The Probability Broach, chapter 8
Win Bear was attacked in the middle of the night, but he successfully defended himself. The attacker got away, but left his weapon behind: a big knife, “almost a short sword, fully eighteen inches from pommel to point, razor-sharp halfway along the back.”
Ed Bear, his parallel-universe twin, calls it a Rezin. It’s this world’s version of a Bowie knife, only here it’s named after Jim Bowie’s brother. He offhandedly mentions that in this world, the Battle of the Alamo was a victory for Texas, resulting in Santa Anna’s death and the establishment of the “Republic of Texas”.
Ed congratulates Win – “you’ve won yourself a handsome Rezin” – because apparently in this anarchist society, when you take something from someone in combat, that makes it yours.
“So I’ve got myself a genuine Rezin. Spoils of war, and all that?”
“You think its former owner will come back and claim it? Besides, it’s the custom.”
However, Win says he doesn’t want the blade, because he’s clueless about knife fighting. (He prefers guns.)
Ed is going to dispose of the knife, but Win realizes it could be a clue:
“Fingerprints!” I hollered. “Don’t screw up the evidence!” I flipped a corner of the blanket over and picked it up by the blade.
… “Fingerprints?” Ed protested. “What kind of evidence is that?”
I sat, trying to take it in. “Look—our worlds may have differences, but this ain’t one of ’em! No two fingerprints are—”
“I’ve heard that theory, but what good does it do? We still have to catch the culprit, and if he’s already caught, what’s the point?”
“Jesus Christ! Don’t you people keep any kind of records, licenses, anything that uses fingerprints for identification?”
“People wouldn’t stand for such a thing. I wouldn’t.”
You have to give L. Neil Smith points for ideological consistency. As a libertarian, he’s opposed to government ID records on principle; but at least he’s willing to acknowledge that this creates problems for catching the perpetrator of a crime. As Win snarkily comments, “Anarchy has its drawbacks, especially for cops.”
In another passage, Win asks if there’s any other way of tracing the car that shot him:
“Okay,” I said, enmeshed again in therapeutic wiring. “Fingerprints are out.” Ed was having coffee and pie. I was sucking vitamin-sludge through a flex-straw, and not liking it. “What about the Frontenac? Anyone in the neighborhood—Lucy maybe—remember the license plates?”
“What’s a license plate?”
You could always ask the filmmakers of the Atlas Shrugged movies. Hilariously, their semi-anarchic utopia did have license plates.
The absence of license plates is logical for an anarchy, although it again raises the question of what Ed actually does at his private-eye job. If there are no fingerprint databases, no license plates, no other official records or means of identifying people… what steps are left to take?
Ed says that such a database would be pointless because it wouldn’t help them catch the culprit. But without these kinds of evidence, how could you ever know that you have the right culprit?
If a crime is committed by a person with a known grudge against their victim, you can imagine steps a private investigator might take. But in the case of a random crime where the criminal has no personal connection to the victim, like a mugging or a burglary, it seems there’d be nothing to do. There’s no way to identify, trace or locate people.
That leads to another important question, which this chapter skates around: If you steal something from someone, do you just get to keep it? Is “stealing” even a meaningful concept in a world with no laws?
Ed tells Win that he can keep the knife as “spoils”, saying this is the custom in the North American Confederacy. How far does that custom extend?
To illustrate the issue, let’s conjure up a scenario.
When we met Ed Bear, he was about to leave on a three-week vacation. As we saw, it’s not that hard to break into someone’s house, especially if you have an expensive “defeater” to silence their burglar alarms.
Imagine that while Ed is away on vacation, someone breaks into his house, moves all their stuff in, throws his away, and changes the locks. When he gets back, he’s greeted by an unpleasant surprise: a stranger occupying the property he thought was his, and claiming to be the rightful owner.
In an anarcho-capitalist society like the North American Confederacy, what could you do about this?
In our world, there are official government records, like deeds and titles, that you can bring to the court to prove you’re the rightful owner of a piece of property. In the NAC, there are no such records. Even if there were, there’s no legal system you can appeal to. There’s nobody with the power to adjudicate who owns what.
What other options are there? The obvious one is to perform a self-help eviction: round up a posse of armed friends to back you up, break into your own house, and toss out the squatter by force. However, that has an unpleasant corollary: you can take over your neighbor’s property the same way. If you outgun them, they’d have no recourse.
This squatter scenario is just the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to the chaos that would ensue in a society with no rules and no records.
Imagine a person who owns a big, expensive house (or some other valuable piece of property) dies with no will, and all their descendants start arguing about who should get it. With no court system to settle the dispute, it would be a free-for-all. In fact, even if there is a will, who’s going to enforce it? Wouldn’t the first person who gets into the empty house and barricades the door get to claim it?
Or imagine a landlord-tenant dispute. If you rent a room in your house to someone else, do you have the power to evict them if they’re messy, disruptive, or violent? Or if you’re the renter, can you take the position that if you live there, you have the right to do anything you want in your space and no one’s going to tell you otherwise? What if a landlord raises the rent and the tenant refuses to pay? Does it end with a shootout?
For someone who calls himself a Propertarian, L. Neil Smith has no clear way of solving these extremely foreseeable problems. Without a legal system that holds a monopoly on force and follows knowable rules, the only other possibility is might makes right. If you steal something, it’s yours. The old proverb is that possession is nine-tenths of the law, but in an anarcho-capitalist society, it’s closer to ten-tenths.
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You have to give L. Neil Smith points for ideological consistency.
Why? Since when does anyone deserve “points” for being an infantile simpleton? Libertarians have always bragged about how “consistent” they always are, as if that somehow makes them better, smarter or more perceptive than the rest of us. It’s just another form of “purity culture,” another form of escape from a reality too complex, messy and “impure” for reactionaries nostalgic for a simpler bygone age that never really was.
(And in this instance, like almost all other libertarians, Smith’s “consistency” ends up showing total disregard for the obvious reality of how real people function in the real world. This is a classic sign of insanity.)
I think someone who has principles and sticks to them, even when it’s to their disadvantage to do so, is displaying a type of honesty that’s pretty rare. That deserves acknowledgement, even if the principles are bad ones.
I can give Smith credit for writing a scenario where his own political beliefs impede his protagonists (as opposed to someone like Ayn Rand, whose attitude was “Property rights are sacrosanct, unless they would interfere with my heroes doing something they want to do”).
In general, I prefer honest disagreement to grifters and bullshitters who are only out for themselves and shift their professed beliefs based on what helps them the most in the moment. With the former group, there’s at least a possibility of reasoning with them.
I might be inclined to give Smith some credit for being “consistent,” at least as a thought-exercise. The problem is, he never really completed the exercise, even within the fantasy-world within his fantasy.
Laughing at the “Rezin” knife: back in the 1970s, my junior high school made all students cycle through four semester-long classes: art, music, home economics, and shop. One of the highlights of shop class was cutting, gluing together with colored resin, and sanding small hunks of plastic. In theory, we were supposed to use the drill bit to drill a hole to wear our new creation on a necklace or use it as a key chain fob. In reality, everyone just made multi-colored shivs with the plastic hunks–none of us had the skill or the time in class to produce anything useful or attractive or the least bit complicated. We made them, the teacher confiscated them and gave us a grade. I have no idea what the point of that was, except to introduce the term “resin knife” to the students.
Now I’m wondering where Smith went to junior high school…
What’s the point of changing the outcome of the Alamo? The Republic of Texas existed in our world anyway, and in this world it still joined the NAC.
Indeed, Win, anarchy does have drawbacks for cops, because anarchists are also police abolitionists. Obviously, propertarians are not, but it’s amusing nonetheless. (Anarchists hold this position because they deny that police actually prevent crime or violence in the first place. Further reading here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/comments/1ifxud5/comment/maklpv2/ and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_justice It’s hard to find, but I hope this database here answers some questions: https://anarchy101.org/2165/how-do-anarchists-plan-to-deal-with-crime-in-system-of-anarchy)
OK, a left-wing anarchist society would obviously lack title deeds and other signs of property, since such movements aim to abolish private property. But I see no reason why a propertarian society wouldn’t have them since maintaining private property is its whole raison d’etre. If Smith really got rid of such things, then he doesn’t even understand his OWN ideology. But all this confusion could be prevented if people just understood the difference between possessions and property.
That’s a good question. I can only assume Smith saw it as a historical injustice that the side which wasn’t white won.
I can believe that a society that provides for everyone’s basic needs would have less crime. However, not all crimes arise from economic motives. There are crimes of jealousy and coercive control, like domestic violence, rape, stalking, and harassment. There’s mental illness, drug addiction, and other medical problems that cloud people’s ability to tell right from wrong. There are rare psychopaths who don’t care about others.
I’ve read left-wing anarchist proposals for how to handle these issues, and I find them vague and handwavy. Neighborhood watches? People keeping their own communities safe? Okay, in principle that could work, but if these groups have power to detain people or to use force, that’s just government by another name. If they don’t, it’s hard to understand how they could make any kind of difference. Does an anarchist society just have to hope that criminals will be shamed out of committing crimes when someone says, “Hey, don’t do that”?
Also, if there are no lawmaking bodies that set the rules these groups have to follow, what prevents them from violating people’s rights? What accountability is there if they misuse their power? Would this just be a slightly more formal variety of mob rule?
Does an anarchist society just have to hope that criminals will be shamed out of committing crimes when someone says, “Hey, don’t do that”?
That reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon where one prisoner says to his cellmate: “…then someone yelled ‘Stop, thief!’ and like a dope I stopped.”
They don’t, and it’s a strawman to claim they do. Even the sources that claim police lower crimes rates admit that anarchistic alternatives work just as well. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/06/12/defund-police-violent-crime/)
I’d also like to point out that absolutely none of these alternatives are in Smith’s proposal. His “solution” is to replace it with nothing at all. Thus, I agree with you that the NAC would collapse if it were real.
Oh, and to answer your other question, what makes you think due process and modern forensic investigation couldn’t exist in the absence of a state?
Due process means that police, courts and other agencies of the state have to follow the law and respect the rights of all parties involved in a proceeding.
Under anarchy, there is no law and there is no state, so there is no due process. Am I missing something?
Here you go: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/delfina-vannuci-richard-singer-come-hell-or-high-water
(Due process doesn’t come up till the end, but the early parts help explain how this can work without a hierarchical structure forcing obedience.) This book is basically a manual of what not to do, showcasing flaws in its preferred system and then explaining how to avoid them.
Oh, and here is another link to more information about how one might protect society without police. Though a perfect solution may well be impossible. https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/search/?q=justice
Since a book written by experts is better than just some posts on Reddit, here is a link to an actual book: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/prison-research-education-action-project-instead-of-prisons
(I wish we could edit comments here. Can’t you tell?)
“Imagine a person who owns a big, expensive house (or some other valuable piece of property) dies with no will, and all their descendants start arguing about who should get it. ”
In a society where you can’t leave your home without fearing that it will be taken by someone else while you’re away, I’m not even sure a big, expensive house could exist. When you always have to look over your shoulder for the big guy who wants to take your stuff (and the guy behind him who shoots you after you manage to defeat the first guy), who has time to build a house?
Hmm. I’m wondering if the population is being kept low due to high murder rates. If so, maybe after a point people rarely built houses anymore, mostly just maintained and disaster-proofed existing ones.
There is another big government ID to consider also. Street addresses are a government system. You have flexibility in numbering apartments and houses within a block but the government tells you this is the 100 block of Wales Road.
In the world Smith is describing there would be private mail delivery services, which would have to maintain their own maps with streets and addresses. They would sell those maps themselves. There is no guarantee of consistency though, In the real world there is confusion at times when both 105 Wales Road North Hampton and 105 Wales Road South Hampton exist. In Smith’s world neighbors might both lay claim to 102 Wales Road. Houses added later might end up with 102-A or 1021 or 102* or be 113 stuck in out of order, with different mail services using different addresses. 105 Red road and 106 Blue road might be neighbors on the same road due to disputes over road names and where town borders are.
As I said before, so much of this sort of thinking seems to be entirely based on completely lack of experience with how bad things could be. Just like anti-vaxxers who are generations removed from ever actually having witnessed the damage caused by contagious diseases, or anybody who wants to just shut down the FDA because they’ve never actually lived through how bad things were before we at least got warnings of known salmonella infections and companies were prevented from putting lead paint in things to make them whiter.
All this stuff about how things just somehow magically work shows that Smith really seems to think a lot of how society works is just background laws of nature because he’s never lived anywhere where such things aren’t actually enforced, even if not well enough. He doesn’t have enough experience with anything other than where he grew up to understand that stuff like this doesn’t just magically happen by itself.
And to add onto what you said here, like we discussed before… what’s stopping a private investigator from just deciding who he wants to blame for this and taking them in? We’ve seen that happen in real life lots of times even when the people doing it know they might get caught. And another variant based on ‘if someone had an obvious motive’… what’s to stop person A with a major grudge against person B from killing person C that person B had a grudge against, and framing B for it? It’s not as though we haven’t seen that happen enough times in real life, either.
I like to call that sort of thing “cargo cult libertarianism” – the assumption that the conveniences of modern society just materialize out of thin air when you want them.
In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s uber-capitalist heroes are hiding out in a remote mountain retreat completely cut off from civilization, but somehow they still have coffee and woven cotton fabric and oranges to squeeze for juice.
Years ago, on an old blog ‘Welcome to the New Scum’ that doesn’t seem to exist anymore, the blogger started doing a ‘fisking’ of Atlas Shrugged. (The blogger in question was one of the old regular commenters from the blog Slacktivist; Fred Clark there had became fairly well-known as a blogger for his detailed deconstruction of Left Behind, and he encouraged a number of others to go on to do similar things.)
Anyhow, just before he started actually going through Atlas Shrugged bit by bit, he started with a rant about ‘stupid things Libertarians say’ in which he referenced the scene where we get introduced to Galt’s Gulch for the first time… “and it’s the most unintentionally hilarious scene in the book, because that’s the point at which you realize that Ayn Rand has never done an honest day’s labour in her life.”
Basically, the blogger in question had actually grown up on a farm, and knew first-hand just how much work running a farm was, much less actually building one, which was basically something that couldn’t be done alone and would require assistance at a village level at least. “Everybody would get together to help, with only the expectation that you would help back when somebody else needed it. Buncha Commies.” And from his viewpoint, the entire idea that Galt’s Gulch had managed to create self-sufficient farms in just a few years rather than still being in the state of half-starving subsistence so they had enough seed corn for next year, even after cheating with a free energy device, that was the absolute breaking point for him. And a blatant indication that Rand had zero idea of what she was talking about.
As I said before, so much of this sort of thinking seems to be entirely based on completely lack of experience with how bad things could be.
That, plus, as we established at the start, a hefty dose of paranoid delusion, sociopathy, simplistic fantasy, and inability to understand how real people function.
@8 jenorafeuer:
For the idealist end of the libertarian beliefs that is often the case. However, at the more cynical end there are a lot of grifters that just want the law out of the way. You see this at the property right end of the libertarians, where they want government and police to exist but only to maintain ownership and enforce contracts. They want to be able to sign any contract they can get somebody else to agree to but they need somebody to enforce those bad contracts also.
It’s also a failure of understanding and imagination – most people simply have no idea just how complicated the world is. They don’t ever think about the huge, fragile supply chains that put food in their bellies, clothes on their backs and fuel and/or charge in their cars. They take things for granted, in short, ignorant entirely of the historic hurdles that were cleared to do things like extract metals from ores or chemicals from oils and gases, develop alloys and polymers and drugs and ceramics and composites and a thousand other basic things, understand concepts like energy and entropy and apply them to processes, negotiate the production of raw materials, the transport of those materials… the world is an incredibly complex web of knowledge and application that no single human can hope to apprehend, much less understand. I know PhD neuroscientists who can describe the mechanism of respiratory stress in your brain, but couldn’t tell you what ingredients you need to make the polyurethane foam that likely fills 90% of the chairs they’ve ever sat on, or where those ingredients come from and how, or even which companies make most of them. All of this stuff is invisible to most people – they just wander round the shop and think “ah, that one.”, with no concept, really, of what it is they’re buying.
I *do* know what goes into that foam, and rat poison and polymorph thermoplastics and Goretex and threadseal tape and chocolate and paint and appetite-suppressant drugs and plastic light fittings. But 30+ years in the chemical industry has only made me more keenly aware of the HUGE areas I know *nothing* about, and I find out about new things I know nothing about most days.
The anarchist position seems to be “yeah, we don’t need that”, when not only do they not really know what “that” is, how it works, or where it comes from – they don’t even know the vast majority of “that”‘s even exist. It seems an essentially childish philosophy, like when as a teenager it occurred to several of my friends and I that we totally should move out of our parents’ houses and into a house together, which we’d be able to just, y’know, buy or something because we all kinda had those little jobs at the weekend, and it’d work great because we got on so well when we hung out living together would be just great. Looking back now it’s a little embarrassing that I was ever that naive. I can’t imagine how embarrassing it would be to still be that naive and be an actual adult.
The anarchist position is not “yeah, we don’t need that” and they have thought quite hard about how to keep supply chains going. This entire comments section seems to have the misunderstandings that are called out here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/margaret-killjoy-anarchism-and-its-misunderstanders
I really want to believe that you are arguing in good faith, but it gets more and more difficult to do so the more you people repeat the misconceptions I keep refuting. (I am not blaming Adam. It is mostly the other commenters who are doing it.) I’m not trying to convert any of you, but I am trying to correct your misunderstandings, and the biggest one is that Smith-type anarcho-capitalism is anything like principled anarchism (not that you people ever stop conflating them) and the second biggest one is that the inherent flaws that would ruin an ancap society would also ruin any stateless society no matter how it is organized. Sometimes I feel like I’m arguing with creationists, because what I say goes in one ear and out the other.
Here are some more anarchist thought about supply chains. Remember that not all anarchists agree on the solutions: https://usa.anarchistlibraries.net/library/eric-fleischmann-is-the-market-to-blame-for-current-supply-chain-problems
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/comments/194rvcq/what_is_the_anarchist_response_to_the_issue_of/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/comments/1l4vb7c/theory_on_supply_chains_and_logistics/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/comments/w1y84r/ancoms_questions_regarding_supply_chains_and/ (Check the comments on this one.)
You can also look up the solarpunk movement, which wants to make technology sustainable environmentally. Guess what? Despite attempts to greenwash it by corporations, it’s thoroughly anarchistic.
I’m sorry, but what you said about anarchists not thinking about how a stateless society can work is so bafflingly ignorant that I felt the need to respond in such detail. Comparing it to a few teens thinking they can buy their own house without a down payment or steady income or anything else is such a non sequitur that I was baffled by either your laziness in doing no research or arrogance in thinking you know all about the ideology without doing any research on it.
And commenters in general, if you don’t want me to rant at you, don’t make comments that are the statist equivalent of, “if evolution says we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys and why don’t dogs give birth to cats?”
The problem, as you probably well know, is that dropping a bunch of links into a comment section is not convincing. It may give you a feeling of superiority, but few people are going to bother reading a bunch of links. If you make a comment, we expect you to clearly and concisely state your position and be prepared to defend it. Since this etiquette has developed over a number of years in the more respectful comment threads, I am certain you are aware how this works. Or, possibly, as you profess to be an anarchist, you think that you can single-handedly change the standard norms of this community. Yet, that cannot be true, as many of the articles you linked to above discuss how anarchism relies on the consensus of a small community to be effective.
So I have read a number of the articles and reddit threads you have linked to. Probably only about 40%, but it’s enough to suggest to me that you are being disingenuous when you suggest that anarchists have solutions for some of the thornier practical and moral issues with society. Or you simply did a reddit search for certain key words, like “Justice” or “Police” and linked those searches into this thread.
So let’s talk about policing and justice first. I am not suggesting that our current system is good and fair, but the solutions offered by the anarchist writings above are laughable. Richard Singer’s essay, the first link you provided, said that due process was not necessary, that an impartial investigation into a possible crime would reveal if the accused performed the crime or not. And that if an impartial set of investigators is not available within the anarchist community, then the community should reach out to another community to ask for some help. How exactly does that work?
When I was an elected official, i.e. selected by my community to represent them in local affairs, I had a long argument with another official about the fact that they are not competent to determine whether they had a conflict of interest on a specific topic which came up. I did not, and still do not, have an opinion about whether that elected official had conflict of interest, I only maintained that he was not qualified to determine if he did. The mere fact that there might be a conflict of interest was enough to compromise his judgement about whether he had one. The point is that even if the anarchist theory of interlocking/intersecting communities existed, the ability for a person to judge whether they are impartial is difficult.
So let’s have a quick glance at anarchist policies on justice. The reddit threads are all over the map on that topic, from vigilantism to community ostracization. The general consensus is that incarceration is bad, and that every criminal should (and can be) rehabilitated. Note that this isn’t that far from the current liberal viewpoint, the main difference is that the liberals sometimes will acknowledge that lifetime incarceration is the only way to prevent some people from continuing to harm others. When confronted by this specific question, “How does an anarchist society handle a serial killer?” There was a lot of hand-waving and few practical suggestions. The question about lynch mobs was asked, and one of the anarchist responses was ludicrous. The response was that lynch mobs only form with the tacit approval of the people in authority. Which can certainly happen, but it also not a requirement for a lynch mob to form unless you significantly re-define what a lynch mob is.
Finally, let’s review the reddit thread about supply chains. There were some good questions asked in those threads, but the answers were not satisfying. The best answer was that now that these supply chains are formed an anarchist society can take them over. The next best was that there are computer programs which manage the entire the supply chain, so we don’t need corporations to do so. Note that neither of them address the issue of how an anarchist society would deal with a supply chain failure. Then there were a lot of responses about how production should be more local anyway, which again, does not answer the question. The Eric Fleischmann essay talked about the evils of the “just-in-time” production strategy, but that has only a tangential relationship to supply chains. You can use “just-in-time” manufacturing methods without long supply chains, and you can have long supply chains without practicing “just-in-time”. If he wanted to say that using a “just-in-time” methodology reduces the amount of disruptions manufacturing can absorb without shutting down a line, then he should have said so. Instead, the essay was beating a dead horse. Maybe Fleischmann isn’t aware of it, but Toyota (and other car manufacturers) are no longer trying get deliveries on a “just-in-time” basis. Most automotive manufacturers have been bitten by that mistake already and require at least 30 days safety stock from their suppliers so they can keep the lines running for at least a month. Toyota wants all their suppliers to have 90 days of safety stock. There is no reason to think that an community-owned company would make these decisions any differently.
You mention that not all anarchists agree, and this is borne out by the links you provided. I don’t have a problem with that, not all capitalists agree, or all liberals, or all atheists. But this also gives you a “get-out-of-argument-free” card. By posting links to other people’s writings you are not sharing your own beliefs, and not providing arguments or evidence to support those beliefs which you have not shared. Again, this is one of the reasons people are not engaging with you or reading your links. We are all familiar with your tactics, we’ve seen it before. If you truly think that the anarchists have superior solutions, present those solutions clearly and concisely with evidence. If you are not certain if you agree with the anarchist solution, and are just throwing it out here for discussion, say that. We’ll understand and respect that. Posting a bunch of links and insulting the commentors for not following them will get you ignored, which is apparently one of the punishments some anarchists favor.
Finally, regardless of what I’ve written above. I have a good deal of respect for the anarchist position. If I understand the anarchist position correctly, the core belief is that power should be distributed as widely as possible. The main areas of disagreement is in the how, and how much. I will point out that the liberal position on power is the same. I am not talking about any political parties or formal organizations, but that a core belief in liberal philosophy is that power needs to be distributed to curb authoritarianism/fascism/tyranny, and provide the greatest opportunity for happiness to as many people as possible.
Let me also point out that the libertarian view on power is also very similar. The difference is that the libertarian view is that an individual should have all the power of a state, while the anarchist view is that there should be no state.
All three positions are anti-authoritarianism, and all three have some unachievable idealistic goals. But I submit that because human beings have a well-pronounced tendency to form hierarchical structures even in the smallest societies (at a tribal level of 10-15 individuals), any solution for a society which doesn’t include the structure of a state in some form is doomed to develop one. Societies which can only function according to their theory by changing how humans think or act are doomed to failure from the beginning, and unfortunately those failures inevitably result in a “Strong-Man” society forming. The main difference between a idealist and a realist is that an idealist expects humanity to change while a realist recognizes that humanity hasn’t changed in hundreds of thousands of years.
Lastly, the principled anarchist ideal of creating interlocking communities which are largely self-policing is certainly possible. In fact they exist today in the class of oligarchs, who for all practical purposes follow their own community law and none other because there is no country which will enforce their laws on the oligarch class. The obvious difficulty with communities which establish their own customs and policing is obvious; there is no equal justice. One community may accept certain behavior which another bans, and one community may execute transgressors while another ostracizes them. If these communities intersect, i.e. a person belongs to a guild of metalworkers and also sits on the town council, which laws and customs is are they subject to? Both of them? Or if your life partner works in a mill which docks pay for being late to work while the mill you work in will fire you, is the difference in punishments just?
I’m certainly not saying that our capitalist system is any better, justice is not equal in capitalism either. But anarchists cannot claim to be better at justice when they cannot, do not, agree on what constitutes a transgression, what sort of due process is necessary to protect both accusers and accused of a crime, and what punishments are appropriate. Keep in mind that ostracizing is only passing the problem in your community to another community, it’s a cop out even though it seems to be the most common answer anarchists will give to the question of punishment.
If you want to polytheize about the value of principled anarchism, go ahead and do so. But not by dropping a bunch of links. In your own words, tell us what solutions you think would work, and why.
Thank you for your courtesy. I apologize for spamming links; I was not aware that doing so was not allowed here; I was too used to forums where doing so is acceptable. I also apologize for derailing the thread, but this is where we are now. L. Neil Smith shows no understanding of what is needed to run society, but I wanted to prove that the stronger claim, that you just can’t have a stable society without the state, is not true. In hindsight I should not have used Reddit as a source; I thought it would be fine because that subreddit is specifically based on answering people’s questions. But I won’t use any Reddit sources in this post unless I absolutely cannot find any answers anywhere else.
I don’t understand why “we can use preexisting supply chains under anarchy” is not a valid answer. It is not the case that anarchism opposes organization, only hierarchical and coercive organization. It has been demonstrated on numerous occasions that workers are more efficient when they run things themselves without managers and when they have autonomy to make their own decisions. At this point, I must explain that anarchism has a specific definition of authority which allows anarchists to be consistent when they say they oppose all authority (no exceptions) but this is not exactly the same as the colloquial definition, though it is similar. In ordinary English, the word “authority” is broad enough to include expertise, even where there is no exploitative relationship, but that would confuse more than elucidate, so anarchists use a stricter definition of the word authority. To an anarchist, authority means “a social relation of domination or exploitation coercively imposed by one party onto others, claiming a right to command or forbid, or exercise some similar privilege, backed by means of physical, economic, or intellectual power, especially when found in a systemic or institutional form and when considered in contrast to free agreement, expert advice, the inevitable laws of nature, or the resistance to this imposition.” (Unfortunately, my source for this definition is from the Internet, so I can’t really cite it without placing a link. Please forgive me when I do so; it comes from here: https://judgesabo.substack.com/p/anarchism-against-all-authority) Since there is no domination or coercion in listening to those who are experts in a subject (meaning they know more than you) anarchists have no problem with science or standards and practices. Moreover, since this definition of authority is more restricted than the common usage, those arguments I have read here that imply that anarchy would have to throw the baby out with the bathwater and reject the complex social relations necessary for technological society to be possible were committing an equivocation fallacy between two incompatible definitions of the word “authority”. This also applies to the term “state”. Anarchists define states as the mechanism by which to enforce authority (in the anarchist-jargon sense). While I could therefore argue that your “how to stop would-be strongmen without recreating the state ourselves” argument thus misses the mark, because if society does not ever accept the dominance relation as legitimate, then it cannot be a state even with its safeguards to prevent people from seeking the power to dominate others (since they would not be hierarchical). It actually sounds obvious when put that way. However, I do not think this argument is necessary since I have a different one.
According to “An Anarchist FAQ”, by Neal et al., anarchist society would consist of mass assemblies of all involved (which could be everyone in the area—anarchists reject the idea that direct democracy is unworkable, especially with modern communications) based on extensive discussion and debate between equals. Of course, elected committees would need to exist to handle administrative tasks that aren’t suited for something else, but they would consist of delegates (not representatives!) that could be recalled for any reason and at any time. Any delegate who tries to go against their mandate gets recalled and their rogue decisions voided. This is so that they remain accountable to the people and don’t become like the US Congress or UK Parliament. (This might be explained better in the book; I’m summarizing because I have to leave for work soon.)
But I can’t stop here, because that would contribute to a common misconception that anarchism would revert to a local scale of isolated communities that cannot work together for big projects. This is not the case at all! So I must mention the second part, which is that the local communities federate together (in what is called a confederation, which has no relation at all to the Confederacy) which is organized from the bottom-up. (Anarchists hold that bottom-up organization is superior to top-down in practically every case, and I know not of any counterexamples in nature.) Basically, this is run just like the local communities but one level higher (like a wedding cake). The difference between this and the current system is that the higher levels have no power over the low; the lower levels could withdraw. But this should not be permanent, but only till a compromise is reached that satisfies everyone. (I have some doubts about how this would work in practice myself, but I assume this is because the FAQ does not go into much detail since it is an introduction. Obviously the system would not end all problems and disagreement; what matters is that it would handle it better than our system. Any community that withdrew because it wanted to keep some hierarchy would by definition not be anarchist, and anarchists do not interact with non-anarchist communities the same way as they do with anarchist ones.) Again, I strongly recommend reading the original source (it’s available online but is a print book) if you are confused, because though I put this in my own words, it’s possible that I misrepresented something by accident. This was from section A.2.9.
Note that some other anarchists claim to be against direct democracy, but this is because they think that term should strictly mean majority rule (where 51% have absolute veto power over 49%, who have no recourse) and that it should not be used to describe their preferred alternative (from the last paragraph) because that would confuse people. The authors of the Anarchist FAQ obviously disagree, but this dispute is of terminology only. Those anarchists who claim to be against democracy still support the system given in the last paragraph, they just call it something else. (That is, they are not anti democracy because they support tyranny, but because they think democracy isn’t free enough!)
Section I.5.8 explains the anarchist alternative to police and prisons. I’ll have to continue this is a later post because I have to leave for work, but anarchists do not, in fact, believe that all crime is the result of capitalism or anything like that (though they do think most of it is and that the crime rate would go down tremendously in a nonhierarchical society. Of course, the problem is how to deal with the remainder of antisocial people, like rapists and serial killers.) But I’ve run out if time, so I have to continue this tomorrow. Wait till then!
I don’t understand why “we can use preexisting supply chains under anarchy” is not a valid answer.
Supply chains mean trade, transport and commerce; and all of that depends on some form of policing to stave off pirates and other criminals who are known to prey on travellers when they can. And that means some form of state(s) ensuring save travel via their respective highways or se routes. Not necessarily a totalitarian state that’s all up in everyone’s business every time they travel, but definitely some form of coercive state power.
It is not the case that anarchism opposes organization, only hierarchical and coercive organization.
That’s fine for the kinds of organization that don’t have to be hierarchical or coercive; but not all organizations involved in supply chains are like that.
It has been demonstrated on numerous occasions that workers are more efficient when they run things themselves without managers and when they have autonomy to make their own decisions.
Here, I suspect, we’re getting into an apples-to-wombats comparison I’ve often heard when talking about anarchism. When we argue about “government” we’re generally talking about whole societies (big or small) and how best to govern everyone in them. But what you’re referring to here seems to be working-groups or teams, within a larger company, which exists within a greater society, which is most likely governed by a state (of any sort). The teams themselves can be anarchic, but they can only function within a larger context of a complex and hierarchical corporation or network of corporations, which both enables and regulates what its component teams do. And those lose anarchic teams are not what we’re talking about when we criticize “anarchy” or “anarchism.”
First, so far as I know the blog owner has not made any suggestions on whether dumping a lot of links into a comment is good or bad. I doubt that he really cares all that much. I will say, from decades of experience in on-line discussions, that dumping a bunch of links into a discussion and then saying, “These prove my point. If you don’t go read them you can’t discuss, or understand what I’m saying intelligently.” That is viewed as condescending. In my opinion, every link should have a short description about what the comment author thinks the reader will learn from it.
I think Raging Bee may be onto something, the scale of the anarchism you are talking about seems to be different than the scale we are thinking about. A number of the Reddit posts I read seem to suggest that many of the anarchists are really following in the footsteps of the early wobblies. That is, less concerned with changing society as a whole and more interested in promoting worker-owned businesses, hoping that with enough of them society will change for the better.
Which brings up the confusion over supply chains. The questions was asked in the Reddit was how an anarchist society would handle supply chain shortages. The answer provided was to say that the current supply chains could simply be taken over by anarchists and managed without a desire for profit. Do you understand how the answer doesn’t match the question? If the question was, “How could a supply chain currently managed by capitalists become run by anarchists?” The provided answer would be acceptable. But the question was about supply-chain shocks, and no answer was given. I wouldn’t expect an anarchist managed supply chain to be any worse than a capitalist one, but I don’t see any evidence that it would be better. In this comment section, sonofrojblake asks how a complex supply chain could form under an anarchist society. That wasn’t answered in the Reddit thread either.
Next, definitions, good, I like looking at definitions because it is often in the differences in definitions where disagreements lie. However, I think everyone here understands that when we are talking about authority, we are not talking about experts. Instead we are specifically referring to a hierarchical structure where some people have the ability to command the actions of others. I will point out, however, that the definition you used has a flaw. In the first part it refers to “intellectual power” and in the second part it says that expert knowledge is not an authority under this definition. Unless the original author thinks “intellectual power” is referring to debunked concepts like I.Q., and the socially accepted status which these arbitrary scales claim to measure, I have a hard time imagining what intellectual power could be other than expert skills and knowledge. But that is really a minor quibble and shouldn’t concern us in this discussion.
In theory, all elected officials in the US can be recalled at any time for any reason. It just takes a consensus of the electorate to do so. They cannot be recalled by one person who doesn’t like them. We establish the consensus using a tool we call voting. Now, there are some special positions in our government, positions where the electorate is not every citizen, but the representatives of a collective of citizens. I can think of two at the moment, the President and Vice-President which are elected by slates of electors chosen by each state, and the people in these offices can be removed for any reason at any time if congress passes a law to remove them.
If the anarchist position is that any citizen can recall any politician at any time for any reason there would never be anyone filling those positions. Now maybe the anarchist position is that those positions should not exist, but I’ve yet to see a convincing method of how a modern society could function without power delegated by the citizens to people who have the authority to speak for them.
Let me conclude by bringing up a concept I’ve held for some time, but only recently learned there was a term for it: Chesterton’s Fence. The concept is simple; before making a change, particularly before dismantling a system, it is wise to understand how why the system was put into place in the first place. Chesterton’s Fence was a thought experiment where someone asks him if they can remove a fence separating a field. Chesterton response was, “If you can tell me why that fence was put up, I can give you permission to remove it.”
When the essays and internet conversations provided as evidence that anarchism is a valid social system can’t seem to answer simple questions about how the anarchist community handles a serial killer (lifelong incarceration or death are the two obvious answers), the goal of having all citizens come to a consensus before making any major decision (which could be on something as important as making insulin which will be used by 5% of the community) seems somewhat of a pipe-dream. People will not pay attention, then object afterwards on the decision which was made in their name. People will change their minds once they see the amount of effort a task will be required. People are not rational beings. Any proposed social order which doesn’t take the irrationality of individual humans into account is doomed to failure.
Finally, I haven’t really looked for one, but if you know of any examples of a working anarchist community along the lines you describe above, I would love to review it. It doesn’t need to be contemporary. I can’t think of any offhand. The closest I can think of are the monasteries in the middle ages, but while they did discuss actions and tried to reach a consensus, they were also definitely in a hierarchal structure even within the monastery.
I think we can all agree in general:
– Handling policing and justice without an active state is not an easy problem.
– There are anarchists who have seriously thought about how to handle this problem.
– L. Neil Smith is not one of them.
This is in reply to flex, since we hit the thread reply limit.
OK, I thought it was obvious that by “delegates can be recalled for any reason” there needs to be a consensus among the relevant constituency and we can’t just have one person doing a heckler’s veto, so I thought this didn’t need to be explained. Thank you for pointing out that this is not self-explanatory. It is my fault for not explaining it properly. (If anything, a heckler’s veto would be the most authoritarian thing there is: one person overriding the decisions of everybody else. Obviously this is incompatible with anarchy. People still have to know that they won’t always get their way.)
Now, about supply chain shocks, I am not sure if anything would actually need to be changed, because is it even the case that they are run hierarchically now? I couldn’t find anything in Wikipedia about it; what I did find is that there is still a lot of research ongoing on how to optimize them. We can just let the experts keep doing what they are doing. (Wikipedia does seem to say that smaller organizations can manage shocks better, though. But I don’t know how relevant that is for the discussion as a whole.) Raging Bee seems to think that we need hierarchy to fend off highway robbers, but the community defenses who I will elaborate on in the next few paragraphs would handle such things.
I had to interrupt my original answer before getting to the good part because I had to run off to work. So, when I left off we were talking about criminal justice, right? As I was about to say before having to leave, anarchists are not required to believe that Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, or the Zodiac killer could be rehabilitated. Bundy claimed that he killed people just for fun and for no other reason; I genuinely believe he’d have turned out exactly the same no matter what society he was born into. For genuine psychopaths like this, they would indeed have to be isolated from other people, but this would be more analogous to how people who are committed to mental hospitals aren’t allowed to leave until their treatment is over; that isn’t at all the same thing as imprisonment. (Note that this is an analogy. I am NOT saying that sufferers of mental illness are dangerous, nor am I even saying that incorrigibly evil people are all mentally ill. Only Hitler and Heydrich, among the Nazis, were mentally ill; the rest were considered normal and yet were still completely unrehabilitable. Anarchists would not have even tried transformative justice on them if anarchists had been in the Allies’ position; they knew it wouldn’t work.) Considering that most modern societies find the death penalty immoral, I don’t know why only anarchists are getting flak for opposing it.
(If we had much more advanced technology then another solution would be possible: have the incorrigibly unreformable evildoer followed around by an indestructible, unevadable robot that says and does nothing unless the offender tries to harm or kill another person, at which point the robot instantly physically restrains them. But such a solution is utterly beyond us right now, so when dealing with Ted Bundy-level psychopaths who can’t be reformed and will never stop searching for new victims, we’ll have to settle for either exiling them to the wilderness or keeping them away from other people in some other way, but there are ways to do that without replicating the injustice of imprisonment.) Note that indigenous societies are able to prevent psychopathic killers from running amok without needing prisons, and I would recommend reading “Instead of Prisons” by the Prison Research Education Action Project for more information on why prisons don’t deter crime and actually make it worse.
But anyway, this was a long tangent on the worst-case scenario of an offender who cannot be redeemed no matter what, someone on the level of Ted Bundy or Hitler. While anarchists should certainly know how to identify such people, for 99% of other antisocial behavior the offender can be rehabilitated, and so for “ordinary” cases transformative justice should be used. (This is not the same thing as restorative justice, as even Wikipedia points out.) But this discussion has only been about how to treat the guilty; I know you also want to know how anarchism can keep dye process and prevent miscarriages of justice. Black’s Law Dictionary defines due process as “such an exercise of the powers of the government as the settled maxims of the law permit and sanction, and under such safeguards for the protection of individual rights as those maxims prescribe.” Despite the statist language here, this doesn’t require a state. The most important part of due process is that the accused is always considered innocent until proven guilty, no matter what, with positively no exceptions, because it is better to let a million guilty people go free than to allow even one innocent to be wrongly convicted. So the defendant must be acquitted if any reasonable doubt is established, even if the preponderance of the evidence says he did it. Since this is a special case of the general fact that the maker of a positive claim is the one to have the burden of proof and it can never be shifted to the maker of a negative claim, this is intuitively a good idea that is in no way dependent on there being a hierarchy. In fact, it was so obvious that, when I questioned Adam’s assertion that due process is institutionally incompatible with statelessness, I assumed he could not possibly, sincerely be asserting that the only thing preventing people from telling the accused, “you can’t prove you didn’t do it, therefore you did and are guilty” is that there is a social hierarchy. Such a claim would be so idiotic that the principle of charity required me to assume he meant something else. The fact is that due process, habeas corpus and presumption of innocence are obviously good ideas, especially from the original position where you don’t know if you’ll ever be accused of something awful. If a community seriously considered abolishing them (which, by the way, is theoretically possible in our statist society if two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the state legislatures wanted to do away with it) that could only mean that defenders of due process were somehow utterly unable to rationally defend it, a situation I find about as unlikely as convincing people they don’t need air to breathe. No, I think his likelier fear is that it will just be ignored despite being best practice because no one can enforce it. But of course, if a corrupt judge in our current system ignores due process, the defendant will appeal and get a new trial, and the same would happen here because, guess what, there would still be trial by jury and there would still be appeals. Why wouldn’t there be appeals? It would be another case of babies and bathwater. We keep what is good about the current system instead of doing away with all of it. These arguments seem to assume that anarchists can’t see what is worth keeping.
Now, I agree with you that idealists require human nature to change and that realists understand that it has never changed and never will. This would refute anarchism… if anarchism were idealistic and ignored human nature. But it does not. Anarchism does not require humans to be good by nature in order to work. Anarchists are very aware that hierarchy brings out the worst in humanity. If human nature really were innately good, then there would be absolutely nothing wrong with hierarchy because human nature would be incorruptible and nobody would ever use hierarchy to exploit people. This, of course, is not the case. It seems like non-anarchists depend on an incorruptible human nature, but anarchism does not. Sections A.2.15, A.2.16, and A.2.17 of the Anarchist FAQ go into more detail than I can provide. But anarchists are absolutely not moronic enough to think that humans can be made perfect.
This is not the first time I’ve heard of Chesterton’s fence. This whole long response has been an attempt to show that I do in fact know why it is there and what purpose it serves.
If you still think this couldn’t work, please ask questions that are specific, so that I know what still needs to be answered. If needed, I’ll also ask other people who know more than me. Thank you for opening up this discussion.
To be a little snarky, then this means we already live in at least a partially anarchist state because as citizens we do have the ability to create consensus within our constituency and recall the delegates we have selected to serve as public servants. There are a multitude of reasons why we don’t. A lot of them are bad reasons, but an anarchic society does not seem to protect against things like the formation of political parties, partisanship, bigotry, racism, sexism, patriotism, or personal loyalty. Sure, the other systems don’t have good answers to those problems either, but there is no evidence that anarchism would manage those problems better. From what I read, the anarchist answer to those problems is to educate the citizenry and maintain constant vigilance against the accretion of power by any one individual or group. I agree with this, but it doesn’t need an anarchic state to agree that our citizenry is woefully undereducated. There is no evidence that anarchism would solve this problem, adopting anarchism in the hope that it would solve this problem seems shortsighted.
Touching on the supply chains again, maybe you are not seeing what I see. The suggestion was that supply chains do not require hierarchal structure, and that is true, most of them do not, when evaluated as a series of transfers of goods. There is not one company or one hierarchal structure overseeing these transfers. But the formation of the supply chains in the first place was driven by capitalists. If the contention is that the anarchists will let other organizations, hierarchal organizations, do the heavy lifting of creating the supply chain in the first place, and then take them over, that’s fine. But be open about it.
But to make one more point about supply chains. They are already largely about distributed power. Every organization in the supply chain knows that everyone loses if one link is broken (well, in my experience, everyone except General Motors). These include not only the companies involved, but also the governments which regulate the companies and products. As I’ve given it more thought, a good argument could be made that a supply chain is already largely anarchic in nature.
To close the worst-case offender discussion, when I wrote incarceration it was not to imply, necessarily, prison bars. I was indicating that the person needed to be isolated from the rest of society. If society was willing to provide them with a suite of rooms with good food and plenty of entertainment and activities it would be fine with me. I do not believe in retributive justice, but I also have come to feel that rehabilitation is not possible in all cases. I also am against involuntary exile (and in some cases voluntary exile), as in those cases the society is simply ignoring the problem.
You indicate that an anarchic society could still have (agreed upon) rules for habeas corpus and other aspects of due process in the protection of individual rights. Without getting into the fact that rights are established by societies, and enforced by societies, this is a pretty bold claim. Because in order to have due process there needs to be a process, a standardized process, which is enforced by people who understand the process. I know anarchists in general do not like the term, enforced (which is strikingly similar to the aversion libertarians have to the term). But you have suggested that specialists will be needed to perform certain tasks. In this case you will need specialists in the process of enforcement of the standards agreed on by the community. Specialists in sifting evidence. Specialists in judging evidence. Specialist in presenting evidence. And because people will not always admit to violating the standards of a community, and thus be unwilling to be present when the evidence and judgements are made, there will need to be specialists who find those people accused of violating the standards of the community. It is even possible that these specialists will need a place to sequester an accused to prevent them from creating further harm to the community. Surprisingly to me, one of the Reddit commentors suggested that in an anarchic society everyone would hire their own security specialists, i.e. bodyguards and police. That idea crops up regularly in the libertarian literature (I’ve always wondered, who do the bodyguards hire to protect them? Or are they not paid enough to hire their own bodyguards?).
Do you need a state to create all of what I just described above? No, not really. And all these people performing all these tasks don’t need to have any authority in any other subject than their specialty. Their specialty may be the customs of the community, and as specialists they can speak with authority on those customs, but they would not necessarily be seen as an authority on other subjects.
So what function does a state have if every community can monitor the behavior of those within the community and correct any transgressions? From a community standards viewpoint, the state can ensure that all communities agree on what constitutes a transgression against the community standards, and work to harmonize them among all communities. The state arises naturally, not through a top-down hierarchy, but through communities desire to interact with other communities.
In all western democracies, and in fact in all functioning societies, the top-down approach only goes so far. A Mongol warlord may conquer India, and demand obedience from their new subjects, but directions about how to farm the land are ignored. Most leaders know this, never give an order which will not be obeyed. The few examples of societies where a top-down approach was rigorously enforced suffered horribly through famine and disease. The fact that our current US administration does not understand power, and is trying a top-down approach, ignoring the specialists which tell them these are bad ideas, has the potential to seriously harm millions of people.
I’ve spent a few hours reading more of the Reddit threads. I’ve invented a few hypotheticals which I’m not going to bother you with, unless they come up. You are certainly right in saying that there is a wide range of views among anarchists. But one of the more interesting comments I read said, paraphrased, “I wasn’t offered an opportunity to agree to the laws of our society when I was born. I don’t like them now. I don’t want to have to follow the laws I don’t agree with.” This sentiment is so close to the libertarian complaint that it kind of surprised me. Are some anarchists libertarians in disguise? Or did separate, but basically similar philosophies develop?
You have argued that specialists, those who have demonstrated greater knowledge about a subject, should still have some authority as related to their specialist subject. I agree. For example, I know something about car repair, but if something is wrong I trust the mechanic to know more than I do. Similarly, I trust a doctor more than myself to diagnose a disease. This leaves the door open both for liars and quacks, but that’s another topic. I even trust lawyers to know more about the law than I do, but I know a few lawyers and I wouldn’t trust any of them to repair my car or give me medical advice. None of these people exist in the same hierarchal structure as I do, at least not in any specific sense. So where is the hierarchy you want torn down?
The anarchists I see on the Reddit dialogs appear to say that corporations are hierarchal. Sure. On paper they are. And there is a significant power differential between what actions I can direct in the organization I work for than the CEO. But, that CEO is supposed to be a specialist in running companies, while I’m a specialist in a few things like electrical engineering, EMC testing, and clearing up documentation messes. I can’t fire him, because I do not have the power to do so. He can fire me because he does. The reality is, however, that regardless of what the organization chart shows, we both have our jobs to do. I make requests, plan work, execute this work, without ever bothering even my direct supervisor. I don’t rely on him to tell me what to do, and he mainly stays out of my way. I know not everyone is in a job where this is possible, but it isn’t much of a hierarchy even if it looks like one on paper.
Similarly, I served on the board of my municipality for many years. I was an elected official. Technically, I was at the top hierarchy in the local municipality. Could I have abused the authority I had? Sure, if I had wanted to do so I could have had a pet project which would really have been a waste of taxpayer money. If I was a lawyer, being able to claim I was an elected official might have helped me get clients. Did I have as much power as the sheriff deputies we hired? After all, we paid their wages. In some ways yes, I had a voice in zoning decisions, road repairs, infrastructure improvements, parks and recreation, building permits, a lot of things which impacted the local community. But I didn’t have the authority to arrest anyone, we hired specialists for that.
After reading a lot of the Reddit discussions, a lot of it seems to be from people who complain about hierarchies of corporations and government without really understanding what they are and how they function. This is very similar to the complaints libertarians make about laws, again without understanding the reasons the laws exist in the first place.
I am not saying that there are no problems with our process of government or with the rapacity of unregulated capitalism. I’m also completely on board with dismantling hierarchies of power as much as possible and distributing power as much as possible. If that is all that your idea of anarchism entails, then we agree.
However, the vast number of people in our government and in our corporations are specialists. They have and use knowledge which other people in the same organization do not have. Some of those people are specialists in directing others in where to apply that knowledge. Most of the hierarchies in government and the private sector are hierarchies of specialists.
Which suggests to me that the anarchism you are promoting really isn’t about tearing down institutions and refusing to put up others in their place. It’s about recognizing that the system we currently operate under has significant flaws; from an unequal justice system, to abuse of government power, to corporate fraud. Liars and loons appear to be rewarded while people with integrity try to avoid the mud and stay out of the game of power. I sympathize with the idea that maybe we should tear it all down and start anew, but even the mild form of anarchy you appear to be suggesting doesn’t seem to offer solutions to the above problems.
Anarchists suggest that the root problem with society is hierarchies. That if there were no formal or informal distinctions between people many of the problems would not exist. If everyone had enough to eat, comfortable places to sleep, and could like without fear, most anti-social behavior would disappear. I don’t actually disagree with the last statement, but a lot of the anarchist writings seem to focus on government and corporate hierarchies, as if those structures were the cause of increasing inequality. I found little in the writings I read suggesting that social hierarchies contribute to the above problems. These are informal hierarchies which exist in a community through long-standing custom. However, these informal hierarchies are responsible for much of the disparity between how citizens are treated by the different members of society.
Further, a lot of the complaints from the anarchists about modern society are not actually related to hierarchies. Policing is intended to be non-hierarchal. That is, the policeman is given the power to arrest citizens, and that authority expands to the function of keeping the peace. Which does encompass protecting property. But it does not officially grant a policeman power to use this authority outside of their working hours or to arrest citizens who are not breaking a law or clearly about to do so. The fact that police take more power than society intended to grant them is a problem, not with a hierarchy but with society. The de-facto immunity police have from prosecution for the same types of offences non-police citizens are arrested for has given, and encouraged, police forces to believe they have more authority than statute allows. This needs to change whether it is called a hierarchy or not. The same problems can develop in any society, including an anarchist one.
After reading through a lot of the anarchist thought, my conclusion is that the anarchists have decided that one solution would solve all problems. Don’t get me wrong, the anarchists are not alone in this belief. I have a belief that one change to US tax law would significantly improve the lives of everyone within 20 years. I don’t think the change I favor would fix everything, but it would provide resources which could be used to fix more. I could be wrong, but it worked in the past so I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t work in the future. Of course, we all laugh at the liberaltarians who think unregulated capitalism and no government at all would solve all societies problems. Complex problems may require multiple changes to solve.
I did look for societies which the anarchists look to as more representative of anarchist anti-hieratical ideals. The most common modern example I found was the Rojava, a loose consortium of Kurds, Muslim, and other religious groups in Northern Syria. I wonder how many anarchists have done anything more than repeat what others have said because even a cursory review of Rojava finds that they have a constitution and a representative democracy. There is language in the constitution referring to judicial authority, which means police, judges, and a legal system with laws. While the Rojava is not a recognized state, it is still technically part of Syria according to the rest of the world, it has the structure of a modern democracy. If this is an example of an anarchist society, it’s very different than what I would have expected.
Do you have any examples of a non-hieratical society?
Thank you for your response, flex.
There is nothing really wrong or incorrect with your first paragraph. In the sense that we do not live under a king, and do elect our rulers, our society is obviously freer than most have been throughout history. But most people would object to saying that the current system is “partially anarchistic”. Yes, anarchism is hope that it could manage those problems better, but anything that promotes anti-racism, anti-patriarchy, acceptance of LGBTQ+ people, and other social justice issues already serves to make society less hierarchical, so it still seems clear that the goal would be something very much like anarchy, to say the least. Mostly, we are in agreement on this first paragraph and our differences are rather insignificant.
Your description of my contention in the second paragraph is also pretty good. I don’t really have a problem with the solution you are proposing, assuming that I understand it correctly in the first place. You are saying that an anarchist society would simply manage the supply chains that were created before under the earlier, non-anarchic system? I don’t see a problem with that, though it might be an oversimplification. I also think that new supply chains could be made afterward, since they are already pretty horizontally run and there is no reason they could not remain that way. (Your third paragraph seems to support this.) I hope I am understanding your position so that neither of us end up beating a dead horse.
I do not actually dispute the claim made in the fourth paragraph that “there needs to be a process, a standardized process, which is enforced by people who understand the process.” I have argued from the beginning that such standardization is fully compatible with anarchy. Standardization and organization need not be hierarchical; hierarchy only happens when somebody at the bottom is being exploited. This is also why anarchy allows specialists with expertise, since greater knowledge is not exploitation. Indeed, the whole open source movement demonstrates that expertise and specialization can function perfectly well without even ownership, much less hierarchical control. Going into your fifth and sixth paragraphs, the point is that the state would not have a function anymore and would not be necessary. (To be clear, these nonhierarchical specialists would not make up a state. This may be the cause of your confusion. The specialists in due process are still necessary, but they would exist in a society that is not organized the way that a state is.) What arises naturally is organization, not the state. Remember that the anarchist definition of the state is an apparatus that allows those with authority to maintain their position in the hierarchy, so a nonhierarchical organization is not a state even if it is complex.
(I am not going to number paragraphs anymore because your original points stretch into multiple paragraphs.) Your next topic asks me whether there is significance in the fact that right-libertarians and anarchists sometimes have the same critique of the state. I do not know the answer to this question. My guess is that, since anti-statism is necessary but not sufficient for anarchist thought, some naïve anti-statists develop that idea first and then join either movement depending on their feelings about capitalism, but I cannot prove that. Of course, the fact that, say, both Christianity and Buddhism teach that good behavior and belief allow the believer into a “good” afterlife (Heaven or Nirvana) and that sinful behavior results in punishment after death for an absurdly long time (Hell or Naraka) does not mean that either was influenced by the other or that they share a common origin.
“You have argued that specialists, those who have demonstrated greater knowledge about a subject, should still have some authority as related to their specialist subject. I agree.”
I am warning you to be careful, because this is using words in a way that is different from how they are commonly understood. The word “authority” means something very specific in this context, and in this context, “authority” is the improper word. Authority implies exploitation and domination, which is not the relationship between the specialist and the layman. A doctor has no right to order his patient to give him the fruits of his labor or to harm him in a medically unnecessary way. This is true in our current society just as much as it is in anarchism. That the doctor knows how to treat the patient and that the patient better do what the doctor says in regards to his treatment has nothing to do with their relation in any other setting. Unless society allows one person to treat another like a servant or other inferior, their relation is not one of authority. It is very important to internalize this in order to avoid accidentally equivocating two definitions of “authority”. There isn’t a hierarchy to be torn down here; it exists elsewhere.
Corporations are hierarchical not just on paper. Going into full detail would take too long, but I will summarize an argument given by one of my sources, which I will cite at the very end so that you can read it yourself if you desire. (I understand that if I give my reasons in my own words, I can put links in a “Works Cited” section at the end of the post, right?) Simply put, capitalism (and by extension, corporations, since they can only exist with the capitalist mode of production) is fundamentally not compatible with liberty, equality, and solidarity. But I will only endeavor here to show that corporations are inherently hierarchical and that any nonhierarchical equivalent would necessarily have no CEOs. A capitalist society is based on private ownership of land, means of production, and raw materials, those who work for a boss are paid wages, and maximizing profit is the supreme goal of the corporations (whose owners grow rich from it). Workers have to work for capitalist bosses because all the means of production are owned by capitalists (CEOs and other board members) not by the workers themselves. If this were not so, nobody would choose to work for a boss instead of being self-employed.
I am greatly abridging, but the next important point given by my source is that commodity production existed in pre-capitalist societies but was not completely dominant like it is today. (Of course, those earlier societies were also hierarchical in their own ways.) In general, because CEOs control the means of production, they get the profits and the workers, who will never get control of the means of production no matter how loyal they are to the boss, will never be in a position where they can afford to stop selling their labor to the capitalist. The workers thus depend on the capitalists being willing to employ them while the capitalists can just find other workers, thus, the capitalists have the greater bargaining power and leverage over other people, putting them in a position of authority. This means the workers must do labor to enrich their employers, not themselves.
My source then proves that this is inherently exploitative and cannot be made otherwise using basic mathematics, and since I don’t want to screw it up by summarizing, I will quote in full:
“Let’s say a capitalist hires a worker for $120 per day to make widgets. Each widget requires $5 worth of raw material, and the labor-process also causes wear-and-tear on the tools and machinery the workers use, depreciating them by, let’s say, $1 per widget. We can also say that each widget can be sold for $12. We will ignore any other costs needed for producing and selling these widgets for now for the sake of simplicity.
Suppose the worker produces 20 widgets each day. In this case, the capitalist will have spent $100 on raw material, $20 on wear-and-tear for the tools and machinery, and $120 on the worker’s daily wage. In total, they have spent $240 to produce 20 widgets. Coincidentally, since these widgets sell for $12 each, the capitalist also only receives $240 from the sale of the 20 widgets the worker made.
In summary:
• Total Cost for producing 20 widgets = $240
o Raw Materials = $5 per widget x 20 widgets = $100
o Wear-and-Tear on Means of Production = $1 per widget x 20 widgets = $20
o A day’s wage = $120
• Total Revenue from selling 20 widgets = $12 per widget x 20 widgets = $240
• Profit = Total Revenue – Total Cost = $240 – $240 = $0
This is a terrible result for the capitalist, who demands that they receive more than they contributed. They did not expect to get an equivalent from all this purchasing and selling, but an excess. They expected a profit. But how can they get it?
Let’s say that the wage-laborer produces 10 widgets per hour. They therefore only need 2 hours to make 20 widgets. Since they were paid $120 for a day’s labor, which in this case is only 2 hours long, they are effectively being paid $60 per hour.
But what if the capitalist decided to extend the length of the working-day from 2 hours to 8 hours, yet pay the worker the same $120 daily wage? In that case, the worker will be making the same amount of money each day, yet the amount of work they must do has quadrupled. Instead of making $60 per hour, they now only make $15 per hour.
Since the worker is laboring for four times as long, they are also making four times as many widgets. They produce 80 widgets instead of only 20. The capitalist needs to buy even more raw materials, and tools and machinery are used up more in the daily labor process. The capitalist now spends $400 on raw materials, $80 on wear-and-tear for tools and machinery, but still spends $120 on the worker’s daily wage. In total, the capitalist spends $600 to have 80 widgets made. But by selling 80 widgets for $12 each, they make $960 in revenue.
In summary:
• Total Cost for producing 80 widgets = $600
o Raw Materials = $5 per widget x 80 widgets = $400
o Wear-and-Tear on Means of Production = $1 per widget x 80 widgets = $80
o A day’s wage = $120
• Total Revenue from selling 80 widgets = $12 per widget x 80 widgets = $960
• Profit = Total Revenue – Total Cost = $960 – $600 = $360
As we can see, while before the capitalist gained no profit at all, they now have a profit of $360, which is 60% more than what they spent. The ultimate source of this surplus comes from the surplus-labor of the working classes laboring to support the owning classes this way.
This is, again, an extremely simplified version of this dynamic. The relation between workers and the capitalists are complicated by market competition, but it expresses this basic underlying point. The capitalists and landlords live off the surplus-product produced by the surplus-labor of the entire working class. Some amount of the total social product does not go to the workers who produced it, but to the owning classes simply because they own every element of the production process. In individual cases, this appears as the worker being made to work longer hours (or work at a greater level of intensity) and at lower wages so that the capitalists can make a profit.”
(Just so we are clear, the worker can’t choose to work for only two hours and then leave because then he’d be fired and earn nothing. The capitalist can thus set the working hours and expect full obedience.)
Now, this is supposed to be an argument against all capitalism, not just laissez-faire capitalism like that seen in the Gilded Age, and the point hasn’t yet been made. Theoretically the government could step in and limit working hours or raise the wages. (And governments have done so starting in the Progressive Era.) We are getting to it soon. This computation is there to prove that capitalists must exploit their workers if they want a profit. They can’t choose to be nice and not do so. My source then compares the choice of working for a capitalist or starving to death (because unless you inherited a fortune, you must work for a living because everything costs money) to the choice of handing over your wallet to a mugger. (Theoretically, you could refuse, but he’d kill you. No reasonable person would consider that a free choice, yet somehow people consider the other situation to be one even though they are equivalent.) As such, workers are free only in the sense that they are not literally the property of their bosses and can’t be tortured or killed arbitrarily, but they still have no choice on whether or not to work long hours so that only the boss gets the profit. If they don’t, they will starve, and the capitalist class will show them no sympathy whatever, let alone actually give them food.
Just so we are clear, the problem isn’t like how we must either drink water or die of dehydration, it’s instead like if some asshole held the only source of fresh water for miles hostage and demanded everybody who came to get a drink work for him or else he won’t let them drink. (By the way, if people joined forces and beat him up, nobody would complain about his property rights being violated in this case!) If people have no problem with air being completely free, then it is inconsistent to demand that people have to pay for other biological necessities. Society could have been organized so that everything is free and nobody has to spend money; prices are not an unbreakable law of the universe.
But what about a welfare state, you ask? Why doesn’t that keep capitalist exploitation under control? Well, now we are finally getting to the main thrust (everything before was necessary background information). Well, even if a country were to hypothetically make a welfare state so good that even the heyday of the Swedish model was indigent by comparison, the capitalists just wouldn’t stand for it. They would start a huge propaganda campaign complaining about freeloaders no longer having to work and how their rights are being violated because their profits went down. How do you think the New Deal was dismantled in the first place? Since the rich have money, they have power, inherently more power than anybody else, and they will use that power to force the state to do their bidding.
But I think I am getting off-track here. Your original claim was that CEOs are specialists in administration and therefore deserve to be paid as much as they are, right? Well, this is a very technical economic question, which I am having difficulty summarizing, so I will just inform you that the answer to that claim can be found in the second source I will cite, specifically sections C.2.3, C.2.4, C.2.5, and C.5 of “An Anarchist FAQ”. (I’d love to summarize it in detail, but it’s dense enough that this really is not feasible. You would just have to read the source directly.) Note that this whole criticism of why income inequality shouldn’t be allowed is about socialism in general, not just anarchism. Technically, none of what we discussed is about a stateless society.
If you got the impression that I wasn’t advocating replacing our system with an equitable one, then that was a fault of how I described it. The whole point of this is that we can’t fix these problems by keeping the system of hierarchy intact. I don’t like the term “tearing it down” because that implies it would be more violent than it is. But the important thing is that the social change must occur before the political change, because if it doesn’t, political change will never happen. The problems you are noticing are problems that happen because some people have power over others, and while an anarchist society wouldn’t be perfect, it at least would not have those problems. The systems I have described are only superficially similar to the ones that exist now, and part of that was a deliberate simplification so that you could have some idea what they would be like. But if the system does not have hierarchy and exploitation baked in, it would not suffer from the problems of liars and loons being rewarded, because liars and loons could not compel other people to do what they say.
You actually come close to the point. Sure, police are theoretically not permitted to murder unarmed black people for no reason, but they get away with it because society holds that police are higher in the hierarchy than their victims. If we only changed this system tomorrow but still kept to the beliefs of our current system (like that profit is a good motive or that white men are more trustworthy than other people) hierarchy would come back, because people would still be thinking in an authoritarian way. That is why I said that the social change must happen before the political change. Obviously, if people don’t internalize that there are no justified hierarchies, they’ll inadvertently institute them again. Anarchy is a process. There will never be a time when we can say “we have achieved perfection, now we don’t have to worry about it again”. We are all still learning and have a lot of authoritarianism to unlearn. No anarchist would disagree with you that complex problems require numerous changes to solve.
Technically, Rojava is not quite anarchist, and neither is the Zapatista movement. Anarchists think they come close, but that they are not quite anarchy. I don’t know exactly how a non-hierarchical modern society would be because none have existed yet, much like how no democratic republic had ever existed before 1776. But we know that at least some indigenous societies were non-hierarchical, so the question is how to do something similar in our post-industrial modern world. Again, this is still an ongoing process; I don’t have all the answers. Even my cited sources don’t have all the answers, but they have more answers than I do.
I hope this helped our conversation. It turned out much longer than I had expected. I hope I successfully established that a stateless society could exist without getting rid of the good parts of modernity, but I do think you should read my sources directly to avoid getting a misleading picture like I seem to have accidentally given in certain places. I don’t think I’m too good at explaining complex things like this.
Works Cited
1. Why Anti-Capitalism? – by JudgeSabo – The Archipendulum
2. An Anarchist FAQ | The Anarchist Library
Well, I’m not going to try to hit every point, because I agree with you that this conversation is probably about done. But I have a couple comments.
First, I was very careful to not suggest that a CEO deserves to get paid more than a janitor. That would be a separate conversation and I suspect we may be pretty close in agreement. There was a reason I mentioned the early Wobbilies earlier. They promoted a philosophy that the workers should own the business, and while people in positions with a higher level of responsibility might get higher pay, any profits are split evenly. If a company earned a profit at the end of the year of $10,000, it was split equality between every employee, from the boot-black to the CEO.
Second, I’m quite familiar how companies make profits. One thing which is not clear from your extended example is who is a capitalist and who is a worker. In today’s economy a lot of CEOs, regardless of how much they get paid, are not capitalists. They are also workers. Companies which have been around a long time generally run on the revenues they generate, they are not getting and influx of cash from capitalists on regular basis with the expectation that the company will give them a return. If they do need a short-term loan (and yes I’m aware that most large corporations carry revolving short-term loans for a number of reasons) they go to an investment bank. There are venture capitalist groups which consist of private individuals, but these usually look for start-up companies, not established businesses. Mainly because, as mentioned above, established businesses generate their own revenue.
For what it’s worth, I feel that venture-capitalist backing should be forbidden. A person with an idea who gets venture-capitalist backing isn’t just getting a start-up loan like a bank may offer. The venture capitalist will own part of the business, and part of the profits, without doing any work. If the business is successful, the value of the venture capitalists share of the business will increase, requiring the people who are running the business to pay back far more to the venture capitalist than the original stake. Venture capitalism is a drag on economic growth.
However, what I am saying is, that while I understand the example you give on how workers are exploited, it is greatly simplified and doesn’t really reflect how businesses work. In most cases there is no ultimate boss. The employees work for the managers, the managers work for the chief officers, the chief officers work for the board of directors, and supposedly the board of directors work for the shareholders. The employees can be shareholders. Because the shareholders are a nebulous bunch, which rarely take a hand in the operation of the company, there is a accepted rule that the only thing the shareholders desire is profits. This idea has been tested in courts of law, and the courts have found that shareholder profit is the one goal companies should have.
But back to the point, I never claimed that CEOs should be paid more than other workers. And I’m well aware of the power differential between employers and employees. But it may be better to say that company policies generate that power differential rather than the people within those companies. A manager may well be willing to hire workers at a higher wage than similar companies are doing, but as that would cut into company profits that is not allowed. Famously, one actual capitalist, Henry Ford, paid his workers a third more than the going rate. When he was chastised by other employers in the Detroit area for stealing their employees he responded by saying that he wanted every one of his workers to be able to afford to buy the cars they were making.
I would hazard a guess that most of today’s corporations are run by boards, and even if one or two of the board members felt that reducing the company profit in order to pay their employees more, the rest of them would vote against it.
Regarding policing, if the anarchist belief is that should we change the beliefs of the people before we can make structural changes in how the police operate I feel they have it backwards. Let me repeat what I believe I read above. I understood from what you wrote that if we, through systemic change in how our policing policy operates, we don’t eliminate the prejudices which exist in society (e.g. white men are more trustworthy) then the current problems will remain (or re-occur).
I do not believe that at all. There have been a number of police reforms over the years which have improved the relationship between police and the rest of society. We obviously haven’t gone far enough, but what has been done has made improvements. Further, while changing culture is the hardest thing to do, culture changes a lot faster if there are penalties for doing the wrong thing and rewards for doing the right thing. But things like body-cams on officers has made a difference in how they interact with others, just as vehicle cameras did before. Some suggested reforms, like one from David Brin’s The Transparent Society haven’t occurred, but are good ones. Brin suggested that all police surveillance and traffic cameras have public feeds, that the police cannot monitor to know when someone is watching (and/or recording) what the police are seeing, plus a public camera inside the police surveillance room. There are a lot of reforms which can occur. I know you are not suggesting that nothing be done until the anarchist revolution, but the impression I got was that you think nothing will improve matters until there is social change. Of course I may be reading it wrong.
Finally, I know of the claims that some indigenous societies were non-hierarchal, but I’ve never seen evidence that I would trust for that claim. I’m not saying they couldn’t have been, only that I haven’t seen convincing evidence to answer the question of whether they were or not. And I have read a good number of anthropology books. I feel similarly about the claims made that many pre-historic human societies were matriarchal. There is some evidence which could be interpreted in that way, but that’s not the only possible interpretation of that evidence.
By the way, if you haven’t done so already, I would recommend reading Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Law. I’m not saying you’ll agree with everything he wrote, I certainly don’t, but you may be interested in the intersection between your version of anarchism and the other systems of government he outlines.
I see. I think I may have misrepresented your tangent on CEOs, and thought you were asking something different than what you were asking. Well, in that case, it has nonetheless been demonstrated that businesses can be run by cooperatives where there is no central board. These have been shown to work at least as well as the other way, and you can find information on it elsewhere on the Internet. What I should have said is that CEOs and corporate boards are unnecessary, not that they are bad (even though they are).