Justin Schwartz:
> >> It's only limited, in terms of force, by thesize of the private army uou
> >> can get together.
Gordon:
> >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).
Justin Schwartz:
> 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.
Justin Schwartz:
> 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.
I didn't concede a point the first time, and I didn't concede a point above, either. You presented a movie as an argument, and I said I could make another movie that was a counter-argument. This does not constitute conceding a point. Nozick is irrelevant to our discussion; if we're taling about _Anarchy,_State_and_Utopia_, Nozick argued against the possibility of preserving current property relations in an anarchy, "anarcho-capitalism" in other words, and I agree; you can't preserve the kind of private property we know today without somee version of the State. But as I'm the communist sort of anarchist, his objections don't apply to my ideas.
Gordon:
> >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.
Justin Schwartz:
> Back to primitivism then.
Probably not. But it's your problem, not mine; you're the guy who is sure high technology requires some sort of social coercion.
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.
Gordon:
> >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.
Justin Schwartz:
> 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?
The question is not whether the State is the sole source of nasty behavior, but whether it's the best way of dealing with nasty behavior, or even an adequate way. However, I don't think free-riding is one of the more prominent problems we have, and in any case the State as we know it doesn't get rid of it -- as I've pointed out, there's plenty of free riding with the present incarnations of the State; in fact the State is the tool of choice for many free- riders.
Gordon:
> >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
Justin Schwartz:
> Well, that's why I'm a liberal and not an anarchist.
Yes, but what does this say about liberalism? If you believe that coercion in the name of technological progress is a good thing, why not go all the way?
-- Gordon