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- From: bcaplan@gmu.edu (Bryan Caplan)
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- Subject: Anarchist Theory FAQ Version 5.2
- Followup-To: poster
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- Summary: This FAQ discusses anarchist theory, with a strong emphasis
- upon the many Net controversies between left-anarchists and
- anarcho-capitalists.
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-
- Archive-name: anarchy/theory/faq
- Posting-Frequency: monthly
-
- ---------------------------------------------------------------------
- This is a slightly revised version of my FAQ on anarchist theory. As
- always, comments, criticisms, and corrections will be much appreciated. In
- particular, if you think that any argument or viewpoint has been presented
- weakly or inadequately, please write me at bcaplan@gmu.edu to
- discuss your preferred formulation.
-
- To view the hypertext version of the FAQ (so the links work), go to
- http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan.
-
- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
-
- Anarchist Theory FAQ
-
- or
-
- Instead of a FAQ, by a Man Too Busy to Write One
-
- by
-
- Bryan Caplan
-
- Version 5.2
-
- I heartily accept the motto, - "That government is best which
- governs least;" and I should like to see it acted up to more
- rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to
- this, which I also believe, - "That government is best which
- governs not at all;" and when men are prepared for it, that
- will be the kind of government which they will have.
-
- --Henry David Thoreau,
- "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience"
-
- Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to
- leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not
- only different, but have different origins ... Society is in
- every state a blessing, but Government, even in its best state,
- is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
-
- --Thomas Paine,
- Common Sense
-
- They [the Marxists] maintain that only a dictatorship -- their
- dictatorship, of course -- can create the will of the people,
- while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other
- aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery
- in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by
- freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the
- people and free organization of the toiling masses from the
- bottom up.
-
- --Mikhail Bakunin,
- Statism and Anarchism
-
- In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for
- evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by
- demanding a law to alter it. If the road between two villages is
- impassable, the peasant says, "There should be a law about parish
- roads." If a park-keeper takes advantage of the want of spirit in
- those who follow him with servile obedience and insults one of
- them, the insulted man says, "There should be a law to enjoin
- more politeness upon the park-keepers." If there is stagnation in
- agriculture or commerce, the husbandman, cattle-breeder, or corn-
- speculator argues, "It is protective legislation which we
- require." Down to the old clothesman there is not one who does
- not demand a law to protect his own little trade. If the employer
- lowers wages or increases the hours of labor, the politician in
- embryo explains, "We must have a law to put all that to rights."
- In short, a law everywhere and for everything! A law about
- fashions, a law about mad dogs, a law about virtue, a law to put
- a stop to all the vices and all the evils which result from human
- indolence and cowardice.
-
- --Peter Kropotkin,
- "Law and Authority"
-
- [W]hoever desires liberty, should understand these vital facts,
- viz.: 1. That every man who puts money into the hands of a
- "government" (so called) puts into its hands a sword which will
- be used against himself, to extort more money from him, and also
- to keep him in subjection to its arbitrary will. 2. That those
- who will take his money, without his consent, in the first place,
- will use it for his further robbery and enslavement, if he
- presumes to resist their demands in the future. 3. That it is a
- perfect absurdity to suppose that any body of men would ever take
- a man's money without his consent, for any such object as they
- profess to take it for, viz., that of protecting him; for why
- should they wish to protect him, if he does not wish them to do
- so?... 4. If a man wants "protection," he is competent to make
- his own bargains for it; and nobody has any occasion to rob him,
- in order to "protect" him against his will. 5. That the only
- security men can have for their political liberty, consists in
- their keeping their money in their own pockets, until they have
- assurances, perfectly satisfactory to themselves, that it will be
- used as they wish it to be used, for their benefit, and not for
- their injury. 6. That no government, so called, can reasonably be
- trusted for a moment, or reasonably be supposed to have honest
- purposes in view, any longer than it depends wholly upon
- voluntary support.
-
- --Lysander Spooner,
- No Treason: the Constitution of No Authority
-
- If we look at the black record of mass murder, exploitation, and
- tyranny levied on society by governments over the ages, we need
- not be loath to abandon the Leviathan State and ... try freedom.
-
- --Murray Rothbard,
- For a New Liberty
-
- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
- Table of Contents
-
- 1. What is anarchism? What beliefs do anarchists share?
- 2. Why should one consider anarchism in the first place?
- 3. Don't anarchists favor chaos?
- 4. Don't anarchists favor the abolition of the family, property,
- religion, and other social institutions besides the state?
- 5. What major subdivisions may be made among anarchists?
- 6. Is anarchism the same thing as libertarianism?
- 7. Is anarchism the same thing as socialism?
- 8. Who are the major anarchist thinkers?
- 9. How would left-anarchy work?
- 10. How would anarcho-capitalism work?
- 11. What criticisms have been made of anarchism?
- a. "An anarchist society, lacking any central coercive authority,
- would quickly degenerate into violent chaos."
- b. The Marxist critique of left-anarchism
- c. The minarchists' attack on anarcho-capitalism
- d. The conservative critique of anarchism
- e. "We are already in a state of anarchy."
- 12. What other anarchist viewpoints are there?
- 13. What moral justifications have been offered for anarchism?
- 14. What are the major debates between anarchists? What are the recurring
- arguments?
- a. "X is not 'true anarchism.'"
- b. "Anarchism of variant X is unstable and will lead to the
- re-emergence of the state."
- c. "In an anarchist society in which both systems X and Y existed, X
- would inevitably outcompete Y."
- d. "Anarchism of type X would be worse than the state."
- e. Etc.
- 15. How would anarchists handle the "public goods" problem?
- a. The concept and uses of Pareto optimality in economics
- b. The public goods problem
- 16. Are anarchists pacifists?
- a. Tolstoyan absolute pacifism
- b. Pacifism as opposition to war
- 17. Have there been any historical examples of anarchist societies?
- 18. Isn't anarchism utopian?
- 19. Don't anarchists assume that all people are innately virtuous?
- 20. Aren't anarchists terrorists?
- 21. How might an anarchist society be achieved?
- 22. What are some addresses for anarchist World Wide Web sites?
- 23. What are some major anarchist writings?
-
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------
-
- 1. What is anarchism? What beliefs do anarchists share?
-
- Anarchism is defined by The American Heritage College Dictionary
- as "The theory or doctrine that all forms of government are
- unnecessary, oppressive, and undesirable and should be
- abolished." Anarchism is a negative; it holds that one thing,
- namely government, is bad and should be abolished. Aside from
- this defining tenet, it would be difficult to list any belief
- that all anarchists hold. Just as atheists might support or
- oppose any viewpoint consistent with the non-existence of God,
- anarchists might and indeed do hold the entire range of
- viewpoints consistent with the non-existence of the state.
-
- As might be expected, different groups of anarchists are
- constantly trying to define anarchists with different views out
- of existence, just as many Christians say that their sect is the
- only "true" Christianity and many socialists say that their
- socialism is the only "true" socialism. This FAQ takes what seems
- to me to be the impartial view that such tactics are pointless
- and merely prevent the debate of substantive issues. (N.B. The
- preceding definition has been criticized a number of times. To
- view my appendix on Defining Anarchism, click here.)
-
- 2. Why should one consider anarchism in the first place?
-
- Unlike many observers of history, anarchists see a common thread
- behind most of mankind's problems: the state. In the 20th-century
- alone, states have murdered well over 100,000,000 human beings,
- whether in war, concentration camps, or man-made famine. And this
- is merely a continuation of a seemingly endless historical
- pattern: almost from the beginning of recorded history,
- governments have existed. Once they arose, they allowed a ruling
- class to live off the labor of the mass of ordinary people; and
- these ruling classes have generally used their ill-gotten gains
- to build armies and wage war to extend their sphere of influence.
- At the same time, governments have always suppressed unpopular
- minorities, dissent, and the efforts of geniuses and innovators
- to raise humanity to new intellectual, moral, cultural, and
- economic heights. By transferring surplus wealth from producers
- to the state's ruling elite, the state has often strangled any
- incentive for long-run economic growth and thus stifled
- humanity's ascent from poverty; and at the same time the state
- has always used that surplus wealth to cement its power.
-
- If the state is the proximate cause of so much needless misery
- and cruelty, would it not be desirable to investigate the
- alternatives? Perhaps the state is a necessary evil which we
- cannot eliminate. But perhaps it is rather an unnecessary evil
- which we accept out of inertia when a totally different sort of
- society would be a great improvement.
-
- 3. Don't anarchists favor chaos?
-
- By definition, anarchists oppose merely government, not order or
- society. "Liberty is the Mother, not the Daughter of Order" wrote
- Proudhon, and most anarchists would be inclined to agree.
- Normally, anarchists demand abolition of the state because they
- think that they have something better to offer, not out of a
- desire for rebellion as such. Or as Kropotkin put it, "No
- destruction of the existing order is possible, if at the time of
- the overthrow, or of the struggle leading to the overthrow, the
- idea of what is to take the place of what is to be destroyed is
- not always present in the mind. Even the theoretical criticism of
- the existing conditions is impossible, unless the critic has in
- mind a more or less distinct picture of what he would have in
- place of the existing state. Consciously or unconsciously, the
- ideal, the conception of something better is forming in the mind
- of everyone who criticizes social institutions."
-
- There is an anti-intellectual strain in anarchism which favors
- chaos and destruction as an end-in-itself. While possibly a
- majority among people who have called themselves anarchists, this
- is not a prominent strand of thought among those who have
- actually spent time thinking and writing about anarchist theory.
-
- 4. Don't anarchists favor the abolition of the family, property,
- religion, and other social institutions besides the state?
-
- Some anarchists have favored the abolition of one or more of the
- above, while others have not. To some, all of these are merely
- other forms of oppression and domination. To others, they are the
- vital intermediary institutions which protect us from the state.
- To still others, some of the above are good and others are bad;
- or perhaps they are bad currently, but merit reform.
-
- 5. What major subdivisions may be made among anarchists?
-
- As should become plain to the reader of alt.society.anarchy or
- alt.anarchism, there are two rather divergent lines of anarchist
- thought. The first is broadly known as "left-anarchism," and
- encompasses anarcho-socialists, anarcho-syndicalists, and
- anarcho-communists. These anarchists believe that in an anarchist
- society, people either would or should abandon or greatly reduce
- the role of private property rights. The economic system would be
- organized around cooperatives, worker-owned firms, and/or
- communes. A key value in this line of anarchist thought is
- egalitarianism, the view that inequalities, especially of wealth
- and power, are undesirable, immoral, and socially contingent.
-
- The second is broadly known as "anarcho-capitalism." These
- anarchists believe that in an anarchist society, people either
- would or should not only retain private property, but expand it
- to encompass the entire social realm. No anarcho-capitalist has
- ever denied the right of people to voluntarily pool their private
- property and form a cooperative, worker-owned firm, or commune;
- but they also believe that several property, including such
- organizations as corporations, are not only perfectly legitimate
- but likely to be the predominant form of economic organization
- under anarchism. Unlike the left-anarchists, anarcho-capitalists
- generally place little or no value on equality, believing that
- inequalities along all dimensions -- including income and wealth
- -- are not only perfectly legitimate so long as they "come about
- in the right way," but are the natural consequence of human
- freedom.
-
- A large segment of left-anarchists is extremely skeptical about
- the anarchist credentials of anarcho-capitalists, arguing that
- the anarchist movement has historically been clearly leftist. In
- my own view, it is necessary to re-write a great deal of history
- to maintain this claim. In Carl Landauer's European Socialism: A
- History of Ideas and Movements (published in 1959 before any
- important modern anarcho-capitalist works had been written), this
- great socialist historian notes that:
-
- To be sure, there is a difference between
- individualistic anarchism and collectivistic or
- communistic anarchism; Bakunin called himself a
- communist anarchist. But the communist anarchists also
- do not acknowledge any right to society to force the
- individual. They differ from the anarchistic
- individualists in their belief that men, if freed from
- coercion, will enter into voluntary associations of a
- communistic type, while the other wing believes that
- the free person will prefer a high degree of isolation.
- The communist anarchists repudiate the right of private
- property which is maintained through the power of the
- state. The individualist anarchists are inclined to
- maintain private property as a necessary condition of
- individual independence, without fully answering the
- question of how property could be maintained without
- courts and police.
-
- Actually, Tucker and Spooner both wrote about the free market's
- ability to provide legal and protection services, so Landauer's
- remark was not accurate even in 1959. But the interesting point
- is that before the emergence of modern anarcho-capitalism
- Landauer found it necessary to distinguish two strands of
- anarchism, only one of which he considered to be within the broad
- socialist tradition.
-
- 6. Is anarchism the same thing as libertarianism?
-
- This is actually a complicated question, because the term
- "libertarianism" itself has two very different meanings. In
- Europe in the 19th-century, libertarianism was a popular
- euphemism for left-anarchism. However, the term did not really
- catch on in the United States.
-
- After World War II, many American-based pro-free-market
- intellectuals opposed to traditional conservatism were seeking
- for a label to describe their position, and eventually picked
- "libertarianism." ("Classical liberalism" and "market liberalism"
- are alternative labels for the same essential position.) The
- result was that in two different political cultures which rarely
- communicated with one another, the term "libertarian" was used in
- two very different ways. At the current time, the American use
- has basically taken over completely in academic political theory
- (probably owing to Nozick's influence), but the European use is
- still popular among many left-anarchist activists in both Europe
- and the U.S.
-
- The semantic confusion was complicated further when some of the
- early post-war American libertarians determined that the logical
- implication of their view was, in fact, a variant of anarchism.
- They adopted the term "anarcho-capitalism" to differentiate
- themselves from more moderate libertarianism, but were still
- generally happy to identify themselves with the broader
- free-market libertarian movement.
-
- 7. Is anarchism the same thing as socialism?
-
- If we accept one traditional definition of socialism -- "advocacy
- of government ownership of the means of production" -- it seems
- that anarchists are not socialists by definition. But if by
- socialism we mean something more inclusive, such as "advocacy of
- the strong restriction or abolition of private property," then
- the question becomes more complex.
-
- Under the second proffered definition, some anarchists are
- socialists, but others are not. Outside of the Anglo- American
- political culture, there has been a long and close historical
- relationship between the more orthodox socialists who advocate a
- socialist government, and the anarchist socialists who desire
- some sort of decentralized, voluntary socialism. The two groups
- both want to severely limit or abolish private property and thus
- both groups fit the second definition of socialism. However, the
- anarchists certainly do not want the government to own the means
- of production, for they don't want government to exist in the
- first place.
-
- The anarchists' dispute with the traditional socialists -- a
- dispute best illustrated by the bitter struggle between Karl Marx
- and Mikhail Bakunin for dominance in the 19th-century European
- workers' movement -- has often be described as a disagreement
- over "means." On this interpretation, the socialist anarchists
- and the state-socialists agree that a communal and egalitarian
- society is desirable, but accuse one another of proposing
- ineffective means of attaining it. However, this probably
- understates the conflict, which is also over more fundamental
- values: socialist anarchists emphasize the need for autonomy and
- the evils of authoritarianism, while traditional socialists have
- frequently belittled such concerns as "bourgeois."
-
- When we turn to the Anglo-American political culture, the
- story is quite different. Virulent anti-socialist
- anarchism is much more common there, and has been from the early
- 19th-century. Great Britain was the home of many intensely
- anti-socialist quasi-anarchistic thinkers of the 19th-century
- such as Auberon Herbert and the early Herbert Spencer. The United
- States has been an even more fertile ground for individualist
- anarchism: during the 19th-century, such figures as Josiah
- Warren, Lysander Spooner , and Benjamin Tucker gained prominence
- for their vision of an anarchism based upon freedom of contract
- and private property. And in the 20th-century, thinkers residing
- within the United States have been the primary developers and
- exporters of anarcho-capitalist theory.
-
- Still, this geographic division should not be over-stated. The
- French anarchist Proudhon and the German Max Stirner both
- embraced modified forms of individualism; a number of
- left-anarchists (often European immigrants) attained prominence
- in the United States; and Noam Chomsky and Murray Bookchin, two
- of the most influential theorists of modern left-anarchism, both
- reside within the United States.
-
- 8. Who are the major anarchist thinkers?
-
- The most famous left-anarchists have probably been
- Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. Pierre Proudhon is
- also often included although his ideas on the desirability of a
- modified form of private property would lead some to exclude him
- from the leftist camp altogether. (Some of Proudhon's other
- heterodoxies include his defense of the right of inheritance and
- his emphasis on the genuine antagonism between state power and
- property rights.) More recent left-anarchists include Emma
- Goldman, Murray Bookchin , and Noam Chomsky.
-
- Anarcho-capitalism has a much more recent origin in the latter
- half of the 20th century. The two most famous advocates of
- anarcho-capitalism are probably Murray Rothbard and David
- Friedman. There were however some interesting earlier precursors,
- notably the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari. Two other
- 19th-century anarchists who have been adopted by modern
- anarcho-capitalists with a few caveats are Benjamin Tucker and
- Lysander Spooner. (Some left-anarchists contest the adoption, but
- overall Tucker and Spooner probably have much more in
- common with anarcho-capitalists than with
- left-anarchists.)
-
- More comprehensive listings of anarchist figures may be found in
- a number of broad historical works listed later in the FAQ.
-
- 9. How would left-anarchy work?
-
- There are many different views on this. Among left- anarchists,
- there are some who imagine returning to a much simpler, even
- pre-industrial, mode of social organization. Others seem to
- intend to maintain modern technology and civilization (perhaps in
- a more environmentally sound manner) but end private ownership of
- the means of production.
-
- To be replaced with what? Various suggestions have been made.
- Existing firms might simply be turned over to worker ownership,
- and then be subject to the democratic control of the workers.
- This is the anarcho-syndicalist picture: keeping an economy based
- upon a multitude of firms, but with firms owned and managed by
- the workers at each firm. Presumably firms would then strike
- deals with one another to secure needed materials; or perhaps
- firms would continue to pay money wages and sell products to
- consumers. It is unclear how the syndicalist intends to arrange
- for the egalitarian care of the needy, or the provision of
- necessary but unprofitable products. Perhaps it is supposed that
- syndicates would contribute out of social responsibility; others
- have suggested that firms would elect representatives for a
- larger meta-firm organization which would carry out the necessary
- tasks.
-
- It should be noted that Tom Wetzel disputes my characterization
- of anarcho-syndicalism; he argues that very few
- anarcho-syndicalists ever imagined that workers would simply take
- over their firms, while maintaining the basic features of the
- market economy. Rather, the goal has usually been the
- establishment of an overarching democratic structure, rather than
- a multitude of uncoordinated firm-centered democracies. Or at
- Wetzel states, "Anarcho-syndicalism advocates the development of
- a mass workers' movement based on direct democracy as the vehicle
- for reorganization of the society on the basis of direct workers'
- collective power over social production, thus eliminating the
- domination and exploitation of the producing class by an
- exploiting class. Workers cannot have collective power over the
- system of social production as isolated groups competing in a
- market economy; rather, workers self- management requires
- structures of democratic control over social production and
- public affairs generally. Workers' self- management thus refers,
- not just to self-management of the individual workplace, but of
- the whole system of social production. This requires grassroots
- bodies, such as workers' congresses or conventions, through which
- coordinated policies for the society can be developed in a
- democratic manner. This is proposed as a substitute or
- replacement for the historical nation-state." On this
- interpretation of anarcho-syndicalism, the revolutionary trade
- unions are a means for achieving an anarchist society, rather
- than a proposed basis for social organization under anarchy.
-
- Many would observe that there is nothing anarchistic about this
- proposal; indeed, names aside, it fits easily into the orthodox
- state-socialist tradition. Bakunin would have probably ridiculed
- such ideas as authoritarian Marxist socialism in disguise, and
- predicted that the leading anarchist revolutionaries would
- swiftly become the new despots. But Wetzel is perhaps right that
- many or even most historical anarcho-syndicalists were
- championing the system outlined in his preceding quotation. He
- goes on to add that "[I]f you look at the concept of 'state' in
- the very abstract way it often is in the social sciences, as in
- Weber's definition, then what the anarcho-syndicalists were
- proposing is not elimination of the state or government, but its
- radical democratization. That was not how anarchists themselves
- spoke about it, but it can be plausibly argued that this is a
- logical consequence of a certain major stream of left-anarchist
- thought."
-
- Ronald Fraser's discussion of the ideology of the Spanish
- Anarchists (historically the largest European anarchist movement)
- strongly undermines Wetzel's claim, however. There were two
- well-developed lines of thought, both of which favored the
- abolition of the State in the broad Weberian sense of the word,
- and which did indeed believe that the workers should literally
- have control over their workplaces. After distinguishing the
- rural and the urban tendencies among the Spanish ideologists,
- Fraser explains:
-
- Common to both tendencies was the idea that the working
- class 'simply' took over factories and workplaces and
- ran them collectively but otherwise as before...
- Underlying this vision of simple continuity was the
- anarcho-syndicalist concept of the revolution not as a
- rupture with, the destruction and replacement of, the
- bourgeois order but as the latter's displacement. The
- taking over of factories and workplaces, however
- violently carried out, was not the beginning of the
- revolution to create a new order but its final goal.
- This view, in turn was conditioned by a particular view
- of the state. Any state (bourgeois or working class)
- was considered an oppressive power tout court - not as
- the organization of a particular class's coercive
- power. The 'state' in consequence, rather than the
- existence of the capitalist mode of production which
- gave rise to its particular form, often appeared as the
- major enemy. The state did not have to be taken,
- crushed, and a new - revolutionary - power established.
- No. If it could be swept away, abolished, everything
- else, including oppression, disappeared. The capitalist
- order was simply displaced by the new-won workers'
- freedom to administer the workplaces they had taken
- over. Self-organized in autonomous communes or in
- all-powerful syndicates, the workers, as the primary
- factor in production, dispensed with the bourgeoisie.
- The consequences of this were seen in the 1936
- Barcelona revolution; capitalist production and market
- relations continued to exist within collectivized
- industry.
-
- Overall, the syndicalist is probably the best elaborated of the
- left-anarchist systems. But others in the broader tradition
- imagine individuals forming communes and cooperatives which would
- be less specialized and more self- sufficient than the typical
- one-product-line anarcho- syndicalist firm. These notions are
- often closely linked to the idea of creating a more
- environmentally sound society, in which small and decentralized
- collectives redirect their energies towards a Greener way of
- life.
-
- Many left-anarchists and anarchist sympathizers have also been
- attracted to Guild Socialism in one form or another. Economist
- Roger A. McCain thoughtfully explores Guild Socialism as an
- alternative to both capitalism and the state in "Guild Socialism
- Reconsidered," one of his working papers. To view it, click here.
-
- Kropotkin's lucid essay "Law and Authority" gives a
- thoughtful presentation of the left-anarchist's view of
- law. Primitive human societies, explains Kropotkin, live by what
- legal thinkers call "customary law": an unwritten but broadly
- understood body of rules and appropriate behavior backed up
- primarily by social pressure. Kropotkin considers this sort of
- behavioral regulation to be unobjectionable, and probably
- consistent with his envisaged anarchist society. But when
- centralized governments codified customary law, they mingled the
- sensible dictates of tribal conscience with governmental
- sanctions for exploitation and injustice. As Kropotkin writes,
- "[L]egislators confounded in one code the two currents of custom
- ... the maxims which represent principles of morality and social
- union wrought out as a result of life in common, and the mandates
- which are meant to ensure external existence to inequality.
- Customs, absolutely essential to the very being of society, are,
- in the code, cleverly intermingled with usages imposed by the
- ruling caste, and both claim equal respect from the crowd. 'Do
- not kill,' says the code, and hastens to add, 'And pay tithes to
- the priest.' 'Do not steal,' says the code, and immediately
- after, 'He who refuses to pay taxes, shall have his hand struck
- off.'"
-
- So perhaps Kropotkin's ideal society would live under the
- guidance of a reformed customary law stripped of the class
- legislation with which it is now so closely associated. But
- Kropotkin continues to give what appear to be arguments against
- even customary law prohibiting e.g. murder. Almost all violent
- crime is actually caused by poverty and inequality created by
- existing law. A small residual of violent crime might persist,
- but efforts to handle it by legal channels are futile. Why?
- Because punishment has no effect on crime, especially such crimes
- of passion as would survive the abolition of private property.
- Moreover, criminals should not be judged wicked, but rather
- treated as we now treat the sick and disadvantaged.
-
- Most left-anarchists probably hold to a mix of Kropotkin's fairly
- distinct positions on law and crime. Existing law should be
- replaced by sensible and communitarian customs; and the critic of
- anarchism underestimates the extent to which existing crime is in
- fact a product of the legal system's perpetuation of inequality
- and poverty. And since punishment is not an effective deterrent,
- and criminals are not ultimately responsible for their misdeeds,
- a strictly enforced legal code may be undesirable anyway.
-
- Some other crucial features of the left-anarchist society are
- quite unclear. Whether dissidents who despised all forms of
- communal living would be permitted to set up their own
- inegalitarian separatist societies is rarely touched upon.
- Occasionally left-anarchists have insisted that small farmers and
- the like would not be forcibly collectivized, but the limits of
- the right to refuse to adopt an egalitarian way of life are
- rarely specified.
-
- 10. How would anarcho-capitalism work?
-
- Most of the prominent anarcho-capitalist writers have been
- academic economists, and as such have felt it necessary to spell
- out the workings of their preferred society in rather greater
- detail than the left-anarchists have. In order to best grasp the
- anarcho-capitalist position, it is helpful to realize that
- anarcho-capitalists have emerged almost entirely out of the
- modern American libertarian movement, and believe that their view
- is simply a slightly more extreme version of the libertarianism
- propounded by e.g. Robert Nozick.
-
- FAQs on the broader libertarian movement are widely
- available on the Net, so we will only give the necessary
- background here. So-called "minarchist" libertarians such as
- Nozick have argued that the largest justified government was one
- which was limited to the protection of individuals and their
- private property against physical invasion; accordingly, they
- favor a government limited to supplying police, courts, a legal
- code, and national defense. This normative theory is closely
- linked to laissez-faire economic theory, according to which
- private property and unregulated competition generally lead to
- both an efficient allocation of resources and (more importantly)
- a high rate of economic progress. While left-anarchists are often
- hostile to "bourgeois economics," anarcho-capitalists hold
- classical economists such as Adam Smith, David Hume, and
- Jean-Baptiste Say in high regard, as well as more modern
- economists such as Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises, F.A.
- Hayek, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and James Buchanan. The
- problem with free-market economists, say the anarcho-capitalists,
- is not that they defend the free market, but merely that their
- defense is too moderate and compromising.
-
- (Note however that the left-anarchists' low opinion of
- the famous "free-market economists" is not monolithic:
- Noam Chomsky in particular has repeatedly praised some of the
- political insights of Adam Smith. And Peter Kropotkin also had
- good things to say about Smith as both social scientist and
- moralist; Conal Smith explains that "In particular he approved of
- Smith's attempt to apply the scientific method to the study of
- morals and society, his critique of the state in The Wealth of
- Nations, and his theory of human sociability in The Theory of
- Moral Sentiments.")
-
- Now the anarcho-capitalist essentially turns the minarchist's own
- logic against him, and asks why the remaining functions of the
- state could not be turned over to the free market. And so, the
- anarcho-capitalist imagines that police services could be sold by
- freely competitive firms; that a court system would emerge to
- peacefully arbitrate disputes between firms; and that a sensible
- legal code could be developed through custom, precedent, and
- contract. And in fact, notes the anarcho-capitalist, a great deal
- of modern law (such as the Anglo-American common law) originated
- not in legislatures, but from the decentralized rulings of
- judges. (The anarcho-capitalist shares Kropotkin's interest in
- customary law, but normally believes that it requires extensive
- modernization and articulation.)
-
- The anarcho-capitalist typically hails modern society's
- increasing reliance on private security guards, gated
- communities, arbitration and mediation, and other demonstrations
- of the free market's ability to supply the defensive and legal
- services normally assumed to be of necessity a government
- monopoly. In his ideal society, these market alternatives to
- government services would take over all legitimate security
- services. One plausible market structure would involve
- individuals subscribing to one of a large number of competing
- police services; these police services would then set up
- contracts or networks for peacefully handling disputes between
- members of each others' agencies. Alternately, police services
- might be "bundled" with housing services, just as landlords often
- bundle water and power with rental housing, and gardening and
- security are today provided to residents in gated communities and
- apartment complexes.
-
- The underlying idea is that contrary to popular belief, private
- police would have strong incentives to be peaceful and respect
- individual rights. For first of all, failure to peacefully
- arbitrate will yield to jointly destructive warfare, which will
- be bad for profits. Second, firms will want to develop long- term
- business relationships, and hence be willing to negotiate in good
- faith to insure their long-term profitability. And third,
- aggressive firms would be likely to attract only high-risk
- clients and thus suffer from extraordinarily high costs (a
- problem parallel to the well-known "adverse selection problem" in
- e.g. medical insurance -- the problem being that high-risk people
- are especially likely to seek insurance, which drives up the
- price when riskiness is hard for the insurer to discern or if
- regulation requires a uniform price regardless of risk).
- Anarcho-capitalists generally give little credence to the view
- that their "private police agencies" would be equivalent to
- today's Mafia -- the cost advantages of open, legitimate business
- would make "criminal police" uncompetitive. As David Friedman
- explains in The Machinery of Freedom, "Perhaps the best way to
- see why anarcho-capitalism would be so much more peaceful than
- our present system is by analogy. Consider our world as it would
- be if the cost of moving from one country to another were zero.
- Everyone lives in a housetrailer and speaks the same language.
- One day, the president of France announces that because of
- troubles with neighboring countries, new military taxes are being
- levied and conscription will begin shortly. The next morning the
- president of France finds himself ruling a peaceful but empty
- landscape, the population having been reduced to himself, three
- generals, and twenty-seven war correspondents."
-
- (Moreover, anarcho-capitalists argue, the Mafia can only thrive
- in the artificial market niche created by the prohibition of
- alcohol, drugs, prostitution, gambling, and other victimless
- crimes. Mafia gangs might kill each other over turf, but
- liquor-store owners generally do not.)
-
- Unlike some left-anarchists, the anarcho-capitalist has no
- objection to punishing criminals; and he finds the former's claim
- that punishment does not deter crime to be the height of naivete.
- Traditional punishment might be meted out after a conviction by a
- neutral arbitrator; or a system of monetary restitution (probably
- in conjunction with a prison factory system) might exist instead.
- A convicted criminal would owe his victim compensation, and would
- be forced to work until he paid off his debt. Overall,
- anarcho-capitalists probably lean more towards the
- restitutionalist rather than the pure retributivist position.
-
- Probably the main division between the
- anarcho-capitalists stems from the apparent differences
- between Rothbard's natural-law anarchism, and David Friedman's
- more economistic approach. Rothbard puts more emphasis on the
- need for a generally recognized libertarian legal code (which he
- thinks could be developed fairly easily by purification of the
- Anglo-American common law), whereas Friedman focuses more
- intently on the possibility of plural legal systems co-existing
- and responding to the consumer demands of different elements of
- the population. The difference, however, is probably over-stated.
- Rothbard believes that it is legitimate for consumer demand to
- determine the philosophically neutral content of the law, such as
- legal procedure, as well as technical issues of property right
- definition such as water law, mining law, etc. And Friedman
- admits that "focal points" including prevalent norms are likely
- to circumscribe and somewhat standardize the menu of available
- legal codes.
-
- Critics of anarcho-capitalism sometimes assume that communal or
- worker-owned firms would be penalized or prohibited in an
- anarcho-capitalist society. It would be more accurate to state
- that while individuals would be free to voluntarily form
- communitarian organizations, the anarcho- capitalist simply
- doubts that they would be widespread or prevalent. However, in
- theory an "anarcho-capitalist" society might be filled with
- nothing but communes or worker- owned firms, so long as these
- associations were formed voluntarily (i.e., individuals joined
- voluntarily and capital was obtained with the consent of the
- owners) and individuals retained the right to exit and set up
- corporations or other profit-making, individualistic firms.
-
- On other issues, the anarcho-capitalist differs little if at all
- from the more moderate libertarian. Services should be privatized
- and opened to free competition; regulation of personal AND
- economic behavior should be done away with. Poverty would be
- handled by work and responsibility for those able to care for
- themselves, and voluntary charity for those who cannot.
- (Libertarians hasten to add that a deregulated economy would
- greatly increase the economic opportunities of the poor, and
- elimination of taxation would lead to a large increase in
- charitable giving.)
-
- For a detailed discussion of the economics of privatization of
- dispute resolution, rule creation, and enforcement, see my "The
- Economics of Non-State Legal Systems," which is archived with my
- other economics writings.
-
- 11. What criticisms have been made of anarchism?
-
- Anarchism of various breeds has been criticized from an extremely
- wide range of perspectives. State-socialists, classical liberals,
- and conservatives have each on occasion examined anarchist
- theorists and found them wanting. After considering the unifying
- argument endorsed by virtually all of the critics of anarchism,
- we shall turn to the more specific attacks of Marxist, moderate
- libertarian, and conservative lineage.
-
- a. "An anarchist society, lacking any central coercive
- authority, would quickly degenerate into violent chaos."
-
- The most common criticism, shared by the entire
- range of critics, is basically that anarchism would
- swiftly degenerate into a chaotic Hobbesian war of
- all-against-all. Thus the communist Friedrich Engels wonders
- "[H]ow these people propose to run a factory, operate a
- railway or steer a ship without having in the last resort
- one deciding will, without single management, they of course
- do not tell us." He continues: "The authority of the
- majority over the minority also ceases. Every individual and
- every community is autonomous; but as to how society, even
- of only two people, is possible unless each gives up some of
- his autonomy, Bakunin again maintains silence." And
- his autonomy, Bakunin again maintains silence." And
- similarly, the classical liberal Ludwig von Mises
- states that "An anarchistic society would be exposed
- to the mercy of every individual. Society cannot exist if
- the majority is not ready to hinder, by the application or
- threat of violent action, minorities from destroying the
- social order. This power is vested in the state or
- government."
-
- Or to consider a perhaps less ideological writer,
- Thomas Hobbes implicitly criticizes anarchist theory
- when he explains that "Hereby it is manifest, that during
- the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in
- awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and
- such a warre, as is of every man, against every man." Hobbes
- goes on to add that "It may peradventure be thought, there
- was never such a time, nor condition of warre as this; and I
- believe it was never generally so, over all the world: but
- there are many places, where they live so now. For the
- savage people in many places of America, except the
- government of small Families, the concord whereof dependeth
- on naturall lust, have no government at all; and live at
- this day in that brutish manner, as I said before." Since it
- is in the interest of the strong to take what they want from
- the weak, the absence of government lead inexorably to
- widespread violence and the prevention or destruction of
- civilization itself.
-
- Anarchists of all varieties would reject this argument;
- sometimes claiming that the critic misunderstands their
- position, other times that the critic's assumptions are too
- pessimistic. Kropotkin, for example, would seriously dispute
- the claim that war is the natural state of ungoverned human
- beings; like many other species of animals, cooperation is
- more common, natural, and likely. Left- anarchists generally
- would normally object that these criticisms rest upon
- contingent cultural assumptions arising from a competitive
- scarcity economy. Replace these institutions with humane and
- egalitarian ones; then poverty, the cause of crime and
- aggression, would greatly decrease. Finally, many left-
- anarchists envisage cooperatives and communes adopting and
- enforcing rules of appropriate conduct for those who wish to
- join.
-
- The anarcho-capitalist would likely protest that the critic
- misunderstands his view: he does believe that police and
- laws are necessary and desirable, and merely holds that they
- could be supplied by the free market rather than government.
- More fundamentally, he doubts the game- theoretic
- underpinnings of Hobbes' argument, for it ignores the
- likelihood that aggressive individuals or firms will provoke
- retaliation. Just as territorial animals fight when
- defending their territory, but yield when confronted on the
- territory of another animal, rational self-interested
- individuals and firms would usually find aggression a
- dangerous and unprofitable practice. In terms of game
- theory, the anarcho-capitalist thinks that Hobbes' situation
- is a Hawk-Dove game rather than a Prisoners' Dilemma. (In
- the Prisoners' Dilemma, war/non-cooperation would be a
- strictly dominant strategy; in a Hawk-Dove game there is
- normally a mixed-strategy equilibrium in which
- cooperation/peace is the norm but a small percentage of
- players continue to play war/non-cooperation.) Self-
- interested police firms would gladly make long-term
- arbitration contracts with each other to avoid mutually
- destructive bloodshed.
-
- (To view an excellent short related essay on anarchism and
- game theory, click here.)
-
- b. The Marxist critique of left-anarchism
-
- One of the most famous attacks on anarchism was
- launched by Karl Marx during his battles with
- Proudhon and Bakunin. The ultimate result of this protracted
- battle of words was to split the 19th-century workers'
- movement into two distinct factions. In the 20th century,
- the war of words ended in blows: while Marxist-Leninists
- sometimes cooperated with anarchists during the early stages
- of the Russian and Spanish revolutions, violent struggle
- between them was the rule rather than the exception.
- between them was the rule rather than the exception.
-
- There were at least three distinct arguments that
- Marx aimed at his anarchist opponents.
-
- First: the development of socialism had to follow a
- particular historical course, whereas the anarchists
- mistakenly believed that it could be created by force of
- will alone. "A radical social revolution is connected with
- certain historical conditions of economic development; the
- latter are its presupposition. Therefore it is possible only
- where the industrial proletariat, together with capitalist
- production, occupies at least a substantial place in the
- mass of the people." Marx continues: "He [Bakunin]
- understands absolutely nothing about social revolution ...
- For him economic requisites do not exist...He wants a
- European social revolution, resting on the economic
- foundation of capitalist production, to take place on the
- level of the Russian or Slavic agricultural and pastoral
- peoples ... Will power and not economic conditions is the
- basis for his social revolution." Proudhon, according to
- Marx, suffered from the same ignorance of history and its
- laws: "M. Proudhon, incapable of following the real movement
- of history, produces a phantasmagoria which presumptuously
- claims to be dialectical ... From his point of view man is
- only the instrument of which the idea or the eternal reason
- makes use in order to unfold itself." This particular
- argument is probably of historical interest only, in light
- of the gross inaccuracy of Marx's prediction of the path of
- future civilization; although perhaps the general claim that
- social progression has material presuppositions retains some
- merit.
-
- Second, Marx ridiculed Bakunin's claim that a socialist
- government would become a new despotism by socialist
- intellectuals. In light of the prophetic accuracy of
- Bakunin's prediction in this area, Marx's reply is almost
- ironic: "Under collective ownership the so-called people's
- will disappears to make way for the real will of the
- cooperative." It is on this point that most left-anarchists
- reasonably claim complete vindication; just as Bakunin
- predicted, the Marxist "dictatorship of the proletariat"
- swiftly became a ruthless "dictatorship over the
- proletariat."
-
- Finally, Marx stated that the anarchists erroneously
- believed that the government supported the capitalist system
- rather than the other way around. In consequence, they were
- attacking the wrong target and diverting the workers'
- movement from its proper course. Engels delineated the
- Marxist and left-anarchist positions quite well: "Bakunin
- maintains that it is the state which has created capital,
- that the capitalist has his capital only by the grace of the
- state. As, therefore, the state is the chief evil, it is
- above all the state which must be done away with and then
- capitalism will go to blazes of itself. We, on the contrary,
- say: Do away with capital, the concentration of the means of
- production in the hands of the few, and the state will fall
- of itself." The left-anarchist would probably accept this as
- a fair assessment of their disagreement with the Marxists,
- but point out how in many historical cases since (and
- before) Marx's time governments have steered their countries
- towards very different aims and policies, whereas
- capitalists are often fairly adaptive and passive.
-
- c. The minarchists' attack on anarcho-capitalism
-
- Probably the earliest minarchist attack on anarcho-
- capitalism may be found in Ayn Rand's essay "The
- Nature of Government." ("Minarchism" designates the advocacy
- of a "minimal" or nightwatchman state, supplying only
- police, courts, a legal system, and national defense.) Her
- critique contained four essential arguments. The first
- essentially repeated Hobbes' view that society without
- government would collapse into violent chaos. The second was
- that anarcho-capitalist police firms would turn to war as
- soon as a dispute broke out between individuals employing
- different protection agencies: "[S]uppose Mr. Smith, a
- customer of Government A, suspects that his next-door
- neighbor, Mr. Jones, a customer of Government B, has robbed
- him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr. Jones' house and is
- met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that
- they do not recognize the authority of Government A. What
- happens then? You take it from there." Her third argument
- was that anarcho-capitalism was an expression of an
- irrational subjectivist epistemology which would allow each
- person to decide for himself or herself whether the use of
- physical force was justified. Finally, her fourth argument
- was that anarcho-capitalism would lack an objective legal
- code (meaning, presumably, both publicly known and morally
- valid).
-
- Rand's arguments were answered at length in Roy
- Childs' "Objectivism and the State: An Open Letter
- to Ayn Rand," which tried to convince her that only the
- anarcho-capitalist position was consistent with her view
- that the initiation of force was immoral. In brief, Childs
- argued that like other free-market institutions, private
- police would have economic incentives to perform their tasks
- peacefully and efficiently: police would negotiate
- arbitration agreements in advance precisely to avoid the
- kind of stand-off that Rand feared, and an objective legal
- code could be developed by free-market judges. Childs
- strongly contested Rand's claim that anarcho-capitalism had
- any relation to irrationalism; an individual could be
- rational or irrational in his judgment to use defensive
- violence, just as a government could be rational or
- irrational in its judgment to do so. As Childs queried, "By
- what epistemological criterion is an individual's action
- classified as 'arbitrary,' while that of a group of
- individuals is somehow 'objective'?"
-
- Robert Nozick launched the other famous attempt to
- refute the anarcho-capitalist on libertarian
- grounds. Basically, Nozick argued that the supply of police
- and legal services was a geographic natural monopoly, and
- that therefore a state would emerge by the "invisible hand"
- processes of the market itself. The details of his argument
- are rather complex: Nozick postulated a right, strongly
- contested by other libertarians, to prohibit activities
- which were exceptionally risky to others; he then added that
- the persons whose actions were so prohibited were entitled
- to compensation. Using these two principles, Nozick claimed
- that the dominant protection agency in a region could
- justifiably prohibit competition on the grounds that it was
- "too risky," and therefore become an "ultra-minimal state."
- But at this point, it would be obligated to compensate
- consumers who were prohibited from purchasing competitors'
- services, so it would do so in kind by giving them access to
- its own police and legal services -- thereby becoming a
- minimal state. And none of these steps, according to Nozick,
- violates libertarian rights.
-
- There have been literally dozens of anarchist attacks on
- Nozick's derivation of the minimal state. To begin with, no
- state arose in the manner Nozick describes, so all existing
- states are illegitimate and still merit abolition. Secondly,
- anarcho-capitalists dispute Nozick's assumption that defense
- is a natural monopoly, noting that the modern security guard
- and arbitration industries are extremely decentralized and
- competitive. Finally, they reject Nozick's principles of
- risk and compensation, charging that they lead directly to
- the despotism of preventive law.
-
- d. The conservative critique of anarchism
-
- The conservative critique of anarchism is much less
- developed, but can be teased out of the writings of
- such authors as Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and Ernest van
- den Haag. (Interestingly, Burke scholars are still debating
- whether the early Burke's quasi-anarchistic A Vindication of
- Natural Society was a serious work or a subtle satire.)
-
- Burke would probably say that, like other radical
- ideologues, the anarchists place far too much reliance on
- their imperfect reason and not enough on the accumulated
- wisdom of tradition. Society functions because we have
- gradually evolved a system of workable rules. It seems
- certain that Burke would apply his critique of the French
- revolutionaries with equal force to the anarchists: "They
- have no respect for the wisdom of others; but they pay it
- off by a very full measure of confidence in their own. With
- them it is a sufficient motive to destroy an old scheme of
- things, because it is an old one. As to the new, they are in
- no sort of fear with regard to the duration of a building
- run up in haste; because duration is no object to those who
- think little or nothing has been done before their time, and
- who place all their hopes in discovery." To attempt to
- replace the wisdom of the ages with a priori theories of
- justice is sure to lead to disaster, because functional
- policies must be judicious compromises between important
- competing ends. Or in Burke's words, "The science of
- constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming
- it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be
- taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can
- instruct us in that practical science; because the real
- effects of moral causes are not always immediate." The
- probable result of any attempt to realize anarchist
- principles would be a brief period of revolutionary zeal,
- followed by chaos and social breakdown resulting from the
- impracticality of the revolutionary policies, and finally
- ending in a brutal dictator winning widespread support by
- simply restoring order and rebuilding the people's sense of
- social stability.
-
- Many anarchists would in fact accept Burke's critique of
- violent revolution, which is why they favor advancing their
- views gradually through education and nonviolent protest. In
- fact, Bakunin's analysis of Marxism as the ideology (i.e.,
- rationalization for the class interests of) middle-class
- intellectuals in fact differs little from Burke's analysis:
- Bakunin, like Burke, perceived that no matter how oppressive
- the current system may be, there are always power-hungry
- individuals who favor violent revolution as their most
- practical route to absolute power. Their protests against
- actual injustices must be seen in light of their ultimate
- aim of imposing even more ruthless despotism upon the
- people.
-
- On other issues, anarchists would disagree strongly with
- several of Burke's claims. Many forms of misery stem from
- the blind adherence to tradition; and rational thinking has
- sparked countless improvements in human society ever since
- the decline of traditional despotism. Moreover, anarchists
- do not propose to do away with valuable traditions, but
- simply request evidence that particular traditions are
- valuable before they lend them their support. And what is to
- be done when -- as is usually the case -- a society harbors
- a wide range of mutually incompatible traditions?
-
- Anarchists might also object that the Burkean analysis
- relies too heavily upon tradition as a result rather than a
- process. Cultural evolution may constantly weed out foolish
- ideas and practices, but it hardly follows that such follies
- have already perished; for the state to defend tradition is
- to strangle the competitive process which tends to make
- tradition sensible. As Vincent Cook explains: "[I]t is
- precisely because wisdom has to be accumulated in
- incremental steps that it cannot be centrally planned by any
- single political or religious authority, contrary to the
- aspirations of conservatives and collectivists alike. While
- the collectivists are indeed guilty of trying to
- rationalistically reconstruct society in defiance of
- tradition (a valid criticism of left-anarchists),
- conservatives on the other hand are guilty of trying to
- freeze old traditions in place. Conservatives have forgotten
- that the process of wisdom accumulation is an on-going one,
- and instead have opted for the notion that some existing
- body of traditions (usually Judeo-Christian) already
- represent social perfection."
-
- Russell Kirk, noted Burke scholar, has written a
- brief critique of the modern libertarian movement.
- (Another conservative, Ernest van den Haag, wrote a
- lengthier essay with a similar theme and perspective.) In
- all likelihood, Kirk would apply many (but not all) of the
- same arguments to left-anarchists.
-
- Kirk faults the libertarians (and when he discusses
- "libertarians" he usually seems to have the anarcho-
- capitalists in mind) on at least six counts. First, they
- deny the existence of a "transcendent moral order." Second,
- order is prior to liberty, and liberty is possible only
- after government establishes a constitutional order. Third,
- libertarians assume that self-interest is the only possible
- social bond, ignoring the broader communitarian vision of
- human nature found in both the Aristotelian and Judeo-
- Christian traditions. Fourth, libertarians erroneously
- assume that human beings are naturally good or at least
- perfectible. Fifth, the libertarian foolishly attacks the
- state as such, rather than merely its abuses. Sixth and
- last, the libertarian is an arrogant egoist who disregards
- valuable ancient beliefs and customs.
-
- Left-anarchists would perhaps agree with Kirk on points
- three and six. So if Kirk were to expand his attack on
- anarchism to encompass the left-anarchists as well, he might
- acquit them of these two charges. The remaining four,
- however, Kirk would probably apply equally to anarchists of
- both varieties.
-
- How would anarchists reply to Kirk's criticisms? On the
- "moral transcendence" issue, they would point out there have
- been religious as well as non-religious anarchists; and
- moreover, many non-religious anarchists still embrace moral
- objectivism (notably anarchists in the broader natural law
- tradition). Most anarchists would deny that they make self-
- interest the only possible social bond; and even those who
- would affirm this (such as anarcho-capitalists influenced by
- Ayn Rand) have a broad conception of self-interest
- consistent with the Aristotelian tradition.
-
- As to the priority of order over liberty, many anarchists
- influenced by e.g. Kropotkin would reply that as with other
- animal species, order and cooperation emerge as a result,
- not a consequence of freedom; while anarcho- capitalists
- would probably refer Kirk to the theorists of "spontaneous
- order" such as Hayek, Hume, Smith, and even Edmund Burke
- himself.
-
- The FAQ addresses the questions of human perfectibility and
- utopianism in sections 20 and 21. As for Kirk's final point,
- most anarchists would reply that they happily accept
- valuable customs and traditions, but believe that they have
- shown that some ancient practices and institutions -- above
- all, the state --have no value whatever.
-
- e. "We are already in a state of anarchy."
-
- Under anarchy, it is conceivable that e.g. a brutal gang
- might use its superior might to coerce everyone else to do
- as they wish. With nothing more powerful than the gang,
- there would (definitionally) be nothing to stop them. But
- how does this differ from what we have now? Governments rule
- because they have the might to maintain their power; in
- short, because there is no superior agency to restrain them.
- Hence, reason some critics of anarchism, the goal of
- anarchists is futile because we are already in a state of
- anarchy.
-
- This argument is confused on several levels.
-
- First, it covertly defines anarchy as unrestrained rule of
- the strongest, which is hardly what most anarchists have in
- mind. (Moreover, it overlooks the definitional differences
- between government and other forms of organized aggression;
- Weber in particular noted that governments claim a monopoly
- over the legitimate use of force in a given geographical
- region.) In fact, while anarchism is logically compatible
- with any viewpoint which rejects the existence of the state,
- there have been extremely few (perhaps no) anarchists who
- combined their advocacy of anarchism with support for
- domination by those most skilled in violence.
-
- Second, it seems to assume that all that particular
- anarchists advocate is the abolition of the state; but as we
- have seen, anarchism is normally combined with additional
- normative views about what ought to replace the state. Thus,
- most anarchist theorists believe more than merely that the
- state should not exist; they also believe that e.g. society
- should be based upon voluntary communes, or upon strict
- private property rights, etc.
-
- Third, the argument sometimes confuses a definitional with a
- causal claim. It is one thing to argue that anarchy would
- lead to the rule by the strongest; this is a causal claim
- about the likely results of the attempt to create an
- anarchist society. It is another thing entirely to argue
- that anarchy means rule by the strongest. This is simply a
- linguistic confusion, best illustrated by noting that under
- this definition anarchy and the state are logically
- compatible.
-
- A related but more sophisticated argument, generally leveled
- against anarcho- capitalists, runs as follows. If competing
- protection agencies could prevent the establishment of an
- abusive, dominant firm, while don't they do so now? In
- short, if market checks against the abuse of power actually
- worked, we wouldn't have a state in the first place.
-
- There are two basic replies to this argument. First of all,
- it completely ignores the ideological factor. Anarcho-
- capitalists are thinking of how competing firms would
- prevent the rise of abusive protection monopolists in a
- society where most people don't support the existence of
- such a monopolist. It is one thing to suppress a "criminal
- firm" when it stands condemned by public opinion and the
- values internalized by that firm's employees; it is another
- thing entirely to suppress our current "criminal firms"
- (i.e., governments) when qua institution enjoy the
- overwhelming support of the populace and the state's
- enforcers believe in their own cause. When a governing class
- loses confidence in its own legitimacy -- from the Ancien
- Regime in France to the Communist Party in the USSR -- it
- becomes vulnerable and weak. Market checks on government
- could indeed establish an anarchist society if the
- self-confidence of the governing class were severely eroded
- by anarchist ideas.
-
- Secondly, the critique ignores the possibility of multiple
- social equilibria. If everyone drives on the right side of
- the road, isolated attempts to switch to the left side will
- be dangerous and probably unsuccessful. But if everyone
- drives on the left side of the road, the same danger exists
- for those who believe that the right side is superior and
- plan to act on their believe. Similarly, it is quite
- possible that given that a government exists, the existence
- of government is a stable equilibrium; but if a system of
- competitive protection firms existed, that too would be a
- stable equilibrium. In short, just because one equilibrium
- exists and is stable doesn't mean that it is the only
- possible equilibrium. Why then is the state so pervasive if
- it is just one possible equilibrium? The superiority of this
- equilibrium is one possible explanation; but it could also
- be due to ideology, or an inheritance from our barbarous
- ancestors.
-
- 12. What other anarchist viewpoints are there?
-
- There is definitely another strand of anarchist thought,
- although it is far vaguer and less propositional than the
- views thus far explicated. For some, "anarchist" is just a
- declaration of rebellion against rules and authority of any kind.
- There is little attempt made here to explain how society would
- work without government; and perhaps there is little conviction
- that it could do so. This sort of anarchism is more of an
- attitude or emotion -- a feeling that the corrupt world of today
- should go down in flames, without any definite view about what if
- anything would be preferable and possible. For want of a better
- term, I would call this "emotivist anarchism," whose most
- prominent exponent is almost certainly Max Stirner (although to
- be fair to Stirner he did briefly outline his vision for the
- replacement of existing society by a "Union of Egoists").
-
- For the emotivist anarchist, opposition to the state is just a
- special case of his or her opposition to almost everything: the
- family, traditional art, bourgeois culture, comfortable
- middle-aged people, the British monarchy, etc. This position,
- when articulated, is often difficult to understand, for it seems
- to seek destruction without any suggestion or argument that
- anything else would be preferable. Closely linked to emotivist
- anarchism, though sometimes a little more theoretical, is
- nihilist anarchism. The anarcho-nihilists combine the emotivist's
- opposition to virtually all forms of order with radical
- subjectivist moral and epistemological theory.
-
- To see Tracy Harms' criticism of my treatment of Stirner, egoism,
- and nihilism, click here.
-
- Related to emotivist anarchism is a second strand of less
- intellectual, more emotional anarchist thought. It has been
- called by some "moral anarchism." This view again feels that
- existing statist society is bad; but rather than lay out any
- comprehensive plans for its abolition, this sort of anarchist
- sticks to more immediate reforms. Anarchism of this sort is a
- kind of ideal dream, which is beautiful and inspiring to
- contemplate while we pursue more concrete aims.
-
- The emotivist anarchist often focuses on action and disdains
- theorizing. In contrast, another breed of anarchists, known as
- "philosophical anarchists," see few practical implications of
- their intellectual position. Best represented by Robert Paul
- Wolff, philosophical anarchism simply denies that the state's
- orders as such can confer any legitimacy whatever. Each
- individual must exercise his moral autonomy to judge right and
- wrong for himself, irrespective of the state's decrees. However,
- insofar as the state's decrees accord with one's private
- conscience, there is no need to change one's behavior. A position
- like Wolff's says, in essence, that the rational person cannot
- and must not offer the blind obedience to authority that
- governments often seem to demand; but this insight need not spark
- any political action if one's government's decrees are not
- unusually immoral.
-
- Yet another faction, strongly influenced by Leo Tolstoy, refer to
- themselves as "Christian anarchists." (Tolstoy avoided the term
- "anarchist," probably because of its association with violence
- and terrorism in the minds of contemporary Russians.) Drawing on
- the Gospels' themes of nonviolence and the equality of all human
- beings, these anarchists condemn government as contrary to
- Christian teaching. Tolstoy particularly emphasized the
- immorality of war, military service, and patriotism, challenging
- Christians to live up to the radical implications of their faith
- by withdrawing their support from all three of these evils.
- Tolstoy's essay "Patriotism, or Peace?" is particularly notable
- for its early attack upon nationalism and the bloodshed that
- usually accompanies it.
-
- Finally, many leftist and progressive movements have an anarchist
- interpretation and anarchist advocates. For example, a faction of
- feminists, calling themselves "anarcha- feminists" exists. The
- feminists, calling themselves "anarcha- feminists" exists. The
- Green and environmentalist movements also have strong
- anarchist wings which blend opposition to the state and
- defense of the environment. Their primary theoretician is
- probably Murray Bookchin, who (lately) advocates a society of
- small and fairly autarchic localities. As Bookchin explains, "the
- anarchist concepts of a balanced community, a face-to-face
- democracy, a humanistic technology and a decentralized society --
- these rich libertarian concepts -- are not only desirable, they
- are also necessary." Institutions such as the town meeting of
- classical democratic theory point the way to a radical
- reorganization of society, in which small environmentally
- concerned townships regularly meet to discuss and vote upon their
- communities' production and broader aims. Doubtlessly there are
- many other fusions between anarchism and progressive causes, and
- more spring up as new concerns develop.
-
- 13. What moral justifications have been offered for anarchism?
-
- Again, there are a great many answers which have been offered.
- Some anarchists, such as the emotivist and (paradoxically) the
- moral anarchists have little interest in high-level moral theory.
- But this has been of great interest to the more intellectual
- sorts of anarchists.
-
- One popular argument for anarchism is that it is the only way for
- true socialism to exist. State-socialism is unable to actually
- establish human equality; instead it simply creating a new ruling
- class. Bakunin prophetically predicted the results of socialists
- seizing control of the state when he wrote that the socialist
- elite would form a "new class" which would be "the most
- aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and contemptuous of all
- regimes." Elsewhere Bakunin wrote that "[F]reedom without
- Socialism is privilege and injustice, ... Socialism without
- freedom is slavery and brutality." Of course, socialism itself
- has been defended on both deontological and utilitarian grounds,
- and there is no need to repeat these here.
-
- On the other hand, anarcho-capitalists have argued that only
- under anarchism can the Lockean rights to person and property so
- loudly championed by more moderate libertarians be fully
- respected. Any attempt to impose a monopolistic government
- necessarily prevents competing police and judicial services from
- providing a legitimate service; moreover, so long as government
- exists taxation will persist. The government's claim to defend
- private property is thus quite ironic, for the state, in
- Rothbard's words, is "an institution that presumes to 'defend'
- person and property by itself subsisting on the unilateral
- coercion against private property known as taxation." Other
- anarcho- capitalists such as David Friedman find these arguments
- from natural Lockean rights unconvincing, and instead take up the
- task of trying to show that Adam Smith's utilitarian case for
- free-market capitalism applies just as well to free markets in
- defense services, making the state useless as well as dangerous.
-
- Still other anarchists, such as Lysander Spooner and Benjamin
- Tucker as well as Proudhon, have argued that anarchism would
- abolish the exploitation inherent in interest and rent simply by
- means of free competition. In their view, only labor income is
- legitimate, and an important piece of the case for anarchism is
- that without government-imposed monopolies, non-labor income
- would be driven to zero by market forces. It is unclear, however,
- if they regard this as merely a desirable side effect, or if they
- would reject anarchism if they learned that the predicted
- economic effect thereof would not actually occur. (Other
- individualist anarchists have argued that contrary to Spooner and
- Tucker, free banking would lead to a much lower rate of inflation
- than we experience today; that rent and interest are not due to
- "monopoly" but to scarcity of land and loanable funds; and that
- there is no moral distinction between labor and rental or
- interest income, all of which depend upon a mixture of scarcity,
- demand, luck, and effort.)
-
- A basic moral intuition that probably anarchists of all varieties
- share is simply that no one has the right to rule another person.
- The interpretation of "rulership," however, varies: left
- anarchists tend to see the employer-employee relationship as one
- of rulership, and anarcho-capitalists are often dubious of the
- claim that envisaged anarchists communes would be democratic and
- hence voluntary. A closely related moral intuition, again widely
- shared by all sorts of anarchists, is that each person should
- exercise personal autonomy, or self-rule. One should question
- authority, and make up one's mind for oneself rather than simply
- following the herd. Again, the interpretation of "personal
- autonomy" varies: the left-anarchist sees the employer-employee
- relationship as inherently violating personal autonomy, whereas
- the anarcho-capitalist is more likely to see personal autonomy
- disappearing in the commune or collective, regardless of how
- democratically they run themselves.
-
- 14. What are the major debates between anarchists? What are the
- recurring arguments?
-
- Without a doubt, the most repeated debate among modern anarchists
- is fought between the left-anarchists on one side and the
- anarcho-capitalists on the other. Of course, there are occasional
- debates between different left-anarchist factions, but probably
- most of them would be content with an anarchist society populated
- by some mixture of communes, worker-controlled firms, and
- cooperatives. And similarly there are a few internal debates
- between anarcho- capitalists, notably the tension between
- Rothbard's natural law anarcho-capitalism and David Friedman's
- more economistic anarcho-capitalism. But it is the debate between
- the left-anarchists and the anarcho-capitalists which is the most
- fundamental and the most acrimonious. There are many sub-debates
- within this wider genre, which we will now consider.
-
- a. "X is not 'true anarchism.'"
-
- One of the least fruitful of these sub-debates is the
- frequent attempt of one side to define the other out of
- existence ("You are not truly an anarchist, for anarchists
- must favor [abolition of private property, atheism,
- Christianity, etc.]") In addition to being a trivial issue,
- the factual supporting arguments are often incorrect. For
- example, despite a popular claim that socialism and
- anarchism have been inextricably linked since the inception
- of the anarchist movement, many 19th-century anarchists, not
- only Americans such as Tucker and Spooner, but even
- Europeans like Proudhon, were ardently in favor of private
- property (merely believing that some existing sorts of
- property were illegitimate, without opposing private
- property as such).
-
- As Benjamin Tucker wrote in 1887, "It will probably
- surprise many who know nothing of Proudhon save his
- declaration that 'property is robbery' to learn that he was
- perhaps the most vigorous hater of Communism that ever lived
- on this planet. But the apparent inconsistency vanishes when
- you read his book and find that by property he means simply
- legally privileged wealth or the power of usury, and not at
- all the possession by the laborer of his products."
-
- Nor did an ardent anarcho-communist like Kropotkin deny
- Proudhon or even Tucker the title of "anarchist." In his
- Modern Science and Anarchism, Kropotkin discusses not only
- Proudhon but "the American anarchist individualists who were
- represented in the fifties by S.P. Andrews and W. Greene,
- later on by Lysander Spooner, and now are represented by
- Benjamin Tucker, the well-known editor of the New York
- Liberty." Similarly in his article on anarchism for the 1910
- edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Kropotkin again
- freely mentions the American individualist anarchists,
- including "Benjamin Tucker, whose journal Liberty was
- started in 1881 and whose conceptions are a combination of
- those of Proudhon with those of Herbert Spencer."
-
- b. "Anarchism of variant X is unstable and will lead to the
- re-emergence of the state."
-
- A more substantive variation is to argue that the opposing
- anarchism would be unstable and lead to the swift re-
- emergence of government. Thus, the left-anarchists often
- argue that the defense corporations envisaged by anarcho-
- capitalists would war with one another until one came out as
- the new government; or else they would collude to establish
- themselves as the new capitalist oligarchs. As Noam Chomsky
- says in an interview with Ulrike Heider, "The predatory
- forces of the market would destroy society, would destroy
- community, and destroy the workforce. Nothing would be left
- except people hating each other and fighting each other."
- Anarcho-capitalists reply that this grossly underestimates
- the degree of competition likely to prevail in the defense
- industry; that war is likely to be very unprofitable and
- dangerous, and is more likely to be provoked by ideology
- than sober profit-maximization; and that economic theory and
- economic history show that collusion is quite difficult to
- maintain.
-
- Anarcho-capitalists for their part accuse the
- left-anarchists of intending to impose their communal vision
- upon everyone; since everyone will not go along voluntarily,
- a government will be needed to impose it. Lest we think that
- this argument is a recent invention, it is interesting to
- find that essentially this argument raged in the 19th-
- century anarchist movement as well. In John MacKay's The
- Anarchists, we see the essential dialogue between
- individualist and collectivist anarchism has a longer
- history than one might think:
-
- "Would you, in the system of society which you
- call 'free Communism' prevent individuals from
- exchanging their labor among themselves by means
- of their own medium of exchange? And further:
- Would you prevent them from occupying land for the
- purpose of personal use?"... [The] question was
- not to be escaped. If he answered "Yes!" he
- admitted that society had the right of control
- over the individual and threw overboard the
- autonomy of the individual which he had always
- zealously defended; if on the other hand he
- answered "No!" he admitted the right of private
- property which he had just denied so emphatically
- ... Then he answered "In Anarchy any number of men
- must have the right of forming a voluntary
- association, and so realizing their ideas in
- practice. Nor can I understand how any one could
- justly be driven from the land and house which he
- uses and occupies ... [E]very serious man must
- declare himself: for Socialism, and thereby for
- force and against liberty, or for Anarchism, and
- thereby for liberty and against force."
-
- There have been several left-anarchist replies. One is to
- readily agree that dissenters would have the right to not
- join a commune, with the proviso that they must not employ
- others or otherwise exploit them. Another is to claim that
- anarchism will change (or cease to warp) human attitudes so
- that they will be more communitarian and less
- individualistic. Finally, some argue that this is simply
- another sophistical argument for giving the rich and
- powerful the liberty to take away the liberty of everyone
- else.
-
- c. "In an anarchist society in which both systems X and Y
- existed, X would inevitably outcompete Y."
-
- Again, this argument has been made from several
- perspectives. Left-anarchists have argued that if workers
- had the genuine option to work for a capitalist employer, or
- else work for themselves in a worker cooperative, virtually
- all workers would choose the latter. Moreover, workers in a
- worker-managed firm would have higher morale and greater
- incentive to work hard compared with workers who just worked
- for the benefit of their employer. Hence, capitalists would
- be unable to pay their workers wages competitive with the
- wages of the labor-managed firm, and by force of competition
- would gradually vanish.
-
- Anarcho-capitalists find that the argument works in
- precisely the opposite direction. For what is a worker-owned
- firm if not a firm in which the workers jointly hold all of
- the stock? Now this is a peculiarly irrational portfolio to
- hold, because it means that workers would, in effect, put
- all their eggs in one basket; if their firm does well, they
- grow rich, but if their firm goes bankrupt, they lose
- everything. It would make much more sense for workers to
- exchange their shares in their own firm to buy shares in
- other firms in order to insure themselves against risk.
- Thus, the probable result of worker-owned firms with
- negotiable shares would be that workers would readily and
- advantageously sell off most of their shares in their own
- firm in order to diversify their portfolios. The end result
- is likely to be the standard form of capitalist
- organization, in which workers receive a fixed payment for
- their services and the owners of the firms' shares earn the
- variable profits. Of course, alienation of shares could be
- banned, but this appears to do nothing except force workers
- to live with enormous financial risk. None of this shows
- that worker-owned firms could not persist if the workers
- were so ideologically committed to worker control that their
- greater productivity outweighed the riskiness of the
- workers' situation; but anarcho-capitalists doubt very much
- that such intense ideology would prevail in more than a
- small portion of the population. Indeed, they expect that
- the egalitarian norms and security from dismissal that
- left-anarchists typically favor would grossly undermine
- everyone's incentive to work hard and kill abler workers'
- desire for advancement.
-
- Some anarcho-capitalists go further and argue that
- inequality would swiftly re-emerge in an anarcho-syndicalist
- economy. Workers would treat their jobs as a sort of
- property right, and would refuse to hire new workers on
- equal terms because doing so would dilute the current
- workers' shares in the firm's profits. The probable result
- would be that an elite class of workers in capital-intensive
- firms would exploit new entrants into the work force much as
- capitalists allegedly do today. As evidence, they point to
- existing "worker-controlled" firms such as law firms --
- normally they consist of two tiers of workers, one of which
- both works and owns the firm ("the partners"), while the
- remainder are simply employees ("the associates" as well as
- the secretaries, clerks, etc.)
-
- d. "Anarchism of type X would be worse than the state."
-
- To the left-anarchist, the society envisaged by the anarcho-
- capitalists often seems far worse than what we have now. For
- it is precisely to the inequality, exploitation, and tyranny
- of modern capitalism that they object, and rather than
- abolishing it the anarcho-capitalist proposes to unleash its
- worst features and destroy its safety net. Noam Chomsky, for
- instance, has suggested that anarcho-capitalists focus
- incorrectly on state domination, failing to recognize the
- underlying principle of opposition to all domination,
- including the employer-employee relationship. Overall, since
- anarcho-capitalism relies heavily on laissez-faire economic
- theory, and since left-anarchists see no validity to
- laissez-faire economic theory, it seems to the latter that
- anarcho-capitalism would be a practical disaster. Left-
- anarchists often equate anarcho-capitalism with social
- Darwinism and even fascism, arguing that the cruel idea of
- "survival of the fittest" underlies them all.
-
- The anarcho-capitalist, in turn, often suspects that the
- left- anarchist's world would be worse than the world of
- today. Under anarcho-capitalism, individuals would still
- have every right to voluntarily pool their property to form
- communes, worker-controlled firms, and cooperatives; they
- would simply be unable to force dissenters to join them.
- Since this fact rarely impresses the left-anarchist, the
- anarcho-capitalist often concludes that the left-anarchist
- will not be satisfied with freedom for his preferred
- lifestyle; he wants to force his communal lifestyle on
- everyone. Not only would this be a gross denial of human
- freedom, but it would (according to the anarcho-capitalist)
- be likely to have disastrous effects on economic incentives,
- and swiftly lead humanity into miserable poverty. The
- anarcho-capitalist is also frequently disturbed by the
- opposition to all order sometimes voiced by left-anarchists;
- for he feels that only coerced order is bad and welcomes the
- promotion of an orderly society by voluntary means.
- Similarly, the left-anarchists' occasional short time
- horizon, emphasis on immediate satisfaction, and low regard
- for work (which can be seen in a number of authors strongly
- influenced by emotivist anarchism) frighten the
- anarcho-capitalist considerably.
-
- e. Etc.
-
- A large number of arguments that go back and forth basically
- duplicate the standard socialist vs. capitalist debate. The
- need or lack thereof for incentives, security, equality,
- regulation, protection of the environment, and so on are
- debated extensively on other sources on the Net, and there
- are several FAQs which discuss these issues from a variety
- of viewpoints. FAQs on the broader libertarian movement are
- frequently posted on alt.individualism,
- alt.politics.libertarian, and talk.politics.libertarian.
- FAQs on socialism similarly appear from time to time on
- alt.politics.radical-left and alt.fan.noam-chomsky. Related
- FAQs sometimes appear on talk.politics.theory. Hence, we
- will spend no further space on these broader issues which
- are amply addressed elsewhere.
-
- 15. How would anarchists handle the "public goods" problem?
-
- Modern neoclassical (or "mainstream") economists -- especially
- those associated with theoretical welfare economics -- have
- several important arguments for the necessity or desirability of
- government. Out of all of these, the so-called "public goods"
- problem is surely the most frequently voiced. In fact, many
- academics consider it a rigorous justification for the existence
- and limits of the state. Anarcho-capitalists are often very
- familiar with this line of thought and spend considerable time
- trying to refute it; left- anarchists are generally less
- interested, but it is still useful to see how the left-anarchist
- might respond.
-
- We will begin by explaining the concept of Pareto
- optimality, show how the Pareto criterion is used to
- justify state action, and then examine how anarchists might
- object to the underlying assumptions of these economic
- justifications for the state. After exploring the general
- critique, we will turn to the problem of public goods (and the
- closely related externalities issue). After showing how many
- economists believe that these problems necessitate government
- action, we will consider how left-anarchists and
- anarcho-capitalists might reply.
-
- a. The concept and uses of Pareto optimality in economics
-
- The most widely-used concept in theoretical welfare
- economics is "Pareto optimality" (also known as "Pareto
- efficiency"). An allocation is Pareto-optimal iff it is
- impossible to make at least one person better off without
- making anyone else worse off; a Pareto improvement is a
- change in an allocation which makes someone better off
- without making anyone else worse off. As Hal Varian's
- Microeconomic Analysis explains, "[A] Pareto efficient
- allocation is one for which each agent is as well off as
- possible, given the utilities of the other agents." "Better"
- and "worse" are based purely upon subjective preferences
- which can be summarized in a "utility function," or ordinal
- numerical index of preference satisfaction.
-
- While initially it might seem that every situation is
- necessarily Pareto optimal, this is not the case. True, if
- the only good is food, and each agent wants as much food as
- possible, then every distribution is Pareto optimal. But if
- half of the agents own food and the other half own clothes,
- the distribution will not necessarily be Pareto optimal,
- since each agent might prefer either more food and fewer
- clothes or vice versa.
-
- Normally, economists would expect agents to voluntarily
- trade in any situation which is not Pareto optimal; but
- neoclassical theorists have considered a number of
- situations in which trade would be a difficult route to
- Pareto optimality. For example, suppose that each agent is
- so afraid of the other that they avoid each other, even
- though they could both benefit from interaction. What they
- need is an independent and powerful organization to e.g.
- protect both agents from each other so that they can reach a
- Pareto-optimal allocation. What they need, in short, is the
- state. While economists' examples are usually more
- elaborate, the basic intuition is that government is
- necessary to satisfy the seemingly uncontroversial principle
- of Pareto optimality.
-
- Anarchists of all sorts would immediately object that the
- very existence of deontological anarchists shows that Pareto
- optimality can never justify state action. If even the
- slightest increase in the level of state activity
- incompensably harms the deontological anarchist, then
- obviously it is never true that state action can make some
- people better off without making any others worse off.
- Moreover, virtually all government action makes some people
- better off and other people worse off, so plainly the
- pursuit of Pareto improvements has little to do with what
- real governments do.
-
- Due to these difficulties, in practice economists
- must base their judgments upon the far more
- controversial judgments of cost-benefit analysis. (In the
- works of Richard Posner, this economistic cost-benefit
- approach to policy decisions is called
- "wealth-maximization"; a common synonym is "Kaldor-Hicks
- efficiency.") With cost-benefit analysis, there is no
- pretense made that government policy enjoys unanimous
- approval. Thus, it is open to the many objections frequently
- made to e.g. utilitarianism; moreover, since cost-benefit
- analysis is based upon agents' willingness to pay, rather
- than on agents' utility, it runs into even more moral
- paradoxes than utilitarianism typically does.
-
- In the final analysis, welfare economists' attempt to
- provide a value-free or at least value-minimal justification
- of the state fails quite badly. Nevertheless, economic
- analysis may still inform more substantive moral theories:
- Pareto optimality, for example, is a necessary but not
- sufficient condition for a utilitarian justification of the
- state.
-
- b. The public goods problem
-
- The "public goods" argument is certainly the most popular
- economic argument for the state. It allegedly shows that the
- existence of government can be Pareto optimal, and that the
- non-existence of the state cannot be Pareto optimal; or at
- least, it shows that the existence of government is
- justifiable on cost-benefit grounds. Supposedly, there exist
- important services, such as national defense, which benefit
- people whether they pay for them or not. The result is that
- selfish agents refuse to contribute, leading to disaster.
- The only way to solve this problem is to coerce the
- beneficiaries to raise the funds to supply the needed good.
- In order for this coercion to work, it needs to be
- monopolized by a single agency, the state.
-
- Public goods arguments have been made not only for national
- defense, but for police, roads, education, R&D, scientific
- research, and many other goods and services. The essential
- definitional feature of public goods is "non-
- excludability"; because the benefits cannot be limited to
- contributors, there is no incentive to contribute. (A second
- definitional characteristic often attributed to public goods
- is "non-rivalrousness"; my own view is that this second
- attribute just confuses the issue, since without the non-
- excludability problem, non-rivalrousness would merely be
- another instance of the ubiquitous practice of pricing above
- marginal cost.)
-
- The concept of externalities is very closely connected to
- the concept of public goods; the main difference is that
- economists usually think of externalities as being both
- "positive" (e.g. R&D spill-overs) and "negative" (e.g.
- pollution), whereas they usually don't discuss "public
- bads." In any case, again we have the problem that agents
- perform actions which harm or benefit other people, and the
- harm/benefit is "non-excludable." Victims of negative
- externalities can't feasibly charge polluters a fee for
- suffering, and beneficiaries of positive externalities can't
- feasibly be charged for their enjoyment. Government is
- supposed to be necessary to correct this inefficiency. (As
- usual, it is the inefficiency rather than the injustice that
- economists focus upon.)
-
- Left-anarchists and anarcho-capitalists would probably have
- remarkably similar replies to this argument, although
- doubtlessly the tone and emphasis would vary.
-
- Objection #1: The behavorial assumptions of public goods
- theory are false.
-
- It is simply not true that people always act in their narrow
- self-interest. Charity exists, and there is no reason to
- think that the charitable impulse might not be cultivated to
- handle public goods problems voluntarily on an adequate
- basis. Nor need charity as such be the only motive: in
- Social Contract, Free Ride, Anthony de Jasay lays out an
- "ethics turnpike" of possible voluntary solutions to serious
- public goods problems, moving from motivation from high
- moral principles, to "tribal" motivations, to economic
- motivations. As de Jasay writes, "On the map of the Ethics
- Turnpike ... three main segments are marked off according to
- the basic type of person most likely to find his congenial
- exit along it. The first segment is primarily for the type
- who fears God or acts as if he did. The second segment has
- exits to suit those who are not indifferent to how some or
- all their fellow men are faring, and who value only that
- (but not all that) which people want for themselves or for
- others. The third is for homo oeconomicus, maximizing a
- narrowly defined utility that varies only with the money's
- worth of his own payoffs."
-
- In short, much of the public goods problem is an artificial
- creation of economists' unrealistic assumptions about human
- nature. Anarchists would surely disagree among themselves
- about human nature, but almost all would agree that there is
- more to the human character than Hobbesian self-interest.
- Some people may be amoral, but most are not. Moreover,
- charitable impulses can even give incentives to uncharitable
- people to behave fairly. If the public boycotts products of
- polluters, the polluters may find that it is cheaper to
- clean up their act than lose the public's business.
-
- Interestingly, many economists have experimentally tested
- the predictions of public goods theory. (Typically, these
- experiments involve groups of human subjects playing for
- real money.) The almost universal result is that the central
- prediction of public goods theory (i.e., that no one will
- voluntarily contribute to the production of a public good)
- is totally false. While the level of contributions rarely
- equals the Pareto-optimal level, it never even approaches
- the zero- provision level that public goods theory predicts.
- Summarizing the experimental literature, Douglas Davis and
- Charles Holt write "[S]ubjects rather persistently
- contributed 40 to 60 percent of their token endowments to
- the group exchange, far in excess of the 0 percent
- contributions rate..." Subsequent experiments examined the
- conditions under which voluntary provision is most
- successful; see Davis and Holt's Experimental Economics for
- details.
-
- Objection #2: Government is not the only possible way to
- provide public goods.
-
- Even if individuals act in their narrow self-interest, it is
- not true that government is the only way to manage public
- goods and externalities problems. Why couldn't a left-
- anarchist commune or an anarcho-capitalist police firm do
- the job that the neoclassical economist assumes must be
- delegated to the government? The left-anarchist would
- probably be particularly insistent on this point, since most
- economists usually assume that government and the market are
- the only ways to do things. But thriving, voluntary
- communities might build roads, regulate pollution, and take
- over other important tasks now handled by government.
-
- Anarcho-capitalists, for their part, would happily agree:
- while they usually look to the market as a first solution,
- they appreciate other kinds of voluntary organizations too:
- fraternal societies, clubs, family, etc. But
- anarcho-capitalists would probably note that left-anarchists
- overlook the ways that the market might take over government
- services -- indeed, malls and gated communities show how
- roads, security, and externalities can be handled by
- contract rather than coercion.
-
- Objection #3: Public goods are rarer than you might think.
-
- Anarcho-capitalists would emphasize that a large number of
- alleged "public goods" and "externalities" could easily be
- handled privately by for-profit business if only the
- government would allow the definition of private property
- rights. If ranchers over-graze the commons, why not
- privatize the commons? If fishermen over-fish the oceans,
- why not parcel out large strips of the ocean by longitude
- and latitude to for profit-making aquaculture? And why is
- education supposed to create externalities any more than any
- other sort of investment? Similarly, many sorts of
- externalities are now handled with private property rights.
- Tort law, for example, can give people an incentive to take
- the lives and property of others into account when they take
- risks.
-
- Objection #4: Externalities are a result of the
- profit-oriented mentality which would be tamed in an
- anarchist society.
-
- Left-anarchists would emphasize that many externalities are
- caused by the profit-seeking system which the state
- supports. Firms pollute because it is cheaper than producing
- cleanly; but anarcho-syndicalist firms could pursue many
- aims besides profit. In a way, the state- capitalist system
- creates the problem of externalities by basing all decisions
- upon profit, and then claims that we need the state to
- protect us from the very results of this profit-oriented
- decision-making process.
-
- While few left-anarchists are familiar with the experimental
- economics literature, it offers some support for this
- general approach. In particular, many experiments have shown
- that subjects' concern for fairness weakens many of the
- harsh predictions of standard economic analysis of
- externalities and bargaining.
-
- Objection #5: The public goods problem is unavoidable.
-
- Perhaps most fundamentally: government is not a
- solution to the public goods problem, but rather the
- primary instance of the problem. If you create a government
- to solve your public goods problems, you merely create a new
- public goods problem: the public good of restraining and
- checking the government from abusing its power. "[I]t is
- wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to
- the constitution of the government, that the crown is not as
- oppressive in England as in Turkey," wrote Thomas Paine; but
- what material incentive is there for individuals to help
- develop a vigilant national character? After all, surely it
- is a rare individual who appreciably affects the national
- culture during his or her lifetime.
-
- To rely upon democracy as a counter-balance simply assumes
- away the public goods problem. After all, intelligent,
- informed voting is a public good; everyone benefits if the
- electorate reaches wise political judgments, but there is no
- personal, material incentive to "invest" in political
- information, since the same result will (almost certainly)
- happen whether you inform yourself or not. It should be no
- surprise that people know vastly more about their jobs than
- about their government. Many economists seem to be aware of
- this difficulty; in particular, public choice theory in
- economics emphasizes the externalities inherent in
- government action. But a double standard persists: while
- non-governmental externalities must be corrected by the
- state, we simply have to quietly endure the externalities
- inherent in political process.
-
- Since there is no incentive to monitor the government,
- democracies must rely upon voluntary donations of
- intelligence and virtue. Because good government depends
- upon these voluntary donations, the public goods argument
- for government falls apart. Either unpaid virtue can make
- government work, in which case government isn't necessary to
- solve the public goods problem; or unpaid virtue is
- insufficient to make government work, in which case the
- government cannot be trusted to solve the public goods
- problem.
-
- David Friedman has a particularly striking argument
- which goes one step further. Under governmental
- institutions, he explains, good law is a public good and bad
- law is a private good. That is, there is little direct
- personal incentive to lobby for laws that benefit everyone,
- but a strong personal incentive to lobby for laws that
- benefit special interests at the expense of everyone else.
- In contrast, under anarcho-capitalist institutions, good law
- is a private good and bad law is a public good. That is, by
- patronizing a firm which protects oneself, one reinforces
- the existence of socially beneficial law; but there is
- little incentive to "lobby" for the re-introduction of
- government. As Friedman explains, "Good law is still
- expensive - I must spend time and money determining which
- protection agency will best serve me - but having decided
- what I want, I get what I pay for. The benefit of my wise
- purchase goes to me, so I have an incentive to purchase
- wisely. It is now the person who wishes to reintroduce
- government who is caught in a public goods problem. He
- cannot abolish anarchy and reintroduce government for
- himself alone; he must do it for everyone or for no one. If
- he does it for everyone, he himself gets but a tiny fraction
- of the 'benefit' he expects the reintroduction of government
- to provide."
-
- 16. Are anarchists pacifists?
-
- Again, this is a complicated question because "pacifism" has at
- least two distinct meanings. It may mean "opposition to all
- violence," or it may mean "opposition to all war (i.e., organized
- violent conflict between governments)." Some anarchists are
- pacifists in the first sense; a very large majority of anarchists
- are pacifists in the weaker, second sense.
-
- a. Tolstoyan absolute pacifism
-
- The primary anarchistic inspiration for pacifism in
- the first sense is probably Leo Tolstoy. Drawing his
- themes from the Gospels, Tolstoy argued that violence is
- always wrong, including defensive violence. This naturally
- leads Tolstoy to bitterly denounce warfare as well, but what
- is distinctive here is opposition to violence as such,
- whether offensive or defensive. Moreover, the stricture
- against defensive violence would appear to rule out not only
- retribution against criminals, but self-defense against an
- imminent attack.
-
- This Tolstoyan theme appears most strongly in the writings
- of Christian anarchists and pacifist anarchists, but it pops
- up quite frequently within the broader left-anarchist
- tradition. For example, Kropotkin looked upon criminals with
- pity rather than contempt, and argued that love and
- forgiveness rather than punishment was the only moral
- reaction to criminal behavior. With the self-described
- Christian and pacifist anarchists, the Tolstoyan position is
- a firm conviction; within the broader left-anarchist
- tradition, it would be better described as a tendency or
- general attitude.
-
- Some left-anarchists and virtually all anarcho-capitalists
- would strongly disagree with Tolstoy's absolute opposition
- to violence. (The only anarcho-capitalist to ever indicate
- agreement with the Tolstoyan position was probably Robert
- LeFevre.) Left-anarchist critics include the advocates of
- revolutionary terrorism or "propaganda by the deed"
- (discussed in section 22), as well as more moderate anti-
- Tolstoyans who merely uphold the right to use violence for
- self-defense. Of course, their definition of "self-defense"
- might very well include using violence to hinder immoral
- state actions or the functioning of the capitalist system.
-
- The anarcho-capitalist critique of Tolstoyan pacifism is
-
- distinguishes between initiatory force against person or
- property (which he views as wrong), and retaliatory force
- (which he views as acceptable and possibly meritorious). The
- anarcho-capitalist condemns the state precisely because it
- institutionalizes the initiation of force within society.
- Criminals do the same, differing only in their lack of
- perceived legitimacy. In principle, both "private" criminals
- and the "public" criminals who run the government may be
- both resisted and punished. While it may be imprudent or
- counter-productive to openly resist state authority (just as
- it might be foolish to resist a gang of well- armed
- mobsters), there is a right to do so.
-
- b. Pacifism as opposition to war
-
- Almost all anarchists, in contrast, would agree in their
- condemnation of warfare, i.e., violent conflict between
- governments. Left-anarchists and anarcho-capitalists both
- look upon wars as grotesque struggles between ruling elites
- who treat the lives of "their own" people as expendable and
- the lives of the "other side's" people as worthless. It is
- here that anarchism's strong distinction between society and
- the state becomes clearest: whereas most people see war as a
- struggle between societies, anarchists think that war is
- actually a battle between governments which greatly harms
- even the society whose government is victorious. What is
- most pernicious about nationalist ideology is that is makes
- the members of society identify their interests with those
- of their government, when in fact their interests are not
- merely different but in conflict. In short, anarchists of
- both sorts would readily accede to Randolph Bourne's remark
- that "War is the health of the state."
-
- Left-anarchists' opposition to war is quite similar
- to the general condemnation of war expressed by more
- mainstream international socialists. On this view, war is
- created by capitalism, in particular the struggle for access
- to markets in the Third World. "Workingmen have no country"
- and should refuse to support these intra-capitalist
- struggles; why should they pay the dire cost of war when
- victory will merely leave them more oppressed and exploited
- than before? Moreover, while Western democracies often
- advocate war in the name of justice and humanitarianism, the
- aim and/or end result is to defend traditional
- authoritarianism and destroy the lives of millions of
- innocent people. Within the Western democracies, the left-
- anarchist's hatred for war is often intensified by some
- sense of sympathy for indigenous revolutionary movements.
- While these movements are often state-socialist in intent,
- the left- anarchist often believes that these movements are
- less bad than the traditional authoritarianism against which
- they struggle. Moreover, the West's policy of propping up
- local dictators leads relatively non-authoritarian socialist
- movements to increasing degrees of totalitarianism. Noam
- Chomsky is almost certainly the most influential
- representative of the left-anarchist approach to foreign
- policy: He sees a consistent pattern of the United States
- proclaiming devotion to human rights while supporting
- dictatorships by any means necessary.
-
- The anarcho-capitalist critique of war is similar in many
- ways to e.g. Chomsky's analysis, but has a different lineage
- and emphasis. As can be seen particularly in Murray
- Rothbard's writings, the anarcho-capitalist view of war
- draws heavily upon both the anti-war classical liberals of
- the 18th and 19th centuries, and the long-standing American
- isolationist tradition. Early classical liberal theorists
- such as Adam Smith,Richard Cobden, and John Bright (and
- later Norman Angell) argued that warfare was caused by
- mercantilism, by the prevailing alliance between governments
- and their favored business elites. The solution, in their
- view, was to end the incestuous connection between business
- and government. The American isolationists were probably
- influenced by this broader classical liberal tradition, but
- placed more emphasis on the idea that foreign wars were at
- best a silly distraction, and at worst a rationalization for
- tyranny. Both views argued that "balance of power" politics
- lead inevitably to endless warfare and unrestrained military
- spending.
-
- Building upon these two interrelated traditions, anarcho-
- capitalists have built a multi-layered attack upon warfare.
- Firstly, modern war particularly deserves moral condemnation
- (according to libertarian rights theory) for the widespread
- murderous attacks upon innocent civilians -- whether by bomb
- or starvation blockade. Secondly, the wars waged by the
- Western democracies in the 20th- century had disastrous,
- unforeseen consequences: World War I paved the way for
- Communist, fascist, and Nazi totalitarianism; and World War
- II, by creating power vacuums in Europe and Asia, turned
- over a billion human beings to Stalinist despotism. The
- anarcho-capitalist sees these results as predictable rather
- than merely accidental: just as rulers' hubris leads them to
- try to improve the free- market economy, only to find that
- in their ignorance they have wrecked terrible harm, so too
- does the "fatal conceit" of the national security advisor
- lead Western democracies to spend billions of dollars and
- millions of lives before he finds that he has inadvertently
- paved the way for totalitarianism. The anarcho-capitalist's
- third point against war is that its only sure result is to
- aid the domestic expansion of state power; and predictably,
- when wars end, the state's power never contracts to its
- original limits.
-
- 17. Have there been any historical examples of anarchist societies?
-
- There have probably been no societies which fully satisfy any
- anarchists' ethical ideals, but there have been a number of
- suggestive examples.
-
- Left-anarchists most often cite the anarchist communes of the
- Spanish Civil War as examples of viable anarchist societies. The
- role of the Spanish anarchists in the Spanish Civil War has
- perhaps generated more debate on alt.society.anarchy than any
- other historical issue. Since this FAQ is concerned primarily
- with theoretical rather than purely historical questions, the
- reader will have to search elsewhere for a detailed discussion.
- Suffice it to say that left-anarchists generally believe that:
- (a) The Spanish anarchist political organizations and unions
- began and remained democratic throughout the war; (b) That a
- majority of the citizenry in areas controlled by the anarchists
- was sympathetic to the anarchist movement; (c) That workers
- directly controlled factories and businesses that they
- expropriated, rather than being subject to strict control by
- anarchist leaders; and (d) That the farm collectives in the
- anarchist-controlled regions were largely voluntary, and rarely
- exerted coercive pressure against small farmers who refused to
- join. In contrast, anarcho-capitalist critics such as James
- Donald normally maintain that: (a) The Spanish anarchist
- political organizations and unions, even if they were initially
- democratic, quickly transformed into dictatorial oligarchies with
- democratic trappings once the war started; (b) That the Spanish
- anarchists, even if they initially enjoyed popular support,
- quickly forfeited it with their abuse of power; (c) That in many
- or most cases, "worker" control meant dictatorial control by the
- anarchist elite; and (d) That the farm collectivizations in
- anarchist-controlled regions were usually coercively formed,
- totalitarian for their duration, and marked by a purely nominal
- right to remain outside the collective (since non-joining farmers
- were seriously penalized in a number of ways). For a reply to
- James Donald's piece, click here.
-
- For my own account of the controversy regarding the Spanish
- Anarchists, see The Anarcho-Statists of Spain: An Historical,
- Economic, and Philosophical Analysis of Spanish Anarchism. For a
- reply to my piece, click here.
-
- Israeli kibbutzim have also been admired as working examples of
- voluntary socialism. Kropotkin and Bakunin held up the mir, the
- traditional communal farming system in rural Russia, as
- suggestive of the organization and values which would be
- expressed in an anarchist society. Various experimental
- communities have also laid claim to socialist anarchist
- credentials.
-
- Anarcho-capitalists' favorite example, in contrast, is medieval
- Iceland. David Friedman has written extensively on the
- competitive supply of defense services and anarchistic character
- of a much-neglected period of Iceland's history. Left-anarchists
- have occasionally criticized Friedman's work on medieval Iceland,
- but overall this debate is much sketchier than the debate over
- the Spanish Civil War. See Is Medieval Iceland an example of
- "anarcho"-capitalism working in practice?; for David Friedman's
- reply to an earlier draft of this piece , click here.
-
- A long stretch of medieval Irish history has also been claimed to
- have pronounced anarcho-capitalist features. Other
- anarcho-capitalists have argued that the American "Wild West"
- offers an excellent illustration of anarcho-capitalist
- institutions springing up only to be later suppressed and crowded
- out by government. Anarcho- capitalists also often note that
- while the United States has never been an anarchist society by
- any stretch of the imagination, that before the 20th-century the
- United States came closer to their pure laissez-faire ideals than
- any other society in history. America's colonial and
- revolutionary period especially interests them. Murray Rothbard
- in particular published a four-volume history of the colonial and
- revolutionary eras, finding delight in a brief period of
- Pennsylvania's history when the state government virtually
- dissolved itself due to lack of interest. (An unpublished fifth
- volume in the series defended the "weak" Articles of the
- Confederation against the strong, centralized state established
- by the U.S. Constitution.)
-
- One case that has inspired both sorts of anarchists is that of
- the free cities of medieval Europe. The first weak link in the
- chain of feudalism, these free cities became Europe's centers of
- economic development, trade, art, and culture. They provided a
- haven for runaway serfs, who could often legally gain their
- freedom if they avoided re-capture for a year and a day. And they
- offer many examples of how people can form mutual-aid
- associations for protection, insurance, and community. Of course,
- left-anarchists and anarcho-capitalists take a somewhat different
- perspective on the free cities: the former emphasize the
- communitarian and egalitarian concerns of the free cities, while
- the latter point to the relatively unregulated nature of their
- markets and the wide range of services (often including defense,
- security, and legal services) which were provided privately or
- semi-privately. Kropotkin's Mutual Aid contains an extensive
- discussion of the free cities of medieval Europe;
- anarcho-capitalists have written less on the subject, but
- strongly praise the historical treatments in Henri Pirenne's
- Medieval Cities and Harold Berman's Law and Revolution.
-
- The Enclopedia Brittanica article on Anarchism gives at best a
- cursory summary of anarchist theory, but does contain useful
- information on the history of left-anarchist political and labor
- movements. Click here to view the article.
-
- 18. Isn't anarchism utopian?
-
- Utopianism is perhaps the most popular criticism made of
- anarchism. In an atypically uncharitable passage in his European
- Socialism, socialist historian Carl Landauer states:
-
- There is certainly one truth in anarchistic beliefs:
- Every large organization contains an element of veiled
- or open force, and every kind of force is an evil, if
- we consider its effects on the human character. But is
- it not the lesser evil? Can we dispense with force?
- When this question is clearly put, the case for
- anarchism seems extremely weak. It is true, that the
- experiment of an entirely forceless society have never
- been made. But such evidence as we have does not
- indicate that ill intentions will cease to exist if
- repressive force disappears, and it is clear enough
- that one ill-intentioned person can upset a large part
- of society if there is no repressive force. The fact
- that some intelligent and highly idealistic men and
- women have believed and still believe in anarchism
- shows that there is a type of sectarianism which
- accepts a belief in spite of, or perhaps because of,
- its apparent absurdity.
-
- As we have seen, however, virtually all anarcho-capitalists and
- many left-anarchists accept the use of force in some
- circumstances. Landauer's remark would be better directed at
- absolute pacifists rather than anarchists in general.
-
- Anarchists' supposed unwillingness to use force in any
- circumstance is only one reason why they have been widely
- perceived as utopian. Sometimes the utopian charge is trivial;
- if, for example, any radical change is labelled "utopian." If on
- the other hand "utopian" simply means that anarchism could work
- if and only if all people were virtuous, and thus in practice
- would lead to the imposition of new forms of oppression, then the
- question is more interesting. Interesting, because this is more
- or less the charge that different types of anarchists frequently
- bring against each other.
-
- To the left-anarchist, for example, anarcho-capitalism is based
- upon a truly fantastic picture of economics, in which free
- competition somehow leads to prosperity and freedom for all. To
- them, the anarcho-capitalists' vision of "economic harmonies" and
- the workings of the "invisible hand" are at best unlikely, and
- probably impossible. Hence, in a sense they accuse the
- anarcho-capitalists of utopianism.
-
- The anarcho-capitalists charge the left-anarchists similarly. For
- the latter imagine that somehow a communitarian society could
- exist without forcible repression of dissenting individualists;
- think that incentives for production would not be impaired by
- enforced equality; and confusedly equate local democracy with
- freedom. Moreover, they generally have no explanation for how
- crime would be prevented or what safeguards would prevent the
- rise of a new ruling elite. For the anarcho-capitalist, the
- left-anarchist is again hopelessly utopian.
-
- But in any case, probably most anarchists would offer a similar
- reply to the charge that they are utopians. Namely: what is truly
- utopian is to imagine that somehow the government can hold
- massive power without turning it to monstrous ends. As Rothbard
- succinctly puts it: "the man who puts all the guns and all the
- decision-making power into the hands of the central government
- and then says, 'Limit yourself'; it is he who is truly the
- impractical utopian." Is not the whole history of the 20th
- century an endless list of examples of governments easily
- breaking the weak bonds placed upon their ability to oppress and
- even murder as they see fit?
-
- 19. Don't anarchists assume that all people are innately virtuous?
-
- This is a perfectly reasonable question, for it is indeed the
- case that some anarchists expect a remarkable change in human
- nature to follow (or precede?) the establishment of an anarchist
- society. This assumption partially explains the frequent lack of
- explanation of how an anarchist society would handle crime,
- dissenting individualists, and so on.
-
- The belief in innate human virtue is normally found only among
- left-anarchist thinkers, but of course it does not follow, nor is
- it true, that all left-anarchist thinkers believe in humanity's
- innate human virtue.
-
- Anarcho-capitalists have a very different picture of human
- nature. While they normally believe that people have a strong
- capacity for virtuous action (and it is to people's moral sense
- that they frequently appeal when they favor the abolition of the
- state), they believe that it is wise and necessary to cement
- moral virtue with material incentives. Capitalism's system of
- unequal wages, profits and losses, rent and interest, is not only
- morally justified but vitally necessary for the preservation and
- expansion of the economy. In short, anarcho-capitalists believe
- in and indeed must depend on some reasonable level of human
- morality, but prefer to rely on material incentives when
- feasible. (Similarly, they morally condemn crime and believe that
- most people have no desire to commit crimes, but strongly favor
- some sort of criminal justice system to deter the truly amoral.)
-
- 20. Aren't anarchists terrorists?
-
- Aren't statists terrorists? Well, some of the them are; in fact,
- the overwhelming majority of non-governmental groups who murder
- and destroy property for political aims believe that government
- ought to exist (and that they ought to run it). And just as the
- existence of such statist terrorists is a poor argument for
- anarchism, the existence of anarchist terrorists is a poor
- argument against anarchism. For any idea whatever, there will
- always be those who advocate advancing it by violence.
-
- It is however true that around the turn of the century, a certain
- segment of anarchists advocated what they called "propaganda by
- the deed." Several heads of state were assassinated by
- anarchists, along with businessmen, industrialists,
- stock-brokers, and so on. One of the most famous instances was
- when the young Alexander Berkman tried to murder the steel
- industrialist Henry Frick. During this era, the left-anarchists
- were divided as to the permissibility of terrorism; but of course
- many strongly opposed it. And individualist anarchists such as
- Benjamin Tucker almost always saw terrorist activities as both
- counter-productive and immoral when innocents were injured (as
- they often were).
-
- The basic argument of the advocates of "propaganda by the deed"
- was that anarchist terrorism would provoke governments -- even
- avowedly liberal and democratic governments -- to resort to
- increasingly harsh measures to restore order. As governments'
- ruthlessness increased, their "true colors" would appear for all
- to see, leading to more immediate results than mere education and
- theorizing. As E.V. Zenker notes in his Anarchism: A Criticism
- and History of the Anarchist Theory, a number of Western
- governments were driven to adopt anti-terrorist laws as a result
- of anarchist terrorism. (Zenker goes on to note that Great
- Britain remained true to its liberal heritage by refusing to
- punish individuals merely for espousing anarchist ideas.) But as
- one might expect, contrary to the terrorists' hopes, it was the
- reputation of anarchism -- peaceful and violent alike -- which
- suffered rather than the reputation of the state.
-
- Undoubtedly the most famous modern terrorist in the tradition of
- "propaganda by the deed" is the so-called Unabomber, who
- explicitly labels himself an anarchist in his now-famous
- manifesto. In his manifesto, the Unabomber makes relatively
- little attempt to link himself to any particular figures in the
- anarchist tradition, but professes familiarity and general
- agreement with the anarchistic wing of the radical
- environmentalist movement. A large proportion of this
- wide-ranging manifesto criticizes environmentalists' cooperation
- with socialists, minority rights activists, and other broadly
- left-wing groups; the point of this criticism is not of course to
- propose an alliance with conservatives, but to reject alliance
- with people who fail to reject technology as such. The more
- positive portion of the manifesto argues that freedom and
- technology are inherently incompatible, and outlines a program
- for the destruction of both modern industry and the scientific
- knowledge necessary to sustain it.
-
- The large majority of anarchists -- especially in modern
- times -- fervently oppose the killing of innocents on
- purely moral grounds (just as most non-anarchists presumably do,
- though anarchists would often classify those killed in war as
- murder victims of the state). Nonviolence and pacifism now
- inspire far more anarchist thinkers than visions of random
- terror. Anarchists from many different perspectives have been
- inspired by the writings of the 16th-century Frenchman Etienne de
- la Boetie, whose quasi-anarchistic The Discourse of Voluntary
- Servitude spelled out a detailed theory of nonviolent revolution.
- La Boetie explained that since governments depend upon the
- widespread belief in their legitimacy in order to rule, despotism
- could be peacefully overthrown by refusing to cooperate with the
- state. Henry David Thoreau influenced many nonviolent protest
- movements with a similar theme in "On the Duty of Civil
- Disobedience." As Thoreau put it: "If the alternative is to keep
- all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State
- will not hesitate which to choose." The success of the nonviolent
- anti-communist revolutions lends new support to the tactical
- insight of la Boetie and Thoreau.
-
- But anarchists have a more instrumental reason to oppose the use
- of violence. Terrorism has been very effective in establishing
- new and more oppressive regimes; but it is nearly impossible to
- find any instance where terrorism led to greater freedom. For the
- natural instinct of the populace is to rally to support its
- government when terrorism is on the rise; so terrorism normally
- leads to greater brutality and tighter regulation by the existing
- state. And when terrorism succeeds in destroying an existing
- government, it merely creates a power vacuum without
- fundamentally changing anyone's mind about the nature of power.
- The predictable result is that a new state, worse than its
- predecessor, will swiftly appear to fill the void. Thus, the
- importance of using nonviolent tactics to advance anarchist ideas
- is hard to overstate.
-
- 21. How might an anarchist society be achieved?
-
- On one level, most modern anarchists agree fully that
- education and persuasion are the most effective way to
- move society towards their ultimate destination. There is the
- conviction that "ideas matter"; that the state exists because
- most people honestly and firmly believe that the state is just,
- necessary, and beneficial, despite a few drawbacks. Winston
- Churchill famously remarked that, "It has been said that
- democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others
- that have been tried." The anarchist's goal is to disprove
- Churchill's claim: to show that contrary to popular belief,
- Western democracy is not only bad but inferior to a very
- different but realistic alternative.
-
- Aside from this, the similarity between anarchist approaches
- breaks down. In particular, what should the "transitional" phase
- look like? Anarcho-capitalists generally see every reduction in
- government power and activity as a step in the right direction.
- In consequence, they usually support any measure to deregulate,
- repeal laws, and cut taxation and spending (naturally with the
- caveat that the cuts do not go nearly far enough). Similarly,
- they can only hail the spread of the underground economy or
- "black market," tax evasion, and other acts of defiance against
- unjust laws.
-
- The desirable transitional path for the left-anarchist is more
- problematic. It is hard to support expansion of the state when it
- is the state that one opposes so fervently. And yet, it is
- difficult to advocate the abolition of e.g. welfare programs when
- they are an important means of subsistence for the oppressed
- lower classes of capitalist society. Perhaps the most viable
- intermediate step would be to expand the voluntary alternatives
- to capitalist society: voluntary communes, cooperatives,
- worker-owned firms, or whatever else free people might establish
- to fulfill their own needs while they enlighten others.
-
- 22. What are some addresses for anarchist World Wide Web sites?
-
- To begin with, there is my homepage at:
- + Bryan Caplan Archives
- http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan
-
- I keep the list of addresses short because the sites
- provided allow easy access to a large number of related
- sites.
-
- Some starting points for discussion of left-anarchism are:
-
- + Anarchist Archives
- http://www.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp/
- faculty/dward/Anarchist_Archives/archivehome.html
- The best page of its type, in my view.
-
- + Prominent Anarchists and Left-Libertarians
- http://www.tigerden.com/~berios/libertarians.html
-
- + The Portland Anarchist Web Page
- http://www.ee.pdx.edu/~jason/
-
- + An Anarchy Page
- http://www.duke.edu/~eagle/anarchy/
-
- + Anarchist Yearbook -- Phoenix Press
- http://web.cs.city.ac.uk/homes/louise/yearbk.html
-
- + Spunk Press Catalog
- http://www.cwi.nl/cwi/people/Jack.Jansen/spunk/cat-us/Toplevel.html
-
- + Critiques of Libertarianism
- http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html
-
- + Burn
- http://burn.ucsd.edu/Welcome.html
-
- + All About Anarchism
- http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/2419/index.html
-
- Some starting points for discussion of anarcho-capitalism
- are:
-
- + Free-market.com
- http://www.free-market.com
-
- + James Donald's Liberty Page
- http://www.jim.com/jamesd/world.html
-
- + Institute for Humane Studies
- http://mason.gmu.edu/~ihs
-
- + Niels Buhl Homepage
- http://www.math.ku.dk/~buhl
-
- + Libertarian Web Page
- http://lw3.ag.uiuc.edu/liberty/libweb.html
-
- + International Society for Individual Liberty
- http://www.creative.net/~star/
-
- + Libertarian Alliance
- http://www.digiweb.com/igeldard/LA/
-
- + David Friedman Homepage
- http://www.best.com/~ddfr
-
- There are several other anarchism FAQs available on the web.
- None of them are to my complete satisfaction; among other
- failings, they normally either ignore anarcho-capitalism
- entirely, or attack a straw man version thereof, and thus do
- little to clarify the most heated of the net-related
- debates. On the positive side, these other FAQs often have
- much more historical information than mine does. See for
- yourself.
-
- + http://www.ibw.com.ni/~dlabs/anarquismo/every.html
- + http://tigerden.com/~berios/libsoc.html
- + http://www.art.net/Poets/Jennifer/anarchy/archyfaq2.html
- + http://www.vnet.net/users/goodag/birdo/ana.html
- + http://www.wam.umd.edu/~ctmunson/TEXT/sp000284.html
-
- There does exist a FAQ written by Roger McCain on
- libertarian socialism and left-anarchism of markedly higher
- quality than the preceding five. It is archived at:
- + http://william-king.www.drexel.edu/top/personal/LSfaq/faq_ToC.html
-
- A new, highly detailed FAQ from a left-anarchist perspective
- has recently been set up, ostensibly in celebration of the
- 60th anniversary of the Spanish Revolution. It is available
- at:
- + http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931
-
- My FAQ is beginning to amass its share of critics who prefer
- to write full-length replies. Those that I am aware of are:
- + Rebuttal to the Anarchism FAQ of Bryan Caplan by Lamont
- Granquist
-
- + Replies to Some Errors and Distortions in Bryan Caplan's
- Anarchist Theory FAQ version 4.1.1
-
- My only comment is that it is simply untrue that I have
- ignored criticisms of my FAQ. There are numerous points I
- have altered or expanded it due to criticism I have
- received; and when I disagree with a critic's claim, I
- frequently ask permission to quote their reservations
- verbatim in the next revision. It is however true that I
- only respond to private e-mail criticisms; attacks simply
- posted to Usenet are unlikely to come to my attention.
-
- To my knowledge there is no page which contains a broad survey
- along the lines of this FAQ. However, these sources in
- combination should give a good picture of the wide range of
- anarchist opinion, along with more information on history and
- current events which I chose not to discuss in detail herein.
- Examination of these sites can also give a reasonable picture of
- how left-anarchism and anarcho- capitalism intellectually relate
- to the broader progressive and libertarian movements,
- respectively.
-
- 23. What are some major anarchist writings?
-
- This list is by no means intended to be exhaustive; nor does
- inclusion here necessarily indicate that the work is of
- particularly high quality. In particular, both Heider's and
- Marshall's works contain a number of embarrassing factual errors.
- (Some of the more glaring errors from Marshall's Demanding the
- Impossible appear to have been corrected in this linked exerpt.)
-
- Particularly well-written and canonical expressions of different
- anarchist theories are noted with an asterisk (*). Broad surveys
- of anarchism are noted with a number sign (#).
-
- + Mihail Bakunin. God and the State
- + * Mikhail Bakunin. The Political Philosophy of Bakunin
- + Mikhail Bakunin. Statism and Anarchy
- + Bruce Benson. The Enterprise of Law: Justice without the
- State
- + Alexander Berkman. The ABC of Anarchism
- + Etienne de la Boetie. The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude
- (also published as The Politics of Obedience: the Discourse
- of Voluntary Servitude)
- + Burnett Bolloten. The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and
- Counterrevolution
- + Murray Bookchin. Post-Scarcity Anarchism
- + Frank Brooks, ed. The Individualist Anarchists: An Anthology
- of Liberty (1881-1908)
- + Roy Childs. Liberty Against Power
- + Frank Chodorov. Fugitive Essays
- + Noam Chomsky. American Power and the New Mandarins
- + Noam Chomsky. The Chomsky Reader
- + Tyler Cowen, ed. The Theory of Market Failure (also
- published as Public Goods and Market Failures)
- + Douglas Davis and Charles Holt. Experimental Economics
- + Ronald Fraser. Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the
- Spanish Civil War
- + * David Friedman. The Machinery of Freedom
- + William Godwin. The Anarchist Writings of William Godwin
- + Emma Goldman. Anarchism and Other Essays
- + *# Daniel Guerin. Anarchism: From Theory to Practice
- + # Ulrike Heider. Anarchism: Left, Right, and Green
- + Hans-Hermann Hoppe. A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism
- + Anthony de Jasay. Social Contract, Free Ride
- + Leonard Krimerman and Lewis Perry, eds. Patterns of Anarchy
- + * Peter Kropotkin. The Essential Kropotkin
- + Peter Kropotkin. Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution
- + * Carl Landauer. European Socialism: A History of Ideas and
- Movements
- + Bruno Leoni. Freedom and the Law
- + Wendy McElroy. Freedom, Feminism, and the State
- + # Peter Marshall. Demanding the Impossible: A History of
- Anarchism
- + James Martin. Men Against the State: The Expositors of
- Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827-1908
- + Gustave de Molinari. "The Production of Security"
- + Albert Jay Nock. Our Enemy the State
- + Albert Jay Nock. The State of the Union
- + Robert Nozick. Anarchy, State, and Utopia
- + Franz Oppenheimer. The State
- + David Osterfeld. Freedom, Society, and the State : An
- Investigation into the Possibility of Society without
- Government
- + *# J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman, eds. Anarchism,
- Nomos vol.19
- + Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. What is Property?
- + Murray Rothbard. Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature
- + Murray Rothbard. The Ethics of Liberty
- + * Murray Rothbard. For a New Liberty
- + Murray Rothbard. Power and Market
- + David Schmidtz. The Limits of Government: An Essay on the
- Public Goods Argument
- + Lysander Spooner. The Lysander Spooner Reader
- + * Lysander Spooner. No Treason: The Constitution of No
- Authority
- + Max Stirner. The Ego and Its Own
- + Morris and Linda Tannehill. The Market for Liberty
- + Henry David Thoreau. The Portable Thoreau
- + Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy on Civil Disobedience and Non- Violence
- + Benjamin Tucker. Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to
- Write One
- + Gordon Tullock, ed. Further Explorations in the Theory of
- Anarchy
- + Robert Paul Wolff. In Defence of Anarchism
- + # George Woodcock. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas
- and Movements
- + # E.V. Zenker. Anarchism: A Criticism and History of the
- Anarchist Theory
-
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------
-
- For comments, suggestions, corrections, etc., write
- bdcaplan@gmu.edu. Thanks to Fabio Rojas, James Donald, David
- Friedman, Robert Vienneau, Ken Steube, Ben Haller, Vincent Cook, Bill
- Woolsey, Conal Smith, Jim Kalb, Chris Faatz, J. Shamlin, Keith Lynch,
- Rose Lucas, Bruce Baechler, Jim Cook, Jack Jansen, Tom Wetzel, Steve
- Koval, Brent Jass, Tracy Harms, Ian Goddard, and I.M. McKay for
- helpful advice or other assistance.
-
- Return to Bryan Caplan Homepage
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