Anarchists can and do cooperate with others when they have shared goals. I’m not sure what your question is, exactly.
There is no “your wheat”. They could just ask for it. As long as there’s enough to go around (and there is; and that is a necessary prerequisite for anarchy in my opinion, a condition of non-scarcity… we’ve got that now though) there’s no need to own commodities just to make sure we don’t run out of them.
Quite aside from the hypothetical reason for organizing, let’s just say some reason exists — let’s say we want to build a bridge over the river. Organization is necessary, we need to coordinate human activities. What makes anarchy anarchy is a willingness and interest on some people’s part to participate, plus a scheme for organizing that does not create a hierarchy of authority.
You suggested that the except conveyed a message of cooperation, and I was saying that I didn’t see that in what you quoted.
No, it doesn’t. Absence of the State, yes, government, no. The two are not actually synonymous.
Black Bloc and Anarchist are not identical sets.
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Your research really was brief, then. Anarchism is by definition left-wing - “the radical, reforming, or socialist section of a political party or system”. If anything, it’s the left-ist part of the Left Wing. “Right-wing anarchism” is as much an oxymoron as “anarcho-capitalism”.
What about anarcho-capitalists? Or anarcho-primitives? They seem right wing to me. I mean “let’s go back to hunter-gatherer days because civilization is a failure” is pretty reactionary. And can you elaborate on the difference between “state” and “government”? I tend to use the terms as roughly synonymous.
Anarcho-capitalism calls for the elimination of the government in the free market so people can produce and trade without regulation or taxation, instead letting the market form society free of any state intervention and government functions like policing or education solely provided by the free market. That sounds pretty right-wing to me.
But again, if you have a group or groups of people who can protect your property rights and your rights to trade in a free market, those people are powerful enough to infringe your property rights and take away your rights to trade in a free market.
There you are sitting in the market, and some guy grabs “your” stuff. What next? You punch him and take it back, yes? Then he screams that you’ve stolen from him.
If the dispute over property rights must be settled simply between the two of you, then whoever is the strongest or fastest wins the contest.
But of course that doesn’t usually happen. There are other people around, who depending on their inclinations, will either help you, or help the other guy, or ignore you both. If your neighbor grabs the other guy and gives you back “your” stuff, then you’ve got a government of two people enforcing property rights. Any system of private cops and private judges immediately becomes a government when one group of cops fights another group and one side or the other wins. Even places like Somalia, which in popular western imagination is “anarchy” in reality has government, the government is the traditional tribal and religious government and various warlords. Or Kowloon Walled City, ostensibly a place with no government but in reality ruled by the Triads.
The problem here is the entire historical record which shows that families prevail over single people, bands prevail against families, tribes prevail against bands, confederations prevail against tribes, and states prevail against confederations. Not always, but often enough that more and more complex social arrangements arise over the centuries to the point where in 2017 the only places not governed by state-level organizations are the open seas and barren wastelands like Antarctica. And even there you have the agents of state level governments enforcing their own versions of their rules.
So how did this happen? If we don’t want it to happen, we first have to understand why it happens, and then change things so those reasons no longer exist. I’m not anticipating any big change in the human heart any time soon. If people were decent then any sort of social organization would work fine, feudalism would be great if all kings were like Aragorn. It’s no good changing social systems without changing the people in those systems, and it’s no good changing the people without changing the social systems.
[QUOTE=Lemur866]
It’s no good changing social systems without changing the people in those systems, and it’s no good changing the people without changing the social systems.
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I find that people are often quite charitable, kind, and voluntarily cooperative with one another in this world, as it is, which should strike folks as surprising, given that the systems of social organization we utilize reward adversarial competition and rely on coercion and hence, at the intersection of those two factors, reward competitive coercion by making those who successfully seek power over others the most insulated from this ratfight, while everyone else suffers deprivation and significant loss of self-determination. Those are all powerful disincentives against being charitable, kind, or cooperative without the prospect of profit or specific gain. Reciprocally, they clearly reward selfish nonsharing, aggressive adversarial forms of interaction, the exertion of control for its own sake and hence infringement on the freedoms of others for its own sake. They foment suspicion, wary fear of each other, xenophobic distrust of strangers and of anyone different. Yet despite all that we have idealistic folks and we have well-intentioned folks and they aren’t even particularly rare.
I see no reason to posit something horrible in “human nature” when the rules of the system we’re using are guaranteed to elicit pretty nasty behaviors. If we sit down and play Monopoly and Risk, we will see a lot of extortionate rent and deliberate bankrupting of opponents, a lot of violent invasion and conquering of enemies, not because those behaviors are characteristics of the players but because those are the behaviors that are rewarded by the rules of the game.
Anarchy must provide non-saintly, ordinarily self-interested participants with reasons to play by the baseline assumptions of anarchy, or you don’t get to have an anarchy. Those baseline assumptions are as follows:
• You can get what you want, materially and socially, by asking for it, and obtaining other people’s voluntary cooperation
• Your best avenue for having your will manifested as the collectively embraced decision on things is to communicate and share your perspective and convince others that your way is best
•Your political and economic currency is your reputation; you, like everyone else, wish to be perceived as a benevolent helper, a person who participates in group endeavors, a good listener, a person with the kindness as well as the untrammeled authority of a god
Of course people are generally OK. 99.99% of all the interactions I have with people don’t require the intervention of cops, soldiers, judges, or prison guards.
The problem is that .01%. That’s the crux of it. Voluntary cooperation works for almost all human interaction, but what’s our plan for when it doesn’t?
If we don’t have a plan for the breakdown of voluntary cooperation we have a positive feedback mechanism for the further and further breakdown of voluntary cooperation. If we don’t have official cops with rules, we’ll have vigilante groups and lynch mobs and gangs. Which are…government, just arbitrary government.
I’m well aware of the paradox that any government strong enough to protect me is also strong enough to oppress me. But there’s no way out of this conundrum by proposing to abolish that government, because that just puts us back where we were before, wondering how we’re going to protect ourselves from those grain-stealing swordsmen.
Completely laissez faire markets without regulation or any government to interfere doesn’t sound right-leaning?
I don’t see how we can have social organization where most of the other people are strangers to me, without coercion.
No, I don’t.
Government is based on the assumption that I give up my right to exert coercion on other people, in return for the commitment that other people give up their right to exert coercion against me. Instead, we agree to set up and support a government to exert coercion against me when I break the law, and against other people when they break the law. Assuming that I agree on what the laws should be (for the most part) then the total amount of coercion (so to speak) exerted against me is going to be less than it would be without any government.
Regards,
Shodan
That may be the idea behind modern liberal democratic governments, but the original idea of government was “A bunch of guys with swords came by to steal our grain, and they liked it so much they moved in, and now we have to keep giving them grain every month or they kill us. However, they also keep other guys with swords from stealing our grain, since they want to steal it themselves.”
Well that doesn’t work in real life.
At least as common was “some guys came by to steal our grain, we banded together to fight them off, and now we have a bunch of guys whose job it is to defend us”. Or “my neighbor tried to steal my land, so we banded together to get it back. Now we agreed to always band together and decide whose land is whose.”
See the Kurosawa movie The Seven Samurai for his take on the matter.
Regards,
Shodan
It’s right-leaning all right, but it isn’t anarchism.
Right, except what happens next.
“Hey, we banded together and beat the crap out of those guys who tried to come over here and steal our grain. Now let’s all go over to that other village, and beat the crap out of them and steal their grain.”
An armed group strong enough to protect themselves against aggression is also perfectly equipped to aggressively use force against others. And the guy who lead your self-defense force to victory comes home with sacks of grain he splits with his buddies, who give up farming and become full time self-defense force dudes, practicing their swordsmanship. After a few generations those guys are indistinguishable from the guys from the other villages who were going to conquer you.
That’s why you’re paying for your privately owned police force, obviously. No one’s going to be paying for private policing if there’s nothing to police. And the free market principle is that if those police aren’t properly preserving your rights then they’ll just go out of business to the better free-market police.
Very few people are calling for total lawlessness with everyone screaming and stabbing one another with sticks. Just like very few people call for the government to own, plan and control every single aspect of existence. But you can certainly slide along the anarchy spectrum to an extreme minimum amount of government intervention to allow you to exercise your right-wing principles and it can rightfully be called a form of right-wing anarchy even if it doesn’t tip into setting cars on fire and murdering someone for their pants.
I’m under the impression that I already addressed that in the post to which you are responding.
So you’re paying your private police force. A gang of guys with guns. What happens when they demand more money? You’re just going to go over to the other gang of guys with guns and ask them to help you out?
If you have a gang of guys with guns who you have to pay to protect you, otherwise bad things will happen to you, they set the rates, not you. That private police force is the new government, except the only “service” they provide is not shooting you in the face if your protection money isn’t late.