I'm aware of this distinction and if you'll read the post carefully, I said I was being hasty. But despite the distinction, both presume the continuity and or flowering of the culture they prefer (communist or property loving) in the absence of the state institutions, rarely explaining how they'll make it work without some form of coercion of the non-compliers. Winstanley started out thinking the best thing to do was get rid of the law, but then rethought it after he saw what people were like when lawless. And if you read people like Nozick, he seems to have a similar presumption about the potential for non-state self organization. Many of the current Austrian influenced libertarians are even worse---they seem to think there is some anarcho capitalism that will simply emerge once the gov't is drowned in the bathtub (I've read several articles praising the entrepreneurial spirit that arose after Katrina in the absence of state.) In this sense, I don't see all that much difference in the pragmatics of each program or the infantile assumptions about the necessity of building culture before the state is evaporated--and then retaining some legitimate force for protection and policing at the very least. I'll get to the road crews below.
>
> Another difference between left and right, as I see it, is that where
> rightists posit the state as something that is omniscient, that taints
> and tries to form everything, leftists see it as something that is
> often inoperative, impartial, and ineffective; rather than everywhere
> and all-powerful, the state is fragile and continually constructed.
> Instead of trying to fight it and banish it everywhere like right
> libs, left libs see it as something that can be strategically
> disrupted and evaded. So it's not about grand arguments or narratives
> but about positioning and tactics.
I don't think this is universally true: the big brother argument is pretty tempting for every political stripe. I see the distinction, but it is usually just one of rhetorical convenience--sort of like Glenn Beck saying Obama is ruining the country with his socialist agenda one day and the next day saying he's ineffectual as a president and hasn't gotten anything done. In other words there are obviously good times to point this out but better times to make the enemy seem all powerful. I also think the "disrupted and evaded" line is much more a small scale strategy for living in the current environment: it doesn't really work as a strategy of post-state organization.
>> Living in a city (Chicago) where the
>> government, while transparently corrupt and often repressive,
>> generally takes care of a bunch of things,
>
> Capital generally takes care of a bunch of things and provides
> billions of people with a basically not-intolerable living. Wonder if
> you're increasingly unimpressed with grand anticapitalist arguments.
I see what you did there. I think you've overplayed the hand though. It has a distinctive "when did you stop beating your wife?" flair. But that's not really the spirit of what I said. Anyway, the only way capital is willing if not able to take care of anything is because there is a capital-friendly state nearby who's got its back--especially when the state is also paying capital (through contracts) to do the things the state should be doing. In that regard, I'm increasingly more impressed with anticapitalist arguments in the sense of ending the state's support of this displaced form of democracy. I'd rather have direct control over the state that is doing the good (or bad) things than leave it to private corps that have to be indirectly reeled in by the increasingly impoverished state.
But more than that, I just don't get why people would want to start from scratch. Do you really think anarchists (because they are anarchists) will have some grand plan for better sewer treatment systems that necessarily improves upon them (which is not to say that they can't be improved but that keeping the infrastructure moving and improving will require some administrative mechanism (i.e. something like the state)? Are anarchists ready to form affinity groups to regulate air travel or food safety? Is it such a stretch to imagine that bureaucrats in who oversee the department of health and human services have some sort of specialized knowledge and experience that would be required for the country to remain operative at a national level--or even to make any important, progressive changes in their everyday operation?
If there is some utility in these organizations, I don't see the point in calling them something else or in trying to reinvent them completely (such as Michael Albert does with his replacements for the IMF, World Bank and WTO). Or are safe food, clean water, medical care, and air travel just bourgeois contrivances we'll have to give up? If so, I don't see the broad appeal. Even at the local level, when dealing with 3 million people, I don't see how the adminstrative mechanisms, vast as they will end up being, won't end up looking quasi states. Making them transparent will require even more layers of regulation (like our current government accountability office) and I don't see why dissolving this social infrastructure is necessary in and of itself since most of what many of them do is provide services we'll want to retain (and likely improve significantly) in whatever utopia follows. And then, of course, there's the whole education for whatever social change you have in mind (right or left) and so on...
That, in a nutshell, is my beef with grand anti-state arguments. It is not, in other words, a vote in favor of actually existing states per se or an admonition to refrain from defenestration when it's clearly necessary in many cases: it is simply a statement that says institutions themselves are not necessarily the enemy especially in large societies such as our own. If there is no care given to this distinction, it is easy to see how flying a plane into the Austin office of IRS is a step on the way to solving all our problems.
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