On Amoralist Anarchism

Thursday, January 22, 2009

I've been a part of numerous online social networks or general social groups online that contains some amoralist anarchists, who either are former libertarian anarchists who have come to reject libertarianism or they are anarchists who rejected libertarianism from the get-go and reached the conclusion of anarchism from a completely different conceptual framework.

On the most personal level, the youtuber D4Shawn and the persona formerly known as Stodles (who now runs this website) are the two amoralist anarchists that I've interacted with most. D4Shawn used to be a libertarian anarchist, and made a separate channel one day trying to approach anarchism from a more utilitarian or relativistic perspective, which has recently devolved into an ethical nihilism. Stodles never was a libertarian, he jumped straight from white nationalism to anarchism, which created some confusion about his position along the way.

Both Stodles and D4Shawn philosophically reject libertarianism while still prefering anarchism. D4Shawn effectively claims that ethics is completely useless metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, and thinks that we should be speaking in purely preferential terms. Stodles even appears to go so far as to imply that any conception of ethics inherently leads to rulership. On the other hand, both of them practically take positions that may very well tend towards libertarian anarchism, but it is functionally a mere statement of preferance from their perspective. This starts to hint at the complications that leads me to see this approach as silly.

While these amoralists may philosophicaly reject libertarianism, they essentially practically support it and they cannot completely avoid value-laden terminology. So while they may loudly proclaim their opposition to ethical principles and rights-concepts until they are blue in the face, they ultimately would like to live their lives in a way consistant with certain ethical principles and rights-concepts. While, unlike Stefan Molyneux, I am not argueing that this by itself proves those ethical principles and rights-concepts, it certainly gives reason for pause when comparing one's behavior to one's philosophy and may hint at a need to reanalyze the moral-practical dichotomy.

Anarchism is indistinguishable from anomie if there is an ethical vacuum. There is no such thing as a society in an ethical vacuum. Even if one concedes to the existance of some kind of subjectivity, I don't think it logically follows that ethics is completely useless and irrelevant. An anarchist society either cannot conceptually be an anarchist society to begin with or will not last as an anarchist society for long if its philosophical and cultural norms deliberately undermine it. So it doesn't make sense to act like anarchism is compatible with any set of values or to act as if all values are equal.

Various ethical principles can undermine anarchism, help foster it and widen its scope. Furthermore, merely having an ethical principle, wether it's sensible or not, doesn't necessarily lead to the use of violence to enforce it. Questions of the use of violence inherently are ethical questions themselves, and the behavior of an individual doesn't always align with their philosophy. There really is no such thing as a person who has no ethical considerations, and this includes self-proclaimed ethical nihilists and various post-modernists. Noone can really divorce themselves from goals, reasons for goals and means towards goals.

Such things almost always have a reason. It makes no sense to proclaim that you favor a society in which rulership is normatively shunned, and then say you have no real reason for it other than preferance. To borrow Molyneuxian terminology, that reduces it to the level of "I like ice cream". Surely, a cause such as anarchism is not at the level of "I like ice cream". If one is putting foreward anarchism as a goal, surely one must explain why it is your goal beyond a mere appeal to the fact that your do favor the goal. It makes no sense to have a goal, and then proclaim neutrality as soon as the question of its foundation and application comes up.

So, by the very least, this ethical nihilism is highly impractical. If taken to its extremes, one is simply advocating anomie. If one is more practical about it, one is nonetheless sort of advocating both anarchy and anomie at once. On one hand, I think there's a sense in which this ethical nihilism is harmless, since the ethical nihilist may practically take a libertarian type of position anyways and most people aren't going to practically take ethical nihilism seriously. Sometimes they even bring up some interesting points. On the other hand, it poses a threat to libertarian anarchism to the extent that it encourages people to either think that anarchism is a pandora's box compatible with any set of values or to ultimately reject libertarian values in the name of putting on a facade of neutrality.

Posted by Brainpolice at 6:12 PM

Does Freedom have a Social Context?

May 24, 2010

Is it really the case that freedom is a separable factor from the kind of social atmosphere in which people exist? I think not. The particular conditions within a society is linked with people's capacity to independently make decisions about their own lives. This includes the possibility of mobility and the structural landscape of power. A social context in which there is a significant disparity of power, including the kind of power that comes with ownership and wealth, functions as a limit on freedom in that it is more susceptible to certain consequences.

A social hierarchy is what occurs when disparities of power are institutionalized and used to limit the freedom of certain people. What this entails, in effect, is that those in positions of power have the most freedom, while those who are in a subordinate or dependant position relative to such power structures have the least freedom. While freedom might not be something that is quantifiable in the sense of mathematical exactitude, it is relative to the particular circumstances that would allow an individual to exercise their faculties and live without appeal to a command structure. When power is centralized or densely concentrated, a breeding ground for authoritarianism is in place.

When the alternative to subordination to authority requires a mobile maneuver and a sacrifice of well-being, to the point where there really is no viable alternative at all or the only alternatives are just subordination to another authority, people aren't really free in the social context. They are systematically prevented from being free by the circumstances of the environment. The possibility of full consent is precluded. At best, they acquiesce for practical reasons. And it is most definitely not simply "nature", some sort of inherent necessity at the level of a law of physics, that causes them to be unfree. The kind of environment in question is a social one having to do with the particular distribution of power.

It is true that a position of power is not absolutely or inherently authoritarian, in the sense that someone can refrain from exercising it or using it to impose an institutional monopoly. But it is also true that the circumstance opens up the possibility of this and that authoritarian consequences are ultimately more likely to occur when power is concentrated. For example, a society in which the economic structure of power is plutocratic or one in which the distribution of land is feudal, is logically compatiblewith and an apt atmosphere for authoritarianism. The people who exclusively hold such massive amounts of power are in a better-suited position to control other people.

This is part of why I really don't understand certain proclamations that some people make to the effect of saying that particular socio-economic and cultural circumstances are effectively irrelevant "so long as everyone is free", or worse, "so long as I'm free". This has also been expressed in the form of a "consequences be damned" mentality. But the problem is that this presumes the two to be absolutely separable. To be sure, perhaps it is possible for a society to at least nominally be free and yet have a sick culture or be stricken with poverty. But aside from the fact that there would still be a reason for opposing a sick culture and mass-poverty in and of themselves, the idea that such an atmosphere can last without internal tensions causing it to be unfree strikes me as ridiculous.

I would say that this kind of "freedom" doesn't amount to much if it ultimately just means that most people live in a horrible socio-economic atmosphere or that society ghettoizes itself into fiefdoms. Such conditions are undesirable regardless of any nominal "freedom" that comes along with them. To have no real concern about the actual condition of people's lives in the name of "freedom" seems to turn freedom into a fairly useless abstraction, while reflecting what could frankly be called psychological bankruptcy and a low moral character. I would question the character of anyone that just said "screw society, as long as I'm left alone" and meant that plainly. It seems like more of an anti-social streak than a well thought out philosophy of freedom.

Healthy social atmospheres are desirable both for their own sake and in the sense that they integrate with freedom. It could be said that freedom is a prerequisite for a healthy social atmosphere and it could also be said that a healthy social atmosphere is a prerequisite for freedom. They are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they are robbed of substance without each other. This is a more holistic view. It is also a more society-based view, because I'm insisting on freedom and society as being reconcilable and mutually dependant. A philosophy that openly (although sometimes not-so-openly) says "down with society" in its one-eyed zeal to respect some narrow set of principles such as property rights is doomed from the start.

Posted by Brainpolice at 7:57 AM

The Usefulness of a Left/Right Distinction

Monday, May 17, 2010

I'd like to defend the proposition that a left/right distinction is useful even for libertarians, although the proposition does have some qualifications.

There is a sense in which it may make sense to say that libertarians transcend the left/right dichotomy at least in the more mainstream and common way that it is presented, in terms of the over simplistic choice between contemporary liberalism and conservatism. Libertarians do not fall neatly into such boxes. Libertarianism could be presented as either synthesizing elements that are typically associated with both or as falling outside of the paradigm because it represents two sides of the same statist coin that libertarians oppose. When the dichotomy is presented in such terms, then perhaps libertarians can claim to be unique.

But it may also be the case that reducing everything to a new dichotomy of statist vs. non-statist or anti-statist can obfuscate the details of political ideologies. One reason for this is that precisely what counts as statist and non-statist may be defined in a way that is contingent on certain norms that are in dispute. Precisely what norms are sufficient for a stateless society to arise and sustainably function is debatable at least on consequentialist grounds. Libertarians sometimes draw different conclusions about what common principles imply. Simply saying that it's about aggression, while doing this in a way that presumes ones own particular take on things, doesn't seem to take the multitude of positions at play into account.

It also isn't clear by any means that all libertarians have completely done away with baggage that can be traced back to the more common left/right dichotomy. People come into libertarianism from different angles, and this may influence what libertarianism means to them. Libertarians do not exist in a vacuum with respect to historical context and contemporary political ideologies. There are distinctions as to how various libertarians align themselves relative to other political groups and what they distinguish as being compatible and incompatible with the core philosophy. This alone is part of precisely why there is inter-libertarian factionalism.

Once one digs into the meat of political philosophy at a broader level, a vast multitude of particular positions on multiple spectrums can emerge. This includes views on social authority, property, the distribution of resources, organizational structure, cultural norms, and so on. In light of more detailed questions such as this, the simple and perhaps vague reduction of political philosophy to "aggression" and "government" doesn't seem to tell us very much by itself, especially when one takes into account the ways in which these different spectrums may overlap or be integrated by people. I suspect that a "plumbline", in the sense of a political philosophy that is genuinely consistently "thin", simply doesn't exist.

A left/right distinction, although things obviously get much more specific than these two terms, is useful insofar as the integrated social philosophies of particular libertarians are inevitably colored by different values or norms in a way that forms distinct views that simply cannot be reduced to a vaguely defined opposition to aggression or the state. Once one begins to disambiguate that, "thickness" of some sort is already at least implicitly entering the picture. The moment that one forms a libertarian philosophy that excludes certain norms from compatibility or defines freedom in specific terms, the alleged "neutrality" of libertarianism begins to dissolve. No libertarian sincerely maintains a neutral standpoint in practise. At best, this is a self-deception.

What a left/right distinction in a libertarian context may signify are varieties of gradiation in terms of how things like more general social views, property norms, and economic goals interlock in an overall ideological system. On a property spectrum, for example, hardcore propertarians are on the far right and communists are on the far left. On an economics spectrum, people who explicitly favor hierarchical and oligarchic structures are to the right of people who put an emphasis on a more equitable distribution of resources and flatter organizational structures. On a social spectrum, people who strongly question traditional social authority could be said to be to the left of those that are indifferent or supportive of it. These are real tendencies, and "left" and "right" are the most convenient and most-likely-to-be-understood terms for them.

The claim that these views are irrelevant seems to obfuscate the way in which "libertarianism" is effected by them. It is necessary to take such things into account if one wants to accurately consider the various ideas that float in and out of "libertarian" circles. While the desire for libertarianism to be unique is understandable at a certain level, it is not unique in a sense that is completely detached from relations with "other" ideas. Once such ideas are considered, this is the context in which a left/right distinction understandably continues to be a question for libertarians, even if some people want to avoid the terminology.

Posted by Brainpolice at 11:48 PM

Labels: Libertarianism

Propertarianism, Voluntaryism and Freedom

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

I'd like to once again clarify my own views, put in contrast to some views that I have rejected. Hopefully this may help illuminate exactly what is at stake in the conflicts that take place within libertarianism and anarchism.

Propertarianism

One of the major issues at stake is how one treats the concept of property. I use the term propertarianism to refer to libertarian ideologies that tend to treat property as a primary value, as an absolute, or as some sort of starting point or the basis for defining everything. For example, Murray Rothbard's declaration that all rights are property rights is an example of a form of propertarianism. More generally, propertarians tends to view freedom as reducible to a question of property and have a deontological view of property rights.

I reject propertarianism. To be clear, rejecting propertarianism does not necessarily mean that one rejects property or property rights outright. In my case, what it means is that freedom is not reducible to property because life and liberty are prior concepts, and that property rights are not absolute in that they may have contextual side-constraints. I reject any framing of the question which assumes that we must either be pro-property or anti-property in some absolute sense, and I do not think that freedom and property can be absolutely equated.

There are reasons for this. There are contexts in which a default defense of property amounts to a rationalization for infringing on someone's freedom or unnecessarily taking their life. I don't think that ownership legitimately grants absolute authority, regardless of how it is acquired. I think that ownership alone may be necessary but insufficient for legitimacy. I think that freedom is more fundamentally a matter of the concrete interpersonal relations of individuals, while property is a secondary question in relation to it.

In my understanding, property in the most general and disambiguated sense is a multi-faceted concept that cannot reasonably be simplified or reduced to a particular aspect or manifestation of it. It depends on the context. In one context, property could be linked to freedom. In another context, property could be linked to aggression and tyranny. Propertarianism attempts to reduce property to its positive aspects while ignoring or denying its negative aspects, and in the process it may end up effectively legitimizing the negative aspects, even if some propertarians do not explicitly intend to rationalize or endorse infringing on anyone's freedom.

If freedom entails not unnecessarily being coerced or bossed around on the basis of other people's whims and not being physically aggressed against in a clearly non-defensive context, then propertarianism has tension with freedom to the extent that this can be justified in its framework. To take this to the institutional and territorial level, if a territorial monopoly on ultimate decision-making power and force is a state and a propertarian framework establishes a standard for legitimacy in which a qualitatively identical institution can be justified depending on nothing more than property acquisition norms, then propertarianism can logically entail and consequently lead to a state. Hence, anti-statists have a reason to be skeptical of propertarianism.

A purely deontological or absolutist conception of property rights also leads to blatant absurdities on practical grounds, particularly because it commits the propertarian to dismiss all life-boat scenarios out of hand or simply default to whatever a property owner decides as an answer. From the point of view of the person in a sticky situation, this implies that they have a moral obligation to let themselves die or at least suffer a significant amount of unecessary harm in the name of respecting property. Hence, property is effectively placed above life. This gives one consequentialist grounds for rejecting propertarianism.

At each step of the way so far, we have pointed out various ways in which property can conflict with both freedom and life. I think that it is important to emphasize that to the extent that one wants to uphold the value of freedom and life in these contexts, one has necessarily placed limits on the concept of property and its practical applications. On the flip side, to the extent that one upholds a propertarian theory one is committed to some sort of negation of freedom and life. I think that there are well-meaning propertarians who hold positions that are a bit fuzzy on these matters, so I wouldn't want to lump them in with a more extreme position. However, I think they have reason for cognitive dissonance.

These questions can invoke a lot of hostility among libertarians and anarchists. Some propertarians are absolutist to the point where the more nuanced positions that I have hinted at are considered to be diametrically opposed to everything they favor and as a total negation of property. I believe that this is false because it is based on a misleading framing of the question that smuggles in the assumption of certain absolute dichotomies. Those propertarians who think that the choice is essentially between their position and communism, or who act as if any alternative position necessarily equates to statism, are being dogmatic and making non-sequitors.

This should constitute a decent overview of the problems that I have with propertarianism. While I don't necessarily condemn property and property rights outright, I do not consider property to be the right framework to conceptualize everything in. I view these concepts as inherently being contingent and necessary but insufficient. There are great dangers to focusing so much or so narrowly on property that all common sense and decency goes out the window and the pretense of freedom begins to become suspect. It would be wise not to think in such simplistic and axiomatic terms about the question of property.

Voluntaryism

I use the term voluntaryism to refer to libertarian ideologies that tend to treat the notion of voluntary interaction as a primary value, as an absolute, or as some sort of starting point or basis for defining everything -- in a way that does not particularly disambiguate what constitutes "voluntary" and "involuntary" relations. Generally, voluntaryism is presented in a way that makes it seem more pluralistic than propertarianism, as a sort of all-inclusive umbrella "so long as it's voluntary". I am using the term voluntaryism to refer to views that tend to consider the question of interpersonal relations as being reducible to a question of voluntary-ness, beyond which point "anything goes" or is "just a preference".

To be sure, I think that some ideas going by the name of "voluntaryism" are actually hardly distinguishable from propertarianism because the concept of "voluntary" and "involuntary" are disambiguated in explicitly propertarian terms, which can make it rather misleading. But as I am using the term here, it involves at least the intent of being more pluralistic than that. Voluntaryism contrasts with propertarianism insofar as propertarians act as if their particular models are the only ones that can possibly be compatible with freedom, while voluntaryists function on the pretext that essentially all norms other than "is it voluntary or not?" are compatible with freedom.

As I have already hinted at, I think that voluntaryism suffers from ambiguity. There are a multitude of normative concepts of exactly what is and isn't voluntary, so a meta-debate is almost inevitably begged. What one voluntaryist considers voluntary may be considered involuntary by another depending on normative assumptions, so it seems hard to think that the concept of voluntaryism can be separate from such questions. I think that voluntaryism collapses into meaninglessness if it is taken at face value, divorced from any particular norm. This kind of pluralism is just nihilism by another name, a nihilism that clings to one norm: noone's views can apply to anyone else. To put it another way, it is a form of nihilism that at least puts on the front of valueing tolerance as some sort of end in and of itself.

Perhaps the closest that voluntaryist pluralism can come to providing a neutral definition of "voluntary" that isn't packaged with additional norms is a definition that effectively reduces to "agreement". But it is hard to see how this is particularly useful. The very nature of any society contains various degrees of disagreement. A stalinist, a monarchist, or a neo-nazi aren't going to agree with libertarians and anarchists, but surely libertarians and anarchists aren't inherently imposing an "involuntary" relationship by opposing those ideas and systems. A murderer may disagree with being defended against or shunned, or they may disagree with the idea that they've done something wrong, but surely their rights aren't violated by this. Something is very fishy about this.

Some voluntaryists essentially do take a meta-view that is inclusive towards all norms and systems. Monarchy, democracy, capitalism, socialism, nationalism, whatever it may be, is fine and dandy with them "so long as it's voluntary" (or contingent on these systems isolating into enclaves or tribes). The problem is that this completely collapses the notion of "voluntary" and "involuntary". At best, it means that each system is voluntary relative to other systems, but a given system inside of this framework could be internally involuntary. Indeed, one could have a totalitarian dictatorship, and it would be okay by these standards so long as it does not cross over into the nation next door.

To be fair, not all those who call themselves voluntaryists take it to this level. Rather, what they are more likely to promote is effectively what's been called "thin libertarianism", the view that freedom or libertarianism is purely reducible to something like the non-aggression principle, beyond which point everything is a matter of subjective personal preferences. That is, it's the idea that non-aggression (which is almost always defined through the lens of some kind of property norm) is sufficient to produce a free society. Thick libertarians, such as myself, disagree with this on the grounds that this is insufficient (although perhaps necessary), that additional considerations matter.

So in this sense "voluntaryism is more or less the same thing as thin libertarianism. A big part of the problem with thin libertarianism is that it seems obvious that political outcomes are in some way dependant on cultural atmospheres and that not all cultural atmospheres are equally good breeding grounds for the goals of political freedom. Hence, this sort of total cultural and moral relativism can be a dangerous attitude to attempt to start a free society with. It is arguable that certain cultural and moral norms are likely to lead to aggression and statism, while others are a healthy precondition for realizing libertarian goals. Without getting into the details of the normative debate, I don't think it should particularly be hard to see the general point being made about this.

Some voluntaryists may be tempted to engage in a non-sequitor in reaction to such objections by accusing the critic of necessarily supporting aggression or "involuntary" relations. This is based a false framing of the discussion and it also likely involves the voluntaryist having hidden or unspoken normative assumptions. The fact of the matter is that noone has a concept of non-aggression or "voluntary" that is completely detached from particular normative premises, and in this sense "thin libertarianism" is inherently misleading, I.E. it is a front of value neutrality or a hypocritically applied relativity.

This should function as a sufficient general overview of my problems with voluntaryism. While I do think that pluralism is an important value, I don't think that it is an acontextual value or some sort of absolute. There are good reasons for being concerned about people being too open-ended with their pluralism, taken to the point of rationalizing blatant contradictions and leaving the door wide open for any old authoritarian ideology and system. And it is wise not to focus so much or so narrowly on "political justice" that a good deal of the social questions that effect people in their everyday lives are dismissed as irrelevant, while being naive about the preconditions necessary for practical achievement of political goals.

Conclusion

For the most part, this was a reiteration and clarification of positions that I've already taken ad naseum elsewhere and talked about in older posts. The two ideological tendencies that I've critisized can be viewed as representive of two extremes in a more general conflict between ideas that are too closed and absolute on one hand and ideas that are too open and ambiguous on the other hand. I would suggest that the most coherant positions can be found somewhere in between such extremes. What I've said here only scratches the surface of a multitude of much more particular discussions that could be had, but I think that I've set up the general foundation for such a discussion.

Posted by Brainpolice at 3:14 PM

Labels: Libertarianism, Lifeboat Situations, Nihilism, Non-Aggression Axiom, Pluralism, Propertarianism, Property Rights, Thick Libertarianism, Thin Libertarianism, Voluntaryism

Putting the NAP In Its Proper Context

Sunday, January 18, 2009

I contend that the non-aggression principle is not a contextless axoim and it requires a specific definition of the difference between genuine self-defense and the initiation of violence. There is a grave problem that thin libertarianism and plumb-line libertarianism runs into, which is that the non-aggression principle has to be properly specified and taken into its proper context relative to other more specific principles or values. Otherwise, one's conception of libertarianism may start to undermine itself by either assuming values that contradict the NAP or through vagueness in the definition of what constitutes the initiation of violence.

For example, I would contend that the value of revenge and the traditional concept of punishment inherently undermines and violates the NAP. I consider them to constitute justifications for ex-post-facto violence, which is a particular form of the initiation of violence. I would also contend that an absolutist view in favor of violence in defense of property rights undermines and violates the NAP because it justifies pre-emptive violence on the mere grounds that someone is on your property. So I think that genuine self-defense has to be clearly distinguished from pre-emptive and ex-post-facto violence, and the context for genuine self-defense is an actual threat to one's life.

The absolutist view, in contrast, is completely arbitrary because anyone at any time can just go "hey, you're on my property" and cap someone. But merely being on someone's property is an arbitrary reason to justify the initiation of force. You need more of a specific context than just "there is someone on my property". The "punishment" of being shot to death isn't even remotely proportional to the crime of trespassing or loitering. Compared to life vs. death, tresspassing and loitering is a fairly minor matter. It certainly does not merit arbitrarily shooting people unless the people truly do present an overt threat of force.

Furthermore, I reject the idea that being on someone else's property means you forfeit your right to life and liberty. It might mean that you have an incentive to generally cooperate, compromise and abstain from infringement, but not that you lose all of your rights all of a sudden. A theory of property rights that overtly undermines the right to life and liberty needs to be fixed, otherwise it is going to be hopelessly inconsistant, even sinking to the level of justifying what are clear cases of assault and murder. Clearly, a consistant theory of rights has to uphold all of the rights, not misdefine rights to the point where one's alleged defense of one right inherently violates another right in the overall network of rights-concepts.

While Objectivists may tend to have a more integrated social philosophy than thin libertarians, Objectivists also fail to put the NAP in it's proper context, since at least the Piekoff-influenced Objectivists openly justify pre-emptive violence on the largest scale possible in the form of the invasive military apparatus, and there is a degree to which Rand was wishy washy on questions of American imperialism and she definitely seemed to throw a bit of a bone to the political right on questions of foreign policy. The problem with this interpretation of the NAP is that it totally turns a blind eye to the mass-death of innocent bystanders in the crossfire of conflict between nation-states. Scruples over private military proposals aside, thin libertarians actually tend to be pretty good on these sort of questions.

Where thin libertarians tend to fail most, however, is in the realm of pre-emptive violence on a smaller scale, in the context of individual private property owners. It's at this point that thin libertarianism may carve a possible path towards vulgar libertarianism, with the baggage of advocacy of the alleged right of property owners to arbitrarily shoot alleged tresspassers and justifications for feudal or quasi-feudal landlordism. These kind of libertarians tend to treat property rights as axoimatic, and effectively they trump life and liberty in their framework. The tendency is to act as if property rights grants completely arbitrary or absolute decision-making power over other people who are on or make use of your property.

This is problematic because it creates tension with the more fundamental principles involved in individual sovereignty. The fact that I'm on someone's property or the fact that I may technically be capable of leaving someone's property does not mean that literally whatever they decide to do to me is inherently justified. The decision-making power that property rights grants a person should not be completely arbitrary, since it always must be put into the context of consistantly respecting other people's rights. Being on someone else's property should not imply that you are their defacto slave or no longer deserve to live, only that one probably has to compromise with the owner in order to make use of the property. Owning property should not logically grant someone completely absolute and unilaterial decision-making power over other people.

So if views on the NAP or the use of violence in general could be put on a spectrum or organized, I'd categorize it like this: (1) Pacifism - All violence is unjustified, including self-defense (2) Thick Libertarianism - The initiation of violence is unjustified, self-defense is justified when there is an actual threat to life (3) Thin Libertarianism - The initiation of violence is unjustified, except in defense of property rights, which is to be categorized as self-defense (4) Objectivism - The initiation of violence is unjustified, except when it is rational "retaliation" (I.E. ex-post-facto or pre-emptive violence is justified), which is to be categorized as self-defense. The problem with both elements of Objectivism and thin libertarianism is that they smuggle in initiations of force by miscategorizing them as self-defense. The thick libertarian option seems the most rational.

Posted by Brainpolice at 1:02 PM

Anarchic Ireland: Rough Draft

This here is part of a short book I'm writing. Any editing one wants to do will be fan-freaking-tastic.

It is very tempting to write off the entire explanation of anarchistic Ireland (~650 CE to ~1650 CE) with "it was basically Iceland with different agreed upon laws". That said, anarchic Ireland was basically Iceland with different agreed upon laws and a different way of administering those laws.

Like Iceland, protection was provided by non-geographic voluntary agencies. In Ireland they were called "tuatha", and functioned much like the chieftaincy in Iceland. Any person could start a tuath, all he needed was people willing to pay money to subscribe to his tuath, but unlike medieval Iceland, the leader of the voluntary political unit did not appoint the judges. The only functions a "king" of a tuath had was to preside over the annual assembly, to serve as high priest, and lead the tuath in war (which was very rare in ancient Ireland). He did not decide upon the laws for members of the tuath, and he could not declare war without the tuath assembly's approval, though he did act as head diplomat.

When the king died, the next king was elected from within the family of the king. If there was no male heir, the tuatha was disbanded, and then most likely another highly respected man would form a "new" tuath with the same members, rituals, and subscription fee, and he would become king.

The assembly was made up of freemen, that is the landholding class. Those who didn't own land but lived as tenants on a freeman's land did not participate in the assembly. A good way to think about the tuath would be as homeowner's association / church branch / defense organization. If any member of the tuath found the land rules, subscription fee or anything unsatisfactory, he could join another tuath or form his own to the extent that he was able to. This threat of unlimited secession prevented any tyrannies of the majority from forming. Tenants of freemen could also join other tuatha, and you could have the tenant of a freeman who lived under a different tuath, and this prevented the freemen from using their presence in the assembly to exploit the tenants.

The reason each tuath functioned like any other tuath in Ireland was that the tuath itself was justified by and subject to the common law of all Ireland, called brehon Law.

Brehon law, like the common law in England and Iceland, is simply a product of the interactions of people, it's just what emerged. Because disputes arose, and people needed to resolve them, and all throughout Ireland people came up with rules within their local community - the people they know face to face, a.k.a. the first order cluster. Then when members of different first order clusters met with each other, they would learn of each others' laws and most often the laws would be similar, and the differences would be either be respected or the laws would be harmonized (in a not necessarily harmonious way). Eventually the common law emerged.

In this environment, certain men became very proficient in law, men who understood the intricacies and could identify when someone was invoking common law inappropriately. These men became known for their knowledge of common law and for their fair application of it, and eventually were called brehons. The brehon didn't create the law as much as he discovered it. Brehons were not appointed, they didn't go to a university and graduate, brehons simply emerged, and one could become known as a brehon if he was known for having a thorough understanding of brehon law and was known for issuing fair rulings as a judge, and people were willing to pay for his arbitration.

Whenever anyone had a dispute, he would submit to the adjudication of a well-known and respected brehon. The brehon would issue a ruling, and the loser of the ruling could either pay the entire settlement, part of it, or none. If he chose to pay part of it or none, then his tuath - either through an assembly or the king himself, could outlaw him (which means the tuath no longer protect him). If the tuath in general found a ruling by a brehon to be heinous, then the tuath may decide not to outlaw the defendant, and obviously no longer consider the brehon who issued the heinous ruling a
brehon.

If the tuath decided to outlaw a man for shirking a brehon's ruling, then that man, in theory, could subscribe to another tuath if that tuath would accept him.

Brehons could also decide if a ruling by another brehon was just, and so this man who recieved what he feels is an unjust ruling could still receive legal protection from any brehon who agreed with him. This is the infinite fallback of free human interaction.

The Irish brehon law sought to prevent conflicts from arising by allowing for insurance agreements called sureties. For example, two freemen who owned property could agree to a suretie that if either one of them trespassed on the other's property, they would have to pay a fine to the property owner. Usually violations of sureties resulting in the violating party simply paying the agreed upon fine and moving on, but if there was a dispute, then they would appeal to a brehon.

The fine for a given suretie could not exceed an individual's honor-price. The honor-price of an individual was related to his wealth, and a man could not enter into a contract in which he could not honor the fine for a breach of contract. This meant he couldn't receive loans greater than his honor price. I am not sure how a man's honor price was determined, and I can only assume it was the amount of income he could produce over a given period of time.

If a man entered a valid contract (this includes loans), in which the fine for violating the contract (or defaulting on the loan) was lower than his honor price, yet for whatever reason he was unable to pay the fine / loan, then he became a debtor to the other party who became a creditor. The creditor could then seize the assets (usually the farm) of the debtor, and the debtor would be a tenant of the creditor until he had paid back the loan or fine, at which point his status as a freeman was restored. Or the debtor could sell his assets to anyone to pay off the fine / loan, including the creditor himself.

"Wars" of a European sense did not occur between Irishmen at this time. Because kings could not tax or conscript, all participants in any war would have chosen to fight, and typically only the affected parties of a dispute would ever be willing to risk their lives to settle it. And so instead of wars as we know them, Ireland had feuds or brawls between parties numbering in the tens, not thousands.

Englishmen and many historians characterized Ireland at this time to be barbaric. They point to the fact that Ireland had no final arbiter of law, no king as they had defined it, and no coin of the realm. The first issue has been dealt with at length, and the reason Ireland had no coin of the realm was because there were no legal tender laws. The reason other areas had coins with a set value and some royal seal printed on it, was because the king had commanded that that coin be used and was required to be accepted by merchants. The value of the coin was set above it's value in metal content by royal decree. This way, the king could buy gold, melt it and pour it into a mold, and use one ounce of royal coinage to buy 2 ounces of gold with which to make more coinage, etc. It was free money with which the king could buy more stuff with.

That Ireland didn't have this violently enforced nonsense is not a sign of barbarism but of a level of civility the rest of the world would do well to emulate.

And it wasn't like the people of Ireland lacked the knowledge of the governments throughout Europe, or that they lacked the know-how to make coins. There is plenty of evidence that the Irish at this time were certainly as well off, as scholarly and as technologically advanced as the rest of Europe, if not more so. The Irish people have also garnered far greater attention and significance than their number would suggest. Throughout the years 650 to 1650, Ireland had a population ranging from 450,000 to 960,000, compared to England and France's populations of 7 and 18 million in 1300.

Conflicts that could be appropriately called wars in Ireland during this time are most easily found during the Viking, Norman and English invasions. By the 840's Vikings had begun raiding Ireland and England. In 839, Thorgest attempted to establish a kingdom in Ireland, but found it difficult to do so due to the lack of any central political authority in Ireland that could be conquered. His kingdom lasted from 839 to 845, at which point he was assassinated by Máel Sechnaill, who then led his tuath's army to victory over a Norse army attempting to reclaim the kingdom in 848.

In 852, Olaf the White (son of the Norwegian king at the time) and Ivar Beinlaus established a kingdom in and around Dublin bay. By 902 it was abandoned. Various other viking bigshots attempted to carve out kingdoms in Ireland, all with little success. In 1002 Brian Boru, a king of the tuath of Thomond, was able to rally enough support throughout Ireland to be recognized as the high king of Ireland. As such, he was able to raise an army and defeat a Viking army at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, which ended the Viking kingdoms in Ireland. After the victory, Boru's descendants were unable to maintain a unified throne and most of Ireland went on as usual. While Ireland was nominally divided into outright compulsory kingdoms, these states were unable to exert much real control outside of their capitols. The Viking invasion illustrated the difficulty of conquering a stateless society, but also illustrated how war leads to the expansion of the state. While Ireland was still mostly anarchic following the battle of Clontarf, the seeds of statism had been planted.

In 1167, a Norman army from Wales invaded Ireland, which was defeated and the leader had to pay a ransom. In 1169, another Norman invasion was more successful and captured the cities of Leinster, Waterford and Dublin. By 1300 most of Ireland was nominally under Norman rule, though in fact their rule extended only to the capitols, and most Irishmen continued to live by the brehon law. Little had changed since 1014.

Over the next 200 years, the effect of assimilation and the visible ineffectualness of Norman law in Ireland resulted in the already limited Norman influence to be eroded. In 1531 Normans had officially gone native when the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Thomas Fitzgerald, began conspiring with the Yorkists to overthrow King Henry VII. In response, Henry had Fitzgerald killed and began a systematic colonization and establishment of real political control over Ireland.

It was found that actually securing control was far more difficult than securing the lord's pledges, and it wasn't until 1603 that King James I of England could establish nominal control over all of Ireland through a serious of attempts at conquests, colonization and deals with local tuaths and the nominal kings (who had been there since 1014). It wasn't until Cromwell's brutal conquest of Ireland from 1649 to 1653 which gave Englishmen the majority of of the land that it could be said that Ireland was truly conquered by England. Cromwell had to kill over 15,000 Irish rebels and 200,000 Irish civilians of a country with only around 1,500,000 people total, or about 14% of Ireland's total population. In comparison, Germany lost about 13% of it's population during World War 2.

Britain's conquest of Ireland, which over the course of the conquest never had a population of over 1.5 million and was separated from Britain only by 21 miles of ocean, took 484 years.

In contrast, the East India Company, a British sponsored venture, was able to conquer India in 240 years (1617 to 1857), and England was able to conquer areas of France far more populous than Ireland many times during the hundred years war.

Ireland is a testament to the effectiveness of anarchic defense. Ireland's defense was not characterized by fielding large armies and submitting to rule after a psychotic and murderous game of capture the flag. It was characterized by non-compliance and literally forcing the invader to go house to house and collect taxes person by person. Anarchic Ireland not only showed how effective a stateless legal order is, but also how difficult it is to conquer people who simply will not submit to being ruled, and who do not slump their shoulders and acquiesce once their flag has been captured and signatures exchanged.

When Napoleon invaded Russia, he had assumed that once he captured the flag capitol, he would "rule Russia". But upon arriving in a deserted Moscow, the base reality of the situation set in. All that was there were a collection of buildings, streets, sewers, etc. collectively called "Moscow". And standing in those streets were a bunch of men with muskets collectively called "the French Army". This apparently had something to do with "conquering" "Russia" (?).

What is conquest? When a soldier passes through a town, is he said to have "conquered" it?

Only when a population believes in the legitimacy of a state can it be said to be truly conquered. Ireland was able to stand against overwhelming force for nearly half a millennium because Irishmen saw through the empty pomp of the state. If Europeans had half the backbone that the Irish had, there would be no states today.Posted by khydraa at 7:45 PM Labels: Anarchism, anarchy, Example, Ireland, Society, Stateless

Gustave De Molinari and The Production of Security

Gustave De Molinari was a radical classical liberal associated with Frederic Bastiat and the French liberal school of economics. In his work "The Production of Security", Molinari was the first economist to propose the possibility of free competition for the production of security, which had been an untouched matter by laissez-faire economists up until this point. Frederic Bastiat, who was a fairly radical classical liberal economist for his time, initially was tempted to disagree with Molinari on this point, but when he was on his deathbed not long after the release of "The Production of Security" apparently he aknowledged that Molinari was the continuer of his work.

Molinari did not see any reason why economists should argue for free competition in all sorts of areas or industries, and then suddenly create a gigantic caviat for the production of security and arbitration. If there should be consumer choice and free entry to the provision of all sorts of products and services such as food, clothing, shelter and all sorts of types of industries, then why not security and arbitration? If there should be no legal monopoly on such things, why wouldn't this also apply to security and arbitration? Molinari came to oppose both "monopoly and communism" in any industry. In other words, he opposed both state and absolute communal control of industry, viewing free competition as the alternative.

Many contemporary free market anarchists consider Molinari to at least be a proto-anarchist, since he had technically surpassed the formal concept of "limited government" from an economic perspective. By the very least, what Molinari realized is a necessary component of market anarchism. Laissez-faire economists prior to Molinari simply did not question the state production of security or arbitration itelf. With this being aknowledged, Molinari never formally called himself an anarchist, but he did become associated with the movement known as panarchism, which tends to favor pluralism and legal aterritorialism. The degree to which panarchism is even distinguishable from anarchism without adjectives is debatable.

While he is not the most well-known historical figure, Molinari more or less represents the final conclusion of the French liberal school of economics and the first thinker to formally propose free competition in the production of security. In this regaurd, Molinari does have historical significance as a precursor to free market anarchism. Molinari's work was also circulated in America and partially praised by the individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker, who favored free competition in the production of security himself. The revival of Molinari as a key figure is partially due to Murray Rothbard highlighting him and writting an editor's preface or foreward to the most recent English edition of "The Production of Security".

To an extent, the significance of Molinari's contribution has alot to do with how early on in time it was that he initially made it. "The Production of Security" was released in 1849, and the idea of free competition for the production of security was largely absent from laissez-faire economists throughout the rest of the century. Even the early leaders of the Austrian school of economics did not really touch the question. In fact, it more or less wasn't until the time of Murray Rothbard that a laissez-faire economist would meaningfully press the issue of free competition in the production of security. With this historical understanding, Molinari was quite radical for his time and he definitely has significance.

Posted by Brainpolice at 5:09 PM
Labels: Anarchism, Benjamin Tucker, Economics, Frederic Bastiat, Gustave De Molinari;, Monopoly, Murray Rothbard, Pluralism, Political Theory

Benjamin Tucker, Herbert Spencer, Lysander Spooner and Mikhail Bakunin

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Benjamin Tucker: American Anarchist

Benjamin Tucker was arguably the leading figure of individualist anarchism in America in the 19th century. He was the editor and chief of the classic anarchist periodical "Liberty", which involved many key figures in early individualist anarchism such as Lysander Spooner, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Auberon Herbert, Joshua Ingalls and Victor Yarros. Tucker once half-jokingly said that anarchists are just unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. Tucker's influences ranged from Proudhon to Max Stirner. In fact, he was the first person to have translated Max Stirner's "The Ego And His Own" and Proudhon's "What Is Property?" in America. He also was an early American translator of Friedrich Neitzsche's works prior to H.L. Mencken.

Tucker highlighted and opposed what he called "the four monopolies": the land monopoly, the money monopoly, the patent monopoly and the tariff monopoly. Hence, Tucker opposed institutional absentee landlordism, central banking, intellectual property law and international protectionism. He thought that various state interventions created and sustained monopolies and artifically concentrated capital. Tucker did not normatively oppose wage labor, but he thought that genuine free competition would improve the wage system and make the difference between wages and the alternatives start to become nullified or indistinguishable. He thought that large-scale institutional landlordism is dependant on state interventions. While he held some geoist or quasi-geoist views on land, he did not propose any kind of land value tax like the Goergists do.

Tucker also explicitly advocated voluntary defense institutions as an alternative to the state. Like Proudhon, while Tucker is classified as a socialist, he contextually supported private or individual property. While Tucker supported voluntary labor organization, he also opposed labor legislation. He was opposed to state-backed union bureaucracries and in favor of more organic worker organization. In Tucker's view, the labor legislation was only a reactionary and ultimately reformist measure added on top of the initial pro-capital legislation. The solution was to eliminate the initial pro-capital legislation and industrial welfare or to counteract it through voluntary social organization, not to favor or use the power of the state in misguided although perhaps well-intended attempts at philanthropy. Tucker rejected communism and even many of the popular trends in the more general movement of socialism, of which Tucker was a part for a while.

Tucker's earlier anarchism made use of natural rights philosophy, but eventually he came to adopt an egoist position influenced by Max Stirner, which does away with any formal concept of rights and ethics and justice. This change of Tucker's could be seen as a transition into what some today may classify as "post-left" anarchism. Tucker's egoist variant of individualist anarchism is in some ways a philosophical drifting away from classical liberalism and socialism. In either case, individualist anarchism split from that point onwards between natural rights proponents and egoists. This egoism was also partially picked up by other anarchist factions, even some anarcho-communists. In either case, Tucker's egoism lead him to take some positions that horrified some of his fellow natural rights proponents, and it could be argued that this is a factor responsible for the initial individualist anarchist movement fragmenting.

Tucker's influence on the history of anarchism and libertarian thought is notable. Murray Rothbard was a fan of Tucker's, despite some mild criticism of Tucker's enonomics in an article he wrote from the 1970's. In fact, the only significant thing that separates Tucker's classic individualist anarchism from Murray Rothbard's initial "anarcho-capitalism" is that Tucker favored a labor theory of value, while Rothbard integrated individualist anarchism with austrian economics. During the 60's and early 70's, arguably Rothbard classified as a classic individualist anarchist in some ways and was considered to be an individualist anarchist, only he was effectively trying to revive individualist anarchism in a different historical and cultural context. Tucker's legacy is also carried on by modern mutualists and individualist anarchists such as Kevin Carson. In either case, it is clear that modern market anarchism is dependant on the pre-existing history of individualist anarchism, which sets up its foundation, and the significance of Tucker's role as a leader of individualist anarchism in the 19th century is clear.

Posted by Brainpolice at 8:54 PM

Labels: Benjamin Tucker, Friedrich Neitszche, History, Ideology, Individualist Anarchism, Kevin Carson; Property Rights, Max Stirner, Murray Rothbard,Mutualism, Natural Law, Natural Rights, Political Theory

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

The Evolution Of Herbert Spencer

The British philosopher Herbert Spencer was a vital player in the developement of theories of evolution in the 19th century. It's important to note that Spencer was one of the first proponents of the theory of socio-cultural evolution, and social darwinism is a more specific thing than socio-cultural evolution. The kind of evolution that Spencer talked about is broader than biological evolution and is actually not darwinian in nature, but actually closer to lamarkianism. Spencer actually proposed the concept of socio-cultural evolution a number of years prior to Darwin's release of "Origin of Species" and the method and scope of his work differs from Darwin's.

Sometimes Spencer has been unfairly mischaracterized as a proto-nazi or proto-fascist, but this doesn't betray any genuine understanding of Spencer's political views. Herbert Spencer was a radical classical liberal who could easily be construed as a proto-anarchist. To be sure, Spencer was a utilitarian of sorts, but of a different variety than his contemporaries. Spencer was an individualist utilitarian. Compared to the views of most people during the period, Spencer's early views were actually relatively egalitarian. His notions of socio-cultural evolution lead him to take an organic and historically-based view of societies, and this eventually lead him even to the point of having the chapter "The Right To Ignore The State" in his book "Social Statics", which was removed in later editions. In either case, Spencer's philosophy lead him to oppose the political norms of his day, especially the "greatest good for the greatest number" maxim.

At first, the anarchistic conclusions of his evolutionary theory was speculative in nature. Spencer speculated about social evolution necessitating a level of independance and decentralization that effectively makes the state obsolete as a social organ. In this sense, Spencer entered a period of being a "philosophical anarchist" and it is worthwhile to speculate if he may have technically counted as an anarchist at one point, despite never formally calling himself an anarchist. In either case, some of Spencer's ideas did end up influencing the individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker, and Proudhon's notion of spontaneous order and the social organism may at least indirectly be linked to Spencer's social evolutionary ideas in some ways. However, Benjamin Tucker later charged Spencer with drifting towards moderation and conservatism in his later years as a result of disillusionment, which Murray Rothbard retrospectively seemed to have agreed with to a degree as well.

Social evolutionary theory may have some gradualist implications, since one is working with long periods of time. To be sure, Spencer's philosophy of history is very different from Marx's. While Marx analized history through the lense of his class theory, Spencer was more broadly working within the sphere of social interaction rather than specializing in or limited to class analysis. While Spencer does speak of social organisms or social organs, he does this while remaining true to methodological individualism. Spencer analized history from the perspective of cooperation, contract and production vs. brute force, coercion and authoritarianism. Spencer favored social evolution towards a society based on contract, cooperation and production. He favored an industrial society rather than a militant one.

What understandably disillusioned Spencer later in life is that it became clear that history was not consistantly progressing in such a direction. Society was becoming both militant and industrial. Fascism and Marxism were on the rise and classical liberalism was fragmenting. Hence, Spencer's retreat into a conservative pessemism. Of course, this isn't to underwrite Spencer's earlier radicalism, which had anarchistic implications and has been influential on libertarians over the years. Spencer had some very keen insights into the nature of social interaction and the history of social organization, and he practically invented the basis for theories of socio-cultural evoltion. Hence, Spencer definitely has significance in the history of ideas.

Posted by Brainpolice at 6:37 PM

Labels: Anarchism, Benjamin Tucker, Herbert Spencer;, History, Human Nature, Libertarianism, Murray Rothbard, Philosophy, Political Theory, Social Evolution, spontaneous order

Lysander Spooner: Libertarian Hero

The American individualist anarchist Lysander Spooner was one of the last natural law philosophers of the 19th century, and his crowning achievement is arguably the total demolition of the myth of the social contract. Spooner applied a libertarian theory of natural law to the United States Constitution that lead him to reject the authority of the constitution, leading to his radical work "No Treason: Constitution of No Authority", in which he applied common sense standards of justice and contract law to political institutions that delegitimized them. Spooner proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the state is not genuinely based on consent, that the standard social contract and democratic arguments for the sovereignty of the state is a fraud.

Spooner was also a slavery abolitionist and a strong supporter of the principle of individual secession, which goes hand in hand. While maintaining a radical opposition to slavery, he simultaneously opposed the concept of "the union" and opposed the civil war. He more or less accused the northern states of only reforming and expanding slavery, although he wasn't necessarily completely sympathetic to the confederacy either. Furthermore, he tried to outcompete the government in mail delivery and got shut down by the government. Another notable feature of Spooner is that he explicitly took the position that vices are not crimes, coinciding with the standard libertarian opposition to prohibition laws and authoritarian forms of social planning. While Spooner may have a legalistic aura, his legalism was not statist in nature and he more fundamentally was working with ethics when it comes down to it.

Spooner was loosely associated with the individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker and the periodical "Liberty". While in the grand scheme of things Spooner's political philosophy was similar to that of other individualist anarchists, it could be said that his approach to property appears to have a distinctively neo-lockean element to it, although Spooner is actually claimed to be a libertarian socialist by some. In either case, some genuine dividing lines did emerge as Benjamin Tucker adopted an egoist position under the influence of the work of Max Stirner, which philosophically clashes with Spooner's natural law position. Spooner was a strong advocate of "natural rights", while a Stirnerite egoism rejects the very concept of "right". So in a certain sense, from that point onward individualist anarchism can be seen as splitting between natural rights proponents and egoists, with Spooner remaining on the natural rights side.

Spooner could be viewed as the first political theorist to take natural law philosophy to the conclusion of anarchism. While Proudhon had of course already come to the conclusion of anarchism, his approach wasn't necessarily a strict natural law philosophy. The earliest natural law philosophies actually justified political absolutism. It wasn't until guys like Locke and Jefferson that it began to meaningfully take a more liberal character, justifying limits on political institutions. But all of these natural law approaches prior to that of Spooner ultimately justified state sovereignty on the grounds of some kind of social contract concept. Spooner took natural law philosophy to its logical conclusion by demonstrating that it is impossible for any state to genuinely be contractual as a state qua state, that all currently existing states must be illegitimate by the standards of natural law. Even Locke invoked the concept of the social contract being undoable, but he didn't take this far enough.

In a sense, Spooner can be seen as merely continueing the Jeffersonian project. The views of some of the later natural law philosophers and classical liberals such as Jefferson and Paine was arguably proto-anarchist in nature. "Philosophical anarchism" was common among the more radical American liberals and heavy emphasis was placed on decentralization. But they always ultimately maintained a pragmatic support for a minimal level of government. Spooner was the first natural law philosopher to overcome this limit, arguably representing the culmination of natural law philosophy. The developement of natural law philosophy in America more or less ends with Spooner, until Murray Rothbard picked it up around a century later and drew heavily on Spooner as a referance.

Spooner has a unique place in the history of anarchism and is worthy of it.

Posted by Brainpolice at 12:36 AM

Mikhail Bakunin and Collectivist Anarchism

Mikhail Bakunin was the Russian father of the strain of anarchism known as collectivist anarchism. He was initially loosely associated with both Karl Marx and Pierre Joseph Proudhon, and eventually he developed anarcho-collectivism using both of them as influences while deviating from them both at the same time. Bakunin's anarcho-collectivism, which wasn't completely developed until towards the end of Bakunin's life, differs from mutualism and individualist anarchism in certain significant ways, but it also differs from Marxist communism in certain ways as well. While it does call for collective worker ownership of the means of production, Bakunin's anarcho-collectivism is more along the lines of a half-way point towards communism since it still allows the renumeration of labor.

However, there are certainly some similarities between communism and Bakunin's ideas. Like the communists, Bakunin emphasized anti-theism. He reversed Voltaire's quote that "if god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent" him to "if god really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him". And like the communists, Bakunin had a materialist basis for his philosophy, which makes his economic analysis similar to that of Marx. The Russian, Polish and generally pan-slavic cultural context that Bakunin was working with was primarily a reaction to the royal or noble classes which were much more prevailent in such a context than in America and certain parts of Europe at the time. This helps explain the cultural trends towards collectivism that took place around Bakunin.

But beyond this, Bakunin was actually a critic of Marx. He rejected the notion of a "dictatorship of the proletariet" and supported the notion of decentralization or federalism, and hence there is supposed to be free association between the communes in an anarcho-collectivist society. While the goals between anarcho-collectivism and Marxism were quite similar, Bakunin fundamentally clashed with the Marxist communists over questions of strategy, rejecting formal political strategy in favor of a more social form of revolution and what he called "the propaganda of the deed". However, some controversy exists over the degree to which Bakunin's notion of "the propaganda of the deed" is dangerous and has been used to justify violence, and individualist anarchists tended to shy away from the revolutionary methods of many collectivist anarchists.

Bakunin is known to have been a strong supporter of the Paris Commune of 1871, which was surpressed by the French government. Bakunin persisted in favoring social revolution over political strategies, which eventually lead him to be purged by Marx from The First International. The difference between Marx and Bakunin over how to go about reaching their mutually held goals became irreconcilable. Bakunin thought that Marx's strategies would just lead to another despotism, which turned out to be a wise foresight. He strongly opposed the idea of seizing the power of the state as a method of revolution. In this regaurd, Bakunin must be credited as the first thinker to effectively try to depoliticize communism.

Bakunin's historical significance in anarchism more or less represents the planting of the seeds for all forthcoming collectivistic variants of anarchism such as anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism. At the same time, it must be said that he also represents the initial cause of a fragmenting of communism between Marxist and anarchistic strains. In either case, Bakunin was most definitely a key figure in the history of anarchism.

Posted by Brainpolice at 3:45 PM

Remembering Proudhon

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Many contemporary libertarians may be mystified at Proudhon being considered a libertarian, but Proudhon was undoubtably the first genuinely libertarian socialist. Proudhon's political philosophy represents a synthesis of sorts between classical liberalism and socialism, without yielding any ground to authoritarian strains of socialism, which eventually resulted in his anarchism. Proudhon was critical of both capitalism and communism, and was generally an opponent of absolutism, making heavy use of the mechanisms of synthesis and deconstruction, which obviously is at least partially Hegelian in nature. His political philosophy arguably became more radical as he aged, leading him to take more of a refined view on property.

The initial form of anarchism that Proudhon set the basis for, mutualism, predates anarcho-collectivism and anarcho-communism by a number decades and significantly differs from them in certain ways. Proudhon and Marx had certain fairly significant disagreements, leading Marx to more or less dismiss him as a "petty burgousie individualist". Unlike Marx and the communists, Proudhon did not advocate purely collective ownership or even worker ownership as an absolute norm. His idea was more along the lines of individual worker ownership of the means of production (I.E. I own my own tools, therefore I don't need to rent your tools). He also advocated cooperative management, but always in a context that allows for individual liberty. Proudhon supported the notions free contract and free competition, only placing more emphasis on cooperative forms of organization than many classical liberals.

Proudhon was most certainly an individualist in many ways, with the theme of "individual sovereignty" running strongly throughout his work. While he rejected the vulgar collectivism of the communists, he synthesized individualism with themes of social cooperation, which is to say that he steered clear of atomism. Proudhon envisioned a free society and the process of working towards such a society as a "spontaneous order" that is emergant from the free interactions of individuals. At the same time, he rejected utopianism and romanticism and he appears to have held a fairly pluralistic attitude with regaurd to what such a spontaneous order entails. The vision is always realistic in that it's not some kind of uniform model for the entire society.

It's important to note that mutualism (and its culmination within individualist anarchism) does not normatively or absolutely oppose wage labor, rent and interest per se. These things may contextually be opposed as a consequence of political authority and it may speculate about a trend towards such things starting to diminish in conditions of free competition, but they are not opposed on an absolute normative ethical level as in often the case with communism, syndicalism and collectivism. A mutualist qua mutualist cannot advocate arbitrary violence to oppose such things. Something more along the lines of agorism makes sense as a strategy for mutualists. Proudhon was skeptical towards traditional methods of revolution.

Proudhon's analysis of property is far more subtle and complicated than a first-reading or face-value-reading of his writtings may reveal. A statement such as "Property is theft", followed by seemingly contradicting statements such as "Property is impossible" and "Property is liberty" is likely to confuse the reader. To a degree, Proudhon is probably being rhetorical and is purposefully trying to intimidate the reader or grab their attention. But a more in-depth look reveals that he is quite creatively making use of synthesis and antithesis here, and a more clear meaning is revealed with this understanding. These statements are contextual and part of a process of synthesis and antithesis, not to be interpreted as absolutes.

What Proudhon is most strongly challenging is the arbitrary legal title to property, property as a legal construct that indeed is historically tracable back to theft in many ways. Property as a state legal construct often is the state doling out a privilege to the property that it initially stole. During Proudhon's time, many of the old legal private property titles that used to belong to the noble class and the feudal landlords had not completely been abandoned or abolished, and in the process of transformation into more modern capitalism, this privilege was slowly being transfered to a new industrial managerial class in bed with the state. Proudhon was more keenly aware of this than most of his collegues and associates.

There is also a context in which Proudon was very much in favor of private or individual property, viewing it as an indispensible counterweight to the state. Unlike the communists, Proudhon had no inherent problem with money, exchange and buisiness. The Marxist aesthetic distain for just about anything that has to do with commerence is nowhere to be found in him. Proudhon's vision of socialism was more along the lines of individual proprietorship, small cooperative buisinesses and unions of artisans. When not exploitative and when not an a monstrous scale, Proudhon supported more small-scale examples of what would be considered private property by contemporary free market anarchists.

Proudhon has been indispensibly influential on the history of anarchism, particularly individualist anarchism. The actual continuation of Proudhon's work was done by the early individualist anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker (prior to his transformation into a Stirnerite egoist), while the anarcho-collectivism of Bakunin and the anarcho-communism of Kropotkin significantly differed from this trend in certain ways. Some anarcho-communists were even lead to dismiss Proudhon from the anarchist tradition as just "a liberal disguised as a socialist". The rise of anarcho-collectivism and anarcho-communism has a notaby different cultural context, centered around Russia and somewhat detached from classical liberalism. Proudhon, on the other hand, was much more exposed to the classical liberalism of the French and Americans.

This isn't necessarily to completely dismiss figures such as Bakunin and Kropotkin out of hand, but to be clear about differences between the direction anarchism took from their standpoint vs. the standpoint of Proudhon and the individualists, as it was definitely the American individualist anarchists such as Josiah Warren and Benjamin Tucker who picked up where Proudhon left off. While Kroptkin arguably took anarchism in a direction that made it closer to Marxism, the individualist anarchists took it in a more individualistic direction or generally steered clear of such collectivistic tendencies. Over time, the individualists tended to come to reject the particular revolutionary methods of the collectivists and ventured to produce some fairly scathing criticisms of anarcho-communism.

Factional griping aside, Proudhon's legacy remains as the first formal anarchist and one who presented a political philosophy that can help bridge the gap between free market oriented thought and the anti-authoritarian left. I think that he is definitely important enough on both a historical and philosophical level that all libertarians should familiarize themselves with him to one degree or another.

Posted by Brainpolice at 4:46 PM

Struggling with Max Stirner

Sunday, January 25, 2009

I have a great amount of respect for the near-forgotten figure Max Stirner. His ill-famed "The Ego and His Own" is probably the most radical, thought provoking and challenging writting that I have ever read. Not only did Stirner explicitly take an egoist position, question the very foundation of morality and critisize modern liberal secularism as not going far enough numerous decades before Neitzsche (and arguably manage to be even more radical than Neitzsche), but he did this as what many think is meant to be the logical completion of Hegel's project and during the same period as and loosely being associated through academia to Karl Marx and Engels.

The "young Hegelians" or "left-hegelians" such as Ludwig Feurbach and Karl Marx all had interacted with Stirner on a personal level in Academia prior to the release of "The Ego and His Own", and from their own perspectives they were trying to surpass Hegel. These young Hegelians came to take an explicitly atheist position, hence aschewing all of the overtly religious elements from the Hegelian project and shifting the emphasis more towards man or humanity. The end result tended towards some kind of secular humanism, and eventually communism as proposed by Marx and Engels (although the communism of Engels was arguably less collectivistic than that of Marx).

Stirner was a student of Hegel himself and passively participated in some of the interactions that took place among the left-hegelians. When he formally released "The Ego and His Own" it greatly shocked many of his collegues, since it took the Hegelian project in an entirely different direction and quite explicitly critisized the left-hegelians as only replacing the old godhead with a new one. Stirner did not critisize the left-hegelians on the grounds of their atheism, but on the grounds that they still cling to concepts that function in the same way as religion. From Stirner's perspective, they had not followed the logical progression far enough. The modern secular liberal had destroyed the basis for an incorporeal god but then proceeded to divinize earthly things and "humanity" in the abstract. In short, the cloak of power had only been secularized, not eliminated. The higher cause of the god had been functionally replaced with the higher cause of the state, the nation, humanity and all sorts of abstract concepts.

This realization of Stirner's and the period during which he realized it is not a trivial matter. Stirner's criticism applies about just as much to contemporary secularism now as it did when he wrote about it. Furthermore, the implications of what Stirner realized is more far reaching than a criticism of secular humanism, it has immense epistemological implications. Stirner effectively denied transcendentalism and rationalism long before anyone classified as a post-modernist did and he reached the conclusion of what by the very least is a strong nominalism using an egoist framework. Stirner had technically surpassed the entire enlightenment project by proclaiming that we should not be ruled by concepts. The enlightenment and secular humanist emphasis on the mind, from his perspective, was just as filled with "spooks" as religion. This is really just an extension on the phenomenology of mind.

While Stirner has been influential in one way or another on many anarchists (ranging from Benjamin Tucker to Emma Goldman) due to his rejection of the state and some of the aspects or implications of his egoism, he also rejected "morality", at least "morality with a big M", and critisized anarchists such as Proudhon for still clinging to morality. To be sure, Stirner seems to put the anarchist on a somewhat higher level because the anarchist doesn't accept the arbitrary authority of the law while the typical secular humanity or liberal still does, but he nonetheless critisized anarchism on the grounds that it still ultimately clung to a human-based morality. This is the point at which I personally start to struggle with Stirner, for while my own views on secular humanism and modern liberalism mirror his in many ways and I'm intrigued by the directions he took the phenomenology of mind, I am an ethical anarchist. That being said, the extent to which Stirner may really be an ethical nihilist is debatable.

Stirner also rejected the traditional notion of revolution, although this was actually picked up and adopted by many individualist anarchists. Certainly not all anarchists believe in violent revolution, revolution for its own sake or at least revolution in the same of a mere change of the seat of power (state-democratic revolution, if you will). So it's questionable wether this criticism should be interpreted to apply to all anarchists per se or wether the criticism is limited to anarchists. There are plenty of people who advocate violent and state-democratic revolutions who are not anarchists and most certainly only wish to change the seat of power, and there are plenty of anarchists who take either a pacifist stance or are generally not comfortable with the traditional method of revolution. If anything, Stirner's criticism could be applied as an anarchist criticism of political libertarianism.

If Proudhon is considered the first formal anarchist, Stirner is definitely the first formal egoist. To be sure, due to the implications of Stirner's phenomenology, Stirner was not an ethical egoist along the lines of Ayn Rand. There are different types of egoism, ranging from nihilist egoism to psychological egoism to ethical egoism. Nonetheless, it seems undoubtable that Stirner has been indispensibly influential on egoism in general, and he must have at least indirectly influenced Neitszche and Ayn Rand in one way or another. Whether or not Neitszche ever read Stirner (and even if he plagiarized him) is a controversy that hasn't been given a rest and has often been pushed under a rug, but I think it's rather undeniable given the historical period and academic connections that Neitszche must have read Stirner's "The Ego and His Own" at once point or another, and some studies have collected some fairly compelling evidence that he must have.

Stirner is not an easy person to classify. While he appears to very strongly oppose communism, democracy and humanism, there is no evidence to indicate that he was necessarily any more supportive of capitalism, conservatism and traditionalism. A knee-jerk response to Stirner from your average secular liberal may be to misunderstand him in such a way, but this is mostly due to cultural cliches and misunderstandings about egoism and individualism. But if anything, Stirner has surpassed all of these things from an egoist framework and as a consequence of his phenomeology. It is also possible for Stirner to be misunderstood as presenting a religious argument against atheism, but this kind of misunderstanding is only an affirmation of Stirner's criticisms of secular humanism.

The reason why Stirner has been pushed under the rug as a philosopher and figure in general, beyond the mere radicalness of his ideas by itself, largely has to do with Marx's own attempts to counter Stirner and all Marxist and post-marxist scholars more or less accepting Marx's line on Stirner. Marx obviously saw Stirner as a threat to his own project, and effectively denounced Stirner as a "petty burgouesie individualist". Very little criticism was directly aimed at Stirner's ideas, it was more of an emotional or knee-jerk reaction. The philosophical community in large part was either silent or dismissive of "The Ego and His Own". It was clearly far too radical for its time and even our time. But it's a shame that the reaction to Stirner has been to marginalize and ignore him, relegating him to a tiny little footnote in history. I highly suggest that anyone, anarchist or otherwise, read "The Ego and His Own" to challenge themselves and perhaps seek inspiration. Stirner most definitely is not irrelevant, and perhaps will become increasingly more relevant over time.

Posted by Brainpolice at 3:37 PM 2 comments