Mark:

I’m unable to use your post at this link to decide which part of the political spectrum you were coming from, but I would have taken your word for it in any case.

Well, the link was to a comment, not to the original post. (The original post at that URL was not by me. The relevant part of the comment I was linking to is the part that begins “But I mentioned it specifically in order to offer myself as an example,” etc. The brief comments about my motivations for getting interested in markets may be tangentially connected to this conversation: the whole point was to deepen my understanding of how spontaneous social orders might emerge and flourish without the need for centralized management or control. The problem with most traditional social anarchists, when there has been a problem, is not that we have called for too little consensual social control, but that we have called for too much; our picture of social transformation has too often looked like one damn committee meeting (*) after another. Markets are valuable as models insofar as they offer an alternative model — mutual exchange and competitive experimentation — for uncontrolled social interaction.

You are mistaking control/government for aggression/the state.

I don’t think that I am. My point about social control (“management,” “government,” etc.) is not limited to a point about coercive forms of control over others. To use the distinction from the “Invisible Fist” essay, I am not just talking about the reality and importance of voluntary orders here; I’m also talking about the reality and importance of undesigned or polycentric orders, which is what I took the business about “no order without control” to be denying. Perhaps what you mean by the word “control” and what I mean by it are different, in which case maybe we should spell out some of the details. My point in talking about orders without control is not merely to point out that there are orders without coercion (I already knew that you acknowledged that). It’s to point out that there are also examples of social order — mutual exchanges among peers in a marketplace, a game of pick-up basketball with no referee, a group of friends settling on the toppings to get on a pizza — where the order emerges without anyone being in charge (who’s in charge of the market exchange? of the basketball game?), and often without any shared purpose or plan (people swapping goods and services in a market often have completely disparate aims; they get along because markets allow the coordination of action without conformity of plans).

Maybe what you mean by “management” or “control” is compatible with social orders in which nobody is in charge and where there may not be any shared purpose or plan among the people participating. If so, I have no objection to the claims you make about it. But I’d be curious who you could say is managing or controlling, and what it is that is being managed or controlled. In any case, if you’re using the terms so that they don’t involve one person having definite power over other people, then I’d submit we’re no longer talking about “governing” in any literal sense.

Not at all. I’m not addressing anarchism’s origins or all its variations. Marxism is a variant of anarchism…

This claim is both ignorant and absurd. How many anarchists do you think would accept your claim that Marxism is a form of Anarchism? How many Marxists do you think would accept that claim? Marx was certainly aware of Anarchism and had some definite views on the relationship between his ideas and Anarchistic ideas; have you read any of the things that he wrote about Proudhon, Bakunin, or Anarchism as a body of ideas?

You keep asking for my credentials. Well, I don’t have any to speak of.

I never asked you for any credentials. I asked you for evidence to back up your claims. Here, the kind of evidence you might have cited are texts that anyone could read, regardless of their credentials or status (**). If you assert that “most Anarchists” believe or say X (***), then you ought to be able to name at least one Anarchist who believes or says X, and to show where X appears in that Anarchist’s work.

If you don’t know enough about Anarchist writing to do that, then that’s no great fault of yours. But it is a good reason to think that — unless and until you have made the minimal effort necessary to make yourself less than ignorant about what actual Anarchists say and believe — you probably ought to wait to find out more about it, or else avoid making strong claims about what “most Anarchists” believe or say. Not because you lack “credentials,” but because you lack knowledge; and if you don’t know what you’re talking about, why keep talking about it?

As for Murray Rothbard, I’m sorry that you found him personally disappointing.

(*) All of them voluntary and run by consensus, natch. But meetings nevertheless.

(**) A lot of them are available for free on the Internet.

(***) The same goes for “Marxist political philosophy,” or any other body of ideas that you know only through a Wikipedia page.

Wayback/Internet Archive has a significant time lag between when they begin archiving a website and when they begin making the archives publicly available. I don’t know whether aaeblog.com is old enough yet to start showing up when requested, or if you’re still in the archived-but-hidden time window.

Econ Major:

If the conclusion you came to after reading this article is that the author thinks that “Ronald Reagan was the greatest president,” then let me suggest, as gently as possible, that you may not have read the article as carefully as you ought to; you have certainly, in any case, not understood the point I was making.

I didn’t mention Ronald Reagan in the article, but if you want to know what I think of him, the implied judgment expressed on “Bush’s policies of corporate privilege, endless warfare, bailouts, executive power, and bureaucratic expansion …” would also apply pretty well to Reagan and his policies of corporate privilege, endless (proxy) warfare, bailouts, executive power, and bureaucratic expansion.

I also do not believe that there are any “great” presidents. Presidents, like all other mendacious, violent, authoritarian states-men, are not in a line of work where a man can even manage to be honest or decent. Men exercising that kind of power are never “great;” they are only large.

Mark:

It’s my guess that you were first a libertarian before you started straying into anarchism. Tell me if I’m wrong.

O.K. You’re wrong.

Mark:

Spontaneous order is not necessarily the harbinger of liberty, happiness or health.

I certainly didn’t say that it was. (Nor would I, if asked.)

What I said is that spontaneous social order is possible (and in fact prevalent; it’s everywhere around us). You claimed that “There is no order without control;” I pointed out that there are counter-examples to that claim: if there are spontaneous orders without control, then the claim that “There is no order without control” is false.

It’s a further, but interesting question, whether orders without control can be beneficial. My claim is that they can be, and in fact often are. (E.g. writing, market pricing, media of exchange, trade roads, Wikipedia….) Spontaneity alone certainly does not logically necessitate that a social order will be beneficial; but I don’t need to make the claim that it is. You claimed that a particular sort of arrangement cannot produce beneficial social order (because it has no element of social control) and I denied that impossibility claim. The onus is on you to prove the universal claim here, not on me.

Mark:

Most anarchists define “anarchy” as an Utopian fantasy where people will live in perfect harmony without authority, laws or civil order…

Me:

Would you care to name some of the Anarchist books you have read in which Anarchists defined “anarchy” that way? … I have no idea who the “most anarchists” you’re referring to here are supposed to be.

Mark:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_and_Marxism

Mark, I really don’t know what that Wikipedia article is supposed to have told you about “most anarchists’” beliefs about utopianism, harmony, authority, laws, or civil order. As far as I can see, it doesn’t say much of anything about these topics (except negatively, in the sense that they emphatically reject Marxist conceptions of how to bring about a revolutionary social order, e.g. through authoritarian horror-shows like the “dictatorship of the proletariat”). In any case, however, I am going to suggest you, as gently as I can, that if your understanding of this topic is based mainly on Wikipedia articles, and you cannot name a single book written by an Anarchist in which anarchy is defined in the way you claim “most anarchists define it,” then maybe you need to read more about this topic before you make confident assertions about how “most anarchists define ‘anarchy.’”

Mark Uzick:

Most anarchists define “anarchy” as an Utopian fantasy where people will live in perfect harmony … after a period of culling and cleansing the people of their “base” human nature, instilling in the survivors an absolute embrace of altruism, where the period of “re-education” is brought about by instigation of the chaos and violence that accompanies the failure and/or absence of government – civilization.

Me:

This is a really absurd. Name the specific Anarchists you’re referring to here and give me citations of where you read them making these claims.

Mark Uzick:

I’m not an expert on Marx’s or Marxist theorist’s strategies for attaining their “Utopia”.

Mark, I did not ask you about Marx or Marxists. I asked you about anarchy and Anarchists. Do you mean to claim that Anarchism simply is a form of Marxism? If so, then I can certainly grant you one thing — you are indeed not an expert (*). However, I’m not asking you to be, or to become an “expert.” I do think, however, that if you are going to make such strong claims about a body of thought, you ought to know at least something about the thinkers responsible for it before you make the claim. (Like, enough to tell me who made the claims you’re attributing to “most anarchists,” and where they made them.) If you don’t know what you’re talking about, to even that minimal extent, then why are you talking about it?

(* If it helps: Proudhon preceded Marx; some of Bakunin’s bitterest fights in the movement were against Marx; Tucker discusses the relationship between Anarchism and Marxism in State Socialism and Anarchism, etc. Marx and Lenin constantly denounced anarchists — for their allegedly “Utopian” belief in spontaneous social order, natch, without dictatorship, “re-education” or mass murder. I have heard many ill-founded Marxist calumnies about the alleged “utopianism,” “perfect harmony,” etc. involved in Anarchistic social theories; but I don’t expect to hear the same calumnies repeated by libertarians. In any case, when the Bolsheviks consolidated power in post-Revolutionary Russia, around 1919-1921, the first people the secret police and the Red Army started murdering were the Russian Anarchists. What with the shooting us, most Anarchists have also not been especially fond of Marxism or Marxist regimes since then. I have a newsletter sitting on my couch right now, which I picked up three months ago at a bog-standard, non-market anarchist infoshop in Eugene, Oregon, which is all about “The Nature of the Left” and how much Marxism sucks. Etc.)

Mark Uzick:

Most anarchists define “anarchy” as an Utopian fantasy where people will live in perfect harmony without authority, laws or civil order

Would you care to name some of the Anarchist books you have read in which Anarchists defined “anarchy” that way? (In particular, those who claimed that a society without government would exhibit (1) “perfect harmony,” and (2) would be “without … civil order”?) Because I do spend a bit of time here and there reading the works of Anarchists, and I have no idea who the “most anarchists” you’re referring to here are supposed to be. But if this is how “most anarchists define anarchy,” then surely you can show me some concrete examples, correct?

after a period of culling and cleansing the people of their “base” human nature, instilling in the survivors an absolute embrace of altruism, where the period of “re-education” is brought about by instigation of the chaos and violence that accompanies the failure and/or absence of government – civilization.

This is a really absurd. Name the specific Anarchists you’re referring to here and give me citations of where you read them making these claims.

It seems that you have crossed into Utopian anarchism, … unless I’m wrong … in which case I admit that, providing that you and other anarchists can complete your transitions, a small percentage of the minuscule amount of anarchists may, by your use of language, become libertarians.

Well, that’s mighty big of you. I’m glad to know that maybe someday I can be in your club.

There is no order without control.

Well, I see that you’ve asserted that. But what’s the argument? As a libertarian I not only deny this, but in fact find it absurd; it seems like a straightforward denial of the possibility of spontaneous order. But spontaneous orders — in which there is no delegation of authority, no central point of control, and often isn’t even any shared purpose or plan — are everywhere; haven’t you noticed?

Classical liberalism advocates the greatest personal and economic liberty,

No, it doesn’t. Classical liberalism — if this means the doctrines actually advocated by historical liberals — such as Locke, Smith, Bentham, Bastiat, Spencer, Mill, et al., or latter-day “Old Liberals” like Mises and Hayek — advocates a territorial monopoly on the use of force in the hands of a “night-watchman” state.

Jim Bennett: Hes restating, with some poetry, the ancient notion of answering the call to battle….

You know, somehow I don’t find this any more reassuring….

Jim Bennett: In context of 2011 those ideas are refreshingly austere, almost libertarian ideas.

Maybe you find the model of militarism and the call to battle (characterized by rigid hierarchy, absolute command and control, the hyper-conformist solidarity of the platoon, and the epitome of unlimited state violence) “refreshingly austere, almost libertarian.” I don’t; I think it is a model for all the worst things that government does.

Mark,

It seems to me you’re expending a lot more effort in talking about what seems “semantically logical” or rhetorically useful to you, than you are in listening to what other folks are seeing we might find useful in different linguistic choices. For example, I pointed to the Encyclopedia Britannica article as one example of the anarchist meaning of “anarchy,” not as an attempt to prove something to you about whether you are allowed to use the word “government” in the way you want to use it. Use the word however you want to; but this insistence that everyone must make the same choices about diction that you do strikes me as wrong-headed, if your interest is in communication and not simply ranting.

If it’s unconventional, that’s only because the state is ubiquitous, but it doesn’t always have to be so.

That’s fine, but you can say exactly the same thing about our counter-conventional use of the term “anarchy,” to mean “consensual social order, without social control,” as opposed to both the violent social chaos of civil war, or the violent social control of the state. That people don’t see the middle term — order by means of consent rather than control — is no doubt due to the ubiquity of the state. But it doesn’t have to be so. Etc.

You can’t use the unconventionality of our favored usage, “less than one percent of people,” etc. as a decisive argument against it and then turn around and insist that your own completely unconventional, less-than-1%, etc. usage is O.K. Either challenging the convention is legitimate or it’s not. If it is, then both uses are potentially legitimate, and the decision is a matter of rhetorical choices and conversational trade-offs, not a matter of one being “illogical” and the other being “logical.”

A non-hierarchical social structure is antithetical to human nature. … If I choose to voluntarily delegate authority to a person or an organization, what right do you have to prevent me from doing so if this organization commits no aggression?

Look, man, I never said I would “prevent” you from doing anything. You do seem to be suggesting that any form of coordination, mediation, deliberation, or decision-making involves hierarchical relationships of “management,” “government,” or “authority,” or “control” (even if it’s a voluntary relationship), and I think that is absolutely false. But even if consensual power-relationships aren’t the only way to get these things done, maybe you’re just into that kind of thing. Well, fine; as long as you keep it safe, sane and consensual I’m hardly going to interfere. But my point is that while you may be into that, I’m not; I think that this kind of structured power over others strikes me as needless, stifling, and often actively hurtful, and is something that I want nothing to do with (either with consensually controlling other people, or being consensually controlled by them). That’s not my bag, so I’m hardly going to identify myself with a set of terms that foregrounds and emphasizes the prospect of voluntary social control.

Since our concern is with civil management and control …

Maybe that’s your concern. It’s not mine. Perhaps you think that dispute-mediation and deliberation just are matters of “management and control;” I don’t. In any case, calling this “civil management and control” tells you exactly nothing to explain the need for a dedicated voluntary associations to deal with it. There are lots of things that happen in the life of a civitas and some of them may be dealt with by neighborhood associations, others by universities; some by lodges, others by labor unions or professional associations; some by churches, others by rating or certification boards; some by credit bureaus, some by insurance mutuals; a lot will no doubt be settled peaceably and informally within families or social circles; some will be handled more or less ad-hoc, by third-party mediators without any standing mandate, who are called in only at need, and those mediators may be either amateurs, or hired guns, without being kept on retainer. If there is something special here that needs to be done by a dedicated voluntary association called a “government,” as opposed to all the other voluntary associations in the society, which does nothing else with its time but the governing, I don’t know what that need is. Perhaps you could make it clearer than the catch-all term “civil management.”

Ask any bomb throwing anarchist, political assassin or rioter….

It sounds like you believe in a lot of ridiculous statist calumnies against anarchists.

… the violence, chaos and disorder that accompanies the breakdown and failure of civil order.

It also sounds like you believe in a lot of fantastical statist propaganda about the breakdown and failure of civil order. While I am interested in promoting the breakdown of civil control, and in the emergence of spontaneous, uncontrolled social order, the fact is that breakdowns and failures of a coercive, State-imposed civil order (whether by acts of God or man) are not typically followed by catastrophe; rather, what follows is rarely any worse, and often substantially better, than the stable, orderly State violence that preceded them. Cf. this on “disaster areas” without effective government control for example.

… the use of “anarchy” as a classical liberal ideal.

I am not a classical liberal, and my use of the term “anarchy” has nothing to do with trying to promote “classical liberal ideals.”

FuzzBeast: "I was merely disagreeing with the use of "womyn" which, in all official contexts of any sort is not a word" Whether "womyn" is ("officially"?) a word or not is a matter of social convention, not an immutable natural fact. Words are defined by conventions of use, not "official texts," and the purpose of feminist language-play is to raise a point by challenging the existing conventions. And the best way to challenge existing conventions, when it comes to language, is just to start using it differently, and teach by example. FuzzBeast: "it is sort of like wearing your politics on your sleeve," Well, yes, that's what I meant when I said it was used as a "signaling device." The difference is that I don't see anything wrong with signaling your politics in your writing. If someone is freaked out about "angry appearing, radical feminism," or about the prospect of people getting "confrontational" over the persistent, violent oppression of half the human race, then that someone probably already has deeper problems with feminist politics that are not going to be solved just by avoiding unconventional spellings of "womyn." If clearly signaling your politics scares away a reader like that, who is just too freaked out by an "angry" vowel-substitution to read what you have to say charitable, or to make a fair judgment about what you have to say -- well, O.K., I don't see those folks as much of a loss. Maybe it depends on who you're trying to write to. As for the rest: I'm well aware that substituting "y" for "e" won't solve all the problems of sexist language (let alone the primary problem of sexist social formations). I don't know anybody who claimed it would. The point is to call attention to one point in a brief, playful sort of way. If you're not interested in the point, O.K.; but given that it's expressed in such a simple, non-intrusive way, why not just treat it like seeing "colour"/"color" or "centre"/"center" or "defence"/"defense"? It seems to me like the "counterproductive" here is coming from the people who are flipping out about "modern identity politics" and the "anger and confrontation" embodied in the substitution of a single vowel.

FuzzBeast: "I was merely disagreeing with the use of "womyn" which, in all official contexts of any sort is not a word" Whether "womyn" is ("officially"?) a word or not is a matter of social convention, not an immutable natural fact. Words are defined by conventions of use, not "official texts," and the purpose of feminist language-play is to raise a point by challenging the existing conventions. And the best way to challenge existing conventions, when it comes to language, is just to start using it differently, and teach by example. FuzzBeast: "it is sort of like wearing your politics on your sleeve," Well, yes, that's what I meant when I said it was used as a "signaling device." The difference is that I don't see anything wrong with signaling your politics in your writing. If someone is freaked out about "angry appearing, radical feminism," or about the prospect of people getting "confrontational" over the persistent, violent oppression of half the human race, then that someone probably already has deeper problems with feminist politics that are not going to be solved just by avoiding unconventional spellings of "womyn." If clearly signaling your politics scares away a reader like that, who is just too freaked out by an "angry" vowel-substitution to read what you have to say charitable, or to make a fair judgment about what you have to say -- well, O.K., I don't see those folks as much of a loss. Maybe it depends on who you're trying to write to. As for the rest: I'm well aware that substituting "y" for "e" won't solve all the problems of sexist language (let alone the primary problem of sexist social formations). I don't know anybody who claimed it would. The point is to call attention to one point in a brief, playful sort of way. If you're not interested in the point, O.K.; but given that it's expressed in such a simple, non-intrusive way, why not just treat it like seeing "colour"/"color" or "centre"/"center" or "defence"/"defense"? It seems to me like the "counterproductive" here is coming from the people who are flipping out about "modern identity politics" and the "anger and confrontation" embodied in the substitution of a single vowel.

FuzzBeast: "The use of this spelling, while not only being a reactionary idea, also shows a great ignorance to the Germanic origins of the English language." You know, I'm aware of the etymology you're mentioning. (I'm also aware that "history" comes from ἱστορία not "his-story," etc.) But it is not clear to me that the meaning of the parts of the words in 9th century England must necessarily be more important to radical feminists than what the structure of the word may suggest to people who are using the language in January 2011, in a linguistic community where we don't have any wer-men and the root "man" is decidedly *not* gender-neutral. Re-spelling "women" as "womyn" is not intended to raise the consciousness of the author of Beowulf or give Alfred the Great a poke in the eye; it's intended, first, to make a point about how deeply embedded sexism is in structures of thought and action that we use, today, and second, simply as a signaling device to indicate something about the writer's gender politics. FuzzBeast: "however the word woman is not a pejorative" I'm pretty sure it has been, in some contexts. But anyway I think the point of "womyn" was to make a point about the way in which women and femininity had traditionally been defined in terms of deviations or defects from normative masculinity, whereas masculinity had simply been treated as the default condition for humanity. Not to reclaim a term which had previously been pejorative. FuzzBeast: "a great way to present oneself in a manner wherein one would be taken less seriously" I think someone who would zero in on the spelling of "womyn" rather than anything the feminist in question is saying about gender politics -- and who would actually take the speaker, or her substantive claims, less seriously because of this purely orthographic issue, was probably already not the most receptive audience for the substantive feminist claims that the writer was aiming to make.