| MTZehvor said:
1. I was trying to say that it was more than just idealistic with the phrase "in generous terms, a very idealistic concept." It seems so far-fetched that pursuing it, even if it's done as piecemeal goals, worries me. I agree that pursuing an ideal, even if farfetched, can be worthwhile, but issues can arise when the belief rests on a number of assumptions working out that may themselves be flawed. 2. For example, let's say that as part of this pursuing this goal, we somehow convinced a state's government to give up its monopoly on legitimized violence to another group (and we'll further assume that this group isn't inherently beholden to the interests of elites, like, say, private police). Now many of the issues I brought up previously have transformed from hypothetical questions to real world problems, and they are problems that need to be addressed now. Entirely new oversight mechanisms have to be constructed, along with rules and procedures, and maps of jurisdiction, not to mention the inevitable questions of whose definition of "legitimized violence" prevails in different locations. If the actions of some law enforcement officials are questionable now, just wait until cases of confusion over which independent force (the state or this new organization) holds authority in different cases. That's admittedly an extreme example, but I think it illustrates how pursuing an ideal can be dangerous itself. If the policies we construct to replace a broken system are founded on notions which are far enough removed from reality, they will inevitably run into issues unaccounted for. 3. The standard does not need to be universal across the globe, but I would argue that it needs to be the same, or very close to the same, across a single nation. If we have multiple, competing definitions for what is and is not legitimized violence functioning in the same territory, any semblance of a functioning law will quickly dissipate, replaced by confusion as to what is and is not legal violence. 4. You can, of course, always take more of an anarchist approach (or what I've come to call the "Senator Armstrong Theory of War" since 2013), where fear of retaliation largely determines right and wrong, but the issue is that, once again, we run a serious risk of the more powerful simply combining forces (or perhaps not even bothering to combine forces if they feel they are capable enough) to oppress the less powerful with no risk of retaliation. I find the reference to global scale politics to be rather intriguing, actually, because I'm reminded of Russia's takeover of Crimea. Regardless of whether you believe the decision to invade Crimea was justified, it's notable because it speaks to the relative lack of consequences in a situation where surrounding bodies believe that an attempt to retaliate in an appropriate manner could hurt them as well. The sanctions that did ultimately result perhaps speak more to the social consequences you mentioned in the second point, and I'll address that a little later. The bottom line, however, is that one powerful body was able to violently impose its will on another with minimal retaliation from others. 5. After all, if what is and what isn't legitimized violence can differ from person to person, there is no reason to investigate what is no longer a crime. 6. This all applies to social ostracization as well, and perhaps even more so. Not only does the information problem make it difficult to determine who to punish socially, but it can also make escaping the consequences of your action far more easily. Arguably the biggest social deterrent from committing a crime is the label of criminal; it permanently brands you as a violator of the law and makes it much more difficult to find employment. However, without a state monopoly on violence, there is no brand of criminal which will follow an offender for the rest of their life. A person can move to a new location and start entirely fresh, with no history of "criminal" behind them. While moving is certainly inconvenient, I wouldn't be particularly comfortable living in a state where the punishment for murder is that some people treat you as a social outcast and which can likely be erased entirely by moving to a new location. Again, this could be perhaps mediated somewhat by private services; perhaps some sort of database by reporters across the country who look into compiling lists of suspected violent offenders. However, that in and of itself might worry me even more. Not only will the sources for who is and isn't a violent offender likely to be more questionable, but there's less hard evidence determining who is and is not on the registry, likely leading to more wrongly accused people. And, of course, there's the always present issue of favoring the richer. 7. But that is exactly the concern we have to take into account when considering pursuing a new ideal. No major country on Earth is used to anarchy, and so a transition to any system that resembles anarchy would be riddled with issues where people attempt to take advantage of opportunities to reinforce some sort of hierarchy that favors them, and the cycle just repeats itself. This admittedly gets a bit more entangled with the issue of transition time, which leads me to... 8. I think we're at risk of deviating from the original debate over state monopolized violence into one over systems of government entirely, but yes, you're right, and I'm not trying to advocate that anarchy (or just about any major change) happens overnight. What I am saying, however, is that the transition period itself is inevitably going to be problematic. I believe you noted this during your initial response to my first post, but the transition from a monarchal system of government to democratic was marked by people using the resources they had available to them to assert authority, usually via financial influence, in the gaps that were left by the disappearance of a monarch. This doesn't have to be done via creating laws that people have to follow, it can be done by altering the living dynamic so that people can choose to disobey, but they likely won't survive if they do (or they'll be incredibly miserable, at the very least). For instance, children working at British factories during the Industrial Revolution; as a parent, you can certainly opt to not send your child to work at a factory, but your family will probably starve if you don't. I fear I've been rambling for a bit, but here's where this all hopefully ties in to my larger point. Those atrocities were ultimately reined in by laws; the general population's influence eventually won over legislators to create legal protection for them. In other words, the room for exerting exploitive authority was removed altogether by the state. If you undo the control that the state holds, be it over time or all at once, there is nothing to suggest that power hungry individuals will not step in to fill the newly created void of authority. And if individuals continue to step in and simply use the lack of state authority to create their own hierarchies, the population never becomes used to a rule-less society, and the same harms that I mentioned previously apply, including the issues with powerful individuals allying and attempting to impose their authority through violence. |
1. So I don't think it is all that far-fetched if we are talking about a long-term goal (many generations, at least.) If we compare the social organization of today to say -- five hundred years ago -- there are significant differences that people of the time would've thought were far-fetched. Liberal representative democracy, republicanism, modern concepts of justice and liberty, all of these would've been far-fetched ideas and "more than idealistic" to the people living then. Yet revolutions, the enlightenment, and many other series of events happened that totally changed the society and sometimes very rapidly (within a few generations.) I am not convinced that what exists now is the end-all be-all social system, nor that we should just complacently accept authority and hierarchy.
2. Merely changing the one who controls the monopoly isn't going to change much, I agree. This is why state socialism has always failed. A new bureaucratic class comes to power which replaces the capitalists and in many ways becomes even more authoritarian. The actual method is to decentralize and localize the political institutions. One means of doing this is to localize political power via federalism/con-federalism. Another is to have more direct democracy. There are a multitude of ways that one can do this. Eventually, political institutions will decentralize to the point where the individual is recognized as a sovereign who needs to consent to those decisions which affect them-- in other words, we transition from majoritarian democracy to consensus-based direct and local democracy, and from there to individual autonomy. Anarchists, by definition, wish to eliminate authority, so I don't see there being a problem of authorities having absolute power, because the goal is to strip them of their authority, piece by piece if we have to.
It's a good thing that nobody will get all of what they want when it comes to the definition of "legitimate violence", because in order to obtain peace all involved parties will have to compromise in proportion to the opportunity costs of fighting. For very common moral beliefs, like those pertaining to murder, the theft of possessions, rape, etc it shouldn't be hard for people to form a consensus that these are wrong and any violence used to prevent them is legitimate. It is in the more ambiguous things like property norms or non-murder killings that are much more controversial and it is a good thing to compromise on these norms so that no particular person or group of people gets an absolute advantage.
3. I obviously don't agree with this. Even in our current system much ambiguity isn't resolved by statutes, but by common law and arbitration. Whether or not somebody is guilty is decided by a jury of peers. I don't see it as a large leap to have a mutually consented group of jurors or arbitrators also determine the legitimacy of any violent action independent of fixed laws. Can you tell me the reason why you think there should be a uniform (or nearly uniform) law across an entire "nation"? To me, nations are arbitrary inorganic entities. Communities and confederations on the other-hand are much more organic social organizations, but even then since I reject the idea of objective morality I reject the idea that any single idea of what is or isn't justice can lead to an efficient distribution of justice. The best justice then would be that which arises out of a compromise and the consent of all involved.
4. One of the things anarchist philosophers have done is analyze how rulers come to exist. The goal is to make it the case that no person or group of people can easily be labeled as "the powerful" or "the poor" that is why we support socialism, so that there is no disproportionate wealth inequality, direct consensus-based democracy so that all local political power is available to every person and consented to by every person, an equal distribution of weapons (which do much to equalize the difference between physical fidelity), and many other egalitarian and horizontal social structures that keep people mostly equal in their capacity to achieve their idea of justice (cooperatives, mutual aid societies, etc.) Just as having access to birth control helped reduce the inequality between men and women, because then women no longer were debilitated and weak from pregnancy, so does having access to other technologies and social structures help equalize people's ability to defend against each-other. Through this equal ability to defend, the relative costs of violating another's self without their consent become much higher than in our current society and therefore violence becomes less common. "The powerful" aren't the only ones capable of associating, so I find it hard to imagine a context where anarchy -- the status where people don't have rulers -- evolves into an authoritarian society again. All of the institutions which achieved anarchy in the first place, would prevent hierarchies from gaining traction as they reinforce one another.
We should also talk about the incentives of violence. Much violence is caused by socio-economic inequality. For example, in the United States most murder and crime is due to the drug trade which preys on people who are poor and desperate. In a society like say -- the Nordic countries -- there are fewer poor and desperate and this has a large effect on crime. This is alongside the Nordic countries' relatively lax criminal prosecution. There are many ways to deal with criminals besides retributive justice.
The UN example I provided wasn't meant to be a perfect analogy. All of the states involved in the U.N are themselves based on exploitation, and Russia being a state that exploits more people had a position of power where it could invade Ukraine. The differences between individual persons aren't this large. With respect to other nuclear powers, Russia wouldn't imagine invading them, because there would be huge costs of doing so. Under anarchism, if everybody had a similar (albeit not perfectly equal) capacity to induce violence to one another, in the same way nuclear powers have a similar enough ability to destroy each-other's cities, a peaceful order comes to exist because it becomes more costly to induce violence than it does to find a different way to get what you want, especially since there are so many social institutions which aim to foster personal needs and wants. Violence then only becomes desirable if the costs of not acting violently are considerable with respect to the costs of violence.
It is important to remember that a lot of the people deciding to be violent in our current world aren't paying the full costs because the state externalizes the costs to others through taxation and its monopoly.
5. That different people have different concepts of right and wrong, and we might not choose to institutionalize a single version of right and wrong, does not mean that individual people (and the communities they form) will tolerate every conception of right and wrong equally. The overwhelming majority of people view murder as wrong, and will perceive the costs and risks of a murderer being around as too considerable not to investigate who that might be and prevent them from murdering again, either by forcing them to make amends, ostracizing them from the society, or if their murderer is especially egregious and they show no remorse/they are dangerous -- execution . That there isn't an objective morality, does not mean that all theories of morals would or should be treated equally. The less popular your morality, the higher the costs of imposing it on others. Remember, just as much as it might be easier to get away with murder, it is also easier to protect oneself against a murderer.
6. I'd imagine that if a person were ostracized by a community (in our age of information) the process would be thoroughly documented in the community records, which would be shared with other communities and individuals who have a mutual relationship with that community, and it would also be known in local media. Whether or not somebody can trust the database depends very much on whether or not they trust the community and its members, but any shared systems of databases would require trust. Certainly something like social ostracization requires social deliberations, discussions, voting, etc. So I don't think it is a simple as anybody being able to add anyone to the database, at least no more or less than a state criminal database, which is just as (if not more) susceptible to corruption. It is also possible for there to be hard protections for people to appeal any decision, just like in our current world.
7. Sure, as we devolve power there will always be people who try to preserve the status-quo and their privilege. These people are called conservatives. That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying to devolve power and eliminate hierarchies. Once a power-structure is destroyed, it is very hard for it to be reinstated again, though. It's why most of the developed world today is composed of liberal democracies and not absolute monarchies, and why the catholic church continues to lose membership since the protestant reformation. New hierarchies replaced them (capitalism, the liberal nation-state, etc), but these hierarchies are relatively less absolutist than that which they replaced. And you might be right, if we abolished the state and capitalism yet even new hierarchies could replace them. The consistent anarchist would then oppose these hierarchies. Your argument might be that these hierarchies are worse than that which they replaced, but then such a movement wouldn't spread globally, people would see the example and try something else. Just as no socialist today wants to replicate the experiments of the Soviet Union and big "C" Communist Asian countries.
8. Sure, every once in a while power leaks through an the common people can have laws passed that help them. Laws alone don't help, and sometimes laws can hurt more than help, despite the best intentions. For example, child labor wasn't only abolished by law, but also by the efforts of collective bargaining and the large mobilization of worker's. Likewise, the civil rights reforms didn't just happen by law, but also due to the protest movements which forced change, and the threat of violence by the Black Panthers.
These are all tiny revolutions in themselves. The law is useful, but only to an extent. Laws are temporary measures that allow for common people to get some breathing room so they can organize further but not permanent solutions, from my perspective. If it were just a matter of laws, the Soviet Union wouldn't have turned out like it had.
Last edited by sc94597 - on 31 January 2018
