Features > September 28, 2007

Floating Utopias (cont’d)

Libertarianism, by contrast, is a theory of those who find it hard to avoid their taxes, who are too small, incompetent or insufficiently connected to win Iraq-reconstruction contracts, or otherwise chow at the state trough. In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy.

Libertarianism’s nemesis, “the state,” is no less abstract. This is particularly so for libertarianism’s seasteading wing, for whom the political entity “the state” is bizarrely geographically literalized. Their intent is to slip the surly bonds of earth not up but sideways, beyond littoral borders. It is a lunatic syllogism: “I dislike the state: The state is made of land: Therefore I dislike the land.” Water is a solvent, dissolving “political” (state) power, leaving only “economics” behind.

‘The captain’s word will be final’

Small communities have taken to the seas to escape oppressive state apparatuses. The miseries of refugee “boat people”—Indonesians, Haitians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Afghanis and others—have been grotesquely real, but this has not given middlebrow utopians pause. The libertarian seasteader is a Pollyanna of exile.

There also have been genuine countercultural maritime polities, shipboard societies opposed to the despotism of state power, that might provide a genuine inspiration. Since the publication in 2000 of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Redicker’s The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, any discussion on liberté sur mer must reference the grassroots, democratic pirate “hydrarchies” that the authors rescued less from the condescension of history than from its pantomime audience booing.

But libertarians are political dissidents only in narrowly selfish directions. As respectful of “order” as the most polite bourgeois, they cannot conceive of pirates as antecedents, only as threats. (As indeed they might be, were there any seasteads to plunder.) By distancing themselves from this antiestablishment hydrarchy, the libertarian seasteaders unwittingly identify with the other hydrarchy that Linebaugh and Redicker discuss: the imperialist, maritime state. Coercive political apparatuses, operating internally and externally, are implicitly, sometimes explicitly, part of the libertarian seasteading project. Good Brechtians, we ask: Who is to maintain New Utopia, Laissez-Faire City, the Freedom Ship? Who will cook the feasts and clean the heads? So many reports. So many questions. The fantasists of libertarian seasteading are vague or silent about on-ship labor standards, preferring not to ponder who will swab the decks on which the offshore traders, speculators and Web entrepreneurs will promenade.

They cannot, however, entirely forget the need for other people, non-passengers. An attenuated anxiety about what such a presence reaches the libertarian mind as anxiety about crime—that shibboleth terror of the petty bourgeosie, impossible to banish from the mind.

On Freedom Ship there will be a jail, a “squad of intelligence officers,” and a “private security force of 2,000, led by a former FBI agent, [that] will have access to weapons, both to maintain order within the vessel and to resist external threats.” And while technically the law applied would be that of whichever state lends its flag, Freedom Ship officials make no bones that “the captain’s word will be final.”

That is the authoritarianism at libertarianism’s core, the symbiosis between the “free market” and tyranny. Seasteading libertarians flee the oppression of bourgeois democracy for the tyranny of dictatorship. The need for internal repression is thus admitted. External repression is less hypothetical. It is already here.

Seasteading as empire

Speculation about internal labor conditions on these polities is anathema, as it raises unpleasant issues of working-class organization on the wrong side of the gate. Externally, no such conceptual constraints exist. Far from remaining vague, the usual charge leveled at utopians, the board of Freedom Ship’s “realism” has made them gung-ho and explicit in describing the economic imperialism to which they aspire.

Freedom Ship Inc. has ostentatiously arranged with Honduran authorities to construct the vessel in the port of Trujillo, citing geographical advantages and cheap labor from the 10,000 to 20,000 workers they imagine exploiting. Locals are skeptical that anything will ever be built, but the project, despite being less “speculative” than utterly fanciful, has achieved a mass of absent presence sufficient to create real socioeconomic effects—attacks on labor, speculative bubbles and so on. In the words of the great activist science-fiction writer Lucius Shepard, who knows the region well:

[T]he Freedom Ship is scheduled to begin construction any day now in Trujillo. … Many, including myself, believe it is a scam, but others are believers. Either way, it’s going to bring a whole new cast of characters into the place, grifters and entrepreneurs and so forth; and it testifies to the fact that foreigners—mostly Americans—believe they can come to Honduras and achieve wealth and power there, that they can work their hustles with impunity.

Already, struggles against Freedom Ship have ensued. In April 2003, a protest march in Trujillo included farmers “protesting against the National Port Authority attempting to usurp their land (for local elites, multi-national tourism projects and the American venture ‘Freedom Ship.’).”

The protest was organized by the Comite de Emergencia Garifuna de Honduras, a grassroots group that represents the Garifuna minority, descendents of African slaves and indigenous Caribs and Arawaks. The ship is a stated reason for one of the many land grabs from the Garifuna, an expropriatory project so unsubtly iniquitous as to be almost camp. It is as if Freedom Ship’s partisans are so keen to prove their “realism” that only an ostentatious performance of imperialist theft will do the trick. According to the Comite, the Garifuna land is being eyed with the government’s active and official participation.

The most recent threat to Garifuna land rights emerged in September of 2002, in the protected reserve between the Caribbean Sea and the Guaymoreto Lagoon called Barranco Blanco. The National Port Company (ENP) a government body, to conduct a topographical survey of the Garifuna land, with the intention of renting out lands for the construction of “Freedom Ship.” … The local Garfiuna community has legal title to this land, but when they asserted their ownership in meeting with the National Port Company, the Port Company went so far as to cite the “international war on terror” at the meeting as a reason for their usurpation of lands, claiming they needed the land to protect the banana boats of Dole Company which dock at nearby Puerto Castilla.

In one area at least, then, Freedom Ship is ahead of schedule. Its continuing nonexistence has not stopped it from casting an imperial shadow. Freedom Ship is and will remain a castle in the air—or sea—but it has already laid foundations in someone else’s land.

Class warfare as bad comedy

Today, the supposed imminent demise of the state—the perforation, dissolution and evaporation of its sovereignty and borders under the onslaught of commerce and capital—is asserted with considerably less vigor than during the boosterish early ’90s. The internationalization of capital was and remains real, however, and with that, inevitably, comes the migration of labor.

One would think that an avowedly anti-statist, laissez-faire movement would support the free movement of labor, as well as capital. To its credit, the Libertarian Party of the United States has enough rigor to take an open border position. But as the ferocious debate on its website suggests, the issue is hugely controversial.

Much libertarianism has a love-hate relationship with borders. Despite the timidity of some unions on the issue, true freedom of labor would strengthen the working class, an unacceptable outcome to the right wing. It is also cause for intellectual gymnastics on the part of libertarian ideologues eager to justify the exclusion of foreign workers from its borders.

Usually this involves conceptualizing the state as the “private property” of its legal inhabitants. However, when we read in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, the self-proclaimed “voice of scholarship in libertarian theory,” that as part of the “natural order” you will find “Whites live among Whites and separate from Asians and blacks,” or read the concern about “diseased immigrants” and the lament for a Los Angeles with “crowds of immigrants, most of them probably illegal, roaming the streets in search of one knows not what,” the despicable racial anxieties are blatant. For some libertarians, “liberty” is more negotiable than “aryan.”

Of course, big capital gains from borders less from the fact that they keep workers out than in the manner that they allow workers in—the economic benefits of “illegals” are enormous, both directly and as a wedge, because of their extreme vulnerability and availability for hyper-exploitation. Realpolitikal big capital, then, and the hysterical wing of libertarianism unite in their predilection for borders, though for different reasons.

Consequently, in the libertarian seastead, citizenship really is a ticket that must be bought—not a right nor a privilege but a commodity. The claim that the state is private property is more believable in such a pretend place than in the real world, where citizenship is not reserved for paying passengers. Of course, illegal immigration onto a floating city would be an impressive feat: another of the idea’s charms. The dream is not of open borders, but of mobile ones, as ferociously exclusive as those of any other state, and more than most.

It is a small schadenfreude to know that these dreams will never come true. There are dangerous enemies, and then there are jokes of history. The libertarian seasteaders are a joke. The pitiful, incoherent and cowardly utopia they pine for is a spoilt child’s autarky, an imperialism of outsourcing, a very petty fascism played as maritime farce: Pinochet of Penzance.

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• Reader Comments

  I recall the pseudonymous anarchist Rayo mocking the idea of floating cities is his pamplet “Vonu.” (Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe he was in favor of it, and I mocked the idea as I read it.  It’s been a while.)

  The idea back then (1960’s ... when he wrote it, not when I read it) was that families would sail in yacht flotillas, farming the sea (actual farming! with crops growing from dirt on deck!), trading for necessities (vitamin C, manufactured goods, etc.) in port, and generally enjoying the benefits of free, non-coercive association.  If anyone didn’t like the mayor of the flotilla, then they could sail away and form a new flotilla.

  If course, if it were that simple, if you could grow enough crops on deck and catch enough fish to eat, with enough left over to trade for other goods in port, I think we humans would have developed these floating cities centuries ago.  I mean, we’ve been farming for what, 10,000 years? And probably fishing for longer.  And there’s been no shortage of despotic, oppressive, and violently coercive regimes from which to flee. 

  Hell, just ask the fishermen of New England or the watermen of Maryland how well they’re doing these days - what with the fishing stocks depleted due to over-fishing, which is turn was due the fact that you have to catch and sell a lot of fish just to stay afloat - literally and figuratively.

  But, as China Mieville points out, the visions are utopian (true, sometimes they’re bland, banal utopias), and as is often the case with libertarian utopians, reality and practicality have little-to-no space in their proprosals.

  As for the Freedom Ship: Why is it that people who defend the free market to the last breath have the weakest grasp of basic economics? Supply and demand, people! Supply and demand!  On a floating city, physical space is gong to have the highest demand because there’s a definite physical limit to its supply.  Think of the real estate prices!  And where the hell are you gonna go when you’re priced out of the market? Overboard?  Or will they be kind enough to drop you off at the nearest port ... for a fee, of course.

  Posted by djmagaro on Sep 28, 2007 at 12:16 PM

  I looked through the freedom ship site. It seems like a pretty obvious scam site to me. I am amazed they’ve been there as long as the dates indicate. You should probably visit their addresses to see what is there, if anything.

  Still, it would seem fitting to con the rich with a utopian vision of Richistan on the high seas. Were it ever realized (but not by these con artists) it would surely turn into a dystopian world. Maybe they can hire Dennis Hopper as the captain (reprising his role in “Waterworld").

  Posted by kcdancer on Oct 1, 2007 at 8:59 AM

  What I find disheartening is not the concept of this Utopian or Segretopian projects, but that when cast off their marketing sheen, there’s still a number of people who would support them, namely here the people of Trujillo.  Why it is so?  Because a closer look would reveal that they would accept a simultaneous appropiation of land and being the subject of a pyramid (pun) scam while aspiring for a better life beside the crazy rich.
  Yes, probably no freedom ship will sail off Trujillo, but surely walled communities and their ill cascading effects (broken society, increased costs and appropiation of the public space) will take root there as they have been doing elsewhere in Latin America.  And that’s a fairly utopian enough for the investors.

  Posted by MarlboroTestMonkey7 on Oct 1, 2007 at 3:08 PM

  I’m a bit sad to see so much material apparently drawn from the book I wrote (Seasteading: A Practical Guide To Homesteading The High Seas [ http://seastead.org/commented/paper/index.html ]), and not see it even mentioned.  At least, the set of projects listed in the article reads like a walk through the Review section of my book [ http://seastead.org/commented/paper/review.html ], which seems unlikely to happen by chance.  So it seems like my book was used heavily as a source.  I’m not familiar with the standards for non-academic writing, but in the world I come from, it’s considered dishonest not to state your sources.

  As to the content of the article: yes, the history of floating utopias has, to date, consisted of scammers and dreamers.  That’s why people like me, with a more serious interest in the subject, write web pages about how the Freedom Ship is bullshit (http://patrifriedman.com/projects/independence/freedomship.html), and spend lots of words in our books describing how wackos like New Utopia are...well...wackos.  Floating cities are an idea that appeals to dreamers (which again is why it’s a bummer that Mievelle left my contributions out, since the whole point of my book was to take a more realistic approach.)

  But just because the idea appeals to dreamers doesn’t mean it’s absurd, and that it can’t be approached realistically.  For an SF author, I must say that Mieville has a rather sad lack of vision.  He almost seems to delight in this piece at sneering at and belittling people for dreaming about better worlds.  Without such dreams, we would have less crackpots for sure, but also less visionaries.  Maybe seasteading is a hopeless dream, but I think there is at least a small chance that it can revolutionize the world by transforming government into a dynamic, competitive industry, which will benefit everyone, not just libertarians.  Here’s my article arguing why: http://patrifriedman.com/projects/socs/commented/drawer/dynamic_geography.html

  The bottom line to me is that it feels like the piece, while prettily written, is in essence a hatchet job by someone who demonizes libertarians.  And demonization is antithetical to understanding.  Yeah, it makes for nicely flowing vituperative prose, but not a very accurate picture of libertarianism’s flaws, let alone a balanced viewpoint.  There are plenty of reasonable criticisms to be made about libertarianism and seasteading.  I’ve made lots myself, and heard plenty more from smart people who knew enough about the subject to argue about the actual movements, rather than the caricatures which Mieville paints here.

  Anyway, if any readers are interested in seeing what the more realistic side of the movement actually believes/expects/claims, instead of just this caricature, please check out my book at seastead.org.  The most recent draft is all available online.

  Posted by patrissimo on Oct 2, 2007 at 12:24 AM

  You seem to have two points:

  1) Libertarianism sucks.  Or at least anti-tax libertarianism sucks. 
  2) Seasteading doesn’t/won’t work.

  On the first point, I disagree, but there’s not much to talk about.  I’ll only say that while you might not like the libertarianism you criticize in this article, in the polycentric world we would like to move closer to, libertarians would be free to live under libertarian laws (so much the worse for us, right?) and socialists would be free to live under socialist laws (so much the better for you, right?).

  On the second point, I assume that since you have a PhD, you are at least somewhat interested in truth, rather than merely pushing your ideology.  As such, I think you should have linked to, or at least referenced, Patri Friedman’s book.  The readers of your article know your views.  Let them at least, if they wish, read the other side.  Maybe seasteading won’t work; let your readers see the other side of the argument.

  Posted by Jonathan Wilde on Oct 2, 2007 at 11:24 AM

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Also by China Mieville

• Floating Utopias
  The degraded imagination of the libertarian seasteaders