Secession and Reform

[CSAnarchist]

http://www.anarchistnews.org/?q=node/1226

Read that article. By now you've probably come to the sudden realization that PEOPLE in general don't take anarchy seriously. Let alone, they don't bother to find out what it really is. I think that we have been taking this wrong way. Of course, not to say that all these ideas on the forum are stupid and have no realistic qualities. The writer in the link above clearly states his position: Anarchists are almost impossible to get rid of. They are everywhere and there are more of them then ever.

Let me ask you all a question? Why the hell are there so many of us and we are not doing anything with the power we have "accidentally" acquired??

The writer pointed out the obvious; there are many anarchists.  You do realize that if we opened up to a little necessary violence, we could achieve things that we never thought possible. Don't gain the misunderstanding that I am all for violence. Rather, I am for violence in totally necessary situations.

You've probably heard the common cliche for starting an anarchist army. I, myself, are a sucker for that idea. Here is what I suggest:

1. Starting this army is not totally out of the question. I have already gather forces from my hometown. So far we have about 20 men.  We ran some 'experiments' on a crowd of government hoodlums(drug dealers) and they buckled and ran for their lives. That was with only 20 men. We, in this case, are called vigilantes. We openly admit to being anarchists and those druggie scum run from us. We have successfully cut crime down to a astonishing 10% as it was orginally up at about 65%.

2. We secede from the U.S My force has decided to leave for Europe. It is totally possible. I have a 20 page booklet saying so. At first, they won't really notice. But as proven during the 60's rebellion, if enough of us leave; they begin notice.

3. The reform part really can't be discussed here on this web site so e-mail me for the last bit.

anarman4@yahoo.com

[John Edward Mercier]

Because the drug dealers were victimizing you? Or you just don't agree with their business model or product?

[CSAnarchist]

because they attacked us. Usually, I don't promote overall violence, but this was a life or death situation.
Plus, we got some sort of personal joy watching them being sentenced in the "unbiased" court.

[memenode]

That article should be titled "Socialist Anarchy is stupid" and with that I wholeheartedly agree.

It is almost a contradiction in terms. Remove private property ownership and you're left with public property. If it is truly owned by everyone at once (no state) then the scenario described in the article is quite likely (if everybody owns it everybody counts on anybody else to maintain and develop it, meaning that things rarely actually get done). Otherwise you have the state as the manager of this public property and it is therefore its defacto owner.

While I as a voluntaryist believe in socialist anarchists right to try and build their society, so long as they don't coerce anyone to be a part of it, I seriously think that it would either result in an even more oppressive state (as it did before) or they would simply gradually drop the idea and join the voluntaryist free market.

So, CSAnarchist, there's nothing to take seriously in the kind of anarchy that article describes. Even I don't take it seriously.

That said, if we're gonna talk about actually making progress with anarcho-capitalism / market anarchy / voluntaryistm I think one of the best hopes is agorism more so than any sort of violence. If you're gonna form an army, let it be a competing police force offering people security and protection services instead of police.. especially those who don't want to pay taxes since they don't want government's equivalent services. Instead of paying taxes, let them voluntarily pay your defense agency instead. Of course, that's a very risky proposition, but it's a proposition.

[CSAnarchist]

that's exactly it. You're anarchists, but you aren't REALLY anarchists. Anarchists are rank with terms like destruction and chaos. I think we should use those to our advantage.

[memenode]

that's exactly it. You're anarchists, but you aren't REALLY anarchists. Anarchists are rank with terms like destruction and chaos. I think we should use those to our advantage.

If you want to use destruction and chaos to your advantage, run for president. Anarchy has nothing to do with it. Destruction nor chaos are nowhere in the original meaning of the word nor are most anarchists actually propagating destruction or chaos, so such connotations are false.

The same, however, cannot be said of the state and statism. Most people may view me as a lunatic when claiming this, but it is government and state which should be equated with "destruction" and "chaos", because that is exactly what it is, being in a constant and perpetual state of war: war between the rulers and the ruled, war between states themselves. And what else is war than destruction and chaos?

Free market and free individuals partaking in them are a constant casualty of this chaos.

Everything is upside down in the mainstream perception. Let's not feed those lies ourselves.

This is precisely the reason why I tend to use the word "voluntaryist" more than "anarchist" or "anarcho-capitalist".

[John Edward Mercier]

Anarchy can be both orderly and chaotic, its not really defined by the term.
Governance is associated with societal order.

The reason for this is that natural order must take into account both cooperative and competive interactions. The free market is an excellent example of both these occuring... sometimes all at once.
'X' may be cooperating with 'Y' to compete with 'Z'.
Governance acts as a framework to limit the scope of the chaos (options). Unlike the Free Market which would allow all possibilities to compete... government removes some options. So while 'X' might cooperate with 'Y' to compete with 'Z', government might make it impossible for 'X' to cooperate with 'Z'. Thus coercing 'X' to act alone or in cooperation with 'Y'.

Whenever societal order is attempted it artificially limits the potential options and outcomes.
As society matures it may accept some of these options, but at a great cost.

[memenode]

Agreed, except maybe the "great cost" as I'm not sure what it refers to. The trouble is, people tend to view "anarchy" as solely chaos rather than possibly both chaos and order and so dismiss it entirely.

Also, the way you described it made me think of "chaos" as possibly meaning both violent and non-violent types of chaos. When you have both cooperation and competition in the free market among variety of different people offering variety of different things in pursuit of variety of different values, we could say there is a state of chaos, but if there is no or little violence going on throughout all of these processes, I wouldn't consider this kind of chaos as negative, and might even see it as a form of order, only one which we can't quite put into a nice centralized hierarchical structure in our minds (which we seem to picture as "order").

But most people's process of thinking when faced with the term "anarchy" seems to be this: Anarchy = Chaos = violence and destruction everywhere, everyone killing and robbing everyone = evil. So anarchy = evil and all anarchists and alike people must be a big threat. They don't even begin to see the positives, and to them the word "anarchy" no longer means merely "lack of coercive authority", but literally "violent chaos".

Attempting to use violent chaos for our cause would only strenghten this perception, not to mention be dishonest if ones goal is freedom because violence seldom cooperates with freedom.

Cheers

[John Edward Mercier]

Chaos just means not having a detectable pattern.

I posted a site to test Right/Left Brain Function a while back. Most replied that the answers felt vague or strange. The reason being is the answers were designed so that a left dominant brain would find 'pattern' in one answer... but not the other two. While a right dominant brain would find 'pattern' in a different answer... but not the other two. The test determined the percentage of answers for each side then equated an answer. All the answers were correct, but some just felt wrong or unattached, depending on the individual.

The 'great cost' is the slow process of mass enlightenment.

[BillKauffman]

Remove private property ownership and you're left with public property. If it is truly owned by everyone at once (no state) then the scenario described in the article is quite likely (if everybody owns it everybody counts on anybody else to maintain and develop it, meaning that things rarely actually get done). Otherwise you have the state as the manager of this public property and it is therefore its defacto owner.

Haven't you ever heard of common ownership where everyone has an individual, equal access right? So your analysis sets up a false dichotomy. Unfortunately people use the word "public" to mean both collectively owned (joint ownership) and owned in common. Sorry, they are not the same.

[John Edward Mercier]

Public property is not willingly purchased by all individual involved, nor is one's interest transferable through sale.

[memenode]

Joint ownership is fine if everyone involved agree to share the cost of purchase, and I'm not at all opposed to socialist anarchists doing that and then establishing a socialist system upon that jointly owner property. That may be the only way of doing it without resorting to coercion, that is back to state socialism.

Which is why I think it's such a contradiction, anarchist socialism, because if they're just jointly buying property they're actually participating in a free market or in other words, a free market is a precondition to the establishment of such a socialist group, yet at the same time they seem opposed to the idea of markets and embrace the idea of public property instead. So it's almost like they're just state socialists disguised as "anarchists", without possibly even being fully aware of it because they so severely misunderstand the way states come into being..

[BillKauffman]

Public property is not willingly purchased by all individual involved, nor is one's interest transferable through sale.

And common property in many cases is not purchased at all but rather provided "free" by nature. The only role of governance as legitimate agency is to insure individual equal access rights are upheld.

[John Edward Mercier]

Examples?

[BillKauffman]

Examples?

Groundwater and lakes over 20 acres.