There's one thing that always struck me as pointless. Do you hear stories about anarchists protesting at the G8 summit, WTO, and IMF meetings? They are usually met with plastic bullets and tear gas. The organizers of those meetings don't care what the protesters are saying.
Further, there are red market agents planted in those protest groups. Those agents are there to ENSURE things get violent, so the protesters are discredited.
It is impossible to organize a mass public demonstration, because red market agents will infiltrate it and do bad things to discredit the protesters.
I read some of the anarchist writings. They say "government is bad". They don't key in on the two big culprits: the Federal Reserve and the income tax. All other problems with government and the "free market" boil down to these two items. They don't really propose viable systems for replacing government. They say "government is bad" and then don't progress further proposing alternatives.
The only way to really hurt the "globalization" bad guys is by creating wealth that they can't confiscate via inflation or the income tax. Voting is pointless. Public demonstrations are pointless. Asking politicians embarrassing questions is like asking for a police beating.
The element that the anarchist movement is missing is that they don't have a sensible replacement system for government.
People falsely believe that "not government equals chaos". That's not true. The only examples of anarchy that people see is when an existing government is overthrown by a group of people wanting to become the new government. In that case, there is a war as the old red market workers fight with the new red market workers. Most examples of an anarchy are really multiple red markets occupying the same space. That's why most people falsely believe that "not government equals chaos".
The belief that "not government equals chaos" is a variation of the "true equals false" fallacy. Nobody knows what "not government" looks like, because in all recorded history there has always been at least one group claiming to be the government and using force to impose their will on everyone else.
The problem in Iraq is not anarchy. The problem is that multiple competing groups want to be the new red market. The people in Iraq have not considered the possibility that maybe they should have no government at all. That choice was not offered to them.
There is another possibility that hasn't occurred before. Normally, a government is defeated by a group of people who want to proclaim themselves as the new red market. Most political revolutions are organized as a dictatorship, so the new red market is a replacement dictatorship. What would happen if the government was defeated by a group of people who didn't organize themselves as a dictatorship? The new "government" would resemble the organizational structure of whoever defeated it.
In an agorist revolution, the businesses that replace the government would be the ones designed to protect people from the falling government. Until the defeat of the red market is universally acknowledged, there will be a tremendous amount of cooperation among the agorist police and justice systems. After the fall of the red market, it would likely fragment into several groups competing peacefully. Any group that competed violently or started to become an oppressive monopoly would find competition and lose their customers.
How do you know that an agorist society is better than a traditional monopolist government? If it winds up defeating the red market, then it will have proven its value in the marketplace, hasn't it? If the red market is defeated once, then enough people should remember to make sure a red market is never created again.
That's the reason most people who identify themselves as "anarchists" are fools. Public demonstrations and rioting are a waste of time. The only thing that isn't a waste of time is creating wealth that the red market can't confiscate easily. That is the goal of the agorist.
That's the reason I like the term "agorist" better than "anarcho-capitalist". The term "anarchist" is tainted, because most people think of anarchists as protesters and rioters, which is pointless. Since most people don't know what "agorism" means, it can be defined as a refinement of anarcho-capitalism. The agorist has a specific action plan that has a nonzero chance of succeeding.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
The Reason Anarchists are Weak
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Very, very few of the protesters at the G8 summit, WTO, and IMF meetings were actually anarchists. Most were anti-corporatists, such as yourself. Listen to their speeches and read their texts. They want government regulation of all sorts, just not in the direction it's going now. Feel free to visit an anti-WTO website and argue that people should be free to drill for the oil in Alaska. You'll quickly be labelled a troll if not banned entirely.
Many, many anarchists offer up options for how we can have an orderly society without government. We don't argue for "replacing" the government, because we want it removed, not replaced. We don't want anyone, regardless of what they call themselves, stealing the fruits of our labor.
And once again, you're perpetuating the myth that there is no history of anarchist societies. I already gave you references for how Somalia has advanced without government in the 15 years it has been stateless. I wrote an article about the Yurok indian tribe of California on Philaahzophy. Peter Leeson, an economics professor at George Mason University, wrote a great paper on anarchy amongst pirates. The Libertarian Nation Foundation has an excellent paper rife with examples as well.
Agreed with this post, but as a corollary:
The reason for the enormous level of violence directed at "anarchist" and "anti-globalist" protestors is not ONLY to discredit them. You wouldn't need a small army of riot police to take down a handful of thugs, some of whom were red-market agents provocateur.
It is to psychologically brutalize the protestors in general, especially the more non-violent ones, in order to infect them with violent tendencies. (if you notice any accounts of protests that got attacked by police they always go after women and more timid/frail people much more brutally. The "tough guys" are usually arrested and let go later, with little interaction. ) And people with that psychological infection are more easily "turned" later on, because they are already compromised.
This is exactly what happened in the late 60s/early 70s.
When the hippies were peaceful dropouts, they were actually much more of a threat to the establishment than when they started "fighting back".
The establishment wants you to "fight", because that's a battle they can win, and psychologically, they can absorb you later when you're disillusioned.
Agorism works because it peacefully competes with the establishment.
At some point an agorist organization might employ violence, but only rigorously in self-defense, and only in situations where it is feasible to do so.
Post a Comment