Intellectual property laws have shifted with the winds of history to justify specific interests. Countries that exported intellectual property favored the notion of authors’ natural rights, while developing nations, which were mainly importers, insisted on a more utilitarian interpretation that limited copyright by public interest. During the 19th century, American publishing companies justified their unauthorized publication of British writers on the utilitarian grounds that the public’s interest to have great works available for the cheapest possible price outweighed authors’ rights. By the beginning of the 20th century, as American authors became popular in Europe and American publishing companies became exporters of intellectual property, the law conveniently shifted, suddenly recognizing the natural rights of authors to own their ideas and forgetting previous theories of social utility.
This example should nicely show you how the laws of capitalist states are always modified to help the resident bourgeoisie make as much profit as possible. It was the same thing with tarriffs and corporate laws. They just paint them in a thin coat of populism and let the suckers who still believe that the common law is for the benefit of the common peopl, support them.
Anyway, read the whole thing. A very interesting take about the way the copyrights developed and what their real purpose has always been. Hint: It was never to promote creativity but to preserve existing monopolies and facilitate the exploitation of artists.
I just think back to my earliest times of hanging out with friends, organizing baseball games, and working on group projects, and the utility and convenience of creating hierarchies seems like a part of the “natural order”
The hierarchies you speak of are, in many ways biological. Packing orders of other primates (baboons for example) also have hierarchical social systems. This doesn’t mean that they are desirable or unavoidable.
There are many natural symbiotic systems (bees and flowers for example) which are purely cooperative, with no top-down, pyramid hierarchies. They are complex systems and each entity needs to maximize it’s own natural abilities to take advantage of the others’ but in taking advantage of one another, neither entity is put at a disadvantage.
Even in primate packs there are no artificial governing rules that the individuals follow, they evolve naturally based on genetic predispositions of strength and intellect as well as factors like age and sex.
But one of the major evolutionary stepping stones on the way to becoming homo sapiens sapiens was the evolved ability of homo erectus so-called beta pack members to band together and form units that were, through strength in numbers, able to overpower individual alpha male “rulers” to form egalitarian hunter-gatherer communities that could successfully fend of warring packs and hunt large mammals without aid of alpha males or single centralized leadership.
This particular trait precipitated many evolutionary milestones in communication and technology. Coordinated hunts, for instance, require linguistic ability which in turn breeds technological advances.
That is not to say they didn’t have leadership or complex social structures it’s just that the responsibilities of leadership were divided amongst many and the social structures naturally evolved from that. This made homo erectus one of the most successful and long-lived species of hominid of all time, as well as, gave rise to the most successful branch of the homo genus and the entire Animalia kingdom – modern day humans.
And while modern day humans retain the tendency for hierarchical pecking orders inherited from primate orders that are still visible today, that tendency is, in fact, a primitive feature, like the opposable thumb.
Cooperation and egalitarianism are derived, advanced features, like the opposable pinky.
This a very succint explanation of what people like Engels was writing about in the Origins of the Family. This is a very good explanation on why humans have a far greater attunement with cooperation and egalitarianism than we have with hierarchies and competition, even though for some (not all) of our closest cousins, this is not the case.
Executive flight is the corporate world’s only effective form of self-regulation: those who are too selfish to pay what they owe to society send themselves into voluntary exile. It’s an act of self-sacrifice for which we should all be grateful. It’s hard on the Swiss, but there’s a kind of mortal justice here too: if you sustain a crooked system of banking secrecy and tax avoidance, you end up with a country full of crooks and tax avoiders.
And for a 2-hit combo:
International attempts to close down tax havens remain half-hearted. But if by some miracle these measures were to succeed, one haven – let’s say St Helena – should be kept open. It should be furnished only with rudimentary homes. All who chose to could live there in peace. Every penny they possessed would remain safe from the taxman, as long as they never set foot in another land. They could sit in their cells and count their money for the rest of their lives. Parties of schoolchildren would be brought to the island to goggle at these hermits, and learn some lessons about the follies of wealth.
On a related note, we need more humor in the anti-capitalist movement.
Perhaps it was, but even if that were the case it wouldn’t mean we still need it. When a (US) shuttle launches into space it has huge rocket boosters/tank attached. Without these it couldn’t overcome earth’s gravity, but at some point they become a drag on progress.
It may well be that we needed war, state and conflict to get us going down the technology road. Once upon a time capitalism gave us the light bulb, the phone, the car, the computer. Today it gives us the DMCA, DVD region codes, copy rights, Internet censorship. It’s very clear (at least to me) that it has stopped rapidly moving us forward and is actually slowing down progression. It’s time to disconnect the boosters and move to the next stage.
If there one question that gets asked ridiculously often to anarchists is to describe how the future society would look like, how would an anarchistic world function. Any answer given to this question can but only raise more questions and open more venues for criticism as any system described can only be simplistic and full of conceptual holes. Therefore I dislike this question with a passion, as not only it is commonly used as a basis for dismissal of anarchism without bothering to look any deeper but also misses the greater point that anarchism is about the process rather than the end result.
However today I had a small epiphany on this topic while watching the excellent BBC documentary The Secret Life of Chaos. At some point in the film, Prof. Al Khalili made the point that while migrating birds have no leaders and no complex system of organization or rules to guide their flights, their flocks nevertheless not only manage to achieve great feats such as flying over whole continents but also display stunning patterns of flight formations, surprisingly suitable for their purpose (such as flying in a V-shape formation) or simply beautiful, while managing to avoid even colliding with each other.
What surprised me about this statement is how incredibly similar this type of organization sounds to an anarchist society. A society which has no leaders and no complex rules and yet manages to function and even create a very complex societal organization and order which serves to maximize the happiness of every human within it. The complexity of it arises, not despite the simple rules underlying the system but because of them and the existence of chaos. In short because of the natural complexity that arises when one combines simple rules with feedback.
And human societies, if anything, are nothing but feedback.
And this, I realized, is why one can never describe an anarchistic society. The simple fact of humans starting to follow simple anarchistic rules will create such levels of complexity and radical, strange and wonderful patterns and formations of social organization, that any prediction one of us makes now can only end up horribly wrong. In fact, the only accurate prediction one can make about a system that follows a certain set of rules within a chaotic environment is…that the system will follow those rules. Nothing else. You cannot predict the end result any more than one can predict the shape a flock of birds will take or how a certain pattern will look like when zooming 10x in a Mandelbrot set, while starting at a random location.
What does this mean? That any targets we set for a future society, such as the end of crime or having conquered the galaxy with billions of human colonies is impossible to predict with any certainty. No matter the system we setup to achieve this, because the smallest changes in our environment and behaviour will radically change what we expect. Just look at how science fiction looked even a mere 100 years ago (not to mention even longer) and you will see how little resemblance it has to our world. In fact, even looking at popular conceptions of the future, as crystalized in various movies produced a mere 30 years ago we can see that most of them are way off base. Personally, I’m still waiting for the flying cars.
And yet, even 30 years ago, nobody could even imagine something like the internet and how it would completely revolutionize our whole way of thinking and interacting with each other.
And yet, when one simple technological innovation completely re-shapes significant parts whole world in one short generation, you ask us to describe how an anarchist society, which would require a whole change of social relations, not to mention technology and lifestyle – in the face of rapid climate change and disentanglement from oil – would look like?! This is simply impossible.
However we can predict one thing: An Anarchy, that is, a society where humans individually follow and promote anarchist principles will…have anarchist principles. Simple nü?
So let me clarify this. One of the most fundamental anarchist principles is true democracy; the very simple concept that the power of one to affect a decision should be directly proportional to how much that decision affects them. As far as social rules go, this is as simple as “One person – One vote” or “The King’s choice is infallible”. We cannot remotely predict how a society based on this rule will look like any more than classical Greek democrats could ever foresee the US political system. What we can predict though is that the society will at its core allow people to have a truly democratic voice in their lives and thus greater control. Such a society would be definition need to have all hierarchies abolished (and that includes for example prison and business hierarchies) and will not have any prohibition on recreational drugs of any sort.
The rule is simple but the society that will form around it will be incredibly complex and impossible to predict.
This, I realize, is the only way to think about societal change. There is no point making utopian constructions in one’s head about how a future society must function for all humans to be happy, as this is moored in current social relations and current technological levels. This is the fatal flaw all such ideas had, from communist Utopias to “anarcho”-capitalist conceptions of freed markets and competing defence organizations. They assume a static world and a have a distinctly “Newtonian” understanding of social sciences. They assume that they have discovered the perfect equation which will bring about the perfect society…if only humans were smart enough to follow it to the letter.
But no matter how smart humans are the end result predicted is impossible. Not only because of minor, minuscule changes in the system (not to speak of major changes such as a new revolutionary technology being innovated), but fundamentally because of feedback, the end utopia will never come to be. All one will end up with is a vague trace of the original idea, somewhere in the developing society. Much like someone, paying very close attention, might discern the flame of a candle as it is moved within a video-feedback system.
In fact, our current society is nothing more than the end result of humans following a host of other basic rules of organization such as respect of free speech, respect for private property, promotion of classical freedom (i.e. your rights end where my rights begin), “one person-one vote”, secularism, gender and race equality, promotion of and respect for the scientific method and many others ((If you thought it’s merely very difficult to predict a future society based on only 1 rule, I want to see you juggle 5 or 10)). However, society did not change overnight, we did not move from feudalism to capitalism in one month, nor did we embrace modern science in a few years. It took centuries for those ideas to become mainstream because of the societal evolution. And those ideas only even got a hold in the first place because of the same evolution that came before them. Because of the way the system ended up forming from the ideas that were dominant in the past. And the funny thing is that those ideas might have been the complete opposite of what they produced.
What this means is that while we may have reached where we are because of the ideals that came before us, the capitalist mode of production which came after feudalism and slavery, which came after theocracy which came after imperialism and so on, we are still capable of changing where we are headed by the simple act of embracing different ideals. We will not know how exactly we will turn out, but we will know that we’ll have those ideas in action ((that is, unless there are no conflicting ideals as well. In fact, this is why we cannot have a free society or even one that is simply gender or race egalitarian. Those conflict with respect for private property and respect for authority which breeds hierarchies and thus perpetuates patriarchy minority oppression)) and thus can rule at least the things out that conflict with them.
In the end, the order of human societies are the complex result of simple rules, much like chaos theory predicts. However there is a factor which is absent from every other chaotic system we see around us. A simple detail which gives a whole new dimension of complexity to the evolutionary progress:
Humans can modify their own environment.
This simple fact I have come to realize is surprisingly important. Whereas every other organism (or simple pattern) can only adapt to how the environment around it changes and will only slowly change its basic rules as a result of natural selection, humans can to a large extent modify both their behaviour and their social rules instantly (in an evolutionary timescale) by using their primary trait, their reason, to discover a better optimal path than the one they were following until then. This means that they can follow a particular rule-set until it stalls or it becomes obvious that it is detrimental and then either modify their environment until this is not the case anymore, or simply discard their rule set for a superior one ((Of course, by going one level of abstraction back, this human ability to modify their environment and behaviour is only the result of evolution again, which has granted the humans the best capacity to expand their number given the nature of the planet and the universe as a whole))
Looking back at human history from this perspective, it’s impossible to miss this process. Humans adapted to their environment by using a specific system of social organization and production. When their environment changed (say by the introduction of a new technology or resource) they changed then either or both of them accordingly. Thus the slavery as a mode of production led to Imperialism (as well as, surprisingly, Democracy in classical Greece – remember the things we can’t predict?). The discovery of the steam engine and oil and the general industrial revolution led to the widespread abolition of slavery in favour of wage-slavery.All these things happened not because of fate, or the will of a creator and whatnot, but because of simple rules and material changes and feedback which always worked mindlessly to create the best combination of social organization given the existing environment for the maximal human spread.
And this is in fact the crux of the cookie. The current socioeconomic framework is not optimal anymore. The environment has changed far too much since the dawn of capitalism. Not only has the technological level broken the barriers of the system and thus made the ground fertile for different organizations (much like the industrial revolution made slavery sub-optimal) but the way the environment changes because of the system (such as global climate change and peak oil) has made the current one not only simply detrimental but outright destructive for the evolutionary success of humans (i.e. our continued existence as a species).
And this is where Anarchism comes in. I can only but consider it but the latest of an human societal recalibration required to work with the current and changing environment. It is no wonder than the first flickers of the idea occurred just as the capitalist system completed its dominance as the chosen method of production. It’s as if human history cunningly winks at us, while it hints to what is to follow. In fact, I consider it even more noteworthy that anarchist theorists had intuitively grasped the chaotic nature of social change approximately half a century before Turing made his breakthrough research into biological patterns. If there’s one thing that has always been a primary concept behind the anarchist movement is how it gives far more weight to the means to achieve change than it does to the ends. For me at least, the more I learn, the more this fact is solidified and the current post is only the latest of such knowledge.
Is Anarchism (or Marx’s “Pure Communism) to be the last sociopolitical stage? I used to think so but now, highly doubt it. As much as we can’t even remotely predict the future, so can we not predict the circumstances that might make Anarchism obsolete. Perhaps it will be enough to save us from annihilation by our own hands but not enough to survive contact with Alien races. Who knows? As much as Adam Smith could not even imagine a system like Anarchism when the Free Markets he suggested was itself a radical concept, so can I not even imagine what could possibly follow Anarchism.
But what I do know, is that no anarchist will be ever be able to accurately describe what Anarchy will look like. Only that like a flock of birds, it will be complex in its simplicity.
Is Anarchism opposed to any and all forms of authority? Does it oppose coercion of any and all forms? Most importantly, can one criticize it by assuming your own answers to those questions?
Ah, another day, another horribly misguided anti-anarchist post from the Barefoot Bum who seemingly simply refuses to even listen to what anarchists propose before criticizing Anarchism. It’s kind of sad really, especially seeing that it’s someone who wishes to pass himself as a radical intellectual and yet is too stubborn to know his enemy and rather prefers to imagine what their position is and counter that. It’s starts to feel as if he purposefully avoids knowledge just so that he cannot be accused of willful strawmanning. But one cannot avoid pointing out that this kind of behaviour goes far beyond simple misunderstanding, and rather points out a stubborn unwillingness to understand the other position. This is unfortunately only exaggerated when one is closed to all dialogue and would rather close his ears while shouting at the wind ((It’s not even worth pointing out how astonishingly hypocritical he is to claim that he faces “hostility and contempt”, when he is practically the one making people hostile by treating them like shit, banning them from his site when they disagree with him and then talking shit about others where he cannot be countered. When he is criticized elsewhere, he faces “hostility and contempt”. Hah.)).
Still, it does seem that when sufficiently demolished, TBB just might realize how egregiously wrong he is and jump to another strawman. At best, one can expect him to eventually run out of strawmen. At worst, this might serve to prevent someone who does not know better from being taken in by this kind of nonsense. So, without further ado, lets take a look at the arguments put forward in this article.
First of all anarchism is criticized for not having a sufficiently succinct definition like “Communism” which he mistakenly defines as governmental control of capital. One can provide quite a lot of descriptions of Anarchism but you cannot understand the sociopolitical system from just a description. That requires either reading, or a discussion with actual Anarchists and you cannot do the latter by acting like a twat. Nevertheless, one can describe Anarchism as egalitarianism via prevention of concentration of political or economical power. The replacement of hierarchical control with individual voluntarism and the replacement of competition as the driving force of progress with cooperation. As TBB said, the devil is in the details but fundamentally anarchism is predicated on the idea that distributed capital is order more effective than concentrated capital ((And this is something sufficiently shown by looking at reality historically and empirically rather than pulling facts out of one’s own arse.)) and that self-determination and mutual aid allows humans to achieve personal happiness that is orders higher than authoritarian top-down management can ever achieve.
TBB then moves to wonder what anarchists mean when they say that they “oppose authority” which is something that indeed needs clarification. But if one actually read what Anarchists had to say about this, they shouldn’t really have any confusion on this issue. This is really not a subject that is easy to explain, nor does it spring up from the definition of anarchism or from sound-bites one heard in a forum discussion and unfortunately that is precisely what TBB is doing and then wondering why it makes no sense. Anarchists recognise very well the distinctions of “authority” and are very clear on what exactly they oppose. In the words of Colin Ward:
“You can be in authority, or you can be an authority, or you can have authority. The first derives from your rank in some chain of command, the second derives special knowledge, and the third from special wisdom. But knowledge and wisdom are not distributed in order of rank, and they are no one person’s monopoly in any undertaking. The fantastic inefficiency of any hierarchical organisation — any factory, office, university, warehouse or hospital — is the outcome of two almost invariable characteristics. One is that the knowledge and wisdom of the people at the bottom of the pyramid finds no place in the decision-making leadership hierarchy of the institution. Frequently it is devoted to making the institution work in spite of the formal leadership structure, or alternatively to sabotaging the ostensible function of the institution, because it is none of their choosing. The other is that they would rather not be there anyway: they are there through economic necessity rather than through identification with a common task which throws up its own shifting and functional leadership.”Perhaps the greatest crime of the industrial system is the way it systematically thwarts the investing genius of the majority of its workers.”
It is blatantly obvious, when one retains intellectual honesty and does even a light attempt at discovering what anarchists oppose, that it is hierarchical authority. We oppose the authority which comes from people being in control only in lieu of them having more power than others. In very short, we oppose coerced authority. Either passively or actively coerced, that is either authority enforced by force of arms, or authority imposed by taking away all other choices. TBB proceeds to doubt wether coercion can be imposed as it’s always “within society” but that is blatantly false as any society which has been invaded by another should make abundantly clear.
He also argued:
The anarchist opposition to “hierarchy” does seems really nonsensical; a small group that exercised coercive power should be objectionable even if it were organized other than hierarchically. For example, the capitalist ruling class employs hierarchical structures, but is not itself organized hierarchically.
This is irrelevant, since the capitalist coercive power can only be maintained by hierarchical control. Taking away hierarchical control would necessarily require the abolition of capitalism and therefore the capitalist class. In short, it is not possible to have a “ruling elite” without hierarchical authority, ie someone to rule over.
Anarchists of course do not aim to abolish all coercion, as that is simply impossible. At the most basic level, we still need to use coercion to prevent the imposition of coercion. Eg, we need to physically prevent someone beating up people who will not become his slaves. It is the use of coercion that matters and how it is applied and anarchists argue that using coercion to form coercive hierarchies is bad, because hierarchical coercion is bad for humans. The reasons why this is so, is a lengthy subject for another day.
Furthermore, his argument that distributed coercion is worse than hierarchical coercion is of course pure nonsense.
Finally, he also posits the following “paradox”
Another important consideration is that there are intrinsic variations in individuals and in the organization of more-or-less “voluntary” associations. These variations can combine naturally to afford some groups more power to effect their desires than other groups. And, of course, one natural desire is for more power. Not only does power naturally concentrate, but the concentration of power forms a positive feedback loop. In order to keep power distributed, some group would have to have the authority — the coercive power — to block or reverse natural concentrations of power. Concentration of power is necessary to stop concentration of power, a nifty paradox.
If there’s one thing that an anarchist who has had to debate quite a lot has learned to look out for, it’s the common fallacy from human nature. There’s key words and phrases which should automatically ring alarm bells to the heads of everyone reading such arguments as they attempt to call out to previous assumptions of the reader about “facts of human nature” and work from there. Such is the argument TBB is doing by saying “And, of course, one natural desire is for more power” where he doesn’t attempt to base his arguments on anything other than a very shaky assumptions of what is a “natural desire” for humans. Once you challenge this, the whole “paradox” topples down like a house of cards.
There is in fact no reason for humans to form coercive authority in order to prevent coercive authority. We can firstly prevent hierarchies from forming by not enabling them (which is where the abolition of private property comes in) and by distributedly coercing those who would impose them. But it is not tyranny to oppose tyranny. TBB would like us to believe that humans naturally would try to accumulate power and that groups of people will somehow manage to do this within themselves before extending over others. This of course will not work as within the group, those who are in the lower rungs of the hierarchy will soon rebel and demand equality. This “natural movement or humans within a positive loop” that TBB asserts is nothing more than an unrealistic idea based on assuming a human who acts however you’d like and on the pre-existence of a system which would naturally select for such a behaviour (such as any propertarian system).
While I was writing this, TBB also wrote an article against voluntary co-operation, unfortunately filled with the same kind of misunderstandings of what Anarchism stands for. This is a perfect example of why it makes no sense to argue against a theory, any theory, without first bothering to at least understand what that theory suggests in the first place. It is unfortunate to say this but TBB is only following in the proud tradition of Marxist-Leninists (I’m certain he’ll reject this classification too and call it slanderous) who go out and make strawman after strawman as they attempt to make people pre-emptively dismiss Anarchism.
Are anarchists naive in their solutions to problems in contemporary society? No, we simply recognise the harmful long-term effects of statist intervetnion.
Recently someone in /r/Anarchism inquired what action should Anarchists ought to take against violent crime in contemporary society, something which triggered quite a thought-provoking discussion since this is a subject which does not really have an easy or simple answer. The subsequent misconstruement from a non-anarchist who happened to be browsing the subreddit at the time, triggered me to put my thoughts down on the general subject of anarchist problem solving and hopefully present a perspective that makes sense and does not sound simply “naive.”
One of the most basic concepts of anarchism, and one that people – who routinely dismiss anarchist solutions – do not know or refuse to understand, is the idea that it’s the methods we use to try and change the world that define how society will look like after we’ve succeeded. To put it more simply: Changing the world via authoritarianism, will create an authoritarian society. Changing the world via violence, will lead to a violent society. Using “bad” tactics, will lead to “bad” society. And as naturally follows, using the right tactics, will lead to the right kind of societal result.
As such, when anarchists see something something that is not right, they look for ways to fix it, that are compatible to the future society they wish to have. And since the two main cores of that future society will be direct action and mutual aid, any way to resolve a contemporary problem will most likely revolve around them primarily. The problem arises when the current society as it exists makes such methods difficult or outright unviable. This, more often than not, is because to allow them would undermine the legitimacy and requirement for the state itself.
In practical terms this means that anarchists will initially try to find a solution to a social ailing which they can implement themselves, via their own power, and when that is lacking by the cooperative power of the community affected by the problem. They will not immediately turn to the state’s aid, even when that is easier to do (in mental and physical effort) because we recognize that not only are most of these problems the result of state action in the first place, but to go to them for solutions only serves to de-power us in favour of those who caused the problem and more often than not, creates peripheral problems that are of equal or greater intensity.
The cop that you empower and trust to protect you from violent crime and activity you wish to prevent, ends up performing it itself, either as a form of corruption (i.e. turning the blind eye to the criminals who can pay him) or as a result of the authority and power that only he possesses (i.e. bullying, uncalled violence, violation of rights etc). And whereas you could fight alone or with your community against crime, you are now powerless against the police.
The judge that you empower and trust to take the objective and right decisions, ends up following the rules that have been decided for society by biased people (politicians), has far more connection (and therefore bias) towards the wealthier society due to his status and is easily manipulated by money (i.e. who can buy the best laywer). As a result, justice is skewed towards the rich, sometimes in very crass ways. Much like the previous example, a distributed, democratic solution would serve a justice that was far closer to the real sentiments of people, which is in fact why trial by jury was implemented (and subsequently corrupted by the way the system works), but as the system stands now, your only options for justice are via costly and time consuming means, which of course end up favouring those with spare time and/or money.
So instead of this, we try to find a way which would be both anarchistic and viable. In the discussion above, people (inlcuding me) attempted to posit answers to the long term problem of violent crime in contemporary society. We recognize the limitations we have to work with, i.e. that as long as the state, capitalism and gross inequality persist, violent crime will never go away, and thus propose solutions which are effective in the short and in the long run. The person who dismissed anarchism because of its proponent’s unwillingness to use state power to combat violent crime only looks at the short term solution and even worse, from a punitive, rather than a reformative perspective.
But the problem is not how to stop this particular gang of thugs in the short term. It doesn’t really matter when the system you empower to do this, will endlessly grind more people into this lifestyle and as long as communities of people cower in their homes unless the police comes to help them – not to mention when those thugs come out of the inhumane prison system far worse than they entered it. It’s like fighting fire with oil. Sure,if you use quite a lot of it, you may end up smothering the flames for a bit, but not only did you create a mess of the place in order to do this, but it wouldn’t take a lot of effort now to end up with even a worse conflagration than before. Just a spark.
Let me present you an example from my own life to see what my own actions and perspective are.
Almost one year ago, me and my girlfriend finally moved together into a larger house. The area we live in is a classic German residential one. As a result there’s a lot of teenagers around who are bored and alienated from society, especially German society which is ridiculously uptight. As one would expect, there’s also the usual samples of discontent youth who just don’t care about the rules enforced on them. The Germans call them “Asis” which basically means “anti-socials” and don’t really want them around. Not because they’re dangerous per-se, but because they’re unruly and will most likely give you the finger if you try to tell them to follow “The German Way”.
As a result, most residents around here, many of which are middle-aged or old try to get rid of them whenever they see them and their main course of action of course is to (threaten to) call the police. This means that the Asis end up in a nomadic style, moving around the neighborhood every time some old fart threatens to call the cops because they don’t like their presence (they’ll imagine some excuse). Eventually some of them ended up sitting close to our balcony, boozing, smoking and whatever and I really couldn’t care less. Not only did we not care if they sat there all day, but my girlfriend at some point even waved at them in friendship.
And it seems that was a mistake. Shortly after this, snowballs started pelting our balcony window now and then, something that is quite shocking if you’re having a calm night watching a movie or something. I didn’t notice it often because I’m either not here or in my own world behind the monitor. However the gf is really starting to get upset about it, not just from the snowballs per-se, but because some of them ended up breaking a plant pot or two and she’s afraid one of them if going to think to throw of beer bottle eventually, which our window will probably not survive.
Now a typical German would have called the Police a long long while ago but my gf (who is slowly moving towards anarchism herself) didn’t and asked me what our joint course of action should be. She had already tried talking, explaining, shouting, and even approaching them in person and she was at the end of her wits. They seemed not to listen and whenever we tried to go down to speak to them, they thought we were trying to catch them or something, and run away.
Now this is difficult situation for me as we need to find a solution to this problem (stuff on our balcony likely to break and we need to then pay for replacement) but I am loathe to involve the state. Thinking about it, we’ve decided that our first actions would be to somehow reach out to them and explain what effects their actions have. The original idea we have is to see when they’re around and then go down to talk to them. If they flee when they see us, we could try to leave them a message and a beer or two, and explain within how we really don’t mind them around but we would appreciate them not breaking our stuff. Will it work? Hopefully. If not, we’ll adapt our tactic.
There is always the case that nothing we think of will make them stop. There’s always the case that my solutions are foiled because I unfortunately live in the current society and not a future anarchist one. I could try to organize something like a neighborhood watch or something similar but given the community’s rather large alienation from each other (a normal middle-class city-dweller’s mind frame really, exaggerated by the German ideas) and my personal language isolation, it will most likely fail. Thus it may come to be that I will indeed have to call the police. The difference is that I will do it as a measure of last resort, and fully recognize that I had to involve them mostly because of the mess they, and all they stand for, have caused. I will rightly blame the state, not thank it, for taking away all my options except going to the state. Much like I would blame a Mafia, not thank it, when my store doesn’t “accidentally” burn down while I pay them for “protection”.
That unfortunately I sometimes may have to go against the ideal solution I would like to have is simply an indication of the non-ideal system we live in. It is not a betrayal of principles any more than working for a capitalist or renting an apartment is a betrayal. We’ve been forced to live in an unfair system which very often leaves us with no choice. However the difference is that as anarchists we will explore all other possibilities which are closer to how we’d like things to be done, before accepting a bad option. And then agitate and point to the unfairness of being left with no choice but to perpetuate evil practices.
In short, anarchists may be visionaries but we are are also pragmatic. We will first try to exhaust the options which would be compatible with our future society before moving on to the “lesser evil” solutions as a measure of last resort when no other possibility is left for us. And even then, the consequences of not taking the “lesser evil” solution need to severely overwhelm the negative effects of such actions, which anarchists are often all to aware of.
So your courts finally and unapologetically sold your democracy out to the corporations. Are you truly that surprised? I see a lot of gnashing of teeth lately online from people who are outraged, Outraged that their high courts would pass such a ruling. “How can they not see that they’re handing the power over to the plutocracy?”, “There goes our democracy”, Boo-hoo-fucking-hoo.
WELL, WAKE UP AND SMELL THE FUCKING COFFEE.
Your democracy has been a farce ever since your corporations started being considered “persons” in the late 19th century. Your politics and your government and your justice system and your enforcement agencies have always worked for the benefits of the rich only. Whatever crumbs of wealth and illusions of democracy you received were only to prevent you from realizing the truth of your situation. But you’ve been so pathetic lately that they know they can get away by spitting at your illusions directly.
I find it extremely humorous that after all the things that have been taken from you. After all the rights you’ve lost, all the people they’ve imprisoned for nothing, all the people they’ve killed and tortured, all the wealth they’ve transferred straight out of your pocket to theirs, now you get all upset and seeing the dystopian future that awaits you?
They’ve been turning your constitution into toilet paper for the last decade (not to mention defecating in the spirit of liberty for the last 150) and you’re still surprised when they crassly continue doing it? Who’s going to stop them? Your politicians? Those were in their corporate pockets long before this latest detail, and it is a detail after all for it functionally changes nothing in the way your political system has always worked. They know how to bypass such limitation for a long while now. They’re just confident enough with your pathetic resistance that they don’t even care to keep up the pretenses.
Your justice system? Only deluded fools with naive beliefs in the efficiency of common law or due process can still expect that there’s some objectivity in the legal system that appropriately balances the interest of the poor to the interests of the wealthy. That the process by which laws and rules were created ensures their fairness. That rich judges with a constitution and politicians making laws skewed towards the wealthy, would create legal precedents that went contrary to the spirit of your “justice” (i.e. protect the rich from the poor).
Perhaps this might wake some of you up but I doubt it. The only thing you people seem to think first when they’re once again preparing the lubricants is to vote for the brand. Yes, lobby some politician to pass some law, or even better, waste your time building yet another non-starter.
When are you going to realize that these things don’t work. Not because you may not get another Pyrrhic victory in such issues, but because your whole system is rotten to the core. These are just the latest symptoms of the decay.
Realize finally that what you’ve been told to believe since you were kids, that your democracy works, is a lie. It does not. No matter how likable the muppet you have at the front is. Your only solution is to tear it down and start from a solid basis again, not battle with palliatives.
So can we please stop with the impotent internet outrages? At the least switch do some good ol’ honest cynicism. This is nothing novel or important.
Once again I must return to the subject of ownership rights and how there’s two very distinct ways to define them: Private Property and Possession. That is not of course to mean that there’s no further variation between each of those systems, such as variation on the time to abandonment, the scale of ownership (individualist or collective) etc but rather that there is a hard core difference which splits the ownership scale in half, making each half incompatible with the existence of the other within the same social structure.
This idea, that Private Property as an ownership system is distinct from Possession as an ownership system should not be difficult to grasp. It is after all one of the core concepts of most forms of Socialism and anyone trying to do a substantial critique – especially of communism – should as a bare minimum be able to understand what socialists actually oppose when we speak about “abolition of private property” or what collective ownership means in practice.
And yet, time and again, instead of seeing valid criticism against socialist theory from defenders of the capitalist mode of production, we see an endless string of strawmen centered around misunderstanding (purposefully, one starts to think eventually) the socialist opposition to “Property”. This is even more cringe-inducing when it is stated as a novel and irrefutable argument against socialist theory. As if it so easily proves that all socialists are just too silly to see and understand the obvious flaws in their opposition to Capitalism. It’s like someone bringing up the “Mud Pie” example as a new and exciting criticism against Marxian economics.
Such is the most recent example where we are guided to understand what “property” is and that communists “seem to forget” a bunch of stuff about how human societies function and the positive aspects of being able to own stuff. It once again trots out the classic red herrings about people who would prefer private property over anything else and that the only way to stop them must be via a state. Yadda yadda. Regular readers of mine should already know how easy it is to refute this nonsense.
It is all, in the end, based on simply calling all “Ownership” as “Property” and thus claiming that we, as humans, can’t function without “property”.He therefore obscures the fact that there is a difference between “Possessive property” and for lack of a better word now, “Sticky Property” and its significance. He pontificates on the voluntary aspects of “property” and how everyone else got it so wrong, while failing to make any point on whether Possession or “Sticky” property should be preferred, something which is at the heart of the socialist idea. In short we replace arguments over substance with arguments over vacuous semantics.
You see, it does not really matter what we call the various systems of ownership, we could call them blue and purple bananas for all the good it will do us. The important thing is that we understand the same concepts. That the socialist criticize the ownership system which facilitates and promotes wage-slavery, rent and usury and promote one which makes that systematically impossible. That this is not a discussion on how we’re going to enforce it (voluntarily or coercively) but on simply which system we ought to prefer.
To simply take your own or what you assume are the “right” definition of the word ‘property’ and superimpose it onto socialist critique, is simple a recipe for strawmen fallacies. Perhaps you have the most popular definition. Perhaps you have the proper or more the most clear. Perhaps not. The important thing to remember, as Proudhon pointed out in the past, is that if you’re going to call all types of ownership “property” then you really need a way to distinguish between possession and “sticky property”. He suggested to call the later the more appropriate name of “theft” of course but I doubt the propertarians will agree on that.
As a communist, I have a reason why I prefer the definitional distinction to be between “Private Property” and “Possession”. Property is generally understood anyway to be “sticky” that is, to remain with someone until they sell or abandon it, regardless of occupancy or use. As such, it does not take much effort, other than explaining that there’s other possible forms of ownership other than that, to clarify my opposition to it. But it’s not important to use those concepts if they confuse someone. I can easily switch to a terminology that one feels more comfortable with if that will make things easier for them. However this is still my preferred terminology for the reason I just explained and thus find it incredibly silly for someone to make strawmen based on what I write for the general audience and then defend their actions on the grounds that their definitions are superior or more correct.
OTOH, what I most commonly end up seeing is that propertarians do not choose to call everything “property” because it is easy to discuss the concepts around it, but because it conveniently allows them to pretend that other valid forms of ownership do not exist. They will attempt to argue that “Property” is necessary and by that lump all concepts of ownership into the same umbrella, even when incompatible with each other. This is necessary in order to make their core arguments from “self-ownership” lead to Laissez-faire Capitalism, something which would be weakened if possession was a valid form of ownership, distinct from private property. Therefore it’s better to assume that the former is simply a subgroup of the latter. In fact, this is surprisingly similar to the way they try to argue that they’re open to the idea of communism…as long as it exists within a greater propertarian framework.
But I digress into an anti-AnCap rant again. What I’m trying to point out is that the words we use are irrelevant as long as we end up understanding each other and making substantial arguments. I long to see someone making a solid critique on why a Possessive system is unfeasible or even simply inefficient, or how private property is more ethical and whatnot…without having those points demolished by decade-old anarchist arguments or simple facts of reality.
And until then, all misguided propertarians who insist on making strawmen and presenting them as the most insightful thing ever and the absolute refutation of any and all forms of Socialism – should and will receive at best a quick dismissal as the waste of time they are, or at worst a well deserved ridicule for being obnoxiously ignorant.
By the Gawds, I really fucking hate this word. I see it used around all my work as a goddamn bludgeon against all things the speaker does not approve of.
Don’t wear the correct kind of clothes? It’s not professional.
Don’t have the correct desktop background? It’s not progessional.
Laugh out too loudly? Desk too cluttered? Not correct combination of colours? Not goddamn professional.
It’s the new ‘Decent’. It is so vague in use that everyone finds it a perfect excuse to judge and get others to change habits they do not approve of. This is marginally tolerable from co-workers who you can either ignore or explain that being efficient has much more to do with being a professional than all the rest of the “peripherals” but lo and behold when a manager mentions it. Then your only option is to shut up and take it.
How can you talk back to your manager? What can you argue? That his subjective understanding of what constitutes professionalism is wrong? Get ready to look for another job (a manager who feels the need to talk about professionalism is unlikely to be the laid-back type who tolerates his employees talking back at him). And you can’t ignore it either as that’s simply undermining his authority.
The way I see it, when anyone (especially your boss) starts demanding ‘Professionalism’, they basically don’t like something about you and can’t reasonably argue why. They simply fall back to vague business speak and back it up with hierarchical authority to enforce it.
And this is what makes it for me such a despicable word. It doesn’t help either that Business-oriented Magazines use their imagery and marketing to present an image of the pristine, sterile business look of suits and ties and fake smiles. Then all the managers try to imitate this and we end up with demands for “professionalism”, which of course feeds directly the pockets of those being advertised in such magazines. Business attire clothing companies and other sources of company sterility.
I wonder if we’ll ever escape the clutches of herd-mentality, status-oriented culture and focus on having fun when working rather than following obsolete nonsense which originated from puritan practices of sex-starved protestants with a mission from Gawd to make everyone as miserable as they were.
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