Todd: << The bit about resposibility worries me, though. What if a duly elected polity, existing under a rule of law that allows for civil disobediance, simply allows for the brutality of police forces or even, as looks like the case was up here in Canada at the APEC conference, instructs the police on what the polity wants to see done against the protesters. The polity can claim ignorance or "excessive use of force" both of which are insanely hard to prove people who don't want to see it (for one reason or another).>>
My reply: But isn't that precisely what the civil rights movement faced in terms of the government of southern states? I don't see how that changes the responsibility of a democratic citizen to recognize the right of the majority to rule.
There is a point, certainly, where a government clearly does not rule by the consent of the governed, and at that point, the government no longer has the claims upon individual citizens that a democratic government does. That is where a right to revolution kicks in. But short of such a loss of legitimacy, one has an obligation, as a democrat, to recognize the right of the majority to rule through the state, just as one has an obligation to recognize the rights of the minority to dissent, to freedom of expression, belief and association, etc.
My original:
<< It seems to me that, as a body of political philosophy, anarchism does not
recognize the democratic principle that the majority has a right to govern.
It accepts liberal principles of individual rights, and thus, minority
rights, but not the right of the majority to make laws. Anarchism is
liberalism taken to the extremis, denying democratic principles in a way that
points out how liberal democracy embodies a tension between
liberalism's focus on individual rights and democracy's focuses on equality. >
>
Todd: << From what extremely little research on the Net I have done by following the directions that are part of Chuck0's posts, it seems to me that anarchists aren't so much interested in concepts of democracy as they are in a massive distrust of hierarchy for which I can't say as I blame them. I, for one, don't mind a hierarchy that is tied down chokingly tight with laws, restrictions, and oversights, but even I can see those are only as good as the people who elect the government which creates the hierarchy who can then dismantle the protections set in place. More education and organization needs to be done before we can destroy the tyranny of capital and replace it with the tyranny of the proletariat. >>
My reply: Don't count me among those who conceptualize a desirable political alternative in terms of a "tyranny of the proletariat." You will have to go to Carrol, Yoshie and Charles for support on that count. There was no more unfortunate phrase in Marx than the "dictatorship of the proletariat," which -- however one reads it conceptually -- provided rhetorical sustenance to the authoritarian Leninist and Stalinist state. My political alternative will have majorities and dissenting minorities on all sorts of issues, and will treat the rights of all to freedom of expression, belief and association, etc., as inviolable.
One of the problems with anarchism is its inability to distinguish between authority, which can be democratic, egalitarian and limited, and authoritarianism, a form of authority which is not democratic, egalitarian or limited. The refusal of all hierachy is a refusal of all authority. In its utopian denial of the need for a state, it collapses all states -- from the most totalitarian to the most democratic -- into one.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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