Peaceful Anarchy
Posted: Fri Aug 30, 2013 5:07 pm
(split from here.)
Having had discussions with anarchists in the past, I would think you would know all of this already.
In regard to the article admitting that private agencies could qualify as government, I assume you refer to this passage:
The only part that could be valid is the example of elected officials, since these could constitute "rulers", but the article I cited did not seem to indicate that these elected officials were doing any sort of "ruling", for all the reasons I stated above. They acted as justices of the peace, judges and similar.
Also, it seems to me that a society intentionally created according to anarchist principles would tend to be more successful than examples of de facto anarchy during a war.
In any case, if you take a government and strip it of all of its negative aspects you end up with anarchy anyway, all the remediations I mentioned bring one closer to an anarchist society.
1) consider examples of anarchy working on a small scale to be "evidence that private providers can act as a system to run all of the functions of a society.", (even if it's only small evidence, and not proof, you still can not justify saying that there is "no evidence",)
2) consider, as I mentioned above, collections of small communities functioning without the presence of a state to be examples of anarchy on a large scale,
3) agree with you that examples of alternatives to government being present in a society with a government, and providing a higher quality service, do not prove that they could function without a government, but still contend that they work as evidence in favor of the thesis, and
4) contend that commercial law operating on a global scale almost entirely, if not entirely, outside government purview, is strong evidence that private enterprise can not only act as a system to provide all the needs of a society, but also that law, on a global scale, can be provided privately and would be better provided privately than publicly.
If you're looking for a stateless society that has large populations condensed into a city, some scholars think that Harappan society, (Bronze Age India), could have been a stateless society. (For arguments for and against see here and here respectively.) According to the first article, one of their largest cities likely had tens of thousands of people living in it. The "free cities" of medieval Europe mentioned by Bryan Caplan here may also work as an example, but I haven't studied them enough to know for sure yet.
One other note, you call it a piecemeal argument. This seems strange to me. Science often has to resort to "piecemeal" arguments, that is, one has to take a wide range of different kinds of evidence, none of which directly prove the thesis, and show that a particular theory has explanatory power in regard to all the evidence available. Then one can attempt to find evidence to falsify the claim. But direct observation is not always possible.
It is demonstrable that small communities can live peacefully without government, it is demonstrable that multiple such communities can live peacefully in an area, rarely warring against each other, it is demonstrable that commercial law can be produced on an international and global scale without government design, oversight, or control, and it is demonstrable, (through case-studies,) that in many industries, including the ones most commonly used as an argument in favor of the necessity of government, (roads, police, courts, etc.), private means can provide a higher quality service than public means, and at a lower cost. On the other hand, it is demonstrable that government "regulation" is detrimental to the operation of numerous industries.
In any case, if everyone who disagreed with the wars the U.S. government has entered into could stop paying their taxes until the troops were brought home and get away with it, I would expect the troops would be brought home with all due speed. A private business can not force someone to pay for actions they find heinous. If they could, they'd be a government.
Anarchy means "no-rulers", and market anarchists accept hierarchy if it's voluntary or contractually agreed to. (While communist anarchists accept it if it's "justified", though I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean operationally. The market anarchist position makes more sense to me.) Having "constitutions, by-laws, ... judicial process and record-keeping." does not make the examples in the old west not anarchist. I keep records of my finances, mutual aid societies have by-laws and constitutions of sorts as far as I know, and the merchant courts existing in medieval times constituted a judicial process. So those aspects do not mean an institution is a government.David Franks wrote:It sounds like you're having that argument over semantics with yourself. But you're forgetting the constitutions, by-laws, elected officers, judicial process and record-keeping.Indium Flappers wrote:At this point we'd just be arguing over nomenclature again. If you want to take private law and law-enforcement, contractual agreement, and so-on, and call it government, then anarchists are fine with government.
Having had discussions with anarchists in the past, I would think you would know all of this already.
In regard to the article admitting that private agencies could qualify as government, I assume you refer to this passage:
I would agree with this, but I do not think the agencies described qualified. For example, in the mining camps, the only penalty for not agreeing with the rest of the group was not receiving protection of one's land claims or property, so far as I can tell. And in the Claims Associations, trade-sanctions were generally used instead of violence against violators. One could, essentially, opt-out of their system.Also, one has to he careful in always describing private agencies as "non-government" because, to the extent that they develop and become the agency of legitimized coercion they also qualify as "government."
The only part that could be valid is the example of elected officials, since these could constitute "rulers", but the article I cited did not seem to indicate that these elected officials were doing any sort of "ruling", for all the reasons I stated above. They acted as justices of the peace, judges and similar.
I confess I was not prepared to have you agree with me in any respect. I should, however, have asked you earlier for an operational definition of "large scale" or "large groups of people". To me, a collection of several small-scale communities constitute a large group of people. Since cities today seem to have a higher homocide rate than rural areas, in the U.S. at least, the problem of higher rates of violent crime in more dense populations does not seem to be limited to anarchy.David Franks wrote:I have simply pointed out that anarchy doesn't work on a large scale. As long as you're talking about small-scale anarchy, we have little disagreement.But you're still left with a peaceful example of the system we advocate.
I'm also sure the correlation between long periods of war and statehood, since there are wars among governments rather often, is just a coincidence as well? Anyways, different nations are different sizes. What are you looking for? 1000 people? 10,000? 1 million? 1 billion? How large would an anarchy have to be while still being peaceful before you would conclude that it can work peacefully on a large scale?David Franks wrote:I never said that there are no successful examples; I pointed out (perhaps too obliquely) that there hasn't been much peace or progress on a large (national) scale under anarchy. (Of course this is particularly true when anarchy comes about as a result of the fall of government, and I'm sure that the correlation between long periods of war and widespread anarchy is just a coincidence.)Your error is that there have been examples of societies or associations of individuals functioning peacefully without a government.
Also, it seems to me that a society intentionally created according to anarchist principles would tend to be more successful than examples of de facto anarchy during a war.
Okiedokie, yes, I would say that they are small, relatively isolated, and relatively self-sufficient. As per above, to me the Bedouin population as a whole constitute a large group of people. But this large group is indeed divided into far smaller groups.David Franks wrote:Would you say that Bedouin tribes are not small, relatively isolated and relatively self-sufficient?How about the Bedouin, would you say their system of law constitutes a government?
I would not say that anarchism is sufficient for peace, but for the most part the anarchist or quasi-anarchist societies I have studied tend to be more peaceful than their neighbors, and certainly pleasant enough places to live. The ones that people try to create through war or during a war do seem to end up being more violent and in some cases, (Paris Commune, used by anarcho-communists), extremely short lived. But in other cases, where they were created by pioneers or similar, they seem to be peaceful relative to their contemporaries.David Franks wrote:That first statement sounds like an admission that anarchy doesn't work for large groups of people. That, or anarchists don't believe that peace is vital.anarchists don't have to create a more peaceful world for large groups of people....If they wish to create a more peaceful world for themselves, they can. I'm not going to force it on them.
Nor do any of them require a government. I have in the past attempted to some small extent to use political means to accomplish improvements of the sort I listed. I sign petitions fairly often for instance, and I have written to the congressman for my district in regard to electronic privacy. My experience thus far has been that such effort is wasted, and that my energies would be better spent on non-political methods, such as, for example, educating people as to the software tools available to attempt to guard against corporate and state data collection, or at least mitigate it. If you believe that political methods are worth my time, please provide me with some evidence thereof.David Franks wrote:None of these remediations require anarchy for their success.Oh my. Do you really want a list?....
In any case, if you take a government and strip it of all of its negative aspects you end up with anarchy anyway, all the remediations I mentioned bring one closer to an anarchist society.
Here's an example. In regard to it being legal in the U.S. to commit suicide, I confess I am quite surprised, I was under the distinct impression that it was not.David Franks wrote:No example, as I requested? Anyway, suicide is legal in the United States. As far as I know, there is no law that directly requires a neighbor to intervene in a suicide. That's a nosy neighbor problem, and anarchy won't solve it. However, if it came to it, I (well, my lawyer) would argue that not intervening in a suicide is covered by "Good Samaritan" law.Suicide is illegal I believe, so no, it's not.
What government is international law subsumed under? What government is the black market subsumed under? Sorry but commercial law does better with less or no government oversight.David Franks wrote:But these private functions, however extensive, are subsumed by the governmental milieu and operate within its purview. They hardly demonstrate the viability of anarchy.It isn't a few private entities, private security plays a major role in our lives. As does private arbitration. Law is not necessarily a function of government.
I don't count an argument not being convincing as indicative of failure, empirical accuracy is my standard.David Franks wrote:Don't blame me for the failure of your argument.As far as I can tell, the reason I'm not persuasive is because when I offer real-world examples of the sort of society I wish to live in, you either say it can't work on a large scale or isn't an example of what I'm advocating. Which is incredible really. (There are no apples. What about this? Oh that doesn't count.)
I would,I have agreed with you that anarchy can work on a small scale. You have shown no examples of anarchy working on a large scale. Private security, arbitration, trash service, and whatever all else are not per se anarchy, and, as they are not the sole providers of these services and they operate within a strongly governmental context, they do not show that running every (currently) government-run aspect of society privately will work. It is a piecemeal argument; there is no evidence that private providers can act as a system to run all of the functions of a society. (I suspect that as services are privatized additively, the failures will increase multiplicatively.) My other objections come directly from the material you have offered as evidence. If your position is that anarchy has been shown to work on only a small scale, then never mind.
1) consider examples of anarchy working on a small scale to be "evidence that private providers can act as a system to run all of the functions of a society.", (even if it's only small evidence, and not proof, you still can not justify saying that there is "no evidence",)
2) consider, as I mentioned above, collections of small communities functioning without the presence of a state to be examples of anarchy on a large scale,
3) agree with you that examples of alternatives to government being present in a society with a government, and providing a higher quality service, do not prove that they could function without a government, but still contend that they work as evidence in favor of the thesis, and
4) contend that commercial law operating on a global scale almost entirely, if not entirely, outside government purview, is strong evidence that private enterprise can not only act as a system to provide all the needs of a society, but also that law, on a global scale, can be provided privately and would be better provided privately than publicly.
If you're looking for a stateless society that has large populations condensed into a city, some scholars think that Harappan society, (Bronze Age India), could have been a stateless society. (For arguments for and against see here and here respectively.) According to the first article, one of their largest cities likely had tens of thousands of people living in it. The "free cities" of medieval Europe mentioned by Bryan Caplan here may also work as an example, but I haven't studied them enough to know for sure yet.
One other note, you call it a piecemeal argument. This seems strange to me. Science often has to resort to "piecemeal" arguments, that is, one has to take a wide range of different kinds of evidence, none of which directly prove the thesis, and show that a particular theory has explanatory power in regard to all the evidence available. Then one can attempt to find evidence to falsify the claim. But direct observation is not always possible.
It is demonstrable that small communities can live peacefully without government, it is demonstrable that multiple such communities can live peacefully in an area, rarely warring against each other, it is demonstrable that commercial law can be produced on an international and global scale without government design, oversight, or control, and it is demonstrable, (through case-studies,) that in many industries, including the ones most commonly used as an argument in favor of the necessity of government, (roads, police, courts, etc.), private means can provide a higher quality service than public means, and at a lower cost. On the other hand, it is demonstrable that government "regulation" is detrimental to the operation of numerous industries.
Ah, quite right!David Franks wrote:In the absence of more formal institutions, stores become important social hubs. The Post Office, too. This is not as true now as it used to be (though people gather at the mall to walk), but it is still a valuable consideration in a government-free society.
Somalia has a government now, so far as I am aware. In any case, assuming that it was a genuine case of anarchy, I would call it a negative outlier. I do not claim that anarchy is necessarily peaceful, only that peace is possible under anarchy, (with which you agree), and that peace is possible on a large scale under anarchy, (with which you do not agree.)David Franks wrote:That also is not an issue of the form of government, or the presence of government. Lots of governments don't traumatize children in Pakistan. (By the way-- children in Somalia are pretty traumatized, too. Of course Somalia doesn't have pure anarchy....)edit: oh I forgot, it'd be nice if my tax money wasn't spent on traumatizing children in Pakistan. If you really want a list of the crimes "our" government has committed, watch the Young Turks.
In any case, if everyone who disagreed with the wars the U.S. government has entered into could stop paying their taxes until the troops were brought home and get away with it, I would expect the troops would be brought home with all due speed. A private business can not force someone to pay for actions they find heinous. If they could, they'd be a government.