The Precarity of Anarchy: A Reason to Doubt
6 years ago in #anarchism by ekklesiagora (62)
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So much to take in. I'm only vaguely familiar with anarchist ideas, but have been meeting more & more people lately who think about it deeply. I appreciated your critical look at all sides.
One simplistic way I like look at things is there are two types of people:
To be truly free requires a ton of work. It also requires a shift in consciousness. Most people aren't up for it or even remotely interested in it. A truly stateless system depends on this highly unlikely event.
So we're left with 99.9% of people who prefer to be governed over. They tend to form tribes.
The challenge is that the world has people from both groups. So ideally a system can support those who seek freedom alongside those who really don't care all that much, but would enjoy the benefits nonetheless.
... I guess much of what your saying picks up from there until you reach "libertarian social democracy with a republican system". Now I need to study and unpack what exactly that means. :)
Thank you for getting me started!
You should look into liquid democracy or delegative democracy....its basically direct and participatory in principle, but people who don't want to participate can delegate their vote to someone else, a delegate, who acts kind of like a representative(but not exactly).
"Libertarian social democracy with a republican system"... Let's unpack that.
Republican simply means "representative democracy"
Libertarian, as I use the term, means left-libertarian or classical libertarian, harking back to libertarian socialism which sought communal-ownership of land and the abolition of wage-slavery. I call my model libertarian social democracy insofar as it involves abolishing wage-slavery through making land publicly-owned (in principle, at least) by instituting a land value tax (or ground-rent) and distributing the revenue evenly amongst the citizens as a universal basic income.
Social democracy just designates a democratic society, with a market system, but that uses taxation in order to fund welfare programs that alleviate the injustices that naturally arise under laissez-faire.
Thank you for the explanation and compass. 😀 I'm clipping this into my notebook to refer back to.
Look forward to reading your future (and past) posts!
I totally agree that it would be impossible to enact anarchy without forcing all others with differing political philosophies to accept it. This act of force in itself breaks core anarchist principles of liberty and autonomy of the individual.
I disagree that the measure of a just and therefore better society is in the amount of suffering. Suffering can be an extremely subjective term. If we are talking purely bodily suffering, then the most just society would control everyone's diet, lifestyle, and remove human autonomy for the sake of the greater good. If we are speaking of emotional and psychological suffering as well, then we are in a very subjective realm of the human psyche, and all objective measures become near impossible.
I also think by reducing infant death, extending life spans, and removing subsistence lifestyles, we create global problems of over population and environmental destruction. The mechanisms that are often meant to reduce suffering, end up creating more in unpredictable ways. I don't think there has been a time in modern society where we aren't dealing with incredible suffering from things that were meant to reduce it just decades ago. In 30-60 years I'm certain we'll be dealing with a terrible aftermath of many of our industrial methods and medical procedures. But I digress.
To me, the measure of a just society is in the autonomy of the individual, in so far as another individual's autonomy is not put in jeopardy by the will of the other. This is something that is easier to measure objectively. I think when free, communities can work what suffering and happiness means to themselves, and create ways to achieve that.
With that said, I am only a humble minnow, in life and on Steem. I really enjoy your writing and the wealth of knowledge you are sharing freely here. These are only my thoughts, and I'm sure there are those much more educated than I that can debunk every word. Cheers!
The flipside of negative liberty (autonomy) is positive liberty. You are not free if you happen to be too poor to exercise your liberty. Under pure free markets, the masses have starvation wages and miserable working conditions. It is government regulations that made "laissez-faire" bearable by mandating minimum safety requirements, minimum wages, and certain rules against air pollution. America would be a hell-hole without OSHA and the EPA. Infringements upon negative liberty are sometimes necessary to ensure a bit of positive liberty. You aren't free to go for a jog if you have to work 20 hours a day or if smog makes it unsafe to breath outside without a mask. I would contend, also, that liberty/autonomy is just as subjective.
Suffering can be measured though. There are metrics for measuring human happiness. You can ask people on censuses. You can look at the rates of depression and addiction in various countries. According to all the metrics, people are happier under social democracy than under more laissez-faire systems. (Cf. World Happiness Report)
As for the overpopulation stuff, that's just Malthusian fear-mongering. Don't let them trick you. The world is nowhere near overpopulated. Most of the world's land is neither occupied nor used for agriculture. Cities are overpopulated. Why? Because we have a system of wage-slavery so people have to flock to where the jobs are. If we abolished wage-slavery by adopting a universal basic income, funded via land value tax, people would no longer have to flock to where the best-paying jobs are. People would spread out more and live in smaller communities. Also, it would stimullate technological and scientific progress, so we might even be able to reach the singularity and enter into a transhumanist era. In which case it may be feasible to break free from this planet and establish an interstellar civilization.
I agree that free markets limit individual liberty. Because of the nature of the corporation and hiarchies inherent in production based society, those at the top have greater liberty than those at the bottom. But this itself is a violation of using your will to impede another’s. I think our entire society is structured poorly, and I wouldn’t advocate for the removal of government or its regulatory bodies in our current culture and context. I believe the best way forward is through heavy regulation on corporations. In fact, I think corporate personhood should be revoked. Worker owned businesses should replace the modern corporation and slowly corporate power reduced to nothing. Once the corporation has been dissolved, I think we can then discuss the necessity of centralized and violent government.
The population issue is not a myth or scare. I did the math on one of my posts a while back. As it stands, we are perfectly ok, and can double in population if we replace animal meats with insects or hemp. But this is not what I’m especially concerned about. High population densities create epidemics and degrade the environment. Even rural America can have populations too high for sustainability without proper care for the land and respect for nature.
I think technology will lean towards creating a dystopian future, rather than a utopia. I tend to think it’s likely humanity will be wiped out before we can colonize other planets. But that’s all guess work.
I can see, overall, we envision a similar future of decentralized populations that can live freeely and happily without cohersion or force. I’m going on somewhat of a vision quest to imagine/invent an ideal society and work my way backwards of how we can get there from here. I believe this to be a healthy practice for any individual. Thanks for your insight and reply.
I wish more people would realize this: "But this itself is a violation of using your will to impede another’s."
There's also so much food waste. If society becomes more equal, society becomes less consumeristic, and society becomes less wasteful, farmers are rewarded better for their labor, small housing take root (rather than the urban sprawl of giant lawns and giant houses), etc, we could allow many more people to live comfortably. Still, there is a limit.
Interestingly, people do tend to give birth to fewer children if they get out of poverty, and after they go through advanced education.
I'm starting to feel like I'm stalking you. Been reading your resteems today and thoroughly enjoying them. The world of quality Steemit content just opened wide.
Lol! No worries. That’s how you find good writers and community on Steemit, stalk people that are interesting and find people even more interesting. Glad I can be of service 👍🏼
Two years ago I would have loved this post :)
The society will always be a reflection of its people. The question is only to which extend the people can express themselves and how easy it is for individuals to get influence. A police state is the one extreme and anarchy is the other. As you state it may not be clear where on this spectrum maximum life standard is reached. We just need to experiment more (but please not again with police states I think we know them quite well by now).
If something that you like can be decided in a democracy (e.g. health care), why would you not be able to organise it in anarchy?
For new ideas anarchy is actually far superior to democracy as you can easily test proposals that have a committed 20% of the population behind them. If they work out the conservative 80% will follow. If the dont it just depends on how stubborn the 20% are :)
There are certain policies that are only beneficial if they are applied universally within a community. E.g. Obamacare in America only makes insurance more affordable if the individual mandate is included (if people can opt out of getting insurance, costs rise). Land value tax only prevents gentrification and land speculation if it cannot be opted out of. Basic income too must be universal, otherwise it doesn't eliminate poverty and wage-slavery within a community. If only 20% of the populace supports universal healthcare, then it will only be funded by that 20% and likely won't be feasible to make free healthcare available to the rest of the community. That's the problem in America, healthcare is universally available on the condition that you voluntarily pay for insurance/services, so most people opt out of insurance but then can't afford healthcare when they do need it. Obamacare was beginning of a solution, but left much to be desired. Direct democracy in America is unlikely to ever vote for a tax increase, so they will never support cap and trade, raising taxes on the wealthy, or land value tax, even though it is in the best interest of the American people to do so. Representatives tend to be more educated on policy proposals and the reasoning behind them, so progressive taxation and cap and trade have been passed through representative democracy. While the American system is currently not working, the Nordic countries demonstrate that republican institutions can work for the people.
Of course there are policies that work only or better when everyone is participating.
Heath care has the problem that denying it may be morally questionable.
Retirement funds have the problem that when you want to reap their benefits you have no more power over the company that is supposed to pay them. Plus the individual risk is huge and there is no way to plan how much you will need.
On the other hand before imposing something on the whole humanity you better have clear arguments and make sure that the restriction of freedom is nesescary and that what you want is precise. For healthcare I dont see this at all. You must decide the question which people will be saved and which are left to die since treatment is to expensive. That is a tough choice. Instead I prefer maybe suboptimal but voluntarist approaches to these problems, considering that I do not trust humanity to answer such questions, without exploiting the position of power that the deciders obtain.
Lets consider we have 1% rich and 99% poor. Now the poor establish a system of insuring each other against certain risks and the rich opt out. If the poor have the ability to organise that gives them tremendous power over the 1% which depend on the 99% as a market and as workers. In that way they can effectively "tax" them in a fully voluntarist way. In the past these technologies were not available yet making large scale trustless organisation impossible. But now we can do it.
I also find your argument on representative democracy questionable. You agree that it does not reflect the view of the population, but state that the representatives are making better choices for the people. I think the opposite is true. The representatives are weak points for corruption. In addition politicians tend to be a very biased sample of the population. Now maybe they are more likely to implement changes you like, but they are less likely to implement changes I like. How do we solve that problem?
On land and resource distribution the most common anarchist notion of claiming what you see is much weaker than on owning your labour. I think it can be argued who is the aggressor in such a case, and I think it is compatible with anarchism to divide the resources of the world g theyven that they are not rooted in human labour.
This also brings us to universal income. You dont own the labour of others, so any universal income should be derived from natural resources. This also means that there is no one deciding on the amount. In the past when work was the most dominant source of wealth, there is no way to introduce a workable basic income. Life is hard, you either work or starve. When the amount of food is scarce a universal basic income cannot magically make more food appear.
But in the future, when robots have replaced most of human labour, the dominant source of wealth is the exploitation of natural resources. Distributing these will let everyone participate without the requirement to work. In that case you dont need to work anymore when your share of the world, combined with modern technologies, can support your lifestyle. When collecting basic income you are not taking money from others that are nice to you, you simply deserve that money. Again, no need for anyone to decide when this will happen, it is just a function of human development and I think we are much closer to this point than we expect.
I like most of what you otherwise said though! :)
We're finally at a point where there's abundance of food and resources for everyone, just that our distribution mechanism, culture, and economic system are so faulty that people would rather poison and throw away food rather than feeding them to the hungry. At this point, something like universal basic income is finally something that could feasibly empower everyone and cover the cost of everyone's basic needs.
I think what you two are mostly pointing towards is how to go from the current system to a better one. I agree that most wealth currently is distributed extremely unfair and that the people benefitting from the corrupt system will not hand it over without a fight. That is a problem i honestly have no answer to. I hope that we can disrupt their power using new decentralised technologies. Also resource distribution is a leading cause for wars around the world and improvements are direly needed.
Where I disagree is that once you are in a hypothetical anarchist society, that people that accumulate wealth could exploit it. The solution to voluntary slavery is self-employement. Currently this is made difficult due to unnecessary entry barriers. But we see the rise of a peer-to-peer economy and I think there is nothing rich people could do short of trying to establish a police state.
Also we are not as free to leave our states. Yes, we can travel but getting another citizenship is a matter of 5+ years and requires me to move and leave my home. That is a quite high barrier that makes competion between states an almost non-issue. States may compete for the top 1%, but not for the rest and that is part of the reason why they suffer. Unless the sate is so bad that there is a large scale migration, they are fine in doing whatever they want.
A few years ago I used to hold to more traditional market-anarchist views, but I realized that the current distribution of wealth was unjust; the current distribution of wealth is the product of government subsidizing certain persons and groups at the expense of others. I realized that others were kept from freely competing and thriving because of restrictive government policies. This meant, in my estimation, that we would need something like distributism in order to get us to a point where the means of production is no longer unjustly concentrated into the hands of the few. I proposed distributism as a way to transition towards voluntaryism, and voluntaryism as a transition to market-anarchism. I think you might, perhaps, find my idea of anarcho-distributism more interesting. (Cf. An Intro to Anarcho-Distribuism)
Taiwan is an important example that kind of demonstrates the basic principle that underlies the idea of anarcho-distributism. In Taiwan, they adopted distributist policies, such as "land to the tiller," and then allowed a free market to follow. When General Douglas MacArthur, a distributist, got control of Taiwan, he implemented distributist policies that laid the foundation for a truly free market to function. Later on, free-market economists like Milton Friedman would praise Taiwan as an example of the success of free markets, without even realizing the distributist foundation that built those markets. It was the "land to the tiller" program that made free trade so successful in Taiwan.
Taiwan's situation mentioned by @ekklesiagora was interesting:
https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=10,23,45,10&post=15716
Clearly we have to solve the issue of land and resource distribution. I think that our concepts of ownership have to be questioned in this regard.
Any distribution of resources that is not uniform will be questioned by those that dont get their share. As a consequence every human born should receive a part and that is not compatible with private ownership. In the past the solution of this problem would have required authority and a state. But I think that we can finally solve the problem without a middle man using distributed organisations and the blockchain.
Yeah. I do think that we might ideally have a more and more anarchistic society in the future. The various anarchistic solutions just need to someday be tested until they're proven, as we change our culture to something that's not as exploitative. I mean, at some point, if genuinely good rules become accepted as the norms maybe laws could become voluntary cultural practices observed by everyone, while the bad rules/laws are not needed by anyone. :)
Capitalists and land-owners will hoard all the wealth and leave the rest of us to starve, if we allow them to. They will hire private police and private militias to protect their resources. The resources (or the wealth that it generates) will have to be forcibly taken from them and the wealth generated redistributed amongst the people. That can be done by the State, which might be able to leverage its superior power so as to convince them to hand it over without a fight, or it can be done by people organizing directly, grass-roots style, and using violence to take those resources. The latter is more libertarian, sure, but also more violent and will cause more suffering and distress. The former solution actually seems better, especially since the State doesn't have to do it all at once, it can gradually take more and more by increasing taxes slowly over time, making it possible to take over those resources over time, maybe over the course of several generations, without the private owners even realizing what is happening or, at least, without shocking the private owners into rebellion.
In regards to your following response to @ekklesiagora: "Lets consider we have 1% rich and 99% poor. Now the poor establish a system of insuring each other against certain risks and the rich opt out. If the poor have the ability to organise that gives them tremendous power over the 1% which depend on the 99% as a market and as workers. In that way they can effectively "tax" them in a fully voluntarist way. In the past these technologies were not available yet making large scale trustless organisation impossible. But now we can do it."
I'm not sure if allowing anyone/any arbitrary group to control the survival necessities on earth and having them say that "If you work for me for free, I'll give you some moldy bread and a tiny cave to survive with", could be considered a fully voluntary arrangement. That's what I believe will happen without any form of control which is why many libertarians ended up becoming geolibertarians.
That would be a new form of feudal government w/ voluntary slave labors that have no better choice but to be exploited, in an extremely inequal exchange of labor vs rewards just so they could barely survive.
I mean, anyone is free to leave the countries they live in as of now. The land is owned by the state, as much as it could be owned by a group of any individuals. Therefore, if land ownership is the only thing that matters in how its owner treats people that is there, we could even claim taxation is just as long as they're enshrined in the laws of the land. Marie Byrd Land and Bir Tawil Triangle are both unclaimed territories that anyone can go to if they want. That doesn't mean people could easily leave and live in those locations, and there are only so many people that can live in those places.
I think a lot of the disagreement stems from the consequentialist right Libertarians beliefs that it is impossible for a natural monopoly to arise in a way that horizontal restraint becomes ineffective. As far as deontological libertarians, they are libertarians that care more about their ideology than the terrible consequence of their beliefs, even if mankind will go extinct because of it. So, words about consequences might be meaningless with them.
My position personally aligns better with the geolibertarians even if not perfectly so. I think their argument is much less flawed and more thorough, while their proposal is just better in general consequences for every individual. Here are a few interesting quotes from "Are you a Real Libertarian, or a ROYAL Libertarian?":
A lot of the older market anarchist thinkers don't spend much time describing in detail what their anarchist society would look like.
I don't know how much that is actually true. I mean, when I think of classical market-anarchism, I think of Josiah Warren, Gustave de Molinari, Benjamin Tucker, and Lysander Spooner, and all of them spent time addressing how to organize a stateless society and what such a society would look like.
It may sound strange but that is part of the point. No single person is smart enough to design a system that has no exploitable weak points. So we can think about what would happen, but we are most likely wrong. In order to understand how anarchism works out given modern day technologies we have to try it and see what innovations people find.
Very nice post! I love the idea of anarchism. But as you, I think it is a hard to reach utopia (still I want to keep the ideas alive). I think a basic income and the end of the war on drugs would be some realistic steps for the future.
I was reading Mutual Aid by Kropotkin and also The Ego And It's Own by Max Stirner. Two very inspiring books with very different perspectives on anarchism.
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I wish you all the best
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I appreciate your post. Thanks for share information.
But he never gave me a reason to ever doubt Him Give me one reason to doubt He is Messiah Give me one reason to doubt He is alive.
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Best of luck my dear.
Resteemit.
You have well-explained both models (social and market anarchism) of Anarchism in a very compact manner that everyone can understand easily in no time. Thumbs Up! :)
keep working like this, good post friends.
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lots of different kinds of anarchism on different levels out there thanks for sharing about it