Interest in anarcho-capitalist newsgroup?
Michael A. Clem
It's been "suggested" before, but I'm seriously considering trying to
create an anarcho-capitalist newsgroup, something separate from the
regular anarchist newsgroups.
But I need to show some support for it. Looking for comments and
suggestions.
I would prefer it to be in the alt. heirarchy, and think it would be
better if it went under alt.politics. or alt.society.
So, instead of
alt.anarcho-capitalism
I would suggest either
alt.politics.anarcho-capitalism
or
alt.society.anarcho-capitalism
I realize that "anarcho-capitalism" is pretty long, but from what I've
read, I don't think that will be a big problem. If we went with "a-c",
it would be short, but not immediately obvious what kind of group it
is. But maybe that would be okay.
Comments?
Joshua Holmes
:
: It's been "suggested" before, but I'm seriously considering trying to
: create an anarcho-capitalist newsgroup, something separate from the
: regular anarchist newsgroups.
There are already numerous anarcho-capitalist and market anarchist
forums, the most popular of which is at anti-state.com.
Strike-the-root.com also has a large ancap contingent on its YaBB forum.
Only truly dedicated netkooks like myself would likely try to read a
fourth fourm in addition to those two and alt.society.anarchy. You might
be carrying coals to New castle here.
In addition, it would likely get colonized by crossposting from
a.s.a and alt.anarchism and would soon become redundant anyway.
Nevertheless, if you decide you want one, go for it.
: But I need to show some support for it. Looking for comments and
: suggestions.
: I would prefer it to be in the alt. heirarchy, and think it would be
: better if it went under alt.politics. or alt.society.
: So, instead of
:
: alt.anarcho-capitalism
:
: I would suggest either
:
: alt.politics.anarcho-capitalism
: or
: alt.society.anarcho-capitalism
alt.society.anarchy.market
alt.society.anarchy.capitalist
--
Joshua Holmes
jdho...@force.stwing.upenn.edu
He who conquers others is powerful
He who conquers himself is omnipotent.
- Lao-Tze
G*rd*n
| ...
| alt.society.anarchy.market
| alt.society.anarchy.capitalist
It's not my business, but I note that many capitalism fans,
when capitalism is criticized, say that the capitalism that's
being criticized is not the _real_ capitalism, to which the
criticizers reply that they're using the word in its historical
meaning to refer to historical facts, etc. This ambiguity
indicates the likelihood of very lengthy rhetorical excursions
into definition and usage. Which for all I know you all enjoy,
but one should be aware.
Whatever happened to alt.individualism?
--
(<><>) /*/
}"{ G*rd*n }"{ g...@panix.com }"{
{ http://www.etaoin.com | latest new material 11/14/02 <-adv't
Joshua Holmes
: Joshua Holmes <jdho...@force.stwing.upenn.edu>:
: | ...
: | alt.society.anarchy.market
: | alt.society.anarchy.capitalist
:
: It's not my business, but I note that many capitalism fans,
: when capitalism is criticized, say that the capitalism that's
: being criticized is not the _real_ capitalism, to which the
: criticizers reply that they're using the word in its historical
: meaning to refer to historical facts, etc. This ambiguity
: indicates the likelihood of very lengthy rhetorical excursions
: into definition and usage. Which for all I know you all enjoy,
: but one should be aware.
What in the world does this have to do with naming an
anarcho-capitalist newsgroup?
G*rd*n
| What in the world does this have to do with naming an
| anarcho-capitalist newsgroup?
Forget I set anything. As I said, it's not my business.
Dan Clore
Seeing that there is already an alt.anarchism.communist and
an alt.anarchism.syndicalist (and maybe an
alt.anarchism.individualist), the proper newsgroup name
would seem to be alt.anarchism.capitalist
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
All my fiction through 2001 and more. Intro by S.T. Joshi.
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord We˙rdgliffe and Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Said Smygo, the iconoclast of Zothique: "Bear a hammer with
thee always, and break down any terminus on which is
written: 'So far shalt thou pass, but no further go.'"
--Clark Ashton Smith
Michael A. Clem
>
> Forget I set anything. As I said, it's not my business.
>
Sure it is. According to what I've read about newsgroup creation, this would
be a "split" from the anarchist newsgroups, and certainly could have an impact
on them, positive or negative.
Michael A. Clem
> There are already numerous anarcho-capitalist and market anarchist
> forums, the most popular of which is at anti-state.com.
> Strike-the-root.com also has a large ancap contingent on its YaBB forum.
> Only truly dedicated netkooks like myself would likely try to read a
> fourth fourm in addition to those two and alt.society.anarchy. You might
> be carrying coals to New castle here.
Perhaps the newsgroups are on the way out, but I still prefer them to most
web-based forums.
> In addition, it would likely get colonized by crossposting from
> a.s.a and alt.anarchism and would soon become redundant anyway.
Yeah, I suppose so, but the left-anarchists would probably get a kick out of it.
>
> alt.society.anarchy.market
> alt.society.anarchy.capitalist
>
Thanks!
G*rd*n
| > Forget I set anything. As I said, it's not my business.
Michael A. Clem <mc...@vigoris.net>:
| Sure it is. According to what I've read about newsgroup creation, this would
| be a "split" from the anarchist newsgroups, and certainly could have an impact
| on them, positive or negative.
That does not make the creation of the newsgroup, or the
name it is given, my business, my bag, my turf. As far as
I'm concerned, people should create whatever newsgroups they
like and name them as they please. My suggestion was
supererogatory and I apologize for intruding. I talk too
much.
Matt
"Michael A. Clem" <mc...@vigoris.net> wrote:
> It's been "suggested" before, but I'm seriously considering trying to
> create an anarcho-capitalist newsgroup, something separate from the
> regular anarchist newsgroups.
> But I need to show some support for it. Looking for comments and
> suggestions.
If you created such a group I would subscribe and post, but I'm not sure
how much need there is for it.
Can you explain more about the purpose you have in mind for it?
If you want private discussion among anarcho-capitalists, there are
mailing lists and web sites. Even on alt.anarchism, the leftists will
generally ignore threads of specific interest to us. And if you want
debate among people with a mix of views, you can just stay here.
Another poster mentioned the problem of crossposting. Unless you create
a moderated group, there's some risk of crossposted messages deluging
your group.
And frankly, though I like USENET, I would prefer to see an expanding
web presence for anarcho-capitalists. My impression is that hardly
anyone knows about USENET, whereas you must be living in a cave if you
haven't heard of the web (and probably a number of caves are wired now).
USENET attracts the technically inclined--people who want to master all
the Net has to offer--and others who consciously seek out political
debate. But it's not linkable, so it's not as likely to draw in new
people with new ideas. Instead, we see the same debates between the
same people over and over. Although it does get tedious, I still like
it better than clunky web forums for threaded debate. It's not,
however, a great medium for promoting your ideas to the masses.
So where do you want to go with it? I don't mean to come off as
negative; I'd like to see how it turns out, and I would subscribe to it.
But mostly I'm attracted to USENET for the unregulated debate.
> I realize that "anarcho-capitalism" is pretty long, but from what I've
> read, I don't think that will be a big problem. If we went with "a-c",
> it would be short, but not immediately obvious what kind of group it
> is.
Yeah, you might have HVAC guys coming in to discuss the latest Carrier.
--
Matt
Blazin' Tommy D.
Michael A. Clem <mc...@vigoris.net> wrote in article
<3DE27D0C...@vigoris.net>...
Joseph K.
I disagree. Stay here. I read your threads and learn from you. I
wouldn't check another ng and then i'd miss your conversations.
Joseph K.
Lee Rudolph
>Joshua Holmes <jdho...@force.stwing.upenn.edu>:
>| What in the world does this have to do with naming an
>| anarcho-capitalist newsgroup?
>
>Forget I set anything. As I said, it's not my business.
*Everything* is business--if not yours, the local prokaryotes'.
Lee Rudolph
Alistair Davidson
>
> alt.society.anarchy.market
Best to avoid that, surely, if you want a /capitalist/ forum? After all,
individualist anarchy and mutualism are market anarchisms too.
--
Alistair Davidson
Prying open your third eye since 1823
Dan Clore
> Joshua Holmes wrote:
> > alt.society.anarchy.market
>
> Best to avoid that, surely, if you want a /capitalist/ forum? After all,
> individualist anarchy and mutualism are market anarchisms too.
Besides which, newsgroups terminating in "market" are for
people to place for-sale and wanted ads.
Michael A. Clem
I appreciate the comments. But having another newsgroup doesn't mean that I
(or we) couldn't still check out this one. I'm just thinking that an A-C
newsgroup would let us cover different territory than what we cover here.
Michael A. Clem
> Just post to Nazi or GOP groups
>
Somehow, I don't think that the Nazi or the Republicans would appreciate your
suggestion... ;-)
Michael A. Clem
> In article <3DE27D0C...@vigoris.net>,
> "Michael A. Clem" <mc...@vigoris.net> wrote:
>
> > It's been "suggested" before, but I'm seriously considering trying to
> > create an anarcho-capitalist newsgroup, something separate from the
> > regular anarchist newsgroups.
> > But I need to show some support for it. Looking for comments and
> > suggestions.
>
> If you created such a group I would subscribe and post, but I'm not sure
> how much need there is for it.
>
Well, that's why I started this thread, to find out how much need there is
before I go to the trouble of trying to create a newsgroup.
> Can you explain more about the purpose you have in mind for it?
>
> If you want private discussion among anarcho-capitalists, there are
> mailing lists and web sites. Even on alt.anarchism, the leftists will
> generally ignore threads of specific interest to us. And if you want
> debate among people with a mix of views, you can just stay here.
>
We too often degenerate into the same old socialism vs. capitalism arguments,
saying the same things over and over without really persuading anybody. I want
to explore different territory. But perhaps you're right, and a new newsgroup
isn't necessary for that. Perhaps we A-C'ers just haven't been starting the
right kinds of threads.
> > If we went with "a-c",
> > it would be short, but not immediately obvious what kind of group it
> > is.
>
> Yeah, you might have HVAC guys coming in to discuss the latest Carrier.
>
LOL!
Constantinople
wrote:
>In message <anonymatt-EDF26...@corp.supernews.com>, Matt wrote:
>> In article <3DE27D0C...@vigoris.net>,
>> "Michael A. Clem" <mc...@vigoris.net> wrote:
>>
>> > It's been "suggested" before, but I'm seriously considering trying to
>> > create an anarcho-capitalist newsgroup, something separate from the
>> > regular anarchist newsgroups.
>> > But I need to show some support for it. Looking for comments and
>> > suggestions.
>>
>> If you created such a group I would subscribe and post, but I'm not sure
>> how much need there is for it.
>>
>
> Well, that's why I started this thread, to find out how much need there is
>before I go to the trouble of trying to create a newsgroup.
>
>
>> Can you explain more about the purpose you have in mind for it?
>>
>> If you want private discussion among anarcho-capitalists, there are
>> mailing lists and web sites. Even on alt.anarchism, the leftists will
>> generally ignore threads of specific interest to us. And if you want
>> debate among people with a mix of views, you can just stay here.
>>
>
>We too often degenerate into the same old socialism vs. capitalism arguments,
>saying the same things over and over without really persuading anybody. I want
>to explore different territory. But perhaps you're right, and a new newsgroup
>isn't necessary for that. Perhaps we A-C'ers just haven't been starting the
>right kinds of threads.
Web sites seem a better medium for advancement of theory. Usenet is
best for attacking flawed or incomplete arguments, and that is good as
a kind of mental hygiene, like flossing between the mental teeth, but
it is not a very good medium for constructive theorizing. That's my
impression. Generally, the discussions on newgroups are between people
who disagree strongly on certain issues.
People don't really put a lot of time into Usenet discussion, and I
don't think they ever will. As always, it is a lot easier to point out
the problems or weaknesses of a person's argument than it is to build
on what someone has said. So Usenet discussion is critical rather than
cooperative. People pick at each other's arguments rather than
building on them.
The point of Usenet, as opposed to mailing lists, is that they are
especially open to contribution from all readers, and you don't have
to specifically subscribe to a thread in order to read it (because of
crossposting, which I find for the most part to be a strength rather
than a weakness, since it brings new people together into a
discussion).
Joshua Holmes
<snip>
: I appreciate the comments. But having another newsgroup doesn't mean that I
: (or we) couldn't still check out this one. I'm just thinking that an A-C
: newsgroup would let us cover different territory than what we cover here.
The webboards already cover vastly different territory than we
cover here on the anarchism newsgroups. I cannot recommend highly enough
the anti-state.com webboard. I'm no YaBB fan, but the talk and interplay
on it is usually very good. There are also a couple of free market
anarcho-communists running around the webboards as well as a fusionist or
two. It all makes for interesting interplay, and the one-sided nature
lets us discuss theory and practice more than beating the dead horse of
socialism.
My contention is, as it was in my first post to this thread, that
an ancap newsgroup will be colonized from cross-posting and be no
different from the other anarchy newsgroups. There's little threat of
that on the webboards.
Dr Wob
I think a dialog with anarcho-capitalists would serve the movement
well. I know I could learn something. Unlike other social anarchists I
do not believe we have all the answers.....
Dr. Wob
David Friedman
DrWobb...@aol.com (Dr Wob) wrote:
> I think a dialog with anarcho-capitalists would serve the movement
> well. I know I could learn something. Unlike other social anarchists I
> do not believe we have all the answers.....
Unable to resist a straight line like that ... .
Speaking as a propertarian anarchist, it seems to me that the central
anarchist problem is how to have coordination without coercion. A single
individual can't accomplish much by himself, so in order to have a
reasonably attractive society, we need some way of coordinating the
efforts of a very large number of people. To make an automobile
(supposing some people want such things, which I think likely) someone
has to mine iron ore, refine it into steel, produce rubber, .... . Run
it out a little and we are talking about millions of people to some
degree coordinating their activities.
The obvious solution to this problem is central authority--the dictator
figures out what everyone should do and hangs him if he doesn't do it.
Versions of that solution can work for very small groups, but it scales
very badly.
The view of a propertarian anarchist (aka anarcho-capitalist) is that
property and trade provide the solution to this problem. Each person
owns himself and things he has gotten without violating the rights of
others, such as things he has made or traded for. We get coordination
through market interaction, with prices providing a decentralized
signalling system to tell everyone the value to everyone else of what he
might produce, and provide an incentive to act on that value. For
details see a good price theory text (there's one webbed on my site, as
it happens).
There are lots of problems with the anarchist version of such a system
that can be raised by non-anarchists, and some of us have spent a lot of
time and effort trying to respond to them. But from the standpoint of an
anarchist, this argument suggests that property is the solution, not the
problem. So far as I can tell by lots of arguing, non-propertarian
anarchists simply don't have a solution to the coordination problem,
perhaps because many of them haven't realized that it is a problem--that
even with lots of good will, it takes more than good will to coordinate
large numbers of people, most of whom don't know each other.
Hopefully that will start the dialog you suggested.
James A. Donald
David Friedman
> Speaking as a propertarian anarchist, it seems to me that the
> central anarchist problem is how to have coordination without
> coercion. A single individual can't accomplish much by himself,
> so in order to have a reasonably attractive society, we need
> some way of coordinating the efforts of a very large number of
> people. To make an automobile (supposing some people want such
> things, which I think likely) someone has to mine iron ore,
> refine it into steel, produce rubber, .... . Run it out a
> little and we are talking about millions of people to some
> degree coordinating their activities.
>
> The obvious solution to this problem is central authority--the
> dictator figures out what everyone should do and hangs him if
> he doesn't do it. Versions of that solution can work for very
> small groups, but it scales very badly.
>
> The view of a propertarian anarchist (aka anarcho-capitalist)
> is that property and trade provide the solution to this
> problem. Each person owns himself and things he has gotten
> without violating the rights of others, such as things he has
> made or traded for. We get coordination through market
> interaction, with prices providing a decentralized signalling
> system to tell everyone the value to everyone else of what he
> might produce, and provide an incentive to act on that value.
>
> [...] So far as I can tell by lots of arguing, non-propertarian
> problem, perhaps because many of them haven't realized that it
> is a problem--that even with lots of good will, it takes more
> than good will to coordinate large numbers of people, most of
> whom don't know each other.
Your account of non propertarian anarchists may well have been
largely true before 1936, but it appears to me that since 1938
their solution is committees, delegates, votes, and a pyramidal
structure of committees, except of course it would be quite
unlike the Soviet Union because the Chairman of the Central
Committee would be a really nice guy. :-)
Hence the absence of dialog.
See the thread
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=38f2bab4...@nntp1.ba.best.com
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=F6mZ3DAs...@libertaria.demon.co.uk
for a conversation with one such "anarchist".
Still, if non propertarian anarchists are indeed unaware of the
coordination problem, or have a better solution for it than the
ones tried in 1936, perhaps they will say so in this thread.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
4OxHEu+T+qSnatEEPt3S6k9DvsbW9L2vdLJVph3x
4LMGdVwpuCEJ34cQK0OMdgb5KrGqytXAokFXe2SLP
Dr Wob
> In article <7e45bbe1.02112...@posting.google.com>,
> DrWobb...@aol.com (Dr Wob) wrote:
>
> > I think a dialog with anarcho-capitalists would serve the movement
> > well
>
It is great to have atracted such direct and succinct comments
when we anarchosyndicalists have been so antagonidtic.
> Speaking as a propertarian anarchist, it seems to me that the central
> anarchist problem is how to have coordination without coercion. A single
> individual can't accomplish much by himself, so in order to have a
> reasonably attractive society, we need some way of coordinating the
> efforts of a very large number of people. To make an automobile
> (supposing some people want such things, which I think likely) someone
> has to mine iron ore, refine it into steel, produce rubber, .... . Run
> it out a little and we are talking about millions of people to some
> degree coordinating their activities.
Many anarchists, including me, have trouble accepting the contention
that
capitulating to a capitalist economic system could really allow
uncoerced
coordination of activity. But I am willing to accept that a market
orientation
which tolerates boycotts and strikes without physical coercion would
be a vast
improvement over state socialism OR state capitalism.
> The obvious solution to this problem is central authority--the dictator
> figures out what everyone should do and hangs him if he doesn't do it.
> Versions of that solution can work for very small groups, but it scales
> very badly.
That seems true in the statist context but what if the authority were
intellectual and scientific rather than purely ideological and
momopolistic?
>We get coordination
> through market interaction, with prices providing a decentralized
> signalling system to tell everyone the value to everyone else of what he
> might produce, and provide an incentive to act on that value. For
> details see a good price theory text (there's one webbed on my site, as
> it happens).
Accepting wages as "prices" is difficult for anarchosyndicalists and
many other anarchists as well but I see your point. For me
anarchosyndicalists have articulated a position that is potentially
compatible with markets. It is just that we do not see ourselves and
our labor as a commodity. But surely propertarian anarchists can
appreciate that. The basis of our dialog could be a humanist
concession that wages are labor prices BUT in a less dogmatic
conception that acknowledges worker dignity.
Dr. Wob
Dr Wob
> > [...] So far as I can tell by lots of arguing, non-propertarian
> > anarchists simply don't have a solution to the coordination
> > problem, perhaps because many of them haven't realized that it
> > is a problem--that even with lots of good will, it takes more
> > than good will to coordinate large numbers of people, most of
> > whom don't know each other.
>
> Your account of non propertarian anarchists may well have been
> largely true before 1936, but it appears to me that since 1938
> their solution is committees, delegates, votes, and a pyramidal
> structure of committees, except of course it would be quite
> unlike the Soviet Union because the Chairman of the Central
> Committee would be a really nice guy. :-)
>
> Hence the absence of dialog.
>
legitimate guarantee for anarchist success. Fundamental analysis of
primate
behaviour would assure any real anarchist that it could not. If the
founding population of Homo sapiens sapiens were similar to the !Kung!
Bushmen, as suggested by glottochronology ,then it might seem possible
for "nice guys" to work for anatchist success.. But as Dr. Friedman
suggests larger groups would not work with such charismatic
individuals (even Jimmy Stevens on Espiritu Santo)! Duch "Big Men"
eventually lead to tribal chiefdoms and the States eventually. Perhaps
the splitting of a market society under anarchist influence
could prevent such transitions toward centralization.
Dr. Wob
Bauknin
In article <ddfr-904670.2...@sea-read.news.verio.net>, David Friedman
<dd...@daviddfriedman.com> wrote:
Excellent. -Doug
James A. Donald
> > The obvious solution to this problem is central authority--the dictator
> > figures out what everyone should do and hangs him if he doesn't do it.
> > Versions of that solution can work for very small groups, but it scales
> > very badly.
Dr Wob:
> That seems true in the statist context but what if the authority were
> intellectual and scientific rather than purely ideological and
> momopolistic?
Or to say the same thing in different words, what if the authority
were intellectuals, intellectuals, as wise, good, and benevolent as
yourself, and these intellectuals decided on rational, scientific, and
objective grounds, what one man shall produce and another man consume.
Would not the enlightened masses gladly obey?
Well no they would not. :-) The masses would be so terribly selfish
and ungrateful that you would have to shoot quite a few of them, and
send lots of others to slave labor camps, in order to get them to
produce what they scientifically and obectively should produce, and
restrain them from consuming what they scientifically and objectively
should refrain from consuming. How very nasty, selfish and
destructive of them :-)
My words above were irony and sarcasm. I will now speak plainly. Men
have different and conflicting purposes. Not all purposes can be
carried out. One man cannot scientifically and objectively decide for
another. Those who seek to do so, those who seek rational,
scientific, and objective planning of production and consumption, seek
a world of slaves and masters, of slavery and terror, of violence,
fear and degradation.
The knowledge problem that Mises points out means that this planner's
plan will ignore the desires and knowledge of individuals, and crush
them, and their hopes and dreams. The knowledge necessary for
economic planning cannot be centralized. The moral problems that
Hayek points out means that these planners will find themselves
committing dreadful crimes, and will soon come to rationalize and
justify those crimes.
The better the intentions of those would be scientific planners of
production and consumption, the more evil their deeds. Pol Pot was a
saint, and had a sound economic argument that collectively planned
agriculture would be much more productive than private agriculture,
since Cambodian rice production was on a flood plain, and upstream
rice growing and water management had large effects on downstream
rice. He committed worse deeds because he had a stronger moral,
scientific and economic case than other socialists, which made him
implement socialism more vigorously, and led him to face less
resistance.
> For me
> anarchosyndicalists have articulated a position that is potentially
> compatible with markets.
The original anarcho syndicalists would prohibit competition, as did
those in Catalonia who called themselves anarcho syndicalists.
Without competition, one has regulated monopolies and enforced
cartels, not markets, just as in "national syndicalism", better known
as fascism. In practice, the regulated monpolies that the
"anarchists" regulated were depressingly similar in their violence and
repression against workers and consumers to the regulated monopolies
and enforced cartels that the fascists regulated.
Real competition means and requires that each must be free to try his
own plan, and win or fail. For there to be competition, there must be
separate plans. Property rights in the means of production are the
boundaries between one man's plan and another man's plan. Competition
thus requires private property in the means of production, which means
some people get to make larger plans than others -- and that those
whose plans are consistently successful tend to be among those who
make large plans than others.
G*rd*n
| > I think a dialog with anarcho-capitalists would serve the movement
| > well. I know I could learn something. Unlike other social anarchists I
| > do not believe we have all the answers.....
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.com>:
The problem with property is this: Property is power over
things, a social relation, and usually over other people,
either directly or through things, another social relation.
Where wide differences in power exist, the will of the powerful
overrides the will of the powerless, and war results as the
powerless try to work their will (as they must, being willful
organisms) and the powerful resist them in the interest of
retaining their power. In order to most securely and efficiently
retain their advantage, it is expedient, even necessary, for
the powerful to combine in a disciplined organization, by
means of which they may regulate the community in defense of
their interests. This organization is the State and its main
business is war, either literal war as the ruling class of
a particular state seeks to defend and extend its powers, or
the frozen war of class stratification and oppression.
Because the social relations of the community are now imbued
with class war, other fault-lines of conflict and oppression
open up, like sexism, racism, caste, and so forth. The
culture of the community is also subjugated and made to
serve ruling-class interests: power, authority, private
wealth, high status and the military virtues are glorified.
A highly successful mass-murderer is adulated as a "great
man".
This is what we observe today and in history for the last
several thousand years. However, a new element has been
added in the last few centuries to this depressing picture:
rapid technological progress. Because most human society
is based on war, new technology is applied to weapons and
the weapons are used in ever more destructive ways. I
probably do not need to go into any detail about this,
since we live in a time when a handful of fanatics would
kill 3000 people with a couple of airplanes, whole cities
have disappeared in a single explosion, and the practice of
exterminating large populations has been successfully
industrialized.
Before people can worry about high-level coordination, they
must first survive and secure their freedom. Property, at
least as generally conceived of under liberalism, does not
accomplish these purposes. Therefore, some other fundamental
principles of social organization are required, radical
principles at odds with the State. Those principles are
peace, freedom and equality. There is no logical,
instrinsic reason why peaceful, free, equal beings cannot
organize themselves into systems of any complexity, but a
simple recipe can't be given for how to do it because humans
have lived for so long under slavery that they have
forgotten almost everything else. It is something we have
to learn by doing from the ground up. However, as I say, it
is first necessary for us to survive, and that means, at the
moment, acting to halt the rush of the State towards the next
war and the war after that and abyss of destruction in general,
and establishing non-coercive relations and institutions at
the most basic levels.
Sage
> Seeing that there is already an alt.anarchism.communist and
> an alt.anarchism.syndicalist (and maybe an
> alt.anarchism.individualist), the proper newsgroup name
> would seem to be alt.anarchism.capitalist
That sounds about right to me.
If this gets off the ground would people PLEASE not cross-post, but
leave your discussion in the appropriate subcategory?
It would be nice to get "anarcho-capitalist" discussions tidied away
somewhere, so real anarchist dicussions can occur here. I would visit
from time to time to see what's going on.
Sage
David Friedman
A saint said "Let the perfect city rise.
Here needs no long debate on subtleties,
Means, end,
Let us intend
That all be clothed and fed; while one remains
Hungry our quarreling but mocks his pains.
So all will labor to the good
In one phalanx of brotherhood."
A man cried out "I know the truth, I, I,
Perfect and whole. He who denies
My vision is a madman or a fool
Or seeks some base advantage in his lies.
All peoples are a tool that fits my hand
Cutting you each and all
Into my plan."
They were one man.
Michael A. Clem
wrote:
> In article <7e45bbe1.02112...@posting.google.com>,
> DrWobb...@aol.com (Dr Wob) wrote:
>
> > I think a dialog with anarcho-capitalists would serve the movement
> > well. I know I could learn something. Unlike other social anarchists I
> > do not believe we have all the answers.....
>
> Unable to resist a straight line like that ... .
>
> Speaking as a propertarian anarchist, it seems to me that the central
> anarchist problem is how to have coordination without coercion.
<snip>
> Hopefully that will start the dialog you suggested.
>
With all due respect, I don't see how this kind of opening won't simply
degenerate into the socialist vs. capitalist argument, if it continues.
And as important as the question of coordination is, I think the larger
question is this: How can we move from our current society to one that has no
government or state?
This is a question that anarchists of all stripes could discuss. And while
the differing views may call for differing strategies and tactics, I would
think that there will be at least some elements in common that all anarchists
could support.
Also note that the coordination question is subsumed under my question,
because it obviously must be dealt with to achieve a society without a state or
government.
Blazin' Tommy D.
It sounds like a lot of unnecessary toil to me
Are you one of those flagellates, trodding down the path of toil whipping
themselves on the back?
What is all of this economic determinism?
If you wont to be rich then join the GOP and beg them for some trickle down
It seems to me that practically any form of government could provide
subsistence to a population and if capitalism is not dependent upon
wrongful exploitation then let there be capitalism too. The problems begin
when capitalists or pseudo capitalists start whining about slackers, &c.
and the government goes around attempting to force us into military service
or Burger King uniforms. We're slackers?! Hey too fucking bad. So then the
response is one of the following (1) okay let them have subsistence or (2)
no, it's not right, but we need more police to protect us from them.
Emmerich de Vattel states in his Law of Nations Chitty Ed. (circa 1863) I
Vattel c. ii, § 15:
"The end or object of civil society is to procure for the citizens whatever
they stand in need of for the necessities, the conveniences, the
accommodations of life, and, in general, whatever constitutes happiness,
-with the peaceful possession of property, a method of obtaining justice
with security, and, finally, a mutual defence against all external
violence"
The private sector will never do this and has no intention of doing it and
Conservatives prevent the government from doing it. Know the reality first
before joining sides.
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.com> wrote in article
<ddfr-904670.2...@sea-read.news.verio.net>...
Blazin' Tommy D.
G*rd*n <g...@panix.com> wrote in article <asda0t$qjj$1...@panix2.panix.com>...
Matt
<mc...@vigoris.net> wrote:
> In message <ddfr-904670.2...@sea-read.news.verio.net>, David
> Friedman
> wrote:
> > In article <7e45bbe1.02112...@posting.google.com>,
> > DrWobb...@aol.com (Dr Wob) wrote:
> >
> > > I think a dialog with anarcho-capitalists would serve the movement
> > > well. I know I could learn something. Unlike other social anarchists I
> > > do not believe we have all the answers.....
> >
> > Unable to resist a straight line like that ... .
> >
> > Speaking as a propertarian anarchist, it seems to me that the central
> > anarchist problem is how to have coordination without coercion.
>
> <snip>
>
> > Hopefully that will start the dialog you suggested.
> >
>
> With all due respect, I don't see how this kind of opening won't simply
> degenerate into the socialist vs. capitalist argument, if it continues.
That's probably inevitable, considering that economics is the major
point of disagreement between socialist and capitalist anarchists.
> And as important as the question of coordination is, I think the larger
> question is this: How can we move from our current society to one that has no
> government or state?
> This is a question that anarchists of all stripes could discuss. And while
> the differing views may call for differing strategies and tactics, I would
> think that there will be at least some elements in common that all anarchists
> could support.
> Also note that the coordination question is subsumed under my question,
> because it obviously must be dealt with to achieve a society without a state or
> government.
How different anarchists answer the coordination question will affect
how they hope to move our current society to an anarchist one.
For example, anarcho-capitalists will naturally contend the government
should privatize its programs and cut its subsidies.
Anarcho-socialists, by contrast, will argue for their vision of a more
democratic government (sometimes this translates to "a government that
does what they want it to"). Chomksy, for instance, argues in favor of
"big government" that could be broken up at some distant point in the
future. Hence, I don't think you will find much common ground on this
subject. Our differing economic views are just too fundamental.
For common ground I would look instead toward issues on which we do not
have such fundamental differences, like war, civil liberties, corporate
welfare, and the separation of church and state.
Another interesting topic where some of us may find common ground is
intellectual property. Some libertarians defend it but others don't,
and I haven't noticed a consensus among anarcho-capitalists on the
subject. At the very least, anarchists of all stripes should be wary
of the entertainment industry's efforts to have the goverment regulate
and control personal computers in its favor.
William Newman
> The problem with property is this: Property is power over
> things, a social relation, and usually over other people,
> either directly or through things, another social relation.
There are some kinds of power over things which are hard to
get away from. We can't build a house on, raise corn on, preserve
wetlands on, and stripmine the same square meter of land simultaneously.
It seems as though there needs to be some procedure to decide
which is which. In any system, then,
where people disagree over what to do,
then, won't *something* have power over them?
There are lots of other property rights that people have cooked
up that are less fundamental. There's no particular reason that
only people who have inherited citizenship can have a right to enter
into employment relationships with willing employers in the US,
or that only Amazon's licensees are allowed to implement one-click
shopping systems, or that people need to be able to buy and sell
people of the wrong skin color, or that governments need to be able
to force their subjects to work and use lethal force to stop them
from escaping. All those "rights" could vanish and leave no problem
behind.
But two people can't wear the same shirt, and if one person wants
to smelt lead it may destroy the ability of someone else to raise
orchids nearby. We can either punt, and let them both try to do it,
in which case they have a disorganized sort of power over each other
by the way their activities interfere; or we can have some sort of
decision procedure to decide which things are possible; or what?
> Therefore, some other fundamental
> principles of social organization are required, radical
> principles at odds with the State. Those principles are
> peace, freedom and equality. There is no logical,
> instrinsic reason why peaceful, free, equal beings cannot
> organize themselves into systems of any complexity, but a
> simple recipe can't be given for how to do it because humans
> have lived for so long under slavery that they have
> forgotten almost everything else.
Would you like to make your rhetoric more specific? Does it
apply to software complexity as well as economic complexity?
Would you say that there is no reason why computer programmers
cannot organize systems of any complexity? If not, what is
different about economics?
We've accumulated quite a bit of experience in complexity
in software in the last forty-five years or so. From my reading
and from my personal experience, complexity in computer software
is almost always vastly underestimated by people, even by very
smart people, until they actually try it. And many techniques
have been worked out over the years to construct software
systems without bogging down too badly in bottlenecks like
(1a) everyone on the project needing to have a detailed
understanding of the entire project, or even (1b) any
single person on the project needing to have a detailed
understanding of the whole project, or even (1c) any significant
number of things needing to be worked out in a meeting of
representatives who among them understand each detail of the project;
and (2) everyone needing to come to consensus on how to do things.
Some of these techniques are quickly reinvented whenever people
notice they need them, but others took a long time to develop, and
some of them not only took a long time to develop but, now that
they've been developed, even take a long time to teach.
What makes you think that the confidence of smart technocrats
that they could just make things work in the economy if they just
controlled it better-placed than the confidence of programmers? (Or
perhaps a better comparison: the confidence of nonprogrammers
anticipating that programming will be easy...)
Jack Black
>
> The problem with property is this: Property is power over
> things, a social relation, and usually over other people,
> either directly or through things, another social relation.
> Where wide differences in power exist, the will of the powerful
> overrides the will of the powerless, and war results as the
> powerless try to work their will (as they must, being willful
> organisms) and the powerful resist them in the interest of
> retaining their power. In order to most securely and efficiently
> retain their advantage, it is expedient, even necessary, for
> the powerful to combine in a disciplined organization, by
> means of which they may regulate the community in defense of
> their interests. This organization is the State and its main
> business is war, either literal war as the ruling class of
> a particular state seeks to defend and extend its powers, or
> the frozen war of class stratification and oppression.
> Because the social relations of the community are now imbued
> with class war, other fault-lines of conflict and oppression
> open up, like sexism, racism, caste, and so forth. The
> culture of the community is also subjugated and made to
> serve ruling-class interests: power, authority, private
> wealth, high status and the military virtues are glorified.
> A highly successful mass-murderer is adulated as a "great
> man".
Class is a fluid construct. Mark Twain won (and lost) several
fortunes in his lifetime. Individualism is a better basis for
analysis than class (and less pernicious.)
> This is what we observe today and in history for the last
> several thousand years. However, a new element has been
> added in the last few centuries to this depressing picture:
> rapid technological progress. Because most human society
> is based on war, new technology is applied to weapons and
> the weapons are used in ever more destructive ways. I
> probably do not need to go into any detail about this,
> since we live in a time when a handful of fanatics would
> kill 3000 people with a couple of airplanes, whole cities
> have disappeared in a single explosion, and the practice of
> exterminating large populations has been successfully
> industrialized.
Mass murder does not industrialization require. The folks in
Rwanda managed their mayhem with little more than rude farm
implements (see Gourevitch in '98 for the details.)
> Before people can worry about high-level coordination, they
> must first survive and secure their freedom. Property, at
> least as generally conceived of under liberalism, does not
> accomplish these purposes. Therefore, some other fundamental
> principles of social organization are required, radical
> principles at odds with the State. Those principles are
> peace, freedom and equality. There is no logical,
> instrinsic reason why peaceful, free, equal beings cannot
> organize themselves into systems of any complexity, but a
> simple recipe can't be given for how to do it because humans
> have lived for so long under slavery that they have
> forgotten almost everything else. It is something we have
> to learn by doing from the ground up. However, as I say, it
> is first necessary for us to survive, and that means, at the
> moment, acting to halt the rush of the State towards the next
> war and the war after that and abyss of destruction in general,
> and establishing non-coercive relations and institutions at
> the most basic levels.
The principle of private property does not prevent pinko
participation in co-ops, credit unions and communes. If you
want to be a communicant at Twin Oaks, knock yourself out.
G*rd*n
Jack Black <jack...@myself.com>:
| ...
| Class is a fluid construct. Mark Twain won (and lost) several
| fortunes in his lifetime. Individualism is a better basis for
| analysis than class (and less pernicious.)
One does not preclude the other. In the case I was describing,
however, the necessity for those with advantages to band
together to protect what they have against those who have not
is obvious, and has resulted in the construction of group
enterprises which I call collectively "the State". I think
_class_ is a useful concept for analyzing this behavior.
Class boundaries can be overt, rigid and impermeable, but
they can also be amorphous, fluid and porous without vitiating
the applicability of the concept. All we require are a group
of actors with advantages and a desire to protect them, and
of course the phenomena which are supposed to result from
the actors and their desires. And these we observe.
G*rd*n:
| > ... [T]he practice of
| > exterminating large populations has been successfully
| > industrialized.
Jack Black <jack...@myself.com>:
| Mass murder does not industrialization require. The folks in
| Rwanda managed their mayhem with little more than rude farm
| implements (see Gourevitch in '98 for the details.)
Radio. Mass communication was also an important factor in
the rise of European fascism, which provided the political
basis for the great advances in industrializing mass murder
made in the 20th century.
There is another sense in which mass killing has been
industrialized, the famines brought about by State policy in
Ireland, India, China, the Soviet Union and Cambodia (among
others). In all these cases, the political technology of
State power had to be advanced to the point where people could
be prevented from feeding themselves over a wide area for a
long time for political reasons. I think this required the
the aforesaid mass communications, and also the ability to
move troops and police over long distances and wide areas
efficiently -- industrialized transportation.
G*rd*n:
| > Before people can worry about high-level coordination, they
| > must first survive and secure their freedom. Property, at
| > least as generally conceived of under liberalism, does not
| > accomplish these purposes. Therefore, some other fundamental
| > principles of social organization are required, radical
| > principles at odds with the State. Those principles are
| > peace, freedom and equality. There is no logical,
| > instrinsic reason why peaceful, free, equal beings cannot
| > organize themselves into systems of any complexity, but a
| > simple recipe can't be given for how to do it because humans
| > have lived for so long under slavery that they have
| > forgotten almost everything else. It is something we have
| > to learn by doing from the ground up. However, as I say, it
| > is first necessary for us to survive, and that means, at the
| > moment, acting to halt the rush of the State towards the next
| > war and the war after that and abyss of destruction in general,
| > and establishing non-coercive relations and institutions at
| > the most basic levels.
Jack Black <jack...@myself.com>:
| The principle of private property does not prevent pinko
| participation in co-ops, credit unions and communes. If you
| want to be a communicant at Twin Oaks, knock yourself out.
I am always happy when liberals tell me I am free to join a
commune or cooperative; as you can imagine, I almost hold my
breath in suspense as to whether this permission may be granted,
even though I know already that liberalism's goodness, like
God's, is already promised. However, there are other problems
with liberalism, such as its tendency to develop plutocracy
and to engage in police-state practices at home and imperial
war abroad, which need to be dealt with somehow. The dog of
liberalism constantly returns to its feudal vomit; a habit
which is becoming dangerous as well as tiresome.
G*rd*n
| > things, a social relation, and usually over other people,
| > either directly or through things, another social relation.
william...@airmail.net (William Newman):
| There are some kinds of power over things which are hard to
| get away from. We can't build a house on, raise corn on, preserve
| wetlands on, and stripmine the same square meter of land simultaneously.
| It seems as though there needs to be some procedure to decide
| which is which. In any system, then,
| where people disagree over what to do,
| then, won't *something* have power over them?
|
| There are lots of other property rights that people have cooked
| up that are less fundamental. There's no particular reason that
| only people who have inherited citizenship can have a right to enter
| into employment relationships with willing employers in the US,
| or that only Amazon's licensees are allowed to implement one-click
| shopping systems, or that people need to be able to buy and sell
| people of the wrong skin color, or that governments need to be able
| to force their subjects to work and use lethal force to stop them
| from escaping. All those "rights" could vanish and leave no problem
| behind.
|
| But two people can't wear the same shirt, and if one person wants
| to smelt lead it may destroy the ability of someone else to raise
| orchids nearby. We can either punt, and let them both try to do it,
| in which case they have a disorganized sort of power over each other
| by the way their activities interfere; or we can have some sort of
| decision procedure to decide which things are possible; or what?
I'm not arguing that all rules and customs of possession
must be abolished; I'm arguing that the (liberal) principle
of property is not one on which a politics of anarchy, that
is, freedom, peace and equality, can be based. Property of
that sort is easily turned into a means of domination and
oppression, as we observe just about everywhere.
g...@panix.com (G*rd*n):
| > Therefore, some other fundamental
| > principles of social organization are required, radical
| > principles at odds with the State. Those principles are
| > peace, freedom and equality. There is no logical,
| > instrinsic reason why peaceful, free, equal beings cannot
| > organize themselves into systems of any complexity, but a
| > simple recipe can't be given for how to do it because humans
| > have lived for so long under slavery that they have
| > forgotten almost everything else.
william...@airmail.net (William Newman):
I suppose that Linux and the entourage of software which now
accompanies it, which I admit has certain serious faults and
omissions, is nevertheless a fairly complex working system
which has been constructed without a political command structure
governing the people who have worked on it. Many of the
problems with large-scale complexity in computer software have
been seriously exacerbated by strategies related to secrecy,
fraud, market domination -- that is, authoritarianism -- for
which I'll give as examples many of the past and present
behaviors of IBM, Netscape, and Microsoft in particular,
although others played the same game. (A common characteristic
of private proprietary development has been adherence to
strategies to lock in users and lock out competitors, to the
disadvantage of the users and the short-term advantage of the
developers. This has usually resulted in a wasteful melange
of incompatible protocols and APIs, all of which have to be
redone when the situation becomes intolerably inefficient.
This is exactly what we would expect from the authoritarian
structure of these companies.)
The fact that people outside the programming craft often
misestimate its complexity and difficulty is partly the fault
of its practitioners, who often do the same thing; I myself
have been at fault in this regard -- once a problem and its
solution are understood conceptually, one forgets to think of
or mention the large amount of detail work which will be
require to actually produce the solution in a useful form.
As for economic complexity in general, though, as I said
above, while we don't know that we can't construct very large
systems on a noncoercive basis, we don't know explicitly how
to do it. That would have to be learned or re-learned in the
form of coordinated action and theoretical development, praxis
for short. I think we have enough theory and experience for
the next immediate steps, if anyone wants to take them.
It is true, of course, that for some as yet unperceived reason,
it may be impossible to anarchistically develop and maintain
such features of the modern world as large airlines with
regular intercontintental service. In that case it might
become necessary to decide between large airlines and peace,
freedom and equality. But I don't see this as a present
problem.
William Newman
And what I was trying to say is that whether you call it liberal
property or not, whatever mechanism of control you use to keep someone
from stripmining a plot of land the day after someone else tills
and sows, or to keep ecoradicals from spiking trees where it has
been decided that housing will be built, or whatever, not property
but something else, still it is likely to have the property that it
gives some people the power to stop other people from doing things.
I'm worried, therefore, that it could be used to be means of
domination and oppression too, since as far as I can see, stopping
other people from doing things is a very good building block for
systems of domination and oppression.
Without knowing anything else about your proposed replacement for
property rights, it's hard to guess whether the people subject to
it would be at risk of it being turned into a means of domination
and oppression. But it has happened several times in living memory
that wholesale replacement of private property rights by other
systems, in the name of removing oppression, was accompanied by
appallingly high levels of oppression of its own. It's not just
an academic, theoretical concern on my part that there might be
such a design flaw in your replacement system too.
What is it about property of that sort which can easily be turned
into a means of domination and oppression, which doesn't appear
in property of your sort?
> g...@panix.com (G*rd*n):
> | What makes you think that the confidence of smart technocrats
> | that they could just make things work in the economy if they just
> | controlled it better-placed than the confidence of programmers? (Or
> | perhaps a better comparison: the confidence of nonprogrammers
> | anticipating that programming will be easy...)
>
> I suppose that Linux and the entourage of software which now
> accompanies it, which I admit has certain serious faults and
> omissions, is nevertheless a fairly complex working system
> which has been constructed without a political command structure
> governing the people who have worked on it.
My point was not that you need a command structure in order to construct
complex software. In fact, I run a free software project myself (sbcl.sf.net)
and though it's substantially smaller than Linux, it's still quite
complex. I realize that volunteers can accomplish an enormous amount.
(And "I run" it not as a commander, but mostly in the sense that I
end up signing off on what software goes into the package, with most
of the work strongly self-directed. So in many ways I run it the way
an editor runs a scientific journal, not the way that Kelly Johnson ran
the SR-71 project.)
My point was that complexity is hard to manage, period. We can design
things as complicated as operating systems and optimizing compilers
relatively routinely these days. Whether the construction was done
by a commercial concern or volunteers or academics or whatever,
it works often enough that no one is flabbergasted when it works (and
it fails often enough that no one is surprised then either). But it
seems to me that we don't know how -- using volunteers, hierarchies,
or whatever -- to design or analyze things enormously more complicated
than that, or even ten times more complicated than that.
People are now slapping together clusters of computers with processing
power approaching the human brain. Typically they use them to run
essentially identical software on each box. For example, each
box might use the same simulation software to model the behavior
of the weather in a different 100 square kilometers of the Earth's
surface. That works. But no one has a clue how to write
software so complex that it would squeeze the most out of all that
computing power, running different hand-crafted stuff on each
processor in order to optimize performance on whatever horrendously
complicated problem you were using it to solve. Someone could give
me a budget of a trillion dollars a month for the next few years,
and if I just used human programmers, there's simply no
way I would end up with software capable of driving such hardware
to the limit of its capacity for solving problems with a less
uniform structure. Most likely my best bet would be to try to build
software which can learn, then let it learn, and then more or less
ask it how to build its replacement. And that might actually
be manageable, since the blueprint for the brain seems to be only
a few megabytes. But short of building a computer smarter than we are,
and then asking it, no one has a clue how to build a highly-integrated
custom 10-terabyte software system, or anything like it.
We don't know how complicated it is to run a modern economy,
because no one has ever done it explicitly nearly as well as we've
managed to do implicitly. We've set up the ground rules between units
and let people run the units themselves, and gotten adequate
results. But we have various good reasons to believe that our adequate
results are far from the hypothetical optimum you could reach if you
had an omniscient infinitely smart perfectly benign director to
run everything. As a programmer who on a 100,000+-line software
system, much of which is an optimizing compiler, as a hobby, my
guess is that doing a good job of running the economy explicitly -- by
just wading right in there and making decisions about who does what
and what goes where, so that things work at least as well as they
did before you gave up the implicit control rulesetting approach and
went for unprincipled micromanagement -- looks vastly more complicated
than hand-crafting an optimizing compiler. And few projects
even one order of magnitude more complicated than hand-crafting an
optimizing compiler have been done successfully, and many somewhat
simpler projects have been cancelled because they turned out
to be much more complicated and unwieldy than people had realized
before they started.
What does seem to work adequately well in running economies is
to design the ground rules between units correctly. I think that's
vaguely analogous to working out the rules that different pieces of
software on your computer will follow to interact with the operating
system and to interact with each other. People are smart enough to
design that, and then let individual application designers work out
ways to get things done within the rules. One design process creates
the ground rules specifying how things like a device driver or an
application process or whatever is to behave, and then lots of
other organizations make device drivers and application software
that lives within the rules. So far, however, it appears
to me that "nobody" -- a sort of generalized "nobody". meaning not
just no one person but also no organization that we know how to
construct -- is nearly smart enough to just bypass all the silly
modularization restrictions and unnecessary generality and stuff
involved in designing an operating system without seeing the details
of all the application, and instead just write The Mother Of
All Software that does all the major things people use X86 laptops
for: spreadsheets, typesetting, Xray tomography, internet
telephony, family photo albums, backups, airdrop logistics for
the Marines, etc. -- and do them in a nice integrated way taking
advantage of all the engineering synergies you could get by
sharing implementation stuff between them. *That's* the kind of
complexity I meant: not "it takes a corporation to make an
operating system," but "IBM can't do this and neither can anyone else".
> The fact that people outside the programming craft often
> misestimate its complexity and difficulty is partly the fault
> of its practitioners, who often do the same thing; I myself
> have been at fault in this regard -- once a problem and its
> solution are understood conceptually, one forgets to think of
> or mention the large amount of detail work which will be
> require to actually produce the solution in a useful form.
But it also seems to have blindsided people over and over and over
before any such problems were understood, and before there were many
practitioners to mislead people. I was recently reading about the
history of automated theorem proving, Previously I knew about
computer gameplaying (e.g. in chess) and the history of multiuser operating
systems and some other things. What you're talking about, the problem of
forgetting to mention what one already understands, sounds to me like the
Oracle or UNIX or F16 control software design teams saying "well, it was
actually not *that* complicated, fundamentally". What I'm referring
to is how people in the 1950s and early 1960s, with the software crisis
barreling toward them full tilt, seldom having any realization about how
much of the design cost of products would come to be software, or how
many projects would end up being completely cancelled because
the software turned out to be an unfinishable monster even though the
project had seemed manageable before it was tried.
> It is true, of course, that for some as yet unperceived reason,
> it may be impossible to anarchistically develop and maintain
> such features of the modern world as large airlines with
> regular intercontintental service. In that case it might
> become necessary to decide between large airlines and peace,
> freedom and equality. But I don't see this as a present
> problem.
In computer software, it seems to be quite difficult to develop
and maintain games anarchistically. Lots of software people love
to play something as clever and polished as Doom or Civilization
or Diablo or The Sims, but as far as I know nothing comparable
has been developed by software volunteers. The closest approaches
I'm aware of are free modules for Doom-like games, especially for
Doom itself; and free clones of games like Civilization. And they're
not all that close. It's not like the situation with Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD
and the GNU tools, where the free version is better than a lot of
commercial systems. In games, no commercial developers are embarrassed
by the free versions.
I don't think anyone would have predicted that pattern in 1974,
and I don't see any reason why analogous predictions about ordinary
(non-software) voluntary economics would be easier. So I suspect
you might find, if you tried to do everything in a voluntary, anything
goes coercion-free way, that the failures were in projects which
you had thought of as less difficult. Many people, including me, were
stunned by what was accomplished in Linux. I would have been much
less stunned by a free Doom. Even in retrospect, having looked at
the code for both, Linux and GCC seem clearly technically harder.
But Doom seems to be sociologically harder for volunteer organizations.
Go figure...
Michael Price
news:arun2h$ci5$1...@panix3.panix.com...
> G*rd*n wrote:
> | > Forget I set anything. As I said, it's not my business.
>
> Michael A. Clem <mc...@vigoris.net>:
> | Sure it is. According to what I've read about newsgroup creation, this
would
> | be a "split" from the anarchist newsgroups, and certainly could have an
impact
> | on them, positive or negative.
>
> That does not make the creation of the newsgroup, or the
> name it is given, my business, my bag, my turf. As far as
> I'm concerned, people should create whatever newsgroups they
> like and name them as they please. My suggestion was
> supererogatory and I apologize for intruding. I talk too
> much.]
You would almost certainly be present on the newsgroup so
you have as much right to comment on it as anyone else. More
since you talk too much and would therefore be more active
than others. :>
Michael Price
You have power over the things you socialise with?
> and usually over other people,
> either directly or through things, another social relation.
> Where wide differences in power exist, the will of the powerful
> overrides the will of the powerless,
How does it do this? The powerful can't command people to
do things they want under capitalism. The fact that some people
can persuade better than others is a feature of all systems, not just
capitalism.
> and war results as the
> powerless try to work their will (as they must, being willful
> organisms) and the powerful resist them in the interest of
> retaining their power.
The problem is that this never happens under capitalism. The
powerless people in capitalism would have to be those with
nothing worth trading. Such people are not a threat to the
average chess club let alone "the powerful" and so confrontations
with violence would be absurd.
> In order to most securely and efficiently
> retain their advantage, it is expedient, even necessary, for
> the powerful to combine in a disciplined organization, by
> means of which they may regulate the community in defense of
> their interests.
This would only be true if the powerful all had the same interests.
Thousands of different lobbyists in Washington alone prove they don't.
> This organization is the State and its main
> business is war, either literal war as the ruling class of
> a particular state seeks to defend and extend its powers, or
> the frozen war of class stratification and oppression.
The State does not stratify people in capitalism. They are free to
move from class to class. To the extent that the State does prevent
you changing your economic status and role it is not capitalist.
> Because the social relations of the community are now imbued
> with class war, other fault-lines of conflict and oppression
> open up, like sexism, racism, caste, and so forth. The
> culture of the community is also subjugated and made to
> serve ruling-class interests: power, authority, private
> wealth, high status and the military virtues are glorified.
> A highly successful mass-murderer is adulated as a "great
> man".
All of which is are elements of Statism not capitalism.
>
> This is what we observe today and in history for the last
> several thousand years. However, a new element has been
> added in the last few centuries to this depressing picture:
> rapid technological progress. Because most human society
> is based on war,
Less than 10% of Gross Domestic Product is used for defense
in the USS at present. At the hieight of the Second World War
with it's very freedom and survival at stake the UK used about
30% of it's GDP for war production. The use of the word "most" is
simply a lie.
>new technology is applied to weapons and
> the weapons are used in ever more destructive ways. I
> probably do not need to go into any detail about this,
> since we live in a time when a handful of fanatics would
> kill 3000 people with a couple of airplanes, whole cities
> have disappeared in a single explosion, and the practice of
> exterminating large populations has been successfully
> industrialized.
>
> Before people can worry about high-level coordination, they
> must first survive and secure their freedom. Property, at
> least as generally conceived of under liberalism, does not
> accomplish these purposes.
Then kindly explain why it's absence is always accompanied
by tryanny and starvation?
> Therefore, some other fundamental
> principles of social organization are required, radical
> principles at odds with the State. Those principles are
> peace, freedom and equality. There is no logical,
> instrinsic reason why peaceful, free, equal beings cannot
> organize themselves into systems of any complexity, but a
> simple recipe can't be given for how to do it because humans
> have lived for so long under slavery that they have
> forgotten almost everything else.
Non sequitur. Just because people have lived for a long time
under slavery does not mean that only complex recipes can
solve their problems. If peaceful, free equal beings can organize
themselves into systems of any complexity then that either
requires complex recipes or it doesn't. If it does then the length
of slavery has nothing to do with it. If it doesn't then you are
just plain wrong.
> It is something we have
> to learn by doing from the ground up. However, as I say, it
> is first necessary for us to survive, and that means, at the
> moment, acting to halt the rush of the State towards the next
> war and the war after that and abyss of destruction in general,
> and establishing non-coercive relations and institutions at
> the most basic levels.
We have such relations and instituitions, you don't like them.
Michael Price
"Dr Wob" <DrWobb...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:7e45bbe1.02113...@posting.google.com...
> David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.com> wrote in message
news:<ddfr-904670.2...@sea-read.news.verio.net>...
> > In article <7e45bbe1.02112...@posting.google.com>,
> > DrWobb...@aol.com (Dr Wob) wrote:
> >
> > > I think a dialog with anarcho-capitalists would serve the movement
> > > well
> >
> > Unable to resist a straight line like that ... .
>
>
> It is great to have atracted such direct and succinct comments
> when we anarchosyndicalists have been so antagonidtic.
>
> > Speaking as a propertarian anarchist, it seems to me that the central
> > anarchist problem is how to have coordination without coercion. A single
> > individual can't accomplish much by himself, so in order to have a
> > reasonably attractive society, we need some way of coordinating the
> > efforts of a very large number of people. To make an automobile
> > (supposing some people want such things, which I think likely) someone
> > has to mine iron ore, refine it into steel, produce rubber, .... . Run
> > it out a little and we are talking about millions of people to some
> > degree coordinating their activities.
>
>
> Many anarchists, including me, have trouble accepting the contention
> that capitulating to a capitalist economic system could really allow
> uncoerced coordination of activity.
Then find an example of coerced coordination of activity in the
capitalist system. Hint: doing something because you won't get paid
if you don't is no cooercion.
>But I am willing to accept that a market orientation
> which tolerates boycotts and strikes without physical coercion would
> be a vast improvement over state socialism OR state capitalism.
But capitalism already tolerates boycotts and strikes without cooercion.
The only cooercion I see in strikes is the threats and violence against
strikebreakers.
>
> > The obvious solution to this problem is central authority--the dictator
> > figures out what everyone should do and hangs him if he doesn't do it.
> > Versions of that solution can work for very small groups, but it scales
> > very badly.
>
> That seems true in the statist context but what if the authority were
> intellectual and scientific rather than purely ideological and
> momopolistic?
But that does not get people to work. Just because a plan is scientific
and intellectual does not mean I will work towards it. If you want me
to work try paying me. This works on everyone who isn't lazy and
shiftless and sometimes it works on me too.
>
> >We get coordination
> > through market interaction, with prices providing a decentralized
> > signalling system to tell everyone the value to everyone else of what he
> > might produce, and provide an incentive to act on that value. For
> > details see a good price theory text (there's one webbed on my site, as
> > it happens).
>
> Accepting wages as "prices" is difficult for anarchosyndicalists and
> many other anarchists as well but I see your point.
Ok, you've got me confused here. Labor is an economic resource. Money
goods or services paid to the owner of an economic resource in return for
being allowed to use it is called a price. How is this difficult? The only
possible
problem is the concept that labor is not the property of the laborer and
therefore
not his to sell. I do not think this concept is economically or
morallysustainable so
what's the problme.
> For me
> anarchosyndicalists have articulated a position that is potentially
> compatible with markets. It is just that we do not see ourselves and
> our labor as a commodity.
Capitalists do not see you as a commodity either. Trade in human
beings is quite rightly illegal. The idea that labour is not a commodity
however is bizarre. What property of a commodity does it not have?
> But surely propertarian anarchists can
> appreciate that. The basis of our dialog could be a humanist
> concession that wages are labor prices BUT in a less dogmatic
> conception that acknowledges worker dignity.
But it is not dogma it is known and observed fact. As for
acknowledging worker dignity that is done by acknowledging the
total property rights the worker has over his own labour. This includes
the right to sell it and the right not to have it extract from him by force.
>
>
> Dr. Wob
Michael Price
news:3ffeab35.02120...@posting.google.com...
That's because the benefits of Linux are a public good (a better free
oerating system benefits people in a way that is hard to make paticular
people pay for). Doom is a private good. It is relatively easy to get p
eople to pay for something like Doom, so any volunteer labour would only
duplicate something the market would do any way. Since volunteer labour
is less well paid than market labour there needs to be a goal that would not
otherwise be achieved and is this thought worthwhile to motivate it.
Michael Price
news:011220022136379040%anon...@bigfoot.com...
Why? That results in a minarchist government not an anarcho-capitalist
society. It could be argued that anarcho-capitalist want more governemnt
interference and oppression so that the public will finally get the message
and throw the bums out.
The critical difference between the present system and anarcho-capitalism
is the choice of protection agencies and legal systems. It is not obvious
how
to get the State to give up it's monopoly on either but minarchy isn't it.
>
> Anarcho-socialists, by contrast, will argue for their vision of a more
> democratic government (sometimes this translates to "a government that
> does what they want it to"). Chomksy, for instance, argues in favor of
> "big government" that could be broken up at some distant point in the
> future.
They tried that in 1861 with a relatively small government. It didn't
work
so well. Why would any government allow itself to be broken up? If
the conditions for eliminating the State do not exist now, what would cause
them to come into being? Certainly the State will not help bring the
conditions about.
> Hence, I don't think you will find much common ground on this
> subject. Our differing economic views are just too fundamental.
>
> For common ground I would look instead toward issues on which we do not
> have such fundamental differences, like war, civil liberties, corporate
> welfare, and the separation of church and state.
These are all issues on which we can work to limit the State. Limitation
is
not elimination though. The State will eventually be in a positon to take
back
any gains we make. We need a blow at the roots not the limbs.
Michael Price
news:01c299a4$b8e46fa0$d8865f18@federalist...
> I imagine it would be a veritable Elysium to persons devoid of soul
What the hell are you talking about? Since when did soul require
government interference?
> It sounds like a lot of unnecessary toil to me
I f you think it uneccesary don't toil. Nobodies putting a gun to your
head.
> Are you one of those flagellates, trodding down the path of toil whipping
> themselves on the back?
What the hell did he say to suggest that? The whole point it hat
coordination
has to happen for us to get what we want. This is not a source of
flagellation
but an eoconomic problem.
> What is all of this economic determinism?
It's the exact opposite of what you criticise in the post you respond to.
> If you wont to be rich then join the GOP and beg them for some trickle
down
Ahh yes the old "you want economic freedom so you must be a greedy pig"
argument.
A favorite amoung people who haven't heard a damn thing we've said. May I
ask
why you think we want to get rich any more than anyone else and why we
should
join the GOP wehn it is clearly opposed to economic freedom?
> It seems to me that practically any form of government could provide
> subsistence to a population
How? By sprinkling fairy dust on the ground and having chocolate
trees spring up? Government extracts provisions it does not create them.
> and if capitalism is not dependent upon wrongful exploitation then let
> there be capitalism too.
We appologise for the delay in defining "wrongful exploitation" we are
experiencing technical difficulties. Your call is important to us and
we will attend to it as soon as possible.
<on hold music starts?
> The problems begin
> when capitalists or pseudo capitalists start whining about slackers, &c.
> and the government goes around attempting to force us into military
service
> or Burger King uniforms.
The government puts a gun to your head and forces you into Burger King? I
find that unlikely. Burger King would not want to aleinate the slacker
market by
particupating in coercion of slackers.
> We're slackers?! Hey too fucking bad. So then the
> response is one of the following (1) okay let them have subsistence or (2)
> no, it's not right, but we need more police to protect us from them.
In other words you don't want to work but you want to be fed, clothed
housed
etc. Well so do I but I'm not so greedy that I think it's OK to reorganise
society to
achieve that goal.
> Emmerich de Vattel states in his Law of Nations Chitty Ed. (circa 1863) I
> Vattel c. ii, § 15:
>
> "The end or object of civil society is to procure for the citizens
whatever
> they stand in need of for the necessities, the conveniences, the
> accommodations of life, and, in general, whatever constitutes happiness,
> -with the peaceful possession of property, a method of obtaining justice
> with security, and, finally, a mutual defence against all external
> violence"
>
> The private sector will never do this and has no intention of doing it and
> Conservatives prevent the government from doing it. Know the reality first
> before joining sides.
The private sector does more of this than government ever did. If you
want
the private sector to provide you with an income here an idea. You are part
of the private sector. Why don't you get an income yourself, perhpas form a
JOB!
Jack Black
>
> Jack Black:
> > ...
> > Class is a fluid construct. Mark Twain won (and lost) several
> > fortunes in his lifetime. Individualism is a better basis for
> > analysis than class (and less pernicious.)
>
> One does not preclude the other. In the case I was describing,
> however, the necessity for those with advantages to band
> together to protect what they have against those who have not
> is obvious, and has resulted in the construction of group
> enterprises which I call collectively "the State".
'Property' does not 'the State' require. States exist without
private possession and private possession exists without states.
Recollect the Soviet Union, where private possession was
theoretically absent while the State was claustrophobically
omnipresent. Recollect Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys,
who asserted their private possession of homestead land against
the expressed wishes of the State.
G*rd*n:
>
> I think
> _class_ is a useful concept for analyzing this behavior.
> Class boundaries can be overt, rigid and impermeable, but
> they can also be amorphous, fluid and porous without vitiating
> the applicability of the concept.
As a construct, race is less fluid than class. If 'race' is
deficient as a basis of prediction then, a fortiori, 'class' should
be as well. As it is with race, so it is with class; viz. that
individualism is better basis of analysis.
G*rd*n:
>
> All we require are a group
> of actors with advantages and a desire to protect them, and
> of course the phenomena which are supposed to result from
> the actors and their desires. And these we observe.
'Class interest' is a myth.
Capitalists compete against other capitalists in order to
cooperate with workers. Workers compete with other workers in
order to cooperate with capitalists. These stubborn facts make
'class interest' meaningless. Individualism dishes out a better
predictive punch than class does.
Besides, if 'class interest' were real, then what would stop the
Many from asserting their 'class interest' against the Few? Is
Bill Gates more manly than the average stevedore? ( Should we
recount the many infamies of various 'worker's states'? )
Jack Black
>
> Jack Balck:
> >
> > G*rd*n:
> > > ... [T]he practice of
> > > exterminating large populations has been successfully
> > > industrialized.
> >
> >
> > Rwanda managed their mayhem with little more than rude farm
> > implements (see Gourevitch in '98 for the details.)
>
> Radio. Mass communication was also an important factor in
> the rise of European fascism, which provided the political
> basis for the great advances in industrializing mass murder
> made in the 20th century.
:: From Rousseau to the Thanksgiving editorialists of Chapter 1,
:: many intellectuals have embraced the image of peaceable,
:: egalitarian, and ecology-loving natives. But in the past to
:: decades anthropologists have gathered data on life and death
:: in pre state societies rather than accepting warm and fuzzy
:: stereotypes. What did they find? In a nutshell: Hobbes was
:: right, Rousseau was wrong.
::
:: To begin with, the stories of tribes out there somewhere who
:: have never heard of violence turn out to be urban legends.
:: Margaret Mead's descriptions of peace-loving New Guineans and
:: sexually nonchalant Samoans were based on perfunctory research
:: and turned out to be almost perversely wrong. As the
:: anthropologist Derek Freeman later documented, Samoans may beat
:: or kill their daughters if they are not virgins on their wedding
:: night, a young man who cannot woo a virgin may rape one to extort
:: her into eloping, and the family of a cuckolded husband may
:: attack and kill the adulterer. [68] The !Kung San of the
:: Kalahari Desert had been described by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
:: as "the harmless people" in a book with that title. But as soon
:: as anthropologists camped out long enough to accumulate data,
:: they discovered that the !Kung San have a murder rate higher
:: than that of American inner cities. They learned as well that
:: a group of the San had recently avenged a murder by sneaking
:: into the killer's group and executing every man, woman, and
:: child as they slept. [69] But at least the !Kung San exist.
:: In the early 1970s the New York Times Magazine reported the
:: discovery of the "gentle Tasaday" of the Philippine rainforest,
:: a people with no words for conflict, violence, or weapons. The
:: Tasaday turned out to be local farmers dressed in leaves for a
:: photo opportunity so that cronies of Ferdinand Marcos could set
:: aside their "homeland" as a preserve and enjoy exclusive mineral
:: logging rights. [70]
::
:: Anthropologists and historians have also been counting bodies.
:: Many intellectuals tout the small numbers of battlefield
:: casualties in pre-state societies as evidence that primitive
:: warfare is largely ritualistic. They do not notice that two
:: deaths in a band of fifty people is the equivalent of ten
:: million deaths in a country the size of the United States. The
:: archaeologist Lawrence Keeley has summarized the proportion of
:: male deaths caused by war in a number of societies for which
:: data are available: [71]
::
::
:: |
:: A. |[][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][]
:: |
:: B. |[][][][][][][][][][]
:: |
:: C. |[][][][][][][][][]
:: |
:: D. |[][][][][][][][]
:: |
:: E. |[][][][][][][][
:: |
:: F. |[][][][][][][
:: |
:: G. |[][][][][]
:: |
:: H. |[][][
:: |
:: I. |[
:: |_______________________________________________________
:: + + + + + +
:: 0 20 40 60 80 100
::
:: Male Deaths (%)
::
:: A. = Jivaro
::
:: B. = Yanomamo (Shamatari)
::
:: C. = Mae Enga
::
:: D. = Dugum Dani
::
:: E. = Murngin
::
:: F. = Yanomamo (Namowei)
::
:: G. = Huli
::
:: H. = Gebusi
::
:: I. = U.S. and Europe in the 20th Century
::
:: The first eight bars, which range from almost 10 percent to
:: almost 60 percent, come from indigenous people in South America
:: and New Guinea. The nearly invisible bar at the bottom
:: represents the United States and Europe in the twentieth century
:: and includes the statistics from two world wars. Moreover,
:: Keeley and others have noted that native peoples are dead serious
:: when they carry out warfare. Many of them make weapons as
:: damaging as their technology permits, exterminate their enemies
:: when they can get away with it, and enhance the experience by
:: torturing captives, cutting off trophies, and feasting on enemy
:: flesh. [72]
::
:: Counting societies instead of bodies leads to equally grim
:: figures. In 1978 the anthropologist Carol Ember calculated that
:: 90 percent of hunter-gatherer societies are known to engage in
:: warfare, and 64 percent wage war at least once every two years.
:: [73] Even the 90 percent figure may be an underestimate,
:: because anthropologists often cannot study a tribe long enough
:: to measure outbreaks that occur every decade or so (imagine an
:: anthropologist studying the peaceful Europeans between 1918 and
:: 1938). In 1972 another anthropologist, W. T. Divale,
:: investigated 99 groups of hunter-gathereers from 37 cultures,
:: and found that 68 were at war at the time, 20 had been at war
:: five to twenty-five years before, and all the others reported
:: warfare in the more distant past. [74] Based on these and other
:: ethnographic surveys, Donald Brown includes conflict, rape,
:: revenge, jealousy, dominance, and male coalitional violence as
:: human universals. [75]
::
::
:: [68] Freeman, 1983; Freeman 1999.
::
:: [69] Wrangham & Peterson, 1996.
::
:: [70] Wrangham & Peterson, 1996.
::
:: [71] Keely, 1996, graph adapted by Ed Hagen from fig. 6.2 on p. 90.
::
:: [72] Ghiglieri, 1999; Keeley, 1996; Wrangham & Peterson, 1996.
::
:: [73] Ember, 1978. See also Ghiglieri, 1999; Keeley, 1996; Knauft,
:: 1987; Wrangham & Peterson, 1996.
::
:: [74] Divale, 1972; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989, p.323, for discussion.
::
:: [75] Bamforth, 1994; Chagnon, 1996; Daly & Wilson, 1988; Divale,
:: 1972; Edgerton, 1992; Ember, 1978; Ghiglieri, 1999; Gibbons, 1997;
:: Keeley, 1996; Kingdon, 1993; Knauft, 1987; Krech, 1994; Krech,
:: 1999; Wrangham & Peterson, 1996.
Stephen Pinker, _The Blank Slate_ (Viking: 2002) pp. 56-57
Mass murder does not require industrialization.
G*rd*n
>
> There is another sense in which mass killing has been
> industrialized, the famines brought about by State policy in
> Ireland, India, China, the Soviet Union and Cambodia (among
> others). In all these cases, the political technology of
> State power had to be advanced to the point where people could
> be prevented from feeding themselves over a wide area for a
> long time for political reasons. I think this required the
> the aforesaid mass communications, and also the ability to
> move troops and police over long distances and wide areas
> efficiently -- industrialized transportation.
And your solution to the 'problem of coordination' would be ...
abolish advanced telecommunications? Zerzan's anarcho-primitivism
is more reactionary than progressive. Zerzan is like Daniel Quinn
on LSD. (Quinn is like Rousseau on quaaludes.)
Jack Black
>
> Jack Balck:
> >
> > G*rd*n:
> > >
> > > Before people can worry about high-level coordination, they
> > > must first survive and secure their freedom. Property, at
> > > least as generally conceived of under liberalism, does not
> > > accomplish these purposes. Therefore, some other fundamental
> > > principles of social organization are required, radical
> > > principles at odds with the State. Those principles are
> > > peace, freedom and equality. There is no logical,
> > > instrinsic reason why peaceful, free, equal beings cannot
> > > organize themselves into systems of any complexity, but a
> > > simple recipe can't be given for how to do it because humans
> > > have lived for so long under slavery that they have
> > > forgotten almost everything else. It is something we have
> > > to learn by doing from the ground up. However, as I say, it
> > > is first necessary for us to survive, and that means, at the
> > > moment, acting to halt the rush of the State towards the next
> > > war and the war after that and abyss of destruction in general,
> > > and establishing non-coercive relations and institutions at
> > > the most basic levels.
> >
> >
> > participation in co-ops, credit unions and communes. If you
> > want to be a communicant at Twin Oaks, knock yourself out.
>
> I am always happy when liberals tell me I am free to join a
> commune or cooperative; as you can imagine, I almost hold my
> breath in suspense as to whether this permission may be granted,
> even though I know already that liberalism's goodness, like
> God's, is already promised. However, there are other problems
> with liberalism, such as its tendency to develop plutocracy
> and to engage in police-state practices at home and imperial
> war abroad, which need to be dealt with somehow. The dog of
> liberalism constantly returns to its feudal vomit; a habit
> which is becoming dangerous as well as tiresome.
Perhaps we could starve the dogs of war by refraining from feeding
them. I take it you approve of efforts to abolish taxes.
Here is a list of 'intentional communities':
Why don't you try one on for size and report back to us.
mikel
Because less state intereference is better than more state
interference.
> That results in a minarchist government not an anarcho-capitalist
> society.
And deterring crime results in lower crime rates, not an elimination
of crime. Elimination of crime is to be desired, but, failing that,
less is better than more.
> It could be argued that anarcho-capitalist want more governemnt
> interference and oppression so that the public will finally get the message
> and throw the bums out.
Maybe some do, but personally I see any improvement as an
improvement; I don't require perfection before acknowledging a change
as an improvement.
> The critical difference between the present system and anarcho-capitalism
> is the choice of protection agencies and legal systems. It is not obvious
> how
> to get the State to give up it's monopoly on either but minarchy isn't it.
A smaller state is easier to oppose than a bigger one. Your argument
is, essentially, that a bigger one is more motivating because more
obnoxious and intrusive. That may well be true, but the reason it's
more motivating is because it's worse. I like better more than worse,
and I'll take what I can get.
> These are all issues on which we can work to limit the State. Limitation
> is
> not elimination though. The State will eventually be in a positon to take
> back
> any gains we make. We need a blow at the roots not the limbs.
As with every 'root cause' argument, the sticking point is being sure
we know the root causes. What is the root cause of the state? Is it
not that there are always people ready to profit from extortion? How
do you propose to strike at that root?
Of course, in order for extortion to become institutionalized to the
point of becoming a state it must be profitable at a scale that
enables extortionists to expend resources enough to drive out
competition andd yet still profit. If such activity can be made
unprofitable then eventually the state will starve--all the quicker
if less extortionist alternatives exist. The history of the rise and
fall of states suggests, though, that conditionss conducive to the
formation and maintenance of states come and go, and not necessarily
predictably. If it is cost-effective to extort at a certain scale,
then governments of that scale form and maintain themselves.
It's all very well to advocate smashing the state, but if the
conditions that states need to prosper continue to exist then I
suspect we can expect states to continue to exist--unless by some
miracle people stop desiring to profit by the intimidation of
others. Failing that transformation of human nature, and until we
discover a means of manipulating the conditions that enable state
formation much more effectively than we know how to do now, I will
continue to regard any small retreat of the state's power as an
improvement much to be desired.
Dan Clore
> G*rd*n:
> > Jack Black:
> > > ...
> > > Class is a fluid construct. Mark Twain won (and lost) several
> > > fortunes in his lifetime. Individualism is a better basis for
> > > analysis than class (and less pernicious.)
> >
> > One does not preclude the other. In the case I was describing,
> > however, the necessity for those with advantages to band
> > together to protect what they have against those who have not
> > is obvious, and has resulted in the construction of group
> > enterprises which I call collectively "the State".
>
> 'Property' does not 'the State' require. States exist without
> private possession and private possession exists without states.
> Recollect the Soviet Union, where private possession was
> theoretically absent while the State was claustrophobically
> omnipresent.
Private possession was neither theoretically nor empirically
absent from the Soviet Union.
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
All my fiction through 2001 and more. Intro by S.T. Joshi.
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord Weÿrdgliffe and Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Said Smygo, the iconoclast of Zothique: "Bear a hammer with
thee always, and break down any terminus on which is
written: 'So far shalt thou pass, but no further go.'"
--Clark Ashton Smith
James A. Donald
Michael A. Clem
> And as important as the question of coordination is, I think
> the larger question is this: How can we move from our
> current society to one that has no government or state?
And the question on which most people disagree, is whether to
do so by extending state violations of private property rights,
or by reducing those violations.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
eP4vjZMBE8CvHpj3FK/uBYLkIbYCb3rgeemkljjq
4T7zb7UOaIfGGlRAyYUhrqIFF0ujvwXznw06PWH1s
Matt
Price <nini...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> "Matt" <anon...@bigfoot.com> wrote in message
> > For example, anarcho-capitalists will naturally contend the government
> > should privatize its programs and cut its subsidies.
>
> Why? That results in a minarchist government not an anarcho-capitalist
> society.
The government could go as far as privatizing its adjudication and law
enforcement services, in which case it would no longer be a government.
You can argue plausibly that no government would voluntarily abdicate
power over these areas.
But I think a libertarian minarchy would be much easier to resist (with
force or with persuasion) than a more expansive and powerful state.
The latter kind would have a choke hold on the economy, extensive
regulatory powers, and a much larger budget (some of which could be
diverted to opposing anarcho-capitalist forces).
It would also be more traumatic (and thus more risky) to overturn a
large government than a smaller minarchist one. With a large
government like we have now, suddenly moving to anarchy would abruptly
put a lot of people out of work, close down companies that rely on
state business, put kids out of school, threaten all kinds of medical
and retirement plans, etc. etc. In short, this is a state capitalist
economy, and the state is pretty tightly integrated into much of the
social fabric. Trying to get rid of it all at once would induce a lot
of opposition, leading to antagonism and conflict in the critical time
when private defense firms are getting settled and establishing their
reputations.
Alternatively, we could try building an anarchist society largely from
scratch, comprising people who specifically want to join one. The
problem with that is finding a decent place where no government will
come and murder us.
> It could be argued that anarcho-capitalist want more governemnt
> interference and oppression so that the public will finally get the message
> and throw the bums out.
Governments seem to interfere and oppress most when they want to secure
their power. It's odd that they do so if that makes them more likely
to lose it.
An oppressive government is simply going to arrest and kill any who
says, "let's throw the bums out." Or it could defend its power more
indirectly, using a plethora of taxes and regulations to make
resistance effectively impossible.
More important, though, I think this type of reasoning suggests you are
putting the cart before the horse: do you want anarchy because you
observe government is bad, or do you want bad government because you
are an anarchist and want to see your views vindicated?
An anarchist of reason observes government is bad and, therefore, wants
to see less of it.
An anarchist of ideology wants bad government--wants people to suffer
more--because that will seem to vindicate his anarchist views held _a
priori_.
It's the same way with socialists: some may relish in the thought of a
stock market crash and major depression, knowing that people will
suffer and starve but not caring because in their minds it justifies
opposition to capitalism--even though the very point of such opposition
was their claimed concern for the welfare of ordinary people.
We may like the thought of government behaving so badly we get total
vindication and everyone swings over to our side. In my view, however,
if you are hoping to see people suffer more rather than less, that is
evidence there is something wrong.
> The critical difference between the present system and
> anarcho-capitalism is the choice of protection agencies and legal
> systems. It is not obvious how to get the State to give up it's
> monopoly on either but minarchy isn't it.
I agree, and I don't argue specifically for minarchy. But I also agree
with Mikel in that less government is better than more.
> > Anarcho-socialists, by contrast, will argue for their vision of a more
> > democratic government (sometimes this translates to "a government that
> > does what they want it to"). Chomksy, for instance, argues in favor of
> > "big government" that could be broken up at some distant point in the
> > future.
>
> They tried that in 1861 with a relatively small government. It
> didn't work so well. Why would any government allow itself to be
> broken up? If the conditions for eliminating the State do not exist
> now, what would cause them to come into being? Certainly the State
> will not help bring the conditions about.
Your point is well taken. I think many of these people conflate
government and people in general (at least when the government is
socialist enough), so they consider the actions of the government to
reflect the will of the people. Such a government under "popular
control" could be broken up if "the people" so desired.
James A. Donald
On 1 Dec 2002 10:31:41 -0500, g...@panix.com (G*rd*n) wrote:
> The problem with property is this: Property is power over
> things, a social relation, and usually over other people,
> either directly or through things, another social relation.
> Where wide differences in power exist, the will of the
> powerful overrides the will of the powerless, and war results
> as the powerless try to work their will (as they must, being
> willful organisms) and the powerful resist them in the
> interest of retaining their power.
Well that is what Marx says would happen, but it is not what
actually happens. What in fact we see is that the more
property rights are respected, the more that property rights in
the means of production is the organizing principle of a
society, the more peaceful it is, both internally and in its
external relations, whereas the more socialist a society is,
the more war.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
HvBng8C7YOQUC5ZNGhQuPeZ0gace6urCh3tLQL+f
4SSo3wFGuD9zZl0kZZjH+q04mHxh7KGSkwX7UhAcR
James A. Donald
Matt
> > For example, anarcho-capitalists will naturally contend the
> > government should privatize its programs and cut its
> > subsidies.
Michael Price
> Why? That results in a minarchist government not an
> anarcho-capitalist society.
It seems obvious that if you want zero of X, then having less
of X is a good thing in itself, and makes it easier to have
zero X.
When communism fell we saw that communism had destroyed the
habits and organizations that were needed for people to look
after themselves. The less state that exists, the more the
institutions of anarchism exist.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
DUFbfPzdChpGBP1HVTv54DVuJXFGbTo3dEnytGA
4Bz00WitNehEo+JawpQZ6KvzAfZIrQ/yNJxx/27kc
Dr Wob
> I realize that "anarcho-capitalism" is pretty long, but from what I've
> read, I don't think that will be a big problem. If we went with "a-c",
> it would be short, but not immediately obvious what kind of group it
> is. But maybe that would be okay.
>
> Comments?
An anarcho-capitalist NG would draw a lot of heaalthy criticism
for anarchism in general because other tendencies are so vague,
including my tendency: anarcho-syndicalism.
Dr. Wob
G*rd*n
g...@panix.com (G*rd*n):
|> I'm not arguing that all rules and customs of possession
|> must be abolished; I'm arguing that the (liberal) principle
|> of property is not one on which a politics of anarchy, that
|> is, freedom, peace and equality, can be based. Property of
|> that sort is easily turned into a means of domination and
|> oppression, as we observe just about everywhere.
william...@airmail.net (William Newman):
| And what I was trying to say is that whether you call it liberal
| property or not, whatever mechanism of control you use to keep someone
| from stripmining a plot of land the day after someone else tills
| and sows, or to keep ecoradicals from spiking trees where it has
| been decided that housing will be built, or whatever, not property
| but something else, still it is likely to have the property that it
| gives some people the power to stop other people from doing things.
| I'm worried, therefore, that it could be used to be means of
| domination and oppression too, since as far as I can see, stopping
| other people from doing things is a very good building block for
| systems of domination and oppression.
|
| Without knowing anything else about your proposed replacement for
| property rights, it's hard to guess whether the people subject to
| it would be at risk of it being turned into a means of domination
| and oppression. But it has happened several times in living memory
| that wholesale replacement of private property rights by other
| systems, in the name of removing oppression, was accompanied by
| appallingly high levels of oppression of its own. It's not just
| an academic, theoretical concern on my part that there might be
| such a design flaw in your replacement system too.
|
| What is it about property of that sort which can easily be turned
| into a means of domination and oppression, which doesn't appear
| in property of your sort?
I'm not advocating wholesale replacement of anything, in the
sense of sudden, radical change in the way everyone lives.
That can be accomplished only by State force, that is, war,
and will almost certainly result only in the replacement of
the existing state with another and probably worse one.
On the contrary, the work of constructing a society based on
freedom, peace and equality must occur from the ground up, so
to speak, beginning with small groups, living within the
framework of existing social arrangements, which are mostly
liberal and capitalist, and avoiding violent conflict as much
as possible. (On many occasions, liberal capitalist states
have attacked harmless non-liberal communities, so that peace
is not guaranteed, and forceful self-defense may sometimes be
necessary simply to preserve life. But I don't believe that
war is a useful tool for advancing toward the sort of society
I would prefer; at best it can only conserve what already
exists.)
Assuming the pacific and nonviolent growth of small anarchist
communities is possible, it will be up to the people in these
communities to work out which practices of possession and
property support freedom and should be preserved, and which
injure it and should be abandoned. The difference between
this process and liberalism is that in liberalism, property
rights, backed up by State power, generally defeat all others,
even the right to life under many circumstances; and the
domination of some persons and classes by others through
property relations is held to be legitimate and even
desirable or inevitable by many liberals.
Of course, I'm positing here the growth of an anarchist
culture which believers in fixed human nature or other
mystical dogmas will contend is impossible. It may be that
they are right -- but if so, it is impossible for human
beings to choose freedom, and probably impossible for them
to choose survival, since the conflicts and contradictions
generated by unfreedom, multiplied by the ever-increasing
power of technological progress, will almost certainly result
in the destruction more and more of its practitioners, until
there is no one left to destroy or be destroyed, as I have
already noted.
The remainder of your article is about the non-authoritarian
management of complexity, which is a different and very
interesting subject deserving of its own thread.
| ...
Michael A. Clem
"James A. Donald" wrote:
> --
> Michael A. Clem
> > And as important as the question of coordination is, I think
> > the larger question is this: How can we move from our
> > current society to one that has no government or state?
>
> And the question on which most people disagree, is whether to
> do so by extending state violations of private property rights,
> or by reducing those violations.
>
That sounds like a loaded question. ;-)
James A. Donald
Michael A. Clem
> > > And as important as the question of coordination is, I
> > > think the larger question is this: How can we move from
> > > our current society to one that has no government or
> > > state?
James A. Donald:
> > And the question on which most people disagree, is whether
> > to do so by extending state violations of private property
> > rights, or by reducing those violations.
Michael A. Clem
> That sounds like a loaded question. ;-)
If you think it is loaded, rephrase it in terms that you see as
neutral.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
gxrgZQpOKXby/T67/sVQOyTlTrTIIeFzMEID+RrD
4t+T8H+eFJ0HpPPsyDXHfrJwPI8av92jQM1Y3Xuyw
G*rd*n
|>>> ...
|>>> Class is a fluid construct. Mark Twain won (and lost) several
|>>> fortunes in his lifetime. Individualism is a better basis for
|>>> analysis than class (and less pernicious.)
G*rd*n:
|>> One does not preclude the other. In the case I was describing,
|>> however, the necessity for those with advantages to band
|>> together to protect what they have against those who have not
|>> is obvious, and has resulted in the construction of group
|>> enterprises which I call collectively "the State".
Jack Black:
|> 'Property' does not 'the State' require. States exist without
|> private possession and private possession exists without states.
|> Recollect the Soviet Union, where private possession was
|> theoretically absent while the State was claustrophobically
|> omnipresent.
Dan Clore <cl...@columbia-center.org>:
| Private possession was neither theoretically nor empirically
| absent from the Soviet Union.
My discussion was pretty much weighted toward liberal
notions of property. Other arrangments of power, control,
possession and so on seem somewhat moot points at this stage
of history, at least in the West. The fact of the powerful
banding together to protect and extend their privileges,
however, flows from the nature of political power and ought
to be observed everywhere where it exists. It certainly
could be observed in the Soviet Union.
James A. Donald
On 30 Nov 2002 05:00:16 -0800, DrWobb...@aol.com (Dr Wob) wrote:
> But as Dr. Friedman suggests larger groups would not work
> with such charismatic individuals (even Jimmy Stevens on
> Espiritu Santo)! Duch "Big Men" eventually lead to tribal
> chiefdoms and the States eventually.
The big men in the west of Papua New Guinea were proto
politicians, proto aristocrats, proto chiefs, and proto
entrepreneurs. Some anthropologists have cast them as one,
some as another. The big men's clubs were both exclusive
private clubs businessmen's clubs, and also proto parliaments.
However the colonial administration, which had a policy of
bringing existing native institutions into the white man's
legal system with the minimum change, and it interpreted the
big men as entrepreneurs, and their organizations as
corporations, which would suggest that in the eyes of the
colonial administrators, their role as entrepreneur or
corporate CEO was primary.
Some anarcho capitalists interpret some big man societies of
west new guinea as proto - anarcho capitalist.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
LQcJs4ZlBEzykecaUZM01HyxChQF2878wyye76J8
4vCz7vFkATCvjAkcPtj6zJaNNGAwW0ggRPkxVvRXW
David Friedman
"Michael Price" <nini...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Agreed, in that a retreat (however small) of the State's power is
> a good thing in itself. In terms of the good it does for the eventual
> abolitition of the State it is not clear that there is any Slicing bits off
> the
> State whenever you can might work until the State gets quite small, but
> once it's down to say 2% of the economy are people going to be that
> bothered? I think that they'll say that the danger of tyranny is past
> and stop worrying about it. Then the next time there's an "emergency"
> the State expands again and we do it all over.
On the other hand, once it is down to 2% of the economy it no longer
controls schooling, so we get a better educated population, hence one at
least a little more sceptical of arguments for state power. We get a lot
fewer people whose income depends on the state, hence a lot less
political pressure for general increases. And we may get established a
set of assumed rules of the game that provide strong protection for
property rights and the like, and so make it politically very difficult
to expand state power much.
Finally, in that world, the state may simply not have the resources to
enforce its laws when they are at all unpopular.
There is a line of Rothbard's somewhere to the effect that we don't
really want to eliminate the state. We just want to reduce to a size at
which the average citizen can walk into its office and club it to death.
I disagree with Rothbard about lots of things, but he did have a way
with words.
In my ideal future transition to anarchy, at the point when the state is
finally abolished hardly anyone notices. For a not very serious
fictional version, see _Snow Crash_.
David Friedman
"Michael Price" <nini...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> What the hell is a fusionist?
It used to mean someone arguing for a fusion of libertarian and
conservative ideas along the lines of the late Frank Meyer. But it
sounds as though it is being used here to describe someone arguing for a
fusion of anarcho-communist and anarcho-capitalist ideas.
Constantinople
<nini...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>What the hell is a fusionist?
Can you fix the date and time of your posts? Because I am neurotic it
bothers me.
Joshua Holmes
: In article <3df8cb60$0$12757$afc3...@news.optusnet.com.au>,
I'm not sure how exactly it arose, but I know that your analysis
of its usage is correct, as envisioned by market communist and market
socialists like Keith Preston and Yan-ock (whatever the hell his real name
is).
--
Joshua Holmes
jdho...@force.stwing.upenn.edu
He who conquers others is powerful
He who conquers himself is omnipotent.
- Lao-Tze
Sean Lynch
> conservative ideas along the lines of the late Frank Meyer. But it
> sounds as though it is being used here to describe someone arguing for a
> fusion of anarcho-communist and anarcho-capitalist ideas.
Would this apply to someone who believes in an absolutely minimal
definition of property? I believe that not much other than goods and
land (including animals) should be considered "property," and I believe
in something along the lines of a "right of access." By this I mean that
if you "own" a huge swath of land and don't use it for much other than
to protect it, and you charge unreasonable amounts for access, people
will probably stop recognizing your claim to the land.
I'm also a proponent of open spectrum, because spectrum can be made to
scale with the number of users, and limiting access to the airwaves to a
few is part of the reason corporate media dominate mindshare, and why I
really don't consider most media as being "separate" from the
government.
I've been toying with the idea of a "capitalist commune," where instead
of simply sharing (something I have yet to see work,) the owner of the
land lives there and rents it out, paying for improvements. The owner of
the "commune" truck rents it out to the people who live in the commune,
because he doesn't really need a big truck all the time. It's sharing,
but with money to track usage. This seems to address some complaints
another friend of mine who used to live in a farm commune had about
living there: they accused him of "holding back" when he wouldn't
immediately jump and fix anything that was broken, because he was the
only reasonably technical guy on the commune.
As far as an anarcho-capitalist newsgroup, I think the dialog between
the ancaps and the ancoms (is that a real term?) is probably healthy.
When it results in pissing matches, I just killfile both sides because
they're clearly more interested in discrediting one another than in
actually discussing ideas.
--
Sean Lynch http://sean.lynch.tv/
James A. Donald
On Thu, 12 Dec 2002 19:05:54 GMT, David Friedman
<dd...@daviddfriedman.com> wrote:
> On the other hand, once it is down to 2% of the economy it no longer
> controls schooling, so we get a better educated population, hence one at
> least a little more sceptical of arguments for state power. We get a lot
> fewer people whose income depends on the state, hence a lot less
> political pressure for general increases.
See my posts on the Argentinean crisis:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=aimhvuoi5tka3ihj9...@4ax.com
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
BebXaQXLFLfVTHJEpxUIlMsM/s996nyV3rJd3Qr4
4S7MgHOVjy3fDU7vtC4mHmca55Yz4WEFG4XbD74wQ
Michael Price
news:6c98b1e6.02120...@posting.google.com...
> Dan Clore <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote in message
news:<3DE2D36C...@columbia-center.org>...
>
> > Seeing that there is already an alt.anarchism.communist and
> > an alt.anarchism.syndicalist (and maybe an
> > alt.anarchism.individualist), the proper newsgroup name
> > would seem to be alt.anarchism.capitalist
>
> That sounds about right to me.
>
> If this gets off the ground would people PLEASE not cross-post, but
> leave your discussion in the appropriate subcategory?
>
> It would be nice to get "anarcho-capitalist" discussions tidied away
> somewhere, so real anarchist dicussions can occur here.
Real anarchist? You are implying that we are not? Them's fightin' words.
Maybe we should start a list of things "real anarchist" do, allong the lines
of
"real men don't eat quiche.
Real anarchists think Ayn Rand is a champion of big government.
Real anarchists have a tax policy of "no".
Real anarchists debate whether to form a group to lynch GWB (ansocs) or
take up a collection and hire a professional (ancaps).
Real anarchists think Soldier of Fortune magazine is "soft on communist
states".
> I would visit
> from time to time to see what's going on.
>
> Sage
Michael Price
news:garhvuoquc6m126nb...@4ax.com...
Sorry.
>
Michael Price
"Michael A. Clem" <mc...@vigoris.net> wrote in message
news:3de4...@news.vigoris.net...
> In message <01c29540$f9187390$d8865f18@federalist>, "Blazin' Tommy D."
wrote:
> > Just post to Nazi or GOP groups
> >
>
> Somehow, I don't think that the Nazi or the Republicans would appreciate
your
> suggestion... ;-)
I think it was Thomas Sowell who when asked if he was ever called anything
offensive
like "uncle Tom", "sellout" etc. said "Yes, Republican".
>
>
David Friedman
"Michael Price" <nini...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > On the other hand, once it is down to 2% of the economy it no longer
> > controls schooling, so we get a better educated population, hence one at
> > least a little more sceptical of arguments for state power. We get a lot
> > fewer people whose income depends on the state, hence a lot less
> > political pressure for general increases. And we may get established a
> > set of assumed rules of the game that provide strong protection for
> > property rights and the like, and so make it politically very difficult
> > to expand state power much.
>
> Yet the State was (in some parts of the world) about that small and
> it grew. How are we to stop a repeat?
It might have been that small in very poor countries, which didn't have
a sufficient surplus over subsistence to support more than that I don't
think I know of any moderately well of country which had a state that
size. Both Britain and the U.S. in the 19th century had government
consuming about 10% of national resources.
Obviously the more general question is how to set up a situation where
the dynamic makes the state gradually shrink instead of gradually
growing. I think at least part of the answer has to involve affecting
the general climate of ideas. We lost last time around at least in part
because a lot of intelligent, thoughtful, articulate people were
persuaded by various versions of the Fabian position.
> All in all I think you're right that a small State is probably easier to
> kill
> a large one, but I needed some reasons why that might be the case. After
> we kill it will the other States "counterattack", though?
States face a public good problem just like the rest of us. Each
individual state will act in its own interest. If it looks as though a
state can benefit itself by invading an a-c area, presumably it
will--which is why a working a-c systems needs some way of organizing
defense. On the other hand, if one state is invading such an area rival
states may well support the a-c area.
Dr Wob
> Some anarcho capitalists interpret some big man societies of
> west new guinea as proto - anarcho capitalist.
>
>
> --digsig
> James A. Donald
> 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
> LQcJs4ZlBEzykecaUZM01HyxChQF2878wyye76J8
> 4vCz7vFkATCvjAkcPtj6zJaNNGAwW0ggRPkxVvRXW
I don't see much of a problem in that interpretation. However
Jimmy Stevens
was Polynesian I believe. I think it supports a common ancestry of
anarcho-capitalism and anarcho-syndicalism (with reservatios).
Dr Wob
Art
> Obviously the more general question is how to set up a situation where
> the dynamic makes the state gradually shrink instead of gradually
> growing. I think at least part of the answer has to involve affecting
> the general climate of ideas. We lost last time around at least in part
> because a lot of intelligent, thoughtful, articulate people were
> persuaded by various versions of the Fabian position.
>
The state itself wants to increase its size and scope.
Special interest groups – the most powerful source of influence on
policy tend to favor policies that expand the state.
Both the state and special interest groups have the power to influence
public opinion.
Do you think that "general climate of ideas" is a more powerful force
than the combination of the above and that it can lead to outcomes
opposite of what Public Choice Theory suggests?
G*rd*n
| > Obviously the more general question is how to set up a situation where
| > the dynamic makes the state gradually shrink instead of gradually
| > growing. I think at least part of the answer has to involve affecting
| > the general climate of ideas. We lost last time around at least in part
| > because a lot of intelligent, thoughtful, articulate people were
| > persuaded by various versions of the Fabian position.
ar...@hotmail.com (Art):
| I don't see how you come up with such optimistic projections.
|
| The state itself wants to increase its size and scope.
| Special interest groups – the most powerful source of influence on
| policy tend to favor policies that expand the state.
| Both the state and special interest groups have the power to influence
| public opinion.
|
| Do you think that "general climate of ideas" is a more powerful force
| than the combination of the above and that it can lead to outcomes
| opposite of what Public Choice Theory suggests?
Sooner or later, the accretion of State power ends in a
disaster, so there's a practical side of the issue, as
well as a theoretical one.
David Friedman
ar...@hotmail.com (Art) wrote:
The corn laws got abolished.
Slightly longer answer:
Think of a democratic polity as having, like a microscope, a coarse
control and a fine control. The fine control is interest group politics.
The coarse control is majority voting driven (because of rational
ignorance) by free information.
Tariffs are common. Laws that simply tax the general public and hand
over the money to the stockholders of (say) steel companies are rare.
Why? Because, given existing beliefs, it is much easier to disguise a
steel tariff as a law for the general good of the society than to
disguise a straight tax and subsidy that way. The political market is
thus constrained by the costs of keeping information costs high to the
losers, in order that they won't vote against the people responsible for
their loss.
Now imagine a society where "everyone knows" that a tariff is simply an
inefficient way of exploiting the general public for the benefit of the
protected industry. You might get tariffs, but a lot fewer of them.
Hence my point about the "general climate of ideas," aka "free
information."
Michael Price
> > > In article <3dea...@news.vigoris.net>, Michael A. Clem
> > > <mc...@vigoris.net> wrote:
> > >
> > > > In message <ddfr-904670.2...@sea-read.news.verio.net>,
David
> > > > Friedman
> > > > wrote:
> > > > > In article <7e45bbe1.02112...@posting.google.com>,
> > > > > DrWobb...@aol.com (Dr Wob) wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > I think a dialog with anarcho-capitalists would serve the
movement
> > > > > > well. I know I could learn something. Unlike other social
anarchists
> > I
> > > > > > do not believe we have all the answers.....
> > > > >
> > > > > Unable to resist a straight line like that ... .
> > > > >
> > > > > Speaking as a propertarian anarchist, it seems to me that the
central
> > > > > anarchist problem is how to have coordination without coercion.
> > > >
> > > > <snip>
> > > >
> > > > > Hopefully that will start the dialog you suggested.
> > > > >
> > > >
> > > > With all due respect, I don't see how this kind of opening won't
> > simply
> > > > degenerate into the socialist vs. capitalist argument, if it
continues.
> > >
> > > That's probably inevitable, considering that economics is the major
> > > point of disagreement between socialist and capitalist anarchists.
> > >
> > > > And as important as the question of coordination is, I think the
> > larger
> > > > question is this: How can we move from our current society to one
that
> > has no
> > > > government or state?
And
> > while
> > > > the differing views may call for differing strategies and tactics, I
> > would
> > > > think that there will be at least some elements in common that all
> > anarchists
> > > > could support.
> > > > Also note that the coordination question is subsumed under my
> > question,
> > > > because it obviously must be dealt with to achieve a society without
a
> > state or
> > > > government.
> > >
> > > How different anarchists answer the coordination question will affect
> > > how they hope to move our current society to an anarchist one.
> > >
> > > For example, anarcho-capitalists will naturally contend the government
> > > should privatize its programs and cut its subsidies.
> >
>
> Because less state intereference is better than more state
> interference.
>
But we are discussing how to move from our current society to an anarchist
one,
not how to move from our current society to a slightly better statist one.
I agree that
if I can't get anarchy then minarcy is better than nothing. That is
different from saying
that minarchy is the road to anarchy (capitalist or not).
> > That results in a minarchist government not an anarcho-capitalist
> > society.
>
> And deterring crime results in lower crime rates, not an elimination
> of crime. Elimination of crime is to be desired, but, failing that,
> less is better than more.
>
> > It could be argued that anarcho-capitalist want more governemnt
> > interference and oppression so that the public will finally get the
message
> > and throw the bums out.
>
> Maybe some do, but personally I see any improvement as an
> improvement; I don't require perfection before acknowledging a change
> as an improvement.
>
> > The critical difference between the present system and
anarcho-capitalism
> > is the choice of protection agencies and legal systems. It is not
obvious
> > how to get the State to give up it's monopoly on either but minarchy
isn't it.
>
> A smaller state is easier to oppose than a bigger one. Your argument
> is, essentially, that a bigger one is more motivating because more
> obnoxious and intrusive. That may well be true, but the reason it's
> more motivating is because it's worse. I like better more than worse,
> and I'll take what I can get.
Yes but that's the point. You will take what you can get, and you'll get
no more.
>
> > These are all issues on which we can work to limit the State.
Limitation
> > is not elimination though. The State will eventually be in a positon to
take
> > back any gains we make. We need a blow at the roots not the limbs.
>
> As with every 'root cause' argument, the sticking point is being sure
> we know the root causes. What is the root cause of the state? Is it
> not that there are always people ready to profit from extortion? How
> do you propose to strike at that root?
>
> Of course, in order for extortion to become institutionalized to the
> point of becoming a state it must be profitable at a scale that
> enables extortionists to expend resources enough to drive out
> competition andd yet still profit. If such activity can be made
> unprofitable then eventually the state will starve--all the quicker
> if less extortionist alternatives exist. The history of the rise and
> fall of states suggests, though, that conditionss conducive to the
> formation and maintenance of states come and go, and not necessarily
> predictably. If it is cost-effective to extort at a certain scale,
> then governments of that scale form and maintain themselves.
>
> It's all very well to advocate smashing the state, but if the
> conditions that states need to prosper continue to exist then I
> suspect we can expect states to continue to exist--unless by some
> miracle people stop desiring to profit by the intimidation of
> others. Failing that transformation of human nature, and until we
> discover a means of manipulating the conditions that enable state
> formation much more effectively than we know how to do now, I will
> continue to regard any small retreat of the state's power as an
> improvement much to be desired.
Agreed, in that a retreat (however small) of the State's power is
a good thing in itself. In terms of the good it does for the eventual
abolitition of the State it is not clear that there is any Slicing bits off
the
State whenever you can might work until the State gets quite small, but
once it's down to say 2% of the economy are people going to be that
bothered? I think that they'll say that the danger of tyranny is past
and stop worrying about it. Then the next time there's an "emergency"
the State expands again and we do it all over.
I'm not saying that a large, intrusive State makes anarcho-capitalism
more likely neccesarily, just that a minimal State might not be a good
stepping stone.
The only thing I can think of that might be is the growth of private
arbitration systems in parrelle with legal systems. For that to occur the
legal system must have some fault that people would pay to avoid and that
would not systematically favour some class of litigant..
>
>
David Graeber
<anon...@bigfoot.com> wrote:
> In article <3dec3c12$0$12762$afc3...@news.optusnet.com.au>, Michael
> Price <nini...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > "Matt" <anon...@bigfoot.com> wrote in message
>
> > > For example, anarcho-capitalists will naturally contend the government
> > > should privatize its programs and cut its subsidies.
> >
> > Why? That results in a minarchist government not an anarcho-capitalist
> > society.
>
> The government could go as far as privatizing its adjudication and law
> enforcement services, in which case it would no longer be a government.
>
> You can argue plausibly that no government would voluntarily abdicate
> power over these areas.
The Russian state did so effectively, at least
in many parts of its territory. Privitization and the
introduction of capitalist relations included the
privitization of adjudication and law enforcement
services - or at least things like the enforcement of
property rights.
But probably I should not bring this up. In fact,
there have been endless examples of cases in which
states collapse and private, profit-oriented organizations
take over security functions - ie, as in so many of
the former Soviet states (or parts of them), as in the
former Yugoslavia, as in many parts of Africa, such as
the Congo now, parts of West Africa... But any time one
mentions a real-life empirical example of this sort of
thing to an anarcho-capitalist they react with outrage
that one might even suggest that they have any bearing
whatever on their fantasies of how private, profit-
oriented organizations that take over security functions
from a state _should_ behave (behavior of which of course
there are no empirical examples whatsoever). Not
surprising, I guess, considering how such groups
actually behave!
DG
Dan Clore
Except for Boosaaso, Somalia, which is an anarcho-capitalist
utopia.
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
All my fiction through 2001 and more. Intro by S.T. Joshi.
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord Weÿrdgliffe and Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Said Smygo, the iconoclast of Zothique: "Bear a hammer with
thee always, and break down any terminus on which is
written: 'So far shalt thou pass, but no further go.'"
--Clark Ashton Smith
David Graeber
<cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
Some parts of Madagascar are doing rather well too
and are effectively outside of state control: they have
a market economy certainly so I suppose you could argue
they are up the same alley, but one function of the
vanishing of state coercion is that loans at interest
are no longer collectable and wage labor has also largely
disappeared (except for the occasional employment of
adolescents and some day labor, mainly among people
descended from slaves. Otherwise wage labor is considered
basically the same as slavery and therefore morally
suspect.) Of course the key here is the *absence* of
armed, private, profit-oriented enforcement agencies.
Where those do crop up, pretty much anywhere around the
world as far as I know, the results are always pretty
much the same.
DG
David Graeber
DrWobb...@aol.com (Dr Wob) wrote:
Ever read "The Trumpet Will Sound" (or anything
else about Melanesian cargo cults)? The main theme
is the complete incomprehension, indignation, outrage,
and general feelings of injustice prevalent among
said "proto - anarcho-capitalists" when first confronted
with actual market forces. So unless you think that
anarcho-capitalists are people who would object to
the very idea of radical commodity price fluctuations,
I think you'd better guess again.
DG
James A. Donald
> > > Some anarcho capitalists interpret some big man societies
> > > of west new guinea as proto - anarcho capitalist.
Dr Wob
> > I don't see much of a problem in that interpretation.
> > However
> > Jimmy Stevens was Polynesian I believe. I think it supports
> > a common ancestry of
> > anarcho-capitalism and anarcho-syndicalism (with
> > reservatios).
David Graeber
> Ever read "The Trumpet Will Sound" (or anything
> else about Melanesian cargo cults)? The main theme is the
> complete incomprehension, indignation, outrage, and general
> feelings of injustice prevalent among said "proto -
> anarcho-capitalists" when first confronted with actual market
> forces
Your interpretation of Melanesian cargo cults differs from that
of the colonialists, who had first hand knowledge of them. The
colonial administrators, seeking to discourage the cargo cults,
believed that if the cargo cultists were persuaded that
manufactured goods were the work of man, were made by white
people, then the cargo cult would disappear, which indicates
that those combating cargo cults believed that the cargo
cultists accepted lockean capitalist values.
Their interpretation of the cargo cults was that the cargo
cultists believed that manufactured goods were supernaturaly
created, analogous to the way that fruit is naturally created,
and were attempting to obtain these goods by magical means.
The outrage of the melanesians was not outrage at actual market
forces, but outrage at alleged supernatural forces, that
magically caused melanesians to be poor, and whites to be rich.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
Osdd0x80OZmSV01t337vUtHOnVSZqbDrKwGdGGJK
4I+xnm4NgAtlbD9C1+1F6vLMR60JIS0OND8MFlEzn
David Graeber
<jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
Read the book, James. You can't take the one
aspect of a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon
that you happen to have heard of and assume that's
the extent of the phenomenon. The moral indignation over
commodity price fluctuations is endlessly documented
from different Melanesian societies. It seems a very
odd way for a bunch of capitalists to behave.
DG
James A. Donald
David Graeber
> > > Ever read "The Trumpet Will Sound" (or anything
> > > else about Melanesian cargo cults)? The main theme is the
> > > complete incomprehension, indignation, outrage, and
> > > general feelings of injustice prevalent among said "proto
> > > - anarcho-capitalists" when first confronted with actual
> > > market forces
James A. Donald:
> > Your interpretation of Melanesian cargo cults differs from
> > that of the colonialists, who had first hand knowledge of
> > them. The colonial administrators, seeking to discourage
> > the cargo cults, believed that if the cargo cultists were
> > persuaded that manufactured goods were the work of man,
> > were made by white people, then the cargo cult would
> > disappear, which indicates that those combating cargo cults
> > believed that the cargo cultists accepted lockean
> > capitalist values.
> >
> > Their interpretation of the cargo cults was that the cargo
> > cultists believed that manufactured goods were
> > supernaturaly created, analogous to the way that fruit is
> > naturally created, and were attempting to obtain these
> > goods by magical means. The outrage of the melanesians was
> > not outrage at actual market forces, but outrage at alleged
> > supernatural forces, that magically caused melanesians to
> > be poor, and whites to be rich.
David Graeber
> Read the book, James.
The world is full of commie liars. I am not going to read
every one. Marx and Chomsky are sufficient. I have read "Road
Belong Cargo", which is I think the authoritative account of
Cargo Cults.
> You can't take the one aspect of a complex and multi-faceted
> phenomenon that you happen to have heard of and assume that's
> the extent of the phenomenon. The moral indignation over
> commodity price fluctuations is endlessly documented from
> different Melanesian societies. It seems a very odd way for a
> bunch of capitalists to behave.
Here in the US we get indignation over commodity price
fluctuations by entirely capitalist american agribusinesses and
steel manufacturers. Hardly evidence that they are not
capitalists.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
hK3YJDWIvhZDjNow+WCfF0/rbqVcRtz8aC1SpCI1
4BL10NR1RRUkMDJsC+/tyI1YD9ber2jgjMTP+6P+l
Matt
<dgraeber-010...@207-237-204-173.c3-0.nyw-ubr2.nyr-nyw.ny.cabl
e.rcn.com>,
dgra...@rcn.net (David Graeber) wrote:
Your comparisons are vague and hard to evaluate without more specific
claims and sources of information.
I'm very skeptical when failed states are adduced as examples of real
world anarcho-capitalism (or anarchy in general).
Very commonly, after the state has been the dominant institution for
years, with a total monopoly on the use of legitimate force and
adjudication, there are (by definition) no non-state institutions people
have adapted for these purposes, so the immediate result is probably
going to be messy as people try to cope with a completely new situation
(and as some try to take advantage of it). Somalia may be the
exception that proves the rule, since it had a failed state but it also
apparently had strong underlying clan-based intititutions.
Furthermore, there may be confusion over the meaning of "privatize."
For it to work, privatization has to involve opening the market up to
competition between private vendors, not just handing things over to the
politically connected.
The most obvious point about Russia's privatization is that it went
backwards: much of the economy liberalized before the basic institutions
needed to protect a market economy (either state or private) were in
place.
In Russia, by some accounts, mafias were like an underground extension
of the bureaucracy. As the overt bureaucracy disintegrated, the mafias
gained power, often comprising the same people who were formerly in the
bureaucracy or the military. See
<http://www.cato.org/dailys/03-04-00.html> for more details.
Further still, the Russian government continued to exist, and despite
its troubles collecting taxes, its character was pretty far from the
laissez-faire, minarchist government some libertarians argue for. That
fact alone is prima facie reason to doubt your claim. Hard to criticize
anarcho-capitalism when you still have a government.
It *is* true that the Russian government began to tolerate private
security companies, and that this business grew substantially. This
following page goes into some detail on the subject:
<http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~ponars/POLICY%20MEMOS/Volkov79.html>
The author is not an advocate of anarcho-capitalism, but he seems to
regard legitimate private security as a auspicious development--not
altogether ideal, but perhaps necessary given the failure of state
intitutions.
The article does note that these agencies are not totally outside the
control of the state. More important, it distinguishes these agencies
from the criminal rackets that developed before the state opened up the
market for legal protection, and it notes (as I previously claimed) the
existing mafias have deep connections to the state--as do the newer
legitimized agencies.
Interestingly, this article claims the legalization of private security
was not so much because goverment officials wanted to stop crime, but
rather it was mainly to provide employment opportunities for many state
workers who were losing their government jobs.
Clearly, there is a lot to sort out before deciding the Russian
experience provides evidence for or against anarcho-capitalism. After
downloading the extended version of this article:
http://www.colbud.hu/honesty-trust/volkov/pub01.PDF
I'll tentatively say it provides some evidence in favor of
anarcho-capitalism--particularly in light of the messy situtuation in
which it evolved--because its general effect has been anti-criminal.
Consider this fascinating paragraph, with my emphasis added:
More directly related to the anti-criminal activity are
those PPCs [private protection companies] which provide a
rare but increasingly demanded service, the so-called
'removal of the roof' (sniatie kryshi). Involving a great
risk, this task consists in forcing the criminal group that
controls an enterprise to leave the latter. The PPC would
then naturally provide alternative protection. As was
earlier mentioned, it is very hard for a company to break
free from a criminal group, the costs of such an action
would normally exceed benefits. Yet, in case the client
company wishing to do so is not itself engaged in illegal
business and has high commercial potential, and the PPC is
powerful enough and well connected to police organs, it can
decide to take the risk and force the criminal group out of
business. This practice represents a truly extraordinary
profitmotivated private form of anti-criminal activity,
whereby MANIFEST COMMERCIAL INTEREST that drives the
struggle for the client has the latent OUTCOME OF RELATIVE
DECRIMINALIZATION OF BUSINESS. The first PPC in Petersburg
Baltik-Escort was set up in April 1993 by the former MVD
employee R. Tsepov and former FSB officer I. Koreshkov. The
core of the staff of Baltik-Eskort was recruited from the
ranks of the former special task police unit (OMON)
stationed in Vilnus and Riga, the capitals of the ex-Soviet
republics. The PPC started by clashing with the Chechen gang
over a car maintenance company Inavtoservis whose management
was seeking for an alternative protection arrangement. Far
from peaceful, the competition ended in favor of the PPC
which thus acquired its first permanent client. Then the
company began to escort trucks that carried imported goods
from the West to Petersburg through Ukraine, the route
controlled by criminal gangs and considered one of the most
dangerous for drivers. This, maintains Tsepov, was key to
the company's subsequent commercial success as it earned
Baltik-Escort a reputation of tough and reliable security
partner. Now the PPC provides protection to over twenty
companies, including Volvo dealer, electric equipment plant
Energomashstroi, computer firm Cityline, as well as to VIP
visitors to St. Petersburg, including the business magnate
Boris Berezovsky and fashion model Claudia Schiffer49.
And that, of course, is just Russia.
--
Matt