Kayfabe Capitalism: What the Wrestling Territories Reveal About the Libertarian Fantasy

American libertarianism promises that free markets, left alone by the state, produce competition, innovation, and voluntary cooperation. Strip away regulation and let private actors order their own affairs, the theory goes, and coercion withers because no one can force anyone into anything. The professional wrestling territories were about as close to a real-world test of that theory as this country has ever run. The state barely noticed the business existed. A private body, the National Wrestling Alliance, governed it. Deals were struck on handshakes and honor. And what emerged was not competition. It was a cartel enforced by violence, which collapsed into a monopoly, with the workers holding no leverage at any point along the way.

That is the whole argument, and the market only ever needed three moves of doom to reach the finish: 

1. private governance became a coercive cartel, 
2. the cartel gave way to monopoly rather than competition, 
3. and labor was powerless under both. 

Same sequence every time, same guy going over. Sorting the history this way, instead of piling up every ugly thing that ever happened in a locker room, is what makes the case hold.

1. Private governance becomes a cartel, and the cartel runs on coercion

The NWA did not referee competition. It suppressed it. Member promoters carved the country into exclusive territories and agreed not to poach each other's talent or run each other's towns. That is not a free market. It is a cartel, the wrestling equivalent of OPEC dividing up oil fields, and cartels have a permanent problem: every member has an incentive to cheat, so something has to punish defectors.

In a system with functioning courts, you enforce agreements with contracts. The territories could not do that, because the whole business ran in a legal grey zone and much of what it was enforcing would never survive daylight. So enforcement went private and extralegal. Promoters who crossed a territorial line or challenged the NWA got blackballed, and the wrestlers who worked for them got blacklisted right alongside, cut off from the only employers in the trade. When ostracism was not enough, there was muscle. Promoters kept enforcers, the "office boys," to hand out beatings and career-ending "accidents" to anyone who tried to jump territories or start a promotion of their own. The 1936 Dick Shikat double-cross, where a wrestler shot on his opponent and took a title for real, ended up in court and briefly exposed how scripted and controlled the whole thing actually was. The system's response to a worker going off-script was not market discipline. It was retaliation.

A libertarian has two ready answers here, and both need to be met head-on. The first: blackballing is just freedom of association, nobody is obligated to book you. Fine, in isolation. But when an entire industry's employers act as one bloc to shut a person out of every job in the trade, "freedom of association" becomes a mechanism of collective coercion no matter how voluntary each individual choice looks. The second answer: the leg-breaking was already illegal, so this is a failure of the state to enforce the law, not a failure of the free market. That objection gives away the game. The territories are what private ordering actually looks like when the state steps back. Remove effective oversight and the vacuum does not stay empty. Private power fills it, and private power writes its rules in whatever currency it has, which in wrestling meant blacklists and broken bones. The libertarian dream is a world governed by private actors instead of the state. Wrestling ran that experiment, and the private governance was more arbitrary and less accountable than any state agency.

2. The cartel collapses into monopoly, not competition

The territorial cartel was unstable, and libertarians are right that it could not last. Where the theory fails is in what came next. A free market is supposed to break a cartel by opening it up to competition. Wrestling's cartel broke open into a monopoly.

Vince McMahon did not win by building a better product and letting fans choose in a fair fight. He won by capturing distribution and raiding rosters that had no legal protection. In 1984, on the day the business still calls Black Saturday, he bought Georgia Championship Wrestling out from under the NWA and seized its national cable slot on WTBS, blindsiding everyone. He gutted Bill Watts's Mid-South by luring away its draws, the Junkyard Dog chief among them, and Watts eventually had to sell. He stripped talent from promotion after promotion, and the promoters he raided had no recourse, because the entire system had been built to operate outside the law they might otherwise have appealed to. Then he used cable television to put his product in every market at once, something no regional promoter could match.

Here the libertarian says: that is competition working, McMahon out-innovated dinosaurs. But look at the actual arc. It runs cartel to monopoly and skips the competitive equilibrium the theory promises entirely. The decisive advantages were not a better wrestling product. They were the capture of a new distribution technology and the ability to poach from rivals who could not sue him because the whole trade was extralegal. The market never produced many buyers competing on merit. It produced one dominant buyer who had absorbed or destroyed the rest. Concentrated private power did not check itself. It compounded.

3. Under both structures, labor holds no leverage

This is the through-line, and it is where the argument pays off. Whether the industry was a cartel or a monopoly, the person with no power was always the worker.

The territory era at least gave wrestlers several employers to play against each other. A man could leave one promotion for another and take his drawing power with him. Consolidation killed that. When McMahon absorbed the competition, he became something close to the single buyer of high-level wrestling labor in the country, and a single buyer sets the terms. The instrument was the independent-contractor classification, and it persists in WWE to this day. Wrestlers work full schedules under non-compete clauses, cover their own travel and medical costs, and are still called contractors rather than employees. That label does specific work: it denies them healthcare despite catastrophic injury rates, it blocks them from unionizing because contractors have no collective-bargaining rights, and it leaves them paid only when booked, so an injury or a fall from favor means no income.

When workers tried to change this, the structure crushed them. In the 1980s Jesse Ventura attempted to organize a wrestlers' union, and by his own account Hulk Hogan reported the effort to McMahon, who shut it down. One worker informing on another to the boss is exactly what you would expect in a labor market with no protections and no solidarity infrastructure, where the rational move for a favored star is to protect his own standing.

The deaths belong here, not in some separate catalog of gore, because they are the cost of a labor system with no safety floor and no worker power to demand one. Eddie Guerrero died at 38 of heart failure after years of the substance abuse the schedule and the injuries fed. Chris Benoit's murder-suicide was later tied to severe CTE from repeated concussions, and only after that did WWE adopt a real concussion protocol, decades late. In an industry with no union, no health coverage, and no independent safety authority, wrestlers were disposable by design. That is not a series of individual tragedies. It is what a monopsony with no regulatory floor does to the bodies it employs.

What the territories actually prove

The honest version of this argument is not that libertarianism logically requires cartels, coercion, and dead wrestlers. It is that when you approximate libertarian conditions in the real world, minimal state, private ordering, voluntary agreements, this is the empirical tendency you get. Private power rushes into the space the state vacates, and it answers to no one. Competition does not discipline it, because the strongest actors have every incentive and every means to suppress competition rather than submit to it. Coercion does not disappear, it privatizes, and private coercion comes with no due process, no appeal, and no vote.

Wrestling calls its maintained fictions kayfabe, the illusion presented as real. The free market in the territories was itself a work. The performance was competition and voluntary exchange. The finish, every time, was concentrated power and a worker with no leverage taking the fall. Without oversight and without the countervailing power of organized labor, the free market is just another rigged match, and everyone in the business knows who is going over before the bell rings. 

Altered States: The Barnes Foundation

The Dead Guy explains why he takes issue with the lack accessibility for low Income residents to the Barnes Collection and other Philadelphia public institutions.

http://youtu.be/5we6ZItTy28

From the Cave to Cyberspace: The Evolution of the Human Element in Visual Art

When we consider the creative capacities of mankind, specifically in terms of visual art, we should typically start with the artists and artisans themselves. Interestingly enough the more one examines art and art history, the more one begin to notice that the further back we delve into the emergence of the creative human being, the more anonymous the individual artist becomes. Prehistoric artwork such as The Lascaux cave, The Venus of Willendorf and countless other ruins and monoliths from around the world were created by many talented artists and artisans, yet a majority of them remain anonymous. Yet this is not surprising if we look at the role, or specifically the lack thereof, of the individual in early human societies. 

As we track the emergence of the creative human being we begin to see a trend where artists far and wide begin to acquire ever more autonomy and status within the context of more complex societies. Consequently, as the autonomy of the artist has grown it begins to fundamentally alter the artist’s relationship with conventional society. Evolving from one that, at one time, was so completely integrated that it rendered the artist essentially anonymous; while slowly developed into one that is so independent it then allowed the artist to represent what could be the paramount expression of individuality in western society. 

This I believe has transformed, and fundamentally altered, the dynamic regarding how an artist approaches their work, and subsequently, how the artist interacts with their audience. It is this fundamental shift in the function of the artist in society which has inevitably generated extreme hostility from the public for the self-aggrandizing nature of the contemporary art world. Perpetuating a profoundly incomplete view of what means to be an individual, and subsequently, what it means to be an artist.

Unfortunately western societies have evolved to view the individual, and particularly the artist, as being the antithesis of the collective within society, denying that the artist is inevitably bound, even in the abstract, to the collective through the language and symbols of human communication. What I mean by this is that artists, in order to be a truly great artist, must utilize our collective accumulated knowledge in order to thoroughly explore a vast amount of different themes and ideas, while utilizing our collective language of visual archetypes and symbol in order to engage mankind on the deepest level, the subconscious. In otherworld: 

“The individual is not an exception to the norm. He carries within himself and embodies the accumulated knowledge, skills and capacities of the collective. The individual is the conscious fount of the accumulated knowledge and experience of the collective… What is exceptional is the freedom and courage with which he explores, creates, invents, recombines and expresses the collective endowment in original ways.”  ~ WAAS (World Academy of Art and Science)

It is due to a chronic misunderstanding of what creativity actually is, which allows us to pervert the fundamental function of artistic creativity within our society. By designating creativity as a ‘skill’ or ‘talent’ possessed by a select few member of our society, we undermine the innate, and essential, creative abilities of the rest of the population. Inevitably this has allowed us to perpetuate an idea of creativity, the artist and the individual, which is not only incomplete but fundamentally flawed at its foundation. This distorted societal concept of creativity is incredibly pervasive, especially when it comes to the the way in which we approach fostering creativity within our society. And the artists themselves are far from innocent bystander in the persistence of such misleading ideas. 

Due to the increased autonomy of the artist within our culture, artists have moved further to the fringes of society, leading many artists into the blind alley of conceptualism, which has become increasingly misanthropic and nihilistic in their relationship with society in general; in its continued assault on the audience with vague concepts, meant to shock and confuse rather than communicate or engage humanity on a deeper collective level. The general public, who the contemporary artist has grown to view as Philistine, has developed an increasingly contemptuous attitude towards these inside jokes, if one could even call them that, littering the pretentious postmodernism of contemporary galleries, while only the affluent, not society at large, continue to perpetuate these dead art movements.

In this age of connectivity there is no excuse for artists to be so detached and condescending in their interactions with the audience. As we move into a new era of human civilization the art world, just like the society around us, will experience some unprecedented changes, particularly when it comes to how artists engage and interact with their audience. Audiences have traditionally viewed art only within the narrow confines of the sterile venues of the contemporary museums, which have become tiresome and lack the crucial engagement that our society is looking for.  

One specific aspect of art, which the audience has been excluded from largely throughout history, is the creative process itself, which would explain the overall societal lack of understanding and appreciation for the creative process in general. What I mean by this is in a traditional gallery setting the audience only gets to experience the final ‘masterpiece’. In seeing only the final work in a state of perceived perfection it helps to foster a misconception that artists are exceptionally gifted at creating forms which are prefect. And that, quite honestly, simply isn’t true. 

For far too long it has been considered taboo for artists to share their own creative process, out of an unsubstantiated fear that it will cheapen the work. These machinations, especially for the legions of contemporary conceptual artists allow artists to put more time in creating insincere concepts meant simply to shock and confuse, rather than genuine living artifacts. This idea that simply sharing your creative process with someone else could cheapen your work is a ploy, one meant to shroud the fundamental lack of vision with in the contemporary art world.  

Fortunately, we are begin to see a shift within the underground arts, which is helping counter this pervasive culture within the art world, and it is taking place before our very eyes online, throughout the numerous social networking sites that populate the internet. More and more artists are sharing the magic of their creativity with their fans and younger artists. These fully interactive artists are using numerous hashtags, which has helped to create, perhaps unknowingly, huge repositories of creativity in progress. Hashtags such as #creativity, #newartwork, and #WIP (work in progress) allow fans and artists access to a massive accumulation of documented creativity, incidentally helping to foster within others a genuine appreciation for creativity, and the arts, through direct observation. Not to mention a system of hashtags being used to create digital art groups of global artists sharing their work with each other. 

This new paradigm within the art world has many advocates throughout the social media world. Artist like Chet Zar have inspired hundreds of artists worldwide to share their artwork every Friday night with a hashtag he created (#fridaynightartdorks).  Unfortunately, many of these artist have been continuously marginalized and relegated to the scene of underground ‘lowbrow’/surrealism, which has typically been viewed as ‘illustration’ or  ‘too commercial’ to be high art, rather than celebrated for being the contemporary visionaries that they truly are. 

Artists like Chet Zar, Buddy Nestor and myself, love sharing the process of our work, not because we think we have to, but because we want to. The creative process, or what Arthur Keostler referred to as the ‘Act of Creativity’, not just the finished product, is precisely what fuels our own creativity. We enjoy direct interaction with our fans, and other artists, which is driven by a collective fascination with the creative process in general, which becomes a common bond. We are, as Chet had put it an interview with Juxtapoz Magizine, ‘process junkies’.  

There are also a growing number of artists whom also find joy in participating in ‘live’ art sessions around the world. Artists such as Guy Atchinson, Michele Wortman, Jon Clue, Chris Dingwell and Alex and Allyson Grey can be found painting live at galleries, events such as Burning Man or a number of the art/tattoo conventions. Painting without haste and taking time to speak to the many of the onlookers as they actively reveal the equally captivating process of their work. These are the artist who are engaging people on a very human level, forging new ways to creatively engage their audience with openness and sincerity.  

We must remember that just because artists tend to have a greater propensity for creativity it doesn’t mean they are the only ones whom possess such 'skills'. Furthermore, those in the contemporary art world, may not even possess any kind of exceptional mastership of such creative capacities; they might just be well versed in the conceptual theology of bullshit. And this is the poisoned pill that many accredited art schools sell to unsuspecting students.  

Edward De Bono once said that, “Far too many people believe that creativity is just being different. Being different for the sake of being different may attract attention but that is not sufficient value. True creativity must deliver real value.” The problem with the post-modern conceptual art movement is that it, even though it may deliver original ideas and concepts, it fails miserably at delivering value, except on a very superficial level to the affluent people that buy it, not for its value, but its ability to exemplify a privileged status.  

Artists are gifted people but not because they're simply creative. They are gifted because of a compulsion to create, refine and eventually deliver the imaginative, and visionary, realms in which they dwell; creatively. Art is an artifact, in the most beautiful sense. By using creativity and communication, an artist navigates through a window within what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious; at a specific time and place with the accumulated lexicon of symbolic language, and imagery, which allows the emergence of ever more novel forms. Therefore art is an artifact in the most fundamental sense, since it carries with it a specific collective history, language, and culture from which it was produced, preserving a living vestige to the society at large. And it is this which makes art a truly magical phenomena.

Dear Friends: My Letter of Membership to the Religious Society of Friends

Dear Friends,

 I’ve been attending meeting now for a little over a year, and I would like to formally become a member of the Byberry Friends. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been acutely aware of my own personal spiritual nature, and have spent my time, mostly as an artist, attempting to explore and express it though a visual medium. After attending meeting for over a year I feel that the Religious Society of Friends is the only religious organization that has thoroughly resonated with me on both a personal and spiritual level enough to pursue membership.

 I feel that my attendance at the local Byberry Meeting has given me a safe and quite place to reflect on my inner thoughts, allowing me to center my spiritual being in a vast and captivating universe. I feel that the Religious Society of Friends has also expanded my social conscience by, not only making me more aware of my fellow (hu)man, but also the social injustice that surrounds me, while providing me many avenues to address such issues. The Society’s dedication to social justice, peace, and equality is something that I would be honored to be associated with.

 I find the history of the Quakers, especially its art history, extremely fascinating, rich, engaging and something that I would love to continue to learn more about. As an artist, activist, feminist, and humanist I believe that the Religious Society of Friends best reflects my personal and spiritual sensibilities. As one of the younger attendees of the meeting I would like to contribute whatever I can to help continue the compassionate and loving spirit that I have encountered in my attendance at Byberry Friends Meeting.

 I would also love to share my love, not only for the arts, but creativity in general, in order to help nurture the growing art community within the Religious Society of Friends, specifically by participating more directly with
The Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts. My ministry, as a member of the Society of Friends, would be sharing my passion for the arts and human creativity, specifically regarding how creativity relates to the cathartic expression of our inner human experience. I would like to help foster within others, both Quakers and Non-Quakers, the idea that creativity is an innate and universal aspect of mankind, while also examining how creative expression can highlight the infinite possibilities of humankind. By reexamine what creativity actually is, through creative play, perhaps we can enhance our understanding of the creative power behind the natural world, which is responsible for building the human organism through the creative process of evolution, in order to better understand our role on this planet as wholly evolved, and creative, beings.

 Thank You For Your Time And Consideration.

Respectfully,
Chuck Angeline

EQAT PNC Mountaintop Removal protest: Fasting Preperation Day 1

I'm joining the environmental group EQAT (Earth Quaker Action Team) eqat.org for a 40 day fast. each individual can fast as long as they want. I will be fasting for one day on Easter Sunday.


for information visit: eqat.org

An update on my experience as a Quaker (Thus Far)

I Haven't been able to update my blog with new content lately since I'll be getting married in two month. So I decided to make this Vlog to share with the rest of the Psychedelic Ministry of the Dead.

The Civics of Jesus

Christ in the Wilderness (1872)

Ivan Kramskoy

The Civics of Jesus  

by Chuck Angeline

I often think about how the compassionate and loving message of Jesus, presented quite thoroughly in the Gospels, tends to sink into the background as the hateful bigotry of some of the more extreme Christian sects takes center stage. I imagine that this is quite a frequent meditation amongst my fellow Quakers, and is not only one that I continue to be confronted by, but one I often find extremely troubling. This carnival of hatred, which has attracted so many willfully ignorant people into its horrendously fanatical tent show, is both extremely frightening and disheartening. And if that isn't bad enough there are certain individual, within some of highest levels of the United States congress, that consistently attempt to legislate such acts of ignorance and bigotry. These Dominionists will stop at nothing to undermine, not only the rule of law, but even the compassionate message of Jesus’ himself, in order to establish an outdated and downright horrific theocratic society, of, for and by the Roman Empire. A society rigidly molded in the image of Constantine the Great, rather than the benevolence of Jesus of Nazareth.

As a Quaker I don’t put much stock in Lent, or any other Christian holiday authorized by catholic liturgy for that matter, since friends tend to regard every day is a Holy(day). But I invite you, whether theist or secular, to reflect on those in history that have fought against similar exploitations, perpetrated against (hu)mankind, by considering how the story of Jesus, whether fictional or not, had played a prominent role in their fight. Some of you might not be aware that Abolitionism, The Civil Rights Movement and Women’s suffrage all had influential leaders and allies that were provoked by their particular religious faith to fight for the rights and privileges of their fellow men and women.

Also, Let us not forget how Jesus fought back, not only against the Roman Empire, but also against the Jewish Rabbis in his community. There are many incidents within the gospels where the Rabbis of the community continuously undermined the best interests of the meek and the poor, in order to accommodate the oppressors of the Jewish people. Jesus was condemned by the Roman Empire, and the rabbinical hierarchy, for questioning the status quo in his attempt to provide another avenue of salvation for the commoner. Not though the crucifixion, which is seen by many Christians as the sacrifice which absolved mankind of their sins, but redemption through the unwavering desire for the complete emancipation of mind, body and soul for each and every human being!