Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> If there is hope, it cannot possibly be in
> >continuing to follow and obey the sociopathy of power, of
> >death, terror and destruction, that is, the works of the State.
>
> Well, there's a lot of that that is private too. And the state also provides
> roads and bridges and medical care and postal service and education and
> social security and support for the arts . . . .
As I indicated before, I'm not going to be sucked into any extensive discussion of this on a maillist, but this is the sort of distinction between "government" and "state" I had in my earlier post. These are governmental, not state, functions. (Note that all these functions have been served, whether well or badly, by non-state organizations. They require organization but not state power necessarily.)
On the discussion re guns. I don't think private ownership of guns is the issue. When the Chinese CP began its swing back towards capitalism, one of the first actions was to dissolve/disarm the militia. And the "constabulary" of old was in many ways more a neighborhood than a "state" function (not all constables being as stupid as portrayed in Shakespeare). You would move towards that, and away from state power as we know it, simply by requiring police to reside in the same areas they policed.
But this is to ignore the main purpose the concept of a stateless society serves -- _not_ as a goal of struggle or blueprint of the good society but as a perspective on the present. Whether there will ever be what would appear to us as a stateless society I do not know or care. (This is one of the reasons I seldom bother to even read anarchist writings: they focus to much on what is a desirable future and too little on understanding what is needed now. Arguments such as you quote and respond to above -- re "sociopathy of power" etc -- I simply find annoying and irrelevant.)
> and conflict resolution forums and
> security from private and even public predators.
I don't think we can know anything very interesting about the future in respect to these matters, and I don't see how attempting to forecast them would help in the present. I think it at least debatable, however, whether the present criminal-justice system creates more predators than it eliminates.
Carrol