rigorousintuition.ca

okay, i'm starting over. this is a minor act of dissociation and an attempt, once again, to draw a few distinctions and provide background for discussion of some, not all, ideas that sparked off my involvment Wombat's freeman thread.

i'll concede to the fact that my stepping into Wombat's thread may have caused some confusion as to why i did and what i was attempting to address. i hope this thread is helpful in that respect.

i'll start it off with a youtube video posted by 23 here (thanks) and a transcript that i just made of it plus some background info etc.

again, i'm interested in ideas that are not exclusively owned my far-right fanatics and historically, in my view, and Chomsky also attests to, are in fact rooted in the working class left – yes, even in the US. i hope we can discuss some of these ideas here without having to drag the Kochs-Tea-Party-freeman movement into it. please, in all civility, if you have no interest in the subject(s), please refrain from derailing it for your personal pleasure. thanks.

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Interviewer: You’re a libertarian anarchist, and when one hears that in the way [unclear] in this country, and we know why there’s often so many misperceptions because of things that you’ve written. Help us understand what that means. In other words, that doesn’t mean that you favor chaos or no government, necessarily.

Chomsky: Well, remember that the US is sort of out of the world on this topic. Britain is to a limited extent, but the US is, it’s like on Mars. So here [in the US] the term libertarian means the opposite of what it always meant in history. “Libertarian” throughout modern European history meant “socialist-anarchist”. They meant the anti… I mean the socialist movement – the workers movement and socialist movement – it sort of broke into two branches, roughly, one statist, one anti-statist.

The statist branch lead to Bolshevism and Lenin and Trotsky and so on. The anti-statist branch, which included Marxists, left-Marxists, Pannekoek, Rosa Luxemburg, others. It kind of merged more or less into an amalgam of the big strain of anarchism, uh, into what was called libertarian socialism. So libertarian in Europe always meant socialist. Here [in the US] it means ultra, Ayn Rand, Cato Institute, or something like that. But that’s a special US usage having to do with a lot of things quite special about the way the US developed, and this is part of it.

There [in Europe] it meant, and always meant to me, socialist anti-state, the anti-state branch of socialism, which meant a highly organized society, completely organized, nothing to do with chaos, but based on democracy all the way through. That means democratic control of communities, of workplaces, of federal structures built on systems of voluntary association spreading internationally. Now that’s traditional anarchism. At least, you know, anybody can have the word if they like, but it’s a main stream, probably the main stream of traditional anarchism. And it has roots in the… coming back to the US – it has very strong roots in the American working class movements.

So, if you go back to say the 1850s, the beginnings of the industrial revolution, right around the area where I live in Eastern Massachusetts, the textile plants and so on, the people working in those plants were in part young women coming off the farms. They were called “factory girls”. Women, come from the farms, and work in textile plants. Some of them were, you know, Irish immigrants in Boston and … that group of people. They had an extremely rich and interesting culture. They’re kind of like my uncle who never went past fourth grade. Very educated, reading modern literature. They didn’t bother with European radicalism, that had no effect on them, but the general literary culture they were a large part of, and they developed their own conceptions of how the world ought to be organized. They had their own newspapers. In fact the period of the freest press in the US was probably around the 1850s.
In the 1850s the scale of the meaning run by factory girls in Lowell and so on, was the scale of the commercial press or even greater. These were independent newspapers, a lot of interesting scholarship on them you can read them now. They were… not … just spontaneously, without any background and they never heard of Marx or Bakunin or anyone else, the developed the same ideas. You know, they thought that their… they… from their point of view, what they called “wage-slavery”: renting yourself to an owner, was not very different from chattel-slavery, you know, what they were fighting the civil war about. And you have to recall that by the … in the mid nineteenth century that was a common view in the US.

For example it was the position of the Republican Party. It was Abraham Lincoln’s position. It was not an odd view, that there isn’t much difference between selling yourself and renting yourself. The idea of renting yourself, meaning working for wages, was degrading. You couldn’t… it was just an attack on your personal integrity. And they despised the industrial system that was developing that was destroying their culture, destroying their independence, their individuality, constraining them to be subordinate to masters. Losing… There was a tradition of what was called republicanism in the US: we are free people – you know the first free people in the world. This was destroying and undermining that freedom. This was the core of the labor movement all over and included in it was the assumption just taken for granted that, quoting: that “those who work in the mills should run them”.

In fact, one of their main slogans of this, quoted was … they condemned what they called “The new spirit of the age: Gain wealth, forgetting all but self”, you know. That idea that you should, the new spirit, that you should only be interested in gaining wealth and forgetting about your relations to other people they regarded as just a violation of fundamental human nature and a degrading idea. That grew into … that was a strong rich American culture, which was crushed by violence. The US has a very violent labor history, much more so than Europe, and this was, it was wiped out over a long period, but with very, with extreme violence.

By the time it picked up again in the 1930s, that’s when I, sort of, came, personally, came into the tail end of it. After the Second World War it was crushed. So by now it’s forgotten, but it’s very real. See I don’t really think it’s forgotten. I think it’s just below the surface in people’s consciousness.


Interviewer: And this is a continuing problem and it actually, it’s something that emerges in your scientific work also. Namely, the extent to which histories and traditions are forgotten, and actually, to really define a new position often means going back and finding those older traditions.

Chomsky: When the… these… things like this are… they’re forgotten in the intellectual culture, but my feeling is they’re probably alive in the popular culture: in people’s sentiments and attitudes and understanding and so on. I mean I know when I talk to, say, working class audiences today, and I talk about these ideas – they seem very natural to them. It’s true nobody talks about them, but when you bring it up: the idea that you have to rent yourself to somebody and follow their orders, and that “they” own, and you work there and you built it, but you don’t own it. It’s a highly unnatural notion. You don’t have to study any complicated theories to see that this is just an attack on human dignity.

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Left-Wing, Anti-Bolshevik and Council Communism

Index to the works of “Left Communists” (a.k.a. “Council Communists” or “Anti-Bolshevik Communists”) and other ultra-left Communist currents and the debates between Left Communists and the leaders of the Comintern and each other.

The Left Communists were those Marxists who supported the 1917 Russian Revolution, but differed with Lenin and Trotsky over a number of issues including the formation of the Soviet government in the U.S.S.R., the tactics of the Comintern in Europe and America, the role to be given to autonomous and spontaneous organisations of the working class as opposed to the working class political parties, participation in Parliament, the relationship with the trade unions and the trade union leadership.

There are two main currents of “Left Communism”: on one hand, the Communist Left or “Council Communists” (the term used by the Dutch and German Left Communists after 1928) criticised the “elitist” practices of the Bolshevik Party, and increasingly emphasised the autonomus organisations of the working class, reminiscent in some ways of the anarcho-syndicalists and left communists of the pre-World War One period, rejecting “compromise” with the institutions of bourgeois society, while rejecting the new forms of working class rule created by the Russian Revolution. The main point of difference with the Bolsheviks was over the role of the Party and a workers’ state. On the other hand, there were “Ultra-Left” communists (especially some of the English and the Italians) who upheld the role of a Party in leading the working class and the aim of a workers’ state, but criticised the Bolsheviks for various forms of compromise, such as advocating participation in Parliament and the conservative trade unions.

The main figures of Left Communism were: Karl Korsch, Anton Pannekoek, Paul Mattick, Herman Gorter, David Wijnkoop, Otto Rühle and Willie Gallacher; Amadeo Bordiga, Sylvia and Adela Pankhurst represent other ultra-left currents. Not all of these remained Left-wing Communists throughout their life.

The “orthodox” criticism of Left Communism is contained in Lenin’s 1920 book: “Left-Wing” Communism – An Infantile Disorder and the classic statement of the position of Left Communism is contained in Herman Gorter’s response: Letter to Comrade Lenin.

http://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/index.htm

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Marxism and Anarchism

Resources on the theory and practice of anarchism and the unity and conflict between Marxists and Anarchists over the past 150 years.

Beginnings

The founders of both Anarchism and Marxism all came out of the dissolution of the Young Hegelians in the 1840s, during the revolutionary upheavals that swept across Europe and destroyed the “Old Order”. Both Mikhail Bakunin and Frederick Engels were present at the December 1841 lecture by Friedrich Schelling denouncing Hegel, representing two of the plethora of radical currents that sprung out of that conjuncture. Also with their roots in the Young Hegelians were Max Stirner, a founder of libertarian individualism, one of the targets of Marx’s The Holy Family, Proudhon, the founder of theoretical anarchism and Bakunin’s teacher...

Anarcho-syndicalism was especially strong in the English-speaking world where the trade union movement had its own traditions independently of the political parties and in Spain and Italy, where anarchism had a long history among the peasantry before the advent of anarchist theory in the workers’ movement.

The founders of Anarcho-Syndicalism in the English-speaking world were socialists before they were anarchists, and looked to Marx not Bakunin for their theory. However, their focus on the independent development of the trade unions and their suspicion of parliamentarians provided the stimulus for the development of the vibrant and anarchic Industrial Workers of the World.

http://www.marxists.org/subject/anarchi ... yndicalism
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Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism

... In common with Liberalism, Anarchism represents the idea that the happiness and prosperity of the individual must be the standard in all social matters. And, in common with the great representatives of liberal thought, it has also the idea of limiting the functions of government to a minimum. Its adherents have followed this thought to its ultimate consequences, and wish to eliminate every institution of political power from the life of society. When Jefferson clothes the basic concept of Liberalism in the words: "That government is best which governs least," then Anarchists say with Thoreau: "That government is best which governs not at all."

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archi ... calism.htm

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Anarchism and the State

Excerpted from the book

Individual Liberty
Selections From the Writings of Benjamin R. Tucker
Vanguard Press, New York, 1926
Kraus Reprint Co., Millwood, NY, 1973.

Mr. Henry Appleton, one of Liberty's original editorial contributors, was obliged to cease to act in that capacity when he took a position not in harmony with that of the editor on a point of great importance, whereat he later complained, and tried to explain his view of the controversy. In answering him, Mr. Tucker dealt with some essential questions of principle:

I do not admit anything except the existence of the individual, as a condition of his sovereignty. To say that the sovereignty of the individual is conditioned by Liberty is simply another way of saying that it is conditioned by itself. To condition it by the cost principle is equivalent to instituting the cost principle by authority, - an attempted fusion of Anarchism with State Socialism which I have always understood Mr. Appleton to rebel against.

It is true that the affirmation of individual sovereignty is logically precedent to protest against authority as such. But in practice they are inseparable. To protest against the invasion of individual sovereignty is necessarily to affirm individual sovereignty. The Anarchist always carries his base of supplies with him. He cannot fight away from it. The moment he does so he becomes an Archist. This protest contains all the affirmation that there is. As I have pointed out to Comrade Lloyd, Anarchy has no side that is affirmative in the sense of constructive. Neither as Anarchists nor - what is practically the same thing - as individual sovereigns have we any constructive work to do, though as progressive beings we have plenty of it. But, if we had perfect liberty, we might, if we chose, remain utterly inactive and still be individual sovereigns. Mr. Appleton's unenviable experiences are due to no mistake of mine, but to his own folly in acknowledging the pertinence of the hackneyed cry for construction, which loses none of its nonsense on the lips of a Circuit Court Judge.

I base my assertion that the Chicago Communists are not Anarchists entirely on the ground that Anarchism means a protest against every form of invasion. (Whether this definition is etymologically correct I will show in the next paragraph.) Those who protest against the existing political State, with emphasis on the existing, are not Anarchists, but Archists. In objecting to a special form or method of invasion, they tacitly acknowledge the rightfulness of some other form or method of invasion. Proudhon never fought any particular State; he fought the institution itself, as necessarily negative to individual sovereignty, whatever form it may take. His use of the word Anarchism shows that he considered it coextensive with individual sovereignty. If his applications of it were directed against political government, it was because he considered political government the only invader of individual sovereignty worth talking about, having no knowledge of Mr. Appleton's "comprehensive philosophy," which thinks it takes cognizance of a "vast mountain of government outside of the organized State." The reason why Most and Parsons are not Anarchists, while I am one, is because their Communism is another State, while my voluntary cooperation is not a State at all. It is a very easy matter to tell who is an Anarchist and who is not. One question will always readily decide it. Do you believe in any form of imposition upon the human will by force? If you do, you are not an Anarchist. If you do not, you are an Anarchist. What can any one ask more reliable, more scientific, than this?

Anarchy does not mean simply opposed to the archos, or political leader. It means opposed to the arche. Now, arche in the first instance, means beginning, origin. From this it comes to mean a first principle, an element; then first place, supreme power, sovereignty, dominion, command, authority; and finally a sovereignty, an empire, a realm, a magistracy, a governmental office. Etymologically, then, the word anarchy may have several meanings, among them, as Mr. Apppleton says, without guiding principle, and to this use of the word I have never objected, always striving, on the contrary, to interpret in accordance with their definition the thought of those who so use it. But the word Anarchy as a philosophical term and the word Anarchists as the name of a philosophical sect were first appropriated in the sense of opposition to dominion, to authority, and are so held by right of occupance, which fact makes any other philosophical use of them improper and confusing. Therefore, as Mr. Appleton does not make the political sphere coextensive with dominion or authority, he cannot claim that Anarchy, when extended beyond the political sphere, necessarily comes to mean without guiding principle, for it may mean, and by appropriation does mean, without dominion, without authority. Consequently it is a term which completely and scientifically covers the individualistic protest.

I could scarcely name a word that has been more abused, misunderstood, and misinterpreted than Individualism. Mr. Appleton makes so palpable a point against himself in instancing the Protestant sects that it is really laughable to see him try to use it against me. However it may be with the Protestant sects, the one great Protestant body itself was born of protest, suckled by protest, named after protest, and lived on protest until the days of its usefulness were over. If such instances proved anything, plenty of them might be cited against Mr. Appleton. For example, taking one of more recent date, I might pertinently inquire which contributed most through their affirmations as the Liberty Party or as Colonizationists, or those who defined themselves through their protests as the Anti-Slavery Society or as Abolitionists. Unquestionably the latter. And when human slavery in all its forms shall have disappeared, I fancy that the credit of this victory will be given quite as exclusively to the Anarchists and that these latter-day Colonizationists, of whom Mr. Appleton has suddenly become so enamored, will be held as innocent of its overthrow as are their predecessors and namesakes of the overthrow of chattel slavery.

It is to be regretted that Mr. Appleton took up so much space with other matters that he could not turn his "flood of light" into my "delusion" that the State is the efficient cause of tyranny over individuals; for the question whether this is a delusion or not is the very heart of the issue between us. He has asserted that there is a vast mountain of government outside of the organized State, and that our chief battle is with that; I, on the contrary, have maintained that practically almost all the authority against which we have to contend is exercised by the State, and that, when we have abolished the State, the struggle for individual sovereignty will be well-nigh over. I have shown that Mr. Appleton, to maintain his position, must point out this vast mountain of government and tell us definitely what it is and how it acts, and this is what the readers of Liberty have been waiting to see him do. But he no more does it in his last article than in his first. And his only attempt to dispute my statement that the State is the efficient cause of tyranny over individuals is confined to two or three sentences which culminate in the conclusion that the initial cause is the surrendering individual. I have never denied it, and am charmed by the air of innocence with which this substitution of initial for efficient is effected. Of initial causes finite intelligence knows nothing; it can only know causes as more or less remote. But using the word initial in the sense of remoter, I am willing to admit, for the sake of the argument (though it is not a settled matter), that the initial cause was the surrendering individual. Mr. Appleton doubtless means voluntarily surrendering individual, for compulsory surrender would imply the prior existence of a power to exact it, or a primitive form of State. But the State, having come into existence through such voluntary surrender, becomes a positive, strong, growing, encroaching institution, which expands, not by further voluntary surrenders, but by exacting surrenders from its individual subjects, and which contracts only as they successfully rebel. That, at any rate, is what it is today and hence it is the efficient cause of tyranny. The only sense, then, in which it is true that "the individual is the proper objective point of reform" is this, - that he must be penetrated with the Anarchistic idea and taught to rebel. But this is not what Mr. Appleton means. If it were, his criticism would not be pertinent, for I have never advocated any other method of abolishing the State. The logic of his position compels another interpretation of his words, - namely that the State cannot disappear until the individual is perfected. In saying which, Mr. Appleton joins hands with those wise persons who admit that Anarchy will be practicable when the millennium arrives. It is an utter abandonment of Anarchistic Socialism. no doubt it is true that, if the individual could perfect himself while the barriers to his perfection are standing, the State would afterwards disappear. Perhaps, too, he could go to heaven, if he could lift himself by his boot-straps.

If one must favor colonization, or localization, as Mr. Appleton calls it, as a result of looking "seriously" into these matters, then he must have been trifling with them for a long time. He has combatted colonization in these columns more vigorously than ever I did or can, and not until comparatively lately did he write anything seeming to favor it. Even then he declared that he was not given over to the idea, and seemed only to be making a tentative venture into a region which he had not before explored. If he has since become a settler, it only indicates to my mind that he has not yet fathomed the real cause of the people's wretchedness. That cause is State interference with natural economic processes. The people are poor and robbed and enslaved, not because "industry, commerce, and domicile are centralized," - in fact, such centralization has, on the whole, greatly benefited them, - but because the control of the conditions under which industry, commerce, and domicile are exercised and enjoyed is centralized. The localization needed is not the localization of persons in space, but of powers in persons, - that is, the restriction of power to self and the abolition of power over others. Government makes itself felt alike in country and in city, capital has it usurious grip on the farm as surely as on the workshop, and the oppressions and exactions of neither government nor capital can be avoided by migration. The State is the enemy, and the best means of fighting it can only be found in communities already existing. If there were no other reason for opposing colonization, this in itself would be sufficient.

http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchi ... cker5.html [/quote]

from here: viewtopic.php?p=378050#p378050

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"Anarchism does not mean bloodshed; it does not mean robbery, arson, etc. These monstrosities are, on the contrary, the characteristic features of capitalism. Anarchism means peace and tranquility to all." --August Spies, Haymarket anarchist

"We are going to inherit the earth . There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie may blast and burn its own world before it finally leaves the stage of history. We Are not afraid of ruins. We who ploughed the prairies and built the cities can build again, only better next time. We carry a new world, here in our hearts. That world is growing this minute." ----Durruti

"'What I believe' is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect." - Emma Goldman

"The essence of all slavery consists in taking the product of another's labor by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded upon ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live" -Leo Tolstoy

"Man must not check reason by tradition, but contrawise, must check tradition by reason." -Leo Tolstoy

"In proportion as the atagonism between the classes vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end" -Marx/Engels

"Juridically they are both equal [the worker and capitalist]; but economically the worker is the serf of the capitalist . . . thereby the worker sells his person and his liberty for a given time. The worker is in the position of a serf because this terrible threat of starvation which daily hangs over his head and over his family, will force him to accept any conditions imposed by the gainful calculations of the capitalist, the industrialist, the employer. . . .The worker always has the right to leave his employer, but has he the means to do so? No, he does it in order to sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same hunger which forces him to sell himself to the first employer. Thus the worker's liberty . . . is only a theoretical freedom, lacking any means for its possible realisation, and consequently it is only a fictitious liberty, an utter falsehood. The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession of terms of serfdom -- voluntary from the juridical point of view but compulsory from an economic sense -- broken up by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is real slavery." -Bakunin

A democracy cannot be both ignorant and free. --Thomas Jefferson

The great are great only because we are on our knees. Let us rise! --Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own

The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual. --Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State

In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interests of the immense majority in subjection to them. --Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State

I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Anarchists are opposed to violence; everyone knows that. The main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human relations. It is life based on freedom of the individual, without the intervention of the gendarme. For this reason we are the enemies of capitalism which depends on the protection of the gendarme to oblige workers to allow themselves to be exploited--or even to remain idle and go hungry when it is not in the interest of the bosses to exploit them. We are therefore enemies of the State which is the coercive violent organization of society. --Errico Malatesta

I am an anarchist! Wherefore I will not rule and also ruled I will not be. --John Henry Mackay

Anarchism...stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral. --Emma Goldman

The political arena leaves one no alternatives, one must be either a dunce or a rogue. --Emma Goldman

Anarchism aims to strip labor of its deadening, dulling aspect, of its gloom and compulsion. It aims to make work an instrument of joy, of strength, of color, of real harmony, so that the poorest sort of a man should find in work both recreation and hope. --Emma Goldman

When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist. --Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Recife

Workers and their families may starve to death in the New World Order of economic rationality, but diamond necklaces are cheaper in elegant New York shops, thanks to the miracle of the market. --Noam Chomsky

In the hands of a people whose education has been willfully neglected, the ballot is a cunning swindle benefitting only the united barons of industry, trade and property. --Daniel Guérin

Capitalism can no more be 'persuaded' to limit growth than a human being can be 'persuaded' to stop breathing. Attempts to 'green' capitalism, to make it 'ecological', are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth. --Murray Bookchin

'Tis better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. Anonymous

Only after the last tree has been cut down,
only after the last river has been poisoned,
only after the last fish has been caught,
only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten. --The Cree People

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vanlose kid wrote:'Tis better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. Anonymous

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knew that attribution was wrong when i posted it so here's the correct one:

"It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees"

One of the iconic figures of the Spanish Republic's battle for land and freedom against Franco's fascists, Communist MP Dolores Ibarruri, known popularly as La Pasionaria. She became a symbol for the extraordinary worldwide solidarity with the Spanish Republic, most famously the International Brigades who travelled to Spain to join the fight against fascism. The quote was La Pasionaria's tribute to all who joined in this fight. Further details on the International Brigades from International Brigades Memorial Trust.

source http://www.philosophyfootball.com/new_win.html

Naturally, the elite benefit from having the the American populace embrace the bastardized version of libertarianism. The authentic version is a direct threat to them.

Every time we treat libertarianism for other than what it originally stood for, we are solidifying the elite's continuing propaganda efforts to remain in power.

http://www.reallibertarianism.com/

(excerpted)

"In the United States, as Murray Bookchin noted, the "term 'libertarian' itself, to be sure, raises a problem, notably, the specious identification of an anti-authoritarian ideology with a straggling movement for 'pure capitalism' and 'free trade.' This movement never created the word: it appropriated it from the anarchist movement of the [nineteenth] century. And it should be recovered by those anti-authoritarians . . . who try to speak for dominated people as a whole, not for personal egotists who identify freedom with entrepreneurship and profit." Thus anarchists in America should "restore in practice a tradition that has been denatured by" the free-market right. [The Modern Crisis, pp. 154-5]"

^ ^ fitting quote 23, thanks.

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edit: seems like this thread is a lost cause though.

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It will be what it will be.

Bashing a faux version of libertarianism may be more popular and inviting than revealing a faux version for what it is.

It will be what it will be.

^ ^ true.

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An Anarchist FAQ – G.5 Benjamin Tucker: Capitalist of Anarchist?


Benjamin Tucker, like all genuine anarchists, was against both the state and capitalism, against both oppression and exploitation. While not against the market and property he was firmly against capitalism as it was, in his eyes, a state-supported monopoly of social capital (tools, machinery, etc.) which allows owners to exploit their employees, i.e., to avoid paying workers the full value of their labour. He thought that the "labouring classes are deprived of their earnings by usury in its three forms, interest, rent and profit." [quoted by James J. Martin, Men Against the State, p. 210f] Therefore "Liberty will abolish interest; it will abolish profit; it will abolish monopolistic rent; it will abolish taxation; it will abolish the exploitation of labour; it will abolish all means whereby any labourer can be deprived of any of his product." [The Individualist Anarchists, p. 157]

This stance puts him squarely in the libertarian socialist tradition and, unsurprisingly, Tucker referred to himself many times as a socialist and considered his philosophy to be "Anarchistic socialism." For Tucker, capitalist society was exploitative and stopped the full development of all and so had to be replaced:

"[This] society is fundamentally anti-social. The whole so-called social fabric rests on privilege and power, and is disordered and strained in every direction by the inequalities that necessarily result therefrom. The welfare of each, instead of contributing to that of all, as it naturally should and would, almost invariably detracts from that of all. Wealth is made by legal privilege a hook with which to filch from labour's pockets. Every man who gets rich thereby makes his neighbours poor. The better off one is, the worse the rest are . . . Labour's Deficit is precisely equal to the Capitalist's Efficit.

"Now, Socialism wants to change all this. Socialism says . . . that no man shall be able to add to his riches except by labour; that is adding to his riches by his labour alone no man makes another man poorer; that on the contrary every man this adding to his riches makes every other man richer; . . . that every increase in capital in the hands of the labourer tends, in the absence of legal monopoly, to put more products, better products, cheaper products, and a greater variety of products within the reach of every man who works; and that this fact means the physical, mental, and moral perfecting of mankind, and the realisation of human fraternity." [Instead of a Book, pp. 361-2]

It is true that he also sometimes railed against "socialism," but in those cases it is clear that he was referring to state socialism. Like many anarchists (including Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin), he argued that there are two kinds of socialism based upon two different principles:

"The two principles referred to are Authority and Liberty, and the names of the two schools of Socialistic thought which fully and unreservedly represent one or the other of them are, respectively, State Socialism and Anarchism. Whoso knows what these two schools want and how they propose to get it understands the Socialistic movement. For, just as it has been said that there is no half-way house between Rome and Reason, so it may be said that there is no half-way house between State Socialism and Anarchism." [The Anarchist Reader, p. 150]

Like other socialists, Tucker argued that profits "to a few mean robbery of others, -- monopoly. Andrews and Warren, realising this, make individual sovereignty and the cost principle the essential conditions of a true civilisation." [Liberty, no. 94, p. 1] Like Proudhon, he argued that "property, in the sense of individual possession, is liberty." [Op. Cit., no. 122, p. 4] However, unlike state socialists and communist-anarchists, Tucker saw a key role for a market system under socialism. In this he followed Proudhon who also argued that competition was required to ensure that prices reflected the labour costs involved in producing it and so interest, rent and profit were opposed because they did not reflect actual costs but simply usury paid to the wealthy for being allowed to use part of their wealth, a part the rich could comfortably lend out to others as they were not using it. Once capitalism was abolished, the market would be able to reach its full promise and become a means of enriching all rather than the few:

"Liberty's aim -- universal happiness -- is that of all Socialists, in contrast with that of the Manchester men -- luxury fed by misery. But its principle -- individual sovereignty -- is that of the Manchester men, in contrast with that of the Socialists -- individual subordination. But individual sovereignty, when logically carried out, leads, not to luxury fed by misery, but to comfort for all industrious persons and death for all idle ones." [Liberty, no. 89, p. 1]

As other anarchists have also argued, likewise for Tucker -- the state is the "protector" of the exploiter. "Usury is the serpent gnawing at labour's vitals, and only liberty can detach and kill it. Give labourers their liberty and they will keep their wealth." [The Individualist Anarchists, p. 89] From this it is clear that he considered laissez-faire capitalism to be opposed to genuine individual sovereignty. This was because it was based on the state interfering in the market by enforcing certain restrictions on competition in favour of the capitalist class and certain types of private property. Thus his opposition to the state reflected his opposition to capitalist property rights and the abolition of the state automatically meant their abolition as well.

Tucker spent considerable time making it clear that he was against capitalist private property rights, most notably in land and what was on it. He supported Proudhon's argument that "property is theft," even translating many of Proudhon's works including the classic "What is Property?" where that phrase originated. Tucker advocated possession (or "occupancy and use," to use his preferred expression for the concept) but not private property, believing that empty land, houses, and so on should be squatted by those who could use them, as labour (i.e. use) would be the only title to "property" (Tucker opposed all non-labour income as usury). For Tucker, the true "Anarchistic doctrine" was "occupancy and use as the basis and limit of land ownership." Supporting the current property rights regime meant "departing from Anarchistic ground." It was "Archism" and "all Anarchists agree in viewing [it] as a denial of equal liberty" and "utterly inconsistent with the Anarchistic doctrine of occupancy and use as the limit of property in land." [Liberty, no. 180, p. 4 and p. 6] He looked forward to the day when "the Anarchistic view that occupancy and use should condition and limit landholding becomes the prevailing view." [Op. Cit., no. 162, p. 5]

This was because Tucker did not believe in a "natural right" to property nor did he approve of unlimited holdings of scarce goods and "in the case of land, or of any other material the supply of which is so limited that all cannot hold it in unlimited quantities, Anarchism undertakes to protect no titles except such as are based on actual occupancy and use." [Instead of a Book, p. 61] He clearly recognised that allowing "absolute" rights to private property in land would result in the liberty of non-owners being diminished and so "I put the right of occupancy and use above the right of contract . . . principally by my interest in the right of contract. Without such a preference the theory of occupancy and use is utterly untenable; without it . . . it would be possible for an individual to acquire, and hold simultaneously, virtual titles to innumerable parcels of land, by the merest show of labour performed thereon." This would lead to "the virtual ownership of the entire world by a small fraction of its inhabitants" which would result in "the right of contract, if not destroyed absolutely, would surely be impaired in an intolerable degree." [Liberty, no. 350, p. 4] Thus "[i]t is true . . . that Anarchism does not recognise the principle of human rights. But it recognises human equality as a necessity of stable society." [Instead of a Book, p. 64]

So Tucker considered private property in land use (which he called the "land monopoly") as one of the four great evils of capitalism. According to Tucker, "the land monopoly . . . consists in the enforcement by government of land titles which do not rest upon personal occupancy and cultivation . . . the individual should no longer be protected by their fellows in anything but personal occupation and cultivation of land." "Rent", he argued, "is due to the denial of liberty which takes the shape of the land monopoly, vesting titles to land in individuals and associations which do not use it, and thereby compelling the non-owning users to pay tribute to the non-using owners as a condition of admission to the competitive market." the land "should be free to all, and no one would control more than he [or she] used." [The Individualist Anarchists, p. 85, p. 130 and p. 114] Ending this monopoly would, he thought, reduce the evils of capitalism and increase liberty (particularly in predominantly agricultural societies such as the America of his era). For those who own no property have no room for the soles of their feet unless they have the permission of those who do own property, hardly a situation that would increase, never mind protect, freedom for all. Significantly, Tucker extended this principle to what was on the land, and so Tucker would "accord the actual occupant and user of land the right to that which is upon the land, who left it there when abandoning the land." [Liberty, no. 350, p. 4] The freedom to squat empty land and buildings would, in the absence of a state to protect titles, further contribute to the elimination of rent:"Ground rent exists only because the State stands by to collect it and to protect land titles rooted in force or fraud. Otherwise land would be free to all, and no one could control more than he used." [quoted by James J. Martin, Op. Cit., p. 210]

This would lead to "the abolition of landlordism and the annihilation of rent." [Instead of a Book, p. 300] Significantly, Tucker considered the Irish Land League (an organisation which used non-payment of rent to secure reforms against the British state) as "the nearest approach, on a large scale, to perfect Anarchistic organisation that the world has yet seen. An immense number of local groups . . . each group autonomous, each free . . . each obeying its own judgement . . . all co-ordinated and federated." [The Individualist Anarchists, p. 263]

The other capitalist monopolies were based on credit, tariffs and patents and all were reflected in (and supported by) the law. As far as tariffs went, this was seen as a statist means of "fostering production at high prices" which the workers paid for. Its abolition "would result in a great reduction in the prices of all articles taxed. [Op. Cit., p. 85 and p. 86] With capitalists in the protected industries being unable to reap high profits, they would be unable to accumulate capital to the same degree and so the market would also become more equal. As for patents, Tucker considered that there was "no more justification for the claim of the discoverer of an idea to exclusive use of it than there would have been for a claim on the part of the man who first 'struck oil' to ownership of the entire oil region or petroleum product . . . The central injustice of copyright and patent law is that it compels the race to pay an individual through a long term of years a monopoly price for knowledge that he has discovered today, although some other man or men might, and in many cases very probably would, have discovered it tomorrow." [Liberty, no. 173, p. 4] The state, therefore, protects the inventors (or, these days, the company the inventors work for) "against competition for a period long enough to enable them to extort from the people a reward enormously in excess of the labour measure of their services -- in other words, in giving certain people a right of property for a term of years in laws and facts of Nature, and the power to extract tribute from others for the use of this natural wealth, which should be open to all." [The Individualist Anarchists, p. 86]

However, the key monopoly was the credit monopoly. Tucker believed that bankers monopoly of the power to create credit and currency was the linchpin of capitalism. Although he thought that all forms of monopoly are detrimental to society, he maintained that the banking monopoly is the worst, since it is the root from which both the industrial-capitalist and landlordist monopolies grow and without which they would wither and die. For, if credit were not monopolised, its price (i.e. interest rates) would be much lower, which in turn would drastically lower the price of capital goods and buildings -- expensive items that generally cannot be purchased without access to credit. This would mean that the people currently "deterred from going into business by the ruinously high rates they must pay for capital with which to start and carry on business will find their difficulties removed" (they would simply "pay for the labour of running the banks"). This "facility of acquiring capital will give an unheard of impetus to business, and consequently create an unprecedented demand for labour -- a demand which will always be in excess of the supply, directly to the contrary of the present condition of the labour market . . . Labour will then be in a position to dictate its wages." [Op. Cit., p. 84 and p. 85]

Following Proudhon, Tucker argued that if any group of people could legally form a "mutual bank" and issue credit based on any form of collateral they saw fit to accept, the price of credit would fall to the labour cost of the paperwork involved in running the bank. He claimed that banking statistics show this cost to be less than one percent of principal, and hence, that a one-time service fee which covers this cost and no more is the only non-usurious charge a bank can make for extending credit. This charge should not be called "interest" since, as it represented the labour-cost in providing, it is non-exploitative. This would ensure that workers could gain free access to the means of production (and so, in effect, be the individualist equivalent of the communist-anarchist argument for socialisation).

Tucker believed that under mutual banking, capitalists' ability to extract surplus value from workers in return for the use of tools, machinery, etc. would be eliminated because workers would be able to obtain zero-interest credit and use it to buy their own instruments of production instead of "renting" them, as it were, from capitalists. "Make capital free by organising credit on a mutual plan," stressed Tucker, "and then these vacant lands will come into use . . . operatives will be able to buy axes and rakes and hoes, and then they will be independent of their employers, and then the labour problem will solved." [Instead of a Book, p. 321] Easy access to mutual credit would result in a huge increase in the purchase of capital goods, creating a high demand for labour, which in turn would greatly increase workers' bargaining power and thus raise their wages toward equivalence with the value their labour produces.

For Tucker, reforms had to be applied at the heart of the system and so he rejected the notion of setting up intentional communities based on anarchist principles in the countryside or in other countries. "Government makes itself felt alike in city and in country," he argued, "capital has its usurious grip on the farm as surely as on the workshop, and the oppression and exactions of neither government nor capital can be avoided by migration. The State is the enemy, and the best means of fighting it can be found in communities already existing." He stressed that "I care nothing for any reform that cannot be effected right here in Boston among the every day people whom I meet in the streets." [quoted by Martin, Op. Cit., p. 249 and p. 248]

It should be noted that while his social and political vision remained mostly the same over his lifetime, Tucker's rationale for his system changed significantly. Originally, like the rest of the American individualist anarchist tradition he subscribed to a system of natural rights. Thus he advocated "occupancy and use" based on a person's right to have access to the means of life as well as its positive effects on individual liberty. However, under the influence of Max Stirner's book The Ego and Its Own, Tucker along with many of his comrades, became egoists (see next section for a discussion of Stirner). This resulted in Tucker arguing that while previously "it was my habit to talk glibly of the right of man to land" this was "a bad habit, and I long ago sloughed it off." Now a person's "only right over the land is his might over it." [Instead of a Book, p. 350] Contracts were seen as the means of securing the peaceful preservation of the ego's personality as it would be against a person's self-interest to aggress against others (backed-up, of course, by means of freely joined defence associations). It should be noted that the issue of egoism split the individualist anarchist movement and lead to its further decline.

Tucker's ideal society was one of small entrepreneurs, farmers, artisans, independent contractors and co-operative associations based around a network of mutual banks. He looked to alternative institutions such as co-operative banks and firms, schools and trade unions, combined with civil disobedience in the form of strikes, general strikes, tax and rent strikes and boycotts to bring anarchism closer. He was firm supporter of the labour movement and "strikes, whenever and wherever inaugurated, deserve encouragement from all the friends of labour . . . They show that people are beginning to know their rights, and knowing, dare to maintain them." Echoing Bakunin's thoughts on the subject, Tucker maintained that strikes should be supported and encouraged because "as an awakening agent, as an agitating force, the beneficent influence of a strike is immeasurable . . . with our present economic system almost every strike is just. For what is justice in production and distribution? That labour, which creates all, shall have all." [Liberty, no. 19, p. 7] While critical of certain aspects of trade unionism, Tucker was keen to stress that "it is not to be denied for a moment that workingmen are obliged to unite and act together in order, not to successfully contend with, but to defend themselves at least to some extent from, the all-powerful possessors of natural wealth and capital." [Op. Cit., no. 158, p. 1]

Like the anarcho-syndicalists and many other social anarchists, Tucker considered Labour unions as a positive development, being a "crude step in the direction of supplanting the State" and involved a "movement for self-government on the part of the people, the logical outcome of which is ultimate revolt against those usurping political conspiracies which manifest themselves in courts and legislatures. Just as the [Irish] Land League has become a formidable rival of the British State, so the amalgamated trades unions may yet become a power sufficiently strong to defy the legislatures and overthrow them." Thus unions were "a potent sign of emancipation." Indeed, he called the rise of the unions "trades-union socialism," saw in it a means of "supplanting" the state by "an intelligent and self-governing socialism" and indicated that "imperfect as they are, they are the beginnings of a revolt against the authority of the political State. They promise the coming substitution of industrial socialism for usurping legislative mobism." [The Individualist Anarchists, pp. 283-284] Hence we see the co-operative nature of the voluntary organisations supported by Tucker and a vision of socialism being based on self-governing associations of working people.

In this way working people would reform capitalism away by non-violent social protest combined with an increase in workers' bargaining power by alternative voluntary institutions and free credit. Exploitation would be eliminated and workers would gain economic liberty. His ideal society would be classless, with "each man reaping the fruit of his labour and no man able to live in idleness on an income from capital" and society "would become a great hive of Anarchistic workers, prosperous and free individuals." While, like all anarchists, he rejected "abolute equality" he did envision an egalitarian society whose small differences in wealth were rooted in labour, not property, and so liberty, while abolishing exploitation, would "not abolish the limited inequality between one labourer's product and another's . . . Liberty will ultimately make all men rich; it will not make all men equally rich." [The Individualist Anarchists, p. 276, p. 156 and p. 157] He firmly believed that the "most perfect Socialism is possible only on the condition of the most perfect individualism." [quoted by Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible, p. 390]

As we noted in section G.1.3, there is one apparent area of disagreement between Tucker and most other socialists, namely the issue of wage labour. For almost all anarchists the employer/employee social relationship does not fit in well with Tucker's statement that "if the individual has the right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny." [The Individualist Anarchists, p. 86] However, even here the differences are not impossible to overcome. It is important to note that because of Tucker's proposal to increase the bargaining power of workers through access to mutual credit, his individualist anarchism is not only compatible with workers' control but would in fact promote it (as well as logically requiring it -- see section G.4.1).

For if access to mutual credit were to increase the bargaining power of workers to the extent that Tucker claimed it would, they would then be able to: (1) demand and get workplace democracy; and (2) pool their credit to buy and own companies collectively. This would eliminate the top-down structure of the firm and the ability of owners to pay themselves unfairly large salaries as well as reducing capitalist profits to zero by ensuring that workers received the full value of their labour. Tucker himself pointed this out when he argued that Proudhon (like himself) "would individualise and associate" workplaces by mutualism, which would "place the means of production within the reach of all." [quoted by Martin, Op. Cit., p. 228] Proudhon used the word "associate" to denote co-operative (i.e. directly democratic) workplaces (and given Proudhon's comments -- quoted in section G.4.2 -- on capitalist firms we can dismiss any attempt to suggest that the term "individualise" indicates support for capitalist rather than artisan/peasant production, which is the classic example of individualised production). For as Proudhon recognised, only a system without wage slavery (and so exploitation) would ensure the goal of all anarchists: "the greatest amount of liberty compatible with equality of liberty." [Tucker, Instead of a Book, p. 131]

Thus the logical consequence of Tucker's proposals would be a system equivalent in most important respects to the kind of system advocated by other left libertarians. In terms of aspirations, Tucker's ideas reflected those of social anarchists -- a form of socialism rooted in individual liberty. His fire was directed against the same targets, exploitation and oppression and so state and capital. He aimed for a society without inequalities of wealth where it would be impossible to exploit another's labour and where free access to the means of life were secured by mutual banking and "occupancy and use" applied to land and what was on it. He considered laissez-faire capitalism to be a system of state-supported privilege rather than as an ideal to be aimed for. He argued extensively that getting rid of the state would mean getting rid of capitalist property rights and so, like other anarchists, he did not artificially divide economic and political issues. In other words, like social anarchists, he was against the state because it protected specific kinds of private property, kinds which allowed its owners to extract tribute from labour.

In summary, then, Tucker "remained a left rather than a right-wing libertarian." [Marshall, Op. Cit., p. 391] When he called himself a socialist he knew well what it meant and systematically fought those (usually, as today, Marxists and capitalists) who sought to equate it with state ownership. John Quail, in his history of British Anarchism, puts his finger on the contextual implications and limitations of Tucker's ideas when he wrote: "Tucker was a Proudhonist and thus fundamentally committed to a society based on small proprietorship. In the American context, however, where the small landowner was often locked in battle with large capitalist interests, this did not represent the reactionary position it often did later where it could easily degenerate into an 'Anarchism for small business-men.' Tucker had a keen sense of the right of the oppressed to struggle against oppression." [The Slow Burning Fuse, p. 19]

As we stressed in section G.1.4, many of Tucker's arguments can only be fully understood in the context of the society in which he developed them, namely the transformation of America from a pre-capitalist into a capitalist one by means of state intervention (the process of "primitive accumulation" to use Marx's phrase -- see section F.8.5). At that time, it was possible to argue that access to credit would allow workers to set-up business and undermine big business. However, eventually Tucker had come to argue that this possibility had effectively ended and even the freest market would not be able to break-up the economic power of corporations and trusts (see section G.1.1).

In this, ironically, Tucker came to the same conclusion as his old enemy Johann Most had done three decades previously. In the 1880s, Tucker had argued that wage labour would be non-exploitative under individualist anarchy. This was part of the reason why Most had excommunicated Tucker from anarchism, for he thought that Tucker's system could not, by definition, end exploitation due to its tolerance of wage labour, an argument Tucker disputed but did not disprove (see section G.4.1 for more discussion on this issue). In 1888 Tucker had speculated that "the question whether large concentrations of capital for production on the large scale confronts us with the disagreeable alternative of either abolishing private property or continuing to hold labour under the capitalistic yoke." [Liberty, no. 122, p. 4] By 1911, he had come to the conclusion that the latter had come to pass and considered revolutionary or political action as the only means of breaking up such concentrations of wealth (although he was against individualists anarchists participating in either strategy). [Martin, Op. Cit., pp. 273-4] In other words, Tucker recognised that economic power existed and, as a consequence, free markets were not enough to secure free people in conditions of economic inequality.

There are, of course, many differences between the anarchism of, say, Bakunin and Kropotkin and that of Tucker. Tucker's system, for example, does retain some features usually associated with capitalism, such as competition between firms in a free market. However, the fundamental socialist objection to capitalism is not that it involves markets or "private property" but that it results in exploitation. Most socialists oppose private property and markets because they result in exploitation and have other negative consequences rather than an opposition to them as such. Tucker's system was intended to eliminate exploitation and involves a radical change in property rights, which is why he called himself a socialist and why most other anarchists concurred. This is why we find Kropotkin discussing Tucker in his general accounts of anarchism, accounts which note that the anarchists "constitute the left wing" of the socialists and which make no comment that Tucker's ideas were any different in this respect. [Anarchism, p. 285] A position, needless to say, Tucker also held as he considered his ideas as part of the wider socialist movement.

This fact is overlooked by "anarcho"-capitalists who, in seeking to make Tucker one of their "founding fathers," point to the fact that he spoke of the advantages of owning "property." But it is apparent that by "property" he was referring to simple "possession" of land, tools, etc. by independent artisans, farmers, and co-operating workers (he used the word property "as denoting the labourer's individual possession of his product or his share of the joint product of himself and others." [Tucker, Instead of a Book, p. 394]. For, since Tucker saw his system as eliminating the ability of capitalists to maintain exploitative monopolies over the means of production, it is therefore true by definition that he advocated the elimination of "private property" in the capitalist sense.

So while it is true that Tucker placed "property" and markets at the heart of his vision of anarchy, this does not make he a supporter of capitalism (see sections G.1.1 and G.1.2). Unlike supporters of capitalism, the individualist anarchists identified "property" with simple "possession," or "occupancy and use" and considered profit, rent and interest as exploitation. Indeed, Tucker explicitly stated that "all property rests on a labour title, and no other property do I favour." [Instead of a Book, p. 400] Because of their critique of capitalist property rights and their explicit opposition to usury (profits, rent and interest) individualist anarchists like Tucker could and did consider themselves as part of the wider socialist movement, the libertarian wing as opposed to the statist/Marxist wing.

Thus, Tucker is clearly a left libertarian rather than a forefather of right-wing "libertarianism". In this he comes close to what today would be called a market socialist, albeit a non-statist variety. As can be seen, his views are directly opposed to those of right "libertarians" like Murray Rothbard on a number of key issues. Most fundamentally, he rejected "absolute" property rights in land which are protected by laws enforced either by private security forces or a "night watchman state." He also recognised that workers were exploited by capitalists, who use the state to ensure that the market was skewed in their favour, and so urged working people to organise themselves to resist such exploitation and, as a consequence, supported unions and strikes. He recognised that while formal freedom may exist in an unequal society, it could not be an anarchy due to the existence of economic power and the exploitation and limitations in freedom it produced. His aim was a society of equals, one in which wealth was equally distributed and any differences would be minor and rooted in actual work done rather than by owning capital or land and making others produce it for them. This clearly indicates that Rothbard's claim to have somehow modernised Tucker's thought is false -- "ignored" or "changed beyond recognition" would be more appropriate.

http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnarchistFAQSectionG5

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Joe Hillshoist wrote:

wintler2 wrote:Yet they're funding the semi-libertarian-branded tea party .. out of the goodness of their hearts, or cos the libertarian rhetoric suits their bankrolls? (the latter of course). And before you say (as i would in your position) that its not the libertarians fault that the Kochs jump on their bandwagon, a) who paid for the bandwagon? & b) why don't 'real' libertarians scream about the billionaire fakes? I hold all christians responsible for the evil christians cos they don't challenge their own, same goes for libertarians.

The word libertarian doesn't have jack shit to do with the tea party.

Its a Republican political movement. Republicans whether they choof or not are not libertarians.

All people have libertarian or authoritarian political tendencies. It is not a definition of the tea party, or really any political movement, tho the first one I ever came across was simply called the guns and drugs party.

If the tea party are calling themselves libertarian its for similar reasons to the way they plagarise MLKs speeches then add little racist violent dog whistles.

Its why they have Glen Beck's 9/12 Project - We the People demand Answers...

If theTea Party are using the word libertarian its a clear sign they are not libertarian but want to slur the concept while attempting to appropriate any poltical and social capital the term once had.

That is their mo.

There is a point where scum fuck capitalism and libertarianism meet, and Ron Paul's personal finances, and holdings in mining companies are an example of that.

Libertarianism as I understand it is more likely to be found in the writings of Randolph Bourne than Murray Rothbard tho. So I might see things differently.

expanding on this, from here.

F1. Are "anarcho"-capiltalists really anarchists?

In a word, no. While "anarcho"-capitalists obviously try to associate themselves with the anarchist tradition by using the word "anarcho" or by calling themselves "anarchists" their ideas are distinctly at odds with those associated with anarchism. As a result, any claims that their ideas are anarchist or that they are part of the anarchist tradition or movement are false.

"Anarcho"-capitalists claim to be anarchists because they say that they oppose government. As noted in the last section, they use a dictionary definition of anarchism. However, this fails to appreciate that anarchism is a political theory. As dictionaries are rarely politically sophisticated things, this means that they fail to recognise that anarchism is more than just opposition to government, it is also marked a opposition to capitalism (i.e. exploitation and private property). Thus, opposition to government is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being an anarchist -- you also need to be opposed to exploitation and capitalist private property. As "anarcho"-capitalists do not consider interest, rent and profits (i.e. capitalism) to be exploitative nor oppose capitalist property rights, they are not anarchists.

Part of the problem is that Marxists, like many academics, also tend to assert that anarchists are simply against the state. It is significant that both Marxists and "anarcho"-capitalists tend to define anarchism as purely opposition to government. This is no co-incidence, as both seek to exclude anarchism from its place in the wider socialist movement. This makes perfect sense from the Marxist perspective as it allows them to present their ideology as the only serious anti-capitalist one around (not to mention associating anarchism with "anarcho"-capitalism is an excellent way of discrediting our ideas in the wider radical movement). It should go without saying that this is an obvious and serious misrepresentation of the anarchist position as even a superficial glance at anarchist theory and history shows that no anarchist limited their critique of society simply at the state. So while academics and Marxists seem aware of the anarchist opposition to the state, they usually fail to grasp the anarchist critique applies to all other authoritarian social institutions and how it fits into the overall anarchist analysis and struggle. They seem to think the anarchist condemnation of capitalist private property, patriarchy and so forth are somehow superfluous additions rather than a logical position which reflects the core of anarchism:
"Critics have sometimes contended that anarchist thought, and classical anarchist theory in particular, has emphasised opposition to the state to the point of neglecting the real hegemony of economic power. This interpretation arises, perhaps, from a simplistic and overdrawn distinction between the anarchist focus on political domination and the Marxist focus on economic exploitation . . . there is abundant evidence against such a thesis throughout the history of anarchist thought." [John P. Clark and Camille Martin, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity, p. 95]

So Reclus simply stated the obvious when he wrote that "the anti-authoritarian critique to which the state is subjected applies equally to all social institutions." [quoted by Clark and Martin, Op. Cit., p. 140] Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman and so on would all agree with that. While they all stressed that anarchism was against the state they quickly moved on to present a critique of private property and other forms of hierarchical authority. So while anarchism obviously opposes the state, "sophisticated and developed anarchist theory proceeds further. It does not stop with a criticism of political organisation, but goes on to investigate the authoritarian nature of economic inequality and private property, hierarchical economic structures, traditional education, the patriarchal family, class and racial discrimination, and rigid sex- and age-roles, to mention just a few of the more important topics." For the "essence of anarchism is, after all, not the theoretical opposition to the state, but the practical and theoretical struggle against domination." [John Clark, The Anarchist Moment, p. 128 and p. 70]

This is also the case with individualist anarchists whose defence of certain forms of property did stop them criticising key aspects of capitalist property rights. As Jeremy Jennings notes, the "point to stress is that all anarchists, and not only those wedded to the predominant twentieth-century strain of anarchist communism have been critical of private property to the extent that it was a source of hierarchy and privilege." He goes on to state that anarchists like Tucker and Spooner "agreed with the proposition that property was legitimate only insofar as it embraced no more than the total product of individual labour." ["Anarchism", Contemporary Political Ideologies, Roger Eatwell and Anthony Wright (eds.), p. 132] This is acknowledged by the likes of Rothbard who had to explicitly point how that his position on such subjects was fundamentally different (i.e., at odds) with individualist anarchism.

As such, it would be fair to say that most "anarcho"-capitalists are capitalists first and foremost. If aspects of anarchism do not fit with some element of capitalism, they will reject that element of anarchism rather than question capitalism (Rothbard's selective appropriation of the individualist anarchist tradition is the most obvious example of this). This means that right-"libertarians" attach the "anarcho" prefix to their ideology because they believe that being against government intervention is equivalent to being an anarchist (which flows into their use of the dictionary definition of anarchism). That they ignore the bulk of the anarchist tradition should prove that there is hardly anything anarchistic about them at all. They are not against authority, hierarchy or the state -- they simply want to privatise them.

Ironically, this limited definition of "anarchism" ensures that "anarcho"-capitalism is inherently self-refuting. This can be seen from leading "anarcho"-capitalist Murray Rothbard. He thundered against the evil of the state, arguing that it "arrogates to itself a monopoly of force, of ultimate decision-making power, over a given territorial area." In and of itself, this definition is unremarkable. That a few people (an elite of rulers) claim the right to rule others must be part of any sensible definition of the state or government. However, the problems begin for Rothbard when he notes that "[o]bviously, in a free society, Smith has the ultimate decision-making power over his own just property, Jones over his, etc." [The Ethics of Liberty, p. 170 and p. 173] The logical contradiction in this position should be obvious, but not to Rothbard. It shows the power of ideology, the ability of mere words (the expression "private property") to turn the bad ("ultimate decision-making power over a given area") into the good ("ultimate decision-making power over a given area").

Now, this contradiction can be solved in only one way -- the users of the "given area" are also its owners. In other words, a system of possession (or "occupancy and use") as favoured by anarchists. However, Rothbard is a capitalist and supports private property, non-labour income, wage labour, capitalists and landlords. This means that he supports a divergence between ownership and use and this means that this "ultimate decision-making power" extends to those who use, but do not own, such property (i.e. tenants and workers). The statist nature of private property is clearly indicated by Rothbard's words -- the property owner in an "anarcho"-capitalist society possesses the "ultimate decision-making power" over a given area, which is also what the state has currently. Rothbard has, ironically, proved by his own definition that "anarcho"-capitalism is not anarchist.

Of course, it would be churlish to point out that the usual name for a political system in which the owner of a territory is also its ruler is, in fact, monarchy. Which suggests that while "anarcho"-capitalism may be called "anarcho-statism" a far better term could be "anarcho-monarchism." In fact, some "anarcho"-capitalists have made explicit this obvious implication of Rothbard's argument. Hans-Hermann Hoppe is one.

Hoppe prefers monarchy to democracy, considering it the superior system. He argues that the monarch is the private owner of the government -- all the land and other resources are owned by him. Basing himself on Austrian economics (what else?) and its notion of time preference, he concludes that the monarch will, therefore, work to maximise both current income and the total capital value of his estate. Assuming self-interest, his planning horizon will be farsighted and exploitation be far more limited. Democracy, in contrast, is a publicly-owned government and the elected rulers have use of resources for a short period only and not their capital value. In other words, they do not own the country and so will seek to maximise their short-term interests (and the interests of those they think will elect them into office). In contrast, Bakunin stressed that if anarchism rejects democracy it was "hardly in order to reverse it but rather to advance it," in particular to extend it via "the great economic revolution without which every right is but an empty phrase and a trick." He rejected wholeheartedly "the camp of aristocratic . . . reaction." [The Basic Bakunin, p. 87]

However, Hoppe is not a traditional monarchist. His ideal system is one of competing monarchies, a society which is led by a "voluntarily acknowledged 'natural' elite -- a nobilitas naturalis" comprised of "families with long-established records of superior achievement, farsightedness, and exemplary personal conduct." This is because "a few individuals quickly acquire the status of an elite" and their inherent qualities will "more likely than not [be] passed on within a few -- noble -- families." The sole "problem" with traditional monarchies was "with monopoly, not with elites or nobility," in other words the King monopolised the role of judge and their subjects could not turn to other members of the noble class for services. ["The Political Economy of Monarchy and Democracy and the Idea of a Natural Order," pp. 94-121, Journal of Libertarian Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, p. 118 and p. 119]

Which simply confirms the anarchist critique of "anarcho"-capitalism, namely that it is not anarchist. This becomes even more obvious when Hoppe helpfully expands on the reality of "anarcho"-capitalism: "In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one's own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance towards democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They -- the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centred lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism -- will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order." [Democracy: the God that Failed, p. 218]

Thus the proprietor has power/authority over his tenants and can decree what they can and cannot do, excluding anyone whom they consider as being subversive (in the tenants' own interests, of course). In other words, the autocratic powers of the boss are extended into all aspects of society -- all under the mask of advocating liberty. Sadly, the preservation of property rights destroys liberty for the many (Hoppe states clearly that for the "anarcho"-capitalist the "natural outcome of the voluntary transactions between various private property owners is decidedly non-egalitarian, hierarchical and elitist." ["The Political Economy of Monarchy and Democracy and the Idea of a Natural Order," Op. Cit., p. 118]). Unsurprisingly, Chomsky argued that right-wing "libertarianism" has "no objection to tyranny as long as it is private tyranny." In fact it (like other contemporary ideologies) "reduce[s] to advocacy of one or another form of illegitimate authority, quite often real tyranny." [Chomsky on Anarchism, p. 235 and p. 181] As such, it is hard not to conclude that "anarcho"-capitalism is little more than a play with words. It is not anarchism but a cleverly designed and worded surrogate for elitist, autocratic conservatism. Nor is too difficult to conclude that genuine anarchists and libertarians (of all types) would not be tolerated in this so-called "libertarian social order."

Some "anarcho"-capitalists do seem dimly aware of this glaringly obvious contradiction. Rothbard, for example, does present an argument which could be used to solve it, but he utterly fails. He simply ignores the crux of the matter, that capitalism is based on hierarchy and, therefore, cannot be anarchist. He does this by arguing that the hierarchy associated with capitalism is fine as long as the private property that produced it was acquired in a "just" manner. Yet in so doing he yet again draws attention to the identical authority structures and social relationships of the state and property. As he puts it:
"If the State may be said to properly own its territory, then it is proper for it to make rules for everyone who presumes to live in that area. It can legitimately seize or control private property because there is no private property in its area, because it really owns the entire land surface. So long as the State permits its subjects to leave its territory, then, it can be said to act as does any other owner who sets down rules for people living on his property." [Op. Cit., p. 170]
Obviously Rothbard argues that the state does not "justly" own its territory. He asserts that "our homesteading theory" of the creation of private property "suffices to demolish any such pretensions by the State apparatus" and so the problem with the state is that it "claims and exercises a compulsory monopoly of defence and ultimate decision-making over an area larger than an individual's justly-acquired property." [Op. Cit., p. 171 and p. 173] There are four fundamental problems with his argument.

First, it assumes his "homesteading theory" is a robust and libertarian theory, but neither is the case (see section F.4.1). Second, it ignores the history of capitalism. Given that the current distribution of property is just as much the result of violence and coercion as the state, his argument is seriously flawed. It amounts to little more than an "immaculate conception of property" unrelated to reality. Third, even if we ignore these issues and assume that private property could be and was legitimately produced by the means Rothbard assumes, it does not justify the hierarchy associated with it as current and future generations of humanity have, effectively, been excommunicated from liberty by previous ones. If, as Rothbard argues, property is a natural right and the basis of liberty then why should the many be excluded from their birthright by a minority? In other words, Rothbard denies that liberty should be universal. He chooses property over liberty while anarchists choose liberty over property. Fourthly, it implies that the fundamental problem with the state is not, as anarchists have continually stressed, its hierarchical and authoritarian nature but rather the fact that it does not justly own the territory it claims to rule.

Even worse, the possibility that private property can result in more violations of individual freedom (at least for non-proprietors ) than the state of its citizens was implicitly acknowledged by Rothbard. He uses as a hypothetical example a country whose King is threatened by a rising "libertarian" movement. The King responses by "employ[ing] a cunning stratagem," namely he "proclaims his government to be dissolved, but just before doing so he arbitrarily parcels out the entire land area of his kingdom to the 'ownership' of himself and his relatives." Rather than taxes, his subjects now pay rent and he can "regulate the lives of all the people who presume to live on" his property as he sees fit. Rothbard then asks:"Now what should be the reply of the libertarian rebels to this pert challenge? If they are consistent utilitarians, they must bow to this subterfuge, and resign themselves to living under a regime no less despotic than the one they had been battling for so long. Perhaps, indeed, more despotic, for now the king and his relatives can claim for themselves the libertarians' very principle of the absolute right of private property, an absoluteness which they might not have dared to claim before." [Op. Cit., p. 54]

It should go without saying that Rothbard argues that we should reject this "cunning stratagem" as a con as the new distribution of property would not be the result of "just" means. However, he failed to note how his argument undermines his own claims that capitalism can be libertarian. As he himself argues, not only does the property owner have the same monopoly of power over a given area as the state, it is more despotic as it is based on the "absolute right of private property"! And remember, Rothbard is arguing in favour of "anarcho"-capitalism ("if you have unbridled capitalism, you will have all kinds of authority: you will have extreme authority." [Chomsky, Understanding Power, p. 200]). The fundamental problem is that Rothbard's ideology blinds him to the obvious, namely that the state and private property produce identical social relationships (ironically, he opines the theory that the state owns its territory "makes the State, as well as the King in the Middle Ages, a feudal overlord, who at least theoretically owned all the land in his domain" without noticing that this makes the capitalist or landlord a King and a feudal overlord within "anarcho"-capitalism. [Op. Cit., p. 171]).

...

http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnarchistFAQSectionF1

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Bump.

Some earlier libertarian faces in the US (before the make-over):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgLP7Gdl ... re=related

reposting this here as an example (that seemingly went to waste on the other thread), not a perfect one admittedly, because WIR incorporated usury sometime in the fifties – but it's an example of a mutual credit institution Tucker was talking about. note that credit means money.

Following Proudhon, Tucker argued that if any group of people could legally form a "mutual bank" and issue credit based on any form of collateral they saw fit to accept, the price of credit would fall to the labour cost of the paperwork involved in running the bank. He claimed that banking statistics show this cost to be less than one percent of principal, and hence, that a one-time service fee which covers this cost and no more is the only non-usurious charge a bank can make for extending credit. This charge should not be called "interest" since, as it represented the labour-cost in providing, it is non-exploitative. This would ensure that workers could gain free access to the means of production (and so, in effect, be the individualist equivalent of the communist-anarchist argument for socialisation).

vanlose kid wrote:

In Switzerland 16 entrepreneurs from Zurich found the solution to the 1929 crisis. They began to trade using a currency parallel to the Swiss Franc, the WIR money. From this experience the WIR Bank was born. WIR is a cooperative bank that today collects nearly 60.000 little and medium-sized Swiss enterprises that exchange good and services among themselves using WIR money. By this way the WIR Bank helps the middle class preserving its employment rate and it anchors the generated richness to the Swiss country. Is it also working today, during the 2010's crisis?

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Anarchism without Anarchism: Searching for Progressive Politics


26
NOV
I apologize for this long blog, but I wanted to introduce a perspective about progressive politics, and citizen engagement, at a time of fallen hopes. I would welcome feedback, and hope that more reflections can be shared as to how to recover confidence in a political outlook dedicated to justice, ecological viability, and human community. This essay will soon appear in the British journal Millennium as part of its special issue devoted to this theme.


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ANARCHISM WITHOUT ‘ANARCHISM’: SEARCHING FOR PROGRESSIVE POLITICS IN THE EARLY 21ST CENTURY


I. Language Matters


Recent explorations of the anarchist heritage are to be welcomed, bringing to a contemporary intellectual audience the politically and morally inspiring thought of such major thinkers as Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, and more recently, Harold Laski and Paul Goodman.[i] This rich tradition reminds us strongly of the relevance of anti-state traditions of reflection and advocacy, as well as the indispensable role of cooperation, non-violence, community, small-scale social organization, and local solutions for human material needs if the aspiration for a just and sustainable society is ever to be rescued from its utopian greenhouse. There is every reason to celebrate this anarchist perspective for its own sake, although in a critical and discriminating manner. Non-violent philosophical anarchism has a surprising resonance in relation to the ongoing difficult search for a coherent and mobilizing progressive politics in the aftermath of the virtual demise of Marxist/Gramsci theorizing, as well as even socialist thought and practice.[ii]


At the same time, it should be acknowledged that this anarchist tradition has accumulated a heavy public burden of discrediting baggage, which adds to the difficulty of relying upon it to engender a new progressive mobilization within the current global setting. An immediate barrier to the wider acceptance of philosophical anarchism as a tradition of thought is its strong identification with exclusively Western societal experience, despite the existence of some affinities with strains of late Maoist praxis, especially the distrust of bureaucracies and political parties. In contrast, Gandhi’s inspiration and influence is often explicitly or implicitly evident in some recent attempts to espouse nonviolent anarchist perspectives as, for instance, in the Green Revolution that has been ongoing in Iran since their contested presidential elections of June 2009. Even within the Western framework of political thought and action there are two formidable obstacles to reliance on anarchism as political posture resulting from widespread public confusion and media manipulation.

First, is the widely endorsed stereotype of the anarchist as a sociopathetic bomb thrower, an understanding given credible cultural currency by way of Dostoyevski’s great anti-terrorist novel, The Devils. In our post-9/11 world it is unrealistic for public opinion to separate this dominant image of the anarchist from its preoccupation with terrorists and terrorism.[iii] To refer to someone as an anarchist invokes a discrediting term that is generally accepted as such without any qualifications. At best, ‘anarchists’ are popularly depicted as those seeking to turn peaceful demonstrations into violent carnivals of anti-state behavior, radical activists with no serious policy agenda. The mainstream media blamed anarchist elements for the violent disruptions that took place during the infamous ‘battle of Seattle’ at the end of 1999, which was the first massive populist expression of radical resistance to neoliberal globalization. In certain respects, by playing the anarchist card, the media and pro-globalizing forces were able to divert attention from the expanding populist resistance to non-accountable, non-transparent, anti-democratic, and hegemonic institutional actors (World Bank, IMF, and WTO). Most of those participating in Seattle neither regarded themselves as anarchists nor wanted to be portrayed as marching in step behind the black banners of anarchist militancy. The self-proclaimed anarchists at Seattle were also sharply criticized as ignorant about and indifferent toward the substantive anti-globalization concerns that motivated most of the demonstrators.


Secondly, our ideas about international relations often associated with Hobbes to the effect that relations among states are characterized by the absence of government, and in realist thinking that emanates from this source, the irrelevance of law and ethics to the pursuit of order and security on a global level. This Hobbesian orientation has been refined in various ways, but most relevantly for my purposes, by the still influential thinking of Hedley Bull and several followers loosely grouped in what is known as the English School.[iv] Bull brilliantly chose the title The Anarchical Society for his most important publication, providing a useful variant of realist thinking by keeping the link to the Hobbes with the adjective ‘anarchical’ while taking account of the actual ‘societal’ contributions of international law, the relevance of human values, cooperation among states for mutual benefit, the managerial role of major states in moderating conflicts and disciplining outlier states.[v] Bull’s basic classical realist understanding of world politics was made explicit in his strong criticism of those that followed what he called ‘the Grotian tradition’ supporting efforts to transcend the sovereignty of states by an increasing and, in his view, unwarranted reliance on international law and institutions. Bull was harshly critical of such undertakings as the Nuremberg initiative holding leaders of states of defeated Germany criminally accountable for policies pursued and of the naïve belief that the United Nations could be empowered to act autonomously as the keeper of world peace.[vi] In other words, for Bull the pursuit of peace, justice, and security is best managed by the pluralist dynamics of a system of sovereign states, without a higher law or decision maker. He was, in this respect, as suspicious of and opposed to world empire as he was about world government. This anarchical presumption of sovereign states as the ultimate and preferred arbiters of world order ignores the more recent ecological and energy pressures of the anthropocene age, which do not seem to be manageable by states acting singly or cooperatively due to the long time horizons, uneven adverse impacts, and magnitude of required adjustments.[vii] Of course, such pressures were not apparent at the time that Bull formulated his argument, although a somewhat similar issue was presented by the existence of nuclear weaponry, and the risk of catastrophic nuclear war.[viii]

Within the domain of academic approaches to international relations this work of Bull and the English School is somewhat more congenial to efforts to achieve humane global governance than is the case for its main cognitive rivals in the United States, yet it also far too wedded to the permanence of the states system as the optimal form of attainable global governance.[ix] Structural realists assessing international relations on the basis of anarchic structure shaping a self-help system of rational action try to find regularities of state behavior in the spirit of scientific inquiry, ignoring normative concerns as well as the benefits of cooperative arrangements.[x] Along analogous lines the work of game theorists and rational choice analysts in the manner of Thomas Schelling and Buena de Mesquita seek to combine assumptions about the degree to which policies of foreign states, especially bearing on the use of force and war/peace issues, are guided by self-interested calculations of instrumental rationality, as epistemologically confirmed by empirical assessments.[xi] Influenced by the model-building approaches of economists these more formal approaches to the study of international relations, which exert growing influence in the United States, have virtually no connection with the outlook of philosophical anarchism or even with the approach of classical realists in the Bull vein that includes contributors such as Vincent and Wheeler.

Bull’s kinship with anarchism is based on viewing the relations among states as a field of human studies in which the potential for behavior in accord with legal and ethical norms is posited as desirable and where opportunities for cooperative action and the promotion of the global public good is affirmed. What sets Bull on a different path from that taken by philosophical anarachism is his overriding concern with pluralist order among sovereign states and his acceptance of the war system as a central feature of world politics. In contrast, the philosophical anarchist views freedom and nonviolence as core value. For Bull order is established among unequal states exhibiting more or less prudence and wisdom in calculating their interests, and benefitting accordingly from the study of history and philosophy.[xii] In essence, Bull, as well as other members of the English School believe is that the best hope for moderate international relations is for a careful assessment of the deep lessons of diplomatic history as further informed by philosophical reflection on the nature of leadership, war, and justice, as well as scrupulous review of past concrete instances of statecraft to learn from failures and successes.[xiii] Bull takes for granted that it will be sovereign states that operate as the dominant political actors for the foreseeable future, and it is not helpful to wipe them off the global map by normative fiat. Anarchists have never devoted systematic attention to how their anti-institutional, anti-war, and nonviolent attitudes would play out globally if ever put into practice. Anarchists are uniformly disposed to deconstruct the state and to repudiate war as the path to human security. It is a genuine challenge for a revived tradition of anarchism without anarchism to develop a global vision that allows its overriding concern with freedom of the individual, autonomy of the group, and harmony among groups to be responsive to the planetary imperatives of a sustainable social life in the early 21st century. The most sustained effort to propose a somewhat anarchist oriented vision of planetary civilization was written without reference to anarchist ideas. Despite this, critics of large-scale polities as regressive presences , perhaps most coherently articulated in Leopold Kohr’s The Breakdown of Nations, can be read as an anarchist approach to world politics.[xiv] It is not surprising that Kohr’s work has made no impact on subsequent international relations writing, and to the extent remembered at all it is by such writers as E. F. Schumacher and Kirkpatrick Sale who were preoccupied with the downsizing of scale in all forms of political and economic activity. This outlook believed that drastic reductions of scale and size were the indispensable basis of humane and ecologically robust societies and patterns of living.[xv]

Another aspect of Bull’s work antithetical to anarchism is the managerial role assigned to what he calls the ‘Great Powers.’[xvi] He attributes this role to the significance of inequality as a defining feature in the existing world of states, and limits the notion of Great Power to those states that correlate size and resources with preponderant military power.[xvii] Such an elevated status resting on military capabilities directly challenges the philosophical anarchist predisposition toward nonviolence as a necessary precondition for a just and humane society. As Bull puts it, “Great powers contribute to international order in two main ways: by managing their relations with one another; and by managing their relations with one another as to impart a degree of central direction to the affairs of international society as a whole.”[xviii] In this sense, the anarchical international society as conceptualized by Bull and other classical realists are totally at odds with the philosophical anarchist postulates of desirable modes of societal and political existence.

The argument being made is that there is much to be learned from both societal and internationalist forms of anarchist thinking, but that neither is sufficiently responsive to the historical circumstances nor normative priorities of the early 21st century. It would be possible to follow Derrida and speak of ‘an anarchism to come,’ that is drawing selectively on the positive heritage but making it attuned to the contemporary situation, and this could produce arresting intellectual results. Even if this happens, the strong cultural and populist prejudices against the anarchist and anarchism could not be overcome. Any avowal of anarchism as a political orientation would appear to have only a narrow sectarian appeal, and even this restricted to Western audiences. Furthermore, thinking about the anarchical society, even if ambitiously extended far beyond the boundaries of the achievable as set by Bull and his followers, is not helpful with respect to the altered global setting which is inherently reliant on statist approaches that are ill-adapted to meet current global scale challenges such as climate change. Indeed the dysfunctionality of a decentralized world order is most likely to give rise to some kind of imperial extension of statism and depostic patterns of rule, which would be regressive with respect to a wide range of emancipatory goals.[xix] The kind of agency and political action that is most promising from an emancipatory perspective now features non-state actors, transnational social movements, the rise of a human rights culture, and turns toward ecumenical religious and spiritual outlooks. Conceptually, such an agenda could be quite easily incorporated into a 21st century re-description of philosophical anarchism (although not the anarchical society of states)[xx], but unfortunately the language and cultural associations of the anarchist legacy are so misleading and diversionary as to make an embrace of anarchism a disempowering intellectual and political option in any public discourse. For this combination of reasons, the position taken here with respect to policy and program is the advocacy of “anarchism without ‘anarchism.’”[xxi] In effect, a covert borrowing and affirmation of principal anarchist positions and values found in the serious nineteenth and early twentieth century treatments of anarchist thought, but without overt reliance. I suppose this posture could be characterized as ‘stealth anarchism.’[xxii]

I would also draw a distinction between anarchism as political practice and public discourse where the perceptions are so warped as to make the use of the terminology confusingly unacceptable and more academic discourses where reliance on philosophical anarchism might be useful and enriching, especially by linking contemporary efforts at extending this discourse quite explicitly with its intellectual forebears. This proposed dichotomy of treatment seems justified because of the peculiarly contradictory history of the anarchist idea, which signifies recourse to violence in the public mind and a principled commitment to nonviolence as principle and praxis among serious students of philosophical anarchism.


II. Searching for a New Progressive Politics


The normative political priorities of the early 21st century, which includes issues left unresolved from the past, can be set forth as follows:

–opting for radical denuclearization (as opposed to ongoing reliance on a two-tier approach based on selective and discriminatory non-proliferation);

–protecting the global commons (applying the precautionary principle; extending ‘polluter pays’ to all forms of harm as a form of strict liability as in affixing BP responsibility for Deep Horizon oil spill in Gulf of Mexico; regulating geo-engineering and high risk technologies);

–addressing global warming (reducing greenhouse gas emissions to manageable levels on an emergency basis to ensure that global warming does not exceed 2 degrees centigrade; extending assistance to harmed and threatened vulnerable societies currently experiencing harmful effects of rising earth temperatures, e.g. sub-Saharan Africa, Pacific islands, Asian coastal regions);

–acknowledging issues associated with water scarcity and peak oil, and planning for equitable distribution of safe water as well as transitions to post-petroleum circumstances;

–eliminating poverty and drastically reducing economic inequalities (moving beyond the ethos of neo-liberal globalization);

–enhancing global democracy (accountability, transparency, democratizing participation; reducing economic, and other forms of inequality);

–diminishing hard power (militarism) and strengthening reliance on soft power (diplomacy, peaceful settlement, nonviolent coercion—‘legitimacy wars’);

–achieving self-determination above and below the level of the state (communities of choice and autonomy displacing imposed communities of artifice and domination);

–encouraging de-globalization and local self-reliance (building cooperative, sustainable, voluntary communities at various levels of social order);[xxiii]

–sensitivity to claims of indigenous peoples to maintain traditional ways of life, and to self-determination and sovereignty goals.


Such an ambitious catalogue of normative priorities exhibits the contours of a possible progressive politics to come. There is a deliberate mixture of elements that can be described as urgent and immediate, and others that are less pressing, but no less relevant. The most pervasive critique of current thinking and practice is to contend that the modernist reliance on the sovereign territorial state, understood in Weberian terms as possessing a monopoly of legitimate violence (except for valid private claims of self-defense) is increasingly anachronistic and dysfunctional when it comes to global policy and problem-solving. The primacy of the state as the foundation of human community and the state system that continues to constitute the operative framework for world order needs to be superseded, or modified, ideologically and behaviorally as rapidly as possible. It is no longer capable of providing minimal security for even the strongest states, much less serve the public good of the state system when considered as a totality.[xxiv] The American situation, especially since the 9/11 attacks is emblematic of this anarchistic and militarist mode of response structure, exhibiting the futility of hard power dominance, often articulated as ‘preeminence’ (a military machine that costs as much as the aggregate expenditures of all other political actors in the world!), the neglect of soft power solutions (bullying Iran about its nuclear program rather than seeking a region, and then a world, without nuclear weapons), and a resulting acute sense of fear and vulnerability (‘homeland security’ without a sense of security within or without).


Given this global setting, it is not surprising that neoliberal globalization aggravates these underlying conditions of insecurity and vulnerability.[xxv] The global economic crisis that started in the United States in 2008 has increasingly been blamed on the greedy opportunism of those seeking to maximize their profits and incomes, especially in the financial sector while simultaneously disguising the resulting burdens on the citizenry by offering unsustainable credit arrangements and facilitating cruel forms of indebtedness. In effect, the most exploitative form of social contract ever negotiated in a capitalist setting came into being after the end of the Cold War. It was encouraged and enabled by the prevailing neoliberal creed of virtually suspending governmental oversight and responsibility in relation to the private sector rationalized by a horde of economists beneath the idiot banner, ‘the market knows best.’ This extreme form of social insecurity became prevalent (‘the Washington consensus’) in the period following the collapse of a socialist alternative, which allowed a triumphalist capitalist consensus to no longer felt challenged in the slightest by socialist values and programs. Capitalism no longer had strong incentives to offer society the semblance of ‘a human face.’


It is a sad commentary on our times that the most coherent and mobilizing voices declaiming these present realities come from the extreme right. The former left does not even provide a sense of oppositional tension. The public reacts to this unidirectional assault on their political sensibilities by a seeming to become more and more receptive to fascist approaches to discontent: hyper-natioanlsim, intensified militarism, xenophobic immigration policy, and an endless search for enemies within and without state boundaries. These pre-fascist clamorings seek to end the insecurities of the age by a combination of geopolitical thuggery, political authoritarianism, and ecological denial in relation to global warming, peak oil, and water scarcity. The absence of a left is partly a reflection of demoralization resulting from the Sino-Soviet experiences and partly a result of the ideological exhaustion of state-centrism as a transformative nexus, providing sites for radical reform and revolutionary possibilities. While the traditional right is partly resurgent, partly in denial, the traditional left (including ‘the new left’) languishes in depression, having been largely expelled from public space in most of the West-centric world. A partial exception to this dreary picture is provided by the rise of social democratic and populist left politics in several Latin American countries, perhaps reflecting the long regional struggle to loosen the chains associated with American hegemony and intervention.


The claim here is that we need to go beyond the progressive promise of traditional left reformist and revolutionary outlooks by selectively reviving the direction and underlying orientation of the tradition of philosophical anarchism.[xxvi] This revival is partial and selective, repudiating that portion of the anarchist orientation that relies on violent tactics in some of the most visible manifestations of anarchism in action, although almost totally absent from the serious anarchist literature. It also enlarges and updates the anarchist orientation by incorporating several compatible, yet non-anarchist, sources of inspiration. These allied modes of thought and practice that seem to enrich the contemporary search for a progressive politics include the worldviews and practices of many indigenous peoples, the theory of and experience with legitimacy wars, the imprint of Gandhi and non-violent struggle generally, social and digital networking, preferential treatment of small-scale and local community, and the transnational advocacy of ecological sustainability and environmental justice.[xxvii]


III. The Re-framing of Anarchist Thinking


The essential qualities of that part of the anarchist legacy that is linked to contemporary efforts to give substance and direction to progressive politics are the following: a primary reliance on non-state actors as the bearers of emancipatory potential; seeking change on the basis of coercive non-violence and soft power, including seeking control of the moral high ground with respect to social and political conflict; reverence for nature and ancient wisdom. There are several focal points that receive an emphasis in policy and values oriented assessments, including resisting predatory globalization, hegemonic geopolitics, and political centralization (that is, opposition to centralizing programs, policies, and visions of the future whether imperial or federalist in character).[xxviii]


Globalization-from-Below. I mention very briefly my own attempt to develop a coherent alternative to the kind of neoliberal forms of economic globalization that were gripping the political imagination during the 1990s, creating the impression that there were no alternatives. In simplifying the originality of this period, I drew a sharp distinction between ‘globalization-from-above’ and ‘globalization-from-below,’ the former being alliance of governments, banks, and corporations that were generating a particularly menacing form of ‘predatory’ capitalism that had an unprecedented global wing spread, was intensifying inequalities, invalidating regulatory oversight, and operating without significant ideological opposition.[xxix] In opposition, was an emergent collection of local, national, regional, and global social movements, initiatives, and visions, labeled ‘globalization-from-below.’ Increasingly, these developments were establishing empowering connectedness through participation at world UN conferences held during the 1990s, demonstrating against meetings of international financial institutions and groupings such as the G-7, G-8, and G-20. Also through reliance on the Internet, mobilizing around local struggles for different forms of justice, and withdrawing legitimacy from the state as the source of security, protection, and identity. A critique of representative and parliamentary democracy was an additional element of this response to globalization. Such forms of democracy were viewed as largely shams or worse, seeking validation, not by contributions to the wellbeing of peoples within a spatially delimited and nationally identified constituency, but merely by the procedural ritual of elections conferring consent of the governed to governance by elites that were capital-driven rather than people-oriented.


What made this critique of globalization-from-above and the perspective of many of those espousing globalization-from-below a virtual species of anarchism in outlook was the turn away from either situating hopes in a reforming state, a revolutionary seizure of state power, or through the global institutionalization of authority via the United Nations or the establishment of world government. Furthermore, the analysis of predatory world capitalism viewed the state as being outmaneuvered as a source of public good in several ways: by the rise of the global private sector, by entrusting security to a highly militarized and globalizing hegemon allied with international corporate and financial interests rather than with the national citizenry, and by situating historical agency in a variety of overlapping arenas of struggle and resistance exhibiting self-reliance and a rising confidence in soft power forms of action. In effect, what exists is an emergent movement for global equity and substantive (as distinguished from parliamentary) democracy.


The Post-modern Prince. In a comparable fashion, Stephen Gill, borrowing from Gramsci, who of course borrowed from Machiavelli, insists that the center of political gravity is moving away from ‘the prince’ who controls from above, as well as away from the transformed vision of social order in Gramsci’s affirmation of the defining and hoped for historical agency of the Communist Party.[xxx] Now Gill comes along proposing a ‘post-modern’ adjustment, re-situating the prince in populist movements of peoples challenging the established order in a variety of ways. Also focusing on the dual priorities of overcoming neoliberal globalization (held responsible for various forms of impoverishment, exploitation, and inequality, as well as for a non-sustainable plundering of the planet) and challenging the military reinforcement of this unacceptable economistic world order and the global gendamerie role played by the United States. From a progressive standpoint Gill sees the displacement of the state through the entrenchment of “the world market as the principal form of governance” as marginalizing organized labor, revolutionary political parties, and working in overall harmony with such state capitalist countries as China, Malaysia, and Singapore.[xxxi] Gill dismisses the effort to relegitimize world order by positing the idea of ‘sustainable development,’ and locates his hopes for a humane future in the emergence of political forces “imagining new possibilities and the making of history” and guided by a societally oriented innovative type of ‘organic intellectual.[xxxii] In depicting these new possibilities Gill draws from a variety of sources to posit a set of conditioning factors: a long-term perspective on change; a broadening of the traditional justice agenda to include gender, race, and nature; reliance on a ‘movement of movements’ without the requirement of a unifying coherent ideology; diversity of organizational forms, ideological perspectives, and policy goals, with shared use of digital tools to achieve effective results and empathy for all those victimized by the established order; due to non-territorial and local sites of activism not easily containable by normal instruments of state police power; and formulating responsive ‘feasible utopias’ and ‘myths’ that project empowerment, autonomy, dignity, and security, and thus providing reassurances that there are benevolent alternatives to neo-liberal globalization.[xxxiii] Such a progressive imaginary resembles in many of its aspects the approach and activity of the World Social Forum, and represents an antidote to its repudiated step-father, the World Economic Forum, the incubator of neoliberal tactics, strategy, and hegemony during the 1990s.


The affinities with anarchism, as specified here are sufficiently prominent as to require only slight explication. The essential affinity is the loss of credible agency by states, imperial projects, and the state system to address successfully the ethical challenges of inequality and exploitation, the economic failures of regulation and stability, and the ecological urgencies associated with global warming and critical resource depletion. Yet this circumstance still generates both hope and an alternative imaginary with respect to the future based on the activation of a multiplicity of social forces the world over and a corresponding dynamic of envisioning a just and desirable future for the planet and its peoples. Building community

and livelihood while marginalizing the role of the state and hegemon is the essence of the anarchist imaginary, whether inside or outside the porous boundaries of the sovereign state. Of course, in this century affirmation of community-based polities while indispensable is insufficient. There is an urgent need to redress the imbalances produced by many decades of ecological depravity, and this presupposes both a planetary ethos, as well as cognitive and enforcement procedures, that is, relevant knowledge and the capacity to act as and when necessary.[xxxiv] Whether 21st century philosophical anarchism can meet this challenge will determine if the legacy must be disregarded and superseded to produce the kind of progressive politics needed at this stage of history and species evolution. It is along such lines that a continuation of the kind of social and moral orientation of the great anarchist luminaries seems so promising, although probably not framed in anarchist language so as to universalize the appeal of core anarchist values and avoid the sort of backlash that is associated with ideological postures discredited by mainstream conventional wisdom. In this regard, anarchism shares the same fate as ‘communism,’ ‘socialism,’ ‘the cultural revolution,’ ‘the left,’ and ‘Maoism.’[xxxv]


Multitude. The middle volume of the brilliantly provocative trilogy of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri offers a way forward to achieve a progressive politics that could be deepened by drawing on the work of philosophical anarchism.[xxxvi] Despite this there is present in this work a somewhat defensive tone that is expressive of the difficulty of relying on anarchist frames of reference. Hardt and Negri directly confront the criticism, ‘You are really just anarchists!’ and seek to deflect its force by contending “that our political alternatives are not limited to a choice between central leadership and anarchy.”[xxxvii] The confusion in language arises from anarchy being generally understood as chaos, confusion as in Yeats’ famous line “mere anarchy is reigned upon the world,” which is most respects the opposite of what it means to espouse philosophic anarchism as thought or practice, a complex imaginary animated by a hopeful vision of human potentiality in opposition to the modernist actualities of exploitation, oppression, inequality, and centralization. It is this dormant anarchist worldview that these authors undertake to explicate and advocate in a suggestive and stimulating manner. At the same time this ambiguous interface between anarchy/anarchism is one more reason to avoid articulating progressive politics in an explicitly anarchist language, however rearticulated to make clear that there is no intention to endorse either bomb-throwers or aimless tumult.


In their sophisticated presentation, Hardt and Negri situate the quest for progressive politics in a kind of transitional phase during which period the peoples of the world, the multitude, are joined in a messy, uncoordinated, and diverse process of discovering and formulating a set of ‘common interests.’ Such common interests of the multitude should be distinguished from older ideas of a ‘general interest’ by the stress on the transnational singularities represented and affirmed as constituting what is common and original among the diversities of the multitude (“multiplicity of the multitude”).[xxxviii] The cohering energy that unifies the quests of the multitude arises from the encounter between the biopolitics of social forces seeking to realize through struggle the conditions for a satisfying life and the biopower of those dedicated to upholding a variety of neo-liberalisms and militarisms.[xxxix] In a moving passage the animating energy of this advocacy of biopolitics is love: “Without this love we are nothing.”[xl] Such a revolutionary stance with respect to the established order resting on an amoral logic of reified capital accumulation represents the countervailing logic of a humanized commitment to emancipatory politics of a radical character. In this regard, there is a resemblance to the radical restructuring of human existence with respect to the fundamentals of economic, social, political, and cultural order that is the essential shared message of philosophical anarchism.


In a more distinctly anarchist idiom, Hardt and Negri identify the most critical feature of their summons to the multitude to be an all out assault on sovereignty, that is a challenging of constituted power of all kinds from above. In their words, “[T]he multitude today needs to abolish sovereignty at a global level. This is what the slogan ‘Another world is possible’ means to us: that sovereignty and authority must be destroyed.”[xli] This is not an ahistoric call, but rooted in the need to take account of historical specifiicities: “The political project of the multitude, however, must find a way to confront the conditions of our contemporary reality.” To do this adequately requires a ‘new science’ described as “a new theoretical paradigm to confront the new situation.”[xlii] Although taking full account of the problems afflicting the planet, this perspective generates a certain non-utopian optimism based on their observation that “never before has the restlessness for freedom and democracy been so widespread throughout the world.”[xliii]


In my view, Hardt and Negri offer us a valuable, if deliberately indirect and probably unintended reinvigoration of anarchism that takes full historical account of a networked world reality (globalization-from-below) that is challenged by global forces that threaten the health, wellbeing, and even survival of humanity (globalization-from-above). The multitude is the differentiated ‘whole’ that must both create the conditions to enable the ‘parts’ to flourish in particular time/space domains but also must address the integrated and imperial mainly unified ‘whole’ that currently oppresses and endangers the ‘parts,’ especially through the mechanisms of the sovereign state, the imperial enforcer, and neo-liberal conglomerate.


Legitimacy Wars. There is abundant occasion for collective despair if the vital signs of the planetary condition are assessed and then projected into the future, especially given the variety of conscious and unconscious techniques being deployed to ensure widespread and deep denial of ‘the real’ by the mass of humanity. The psychological mechanisms of denial operate politically to insulate self-destructive behavior from exposure, criticism, and eventual repudiation. A pattern of denial is evident with respect to the continuing reliance on a neoliberal approach to global economic policy despite the disquieting actualities of climate change, peak oil, poverty, and human suffering. Such an assessment is discouraging about our prospects for constructive behavior in the near future. At the same time, there is one virtually unnoticed counter-trend that is more encouraging: namely, the declining efficacy of hard power approaches to security and conflict by way of war and militarism, and the increasing success of reliance upon soft power approaches as measured by political outcomes. From the anti-colonial wars in which the militarily weaker side consistently prevailed to the anti-apartheid campaign that transformed racist and militarist South Africa to the ongoing solidarity movement that is fighting for Palestinian self-determination on a symbolic global battlefield relying on the weaponry of coercive non-violence (including boycott, divestment, and sanctions) there is a pattern of political outcomes that defies realist calculations based on military superiority. These Legitimacy Wars are being won by the side that commands the high moral ground, and is able to mobilize a variety of symbolic sources of grassroots support. Illustratively, it was not sovereign states or even the United Nations that effectively challenged the unlawful blockade of the civilian population of Gaza but humanitarian missions of political activists and citizen pilgrims on board the Freedom Flotilla that has finally caused sovereign Israel to acknowledge, at least in part, its responsibilities to the 1.5 million Gazan civilians living under siege and terrifying oppression.[xliv] What is becoming manifest is that in many settings of conflict the weapons of the weak, the biopolitical multitudes, are prevailing over the weapons of the strong, the biopower arenas of sovereign authority. At the same time, caught in their maelstrom of failures, without the political will or imagination to move outside the militarist mentality, the horrifying repetition of wars fought with post-modern weaponry (cyber war, drones) that makes killing as impersonal as possible goes forward with larger and larger investments in the futile quest for the ultimate enactments of ‘shock and awe,’ as well as a continuing effort to wage an utterly misguided permanent war in battlefields around the world in response to the 9/11 attacks. Instead of learning from failure and defeat, governmental elites are captives of a militarist, hard power imagination that is incapable of coping with security challenges while causing widespread death and destruction.

The realities of soft power legitimacy war offer a vindication of an anarchist confidence in human potential for nonviolent political resolution of conflict and the pursuit of justice. At the same time, the disastrous failures of hard power state centricism, relying on money and technology to achieve goals through threats and uses of force illustrates the realist fallacy given the post-colonial setting of the 21st century.[xlv] It is my view that these developments in a globalizing world, with the coordinates of globalization as yet undetermined, provides the basis for an extension of philosophical anarchism to the under analyzed domain of international relations.[xlvi]


IV. A Concluding Remark


The argument being put forth is that part of the anarchist impulse based on the search for freedom, community, and autonomy has a surprising relevance to constructing a globally responsive progressive politics. It is both instructive and inspirational. Some expressions of this search seem to confirm this claim of anarchist affinities. Despite this, it seems desirable to avoid any explicit reliance on anarchism because it has been so widely discredited in the marketplace of ideas and does have an alienating Western intellectual provenance. Beyond this, it is too easy to conmingle the words ‘anarchic’ and ‘anarchistic,’ thereby creating profound disquiet. What the anarchistic legacy does provide is greater confidence in the appropriateness of a radical imaginary of emancipation that is strongly biased in favor of dispersal and decentralism and dismissive of making the big bigger in the name of security and order. Part of the contemporary situation is to move beyond discredited centralizing ideologies and governmental visions of a secure and satisfying human future, while acknowledging that there exists global interconnectedness, complexities, and fragilities that must be given their due in a progressive politics viable for the 21st century.

There are two final observations. First of all, the fundamental anarchist impulse can be actualized to varying degrees by living locally and in accord with the mandates of voluntary simplicity. In this sense, it is not utopian, although it may be shielded from the harsher truths of the contemporary world by enjoying the paradoxical benefits of security provided by a reasonably well-governed state. Such a search for sustainable community can draw inspiration from the persistence of indigenous nations as well as from the writings of Gandhi, Tolstoy, Paul Goodman, Murray Bookchin, E.F. Schumacher, and countless others who can be loosely associated with anarchist thought and practice. It is my argument that this perspective should form the nexus of anarchism without anarchism.

There is a second strand of thought that involves the combination of the present circumstances of ecological emergency with the decline of hard power effectiveness that creates a new set of opportunities for an intellectual renewal and adaptation of the tradition of philosophical anarchism to the present historical moment.[xlvii] Here is may be useful to connect explicitly with the earlier writings of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, and others, and write and reflect unselfconsciously in the spirit of anarchism with anarchism, or put differently to create a discourse of philosophical neo-anarchism. Here, since the concern is the way in which the world should operate and be organized for the benefit and security of all, the allegations of utopianism must be taken seriously, but not as the occasions for closure of debate and deliberation. After all, since the future is essentially unknowable, what is perceived at present as ‘utopian’ may yet come to pass. Surely, the peaceful transformation of apartheid South Africa to an unfolding form of multi-ethnic constitutionalism seemed utopian until it happened. Besides, by holding a critical mirror before the present, and providing an alternative, can liberate the political and moral imagination from the current gathering sense of doom and gloom. In the more pristine workshop of academic debate, the popular denigration of anarchism and anarchists is not nearly so relevant, and there may be more to gain from retaining the old language than by abandoning it.

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[i] See especially the recent articles by Alex Prichard, “Deepening Anarchism: International Relations and the Anarchist Ideal,” Anarchist Studies, 2010; Prichard, “What can the Absence of Anarchism tell us About the History and Purpose of International Relations,” Review of International Studies, forthcoming 2010; compare Richard Falk, “Anarchism and World Order,” in J. Roland Pennock & John W. Chapman, eds., “Anarchism and World Order,” in Anarchism (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 63-87.

[ii] This demise has at least two dimensions: the collapse of the Soviet state, along with the documentation of its continuous reliance on massive repression; the abandonment of socialist economic policy by China, along with its regressive ‘socialist’ political order and spectacular market success story. Beyond this, the Marxist-Leninist form of revolutionary thought seems ill-adapted to 21st century imperatives, being premised on the revolutionary violence of workers, material abundance, industrialism, state power, and a world of warring sovereignties. For these reasons Marxism-Leninism has lost its emancipatory potential, even its historical relevance, although socialist values continue to animate many anti-capitalist struggles, as well as resistance to neo-liberal globalization.

[iii] Even such sophisticated observers as Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida viewed the post-9-11 world as an aspect of ‘the age of terror.’ See Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

[iv] See Tim Dunne, Inventing International Society: A History of the English School (Basengstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1998).

[v] Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977)

[vi] Bull, “The Grotian Conception of International Society,” in Herbert Butterfield & Martin Wight, eds., Diplomatic Investigations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 50-73. See also Bull, Note 5.

[vii] On the anthropocene see Simon Dalby, Security and Environmental Change (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009); Dalby, “Geopolitical Trends in the Near Future: Welcome to the Anthropocene!” paper presented workshop on “The World in 2030: Geopolitics and Global Climate Change,” UCSB/UNU, June 24-25, 2010; also Richard Falk, “A Radical World Order Challenge: Climate Change and the Threat of Nuclear Weapons,” Globalizations 7 (Nos, 1-2): 137-155(2010); also Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times (London, UK: Verso, 2010).

[viii] Daniel Deudney mounts a strong conceptual argument for limited world government as essential for the management of nuclear weaponry. See his chapter entitled “Anticipations of World Nuclear Government” in Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 244-264; see Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth for deep analysis of the non-sustainability of world order in which state actors possessed nuclear weapons; also see E.P. Thompson, “Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization” in Thompson, Beyond the Cold War (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 41-79.

[ix] For an excellent study of international relations that both explicates the British School and relies upon analogous modes of inquiry see Robert Jackson, The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States (Osford, UK: 2000), 58-76.

[x] Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979: see also Waltz, “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better,” Adelphi Papers, International Institute for Strategic Studies,

[xi] Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).

[xii] This is the central theme of Bull’s The Anarchical Society, Note 5. As he puts it, p. xii: “Of course, in common with most men [sic] I do attach value to order. If I did not think of of order in international politics as a desirable objective, I should not have thought it worthwhile to attempt this study of it.”

[xiii] For an example of the latter, see the principal work of Bull’s most talented student, R. John Vincent, Non-Intervention and International Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974); another excellent work in this vein, sensitive to

human values is Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000).

[xiv] (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1978). It is noteworthy that there is not a single reference in the Kohr bibliography to an author that would be considered to fall into the IR tradition. See also Kohr, The Overdeveloped Nations: The Diseconomies of Scale (New York: Schocken Books, 1978),

[xv] Most notably E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: A study of Economics as if People Mattered (London,UK: Blond & Biggs, 1973) and Kirpatrick Sale, Human Scale (New York: Putnam, 2nd ed., 1982).

[xvi] See Bull, Note 5, 200-229.

[xvii] See Bull, Note 5, 201-202.

[xviii] Bull, Note 5, 207. Michael Mandelbaum, an American writing in a spirit that is akin to the British School except for his enthusiasm for the role of the United States as a virtual world government, is similarly convinced that without such a presence chaos would diminish the wellbeing of all actors. But to favor this kind of centralism in a pluralist framework for human relations contradicts the fundamental anarchist claim and insight. See Michael Mandelbaum, The Case for Goliath: How America acts as the World’s Government in the twenty-first century (New York: Public Affairs, 2005).

[xix] See important strictures on departing from the ‘international’ and embracing the ‘global’ in R.B.J Walker, After the Globe, Before the World (New York: Routledge, 2010).

[xx] It should be observed that the anarchical society hypothesis was always antithetical to the anarchist vision of a good society. At its core, the former was statist and pluralist, while the latter was anti-statist and decentralist.

[xxi] The attractiveness of the anarchist tradition in the context of the present is well formulated in a stimulating book. See Simon Critichley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of commitment, politics of resistance (London, UK: Verso, 2007), especially 119-128.

[xxii] For useful survey see George Woodcock, Anarchism (New York: World Publishing Co., 1971); for a lively narrative account of a mixture of popular and academic perceptions of historical anarchism with a somewhat provocative linkage to contemporary concerns about transnational terrorism see Alex Butterworth, The World that Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents (New York, Pantheon, 2010).

[xxiii] A congenial alternate listing of normative vectors with affinities to the spirit of non-violent anarchism can be found in the preface of Boaventura de Sousas Santos, ed., Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon (London,UK: Verso, 2005), xxx-xxxiii.

[xxiv] Of course, arguments about the adequacy of the state system from an ethical perspective have existed throughout the entire modern period, indeed ever since the original Westphalian framings of world order in the early 17th century by such figures as Grotius and Hobbes. One line of rationalist critique was associated with Kant’s view of the moral evolution of international political life, enabling a possible ‘potential peace,’ resting on political republicanism and demilitarization. What seems different over the period since 1945 is the apocalyptic shadow being cast over planetary life, initially by the prospects of large-scale nuclear war and more recently by ecological collapse, both caused by human not natural agency. For recent assessements see Falk, Zizek, Note 7. It should be observed that always human experience has been haunted by apocalyptic dangers, but previously due to threats to human existence posed by natural disasters such as disease, drought, flooding.

[xxv] For three excellent analyses along these lines see James H. Mittelman, Hyperconflict: Globalization and Insecurity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Joseph A. Camilleri & Jim Falk, Worlds in Transition: Evolving Governance Across a Stressed Planet (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2009); Stephen Gill, Power and Resistance in the New World Order (London, UK: Palgrave, 2nd rev. ed., 2008).

[xxvi] A notable attempt to set forth a reformist program based on social democratic values was made by David Held, Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004). But such an attempt seems too beholden to Westphalian statism to offer insight into the distinctive problems and opportunities of this historical moment. See also Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

[xxvii] Critchley, Note 20, proceeds from a similar ethical/political standpoint, reinforced by sophisticated readings of Western philosophy.

[xxviii] There are many complexities, and tradeoffs. For instance, arguably regional forms of centralization, as in the European Union, may produce greater autonomy for ethnic and cultural minorities by weakening the internal role of the state in the lives of the citizenry. It may be that regionalism combined with transnational networking and activism is the best available strategic move to weaken the grip of the state on global policy solving and on the lives of peoples caught within the confines of territorial sovereignty. See Terrence Edward Paupp, The Future of International Relations: Crumbling Walls, Rising Regions (New York: Palgrave, 2008

[xxix] Richard Falk. Predatory Globalization: A Critique (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1999)

[xxx] Stephen Gill, Note 23, especially 237-269.

[xxxi] Note 23, 258.

[xxxii] Note 23, 261, 265.

[xxxiii] Note 23, 266-268.

[xxxiv] For one perspective see Richard Falk, “The Second Cycle of Ecological Urgency.” In Jonas Ebbesson & P. Okawa, eds., Environmental Law and Justice in Context (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

[xxxv] But see Alain Badiou’s extensive writings, particularly relevant is The Communist Hypothesis (London, UK: Verso, 2010)

[xxxvi] See Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).

[xxxvii] Note 34, 222.

[xxxviii] Note 34, 356, also see 355-356.

[xxxix] Note 34, 206, 348-358.

[xl] Note 34, 353. “..love serves as the basis for our political projects in common and the construction of a new society.” at 352.

[xli] Note 34, 353. This idea of destroying sovereignty is specifically focused on the primacy of the state as the locus of sovereign biopower. “Sovereignty in all its forms inevitably poses power as the rule of the one and undermines the possibility of a full and absolute democracy.” At 353.

[xlii] Note 34, 353

[xliii] Note 34, 353. Hardt and Negri confront the criticism that their faith in the multitude and biopolitics is utopian, at 226-227.

[xliv] On May 31, 2010 the Freedom Flotilla carrying 10,000 tons of humanitarian assistance to the entrapped civilian population of Gaza was attacked in the middle of the night by Israeli military forces while sailing in international waters. The attack resulted in nine deaths of Turkish nationals in the lead vessel in the flotilla, the Mavi Marmara. The lethality and brazen unlawfulness of the attack caused widespread international outrage, and a temporary rupture of relations between Turkey and Israel. The resulting pressure also caused the Israelis to announce a termination of the blockade with respect to all items other than arms and ammunition and to break with their practice of non-cooperation with UN inquiries into their behavior in occupied Palestine by agreeing to participate in an international panel appointed by the UN Secretary General.

[xlv] For an elaboration see Richard Falk, “”Nonviolent Geopolitics: Rationality and Resistance,” forthcoming 2010 in festschrift dedicated to Johan Galtung.

[xlvi] A notable, yet preliminary and inconclusive effort to do just this can be found in Thomas G. Weiss, “The Tradition of Philophical Anarchism and Future Directions in World Policy,” Journal of Peace Research 12:1-17 (1975).

[xlvii] For useful depictions of the ecological emergency see Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars:

The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats (Oxford, UK: One World, 2010); Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change (London: Earthscan, 2010).

http://richardfalk.wordpress.com/2010/1 ... -politics/

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I agree with the article's assertion that language matters. Especially if you're using terms that come with a lot of emotional baggage, however they were accumulated.

Which is why I rarely use the term anarchism in my discussions with interested parties. Instead, I prefer to use the descriptor "decentralized self-management".

It allows our conversation to address the pros and cons of various degrees of decentralization, as well as the many different applications of self-management.

Having had dabbled in organizational development for a few years, I spent some time helping a few workplaces to employ a form of management popularly referred to as self-directed teamwork.

I got a secret pleasure from doing that, at the time, simply because there are some resemblances between self-directed teamwork and certain aspects of anarchism.

have been reading Understanding Power lately, and there are so many passages that speak to what is happening in Egypt right now that typing them all up would be meaningless – i'll probably end up doing it anyway – i might as well recommend you get the book. so, get the book.

that said, here's something from chapter four, a section titled "Perpetuating Brainwashing Under Freedom". it's in the form of Q&A's with the questioner anonymized: marked only as "Man" or "Woman".

Man: Why is it that across the board in the media you can't find examples of people using their brains?

You can find them, but typically they're not in the mainstream press.

Man: Why is that?

Because if they have the capacity to think freely and understand these types of things,, they're going to be kept out by a very complicated filtering system – which actually starts in kindergarten, I think. In fact, the whole educational and professional system is a very elaborate filter, that just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on – because they're dysfunctional to the institutions. I mean, it would be highly dysfunctional to have people in the media who could ask questions like this. So by the time you've made it to Bureau Chief or editor, or you've become a bigshot at CBS or something, the chances are that you've just got all this stuff in your bones – you've internalized values that make it clear to you that certain things you just don't say, and in fact, you don't even think about them anymore.

This was actually discussed years ago in an interesting essay by George Orwell, which happens to be the introduction to Animal Farm. Animal Farm is a satire on Soviet totalitarianism, obviously, and it's a very famous book. But what people don't usually read is it's introduction, which talks about censorship in England – and the main reason people don't read it is because it was censored, nicely; it simply wasn't published with the book. It was finally rediscovered about thirty years later and somebody somewhere published it, and now it's available in some modern editions. But in this essay Orwell said, look, this book is obviously about Stalinist Russia, however it's not all that different in England. And then he described how things work in england. He said: in England there isn't any commissar around who beats you over the head if you say the wrong thing, but nevertheless the results are not all that different. And then he had a two-line description of how the press works in England, which is pretty accurate, in fact. One of the reasons why the results are similar, he said, is because the press is owned by wealthy men who have strong interests in not having certain things said. The other, which he said is equally pertinent, is that if you're a well-educated person in England – you went to the right prep schools, then to Oxford, and now you're a bigshot somewhere – you have simply learned that there are certain things that it is not proper to say.

And that's a large part of education, in fact: just internalizing the understanding that there are certain things it is not proper to say, and it is not proper to think. And if you don't learn that, typically you'll be weeded out of the institutions somewhere along the line. Well, those two factors are very important ones, and there are others, but they go a long way towards explaining the uniformity of ideology in the intellectual culture here [14].

UP pp. 111-2.

Orwell's introduction or preface to Animal Farm:

THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS
This book was first thought of, so far as the central idea goes, in 1937, but was not written down until about the end of 1943. By the time when it came to be written it was obvious that there would be great difficulty in getting it published (in spite of the present book shortage which ensures that anything describable as a book will 'sell'), and in the event it was refused by four publishers. Only one of these had any ideological motive. Two had been publishing anti-Russian books for years, and the other had no noticeable political colour. One publisher actually started by accepting the book, but after making the preliminary arrangements he decided to consult the Ministry of Information, who appear to have warned him, or at any rate strongly advised him, against publishing it. Here is an extract from his letter:

I mentioned the reaction I had had from an important official in the Ministry of Information with regard to Animal Farm. I must confess that this expression of opinion has given me seriously to think ... I can see now that it might be regarded as something which it was highly ill-advised to publish at the present time. If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships. Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs. [It is not quite clear whether this suggested modification is Mr ... 's own idea, or originated with the Ministry of Information; but it seems to have the official ring about it - Orwell's Note] I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are.

This kind of thing is not a good symptom. Obviously it is not desirable that a government department should have any power of censorship (except security censorship, which no one objects to in war time) over books which are not officially sponsored. But the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the MOI or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.

Any fairminded person with journalistic experience will admit that during this war official censorship has not been particularly irksome. We have not been subjected to the kind of totalitarian 'co-ordination' that it might have been reasonable to expect. The press has some justified grievances, but on the whole the Government has behaved well and has been surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions. The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news - things which on their own merits would get the big headlines - being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that 'it wouldn't do' to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Every-one knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. And this nation-wide conspiracy to flatter our ally takes place, curiously enough, against a background of genuine intellectual tolerance. For though you are not allowed to criticize the Soviet government, at least you are reasonably free to criticize our own. Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill, at any rate in books and periodicals. And throughout five years of war, during two or three of which we were fighting for national survival, countless books, pamphlets and articles advocating a compromise peace have been published without interference. More, they have been published without exciting much disapproval. So long as the prestige of the USSR is not involved, the principle of free speech has been reasonably well upheld. There are other forbidden topics, and I shall mention some of them presently, but the prevailing attitude towards the USSR is much the most serious symptom. It is, as it were, spontaneous, and is not due to the action of any pressure group.

The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards would be quite astounding if it were not that they have behaved similarly on several earlier occasions. On one controversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicized with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency. To name only one instance, the BBC celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Red Army without mentioning Trotsky. This was about as accurate as commemorating the battle of Trafalgar without mentioning Nelson, but it evoked no protest from the English intelligentsia. In the internal struggles in the various occupied countries, the British press has in almost all cases sided with the faction favoured by the Russians and libelled the opposing faction, sometimes suppressing material evidence in order to do so. A particularly glaring case was that of Colonel Mihailovich, the Jugoslav Chetnik leader. The Russians, who had their own Jugoslav protégé in Marshal Tito, accused Mihailovich of collaborating with the Germans. This accusation was promptly taken up by the British press: Mihailovich's supporters were given no chance of answering it, and facts contradicting it were simply kept out of print. In July of 1943 the Germans offered a reward of 100,000 gold crowns for the capture of Tito, and a similar reward for the capture of Mihailovich. The British press 'splashed' the reward for Tito, but only one paper mentioned (in small print) the reward for Mihailovich: and the charges of collaborating with the Germans continued. Very similar things happened during the Spanish civil war. Then, too, the factions on the Republican side which the Russians were determined to crush were recklessly libelled in the English leftwing press, and any statement in their defence even in letter form, was refused publication. At present, not only is serious criticism of the USSR considered reprehensible, but even the fact of the existence of such criticism is kept secret in some cases. For example, shortly before his death Trotsky had written a biography of Stalin. One may assume that it was not an altogether unbiased book, but obviously it was saleable. An American publisher had arranged to issue it and the book was in print - I believe the review copies had been sent out - when the USSR entered the war. The book was immediately withdrawn. Not a word about this has ever appeared in the British press, though clearly the existence of such a book, and its suppression, was a news item worth a few paragraphs.

It is important to distinguish between the kind of censorship that the English literary intelligentsia voluntarily impose upon themselves, and the censorship that can sometimes be enforced by pressure groups. Notoriously, certain topics cannot be discussed because of 'vested interests'. The best-known case is the patent medicine racket. Again, the Catholic Church has considerable influence in the press and can silence criticism of itself to some extent. A scandal involving a Catholic priest is almost never given publicity, whereas an Anglican priest who gets into trouble (e.g. the Rector of Stiffkey) is headline news. It is very rare for anything of an anti-Catholic tendency to appear on the stage or in a film. Any actor can tell you that a play or film which attacks or makes fun of the Catholic Church is liable to be boycotted in the press and will probably be a failure. But this kind of thing is harmless, or at least it is understandable. Any large organization will look after its own interests as best it can, and overt propaganda is not a thing to object to. One would no more expect the Daily Worker to publicize unfavourable facts about the USSR than one would expect the Catholic Herald to denounce the Pope. But then every thinking person knows the Daily Worker and the Catholic Herald for what they are. What is disquieting is that where the USSR and its policies are concerned one cannot expect intelligent criticism or even, in many cases, plain honesty from Liberal writers and journalists who are under no direct pressure to falsify their opinions. Stalin is sacrosanct and certain aspects of his policy must not be seriously discussed. This rule has been almost universally observed since 1941, but it had operated, to a greater extent than is sometimes realized, for ten years earlier than that. Throughout that time, criticism of the Soviet régime from the left could only obtain a hearing with difficulty. There was a huge output of anti-Russian literature, but nearly all of it was from the Conservative angle and manifestly dishonest, out of date and actuated by sordid motives. On the other side there was an equally huge and almost equally dishonest stream of pro-Russian propaganda, and what amounted to a boycott on anyone who tried to discuss all-important questions in a grown-up manner. You could, indeed, publish anti-Russian books, but to do so was to make sure of being ignored or misrepresented by nearly the whole of the highbrow press. Both publicly and privately you were warned that it was 'not done'. What you said might possibly be true, but it was 'inopportune' and 'played into the hands of' this or that reactionary interest. This attitude was usually defended on the ground that the international situation, and the urgent need for an Anglo-Russian alliance, demanded it; but it was clear that this was a rationalization. The English intelligentsia, or a great part of it, had developed a nationalistic loyalty towards the USSR, and in their hearts they felt that to cast any doubt on the wisdom of Stalin was a kind of blasphemy. Events in Russia and events elsewhere were to be judged by different standards. The endless executions in the purges of 1936-8 were applauded by life-long opponents of capital punishment, and it was considered equally proper to publicize famines when they happened in India and to conceal them when they happened in the Ukraine. And if this was true before the war, the intellectual atmosphere is certainly no better now.

But now to come back to this book of mine. The reaction towards it of most English intellectuals will be quite simple: 'It oughtn't to have been published'. Naturally, those reviewers who understand the art of denigration will not attack it on political grounds but on literary ones. They will say that it is a dull, silly book and a disgraceful waste of paper. This may well be true, but it is obviously not the whole of the story. One does not say that a book 'ought not to have been published' merely because it is a bad book. After all, acres of rubbish are printed daily and no one bothers. The English intelligentsia, or most of them, will object to this book because it traduces their Leader and (as they see it) does harm to the cause of progress. If it did the opposite they would have nothing to say against it, even if its literary faults were ten times as glaring as they are. The success of, for instance, the Left Book Club over a period of four or five years shows how willing they are to tolerate both scurrility and slipshod writing, provided that it tells them what they want to hear.

The issue involved here is quite a simple one: Is every opinion, however unpopular - however foolish, even - entitled to a hearing? Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say 'Yes'. But give it a concrete shape, and ask, 'How about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?', and the answer more often than not will be 'No'. In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses. Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty. There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organized societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg said, is 'freedom for the other fellow'. The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: 'I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it'. If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilization means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way. Both capitalist democracy and the western versions of Socialism have till recently taken that principle for granted. Our Government, as I have already pointed out, still makes some show of respecting it. The ordinary people in the street - partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them - still vaguely hold that 'I suppose everyone's got a right to their own opinion'. It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.

One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that 'bourgeois liberty' is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who 'objectively' endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought. This argument was used, for instance, to justify the Russian purges. The most ardent Russophile hardly believed that all of the victims were guilty of all the things they were accused of. but by holding heretical opinions they 'objectively' harmed the régime, and therefore it was quite right not only to massacre them but to discredit them by false accusations. The same argument was used to justify the quite conscious lying that went on in the leftwing press about the Trotskyists and other Republican minorities in the Spanish civil war. And it was used again as a reason for yelping against habeas corpus when Mosley was released in 1943.

These people don't see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won't stop at Fascists. Soon after the suppressed Daily Worker had been reinstated, I was lecturing to a workingmen's college in South London. The audience were working-class and lower-middle class intellectuals - the same sort of audience that one used to meet at Left Book Club branches. The lecture had touched on the freedom of the press, and at the end, to my astonishment, several questioners stood up and asked me: Did I not think that the lifting of the ban on the Daily Worker was a great mistake? When asked why, they said that it was a paper of doubtful loyalty and ought not to be tolerated in war time. I found myself defending the Daily Worker, which has gone out of its way to libel me more than once. But where had these people learned this essentially totalitarian outlook? Pretty certainly they had learned it from the Communists themselves! Tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England, but they are not indestructible, and they have to be kept alive partly by conscious effort. The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous. The case of Mosley illustrates this. In 1940 it was perfectly right to intern Mosley, whether or not he had committed any technical crime. We were fighting for our lives and could not allow a possible quisling to go free. To keep him shut up, without trial, in 1943 was an outrage. The general failure to see this was a bad symptom, though it is true that the agitation against Mosley's release was partly factitious and partly a rationalization of other discontents. But how much of the present slide towards Fascist ways of thought is traceable to the 'anti-Fascism' of the past ten years and the unscrupulousness it has entailed?

It is important to realize that the current Russomania is only a symptom of the general weakening of the western liberal tradition. Had the MOI chipped in and definitely vetoed the publication of this book, the bulk of the English intelligentsia would have seen nothing disquieting in this. Uncritical loyalty to the USSR happens to be the current orthodoxy, and where the supposed interests of the USSR are involved they are willing to tolerate not only censorship but the deliberate falsification of history. To name one instance. At the death of John Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World - a first-hand account of the early days of the Russian Revolution - the copyright of the book passed into the hands of the British Communist Party, to whom I believe Reed had bequeathed it. Some years later the British Communists, having destroyed the original edition of the book as completely as they could, issued a garbled version from which they had eliminated mentions of Trotsky and also omitted the introduction written by Lenin. If a radical intelligentsia had still existed in Britain, this act of forgery would have been exposed and denounced in every literary paper in the country. As it was there was little or no protest. To many English intellectuals it seemed quite a natural thing to, do. And this tolerance or [of?] plain dishonesty means much more than that admiration for Russia happens to be fashionable at this moment. Quite possibly that particular fashion will not last. For all I know, by the time this book is published my view of the Soviet régime may be the generally-accepted one. But what use would that be in itself? To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.

I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech - the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don't convince me and that our civilization over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice. For quite a decade past I have believed that the existing Russian régime is a mainly evil thing, and I claim the right to say so, in spite of the fact that we are allies with the USSR in a war which I want to see won. If I had to choose a text to justify myself, I should choose the line from Milton:

By the known rules of ancient liberty.

The word ancient emphasizes the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice. An example of this is the failure of the numerous and vocal English pacifists to raise their voices against the prevalent worship of Russian militarism. According to those pacifists, all violence is evil and they have urged us at every stage of the war to give in or at least to make a compromise peace. But how many of them have ever suggested that war is also evil when it is waged by the Red Army? Apparently the Russians have a right to defend themselves, whereas for us to do [so] is a deadly sin. One can only explain this contradiction in one way: that is, by a cowardly desire to keep in with the bulk of the intelligentsia, whose patriotism is directed towards the USSR rather than towards Britain. I know that the English intelligentsia have plenty of reason for their timidity and dishonesty, indeed I know by heart the arguments by which they justify themselves. But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it. In our country - it is not the same in all countries: it was not so in republican France, and it is not so in the USA today [i.e. 1945(!)] - it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect: it is to draw attention to that fact that I have written this preface.

http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/Orwell.html

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23 wrote:I agree with the article's assertion that language matters. Especially if you're using terms that come with a lot of emotional baggage, however they were accumulated.

Which is why I rarely use the term anarchism in my discussions with interested parties. Instead, I prefer to use the descriptor "decentralized self-management".

It allows our conversation to address the pros and cons of various degrees of decentralization, as well as the many different applications of self-management.

Having had dabbled in organizational development for a few years, I spent some time helping a few workplaces to employ a form of management popularly referred to as self-directed teamwork.

I got a secret pleasure from doing that, at the time, simply because there are some resemblances between self-directed teamwork and certain aspects of anarchism.

Doc Chomsky take-down of "right-wing libertarianism" or "anarcho-capitalism" (not just the term). language does matter.



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on edit: the video above is the result of a long PM exchange i've been having with IanEye which has been really good. i might post it here on in another thread he's thinking of bumping, with his agreement of course, but anyway, it's good viewing and fits here. also, thanks to "the three Js": Jeff, Jack, and Joe for mediating and all.

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