Contemplationist:

However, in this world full of states one can only compare states with other states.

No, I’m pretty sure that I can do other things. Just watch me: nobody acting on behalf of a state has the right to rob, rape, torture, expel, or kill innocent people, on the basis of collectivist demographic policies, statist “national security” interests, or for any other reason. They don’t have those rights because nobody has those rights, under any conditions.

Maybe you meant to say that comparing the actions of rulers to those of ordinary, non-ruling people, or expecting rulers to be held to the same ethical standards as ordinary, non-ruling people, is somehow inappropriate, or out of order. But why would it be inappropriate, or out of order? If everybody in the room is a liar and a murderer, that’s not an excuse for lying and murdering — although it may be a good reason to try to get out of the room as quickly as possible.

Contemplationist:

Israel accepted its meager 1948 boundaries while not getting close to everything they wanted. The Arabs rejected the state

“Israel” and “the Arabs” did these things? Really? Did they do them all at once, or one at a time?

Last I checked, what actually happened is that a handful of individuals who arrogantly styled themselves the rulers of “Israel” and of “the Arabs” made these decisions, claiming to speak on behalf of all of “their” people, and then used their decisions as a justification for mercilessly dispossessing, slaughtering, and otherwise “cleansing” each others’ claimed territory of a bunch of ordinary people who were never asked, never consented, and never had anything really to do with the political decisions being made.

You may not agree with the blockade but a blockade is a legitimate tool of war

No, it isn’t. There are no legitimate tools of war.

Government war is nothing more than political mass murder. Why would I accept that there are legitimate tools to that end?

Now, sometimes government wars can, by accident, involve legitimate acts (e.g., individual acts of legitimate defense, of self or others, against assault), even while the policy itself is criminal. But some tools of war are incapable of being used like that, because they invariably hurt or kill innocents. Firebombing cities is one such example; random bus bombings are another such example; and starvation blockades are a third. These are moral crimes, and those who kill in order to inflict them are murderers.

You can see the soldiers being attacked and thrown overboard

Good. Soldiers who attempt to commandeer ships that they don’t own are violating the rights of the travelers, are no better than pirates, and ought to be attacked and thrown overboard if at all feasible.

But you cannot ignore the attack on soldiers when many many ships have been boarded and inspected before without incident.

MBH:

But if that force is subject to the decision-making of the corporation, then either (a) the state doesn’t monopolize force or (b) there is no actual monopoly on force.

I do not grant that force is solely “subject to the decision-making of the corporation;” I think that’s an absurd oversimplification, and very obviously so in an age when the United States Department of the Treasury owns controlling shares in several major corporations. But even if I were to grant this for the sake of argument, the attempt to infer this disjunction from that premise is a complete non sequitur.

If a social function is entirely controlled by a single organization, then that organization is a monopolist, even if the organization is, in turn, controlled by some other organization. The monopoly is in the constriction at the point of production, not in the decision-making structure that sets policy for that constricted point of production.

You may as well argue, “Under absolute monarchy, the force of the State is under the personal control of the King, not the State as such. Thus, either (a) the State doesn’t monopolize force or (b) there is no actual monopoly of force. Thus, 17th century France was in a state of anarcho-monarchism!” This would, of course, be absurd. But no more absurd than the claim that effective corporate control over the state makes for “anarchy” in any way, shape or form.

MBH:

But now I tend to think it’s an open question.

Well, everything’s an open question — nobody with any sense is promising a strategy on the grounds that it absolutely guarantees success. The question is what tendencies would push in what direction. And my argument is that, generally, the tendency will probably be towards dissipating great fortunes, (creatively) destroying incumbent corporations, and undermining capitalist social relations. For reasons I’ve already discussed at length. If, on the other hand, that’s not what prevails — if the strategy fails, as it might — then failure is just going to be failure to keep the state abolished in the first place — that is, for powerbrokers to try to recuperate the cultural prestige and externalization of costs that they had through the state. But that would just be to recreate the state. Of course, the reemergence of a state is a well-known and much-discussed danger for any anarchistic society, but you’ve given no reason as yet to consider it inevitable, and all of this is certainly no reason to think that having to rebuild the state from scratch would be somehow more advantageous to the robber barons than is simply availing themselves of a ready-made state that they already have.

GE’s a terrible example because it would certainly be too expensive for them.

A terrible example for what? We were talking about enforcing intellectual monopolies without the state, so it makes sense to discuss a company that subsists mainly on its patent portfolio. We could talk about Microsoft, GlaxoSmithKline, Time Warner, or whoever you want, but I don’t think that changing the company will change the outcome. If it turns out that this kind of proposal is absurd for any of the major intellectual monopoly leeches, then it seems likely that intellectual monopoly would indeed collapse in a stateless society, as predicted.

But what about, say, Citi, Magnetar, and a few other hedge funds?

Uh, well, what about them? CitiGroup controls fewer resources than G.E., not more (they have a much lower market cap, make much lower revenues, and lost about $1,606,000,000 last year, while G.E. made $11,025,000,000 in profits. Citi is also obviously not any more independent than G.E. from continuous and ongoing government privilege and subsidy as a basic part of their business model; you may recall that they’ve been bailed out by the feds four different times, were insolvent as of November 2008 prior to massive infusions of extorted cash. There is also the minor fact that the United States government currently owns about 1/3 of the bank.

If paying for enforcement on their own dime and without cultural sanction is not going to be sustainable for G.E. there is absolutely no reason to believe it would be sustainable for CitiGroup, or any other money-monopoly firm, either. (The financial sector, as a whole, is uniquely and peculiarly dependent on a very complicated network of interlocking government regulations, cartels, and massive direct subsidies.)

And if that’s the case, how could the highest level companies not control the flow of capital to such a degree that they essentially owned the US armed forces?

If there were no U.S., which is the hypothetical situation we were considering, there would be, ex hypothesi, no U.S. armed forces, either. Perhaps you mean hiring up the men and buying up the equipment after the U.S. military disappears? But if so, how is that a different case from any other case of hiring on private enforcement? How does it differ at all from the case I just discussed?

I wouldn’t dare to speculate about why people like Trotsky became won to Bolshevism. But I don’t know why you think that people like the butcher of Kronstadt would be good figures to appeal to around a bunch of Anarchists.

In any case, if your “successful anti-capitalist revolution” includes industrial conscription, the dismantling of all independent trade unions, the Red Army, the Cheka, and confiscating grain while 5,000,000 peasants starve to death, then I have to wonder what “anti-capitalism” means to you; apparently you don’t have in mind the end of bosses, death squads, political repression, militarism, or (literal) starvation wages. If that’s what “success” looks like, what in the world would you count as a failure?

If I can’t survive, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.

... Nope; since the 1996 welfare bill, both undocumented *and* documented immigrants have been denied eligibility to all means-tested federal aid, including

... For reference, it's Steph*a*n Kinsella, not Steph*e*n. (His first name is actually Norman, but he generally goes by N. Stephan Kinsella or just Stephan.)

... Well, O.K., but land accumulation doesn't just happen in a social vacuum, and I suspect that in a free society it would be pretty expensive to pull this

MBH:

Why? Are deeply ingrained belief systems not institutions?

No, not in the primary sense of the word “institutions” they are not. Of course, many or most of them are promulgated by institutions, and legitimize institutions — universities, churches, etc.

But, in any case, I had no idea that by “the System” you meant to refer to “deeply ingrained belief systems.” If that is what you meant by that term, then I’ll recur to what I said above, with some minor and obvious changes.

If you just mean any “deeply ingrained belief system” just as such, then of course no non-Nihilistic version of Anarchism has any problem with deeply-ingrained belief systems just as such, any more than we are against human sociality just as such — most of us would like anti-statism and anti-authoritarianism to become more deeply ingrained in most people than they currently are, for one thing. Of course, you may say, “Ah! But what about what the Nihilists say?” Well, what about it? I think what they say is wrong; but in any case I’m not aware of any strong reason for treating the Nihilists as the exemplary Anarchists rather than any other school of Anarchistic thought.

What about actually-existing deeply-ingrained belief systems? Certainly, Anarchists call on people to reject a lot of conventional beliefs. But it certainly doesn’t mean simply jumping out of all existing conventional beliefs, any more than it involves jumping out of the entire institutional structure of society. There are belief systems that we challenge, and belief systems that we have no basic beef with (most Anarchists, as far as I know, are happy with people believing that the earth revolves around the sun and that you shouldn’t torture dogs or children just for the fun of it). In point of fact, when we set out to challenge the belief systems that we challenge, it is often by showing how those beliefs conflict with other, deeply ingrained beliefs that we want people to hold onto (e.g., by showing how support for government wars is incompatible with opposition to murder and torture, etc.).

If you mean to pick out some particular form of “belief systems,” e.g. hierarchical belief systems or belief systems that sanction coercion, then of course there are available alternatives to that; or at least, you haven’t yet given me any reasons to believe that they can’t. Certainly, Anarchists have spent a lot of time trying to develop alternative, non-hierarchical, non-coercive belief systems, and I don’t think you’ve shown how “alternative institutions” or alternative belief systems or whatever presuppose the negation of those alternative belief systems.

MBH:

Can we just assume that I’m not giving a history lecture?

O.K., but expecting your use of 100-year-old technical terminology to be based on something that will cover more than just the past 10 years within a specific, narrow, and kind of weird subculture (viz. the movementarian radical Left) is not exactly expecting “a history lecture.” It’s more like expecting a functioning memory.

Can we also assume that words might be more malleable than you’re willing to concede?

As you please, but the malleability of words depends on conventional use of the words. Not on your personal and extremely idiosyncratic use, or on the responses that you would imagine getting if you asked a weird and really stilted question (“Do you think that you would consider yourself 25% Anarchist?”) to a tiny minority of the population (“radical Leftists”), which nobody other than you personally has thought to go around asking.