Start using public key cryptography to the extent possible in your private correspondence. Encourage others to do so. Help non-technical users get started with it.

Support your neighborhood CopWatch. If you don’t have a neighborhood CopWatch, get in touch with the nearest one and ask for their advice and/or help in starting one.

Write to public forums that don’t usually publish anarchist material, but where you stand a chance of getting published anyway, explicitly advocating anarchism. For example, a letter to the editor of your local newspaper. Include pointers to online resources where people can learn more about anarchist takes on the issue you’re writing about.

Find ways to get things that you need outside of the documented cash economy. For example, if there’s a Food Not Bombs in your town, you can get to know a bunch of other anarchists, do some mutual aid work, and, in the process, get some free food for your labor. If there isn’t a Food Not Bombs in your town yet, again, get in touch with existing FNB groups and try to start one. (There are lots of guides online.)

If you have it, I’d also recommend contributing some money to groups that provide direct relief and aid for victims of violence, and which combat cultural attitudes that promote violence. For example, I give a fixed percentage of my income to women’s shelters and groups like Women for Women International (which focuses on relief for women in war zones). By doing so I not only provide direct aid to real people and to a network of institutions which can supplant the supposed welfare functions of the State; I also remove that much more money from the taxed economy, and put it toward the purpose of healing and mutual aid, rather than what it would otherwise have been used for — graft, handcuffs, bombs, prisons, etc.

Micha: I fail to see how the issue of immigration could be seen as complex, rather than for what it is ….

I think the short answer is this: calling border laws and internal immigration policing a complex issue for libertarians primarily serves a social function, not an intellectual one, in the Mises Institute / LewRockwell.com circle.

The issue is actually, obviously, extremely simple, and Hoppe’s and Ron Paul’s positions are actually, obviously, completely wrong. I suspect that most of those who criticize their positions but pass off the issue as a complex one realize this, but also reckon that it wouldn’t go over well in mixed company to say so in as many words.

Radfem,

I think the sad fact is that it’s never going to come up in the Presidential campaign, or in any other electoral campaign, because there’s no real disagreement within the ruling class over the issue of police brutality; both of them believe that the hirelings of the (white, male) State should be given every possible benefit of the doubt, and some impossible benefits of the doubt besides, in their use of violence to “control the situation” in dealing with people who are “suspect” in the eyes of the (white, male) State. Meanwhile their victims, especially people of color, “belligerent” women, etc., should be automatically presumed to be either liars or crazy if they complain about their treatment at the hands of police. Nearly all of the leadership in both of the major parties believe in this because it’s in their interest to believe it; they both want control of the State apparatus, and when they have that apparatus in their hands, they want it to be an effective weapon, which requires a brutal and unchecked police force. Besides which, anyone who exhibited enough humanity to see through the politics, and dared to suggest anything different would be promptly crucified by the Fraternal Order of Police and the howling sado-fascist bully brigade that gets their back in every major media outlet. The only real constituency for reform on this issue are a handful of radical political activists who have made this a pet issue, and a vast run of ordinary people who have been themselves threatened or hurt by police violence–and neither of these groups have or are likely to have any real power in partisan politicking anytime soon. And since there is no real difference within the ruling class on the issue, there’s no real wedge for driving it into the stage-managed political debate.

It’s for precisely this reason that I think any attempt at healing the survivors and defending ourselves from police violence has to come through fundamentally different means–means which disrupt, or simply bypass, that stage-managed political debate in favor of much more direct action. For example, supporting your neighborhood CopWatch.

Thanks for the mention, and for the kind words. I agree about the tone of that OC Weekly article. It’s kind of baffling, because the analysis is actually so much better than the analysis in most abusive-cop pieces, but the tone comes off as if it were written by a fugitive from a direct-to-video American Pie script.

As for self-described libertarians, what I’ve found is that they (we) are a pretty diverse lot. A lot are tools or creeps, and especially those “small government” types whose views are conventional enough to fit into the outer fringes of mainstream political discourse. But, while I don’t want much to do with those folks, radical libertarians tend to be a very different sort, and those that I get along with and try to learn from (e.g. Roderick Long, Kevin Carson, Jennifer McKitrick, Carol Moore, Anthony Gregory, Sheldon Richman, Brad Spangler ….) are generally maneuvering to out-Lef the establishment Left, in terms of exposing the class dynamics of the State and making a case for radically decentralist, grassroots approaches that achieve Leftist and feminist goals by ordinary people getting together amongst themselves, and bypassing or confronting the State, rather than collaborating with it or trying to seize control of it. Maybe that approach is the right approach, and maybe it’s the wrong approach; but in any case it’s a very different approach from the one that you’d be likely to see from the “small-government conservative” types, or at your local Libertarian Party, or in your average MeetUp for Chairman Ron’s Great Libertarian Electoral Revolution. And it’s an approach that more libertarians seem to be adopting lately; a tendency which I hope I might be able to encourage, in whatever small ways I can manage.

Anyway, that’s how I see it now. Does that help clarify, or does it muddy?

GT 2008-03-10: Rapists on patrol (#2) in which David Alex Park, stalker and rapist, is acquitted on all charges, by a jury of eleven men and one woman. Not because he is anything other than a stalker and a rapist—which he as much as admitted in open court, and which was proven well enough anyway by phone records, license plate requests, and DNA evidence–but rather because he is a cop, and the woman that he harassed and sexually extorted danced at a strip club.

Mike G:

I have yet to be convinced that once the state is dissolved we would default to the well conditioned individuals required for governmentless existence.

So, Mike, if you’ve “yet to be convinced” that enough people could become “well conditioned” enough to govern their own affairs without intervention from the government, then why are you convinced that enough people can become “well conditioned” enough to run a government, which requires not only governing their own affairs well, but also governing the affairs of millions of complete strangers? Governments are, after all, made of people, and if you think that people are basically unfit to run their own lives, then it seems like the worst thing you could do would be to put such paragons of folly and vice in charge of other people’s lives, too.

Of course, you might instead claim that a most people aren’t equipped with the wisdom or virtue necessary to govern their own affairs, but that a select few people do have it, and have enough of it to successfully govern others, too. But if such philosopher-kings exist, then it’s up to you to figure out how you will ever find them and what sort of political process could ensure that the people who get into power are members of the select few rather than the multitude that you consider to be so ill-conditioned for self-government. But what would that be? By heredity? Conquest? Election? Self-selection? If the first two, then certainly neither heredity nor fighting it out (which are by far the most common means, for the vast bulk of known human history, by which these questions have been decided) provides any guarantee whatever that the wise and temperate will tend to win out in either the genetic lottery, or in armed combat, over the careless, ignorant, or brutal. If the third, then you are just proposing that the select few are to be picked out and installed by the multitude. But then why should people who are (on your view) incapable of self-government be capable of correctly picking out those who are capable of governing them? Or, in the fourth option, if the select few are to be picked out and installed by predecessors who are also part of the select few, then you face a regress; for how did we go about finding and installing those predecessors?

If you want to try and use general folly, ignorance, or vice as an argument against anarchy, then you take on the burden of showing how you could successfully find and organize enough people who avoid that general condition in order to constitute a government and maintain it over long periods of time. Until you give some concrete idea of how to do that, proposing to solve the problem with government is hard to distinguish from proposing to put out a fire by pouring some cool, fresh gasoline on it.

Angelica:

My point actually doesn’t have very much to do with “personal responsibility.” It has to do with the priorities that you’re expressing in your action, and with some basic considerations of fairness.

You evidently don’t think that the problem is important enough to stop you from eating at El Toro. That’s fine; as I see it, that’s your business, and if don’t consider it a big enough deal to affect your eating choices, I’m not about to butt in and try to tell you that you should. But if you’re fine with eating there, under those conditions, then why oughtn’t other people be able to eat there, too, under those conditions?

If the argument is that other people should be able to, if they know what they’re getting into, but currently they don’t know what they’re getting into, because only the boss and the employees know about the situation, then that response only seems to relocate the problem. Firstly, an argument like that doesn’t actually justify having the government threaten restaurateurs with being fined or shut down over their rat problems. At most it would justify having the government publish the information about the rat problem, and then allowing customers to make their own decisions once they have been given the opportunity to find out about it.

But, secondly, it also seems obvious, from your actions, that you don’t consider the rat problem at El Toro, or the problem of customers not knowing about the rats, to be a very serious problem, anyway. If you did believe that your customers’ health or well-being was likely to be put at a serious risk, then what excuse would you have for not telling them about the danger? (So you’d lose your job. Better to risk that than to conceal information and gamble with other people’s health.) If, on the other hand, you don’t believe that there’s a serious enough issue here to justify you putting yourself out in any way to protect others from it, then what makes you think it’s a serious enough issue to justify calling in the government to force other people to pick up costs that you don’t see as worth taking on? The issue here isn’t so much with personal responsibility; it has to do with the mismatch between your explicit claims about the importance of the problem, and the real-life priorities that seem to be revealed in your chosen course of (in)action.

As for what would happen if El Toro got put out of business over the rat problem, have you considered that if restaurants started getting put out of business by conscientious private individuals who exposed rat problems, then remaining restaurants might have a pretty strong motivation to clean out any rat problems they may have before the same thing happens to them?

JOR,

The same. The original essay is available online; cf. also GT 2003-09-30: Why There Are No Arguments for Terrorism for my responding to Honderich with a certain gesture of the hands.

Kevin: I think the net effect in this case, as in many hypothetical scenarios of dismantling the state in the wrong order, would be–as counterintuitive as it may seem–to increase the net level of exploitation carried out with the help of the state.

Well, I’m not sure that that’s especially counterintuitive. I’m perfectly willing to grant that there are plenty of cases where it’s true. What I’m trying to stress is that, as far as I can tell, we don’t disagree very much about the net consequences of different sequences of repeal. I agree that in the hypothetical case I gave, there might very well be a net increase in the predominance of class exploitation in the markets for labor, land, etc.

But, while I agree with you on that, I also think you have to keep in mind that when you make political choices you’re not just making choices about which God’s-eye-view net outcome you would prefer. You’re acting within the world, as one mortal creature among many fellow creatures, and when you deliberate about what to do you have to deliberate about what sort of person you, personally, are going to be, and what you, personally, are or aren’t willing to do to another human being. I know that I, personally, couldn’t live with deliberately choosing to shove around or rob another human being, or letting another human being go on being shoved around or robbed, for even a second longer, if all I needed to do to stop the latter would be to push a button, no matter how much I might prefer the results that I might be able to get from it. Because I’m not a thief or a bully, and I don’t want to let myself become an accomplice of thieves or bullies, either, even if it would otherwise improve my quality of life. Hence why I’d push the button, immediately and without reservation, even though I do in fact think that the net consequences of doing so would be substantially worse, in terms of things that I care about and which affect me personally, than the net consequences of repeal in the opposite order.

So I’m anti-gradualism not because I’m anti-dialectics, but rather because I think that there are personal obligations of justice involved in the political choices you make, and that dialectically-grounded praxis has to integrate those personal obligations into your course of action just as much as it has to integrate the general, big-picture view of class dynamics, socio-political structure, et cetera. In fact, if a process of deliberation abstracts away from the ground-level personal obligations of justice, fair treatment, etc. that we all have to each other, and only reckons what to do based on some very high-level structural-functional considerations about society as a whole and global-level net consequences, then I’d say that process of deliberation has become dangerously one-sided and acontextual. A praxis that doesn’t take into account what I could or couldn’t live with as a conscientious human being is an anti-dialectical and indeed an inhuman praxis.

But I fear that I’m beginning to throw a lot of jargon at the problem. Does that clarify or muddify?

Kevin: I’d probably even quibble as to whether it amounted to a reduction in statism even as such, since a high marginal tax rate on Bill Gates arguably amounts to the state ameliorating or moderating its primary act of statism in guaranteeing the income to Gates in the first place through IP.

Sure; this is a legitimate concern, to the degree that the exploitation in question is based not only on profiteering from the ripple effects of other, directly coercive acts, but where the exploitation is itself directly coercive (as is the case in government-enforced monopolies and captive markets). I would agree that there is some non-zero proportion of Bill Gates’s annual income, for example, which he actually has no legitimate property right to at all, and so no moral right to complain about taxation, any more than a slave-ship captain has a moral right to complain about a pirate making off with “his” gold, rum, and slaves. In such cases, my basic attitude is Tucker’s good old “No pity, no praise.”

But there are a couple problems in trying to translate this into any conclusion about income tax policy. Income tax policy has no way of distinguishing the legitimate portion of Bill Gates’s income (which I presume is also non-zero) from the extorted portion of it. In fact, in most cases, I think it would be impossible even in principle to calculate what the right proportions would be; in the absence of an actual free market process, there’s just no way to know how much of an intellectual monopolist’s income is legitimate and how much of it is an extorted monopoly rent.

And, beyond that, the tax also imposed alike on everyone in that income tax bracket, whether or not their income derives from direct violations of individual rights in the way that copyright and patent monopolists’ income does. Many if not most of the top 10% derive a lot of their income from direct coercion, but many of them do not (rather, they get fatter-than-free-market profits by profiteering of the ripple effects of other people’s coercion; but, while that’s also ethically objectionable, it’s a very different case from the standpoint of whether those profits can justly be expropriated). And if there’s even one single person who is robbed of even one cent of legitimately earned wealth by the general tax policy — and I think it’s next to impossible that nobody would be unjustly victimized by the tax — then, again, I think that’s reason enough to push the button. I couldn’t leave that one guy to go on getting robbed, even though all the rest of the people affected by the tax be a gang of pirates, swindlers, and extortionists. There are cases where expropriating the expropriators is legitimate and just; but government taxation is far too blunt a weapon to ever achieve it without inflicting a lot of collateral damage on innocent people.

Angelica,

So, just so we’re clear:

You’re fully aware of the rat problem at El Toro. You could just not eat there, but you choose to eat there anyway because you think the food’s good enough that it outweighs whatever risks you think the rat problem may pose to you.

You also could tell customers about the rat problem that you happen to know about, if you wanted to. You choose not to tell them because, for whatever reason, you don’t think it would be worth it to provide that information, even though you apparently think your customers would care about it.

In short, while you no doubt harbor some idle dislike for the situation, you manifestly don’t think it’s enough of a problem for you to stop eating there, nor enough of a problem for you to stick your neck out by giving customers the straight dope, or, as far as I can tell, to really inconvenience yourself in any way at all over this issue, either for your own sake or for others’.

On the other hand, even though you’re not willing to do anything personally about this putative problem through nonviolent means and on your own dime, you are willing to endorse a third party barging in to force the restaurateur to do what you want him to do (or else), because that course of action allows you to get your own way while forcing other people to bear the costs of your own hygienic preferences.

Have I got your position right, or is there something that I’m missing? If so, what?

If not, then I don’t understand how this is intended as an argument for the legitimacy or the desirability of State hygienic intervention. Rather, it sounds a lot like you started off presuming what you claimed to be proving.

Man, a “anarchists can’t get organized” joke. Ho ho ho. Never heard one of those before.

“ANARCHISM … the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.” – P.A. Kropotkin

I don’t mean to be an old stick in the mud, but really, this old chestnut involves such a complete misunderstanding of what the overwhelming majority of anarchists in the history of the world (who have tended to assign a lot of importance to freely constituted, participatory assocations) have thought, that it really just fails as humor.