[p2p-research] Drone hacking

[Michel Bauwens]

I think it is useful to distinguish various aspects of the state,

1. the state as instrument of  the dominant class system, this is the most
reprehensible aspect of the state, in which it commits its most terrible
acts; but we can still distinguish relatively healthy states, which take
into account the whole system, from the predatory states such as those of
Bush and Berlusconi (and unfortunately's Obama's), in which the state
becomes subservient to a predatory faction of the rulers

2. the state as reflecting the balance of forces within society, I'm
guessing this is what Andy refers to by his constraints.

Polanyy stresses in the great transformation, that no state can survive
without legitimacy and a concern for the whole of society, but obviously
this depends of civil society being strong enough, and for the weak sections
of society to be organized in their defense

If we do no not have a belief in a utopian vision of a stateless society,
which disappeared at least 5,000 years ago, then such a 'humanized' state
appears acceptable, and I'm guessing this is what Ryan experiences.

It is also my experience as a social democrat ... life for a working class
youth of two orphan parents was not bad at all until the 1980's, in which
constant social progress was 'managed' by the state in partnership with
coopted forces of the labour movement.

Of course, with Kevin Carson, though I'm much less hostile to statism
myself, I do believe that p2p self-organisation can and will replace many
current statist functions, since the global scaling of small group dynamics
is now very competitive with centralisation


3. The state as it own autonomous forces. This has both negative expressions
(as in corruption and kleptocratic states), but also positive ones. I think
Ryan refers to the many civil servants that believe in the public good, and
do extraordinary work. These people are still legion, and in many countries,
choose a state function in order to help their societies and communities.
I've met and experienced different people of this description. They are
usually a minority, but they do exist.

Michel

On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 1:50 AM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Waltzer on dirty hands: the argument that unethical action in pursuit of a
> supposed greater good is somehow a virtue.  A crude attempt to portray
> ethical limitation as self-indulgence.  This kind of hypocrisy - ethics is
> for everyone else, not statists, whose actions are immeasurably 'higher' -
> is typical of the statist way of seeing and is a clear effect of the ways
> 'sovereignty' distorts perception.  From an ethical point of view, it can be
> simply discarded either as performative contradiction or as crude
> utilitarianism (before its rule-consequentialist modifications).  Not a new
> argument either I have to say.  It is identical to certain aspects of the
> doctrines of Carl Schmitt (card-carrying Nazi) and early act-utilitarians
> such as Bentham, founder of the Panopticon (utilitarianism being the model
> for dystopias such as *Brave New World*).
>
> Let us be clear.  Statists (not only politicians but generals, soldiers,
> bureaucrats, cops) like to imagine they have an incomparably hard job
> because in their pursuit of 'order' at any cost, they commit acts they know
> are terrible evils.  They pretend this is in the service of some greater
> good which amounts more often than not, simply to the existence of the state
> itself (or occasionally to the teleology of the state's project - the
> realisation of communism, the maximisation of the general welfare, the glory
> of the nation or whatever it may be).  It is their case for not only legal
> but ethical impunity - they have a "hard job", they should be left alone.
> Actually they don't face any more serious dilemmas than anyone else, and
> most of their dilemmas are no such thing, simply pathological motives to cut
> corners for personal or statist-group gain.  Compare these statists, smugly
> confident of their own rightness, to networked activists facing tremendous
> risks to achieve a better world, or poor people facing agonising choices at
> the borders of survival.  I have seen mobs of armoured police, tooled-up
> with the latest high-tech weapons, shielded from prosecution and backed up
> by weight of numbers and by support in high places, take on people fighting
> desperately to defend their homes, taking tremendous risks of being beaten
> unconscious or jailed for years to rescue a comrade from a truncheon blow,
> only for the police to be lauded for how brave they are, how many risks they
> take and how their brutality can be forgiven as a result - while people
> defending themselves with nothing but their bare hands are condemned as
> thugs and thrown to the wolves.  No, the statists don't have a "hard job".
> They don't have greater temptations to cut ethical corners than other kinds
> of agents.  They just pretend they do to cover up the impunity they build
> for themselves with raw power.  And while making themselves immune to the
> most vital ethical precepts - while finding excuses for murder, torture, the
> corrosion of human rights - these statists are the first to enforce vicious
> 'moral' prohibitions on everyone else, under the guise of 'law and order'.
> Their contempt for real mitigating circumstances and really difficult
> choices is proof that their own claims to mitigation for their persistent
> unethical actions is simply an assertion of privilege and power.
>
> Doubtless pretty much everyone undergoes temptations to act unethically for
> the special goods embedded in their own subject-position, their own
> doctrine, their own special social roles.  Statists get away with far too
> much special pleading on this account, through the distorting effect of the
> master-signifier on the coherence of the symbolic.  Because of this
> pathological special pleading by statists, I insist on the absolute
> comparability of the ethics of state action to the ethics of similar
> networked action or similar individual action.  To do any less is to make
> oneself complicit in the collective 'racism' of the state-caste's conception
> of itself as a race apart, bound by different rules, by a 'civilizing
> mission'.
>
> By these standards, of course, it quickly emerges that states are
> responsible for far more evil than any comparable network or group, that
> they persistently refuse to propose or accept ethical principles which apply
> equally to themselves and others, that they constantly claim mitigation
> which they do not allow in others, and that the fallacious plausibility of
> their claims comes down to the naturalisation of irrational caste-like
> privilege and/or the irrational assertion that the existence of the state is
> such an overwhelming good that it justifies suspending everything else.
> Since this overwhelming ethical primacy is indefensible and is simply an
> article of faith (introduced most often through the *distortion* of
> otherwise defensible doctrines such as liberalism, conservatism and
> Marxism), the boundary at root between a regular state and a totalitarian
> state, or between a theocratic and a non-theocratic state, becomes
> persistently blurred.  One sees statists perpetually deploying arguments
> which push it towards the totalitarian or theocratic pole to the extent that
> they are widely accepted.
>
> Now, to possible futures.  The best possible worlds are without question
> worlds without states.  This is shown by comparing life in state-dominated
> and stateless societies.  The more I see the state arrogating power to
> itself - the more I hear of RFIDs in cars, infinitely trackable electronic
> money, misuse of mobile phone records and the rest - the more I come to see
> a statist future in totalitarian terms.  The other possibilities arise from
> the power of networks.  At the moment it might not look a great hope.  My
> heart often despairs at the current state of social movements.  But my head
> says that networks have great power, and that the state is lashing out
> because of its *loss* of power (this is especially clear in the
> asymmetrical warfare literature).  Vast swathes of humanity live outside
> effective day-to-day regulation.  On the whole, this is the global poor, who
> have great power to throw spanners in the works by means such as blocking
> transport infrastructure and making areas 'ungovernable'.  The future I work
> towards is a world of interlinked networks in which the excluded claim back
> the resources grabbed on a global scale by states and corporations, impose
> costs on state retaliation which prevent the state from exercising power,
> gradually reduce state control to a few core nodes, and create different
> worlds in the resultant spaces beyond control.
>
> But if we assume a society with a state, there are nevertheless many
> different kinds of states, many different articulations between the state
> and society.  I have reached the conclusion that the least-worst forms of
> state-society are those which the state's 'social logic' (what Kropotkin
> terms the 'political principle') is most effectively contained and
> channelled.  Not only the kinds of states which I find least-worst myself,
> but pretty much all of those which have been politically advocated, are
> examples of variations of this phenomenon.  It can happen in various ways.
>
> There is the social- or liberal-democratic state, in which the state is
> hemmed in by strong procedural constraints which retain their force through
> the power of the 'included stratum', the professions and quasi-state bodies,
> through checks and balances which hamstring the state from inside, and by
> popular sentiments and movements which the state is afraid to annoy too
> much.  There is the conservative state in which the state fuses with an
> informal power-elite outside the state in such a way that the power of the
> societal elite overrides and constrains the power of the state.  There are
> various democratic and republican models in which the separation of the
> state from society is constrained through participation.  Then there are
> various kinds of 'weak' states in which the power of the state is kept to a
> minimal level relative to social forces, the shadow states and rhizo-states
> of the periphery, the ideal states of left and right libertarianisms, etc.
>
> All these kinds of states have two things in common: they are *required*(firstly by the balance of social power, and secondly by their discourses of
> legitimation which matter because the balance of social power prevents them
> from ignoring certain social groups) to provide services to certain forces
> within society and not simply to arrogate power to themselves; and they are
> externally *constrained* in their capacity to invade and control social
> spaces - it would be far too costly to invade the spaces associated with
> those social groups.  Usually this boundary is marked by the recognition of
> certain basic rights (or in the more elite-dominated forms, certain
> privileges or traditions) which the state is forced to respect and which
> form the outer limit to its legitimacy.
>
> The problem with totalitarian states, which is reproduced in moves afoot in
> many core states today, is that the state no longer recognises any such
> requirements or constraints, that 'rights' while still mouthed are in
> practice permanently suspended or reinterpreted at statist whim, and that
> the result is a situation where 'everyone is dispensable' and there is no
> 'right to have rights' (the terminology is Arendt's).  When does this
> situation arise?  It arises when the state *no longer needs* to articulate
> itself with society, either because it is accepted as unconditionally
> legitimate or because its apparent illegitimacy to large strata of the
> population is rendered irrelevant to its effectiveness and its exercise of
> power.  (Notice that it tends to behave similarly even in its more
> constrained forms, when dealing with population sectors who are excluded in
> various ways - for instance, a liberal state might behave this way in its
> colonies).
>
> Hence the overwhelming danger posed by creeping social control - a danger
> inherent both in the technologies which render the state able to rule by
> coercion without legitimation, and in the discourses which portray the state
> as unconditionally justified without regard for its actions.
>
> Hence, if you are looking for a tolerable or 'least-worst' future which is
> not that of a stateless society, if you are looking for *a better state*(which is not at all a more efficient or powerful state), your best hope
> lies in the extension of constraint of the state so as to produce effects of
> state dependence on society which force the state both to recognise general
> obligations and to recognise limits in its control over spaces.  Since the
> current tendency is for the state to arrogate power, this necessitates
> balancing against it.  In effect, a revived liberalism, or social-democracy,
> or any other kind of tolerable state-society, would require a
> quasi-revolutionary assertion of power against the actually-existing state
> which either overthrows it or pushes it back within its bounds.  This is how
> *a better state* (from an ethical point of view) might come about.  If the
> aim is that there be no remaining black-holes of state violence in which
> human rights violations are tolerated as 'exceptional', it is necessary that
> this rebalancing be such as to give a strong discursive claim to every
> person regardless of status - in other words, that the state be hedged in by
> strong assertions of rights, and that these assertions not permit exceptions
> the state can exploit.  This kind of movement to constrain the state and
> hence produce a 'better' state would necessarily make use of the networked
> modalities of autonomous movements, but there is no reason it would have to
> be in any way anarchistic.  It could in theory be a pan-liberal,
> non-factional, or even in some circumstances a conservative kind of
> movement.  What is important is that it exercise power located in society
> and in networks outside the state to constrain the power of the state and
> push back the statist hubris we see today.  I see the recurring popular
> movements which ultimately brought down the eastern European dictatorships
> and which have been a thorn in the side of so many one-party regimes of
> whatever faction as indicative of the range of potentials.
>
> But I think when you say 'better state' you mean more efficient, more
> effective, more powerful state.  This is dangerous.  Granted, you may create
> a state which *can* end world hunger or avert environmental catastrophe,
> but this doesn't mean that this state *will* do such things.
>
> Actually, state discourse seems to be rather split.  There is the arrogance
> of states which no longer accept conventional constraints, which can ignore
> or neutralise established discourses of rights, which are no longer held
> back by the party system, which can increasingly ignore the 'included
> stratum'.  But on the other hand, there is a constant sense that states are
> *terrified* - and this is how they articulate the *motives* for
> ever-greater measures of social control.  States feel their power breaking
> down disastrously, and are desperate to avert the flows of power to networks
> (which in statist discourse is metaphorised as crime, failed states,
> terrorism, porous borders, etc).  This provides opportunities to use this
> growing network power either to move beyond or to push back the state.
>
> The only danger of a dystopian future in this scenario is if the state is
> able to hoard to itself enough concentrated power to eliminate the existence
> of open spaces and carry out a day-to-day violence so intrusive as to
> decompose potentially disruptive networks before they can form.  *This is
> the future which needs to be prevented*.  And you don't have to be an
> anarchist to see how such a future is both deeply terrifying and quite
> probably preventable.  You also don't have to be an anarchist to act against
> it.  The means to prevent it is to act wherever possible to strengthen the
> power of networks and to weaken the power of states.  There are a million
> ways that a liberal for example can usefully help constrain states - though
> sadly, too few liberals today see the necessity to do so.  In the American
> case, one of the most crucial is to try to reconstruct a discourse in which
> rights are effective limits on state power by reconstructing rights
> discursively as an outer limit to state legitimacy.  In practice, this means
> liberals will have to be prepared to take destabilising actions in order to
> constrain the state within liberal bounds.  Liberals will have to act
> something like they would have acted in eastern Europe or in various other
> dictatorships.  Not as comforting as imagining that a state left to its own
> devices, or aided technocratically, will continue to be liberal in spite of
> having no need for 'citizens'.  But a thousand times more realistic.
>
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