[p2p-research] The difference between anarchism and libertarianism

[Andy Robinson]

Responding point by point:



HUMAN NATURE:

Is not a useful context because of the extent of social construction and the
difficulty in isolating cross-cultural universals – of which there are few
if any, and none of them politically relevant.  Evolutionary psychology is
speculative nonsense.  Until and unless they can point to empirically
demonstrable instinctual causes rooted in specific genes, they’re left
guessing as to which of the behaviours they happen to observe might or might
not be “natural”.  If evolutionary biologists are claiming that in-group
conformist exclusivism is natural – I haven’t seen the research but it
sounds like more of the same nonsensical backwards deduction from “human”
(read capitalist) traits (cf the way here, abstract citizens of Montreal are
taken as representative of “humanity” as such).  I doubt they have attempted
to comprehend, for example, the looseness of group affiliations in societies
with multiple attachments, for instance the context-specific affiliations of
pre-colonial Australian Aborigines, or the active pursuit of difference in
Amazonian cosmology.  Put simply, I won’t take seriously a claim that
something is universal to humans until an anthropologist (not a
pseudo-natural-scientist) says it, and even then, only if they’ve reviewed a
wide range of the cross-cultural literature on the topic in question.  For
the record, most anthropologists are strong social constructionists.



RELEVANCE TO ANARCHISM:

It is not, and has never been, true that anarchists as a group assume that
human nature is good (some do, some don’t).  Kropotkin for instance believed
that people could either be cooperative or competitive, depending on their
social context and conditioning, and that societies are subject to a kind of
cyclical rise and fall.  Bakunin was a historicist.  Proudhon was a
deontologist.  Logically, someone who assumes that human nature is good
would support anarchism.  Equally logically, someone who assumes that human
nature is bad would support anarchism, since bad humans could not be trusted
with state power.  Someone who assumed that human nature is somewhere
inbetween good and bad would support anarchism, because states bring out the
worst.  Someone who believed that human nature does not exist, or is
socially constructed, would support anarchism because it produces the most
benevolent kind of society.  The logical assumption of statism cannot be ANY
consistent assumption about human nature.  Rather, statists assume that
human beings can be divided into two types – ubermenschen and untermenschen,
civilised and barbarian – and that the former are destined, or morally
obliged, or required for their own defence, to dominate or exterminate the
latter.  Statists must logically believe that there are two different "human
natures", one of which is embodied in the state, the other in some of those
subject to state power, for the gross inequality of power it proposes to be
logically defensible.



THE SUPPOSED EMPIRICAL “PROOF”:

Montreal: a pressure cooker does not show that water is inherently
explosive.  Also, it is a fallacy to assume that simply the withdrawal of
police caused the fairly small-scale problems which occurred.  Aside from
looting, the scale of trouble was very low – only two killings and twelve
fires for example.  This is not really all that bad – we don’t know for
instance, how many lives were saved because poor people were able to loot
things they needed, or because there was less traffic.  In similar cases
elsewhere, there was no effect at all – for instance, Copenhagen between the
Nazis withdrawing and the state being reconstructed.  Seems to me Pinker has
no idea how to test empirical predictions in social science.  Rather, we see
a petty-bourgeois sense of order, where even a slight variation in variables
is taken as disastrous, combined with a very unscientific deduction of
effect from cause, without consideration of other factors.  In this case,
the police strike acted as a trigger for social insurrection – attempts to
cast off other aspects of an oppressive apparatus – plus some low-level
opportunism.



JOHN GRAY:

This is actually simply a repetition of the Cold War demagogy of people like
Karl Popper.  It is largely inaccurate in that it wrongly attributes
totalitarianism to beliefs (in perfection, perfectibility, a single
removable evil…) rather than to substitutionism and the state.  All
totalitarian regimes arise from a state or aspirant-state which seeks to
control the whole of social life.  Such regimes will doubtless claim that
some massive, overwhelming or unconditional good is served by such social
control.  Given the scale of the control, it suits them to seek some
suitably massive danger or opportunity.  But the same tendencies arise when
the identified “good” is small or partial – as with the state crimes
perpetrated in the name of urban planning, development, secularism,
moderation.  In the Russian case, there is a marked transmutation from a
hierarchical but popular movement into a hardened state-form which
problematises the idea that some original sin of ideological perfectionism
caused totalitarianism.  Anarchism carries no such dangers for the simple
reason that it (alone of all movements) refuses the state as a means towards
its goals.  It is also not an “ism” in the same sense as the others.  The
goal of anarchism is not to create a particular “place”, it is to maximise
free space.  It is certainly critical and in a sense “utopian”, but as
“propulsive utopia” and not as fixed ideal.  I would counter that it is,
rather, statism which in all its forms contains seeds and dangers of
totalitarianism.  Popper and his ilk like to imagine that insisting that the
state present itself as gradualist and realistic will stop it from grabbing
power.  This has been rapidly disproven as ostensibly anti-ideological
neoliberal and “Third Way” regimes have degenerated towards totalitarianism
(e.g. Pinochet, Thatcher, Bush, Blair).  The blackmail inherent in the
Popperian perspective is the prohibition of critique.  This is based on a
certain complacency about the present – we are not in hell already, this
theory assumes, and it can be warded off by not being too “radical”.  But
what if we are already in hell?  One might refer to police brutality and
torture, climate change, deportation of refugees, huge numbers of deaths due
to poverty…  it is comforting for middle-class worshippers of order to
fantasise that things are alright, but this perspective is only possible by
hiding inside a protective sphere.



STATE AS NON-OPPRESSIVE?:

In fact the state today is far more intrusive and menacing than it was 150
years ago.  Remember that they didn’t have DNA tests, CCTV cameras or riot
gear back then.  Most people spent most of their lives beyond the gaze and
outside the reach of the state.



The NHS is thankfully not run by the state, but simply “funded” by it,
meaning that the state juggles imaginary figures to allow it to operate as a
paid economy at one end and a gift or free economy at the other.  The more
the state intrudes directly in its functioning (e.g. targets, internal
market, requirements to report injuries from violence, exclusions of
refugees from medical treatment), the worse it becomes.  Let’s add a bigger
perspective also.  Most of the illnesses treated by the NHS are caused by
modern capitalist conditions; capitalism has forced people into concentrated
cities which would be deathtraps without health services.  Health services
in the North derive partly from unequal economic structures exploiting the
South, up to and including a “brain drain” of doctors into the North.  Such
services are not only largely absent in most of the world, but useless to
the vast majority who are in rural areas or outlying shanty-towns and would
not be able to reach a hospital in time even if it provided free
services.  Hence,
there is a certain reaction against scientised medicine and in favour of
homeopathy, preventive medicine, or at least the decentralisation of
services to the point of need.  In addition, there is the problematic
relationship between the “welfare state” and Fordist economic regulation.  But
supposing the NHS is the best model – why couldn’t an anarchist society
operate such institutions?  If people want something, they will set it up.  All
it takes in this case, is for enough people to be trained as doctors and
nurses, and prepared to give over some of their time to such tasks (assuming
the entire economy is gift-economy).  It might actually be easier in an
anarchist society, for two reasons:  firstly, an Illichian approach to
education and a backdrop of support would enable more people to train than
the current selection-based, centralised, fee-charging education system, and
secondly, effective drugs and therapies would no longer be patented and so
could be reproduced cheaply or freely.


bw

Andy
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