What I’m about to say may surprise you, but I assure you it’s the honest truth: in my personal experience, cops are overwhelmingly decent folks. They almost always conduct themselves “professionally” and have generally treated me with respect. I’m not saying stories of law enforcement abuse haven’t affected me–they absolutely have, and I’ll get into that. I’m not saying my arsenal of privileges haven’t colored my experiences. But as far as my personal dealings, I’ve encountered very few who were anything but by-the-book and courteous.

Because they are so frequently decent, I’m sometimes tempted to reconcile the profession of policing with the kind of free society I dream about. After all, I have several friends and family who are police officers, and I’m loathe to let ideology darken my opinions of them as individuals. I want to believe policing is possible outside the hegemony of a state, and that these people can be meaningful participants in a stateless community.

But I never persist in that belief very long. I cannot think of any acceptable justification for the existence of law enforcement as an institution at all. The entire enterprise is abominable, root and branch. There is no escaping the conclusion that, everywhere they exist, police are mercenary occupiers serving a power hostile to the authentic human flourishing. As I intend to show, so long as our society exhibits privilege and injustice, I cannot pretend law enforcement does not prop it up in some fundamental manner.

It is the transformation of the function of policing into a profession that chiefly offends me. It’s as ridiculous as professionalizing the role of the voter in a democracy. I’m sure contractors or bureuacrats could devise a way to vote more efficiently than any of us flesh-and-blood folks can, but wouldn’t that defeat the point? It’s crucial to a democracy that everybody vote; it’s what makes it a democracy (putting aside whether such formal democratic governance is desirable).

In the same way all eligble members must vote in order for a democracy to be most legitimate and authentic, being a member of a free, self-governing, non-authoritarian community necessarily entails policing on the part of every community member. After all, more is implied by “community” than mere proximity of domiciles. Rather, communities should comprise a population unit bound by shared values, a coherent body brought together and made distinct by the identity emerging from individual lives. When you surrender using coercion as an organizing principle, what other basis is there for collectivity?

These shared values do not ensure there will never be conflict, or even that these communities will always work. They do, however, ensure that the costs, side-effects, and consequences of that community’s values will be legible to the people themselves. If you want racism in your community, well, you’ll have to do the dirty business of pushing around people yourself–no passing laws and hiring cops to do it for you. If you want to enforce unequal distribution of wealth, you can’t hire goons to keep your neighbors fenced off in squalor. Whatever problems face the community, at least the community cannot ignore them.

Professionalizing the policing of communities encourages people to promote values–such as through monopoly law–without fully internalizing the costs of doing so. These costs accrue not just monetarily; they are costs incurred through inconvenience, through mental calcuation, averting one’s eyes, and psychological coping, through the inalienable duties of community membership, through the inability to simply ignore the reality of your fellow man. If you outsource this, you don’t just concentrate power in a class of people with obscene incentives to abuse it. You also outsource your ability to learn whether or not your community actually functions at all. And you will be hostage to the police because you’re afraid to fully accept and participate in the consequences of your way of life. Shouldn’t that tell you something about your community?

I don’t understand why anarchists of all stripes underemphasize the degree to which anarchism is necessarily incompatible with mediating institutions like the police. It seems to me that speaking only of what people can expect to get from a stateless society smacks of typical individualist myopia. Abolishing constituted authority confers the duty to regulate and manage personally, relying on everybody to step up and do their part.

You can’t hold the responsibilities of human freedom without unfiltered, direct information about the conditions under which that freedom exists. To be free in a particular context must entail an awareness of that particular context. Anarchism, sans ideology, is ultimately about being present, directly experiencing the collective reality, noticing the fluid conditions that are equally capable of frustrating and liberating us all. Any political principles following from that approach downright empirical facts.

Anarchism prefigures a world in which people go about human business in all its facets, without mediation or privilege. Self-government doesn’t merely devolve the operations of governance, such as the parliamentary or legal, to the common man. It changes the nature of what we mean by government, transforming it from a formality of institutions running parallel to society into a day-to-day individual duty, a constant creation of and reaction to society, not in spite of the people’s confluence and conviviality but as its logical product.

We find ourselves held hostage by police and their increasing demands for more intrusive, more arresting, more egregious domination because we know our communities cannot work on their own. So we put up with the arrogance, the abuse, the concentration of unaccountable power. In addition to pointing out the evil and error of this situation, anarchists must stress that it is also an abdication to the state of the very essence of our social nature. A police force tangibly represents the abandonment of community, a clue that the collective values of the population do not align with the lived reality.

A community doesn’t require guards wielding lethal force to maintain itself. It doesn’t have to protect those with more privilege, power, or wealth from those with less. The very fact that you have to constantly protect power and privilege in first place, let alone do so by hiring the goon squad, tells you whatever arrangements you wish to protect are artificial, illegitimate, and unsustainable.

If community wealth is imbalanced, of course you will have crime. If you have a subclass of people who are disrespected consistently by the others, of course you will have violence. If you refuse to engage directly with your neighbors, of course you’ll need an armed mediation squad to protect you and yours from them and theirs. And if your reaction to the messy business of human beings is to wall yourself off from them with a professional cleanup crew, mopping up the trail of blood and pain your chosen existence creates, of course it will persist. To solve a problem you must first face it.

The police don’t create injustice, inequality, suffering, poverty, and crime; those things will probably happen anywhere to some degree. All that police do is maintain the status quo that allows these things to continue and intensify, protecting business as usual from them. “Bad people” exist, but I see no evidence that the police has some sort of unique ability to identify them, so prevalent are they in the halls of power (and donut shops).

By sanitizing the problems our laws, practices, and values create for us, they make our collective dysfunction possible. We don’t need to actually respond to the damage we cause; we just pay to have it managed for us, and this default attitude enables many of the intractible, ongoing crises of modern life because the community’s fluid, adaptive nature has been denied. The police allow us to pretend this constant failure of humanity is just the way the world is, instead of what we ask them to institute as an alternative to facing it head on.

It’s like a town living behind a dam that can’t hold; every time it floods, the solution is a bigger, better, more expensive dam, instead of just moving to a place that doesn’t require a dam. Similarly, it’s as if the police manufacture the community’s need for their services, with our all too frequently enthusiastic blessing. While I criticize the individuals who choose the crappy profession of law enforcement for not self-regulating more, I’m sympathetic to their predicament to defend an indefensible and unsustainable order. There’s no way to do it but with brutal violence, ubiquitious threats, and raw, unaccountable power.

Professional police create the illusion that we can be passive consumers of government. Law enforcement is the indispensible institution of the modern state, the fulcrum of authoritarianism in our society. The honest anarchist intuitively recognizes this, but may not realize that any future stateless society with a professional police class will inevitably end up as bad or worse. When it comes to anarchism, you cannot alienate your agency to personally produce the society you wish to participate in.

The only alternative to hierarchy, authority, and privilege is to reclaim our inalienable duty to be the police ourselves, to be members of a horizontal community, to be the exemplars of the values we claim to hold dear, and to face danger and suffering squarely. Anything less is nothing but an amusement park, a simulcrum of community that sells us tickets to a cage. That kind of farce has nothing to do with the anarchist project, which concerns humans and the communities that emerge from their congress.

Those of us who make a habit of dissent have gotten used to this frustrating complacency. It demonstrates that we as a social body don’t trust ourselves, that the complex of media, government, academia, and business — otherwise known as the state — that purports to lead us can be better described as creating and curating our reality. This insight renders many radicals outright misanthropic, but I tend to approach our apathy sympathetically, regarding our behavior as a kind of learned helplessness inculcated by decades of spiritually arresting mediation. When political expediency necessitates disclosure, we don’t know what to do with it, much like paroled prisoners who don’t know how to live on the outside.

So when the school assembly is over and the principal has made her announcements, thank God the pundits are there to round us up and lead us back to our homerooms, single file. Our passive consumption of pundits’ reactions give us a false sense of agency, as if somehow the variety of spins from which to choose is itself empowering. After all, we don’t have time in our busy lives to mentally deal with this, let alone exercise our inherent duty to apprehend it. Better to signal our relevancy by choosing our coping mechanism from a buffet of cynicism, jingoist indignation, reformist compromise, or handwringing resignation.

And so it is with the NSA story. As far as I can tell, we’re being provided a number of templates that can help us integrate this newly certified reality into our individual matrices, including:

1. Mass surveillance is an acceptable encroachment on our privacy.
2. Mass surveillance requires appropriate oversight or a national conversation to protect our privacy.
3. Mass surveillance is an unacceptable encroachment on our privacy.

You didn’t see it, but you just got jammed. The way we’re encouraged to cope with this is to make it about privacy: to turn inwards, take stock of our personal inner domain, and decide just how much of our lives can be offered up to the state. Large scale, bureaucratic intrusion into our personal lives is a given, but we can fill out a customer response card if we have any comments about the degree of the intrusion. If this is about privacy, the onus is on us to define its limits, to guide our servant institutions to the right policies that will protect our newly cordoned-off personal space.

It’s in this way that pundits can claim that our ubiquitous sharing on social media validates such large scale, coordinated exploitation. Just like the rape victim was “asking for it” because of what she wore at the time of her attack, we’re “asking for it” because our online sharing habits have been deemed unjudicious. They switch from condemning the aggressor to blaming the victim, and they do it because facing up to the cultural inertia behind the aggression risks exposing the perniciousness of the status quo. And so they invent a clever distraction about what the limits of privacy should be — as if that were the only limits with which we should be concerned. It’s like fighting rape by starting a conversation about the definition of tasteful attire.

Well, let me provide a counterspin that I hope is destabilizing: when it comes to this matter, I don’t give a goddamn about privacy. It’s no more relevant to this story than the big paychecks NSA contractors haul in. Privacy, like fatcat military industrial intelligence complex profiteering, is an important issue without a doubt, but it’s not at the center of this matter. The scandal is not about privacy, or whisteblowing, or whether Edward Snowden was a bad neighbor, or whether he had enough education to work within the NSA, or whether the media should have published the story, or the decline of community, or any of that. Anybody who makes the conversation about those issues are welcome to; they should find another room to talk in, though, lest they hijack the real conversation.

This is about state-sponsored spying, not personal privacy. The U.S. government has decided the best, most defensible way to fight whatever it deems threatening (now or in the future) is not to create a dossier on every human being on the planet — that would be totalitarian! Instead they’re merely building the infrastructure that enables them to do so both at will and retroactively. All they’re doing is merely collecting anonymous “metadata”. That’s true insofar as it goes (though as a programmer I must protest the abuse of the term “metadata”, which typicaly refers to “data about data”, whereas phone numbers, emails, Facebook likes and the like are “data about us”) but, like most spin, the argument routes around the point with expert precision.

The danger is not so much that government officials are currently investigating you (not that they aren’t). It’s that if they ever decide they’d like to, they already have your entire history of communication. Normally, an investigation would begin with the gathering of evidence. The cost and effort of beginning to collect evidence is a small and insufficient but important bureaucratic deterrent against starting arbitrary persecutions. However, now an investigation begins with merely bothering to look at the evidence already gathered. Essentially, they started the investigation into you years ago, but it’s proceeding on autopilot, waiting for a government spy caring to look.

Imagine, if you will, the NSA claiming the authority to search and catalog the contents of every home on the planet preemptively, but promising never to look at it unless absolutely necessary. The justification is that, in case you’re ever accused of a crime in the future, they don’t need to assume the burden of getting a warrant or actually searching for what they want to find. They already started it ahead of time, they already have the evidence, and they can just go back and mine that evidence for a crime. Maybe the crime validates the accusation. Maybe along the way they find a totally separate crime. The point is that the investigation is preassembled, a keyword search away from being an actual indictment. If they can create a dossier anytime they want with minimal effort, that’s functionally the same as keeping one on you right now.

There’s a reason NSA is not in law enforcement: there’s nothing limited or legal about the above. It has absolutely, positively zero to do with rights or the law as we understand them. They do what the CIA does to its targets: extralegal gathering of evidence for exploitation at a time of the government’s choosing. That is espionage, and there’s a reason we abhor it being done to people who are not part of the spy game, let alone people who are supposed to watch over the very government running the spy game.

Yet the most pundits can offer is a shallow, parochial debate about some bourgeois, neutered conception of privacy. For them, this is only about the exact nature of our freedom to share with sufficient insularity pictures of cats, what we had for lunch, and silly memes. Now we need to all sit around indian style and figure out the kind of Stasi with which we’d be most comfortable, what kinds of checks and balances, safeguards and oversight would allow us a good night’s monitored sleep.

Don’t be fooled. The onus is not on us to properly circumscribe the boundaries of our private lives. The onus is on them to explain the way their leviathan, totalitarian institutions spill out of the confines they agreed to obey, those charters that give them their existence in the first place, the enumerated powers they claim separate them from totalitarian regimes or organized crime syndicates. The lesson here that no pundit will mention is that the state is inherently a scam. This domestic spying on us is but one facet of the overall institutional hegemony that dominates us and teaches us helplessness.

It’s understandable to feel powerless when massive bureuacracies continually body check your sense of self. If you’d rather ignore the reality of what our world is becoming, fine. But you don’t have to accept the turnkey distractions of the punditry. Who knows, one day you may decide that this time they went too far, and if that happens, you’ll need a sense of judgment and agency that hasn’t completely atrophied.

The whole point of labor unions, in the minds of RTW supporters, is to exploit the Wagner Act requirement that parties “negotiate in good faith,” thereby moving wages and benefits up in a way a free market in labor would never allow. Jason Sorens even compares unions with Mafia protection rackets in this regard (“Right-to-Work: An Inflammatory Analogy,” Pileus, December 17).

To describe this line of reasoning as selective would be a gross understatement. Labor is not the only interest engaging in collective bargaining. What about the individuals involved in the employing corporation? Aren’t these businesses effectively “capital unions” exploiting incorporation laws to achieve a better bargaining position relative to labor? Isn’t that why investors pool their resources and form businesses — to get better deals in the market through economies of scale? Isn’t that why they try to get investors rather than simply borrowing all the money for their start-up costs — to spread the risk and the reward?

Labor unions are only one side of this story. To emphasize collusion on the workers’ side is to leave another form of collusion totally unaddressed. Corporations are capital unions, organizations whose members work together to negotiate wages and benefits (and other costs, of course) downwards to get the best return for themselves. Why is one form of collusion wrong and the other not?

I’d add that, in historical comparison to labor unions, corporations are much more fully creatures of the state. While labor unions have existed for much of their history in legally unrecognized forms, arising from the spontaneous organizing efforts of workers themselves, incorporation has always been a government-chartered, government-privileged, and therefore necessarily statist activity. There’s nothing “free market” in the fact that corporations are dealt with on their own, special terms. Conferring limited liability, entity status, and other privileges on corporations is intervention to skew the market, a crime that can only be laid at the feet of the state and the capitalists that run it.

I view the RTW movement as not only the argument that capital should get to deal with labor in a privileged manner, but also as a defense of the entire balance of power between employers and employees. It’s about more than just authoritarianism and a system that favors capital over labor. It’s also about the legal codification of class distinctions inherent in the structure of production.

To the extent that capitalists decry so-called “class warfare,” they are glossing over the privileged terms on which they themselves do business — claiming there are no classes of consequence while entrenching their own class, allegedly deferring to the market, while actually ensuring that market always delivers the balance of power they desire.

If RTW folks truly believe that each and every worker deserves the right to negotiate individually with the capital union, why stop there? Why not also grant each and every shareholder, investor, creditor, and other owner of the corporate capital union the right to negotiate individually with the worker himself or his labor union? Why should both workers and owners be forced to deal with the extractive, exploitative management class as the exclusive agent of the corporation? If it’s unfair for the labor union to monopolize labor relative to a given employer, isn’t it equally unfair for the capital union to monopolize capital relative to a given employee?

The reason is that capital unions are politically and legally favored in labor negotiations, because they have always been favored. Our entire political economy is built around doing business on their terms. If you want a genuinely free market in labor, you can start by ridding yourself of the biased narratives that explain how collective bargaining is virtuous and crucial for those who have money, but unnecessary and evil for those who don’t.

My shift from minarchism to anarchism was not completely, or even substantially, motivated by a distaste for government (I already had that). Rather, anarchism is a way of looking at the human condition that does not presuppose the power relationships we take for granted. I grew to view state politics as but one manifestation of these underlying relationships.

If the way in which we organize and think about ourselves precipitates certain outcomes, perhaps we can effect different, more desirable outcomes by choosing different organizing ethics. Such an examination leads one in an extremely open-ended – yet liberating – direction, where these ethics and their premises are finally considered on their own merits. To quote Einstein, “The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.” So how do we start to talk about that next level of thinking?

The existence of this uncharted territory, outside the pragmatic confines of our regimented, conservative society, is not directly explored in Butler Shaffer’s Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival. Admirably, Shaffer wastes no time arguing for his – or any – particular solutions to mankind’s many crises and problems. Instead, he takes the revolutionary step of removing the veil of indifference and deference to the primary units through which we realize our agendas: institutions. The book is a cataloging of the myths we tell ourselves and each other to keep things comfortable and stable at the expense of our freedom.

Written almost a quarter century ago but still penetratingly relevant, Calculated Chaos tries to strip down our modern managerial society into its basic organizing ethics. Shaffer’s thesis may seem awkward at first, but through careful examination of society the weight of this argument is established throughout the book:

Briefly stated, the basic theme of this book is that institutions are the principal means by which conflict is produced and managed in society. Peace is incompatible with institutional activity. Stated another way, the success of institutions depends upon the creation of those conditions in which personal and social conflict will flourish. We experience so much conflict in our lives because we have permitted ourselves to be organized into self-perpetuating, self-justifying organizations with which we have identified our personalities and to whom we look for direction. We have allowed our lives to be taken over and monopolized by a variety of political, religious, educational, economic, and social agencies over which we have little, if any, influence. These entities have helped us construct the barriers that not only restrain us, but keep us separated from one another and serve as the boundary lines for the intergroup struggles of which we are part. Through these groupings, we have helped to institutionalize conflict, to make it a seemingly permanent and necessary feature of human society. Such conflict has not resulted from mere accident of inadvertence, nor has it been the product of vicious or depraved minds. Rather, for reasons to be developed herein, conflict is a condition upon which the health and well-being of institutions is absolutely dependent.

It is crucial for anarchists and libertarians to note that he is not confining this argument to the state, though he devotes a whole chapter to “the people pushers” of politics. In order to appreciate the weight of this book, you must understand that his argument applies just as much to the Catholic or Baptist churches, to the activist groups of the left and right, to the corporations, to the Kiwanis and Rotaries, and so on.

Not all groups are institutional, Shaffer argues. By institutions, he means:

any permanent social organization with purposes of its own, having formalized and structured machinery for pursuing those purposes, and making and enforcing rules of conduct in order to control those within it.

A key distinction for Shaffer between institutional and noninstitutional forms of organization lies in part in the formality of such groups. People coming together for a common purpose of their own is not institutional, because the group is merely a convenience for each individual pursuing their interests. The problem arises when the group becomes something more than that: an entity in its own right, with interests and purposes independent of its members’. Surprisingly (for a LewRockwell.com columnist) he even challenges some Austrian sacred cows:

What begins as a simple division of labor, a system of specialization designed to allow the work of the group to get done more efficiently, becomes a division of purpose, with group members segregated into a chain of command. When this takes place, the organization is no longer a tool serving its members: the members have become conscripts in service to the organization.

It should be clear by now that Shaffer plays no favorites in his critique of institutional society – everything is game for the thinking individual.

Yet individualism is not Shaffer’s bag, either. To him, that philosophy is just as reactionary as the collectivism of many institutions:

The search for human liberty is not one in which every individual is arrayed against the presumed collective of all others, or of one group struggling against another group, but is a pursuit that should serve to unite us on the basis of our common desire for the autonomy we require if we are to experience self-fulfilling transcendence of our continuing evolution.

If there is an individualistic theme to Shaffer’s argument, it is only because of his insistence on the personal part each of us play in the conflicts that make institutional society function. In contradistinction to the group identities of institutions, Shaffer discusses the spontaneity and intimacy of community, and the need to know and be yourself within it.

Self-analysis and self reflection end up being the lynchpins of this book. Much of our dilemma stems from personal values and assumptions we’ve accepted of our own free will without careful thinking – sometimes because of indoctrination, often out of laziness or a lack of self-esteem. Calculated Chaos is in many ways not a call for society to change, but for the reader to rediscover himself.

I must admit my surprise at how metaphysical Shaffer’s book becomes as it delves deeper and deeper into the personal nature of the organizational ethics and principles underlying our society. For instance, Shaffer proposes that institutions serve as surrogate identities that allow us to expand what he calls our “ego boundaries”. This imperative to seek outside ourselves for purpose and meaning arises, he posits, from failing to train our attention on the present moment and allowing narratives of reality to arise that are incomplete and simplistic. Institutions encapsulate a convenient myth that divorces us from the responsibility to know ourselves fully, providing contrived identities to which we can cling. These identities and allegiances drive the interpersonal and intergroup strife that establishes institutional primacy because we are acting out of a lack of understanding of ourselves.

Shaffer provides very few answers in his exploration of the conflicts we have established within and without ourselves, preferring to ask questions that challenge the hidden premises of our institutionalized society. This is uncomfortably deliberate: one of Shaffer’s theses is that institutions thrive in regimented, predictable environments where events conform to articulable principles and systems. To transcend the conflicts created by our institutional manners of thought, we must appreciate that our need formality certainty is largely artificial and unessential, serving the purposes of institutional perpetuation and organization more than our own. A dogmatic, rule-oriented approach to reality will always be necessarily limited, because it’s built on assumptions of stability and order based on past experience instead of present experience. By participating in these rigid, static systems of thought, we lose our awareness for the present, which is dynamic, mysterious, and able to be apprehended without inhibition or formula.

It is in this speculative, inquisitive, inward-directed manner that Shaffer explores “our well-organized conflicts”. Anarchists would find the idea that institutions create the conditions of strife and discord that give them their social functions quite unremarkable. But Shaffer goes deeper, locating the origin of institutions in our own minds and hearts. It is through sublimating our own selves to institutional identities, adopting the views that reinforce their purposes and interests, complying with and depending upon their expectations, direction, and mobilization, that we realize a world so chaotic and conflicted.

Calculated Chaos advances the unthinkable political concept that you and I are responsible for the institutional dysfunction of society. This seems hard to accept because radical politics is built on identifying enemies in things outside ourselves that compel and control us. Shaffer’s book is a new take on the philosophy of liberation: we have made the agendas of institutions our own agendas, but we can choose otherwise. To all left libertarians, anarchists, and advocates of a voluntary society, I give this book the very highest recommendation possible.

On a personal surprise visit to Occupy Richmond’s camp at Kanawha Plaza, in the shadow of the Federal Reserve System branch and numerous corporate skyscrapers, Mayor Jones pretended to hear our concerns and promised further meetings to determine how to work together. Only days later, the peaceful camp was raided by theRichmond Police. In the middle of the night, bulldozers destroyed thousands of dollars of medical supplies, food, and other equipment that had been used not just for new occupiers but the existing homeless population, a few of which had become prominent members of our movement.

In protest to this betrayal, Occupy Richmond began a series of mobilizations culminating in a new camp on the lawn neighboring Mr. Jones’ residence (at the invitation of his neighbor, a civil rights veteran and supporter). While encamped outside his house under 24/7 police surveillance, our camp drafted a protest letter to the mayor. We asked him to explain why he was engaging in such duplicity and to announce his position plainly instead of resorting to violence.

In his Nov. 16 response to Occupy Richmond, Mr. Jones claimed to share our concerns about economic injustice. He listed several programs his administration continues to pursue, including an anti-poverty commission, a homeless-reduction plan and a job-training and placement system. These programs were cited as proof of the mayor’s attention to the problems central to the movement’s mission. We appreciated his invitation for a meeting and believe a productive relationship is possible.

But surely Mayor Jones understands that a great deal of Richmond’s economic justice woes aren’t of the city’s making. They originate in national policy and the corporate hegemony that dictates the terms of that policy. These aren’t matters that anyone reasonably expects the mayor or City Council to resolve. A city administration possesses neither the resources nor the authority, let alone the wisdom, to meaningfully address the structural poverty of our global capitalist economic system.

Given these problems, the concerns we share — and the limited actions available to us — the question should be clear: What is to be done?

By establishing protest camps in public spaces, Occupy Richmond’s answer has been to make these issues impossible to be ignored, because we realize that our society excels at making systemic problems invisible to everyday people. These occupations aren’t intended to avoid any and all disruption of normal, everyday life. They’re intended to assert our legitimate rights as human beings, regardless of how inconvenient that may be to the establishment. This places us at risk, but a transformation of our social mindset equal to the challenges we face cannot take some second-place position to business as usual. Addressing these deep issues won’t be easy or comfortable, just as occupying outdoors in the city isn’t easy or comfortable.

In contrast to our tactics, how has the mayor responded to this situation? His solution is to work within the system of privilege to collect crumbs falling from the corporate table on our behalf. Unlike Occupy Richmond, the mayor has ruled out any disruption that isn’t certified through corporate-friendly channels. He rejects any political means that might interrupt normal life under our present unjust system. He’s taken the comfortable, complacent road of seeking a middle ground that leaves business as usual intact.

By seeking to preserve the status quo at all costs, the mayor props up the very system of injustice which he claims to be working against. While he may not have control over policy at the state and national levels, those policy makers rely on his governance at the local level. They count on the mayor to keep the people in check, to corral our desires for justice and progress into channels that cannot disrupt the capitalist system of exploitation.

Whether or not he realizes it, Jones’ commitment to business as usual is precisely the stability that the elites require to maintain their dominance and perpetuate their agenda. Why else did mayors in more than a dozen cities participate in a nationwide conference call on coordinating occupation crackdown strategies, to which Oakland Mayor Jean Quan admitted last year?

The mayor has abdicated a critical responsibility he owes to his values and his constituents. No authentic change comes from the top down. At the top of our society, the 1 percent and their functionaries likely feel just as trapped by the logic of this system as we do — however more comfortable it is for them. A genuine change in direction, a real and enduring evolution of mindset and values, must emerge from the bottom up. It will require all of us becoming better people, rediscovering our core values and re-establishing a civil society emphasizing responsibility, cooperation and self-organization to solve the problems that human societies encounter.

Richmond will change its unsustainable and unjust course and figure out a new business as usual — but will it work together to address the issues, or will it fight the need for change to the point of collapse? It probably depends on how much longer we think we can afford to trust mayors.

Mayor Jones can cite all the city programs he wishes. But it’s in helping us change the greater society from the bottom up that he has the real power to act on those values he claims to share with us. It isn’t easy or comfortable, and there are plenty of political reasons for him to stick to a narrow law-and-order mindset — just as there are plenty of practical reasons for all of us to stay home and not protest. But if we truly intend to overcome the obstacles to a more just and equitable future and avert the many catastrophes awaiting our country, we must all take bold and substantive action that moves us outside our comfort zone. Our very nation was founded on just such an audacious risk, and even politicians have human hearts that want liberty and community at some level.

One of Occupy Richmond’s goals has been to create a space for open, direct dialogue among citizens. That, I’d argue, is the real significance of the occupation: the unconditional demand for a deliberative body of residents unmediated by politicians’ agendas or corporate money. Only such an out-of-the-box, fully bottom-up movement can arrive at the kinds of solutions that transcend the rigid, entrenched special interests and divisive ideological identities that our system has adapted itself to serve. The marks of anarchist philosophy are clear here.

Working in a prefigurative organization that attempts to model the kind of relationships they want to see in the world, many liberals have now been exposed to the anarchist approach through the Occupy movement. They can see how frightened the institutions they sought to merely fix are at their exercise of liberty. Witnessing that fear, and seeing its results as genuine violence, makes it difficult to believe that aggregated power can be reliably used for good. Regardless of which candidate is the lesser evil, the machine they’re elected to command is too destructive to reform.

As anarchists, we find ourselves in an environment run by statists who attempt to get away with all manner of illegitimate actions and policies. For us, those acts and policies are not illegitimate because they are inconsistent with the state’s own internal rules. We believe there are no rules that can justify the state or its coercive actions.

However, the statists who claim to rule us are in thrall to the myth of the constitution’s legitimating power. Of course they get away with a lot that any plain reading of that document prohibits. This is the origin of “loose construction” in the first place: if they could just ignore the constitution to get what they want, they wouldn’t bother framing their acts in any construction of the constitution at all. Clearly, the constitution doesn’t matter to them in the way it’s supposed to, but it does play some sort of role in the state’s performative exercise of authority and power.

So we have a situation where the proper homage and respect must be paid to a document that provides the basis for the ruling class’s state power. However, that class doesn’t always agree about how that power should be wielded. When such a disagreement occurs, it can threaten the continued coherence of the state, which would deny the entire class uninterrupted power and legitimacy and create a window of opportunity for competing narratives of how we might be ruled. There must be an arbiter to resolve this dispute to preserve the overall infrastructure of the state.

In the same way a papal decree arbitarily puts to rest a matter of theological contention within the Catholic church, the Supreme Court can resolve a dispute among the statist political class in a “final” manner. Since the constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation to serve the business class’s interests in “interstate commerce”, the Supreme Court was designed to resolve disputes between the states in a binding manner. That does have implications for how the government will apprehend us, the people. It doesn’t make that binding finality “legitimate” or “just”. It just means that to the extent the government operates according to internal rules and policies, we can study its deliberations to gain insight into future encroachments.

Think of anarchist constitutional scholarship as counter-intelligence and strategic analysis. For example, the CIA was intensely interested in the internal disputes and intrigues of the Soviet Kremlin. This wasn’t because they were rooting for one side over the other as a matter of justice or morality. It had more to do with trying to predict future policies and acts of that government, since those in charge are the ones who effect those policies and actions. Any interventions by the CIA in this area would have been in service to realpolitik, solely to advantage the U.S.government’s interests.

I suggest anarchists think about constitutional law in a similar way. There may be broad, abstract principles of justice and reason embedded in the constitution. But they have little to nothing to do with how the state realizes its own power. We consider the exercise of that power to be a problem regardless of its adherance to an over two hundred year old document. So we should try to predict the political zeitgeist and foresee threats to ourselves and our communities, analyzing these matters in cold, calculating terms rather than in an outraged, indignant matter. Constitutional scholarship has something of a rhyme or reason to it, and it might be helpful to understand as a rear-guard defense against the state while building our own autonomous institutions to meet our needs.

To flip von Clausewitz’s aphorism, politics is the continuation of war by other means. Anarchists should regard constitutional politics as nothing less. Obamacare is just another move in the chess game between privilege and the people. The solution to its injustices is not to convince the ruling class that its own myths allow us a bit more freedom; it is to topple our rulers and their myths utterly, building our own solutions, discovering our own sources of transcendent meaning, and defining the legitimate in our own interests. The constitution is of no help there except as a kind of specification document for one of the enemy’s weapons.

Mutual Exchange will provide opportunities for conversation about issues that matter to the Center’s various publics. A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged.

Jeremy Weiland’s essay, Class Struggle in Civil Service: Viewing Public Sector Unions Through the Lens of Class Theory, offers us a third way to look at the outcome of Governor Scott Walker’s controversial victory in Wisconsin. Instead of seeing it as a Republican – Tea Party – Conservative “victory” for the taxpayer over big government and unions or as a Democrat – Progressive – Liberal “defeat” of collective bargaining and community agency in the face of Corporate interests and campaign mega-spending, Weiland suggests that we (again – this article was originally published on March 15th, 2011 in response to the last electoral battle in Wisconsin) regard this as an opportunity to “resurrect” class struggle.

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I support the public sector unions opposing Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s agenda. While I’m neither a fan of government nor the civil service, it’s clear that the so-called lavish benefits and salaries public sector unions defend against Republican encroachment represent not entrenched privilege but merely the last vestiges of a minimally fair employment deal. The last forty years have seen this deal eviscerated in the private sector, and it is only in comparison to the current paltry influence of contemporary labor that public sector unions seem pampered. One need not single out individual teachers to critique public schooling, for instance – in any case, the idea that a school teacher is grifting me provokes involuntary laughter.

As a Wobbly, however, the ideology of class struggle informs my activism on labor. Solidarity is never unconditional, as my friend Chris Lempa pointed out to me in a letter. True common purpose in the struggle against bosses must be framed in terms of legitimate class theory in order not to degenerate into the business-as-usual, reformist, junior-partner-in-the-ruling-class unionism that has prevailed since the Wagner Act. And so while I support public sector unions in this conflict, I find it difficult to place them in the traditional model of class struggle.

In the private sector the class dynamics are clear: workers and bosses can be easily seen as in zero-sum competition. One gains at the expense of the other, the prize is effective control over the means of production, and the players line up along the party whose control they favor. Customers and suppliers represent the third parties who, while not powerless in the equation, tend to deal with the organization as a whole on a voluntary basis. The adversarial relationship is more centered inside the organization, and market pressures from the third parties are accepted as a given. Much of the decline in labor power has arisen from capital’s superior marketing of the narrative that union gains come at consumer losses.

This analysis falls apart when applied to the public sector. The government has no equivalent market pressures to which it is compelled to respond. As a monopoly producer, government has every incentive to pacify its workforce by delivering higher wages and benefits. The taxpaying consumer of these services is without recourse. Politicians cannot be seen as perfect analogs of the boss class, nor can civil service management be viewed in the same sense as private sector management. Indeed, to invoke the oft-cited preamble to the IWW constitution, does the public sector working class and the public sector employing class really have nothing in common?

As a former public school teacher, my wife offered me an example of organizational dynamics in the public sector that might better explain the class disposition of the various players. Who is the favored class within the public schooling institution? Surely not teachers – they are serially overworked and underpaid, but even more importantly from a radical labor perspective, they enjoy little control over the workplace. In fact, the history indicates that teachers have been viewed by the establishment as nearly as much in need of control and discipline as the students they teach. Curricula are designed not merely to guide student learning but, to the greatest extent possible, make classrooms teacher-proof. The fear has always been that a genuine relationship between teachers and students would be harmful to the institution as a whole, and so a factory model guided the development of modern pedagogy.

So, who is exploiting teachers? Who is denying them control of work conditions? Who is playing them off against the end consumers (students and parents) to limit their power and influence?

It would easy to say: the public, through their designated politicians, from the Governor down to the School Board. However, the public has very coarse control over the schools (or any government function) through political means. The public is not the “boss class” in any meaningful way, least of all because they desire maximum effort from teachers at a minimum wage. They are imprisoned customers given a modicum of choice but no exit, and as they work for a living just like teachers they are more likely to see their interests aligned than opposed.

What about the politicians? Surely they have outsized control, at least as the managers. They seek to maximize their own control over the institution and position themselves for personal political advantage in the larger establishment. While market pressures may not factor in directly, they still have to deal with budget pressures, balancing interests among the entire government. The relative competition may not originate in the market so much as among the interest groups of the state: those seeking to grow one department’s budget at another’s expense, or those who favor capital over government power and fight taxes.

But even if politicians are the boss class, that is still insufficient to explain organizational dynamics within the school. Where is the class managing affairs on a daily basis on the boss’s behalf? Who implements the control over workers? Who sees their interests as more aligned with the bosses than with the workers? The answer is obvious when you think about it.

The school administration is the management class of public schooling. They are the class with fat salaries, minimal work to do, and an interest in running the school as a factory. They prefer stability to true empowerment and education. They hold both teachers and students in check. Their class actually grows pretty steadily, soaking up funds from those who actually teach, while implementing stupid policies like zero tolerance to subsume more and more of the classroom under their direct management.

I’ve focused on public schooling, but I imagine this model could apply to just about any civil service field. You have the people who do the work – in a zoning office, for instance, it’s the clerks and surveyors and those who actually affect the end product. Then you have the city administration and the Mayor / Board of Supervisors / etc., which use the institution as a means to a political career focused on directing others and taking credit for it. They don’t care about zoning per-se; their interest is in stabilizing the organization so they can grow the parasite administrative class and pursue their agenda of personal aggrandizement and its ideological trappings (set aside your feelings about zoning laws in general for a moment).

As a Wobbly and a mutualist, then, I’d like to see radical labor take a stand that does not simply provide unconditional solidarity to public workers, but pushes them to take increasingly radical stances on issues of workplace control. What do we want: state-recognized and -enforced collective bargaining rights, or a movement so powerful it can operate without the state’s permission? Are we fighting for a bit higher wage and benefits for public workers, or an end to the wage system? Do we want civil servants to be treated with slightly more respect by their overlords, or do we instead demand worker control of these capital-serving institutions?

After all, we’ve established that public sector unions are the last vestiges of something approach a fair deal between labor and capital. Perhaps we should remind capital why they sought to give us that deal to begin with, thus securing a better position for labor in all sectors. To accomplish this, Wobblies and all radical unionists must reassert the primacy of the class struggle and creatively compose the narrative that frames the public and private sector worker grievances in class terms. Only a rebirth of class consciousness will push the center of the labor movement leftwards and secure our interests. It’s not enough to defeat Governor Walker or even to respond to these periodic crises in labor relations with solidarity: we have to resurrect the class struggle.

Let’s be clear about the establishment: both critics and proponents of this war serve each other’s purposes in a mutually reinforcing fashion. Without exception, each and every participant in this endless debate has supported the authority of the State. While war opponents may not have supported this particular exercise of privilege and brutality, they nevertheless agree that the government reserves the arbitrary right to impose itself upon citizens. Privilege, not some bureaucratic or strategic error, gave us this war.

Faithful adherents to the State, hawks and doves alike, appeal to the same sacrificial and mystical arguments as those who peddled the war originally. The myths of glorious liberation and foreign menaces spun by war proponents are not different in principle from all other government attempts to regulate, control, and manipulate society. Skeptics of the invasion questioned its expediency but not the right to invade, reducing the controversy to amoral calculation and cost/benefit analysis.

Among the establishment this debate has more to do with the strategic, profitable management of “human resources” than representing the interests of citizens. Moreover, the entire domain of policy is hopelessly immersed in abstractions and theories which only serve to drag consensus further and further from the concrete reality of its effects. The drive towards war was only a slightly cruder invocation of the same double-talk and domination that governments have always foisted on people. “Support the troops” is a failsafe mechanism designed not to stop wars but to conserve the power to wage war another day.

Oil, terrorism, and dictators are just peripheral issues, after all, compared to the bedrock goal of preserving faith in the power and sanctity of our government. The only thing worse than losing a war is losing the right to wage war. The only thing worse than losing an election is losing the system of power and privilege which makes elections worth winning. And the only thing worse than implementing bad policy is the realization that policy is largely irrelevant to reality. Critics of the war are obligated to speak in terms that reinforce the abstract dogma of the State — otherwise, why would they seek office?

Even for an “antiwar” politician, the military is the final guarantee of order and control, both domestically and abroad. So the only thing worse than opposing the troops is to challenge the special nature of this thing we call “the troops” – to stop treating servicemen and women as some abstract policy artifact and examine their objective human reality. The truth is that “the troops” is an entirely artificial construct. Juxtaposed against an equally absurd abstraction, “the American people,” it can be used in a variety of clever ways to manipulate public sentiment at will. But “the troops” are really just human beings; so are “the American people” and, for that matter, so is “the enemy.” That is the empirical, material reality that will remain once the lights and cameras are gone and the bombs have stopped falling. It is far too horrible to contemplate on its own terms.

Every last shred of professed obligation to support the military, let alone the unbearable moral ambiguities piled upon soldiers, is a coordinated myth designed to trick us all into working together like a big, amoral machine – with policy wonks at the control panel, of course. The reality is that people are wrongly dying because of the State, people have always wrongly died to preserve the State, and they will continue to die until we, the people, start saying “no”. We cannot count on establishment types to say “no”; until people are finally unwilling to believe in fairy tales, storytellers are easily replaced.

Criticizing the war while “supporting the troops” is just another sneaky way to preserve the long term power to wage war – and it’s just about as duplicitous as it gets. We should assert our human sovereignty and solidarity on our own, unmediated terms and reject appeals for obedience and sacrifice based on meaningless abstractions. Only then can we – soldiers, civilians, humans – begin to truly do away with the contrived abstractions that dehumanize our planet and fuel war.

How, then, do we reconcile these goals with the case of Mark Foley, a Congressman recently caught engaging in sexually explicit conversations with a minor? Perhaps those who seek to protect us from the nameless, faceless criminals out there have completely misunderstood the problem. The body empowered with enacting nationwide laws, creating criteria for punishing people, and directing the full power of the State contains the very corruption it seeks to root out among us.

It makes one wonder: whom can we trust?

As an anarchist promoting the abolition of this governmental body, it seems reasonable to me that Congress would be as prone to the evils and weaknesses of human experience as any of us. That is precisely the reason they are worthy of ruling neither me nor anybody in this country. We are all fallible, equally capable of deceit and depravity — but also nobility and prudence. We learn whom to trust and whom to avoid not by decrees from on high but by building relationships.

Society is the answer to our problems: the fashioning of markets, communities, networks, and organizations on a voluntary basis, allowing people the freedom to experiment, innovate, band together, and part ways based on their own interests and judgment. We defend our families by allying ourselves with our neighbors, hiring agents among a proven pool of open competitors, and sharing information and advice. Protecting children is best accomplished by the people who understand the stakes: parents and communities.

Of course, bad things happen — whether or not you have the power to pass laws. This brings us to a question anarchists are often asked: how would we prevent x, y, or z from happening without the state? What mechanisms exist to guarantee outcomes acceptable to all? How do we “balance” the sheer volume of competing interests in the world without some empowered and managing body? And in the case of child exploitation: how do we ensure our children’s safety from depraved individuals?

These are all good questions whose answers normal people seek. Unfortunately, they’re rarely asked honestly in politics. Rather, they are posed as rhetorical preludes to some new control placed on society. Instead of looking at the problem as one of complex interpersonal and community dynamics, with a host of causes and possible solutions, we are encouraged to see the problem as a one-dimensional, simple omission: evil originates from a lack of sufficient governance.

The answer from government is always to cripple ourselves for our own good. By making society less complex, less adaptive, and less empowered, we are easier to manage in a top-down fashion and, therefore, more predictable and homogeneous. Through stricter oversight and prohibitions handed down by Congress we can start to rediscover our virtue, at least as Congress defines it.

But the irony is that Congress doesn’t have virtue figured out, either.

The Foley scandal demonstrates the impotence of authority to effect moral management of society. Those who make laws on our behalf are just as flawed as we are. Their officialdom grants them no special insight into human nature. Their power doesn’t convey the ability to discipline society — or themselves. When we ask for leadership from above, a guarantee of safety and order, we surrender our consciences to the unworthy. Government will forever attempt to deliver on unreachable guarantees of safety and moral health by instituting more controls on us.

Indeed, reports indicate that politicians from both parties may have known of the problem and yet did nothing to stop it. Think about it: the most powerful body in the Nation, ignoring a case of exploitation they can address immediately without resorting to political maneuvering or deliberation. Then ask yourself: is any of this about the children?

Think about Foley the next time a law is passed that takes away more of our liberty and freedom “for our own good” or to “protect the children”. He demonstrates the truth of politics: virtue is not a matter of coercive laws and enlightened governance. We must place our faith and trust in ourselves, cooperatively building the solutions we seek rather than hoping they will be forced upon us.