Of course. I’m unclear on how working against empire with a broad coalition of people would, for example, impair the struggle against patriarchy by those who see that struggle as valuable, but it’s certainly a possibility.
One of the conclusions I’ve come to in the past year or so is that I don’t have enough information to guarantee that my actions or activism will not lead to unintended consequences. So, I can accept your critique without deeming it sufficient to deter me from my course. I would also caution you that your activism almost certainly has opportunity costs and unintended negative consequences, and that I don’t expect you to necessarily answer for each and every one of them (let alone those I vaguely hint at occurring at some theoretical, predicted point in the future).
In other words, we’re human beings, and we don’t know enough to be certain.
If it turns out to be the case (as Soviet Onion and I keep on suggesting, without much uptake from you) that some of the deep reasons behind X, as a social phenomenon, are closely connected or directly from Y, then you may need to find that you need to work on both after all, if you want to get anything lasting accomplished
Ah, yes – you’ve wisely chosen to qualify this with, “if it turns out to be the case”. I appreciate the lack of universalism inherent in that statement. I appreciate the sentiments that we’re all in the dark here, doing the best we can. That is precisely the spirit in which I, as a fallible human being, suggest the desirability of this cross-ideological project.
I could be flat-out, 100% wrong. This is true.
The fact that you have chosen, no doubt for good reasons, to focus your limited resources on X rather than Y does not mean that everyone else in the world has the same reasons for allocating their own limited resources (which are no doubt different resources and subject to different limits) to X rather than Y like you did. I am fairly sure that you will say, at this point, Of course; I’m only telling you about my priorities; you may have your own. But in fact, your writings on these subjects has repeatedly talked about priorities in a way which makes it clear that you’re recommending those priorities to others, not just reporting your own. And, even setting that aside, I’m fine with all this, when and to the extent that folks working full-time on X but not Y, and those working full-time on Y but not X, and those working on both, can all do work that complements the work of the others, so that the entire goal is realized by groups each working on a bit of the big problem in parallel to each other. But the problem is that that only works when they actually are working in parallel, so as not to actively harm the efforts of the others. On which, see #1.
I am recommending a course of action, yes. But if I understand the critiques so far, they have not been arguing that the course I’ve chosen is wrong; it’s that the course doesn’t factor in the correct ideological, political, and philosophical analysis. In other words, it’s not that my strategy is wrong for you; it’s that it’s wrong for me. That’s where I see the source of conflict coming from.
What do you mean here? The revolutionary success of the cause as a whole, or the incremental success produced by your personal efforts on the margins?
I mean the former.
If the former, I think that you’re minimizing male violence against women, and that you should stop doing that. However, in any case, it’s unclear to me why considerations about global revolutionary victory in one or the other cause should be of much interest for the kind of hard-nosed strategic planning you say you want to engage in, rather than looking at the effects of your personal actions on the margins.
Well, think what you will. I don’t see the point you’re making that, because I disagree with you on priorities, I have particular value judgments about women. It does not minimize male violence against women to say that the state is a more vital target to undercut the institutionalization of violence and brutality. It’s not one or the other; it’s simply that the one is more actionable in a given context. This isn’t a debate of the relative merits of work on either issue (and I think it’s bad faith, frankly, to superimpose that into what I’m saying), but of where the possibilities lie at present.
Of course, my own view is that simple body-counting is not enough to determine where your efforts should be directed. I suspect that’s your own view, too, when you’re not getting defensive about your own prioritization of causes as against other people’s.
Of course. Let me be crystal clear here: the selection of the state as a target around which to rally has nothing to do with the merits of the case against the state vs. the case against male violence (this has been a confusing point, because I haven’t been clear that the “body count” is only significant because there is a body count with the state, whereas we don’t have that kind of strong, empirical data in analyzing the effect of patriarchy). The only difference is that the state provides a big, honking thermal exhaust port which we can rally against so that Skywalker can fire those photon torpedoes and cause a chain reaction that destroys the Death Star. The state furnishes revolutionaries with an established concept we can rally against; anti-patriarchy, for example, requires much more propaganda work – work not suited to those who have, well, patriarchal approaches.
]]>When you talk of “neighborhoods” there’s a certain objectiveness and discreteness to such concepts that implies the presence of lines and boundaries (even if there may be contention or haziness as to their precise nature).
I don’t think that there is, actually. Like I said, my aim here is to talk about neighborhoods, not strategic hamlets. Real neighborhoods aren’t just hazy
or contested
in their boundaries; they typically overlap, intermingle, subsume each other (do I live in the neighborhood of UNLV or of Tropicana or of my apartment complex or of my own home? well, all of the above; I have a lot of neighbors, and you can slice it up different ways, but each slice has some interesting and distinctive peculiar characteristics). Sometimes people draw sharp geographical boundaries for their own purposes (TriBeCa starts BElow CAnal street, by definition), but that’s the exception, not the rule, and typically the result either of past segregation, or of some ass sitting in an office thinking he can lay down neighborhoods like you lay down houses and hotels on a Monopoly board; there are other, different ways that neighborhoods can grow.
I find this frightening. When folks like Soviet Onion talk about polycentrism in this context, my reading of that is not a center over here and a center over there but every possible perspective a valid center. So that I don’t live on the fringes of the Lents Park Neighborhood near the Mt. Scott Neighborhood, but in MY neighborhood. Everyone’s neighborhood is THEIR neighborhood.
I’m happy to agree with that conception of polycentrism, but I don’t think it cuts against what I’m saying.
My problem, though, is that your list of all the everyones
seems to be a list entirely of individual people with idiosyncratic centers. That’s a good start, and it certainly acts to break down the coercive forms of centralization of perspectives that political forces work to impose; but it seems to leave out an important third category — the perspectives that emerge from mutual efforts, and which cannot be reduced to any one individual’s idiosyncratic aims, pursuits, knowledge, etc.
Some neighborhoods have a distinctive local character because the neighbors are engaged in a project which is essentially collaborative, and from which certain distinctive features necessarily emerge, not because any one center is building a tower and forcing or browbeating the rest into it, but rather because a thousand individual bricklayers are each laying one or two bricks in such a way that all the bricks build a distinctive building. (But, importantly, they wouldn’t be laying those bricks where they do if they didn’t expect other, different bricklayers to lay the other bricks on top of or beside them. That’s why it’s irreducible to any one person’s solitary perspective.)
A community of scholars,
of the sort which actually-existing University campuses imperfectly try to realize, is an example of this sort of thing. Any University worth a damn has a campus which forms a very distinctive neighborhood, architecturally, culturally, and so on, indeed a neighborhood with an unusually strong sense of inside
and outside
, because it’s a hub for a certain kind of collaborative activity, and the activity involves creating a certain kind of shared life and shared space. That creates a additional perspective, not instead of, or superior to, the perspectives of each individual person, but rather in addition to them, as an emergent center that results from the shared activity, and which ends up profoundly shaping how distinctive the neighborhood tends to be.
Your portrait seems to be of the Modulaic Glistening Collaborative Highrise sharing laundry lines with Dinotopia Tree Houses, but I don’t think there’s any reason such such strong and immediate diversities would persist. People are free to be iconoclasts and sequester themselves in trial runs, but that’s the long tail. In societies of true open communication and association the vast majority experience is largely similar, they normalize into a soup of the best parts.
(1) How similar the experience ends up being depends on how universal the bestness
of the parts are. There are some things which are best for everyone and other things which are best for some people and not for others based on fairly particular features (age, season of the year, life experiences). And there are some things which are best for some people and not for others based on arbitrary, creative, or otherwise unpredictable features. Of the last, those unpredictable features may be idiosyncratic (in which case it’d all get centrifuged out to each individual depending on taste or preference, regardless of neighborhood clusters; or they may be associational, produced from particular interactions that aren’t 1:1 reducible to shared individual preferences, in which case you would get neighborhoods).
Many of the benign kinds of cultural difference — shaking hands versus kissing on the cheek, that kind of thing — are examples of this last case. Of course, cultural diversity is mainly associational, not territorial; the connections may be either geographical, as with local customs, or non-geographical, as with the customs and norms of, say, Star Trek fandom, or open source, or academe, or whatever. Of course, the more open the communication of knowledge, the more cultural exchange there is, and that can radically affect, e.g., the extent to which geography does or does not matter — fuzzing up all the boundaries, and amalgamating some, and so on, and so on. Which I think is all awesome. But it also tends to dissolve or centrifuge others — network standard
English is currently dying in America, precisely because of the crack-up of rigidified media monopolies, and global English
is growing luxuriantly in all different directions. In the world of the future, if things keep going as they have been, everyone may well speak English, but damn there are going to a lot of different accents and a lot of different dialects. And, also, see below.
In societies of true open communication and association the vast majority experience is largely similar, they normalize into a soup of the best parts.
(2) That’s the equilibrium point. But if the Austrians have taught me anything, it’s that all the interesting stuff is about the processes in disequilibrium, not about the results in a state of equilibrium. What people do when they’re off-kilter in order to try balance themselves, and what sorts of thing constantly shift the equilibrium point before you can catch it, and so on.
Hence my interest in neighborhoods. Maybe the end-state of Dinotopia and Metropolis, given access to information and freedom to travel and so on, is a mash-up of all the best in each, or an idiosyncratic distribution of what works best for each individual person in between the two, but nobody ever reaches that end-state (equilibrium points shift), and the entrepreneurial process of finding the best in each,dispersing it to them as want it, adapting it to what folks want on the margin, etc., is a matter that has actually ends up having a lot to do with intimacy with, and care for, localized diversity.
]]>I care about many things. My time and energy is slightly more constrained. The ills of the world will not all be vanquished by me. So there is a role for strategic thinking, resourceful allocation, and deep digging within the tease out the values that would govern action.
Sure. Everyone’s got to choose their battles.
But, if (for the sake of argument), you are equally concerned with X and Y on the same terms:
There’s a difference between choosing to work more on X than on Y, and choosing to work on X through means that actively harm the efforts of those working Y;
If it turns out to be the case (as Soviet Onion and I keep on suggesting, without much uptake from you) that some of the deep reasons behind X, as a social phenomenon, are closely connected or directly from Y, then you may need to find that you need to work on both after all, if you want to get anything lasting accomplished; and
The fact that you have chosen, no doubt for good reasons, to focus your limited resources on X rather than Y does not mean that everyone else in the world has the same reasons for allocating their own limited resources (which are no doubt different resources and subject to different limits) to X rather than Y like you did. I am fairly sure that you will say, at this point, Of course; I’m only telling you about my priorities; you may have your own.
But in fact, your writings on these subjects has repeatedly talked about priorities
in a way which makes it clear that you’re recommending those priorities to others, not just reporting your own. And, even setting that aside, I’m fine with all this, when and to the extent that folks working full-time on X but not Y, and those working full-time on Y but not X, and those working on both, can all do work that complements the work of the others, so that the entire goal is realized by groups each working on a bit of the big problem in parallel to each other. But the problem is that that only works when they actually are working in parallel, so as not to actively harm the efforts of the others. On which, see #1.
Perhaps I can oppose patriarchy and the state on the same terms – but I guarantee you in the world of real action one cause is going to tend to save more lives.
What do you mean here? The revolutionary success of the cause as a whole, or the incremental success produced by your personal efforts on the margins?
If the former, I think that you’re minimizing male violence against women, and that you should stop doing that. However, in any case, it’s unclear to me why considerations about global revolutionary victory in one or the other cause should be of much interest for the kind of hard-nosed strategic planning you say you want to engage in, rather than looking at the effects of your personal actions on the margins.
If the latter, then I’d like to suggest that, as a matter of effectual action on the margin with limited resources, as a matter of fact, you would probably save more lives on the margins through your immediate personal actions by cutting a check to your local battered women’s shelter (which actually do save lives and stop murders, every day, in the world of real action
) than you could possibly save by penning eloquent anti-war essays on the Internet, or by joining local war protest groups, or even by direct-action tactics like counter-recruiting and war tax resistance (which are all great, but which are not likely to produce even incremental results any time soon).
Of course, my own view is that simple body-counting is not enough to determine where your efforts should be directed. I suspect that’s your own view, too, when you’re not getting defensive about your own prioritization of causes
as against other people’s.
Incidentally, Benjamin Tucker often defined anarchism as the rejection of “government,” where by government he meant something weaker than all domination but stronger than just the state — something pretty close to what ancaps mean by “aggression.”
Given the relations of thickness I see between a) opposing the state, b) opposing aggression, and c) opposing nonaggressive forms of domination, I’m not that exercised by the need to determine which are and which are not strictly part of the definition of “libertarianism,” or “left-libertarianism,” or “anarchism,” or “individualist anarchism,” or what have you. There’s a package of interrelated values I’m concerned to promote, where the terms “libertarianism” and “anarchism” clearly apply to some portions of the package. I’m happy to work with people whose packages of values are broadly similar to mine even if they aren’t identical.
]]>I think NAP is sufficient for being a libertarian. Whether it’s necessary is another question. I find that depending on the occasion I use the term “libertarian” with at least three different degrees of breadth, where NAP is sufficient for any of the three but is necessary for only the narrowest one.
Of the two broader versions, one is very broad indeed, meaning something like “anyone who favours a fairly radical redistribution of power from the state to voluntary associations,” and so would include everything from social anarchists to classical liberals. The intermediate version means something like “the region of the broad libertarian spectrum spectrum reasonably near to or simpatico with the narrow libertarian region” and so would, e.g., include some social anarchists but not others (depending on their willingness to tolerate markets and such).
]]>Anyway, I just added another crop of responses at the bottom of the Open_Thread which may, or may not, have relevance and quotes pulled from this one.
http://radgeek.com/gt/2009/04/26/open_thread/comment-page-3/#comment-20090429182156
]]>I do think Hoppe is both a libertarian and an anarchist. Hoppe’s proposals are intended to be squared with the non-aggression principle (even if, in our judgment, his attempts so to square them fail). North has no commitment to the non-aggression principle whatever.
I realize you could be invoking the NAP as a litmus for Libertarianism alone, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard you clarify your position on Social Anarchists who (it’s true almost across the board) don’t subscribe to the NAP and are unlikely to. (Although that we would functionally once having reached anarchy is, I think, beside the point.)
]]>Does anyone mind including me? I don’t want to miss the continuation of this intellectual gorefest. At the minimum, I’d like permission to see the final results from all of you — Soviet can send me it
Don’t hate and discriminate…
( :
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