Why I am an anarchist

These days, anarchism specifically and libertarian thought in general is seeing a pronounced surge in support in radical/alternative circles. We see this on the right and the left of the spectrum simultaneously and despite the majority of the people involved falling into rhetorical rival camps it is one of the few political phenomena that gives me cause for hope.

I’ve been compelled by anarchism since I was a late teenager, reading all kinds of political philosophy and having all kinds of arguments about it I quickly tired of the ‘it’s the system’ and the ‘it’s this or that group of people’ and soon realised that the state is just another God, indeed that in recent centuries the state has replaced God as the (perceived) transcending abstract source of power and good in the world. Where once we turned to God to keep us safe, nourish and heal us and look after the poor we now turn to the state for all these things. Anarchism to me seemed the only political philosophy where people did not turn away from themselves and toward some or other God to resolve conflicts and overcome challenges.

Plus, anarchists are generally good people. They are often generous, not particularly possessive, like to listen to people whose views contradict their own, quite good humoured and imaginative in their political activism, albeit disorganised and often misguided. I’ve known a lot of anarchists in my life, and an increasingly proportion of my friends are turning in that direction. That is not to say it is all rosy, just that this is my experience.

However, I do see in anarcho-capitalism, the form of anarchism that is becoming popular in the alternative talking shops of North America, something that bothers me and that is their worship of ‘the market’. To my mind, there’s no such thing as ‘the market’, there is people buying and selling stuff. While buying and selling stuff is cool because it enables people to get things they cannot make for themselves, this is not to my mind so wonderful that it should be the absolute basis for an anarchistic society. Indeed, to me ‘the market’ and particularly ‘the free market’ are transcendent, transhuman abstractions just like God and the state. The notion that ‘the market’ should have unlimited power is glossy-eyed nonsense.

So, why am I an anarchist? I’m an anarchist not because I believe in the market and not even because I recognise the state as an extortion racket, but because I believe in humanity, I believe that humans are creative, intelligent, good natured, compassionate, innovative, funny - and that we simply don’t need the state anymore, if in fact we ever did. It is not ‘the market’ that will take over from the state, it’s just people. It was always just people anyway…

As we can see ever more clearly, the state is an instrument for sociopaths to legitimize their will to power. The state is very effective in legitimizing sociopathy, as it really has no other criteria than ruthlessness and supreme confidence in oneself that is not at all necessarily related to any real capacity. There is, after all, no filtering authority, nothing whatsoever that checks the legitimacy of someones ambition against some kind of moral teleological standard, unlike any kind of naturally emergent group. There never can be such a check in the state, as an institution does not actively hold values. Organization has to be close to the individual otherwise it is per definition (in VO) corrupt.

It is very possible that the whole idea of a state is a product of sociopathy.

I am not against the institution of market as I am against the state - what I see as the most poisonous reality is the combination of market and state. The only thing that this does is to give sociopaths an edge in the market, as the state exerts its control.

I value the idea of the market as an institutional exchange of value. It needs not be grounded in a state, the self-valuing reality of humans is sufficient to control it. The state has proven itself to be an instrument of total death. And perfectly, the only justification I see for it now is that it has come to the point of building atomic bombs, which must be kept, protected somehow. But of course that is not really a very good argument. The state is justified only by its attainment of absolute coercive power.

State is, as you say, equal to religion. Both must ultimately die, or mankind will die out and give way to a purely sociopathic species. We’re well on our way to that last possibility, but I feel that the resistance has reached a threshold, it is becoming a real problem now, slowly.

The resistance (i.e. non sociopathic humanity awakened tot he nature of their ‘leaders’ ) would benefit greatly from a proper code of understanding power and market. You know what I’m getting at. Value ontology could be developed to the point of being able to replace each and every law system on the planet. It would result in great voluntary migrations of people seeking out their ‘kin’, rhizomatic value-webs replace nation states, and economic communities which have absolutely no interest in conquering, let alone destroying other groups, because these groups provide specific values that, given their particular values and thus capacities, only they can produce.

The term anarchy has to be replaced at one point as well, as it’s impossible to have no ruling principle, except if this principle is chaos, which is not really a principle.
I don’t know how this would translate into greek and then back into english, but it needs to be something like value-archy.

The principle of value, in the sense that self-valuings determine it, is ultimately at the center of any non-sociopathic structure.

Both democracy and free market capitalism are first attempts at an approach of such an organization.

Anarchism only needs to toughen up philosopically in precisely this sense - accepting the law of value as inevitable and developing its implications - and then it will gradually come to be understood as the only alternative to totalitarianism.

To be clear: I am not opposed to anarchic society having a market economy, I am opposed to the idea that ‘the market’ is so superfly fucking fabulous that we should do absolutely nothing to constrain it. It is the absolutising of market economics in lieu of the state that bothers me, as illogical and simply inaccurate. As a means of mutually valuing things a market economy does fulfill and could fulfill a lot of functions, but the idea that everything else should be subservient to it is to my mind a denial of value and valuing-potential (I’m struggling with words here too) that we already see.

More simply: it is in the valuing of other things alongside a market economy that an anarchic society would flourish, and to my mind it is in the asserting of those things that we will be able to leave the term ‘anarchy’ behind and replace it with… a better word.

I agree, but I see the cause of this totalitarian marketism as a symptom or result of the states power to favor certain enterpreneurs. In the end the state is just another thing that can be bought.
It is now completely bought, and since the state determines what’s legal trade and what isn’t, there is no such thing as a free market today.

I see market as a side-phenomenon to the main phenomenon of production, or rather as the combined side-phenomena of all excess producing production processes. Now, in the west, production is a side phenomenon to the market. Everyone who has an IQ higher than his shoe size can see that this leads necessarily to total depletion of all production capacity.

Note that I only see the market as an instrument to deal with excess, surplus. I agree with you that the main ‘‘essence’’ of humanity is capable of having a perfectly satisfying life without such a mechanism. Simple trade, some loafs of bread and a pint of milk for a pair of sandals, so to speak, does not require a market institution, no form of currency.

But perhaps what you are proposing is even more ‘‘cummunist’’ - no trade at all, just communal production and communcal access.
If so, I “foresee” a problem - people aren’t as motivated to produce when, no matter what or how much they produce, the benefits of that work to them will be equal.

So I am in favor of a market for excess, which would operate on top of either a more basic local ''marketplace" or a local, basic communal form of acquisition and distribution, which allows for the producers to gain value in proportion to their labor (instead of in proportion to their supposed requirement). I do not think that any government or community should dictate what any individual requires. They can only forbit that he acquires it at their cost.

Sorry for hijacking your thread, DE, I’m afraid you got me inspired.
I should probably develop this in another thread though. But I still would like to add what seems to follow from the considerings above - a state-less, anarchistic but non chaotic society would have to provide several different, distinct layers of value-abstraction.

The first level is where value is measured a a direct derivative of the human being - air, water, basic food – then also basic cloathing, basic shelter, and basic healthcare.
All this should be free, because it is required by (virtually) all humans

The second level would be a slightly more distant derivatives, such as basic vehicles, more special foods, school – things a local community is able to produce, but not in such a measure as the provide everyone with it effortlessly – things also which aren’t necessarily required, but fairly standard. These values should be available via basic trade transactions, without any form of currency. Currency is the abstraxction of value. No abstraction should be required in a purely local context.

The third level is the level of luxuries – products to which particular tastes apply, products that require a great deal of effort to produce, and which can not be produced under all circumstances. These products would sort of naturally form the economic spearheads of communities - specialties. They would be in demand from across greater distances, and would conveniently be paid for in currency.

These together seem to be able to form a perfectly non-stressed, non-scarcity based economy, where no one is barred from participating and no one is cooerced into participating.

Then possibly, as an even further derivative/abstraction, there can be a form of ‘‘market of producer-communities’’ related to what we know as the stockmarket. I haven’t figured out how that would function without threatening the local dynamics or be justified at all, I’ll work on that though, as humanity requires a lot of excitement and gambling, risk and fortune, rising and falling, and I don’t want to stand in the way of that, as long as it doesn’t interfere with a sane distribution of basic values.

[EDIT –

Health care should not occupy the first category of universal necessities and provisions, but the second, of basic, currency-less trade. After all, not everyone is constantly ill, illness is an exception, and thus so is treatment. And neither is a qualified doctor something that grows fairly naturally from the land. The doctor should be rewarded for his efforts by the patient, or his friends or family.

Not-so-basic healthcare, treatments for which great apparatuses and long trained specialists are required, are to be included in the third category of monetary trade. Simply because to include such services at a price equal to, say, a bicycle, is not possible except through government interference - and we do not have a government to do this.]

Only philosophers don’t need a government. The sheep like superficial people must be forced to work and not commit crimes.

That’s not my experience. Of my family and friends, only a very small group is unhappy to work and prone to steal and rob. And even those who are prone to steal and rob are actually quite happy to work, when they are valued, when they turn out to have a talent other than muscling people and stomping on heads.

To work at what you’re good at is basically very satisfying to people.

But the state attracts criminals, as the law-enforcer is logically above the law to a certain degree.

The state has often been established by philosophers, people of genuinely altruistic intent. But it is necessarily used by those who seek to gain at the cost of anything as well as by those who try to live up to or improve on the philosopher.

So our task is to establish a logic in place of the state, at the ground of all laws.

I’m saying there never really has been - there has always been limiting factors on the market, often for very good reasons and with very good consequences. Now, of course today’s corporate monopolies are almost all assisted and sponsored by the government, and to my mind it is this relationship in particular that constitutes the state. I’m saying that if you take the government out of the equation that still leaves the corporations, and they have become masters of market manipulation.

Agreed.

I’m not proposing any such thing, except whereby people enter into communism of their own accord. I’m proposing more a healthy respect for what is nourishing about the natural world, and the resisting of the privatisation and market-isation of its bounty. I would however distinguish when someone makes a farm, I recognise that private property gives people an incentive but I also recognise that it is a reality that someone who is ultimately going to die within a matter of decades causes damage to the earth in a way that outlasts them, and that this affects other people and therefore is of justifiably ‘social’ concern. The idea that owning something gives you the right to destroy it, in particular, I ardently oppose.

I broadly agree.

No apology required, this is exactly why I started this thread. I can’t register on BTL and this was the next easiest place.

I would distinguish here between the moral value judgment and the law, but otherwise I agree entirely and think you’ve broken it down very well. I don’t think there should be a legal obligation on people to help others, even if I believe in a moral obligation. I think the nature of duty-altruism is violated by having it be an obligation backed up by the threat of force, rather than an attempt to persuade and extol the virtue of. The sad truth is that in any society you’re going to get people dying who could have been kept alive, so outlawing that would be meaningless anyway.

This is a difficult one, because healthcare is, at times, an absolute necessity for survival and yet it is relatively highly skilled, rare, work which is therefore deserving of considerable reward. It bridges the natural hierarchy of needs-wants and the respective economies you’ve suggested. So I don’t know, I’d like to think something like welfare healthcare would still be possible, but without all the massive subsidising of drug companies and so on. I mean, you wouldn’t want to be dependent on the drunkard in Deadwood, would you? Nor would I. I think we can do better than that.

Yes, you are absolutely right, but our task is also to appreciate that which is valuable beyond the logic and the laws.

So, to the question that is perhaps most difficult to answer in practical terms - what about security? Almost everything the state does, it does in the name of security (it says it means our security when of course it means its own). Avoiding economic armageddon, pig flu, bad weather and terrorists gives the state mosts of its perceived legitimacy. Now, demonstrating the absolute corruptness of the state in this regard is not difficult, but the politics of security goes to the heart of what makes humans humans - our ability to imagine different possibilities, including nightmares. Most creatures simply don’t suffer from nightmares. So, even when people recognise that the state is corrupt they don’t make the jump to anarchy because ‘better the devil you know’. They can envision a worse scenario than anything you can tell them is real, and hence the feeling of protection offered by the state remains with them.

Here is one instance where I think the free marketeers haven’t thought it through, because offering up security as a commodity to an open market, in an age where people perceive all kinds of fictitious threats, is the mafia-media complex’s wet dream. Combating that would require intelligence analysis and media production of a quality much higher than the web based media is capable of, because alerting people to real threats and steering them away from bullshit, and doing so on a daily basis, is not an easy task. I got involved with all that with the intention of trying to raise the standards, what I found was that most people didn’t give a fuck. Hence my desire for a different approach, and our discussions.

This mirrors the development of the cerebral cortex in humans, developed to repress the raw power of the inner layers of the brain because it is simply more prudent to do so in order to survive more powerfully. Mandatory self-enslavement due to nothing more than successful biological circumstance.

Reflecting this aspect of human biology back outwards to society, one’s individual purpose translates into economic organisation - to which we freely are, on an individual level, happy to subject ourselves to - but apparently not on a societal level. But then individual biologies differ (but so do various different parts of our body, that all work together). Our economy must take this into account. Else we fall into the same trap of blaming the name of the institution - whether it be “God”, “State”, or “market”, rather than the common form of all three.

The OP just seems like a dishonest rationalisation that the market is any different from God or State. Maybe the market just hasn’t yet developed capital letter status. It’s just another form of the same meta-individual purpose…

The market is the God-State of mediocrity because price is the average “quantified” value that everyone is individually willing to sacrifice for something. Only it is mixed with the God-State of elitism because prices are set more by those in power than those without. Think of it like a bell-curve (Gaussian distribution) but shifted “to the right” where the y-axis is degree of market-value influence. The more luxury the item/service, the further shifted to the right. Adding all markets together, you get a cumulative distribution function. This has power as the y-axis.

The common criticism of solutions such as “evening out the distribution of power” (equality) is that the volume under the curve has to be constant, lessening the power of the rich to the benefit of the poor (only the volume might even decrease if we allowed this).
I propose we make more use of the poor without compromising the power of the already rich. The poor don’t need keeping down, they need their potential to be realised. The rich already have that.

I suppose I am advocating some kind of Hindu system, except instead of being based in endogamy it would be based on individual preference with “castes” infinite and self-formed. Any incentives based on superiority are internalised within each “caste” so there’s still competition. Only I’m fairly sure that such a system needs an overall direction of the “brain”. But that would take us back to the conundrum of which “overall purpose” we are to bow down to: God, State or Market…

Much the same as saying “[any type of economy] works in theory but not in practice”. One can either say that such a theory did not take sufficient account of the nature of the people using it, or it did not sufficiently discriminate between people using it - disallowing those that would otherwise ruin it.

The problem with this ideal is that essentials need other services applied to them in order to be available. Water, food, clothing and shelter need raw material extraction, often manufacture, and always distribution. Farming has to be intensive and localised in order to provide for so many people, necessitating distribution, and even security and supervisory analysis. Water needs to be treated because we’re so fucking dirty. Clothing and shelter need to be constructed… All these services have to be applied to the essentials in order for them to become available - services that don’t come for free.

I wouldn’t worry too much about him - Das Experiment isn’t a real anarchist, he’s just one of those young men who, frustrated by poor employment prospects at the point in his life cycle where he’s at his peak of testosterone production telling him to go out and make his mark on the world, has made the mistake of identifying with anarchism as a sort of displacement activity.

Silhouette - fascinating analogy to the brain. I will respond later, have to ponder this.

Stoic - I know Das Experiment, he’s done more politically already than 99% of the sites members will do in their life. People who actually have their words followed by actions are extremely rare, and it’s an ugly fact that the mobs of this site consistently try to put down such a person who actually manages to make a mark, have an influence, do something.

Thankfully this in no way reflects on DE’s actual actions, but only on the site and the general quality of its posters - your unintended suggestion that having a set of testicles makes one less of a man.

I’m nearly 31, therefore nowhere near the peak of testosterone production, I have two jobs (one working for a charity, one self-employed selling my book and writing another) which embody my moral and personal principles, and I have actually done quite a lot in recent years to try to undermine the state and demonstrate that ordinary people can do things better than governments can.

Edit - for those that don’t know, I’ve produced two feature length documentaries that, whatever you think of the production values, are rigorously researched. Given that they are investigative documentaries, that is their purpose, and that I had no money and no training, the research was the important bit and everyone who has watched my films has praised the quality and quantity of research in them. Plus the production values aren’t that bad, they’ve both been watched by over 100,000 people, all over the world. This year I published my first book which broke even in less than three months and has now made enough money for a second print run, and to fund the first print of my second book. I’m not saying this to brag, but to illustrate what’s fucking possible if you actually bother to do something with your life. And now I’ve done these things I don’t have much choice but to continue - it would be madness to stop now.

So you’d be wrong about all of this. The fake anarchists are currently sitting in a park somewhere waving a sign saying that other people should be looking at and/or doing something about something. Feel free to go and hassle them into doing something more useful with their lives, but leave me out of your childish fantasies. Who knows why Carleas made you a moderator, at least Pav was a reasonably nice guy (though a coward who perma-banned me days before quitting the forum for good), but you’re just a complete dick.

fc----I don’t know this de…exactly what has he done…I need to know in order to compare him to me…

I don’t see a difference at all anymore between government and corporations. In Holland, virtually all the news about what the government does is about how well it obeys certain corporate interests in curbing other corporate interests. What I mean is, the government of the state is the corporate boardrooms. The parliamentary system is now almost pure sham. It has become so in recent decades, after the collapse of the USSR. Before that there was still a powerful political dichotomy within the state.

That is a very good point.

This all depends on our [the states] conception of viable medical technology. I disagree with that conception for about 80/90%, though of course not with all of it. I am certainly well aware that both diseases and treatments are created in order to drawn funds into certain industries, and that cheap and simple cures are legally banned, destroyed and their creators murdered. So there’s all that, it’s uncomfortable to talk about really. But the medical industry is at the very core of the corporate state, there’s literally nothing that anchors it deeper, it outperforms even the military branch.

That’s why I found that value had to be placed at the very root of logic itself, for logic to be able to operate on truly significant levels.
value always precedes logic. Logic is the basic instrument of operating value. As a tool, it is worthless or worse when we do not first clearly perceive what is valuable to us.

Very true and in this light we should look at Silhouette’s point about the brain.

What’s important to know is that our state is not the only problem. There is an even greater problem with the Islamic religion. We can not break down our own state before the Islamic hegemony has been dismantled. Both are the result of fear, the pretense of security. We can not break down any state on any other ground than having found a true security. And such true security only arises from properly understanding what makes organisms tick. Hence, I say we must start with the logic of value. We must start from the ground up even when the massive security machines are still expanding.

The only way to approach a solution is to seek to eliminate, on a psychological level, the causes for people to become uprooted and excessively violent, universal threats. You can’t ever eliminate the threats implicit in the will to power, itself - that should not be the purpose. We can only seek to reinvent the concept of power altogether. This is the sort of thing that (the legend of) Jesus is about, and as sorry I am to bring up a religious figure, we may perhaps look at the philosophy of Christianity as a means to disconnect the self-valuing from the state and to generate a spontaneous self-value-based order locally.

I have grown tired of the Nietzschean view of Christianity. I rather prefer the Napoleonic view now.

People who can not value themselves in terms of the world around them will value the death of those around them in terms of their own self-value. So what is required is to make the world appear differently. As it will always be clear that the world is will to power, it is necessary to come to terms with power, to value power itself in terms of our power to value.

I am aware that my practical ideas are only viable in a context that is not real at this point. But we are living in a context where virtually nothing that I consider to be viable is possible. So my task so far has been to establish a kind of Vestal flame in the middle of the wilderness. I have not actually started the work of building a political form, nor am I sure this task should fall onto me. This layered form of economics is one of the first practical forms I’ve come up with.

Such discussions are very difficult, because I have to make sense in two contradicting contexts at once. The current state needs to be used in order to cause its own gradual dissolution. My mentioning of Christianity should be seen in this light. In general, I can easily see Marxism as well as anarchism as related to early, pre-church Christianity. And value ontology may be interpreted even as a rational definition of what once was called ‘the Christ’ – the anointed one, ‘God within’.

ill try again

Why don’t you read DE’s own post?