The usual line about RATM is that Zack de la Rocha’s the Anarchist and Tom Morello’s the Marxist. I don’t know how accurate either of those is. (Brad Wilk and tim K. are usually more or less ignored in the jawboning about RATM’s politics.)

But in fact most of their product tended to be something of a stew of urban-guerrilla and third-worldist revolutionism, which is mostly focused either on big-R Revolution, or on particular causes (like the EZLN, Mumia Abu-Jamal, American imperialism in Latin America, black nationalism, etc.), and which was pretty well calculated to appeal to those of us eating up a similar stew of intermingling, competing and conflicting views in the radical left and the global justice movement during the 1990s, especially just before and just after Seattle. (Evil Empire comes with a “book list” in its liner notes, and you’ll find Alexander Berkman, Abbie Hoffman, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn name-checked in it, right alongside Lenin, Marx, Fanon, Angela Davis et al. There’s … not too much stress here on a coherent political line, and a lot more stress on introducing a messy political-social scene. But that at least is almost certainly for the best, even if it led to some real shit being promoted; and in any case seems to have been the practical result of some pretty divergent views within the band.)

I expect Paul Ryan likes them because they cranked out some really amazing metal.

Depends on the Objectivists, of course. But certainly those who consider a nuclear massacre of the city of Tehran to be a necessary and proper response to the September 11 attacks definitely don’t have any claim on being a “tolerable” regime. At least, not if the people being asked to tolerate include everyone affected by the government, and not just those within its official borders.

This is a good point, and perhaps connected with the very long tradition of liberal thought on the state which has tended to see it as a “necessary evil,” justified only by, and to the extent that it improves on, the inconveniencies of the state of nature. If it turns out that it is not necessary to flourishing social order after all, then it is by that line of thought just an evil, and therefore not permissible.

“Clearly there is something quite good about first world countries and their governments.”

One reason may be that the effects of first-world governments have on people are not limited to the effects that they have on people within the borders of “their own” countries. In fact these effects often are dropped on third-world countries from high-altitude bombers or launched from offshore battleships.

In other cases, first-world governments sell or loan their effects to third-world governments (e.g. in Iraq and Iran, or in Egypt, or in Indonesia, etc.) so that they can do the massacreing themselves, on scales and by methods that they could not possibly have managed but for the assistance from governments that are skimming off a much larger supply of economic growth and high-tech development. This may in fact be one of the reasons worth noting when we ask why bombed-out countries have some of the problems they have with “economic growth, happiness, etc.” Of course there are many other reasons also worth noting, but it seems to me that the fact that the activities of “first-world governments” killed literally hundreds of millions of people over the course of the past century might be worth pausing over.

It may also be a reason for libertarians not to be “friendly” with the governments that do this, even if the people that they tax within their official borders happen to be enjoying a relatively high standard of living.

Kevin:

Well, that’s an interesting possibility, but if it’s one-time consent that’s enforced over yourself at a future time, even if within a fixed period, that seems like it comes under Roderick’s first horn (“an attempt to transfer inalienable rights, and so invalid”). Of course what you think of the nested inference within that horn depends on what you think about inalienability, and there are forms of “market anarchist strictures” that don’t depend on an inalienability claim.

I don’t want to spend too much more time on the definitional issue here, but (1) I am inclined to doubt that what you describe here counts as a state, all things considered (again because of the radical departures this involves from ordinary views about state sovereignty, territoriality, obligation, etc.); (2) I’m not as sure as you are that everyone looking at it would obviously call it a state (except in the sense that many people seem initially inclined to describe literally any form of institutionalized decision-making or social dispute-resolution a “state,” which is I think a confused intuition that anarchists already have to deal with in another form, and which people tend to give up under examination); but (3) it doesn’t matter much, because what you describe is objectionable for the same reason that states are objectionable.

I don’t think that any of this affects the central question of your post; while I reject the claim that states are permissible but not mandatory, my rejection of it depends on some strong ethical commitments that a lot of anarchists don’t necessarily share (e.g. to inalienable rights and to a conception of rights as side-constraints on worthwhile ends); and I agree that that’s an interesting location in conceptual space that ought to be better mapped out.

(Another thing I’d like to see mapped out here are some of the modalities. For example, almost all anarchists seem to be of the view that there is nothing that could possibly count as a state that exercises legitimate authority over individuals, under any condition. And this is in fact my view — call it “hard anarchism.” And all minarchists seem to be of the view not only that there is something that could count as exercising legitimate authority over individuals, but that there is in fact actually at least one state in the world which does so — call this “practical archism.” But that seems like a tendentious empirical claim, which has no necessary connection with the standards for legitimate authority that most minarchists propose; if meeting some set of standards would qualify a state as legitimate, that’s no guarantee that any actual state is going to meet them and so qualify. So it seems like there ought to be a third possible view left between hard anarchism and practical archism. You might be a “soft anarchist” — you might hold the view that it’s perfectly possible for there to be a state that exercises legitimate authority under the right conditions; but in fact there is actually no such state that does, so therefore, at least for the time being, there are no legitimate states in @, although there may be in other possible worlds, and there might be in the actual past or the future. A “soft anarchist” view presumably requires the claim that states are morally permissible. And it’s compatible with the claim that they are not mandatory. But it may even be compatible with the claim that they are mandatory — if failing to have a state is morally impermissible for some reason, but all the available states do something else which is morally impermissible for other reasons, etc. etc.)

In both cases, I agree that the lack of discussion seems to indicate that there is something puzzling going on. Although I guess not necessarily unpredictable or surprising. My best guess is that these parts of the conceptual map tend to go unexplored because at a fundamental level many or most people still tend to line up in debates about the State in ways that seem to be driven as much by rationalizing loyalty to, or rejection of, actually existing politically dominant authorities, as by an effort to defend a philosophical claim against all logically possible alternatives. Which I think is too bad, and has constrained the debate.

Nerd grouching for the day: if you’re comparing two fixed quantities X and Y, X cannot be “exponentially larger” than Y. Even if X is overwhelmingly larger than Y is. “Exponentially” refers to the rate of growth of a function over a range of fixed values, and does not apply to a pairwise comparison of two fixed values. It doesn’t just mean “lots bigger.”

No point for you, or no point you can see, maybe. But philosophers (libertarian or otherwise) do have reasons to try to theorize, and to analyze concepts, and to try to get clear on arguments, other than whatever short-term political gains they think that they might be able to get out of it.

Hector: Can someone explain me what is happening the photograph please?

During the SNCC sit-in protests, the nonviolent protesters were very often surrounded by angry crowds of white neighbors who were trying to intimidate or humiliate the protesters. Most of the people in the crowd verbally taunted them; some, mainly young white men, physically attacked them. The SNCC protesters wouldn’t fight back (they had adopted a code of nonviolence and spent days role-playing and training themselves not to retaliate), so most often the assaults amounted to extended efforts to humiliate them. In the photograph, the white man extending his arm from the left-hand side of the frame is about to dump a glass of water on the head of a black woman who is protesting the segregated lunch-cuonter. All three of the protesters in the photograph have already been smeared with food by the vigilantes in the crowd.

For the same reason that someone who you hire, and can fire at any time, isn’t your boss.*

* Even if, say, you hire her as a personal manager or coach, and her job is to tell you what to do from day to day, and even if (as a matter of fact it turns out that) you consistently do whatever she tells you to do.

A political arrangement that nobody can be forced to participate in, which any individual, as an individual, can withdraw from at will and without lasting obligation, may be desirable or undesirable, depending on the breaks, but it just doesn’t count as successfully claiming the kind of sovereignty over individuals, or imposing the kind of enforceable positive obligations on them, that rights-based anarchist arguments objects to when they object to states as necessarily rights-violating.

Now, you could of course say something like, “Well, but if everyone agrees to participate, as long as they agree, that is at least a territorial monopoly on the authorization of force, isn’t it?” But the distinction between de facto monopolies and de jure monopolies is important to bear in mind here. Most anarchist arguments pushing a conclusion to the effect that government necessarily practice an illegitimate or unjust form of domination (e.g. Roy Childs’s argument, or Murray Rothbard’s, or Spooner’s various later arguments) are specifically concerned with, and arguing against governments not just as de facto, but as de jure monopolies on the authorization of force.**

And you might want to challenge the claim that sovereignty over individuals, or enforceable duties of obedience, or de jure monopolies on the authorization of force (call these “ruling,” perhaps, for short), really are essential features of the state as such; or whether you could instead have a hypothetical at-will arrangement without these features that might still, in virtue of other features, count as an actual, full-bodied state, even if it only operates by universal, sustained consent. But I’d need to hear some argument in order to be convinced that it could count as such, and I’d need to hear something about what features are supposed to be essential features of states, if it’s not the sovereignty or the obedience or the de jure monopoly; otherwise, my view is that no matter what forms you adopt, if it stays safe, sane and consensual, then it’s not really ruling; at most it is some pretty elaborate role-playing.*** And if there’s no ruling going on, that’s a pretty strong reason to say that there is nothing you could call a state.

** Of course there may be other reasons why a de facto monopoly would be undesirable, or wouldn’t be a stable equilibrium under conditions of equal freedom, or whatever.

*** There may of course be other reasons to object to it. Maybe you’re just not into that kind of thing.

is awaiting an Inter-Library Loan request for Fred Schulder’s “The Relation of Anarchism to Organization” (1899). Fingers crossed….