Marxism, Anarchy, Psychiatry as art and/or science
Anarchism is the slow and steady philosophy that will probably never win the race. It has been an extremely resilient minority view on politics and ethics for thousands of years in many cultures. Many see its origins in Chinese Daoism. In Western philosophy, people have been asking the question since at least the ancient Greeks: where does political obligation come from? We all agree that when the State says jump, you have to jump, but why? It surely cannot only be because the State has Power over you, for if that is the only dynamic at play the State is no different from a gangster.
Anarchists assert that we while we have a practical inclination to obey laws, we have no moral obligation to do so. This is because our first duty, as living individuals, is to our own autonomy.
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on “Philosophical Anarchism” under the article, “Political Obligation.” Link:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/political-obligation/
“...According to Robert Paul Wolff...there can be no general obligation to obey the law because any such obligation would violate the “primary obligation” of autonomy, which is “the refusal to be ruled” (1998 [1970], p. 18). As Wolff defines it, autonomy combines freedom with responsibility. To be autonomous, someone must have the capacity for choice, and therefore for freedom; but the person who has this capacity also has the responsibility to exercise it — to act autonomously. Failing to do so is to fail to fulfill this “primary obligation” of autonomy.
This primary obligation dooms any attempt to develop a theory of political obligation, Wolff argues, except in the highly unlikely case of a direct democracy in which every law has the unanimous approval of the citizenry. Under any other form of government, autonomy and authority are simply incompatible. Authority is “the right to command, and correlatively, the right to be obeyed” (p. 4), which entails that anyone subject to authority has an obligation to obey those who have the right to be obeyed. But if we acknowledge such an authority, we allow someone else to rule us, thereby violating our fundamental obligation to act autonomously. We must therefore reject the claim that we have an obligation to obey the orders of those who purport to hold authority over us and conclude that there can be no general obligation to obey the laws of any polity that falls short of a unanimous direct democracy.
Arguments of the second, a posteriori form are more modest in their aims but no less devastating in their conclusions. In this case the aim is not to show that a satisfactory defense of political obligation is impossible but that no defense has proven satisfactory, despite the efforts of some of the best minds in the history of philosophy. All such attempts have failed, according to those who take this line, so we must conclude that only those relatively few people who have explicitly committed themselves to obey the law, perhaps by swearing allegiance as part of an oath of citizenship, have anything like a general obligation to obey the laws under which they live (e.g., Smith 1973; Raz 1979, chap. 12; Simmons 1979 and 2001, chap. 6; Green 1988, pp. 220–47, and 1996).
Bibliography for this excerpt:
· Simmons, A. John (1979). Moral Principles and Political Obligations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
––– (1987). “The Anarchist Position: A Reply to Klosko and Senor,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 16: 269–79.
––– (2001). Justification and Legitimacy: Essays on Rights and Obligations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wolff, Jonathan (1995). “Political Obligation, Fairness and Independence,” Ratio (New Series), 8: 87–99.
––– (1996). “Anarchism and Skepticism,” in J. T. Sanders and J. Narveson (eds.), For and Against the State.
––– (2000). “Political Obligation: A Pluralistic Approach,” in Pluralism: The Philosophy and Politics of Diversity, M. Baghamrian and A. Ingram (eds.), London: Routledge.
Wolff, Robert Paul (1998 [1970]). In Defense of Anarchism, 3rd edition, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Anarchist texts frequently give the argument that governments inevitably lead to war. In the following excerpt, we see one highly structured version of this argument:
From Prof. Daryl Hale's summary on WCU.EDU of Robert Paul Wolff's argument:
“In politics, people often forfeit their autonomy. Most people feel so strongly the force of
tradition or even the power of bureaucracy that they unreflectively accept claims to authority
made by their putative rulers. Once we raise the question about the right to authority of the rulers,
several arguments are forthcoming. Consider the ancient argument of Plato in the Republic – we
should submit to the authority of those with superior knowledge, wisdom, or theoretical/practical
insights. A more refined modern version presents the educated portion of a democratic society to
be more likely to be politically active; in fact, we might do well to discourage the uninformed
from entering into the political arena since they only support the dangerous efforts of demagogues
and extremists.
Given these 2 basic concepts of the authority of the state and the autonomy of the
individual, Wolff finally sketches out an argument for their imminent conflict.
1) The defining mark of the state is authority, the right to rule.
2) The primary obligation of a human being is to his/her own autonomy, the refusal to
be ruled by any other laws than those one has legislated for oneself.
3) Thus, it seems there can be no resolution of the conflict between the autonomy of the individual and the alleged authority of the state.
4) Even more strongly, insofar as one fulfills one’s obligation to make oneself the author of one’s own decisions, one will resist the state’s claim to have authority over one.
5) Hence, it seems that anarchism is the only political doctrine consistent with the primary virtue of autonomy. Wolff acknowledges that the anarchist will grant the need for complying with the law under certain circumstances or perhaps even for the time being (until the revolution comes?), and a realistic anarchist might well doubt the future prospect of eliminating the state as a human institution. But s/he will never view the state’s commands as legitimate or as having a binding moral force on one. Wolff states the dilemma even more powerfully in terms of the earlier concept of a de jure state.
6) If all humans have a continuing obligation to achieve the highest degree of autonomy possible, then there appears to be no state whose subjects have a moral obligation to obey its commands.
7) This means that the concept of a de jure legitimate state appears to be vacuous.
8) Thus, philosophical anarchism seems the only reasonable political belief for an
enlightened person.
Let us look at one more version of this argument, from Anselm Bellegarrigue, written in 1850. This text is sometimes considered to be the founding document of modern European and American philosophical Anarchism.
Anarchy is an ancient word, but, for us that word articulates a modem notion, or rather, a modern interest, the idea being daughter to the interest. History has described as "anarchic" the condition of a people wherein there are several governments in contention one with another, but the condition of a people desirous of being governed but bereft of government precisely because it has too many is one thing and the condition of a people desirous of governing itself and bereft of government precisely because it wishes none quite another. In ancient times, indeed, anarchy was civil war, not because it meant absence of governments but, rather, because it meant a multiplicity of them and competition and strife among the governing classes. The modern notion of absolute social truth or pure democracy has ushered in an entire series of discoveries or interests which have
turned the terms of the traditional equation upside down. Thus anarchy, which, when contrasted with the term monarchy, means civil war, is, from the vantage point of absolute or democratic truth, nothing less than the true expression of social order.
Indeed:
Who says anarchy, says negation of government;
Who says negation of government says affirmation of the people;
Who says affirmation of the people, says individual liberty;
Who says individual liberty, says sovereignty of each;
'Who says sovereignty of each, says equality;
Who says equality, says solidarity or fraternity;
Who says fraternity, says social order;
Who says government, says negation of the people;
Who says negation of the people, says affirmation of political authority;
Who says affirmation of political authority, says individual dependency;
Who says individual dependency, says class supremacy;
Who says class supremacy, says inequality;
Who says inequality, says antagonism;
Who says antagonism, says civil war,
From which it follows that who says government, says civil war.
Whether what I have just stated is new, eccentric or frightful, I cannot tell. I do not
know, nor do I care to know. What I do know is that I can boldly argue my case
against all of the White and Red governmentalist prose of past, present and future.
The truth is that, on this terrain - the terrain of the free man untainted by
ambition, diligent in his work, contemptuous of command and refractory to
submissiveness - I throw down the gauntlet to functionarism's every argument, all
of the rationale of marginalisation and all the champions of taxation -- be it
monarchist or republican - and regardless of whether it go by the name of
progressive, proportional, territorial, capitalist and whether it be on property or on
consumption.
Yes, anarchy is order, whereas government is civil war.
When my intellect looks past the wretched details underpinning the day to day
dialectic, I discover that the intestinal strifes which, throughout the ages, have
decimated humankind, are bound up with a single cause, to wit: the destruction or
preservation of government.
Anarchism, like queer theory, is a philosophy borne out of a very real lifestyle of very real individuals who might always remain a minority. Who are the true anarchists?
Anarchists in America are a frustrated bunch. I lived with a small collective who ran an anarchist-activist bookstore in Prescott, AZ, and they were constantly trying to push the limits of the squatting laws in the vast national forest just outside of town. The government will not leave you alone, they would complain.
In my travels in Central America, I met several ex-Pats, mostly American and European, who felt strongly aligned with anarchism and had settled in some small fishing villages on the Pacific Coast. I lived in one of these villages for three months 8 years ago, and just last year returned and saw things much changed. I offer the following story as a way of, I hope, briefly explaining some of the virtues and pitfalls of anarchist ethics. The names of people and of the villages are not included or have been changed to protect people's privacy.
The government had no presence in the village other than paying the local school teacher the equivalent of $2.50 a day, which was considered a decent salary. The teacher was the only government employee, and less than half the children regularly attended school. No police station, no electricity for the school, and no medical services of any kind were offered. Also, no regulation of what electricity there was, which meant that it was not "stealing" to illegally wire a transformer; it was what literally everyone did, because there was no reason not to. No regulation of fishing practices, and no regulation of how people divied up their catch.
At the end of a fishing trip, which usually took around 12 hours, you would see the fishermen all pitch in a few coins and they would buy a single 12 oz beer, which cost about a dollar (the same as it would in the U.S. at a grocery store), and pass it around. There was a powerful bond between the fishermen; they had started savings clubs, in which everyone pitches in a few dollars per month, and once a month the entire sum is given to someone in the club. That way, the individual families can buy large items with a block of cash they probably never would have saved all by themselves. No law enforcement apparatus forced the villagers to chip in every month, and no cops would have prevented them from robbing each other. I brought the idea up (what stopped them from robbing each other?) and it was insulting and strange; the cops were at least two hours away and would only come out if there was a corpse; everyone knew that.
8 years ago, there were only a few foreigners in town. One was Pedro, an American who had volunteered in the village and then moved their permanently. As of today, he's been there for 12 years. As of last year, there are now dozens of foreigners, because due to either global warming or over-fishing with dynamite that has killed the natural corral and kelp barriers, there are now large waves where once there were not, and suddenly the village is a surfing destination. 8 years ago, Pedro reported that there had been only a few opportunistic thefts of his volunteers; now, he said, there have been at least a dozen armed robberies, all targeting foreigners.
One day, an armed crew came after Pedro's compound for volunteers when only Pedro's security guard was present. The guard had no gun, but he screamed, "Pedro, get the shotgun!" and the robbers fled. Pedro is a philosophical pacifist, had never owned a gun, believed that his long history in the village would protect him. He did what no-one else would do: he called the cops.
The police were very confused, he said. They asked him if he owned a gun, and when he said no, they asked repeatedly why not. They explained that every other business owner in the village was armed. They told him that they would not investigate, in spite of Pedro's insistence that he had found receipts and packaging from stolen items in the trash of one of the villagers. Was this not sufficient evidence? Evidence is irrelevant, Pedro was told, because a trial was not going to happen. What had to happen was for Pedro to arm himself, and shoot one of the robbers the next time they came on his property. Pedro tried to explain that he couldn't kill one of these teenagers who were being coerced by outside gangs from the capital, couldn't kill one of the kids he had helped to raise. He offered to pay the police to come and investigate and make an arrest, but they wouldn't come. "Just shoot him in the foot if you feel like want to kill someone," he was told. He asked what would happen if he did kill someone. "If you shoot him on your property and he's armed--a kitchen knife will do--there's just a form you have to fill out. You have six months to do it."
Another American was now in town permanently, an ex military guy named Teagan. Teagan was building an all cement fortress down the road, was armed from the first day he was in the village, had a rather different approach than Pedro. Teagan followed the law of the land: when two armed robbers came into his girlfriends house, Teagan disarmed both of them, dragged them to the jail, and stood watch. The law in the village: any citizen had the right to arrest any other citizen and put them in the cell for up to 12 hours, but if after that time, the cops had not shown up, you had to let them go. The cops never showed up, and so the thieves were released.
Pedro was deeply unhappy, he told me. He had never imagined that he could become so unhappy here. When I left, he was constantly negotiating with Teagan, trying to convince Teagan not to kill anyone. The robberies continued; the opportunity was just too rich. With no bank in the village or anywhere near it, all the surfers came into down with at least a few hundred in cash, and no-one to protect them. Pedro was starting to wonder if maybe Teagan or him should just shoot a few people.
An anarchist would look at Pedro's dilemma, at his sadness, and would wonder why he has so much faith that the State would do a better job at dispensing justice. A prison in a developing country is no kind place, especially for a poor campesino kid who probably has no connections inside, and Pedro would feel comfortable sending a kid he knows and cares about to such a prison...but is not comfortable shooting at the kid? We are separated from how our meat is slaughtered, and that makes us comfortable; similarly, perhaps, we don't have to actually maim, rape, psychologically harm, and possibly even kill the robber we send to prison, so if that robber is raped, maimed, traumatized, or killed in that prison, we don't know and probably wouldn't care. Anarchists aren't saying that we should care necessarily, just that we ought to be more willing to do our dirty work ourselves--because we should do ALL our work ourselves--instead of farming it out to the state.
Two years ago, near the village, the road washed out because a government levvy collapsed. Dozens of families were permanently displaced, could no longer access their homes. Pedro hired an attorney and told the villagers that if enough of them showed up to lobby the provincial government, the government would have to rebuild the levvy and the road. On the day of the hearing, less than 10 villagers showed up. Pedro was devestated, and the found out that the families who were displaced had simply moved. The road would never be rebuilt unless the villagers did it themselves, which they proceeded to do.
"It would have been such a small effort to try to get the government to fix the road!" Pedro said to one of the older villagers.
"A small effort, yes, but a wasted one." The villagers repaired the road themselves. Informal work crews also regularly re-wire all the electrical transformers in the village. Pedro said that that there isn't one person there who is using electricity legally.
Anarchists idealize places like the village, where the law is either non-existent or meaningless. They also idealize America's wild west. This is because they believe in a very simple mode of ethical improvement: if you lived in a village where everything--justice, road building, medical care, education--had to be taken care of by the local citizenry, you would become a much better person than you are now--more resourceful, more bold, more connected to your fellow citizens. You cannot imagine the person you might become, because right now you depend on the government to do most of these things for you. Centralized government control of basic human dynamics (ie, education, justice, etc.) cheapens and corrupts these things, always; no exceptions. The happiest people in the world, the most alive, the most connected to their communities and to their own potential, are people who live in places like the village, or people who lived in the old west. You had to take care of everything yourself, and so you did, or else you died.
Today, we have increasingly become a world of whiners who frequently make very just and logical claims about, "if the government said it would do X, then it should," or, "if the government gives group Y a certain amount of benefit, then they also owe me." We are frequently right in these claims, meaning that we are logical, but in all this debate we miss the broader point: that we actually owe the government nothing and they owe us nothing. The vast bureaucracy of modern governments have sapped and cheapened our humanity. The sense of obligation that those fishermen feel to each other, the sense of obligation Pedro feels to try to keep his volunteers safe, THAT'S real living. True ethical obligation comes from intimate community, which brings us full circle: we are morally obligated to be just and kind and fair to those we are intimate community with. We have no moral obligation whatsoever to something as vast and bloated and impersonal as the U.S. government, and never could.
Thus anarchists do not imagine war and strife as the primary characteristic of the old west, the village, or any other place. This is the greatest misconception about anarchy: anarchists do not love chaos and conflict, but quite the opposite. The village is going through a transition period, and it will sort itself out. After all, before there were so many unarmed, vulnerable surfers, there was almost no crime, because the villagers simply wouldn't tolerate it.
Let's systematize this a little, and then wrap this up:
Less government equals
less abstract political obligation to entities which care nothing for you personally equals
more interpersonal connection because there is less specialization; everyone must do a little bit of everything which equals
a fuller, richer life for each individual and an incomparably richer sense of community.
vs.
What we have now, where if you see a homeless person on your doorstep you probably call CPS or the cops, depending on the person's age, and the govt. takes care of it. We barely know our neighbors, and probably don't depend on them, nor they on us, for anything.
Anarchist life is morally clear about war and self-interest: the government cannot tell the people in the village, "now you must go to war, because your interests are at stake," because the people in the village know whether their interests are at stake or not. Whereas only we, in modern industrialized societies, can wage modern wars, wars fought for vague socioeconomic political dynamics that cost millions of lives and benefit no-one, not even sometimes the ideological extremists or capitalist thugs who started them. Let's give three cheers for human progress...
Anarchists really do believe that a compassionate, vast, centralized government which is good for the people is actually impossible. This is because it is in the nature of vast, centralized governments to be divorced from the interests of the people. How can they possibly be connected to them? They do not know you, they do not depend on you, and they do not care about you.