<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><FONT SIZE=3>My [Leo's] original:
<BR><< That is why the classic notion of civil disobedience under a democratic
<BR>government asserts both the right to disobey laws which one believes violates
<BR>fundamental human rights and the responsibility to accept whatever penalties
<BR>may come from the judicial system as a result of breaking the law.>>
<BR>
<BR>Todd:
<BR><< The bit about resposibility worries me, though. What if a duly elected
<BR>polity, existing under a rule of law that allows for civil disobediance,
<BR>simply allows for the brutality of police forces or even, as looks like the
<BR>case was up here in Canada at the APEC conference, instructs the police on
<BR>what the polity wants to see done against the protesters. The polity can
<BR>claim ignorance or "excessive use of force" both of which are insanely hard
<BR>to prove people who don't want to see it (for one reason or another).>>
<BR>
<BR>My reply:
<BR>But isn't that precisely what the civil rights movement faced in terms of the
<BR>government of southern states? I don't see how that changes the
<BR>responsibility of a democratic citizen to recognize the right of the majority
<BR>to rule.
<BR>
<BR>There is a point, certainly, where a government clearly does not rule by the
<BR>consent of the governed, and at that point, the government no longer has the
<BR>claims upon individual citizens that a democratic government does. That is
<BR>where a right to revolution kicks in. But short of such a loss of legitimacy,
<BR>one has an obligation, as a democrat, to recognize the right of the majority
<BR>to rule through the state, just as one has an obligation to recognize the
<BR>rights of the minority to dissent, to freedom of expression, belief and
<BR>association, etc.
<BR>
<BR>My original:
<BR><< It seems to me that, as a body of political philosophy, anarchism does not
<BR>recognize the democratic principle that the majority has a right to govern.
<BR>It accepts liberal principles of individual rights, and thus, minority
<BR>rights, but not the right of the majority to make laws. Anarchism is
<BR>liberalism taken to the extremis, denying democratic principles in a way that
<BR>points out how liberal democracy embodies a tension between
<BR>liberalism's focus on individual rights and democracy's focuses on equality. >
<BR>>
<BR>
<BR>Todd:
<BR><< From what extremely little research on the Net I have done by following
<BR>the directions that are part of Chuck0's posts, it seems to me that
<BR>anarchists aren't so much interested in concepts of democracy as they are in
<BR>a massive distrust of hierarchy for which I can't say as I blame them. I,
<BR>for one, don't mind a hierarchy that is tied down chokingly tight with laws,
<BR>restrictions, and oversights, but even I can see those are only as good as
<BR>the people who elect the government which creates the hierarchy who can then
<BR>dismantle the protections set in place. More education and organization
<BR>needs to be done before we can destroy the tyranny of capital and replace it
<BR>with the tyranny of the proletariat. >>
<BR>
<BR>My reply:
<BR>Don't count me among those who conceptualize a desirable political
<BR>alternative in terms of a "tyranny of the proletariat." You will have to go
<BR>to Carrol, Yoshie and Charles for support on that count. There was no more
<BR>unfortunate phrase in Marx than the "dictatorship of the proletariat," which
<BR>-- however one reads it conceptually -- provided rhetorical sustenance to the
<BR>authoritarian Leninist and Stalinist state. My political alternative will
<BR>have majorities and dissenting minorities on all sorts of issues, and will
<BR>treat the rights of all to freedom of expression, belief and association,
<BR>etc., as inviolable.
<BR>
<BR>One of the problems with anarchism is its inability to distinguish between
<BR>authority, which can be democratic, egalitarian and limited, and
<BR>authoritarianism, a form of authority which is not democratic, egalitarian or
<BR>limited. The refusal of all hierachy is a refusal of all authority. In its
<BR>utopian denial of the need for a state, it collapses all states -- from the
<BR>most totalitarian to the most democratic -- into one.
<BR>
<BR>Leo Casey
<BR>United Federation of Teachers
<BR>260 Park Avenue South
<BR>New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
<BR>
<BR>Power concedes nothing without a demand.
<BR>It never has, and it never will.
<BR>If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
<BR>Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who
<BR>want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
<BR>lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
<BR><P ALIGN=CENTER>-- Frederick Douglass --
<BR>
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