Anarchy, or “the state of nature” as it was often referred to in the past, is a way of living that requires responsibility from those living in it. This requirement, however, is very often misunderstood. This misunderstanding tends to lead to the Hobbesean argument that, since people are irresponsible by nature, Anarchy can never “work.” I would like to know more precisely what some of those people mean by it “working” or “not working,” but let’s assume for the moment that by “work” they mean “allow us to live peacefully and harmoniously.”
Anarchy does not depend on people behaving responsibly. Anarchy depends on nothing except the understanding that no one has a legitimate claim to any power that anyone else doesn’t have. It’s more the case that Anarchy imposes responsibility on people. This imposition is not understood or acknowledged by most statists. If people behave badly in an anarchist society, they are the ones who will ultimately suffer most. This may seem counter-intuitive to those of us who grew up and live in a society whose edges are delineated by the state, but it is precisely the state which allows the irresponsible to get away with their irresponsibility.
One way in which this is so is in the nature of centralized enforcement. The state takes upon itself the function of meting out justice and reward. The more it does so, the more complex its task becomes and, thusly, less efficient. The police (or what passes for the “punishing authority” in a particular situation) cannot be everywhere at once, looking in every nook and cranny of the world for evildoers.
Ironically, it is the worst of the evildoers that are the most equipped to evade detection and capture. As that old cliché goes, if we outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns. To take it a bit further, the more you outlaw guns, the more of an outlaw those who still have guns will be. The obvious real-world example is the so-called “war on drugs”. Only the most violent and clever drug dealers will survive, the more the government succeeds in cracking down on drugs. A less obvious example is the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. As antibiotics become stronger, every bacterial strain that survives ends up more and more resistant to antibiotics.
Another way is in the corruption of the state itself. The ability to mete out justice is precisely attractive to the unjust because it is the perfect way to evade it. Even if you started with a government of angels, in a few generations it would become a government of devils. Their primary motive is to use this power to evade responsibility and thrive nonetheless. Our entire corporate economy is predicated on just this sort of evasion of responsibility, quite openly and explicitly. Mechanisms of interlocking debt and selective enforcement establish an elite who are “too big to fail”, while pushing their burdens onto those who cannot enlist the state to their advantage. When someone in the government does do something horribly irresponsible and gets caught, some spokesman will come out on television and say something like “Mistakes were made”. That line right there, tells you all you need to know about the mindset of the state. Everyone by now has heard stories of police who abuse their power and suffer nothing more than a paid vacation and possibly their name in the paper. These stories are more commonplace than one might think. Radley Balko’s blog, The Agitator, has done a good job of collecting and documenting these stories.
For a more recent example, look at the recent Wikileaks “controversy”. The US government would like to spin the story that they are trying to protect lives by keeping all this information under wraps, but if you look at what is coming out, they are really just trying to evade responsibility for their actions. Some of this stuff has no specific information that could be used to hurt anyone, but is very embarrassing for the US government. Wikileaks has cleverly even asked the US to go over their documents and “redact” anything that has specific information that could hurt someone. This of course was refused; because that would entail admitting that some of those documents had no good reason to be classified.
Beyond all that, even in its ideal form the Hobbesean statist idea is putting the cart before the horse. It says “People are irresponsible; therefore we shall institute a state which can take on ‘responsibility’ for them.” With this guiding attitude, there is no incentive for anyone to take on any additional responsibility, since, on the one hand doing so will not reward them much compared to what they risk and not doing so will not expose them to much, if any, danger. It is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. It creates a system of avoidance, where people become more concerned with evading punishment than seeking reward. And in the final stages of this madness, the state begins to punish people for taking responsibility for their own lives, thus creating the perfect feedback loop into apathy and slavery. “It’s not my job.” Or the famous Ebenezer Scrooge line “The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigor then?”
In an anarchist society this is not so. No one may evade the consequences of their actions, unless the mercy of their neighbors allows such. To be sure, here and there, a bit of it may slip away through the cracks, but a systematic pattern of irresponsibility cannot exist in anarchy.
One reason for this is that it is the state of nature that determines what counts as responsibility in the first place. For an example, if there’s a person who doesn’t seem to do very much, makes silly impractical decisions, fails to live up to their agreements, and yet, this person manages to scrape by in an anarchist community, there must be some reason they put up with it. Maybe he’s a genius engineer who manages to build stuff that is so awesome, that people will put up with his other quirks. Maybe he’s really entertaining to be around (the Dude from the Big Lebowski comes to mind). But whatever it is, he’s responsible enough in context in order to survive. In the end, scarcity itself imposes certain limits. A society of Dudes wouldn’t last very long, nor would a society of thieves, without a central authority who can protect them from the consequences of their actions by shifting the consequences onto someone else (assuming there was someone else to exploit). But however we the people decide to organize ourselves, we will have to be responsible for ourselves and each other without any external “authority figure” to pin the blame on, or to give credit to, or to appeal to.
A Hobbesian might claim that what I’ve said is true, yet people are incorrigibly irresponsible nonetheless and will insanely and suicidally misbehave even in the face of their impending doom. In fact maybe they will not recognize that doom in the first place, even with all of the signs pointing to it. In that case, if that is true, no attempt to establish a state will help one bit. If people do not respond to incentives, they will not respond to the incentives added by a state. Because that’s what a state does, in practical terms, it shifts incentives. The purpose of punishment and policing is to create a deterrent, or a set of behavioral incentives that will change the behavior of people. If people don’t respond to incentives, then the state can’t improve the situation.
We know from practical experience that people do respond to incentives. If they didn’t, simple robbery would never work, or it would work so randomly that it would never have developed as a recognizable form of behavior. But if people do respond to incentives, then there is no need for a state. The people themselves can police themselves.
To claim that large scale irresponsibility and anarchy can co-exist, is to claim that there is a set of values that make up responsibility that is external to the values of people at large, and in contradiction to the laws of nature. It is an attempt to impose a specific, preferred code of behavior on people that don’t share that code with you. In short, it’s tyranny.
As I’ve outlined above, even if you feel justified in your particular “benevolent tyranny” it won’t do what you want it to do. And if your code is contradictory to scarcity, then not only is it tyranny, but it is hardly benevolent, because someone will have to pay for everyone whom you shield from the consequences of their actions. In fact it is the more corrupt and flexible forms of tyranny that have survived, because they are able to bend to the laws of nature and the will of the people, when they have to. A rigid idealistic state that was contrary to human desires would fold up in a few years (and if it’s not contrary to human desires, it’s unnecessary). So if you’re a statist, and you’re a benevolent statist, you’re just making your own system more unstable, the more you clean it up.
In the end it’s about us, our values, the laws of nature, and our ongoing struggle against scarcity. There’s nothing in that situation that a centralized authority can add to a society, but much that it can take away. A state is only good for shielding people from responsibility, which implies punishing responsible people, shifting the costs of irresponsibility onto them. The state is either unnecessary or evil, or both.
"Without this anarchists need to present a concise answer to this question: what is to keep the existing assholes (the very one’s anarchist claim use the state) from just setting up another system for exploiting power, building coalitions that act as mini-states even if not a “state’ in name. "
Well, it's entirely possible they might. In which case we have to undermine them just as we did the previous state. Certainly the situation is no worse than before. It's not like I am claiming that simply assassinating the existing members of the government results in Anarchy. Anarchy only exists in a place where there is a widespread understanding that no one has the right to claim power over other people. Some people might try it anyway, but a world where everyone knows that criminals are merely criminals, is a world where it is prohibitively difficult to exert power on a large scale.
"Some reason THEY put up with it? I’m concerned about that THEY! "
Well, no one has the right to force the Dude to do a goddamn thing. But the Dude has no right to force anyone else to do a goddamn thing either. Which implies cooperation as a necessary requisite of survival. Sure, a world where there was absolutely no scarcity would be awesome. When they build the energy-> matter replicators and personal space craft (to eliminate land scarcity), then anyone can do anything they want and no one can say "boo" about it. Until then, we need other people. And in a world where we don't force people to do things they don't want to, that means we have to persuade people to cooperate with us. If you find the need to gain agreement from other people to make them do what you want to be oppressive, then your only other option is to oppress them.
If I adhere to the grand picture of anarchy, a state of nature in which self-responsibility is developed, through time and education; I can play out and see how an anarchist society would function. But this is assuming the utopia, with the requisite time for education, implementation, and change of perception to occur, is in place.
Without this anarchists need to present a concise answer to this question: what is to keep the existing assholes (the very one’s anarchist claim use the state) from just setting up another system for exploiting power, building coalitions that act as mini-states even if not a “state’ in name. This holds as well for anarchists with a “market” bent – what is to keep the same assholes who abuse the state (or corporate power) from setting up another such system? It can’t be chalked up to an assumed anarchist enlightenment or newfound belief in true individualism and self-restraint/responsibility.
“One reason for this is that it is the state of nature that determines what counts as responsibility in the first place. For an example, if there’s a person who doesn’t seem to do very much, makes silly impractical decisions, fails to live up to their agreements, and yet, this person manages to scrape by in an anarchist community, there must be some reason they put up with it.”
Some reason THEY put up with it? I’m concerned about that THEY! The same people who will determine what an appropriate “state of nature” is? Why the hell is it their place to be making this decision on someone, who from the example, merely lives life differently? This is a problem and I find it skirted a lot.
The state of nature, along with culture, has given us people who are obsessed with what other people do and controlling that behavior. It is easy to see naturally why these people – the control freaks – wind up in control and power when contrasted with those who really just don’t give a damn what other people do or how they live their lives unless DIRECTLY effecting them.
This is an evolutionary aspect that needs to be addressed.
“But this is assuming the utopia, with the requisite time for education, implementation, and change of perception to occur, is in place.”
I am arguing the opposite. “Anarchy does not depend on people behaving responsibly. Anarchy depends on nothing except the understanding that no one has a legitimate claim to any power that anyone else doesn’t have. It’s more the case that Anarchy imposes responsibility on people.”
Why do those who support government think anarchists propose utopia? It is the politicians that promise to use government to achieve utopian ends. Instead, government is bringing us closer to dystopia. To expect a stateless society to bring about utopia, or to reject it because it won't, isn't reasonable.
I think you are both missing my point. First, I don't support government. I also don't instill some magical power into government – government is a tool, or a form of control. Take away the government and you still have people who will look for a means to control other people.
I don't expect a stateless society to bring about utopia – and I think the burden put upon anarchists in describing "what the world would be like" is not proportional compared with what is expected of status quo accounts of how to address societal issues.
"Anarchy depends on nothing except the understanding that no one has a legitimate claim to any power that anyone else doesn’t have."
That's a hell of a huge understanding to have anarchy depending upon, isn't it? And it sure as hell doesn't exist to a wide degree in today's world, so, when we describe anarchic worlds in which this already exists, we are assuming an idealized outcome which is itself an ingredient necessary for the outcome.
Now we can try to step outside of the current system, get off the grid, participate in the grey market, etc. – all the stuff Kevin Carson writes about in his homebrew writings – I'm all for that and think it is a necessity if things are going to change (and partly because in this case the means are the ends), however, as Anna wrote,
"To take it a bit further, the more you outlaw guns, the more of an outlaw those who still have guns will be"
THAT aspect of humanity is still there, and the more you try to step outside the system, the more people who try, the greater the retaliation will be. It is this aspect of humanity that I think it too often assumed away in explaining how anarchist society would function.
"Take away the government and you still have people who will look for a means to control other people."
In other words they will look for a means of government. If they find one, then we haven't achieved anarchy.
"so, when we describe anarchic worlds in which this already exists, we are assuming an idealized outcome which is itself an ingredient necessary for the outcome."
Well, when we imagine an anarchist society, we are assuming that this understanding is widespread. There's no contradiction in there. Until that understanding is widespread enough for an anarchist society to exist, there won't be one.
"when we imagine an anarchist society, we are assuming that this understanding is widespread. … Until that understanding is widespread enough for an anarchist society to exist, there won’t be one."
Are you saying that you feel an anarchistic society will not be possible until the theoretical tenets of anti-hierarchism are widely accepted? If so, it seems that we could never reach that benchmark.
IMO, we must build anarchistic communities within the confines of the State to provide a model alternative to Statism. Once we show that independent (and interdependent) communities can not only survive, but thrive "off the grid," securely and self-sufficiently, the movement can attract sufficient numbers to tip the balance away from the complacency and fear under which the average person now struggles. People will need real life examples, not theory alone, to give up the comfort of their cages.
The idea of the anarchist community described in the 9th paragraph is the closest description of Anarchist-Communism I've ever seen on this site. Congratulations!
Thanks Ran! I am definitely influenced by Marx, and even more so Bakunin, but I'd call myself more of an anarchist without adjectives.
I suspect anarchist economics will be very different from any statist form that we're used to. Freedom without hierarchy, and mutual aid without forced participation, is something people (probably even me) will find shocking when put into practice.
Anna, After reading your piece it got me thinking about a point you made….
You said that the State is basically an agency of responsibility avoidance (I think I am paraphrasing here).
Is this why so called,"Limited" (any Anarchist worth his salt knows this a boldface lie but I digress) Government "succeeds" at first since the citizens living under it still have most of their responsiblities at this point.
However, once the genie is out of the bottle,so to speak, the precident is set which puts in motion a incremental relieving of resposibilities which puts us at National Health Care today?
Let me know what you think and I would love to see you explore the topic of the State as an assumer of responsibilities in a future column.
Thanks
That's a good way of putting it, A70.
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