I always liked Bucky Fuller . He is another great unsung American thinker his work is overlooked after his heyday in the sixties.
His book The Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, I read it way back in my formative years as a radical, introduced the idea of pirates as independent captialists
( before I had heard of the primitive accumulation of capital) based on a free contractual association. In other words libertarians.
A short history of the Golden Age of Piracy in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the origins and role of the pirates in the class struggle on the high seas at the time
During the 'Golden Age' of piracy in the 17th and 18th centuries, crews of early proletarian rebels, dropouts from civilization, plundered the lucrative shipping lanes between Europe and America. They operated from land enclaves, free ports; 'pirate utopias' located on islands and coastlines as yet beyond the reach of civilization. From these mini-anarchies - 'temporary autonomous zones' - they launched raiding parties so successful that they created an imperial crisis, attacking British trade with the colonies, and crippling the emerging system of global exploitation, slavery and colonialism.Pirate Utopias (Do or Die)
Pirates and State-Sponsored Terrorism in Eighteenth-Century England
The political, economic, and social elites in England attempted to distinguish pirates from
imperialists during the early decades of the eighteenth-century. Only a few decades earlier, the
state appreciated the terror that pirates spread throughout the Spanish-controlled, Caribbean and
South Sea islands and settlements, but as the English began to colonize some of these territories
for themselves, they used laws, propaganda, and popular literature to vilify piracy and glorify
imperial trade and colonial occupation. However, the moral and social differences between
pirates and imperialists were much less clear. England’s rigid, hierarchical social structure
encouraged marginalized people to leave and become pirates so they might discover and foster
their “deviant” identities. Pirates were known as brutal villains, but many of them acted like
ideal English citizens by publishing their scientific observations and creating societies on board
their ships that put into practice the democratic and egalitarian ideals that were more rhetoric
than reality in the English colonies and in England itself. Many imperialists, on the other hand,
acted as pirates were believed to act: they cruelly traded slaves, greedily and selfishly exploited
natural resources for a profit, and violently exploited indigenous peoples for profit. The borders
between pirate and imperialist often blurred, and although eighteenth-century English society
considered itself democratic and free, the actions of its officials and merchants supported
cultural, social, and economic terrorism abroad as well as within England itself.
Was Bucky a libertarian as Robert Anton Wilson likes to claim? You betcha. He rebelled, like the pirates he enthused about,determined not to be a wage slave.
And Wilson modeled his character Hagbard Celine after him.
WHO WAS BUCKMINSTER FULLER, ANYWAY?
Inventor? Architect? Engineer? Philosopher? Dreamer? Genius? All or none of the above?
by Amy C. Edmondson
Thus began the fifty-six-year experiment of “guinea pig B”—for Bucky—in which “an average healthy human being” resolved to become a problem solver “on behalf of all humanity.” One can only imagine the reactions of family and friends when the thirty-twoyear-old Fuller announced this. He further determined to dispense forever with the idea of “earning a living,” which to him meant advantaging oneself at the expense of others; if he concentrated on doing what needed to be done, funding would take care of itself. He decided to devote himself, broadly, to the technology of “livingry,” as opposed to weaponry.
Also See:
The Many Headed Hydra
Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Bucky, Fuller, R.Buckminister.Fuller, Geodesic, Dymaxion, RAW, pirates, piracy, freebooters, capitalism, free-association, RobertAntonWilson, anarchism, anarchy, libertarian, libertarianism, left-libertarian, primitive-accumulation-of-capital
4 comments:
Very interesting stuff. Thanks!
I had been meaning to seek out more info on the true nature of pirates ever since coming across the following short article about them a couple of weeks ago:
Hmm... I tried to make a link to the article I mentioned, but it didn't work for some reason. Well here's the URL at least:
http://www.physorg.com/news70726212.html
Interesting article thanks for the url here is the link; Pirates pursued democracy, helped American colonies survive
And this is the point of Atlantic History, which is very influenced by the left. But which looks at the development of the Americas as the development of nascent/embryonic capitalism, as it evolved in England, it needed to expand and thus colonize. The colonies were formed by exiling proletarian rebels, who were criminalized or indentured servents.
The freedom of the piracy was not just the freedom of the later pre=revolutionary American captialist freebooter but of those who had no rights, who then enshired their freedom in a contract.
Yes they were hierarchical in sharing, all pirates got personal loot up to a point, the rest was collecitivized and all took a 10% share. Except the Captain who took more, and if any new officer was enlisted from the Navy, after capture, he too got a larger share due his craftsmanship; predominately navigation.
Furthermore later piracy was no more democratic than its earliest forms. As a collective contractual free association, this form of mutualism was far different from their competition the corporate freebooter or privateer. And it has existed as a the key to authentic piracy regardless of the age. Without it piracy which is democratic self management on the high seas, would be mere rapine and blunder.
Post a Comment