Considering Anarchy
The March issue of Commentary has an interesting piece, "The Return of Anarchism." (Subscriber link.) Commentary, of course, is a neo-con rag, so I didn't expect a fair treatment of limited government and, unfortunately, it met my expectations. Still, it contains entertaining romps, from 19th century Russian nihilists to the 21st century cyberanarchists known as "Anonymous." A guy can't entirely dismiss a piece that contains bullets of knowledge like this passage:
In its heyday, anarchism was divided into sub-sects. Kropotkin was an anarcho-communist, who foresaw an age of voluntary communal living in which no centralized power would be required to adjudicate disputes or apportion resources. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who declared in 1851 that “anarchy is order,” advocated anarcho-syndicalism, in which worker-owned factories constituted the social and economic anchors of agreeable and sustainable human association. The Russian Michael Bakunin (1814-1876) regarded revolution itself as an essential component of human existence and therefore intrinsically worthy. The German Max Stirner (1806-1856) argued that man's authority over himself was absolute and that any effort to remove him from the state of nature was harmful and to be resisted.
There, in 120 words, you have a good snapshot of 19th century anarchism. If you want a glimpse of anarchism in the twentieth century, there's this humorous description of Sex Pistol anarchism:
The circle-A and black-flag symbols traditionally associated with anarchism became fashionable logos in and around the punk set, worn on the sleeves (and bare arms) not of dynamite throwers but of ordinary high-school kids. With its stark good vs. evil ethos, its anthology of lurid violence, and its intellectual foundations thinned down to a marketable sound-bite wavelength, anarchism was a natural fit for those whose politics arose in part from comic books.
That's good stuff. So I don't fault the piece for what it contains. I fault it for what it doesn't contain. It focuses exclusively on anarchism as a form of nihilism, a force of destruction, a type of jihad. It acknowledges different strains within anarchism, but every strain mentioned is the sort that requires violence or Communism: hardly attractive choices.
It fails to mention anything about anarcho-capitalism. And I think I know why: it contradicts everything the author assumes about anarchy. Anarcho-capitalism is not violent, and it's not communistic. Of course, the author may have excluded it for the intellectually-innocent reason that he only had so much space to devote to the topic of anarchism and that anarcho-capitalism falls outside his scope. But still, a movement that encompasses thinkers ranging from Lysander Spooner to Murray Rothbard deserves at least a footnote, especially with a sympathizer (Ron Paul) in the limelight and the upcoming theater release of borderline-anarchist Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. (As an aside, I also find it highly disappointing that a brilliant book like Hoppe's Democracy, the God that Failed continues to get overlooked by everyone outside of libertarian circles.)
Am I an anarchist? It's a question of definition, I suppose, but I don't think I am. For starters, I lean toward fondness of police. I also find the anarcho-capitalists' explanation about how national defense would be handled laughable. I often find Murray Rothbard compelling, but he hurt his legacy with passages like this: "Those Americans who favor Polaris submarines, and fear a Soviet threat, would subscribe toward the financing of such vessels. Those who prefer an ABM system would invest in such defense missiles." Stringham (ed.), Anarchy and the Law, p. 38.
But even in the area of national defense, there is a good anarcho argument: decentralization. An anarchist thinker (Rothbard, I think) pointed out that it took Britain centuries to subdue Ireland because there was no central government to capitulate. For most of history, in fact, wars were exclusively the realm of royalty: the nobility fought, the peasants worked the fields. It didn't make a huge difference to the peasant who ruled them. This arrangement fell apart with the rise of the nation state and the people's armies that Napoleon put into the field, but it doesn't mean it can't return.
In fact, I would argue it is returning already. The Communist threat represented by the USSR is gone. We now have the capitalist-influenced strain of Chinese Communism. Think about it carefully: Would there be a huge difference between living under the American Left and living under the Chinese? I honestly don't think so. There would be a difference, but I don't think it'd be huge. The Chinese would let us work and keep us motivated to work by letting us keep some of our profits, just like our masters in Washington and on Wall Street do today. If Beijing got itself into financial trouble, it'd pillage a trillion dollars from American coffers to bail itself out. It would suck, but can you honestly claim that it would be totally foreign to American life today? I can't. Not anymore. Not in light of the extraordinary Chimaera attack ordinary Americans experienced in the past 30 months: The Wall Street bailout and ObamaCare. I honestly don't know how a middle-class American could watch those two events and still think the federal government is their government. It's not. It's a ruler, plain and simple. Like any ruler, it does what it has to do to keep power (you may have noticed that the new Republicans aren't pushing for social security reform) and enjoy the fruits of power. In that, I don't think it'd make a huge difference whether we're ruled from DC/NYC or from a foreign capital.
Am I an anarchist? In the end, no. Whenever people come together, some form of government will rise up to give it order. It's an inevitable thing, it's a good thing. But what we have now isn't just "some form of government." It's a monster, and it's evil, and it's out of control, and the mini-revolution at the polls in November 2008 is doing nothing about it.
We need to rip down the edifice and start over. But I abhor violence and devoutly believe that nothing good, nothing peaceful, can come from it. So we need to turn people's thinking, and the best way to turn people's thinking is to get them to start thinking about radical alternatives. And that radical alternative is anarchism. We'll never get there, and I don't want us to get there, but if more people start reading about anarchy and giving it serious thought, a leavening in the public consciousness and discourse may occur. The collective mental landscape might shift.
And that can only be a good thing.
If you're unacquainted with peaceful anarchism and want a different way of thinking about political philosophy, consider these two books. The Hoppe book is a life changer. If I knew people would read it, I'd buy copies and pass them out to strangers on the street:
