from value-adding production will decline in favour of interest, rent and tax income, with as a corollary an increase in the level of permanent unemployment.

As a rule, the larger the total sum of capital invested, the higher the return on investment will be. The more capital one owns, the more capital one can also borrow and reinvest at a higher rate of profit or interest. The inverse is also true, and this is one factor in the widening gap between the rich and the poor.

Ernest Mandel emphasized that the rhythm of capital accumulation and growth depended critically on (1) the division of a society's social product between necessary product and surplus product, and (2) the division of the surplus product between investment and consumption. In turn, this allocation pattern reflected the outcome of competition among capitalists, competition between capitalists and workers, and competition between workers. The pattern of capital accumulation can therefore never be simply explained by commercial factors, it also involved social factors and power relationships.

Circuit of capital accumulation from production

Strictly speaking, capital has accumulated only when realized profit income has been reinvested in capital assets. But the process of capital accumulation in production has, as suggested in the first volume of Marx's Das Kapital, at least seven distinct but linked moments:

• The initial investment of capital (which could be borrowed capital) in means of production and labor power.
• The command over surplus labour and its appropriation.
• The valorisation (increase in value) of capital through production of new outputs.
• The appropriation of the new output produced by employees, containing the added value.
• The realisation of surplus-value through output sales.
• The appropriation of realised surplus-value as (profit) income after deduction of costs.
• The reinvestment of profit income in production.

All of these moments do not refer simply to an economic or commercial process. Rather, they assume the existence of legal, social, cultural and economic power conditions, without which creation, distribution and circulation of the new wealth could not occur. This becomes especially clear when the attempt is made to create a market where none exists, or where people refuse to trade.

In fact Marx argues that the original or primitive accumulation of capital often occurs through violence, plunder, slavery, robbery, extortion and theft. He argues that the capitalist mode of production requires that people be forced to work in value-adding production for someone else, and for this purpose, they must be cut off from sources of income other than selling their labor power.

Simple and expanded reproduction

In volume 2 of Das Kapital, Marx continues the story and shows that, with the aid of bank credit, capital in search of growth can more or less smoothly mutate from one form to another, alternately taking the form of money capital (liquid deposits, securities, etc.), commodity capital (tradeable products, real estate etc.), or production capital (means of production and labor power).

His discussion of the simple and expanded reproduction of the conditions of production offers a more sophisticated model of the parameters of the accumulation process as a whole. At simple reproduction, a sufficient amount is produced to sustain society at the given living standard; the stock of capital stays constant. At expanded reproduction, more product-value is produced than is necessary to sustain society at a given living standard (a surplus product); the additional product-value is available for investments which enlarge the scale and variety of production.

The bourgeois claim there is no economic law according to which capital is necessarily re-invested in the expansion of production, that such depends on anticipated profitability, market expectations and perceptions of investment risk. Such statements only explain the subjective experiences of investors and ignore the objective realities which would influence such opinions. As Marx states in Vol.2, simple reproduction only exists if the variable and surplus capital realized by Dept. 1—producers of means of production—exactly equals that of the constant capital of Dept. 2, producers of articles of consumption (pg 524). Such equilibrium rests on various assumptions, such as a constant labor supply (no population growth). Accumulation does not imply a necessary change in total magnitude of value produced but can simply refer to a change in the composition of an industry (pg. 514).

Ernest Mandel introduced the additional concept of contracted economic reproduction, i.e. reduced accumulation where business operating at a loss outnumbers growing business, or economic reproduction on a decreasing scale, for example due to wars, natural disasters or devalorisation.

Balanced economic growth requires that different factors in the accumulation process expand in appropriate proportions. But markets themselves cannot spontaneously create that balance, in fact what drives business activity is precisely the imbalances between supply and demand: inequality is the motor of growth. This partly explains why the worldwide pattern of economic growth is very uneven and unequal, even although markets have existed almost everywhere for a very long time. Some people argue that it also explains government regulation of market trade and protectionism.

Origins

According to Marx, capital accumulation has a double origin, namely in trade and in expropriation, both of a legal or illegal kind. The reason is that a stock of capital can be increased through a process of exchange or "trading up" but also through directly taking an asset or resource from someone else, without compensation. David Harvey calls this accumulation by dispossession. Marx does not discuss gifts and grants as a source of capital accumulation, nor does he analyze taxation in detail (he could not, as he died even before completing his major book, Das Kapital). Nowadays the tax take is often so large (i.e., 25-40% of GDP) that some authors refer to state capitalism. This gives rise to a proliferation of tax havens to evade tax liability.

The continuation and progress of capital accumulation depends on the removal of obstacles to the expansion of trade, and this has historically often been a violent process. As markets expand, more and more new opportunities develop for accumulating capital, because more and more types of goods and services can be traded in. But capital accumulation may also confront resistance, when people refuse to sell, or refuse to buy (for example a strike by investors or workers, or consumer resistance).

Capital accumulation as social relation

"Accumulation of capital" sometimes also refers in Marxist writings to the reproduction of capitalist social relations (institutions) on a larger scale over time, i.e., the expansion of the size of the proletariat and of the wealth owned by the bourgeoisie.

This interpretation emphasizes that capital ownership, predicated on command over labor, is a social relation: the growth of capital implies the growth of the working class (a "law of accumulation"). In the first volume of Das Kapital Marx had illustrated this idea with reference to Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory of colonisation:

"...Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3,000 persons of the working-class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.” Unhappy Mr. Peel, who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!"

— Das Kapital, vol. 1, ch. 33

In the third volume of Das Kapital, Marx refers to the "fetishism of capital" reaching its highest point with interest-bearing capital, because now capital seems to grow of its own accord without anybody doing anything. In this case,

"The relations of capital assume their most externalised and most fetish-like form in interest-bearing capital. We have here ${\displaystyle M-M^{\prime }}$, money creating more money, self-expanding value, without the process that effectuates these two extremes. In merchant's capital, ${\displaystyle M-C-M^{\prime }}$, there is at least the general form of the capitalistic movement, although it confines itself solely to the sphere of circulation, so that profit appears merely as profit derived from alienation; but it is at least seen to be the product of a social relation, not the product of a mere thing. (...) This is obliterated in ${\displaystyle M-M^{\prime }}$, the form of interest-bearing capital. (...) The thing (money, commodity, value) is now capital even as a mere thing, and capital appears as a mere thing. The result of the entire process of reproduction appears as a property inherent in the thing itself. It depends on the owner of the money, i.e., of the commodity in its continually exchangeable form, whether he wants to spend it as money or loan it out as capital. In interest-bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish, self-expanding value, money generating money, are brought out in their pure state and in this form it no longer bears the birth-marks of its origin. The social relation is consummated in the relation of a thing, of money, to itself.—Instead of the actual transformation of money into capital, we see here only form without content."

— "Das Kapital", vol.3, ch. 24

Markets with social influence

Product recommendations and information about past purchases have been shown to influence consumers choices significantly whether it is for music, movie, book, technological, and other type of products. Social influence often induces a rich-get-richer phenomenon (Matthew effect) where popular products tend to become even more popular.