Comments Elsewhere

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.

MBH:

Seriously? Do I have to read everything you write to make sound judgments about your ideas?

No, but I don’t see how this rhetorical question is related to the sentence you’re responding to. My point isn’t that you have to read anything in particular; it’s that if you pre-announce that you’re no longer interested in listening to arguments (“You can argue all day … I don’t buy it”) in this specific conversation, while expecting me to accept conclusions that run directly counter to what I think those arguments establish, then (1) that’s really kind of rude; and (2) I don’t know what to do about that, except to tell you that you’re not likely to get what you want by through this kind of kerygmatic political economy.

Have you ever worked inside a corporation?

Yes, I have.

My point is that legal power is no object on that level. It may as well not be there at all. You can argue that the corporation would never have become so powerful if not for legal power, and I’d agree. But it is what it is.

If you were interested in listening to arguments, I would point out that most of the Fortune 500 depends on ongoing grants of political privilege, not just the long-ago privileges that allowed them to primitively accumulate. The entire “too big to fail” financial industry are an obvious case in point; so are the RIAA, MPAA and the patent monopolists are a case in point; so are the military-petrochemical complex. There’s a reason these dudes allocate so much for their lobbying budget: it’s because they know where their bread has been and is still being buttered.

MBH:

Anarcho-corporatism holds no more or less meaning than free-market anti-capitalism. It’s a way of elucidating seemingly contradictory concepts.

O.K., dude, but what are the concepts? Specifically, what’s the concept you’re trying to elucidate by including the “anarcho-”? I mean, I understand how Roberts, Alito, et al. are “corporatists.” But In what specific respect are nearly half of the United States Supreme Court “anarcho”-anything?

MBH:

But I’m questioning whether or not the corporation needs the government anymore to maintain subsidies, favoritism, copyrights and patents.

How exactly do you envision GE, say, maintaining its patent portfolio against infringement if there is no government to issue or enforce legal patent monopolies? Let’s have some details.

Of course, they could hire the Pinkertons or whoever to go around and bash the heads of infringers. But hiring on your own muscle for that would really be quite expensive, particularly when you consider that they would have no presumption of social support for their position (since it’s no longer protected by the cultural prestige of the State), and since the people whose heads they want to bash are also going to have money and are going to want to be defended against the head-bashing. If GE has to resort to overtly criminal behavior and to pay in full for the enforcement of their own criminal monopoly, then I think you’d find that we’d be in a much better position than we are now. (For the same reasons that Mafia extortion rackets are not a very profitable business model in any but a few markets — most of them markets in which overt criminality is artificially selected for and rewarded, due to the effects of State prohibitions.)

MBH:

You’re approaching this as if certain positions either derive from a particular axiom or not.

Really? Where?

As far as I can tell, you’re the only one who’s mentioned axioms here. What I have said is that boycotts-for-equality or whatever are not uniquely or distinctly anarcho-syndicalist. And that if you tried to use the term “anarcho-syndicalist” in that way, you’d be encompassing a lot of people who certainly don’t understand themselves as anarcho-syndicalist, who are not understood as anarcho-syndicalists by anybody except you personally, and who don’t accept some of the core beliefs (N.B.: core; not axiomatic; we’re talking family relations here) that tend to mark out anarcho-syndicalists from the rest of political movements. For example, Anarchism. Or Syndicalism.

I’m not making the case that Olbermann is secretly coming from an anarcho-syndicalist axiom. I’m making the case that he takes positions that distinctly overlap with those that can be derived from the anarcho-syndicalist axiom.

I don’t think there is an “anarcho-syndicalist axiom.” But in any case, this only underlines my point about conservatism and breathing oxygen. Of course, if you pick some single isolated belief at random without paying any attention to how the person’s beliefs are related to each other, you can find all kinds of “overlaps,” often including “overlaps” that pull in directly opposite directions from one another. Olbermann believes in an active government, and so do militaristic conservatives; so Olbermann is apparently also a militaristic conservative to some percentage, while being an anarcho-syndicalist to some percentage. It seems like his percentage of militaristic conservatism ought to be inversely proportional to his percentage of anarcho-syndicalism, but as specified there’s no reason so far why this should be so — certainly, you can believe in boycotts-for-equality really strongly while believing no less strongly in very active government. Meanwhile, Anarcho-syndicalists are for organizing labor, and so are fascists! So perhaps fascists are 10% Anarcho-syndicalist. Progressives are against religious law, and so are classical liberals, and so are Stalinists! So perhaps liberals and Stalinists are 25% progressive Islamists believe in political revolution, and so do radical feminists, and so do Anarcho-syndicalists! In fact, it’s very important to all of them. So maybe Anarcho-syndicalists are 50% Islamist. Or 50% radical feminist. Or… well.

MBH:

Again, you’re assuming that you either are or aren’t an anarchist

Am I? I thought what I was doing was giving you arguments that the spectrum you were trying to draw was not useful, at least not the way you were trying to draw it. (One such argument was the claim that it allowed you to draw “overlaps” which have nothing in particular to do with the real general tendencies of somebody’s political thought; another argument was that it tended to identify people as “anarcho-syndicalist” who would definitely reject that description, and who seem to fall way outside the boundaries of the concept. I don’t see that you’ve responded to these arguments, except to call their conclusion an assumption and to say that you don’t like it.

I think that’s a muddled framing. And I think that if you told radical leftists who had never wrestled with anarchy that they were, say, 25-30% anarchist that they would not be that surprised.

Nowadays? Some might, because Anarchism is increasingly popular on the radical Left, and these days even Trotskyists cite Anarchist literature in their anticapitalist broadsides, while Maoists show up to hang out with Anarchists in towns with a small radical scene.

But this was certainly not the case prior to about 1999; if you asked radical Leftists about their percentage of Anarchism prior to Seattle, what you’d get as a response would most likely be an index either of their doctrinaire Marxist-Leninism (in which case they’d recite a standard Leninist line about the infantile Left) or else of their attitudes toward the New Left (with some liking it and others detesting it). But in any case, I wasn’t talking about the weird socio-ideological dynamics of the “radical Left” social scene — of which Olbermann was not a part, and of which Dr. King and Ella Baker were not parts, either. (Although Baker could perhaps be listed as a “radical Leftist” in an extended, ideological sense.) If you asked Dr. King whether he was “25% Anarchist,” I am almost certain that he would reject the description right away. His writing on law and civil disobedience is specifically shaped by the desire to avoid conclusions that would lead to “anarchy” (quote-unquote). While there is certainly something for anarchists (of any adjective) to get from his writing on legal authority, to simply ignore the basic organizing principles of his thought, and to pretend as if it had no relationship to his conception of a just state (as opposed to anarchic freedom, as he understood it), is to simply ignore Dr. King’s political thought, in favor of tossing around, higgeldy-piggeldy, conclusions that you happen to more or less agree with, without any attention to why those conclusions were concluded, or how far they are or are not allowed to go.