As the year rolls to an end, I’d like to compile a few thoughts on the handling of the NSA secrets leaked by Edward Snowden to Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ryan Gallagher, and others. This debate has occurred on ephemeral media like twitter, and these matters deserve a more extended treatment. There have been many developments since my last post on the subject; one of the most interesting has been the journalistic issues surrounding this episode.
Throughout this post, keep in mind that I approach this as a radical, anti-institutionalist anarchist. My values place very little weight on compromising secret government plots for any reason. I disagree fundamentally with Snowden’s desire for selective leaking, though it shouldn’t surprise anybody that an ex-NSA employee would maintain very different priorities than an anarchist. Nothing could be more useless or moronic than to expect relatively establishmentarian, statist folks like Snowden, Greenwald, or Poitras to act exactly like I might were I in their shoes.
However, I have a basic respect for Snowden’s sacrifice and Greenwald’s work that transcends my political preferences (I’m not familiar with Poitras’s work prior to this episode, though she has my respect as well). I will not sully that respect by dragging any of these people through the mud, even if their chosen acts don’t quite conform to my personal standards. Indeed, I wish to advance a critique of their conduct that can actually contribute to the debate without drowning everything in the noise of acrimony and belligerence.
Unlike many on the radical left, I believe tone is important, both for maintaining crucial solidarity within the larger resistance and for disciplining our own thinking against irrational laziness. Snowden, Greenwald, Poitras, and others are fundamentally on my side of this issue, regardless of our differences in values and ideology. People on the same side can disagree and debate without devolving into crude infighting. I regard it as shameful, juvenile, and counter-productive to elevate any kind of political or methodological purity over those broad interests that unite us.
Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Julian Assange, Jacob Applebaum, and others have had to sacrifice some degree of the kind of personal liberty, safety and security we all take for granted. They did so in order to facilitate an informed, urgent debate that could advance beyond breathless, unhinged conspiracy theory. It is the U.S. government that has created the best argument for why Poitras and Greenwald are careful about releasing NSA documents, as Greenwald has stated:
One of the few protections you have when you’re reporting on classified materials is that you’re doing it as a journalist. It’s therefore vital that we never act as a source or distributor of the materials, which is what the DOJ would eagerly claim if - as individuals - we just started handing out massive amounts of documents to media organizations around the world, rather than doing what we’ve been doing: reporting on them on a story-by-story basis with those outlets.
And it’s not just known legal precedent that hampers him. Poitras and Greenwald must also contend with all sorts of governmental deceit, spooky dirty tricks, and outright nationalist bellicosity. There is no certain, clear, safe path here at all, and if you think there is then I’d argue you don’t really understand the material situation.
Remember: the U.S. Government is not engaging in this debate with critics of their policies. They aren’t entertaining anything but the most trivial, shallow observations from insiders and loyalists who fundamentally defer to them. So it is to be noted that Greenwald, on the other hand, has shown remarkable (if finite) patience with his critics. From the very get-go he has solicited a debate around the ethics of the leaks, appreciating his unique position. Now he’s not a public servant and has no inherent duty to do his job in the way we like, let alone according to values he does not share. He does not deserve bile for seeking out critique.
It’s also curious to see how few complaints Greenwald’s critics hurl at Snowden himself. Indeed, it seems to me the primary constraints on Greenwald, Poitras, Gallagher, et al’s reporting were placed by Snowden himself through the source agreement they concluded at the beginning of all this. Why does Snowden get comparatively little criticism? People like me who would have prefered a mass dump of all these documents on Wikileaks ought not to ignore his initial gatekeeper role. I’m sad to say that Snowden escapes his critics because he does not seek them out in the way Greenwald has.
Just because I oppose writing rancid denounciations of these heroes’ acts and motivating principles doesn’t mean I agree with all of it. It seems vital to me that we all wrestle with these matters as we search for a new consensus about institutional accountability and individual conscience. An unprecedented leak obviously sets a precedent for future leaks, so everybody concerned with covert misconduct and government overreach has an interest in how this plays out. We are learning lessons and hashing out disputes that will guide future whistleblowers, journalists, and activists for decades to come, and that elevates both criticism and civility as dual imperatives in ensuring a productive debate.
Greenwald in particular has asked folks who criticize his approach to suggest better ways to go about it. There is a sense in which any suggestions are meaningless without his and Poitras’s access to the source documents. It may be a reason to defer to his judgment, but it’s an unsatisfying principle to uphold. The ideal situation would not depend on any one small group or career class. That said, I find certain problems with how he has reported this story, and I’ll make some general suggestions as we proceed.
There’s no doubt that all journalism implicitly serves some political narrative; probably what defines the status quo is it’s ability to sneak in political assumptions as neutral facts of life. Nevertheless, Greenwald has explicitly stated (at 52:56 in the video) that he, Poitras, and other journalists who work with him choose to release documents and details from the NSA leak cache in order to “create the most powerful debate and the greatest level of recognition, and to sustain the interest that people have in the debate that we felt was so urgently needed”. As much as I might personally approve of their ends, I find this a troublesome and potentially discrediting criterion for publicizing source material in the public interest.
Imagine for a moment that Greenwald, Poitras, et al both dumped all the NSA documents and wrote all the stories exactly as they have done. Accusations of bias would ring more hollow, because anybody who doubted their take could check the source materials themselves. Greenwald, Poitras, et al’s particular narrative could be tempered by fully informed alternative interpretations.
Or imagine that Greenwald, Poitras, et al both followed their current source material release strategy and wrote in a much less opinionated, more neutral and descriptive voice. No speculations, no denouncements, no context from Greenwald’s constitutional law background–just the absolute basic facts about a leak and its contents. The rest of us could build our stories around interpretations of this data, but there would be less of a sense that Greenwald, Poitras, et al are personally curating leaked information to serve their narrative.
The problem with withholding leaks is that one wonders whether they are telling the whole story. What if these journalists are not releasing documents that contradict the picture they are painting? There’s a certain amount of trust Greenwald, Poitras, et al are asking of their readers and, indeed, an entire world that needs to understand that cache of secrets. Many like me see these issues within the same general narrative that the Greenwald, Poitras, et al do, but we don’t really need to have our minds changed. Do others trust him enough to let him withhold information? Just because I share Greenwald’s distaste for totalitarian government surveillance, I don’t necessarily want to give him or his colleagues complete control over what I do and do not learn about.
To be clear, every journalist filters source information in this way. However, most journalists can be independently fact checked and followed up on by other outlets. It’s the combination of public importance of the source material and Greenwald, Poitras, et al’s exclusive control over access to it that makes this so uniquely problematic.
Greenwald refutes accusations that he and his colleagues are monopolizing the documents by pointing to other mainstream journalists with whom he and Poitras collaborate. So the accusation should rightly be oligopolization, not monopolization, but the root criticism persists. Working with other establishment journalists to reach a consensus on what should be published doesn’t put my mind at ease because I remember how Assange got screwed over by mainstream papers.
Journalistic mediation of source materials is not supposed to restrict access to the source facts themselves; that’s not it’s intent. Journalism is supposed to add clarity and understanding to the facts but not exercise total access control over them. Remember when Greenwald calling out Dina Temple-Raston for reporting national security stories based on materials only she was allowed to see? This is not the same situation, but it has a similar feel to it, because we’re just supposed to trust the journalist without verifying it.
Moreover, I can’t help but regard Greenwald’s arguments for the urgency of mediation here as inherently elitist; the idea that we, the public, must be guided or conditioned by the “drip” strategy of reporting on the leaks seems almost insulting. If this debate is so important, why does it require so much guidance, especially from one faction of one class in society? If we the people cannot be trusted to react to these disclosures in the “proper” manner, why bother with reporting at all? Ultimately, as noble as I think Greenwald, Poitras, et al’s ends are, I can’t help but find this reasoning a bit hypocritical.
How else can the leaks be safely consumed than having credentialed journalists dishing them out? Greenwald in a recent blog post lays out some hypothetical situations in which we would presumably approve of his withholding documents:
- if we know the names of people the NSA is accusing of engaging in “online promiscuity” on the internet, or the names of those the NSA believes are terrorists, should we publish that, thereby invading their privacy and destroying their reputations?
- if we have the raw chats, internet activity, and telephone calls of people on whom the NSA has spied, should we just publish those?
- if we have documents that would help other states spy more effectively on their own citizens’ internet activities, should we publish those, thereby subjecting hundreds of millions of people to heightened state surveillance?
- if we have documents containing the names of innocent people whose reputations or lives would be endangered if they were exposed, should we just ignore their plight and publish those?
- if we have documents that are so complex that we don’t yet understand the potential consequences for other people from publishing them, should we just throw caution to the wind and publish them anyway, and learn later what happens?
Before I address his reasoning here, I must admit something a little sappy but sincere: I was astounded at how much more complex answering these questions became for me if I actually put myself in Greenwald’s shoes in my imagination and considered the real logistics of my favored approach. There are no perfectly secure places to leak that volume of data. There’s no sure-fire defense of Greenwald, Poitras, et al’s conduct in this climate. Any act they would take would have downsides. That’s why despite our differences I afford all of them a great deal of deference along with infinite gratitude for doing the job at all.
That said, let’s address these hypotheticals by breaking the concerns down into three categories: Personal identity issues, technological issues, and national security issues.
####Personal identity issues####
This is a legitimate concern, so if it would speed up the release of documents I’d be in favor of redacting any and all personal names automatically, without exception. To me, the “who” is much, much less important than “what” and “how”. Sure, there’s probably some information that could be traced back to particular people even without explicit names, but at least some deniability would be preserved.
The advantage of this approach is that it is at once clear cut and achieves a stable balance between personal privacy and the public interest. A newspaper that legitimately cared about this debate could start churning through the documents as a public service, redacting names and releasing, all while maintaining a first scoop advantage. Frankly I fail to even see the controversy here, although Greenwald, Poitras, et al can’t be expected to do all of it by themselves. As I’ll get to later, they could convince these papers profiting off the leaks they provided to do the work as a public service.
####Technological issues####
I have a hard time believing that publishing any technological details mentioned by the documents would do more harm than good. Open information in this area can inform and quicken the production of countermeasures. I assume Greenwald, Poitras, et al would approve of the public at large learning to defend against NSA exploits. For me, that’s enough to shoot down this criterion.
But there’s a bigger issue here: the technical details matter relatively little because the most effective things the NSA has done are only possible at scale. The sheer amount of money and authority wielded by the NSA dwarfs any other institution and would make them powerful even if they had no technology. Think about it: they probably have enough resources to create a Stasi-like snitch network that could accomplish a good deal of the same work the technological approaches do that could do. It is the power, not the particular exploits or spyware schematics, that makes the NSA totalitarian.
The NSA’s intentions are no more dangerous than those of other governments, organized crime syndicates, and gadfly hackers. Most of the technical methods they’ve employed can be discovered by anybody. But no one person, and probably no other institution on the planet, could assemble this kind of massive, comprehensive toolset.
For example, if the NSA had invested in uncovering only the software, hardware, and firmware exploits it absolutely needed for surveillance, that might be worth keeping secret according to Greenwald, Poitras, et al’s less radical values. But the NSA has tried to amass an encyclopedic, overlapping catalog of exploits in the interests of maximizing not just the breadth of surveillance but its depth and redundancy as well. As a programmer I know that exploits can and will always be discovered in software; the NSA has simply directed their considerable resources towards cultivating and maintaining them for unclear reasons.
Couple that with the technological details about their collaboration with other companies and spy agencies, such as tapping into internet trunk lines and compromising encryption algorithms. These are methods that do not stem from technical expertise; they are hacks of other organizations through the projection of physical cloak-and-dagger force, intimidation, bribery, and mutual nefarious ends. Any agency operating with similar power could do the same thing–in fact, the U.S. has condemend China for precisely these kinds of activities. Political clout and force projection capabilities can greatly enhance technological sophistication, but it’s still a crucial ingredient available only to organizations working at the NSA’s scale.
I cannot accept that withholding technological information stops anybody from being spied on. Releasing this information publicly is in fact the best thing one can do to counter this power. Once these bugs, vulnerabilities, and technologies are public, they have the best chance to be addressed in the public interest. That’s not to say there are no dangers, only that I see no scenario where those dangers outweigh the benefits by any civil liberties accounting.
####National security issues####
What if there are documents that, once published, would have consequences we simply don’t or can’t understand? To me, this line of thinking totally validates the arguments of the NSA’s defenders who say public knowledge of any of this endangers us. I doubt that there are any legitimate national security secrets necessary to our survival as an independent nation–at least, an independent nation sans the empire we’ve collected over the past century.
Now, neither Snowden, Poitras, nor Greenwald are anarchists, so it surprises me not at all that they’d strike a very different balance on national security than I would. Berating them over this is particularly unhelpful, not least because it reinforces any elitist notion that the public at large is too immature or reckless to handle this information. However, the facts about the true state of our security are among the very most important revelations we could learn. Such facts could undermine the entire imperial narrative and change the game completely.
At least given what we have learned so far, the NSA has had very poor reasons for concealing their activities. If Snowden, Poitras, Greenwald, and others involved in the leaks have similar or superior reasons, they should not expect our patience with non-explanations. Make your case for withholding explicit, release it all entirely, or relinquish the moral high ground in this particular aspect.
It seems to me that if Greenwald, Poitras, et al are going to control how these documents are disseminated, they cannot simply do so in the service of their own reporting or the reporting of their hand picked journalists and newspapers. There’s been too much inside baseball already, and expanding the class of insiders is not equivalent to public knowledge. This story is just too important, and if the open debate he, Poitras, and Snowden seek is going to happen, one party cannot linger in a position to dictate terms.
Therefore, I’d like to suggest that as steward of these leaked documents, their reporting is only one part of the job. Within the constraints of their source agreement with Snowden, I argue Greenwald, Poitras, and other involved journalists have an equal responsibility to see that the documents get out as quickly as possible, regardless of whether they serve their particular reporting narrative. This is a unique duty that stems from the singular position these journalists, especially Greenwald and Poitras, occupy relative to a matter of such gravity.
As soon as documents are cleared according to whatever criteria they choose (I assume they include the conditions I discussed above), they should be immediately released regardless of whether Greenwald, Poitras, et al report on them or not. I realize they cannot be seen as a disseminator of these leaks in order to protect themselves legally. But surely they could find a way with the help of this worldwide network of newspapers with which he’s collaborating. There’s a ton of resources there that could be put to a real public good equal to their reporting: expanding the historical record. Keep in mind that this is an unprecedented scale of disclosures entrusted to one small group; to treat this as just another instance of journalism, conforming to the exact same rules, may not be appropriate.
Finally, I can’t accept their “drip” strategy as a sufficient reason to withhold these leaks from the public. Keep in mind that the vast majority of people will not even want to read the source documents directly, so it’s not like one cannot maintain at once a drip of contextual reporting as well as a healthy stream of primary materials.
I mentioned earlier that it is the scale at which the NSA operates that makes it dangerous. Only with such concentrated resources and authority can the NSA compromise the entire communications network infrastructure at every layer. Any defense strategy or reform that doesn’t squarely address the issues surrounding this unprecedented concentration of power is worse than useless. Clever hacking will not save us from concentrated power; crypto is a workaround and not a sufficient response to the fundamental challenge here. New oversight practices, such as a “privacy advocate” position in the FISA court, will fail as surely as old ones. Organizations like the NSA specialize in telling themselves and others precisely the narratives that justify their abusive, disingenuous conduct in the dark.
Knowing this, statists of all varieties must wrestle with how to check and balance the government in this era. The sheer level of secrecy and abuse here can’t help but give the lie to their minarchist approach of legal reform and institutional counterbalancing. Clearly any government abiding an organization like the NSA is no mere accomplice but rotten to the core. Any reform that does not squarely face this reality is insufficient and counterproductive on its face.
While anarchists understand that even this latest outrage will not bring about the revolution, I do think we are uniquely positioned to advocate for extreme measures that others currently find unthinkable. There literally is no alternative, because who could ever trust anything the government does in secret again? The NSA’s power and operation in the dark must be scaled far, far back if we are to have a real solution to this crisis. Indeed, the state must be made to understand that its very legitimacy is at stake, and this is a core anarchist goal in the first place.
Dissolution of the state and the NSA may not be politically feasible, but a sharp and crippling cut to the budget–especially the abolition of the secret black budget–may be one concession we can extract from the establishment. After abolition, containing the budget is the next best insurance against power becoming too concentrated in an organization. Granted, this is a long shot, but it both has the virtue of being measureable and also marking a grave reappraisal of the government’s legitimacy.
I’m sure each and every person responsible for bringing the NSA cache of secrets to light has a different vision of what reforms are best. However, we are at a unique juncture in history–one we indeed owe to Snowden, Greenwald, Poitras, and others, but nevertheless one which belongs to all of us. Never before have the people faced such pervasive and subtle totalitarianism so undermining to society as we know it. If folks finally consider radical solutions, it will not be because anarchists berated them into it. The right arguments could ensure the separation of the head from the snake this time, if anarchists can model a new attitude towards power that seeks not to alienate opponents but build a qualitatively different consensus.
]]>Because they are so frequently decent, I’m sometimes tempted to reconcile the profession of policing with the kind of free society I dream about. After all, I have several friends and family who are police officers, and I’m loathe to let ideology darken my opinions of them as individuals. I want to believe policing is possible outside the hegemony of a state, and that these people can be meaningful participants in a stateless community.
But I never persist in that belief very long. I cannot think of any acceptable justification for the existence of law enforcement as an institution at all. The entire enterprise is abominable, root and branch. There is no escaping the conclusion that, everywhere they exist, police are mercenary occupiers serving a power hostile to the authentic human flourishing. As I intend to show, so long as our society exhibits privilege and injustice, I cannot pretend law enforcement does not prop it up in some fundamental manner.
It is the transformation of the function of policing into a profession that chiefly offends me. It’s as ridiculous as professionalizing the role of the voter in a democracy. I’m sure contractors or bureuacrats could devise a way to vote more efficiently than any of us flesh-and-blood folks can, but wouldn’t that defeat the point? It’s crucial to a democracy that everybody vote; it’s what makes it a democracy (putting aside whether such formal democratic governance is desirable).
In the same way all eligble members must vote in order for a democracy to be most legitimate and authentic, being a member of a free, self-governing, non-authoritarian community necessarily entails policing on the part of every community member. After all, more is implied by “community” than mere proximity of domiciles. Rather, communities should comprise a population unit bound by shared values, a coherent body brought together and made distinct by the identity emerging from individual lives. When you surrender using coercion as an organizing principle, what other basis is there for collectivity?
These shared values do not ensure there will never be conflict, or even that these communities will always work. They do, however, ensure that the costs, side-effects, and consequences of that community’s values will be legible to the people themselves. If you want racism in your community, well, you’ll have to do the dirty business of pushing around people yourself–no passing laws and hiring cops to do it for you. If you want to enforce unequal distribution of wealth, you can’t hire goons to keep your neighbors fenced off in squalor. Whatever problems face the community, at least the community cannot ignore them.
Professionalizing the policing of communities encourages people to promote values without fully internalizing the costs of doing so. These costs accrue not just monetarily; they are costs incurred through inconvenience, mental calcuation, averting one’s eyes, and psychological coping, through the inalienable duties of community membership, through the inability to simply ignore the reality of your fellow man. If you outsource this, you don’t just concentrate power in a class of people with obscene incentives to abuse it. You also outsource your ability to learn whether or not your community actually functions at all. And you will be hostage to the police because you’re afraid to fully accept and participate in the consequences of your way of life. Shouldn’t that tell you something about your community?
I don’t understand why anarchists of all stripes underemphasize the degree to which anarchism is necessarily incompatible with mediating institutions like the police. It seems to me that speaking only of what people can expect to get from a stateless society smacks of typical individualist myopia. Abolishing constituted authority confers the duty to regulate and manage personally, relying on everybody to step up and do their part.
You can’t hold the responsibilities of human freedom without unfiltered, direct information about the conditions under which that freedom exists. To be free in a particular context must entail an awareness of that particular context. Anarchism, sans ideology, is ultimately about being present, directly experiencing the collective reality, noticing the fluid conditions that are equally capable of frustrating and liberating us all. Any political principles following from that approach downright empirical facts.
Anarchism prefigures a world in which people go about human business in all its facets, without mediation or privilege. Self-government doesn’t merely devolve the operations of governance, such as the parliamentary or legal, to the common man. It changes the nature of what we mean by government, transforming it from a formality of institutions running parallel to society into a day-to-day individual duty, a constant creation of and reaction to society, not in spite of the people’s confluence and conviviality but as its logical product.
We find ourselves held hostage by police and their increasing demands for more intrusive, more arresting, more egregious domination because we know our communities cannot work on their own. So we put up with the arrogance, the abuse, the concentration of unaccountable power. In addition to pointing out the evil and error of this situation, anarchists must stress that it is also an abdication to the state of the very essence of our social nature. A police force tangibly represents the abandonment of community, a clue that the collective values of the population do not align with the lived reality.
A community doesn’t require guards wielding lethal force to maintain itself. It doesn’t have to protect those with more privilege, power, or wealth from those with less. The very fact that you have to constantly protect power and privilege in first place, let alone do so by hiring the goon squad, tells you whatever arrangements you wish to protect are artificial, illegitimate, and unsustainable.
If community wealth is imbalanced, of course you will have crime. If you have a subclass of people who are disrespected consistently by the others, of course you will have violence. If you refuse to engage directly with your neighbors, of course you’ll need an armed mediation squad to protect you and yours from them and theirs. And if your reaction to the messy business of human beings is to wall yourself off from them with a professional cleanup crew, mopping up the trail of blood and pain your chosen existence creates, of course it will persist. To solve a problem you must first face it.
The police don’t create injustice, inequality, suffering, poverty, and crime; those things will probably happen anywhere to some degree. All that police do is maintain the status quo that allows these things to continue and intensify, protecting business as usual from them. “Bad people” exist, but I see no evidence that the police has some sort of unique ability to identify them, so prevalent are they in the halls of power (and donut shops).
By sanitizing the problems our laws, practices, and values create for us, they make our collective dysfunction possible. We don’t need to actually respond to the damage we cause; we just pay to have it managed for us, and this default attitude enables many of the intractible, ongoing crises of modern life because the community’s fluid, adaptive nature has been denied. The police allow us to pretend this constant failure of humanity is just the way the world is, instead of what we ask them to institute as an alternative to facing it head on.
It’s like a town living behind a dam that can’t hold; every time it floods, the solution is a bigger, better, more expensive dam, instead of just moving to a place that doesn’t require a dam. Similarly, it’s as if the police manufacture the community’s need for their services, with our all too frequently enthusiastic blessing. While I criticize the individuals who choose the crappy profession of law enforcement for not self-regulating more, I’m sympathetic to their predicament to defend an indefensible and unsustainable order. There’s no way to do it but with brutal violence, ubiquitious threats, and raw, unaccountable power.
Professional police create the illusion that we can be passive consumers of government. Law enforcement is the indispensible institution of the modern state, the fulcrum of authoritarianism in our society. The honest anarchist intuitively recognizes this, but may not realize that any future stateless society with a professional police class will inevitably end up as bad or worse. When it comes to anarchism, you cannot alienate your agency to personally produce the society you wish to participate in.
The only alternative to hierarchy, authority, and privilege is to reclaim our inalienable duty to be the police ourselves, to be members of a horizontal community, to be the exemplars of the values we claim to hold dear, and to face danger and suffering squarely. Anything less is nothing but an amusement park, a simulcrum of community that sells us tickets to a cage. That kind of farce has nothing to do with the anarchist project, which concerns humans and the communities that emerge from their congress.
]]>Greenwald invites us to consider a series of bills that enlist government in punishing corporations for views they express, money they donate to causes, etc. Some examples:
I agree with him that the above laws are unconstitutional. Government is prohibited from discriminating or giving unequal protection to the free speech rights of corporations as currently settled law stands (that was indeed one of the caveats he made). Indeed, Greenwald took pains to point out that even in the Citizens United case, not one Supreme Court justice questioned the legitimacy of corporate personhood at all (I addressed Greenwald’s commentary on this matter in more detail here). I also agree with him that The Nation’s Lee Fang takes an unprincipled, politically expedient position against corporate personhood – one cannot confine one’s critiques of the doctrine to only those cases where it acts against one’s sense of justice. Nobody wants to be allied with a hack like Fang less than I.
However, I do take issue with Greenwald’s notion that protecting corporate rights are constitutive to unbiased government. The imaginary laws he suggests are careful to target particularly contentious political issues that divide our nation. I assume his goal here is to show how Fang’s argument could be pressed into the service of a variety of illiberal ends. But why should we only consider narrowly moral issues in light of interventions by government? The examples ably illustrate the heaviness of the hand government uses to skew society to its political vision in general; no need to contain our outrage to only those narrow attempts at referreeing decorum and moral convention.
Indeed, the sole problem I have with Greenwald’s thesis is that it doesn’t go nearly far enough, constituting a blind spot for certain institutional arrangements he (and not simply the Supreme Court) considers beyond dispute. I would argue that the corporate form owes its very existence as a legitimate legal fiction to government intervention in the first place. Not only that, the intervention was designed to favor a certain view – in fact a political, even moral, opinion – of how business should be organized. This view is at least as arbitrary, moralistic and prejudicial as the imaginary laws he righly argues represent state overreach.
As far as I can tell (and I’d be happy to be corrected) Greenwald takes a thoroughly liberal view here that makes a distinction between rational, secular business matters and irrational, polemical moral and religious matters. I hold that this distinction is thoroughly false: government intervention to create and sustain corporate privilege is itself a moral intervention. For example, it has rigged our business environment to prefer capital over labor and business interests over civil interests. That is not just a technical legal matter for our society to work out rationally; rather, I’d argue it circumscribes a great deal of the inequality at the heart of our society’s decay.
I’d like to follow Greenwald’s lead by imagining the following laws:
In each of the above cases, I have not entirely made up the law as Greenwald did – these statements more or less describe the current legal environment. Corporations are created by government when people file paperwork and pay a fee. In return, the government grants them ownership over an entity they may govern. This entity confers on them limited liability for their actions, entity status that people are compelled to respect, and the privilege to abide by different standards than those applied to us flesh-and-blood humans. This is just the beginning of the story of how government intervenes through the corporate form to skew society towards an arrangement with moral and ethical consequences. Among other results, this artificially instituted and imbalanced playing field directly contributes to:
The idea that somehow the above situation is a technical, amoral, secular outcome that government is perfectly at liberty to pursue underlies Greenwald’s entire argument. It’s only when the issue at hand is abortion, or minority rights, or religion, or some other contentious topic on which the elite have not already reached consensus that government must look the other way.
The proper remedy to all of this (besides abolishing the state and privilege at large) is hold all people equal before the law – whether or not they are principals, managers, or shareholders in some contractually created, legally fictitious business entity. This must entail the end of all government favoritism, including that powerful subsidy embodied in corporate privilege. Nobody should be allowed to manipulate society through government force, neither for moral ends nor business advantage.
But more subtly and importantly, the line liberals draw between secular business matters and religious or moral matters is itself an arbitrary, self-serving reordering of society to their liking that underlies their statist politics. Every group with an agenda thinks theirs is different, but the liberal desire for technocratic, rational secularism is just as much a pre-rational value imposed on society as Christian fundamentalist theocracy would be. We could strike a blow for true equality – and accomplish a lot of “progressive” ends along the way – not by encouraging more government picking of winners and losers but by stopping the intervention that has already been going on for a century and a half.
]]>As anarchists, we find ourselves in an environment run by statists who attempt to get away with all manner of illegitimate actions and policies. For us, those acts and policies are not illegitimate because they are inconsistent with the state’s own internal rules. We believe there are no rules that can justify the state or its coercive actions.
However, the statists who claim to rule us are in thrall to the myth of the constitution’s legitimating power. Of course they get away with a lot that any plain reading of that document prohibits. This is the origin of “loose construction” in the first place: if they could just ignore the constitution to get what they want, they wouldn’t bother framing their acts in any construction of the constitution at all. Clearly, the constitution doesn’t matter to them in the way it’s supposed to, but it does play some sort of role in the state’s performative exercise of authority and power.
So we have a situation where the proper homage and respect must be paid to a document that provides the basis for the ruling class’s state power. However, that class doesn’t always agree about how that power should be wielded. When such a disagreement occurs, it can threaten the continued coherence of the state, which would deny the entire class uninterrupted power and legitimacy and create a window of opportunity for competing narratives of how we might be ruled. There must be an arbiter to resolve this dispute to preserve the overall infrastructure of the state.
In the same way a papal decree arbitarily puts to rest a matter of theological contention within the Catholic church, the Supreme Court can resolve a dispute among the statist political class in a “final” manner. Since the constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation to serve the business class’s interests in “interstate commerce”, the Supreme Court was designed to resolve disputes between the states in a binding manner. That does have implications for how the government will apprehend us, the people. It doesn’t make that binding finality “legitimate” or “just”. It just means that to the extent the government operates according to internal rules and policies, we can study its deliberations to gain insight into future encroachments.
Think of anarchist constitutional scholarship as counter-intelligence and strategic analysis. For example, the CIA was intensely interested in the internal disputes and intrigues of the Soviet Kremlin. This wasn’t because they were rooting for one side over the other as a matter of justice or morality. It had more to do with trying to predict future policies and acts of that government, since those in charge are the ones who effect those policies and actions. Any interventions by the CIA in this area would have been in service to realpolitik, solely to advantage the U.S.government’s interests.
I suggest anarchists think about constitutional law in a similar way. There may be broad, abstract principles of justice and reason embedded in the constitution. But they have little to nothing to do with how the state realizes its own power. We consider the exercise of that power to be a problem regardless of its adherance to an over two hundred year old document. So we should try to predict the political zeitgeist and foresee threats to ourselves and our communities, analyzing these matters in cold, calculating terms rather than in an outraged, indignant matter. Constitutional scholarship has something of a rhyme or reason to it, and it might be helpful to understand as a rear-guard defense against the state while building our own autonomous institutions to meet our needs.
To flip von Clausewitz’s aphorism, politics is the continuation of war by other means. Anarchists should regard constitutional politics as nothing less. Obamacare is just another move in the chess game between privilege and the people. The solution to its injustices is not to convince the ruling class that its own myths allow us a bit more freedom; it is to topple our rulers and their myths utterly, building our own solutions, discovering our own sources of transcendent meaning, and defining the legitimate in our own interests. The constitution is of no help there except as a kind of specification document for one of the enemy’s weapons.
]]>It is so gratifying to see this maturity of thought from the anarchist sector I consider my closest allies. Let this powerful presentation start the conversation on how we prosecute this next era of the struggle against privilege. If this presentation is representative of the topics discussed at the recently concluded AgoraI/O conference, then I really missed out, and will be there with bells on next year!
]]>Understood in this narrow sense, I do not find elitism dangerous as an abstract analysis. Indeed, there are a vast variety of competencies inherent in people, whether through their choosing to develop them or whether they come “naturally” (whatever you think that means). That some should gravitate to a place where their talents are best used is not a problem; it is a core purpose around which we associate.
The problems enter in when a mere measurement of talent distribution is expanded into an individual or group identity. Without elitist pretensions, there is no need for a purposeful elevation of the more competent over the less. There is no need for institutional structures that maintain elite predominance. Why go to great lengths to stress differentiation between non-elite and elite if those differences are obvious?
In other words, it appears that elites are elite due to their ability to render some sort of service to others. But over time, elites come to be served by others. This happens because, instead of the elite status being a matter of demonstration and service, it turns into a status existing in and of itself. If the elite status cannot be commonly seen, then it must be imposed. Hence, institutional structures like royal families, aristocratic classes, and executive professional networks maintaining exclusive access to power. The elite become an identity, not a competency.
The importance of coercive structure to elevate these elites cannot be underemphasized. Societies are narrower than the humans they comprise. They select for qualities, talents, and characteristics they value based on their imperfect understandings at a given time. For societies to develop, they cannot simply perpetuate the same patterns for which they select; they must broaden their appreciation for underutilized talents, unappreciated qualities. The elite, in order to maintain their position as a matter of identity, must arrest this progress as a matter of preserving their status. Service to society is once again hampered.
I can imagine elite apologists saying that certain individuals are more valuable to society than others. For whatever reason, their talents are rarer. The loss to society of an improperly elevated talent is worth the danger of codified supremacy. The values informing this distinction between individuals are arbitrary but inherent in the social body. But this views the danger of elitism only in terms of its social consequences. It does not speak to the consequences to the so-called elite individual.
Talent within the self is not alone sufficient. It must be developed and actionable in order to useful. After all, if elites are distinguished by their usefulness to society, then their talents must be realized or the elite status is illegitimate. In a very real sense, the only legitimate use for a concept of elite is the service by the elite to the net benefit of society.
If one’s sense of identity comes from the opinion that one is elite as a matter of what one can do, and not what one does do, it can hamper this striving to develop the talent. It can invert the pattern of service and squander the talent through demanding that others serve the elite. This then becomes a mere power relationship and, as earlier mentioned, will require recognition by society through coercive means in the end.
I’d argue that egalitarianism is not the argument that everybody is equal in talents. Instead, egalitarianism is the argument that what constitutes virtue is service, not identity, and that human potential is the basis for moral equality. It is through the kinetic that the potential is demonstrated and work is performed, if accomplishing work is the point in the first place.
What counts as “talent” is after all a normative construct. It isn’t important at all, in the end, whether everybody has the same capabilities; what is important is that we understand genuine service, and that we cultivate a society that sees value in service to others so that potential is realized wherever it lay and not be squandered by mere institutional momentum.
The egalitarian approach has perhaps one construct on top of this: that perhaps potentials of import are not so easily perceived by us mortals, and therefore the safe bet is to value all instead of directly ordering the social body to select for the obviously desirable talents. Rousseau may have been correct that institutions corrupt man, but it seems more important to me that they may promote the development of individual talents based solely on their value to institutions. Obviously, human potential is broader than the society can integrate at a given moment. We can have faith in people, or we can have faith in leaders - this is the insight of the anarchist.
]]>I just discovered the RAW Illumination blog that carries on and promotes the philosophy, attitude, and perspective of one of my very favorite authors and thinkers, Robert Anton Wilson. There’s a great interview with Douglas Rushkoff on his book “Program or Be Programmed” which I reviewed here. However, this transcription of Robert Shea’s speech upon accepting the Hall of Fame award from the Libertarian Futurist Society for the book he co-wrote with Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, is quite gratifying to me. It provides comfort for the long, hard slog of being intellectually free and curious, not so much as some demonstration of autonomy as a will to self-definition and self-discovery. The final paragraph is powerful:
We say in the novel that the original Illuminati were dedicated to religious and political freedom and that this secret organization somehow became perverted so that in recent centuries the Illuminati had become a vehicle for a monstrous authoritarianism. Thus the myth of the Illuminati is an archetype for every political movement, from Lenin’s Bolshevism to Reagan’s Republicanism, that has promised people greater freedom while loading them down with more government. People can be fooled in this way because they are not sure what freedom is. Freedom is a word whose meaning has been worn away by overuse, like a coin that has passed through too many hands. We need to be clear about what it means to us when we use it and maybe not use it quite so much, but use other, more precise words instead.
In ILLUMINATUS! we suggest that freedom begins in your right to define yourself and to insist on the validity of your own perceptions and your own thoughts. To change to a new point of view because you find it convincing is, of course, merely an exercise of that freedom. But freedom is lost when you are coerced or frightened into denying your own way of seeing reality and into accepting a point of view you cannot really believe in, be it that of a family, a teacher, a boss, a party, a church, a state. And an amazing thing is that when each of us insists on his or her own vision, it does not divide us. It unites us as no externally imposed unity ever could. It unites us in reverence for that inner light which we can only find by knowing ourselves, never by denying ourselves, that light by which each one of us can truly be said to be illuminated - the true Illuminati.
Read the whole thing. He also mentions that Wilson stopped calling himself an anarchist, but more out of a rejection of loaded labels than a rejection of the ideas. I feel myself pulled that way at times.
]]>At the time, Allies were debating the proper reaction to an inflammatory essay that had been written by a non-left libertarian. This debate turned into a crisis: one left libertarian denouncing the other as out of bounds and beyond the pale. As all parties stood their ground, things digressed into nasty insults and accusations that mainly exhausted us. It got to be surprisingly ridiculous, but what surprised me the most was the fact that, of all people, Wilbur - the one who likely understands the historic trajectory of this movement more than anybody else, and therefore would have the most to say about where all this is headed - was the one to leave.
Among Wilbur’s arguments, as I understand them, was the absence of any way to resolve the dispute to everybody’s satisfaction. The Alliance had always been a vague and inarticulable one, grounded in shared tendencies but no shared principles that had ever been made clear, let alone binding. Add to that the concept of ALL being a place where “we all agree to disagree” and you have the basis for neither ideological commitment nor ideological boundaries. Personal attacks were all anybody had, because there was no shared premise of alliance, and I imagine Wilbur couldn’t see the point of continuing to associate with such a meaningless brand. If all we were going to do was be an online club of likeminded malcontents, why bother winning this fight?
Fast forward to earlier this year: the Center for a Stateless Society had been building momentum with a new funding model and a solid record of publishing op-eds for a year or so. However, Wilbur left the advisory board because he was increasingly uncomfortable with the term “market anarchist” as a description of his beliefs. Read his blog and you’ll feel a yearning expressed over and over: to get beyond the ideological factions and locate the common principle that impels us to use fancy terms like “individualism” and “market”. Where C4SS offered a brand, Wilbur sought substance.
It appears the same concerns that led to Wilbur’s departure from the Alliance contributed to his departure from the Center. In the comments for a recent C4SS op-ed that caused many of us discomfort, Wilbur persistently argued not just against the article but against the nebulous constellation of ideas and tendencies that comprise the Center’s mission:
I’ve gradually distanced myself from left-libertarianism, market anarchism, the ALLiance and the Center, largely because the sorts of “agreement” that seem most common look more like disagreement to me – and because they seem to open the door more often to those who elevate “private property” over individual liberty (despite their rhetoric) much more often than they admit those whose concern for individual liberty makes them resistant to “private property.” I’m not being stubborn about disagreement. The ALLiance was initially built around a certain amount of active disagreement. The notion that we “really agree” really just seems dismissive to me, given the obvious gulf between our positions.
Now, I’ve been an enthusiastic supporter of the Center for a year or so. It is not everyday that you get a chance to push op-eds promoting anarchism to mainstream media sources. Given the people involved in the project - Brad Spangler, Gary Chartier, Kevin Carson, Darian Worden - I felt like the left libertarian credentials of this organization needed no vetting whatsoever. The biggest motivator for me was being able to support those writers whom I appreciate and whom I think are as potentially convincing to others as one was to me. Kevin Carson is probably the reason I ever considered anarchism in the first place.
However, I do have reservations. For one, I do not consider myself a “market anarchist”, for many of the reasons Wilbur articulates. For another thing, the Center has a tendency to extend its language beyond what I would consider the left libertarian consensus into narrow agorist or market fundamentalist language, where all we seek to advocate is expressed in pure economic terms. I don’t want to single out specific articles or authors; it suffices to say that these misgivings are shared by more than a couple of supporters, so it’s not just me.
In fact I don’t think it’s the authors’ fault - they do what they can to further the work of the Center as they understand it, and none of them understand it any worse than the rest of us. Without a clear consensus on the Center’s mission, why shouldn’t they just write about whatever they feel like? The problem is not their understanding of the C4SS consensus so much as ours.
What vision and principles do we share? When we support the Center, what are we saying with that support? How do we judge the efficacy of the Center when there’s no clear statement of the advocated “stateless society”? Why stop at “market anarchism” as the only articulation of statelessness - why not be more ecumenical towards the variety in the anarchist movement?
All of the articles that bother me are perfectly consonant with market anarchism, broadly constructed. We can say, “So what? We disagree on certain points. Big deal.” But I don’t consider that a sustainable situation, any more than it was in the Alliance. It’s even more urgent because the Center is not merely a debate club, affinity group, or online brand; it’s an outreach organization designed to generate real results: new anarchists. What is at stake here is bigger than competing visions and ideological formulations of market anarchism; this agitprop will influence future left libertarians and market anarchists who will expand upon our work for years to come. Little in our corner of the universe could demand more accountability.
Until we take the difficult leap towards defining the positive goals, values, and dreams that unite us, as well as the outcomes we mutually reject as unacceptable even in a stateless society, it will be difficult for people to feel they understand exactly what they are funding. Every time a member reads an article that strays from their personal vision, they will question the Center’s mission. The Center’s success cannot be judged by its supporters if there is no sense of our common approach and aspirations, or at least an understanding of the contested areas that are likely to divide us. Remember: this is not about all of us agreeing so much as all of us deciding how to package and sell this “market anarchism” to which we all supposedly adhere (and yes, that alone gives me pause).
I don’t know how to go about organizing the discussion that would articulate or ratify such a consensus. But if this Center for a Stateless Society is going to advocate for us, especially when capably and admirably run by such steadfast organizers and generous writers on a shoestring budget, the least we can do is give them guidance and not just criticism. Wilbur’s departure was an indication that we cannot simply rally around a black flag; revolutionary consensus requires us to be honest about the change we seek, and to ally on the basis of that honesty. It might be painful, but if we could find such a consensus that all sides of the market anarchist / left libertarian milieu could get behind, we would have the basis for a powerful advocacy and outreach group, indeed.
]]>Your revolution succeeds. Through whatever means you think it possible, your fellow ____s have defeated the authoritarian/fascist/totalitarian forces and are ascendant. You, of course, know that your side will not rule in the same ruthless manner your enemy did.
Now what do you do with all these enemies whom you haven’t killed or converted yet? The same beliefs that motivated them to oppose you in the past are likely not to be simply cast aside. After all, you didn’t cast yours aside when you were out of power. As somebody experienced with dissidence, you know all too well that such people can take a long term view of their agenda and undermine the society you want to build in countless subtle ways.
Well, if you’re Lenin, you kill as many as you can and install a ruthless regime of your own to deter revolt of the rest. If you’re Washington, you expel as many “loyalists” to the enemy side as possible and, oh yeah, if anybody doesn’t like it you lead the army against them. If you’re Hitler, you kind of just kill them all. If you’re Mao, you kind of just kill them all.
See where I’m heading with this? We’re so used to being dissidents that we don’t even have a plan for success. Not only have we built the assumptions of marginality and defeatism into our politics, but we leave ourselves with a giant, gaping hole in the middle of our view of the world we seek to change. And if we don’t address this hole in the middle of our strategy, our revolution is likely to bring about the same kind of reactionary despotism we sought to overthrow, because there’s always going to be some asshole who’s willing to be the “serious, pragmatic” son-of-a-bitch to get shit done.
The only honest anarchists I know recognize that violent revolution is likely to come only after a large majority of people have rejected the establishment, and that any outward revolution will be, at most, a lagging indicator of the shift in public opinion, not the cause. These activists stress education and outreach. On the face of it, I think this is admirable for reasons I explained in my last post. But what about people who, even in the face of arguments you find compelling, simply do not agree with you? How do you deal with them? You can neither ignore the problem nor resolve to just kill them all, because the latter undermines the legitimacy of your victory and the former just invites somebody in your camp to do the same.
Let me pose a possible solution: yes, outreach and education as much as possible. But not just printing pamphlets and screeching at people; genuine dialogue with people who make you uncomfortable; dialogue that allows you to uncover peacefully what the ill-planned, knee-jerk revolution will uncover violently. You need to understand the strains of belief among your fellow man and not just call them bigoted or evil or stupid, but genuinely address them. We need to reach the hearts of people and not just change the label they attach to themselves, and that is harder work than most people consider when they advocate for propaganda (nothing wrong with propaganda, just that it’s not the end-all-be-all of the task).
But we need a back-up plan, and here’s my suggestion: anarcho-pluralism. Because people hold beliefs that are rigid and often unshakeable in the face of majority or forceful opposition, we need to be able to go our separate ways if we cannot resolve our differences. Of course, every attempt should be made to have as good of a relationship as possible with these people, but we must be ready for their rejection of premises and values we find compelling. If that means the theocrats or the fascists or the racists get their own little territories to be autocrats, well, what’s the alternative? Killing them? Imprisoning them?
Here’s the upside: by not marginalizing them within a majority society they find alien and intolerable, but instead letting them have their own sphere of influence - no matter how despicable we might find its exercise, we keep the door open that someday they will come around of their own accord. The kind of counter-revolutions that darken the history of initially pure revolutions around the world always happen because what was the ruling ideology becomes an insurgent ideology. People can feel like they are victimized and oppressed, even if they were previously oppressors, because their views are not realized - similarly to how we feel now. But by letting them build their own societies and live their own lives:
At the core of this approach is the understanding that none of us have a monopoly on the truth. If we desire freedom in order to express ourselves and our conception of truth better, we must allow others equal freedom - in spite of how distasteful it may seem to us. Finally, if we truly believe in the principles of egalitarianism and liberty, we should expect that the less regimented and controlled the world is, the more likely our ideas are to emerge spontaneously. And nothing will undermine the fascists, the theocrats, the bigots, the petty dictators, and other assholes like having to abandon minority politics and actually govern according to their sad principles.
This approach also forces us to come to terms with the true significance of our agenda. It’s not just about the workers or the productive class or the people rising up; it’s about starting to genuinely address the dark sides of our world, instead of just overcoming it in some outburst of eschatological exuberance. If this causes us to be more careful in how we revolt, well, we should be careful.
Finally, what about the people who would suffer under these other totalitarian societies through no fault of their own? Here we have to be practical: ridding the world of human suffering cannot be our political goal. In any society, even ours, people will suffer. Look at our rich, flush society and how much even privileged people cause themselves grief and heartache. The real question is: do you want to fight a fucking war over it, or do you want to start healing that suffering in the nuanced and personal manner that is required?
Again, we have to face the fact that mere military victory doesn’t solve anything, and that it is a patient, thoughtful, engaging people that truly changes minds. If we are really caring and open-hearted, we will not fool ourselves into thinking evil can be simply vanquished by some faux-end-times conception of revolution. We will remain sympathetic to suffering, willing to continue the unending work of reaching out. Anarcho-pluralism allows the revolution, the transformation to continue even after we win.
Idealists and realists are always juxtaposed as if they represent two unreconcilable approaches. But in looking at these two camps with respect to revolutionary politics, perhaps this is only the case because they both go about their tasks in such a totalitarian manner. Idealists consider the revolution successful only if the ideals are adopted by 100% of the people. On the other hand, pragmatists consider themselves successful if they are able to rule with 100% of the power.
True transformation of society must be more subtle and thoughtful, and anarcho-pluralism provides a framework for ongoing transformation in just this manner. You can be idealistic and realistic by simply living and letting live; all you have to give up is the desire for the shallow smugness of instant moral satisfaction in exchange for a genuine, long-term commitment to your ideals. If these beliefs are worth fighting for, aren’t they worth continuing to work for after the peace accord? Or are you only in it for a final triumph of good over evil?
]]>It is true that there existed among us “social study groups”, but we know how ephemeral and precarious they were: born out of individual caprice, these groups were destined to disappear with it; those who made them up did not feel united enough, and the first difficulty they encountered caused them to split up. Furthermore, these groups do not seem to have ever had a clear notion of their goal. Now, the goal of an organization is at one and the same time thought and action. In my experience, however, those groups did not act at all: they disputed. And many reproached them for building all those little chapels, those talking shops.
This is Amedee Dunois at the 1907 International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam. Read the full speech here. We can learn a lot from the example of those who have gone before.
]]>“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal,” declared Emma Goldman in a ringing indictment of the feeble mechanism by which the state claims to be restrained and directed. Of course, in invoking this quote anarchists argue against counting upon elections to change the status quo. We aren’t going to bring about the voluntary society by listening to politicians, casting votes for them, and pressuring them to abolish their own offices. The statist means and the anarchist ends are clearly opposed.
But there’s another argument against voting: that by casting a ballot, one registers endorsement of the state and its violence. Advocates of this argument do not hold that you must have chosen the politician who wields power. They disregard personal intent, interests, and any issues at hand. The argument is quite simple: by participating in the election, one is bound to its results. Given the anarchist view of those results - violence, fraud, and lies - one can only conclude that voting makes one an accessory to the crime.
This constitutes a body blow for those who define themselves by their rejection of the authoritarianism so intrinsic in the state. It’s one thing for voting to be a silly ritual. But a decidedly different attitude must be adopted if pulling the voting lever leaves one with blood-stained hands. Faced with such an awful proposition, the task becomes one of avoiding complicity with the system. An absolute break with the state is the only path of conscience.
In theory, this break seems reasonable to achieve: one simply ceases to cooperate with its agents and directives. But the state reaches far into the world we live in. It doesn’t just direct the police, military, teachers, judges, and other bureaucrats who intervene overtly. The very civil society we seek to unleash through the spirit of voluntarism, mutual aid, freedom, and solidarity seems hopelessly bound up in the state.
##Anarchism is not absolution##
The biggest statist distortion lies in the minds of people - the very people so foundational to our dream of a voluntary society. They are conditioned to behave in ways congruent with governance, to think of themselves in terms that reinforce the primacy of governance, and therefore too often to mistake their largely voluntary lives as a gift from authority. Allegiance to the state and allegiance to one’s country, locality, and neighbors are seen as not merely connected but rather the same idea.
It is the behavior of these people that provides the underlying legitimacy to the state. After all, were it not for the people, there could be no power to rule. It is the people who elect the politicians, pay the taxes, enforce the laws, fight the wars, and more. As Étienne de la Boétie argued centuries ago in the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, inciting the masses to organized resistance is totally unnecessary. Rather, all that is required is for the people to stop obeying. So to address the problem of the state, we must address the people’s obedience. Sociologically, psychologically, spiritually - why do they obey?
This leads one to wonder whether mere withdrawal of consent is even sufficient. Symbolic micro-secession by an individual does little to address the behaviors inherent in statist society. Where does the state end and civil society begin? For that matter, what’s so fundamental about the individual that its removal from the equation affects the problem of authoritarian society? How does one isolate oneself from the crimes and violence of the state when its institutions pervade our society - especially when it is in that very society the seeds of voluntary association must be planted? A break is impossible without at least an implicit answer to these questions.
This is not to say that personal reflection and a critical review of one’s choices is not necessary. The example of one’s own life and actions is likely more effective persuasion than the most articulate thesis. What I object to is a pseudo-christian guilt that demands an absolute purge of statist sin. To focus on distinguishing oneself from statist society can only detract from the task of engaging with that statist society. We must resist adopting an anarchist identity so foolishly consistent and exacting that it destroys our connection to the people in whom we hope to realize a free society.
Our goal cannot be simply to free our persons of perceived statist taint. Anarchism is not some sort of political puritanism. We are not seeking some form of absolution for the “sin” of being born in a statist society. To view the state as this intelligent, malignant entity out there influencing people to initiate force and fraud is to invoke the Christian’s concept of perpetual spiritual struggle with a malevolent Satan. This conception of the state is also an unfounded superstition, since we understand that it is people’s actions that not only reinforce its perceived legitimacy but make it possible in the first place.
The state is an abstraction; an institution formed out of ancient patterns of behavior. But it doesn’t exist as an independent thing, so rejecting it as such can only lead to confusion. There is no state: there are only people - people enforcing laws, people obeying laws, people paying taxes, people going to schools, people believing that the guy sitting in the oval office is special. The question is surely not how to isolate oneself from these people, but how to influence them to change their mindset and thereby their behavior. The only “state” we will ever apprehend is an apparition formed from the inertia of people’s habits of thinking and acting.
From this point of view, one can hardly ascribe to voting the degree of evil anarchists often do. It’s just another abstraction. Pulling a lever, writing words on a piece of paper, or pushing buttons on a screen do not in and of themselves do anything. In fact, even if you accept the significance of an electoral outcome, it’s hard to assign responsibility when the odds of an individual affecting it are so astronomical.
##A double standard##
So what does the vote mean in real, concrete terms, divorced from the popular myths of state legitimacy? It merely influences the way other people will behave. That behavior will influence the way yet other people will behave, just as we all have an effect on everybody else in small but indeterminate ways. Some of these people will assign a title to one person instead of the other. They will treat the one person’s words as “official”, unlike the other’s. They will do what the one person says, but not the other. Who can fathom the will of government employees and other interested affiliates?
After all, it is the people materially prosecuting the agenda resulting from the election of a public figure who inflict the real damage. The President doesn’t do anything; only agents of the state arrest, tax, jail, and kill. The behavior of legions of bureaucrats define the agenda, the interests, the nature of what we lament as “the state”. We should worry less about whose orders they’re following and worry more about what they’re actually choosing to do.
If this seems like splitting hairs, consider that one of the best anarchist arguments against the state lies in the behavior of its agents. A robber is a clear menace, and yet we let these state actors confiscate our wealth with hardly a peep. Nobody would gladly accept the help of a mafia-style protection racket, and yet we allow state racketeers into our neighborhoods constantly simply because they sport a badge. We look down on those who indiscriminately kill in our society, and yet we fund state bureaucrats with rifles to go out and commit these crimes against humans - so long as they’re “our troops” and not “theirs”. Our society has internalized a blind spot far more systemic and significant than the election cycle, and the resulting behavior crucially underwrites the state agenda.
Anarchists point out the inconsistency between how we regard normal crime and state crime to illustrate a core value: what people actually do, not their institutional affiliation or authority, is what matters. Murder is murder, theft is theft, and kidnapping is kidnapping. Only a double standard prevents people from judging such actions as less objectionable merely because they are performed in an “official” capacity. The anarchist proposes a radical consistency: people are responsible for their own actions, regardless of their position in some organizational hierarchy, governmental or otherwise.
And yet, many anarchists themselves apply this maddening double standard to those who do nothing more than write words on a piece of paper. They call them enablers of the state, as if the mere act of casting a ballot makes one responsible for the crimes of the state’s actors. This ascribes to the state precisely the mythical legitimacy we claim to reject - as if there could exist a magical transfer of permission from one person to another making crime acceptable. We cannot combat the statist double standard by promulgating its myths ourselves.
##Understanding civil society##
At the same time, anarchists must acknowledge how integral the political order, including elections, are perceived to be to the majority of the social body. Because people conflate the state with civil society, they often view its institutions as portals to engagement with their neighbors. As anarchists, we can either secede from this engagement on puritan grounds, or we can risk the taint of the state by meeting them in the world we jointly occupy, warts and all.
It is a sad fact that the social deliberative functions necessary for true community occur within the trappings of government; yet to reject interaction because the state is involved divorces us from important opportunities to influence others. And it is in convincing our brothers and sisters to change their mindset and behavior - not in breathless denunciations of formless institutions - that we genuinely oppose “the state”.
Remember that voting for politicians has about the same direct physical effect as an online survey: it has no power or authority but what people attribute to it. An election may convince certain individuals to commit (or abstain from committing) violations of rights, but since we hold that those individuals are solely responsible for their own actions, and nothing can absolve them of that responsibility, are the results of that election relevant? In the end, it is the behavior, not the myths and abstractions, that matter. So if by voting, you can engage with your neighbors to influence them within this mixed society, or possibly influence state actors to behave more peaceably, why would you insist on abstaining?
None of this is to say an obligation exists to participate in every election; only that we should not blow these rituals out of proportion and turn them into boogeymen. Every situation is unique, and every election is a singular moment in the social body. Only an individual can decide the right course of action in a given scenario; indeed, it is highly authoritarian to dictate rules to the individual. The danger is not in voting or not voting, but in tilting at windmills out of ideological self-importance or moralistic high-handedness.
Blaming voters for state-sponsored crime is only meaningful in the sense that the voters stand by while the crimes are committed - not in the sense that we somehow mystically sanction it through some statist ceremony. The problem lies not in the ballot, but in our patterns of thinking and behavior that lead us to treat the vote’s outcome as anything more substantive than an internet poll. We allow state actors to engage in activities we all know are deeply wrong; it is that habit of complacency towards authority which we must address in ourselves and others.
Voting may be many things, but it is not abject complacency. In fact, most people see it as a form of civic engagement. Given that, should we not start from where they are, rather than washing our hands and demanding they make the long and difficult mental transitions we’ve already achieved? Whether or not we vote, we must engage these enabling attitudes where they are, whether in political parties, city council meetings, the lines at the polls, or at family dinner tables. To abandon this society because it doesn’t meet our standards is to surrender the anarchist project totally. Anarchism as a movement is concerned with this society, like it or not.
##Conclusion##
If we fear accusations of hypocrisy by participating in institutions tied to the state, perhaps we should take a harder look at our motivations. What are we in this struggle to accomplish? To be seen rejecting the state loudly and publicly? To have an impeccably consistent argument that no debater can assail? To shield ourselves from any chance of statist entanglement? To maintain a black and white moral superiority that makes it easy to judge the world?
Or does our project transcend the immediate political realities by posing a deeper question about human relationships and individual responsibility? Are we comfortable enough with ourselves and our principles to entertain doubt, to risk making mistakes, to remain vulnerable to misunderstanding and grey areas - all for a chance at reaching our brothers and sisters within institutional statism? Can the message of mutual liberation be heard if it is not taken into the mire of authoritarian culture in which most people find themselves, on terms they can grasp?
It has never been enough for anarchists to win debates; we must win the hearts of our fellow man, wherever they are found. We do this by engaging with them where they are, not where we’d have them be. The vote is a meaningless, superstitious ritual that masks deeper social issues and sanctions nothing. It does not bolster our argument to agree with statists that elections matter. Instead, we should treat them as what they are: the trivial rites of a false religion.
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