Comments Elsewhere

... In fact I'd be rather *less* embarrassed by connections to Reagan than to Wilson. Much as I detest Reagan, he did spend a lot less time destroying

... Well, this is going to depend on the leftist, and on the president, no? Although he was a Democrat and a Progressive, I find that I don't have trouble

... Well, probably depends on how you count these things, no? Like the rest of the post-Vietnam Cold War presidents, Reagan mostly held off on open invasions

Contemplationist:

I never disputed your point that from an anarchist perspective most state action is criminal. But thats irrelevant.

Why?

We cannot go singling out Israel for mild versions of anarchist-defined criminal acts which are carried out daily by every other state.

Speak for yourself; I am I can and I will. But who’s “singling out?” Good lord, did you think that I don’t condemn other governments when they go to war, build border walls, or impose military blockades?

I also reject that the ongoing blockade of Gaza is a “mild version” of military criminality. Given the material condition of people trying to survive in Gaza, under the conditions created by years of bombardment, lockdowns and blockades (inflicted by Israeli state policy, and enforced by the Israeli and Egyptian government’s militaries), this is, to be quite frank, an absolutely appalling bit of denialism.

Contemplationist:

Its extremely simple. Stop trying to kill Jews and you will live in peace.

I don’t give a damn about what happens to people who are trying to murder Jews; murderers have no right to expect a peaceful life. But what you don’t quite seem to notice is that people in Gaza are starved, imprisoned and blockaded whether they try to kill Jews or not. “The Palestinians” don’t try to murder Jews as a collective; only individual Palestinians — as it happens, a tiny minority, try to do that. But the Palestinians are punished and attacked as a collective. Your collectivist musing about “Who wants peace?” (the answer is, lots of individual Jews and Palestinians do; but none of them are given the choice, because war is conducted by governments and armed factions, which operate without individual consent) completely glosses over the fundamental issue of collective punishment, in the service of cheap collectivist rhetoric.

MBH:

So why should I think the guys with 20/1 leverage are dependent on the other guys?

Because the other guys have atom bombs.

And own plurality stakes in a lot of the banks that you’re claiming to be independent of them.

I say it would take B, C, and D to monopolize force. You say, well, B couldn’t do it on their own. As if I ever made that claim.

What you did was make an ambiguous claim — or rather, implied a claim, ambiguously, through the use of a rhetorical question — about “Citi, Magnetar, and a few other hedge funds” without specifying whether this was supposed to be about them acting independently, or as a cartel, or in some other way. If you meant to talk about a cartel specifically, I apologize for taking the wrong interpretation.

Just let me know when you’re willing to address B, C, and D as a cartel.

This is just special pleading; of course, we could have added most of the IP industry acting in a cartel with GE (GlaxoSmithKline, Time Warner, the RIAA, Microsoft, Apple, et al.), just as easily as we could speculate about a cartel of the financiers. But how does that overcome any of the reasons that I gave for thinking that one company would be unlikely to manage it? None of the reasons I gave for thinking that G.E.’s use of overtly criminal means would fail depends upon G.E. acting as a single company; if they were trying to posse up with the rest of the copyright and patent monopolists, they’d just be facing the same basic problems with the additional problem of trying to keep a large cartel together, in spite of the transaction costs and the strong economic incentives for cartelists to defect.

The same is true for the financiers. Add together as many bankrupt TARP suckers as you like; they’re still going to be dependent on a functioning government to marshal the resources you say they can marshal. And without government, they are going to face exactly the same problems in trying to maintain a cartel. They can cartelize easily right now because they are held in the cartel by a government central bank explicitly designed to cartelize them, and because government laws make defection from the cartel illegal. Without government, you wouldn’t have that. But with or without the cartel, they will still face exactly the same problems of (1) the direct financial costs of enforcement; and (2) the social costs of reverting to overt gangsterism.

MBH:

You aren’t very self-aware, are you?

Well, if I’m not, I’m probably not aware of my lack of self-awareness. So I’ll leave that up to others to decide.

However, I will say that you either haven’t read the essay very carefully, or else not attending very carefully to this conversation. The passage you quote argues that dissenters are genuinely free of all political obligations, not that they are in a condition of anarchy.

But in any case, if you did want to say the dissenter is living in anarchy (which I don’t), what would follow from that is that to the extent she’s living in anarchy, she’s not living under monarchy; the purported monarch is just a belligerent foreign head of state, to whom she owes no allegiance. Which would mean that a claim of “anarcho-monarchism” is still absurd.

Meanwhile, this conversation had nothing to do with whether or not revolutionary rejection of government makes for anarchy. It had to do with whether effective control over the State, by a power center other than the State itself, makes for anarchy. (In your original, it wasn’t corporations dissenting from the state that were supposed to undermine government monopoly; it was corporations allegedly controlling the state, which you insisted entailed that “either (a) the state doesn’t monopolize force or (b) there is no actual monopoly on force” and (because of this disjunction) legitimized the claim that we already live under “anarcho-corporatism” (rather than just plain old corporatism) right now. The parallel is with those who had similar effective control over the State in 16th century France (at times it was the landed aristocracy; in the age of Versailles, it was the king personally). Not with dissenters who had no effective control over the State, but (rightfully) rejected its authority.

MBH:

And if 100% anarchy is life entirely free from the rule of government, then we’re already in a virtual anarchy since the supreme court has tied government’s hands.

Man, you must have a different Supreme Court where you live.

Anyway, again, if I grant your theory about the relationship between government and corporations, how does that chain of command alter the fact that government is commanding? If I’m Earl’s bondsman, and Earl takes orders from his Overlord, it doesn’t follow that Earl is no longer ruling me. It just means that the way he rules me is partly determined by the Overlord. If the Overlord never directly commands me anything, but always has Earl do it for him, then Earl still has a monopoly of force, as far as I’m concerned. (Just as NBC still has a monopoly on their copyrighted shows. Even though they are a wholly owned subsidiary of G.E. Or Kabletown.)

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?