“The largest measure available to us is how many people left after the constitution was adopted. Tell me, John how many of them left after the constitution was adopted? I’m willing to bet that the number was small enough that you can’t tell us. You would think that if so many disagreed with the concepts embodied in the constitution that they would have voted with their feet.”

O.K., great. Here’s a new constitution. It says, “We the people of North America, do hereby proclaim Rad Geek as the sole Emperor of all North America. He has the power of life and death over everyone in North America and you have to do everything he says.” I’m going to put this constitution up to a vote. Who gets to vote on it? I do. I hereby vote in favor of this constitution. Voila, I am now Emperor of North America by unanimous consent.

Now let’s see how many people leave North America. Hell, I’ll give them a month before my coronation to get packing. If they don’t, then that entails that they are tacitly accepting Our Imperial reign over them, right?

Amp,

Thanks for this post. I made a similar argument in connection with Eric Robert Rudolph’s trial last year, in GT 2005-01-29: Hello, Birmingham. In the United States alone, there are over 1,360,000 abortions every year. The overwhelming majority of those are elective abortions that would be criminalized under South Dakota-style bans or even “reformed” bans with provisions for the usual rape / incest / health-of-the-mother exemptions. If you earnestly believe (as many anti-abortion folks claim to) that almost every single abortion is an act of murder, then you’re committed to believing that over 40,000,000 people have been murdered in the U.S. since abortion was decriminalized in 1973, that every single day that passes another 4,000 are being murdered. If that’s what’s happening, then we are living through the worst holocaust in all of recorded history.

And if that’s what you earnestly believe, then what the fuck are you doing writing checks to Michigan Right to Life or GOPAC? Why aren’t you shooting doctors? Why aren’t you blowing up clinics? Why aren’t you contributing funding or arms or safe space to militant networks such as the Army of God? If that’s what you earnestly believe, it would be very easy to do what you’re comitted to thinking of as saving a lot of innocent people from being murdered, just by going out tomorrow and injuring or killing a provider. If that’s what you earnestly believe, it’s precisely as if you were standing by and doing nothing (other than perhaps some “sidewalk counseling”) as you watch the SS shove men and women onto the cattle cars to Auschwitz.

Lots of people, even those in the anti-abortion movement, regard Rudolph, James Charles Kopp, et al. as murderers and dangerous lunatics. They’re right about that, but the only way that they can have any right to believe that is if they do not earnestly believe that abortion is murder. If you think Rudolph is a dangerous lunatic, then what can you say about someone who earnestly believes exactly what Rudolph believes about abortion, has no principled opposition to the use of violence to defend the innocent, and yet sits back and does nothing about it? That kind of person might be less dangerous than Rudolph, but they are also more contemptible: by their own lights, they ought to be regarded as cowards or moral monsters of the most depiscable sort.

I think the only charitable conclusion is that most people in the anti-abortion movement don’t really believe that abortion is murder; they believe that it’s wrong, for other reasons (because they think it’s cruel, perhaps, or tragic, or irresponsible, or something else), but the constant use of the terms “murder,” “infanticide,” etc. to condemn it can’t be anything more than empty and bloody rhetorical flourish.

A flourish which they really need to stop using, for the sake of their own compassion and humanity.

I don’t think Ms. Fire Thunder has testicles. Anyway, why would she, or any other woman in the U.S., want or need them?

Here is some information for those who would like to lend some direct support to President Fire Thunder’s efforts (via Hopelessly Midwestern):

If you want to mail donations to the reservation, you may do so at:

Oglala Sioux Tribe
ATTN: President Fire Thunder
P. O. Box 2070
Pine Ridge, SD 57770

OR: and this may be preferred, due to mail volume:

ATTN: PRESIDENT FIRE THUNDER
PO BOX 990
Martin, SD 57751

Enclose a letter voicing your support and explaining the purpose of the donation. Bear in mind, the Pine Ridge Res is not exactly dripping with disposeable income, so do consider donating funds directly to the tribe as well as specifically for this effort.

ETA: Make checks out to OST Planned Parenthood Cecelia Fire Thunder. This will ensure that the funds get routed properly.

For email contact, you can contact the president at:

firethunder_president AT NOSPAM yahoo DOT com cc:vbush AT NOSPAM oglala DOT org

For the sake of record keeping, do cc: the listed address on all correspondence; that’s her official secretary.

nobody.really:

But then RadGeek rebuts this argument by conceding that anarchies are not natural. To the contrary, RadGeek states that anarchies require “material and cultural preconditions” — even more elaborate preconditions than are required for existing forms of government.

Neither anarchy nor statism is natural. There is no natural political order, if “natural” means something like what we tend towards apart from or independently of culture; politics is a cultural artefact, and like all artefacts it has material and cultural preconditions. I didn’t say, and don’t think, that the material and cultural preconditions of flourishing anarchy are “even more elaborate” than the material and cultural preconditions of various forms of statism. They’re just different, and not all of them are currently present.

To the contrary, they create institutions specifically dedicated to the proposition that some people both within and beyond their borders will hold values OTHER than liberal democratic values; they call these institutions the “military” and the “police.”

Why do you think that anarchists don’t advocate participating in institutions for co-operative self-defense? They do (even pacifists; they just advocate different means). The only requirement is that those institutions not involve coercive methods and that they not make claims to sovereign authority. Actually existing stateless societies (medieval Iceland, medieval Ireland, Catalunia during the Spanish Civil War, etc.) had armed forces for defense; they just didn’t have standing government armies or police forces.

The problem that anarchists have with the military and the police are their aggressive and repressive functions, not their defensive function.

nobody.really:

I like wealth (among other things). In making my life decisions I considered various alternatives in terms of their likelihood of producing wealth, and I opted to pursue a professional degree.

I understand the concept of trade-offs. What I deny is that virtue is a good of the same sort that wealth or pleasure is (specifically, it’s what some ethicists have called a “side constraint” on the pursuit of goals, not just one goal among many to be pursued). The issue isn’t “going for broke” (which is just one more strategy, often a foolish one, for maximizing a good); it’s that you, personally, have a categorically binding obligation to do the right thing, not just to “maximize” the quantity of doing-the-right-thing going around in society as a whole. It’s about what kind of person you’re going to be, not what “quantities” of virtue you or your neighbors are going to accumulate. The nature of the thing is such that talk about trade-offs (and thus also talk about “going for broke”) does not make sense. Trading off a little bit of ethics now to get a greater quantity of righteousness later (how?), or worse yet more of other goods, is not prudent planning; it’s just moral treason.

Anarchist:

I enjoyed it too. Too bad it’s written from the position that coercive government is just fine and dandy until it picks on gays.

It’s not. Have you read the book?

V is explicitly an anarchist and rejects coercive government as such. He cites the crimes of Norsefire (which involve an awful lot more than sending gay people to concentration camps, although I should say that sending gay people to concentration camps really is quite a good reason to resist a government) only as the most brutal end-result of statism.

Macker:

“It was you. You who appointed these people. You who gave them the power to make your decisions for you.”

I assumed the crime here was voting, and/or giving political support.

Not quite. The sin that V is talking about is submission: specifically, deference to claims of political authority over your life and the lives of your neighbors. Voting or concrete political support may be an expression of deference to claims of authority, or they may not, depending on the breaks.

Robert:

But dear boy, you don’t have to think it. You don’t even have to be the one to do it. The point is that, faced with oppression or tyranny or banditry under anarchy, some group of farmers is going to get together, spit, and say “you know, if we each just gave 5 percent of our crop to a central body, and then the central body used it to hire soldiers to patrol each of our farms, that’d keep the bandits out.”

They’re welcome to arrange for the defense of their farms in this way if they want to do so. After all, those are their farms, so if they want to host armed patrols to protect it that’s their business. Although there are pacifist anarchists, I’m not one of them. You’ll notice that I listed armed self-defense as one of the options for ways to resist tyranny that don’t involve forming embryonic states. The important thing is that (1) farmers are not coerced into ponying up the money for the patrols, (2) farmers can refuse to allow the patrols access to their land, and (3) farmers can choose to arrange for a different means of defense if they decide that they’d prefer to. (N.B.: in the list of attributes I gave for miniature states, all of them are important. The example that you gave is not coercively funded, or violently enforced, and whether it’s permanent or unchallenged is thus far up to the farmers who support it.) Historically speaking, I doubt that they’d really want full-time mercenaries to tromp around in their fields; it’s expensive and usually unnecessary. This kind of stuff is what citizen militias used to be for.

Of course, you may very well be right that if you have a lot of organizations like this around, and people interact with them in much the way they interact with government police forces today, it’s unlikely to be conducive to maintaining liberty:

But I think they’re a lot more likely to just organize an entity that carries guns, and have it shoot their enemies. And once that starts, the entity itself will want to continue existing.

The difficulty with the approach you outline is that it assumes everyone is a trained theoretical anarchist with a distaste for hierarchy and a commitment to avoid statist solutions to their immediate problems. I don’t think that’s a realistic premise. You’re going to have folks out there whose first solution is “let’s form a government”. And governments have a way of growing.

But the simple answer to this is that anarchism has material and cultural preconditions for flourishing. That might seem like a liability, but it’s a liability that anarchy shares with most other political theories (democracy, for example, requires a population that’s at least minimally willing to, and interested in, participating politically in order to function; republican politics in general is supposed to work best when caste sentiment and class deference are weakest; most modern statist theories presuppose at least a certain respect for process and the rule of law; etc.). I certainly agree with you that a sudden transition to anarchy is not likely to be sustainable in the current cultural climate. But the current cultural climate will not always be current, and there are plenty of reasons to think that a number of the things you mention (lack of scruple about coercion, deference to ritualized hierarchies, adherence to traditional political forms, etc.) are not natural or inevitable facts, but rather facets of a culture that can and ought to be changed.

nobody.really:

I’m with you up until 3. But when seeking to minimize (or maximize) a variable, the optimal strategy may be to pursue a second-best solution.

You’ve actually misunderstood my argument if you think that I’m primarily making a point about how to “minimize a variable” or suggesting that the primary reason for anarchism is that it produces the least coercion on net in society. Some anarchists lean on that kind of consequentialist argument; I don’t.

To be clear, I think it’s true that anarchy is a necessary but insufficient condition for minimizing the total amount of coercion in a given society. But I don’t think that’s the primary reason to be an anarchist. The primary reason is (1) that it’s wrong for any one person to coerce any other peaceful person; (2) that the State, as such, exists by one group of people coercing another group of peaceful people; and (3) that peaceful people have no special obligation to defer to morally illegitimate commands. (1) and (2) together establish the moral illegitimacy of all governments, and (1), (2), and (3) together establish the moral legitimacy of ignoring, defying, or resisting arbitrary government demands. It’s not an issue of whether this maximizes liberty on the whole or minimizes coercion; coercion is something that each individual person is categorically obliged to abstain from, and liberty is something that each individual person has an inalienable right to exercise, independently of whether or not this “minimizes” the former and “maximizes” the latter on the whole.

… For if anyone demonstrated freedom of conscience and expression, it was Ayn Rand. …

Ayn Rand was not an anarchist. She said so in quite explicit and vituperative language (see e.g. her writings on Murray Rothbard). So her life decisions don’t say anything in particular about anarchism at all.

That said, the argument you offer is frankly a silly one. I’m pretty fed up with the U.S. government, but where else would I go, and why? All this tells you about anarchism or anarchists is that (1) anarchists have reasons, much like everyone else, to stay in their own homes rather than uprooting their whole lives to move somewhere else, and (2) there aren’t any stateless societies that are worthy enough of relocating to to overcome (1). Back around 1740 there were many French-speaking republicans, who opposed the absolute monarchy and feudal privilege in France, but who did not move out of France to live somewhere else without an absolute monarchy and feudalist privileges. So what? Is that supposed to prove that late Bourbon monarchy was the ideal political system at the time? Or does it simply prove that sometimes your options suck and you have to go with the least-worst that’s available until something new comes up?

There’s a lot of points that I haven’t answered yet; it’ll have to wait a while longer, I fear.

nobody.really:

And about that air pollution thingy…?

What about it? Some forms of air pollution (e.g. pollution from small, decentralized sources such as automobiles) would be harder to limit under anarchy. Others (e.g. air pollution by large, centralized polluters such as oil, gas, and coal operations) would be easier to limit because the companies wouldn’t be subsidized and immunized from liability by the State. It’s currently very hard for people suffering from the local effects of polluters (in, for example, Port Arthur and other refinery towns in Texas) to demand compensation from the people who are poisoning them, because as long as the companies can convince bureaucrats that they’re dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s under the ex ante pollution regulations, they bear very little risk of being held liable for the actual effects that they are having on people.

The best thing to do about air pollution is use demands for compensation (under principles of nuisance and documented harms) to internalize the costs of air pollution and require the polluters to bear those costs. That won’t always be easy (some major sources of pollution are decentralized and thus hard or impossible to deal with through direct means. In that case you’ll have to lean on cultural criticism, moral persuasion, economic boycotts, technological development, etc. Oh well; nobody promised that anarchism would solve all the problems in the world; any political theory that promises to is guaranteed to be bunkum. All I suggested is that it will solve or ameliorate some of them; and in particular that putting questions to legislators who don’t personally bear any of the costs of their decisions is typically going to make free-rider problems worse, not better. (Again, check out the riders on any large federal spending bill if you don’t believe me. I can think of several big, politically-connected polluters, for example, who wouldn’t be receiving a cent of my money if I had a say in how my money got spent.)

I am seriously suggesting that some people will be free riders if you let them.

The question is why you think that “people” have this problem but legislatures don’t (legislatures are, remember, made of people). Free-rider problems become more of a problem, not less, when the people making decisions about how money should spent bear no personal cost for how it is spent. If you’re seriously concerned about the free-rider problem, then you need to think harder if you think that externalizing costs for the decision-makers is the best solution to it.

As a further note on my brusque earlier reply.

Many of the common lines of criticism against anarchist theories succeed only by holding anarchy and anarchists to higher standards than the State or statists are held to. The line of how anarchists intend to stop tyrants (petty or grand) is one of them. Nobody in the world, anarchist or statist, has a perfect theory of how to resist oppression; democratic states, republican states, aristocratic states, constitutional monarchies, absolute monarchies, grand empires, humble city-states, stateless societies (medieval Iceland, medieval Ireland), etc. have all, at some time or another, fallen into tyranny or into civil war; have been conquered in war; have systematized and ritualized forms of violent oppression by one class or caste or sex over another. Revolutions fail; societies decay; things fall apart. Judging from the results of the late unlamented century, most of the powers that be don’t even have a good theory of how to stop that: hundreds of millions of people were murdered because major powers engaged in tyranny and imperial warfare, civil war, terror famines, and genocide, and because even when they were not actively doing these things themselves, they were either powerless or unwilling to do anything to stop the others. So while these are reasonable questions to ask of any theory of social life, a bit of recognition that the topic is hard and that it’s unfair to hold any theory to the standard of needing a complete solution to the problem of evil, would go a long way.

That said, here are some things that anarchists typically stress.

(1) For just about any form of successful oppression, it’s hard to see how introducing the State will dampen the problem rather than amplifying it. If there is a discernible ruling class then it’s a matter of course that they’ll have disproportionate power over the apparatus of the State; if you have a centralized Leviathan that is able to assert and enforce its claims to sole authority then that means a corresponding increase in the capacity of oppressors to violently enforce their will over the oppressed. Without a central state, there is no guarantee that the oppressed will be able to successfully resist the aggression of oppressors, but when a central state with unchallenged police power, military power, intelligence capabilities, etc. is systematically turned against them, the prospects are correspondingly much bleaker. You might say, “But look, what that means is that the oppressed should have access to state power so that they can defend themselves. Wouldn’t that be great?” But then you need to (1) figure out how they are going to get it (magic won’t do) and (2) how whatever means help them to get it (organizing, moral agitation, cultural change, nonviolent resistance, etc.) wouldn’t work just as well, or better, if it were focused on direct action rather than on trying to influence or take control of government decision-making bodies.

(2) As a strategy for resisting potential new forms of oppression, a Leviathan state also seems like a risky strategy at the very best. Tyrants very often solidify their tyranny by taking over centralized structures of power that were already in place; it’s much harder to build an effective tyranny from scratch than it is to consolidate power over existing police, intelligence, military, etc. forces and then to turn them to your ends. In anarchy, any projects or organizations for self-defense are voluntary, decentralized, and don’t claim a monopoly on legitimate authority; that means that if a tyrant tries to subvert the existing structures there aren’t institutional barriers to withdrawing from them and setting up new ones that aren’t subject to her or his will. Under territorial states, no such option is available: there’s only one target that needs to be seized, and once it’s seized, the subjects of the state can’t do much of anything about it. The “stability” of an organized power structure is only a virtue if that power structure is, on the whole, benevolent; if it’s malevolent then the last thing you want is for its hegemony to be stable and unchallenged. The problem is how to protect yourself from the malefactors once you’ve already ceded your ability to resist back when times were allegedly good. Actually existing states don’t have a very good record on this count.

(3) To be quite frank, nearly no State in all of recorded history (certainly not the United States, for one) could seriously be claimed to be a bunch of ordinary people banding together to protect themselves from marauders. The band of slavers and genocidaires who founded the U.S. government, to take one example, were pretty explicit that they aimed for the federal government to protect and systematize their own marauding against innocent Africans, African-Americans, and Indians not taxed. It’s not much different elsewhere — the people who oversee the formation of states are typically powerful and concentrated interests who hope to, and do, turn the newly-formed State to the pursuit of their own interests at the expense of the less powerful. The popular liberal myth of government by compact wouldn’t morally justify the State, even if it were true of actually existing governments; but it’s not true. The only “compacts” made have been pirate’s codes, and nothing more.

(4) The strategic question of how to create, sustain, and defend anarchy is an important one to ask, and a difficult one to answer. But it ought to be understood that it is not, actually, the primary issue involved in whether or not anarchism is true. The primary arguments for anarchism are not strategic arguments, but moral ones; it’s not that anarchy is valued because it’s useful to attaining some other goods, but rather because violent coercion is wrong, whatever its effects may be, and the princes, potentates, and presidents of the world make claims of authority over other people that can only be, and are, backed up by violent coercion. So demonstrating that there are tricky problems for anarchists to solve doesn’t mean that anarchy isn’t the right thing to aim for; it just means that what you ought to aim for might be tricky to hit. But nobody said that the right thing has to be easy, or that achieving it has to be effortless. The emancipation of women, civil rights, the abolition of slavery, religious toleration, democracy, etc. have all been difficult propositions, tricky to achieve and difficult to sustain in the face of coordinated and unrelenting resistance. That raises questions about strategy and tactics, but it doesn’t provide any reason for thinking that the goal itself ought to be abandoned.