> > >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.
>
>Justin Schwartz:
> > It's only limited, in terms of force, by thesize of the private army uou
> > can get together.
>
>Precisely. In a viable anarchist culture, when you start to
>collect a private army, people are likely to interfere (since
>they can't refer to problem to the cops).
And you say about my invocation of The Postman:
(Me: ) I think the first part, with
> > small nice communities terrorized by lawless warlords, without the sappt
> > happy ending, is a pretty good description of how anarchsim would work
>in
> > practice.
>
>It's just a movie. I don't think I want to argue with a
>movie. Give me forty million dollars, though, and I'll make
>a movie where anarchism prevails and everyone is happy. Or
>at least I'll be happy.
>
But again you concede the point. In fact, without a state, people can get pretty large private armies together. Others will respond in kind, and we enter Nozick's grim world of "dominant protective associations," the baddest of which imposes the state and libertarian economics in the end.
>
>Well, we know people can have _some_ technology without the
>State, because pre-civil people invented and developed things
>like agriculture, the wheel, the bow and arrow, and so on.
>So then the question becomes how high we can jump, and we have
>to ask that on the way up. Certainly, small groups have been
>able to cooperate in advanced technology because they wanted
>to, not because someone forced them to. Possibly much larger
>projects could be carried out in this way, untainted by blood
>and the tears of prisoners and slaves. And if not, maybe we
>could forego them. I don't want to go to the moon or have a
>videophone at the cost of enslaving millions of people; I'll
>try to do without.
Back to primitivism then.
>
>Justin Schwartz:
> >>> . Otherwise you
> >>> have the free rider problem.
>
>Gordon:
> >> 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?
>
>Justin Schwartz:
> > This concedes the point. Of course there is a lot of free riding. And if
> > people weren't forced by the ultimate sanction of fines and prison to
>pay
> > taxes, or by the sanction of going hungry and homeless to work, there
>would
> > be a lot more.
>
>I thought "otherwise you have the free rider problem" meant
>"otherwise you have the free rider problem, which destroys
>the enterprise/project/institution/industry." If then I adduce
>the existence of much free-riding without the accompanying
>dissolution, it seems to me I've given a counterexample, not
>a concession.
My contention is that the state is a solution to the free rider problem. You change the incentives so that people will be less likely to cheat. Your solution is to change the motivational structure, but your only basis for thinking that it would chanmge is the assumption that it is the state and capitalsim that provide the sole source of selfish and nasry behavior. Surely they provide some of the source, but all of it?
>
>If I believed as you do, that high technology necessitated
>coercion (slavery), the only moral thing I could do would be
>to become the primitivist you wished to see me as. No wonder
>I, being a city boy, am unwilling to believe this
Well, that's why I'm a liberal and not an anarchist.
jks
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