Zyx wrote:How is the initial possession justified?
Suppose that I come across an iron mine. Does it belong to someone? To whom?
Justified, to whom?
Without the state, that’s up to you and whoever else wants it. Usually, finders keepers, but some people don’t follow that rule. Remember, in Anarchism, nobody has to follow any rules. In Hunter Gatherer social orders folks sort of work these things out. Of course, sometimes somebody gets killed.
Oh, and the finders keepers bit means that you keep it. If you leave it, well then it’s no longer yours.
Zyx wrote:This was the OP's statement and the statement of Suska. If Anarchy is violence than what promotes it above stateship?
I read the OP’s statement and I didn’t get the same meaning. Remember I’m an Anarchist. Anarchism isn’t violence, but it isn’t non-violent either.
I made a post a while back, don’t ask me to cite it, I don’t have time to look it up, but my post said pretty much the same as the OP’s post.
However, I will state it a bit differently and it may be a bit clearer. That’s because my perspective is a bit different from European derived Anarchisms. European Anarchisms are a subset of my Anarchism. Mine includes the Tao Teh Ching, which most folks don’t realize is Anarchistic.
I start with Civilization. Civilization began as slavery and just refined itself a bit, but basically it’s still slavery, only they don’t call it that. Civilization began with agriculture and part of agriculture is animal husbandry. Dogs and slaves probably existed before civilization but civilization organized it big time. What civilization did is domesticate man. The hunter gatherer Humans before civilization were feral men and probably some of the hunter gatherers still around are feral men.
If you have ever been around a farm you sort of get the picture. Domesticated animals want to be domesticated. If they get away, they usually come back. Feral animals don’t want to be domesticated and will struggle to be free.
Today the people in the few remaining hunter gatherer groups have to struggle to be feral. Some succumb to the pressures of Civilization, but by and large feral men want to free. On the other hand, domesticated men by and large want no part of living with feral men. Life is a bit chancy as a feral man for a domesticated man. It’s sort of like the fable of the dog and the wolf. When each tried the other’s life style, they ended up preferring their original style.
Anyway to cut a book into a post, over the millennia domesticated men developed rationales for domestication. One of them was the Myth of Legitimacy. The state was legitimate, what it did was right. Religion usually supplied the rationale in the beginning. Today we have economic and social theory. Same BS.
What Anarchism does, and mostly without my perspective, is reject the Myth of Legitimacy. Part of the Myth of Legitimacy is the right of the state to use force. The policeman guns down the citizen that usually ends up being OK. A citizen guns down a policeman, that’s rarely OK. Maybe if you have lots and lots of money, but even then, it’s a bit iffy. You are a screwing with the States fundamental right to kill. The warriors kill, the slave gets killed. That’s the way the game was set up in the beginning. They frowned on the slaves killing Elites and their Warriors.
However, the Myth of Legitimacy is a fundamental part of the conditioning of Domesticate Man and he will struggle to keep it. That’s one of the reasons for elementary school. You have to learn the Myth of Legitimacy at an early age. No, they don’t call it that. They call it being a good citizen. A good citizen believes in the Myth of Legitimacy and the right of the state to set the rules. In Domesticated Man, it probably comes with mother’s milk.
However, as I said, Anarchism rejects the legitimacy of the state to set the rules on the application of force or any other thing for that matter. It doesn’t say that force is bad, it just doesn’t accept that the state has a right to use it. The state can use it, it will use it, but it doesn’t have any more right to use it than a feral man has.
The Anarchist doesn’t need an Anarchism to be an Anarchist. He can exist in the state. However, he’s not really a member. He’s just living there. Sort of like cats. When I ride my bicycle in traffic, I’m really in an Anarchism, because usually the police ignore what bicycles do or what is done to them, unless a car driver happens to kill a bicyclist, then the Policeman has to figure out what the bicyclist was doing wrong. However, I try to make it as easy for the car driver as I can. I try not to obstruct him or hold him up, not because of law, but because, one, I don’t want to get killed, and two, because it is the nature of feral man not to be a problem. There’s a good reason for that, in the real old days, being a problem could get you killed.
I don’t recognize the validity of society’s laws, but I recognize their existence. Most people don’t really follow the law in America, they follow some shorthand version of it. If I expected people to obey the law on my bicycle, now tricycle, I would have been dead years ago.
However, most people accept the legitimacy of law even when they are violating it. I don’t. I just obey it because it’s usually convenient, and when it’s not, just like most Americans, I don’t. The only difference is, I don’t feel that I’m doing anything wrong. Just like my fellow Americans, I watch out for the police when I’m violating the law, after all, he has a gun and a club, and besides that, he has a job to do, and I sure wouldn’t want to kill a nice chap over running a stop sign. Much better to pay the ticket.
So like the chap was trying to tell you in the OP, you can be an Anarchist without being in an Anarchism. You just have to behave like a Domesticated Man most of the time, that’s all.
Oh, the chap in the OP wasn’t saying that Anarchism and Libertarianism were the same, he was illustrating a difference. I’m not sure that Secret Squirrel figured that out.
“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”, A. Einstein
“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” A. Einstein.