If you demand X and I give you X, Y and Z or maybe just Y and Z instead - you did not consent to Y or Z. The state functions like a package deal. People don’t specifically get what they actually demand, and it’d be absurd to say that they “consent” to such a package deal. The fact that people demand specific things of the state by no means implies that they actually consent to whatever the state actually goes on to do. But if you wish to be willfully blind to the fact that noone truly consents to the state, that’s your problem and it’s something that you’ll have a hard time reconciling with anarchism.
The only people who truly consent to the internal decision-making process, mechanisms and enforcement of the state are the state agents themselves, since they are the only people who are truly in direct control of it. One cannot “consent” to something that they have no genuine control over. Joe Blow on the street, whatever his political views may be, does not truly “consent” to or participate in the decisions made by some man in an ivory tower halfway across the country. They have no real decision-making power in such matters to the degree that it effects them. They have no real choice in the matter. The politician or bureaucrat does.
“The union” does not allow individual secession, hence your argument does not apply to the state as it actually is. If “the union” were to allow individual secession, it would cease to be a state. You’re using an anarchistic scenario to argue for conditions in the present as if people truly “support” or “consent” to it, when quite clearly the nature of present conditions does not truly allow for it. It’s simply makes no sense at all.
I tire of explaining the anarchist view of the state to self-proclaimed anarchists who harbor conspiciously conservative notions.
People are a package deals. Are marriages not consentual because I can’t design my ideal wife?
No what makes no sense at all is using the fact that people are not allowed to expressively demonstrate their consent for the state to prove that they don’t approve of it.
I was wondering where the pyschoanalysis had gone to.
You have a nice way of getting off track.
Governments exist because people want to be ruled. Governments will end when people want to no longer be ruled. People are only “forced” to use government roads, because sufficient demand exists for only government roads.
Well, now, a slight correction here. People don’t really want to be ruled themselves, they want other people to be ruled. They tolerate the rule over themselves because they perceive a benefit in other people being controlled the same way.
Is it conservatism to say that the American government is only able to kill Iraqis because the American population agree with the policy?
Of course, if you ask many people they will say they are against the Iraq War but thats a case of wanting to have their cake and eat it too. The Iraq war is the inevitable result of policies that they do support. You can’t be simultaneously for military dictatorship and against wars of aggression.
The original ideal of democracy in terms of a society in which the function of government is literally entirely absorbed by society as a whole is the same thing as anarchism, I.E. civil society self-governs. Market anarchism is nothing but a voluntary economic participatory democracy. Yes, the state is not legitimate because it is not unanimously consented to. A society in which participation and organization is truly voluntary would have to be stateless. The very nature of the state as an institution is undemocratic in the anarchistic and participatory sense of democracy, since the function or provision of law and final arbitration is monopolized rather than a the result of a spontaneous order arising from the participatory and genuinely consensual interpesonal relations of society itself.
Brainpolice, it’s possible to be a conservative right-winger, a conservative left-winger, and a conservative anarchist. Of course, none of that applies if you meant “right-wing” when you said “conservative”.
hold on guys, isnt the ‘english only’ ‘official’ language bill everyone is talking about just a bill that says US govt business is to be conducted in English?
either way… its pretty sad is everyone is gonna write off ron paul because he supports said bill…
You’re not understanding. The state does not appease individual consumer demands! From the standpoint of the individual citizen, no matter what they do, they get the exact same product foisted upon them and they must pay for it. If we’re going to make wife analogies, this would be comparable to having your wife chosen for you ahead of time (either by a man in an ivory tower or a numerical majority indirectly through a man in an ivory tower) and a “price” for the wife being unilaterally imposed onto you. Every single person would get the exact same wife prototype no matter how they “vote” or whether or not they vote at all. Additionally,perhaps even you are made to pay for the upkeep of everyone else’s wife. This is what I mean when I describe the state as a package deal, I.E. there is no consumer sovereignty. And it’s a gigantic web of forced payment.
You’re jumping through a lot of absurd hoops here in the name of battling against me simply pointing out that the state is not truly voluntary. I’m mystified that you hold such a view yet consider yourself to be an anarchist, when the implications of your view amounts to state legitimacy.
Are you purposefully not comprehending? My point is that people are not allowed to opt out! They don’t have an option to not pay! They don’t have an option to disassociate! They don’t have an option to not be ruled! The situation is not consensual by its very nature.
This is the logic of totalitarians of all types. Noone actually wants to be ruled. The very nature of rulership defies desire or consent. What people do, at best, is asquiesce to being ruled. That is not the same thing as genuine consent. I am fully in support of La Boetie’s analysis, only it should not be interpreted to legitimize the state as if it were voluntary. If one buys into La Boetie’s analysis, agorism makes even more sense, since mass civil disobedience is the best way to fight against the state. To stop asquiescing. To make civil society ungovernable.
Surely you recognize that state provided services are not based on genuine consumer demand. Come on! Do we really have to baby step you back through the basics here?
A conservative, by definition, is a statist. A conservative, by definition, resists meaningful changes and wishes to either cling to the status quo or return to a past utopia. Conservatism, as a historical perspective, is backward-looking while an anarchist is foreward-looking. Conservatism is the polar opposite of libertarianism.
Brainpolice, it’s clear that he doesn’t believe the state is voluntary; I don’t know what you gain by trying to paint his views otherwise (oh, wait…).
He’s simply acknowledging that many people do want to have a state; they might not agree with everything it does, but they prefer to have the package deal than nothing at all.
It is a more accurate analysis of the state as an institution to say that the American government would be able to kill Iraqis regaurdless of the views of the American population. To insist that whatever the government does has the majority of the population’s support behind it is absurd and merely perpetuates the myth of representative democracy, I.E. the idea that the government truly does represent the people. It doesn’t. It is made up of a tiny oligarchy in patronage with other oligarchies.
Dead wrong. The word “conservative” doesn’t have even to apply to politics, so it certainly doesn’t mean “statist” by definition. In the case of a conservative anarchist, it would mean that you believe that a gradual approach has a greater potential for success than a revolution.
1.) “economically and socially independent”, imo, is relative when living under the current government & state. Everytime someone argues that using the Internet is using the state, or using public roads is using the state, is forgetting that something like the Internet, & roads would exist regardless because of the use of such. The government nor The State has a monpoly how to live, or what would entail a society; the Internet & roads would exist because of their inherent technological usefulness.
Just as reformists will argue “the lesser of evils”, “economically & socially independant” would entail “more independant than others; not completly independant, but it’s the lesser of evils compared to be completly dependant”. Even if you were somehow to amass a fourtune (say, a few billion dollars), and would be a more favorable position, you still would not be entirley independant. I’m not saying it’s futile to strive for independance, I’m simply pointing out it’s not really independance as long as the government & the state in which it represents exist.
“…Because I find trying to be economically and socially independent is a lot tougher than it looks, and “tends” to take the starch out of the toughest critics of compromise.”
Purley ancedotal, dependant on the individual, different circumstances, etc.
Anarchism is a radical position, not a conservative one. When one consistantly adheres to gradualism, it becomes perpetuity, as William Loyd Garrison once noted. The reformist or extreme gradualist does not function as an anarchist anymore, they are retreating to a classical liberal position at best. Anarchists are distinguished from mere classical liberals, for they take the classical liberal’s ideas to their logical and consistant conclusion. So-called “anarchists” who take a classical liberal position in practise may as well call themselves classical liberals, or worse, conservatives. “Conservative anarchist” is a contradiction in terms.
Democratic elections would not exist without the state. Democratic elections are a function of democratic states. In the absence of a state, there are no democratic elections to be had.
I don’t know. It was you who responded with “same with elections” when someone was making the point that the internet and roads would exist without the state. This would appear to imply that you think elections would exist without the state.
To be “anarchist” is to oppose the existance of the state; the ultimate goal of any anarchist is, by definition, to eliminate the state. Just because an anarchist thinks that the only way to reach his/her goal is to work at it gradually doesn’t mean he/she isn’t an anarchist. I can’t believe you’re willing to burn credibility on this point!