With the din of another presidential election overwhelming all other would-be news, it’s not easy to be among the uninterested. It isn’t just that you’re barraged with details of an election whose outcome doesn’t matter to you — it’s that the outcome actually doesn’t matter.
An indifference toward practical, electoral politics, however, shouldn’t be taken as apathy regarding political or social questions more generally. As hard as it may be for the proselytizers of the Republocrat total state to grasp — the contemporary civic religion abiding deep in their guts — it is my interest in theories of politics that impels my disinterest toward this or any other election. From the perspective of an anarchist, they are all no more than hollow spectacle.
Regarding the philosophical bases for the adoption of the anarchist view, there are, as a practical matter and as one might expect, as many as there are anarchists. Some fight shy of the idea of preexisting and inherent rights, contending that these are secondary, not primary, granted to men under the constructs of given social creation.
Still some more are utilitarians, concerned with versions of what Bentham notably discussed as “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” with finding a calculus through which social efficiency and coherence might reign. Then there are egoists, elevating self-interest and maintaining as some do that, fundamentally speaking, might makes right.
An anarchist may embrace a combination of all of these, or none of them, gravitating to no system or to another not enumerated here. Anarchists therefore disagree (and spiritedly so) on any number of important questions in connection with the rationales engaged to come to the conclusion that the state is undesirable and ought to be opposed.
Taking different paths, anarchists all nevertheless subscribe to something like what Benjamin Tucker called “the law of equal liberty,” explained generally as “the largest amount of liberty compatible with equality and mutuality of respect, on the part of individuals living in society, for their respective spheres of action.”
This is the simple idea that itself brings anarchism about — that if carried to its own ineluctable conclusions provides all that is necessary for abandoning confidence in the state. Once the principle is established, we have “the distinction between invasion and resistance,” and thus a framework within which we can analyze various proposed social relationships and systems.
It is essential to understand that it is just because the state is and must be an “invasion of the individual sphere” that anarchists oppose it. We stand against authority, conceived in the abstract, first and so are necessarily against the state as a particularized and distinct embodiment of authority. We don’t idiosyncratically decide that we’re against government at the outset, working backwards from there, hoping to discover some reasonable or plausible explanation for our stance.
And then even after anarchism’s disapproval of invasion, or aggression, or authority is confirmed, anarchists diverge on the question of what it means to invade or to aggress, of where the borderline falls in a hypothetical free society. These questions and debates remain a part of the doctrine of anarchism (if such a thing can be said to exist), outside of the hubbub of mainstream political contests, elections, and the maddening babel of Republocrat talking heads.
Our rejection of politics is not a product of acedia, but of a careful and deliberate observation of events; we actively, as opposed to passively, abstain from engaging with the “proper channels” of the political process.
The way to change society is not to willingly allow yourself to be folded into the systems of political authority, but to counterbalance and neutralize the importance of those systems through the way you live your life. There’s nothing apathetic about that.
Citations to this article:
- David D'Amato, Anarchy not apathy, Hernando [Florida] Today, 02/24/12
- David D'Amato, Don’t confuse anarchy with apathy, South Coast [Massachusetts] Today, 02/22/12
"it’s that the outcome actually doesn’t matter"
Well I would agree were it not for the fact that the only Austrian in the whole of american presidential candidate history weren't in with a good shot of doing something spectacular. America is a Schmittian executive dictatorship what if maybe…just maybe the Leviathan got a fiery sword of truth between it's eyes?
Actually, there is no “must be” about it, in the sense of being an essential feature without which it would not be a state; it would be theoretically possible to construct a functioning state without it. Rather, even such a state would be inherently unable to resist degrading into that, so it would soon become like that if it weren’t already.
I don’t think that follows at all. On the one hand, just as an anarchist can take state services that have been improperly funded, it may make sense to participate in the system for so long as it is there, at least if doing that is not further entrenching the system (the same resolution that the apparent paradox of the “socialist millionaire” has). On the other hand, I have often suggested taking a leaf out of the book of the 19th century Irish participating in British politics: they followed a mixed strategy, with an extra-parliamentary effort and a parliamentary one built around “join and sabotage” rather than supporting the system; the anarchist equivalent would be both to try and build “the new within the shell of the old” and to try to work within the system on a “join and sabotage” basis, not to reform it but to hinder it from acting against the other efforts.
Also, disinterest is not the same thing as uninterest.
"There is no 'must be' about it"
What I think you have to keep in mind is the difference between laws, rules, deals, norms, and etc.
When a new law is passed, it doesn't matter if the law is good or bad, trivial or important, serious or silly. All that matters is that it is a law, and that means you have a choice between: A) Doing what you would have done, in public, and going to jail B) Doing what you would have done in secret, hiding from the police or you go to jail C) No longer doing what you would have preferred to do.
What you've lost is D) Do what you would have in public, and no one makes a big deal about it, because it's not illegal. That loss of option is what is being referred to by "an invasion of the private sphere" and without that loss, what the state makes is a suggestion, not a law. And if it only makes suggestions and never makes laws, it isn't a state.
“And if it only makes suggestions and never makes laws, it isn’t a state”.
Oh, yes, it is. What it takes to be a state is a monopoly of force, at least in effect, at least locally. It could abstain from anything else without losing that. So you could indeed have a non-intrusive, watchman state that never did those things, in the sense of its existence not being a contradiction in terms – only, nobody would be able to stop it doing those things either, which would lead in short order to doing them.
“it’s that the outcome actually doesn’t matter.”
This is a good point, and probably something worth emphasizing as many people get tired of the electoral campaigns. But as the first comment indicates (e.g. What is my favorite candidate wins?), it can be a hard sell.
It can be good to explicitly state why the election (or more properly, your vote) doesn’t matter.
First, let’s assume that the system “works”: everyone knows that their vote is unlikely to sway the election, even if it is added with the vote of the 50 friends who they can persuade to vote one way or another (if they are really effective!). Even if you could assure that your favorite candidate (e.g. Ron Paul) got elected, the election still might not make a difference, at least not as much as many people imagine. Even though the Pres is the most powerful man in the state, the state is still much bigger than him. Any lasting change requires the cooperation of Congress. Bureaucrats often ignore (or drag their feet on) the instructions given to them by the President — they can easily wait out a term or two. Given how long it will take to make changes, the President needs to be concerned with maintaining an electoral majority so that his efforts are not immediately reversed in a backlash. Basically, unless you think that you are building a stable electoral majority, these efforts to change the state through elections are pointless. And truly radical presidents are typically removed from office, one way or another.
Second, candidates typically are not as “good” as we think they are. They make tons of promises that they either have no intention of keeping, or consider to be such a low priority that they will never realistically do anything about it. These peoples are masters of deception, which is a skill required by the nature of the game. Don’t rely on them to make the policy changes that you want them to make.
Third, it is often hard to predict the outcome of different policies.
At the end of it all, not only is there no way for a regular person to influence the outcome of the election, but there is no way for him to even make an informed decision as to which outcome would be better.
This is not to say that the Democrats and Republicans are “the same” … it’s just to say that for most centrist voters, there is no rational way to decide if one candidate would be better than the other.
Hmm… this seems like an argument I should try on the LessWrong blog.
My point is that power particularly, that of the secret government (global death squads, its drug trafficking and money laundering arms etc) draws its lifeblood from the executive. If say Ron Paul got into that position that would be a major blow for the parasites. Oh and he would be commander in chief so the legions could be withdrawn from the empire as expeditiously as they were sent. That he could do. For all else that depends on you anyway.
In that case it has made at least one law: leave all use of force to the state.
Martin wrote:-
Nice try. No. a state doesn’t have to do that, it only has to have an effective monopoly of force, which it can get and maintain by other means. It doesn’t have to have a law prohibiting it to others any more than anarchists who remove violators of anarchist norms from their community have to have a law saying they can do that.
For instance, a highly simplistic (and thus, easy to analyse) state of that sort, based on Celtic historical practice (so we know it was viable), could consist of a clan chief for life, wealthy in agisted or leased cattle and equipment, and in control of who gets land tenure, with a following of young men supported partly by that and partly by sharecropping for older men who already have land tenure, and kept loyal by family ties and the patronage of being on a wait list for getting land sufficient to support a wife and family independently on a lifetime tenure subject to good behaviour, e.g. paying small average rents in cash or in kind, regularly or at trigger events like being called out in time of war (historically, the usual arrangement was that all but one in some five or six went, while the other stayed behind to keep the farms ticking over). The sanction for non-compliance – bad behaviour – is losing the land to someone on the wait list who has served long enough under it; that means that there is a constituency supporting such foreclosures, so eliminating or mitigating blowback. On that economic base the chief’s household maintains widows and orphans, and also artisans and other specialists, a “palace economy” that provides goods and services useful for further patronage and for generating cash from receipts in kind. Note that drawings on the economy are structured as rents, not as taxes.
Now further suppose that this clan chief was of a pacific, King Log disposition, not going out of his way to make war though doing so defensively if it were forced on him: an anarchist writ large. Defensive force, of which he has a monopoly, includes being ready, willing and able to expel disturbers of the peace from his area, i.e. those who start violence without his prior or implied consent (which he does not give for aggression). Now, he could announce that this was his policy and frame the announcement as a pre-emptive requirement, which would amount to a law – or he could just announce it as a courtesy so that everyone could adjust more easily and so that he could avoid a number of mutually costly object lessons, or he could just do it tout simple.
So no law is required at all. But sooner or later a King Stork would follow King Log, though at least it would be more likely to last longer with a chief for life than with some officer elected every so often (the Celts elected chiefs for life on a Tanistry basis, with voters and candidates drawn from the hereditary elite core and success as a lieutenant-during-pleasure raising a candidate’s profile, subject in practice to successful rebellion).
So, I went ahead and wrote it… “elections are not worth our attention”:
http://e-vigilance.blogspot.com/2012/02/elections…
As for Ron Paul bringing the troops home… I doubt it. If he seriously tried, he’d get impeached or removed in a coup. The vested interests within the army and diplomat corp would drag their feet, with only a fraction of the soldiers being removed in 4 years.
Even if he somehow achieved it, much of the state would collapse in a rather uncontrolled manner as the employees resigned in protest or ran for the exit after seeing that there is no future for them. Any problems would be laid at the feet of Paul and libertarianism, and the next election would be won by an outright statist. A Paul election would be a fluke.
Oh, and he’d probably bring a bunch of outright racists into government with him, with who knows what consequence.
As so often it comes down to definitions. To me such arrangements or customs or whatever you may call them simply *are* laws. If it looks like a duck… and all that.
That’s quite some delay waiting for moderation.
The following should have appeared on 24.2.12, but somehow got jammed up in the moderating system:-
Again, a nice try, Martin, but it still doesn’t work – because this “duck” doesn’t quack, walk like a duck, and so on – unless everything is a duck. That is, this behaviour is just precisely what anarchists would do in the same situation, resourced in the same general way, and so on. They, too, defend against aggression but no more, and they too do so using only the resources that they own. This clan chief merely defends against aggression using his own resources, and doesn’t have to enforce any laws whether overt or hidden to achieve all that – because he is tapping into rights over established and justly acquired property.
That was the point of the example – it drew on actual historical precedents that made clan systems work in real life. Certainly, you can call the clan customs “laws” – but there was no aggression involved in holding the system together, precisely because anybody trying to take it apart would be trying to take things, i.e. would be aggressing. Actual clans usually got their lands etc. by stealing them in the first place (the Scottish Declaration of Arbroath acknowledges as much), but that goes to the natural tendencies to deteriorate I mentioned, as it is not an essential feature (a clan could have been the first to settle empty lands).
So any definition that makes a clan chief behaving non-aggressively and only using his own resources into a law maker and enforcer imposing on others who are not themselves aggressors … applies equally to anarchists doing the same things. The only difference is the arithmetical one that he is the monopolist of force in his area, which is sufficient to qualify him as a state; he isn’t actually doing anything aggressive, or being anything that implies aggression to have established and to continue to maintain it: his force monopoly isn’t necessarily evidence of past aggressions with effects and culpability enduring into the present (though usually that was true). The monopoly only arises because nobody else can resource the use of force in his area without being aggressors, because nobody else in the area owns enough suitable resources to do it; they would have to trespass to do it.
So the accusation is simply defining all non-anarchists into inherently being actual aggressors, whereas it is merely that they are in a position to fall prey to that temptation, and generally have – because they can.