In the course of establishing a revolutionary society, we will eventually have to deal with an important problem: what do we do with the rich people? Being non-coercive, we don't want to just kill them. And having a respect for personal property (i.e. possession, c.f. private property or capital), we don't just want to dispossess them of all their wealth. But we also want to create an egalitarian society, so surely we can't just let them keep their yachts and mansions and golf courses! ...can we?
Well, let's think this through: is property the extent of wealth? No. Let's see why:
Wealth depends on public power to defend it both from roaming hordes of peasant criminals who might wish to take it by force and the pesky egalitarianism of real democracy — the Founding Fathers of the United States consciously established a state that would defend the rich against the poor. In a real democracy, the accumulation of wealth would be impossible since the poor could just vote to redistribute land and capital; this, in fact, has been the main cry of every peasant revolt in history — cancel the debt and redistribute the land.
Wealth just as crucially depends on something a little more subtle: the private power of the wealthy to command the resources needed to sustain and maintain their property. By this I mean the army of servants, groundskeepers, housekeepers, mechanics, drivers, sailors, caddies, security guards, technicians, etc, that are needed to keep a mansion, yacht, golf cart, kitchen, etc, stocked, operational and convenient. Without the economic power to hire and fire the said army, the lifestyle of the rich becomes impossible for any length of time. Machines break down, houses become decrepit, country clubs grow weeds.
With the rapid or eventual elimination of the State, the public power to defend the rich obviously disappears. But less obviously, with the rise of socialism (that is, the control by workers of their own labor) the private power disappears as well. When workers are not dependent on the workings of financial and labor markets to feed themselves but instead organize work and distribute goods based on principles of mutual aid and the needs of the many, there's no time to do upkeep on the toys of the rich.
The upshot of all this is, a libertarian socialist society doesn't need to do anything with or to rich people. It's almost certain that we'll never really need to commandeer the land that mansions sit on, or the harbors that yachts are docked at (not to mention the mansions and yachts themselves). The rich can keep them, for what they'll be worth with no workers willing to do maintenance on them, or provide them with fuel and food and service besides the basics that anyone would be entitled to. We can let the rich keep everything they can make a reasonable claim to using, and just wait for them to get sick of living in broken-down palaces, with rusting yachts in their rotting docks. No coercion, appropriation or, really, action necessary.
(This of course says nothing of what we do with those things that the rich cannot reasonably claim to use, such as huge tracts of empty land, factories, business places, etc, which can in no way be construed to be personal possessions as they fundamentally depend on the labor of others for their very existence.)
Showing posts with label coercion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label coercion. Show all posts
Friday, June 14, 2013
Monday, August 6, 2012
Prescriptivism and Mysticism
It struck me that grammatical prescriptivism bears a very similar relationship to linguistics as does mysticism to science. This can be analyzed from a philosophical as well as a political perspective.
[Edit: It was pointed out to me that my use of the word "mysticism" here is inappropriate. By it I mean any sort of magical or supernatural thinking, rather than the more usual notion of special states of consciousness meant to put one in touch with the divine. Additionally, a few edits were made towards the end to make my main point clearer.]
Both mysticism and prescriptivism operate on the basis that there need to be certain well-defined rules for how the world works (even if that rule is just "because that's how God did it"). In each case, there is a very strong reluctance to let go the reigns of reality, as it were, for fear that utter chaos would result. The mystic needs their magical system to keep their crops growing, their cities plague-free, and their soul saved. Similarly, the prescriptivist needs strict usage rules to make sure their sentences are (what they consider to be) optimally readable, socially and politically correct, and up to some abstract standard, lest all semblance of readability and communication disappear. In each case the advocate of such rules fails to see that their rules are arbitrary and related to reality only through social convention and particular modes of thought. They miss the point that their devotion to the actual facts of the world is outweighed by their devotion to an already-given system of rules. The rules of both the mystic and the prescriptivist are arbitrary rules.
Now, there is certainly a place in society for arbitrary rules. In the United States, people drive on the right side of the road. If we don't all agree to do so, there will be a lot of head-on collisions. But we don't look at England or Australia and scream that they are doing things wrong and need to change which side of the road they drive on. There may be a bit of inconvenience in shifting from one to the other, but no one in their right mind would claim that there is a correct side of the road to drive on, and an incorrect one, and that America is correct and England incorrect. They are just arbitrary stylistic choices. (Well, maybe.)
Similarly, religious prescriptions are arbitrary rules insisted upon by people with an interest in standardizing the behaviors of members of a given community (including thoughts and utterances). And grammatical prescriptions ("no dangling modifiers", "no stranded prepositions") are arbitrary rules that have been historically insisted upon by people with an interest in standardizing the grammar of a given language.
Of course, I am assuming my reader agrees with both of these assertions. The first one is easy for many people to accept (or at least grant for the sake of argument), as opposition to mystical ideas has a long and proud history, in the form of rationality and science. The second one, though, has its basis in the very young and very much still growing field of linguistics, whose goals, methods, and justification few people have been exposed to, and fewer still understand. But prescriptivist accounts of language fly out the window the moment you actually look at human language as a natural phenomenon. Just as the thunderbolts of Zeus turned into electrical imbalances between the ground and atmosphere, dangling modifier and double negatives turn into simple sentences perfectly comprehensible to speakers of the relevant language. If one speaker says something and another understands the utterance, then grammatically correct linguistic exchange has transpired, regardless of whether any English Grammar Rule Book rules were violated. By way of example, I ended an above sentence with the phrase, "which side of the road they drive on." Nothing exploded. No hair-pulling confusion resulted. Yet I violated a rule of "proper English grammar". But this post isn't about convincing people that prescriptivism is wrong — only that it shares a certain key feature with mysticism.
I insist that in both the case of the mystic and the prescriptivist, there is either a lack of competence in understanding the rules by which nature operates or an emotional attachment to the social implications of the rule set. The mystic cannot grasp the science behind evolution, quantum mechanics, or cosmology, much as the prescriptivist cannot grasp the science behind linguistic universals, childhood language acquisition, or sociolinguistic discrimination. The mystic feels that they are saved and loved and special, much as the prescriptivist feels that they are proper, correct, and supremely literate. But both case are driven by either ignorance or contempt. In neither case is one able to recognize the elitism involved. Or, if the elitism is recognized, it's immediately defended as good and justified. One must be a speaker of "good English" much as one must be a "good Christian". And failing to be so means that you are inferior to the defender of this (dubious) Good.
But because linguistics is a young field which has not yet permeated the cultural fabric, we scoff at linguistic discrimination just as readily as we decry racial or religious discrimination. If you can't talk good, you must be stupid and inferior to all of us who can speak well. This, however, is just ignorance of the way in which people learn language and the way in which language changes, and an almost-mystical assumption about the existence of some Platonic True Form of a given language. It is ignorance of the fact that this Platonic language almost always coincides with the way the elite speak, be they London aristocracy (where "standard" British English comes from) or Muscovite czars (where "standard" Russian comes from).
As an aside, it must be pointed out that this ignorance costs people in very real ways. Being a speaker of a non-standard dialect cannot, on principle, relate in any way to intelligence or ability. There are astrophysicists in Memphis, Manchester and Mumbai alike, each speaking very different versions of English. Sounding Black on the phone is often a sure-fire way of not getting past a first interview. Having a Queens accent is just the same. Yet such linguistic variations have nothing to do with intelligence, training, education, personability. They are merely artifacts of our physicality, of our vulnerability to our social environments as children. We speak the way the people around us speak.
A final thought: there are good reasons to have arbitrary rules. And this applies to grammatical rules. Writing is a suboptimal translation of language, because it misses so many of the nuances essential to conveying understanding, such as tone, pace, volume, expression, etc. So in order to make writing understandable to others, it is important to have usage and spelling rules. In a written document, double negatives are recognized as negating each other, rather than the sentence as a whole (as is the case in, for example, Italian). Standardized spelling and punctuation are essential to the way English is written and read. But insisting that such rules be transferred from the page to the spoken word is ludicrous. Writing is the only place that needs the extra stringency of arbitrary grammatical rules. And it inherits this property from the already-natural-rule-governed richness of spoken language.
[Edit: It was pointed out to me that my use of the word "mysticism" here is inappropriate. By it I mean any sort of magical or supernatural thinking, rather than the more usual notion of special states of consciousness meant to put one in touch with the divine. Additionally, a few edits were made towards the end to make my main point clearer.]
Both mysticism and prescriptivism operate on the basis that there need to be certain well-defined rules for how the world works (even if that rule is just "because that's how God did it"). In each case, there is a very strong reluctance to let go the reigns of reality, as it were, for fear that utter chaos would result. The mystic needs their magical system to keep their crops growing, their cities plague-free, and their soul saved. Similarly, the prescriptivist needs strict usage rules to make sure their sentences are (what they consider to be) optimally readable, socially and politically correct, and up to some abstract standard, lest all semblance of readability and communication disappear. In each case the advocate of such rules fails to see that their rules are arbitrary and related to reality only through social convention and particular modes of thought. They miss the point that their devotion to the actual facts of the world is outweighed by their devotion to an already-given system of rules. The rules of both the mystic and the prescriptivist are arbitrary rules.
Now, there is certainly a place in society for arbitrary rules. In the United States, people drive on the right side of the road. If we don't all agree to do so, there will be a lot of head-on collisions. But we don't look at England or Australia and scream that they are doing things wrong and need to change which side of the road they drive on. There may be a bit of inconvenience in shifting from one to the other, but no one in their right mind would claim that there is a correct side of the road to drive on, and an incorrect one, and that America is correct and England incorrect. They are just arbitrary stylistic choices. (Well, maybe.)
Similarly, religious prescriptions are arbitrary rules insisted upon by people with an interest in standardizing the behaviors of members of a given community (including thoughts and utterances). And grammatical prescriptions ("no dangling modifiers", "no stranded prepositions") are arbitrary rules that have been historically insisted upon by people with an interest in standardizing the grammar of a given language.
Of course, I am assuming my reader agrees with both of these assertions. The first one is easy for many people to accept (or at least grant for the sake of argument), as opposition to mystical ideas has a long and proud history, in the form of rationality and science. The second one, though, has its basis in the very young and very much still growing field of linguistics, whose goals, methods, and justification few people have been exposed to, and fewer still understand. But prescriptivist accounts of language fly out the window the moment you actually look at human language as a natural phenomenon. Just as the thunderbolts of Zeus turned into electrical imbalances between the ground and atmosphere, dangling modifier and double negatives turn into simple sentences perfectly comprehensible to speakers of the relevant language. If one speaker says something and another understands the utterance, then grammatically correct linguistic exchange has transpired, regardless of whether any English Grammar Rule Book rules were violated. By way of example, I ended an above sentence with the phrase, "which side of the road they drive on." Nothing exploded. No hair-pulling confusion resulted. Yet I violated a rule of "proper English grammar". But this post isn't about convincing people that prescriptivism is wrong — only that it shares a certain key feature with mysticism.
I insist that in both the case of the mystic and the prescriptivist, there is either a lack of competence in understanding the rules by which nature operates or an emotional attachment to the social implications of the rule set. The mystic cannot grasp the science behind evolution, quantum mechanics, or cosmology, much as the prescriptivist cannot grasp the science behind linguistic universals, childhood language acquisition, or sociolinguistic discrimination. The mystic feels that they are saved and loved and special, much as the prescriptivist feels that they are proper, correct, and supremely literate. But both case are driven by either ignorance or contempt. In neither case is one able to recognize the elitism involved. Or, if the elitism is recognized, it's immediately defended as good and justified. One must be a speaker of "good English" much as one must be a "good Christian". And failing to be so means that you are inferior to the defender of this (dubious) Good.
But because linguistics is a young field which has not yet permeated the cultural fabric, we scoff at linguistic discrimination just as readily as we decry racial or religious discrimination. If you can't talk good, you must be stupid and inferior to all of us who can speak well. This, however, is just ignorance of the way in which people learn language and the way in which language changes, and an almost-mystical assumption about the existence of some Platonic True Form of a given language. It is ignorance of the fact that this Platonic language almost always coincides with the way the elite speak, be they London aristocracy (where "standard" British English comes from) or Muscovite czars (where "standard" Russian comes from).
As an aside, it must be pointed out that this ignorance costs people in very real ways. Being a speaker of a non-standard dialect cannot, on principle, relate in any way to intelligence or ability. There are astrophysicists in Memphis, Manchester and Mumbai alike, each speaking very different versions of English. Sounding Black on the phone is often a sure-fire way of not getting past a first interview. Having a Queens accent is just the same. Yet such linguistic variations have nothing to do with intelligence, training, education, personability. They are merely artifacts of our physicality, of our vulnerability to our social environments as children. We speak the way the people around us speak.
A final thought: there are good reasons to have arbitrary rules. And this applies to grammatical rules. Writing is a suboptimal translation of language, because it misses so many of the nuances essential to conveying understanding, such as tone, pace, volume, expression, etc. So in order to make writing understandable to others, it is important to have usage and spelling rules. In a written document, double negatives are recognized as negating each other, rather than the sentence as a whole (as is the case in, for example, Italian). Standardized spelling and punctuation are essential to the way English is written and read. But insisting that such rules be transferred from the page to the spoken word is ludicrous. Writing is the only place that needs the extra stringency of arbitrary grammatical rules. And it inherits this property from the already-natural-rule-governed richness of spoken language.
Friday, June 8, 2012
State vs. Government
When I talk about anarchism, I mean it as opposition to the State: that is, the institution which claims sole authority to violence in a geographic territory. Strictly speaking, I do not oppose government. Now, the terms "State" and "government" are generally interchangeable in English, and I usually follow that convention. But the word "government" to me evokes the sense of "maintaining function and control". And it's certainly true that humans want control over their environment, both physical and social (that they can rarely have it is beside the point). The confusion comes in the assumption that a State is required for government, and that any society without a State is without government. Two hundred years of libertarian political theory and a handful of historical examples put the lie to this. Humans are able to govern their affairs quite efficiently without the continual threat of violence. Violence is, of course, a possibility in many everyday situations, but that's certainly no less a fact in a Statist society than in a Stateless one. Simply put, State is not necessarily government, and government is not necessarily State.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Who Is a Moral Agent?
There is an important assumption about moral agency which always goes unstated in political discussion. It is this: institutions have moral agency. I could not possibly disagree with anything more than this. I believe that this assumption is responsible for a great deal of the evil that happens in the world. The assumption is unquestioned and unacknowledged because people do not think carefully about where moral agency can rest. Liberals who are outraged by the Citizens United verdict have no problems with treating the government as a valid moral agent, capable of killing, stealing, and taking on social projects. Likewise, right-wingers want to treat huge, fascistic corporations as equivalent to human beings, but balk at the idea of the government doing anything which doesn't put money into their wallets.
My take on this matter is simple: moral agency must lie with individual human beings. This is a minimal assumption, and I will take it for granted. However, humans do not live in isolation, and collective decisions must be made. As such, there must be some provision for super-individual moral agency. This is what I refer to as a group of individuals, or simply group. I do not use this term in a simple way, meaning any attempt at decision making involving more than one person. Instead, I use it in a technical way, to mean a voluntary association of individuals, none of whom relinquish or subvert their own moral agency, but merely use some method to determine the prevailing moral judgement of the group. The methods by which a group can come to such a determination are manifold: voting, by simple or super majority; formal debate; consensus building; and many not yet invented, I'm sure.
I contrast the idea of the group to the idea of the institution. An institution is also a super-individual decision-making body. However, it is not composed of individuals. In fact (as I shall discuss in a future post) institutions have priorities and prerogatives completely independent of the will of any given person. Obviously, decisions within institutions are ultimately made by individuals. But that individual must be willing to act, and must in fact act, in the interests of the institution rather than in their own individual interest or they would not be placed in such a position to begin with. A perfect example of this comes from a friend of mine who was tasked to go to a State Legislature meeting on behalf of the healthcare non-profit he works for. The people in charge had decided they would side with a certain political bloc which my friend opposed. However, it was his job to go and relay, and argue for, the position of the non-profit. His individual opinion of the matter at hand did not matter in the slightest. All that mattered was whether or not he could accurately relay the prevailing opinion of the institution he was a part of.
I do not think that the suppression of one's own moral agency in such a circumstance is conscionable. Be it as an employee, a soldier, or a politician, one should not have to abnegate one's own moral agency to serve a greater good. Such a good can be served voluntarily, and morally, by acting as part of a group of individuals, whose decision you can protest and even reject with no artificially contrived consequences to you, such as destitution or imprisonment.
My take on this matter is simple: moral agency must lie with individual human beings. This is a minimal assumption, and I will take it for granted. However, humans do not live in isolation, and collective decisions must be made. As such, there must be some provision for super-individual moral agency. This is what I refer to as a group of individuals, or simply group. I do not use this term in a simple way, meaning any attempt at decision making involving more than one person. Instead, I use it in a technical way, to mean a voluntary association of individuals, none of whom relinquish or subvert their own moral agency, but merely use some method to determine the prevailing moral judgement of the group. The methods by which a group can come to such a determination are manifold: voting, by simple or super majority; formal debate; consensus building; and many not yet invented, I'm sure.
I contrast the idea of the group to the idea of the institution. An institution is also a super-individual decision-making body. However, it is not composed of individuals. In fact (as I shall discuss in a future post) institutions have priorities and prerogatives completely independent of the will of any given person. Obviously, decisions within institutions are ultimately made by individuals. But that individual must be willing to act, and must in fact act, in the interests of the institution rather than in their own individual interest or they would not be placed in such a position to begin with. A perfect example of this comes from a friend of mine who was tasked to go to a State Legislature meeting on behalf of the healthcare non-profit he works for. The people in charge had decided they would side with a certain political bloc which my friend opposed. However, it was his job to go and relay, and argue for, the position of the non-profit. His individual opinion of the matter at hand did not matter in the slightest. All that mattered was whether or not he could accurately relay the prevailing opinion of the institution he was a part of.
I do not think that the suppression of one's own moral agency in such a circumstance is conscionable. Be it as an employee, a soldier, or a politician, one should not have to abnegate one's own moral agency to serve a greater good. Such a good can be served voluntarily, and morally, by acting as part of a group of individuals, whose decision you can protest and even reject with no artificially contrived consequences to you, such as destitution or imprisonment.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Games
Most people have the intuition that, while you do not have the right to do violence to someone unprovoked, once they have done violence to you, you are justified in doing violence back to them. I have a system by which I try to schematize this intuition. I frame interactions between people as games. Such games have rules, which are agreed upon implicitly by those involved. The players in these games, I assume, are in an equal power relationship — that is, factors such as authority, gender and race are not involved (this mitigates such non-reciprocal cultural artifacts as orders and bigoted statements. [I should probably make a post about this assumption at some point.] ).
Cultural expectations and past relationships play big roles in determining the rules of such games. These rules can include: "talking is allowed", "intentional physical contact is not allowed" (this might well be a rule with strangers on the street), "kissing is allowed" (such as between people in a romantic relationship). For the vast majority of interactions, "don't do violence" is a rule. However, the rules of games can change, and often do in short order. These changes come about when one person implicitly or explicitly violates a standing rule. Once this happens, both players may now play by these new rules. What this creates in effect is an "eye for an eye" situation. If you are willing to violate one of the rules of the interaction, you are implicitly agreeing to play by that rule for the duration of the interaction. So, if you punch someone (a violation of a rule outside of a boxing ring), you agree to getting punched yourself. If you kiss someone, you are implying that they may kiss you back. And so on.
This allows us to set up a naive code for behaviour: follow the rules, or, if you violate them, accept that the new rules your violation established apply to you as much as to anyone else you interact with.
Cultural expectations and past relationships play big roles in determining the rules of such games. These rules can include: "talking is allowed", "intentional physical contact is not allowed" (this might well be a rule with strangers on the street), "kissing is allowed" (such as between people in a romantic relationship). For the vast majority of interactions, "don't do violence" is a rule. However, the rules of games can change, and often do in short order. These changes come about when one person implicitly or explicitly violates a standing rule. Once this happens, both players may now play by these new rules. What this creates in effect is an "eye for an eye" situation. If you are willing to violate one of the rules of the interaction, you are implicitly agreeing to play by that rule for the duration of the interaction. So, if you punch someone (a violation of a rule outside of a boxing ring), you agree to getting punched yourself. If you kiss someone, you are implying that they may kiss you back. And so on.
This allows us to set up a naive code for behaviour: follow the rules, or, if you violate them, accept that the new rules your violation established apply to you as much as to anyone else you interact with.
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