Which means the path to anarchism is one that doesn't engender a violent pushback, which means a peaceful osmosis of institutions reworked into anarchist frameworks?
I'm even more pessimistic than Traitorfish in this regard. I imagine a violent pushback is inevitable, and so looking to pursue a policy that avoids one is ultimately going to lead to collaboration. Facing violence is a reality that will have to be accepted.
I will point out though, that this sort of assumes the status quo is peaceful, when the reality of the state is violence. We see a violent pushback every day, some of us just have managed to get out of the way of it.
ReindeerThistle said:
Perhaps answer me this: how then do the anarchists propose we get to that point?
My answer is individually. You and me have personally, despite some heated disagreements, never resorted to violence or coercion to control or subjugate the other. That to me constitutes enough proof of the viability of anarchy, because it exists right there. The question is then, how do we turn anarchy into the governing principle of all human relations?
I propose first of all at an individual level, starting with ourselves:
The first is, even if another method is possible, starting at an individual level is morally necessary. If I object to the prison system, I must make sure I don't take part in imprisoning people. If I object to capitalism, I must make sure I don't exploit the working class. If I object to war, I must make sure I don't take part in it.
These are not easy things to do in our society, by design. But if even if change is impossible, we can't shirk our moral duties.
Obviously, if all of us fulfilled our moral duties, a larger plan for Anarchism would be unnecessary.
Now, the second is because I have a great deal of doubt in the capability in the long term, and grand scale, for anyone to really get to any point and stay there. I don't really conceive of revolution as something that can happen given the right opportunity, and then we have it, and it's over. States do this all the time, and even with their lowered moral standards, they usually fall apart in any recognizable form within decades, centuries at most.
Realistically, I believe the struggle for peace and anarchy will probably be something that needs to be fought until the end of time.
I guess my question is, then, what does an Anarchist do to manifest the class struggle. How do you form the vehicles of change for the change you seek? Or, do you?
By total non-cooperation with the state. If we're going to talk about this tactically, the advantage to this strategy is that it at once cuts to the power of the bourgeoisie, and provides witness to the struggle, and reveals the state's true nature.
Traitorfish said:
I've been told that beards are misogynistic and therefore anti-anarchist. Something to do with how women are expected to shave body hair and men aren't, so growing a beard is like revelling in the inequity, and I can kinda see the logic of making an argument about how physical ideas, exaggerated tertiary sexual characteristics, etc. play out in a sexist society, but it seemed like taking the thesis a bit too far.
See, this might be the stereotypical anarchist in me, but it seems to me that "Beards for All" is much better than "Beards for None."
Terxpahseyton said:
So being an Anarchist does not require me to believe that anarchism is actually viable?
No. No one is going to come knocking at your door to tear up your membership card, or whatever.
Or do you think it just magically will not?
No. I don't believe in magic. Glad I could answer your questions.
Cheezy said:
Should Batman have killed the Joker at the end of The Dark Knight?
I will try my best not to get
too nerdy on this one, because I have sunk countless hours into this argument. But I assume for the purposes of this thread you want an answer from the philosophical abstract and not something like "No, because whenever you kill the Joker, you get a dystopia, like the Justice Lords, Kingdom Come, or Batman Beyond." Or you know, if you want to just digress into Batman trivia, I'm OK with that too.
But anyway, dealing with this as a serious philosophical question: No. By killing the Joker Batman would be killing the Joker for what has happened in the past, based on what he thinks likely to happen in the future, and based on what he thinks would have happened in the future, if Joker hadn't done certain things in the past.
All of this requires endless counterfactuals, which Batman cannot know, and amounts basically to moral gambling. Batman is hoping that Joker kills people in the future (and that these people would be on the moral upside in general, and he's not going to kill any future Hitlers, or Jokers, which would presumably justify Jokers killings, by the same logic being used here to kill him), because otherwise he would be committing an evil act and killing for no reason other than petty vengeance.
All of this however, on top of being a moral gamble, which means the rightness or wrongness of the action has nothing to do with Batman or the Joker, still reduces human beings to a series of 'pros' and 'cons.'
The question is, pros and cons for whom? Clearly, there's nothing material we regard as the measure of man, and if we did, Joker would unlikely be the worst offender against that thing, whatever it is.
It seems to me then, that either human beings are entities with inherent moral value, or they're not. If they have inherent moral value, then that's all there is too it. Killing someone is inherently wrong, and what that person is like doesn't change that. The right to life is not something other people have to earn or prove to us.
On the other hand, if Humans lack a natural moral value, then there's an extraordinary burden of proof placed on Batman to kill the Joker. Because in order to establish that Joker has no moral worth because of his actions, he has to establish the moral worth of everyone he hurt. I suppose there's a parallel here for the whole situation with the prisoners and the bombs on the boat. To me, there seems to be very little difference between "should Batman kill the Joker" and "should the free men kill the prisoners?"
If I'm going to put my political analysis hat on for a second though, Batman shouldn't kill the Joker because Nolan's Batman is The Leviathan. His job is to be an untouchable, unaccountable force of violence to suppress the base instincts and fundamental knowledge of the masses, to keep them cowed and in line, less they try to control their own lives, and let the city fall into depravity, ignorance and decadence.
So Batman should instead go do something that I'm not allowed to say on this forum.
But the point I think it tries to make is that the violence associated with revolt is more obvious and more spectacular but not necessarily any more violent than that of the everyday workings of capitalism, the indirect, routine suffering which reproduces capitalist social relations, suffering that we're not even accustomed to thinking of in those terms because "it's just how things are". They're arguing that when see revolt, we're a looking at a change in the sort of violence and in who it's directed at, but not necessarily in the actual quantity or degree of violence present, because we're not necessarily looking at any greater amount of human suffering.
