Landed gentry

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

 

Mr and Mrs Andrews (c. 1750) by Thomas Gainsborough, a couple from the landed gentry, a marriage alliance between two local landowning families – one gentry, one trade. National Gallery, London.

The landed gentry, or simply the "gentry", is a largely historical British social class consisting of landowners who could live entirely from rental income, or at least had a country estate. While distinct from, and socially below, the British peerage their economic base in land was often similar, although in fact some of the landed gentry were wealthier than some peers, and many gentry were close relatives of peers. It is the British element of the wider European class of gentry. With or without nobel title, owning rural land estates often brought with it the legal rights of lord of the manor, and the less formal name or title of "squire", in Scotland laird.

Generally lands passed by primogeniture, and the inheritances of daughters and younger sons were in cash or stocks, and relatively small. Typically they farmed some of their land, as well as exploiting timber and owning mills and other sources of income, but leased most of the land to tenant farmers. Many heads of families also had careers in politics or the military, and the younger sons of the gentry provided a high proportion of the clergy, military officers, and lawyers.

The decline of the gentry largely stemmed from the 1870s agricultural depression; however, there are still many hereditary gentry in the UK to this day.

The designation "landed gentry" originally referred exclusively to members of the upper class who were landlords but also commoners in the British sense – that is, they did not hold peerages – but usage became more fluid over time. Similar or analogous social systems of landed gentry also sprang up in countries that maintained a colonial system; the term is employed in many British colonies such as the Colony of Virginia and some parts of India. By the late 19th century, the term was also applied to peers such as the Duke of Westminster who lived on landed estates.

Successful burghers often used their accumulated wealth to buy country estates, with the aim of establishing themselves as landed gentry.

The book series Burke's Landed Gentry recorded the members of this class.

Groupings

The term gentry, some of whom were landed, included four separate groups in England:

1. Baronets: a hereditary title, originally created in the 14th century and revived by King James in 1611, giving the holder the right to be addressed as Sir.
2. Knights: originally a military rank, this status was increasingly awarded to civilians as a reward for service to the Crown. Holders have the right to be addressed as Sir, as are baronets, but unlike baronet, the title of knight is not hereditary.
3. Esquires: originally men aspiring to knighthood, they were the principal attendants on a knight. After the Middle Ages the title of Esquire (Esq.) became an honour that could be conferred by the Crown, and by custom the holders of certain offices (such as barristers, lord mayor/mayor, justices of the peace, and higher officer ranks in the armed services) were deemed to be Esquires.
4. Gentlemen: possessors of a social status recognised as a separate title by the Statute of Additions of 1413. Generally men of high birth or rank, good social standing and wealth, and who did not need to work for a living, were considered gentlemen.

All of the first group, and very many of the last three, were "armigerous", having obtained the right to carry a coat of arms. In many Continental societies, this was exclusively the right of the nobility, and at least the upper clergy. In France this was originally true but many of the landed gentry, burghers and wealthy merchants were also allowed to register coats of arms and become "armigerous".

Origin of the term

The term landed gentry, although originally used to mean nobility, came to be used of the lesser nobility in England around 1540. Once identical, eventually nobility and landed gentry became complementary, in the sense that their definitions began to fill in parts of what the other lacked. The historical term gentry by itself, so Peter Coss argues, is a construct that historians have applied loosely to rather different societies. Any particular model may not fit a specific society, yet a single definition nevertheless remains desirable. The phrase landed gentry referred in particular to the untitled members of the landowning upper class. The most stable and respected form of wealth has historically been land, and great prestige and political qualifications were (and to a lesser extent still are) attached to land ownership.

Development

The primary meaning of "landed gentry" encompasses those members of the land-owning classes who are not members of the peerage. It was an informal designation: one belonged to the landed gentry if other members of that class accepted one as such. A newly rich man who wished his family to join the gentry (and they nearly all did so wish), was expected not only to buy a country house and estate, but often also to sever financial ties with the business which had made him wealthy in order to cleanse his family of the "taint of trade", depending somewhat on what that business was. However, during the 18th and 19th centuries, as the new rich of the Industrial Revolution became more and more numerous and politically powerful, this expectation was gradually relaxed. From the late 16th-century, the gentry emerged as the class most closely involved in politics, the military and law. It provided the bulk of Members of Parliament, with many gentry families maintaining political control in a certain locality over several generations (see List of political families in the United Kingdom). Owning land was a prerequisite for suffrage (the civil right to vote) in county constituencies until the Reform Act 1832; until then, Parliament was largely in the hands of the landowning class.

Members of the landed gentry were upper class (not middle class); this was a highly prestigious status. Particular prestige was attached to those who inherited landed estates over a number of generations. These are often described as being from "old" families. Titles are often considered central to the upper class, but this is certainly not universally the case. For example, both Captain Mark Phillips and Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence, the first and second husbands of the Princess Anne, lacked any rank of peerage, yet could scarcely be considered anything other than upper class.

The agricultural sector's middle class, on the other hand, comprise the larger tenant farmers, who rent land from the landowners, and yeoman farmers, who were defined as "a person qualified by possessing free land of forty shillings annual [feudal] value, and who can serve on juries and vote for a Knight of the Shire. He is sometimes described as a small landowner, a farmer of the middle classes." Anthony Richard Wagner, Richmond Herald wrote that "a Yeoman would not normally have less than 100 acres" (40 hectares) and in social status is one step down from the gentry, but above, say, a husbandman. So while yeoman farmers owned enough land to support a comfortable lifestyle, they nevertheless farmed it themselves and were excluded from the "landed gentry" because they worked for a living, and were thus "in trade" as it was termed. Apart from a few "honourable" professions connected with the governing elite (the clergy of the established church, the officer corps of the British Armed Forces, the diplomatic and civil services, the bar or the judiciary), such occupation was considered demeaning by the upper classes, particularly by the 19th century, when the earlier mercantile endeavours of younger sons were increasingly discontinued. Younger sons, who could not expect to inherit the family estate, were instead urged into professions of state service. It became a pattern in many families that while the eldest son would inherit the estate and enter politics, the second son would join the army, the third son go into law, and the fourth son join the church.

Landed gentry and nobility

Persons who are closely related to peers are also more correctly described as gentry than as nobility, since the latter term, in the modern British Isles, is synonymous with "peer". However, this popular usage of 'nobility' omits the distinction between titled and untitled nobility. The titled nobility in Britain are the peers of the realm, whereas the untitled nobility comprise those here described as gentry.

David Cannadine wrote that the gentry's lack of titles "did not matter, for it was obvious to contemporaries that the landed gentry were all for practical purposes the equivalent of continental nobles, with their hereditary estates, their leisured lifestyle, their social pre-eminence, and their armorial bearings". British armigerous families who hold no title of nobility are represented, together with those who hold titles through the College of Arms, by the Commission and Association for Armigerous Families of Great Britain at CILANE.

Burke's Landed Gentry and Burke's Peerage

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the names and families of those with titles (specifically peers and baronets, less often including those with the non-hereditary title of knight) were often listed in books or manuals known as "Peerages", "Baronetages", or combinations of these categories, such as the "Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage, and Companionage". As well as listing genealogical information, these books often also included details of the right of a given family to a coat of arms. They were comparable to the Almanach de Gotha in continental Europe. Novelist Jane Austen, whose family were not quite members of the landed gentry class, summarised the appeal of these works, particularly for those included in them:

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed.

— Jane Austen, Persuasion, chapter 1, page 1

Equally wryly, Oscar Wilde referred to the Peerage as "the best thing in fiction the English have ever done".

In the 1830s, one peerage publisher, John Burke, expanded his market and his readership by publishing a similar volume for people without titles, which was called A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland, enjoying territorial possessions or high official rank, popularly known as Burke's Commoners. Burke's Commoners was published in four volumes from 1833 to 1838.

Typical entry in Burke's Landed Gentry (from Volume 2 of the 1898 edition).

Subsequent editions were re-titled A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry; or, Commons of Great Britain and Ireland or Burke's Landed Gentry.

Burke's Landed Gentry continued to appear at regular intervals throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, driven, in the 19th century, principally by the energy and readable style of the founder's son and successor as editor, Sir John Bernard Burke (who generally favoured the romantic and picturesque in genealogy over the mundane, or strictly correct).

A review of the 1952 edition in Time noted:

Landed Gentry used to limit itself to owners of domains that could properly be called "stately" (i.e. more than 500 acres or 200 hectares). Now it has lowered the property qualification to 200 acres (0.81 km²) for all British families whose pedigrees have been "notable" for three generations. Even so, almost half of the 5,000 families listed in the new volume are in there because their forefathers were: they themselves have no land left. Their estates are mere street addresses, like that of the Molineux-Montgomeries, formerly of Garboldisham Old Hall, now of No. 14 Malton Avenue, Haworth.

The last three-volume edition of Burke's Landed Gentry was published between 1965 and 1972. A new series, under new owners, was begun in 2001 on a regional plan, starting with Burke's Landed Gentry; The Kingdom in Scotland. However, these volumes no longer limit themselves to people with any connection, ancestral or otherwise, with land, and they contain much less information, particularly on family history, than the 19th and 20th century editions.

The popularity of Burke's Landed Gentry gave currency to the expression Landed Gentry as a description of the untitled upper classes in England (although the book also included families in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, where, however, social structures were rather different).

Families were arranged in alphabetical order by surname, and each family article was headed with the surname and the name of their landed property, e.g. "Capron of Southwick Hall". There was then a paragraph on the owner of the property, with his coat of arms illustrated, and all his children and remoter male-line descendants also listed, each with full names and details of birth, marriage, death, and any matters tending to enhance their social prestige, such as school and university education, military rank and regiment, Church of England cures held, and other honours and socially approved involvements. Cross references were included to other families in Burke's Landed Gentry or in Burke's Peerage and Baronetage: thus encouraging browsing through connections. Professional details were not usually mentioned unless they conferred some social status, such as those of civil service and colonial officials, judges and barristers.

After the section dealing with the current owner of the property, there usually appeared a section entitled Lineage which listed, not only ancestors of the owner, but (so far as known) every male-line descendant of those ancestors, thus including many people in the ranks of the "Landed Gentry" families who had never owned an acre in their lives but who might share in the status of their eponymous kin as connected, however remotely to the landed gentry or to a county family.

Contemporary status

The Great Depression of British Agriculture at the end of the 19th century, together with the introduction in the 20th century of increasingly heavy levels of taxation on inherited wealth, put an end to agricultural land as the primary source of wealth for the upper classes. Many estates were sold or broken up, and this trend was accelerated by the introduction of protection for agricultural tenancies, encouraging outright sales, from the mid-20th century.

So devastating was this for the ranks formerly identified as being of the landed gentry that Burke's Landed Gentry began, in the 20th century, to include families historically in this category who had ceased to own their ancestral lands. The focus of those who remained in this class shifted from the lands or estates themselves, to the stately home or "family seat" which was in many cases retained without the surrounding lands. Many of these buildings were purchased for the nation and preserved as monuments to the lifestyles of their former owners (who sometimes remained in part of the house as lessees or tenants) by the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. The National Trust, which had originally concentrated on open landscapes rather than buildings, accelerated its country house acquisition programme during and after the Second World War, partly because of the widespread destruction of country houses in the 20th century by owners who could no longer afford to maintain them. Those who retained their property usually had to supplement their incomes from sources other than the land, sometimes by opening their properties to the public.

In the 21st century, the term "landed gentry" is still used, as the landowning class still exists, but it increasingly refers more to historic than to current landed wealth or property in a family. Moreover, the deference which was once automatically given to members of this class by most British people has almost completely dissipated as its wealth, political power and social influence have declined, and other social figures such as celebrities have grown to take their place in the public's interest.

Corporate republic

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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

A corporate republic is a theoretical form of government run primarily like a business, involving a board of directors and executives, in which all aspects of society are privatized by a single, or small groups of companies. The ultimate goal of this state is to increase the wealth of its shareholders, and the government acknowledges its status as a corporation. Utilities, including hospitals, schools, the military, and the police force, would be privatized. Social welfare is carried out by corporations in the form of pensions and benefits to employees, instead of the state.

Corporate republics do not exist officially in modern history. Modern competition laws and the development of modern nation-states prevent a company from gaining or being granted such amounts of political power. Historical states, such as post-classical Florence and the East India Company, may be described as corporate republics. Political scientists have also considered state socialist governments (criticised as state capitalist) to be forms of corporate republics, with the state assuming full control of all economic and political life and establishing a monopoly on everything within national boundaries, effectively making the state itself equatable to a giant corporation.

Corporate republics are used in works of science fiction or political commentary as a warning of the perceived dangers of capitalism. In such works, they usually arise when one or more vastly powerful corporations depose a government either over an extended time period via regulatory capture or swiftly in a coup d'état.

Examples

The typical examples of corporate republics throughout history are typically the imperial East India Companies and other such chartered companies during the early modern era, such as the VOC, or the Honorable East India Company. Lesser known examples include the International Association of the Congo (the predecessor to the Congo Free State), the British South Africa Company, and the Lanfang Republic.

Republic of Florence

The maritime city-state of Florence in northwestern Italy is argued to be a corporate republic based on two reasons. Like most of the merchant republics of Italy, Florence's social and economic life was dominated by vast guilds that regulate and control key industries in the city. The key difference between Florence and other contemporary republics like Venice was that the city was administered by a council, the Signoria of Florence, whose membership was restricted to seven major guilds of Florence. But due to the rigging of the Signoria electoral lottery system, members were typically those of influential families, making the republic an aristocracy. This was exacerbated by the legal restriction that elected offices are restricted to the family members of previous holders, which heralded the rise of the Medicis as a dynasty, legitimized by the 1533 ducal crowning of Alessandro de Medici, ending the Republic.

British East India Company

Starting in 1757 after the Battle of Plassey, the Company under Major-General Robert Clive was able to enthrone a puppet ruler in Bengal and was awarded the diwani, the right to collect revenue in Bengal and Bihar. Under subsequent Governor-Generals and their Presidency Armies, the Company was able to establish indirect British Rule in the Indian subcontinent until the revolt by the Sepoys (native Indian mercenaries) in 1857 forced the British Government to establish direct colonial rule in India.

Dutch East India Company

Another classic example of a corporatocracy, the Dutch East India Company (aka the VOC) was chartered by the Dutch Republic in order to monopolize trade in the East Indies and ensure the collective prosperity of the Republic. With the powers to conclude treaties, wage wars, imprison and execute convicts, strike its own coins, and establish colonies, the VOC created a vast corporate empire that set the standards for future transnational corporations.

In popular culture

• Robocop: Omni Consumer Products (OCP) is a modern example of the longstanding trope of the evil corporate republic in science fiction.
• In the turn-based strategy game Civilization: Call to Power, a corporate republic is one of the futuristic government types available in the Genetic Age.
• Shinra: one of the antagonists in the RPG Final Fantasy VII could be considered an example of a corporate republic due to its encompassing scope and massive power in planet affairs.
• Max Barry's 2003 novel Jennifer Government portrays a world in which everything but the courts, police and military functions of government have been privatized, as has actually been proposed by minarchist libertarians.
• Continuum: A new system of corporate republics, the North American Union, dominates a dystopian future, instituting a high-surveillance, technologically advanced police state and removing certain social freedoms, specifically criticism of the "Corporate Congress".
• Prodigy, by Marie Lu: There is a government in which everything is controlled by 4 large companies: Cloud Corp, Meditech, DesCon Corp, and Evergreen Enterprises.
• The Teladi Space Company from the X Computer Game Series is possibly another example of a corporate republic and is dominated by a near-religious lifestyle of profiteering. The Company is led by a mysterious figure only known as Ceo.
• République: A point and click adventure through a secret surveillance republic.
• The nation of Cascadia is ruled by an alliance of corporations called the Conglomerate in the videogame Mirror's Edge Catalyst.
• In The Outer Worlds, the Halcyon Colony is controlled by a collection of corporations known as 'The Board'.

Rent-seeking

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking 

In public-choice theory, as well as in economics, rent-seeking means seeking to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking results in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth-creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, and potential national decline.

Attempts at capture of regulatory agencies to gain a coercive monopoly can result in advantages for rent-seekers in a market while imposing disadvantages on their incorrupt competitors. This is one of many possible forms of rent-seeking behavior.

Description

The term rent-seeking was coined by the British 19th-century economist David Ricardo, but only became the subject of durable interest among economists and political scientists more than a century later after the publication of two influential papers on the topic by Gordon Tullock in 1967, and Anne Krueger in 1976. The word "rent" does not refer specifically to payment on a lease but rather to Adam Smith's division of incomes into profit, wage, and rent. The origin of the term refers to gaining control of land or other natural resources.

Georgist economic theory describes rent-seeking in terms of land rent, where the value of land largely comes from government infrastructure and services (e.g. roads, public schools, maintenance of peace and order, etc.) and the community in general, rather than from the actions of any given landowner, in their role as mere titleholder. This role must be separated from the role of a property developer, which need not be the same person.

Rent-seeking is an attempt to obtain economic rent (i.e., the portion of income paid to a factor of production in excess of what is needed to keep it employed in its current use) by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth. Rent-seeking implies extraction of uncompensated value from others without making any contribution to productivity. The classic example of rent-seeking, according to Robert Shiller, is that of a feudal lord who installs a chain across a river that flows through his land and then hires a collector to charge passing boats a fee to lower the chain. There is nothing productive about the chain or the collector. The lord has made no improvements to the river and is not adding value in any way, directly or indirectly, except for himself. All he is doing is finding a way to make money from something that used to be free.

In many market-driven economies, much of the competition for rents is legal, regardless of harm it may do to an economy. However, some rent-seeking competition is illegal—such as bribery or corruption.

Rent-seeking is distinguished in theory from profit-seeking, in which entities seek to extract value by engaging in mutually beneficial transactions. Profit-seeking in this sense is the creation of wealth, while rent-seeking is "profiteering" by using social institutions, such as the power of the state, to redistribute wealth among different groups without creating new wealth. In a practical context, income obtained through rent-seeking may contribute to profits in the standard, accounting sense of the word.

Tullock paradox

The Tullock paradox is the apparent paradox, described by economist Gordon Tullock, on the low costs of rent-seeking relative to the gains from rent-seeking.

The paradox is that rent-seekers wanting political favors can bribe politicians at a cost much lower than the value of the favor to the rent-seeker. For instance, a rent seeker who hopes to gain a billion dollars from a particular political policy may need to bribe politicians only to the tune of ten million dollars, which is about 1% of the gain to the rent-seeker. Luigi Zingales frames it by asking, "Why is there so little money in politics?" because a naive model of political bribery and/or campaign spending should result in beneficiaries of government subsidies being willing to spend an amount up to the value of the subsidies themselves, when in fact only a small fraction of that is spent.

Possible explanations

Several possible explanations have been offered for the Tullock paradox:

1. Voters may punish politicians who take large bribes, or live lavish lifestyles. This makes it hard for politicians to demand large bribes from rent-seekers.
2. Competition between different politicians eager to offer favors to rent-seekers may bid down the cost of rent-seeking.
3. Lack of trust between the rent-seekers and the politicians, due to the inherently underhanded nature of the deal and the unavailability of both legal recourse and reputational incentives to enforce compliance, pushes down the price that politicians can demand for favors.
4. Rent-seekers can use a small part of the benefit gained to make contributions to the politicians who provided enabling legislation.

Examples

Antichristus, a woodcut by Lucas Cranach the Elder, of the pope using the temporal power to grant authority to a ruler contributing generously to the Catholic Church

An example of rent-seeking in a modern economy is spending money on lobbying for government subsidies in order to be given wealth that has already been created, or to impose regulations on competitors, in order to increase market share. Another example of rent-seeking is the limiting of access to lucrative occupations, as by medieval guilds or modern state certifications and licensures. Taxi licensing is a textbook example of rent-seeking. To the extent that the issuing of licenses constrains overall supply of taxi services (rather than ensuring competence or quality), forbidding competition from other vehicles for hire renders the (otherwise consensual) transaction of taxi service a forced transfer of part of the fee, from customers to taxi business proprietors.

The concept of rent-seeking would also apply to corruption of bureaucrats who solicit and extract "bribe" or "rent" for applying their legal but discretionary authority for awarding legitimate or illegitimate benefits to clients. For example, tax officials may take bribes for lessening the tax burden of the taxpayers.

Regulatory capture is a related term for the collusion between firms and the government agencies assigned to regulate them, which is seen as enabling extensive rent-seeking behavior, especially when the government agency must rely on the firms for knowledge about the market. Studies of rent-seeking focus on efforts to capture special monopoly privileges such as manipulating government regulation of free enterprise competition. The term monopoly privilege rent-seeking is an often-used label for this particular type of rent-seeking. Often-cited examples include a lobby that seeks economic regulations such as tariff protection, quotas, subsidies, or extension of copyright law. Anne Krueger concludes that "empirical evidence suggests that the value of rents associated with import licenses can be relatively large, and it has been shown that the welfare cost of quantitative restrictions equals that of their tariff equivalents plus the value of the rents".

Economists such as the chair of British financial regulator the Financial Services Authority Lord Adair Turner have argued that innovation in the financial industry is often a form of rent-seeking.

Development of theory

The phenomenon of rent-seeking in connection with monopolies was first formally identified in 1967 by Gordon Tullock.

A 2013 study by the World Bank showed that the incentives for policy-makers to engage in rent-provision is conditional on the institutional incentives they face, with elected officials in stable high-income democracies the least likely to indulge in such activities vis-à-vis entrenched bureaucrats and/or their counterparts in young and quasi-democracies.

Criticism

Critics of the concept point out that, in practice, there may be difficulties distinguishing between beneficial profit-seeking and detrimental rent-seeking.

Often a further distinction is drawn between rents obtained legally through political power and the proceeds of private common-law crimes such as fraud, embezzlement and theft. This viewpoint sees "profit" as obtained consensually, through a mutually agreeable transaction between two entities (buyer and seller), and the proceeds of common-law crime non-consensually, by force or fraud inflicted on one party by another. Rent, by contrast with these two, is obtained when a third party deprives one party of access to otherwise accessible transaction opportunities, making nominally "consensual" transactions a rent-collection opportunity for the third party.

Possible consequences

From a theoretical standpoint, the moral hazard of rent-seeking can be considerable. If "buying" a favorable regulatory environment seems cheaper than building more efficient production, a firm may choose the former option, reaping incomes entirely unrelated to any contribution to total wealth or well-being. This results in a sub-optimal allocation of resources – money spent on lobbyists and counter-lobbyists rather than on research and development, on improved business practices, on employee training, or on additional capital goods – which slows economic growth. Claims that a firm is rent-seeking therefore often accompany allegations of government corruption, or the undue influence of special interests.

Rent-seeking can prove costly to economic growth; high rent-seeking activity makes more rent-seeking attractive because of the natural and growing returns that one sees as a result of rent-seeking. Thus organizations value rent-seeking over productivity. In this case there are very high levels of rent-seeking with very low levels of output. Rent-seeking may grow at the cost of economic growth because rent-seeking by the state can easily hurt innovation. Ultimately, public rent-seeking hurts the economy the most because innovation drives economic growth.

Government agents may initiate rent-seeking – such agents soliciting bribes or other favors from the individuals or firms that stand to gain from having special economic privileges, which opens up the possibility of exploitation of the consumer. It has been shown that rent-seeking by bureaucracy can push up the cost of production of public goods. It has also been shown that rent-seeking by tax officials may cause loss in revenue to the public exchequer.

Mançur Olson traced the historic consequences of rent seeking in The Rise and Decline of Nations. As a country becomes increasingly dominated by organized interest groups, it loses economic vitality and falls into decline. Olson argued that countries that have a collapse of the political regime and the interest groups that have coalesced around it can radically improve productivity and increase national income because they start with a clean slate in the aftermath of the collapse. An example of this is Japan after World War Two. But new coalitions form over time, once again shackling society in order to redistribute wealth and income to themselves. However, social and technological changes have allowed new enterprises and groups to emerge.

A study by Laband and John Sophocleus in 1988 estimated that rent-seeking had decreased total income in the US by 45 percent. Both Dougan and Tullock affirm the difficulty of finding the cost of rent-seeking. Rent-seekers of government-provided benefits will in turn spend up to that amount of benefit in order to gain those benefits, in the absence of, for example, the collective-action constraints highlighted by Olson. Similarly, taxpayers lobby for loopholes and will spend the value of those loopholes, again, to obtain those loopholes (again absent collective-action constraints). The total of wastes from rent-seeking is then the total amount from the government-provided benefits and instances of tax avoidance (valuing benefits and avoided taxes at zero). Dougan says that the "total rent-seeking costs equal the sum of aggregate current income plus the net deficit of the public sector".

Mark Gradstein writes about rent-seeking in relation to public goods provision, and says that public goods are determined by rent seeking or lobbying activities. But the question is whether private provision with free-riding incentives or public provision with rent-seeking incentives is more inefficient in its allocation.

The Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has argued that rent-seeking contributes significantly to income inequality in the United States through lobbying for government policies that let the wealthy and powerful get income, not as a reward for creating wealth, but by grabbing a larger share of the wealth that would otherwise have been produced without their effort. Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva have analyzed international economies and their changes in tax rates to conclude that much of income inequality is a result of rent-seeking among wealthy tax payers.

Plutocracy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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

A plutocracy (Greek: πλοῦτος, ploutos, 'wealth' + κράτος, kratos, 'power') or plutarchy is a society that is ruled or controlled by people of great wealth or income. The first known use of the term in English dates from 1631. Unlike systems such as democracy, liberalism, socialism, communism or anarchism, plutocracy is not rooted in an established political philosophy.

Usage

The term plutocracy is generally used as a pejorative to describe or warn against an undesirable condition. Throughout history, political thinkers such as Winston Churchill, 19th-century French sociologist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville, 19th-century Spanish monarchist Juan Donoso Cortés and today Noam Chomsky have condemned plutocrats for ignoring their social responsibilities, using their power to serve their own purposes and thereby increasing poverty and nurturing class conflict, corrupting societies with greed and hedonism.

Examples

Historic examples of plutocracies include the Roman Empire, some city-states in Ancient Greece, the civilization of Carthage, the Italian city-states/merchant republics of Venice, Florence, pre-French Revolution Kingdom of France, Genoa, and the pre-World War II Empire of Japan (the zaibatsu). According to Noam Chomsky and Jimmy Carter, the modern United States resembles a plutocracy though with democratic forms. A former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, also believed the US to be developing into a plutocracy.

One modern, formal example of a plutocracy, according to some critics, is the City of London. The City (also called the Square Mile of ancient London, corresponding to the modern financial district, an area of about 2.5 km²) has a unique electoral system for its local administration, separate from the rest of London. More than two-thirds of voters are not residents, but rather representatives of businesses and other bodies that occupy premises in the City, with votes distributed according to their numbers of employees. The principal justification for this arrangement is that most of the services provided by the City of London Corporation are used by the businesses in the City. In fact about 450,000 non-residents constitute the city's day-time population, far outnumbering the City's 7,000 residents.

United States

Some modern historians, politicians, and economists argue that the United States was effectively plutocratic for at least part of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era periods between the end of the Civil War until the beginning of the Great Depression. President Theodore Roosevelt became known as the "trust-buster" for his aggressive use of United States antitrust law, through which he managed to break up such major combinations as the largest railroad and Standard Oil, the largest oil company. According to historian David Burton, "When it came to domestic political concerns TR's bête noire was the plutocracy." In his autobiographical account of taking on monopolistic corporations as president, TR recounted

…we had come to the stage where for our people what was needed was a real democracy; and of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.

The Sherman Antitrust Act had been enacted in 1890, with large industries reaching monopolistic or near-monopolistic levels of market concentration and financial capital increasingly integrating corporations, a handful of very wealthy heads of large corporations began to exert increasing influence over industry, public opinion and politics after the Civil War. Money, according to contemporary progressive and journalist Walter Weyl, was "the mortar of this edifice", with ideological differences among politicians fading and the political realm becoming "a mere branch in a still larger, integrated business. The state, which through the party formally sold favors to the large corporations, became one of their departments."

In his book The Conscience of a Liberal, in a section entitled The Politics of Plutocracy, economist Paul Krugman says plutocracy took hold because of three factors: at that time, the poorest quarter of American residents (African-Americans and non-naturalized immigrants) were ineligible to vote, the wealthy funded the campaigns of politicians they preferred, and vote buying was "feasible, easy and widespread", as were other forms of electoral fraud such as ballot-box stuffing and intimidation of the other party's voters.

The U.S. instituted progressive taxation in 1913, but according to Shamus Khan, in the 1970s, elites used their increasing political power to lower their taxes, and today successfully employ what political scientist Jeffrey Winters calls "the income defense industry" to greatly reduce their taxes.

In 1998, Bob Herbert of The New York Times referred to modern American plutocrats as "The Donor Class" (list of top donors) and defined the class, for the first time, as "a tiny group – just one-quarter of 1 percent of the population – and it is not representative of the rest of the nation. But its money buys plenty of access."

Post World War II

In modern times, the term is sometimes used pejoratively to refer to societies rooted in state-corporate capitalism or which prioritize the accumulation of wealth over other interests. According to Kevin Phillips, author and political strategist to Richard Nixon, the United States is a plutocracy in which there is a "fusion of money and government."

Chrystia Freeland, author of Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, says that the present trend towards plutocracy occurs because the rich feel that their interests are shared by society.

You don't do this in a kind of chortling, smoking your cigar, conspiratorial thinking way. You do it by persuading yourself that what is in your own personal self-interest is in the interests of everybody else. So you persuade yourself that, actually, government services, things like spending on education, which is what created that social mobility in the first place, need to be cut so that the deficit will shrink, so that your tax bill doesn't go up. And what I really worry about is, there is so much money and so much power at the very top, and the gap between those people at the very top and everybody else is so great, that we are going to see social mobility choked off and society transformed.

— Chrystia Freeland, NPR

When the Nobel-Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote the 2011 Vanity Fair magazine article entitled "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%", the title and content supported Stiglitz's claim that the United States is increasingly ruled by the wealthiest 1%. Some researchers have said the US may be drifting towards a form of oligarchy, as individual citizens have less impact than economic elites and organized interest groups upon public policy. A study conducted by political scientists Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin Page (Northwestern University), which was released in April 2014, stated that their "analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts". Gilens and Page do not characterize the U. S. as an "oligarchy" or "plutocracy" per se; however, they do apply the concept of "civil oligarchy" as used by Jeffrey A. Winters with respect to the US.

Russia

Further information: Russian oligarch

Propaganda term

In the political jargon and propaganda of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and the Communist International, Western democratic states were referred to as plutocracies, with the implication being that a small number of extremely wealthy individuals were controlling the countries and holding them to ransom. Plutocracy replaced democracy and capitalism as the principal fascist term for the United States and Great Britain during the Second World War. For the Nazis, the term was often a code word for "the Jews".

Causation

Reasons why a plutocracy develops are complex. In a nation that is experiencing rapid economic growth, income inequality will tend to increase as the rate of return on innovation increases. In other scenarios, plutocracy may develop when a country is collapsing due to resource depletion as the elites attempt to hoard the diminishing wealth or expand debts to maintain stability, which will tend to enrich creditors and financiers. Economists have also suggested that free market economies tend to drift into monopolies and oligopolies because of the greater efficiency of larger businesses (see economies of scale).

Other nations may become plutocratic through kleptocracy or rent-seeking.

Anti-corporate activism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-corporate_activism 

Anti-corporate activism is the idea that big business corporations are a detrimental to the public good and to the democratic process.

Disagreements with corporations

Activists argue that corporate globalization corresponds to a displacement in the transition from a highly industrial-based economy to one where trade development is connected to the financial deregulation on the basis of circulation of capital. An increasing number of diverse societies have changed to free-market structure, which leads to displacement. Due to this expansion, market-governed regulation has outrun the grasps of the state. Opponents of corporate globalization hold that the government needs greater power to control the markets, that income inequality is increasing, and that corporations have gained too much power. As part of the political left, activists against corporate power and influence support a decreased income gap and improved economical equity.

Counter-arguments

The defenders of corporations such as Ron Arnold highlight that governments do legislate in ways that restrict the actions of corporations (see Sarbanes-Oxley Act) and that lawbreaking companies and executives are routinely caught and punished, usually in the form of monetary fines.

In addition, from the perspective of business ethics it is argued that chief executives are not inherently more evil than anyone else and so are no more likely to attempt unethical or illegal activity than the general population. Large multi-national corporations do continue to attempt to erode governmental regulations through in-house or contracted lobbyists who work closely with State and Federal legislators. So as corporate laws continue to lean in their favor, corporate members have improved portals to drive up company profits.

Alliances

Anti-corporate activists may often ally themselves with other activists, such as environmental activists or animal-rights activists in their condemnation of the practices of modern organizations such as the McDonald's Corporation and forestry company Gunns Limited.

In recent years, the number of books (Naomi Klein's 2000 No Logo being a well-known example) and films on the subject has increased such as The Corporation which have to a certain extent supported anti-corporate politics.

Art activism

An artist critical of sociopolitical agendas in business is conceptualist Hans Haacke.

Anti-corporate web sites

In June 2008, Condé Nast Publications released an article entitled "The Secret Seven" which it listed the top seven anti-corporate web sites which include: WikiLeaks, Mini-Microsoft, Wal-Mart Watch, HomeOwners for Better Building, Brenda Priddy and Company (automotive spy photos) and finally Apple Rumor Sites AppleInsider and MacRumors.

New digital media

Media and digital networking have become important features of modern anti-corporate movements. The speed, flexibility, and ability to reach a massive potential audience has provided a technological foundation for contemporary network social movement structure. As a result, communities and interpersonal connections have transformed. The internet supports and strengthens local ties, but also facilitates new patterns for political activity. Activists have used this medium to operate between both the online and offline political spectrums.

Email lists, web pages, and open editing software have allowed for changes within an organization. Now, actions are planned, information is shared, documents are produced by multiple people, and all of this can be done despite differences in distance. This has led to increased growth in digital collaboration. Activists can presently build ties between diverse topics, open the distribution of information, decentralize and increase collaboration, and self-direct networks.

Rise of anti-corporate globalization

Close to fifty thousand people protested the WTO meetings in Seattle on November 30, 1999. Labor, economic, and environmental activists succeeded in disrupting and closing the meetings due to their disapproval of corporate globalization. This event became a symbol as anti-globalization networks emerged and became strengthened. The experiences from the protests were distributed throughout the internet via emails and websites. Anti-corporate globalization movements have also expanded through the organization of mass mobilizations, including the anti-WTO protests, which were remarkably successful. In the United States, these movements reemerged after less attention was given to the war in Iraq, resulting in an increase in mass mobilizations.

Anarchism and religion

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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

Anarchists have traditionally been skeptical of or vehemently opposed to organized religion. Nevertheless, some anarchists have provided religious interpretations and approaches to anarchism, including the idea that glorification of the state is a form of sinful idolatry.

Anarchist clashes with religion

Members of the Italian Anarchist Federation marching in an anticlerical demonstration as the banner reads "Free from dogmas, always heretics"

Anarchists "are generally non-religious and are frequently anti-religious, and the standard anarchist slogan is the phrase coined by a non-anarchist, the socialist Auguste Blanqui in 1880: ‘Ni Dieu ni maître!’ (Neither God nor master!)...The argument for a negative connection is that religion supports politics, the Church supports the State, opponents of political authority also oppose religious authority".

William Godwin, "the author of the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), the first systematic text of libertarian politics, was a Calvinist minister who began by rejecting Christianity, and passed through deism to atheism and then what was later called agnosticism." The pioneering German individualist anarchist Max Stirner, "began as a left-Hegelian, post-Feuerbachian atheist, rejecting the ‘spirit’ (Geist) of religion as well as of politics including the spook of ‘humanity’". Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, "the first person to call himself an anarchist, who was well known for saying, ‘Property is theft’, also said, ‘God is evil’ and ‘God is the eternal X’".

Published posthumously in French in 1882, Mikhail Bakunin's God and the State was one of the first anarchist treatises on religion. Bakunin had become an atheist whilst in Italy in the 1860s. For a brief period he was involved with freemasonry, which had influenced him in this. When he established the International Revolutionary Association he did so with former supporters of Mazzini, who broke with him over his deism. It was in this period that Bakunin wrote: "God exists, therefore man is a slave. Man is free, therefore there is no God. Escape this dilemma who can!" which appeared in his unpublished Catechism of a freemason Bakunin expounds his philosophy of religion's place in history and its relationship to the modern political state. It was later published in English by Mother Earth Publications in 1916. Anarcho-communism's main theorist Peter Kropotkin, "was a child of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, and assumed that religion would be replaced by science and that the Church as well as the State would be abolished; he was particularly concerned with the development of a secular system of ethics which replaced supernatural theology with natural biology".

Errico Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero, "the main founders of the Italian anarchist movement, both came from freethinking families (and Cafiero was involved with the National Secular Society when he visited London during the 1870s)". In the French anarchist movement Eliseé Reclus was a son of a Calvinist minister, and began by rejecting religion before moving on to anarchism. Sebastien Faure, "the most active speaker and writer in the French movement for half a century" wrote an essay titled Twelve Proofs of God's Inexistence. German insurrectionary anarchist Johann Most wrote an article called "The God Pestilence".

In the United States, "freethought was a basically anti-christian, anti-clerical movement, whose purpose was to make the individual politically and spiritually free to decide for himself on religious matters. A number of contributors to Liberty were prominent figures in both freethought and anarchism. The individualist anarchist George MacDonald was a co-editor of Freethought and, for a time, The Truth Seeker. E.C. Walker was co-editor of the excellent free-thought / free love journal Lucifer, the Light-Bearer". "Many of the anarchists were ardent freethinkers; reprints from freethought papers such as Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, Freethought and The Truth Seeker appeared in Liberty...The church was viewed as a common ally of the state and as a repressive force in and of itself". Late 19th century/early 20th Century anarchists such as Voltairine de Cleyre were often associated with the freethinkers movement, advocating atheism.

In Europe, a similar development occurred in French and Spanish individualist anarchist circles. "Anticlericalism, just as in the rest of the libertarian movement, in another of the frequent elements which will gain relevance related to the measure in which the (French) Republic begins to have conflicts with the church...Anti-clerical discourse, frequently called for by the french individualist André Lorulot, will have its impacts in Estudios (a Spanish individualist anarchist publication). There will be an attack on institutionalized religion for the responsibility that it had in the past on negative developments, for its irrationality which makes it a counterpoint of philosophical and scientific progress. There will be a criticism of proselitism and ideological manipulation which happens on both believers and agnostics.". This tendencies will continue in French individualist anarchism in the work and activism of Charles-Auguste Bontemps and others. In the Spanish individualist anarchist magazine Ética and Iniciales "there is a strong interest in publishing scientific news, usually linked to a certain atheist and anti-theist obsession, philosophy which will also work for pointing out the incompatibility between science and religion, faith and reason. In this way there will be a lot of talk on Darwin´s theories or on the negation of the existence of the soul.". Spanish anarchists in the early 20th century were responsible for burning several churches, though many of the church burnings were actually carried out by members of the Radical Party while anarchists were blamed. The implicit and/or explicit support by church leaders for the National Faction during the Spanish Civil War greatly contributed to anti-religious sentiment.

In Anarchism: What It Really Stands For, Emma Goldman wrote:

Anarchism has declared war on the pernicious influences which have so far prevented the harmonious blending of individual and social instincts, the individual and society. Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man's enslavement and all the horrors it entails.

Chinese anarchists led the opposition to Christianity in the early 20th century, but the most prominent of them, Li Shizeng, made it clear that he opposed not only Christianity but all religion as such. When he became president of the Anti-Christian Movement of 1922 he told the Beijing Atheists' League: "Religion is intrinsically old and corrupt: history has passed it by" and asked "Why are we of the twentieth century... even debating this nonsense from primitive ages?"

Religious anarchism and anarchist themes in religions

Religious anarchists view organised religion mostly as authoritarian and hierarchical that has strayed from its humble origins as Peter Marshall explains:

The original message of the great religious teachers to live a simple life, to share the wealth of the earth, to treat each other with love and respect, to tolerate others and to live in peace invariably gets lost as worldly institutions take over. Religious leaders, like their political counterparts, accrue power to themselves, draw up dogmas, and wage war on dissenters in their own ranks and the followers of other religions. They seek protection from temporal rulers, bestowing on them in return a supernatural legitimacy and magical aura. They weave webs of mystery and mystification around naked power; they join the sword with the cross and the crescent. As a result, in nearly all cases organised religions have lost the peaceful and tolerant message of their founding fathers, whether it be Buddha, Jesus or Mohammed.

Buddhism

Many Westerners who call themselves Buddhists regard the Buddhist tradition, in contrast to most other world faiths, as nontheistic, humanistic and experientially-based. Most Buddhist schools, they point out, see the Buddha as the embodied proof that transcendence and ultimate happiness is possible for all, without exception.

The Indian revolutionary and self-declared atheist Har Dayal, much influenced by Marx and Bakunin, who sought to expel British rule from the subcontinent, was a striking instance of someone who in the early 20th century tried to synthesize anarchist and Buddhist ideas. Having moved to the United States, in 1912 he went so far as to establish in Oakland the Bakunin Institute of California, which he described as "the first monastery of anarchism".

Christianity

Main article: Christian anarchism

The Masses, 1917 political cartoon by socialist cartoonist Art Young

According to some, Christianity began primarily as a pacifist and anarchist movement. Jesus is said, in this view, to have come to empower individuals and free people from an oppressive religious standard in the Mosaic law; he taught that the only rightful authority was God, not Man, evolving the law into the Golden Rule.

According to Christian anarchists, there is only one source of authority to which Christians are ultimately answerable, the authority of God as embodied in the teachings of Jesus. Christian anarchists believe that freedom from government or Church is justified spiritually and will only be guided by the grace of God if Man shows compassion to others and turns the other cheek when confronted with violence.

As per Christian communism, anarchism is not necessarily opposed by the Catholic Church. Indeed, Distributism in Catholic social teaching such as Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum novarum and Pope Pius XI's Quadragesimo anno  resembles a Mutualist society based on Cooperatives, while Pope John Paul II's Catechism of the Catholic Church states "She (the Church) has...refused to accept, in the practice of "capitalism," individualism and the absolute primacy of the law of the marketplace over human labor. Regulating the economy solely by centralized planning perverts the basis of social bonds; regulating it solely by the law of the marketplace fails social justice". Notable Catholic anarchists include Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin who founded the Catholic Worker Movement.

The Quaker church, or the Religious Society of Friends, is organized along anarchist lines. All decisions are made locally in a community of equals where every members voice has equal weight. While there are no formal linkages between Quakerism and anarchism and Quakers as a whole hold a wide variety of political opinions, the long tradition of Quaker involvement in social-justice work and similar outlooks on how power should be structured and decisions should be reached has led to significant crossover in membership and influence between Christian anarchists and Quakers. The Quaker influence was particularly pronounced in the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s and in the North American anti-globalization movement, both of which included many thousands of anarchists and self-consciously adopted secular, consensus-based aspects of Quaker decision making.

Gnosticism

Gnosis, as originated by Yahoshua, is direct revelation of moral and ethical perfection, received by each individual from the one Father God of all creation. This ‘gnosis’ is necessary for self governance; self governance is the foundation of anarchist society. Yahoshua embodied and taught that affirmed alignment with Father God allows for individual gnosis which naturally co-creates collective harmony, eliminating external governing structures.

The discovery of the ancient Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi coupled with the writings of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, especially with regard to his concept of the Black Iron Prison, has led to the development of Anarcho-Gnosticism.

Some ancient forms of Gnosticism had many things in common with modern ideas of anarchism: their members lived on communes with little to no private property and they practiced ceremonies led by people chosen each time by lots rather than hierarchical authority. Gnostic groups also practiced equity among the sexes; some were vegetarians. Central to all Gnostic philosophy was an individual attainment of affirmed alignment with Father God as taught by Yahoshua to the first ‘gnostic’ sects,a personal experience rather than one based on dogma. They often had decentralized church structure and, given that early Gnostics believed we are all precious and holy children of Father God, they placed a strong emphasis on equity. Some modern ‘Gnostics’ view themselves in opposition to spiritual entities called "archons," a word which means "ruler"; the word "anarchy" comes from, "anarkhos," meaning, "without rulers," and so in many ways the goal of Gnosticism is literally anarchy. Other modern Gnostic sub-schools believe they are ruled by the ‘Demiurge,’ an ‘Archon overlord.’

Islam

A dark-green-and-black flag with a white star and crescent on its green section representing Islamic anarchism

 

A black flag with a white circle-aleph in the center representing Jewish anarchism

The Bedouin nomads of the Khawarij were Islam's first sect. They challenged the new centralization of power in the Islamic state as an impediment to their tribe's freedom. At least one sect of Khawarij, the Najdat, believed that if no suitable imam was present in the community, then the position could be dispensed with. A strand of Muʿtazili thought paralleled that of the Najdat: if rulers inevitably became tyrants, then the only acceptable course of action was to depose them. The Nukkari subsect of Ibadi Islam reportedly adopted a similar belief.

Judaism

While many Jewish anarchists were irreligious or sometimes vehemently anti-religious, there were also a few religious anarchists and pro-anarchist thinkers, who combined contemporary radical ideas with traditional Judaism. Some secular anarchists, such as Abba Gordin and Erich Fromm, also noticed remarkable similarity between anarchism and many Kabbalistic ideas, especially in their Hasidic interpretation. Some Jewish mystical groups were based on anti-authoritarian principles, somewhat similar to the Christian Quakers and Dukhobors. Martin Buber, a deeply religious philosopher, had frequently referred to the Hasidic tradition.

The Orthodox Kabbalist rabbi Yehuda Ashlag believed in a religious version of libertarian communism, based on principles of Kabbalah, which he called altruist communism. Ashlag supported the Kibbutz movement and preached to establish a network of self-ruled internationalist communes, who would eventually annul the brute-force regime completely, for "every man did that which was right in his own eyes.", because there is nothing more humiliating and degrading for a person than being under the brute-force government.

A British Orthodox rabbi, Yankev-Meyer Zalkind, was an anarcho-communist and very active anti-militarist. Rabbi Zalkind was a close friend of Rudolf Rocker, a prolific Yiddish writer and a prominent Torah scholar. He argued, that the ethics of the Talmud, if properly understood, is closely related to anarchism.

One contemporary movement in Judaism with anarchist tendencies is Jewish Renewal. The movement is trans-denominational, including Orthodox, non-Orthodox, Judeo-Buddhists and Judeo-Pagans, and focusing on feminism, environmentalism and pacifism.

Contemporary Paganism

Neopaganism, with its focus on the sanctity of nature and equality, along with its often decentralized nature, has led to a number of Neopagan inspired anarchists. One of the most prominent is Starhawk, who writes extensively about both Neopaganism and activism.

Gods & Radicals Press  is a not-for-profit anti-capitalist Pagan publisher. Since 2015, it has been publishing writing on the intersection of anarchist, Marxist, anti-colonialist, druidic, feminist, occult, environmentalist, and esoteric thought. The Gods & Radicals Press website declares, "We know the power of mead and molotov, the beauty of ancient forest and shattered window, the sacred celebration of spiral dance and protest march." In addition to paper and e-books, the Press maintains an online journal.

Taoism

Many early Taoists such as the influential Laozi and Zhuangzi were critical of authority and advised rulers that the less controlling they were, the more stable and effective their rule would be. There is debate among contemporary anarchists about whether or not this counts as an anarchist view. It is known, however, that some less influential Taoists such as Pao Ching-yen explicitly advocated anarchy. 20th and 21st century anarchists such as Liu Shifu and Ursula K. le Guin have also identified as Taoists.

Dysnomianism

One religion known as Dysnomianism seeks to fuse anarchism with religion and occult practices as its primary text The Chronicles of Anarchy (released on The Pirate Bay) presents a broad overview of the connections between anarchism and various traditional spiritual philosophies from around the world, especially those with a magickal and occult leaning. This book attempts to blend all the most anarchist aspects of world spirituality into one coherent practical anarchist spirituality which sees Dysnomia, the Greek goddess of lawlessness as its central deity. An abridged form of the Chronicles can also be found and is known as "Liber Anarkhos" which assumes some knowledge of anarchism and magick on the part of the reader, but provides some of the most relevant rituals for practical use. Often utilizing psychedelic drugs and anarchist tactics of direct action, those who follow this path are known as Dysnomians. As explained in the Chronicles, by utilizing the principles of neuroplasticity Dysnomians seek to free their brains/minds of all hierarchical and legalistic conditioning to arrive at a state known as anarkhos.