Why I am an Anarchist - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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The 'no government' movement.
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By SolarCross
#14103715
I had a request to post on pofo an op-ed entitled 'Why I am an Anarchist' that I wrote for Anarchomedia. Spookily Mike has just started a thread here in the Anarchism section with much the same title. I've already made the arguments in it on a number of different threads so for some there is nothing new in it but it is concise if not comprehensive description of my position. So anyway here it is: -
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Why I am an Anarchist

What is government? Sometimes it is hard to tell what is the essence of it. It muscles its way into so many social activities: health, education, standards, trade, dispute resolution, justice, research and development, media, insurance, investment, defence. Its essence is obscured by these activities like camouflage. But it is none of these activities; they can and have been done without government. When you subtract out all the activities of government that do not require government, can be done and even be done better by civil organisations, then all you are left with is an armed and idle minority bullying and robbing an unarmed working majority. That is the essence of government. It is nothing but a ‘protection’ racket. A local monopoly on the self-legitimised use of violence utilised for fun and profit. It is then an institution of oppression, no matter if it calls itself a republic or a democracy. It is a parasite on society, like a flea on a dog. Lackeys of the government will say in defence of their master that the flea can be reformed; one can plead with it to drink less blood from its host. Fleas can’t be reformed, the cure can only come from their removal. You can’t teach a flea new tricks.

When one finally realises this, that government is a parasite on the host society one must then ask is it an inevitable parasite? Must society always be pillaged and bullied by an armed and idle minority? I would answer no. History does not yield many examples of societies free from this parasitism but there are some. Foremost of these would be the Icelandic Commonwealth which lasted over 300 years and the much shorter lived Ukrainian Free Territories and Revolutionary Catalonia which each lasted only 3 years. Of course all hunter-gatherer societies and most tribal societies are functionally if not philosophically anarchist. This is enough to say that government is not inevitable.

Therefore from this understanding that government is not just unnecessary to fulfil human needs but is actually morally baleful and that it is possible to have a society without its menace then one must recognise one’s political philosophy as anarchism.

One may support capitalism or socialism; neither requires government and both are perverted by its presence. How capitalist is the USA when government robs property and distorts the markets? How socialist was the USSR when the government shoots workers that strike? The USSR was the final proof of the intrinsically evil and unredeemable nature of government. Prior to the USSR all governments had been founded explicitly on the coercion of obedience and the robbing of the wealth of the many into the undeserving hands of the few. The USSR was founded on nobler values yet within a few years became exactly as oppressive as any state before it. No Marxist state that followed has ever differed from this pattern. Socialist or capitalist, recognise your ideals can not be safely entrusted to government.

That then is why I am an anarchist.
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Why I am an Anarchist
#14103814
You are what I call a sensible or "true" anarchist. That is, a voluntarist who takes their arguments to their natural conclusion as you identify government as the sole monopoly of force regardless of who makes up government. Some anarchists on here are so bent against "capitalists" that they fail to realize that given the chance their "workers paradise" would be substituting one government for another.

But, alas, I cannot be too optimistic; here is my reply "Why I am not an Anarchist".
#14105645
Demosthenes suggested to me that I check out your position on this, Taxizen, as my Political Compass score is moving progressively toward the bottom-left corner of the grid.

I should first confess my background bias:

I have been a public servant - a government employee - for all of my working life. Particularly given that I started in healthcare (I'm a nurse) I have always viewed government as something benevolent rather than as you describe. Indeed, I find the increasing 'marketisation' both of healthcare and education to be profoundly distasteful and unwelcome, and would prefer both of these areas to be run exclusively as public services.

However, I am beginning to see that there might be merit in reframing my view of government, which is why I thought I'd check out your thread. The difficulty I have is that for me, the whole point is that in the affairs of humankind, the potential whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. Would we have been able to make any of the technological or medical advances of the last century had humankind not pooled its resources and organised itself? And, in organising itself, does humankind not need some form of governance? and at what point does the organisation of such governance lead to the establishment of a government?

You wrote:...all hunter-gatherer societies and most tribal societies are functionally if not philosophically anarchist.

I'm sure you're right...but in positioning oneself as an anarchist, does one aspire to reduce human civilisation to tribal hunter-gatherers? And if not, in what form can humankind endure and develop according to anarchist principles?

Sorry about all the questions. I have been trying to read Peter Marshall's Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, but it's heavy going and I was hoping for something simpler to help me penetrate Marshall's analysis.
By mikema63
#14105728
I certainly don't.

There are several sects and I'm going to immediately assume ancap is off the table for you.

I would imagine you should look into coops and syndicalism. :hmm:

You could consult red barn.
#14105826
@Cartertonian
No need to apologise for asking questions, it is people that don't ask questions that bother me.

Hunter-gatherers - The vast majority of anarchists certainly do not aspire to return to the hunter-gatherer level of technology and neither do I. They are worth a mention only to remind us why every human being covertly or overtly hates being a slave. It is unnatural to us. If our ancestors had been socially something more like ants then we would all be terrifically comfortable with being bossed around and the ideals of anarchism could have no purchase on the human soul.

I understand your dislike for competition and profit-seeking especially in social activities such as health care and education for which cooperation and mutual benefit are the more appropriate approaches. The dichotomy between statism and anarchism however is not about left or right economics it is only about coercion vs. voluntarism, centralism vs. decentralism, subjection vs. autonomy. When it comes to economics most anarchists tend to the left and are actually as hostile to capitalism as they are to brutality of the state.

More than anything else humanity's great superiority over other animals comes from our organisational networks that have never been more extensive than in the current period. Yes it is from this great pooling of information and resources that we have our terrific technology and great projects. However do not give the state all the credit for this and in fact it deserves very little. Cooperation and organisation happens ubiquitously without any help from the men with guns. Make no mistake that is the essence of the state - ' a self-legitimised local monopoly of violence ' just men with guns subjecting men without guns whatever other social activities they bring under their dominion. It is a hijacker of good things not the good thing itself.

Governance is not identical with organisation. Governance is the master and his slaves. Organisation is peers voluntarily working together for mutual benefit and good cause.

Anarchists are in general all for organisation and mutual aid but will not suffer subjection and servitude.
#14109104
The reason I thought you might look into taxizen's work here Cart, is because it equally condemns the capitalist AND soviet models (In essence) while still maintain a leftist-anarchist bent.

To me, the biggest thing is not to get too hung on labels and read too much into what a label might mean. As taxi says above, we have things because we're organized, not because government organized us, and for that matter, one could speculate that corporate organization has given us quite a bit outside of government, if you care to make a distinction between the two (might be a pointless exercise).

I think the most interesting thing in here is that this was the first written article I had seen that made an effort to strike against both camps, and I found it refreshing. I am completely opposed to bourgeois capitalism, and as such don't have a problem siding with pure communists against it, but the bit about calling out the Soviets for shooting striking workers made me quite happy.

We get inaccurately painted regularly as either being destructive little fucks who just want to loot, or those begging for the tyranny of the old Soviet System. There isn't any room for an alternative to both, and this article provided that for me. It may not for anyone else, and that's fine.
#14109127
I have to re-emphasise my personal bias here. Not to justify it or to entrench my position - I am genuinely open to alternative interpretations. but take pity on me; I'm a military man and in the military we have a range of phrases we use to describe organising civilians, most of which are too derogatory to include here. Herding cats, plaiting fog and juggling blancmange are three that are fairly innocuous.

Furthermore, I teach leadership, management and organistional behaviour. I struggle to comprehend - not in any adversarial way of assuming alternative explanations must be wrong - to see any other way of harnessing the collective efforts of a band of humankind toward one collective goal when that band of humankind ideologically objects to their being harnessed in such a (or any) way.

taxizen wrote:Governance is not identical with organisation.

No, but the way I see it (having studied and taught organisational behaviour) is that some form of governance is an inescapable consequence of organisation. Otherwise that which is organised will rapidly become disorganised and ineffective. I'd be grateful for someone's vision of how we can organise ourselves without a need for some form of governance?
By mikema63
#14109148
Well there are always governing factors, even in anarchism, market forces or social forces or collective forces.

It's not so much that anarchists are against organization or leaders, it's just an opposition of involuntary organizing.

I would be quite happy to accept some rules to live in a community with other people, it just should be my choice which community and which rules I'll accept, even if I must make my own.
By michael3
#14109423
I would say in response to catertonian's last post that I too used to come from a very 'pro-State' background, and some of that attitude still lingers today with me.

I can imagine howver, order and government existing without the State as such, if we bring in a purely voluntarist ideology in all this, in which people are perfectly willing to submit to the common good because they recognize it as being the common good, and reject the coercion of submiting to any involutary organization.

I don't believe in this because I have a particularly rosy view of human nature, quite the contrary, but because I believe there will come a time when people will have evolved technologically enough to the point the State will no longer be viewed as sufficient to the ends with which people justify It....That is, the ends of enabling everyone to satisfy some of their greed without exterminating everyone else.
#14109646
I can't speak for the OP, and I won't.

Let me try a scenario that we will all probably beat to hell and back until I have to take the whole thing back... :eek:

You're with a group of 20 people on a swatch of land that is potentially self-sufficient. It has plenty of fresh water, can support wildlife, and will also support the planting of enough crops to sustain the 20 of you yearly. Additionally there are wild nut and berry trees around the swatch of land.

At some point you all realize you need a dam for the stream (think small, not large), someone to farm grain, gather meat, take care of the children in your party, and provide some sort of defense for all of you. People largely sort themselves based on what they can do and are good at.

Please don't overwhelm me with variables. This is just a basic scenario to illustrate that it doesn't take a government to get people to work together based on common interests.
#14109729
I became an anarchist mostly because as a minarchist that agreed with the non aggression principle, I finally gave up on trying to fit the square peg of the NAP into the round hole of statism. The two are just counter intuitive. It's mostly a moral position for me.
#14109853
Anarchistic organisation vs Statist governance

We all born anarchists and anarchists we remain until subdued by force. Anarchists make their own decisions and evaluations those subdued by force just follow orders. Within any state we are all more or less subdued by force but not equally so. Military men have had to endure a more than ordinary amount of suppression and so more readily and efficiently follow orders but at the cost of the ability to act spontaneously or make their own decisions and evaluations. Civilians have been subdued much less and so much more readily make their own decisions and evaluations and plot their own course. Military men no doubt get frustrated ordering about civilians but this is because they are using the wrong approach. Civilians don't just follow orders with a 'sir, yes sir!', smart click of the heels and that funny arm wavy thing military men do. The civilians ask 'why?' - why! what is that? the military man can't grasp it, there is no why, just do or die. Civilians are self-organising they don't do as they are told they do what they think is the best thing according to the information they have which why they ask 'why?'; to get more information with which to make an informed decision. This may seem terribly inefficient but actually the reverse is true. The very apex of efficiency is not doing stupid things. The more minds that are involved in error checking the less stupid things get done. If the proposition of invading Poland is put to a group of military men then as long as the 'dear leader' accepts it then no one else will question it and then quick as stink the tanks are rolling and blood starts flowing.
Put a proposition like that to a bunch of anarchists and you will face a withering barrage of questions 'can we afford it?, what did they do to us?, what's the motivation?', and so and so on. Every question answered will prompt more questions:- Q. 'Why are we invading?' A. 'To steal their stuff'. Q. 'Since we have surplus stuff that we don't want why don't we just trade that with them to get the stuff we want?' A. 'Um .. I never thought of that.. well done that man!'. Poland doesn't get invaded - most efficient solution.

Society wouldn't exist without organisation but that organisation happens spontaneously as diverse individuals come together to solve common problems regardless of any governance and is actually only ever hampered by governance. How about the internet? Arguably the internet is the largest organised project that humankind has ever achieved and it is substantially self-organised along a mostly peer-to-peer basis. Governance plays very little role except to try to limit its usefulness to people.
#14111444
People really do live their lives in anarchy, and the reason for that is because statism is a lie. The true definition of anarchy does not mean no rules, or no organization. Archy means rulers or to be ruled, anarchy means without rulers.

For minarchists that have trouble coming to grips with anti-statism, there is an easy test to see if you actually think the concept of statism isn't ridiculous. Suppose we replaced the Federal Government of the United States with McDonalds. Instead of dollars, we have McBucks. When we go to war, we send our McSoldiers. We have the bureau of McAgriculture and instead of an eagle we have pictures of Ronald McDonald.

The truth is that when you go to the mall, you don't find the person with the most money and then vote that this person has to pay for everyone else, that would be wrong. When you are out at a bar, you don't get a bunch of guys and vote on whether or not a woman has to spend time with you (to keep this mild), that's morally abhorrent. You live 99.99% of your life in anarchy and only submit to the state when it forces you to do so, because again, the perception you have of the state is a lie. The truth is that what you call the state is nothing more than a gun.
#14111621
A couple of points:

Firstly, my working assumption is that both of you live in the US? Please correct me if I'm wrong. I believe we can underplay the significance of our cultural differences with regard to gun culture between the UK and the US. This business about, "the state is nothing more than a gun", is probably highly pertinent to residents of a country where most state officials are armed and empowered where necessary to use the gun to force their - and the state's - will. Here in the UK we have no such regime. Law enforcement officers have available to them armed response units, but these units are only ever deployed in situations where life is immediately threatened. Ergo, culturally we Brits struggle with this popular American aphorism with regard to the state. It is perhaps best, therefore, to set that to one side as the issue is used by American anarchists as a totem which does not readily translate to other cultures.

Secondly, the tone of this thread is becoming unnecessarily vitriolic. I am not seeking any kind of adversarial debate. I accept the pernicuous and pervasive power of the state and, in an ideal world, I would be quite happy to see it minimised or removed. However, we do not live in an ideal world.

Thirdly, in offering up my extensive experience of organisational behaviour from a military perspective, I am not advocating it as an appropriate way to organise non-military folk. I was merely highlighting the fact that from the perspective of someone familiar with a high degree of organisation, it is difficult to comprehend how anything productive can be achieved without guidance, leadership and co-ordination. The whole point behind the manner in which the military organises itself is to be able to co-ordinate the activity of many people (often many thousands) into one singular, unified effort to achieve whatever must be achieved. How would any project of magnitude be achieved in an anarchist state without some form of guidance, leadership and co-ordination?
#14111675
Famous anarchist Joseph Pierre Proudon said 'Anarchy is order, government is civil war'.

First lets look at the last part 'government is civil war'. It is an over-simplification to refer to the state as rule of the guys with guns because actually deception is the majority of the state. Behind the lies though is always the gun as is easily seen when the lies fail. It isn't really different for any state UK, US or anywhere. The 'guns' may not be guns they may be tazers, cages, bamboo sticks, water cannon, toxic gas but it is always the exploitation of the human fear of pain, injury and death. The government says do X in manner Y. You say that you prefer to do A in manner B. They say you don't have a choice, do X in manner Y or we will put you in a cage. This is their 'organisation' and it is a declaration of war. A military man should know what is war. What else is war but a trial of coercion with at least one side aiming to subdue the other? So, just as Proudhon says, government is civil war. To the extent that government succeeds in subduing the people it becomes less war and more slavery. Is slavery a productive organisational model? For the slaver it is but not for anyone else.

Anarchy is order. Anarchy is the absence of 'civil war' and 'slavery' and in its absence there is free association, free agreement, voluntarism and trade which exists everywhere the state is not. There can be leaders, yes, people will choose to follow those that they decide have knowledge and skill that is useful for them and they will choose not to follow when they decide the leader's services are no longer required. Anarchism is everywhere, in every marriage, every friendship and every marketplace. What is the internet but anarchy incarnate? Is the internet disorganised? If by disorganised one means ungoverned and perhaps ungovernable then yes it is disorganised. If by organisation one means free human beings voluntarily cooperating for mutual benefit then the internet is highly organised.
#14111774
I fear we are diverging, at tangents to each other. I agree with you philosophically, but my concerns are rather more practical. As, in one sense, a professional observer of humankind, it seems to me that we humans are very good at articulating what we don't like, but very bad at clearly articulating what we would like in its stead. Whenever I encounter non-mainstream ideologies that attract me I want to hear about how the world might be re-fashioned, but invariably all I get are strident attempts to decry the current state of things and very abstract, esoteric notions of how things might be.

Earlier in the thread, my esteemed friend and admin colleague, Demosthenes wrote:You're with a group of 20 people on a swatch of land that is potentially self-sufficient. It has plenty of fresh water, can support wildlife, and will also support the planting of enough crops to sustain the 20 of you yearly.

But that's just it. We're not in such a situation.

It's a hackneyed criticism, I know, and I'm not using it to troll or otherwise antagonise, but it seems to me that the only way anarchy can exist is if we dismantle our 21st Century Western civilisation and return to tribal groupings and subsistence farming, which seems to me to be a profoundly retrograde step. As I said, I'm not trying to flame anyone by using that example. I just can't see how humanity can continue to develop and build upon where we are now if we were to take a ten-thousand year backward step.

Help me out, here. I'm genuinely and sincerely trying to understand.

:)
By mikema63
#14111775
Have you looked in the mutualism thread on this subforum?

Most ideas about getting anarchy deal with creating alternate institutions among people like the lets systems or bitcoins and simplyoutcompeting the state with them.
#14111863
Ok I hope I don't sound 'strident' to you, this being written information the tone is entirely in the mind of the beholder, the content may be alarming in some sense, but I arrived at my conclusions entirely by cold logic and if I read it out to you the tone of voice would be calm and matter-of-fact. I merely hoped to show that the idea that anarchic organisation is not anything new that must imposed to replace the state but rather that it always exists with or without the state. To lay down prescriptions like 'this will be done so in this manner' is a sort of statist way of looking at organisation. Society is a massive peer-to-peer network like the internet, and things just sort of evolve through innumerable interactions. No individual is clever enough to prescribe or predict how this massive hive mind will solve its problems.

Some clever people have come up with some ideas on how certain businesses that are usually monopolised by the state might be done sans the state which you might find interesting.

Security - Machinery of Freedom

Money - Bitcoins

Anarcho-syndicalism just for fun :D
#14112501
Cartertonian wrote:A couple of points:

Firstly, my working assumption is that both of you live in the US? Please correct me if I'm wrong. I believe we can underplay the significance of our cultural differences with regard to gun culture between the UK and the US. This business about, "the state is nothing more than a gun", is probably highly pertinent to residents of a country where most state officials are armed and empowered where necessary to use the gun to force their - and the state's - will. Here in the UK we have no such regime. Law enforcement officers have available to them armed response units, but these units are only ever deployed in situations where life is immediately threatened. Ergo, culturally we Brits struggle with this popular American aphorism with regard to the state. It is perhaps best, therefore, to set that to one side as the issue is used by American anarchists as a totem which does not readily translate to other cultures.

Secondly, the tone of this thread is becoming unnecessarily vitriolic. I am not seeking any kind of adversarial debate. I accept the pernicuous and pervasive power of the state and, in an ideal world, I would be quite happy to see it minimised or removed. However, we do not live in an ideal world.

Thirdly, in offering up my extensive experience of organisational behaviour from a military perspective, I am not advocating it as an appropriate way to organise non-military folk. I was merely highlighting the fact that from the perspective of someone familiar with a high degree of organisation, it is difficult to comprehend how anything productive can be achieved without guidance, leadership and co-ordination. The whole point behind the manner in which the military organises itself is to be able to co-ordinate the activity of many people (often many thousands) into one singular, unified effort to achieve whatever must be achieved. How would any project of magnitude be achieved in an anarchist state without some form of guidance, leadership and co-ordination?


The difference between your government and, say, an insurance agency or homeowners association, or any other voluntary institution, is that if you don't obey the government it will hurt you. You might get a letter in the mail first, and if you ignore it another letter, and later a summons to court, so on and so forth, but the bottom line is that sooner or later, men will come to your door with the intent of forcing you to comply and if you resist, they will hurt you. Maybe kill you.

In 'the state is a gun', the gun is a metaphor for violence, specifically violence against people who haven't tried to hurt anyone. You cannot, as a statist, state that it is wrong to harm people in anything other than self defense with any logical consistency.

What you say about an 'ideal world' makes no sense to me. The reason statism fails is because we do not live in an ideal world. The misguided notion that if we give small groups of people overwhelming power to hurt others it will lead to a better society is just not rational. Maybe that is why democide surpasses anything else in the world in human death and misery by such a large degree? You're defending something so malicious that you can disregard the holocaust as a rounding error in the human death tally.

Obama explains further:

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