Anarchy as Law
Anarchy is a system of law in which those who apply the law don’t have any specially privileged status to do things that would be crimes if other people did them.
For example, taxation is theft. War, as conventionally understood, is mass murder. Arrest for a “crime” with no actual victim is kidnapping.
The understanding of how such a system of law would be possible is that the business of applying law ought not be forcibly monopolized by any one single organizational entity. As a result, adjudicating disputes and providing non-aggressive security services could be carried out by a multitude of organizations.
It is not the provision of such services that demands hegemonic monopoly over a particular territory. Rather, it is the nature of forcible maintenance of a monopoly itself that requires hegemonic domination — and such actions are demonstrably criminal, as crime is best understood to mean violation of a person’s rights.
Ultimately, then, an authentically anarchist revolution would be the process of bootstrapping this polycentric system of stateless law and resulting suppression of the biggest criminal gang around — government itself.
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Only anarchists truly advocate the Rule of Law.
In other words, agorism. Preach it, brother!
Saying that the government is the biggest criminal gang around is like saying that the Yankees are the only Major League Baseball team in the state of New York.
I do like the notion of “anarchy as law” though.
Wouldn’t saying the government is the ONLY gang be more like your comparison, MBH?
There’s plenty of gangs, but only one has end-the-world type weaponry & billions of victims.
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I’m afraid that the banking cartel and military industrial complex are not government agencies. That’s not to say that government is not crucial to their survival. But the partnership is two-sided — two gangs working side-by-side.
Put another way: how would either survive without the other? What would government do without the banking cartel and military industrial complex?
> What would government do without the banking cartel and military industrial complex?
It would invent them. ;)
Sure, if they had enough time to. They’d need consent before they could invent. Who would give a bunch a black suits power if they couldn’t offer protection or production?
Your laser-like focus on government is like a guy looking through a hole in the wall while a killer stands behind him with a knife. “But I can see what’s on the other side,” shouts the genius describing all the dangers he sees through the hole.
re: “Sure, if they had enough time to.”
Well, no. Although I can’t speak on behalf of Less, it’s pretty clear in my view that unnaturally large concentrations of capital in nominally “private” hands are an inescapable result of the state’s nature as an engine of involuntary wealth transfer. No conspiracy theories necessary. The very act of ruling creates a ruling class.
Brad, how does ruling automatically generate consent? I’m pretty sure it’s the other way around.
@MBH — re: “how does ruling automatically generate consent?”
Where did I claim that? In fact, I would tend to define “ruling” as a systematic overriding of consent by the application of force or the threat of it. The term “ruling class”, though, is typically used much more loosely to refer a group of people with an undue degree of economic influence. The point I was making is that the latter derives from the former, rather than being a natural result of market exchange as Marxian thinkers might claim
I think what you have in mind is closer to imprisonment than consent. How does A rule B without A’s ongoing consent — whether implicit or explicit?
Oops. Should read: without B’s ongoing consent.
re: “I think what you have in mind is closer to imprisonment than consent. How does A rule B without A’s ongoing consent — whether implicit or explicit?”
Governments do things to people non-consensually and that is a defining characteristic of them as governments. Six million Jews did not commit suicide in Central Europe in the 1940’s, for example.
This understanding of what a political state is and does, that it is a monopoly of violence, has been a prominent or even dominant understanding if the matter within mainstream political science in modern times.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
Now, there is a kernel of truth in what you say in that the illusion of moral legitimacy has been recognized as crucial to the power of tyrants since at least the 1500’s when La Boétie wrote about it in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude:
http://mises.org/rothbard/boetie.pdf
And I’ll even say that understanding is crucial to revolutionary theory — but I have to disagree if you’re saying that a widespread tendency to acquiescence among a populace is equivalent to even “implicit” consent at the granular level of individuals.
“Governments do things to people non-consensually and that is a defining characteristic of them as governments. Six million Jews did not commit suicide in Central Europe in the 1940’s, for example.”
Non-consensual action is a defining characteristic of war — not government. Government is the reification — I use the imaginary word ‘concretization’ — of the abstraction called State. That entails an illegitimate monopoly of force. But insofar as a citizenry accept that monopoly as legitimate, then they consent to the government. Mass internal murder, however, would most likely be considered — by all citizens — as an illegitimate application of the monopoly of force. That act would automatically disqualify the actors as ‘government’.
I should say: Non-consensual ‘behavior’ — instead of ‘action’. I think Roderick has shown that it’s praxeologically incoherent to speak of non-consensual ‘acts’ — since ‘action’ necessarily entails voluntariness regarding all parties.
re: “Non-consensual action is a defining characteristic of war — not government.”
I see no contradiction there. Government is, essentially, top-down class warfare. Death can be just as consensual or non-consensual as anything else, so I would say it muddies the waters to focus on matters of degree (e.g. death) rather than the qualitative consideration of consensuality. It also seems like begging the question to assert that anything a government does is “consensual” by definition. Government carries out social sanctions by means of violence. That’s what all those fellows with badges do, you know.
Additionally, it’s worth pointing out that all government edicts are death threats, given sufficient resistance to the carrying out of them — right down to every municipal littering ordinance.
re: “…since ‘action’ necessarily entails voluntariness regarding all parties.”
Well, action entails volition on the part of the actor(s), discounting involuntary twitches and similar cases that potentially butt up against the definition of “action” being used.
@MHS
Given my time, I’m inclined to sit back and enjoy the conversation you’re having with Brad (please continue it), but I’d like to clarify my own views:
(1) Virtually all of the governments I’ve seen have the consent of an overwhelming percentage of those being governed, in the broad sense of supporting the continuation of it.
(2) Most people believe they benefit, on net, from the existence of government.
(3) Most people are wrong about that.
(4) Virtually all of the governments I’ve seen quickly develop a mechanism for funneling large amounts of wealth and power to a reasonably small number of favored groups. America certainly went from the Declaration of Independence to government of, for, and by the central bankers in the blink of an eye. There is a reason my wife and I celebrate Aaron Burr’s birthday every year.
(5) It would be extremely hard for those accumulating wealth in the market to create a coercive wealth transfer mechanism on their own. It is easier to start a business than a government, so I don’t believe the relationship is as symmetrical as you might see it.
I see removing the consent of the governed as game, set, and match for freedom. Once the people in Great Britain saw slavery as an intolerable evil, all the King’s lobbyists and all the King’s sugar planters couldn’t keep the institution going in the British Empire. Had the American abolitionists focused more on persuasion and less on agitation, I believe slavery might have been overcome peacefully in the US as well. I see the anarchist movement as simply a continuation of the abolitionist movement, extending the idea that no man has the right to own another to cases where the owner is a government official.
@MHS
BTW, that isn’t intended as a rebuttal of your views. Needless to say, we have many common ideas on this subject. I just wanted to summarize my own on this subject cleanly.
And, no, I have no idea how MBH became MHS. Sorry ’bout that.
You might be an anarchist if… you get censored on a site claiming to be pro-anarchy. ;)