Justin Schwartz:
> No, but as Mill pointed out, unofficial social norms can be as repressive as
> state power. NB, since under anarchism there is no official monopoly on the
> use of force, there's nothing but norms and other people with guns to stop
> those who are offended at the violation of their favored norms to resport
> to force.
This state of affairs seems inferior to State power with regard to coercive capability, e.g. killing a whole lot of people at once, and therefore possibly preferable.
Gordon:
>> I find these construals of anarchism very odd among people
>> who appear to know so much -- first primitivism, and now
>> total social breakdown. And no reasoned support of either
>> construal, so far
Justin Schwartz:
> Well, sunce the anarchists here are supporting a return to hunter-gathering
> while maybe scavenging the detritus of technological civilization,
> primitivism seems to be indicated.
"The anarchists" weren't supporting a return to hunter- gathering. The primitivism bit was brought to the discussion by Doug in the following exchange:
Miles Jackson wrote:
>>> Kel hits on the thing that bugs me here: if we keep using the term
>>> "work" to refer to wage labor, we make invisible a huge amount of the
>>> social labor that is necessary for our society to thrive, and we take
>>> the people who do it for granted. "Everybody should work, no shirkers":
>>> fine, as long as we realize that work is far, far, more than wage labor,
>>> even in an industrial society.
Chuck0:
>> Of course, there is always Bob Black's "The Abolition of Work," which
>> sums up my feelings and thinking about work. I've also found that
>> Wendell Berry's writings on work to be valuable. There is work of the
>> "wage slavery' variety and work of the variety that meets basic needs
>> and/or is personally satisfying.
Doug:
> So no more computers, Chuck?
In effect, Doug baited Chuck into defending a primitivistic version of anarchism, possibly for the sake of argument -- as Chuck noted subsequently, anarchists disagree about the kind of technology which could be supported by an anarchist society. But then a large number of people earnestly chimed in about how they were saved by penicillin at the age of six, etc., as if John Zerzan himself had showed up on the list, smelling of the primordial compost-heap and cursing the wheel. Lots of fun, but all based on a characterization of anarchism which is a false as the guy with fright whiskers, a black raincoat, and a smoking bomb -- almost the kind of thing you'd expect to see in a daily newspaper or network television. Why people want to engage in this sort of thing at length for free is beyond me; the corporate shills in the media are at least paid to do it. But _de_gustibus_.
Justin Schwartz:
> And as for total socail breakdown, what
> else do you expect if you have no mechanism for making enforceable
> collective decisions, no rukes for interpreting the norms (no laws, that
> is, no lawyers, no courts), and no recoyrse against the use of force but
> force? You mention Hobbes below; he comes to mind.
I should think so; evidently you believe human beings can get along only if one holds a gun to another's head. It may be that you're right, but as I've pointed out before, this means that the human race is doomed, because advancing technology devoted to guns will continue to improve the guns until they can and will kill everyone automatically. The way of the gun ends in death; that's what it's for. Death is boring. Therefore, although it may be a long shot, I choose a more interesting politics, and this certainly means abandoning the gun-to-the-head political vision and thus the State.
Gordon:
>> It seems to me if you believe that you have to hold a gun to
>> someone's head to get high technology,
Justin Schwartz:
> If by this you mean mechanisms for enforcing policy, yes. Otherwise you
> have the free rider problem.
This does not look to me like a demonstration, much less a proof. There's lots of free riding in the high-tech world. So why do people have to be coerced to produce high technology? What's the necessary connection? Try again.
Gordon:
>> a rather Hobbesian
>> view, I think, you'd at least refer me to Hobbes. I wonder
>> what you would think of this guy Marx who talked about the
>> withering-away of the State.
Justin Schwartz:
> I think Marx was wrong (the term is actually Engels'). But then I am a
> liberal democrat. Be that as it may, Marx didn't mean anarchism, he meant
> that the government wouldn't be an instrument of class oppression.
I think the idea of the State withering away, that is, becoming non-existent, is pretty explicit in Marx, who wrote the notes for Engels's book. This is the way Lenin took it, if Lenin is any evidence of proper Marxist thought.
-- Gordon