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Anarchism: Necessary But Not Sufficient
Posted on September 4th, 2010 No commentsPosted by Anna Morgenstern on C4ss.org
In discussion with a few people, talking about the extra-anarchistic aspects of various forms of social justice, I said “Anarchism is necessary, but not sufficient, to create a just society.” It seemed like a statement that warranted a bit of expansion, so here we go.
Anarchism is necessary, we can say, to create a just society. As far as I can tell, the best definition of anarchism is “the belief that no one has any special authority to do anything that anyone else doesn’t have.” Anarchy, then, is a society in which this principle is widespread enough to be a truism. If one group of people can arrogate special authority to themselves to rule over others, this alone is a vast injustice in and of itself. But it also creates a cascade of further injustices.
Under statism, the overall socioeconomic system tends to divide into classes, some more privileged than others. This allows people in the more privileged classes to use their power to bully others or manipulate them, even without direct coercion. An example of this is “survival prostitution”. There are people who are so abject and miserably poor that they are willing to do anything for enough money to survive until tomorrow. They do not have the option to say “no”, if they want to live, they must say yes. Wage slavery in the modern corporate capitalist world is, for many people, merely a more extended version of this.
Now yes, the state can and does sometimes offer marginalized groups protection from some of the worst effects of their marginalization, but it is the state which put them in the position of needing that protection in the first place. It is the state which makes people economically dependent. It is the state which destroys the wealth of the lower middle class and poor. It is the state which shifts the supply/demand balance of the labor market so workers are chasing jobs, rather than the other way around. And though everything in our world is not economic, in the sense of being about trade and production, economic freedom gives people more space to carve out social freedom. It is difficult if not impossible to wield social power if you’re barely subsisting.
Also, the state even at best is a double edged sword. If you’re an LGBT person in the USA you know what I’m talking about. Laws against sodomy, laws against gay marriage, indecent exposure and attempted solicitation laws being applied unjustly against MTF trans people, and much, much more. Let’s not forget schools. Public schools under statism are state schools. If a pressure group can take over the school board, they can impose their will on the curriculum, as they have in Texas. This pattern applies to just about anything in a statist society. The immigration laws in Arizona are a good example. Even though there are plenty of nice, non-racist people in Arizona, they aren’t the ones in control over the state, and they still have to live under those laws, or dare to defy them. And even when the state passes a law that most people believe will bring about “justice”, some innocent people are going to get fucked over by it. There’s no getting around that, because justice is situational and fluid. There is no centralized legal code that can avoid fucking people over.
And then there are the ethical implications of statism itself. Statism tends to favor the social manipulators, the bullies and the ass-kissers of the world. It rewards the fraudulent and the corrupt, and creates a myth of elitism that is not removable as long as there is a state. The primary view of humanity that the state espouses is Neo-Hobbesian. That humans left to their own devices are inherently self destructive and deplorable, but that there is an elite group of people, such that if they are in charge of the world, they can uplift the rest of us, or at least force us all to live relatively peacefully with one another.
Over and beyond all that you have the problem of selective enforcement. When the rubber meets the road, the state means cops. This means that the law gets enforced when the cops want it to. Every state in history has eventually reached a point where the sheer volume and overlap of contradictory laws allows the police to act as local dictators of a sort. Most people of color will know just what I’m talking about. Anecdotes abound about getting pulled over for DWB: Driving While Black. Arrest to Conviction ratios clearly seem to show a pattern of racial and class bias. And this is not likely to change as long as there is a state. Sure, some places might be better than others, but no matter how fluid, the state holds a territorial monopoly over law enforcement, and so there will always be a certain scale of injustice built into the system. There aren’t many, if any statist societies I’ve seen in which “resisting arrest” isn’t a crime, for example.
Under anarchism, people at least have a fighting chance to achieve widespread justice. However, anarchism alone is not enough. There might still be racists and homophobes under anarchism, there might still be sociopaths and liars. Without a statist economy, and a centralized code of laws, it will be much harder to get away with unjust acts on a large scale, over a long period of time, however.
But the question of selective enforcement and/or selective defense will still exist. Transgendered people, for instance, make up a very small fraction of the overall population. Even accounting for the fact that transgenderism is vastly underreported due to the current social milieu, it will still most likely be a tiny fraction of the human race. It would not be impossible for systematic crimes against transgendered people to go largely unpunished, even in anarchy.
And the question of population distribution also matters. A pocket of black people who live surrounded by white people who are determined to make life difficult for them will have a hard time fighting back even without a state imposing on them.
In the thinnest of thin anarchisms, in which there is no state, but nothing develops in the vacuum left behind, packs of extremely clever sociopaths could roam the land, draining community after community of their resources and good will, like a vampire gang.
So there will still be a need for social awareness and ethical debate even after the concept of “the state” has been destroyed. The arguments between the ancaps, ansocs, and the rest of us anarchists about how a valid anarchic society deals with money, contracts, property, ownership and various torts will go on after the state has become a ridiculous fiction in the mind of most people.
The good news is that a stateless society synergizes with all these other things. The amount of energy that your cause puts into getting the state to protect you from some other aspect of statist society will do much, much more good in direct action without the state getting in your way. And the amount of solidarity you’ve seen from other people is a fraction of what you’d see if people weren’t crushed under the heel of the state. A person who is slaving away to keep themselves going does not have the time or energy to help other people very much, even if they are sympathetic. And the “I gave at the congress” mentality prevails. In a statist world, where people expect the state to provide for them, even kind and sympathetic folks will expect the state to provide justice, as rough and unjust as it may turn out to be.
In an anarchist world where people feel like the buck stops with them, they’ll be more able and willing to help each other.
And there is one other factor to consider. Over time, people in an anarchist society will tend to begin to develop their own quirky interests. That thing you’ve always been into, but never had the time or money to pursue, well you will now. This unleashing of the inner weirdo that lurks within us all will tend to make people more tolerant of differences in general.
Under anarchism, if you have an idea you share with other people, you can put it into practice NOW. You don’t need permission; you don’t have to force other people to agree with you, you can just start doing it. Then you will find out what it’s like in practice.
As Allan Thornton said, “What will happen under anarchism? EVERYTHING.”
Now sure, some people are sociopaths or psychologically crippled by irrational hate and fear. And those people are always a threat. They might get together and form a small pocket of hell. But in a sense, they’ve imprisoned themselves. On that note, I can imagine anarchist “extraction teams” developing who extract people from communities in which they are being held against their will.
Again though, a lot of this psychological corruption comes from living in a state which imposes its values on you. Not only are the state’s values inherently corrupt because of the built-in elitism and hero worship and hatred of the “masses”, but those who resist this early indoctrination are tortured and torture often makes people psychotically hateful and sadistic. A world in which most children grow up without forceful indoctrination, will yield a much healthier, more positive group of people.
There is another aspect of things that I have hinted at before, but I think hasn’t really been totally understood or accepted. I believe that large scale, widespread economic injustice is impossible under anarchism. This is at the heart of the matter. I believe that economic anarchy is its own economic system, apart from what most people think of as either “capitalism” or “socialism”. It will have aspects of both, in the best sense of each of them. But it will also be much fuzzier and less rigid than either of those systems in their statist form. Public will no longer equal “owned by the state” and Private will no longer equal “owned by a small elite (who happen to run the state)”. Basically, to put it crudely, an anarchist doesn’t let a corporation or a syndicate or a commune tell them jack shit. Things like property rights and debts and contracts will be much more nebulous than they are in a system where they are predefined by a strict centralized law code enforced by cops, but more tangible and solid than they are in a system where an elite group can willy-nilly revoke them at will.
It will be much harder to hold onto capital in some places, but much easier in other places. A lot of it may depend on good will. Likely, any sort of currency, no matter what it’s backed by ostensibly, will practically function much like “obs” in E.F. Russell’s wonderful “And then there were none”. The economy will be situational, fluid and creative, like we will be. There will be trial, and there will be error, but there will be change, and we will learn how to “do it right”. Because we will be able to.
C4SS Contributing Writer Anna O. Morgenstern has been an anarchist of one stripe or another for almost 30 years. Her intellectual interests include economic history, social psychology and voluntary organization theory. She likes piña coladas, but not getting caught in the rain. -
Economic Development Without the State
Posted on August 20th, 2010 No commentsAmerican political debate has recently centered on manufacturers that relocate overseas and “abandon” American workers — and the alleged need for government to stop them from doing it. But maybe we need to figure out a way to abandon the corporate employers, instead.
Conventional community economic development policy — this is equally true of Chambers of Commerce, state industrial development commissions, and World Bank technocrats — starts from the assumption that the path to economic development is colonization: Get a giant corporation to set up an outpost in your community and provide a lot of jobs (preferably with government seed money to lure them in).
The rationale was simple: For a couple of centuries, the propertied classes’ privileged access to big piles of capital and millions of acres of stolen land made them a chokepoint on economic development.
But technological developments in recent years — the desktop/Internet revolution in the information sphere, and the revolution in cheap digitally controlled machine tools in manufacturing — are freeing us from this dependence.
The main material reason for the factory system and predominance of wage labor was the technological shift a couple hundred years ago from relatively inexpensive, general-purpose artisan tools to expensive machinery. Only the very rich could afford the machinery required for production, and they then hired wage laborers to operate it.
The computer revolution, and the revolution in cheap garage-scale machine tools, have reversed this shift. The computer is a cheap, general-purpose artisan tool that destroys the quality gap between what a person can produce at work and what he can produce at home, in a whole range of industries: Software, recording, and desktop publishing among them.
And now cheap digital machine tools mean the same thing for manufacturing. Open-source hardware hackers have cooked up homebrew versions of CNC routers, cutting tables, milling machines, lathes, 3-D printers, etc., that cost one or two thousand dollars (or less) to build — compared to tens of thousands for commercial, proprietary digital tools, and millions for a factory equipped with old-style mass production machinery.
A garage “factory” with $10k worth of homebrew machinery can do most of what used to require a million-dollar factory. And with a network of open-source hardware designers, it can design its own products, and produce “lean” style: Producing in small batches and switching back and forth between lots of different products as the orders come in, and gearing production to a local/neighborhood market. That means low overhead, no inventory, drastically reduced shipping costs, and no mass-marketing costs.
In a lot of manufactured products, a major portion of price is either brand-name markup or embedded rents on patent and copyright, rather than labor and material cost (Tom Peters crowed, in The Tom Peters Seminar, that 90% of his new Minolta’s price was “intellect”). Competition will strip out that part of price (along with the portion of your work hours that go toward earning money to pay tribute to the owners of artificial property rights).
It helps that relocalizing manufacturing to “a hundred thousand garages” essentially makes proprietary designs unenforceable. The costs of industrial patents are such that they only pay for themselves if you produce in large batches, and enforcement costs are minimized by the fact that a handful of oligopoly firms distribute their products through a handful of corporate retail chains. When thousands of garage factories are producing knockoffs or riffing off of proprietary designs, in small batches at the neighborhood level, the costs of enforcement will destroy the patent regime.
Patents are also the main legal support to planned obsolescence, as well as to the whole model of price-gouging on parts and accessories (e.g. cheap phones and expensive service plans, cheap printers and expensive toners, etc.). With no patent restrictions on competition, there would be no legal barrier to competitors producing generic modular accessories and spare parts for other companies’ platforms. So the competitive pressure would be toward developing products that were compatible with other companies’ stuff and easy to repair by simply replacing one modular component — instead of designing products that only work with your own marked-up accessories, and can’t be fixed without throwing the whole thing away.
And all this renders the conventional strategy for community economic development totally obsolete. A low-capital, low-overhead approach to development is an enormous force multiplier for the community’s own resources. When the capital outlay for building a factory to produce everything you need falls a hundredfold, the propertied classes’ longstanding advantage in access to land and capital is completely nullified — communities can bootstrap local economies, starting with almost nothing, without begging a Daddy Warbucks for help.
So maybe this is the beginning of a shift away from the idea of “jobs,” and back to work as something working people do for ourselves and for exchange with each other.
C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.
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The White House’s Bait and Switch on the LGBT Community
Posted on July 13th, 2010 No commentsPosted by lauraflanders at Alternet.org
July 13, 2010LGBT voters came out and contributed en masse to Barack Obama’s campaign. A year ago, he promised them action on, among other things, repeal of the military’s discrimination policy, Don’t ask Don’t Tell. This May it seemed as if they’d won. To much ballyhoo, on the eve of a war appropriation vote, the White House announced what sounded like repeal.
Now half the LGBT community thinks Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is already repealed, Miriam Perez of Feministing told GRITtv recently.
Except what the President actually announced wasn’t repeal. It was a compromise that opened the way for a vote on repeal if a Pentagon working group, the President, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs all approved such a thing.
Now it turns out that 400,000 service members are going to have their say as well.
As the jobless go with nothing and school libraries are shut up tight for lack of cash, we the taxpayers have, it turns out, paid a research firm some $4.4 million to send an email-survey to 400,000 troops.
Leaked copies include the following questions: “If a wartime situation made it necessary for you to share a room, berth or field tent with someone you believe to be a gay or lesbian service member, what are you likely to do?” (The survey offers options.) “If Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is repealed and you are assigned to bathroom facilities with open bay showers with a gay or lesbian service member, would you: Take no action? Use shower at different time?”
There’s also a question asking service members, if a gay or lesbian member moved into military housing with a same-sex partner, would they pick up their family and move out.
There’s no question about how troops feel about serving under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (of course.)
And — no question, this is a first. No one surveyed the troops when it was time to desegregate. No one surveyed male soldiers about allowing women in. When it came to school desegregation, the Supreme Court didn’t survey white kids. In fact it’s impossible to imagine such a thing.
About as impossible as imagining that LGBT campaign contributors will be doling out much cash to Democratic candidates this fall.
The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Support us by signing up for our podcast, and follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter.com.
Laura is a long-time journalist, author and media activist. She wrote the New York Times bestseller Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species and Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable, and Inspirational Political Change in America. Before founding GRITtv, she started up and hosted “Your Call” on public radio KALW in San Francisco and RadioNation on Air America Radio. She is also a regular contributor to The Nation magazine and the Huffington Post. Flanders was founding director of the Women’s Desk at the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) and for more than 10 years she produced and hosted CounterSpin, FAIR’s nationally-syndicated radio program. Laura is a regular commentator on MSNBC’s The Ed Show where she has become the go-to source for reliable, progressive analysis of the day’s top stories. The Institute for Alternative Journalism named her one of ten “Media Heroes” of 1994 and she was recently awarded a NY Moves “Power Woman of the Year.” -
Gayle King Speaks Out for Marriage Equality
Posted on July 12th, 2010 No commentsGayle King who is the editor of O Magazine and host of the Gayle King radio show has spoken up in favor of marriage equality for same-gender couples. King is best known for being Oprah Winfrey’s closest friend and has been given a national platform thanks to their close relationship.
New allies are always welcome and we applaud Ms. King for speaking out in favor of LGBT civil rights.
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Lady Gaga loves her gay Canadian little monsters
Posted on July 12th, 2010 No commentsMonday, July 12, 2010Lady Gaga brought her Monster Ball tour back to Toronto last night, and she certainly lived up to her nickname “Lady Gay Gay.”
During the closing number “Bad Romance,” Gaga grabbed a Canadian rainbow flag that was thrown onto the stage, and she held it high. Check it out (starting around the 4:15 mark):
During the show, Gaga dedicated “Boys Boys Boys” to “all my Toronto gay boys,” and she gave shout-outs to queer charities.Lady Gaga performs a second show tonight at the Air Canada Centre. Elton John attended last night’s concert, which has some on Twitter speculating that he may perform a duet with Gaga tonight. Elton and Gaga teamed up for a performance at the Grammy awards earlier this year. -
Lady Gaga defends teen’s “Lady Gay Gay” shirt
Posted on July 12th, 2010 No commentsLady Gaga has come to the defence of a US teen who was sent home from school because he wore a shirt that read “I Heart Lady Gay Gay.”
The pop star tweeted last night: “I love you cole, you just be yourself. You’re perfect the way God made you. #colethegreat @fiercefaggot.” Earlier in the day, Gaga tweeted, “Thank u for wearing your tee-shirt proud at school, you make me so proud, at the monsterball, you are an inspiration to us all. I love you.X”
His mother said if other students are allowed to express themselves by wearing religious and rebel flag shirts, her son should be able to wear shirts that reflect his views on sexual orientation. (read more and watch a video report at WSMV)
The Nashville high school sent 15-year-old Cole Goforth home and asked him to change out of the shirt, reports WSMV:
“We’ve had a few disruptions the last few days, and we thought the slogan on that shirt would continue to escalate those incidents that had occurred,” said Danny Weeks, assistant director of the school board.
Cole sees it differently.
“I just think my sexuality isn’t widely accepted around here, so of course they are going to single me out,” he said.
POSTED BY BrentCreelman @xtra.ca
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Pride is not a season it is a feeling inside.. and it is not narcissism.
Posted on July 11th, 2010 No comments
pride noun, verb, prid·ed, prid·ing.–noun
a becoming or dignified sense of what is due to oneself or one’s position or character; self-respect; self-esteem.Narcissism
Excessive preoccupation with self and lack of empathy for others.
Narcissism is the personality trait that features an exaggerated sense of the person’s own importance and abilities. People with this trait believe themselves to be uniquely gifted and commonly engage in fantasies of fabulous success, power, or fame. Arrogant and egotistical, narcissistics are often snobs, defining themselves by their ability to associate with (or purchase the services of) the “best” people. They expect special treatment and concessions from others. Paradoxically, these individuals are generally insecure and have low self-esteem.
As you can see in the above definitions there is two very big differences between Pride as in GBLTIAQS or any other form of Pride and Narcissism. I felt the need to draw a sharp distinction between the two because sometimes I have met people whom seem to have somehow swapped the attitudes with each other. I also want to make another point and that is to let people realize that Pride is a natural emotional reaction and also not just a “season” or a “dance.” I have good reasons for doing both these things and this is because we do not need narcissists to be calling their lack of self esteem and need to feel like the universe centres on them to be mistaken for what Pride is about. The other good reason is because some people seem to think that their Pride rests on there being Pride dances and parties.
There are some people whom act like Pride is something that can come out for a certain season and than hides away the rest of the year. This of course would be a big mistake to make and people should not be thinking like this. I should be Proud of myself anywhere I am. I should be Proud; while working (assuming my work is now something I detest in which case you should get another job), while shopping, while hanging out with the girls or guys, while watching Barbie animated musicals and Penn & Tellers Bullshit!. (Yes, I am a fan.)
The point is Pride is not an “event” and if you only have Pride when wearing the most expensive brand name labels and find you only feel “self-respect/self-esteem” for yourself when at a Parade than maybe you do not have Pride after all. Real pride does not come and than go like the wind after a week in the city. Pride is a feeling of complete self-esteem/self-respect/self-love and if in all situations you do not love yourself than no one will be able to put that love in your heart.
If you think that GBLT Pride is all about dancing and fucking you have another thing coming. Unfortunately there is an entire generation of our “Family” that did not have to put up with the institutionalized oppression that befell their Queer peers in previous generations. I am not an ageist and I do not blame their age, but, the lack of education on Queer issues in the mainstream public school systems. The unknowing of what Pride represents is due to this lack of knowledge about why the GBLT Liberation Movement was needed and how we have it to thank for what he do have now in terms of GBLT rights. A very high proportion of even GBLT youth do not know the first thing about Stonewall (which I will address in another post more fully) or how we literally have fought with our lives for some recognition.
Our Governments are still largely made up of Heterosexual males and there is a lack of visibility in terms of GBLT people in many institutions. The fight for us to be considered “individuals” and to have the right to get jobs when we have the qualifications is still not over when it comes to our Government. There is still rampant Sissy-phobia and Fem-phobia both outside the GBLT as well as inside the GBLT communities. Lots of things are still needing to peacefully change in our society for the dream of those GBLT Liberators to come true.
Here is a trick for trying to get that Pride going in yourself… think of what you have done to help others and what you do that means so much to this world. Than sit back and look how wonderful you are… now welcome that deep feeling of pure self-love/self-respect/self-esteem sync in. Once that is over with add “and I am G.B.L.T.Q.I. or A.” Than smile!
To those whom thing that you should not bother to even add the “G.B.L.T.Q.I or A” I say you are not still considered a Devil to some people in society. I would also add that you have not undergone the oppression these groups have been through and in some cases still do go through. I would also add that according to Stats Canada the #1 Hate related belief that has been found to be behind crimes considered “hate crimes” is orientation or ones gender identity/expression. When you start having people kill or attack you for being born into the opposite sex than we will have something to discuss.. until than blabber all you want against Pride in print or on the radio or whatever, but, don’t you ever dare turn out to be a hater of the GBLTQIAs in the world. If you do hate us I hope you go to sleep well at night with your bigoted (I would also throw in immoral) self. I also hope you never run into someone in a “conceal and carry” State when you are on the prowl for victims because some of us actually carry Pink Pistols.
