Ask an Anarchist

[Takhisis]

In another thread he ahs posted his disappointment in how the Republican Party of the United States has managed to nominate a certain… person.

 

[Tahuti]

What does an anarchist think of the EU referendum?

It's largely meaningless. So that doesn't warrant any further discussion, I wager.

 

[Traitorfish]

What did you think within grasp that now seems unattainable?

Heh, I actually meant my expectations re: my ability to answer this thread in a timely or effective manner.

But, yes, I suppose in some ways I'm more cynical. Not so much for the end-game, I'm as much a wild-eyed idealist when it comes to the year 3000, but in the short term, I'm less impressed by "anarchist organisations", less repulsed by bureaucratic unionism. A lot of anarcho-syndicalists will tell you that they used to be staunch trade unionists, but the realities of industrial organisation turned them towards anarchism; for me, it's a little of the opposite, a little real-world experience to prod me into realising that actually organising people is more important than how many red-and-black flags you can accumulate. (Perhaps "pragmatic", then, rather than "cynical".) And if I'm honest, I was already heading in this direction when I last posted here: it's just that once you establish a certain capital P-Position in in a forum like this, you feel compelled to defend even as you begin to doubt it.

What does an anarchist think of the EU referendum?

From an anarchist perspective, it's a rock and a hard place decision. It's a choice between two versions of the state, so it goes without saying that there can be no "anarchist position" on this, and that anybody claiming to espouse such a position is deeply mistaken.

Some would go a step further, and say that anarchists shouldn't only remain indifferent to this sort of choice, but actively reject it, perhaps even to the point of advocating for abstinence or ballot-spoiling. I understand this sentiment, and certainly there's something to be said for the rhetorical value of a "plague on both they houses" attitude towards the whole thing.

But I'm pragmatic by nature, and I don't think the lack of a coherent "anarchist position" means that anarchists can't take a position as individuals. In my case, it seems inevitable that Brexist would result very quickly in the erosion of workers' rights, of civil liberties, and of the rights of foreign-born workers. I don't kid myself that the EU is a guardian of any of these rights, but it's less actively menacing than the regime in Westminster.

 

[Ajidica]

If Brexit occurs, how long do you think it will be before Scotland tries to leave the UK again?
If Scotland does go solo, do you think the Scottish government will be any better at protecting civil rights than the EU or Westminster?

 

[Takhisis]

Heh, I actually meant my expectations re: my ability to answer this thread in a timely or effective manner.

Are your expectations even lower than ours?

------------------------------
So, what do anarchists (in their own media, which I only rarely read) say about having to choice between one government and another, when they are both, ultimately, well, governments?
(I mean, those who don't just say ‘let them all die&#8217

Also, a general anarchistic conundrum:
Are we allowed to tell you what to do?

 

[Traitorfish]

If Brexit occurs, how long do you think it will be before Scotland tries to leave the UK again?

Not sure. The SNP will start pushing right away, but I'm not sure if they'll have the support for it, or if a Britain-less EU will remain stable enough to be worth breaking the Union over. Scots certainly seem to prefer the EU by a solid margin, but it's not clear that they we strongly enough about it to tempt us into an other referendum, or if a "Leave" outcome on the strength of English votes will sufficiently offend our sense of sovereignty. But I think that it will mean a second referendum, whatever the circumstances, and sooner rather than later, if not so soon as the SNP might like.

If Scotland does go solo, do you think the Scottish government will be any better at protecting civil rights than the EU or Westminster?

Not much, to be honest. The SNP are in a strange situation right now: on the one hand, they've successfully challenged Labour as the party of the working class, but at the same time, they're trying to establish themselves as the Party of Government, and those aren't happy bed-fellows. Sooner or later, they'll be the ones setting cops on protesters.

My hope, though, is that the Scottish public will be more effective at holding them to account. It's a smaller country, with a more transparent governmental system (not that it's hard) and without the same concentrations of political, economic and cultural power that we see in England. And despite Unionists cries of cybernat zealotry, independence-minded Scots are a critical bunch, by and large, and I don't think they're going to lapse into complacency just because we've rearranged the flags.

So, what do anarchists (in their own media, which I only rarely read) say about having to choice between one government and another, when they are both, ultimately, well, governments?
(I mean, those who don't just say ‘let them all die&#8217

I think the general rule is to tread carefully. We can recognise that certain governments are better than others, but that doesn't make them good, and it doesn't legitimise them as institutions. We have to be pragmatic enough to recognise that some virtues are relative, and that some aren't. We should avoid mystifying states, and while that means avoid the hysterical attitude that all states are the Third Reich waiting to happen, we also have to avoid the trap of thinking that some states are possessed of nobler traditions or more virtuous functionaries. They're groups of people in power, trying to stay in power, reliant to a greater or lesser degree on forceful repression; nothing more.

Also, a general anarchistic conundrum:
Are we allowed to tell you what to do?

Yes, but I'm not obliged to listen.

 

[ParkCungHee]

If Brexit occurs, how long do you think it will be before Scotland tries to leave the UK again?
If Scotland does go solo, do you think the Scottish government will be any better at protecting civil rights than the EU or Westminster?

First Scotland will fall, then Stormont. Then Arthur will return to finish the job of driving the English into the sea. This has already been decided in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Hibernia.

My general perspective is that fragmentation of states is a good thing for Praxis, for two reasons:

1) It makes us aware of the fact that government is not a natural law, but a thing we chose to make every day of the year. If we can mentally cross the divide that the shape of our states are in our power, we are one step closer to crossing the mental threshold that the existence of the state is our decision. This isn't even yet to the point of actually convincing people we SHOULD abolish the state, or that we can as a matter of practicality, but it grants us awareness that this Thing is not a thing in itself. That it's a game of pretend that we engage in. At the very least, the concious awareness of that fact helps remind people of their moral duties, and ignore the ethical legerdemain of the state.

2) Localism is inherit in a practical vision of what we might term an 'anarchist society'. Big Government saps our ability to think and exist as moral actors. We act as if we are not humans, but parts of a machine, and our actions are justified not by how a Human Being is obligated to behave, but by how we serve this great machine. We may even believe that human beings benefit from our actions, in this way. But this allows us to ignore the concrete, tangible ways we harm incarnate humans. The smaller the scale of society, the easier it is to conceive of, and the less power it tends to wield psychologically. It is much easier to believe the solution to the problem of 5 million people can be found in changing your behavior than the problems of 64 million.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Are your expectations even lower than ours?

They're at least higher than mine.

 

[Mouthwash]

They're groups of people in power, trying to stay in power, reliant to a greater or lesser degree on forceful repression; nothing more.

How do you square that with the apparent effectiveness of ethnically-based countries like Israel? (I'm not picking a fight here; I'm genuinely curious at how you view such phenomena.)

Built by East European and Muslim-world immigrants with no actual experience of democracy, the Israeli state is, on paper at least, worryingly monolithic and intrusive. The local traffic cop, the school textbook, the neighborhood rabbi, even the local ritual mikveh bath, are all appointed and administered by watchful bureaucrats in Jerusalem.

Nor did Israel’s early history favor democracy. For the first 29 years of the state’s existence, the center-left, today called the Labor Party, never lost an election. This de facto one-party regime controlled not only the country’s powerful security services, but much of the economy. Israel’s largest industries were state-owned and -run (and thus de facto Labor-owned and -run) in those decades.

There are almost no formal checks and balances between the branches of Israel’s government. The prime minister is not chosen directly by the people, but in a complicated process of parliamentary coalition-building. He or she cannot govern without a parliamentary majority, and is thus not meaningfully constrained by any American-style opposition legislature.

Nor does Israel possess any clearly articulated ideology of political liberty. There was no Philadelphia Convention at Israel’s founding, no Federalist Papers, no explicit public debate about the nature and shape of the country’s political institutions. The Declaration of Independence, which refers in broad terms to notions of freedom and equality, lacks the force of law.

Only in 1992 were some key rights delineated in two pseudo-constitutional “basic laws,” yet even these are in an important sense only halfheartedly constitutional. The Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, which articulates fundamental rights such as bodily safety, privacy and freedom of movement, can be changed or overturned by a simple majority of MKs present in the Knesset plenum.

Add to that Israel’s bitter history of near-constant warfare that gave the military a central role in the formation of national identity, the heroicizing of military leaders that naturally flowed from this experience – indeed, add in the enormous number of generals who moved seamlessly out of uniform and into the highest elected offices in the land: Yitzhak Rabin, Moshe Dayan, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak – and one begins to feel that it is not the allegedly looming collapse of Israeli democracy that should surprise us, but the fact that so robust a democracy ever took root here in the first place.

The extent of [England's] strength is best shown by comparing it to Fukuyama’s counter-example: the French monarchy. For all their famed pageantry, French kings were never strong enough to meaningfully tax their nobility, and so resorted to conspiring with them against the peasantry. Unconstrained in any formal sense, but also lacking the legitimacy of their English counterparts and only tenuously in control of the land-owning classes of their country, the Bourbon monarchs gave up on ever imposing a uniform tax system in the country and resorted to selling tax-collection offices to local lords, all but exempting them from taxation while subjecting the lower classes to a double burden. In the end, the French monarchy was felled as an “enemy of the people” by the very classes it had abused.

But in England, the very fact that he was forced to confer with Parliament over taxation and war gave the English king the ability to do both effectively. In the eighteenth century, English state spending reached as high as 30% of GDP, while France’s, even in the two decades of nearly constant war with England from 1689 to 1713, could not surpass 12-15%. The English could double and triple the size of their navy when need arose without compromising the national finances; the French drove themselves repeatedly to the brink of bankruptcy.

This empowering effect of power-sharing lies at the heart of English liberty, and of Britain’s eventual preeminence. For English democracy, Fukuyama explains, did not begin in the weakening of government, but in a more complex standoff, exemplified at Runnymede, that empowered all sides.

The key to the standoff was just that: that it was a standoff. The nobles could sometimes defeat the king, but not topple the monarchy. The king could win battles against armies assembled against him, but never entirely crush the regional lords when they banded together. The result was a tense equilibrium between more or less matched opponents — king vs. nobles, monarchy vs. Parliament — with no side able to comprehensively quash the other. The rights and obligations each eked out of the other were initially extracted by force — quite literally at sword-point at Runnymede — then by implicit agreement, and eventually, over the centuries, by the institutionalization of these arrangements in the peculiar unwritten traditions of Britain’s monarchic democracy.

And it would not have happened without a strong king, one to whom commoners could turn through regional “king’s courts” for redress of grievances against the nobility, one who could unite the country in war, one who could serve as an embodiment of a shared national identity in peacetime.

This ethos of refuge lies at the heart of Israeli solidarity. It is responsible for the deep-seated taboo against intra-Jewish violence. Amid countless wars and terror attacks, bordered on all sides by an imploding, war-ravaged Arab world, Israelis usually say they find the rare instances of Jew-on-Jew violence more unsettling and traumatic than even the largest and most frightening of the wars they have fought with outsiders. The sinking of the Altalena in 1948, the 1983 killing of Peace Now activist Emil Grunzweig or the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 — all instances when Jews killed other Jews — are better known to most Israeli high schoolers than the full-blown wars that took place in those years. They are studied as watersheds of the Israeli experience because they are seen by so many Israelis as events that violated the premise of collective responsibility at the heart of the Israeli Jewish narrative.

The essential elements at the root of Anglo-Saxon liberties, then, were all present at the dawn of the Israeli Jewish polity: an unwinnable competition among mutually antagonistic groups shackled to each other in a unifying ethos of solidarity, a simultaneous push and pull that forces on Israel’s Jews the compromises that make up what Israelis call “democracy.”

Israel’s democracy, like Britain’s, is thus in a deep sense accidental, organic, rooted as much in the collectivist instincts of this refugee nation as in any self-conscious notions of individualism or political liberty.

 

[ParkCungHee]

How do you square that with the apparent effectiveness of ethnically-based countries like Israel? (I'm not picking a fight here; I'm genuinely curious at how you view such phenomena.)

Some states are more effective at utilizing power than others. That's not really surprising, it's been going on since they arouse. Sometimes it's a fun intellectual curiosity to examine their workings, but being effective at a fundamentally illegitimate act doesn't provide much ground for appreciating it.

 

[Mouthwash]

The argument being made is that it's more effective because it's a genuine creation of the will of the people, not because of any special competence.

 

[Lohrenswald]

My general perspective is that fragmentation of states is a good thing for Praxis, for two reasons:

What exactly is praxis? I've heard the term, but it's been a long time, and I'm not sure if I ever really understood

 

[Takhisis]

Wiki-walk time!

Etymology
From Ancient Greek πρᾶξις ‎(prâxis, “action, activity, practice”)

Noun
praxis (plural praxes or praxises)The practical application of any branch of learning.​

and thence:

Young Hegelian philosopher August Cieszkowski was one of the earliest philosophers to use the term praxis as meaning "action oriented towards changing society" in his 1838 work Prolegomena zur Historiosophie (Prolegomena to a Historiosophy). The 19th century socialist Antonio Labriola called Marxism the "philosophy of praxis".[5][6] This description of Marxism would appear again in Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks[7] and the writings of the members of the Frankfurt School.[8]​

 

[Lohrenswald]

I didn't ask you

 

[Takhisis]

In this thread, of all threads, you're telling somebody not to do something?

 

[Lexicus]

What exactly is praxis? I've heard the term, but it's been a long time, and I'm not sure if I ever really understood

It means putting theory into practice, Lohr, though I gather you weren't asking me either.

 

[civver_764]

This is for Traitorfish, since I'm pretty sure I know where ParkCungHee and amadeus would stand:

What do you think about "Bash The Fash!" and other forms of political violence?

 

[Broken_Erika]

Is that any thing like Bash the Fish?

 

[W|M]

What do you think about "Bash The Fash!" and other forms of political violence?

Yes

 

[Lexicus]

What do you think about "Bash The Fash!" and other forms of political violence?

Gee, whatever you do, don't google ww2, you will most certainly be triggered by all the political violence against fascists.