G*rd*n:
>> If I may translate your argument, I think it can be stated
>> more simply as "There will be sociopaths, and we need a
>> government to control them." (I take it you are not talking
>> about simple disagreements and misunderstandings, for which
>> there are obivously other possibilities of resolution than
>> government force.)
Thiago topp8564 at mail.usyd.edu.au:
> Forgive the interjection, but the problem seems to have less to do with
> sociopaths than with people who disagree with each other irresolvably. The
> argument thus looses something crucial in the translation. Moreover, even if
> your gloss was acceptable, your implication would hardly be less alarming. Seen
> from one perspective, the characterisation of criminals or people who don't
> feel like accepting consensus as sociopaths seems to be quite a dangerous one.
>
> I have a lot of time for anarchist arguments, but this appears to me to be a
> particularly weak spot in the doctrine. Without wanting to sound to acerbic, I
> have felt that anarchists often pursue consensus at the price of ostracising
> potential dissenters; casting the psychiatric net over them seems like another
> step backwards.
Doug Henwood:
> And what's so "simple" about "disagreements and misunderstandings"?
> That's why I said the anarchist utopia is a fantasy of perfect
> transparency and harmony - there are no competing interests, no
> cultural or temperamental gulfs in ideology or preferences - none,
> that is, beyond minor ones that can be cleared up with conversation.
> It dispenses with coercion and conflict by imagining a world where
> all important differences disappear. Call me stunted and brutalized
> by the world we live in, but that seems impossible and undesirable
> even. It would require a pretty static world too, since change would
> have to inspire conflict. Don't you see anything productive about
> conflict, Gordon?
By "simple" I meant "uncomplicated by sociopathy". I will describe my view of sociopathy if necessary, but generally it includes things like unprovoked violence.
I think part of the problem here is that you all are viewing anarchism as some sort of version of more traditional political movements, e.g. State socialism, fascism, liberalism, etc., in which the revolutionary party seizes control of the state and its contents, and imposes a new government on it, to which all must adhere. Some anarchists have, indeed, posited such a sequence of events, but to me it seems self-contradictory. Anarchism can't proceed by fighting for victory, because victory is death. It proceeds by subversion and seduction, from below rather than from above, from the margins rather than from the center. If coercive institutions and relations are to be replaced by voluntary ones, it seems clear that the replacement can't occur coercively. What would have to happen instead would be a sort of migration away from coercive institutions and relations into non-coercive ones, mostly out of sight of the ruling class.
Anarchism has to do this because in fact after several thousand years of slavery we don't actually know how to live without masters, except on a very small scale. However, we can work on the problems at a local level by enacting anarchist ideas, living anarchist lives, and seeing what works and what doesn't. Anarchist groups have actually put a lot of effort into developing noncoercive group processes, for which they are usually roundly mocked. But some things are at once ludicrous, rewarding, and necessary. In any case, it may be that the forms which anarchists develop will be better at sustaining and integrating productive conflict that those which now exist under the aegis of State power, where the losers are often simply wiped out.
(This attention to locality will not prevent anarchists from joining wider movements with which they agree, such as the present effort to stop the latest war, so my remarks should not be taken to indicate withdrawal from political action in the world unless one urgently requires a cheap and inaccurate rhetorical shot.)
Yoshie:
> >But we are not talking about all manners of conflict; some conflicts, even
> >today, do not require state intervention. We are specifically debating if
> >there will always be the kind of conflict (class conflict;
Justin Schwartz:
> Almost everone here, including Doug and me, agree that class conflict is
> eliminable.
Yoshie:
> and horrid acts of interpersonal violence like
> >murder, rape, domestic violence, etc.)
Justin Schwartz:
> No doubr these can be drastically minimized; I do not think they can be
> eliminated.
Yoshie:
> that demands the presence of
> >the state (an institution that monopolizes legitimate use of force),
> >regardless of what sort of social relations we may have.
Justin Schwartz:
> Those are not the only things that demand the presence of the state. Please
> note: it is only one function of the state to monopolize the legitimate use
> of force, although that is a good function. I should not want every Tom,
> Dick, and Harriet to have the right to blow me away with no fear of legal
> consequences. In addition to its coercive aspect, the state also,a nd
> indeed primarily, has a number of other functions" it establishesa nd
> maintains a regimes of laws that enable people to do things they want to do
> with some predictive regularity, such as make contracts, have marriages,
> transfer property, and the like.
>
> This is a point made with eloquent force in HLA Hart's great book The
> Concept of Law, criticizing the old Austin-Bentham view that the law is
> commands backed by threats of force--a view basically held by mnay Marxists
> who have no absorbeds Gramsci's lessons about hegemony. In addition the
> state provides public goods like roads and schools that people will not
> provide on their own.
>
> So, even if the last murderer and rapist could be rehabilitated and the
> last capitalist reformed by labor, we would still the the state and law.
> Lenin admitted as much in in quasi-anarchist tract, The State and
> Revolution. His example--a ghood one too--was the Post Office.
This is generally a return to the argument from efficiency. Efficiency is the ratio of cost to production, but by itself it does not state some ultimate value of what it is that is being produced, or its costs. So many measures of efficiency omit significant costs and byproducts. Thus, while a monopoly postal service may be a good thing by itself in terms of getting one's mail, no evaluation has been provided as to whether this convenience outweighs the cost of class and class war, which are necessary to sustain a state and its agencies, as well as the other products of the State, such as war in the conventional sense, political repression, police violence, economic oppression, and so on, which arise directly out of class war or are resonances of it.
I am assuming here for the sake of the argument that a monopoly post office can be maintained only by coercive force, which seems to be taken for granted above; in fact, I don't see why, if a monopoly post office is a universal good, it could not be maintained without the use of force, and thus, in the absence of State power.
As a note which may help to clarify the above, I am using the term _state_ to denote the interlocking complex of permanent institutions of coercion in a community, capitalized when I refer to it as an abstraction. The visible governments of a community are only one set of such agencies; in America, for instance, corporations, other institutionalized groups, and private individuals can sometimes act coercively (usally with government backing). The existence of a state necessitates class, because for coercion to take place in a reliable way it is necessary for some to have power over others, and the some who have power must form a coherent body in order to forestall the probability of revolt and tyrannicide which will certainly occur if there is but one monarch without friends and guards; sooner or later, he will have to sleep.
-- Gordon