Anarchists: anyof you care to explain your philosophy to me? (Well, us.)

Great Debates
21

Hopefully this isn’t a hijack–I’ll get to why it’s not in a minute. There’s another rule that needs establishing and enforcing, namely, that you don’t get to get fat off of those fruit trees while other people starve to death, just because you say, “these trees are mine.” Just as property is an artificial social construct to keep assholes from grabbing your shit, taxes are an artificial social construct to keep assholes from hoarding their shit. Neither one is a natural state of affairs.

Anarchism is an alternate system of handling stuff. Rather than having an artificial system of property and taxes, you’d have collective decisions about who gets to use stuff, and what’s a reasonable amount of stuff for them to use. Your house? Sure, you get to use it. Your labor? yours. Tools you use to do your labor? Most likely yours. Tools for someone else to use to do their labor? Not yours, theirs, most likely.

It’s much messier than the black-and-white clear rules of capitalist libertarianism, but it’s no more arbitrary. It’s almost certainly less efficient and almost certainly more egalitarian. It suggests that material goods lead to happiness in a less-than-direct path, and that increasing material wealth in total is not necessarily the best aim of a society. It decentralizes political power.

And it’s almost certainly unworkable IMO (and I hate to say that–for many years I would have disagreed, but I’ve become pretty jaundiced as I age). Haters gotta hate, and powermongers gotta powermonger, and followers gotta follow. I’m no longer convinced, as I was when I was younger, that people can become sufficiently unhappy with hierarchies that they’ll resist hierachical structures even at personal cost or risk. Hierarchies are very, very good at meeting specific goals, especially competitive goals; and as long as there are sufficient powermongers who want to gain personal power, they’ll wipe the floor with any anarchist society with which they come into conflict. It’d be nice to think that the anarchists could appeal to the better nature of the powermongers’ soldiers, but if that sort of appeal were really effective, the Spanish Civil War would have been successful, and the Holocaust wouldn’t have been nearly as successful.

Anarchists, I think, can exist only at the pleasure of hierarchies. And I’m very glad the good ones exist, because they can serve as a constant reminder of the arbitrariness of our property rules and of the perils of too much faith in hierarchies. But I no longer believe they could last as anarchist societies in the face of opposition from hierarchical societies. Talk about how anarchist societies haven’t been allowed to function exactly demonstrate what I’m talking about.

22

My take on Anarchism is, you’re a boring, spotty, underachiever, who lives at home with his mum and claims welfare.

In an attempt to makle yourself interesting to members of the opposite sex you start wearing combat jackets, handing out leaflets called Anarchist Worker, or Anarchists against----------,fill space there.

You indulge in recreational hooliganism, (safer being in a riot against LEOs who are on camera, and are supposed to show restraint, then be a soccer hooligan where the other side might well beat you unconscious, if not actually kill you).

Anti globalisation ones are supposed to be a good gig, you might get on tv, plus you can brag about it to your friends, AND it might make you seem tough and interesting, just so long as when you recount your stories you leave out a lot of detail.

You go to free, concerts all of course for the cause.

Being an Anarchist, might also make you appear to be caring, a rebel, and explain why you’re not really a loser for claiming welfare instead of having a job, you know undermining the system from within and suchforth.

The main thing is that you fight for Anarchism knowing full well that you aint gonna get it.

Because if you did, not only do the dole cheques stop, but people like myself have a free run to do WHATEVER WE LIKE.

And we would most likely do it to you, because you couldn’t fight back, not even a little bit.

23

Thanks for sharing!

24

My ideal society is the Anarchist Internationale - there would be no neighbouring societies to invade. But failing that, passive resistance and every direct action short of personal violence is on the cards.

Yes - basically, “building a new world in the shell of the old.” - build a parallel anarchist structure that will gradually come to replace the existing hierarchy without revolution.

25

Lust4Life, you’re threadshitting and your post contributes nothing to the discussion. Don’t do this again.

26

I understand that the thinking is that one strategy would be to build a network of anarcho-cooperatives, which would eventually supplant their competitors due to better working conditions and a more consumer-friendly (though not consumerist) stance.

My problem is that hierarchy is just so damn efficient. Now it can be taken too far: the Toyota way turns out to be superior to GM’s plant management of the 1950s-1990s. Cite. But while there are a certain number of anarcho-institutions, they aren’t exactly taking the world by storm. Even credit unions typically operate on hierarchy. More generally though, cooperatives can be highly successful. Examples include Vanguard and USAA.

27

There’s a reason for that, but it’s not because of “efficiency”:

There’s also the problem of attracting outside investors. They would only get a limited rate of return on their investment in a worker controlled firm, as opposed to the potentially limitless returns of the standard capitalist model.

Capitalism is better at expanding itself. But then again, so are viruses and cancer cells as compared to other body cells. Eventually though, they will kill their host. An economic system based upon endless expansion cannot sustain itself on a planet with finite resources. This, more than anything, is why I feel Libertarian Socialism (AKA Anarchism) is humanity’s best hope for sustainably living on this Earth.

28

Hard-core Randians in fact dispute this very point. Near the end of her novella Anthem, Rand sums up whole books on the subject of anti-altruism by having her protagonist say (of the mass of humanity) “They will have to do more than exist to earn my love”. And this brings up the dichotomy expressed by the phrase “for love or money”. One definition of Love is giving without expecting a strick quid pro quo, or least not with an accounting-ledger exactness. When we love someone, we don’t continually say “what have they done for me lately?”. But by contrast, money is how we deal with people we don’t love, where in place of a personal relationship we substitute a strict cost/benefit analysis to the interchange. This is because ultimately there is an upper limit to how many people we can know and interact with on a personal basis. Beyond that we can only give strangers the benefit of the doubt and record how beneficial or harmful to us our interactions with them are. As a personal moral conviction one can believe in one’s heart that all people are one big family of God’s children; but in brutally pragmatic real-world terms, people are only valuable to you if on some level or another they’re on your side: your family, your friends, your clan, your gang, your tribe, your nation. Or if nothing else, at least the assurance that you and some total stranger are both law-abiding members of a civil society. And at that level your interaction with them is highly abstracted: laws define the balance between your rights, and money defines the balance between your exchange of benefit.

It’s been sarcastically suggested that Socialism is the idea that one can regard 100 million strangers in exactly the same way one would regard the members of one’s family. Unselfishness has always been highly touted as a virtue, but there are two distinct ways one can be unselfish: intrinsically by making the personal uncoerced choice to forgo at least some of one’s self-interest in the name of helping others; or by having that sacrifice imposed from without, by essentially having one’s self diminished or absorbed. At its extreme, the end of this doctrine would be the absolute subjugation of the individual to the mass, a human reduced to a robot or a drone in a hive. It’s this second way that Ayn Rand was foaming-at-the-mouth berserkly against. Rand survived and escaped the horrors of Soviet collectivism in the 1920s and the rest of her life was essentially a reaction to that. The Randian position is that no one can demand, as a moral duty, that one be altruistic. Certainly it could hoped that one would not be a heartless bastard, but charity has to be just that- a genuine gift from the giver, which implies that they were free to NOT give it. Going back to the fruit trees example, if I will starve to death if someone doesn’t give me food, and if they won’t give it voluntarily I’ll take it, that might be a natural position for me to take but it wouldn’t make it morally right, because I don’t intrinsically deserve to exist at someone else’s expense.

29

And this sentences gets to the difference, and the central problem with Randians: they tend to regard private property as a natural state of affairs, when I think it’s anything but. If someone eats fruit from a tree, it’s not at your expense; if you don’t want others profiting from your labor, maybe you shouldn’t grow fruit trees and then leave the fruit on the tree where anyone can get it.

Capitalism imposes the idea of property on those trees, because it’s a really efficient and relatively peaceful way to determine who gets to use what. But it’s only relatively peaceful if you don’t go overboard with this artificial construct: when you go overboard, you get food riots and the like.

It’s not “love” that means you treat other people well. Rationalism can lead to the idea of limits on property just as easily as altruism can. But as long as people think Private Property is an intrinsic feature of the universe, rather than being a very useful social fiction, they’ll go off on insane Rand-like screeds.

30

Remember the Dr. Seuss story “Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose”? Thidwick tries to be fair and sharing; but somehow what everyone needs is limitless, and in the end Thidwick tells them to go stuff themselves*.

There is a spectrum of reasonableness, with one person’s insane greed and selfishness at one end and the looting mob at the other. Since material wealth is (at least currently) resource and labor-limited, some hard and fast way is needed of accounting what output is worth what input.The biggest advantage of private property is that it clearly defines exactly how many people are entitled to something. Once you get into collectivism, it becomes first murky and then outright impossible to assign just how widely an asset is going to be spread. Even cooperatives need limitations on who gets to share in the fruits of labor, and goldbricks get resented fast. Private property is arguably a cooperative of one.

Of course private property doesn’t mean that God is going to send angels down out of heaven with flaming swords to defend your “right” to what’s yours. But while it may be an abstraction of a (sometimes very complex) relationship of the individual to others, calling it artificial makes it sound completely fictional, which I think is going too far.

*pun intended.

31

Human beings shape the environment they live in so odds are that fruit tree doesn’t just exist in a natural state either. Some farmer planted it and nursed it for ten years before it started producing apples. So, yes, anyone who takes an apple from that tree is living off the labor of the farmer (i.e. at his expense).

32

Exactly. From “ABC of Anarchism”:

33

This is absolutely true, for a small scale farmer who works the land that he owns. The issue gets somewhat more complicated when we get to the larger scale corporate farming that’s predominant today, where the worker who planted that tree doesn’t own the land nor the product of his labor but receives a wage for the labor which, by neccesity, has to be a lesser sum than the value he generates. That surplus value is scooped up by the employer in the form of “profits.”

34

Did the farmer make the land the tree grows in with his own labour? The water that feeds its roots?

35

The mistake here is that you’re assuming some people fall within a label you chose to apply to them.

Labels are the sign of idiotic and worthless arguments.

36

If a thousand needy people showed up and you shared with them, you would all starve to death.

If a thousand needy people showed up and you protected your property, at least your group would survive.

37

Forget complicated. How does an anarchist society address the farmer who has a small orchard? Who decides how to distribute the fruit of his labors? What if it’s just an apple tree grown in the backyard? Hell, can someone even own a house?

Of course not. However, he may have made improvements to the land to facilitate healthy crops by removing rocks, leveling ground, fertilizing, irrigating, etc., etc. Entirely through the efforts of the farmer, where there were no apple trees there are now apple trees. Are you really going to tell me that someone taking an apple from one of those trees without compensating the farmer is not stealing from him?

38

Notice that your argument is a practical one, not a moral one. And sure, under certain circumstances it’s true. Of course, we can turn it around:

If your band shows up to the orchard and shares the apples with the owner and everyone else, you’ll all starve to death.

If your band shows up to the orchard and shoots anyone else trying to eat apples, at least your group would survive.

No–but only because the farmer lives in a society where “stealing” is a crime, and a society where “letting people starve to death so you can get and extra 5 cents a bushel” isn’t a crime.

If you go and take things from the farmer that the farmer needs to survive, that’s different: that’s immoral. But if the farmer extends legal and lethal protection over a bunch more stuff than she needs to survive, at the cost of other people’s lives, anarchists would suggest that’s equally immoral.

39

I agree. And in as much as he made those improvements, it is entirely because he had possession of the land to start off with.

It is, of course, entirely as possible for apple trees to grow on public property as it is for them to grow on private property. And while there are inputs into an apple that derive entirely from the farmer’s labours, as I pointed out, there are others that derive from the common weal.

Of course it’s stealing - that’s how the law is written. Wouldn’t say it was wrong, though. Be wrong to take all the apples, sure - farmer worked for them, no argument here. But if I’m strolling through his orchard (as should be my right), if I pick an apple or two, that* shouldn’t* be a crime.

40

What exactly does “non-heirarchical:” mean here? Because right now it seems to be used in a variety of vague ways. More to the ppint, how do you distinguish from capitalist free associations backed by the rewards people choose to give from the “anarchist” non-heirarchical associations.

Volunteer militias don’t tend to do very well against dedicated and professional military forces. I mean, it’s a nice thought, I suppose, but I don’t see how you make this part alone work, alone the more immediate practical issues and the theoretical moral ones.

If the point is a developing economy, it most certainly is more efficient. If you want strong competitive forces, it most certainly is.

What happens, exactly, when your neighbors just start killing you? I mean, as long as we’re talking about it, preindustrial tribes had a sky-high rate of violent death.

Note, too, that Toyota’s was not non-heirarchical, although it had a different and less obvious heirarchy. But it most certainly had one.