ALLies,

As promised, here is (finally) the text (more or less) of my speech at the Libertarian Party of Clark County. There was a scheduling mix-up, so I got about half the time I expected in which to speak; parts that are struck out are parts that I omitted in the interest of time. I should note that, if you’re not familiar with public speaking, reading from a more or less completely prepared script like I did can be both a crutch and a handicap at the same time; if you’re nervous it provides a guaranteed route from where you are to the end of the line, but having it ready at hand also encourages nervous tics, including obtrusive glances down to the sheet, that can really detract from the reading. In my own case, I’m fairly familiar both with talking from notes and with reading prepared papers, but the written-out script was mainly the result of time pressures, and, since I didn’t have time to rehearse it, and also found out, too late to do anything about it, that I wouldn’t have a lectern to make my glancing at the sheet less obtrusive, I know my delivery suffered a bit because of it. The best thing to do in your local groups is, no doubt, to try to make sure you have enough time to meet beforehand and practice your talk. Anyway, on to the content:

I am here today to bring you two messages. So let me cut to the chase and deliver both of them right now. They are the point of this entire talk, and I can put them both in ten words or fewer. Here’s the first: Las Vegas will be free soil in our own lifetimes. And the second is: We are all going to make it happen. And when I say We all, I don’t just mean the people in this room. I don’t just mean the people in this political party, either. I don’t mean the people in my own organization, the Southern Nevada Alliance of the Libertarian Left. I mean all of us, everybody. The LP and Southern Nevada ALL and you and me, yes—but also our friends and our neighbors and our fellow workers. I believe that in my lifetime, all of us in Las Vegas will rise up and we will make ourselves free of the oppression and exploitation inflicted upon us by government laws, government regulation and regimentation, government cops, and government bureaucrats—local government, county government, state government, federal government, and transnational governing bodies like the UN, WTO, and IMF. We will become free because we have, individually and cooperatively, made ourselves ungovernable. We will do this with or without the cooperation of the rest of the world, and whether or not the political powers that be have been persuaded of the truth and virtue of the freedom philosophy; if the souls of politicians and political institutions can be cured, then that will make it so much the easier, but even if they cannot, we can and we will make it no longer worth their while – no longer even sustainable – for them to rule us against our will. We can and we will dump the bosses and the bureaucrats off our backs—politically, socially, economically—and we will stand upright, in control of our own destinies.

I’m saying these things today because I think they are important. I think they are important because they seem impossible, and yet they are true. It’s easy to doubt that Las Vegas can be free—really, totally free—in our own lifetimes. Government is big. Government is everywhere. Government consumes somewhere between one third and one half of every dollar that you make. Every dollar that you make and every dollar that you spend is itself part of the world’s largest and most powerful government monopoly—the government-centralized banking cartel and its fiat money monopoly. City government patrols every street. The federal government of the United States is the richest, most technologically advanced, and most militarily powerful organization in the history of the world. The two major parties, which thoroughly dominate the electoral process at every level, show no real signs of wanting to roll back government in any major area of policy, or even to contain it at its current levels; no matter whether a Demopublican or a Republicrat candidate wins, the party in power is more or less guaranteed to aggressively push government further and further into our lives. It’s easy to get dizzy just looking at the size and scope of government. It’s easy to lose hope entirely in the face of such an enemy. And it’s just as easy, and just as destructive, in the long run, to lose hope by deferring it, by concluding that freedom is only for our children or our grandchildren or our great-grandchildren, that it takes a long and slow process of chipping away at the edges of invasive government, in the hope that, after the next several four-year election cycles, we might begin to get a little freer, and we might be able to contain or even roll back government a little, leaving the rest of the task for future generations. I am here today to say that that’s not good enough. I am here to say that freedom is much closer than any of us think, if we fight for it, and if we know where to take that fight. And I am here today to ask you all to get into that fight by having the hope to believe in, and the courage to say some things that are both crazy and true.

Well, O.K., then. Now that I’ve said all that, let me back up a bit, so that I can give you an idea of where I’m coming from, and then come back around to the details of where I think we can go from here. My name is Charles Johnson. I’m here on behalf of a new radical libertarian project called the Southern Nevada Alliance of the Libertarian Left. I write for a weblog called the Rad Geek People’s Daily, at radgeek.com. I’ve been a libertarian writer, activist, and organizer – both inside and outside of the Libertarian Party, especially the Libertarian Party of Alabama – since about 2001. Since 2000, I’ve also been a writer, activist, and organizer for many groups and causes within the radical Left and the radical feminist movement. Depending on where you are coming from, that may or may not seem strange; it may even seem incoherent. I think that with the right understanding of both the Freedom Movement and of the radical Left – or, rather, the right understanding of the particular tendencies within the Freedom Movement, and within the radical Left, that I am working in – it won’t seem that way anymore. But I’ll come back to that in a bit.

First, I want to say a few words about Southern Nevada ALL. We are a new organization, a local chapter of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, which also has active chapters in Kansas City, Richmond, Virginia, and a new chapter forming in the Chicago area. The locals are autonomous and work together as equals: there’s no big central ALL office that tells local chapters what to do, but we keep in touch with the locals in other towns and we share our experiences and our materials, which each local chapter can adapt to the conditions in its own community. We use the ALL name because our groups have certain principles and strategic priorities in common with each other. Let me try to break down what some of those are. The Alliance of the Libertarian Left believes in….

1. Radicalism – we pull no punches, and we make no compromises, in our presentation of the freedom philosophy. We don’t shy away from emotional and controversial issues, either. We are anarchists, not limited-governmentalists; we are extremists, not moderates; and we’re not afraid to say so.

2. Populism – we believe that libertarianism is for everybody, and the people who have the most to gain from, and the most to contribute to, the movement, are the people who are the most downtrodden, the most thoroughly oppressed and exploited, in our current social and political regime.

3. Solidarity and social justice – we believe in many of the goals associated with Progressives or the statist Left today – anti-racism, anti-imperialism, gay liberation, feminism, environmental sustainability, radical labor solidarity, and many of the other commitments that are commonly grouped together under the heading of social justice. Unlike state Leftists, we believe that these goals can and should be achieved by free people in a free society, using free association and cultural activism to change existing social and material conditions, without getting government regulations or bureaucracies involved. We intend to achieve Lefist goals through libertarian means.

4. Non-electoral social change – we are not affiliated with any political party or any candidate for political office. We do not try to achieve change by petitioning the politicians currently in power, or by trying to replace them with other, better politicians. There’s a place for that kind of activism, but lots of other organizations – including the Libertarian Party – are already working on it. If we tried to do it, we wouldn’t be very good at it, so what we specialize in are other means of social change: mass education, targeted persuasion, non-violent direct action, and the creation of alternative institutions that counter or bypass the State.

I’ll have more to say about all of this later. But for now, let me say a few things about what Southern Nevada ALL has done so far, and where we are going from here.

Right now we are a new organization, and we are in the process of getting our bearings, making contacts, and looking for allies. Southern Nevada ALL’s first public action was a bit of guerrilla education that we did on Tax Day, April 15th – by posting these flyers around town in Las Vegas, mainly on UNLV campus and in the surrounding neighborhoods. The action had two immediate goals. First, to get out a radical anti-tax message that would appeal to anti-authoritarians of all stripes, and also specifically to anti-war Leftists. Second, to get our name out and let likely new ALLies and contacts know that we were forming this new organization. I consider it to have been a smashing success – at least, insofar as it ended up almost tripling our membership (growing from the two founders, David Houser and myself, to five members after the flyering), and laid the groundwork for future actions. I’ll come back around to talk about those in a minute.

First, though, I want to say a few things about non-electoral methods for social change, and then about the Left.

I’m not about to deny that electoral politics – voting, party-building, running better candidates – has some role to play in making social change. I think it has played a very important role in the past, and that it can play a very important role in the future – both through efforts to destabilize or reorient the major parties, as with Ron Paul’s campaign within the Republican Party, and also through efforts to create alternatives to the two-party system and open up new spaces for libertarian ideas, as with the Libertarian Party. What I do want to stress today is that it’s important for us not to limit ourselves to electoral politics. There are all kinds of ways that social change happens, and electoral politics is only one of them. While it can be a very powerful method, it’s also a very difficult one, and a time consuming one, and a slow one. So while I encourage you all to do whatever you find it worth your while to do through electoral politics, I am here to stress the need to add other forms of activism to your toolbox. If we are going to become free in our own lifetimes – and I believe that we will – then relying on electoral politics alone will never be enough. After all, running candidates and voting can only effect a change once you have managed to convert 50%+1 of the electorate over to your position; there’s very little room for accomplishing small changes on the margin. It also imposes a very rigid and quite slow schedule on making social changes: you only have a shot at changing anything for one day every two to four years. And an elections-only strategy necessarily excludes large numbers of people – including especially the very people that are the most thoroughly oppressed by the current political regime, who have the most to gain from a fight for freedom – people like drug war prisoners, and illegal immigrants, who are legally excluded from voting at all. If we want to make lasting change within our lifetimes, we will need to adopt some other methods of social change – methods that don’t have to wait on the next election, methods that don’t have to wait on 50%+1, and methods that can be for everybody, with or without a permission slip from the State.

To give you an idea of what I mean, let me tell you a couple stories.

[Spokane Free Speech Fight, 1910]

There are a lot of ways of doing direct action. Here’s a recent one that I read about, from a group of middle-schoolers in Readington, NJ. [Pennies work-to-rule in Readington, NJ]

Another special kind of direct action that I want to mention, which is very important to the ALL and to many other libertarian Leftists, is the concept of counter-economics. Counter-economics is the underground practice of radical libertarian theory. Counter-economics means creating your own, unregulated institutions, independently of the State, in which you profit by ignoring or defying the institutionalized requirements imposed by the government and by the business establishment. Counter-economics builds alternative institutions through illegal black markets, and quasi-legal grey markets. And counter-economics is everywhere: it’s the unlicensed pharmacist slinging drugs to willing customers on the street corner. It’s the illegal immigrant dodging government border controls and then working under the table, without turning over the fruits of her labor to the IRS. It’s the waitress building up a nest egg from cash tips that she doesn’t report to the IRS. It’s e-gold and the Liberty Dollar and the Ithaca Hour producing durable currencies as an alternative to the Fed’s fiat money monopoly. It’s your cousin downloading free MP3s on his college network, in defiance of government-enforced copyright monopolies. It’s a grey market outfit like Food Not Bombs, where activists cover their own food costs and provide hot meals to homeless people by dumpster-diving surplus food from grocery stores (which is still fresh enough to eat, but no longer fresh enough to sell under existing government food regluations), cooking it, and serving the food for free in public spaces like parks.

It’s important to see that this kind of black market and grey market activity is itself a form of direct action, no less than filling the jails, and no less than a sit-in or a work-to-rule action. One of the ALL’s chief goals is to promote freedom through direct action, including through counter-economics, to encourage people who haven’t gone counter-economic yet to support the legitimacy and the importance of counter-economic businesses, and to encourage people who are already engaged in counter-economics to become self-conscious and organized counter-economists – that is, to see that what they are doing is not only personally profitable, but also politically valuable, and to see themselves as part of a larger movement to evade, undermine, and ultimately eliminate the invasiveness of the State.

One of the great advantages of counter-economics is that it’s one of the few forms of political activism in which people can strike a blow for freedom without having to become something that they are not, and which most people never will be – that is, die-hard, self-sacrificing activists who have a perfect grasp on libertarian philosophy and consistently make the right policy decisions. Counter-economics puts libertarianism into practice naturally; a practicing counter-economist is a practicing anti-statist as a matter of day-to-day business, whether or not she understands the whole philosophical theory that backs up her practice. And counter-economics also does something that almost no other form of political activism does: it produces direct, immediate profits for the person practicing it (because she makes money she wouldn’t otherwise be able to make, or keeps money she wouldn’t otherwise be able tokeep, or gets goods and services she wouldn’t otherwise be able to obtain). Part of the reason I said that I believe that we are all going to be part of Las Vegas becoming free soil is because I believe that if we take this fight not only to the electoral arena, but also to the streets, in the form of self-conscious direct action and counter-economics, we will have a tool at our disposal which will empower the most marginalized and least privileged people to join the struggle, and which will also make fighting for freedom the most selfish and most profitable thing for people – especially poor and oppressed people – to do.

Now, of course, there’s a downside to direct action, and especially to counter-economics: it can be dangerous. Nobody in ALL saying that you should get out there and start your own multimillion dollar heroin ring. (If you have started one, anyway, I’m not about to talk about it, and I’d rather you didn’t tell me about it. The first rule of a counter-economic business is, you don’t talk about a counter-economic business.) I’m the first to acknowledge this, and also to acknowledge that that means we shouldn’t put all our eggs in the counter-economic basket. I don’t think we should put all our eggs in any tactical basket. Counter-economics is important, and other forms of direct action are important, but so are a lot of other things. For the LP, that can mean electoral politics. For Southern Nevada ALL, it means mass education and targeted persuasion – through our flyers, through literature drops, through our website, through public speaking events like this one, and by creating alternative institutions (which I’ll come back to later) for distributing information and views through new channels. Neither education alone nor direct action alone will bring about victory; but when they are put together, each can become much more powerful than they were alone. Educating the people at large about libertarian ideas, and trying especially hard to persuade a handful of people who are especially open to radical politics, can make direct action much more powerful by creating the above-ground and underground networks of supporters that direct action needs to be successful. On the other hand, putting libertarian ideas into practice through direct action also reinforces education and persuasion, and makes them much more powerful than they would be on their own: people are much more likely to get involved, and to stay involved, in a project that leads to concrete action and real results. Libertarian talk accomplishes little if libertarianism remains nothing more than a talk shop; but talk can accomplish a hell of a lot when talk pulls people towards public and private action, and when public and private action get more people talking.

Now, some words about the Left. From the mid-20th century onward, movement libertarians have mostly conceived of themselves as the enemies of the Left (and vice versa), and the radical Left especially. Many libertarians came directly out of Right-wing or conservative movements (such as Young Americans for Freedom, the Republican Party, or the Right-wing talk radio scene). Libertarians mixed fairly freely with, and often worked with, small-government conservatives, and, even when they criticized conservative forms of government intervention (especially socially conservative policies, such as the Drug War or anti-abortion laws), they generally reserved their harshest words and most of their political activism for Left-liberal politicians, for redistributionist government social programs such as welfare and food stamps, and for social justice organizations like the anti-sweatshop movement and labor unions.

Well, to be clear, I for one have no problem attacking Left-liberal politicians, or government welfare programs. I oppose all efforts to expand the scope and power of government, and all forms of government-directed regimentation of trade or redistribution of wealth. But it is important to realize that criticizing the political means that many Leftist reformers have adopted over the past century doesn’t necessarily involve criticizing the ends that they adopted. And it is just as important to remember that the relationship between libertarians and the Left has not always been so chilly on either side. If we distinguish radical Leftists – think the Industrial Workers of the World, or Students for a Democratic Society, or the Black Panthers, or Noam Chomsky – from establishment liberals – think Albert Shanker or Teddy Kennedy or the AFL-CIO – then we’ll find that, while the establishment liberals have always been rock-ribbed defenders of the State, the radical Leftists – especially the radicals of the late 19th century, early 20th century, and, for a few years, the New Left of the late 1960s and early 1970s – have been some of the fiercest critics of the welfare-warfare State, as opponents of imperialism and COINTELPRO domestic surveillance, and also as proponents of people-powered, grassroots projects that provided mutual aid directly to people in the community, without any government welfare bureauracy. (Teddy Kennedy pushed for government welfare and healthcare. The Panthers argued that black people should forget about the government bureaucracy, and served voluntarily-funded free breakfasts in the ghetto instead—while they derided government welfare as a means of alienating poor blacks from their own community and keeping them dependent on the white man’s government.)

Similarly, there was a time when libertarians saw themselves not as the enemies of the Left, but as the most radical and consistent part of the Left. Nineteenth century libertarians such as Lysander Spooner and Stephen Pearl Andrews came out of the radical wing of the Abolitionist movement, and, after the Civil War, allied themselves with other culturally and politically radical movements against political and social privilege – including the labor movement, the anti-racist movement, the freethought movement, and First Wave feminism. The individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker, whose magazine Liberty was one of the most influential libertarian publications in America from the 1880s through the first decade of the 20th century, described his position as Absolute Free Trade; … laissez faire the universal rule, but he and his circle also routinely identified themselves as socialists – not because they were setting themselves against the ideal of the free market, but rather because they were setting themselves against actually existing big business. They argued that a handful of men exercised control over finance, capital, and (thus) the daily lives of ordinary workers, not because of free market processes, but rather because of plutocratic government economic regimentation and government-granted monopolies – especially the Big Four monopolies of government centralization and regulation of banking for the benefit of finance capital, government protectionist tariffs for the benefit of industrial fat cats, government-granted monopolies on the use of ideas through patents and copyrights, and government seizure of control over wild and unused land. The Tuckerite individualists saw the invasive powers of the State as both the root of, and the reason for, the dominance of Big Business and entrenched capitalists over smaller competitors, workers, and cooperative shops. And they suggested that the Freedom Movement should strike at the root of the problem by organizing workers into countervailing organizations such as boycott leagues and labor unions to expose, challenge, resist, and ultimately simply to bypass the economic regulations that the State and the bosses were conspiring to impose on them by force. In the early 20th century, American individualists like Dyer Lum and immigrant anarchists like Emma Goldman fought for much the same vision, and their influence produced one of the largest and most influential labor unions of the early 20th century – the Industrial Workers of the World, which viewed government planners and bureaucrats as the tools of the bosses and the enemies of workers, and who urged workers to look not to the government, but to themselves, through the creative use of free association, agitation, direct action in the workplace, voluntary strikes, union solidarity, and voluntary mutual aid between workers, which would bypass the State, and create alternative, non-coercive institutions like union hiring halls and workers’ co-ops, which would build a new society within the shell of the old.

If the labor movement is statist today, it is only because it is now what State regulation and patronage have made it. The I.W.W. was targeted for massive government repression during the 1910s and 1920s, most notoriously in the Wilson administration’s World War I political prosecutions and the later Palmer raids, in which Wilson’s goon squad rounded up, jailed, and deported thousands of I.W.W. unionists and other anarchists, solely on the basis of their political beliefs. In the 1930s, a conservative, pro-government wing of the labor movement collaborated with the Progressive business class and the New Deal pro-government liberals to create the modern National Labor Relations Board system, in which centralized, establishmentarian unions like the AFL-CIO have been granted government privileges in organizing and negotiating, in return for submitting to extensive government regulations on the methods and goals that they can adopt. These new laws served as both a subsidy for conservative unionism as against radical competitors like the I.W.W., and also as a form of insurance that the subsidized labor unions would not do anything that fundamentally challenged the fundamental principles on which the state-corporate system and the interventionist political regime were founded.

The reality is that, through government regulation of the labor movement, export subsidies, the Big Four monopolies, government support for regulations that benefit entrenched market players, and through corporate welfare (whether in the form of direct monetary pay-offs, or in the form of land seized, Kelo-style, through eminent domain), big corporations like General Motors have benefited at least as much from government patronage as big unions like the UAW. Yet libertarian criticism of the magntes of state capitalism is hardly expanded into criticism of all businesses as such; while many 20th century libertarians have written as if the labor movement did not exist before the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935, and as if the faults of existing conservative unions are a sort of original sin for which all labor unions ought to b condemned. This difference in treatment is no doubt closely connected with the emphasis many 20th-century libertarians placed on defending the free market against the attacks of Communists and other state socialists. While they were right to argue that existing modes of production are distorted by government intervention, should not be even further distorted by increasing government regimentation, this insight was often perverted into the confused belief that existing business practices – the way that Wal-Mart does business, say, or the way that Nike treats its workers in third-world sweatshops – are themselves the natural outcome of an undistorted market. But these practices did not emerge from a free market in the first place; they emerged from a market already heavily distorted by government intervention. The answer, then, is clearly less government, not more; but there is also good reason for libertarians to condemn the economic distortions that already shape the state-capitalist labor market, and to promote anti-statist models of labor organizing as an essential part of the libertarian defense of free markets.

It’s for precisely these reasons that those of us in the ALL support wildcat unions and state-free forms of voluntary mutual aid, and look back to the history of those radical Leftist efforts that organized the oppressed and made use of people-power to challenge, resist, or simply bypass the State – such as the I.W.W.’s free speech fights. Or the nonviolent civil disobedience campaigns against British imperialism in India and against government Jim Crow laws in the Southern United States. Or the Jane network in Chicago, in which radical feminists learned how to perform simple first-timester abortions, and provided safe, affordable illegal abortions to hundreds of women in Chicago years before Roe v. Wade. Or the Black Panther Party’s efforts to replace white-controlled government policing and government welfare in black neighborhoods with community-based, non-governmental mutal aid and self-defense. And so on.

So, with these tools in hand and with these examples in mind, what can we do?

As I mentioned, Southern Nevada ALL is a new organization, and what we have done so far has focused on getting our name and our basic message out, on networking and making contacts, and on preparing a base for future activism. Our choice of present and future actions has been guided by a particular understanding of the situation in Las Vegas, and of the place where we can best fit ourselves into the existing activist scene. Southern Nevada ALL can act as a partner for, and as a sort of interface between, three different groups of activists within the Las Vegas area, each of whom we have some significant differences with, but also many overlapping interests: first, voting libertarians such as y’all in the Libertarian Party, and the movement that has grown out of the Ron Paul MeetUps; second, other non-electoral, anti-statist activists, especially Black Flag anarchist groups and projects; third, Leftist social justice groups working on issues such as immigration, civil liberties, police brutality, abortion rights, or the decriminalization of sex work.

Our role and the issues we have chosen come from our analysis of the particular situation here in Las Vegas. There’s clearly a tremendous thirst for anti-war, radical libertarian ideas in Las Vegas – as demonstrated by the groundswell of support for Ron Paul this past year, in direct opposition to the old guard of the state Republican Party. And also as demonstrated, in a different way, by the massive turn-out for immigrant freedom marches two years ago, on May 1, 2006. But this interest has not yet been converted into effective action, and there is a danger that, when election season ends five months from now, and the excitement of campaigning fizzles, a lot of that interest and that organizational energy may dissipate back into the background. We believe that at this point it is vital to reach out to energized, creative activists, and give them a channel for their enthusiasm and their activism that doesn’t require them to wait four more years before they see any action. Now is the perfect time to advance non-electoral methods of social change, and the building of alternative institutions that don’t revolve around multiyear election cycles, in order to keep the push for freedom going beyond the end of the election season.

And here in Las Vegas, the peculiar issues that we face have informed our decision of what sorts of groups to work with and what sort of issues to stress most in our activism. We have chosen to focus most closely on issues that intimately affect the lives of ordinary people in Las Vegas – such as police brutality (especially relevant, in light of the heavy police presence in Las Vegas and the recent string of brutality complaints lodged against the Henderson police), freedom from government border restrictions (especially relevant in a town with as large an immigrant population as Las Vegas, and where so many turned out for immigrant freedom marches only two years ago), and the collusion between politically-connected real estate developers and government interventions such as eminent domain and politically-driven development schemes (especially relevant in a town so thoroughly dominated by the Convention Board and other private-public partnerships, not to mention a town which has been hit so hard by the collapse of a government-driven real estate development bubble).

With that in mind, since our Tax Day flyering on April 15th, Southern Nevada ALL has also:

1. Done literature drops of left-libertarian pamphlets around town, getting our message out on labor solidarity, freedom of immigration, voluntary mutual aid, how government creates and entrenches urban poverty, and so on, using these pamphlets – from William Gillis’s excellent Market Anarchy zine series, and a Vegas Anarchy series of our own;

2. Done some low-level networking and outreach events with this chapter of the Libertarian Party, the United Coalition for Im/migrant Rights, and local feminist and gay liberation organizations;

3. Started holding informal dinner meetings of ALL members and sympathizers, for networking, talking shop, and launching new projects. (The next one is planned for June 18th; if you’re interested, I’ll hook you up with the details later tonight.)

4. Participated in the May Day immigrant rights rally at the federal court house in Las Vegas, where we called for the decriminalization of all peaceful immigrants.

5. Worked together with other organizations to help build the infrastructure for anti-statist and social justice activism in Las Vegas – by creating a listserv for all libertarians in the Las Vegas area, and by helping to organize, and marching in, the United Coalition for Im/migrant Rights’s March for the DREAM on May 23rd.

We are just getting started. Our plans for projects in the immediate future include:

1. We will distribute literature more widely, both through contacts with other anti-statist and social justice groups (like the LP and UCIR), and also through literature drops in stores and public spaces.

2. We are planning a second, wider flyering event, focused on police brutality. (This will be coordinated with distributing pamphlets on police brutality, connecting it with the legal privileges involved in government policing, the militarization of police, and the effects of the racist War on Drugs.)

3. Over the longer term, we intend to use Southern Nevada ALL as a spring-board for creating alternative institutions that will help us more effectively push for freedom, and help create a more vibrant activist community within Las Vegas. In particular, we plan to help re-organize a couple of projects which have mostly lapsed over the past few years – a Las Vegas Independent Media Center, which will provide an open, grassroots publishing forum for anti-state and social justice activists in the Las Vegas area, and which will create new channels for information and analysis outside of the mainstream local media; and also revitalizing the Las Vegas chapter of Food Not Bombs, which provides a grey market, counter-economic form of mutual aid outside of the State welfare bureaucracy and the corporate food market. As Food Not Bombs becomes more stable and sustainable, we plan to regroup and begin to talk about other grassroots mutual aid projects, in order to take stock of what’s most needed in the community, and what sorts of projects present the most transformational opportunities.

Each of our plans and projects is a fairly small undertaking, especially when you compare it to the size of the problems that we face. But I am confident that these small pieces, loosely joined together, can serve as the building blocks for something much larger. Something which I believe Southern Nevada ALL will be an important part of, but in which we all will have a role to play, and in which our power standing shoulder to shoulder will be much greater than the power any of us have separately. Electoral politics can pressure the powers that be and soften up their will to strike back at us. Education can create public support for freedom and make it dangerous or disastrous for government to try to strike back. Direct action, combined with education, and when carried out through a large and vibrant network of people-powered Leftist and anti-statist organizations, can and will make us ungovernable – without depending on petitioning or begging, and without depending on the good will of the powerful. I believe that it can be in our hands sooner than any of us realize, if we make full use of non-electoral, radical, populist methods to create alternatives to the State, to bring everyone into the struggle, and to take direct action against government oppression. That’s a fight we can begin right now, by reaching out to our friends and neighbors and our activist comrades. We don’t need to wait until the next convention or the next election. We don’t need to wait for sympathetic politicians. We can take the power into our own hands. And when we do, we will become free.

Thank you for your time, and your very gracious offer of a forum in which to speak. I’ll be glad to take any questions you may have and to talk some more about anything that you’d like to hear more about.

All power to the people!

As far as success goes, the discussion following the talk was lively and interesting. We got a certain number of folks staring at me like I was from Mars, which I expected, but also a fair amount of interest and sympathy, and we made a couple new contacts who may be good prospects for ALLies or fellow travelers. I hardly convinced the entire LP of Clark County to join the Revolution, but I hardly expected to, and I’d call the whole affair a reasonable success, given my goals for the talk. As far as lessons for the future go, the main ones that I’m keeping in mind for myself, and which you may want to keep in mind if you’re going to give a similar talk, are the following:

1. The most interested people will always seek you out after the talk, but if you want to get a little something into everybody’s hands — e.g. pamphlets, contact sign-up sheets, handbills, etc. — don’t count on people to come up to your table for anything. Remember to hand it around at the start, if you possibly can.

2. Because of time pressures, some sections of the talk drew pretty heavily from material that I had already written elsewhere for print publication. Historical references are important but I intend to make the talk for future events somewhat less bookish, somewhat more attuned to my speaking style, and somewhat more present-oriented.

3. Go to some meetings beforehand so that you can scope out the audience and the space. If you make an appointment at one meeting, to give the talk at a later meeting, and there’s a substantial time period between the meeting where you made the appointment and the meeting where you’ll speak, make sure that you touch base (on whatever pretext; information, double-checking, follow-up, whatever) with the people who will be in charge at the meeting where you give your talk. I went to LP meetings beforehand but neglected to do the follow-up contacts I should have done; as a result there was some unclarity about who they were expecting to give the talk, and I wasn’t confident enough from a previous paper trail to speak up. Touching base more often would have resulted in having more time for the talk. (On the good side, having attended previous meetings gave me a much better sense for who I was pitching to and how to pitch it.)

4. Keep your audience well in mind. This talk is pretty directly calculated for voting libertarians, like LP members or Pauliticos. If you want to talk to social justice groups, antiwar groups, lefties, and so on, obviously you will want to cover much of the same ground, but probably from a different angle of approach.

5. Remember that, especially for a new radical effort like ALL, for any large group you are really looking for only a handful, maybe only one or two, new contacts in a much larger audience. Make sure that you have a gaff for anybody who bites — contact sheets, handbills, literature, and especially a well-defined upcoming event (like the dinner meeting, or even better an action that you’re planning) — to pull in likely new ALLies. But don’t worry if many in the audience give you the blank stare. You’re not there for them, except to give them some notional idea of your existence. You’re there for mass education and targeted persuasion, and the one or three or five potential ALLies or fellow travelers in the audience are your target.

Anyway, as I said, I consider the talk to have been a reasonable success and a good start. I hope that we can continue giving talks like this to other local groups in the future.

Other ALLies who are thinking about hitting up local groups for similar talks should feel free to appropriate, repurpose, and re-use the material in this talk.

Have y’ALL given any talks for your local chapter of ALL, or made any plans to give talks in the future? Let me know in comments. I’ll be glad to discuss any questions you might have about how my talk went, and to use the blog to talk up any talks that you have given or will be giving in the future.

If you happen to pass through Justice of the Peace Gustavo Gus Garza’s court room, anyway.

(Mike Gogulski @ nostate.com 2008-06-08: Texas: Court-mandated assault for skipping school.)

Lawsuit: Los Fresnos JP ordered spankings

5 June 2008

BROWNSVILLE, TEXAS (AP) — A Los Fresnos family is going to court to prevent a Cameron County justice of the peace from ordering spankings in his courtroom.

A lawsuit filed today alleges Justice of the Peace Gustavo Gus Garza told a 14-year-old girl's stepfather to strike her repeatedly on the buttocks in open court.

If he didn't, the judge said the girl would be found guilty and fined $500 for truancy.

The lawsuit by Mary Vasquez and her husband, Daniel Zurita, described the paddle provided by Garza as large and heavy and fashioned from a thick piece of lumber.

In a story for The Brownsville Herald, Garza declined to comment on whether he has people spanked in his courtroom. He also said he had not seen the lawsuit.

Zurita says he didn't feel as if he had a choice but to follow the order.

In an affidavit, Zurita says that when he was through, the judge told him he had not struck the girl hard enough.

— KGBT 4 (2008-06-05): Lawsuit: Los Fresnos JP ordered spankings

Because he coerced the stepfather into beating and humiliating his 14-year-old daughter in open court, in front of strangers, by threatening to inflict a several hundred dollar fine and a criminal record on the young woman if he didn’t do it, Justice of the Peace Gustavo Gus Garza believes that he didn’t order the beating; he just offered it as a punishment option. Much like a mugger offers you an option between your money and your life, I guess:

Justice of the Peace Judge, Gustavo Garza was in court this morning after getting sued for his spanking punishment option. The plaintiffs are Mary Vazquez and Daniel Zurita. They want a temporary restraining order against Judge Garza's spanking punishment. Instead, state district judge Abel Limas has reset the hearing for next Wednesday.

The parents of a 14-year-old teenager were in court, hoping to put a stop to Judge Garza's idea of punishment. Their complaint says that Garza told the teen and her step-father that the teen would be found guilty of a criminal offense and fined $500 for not attending school unless Zurita spanked his step-daughter in the JP courtroom on April 9th. The couple’s attorney Mark Sossi, argued that Judge Garza did not have the authority to order someone to spank their child. But after the hearing Judge Garza told us again that he did not order anyone. Parents had a choice to either spank or pay up.

I've never ordered anybody to use discipline on their children in court.

— Michelle Macias, KVEO 23 Rio Grande Valley (2008-06-06): Judge Gustavo Garza’s First Day in Court

Please note that when Garza says using discipline, he doesn’t mean what the words would naturally suggest, that is, for the parent to exercise restraint in spite of strong feelings of anger or frustration. By using discipline, Garza means parents lashing out rather than restraining themselves, beating their child or teenager with a wooden bat, and laying it on well, while they do so.

Of course, there’s more. Because there’s always more. Court-ordered teen-beating isn’t just a good way to deal with the victimless crime of choosing not to go to a government school. What with the criminalization of everything, especially everything that young people might do, it’s a good way to deal with all kinds of things. Like disabled teens who swear at school bus drivers:

A petition against Gustavo Gus Garza grew by two on the eve of a temporary restraining order hearing against the Cameron County Pct. 6 Justice of the Peace.

The parents of two minors came forth Tuesday, asking 404th state District Judge Abel C. Limas to prevent Garza from ordering, encouraging or allowing spankings in his courtroom as punishment.

I wouldn’t hit a child with a paddle, particularly one with physical problems, plaintiffs’ attorney Mark Sossi told The Brownsville Herald late Tuesday. Sossi was referring to one of the two children, who suffers from a muscular-development birth defect and allegedly was spanked in Garza’s court.

The child with the disability is a 14-year-old boy who used profanity toward a school bus driver. The second is a 14-year-old girl who skipped class, Sossi said, shortly after filing his amended petition in district court. The respective parents are Leroy Garcia and Rosa Valdez.

. . .

The parents also seek Garza’s removal from office [in addition to a restraining order].

After parents feel compelled to spank their children, they claim, Garza orders the children to bend over a chair placed directly in front of the bench. They are ordered to put their elbows on the arms of a chair with the buttocks facing Garza.

(Garza) has long engaged in this kind of corporal punishment under the authority of his office. Ten years ago when the defendant was a district attorney in Willacy County, he used the color and authority of his office to threaten criminal prosecution unless the parents struck their children with a wooden paddle he owned, Sossi states in the amended petition.

The initial petition alleges Garza directed Zurita to repeatedly strike his stepdaughter on the buttocks with a large, heavy wooden paddle fashioned from a thick piece of lumber in open court and in the presence of other adults and juveniles.

Zurita stated in an affidavit that, I did not feel that I had a choice but carry out the orders of the judge. When I was finished, Judge Garza told me that I had not struck (my stepdaughter) hard enough…

Zurita and Vasquez also claim that they were in Garza’s courtroom when he ordered the paddling of other minors.

Garza said Friday that he has not kept count on the number of children paddled in his court.

— Emma Perez-Trevi?@c3;b1;o, The Brownsville Herald (2008-06-10): More families file against spanking judge

Justice of the Peace Gustavo Gus Garza believes that Texas state law is on his side:

Judge Garza says his disciplinary option does not break any Texas law.

I believe and as you will find the law will support me. The penal code addresses it for parents and educators to use it for discipline, the family code obligates it.

— Michelle Macias, KVEO 23 Rio Grande Valley (2008-06-06): Judge Gustavo Garza’s First Day in Court

I don’t know whether or not Garza really meant to claim that the Texas state family code obliges parents to beat up self-willed children and teenagers in the name of discipline. That seems odd. But I don’t know much about Texas state law, and he is Da Judge, so, for all I know, he may very well be right about the contents of the Texas penal code and the contents of the family code. The legal condition of children and teenagers throughout the United States is generally pretty appalling. But if he is right, then that’s a good reason to say to hell with the penal code and the family code.

To prove, that these Sort of policed Societies are a Violation offered to Nature, and a Constraint upon the human Mind, it needs only to look upon the sanguinary Measures, and Instruments of Violence which are every where used to support them. Let us take a Review of the Dungeons, Whips, Chains, Racks, Gibbets, with which every Society is abundantly stored, by which hundreds of Victims are annually offered up to support a dozen or two in Pride and Madness, and Millions in an abject Servitude, and Dependence. There was a Time, when I looked with a reverential Awe on these Mysteries of Policy; but Age, Experience, and Philosophy have rent the Veil; and I view this Sanctum Sanctorum, at least, without any enthusiastick Admiration. I acknowledge indeed, the Necessity of such a Proceeding in such Institutions; but I must have a very mean Opinion of Institutions where such Proceedings are necessary. [...] In vain you tell me that Artificial Government is good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing! the Thing itself is the Abuse!

— Edmund Burke (1757): A Vindication of Natural Society

Meanwhile, the comments thread, here’s how to maintain high moral standards and exonerate sadist judges in ten easy steps:

1. Conflate force with reason:

   I myself have spanked my kids in the butt area. Only once in a long while to teach my kids right from wrong. . . . Teach your daughter the consequences of not been in school. Don’t wimp out and try to be her friend.

   — Sy A, Edinburg, comments on KGBT 4 (2008-06-05): Lawsuit: Los Fresnos JP ordered spankings

   How are they going to learn if there is no discipline?

   — lachancla, reader comments (2008-06-11) on Emma Perez-Trevi?@c3;b1;o, The Brownsville Herald (2008-06-10): More families file against spanking judge

2. Blame the victim:

   WHY IS THE BOTTOM LINE NOT SEEN HERE? These kids are not in court because they are honor students! They are discipline problems!!

   — chula71, reader comments (2008-06-11) on Emma Perez-Trevi?@c3;b1;o, The Brownsville Herald (2008-06-10): More families file against spanking judge

   Children with disabilities? That kid certainly was very able to run his mouth off to the bus driver. All this is drama for your mama.

   — donkique, reader comments (2008-06-11) on Emma Perez-Trevi?@c3;b1;o, The Brownsville Herald (2008-06-10): More families file against spanking judge

3. Blame the victim’s parents:

   The article never mentioned the mothers role or lack there of??? I wonder if the child has been late for school since the step-father opted to save her future by not paying the fine and allow a criminal history?

   — Patrick R. Murray, comments (2008-06-05) on Nikki W., Digital Journal (2008-06-05): Judge Sentences Children To Spankings By Parents And One Family Is Fed Up

   Man, these parents are something else. . . . Obviously the judge is doing the job the parents have failed to do. I wonder if these parents read these blogs and feel just a little dumb for trying to milk the county for their child’s inability to stay in school or behave?

   — chula71, reader comments (2008-06-11) on Emma Perez-Trevi?@c3;b1;o, The Brownsville Herald (2008-06-10): More families file against spanking judge

   The kid's step father couldn't control the kid (Is he a wimp?). Far too many judges refuse to enforce the law. Judge garza should be recognized for enforcing the law. The parent had three choices: Make thge kid go to school, pay a fine, or paddle the kid–and he is now crying about his choice. Again, I ask if he is a wimp?

   — retired principal Terry Olbeg, McAllen, comments on KGBT 4 (2008-06-05): Lawsuit: Los Fresnos JP ordered spankings

4. Blame the lawyers:

   What these people don’t understand is that the only one that will come out winning is the lawyer(s). The more petitioners, the more the lawyer gets and the less they get.

   — peepaw, reader comments (2008-06-11) on Emma Perez-Trevi?@c3;b1;o, The Brownsville Herald (2008-06-10): More families file against spanking judge

   These people are being led by the nose by sharks, aka lawyers.

   — donkique, reader comments (2008-06-11) on Emma Perez-Trevi?@c3;b1;o, The Brownsville Herald (2008-06-10): More families file against spanking judge

5. Blame the victim’s socioeconomic class:

   I bet you she will be pregnant and on public assistance before she is 18 years old. Thats all we need another dumb teenaged parent with an attitude. Sorry if it seems harsh but thats what it is. Just a thought!

   — L Deleon, Harlingen, comments on KGBT 4 (2008-06-05): Lawsuit: Los Fresnos JP ordered spankings

   I guess everyone forgets about the drop out kids from school who because of lack of education leads to no job and deperation for money which might lead to theft,burglary (your neighboorhood)robbery. More drain on the goverment assistance.

   — D Morales, Harlingen, Texas, comments on KGBT 4 (2008-06-05): Lawsuit: Los Fresnos JP ordered spankings

6. Blame other youths, unrelated to this case, because you presume that the youths in this case are kind of like those other youths:

   I feel compelled to spank my child as well too but I don’t. I would if she acted like some of these punks though.

   — lachancla, reader comments (2008-06-11) on Emma Perez-Trevi?@c3;b1;o, The Brownsville Herald (2008-06-10): More families file against spanking judge

   Some kids do need a good spanking. Especially if this punishment averts any other form of criminal activity.

   — harmony, comments (2008-06-05): on Nikki W., Digital Journal (2008-06-05): Judge Sentences Children To Spankings By Parents And One Family Is Fed Up

   I wonder how many people would make the same comment if they worked in a public school you have no idea what type of behavior kids have in school. Texas Law allows the parent to discipline their child but when the parent wants to do so their child threatens to call police and file assault charges against them.

   — D Morales, Harlingen, Texas, comments on KGBT 4 (2008-06-05): Lawsuit: Los Fresnos JP ordered spankings

7. Impugn the parents’ motives without evidence:

   Man, these parents are something else. Jumping on the band (more like BANK) wagon to gain notoriety. WHY IS THE BOTTOM LINE NOT SEEN HERE?

   — chula71, reader comments (2008-06-11) on Emma Perez-Trevi?@c3;b1;o, The Brownsville Herald (2008-06-10): More families file against spanking judge

   If the parents thought this was embarrassing then they should have paid the fine. A choice was given so why are they crying about it now. The lawyer and the parents are probably doing this for the money.

   — I. Flores, Mid Valley, comments on KGBT 4 (2008-06-05): Lawsuit: Los Fresnos JP ordered spankings

   [The story says only that the parents are seeking a restraining order against Garza and, if possible, his removal from the bench. As far as I can tell there is no mention of their seeking monetary damages. Not that there would be anything wrong with it if they are. –R.G.]

8. Compete to see who can go most over-the-top in their praise of beating and terrorizing children:

   Go Judge Garza! It’s about time someone taught kids now a days about discipline. This lawsuit is a joke. If we as parents don’t want to be at this point where we are at court having to spank our kids in front of a group of people, we need to start doing it at home.

   — N R, Los Fresnos, comments on KGBT 4 (2008-06-05): Lawsuit: Los Fresnos JP ordered spankings

   I think their is always two sides to the story. Many of the kids today need corporal punishment. I am thankful that my principal and school community still allow my principal to spank kids. As a school administrator it is very simple to know what school still uses paddling and which one doesn’t. Most of the ones with the most discipline problems do not spank. I would like to hear more about why this J.P. ordered the spanking. A firm supporter of spanking. Get’m Judge.

   — Anonymous school counselor, Edinburg, comments on KGBT 4 (2008-06-05): Lawsuit: Los Fresnos JP ordered spankings

   As we were growing up we got spanked, not beat, and we grew up just fine. I believe in spanking on the buttom. It is even in the bible. . . . Save you children now while you still can, don’t be too soft on them. I had my children spanked in school if and when they did wrong. There is nothing wrong with a spanking here and then when done right. I am all for you Judge Garza, God Bless You.

   — I. Flores, Mid Valley, comments on KGBT 4 (2008-06-05): Lawsuit: Los Fresnos JP ordered spankings

   When I went to school, we were threatened with the slap. the school had two different types. They had a red leather slap and a black one. I forgot which one was thicker. The strap was used as a form of discipline and it worked. Kids were too afraid of getting the strap therefore they were obedient. Most kids were never given the strap because they knew better. Today kids are threatening and abusing their teachers. I’m beginning to think that the schools should implement the strap again.

   — harmony, comments (2008-06-05): on Nikki W., Digital Journal (2008-06-05): Judge Sentences Children To Spankings By Parents And One Family Is Fed Up

   Spank Her Good

   The judge should have had a police officer spank that brat. Getting a strong, muscle-head cop to do the spanking would have been ideal. Then I would have paddled the hell out of the parents too. They know when their child is not attending school.

   — L Deleon, Harlingen, comments on KGBT 4 (2008-06-05): Lawsuit: Los Fresnos JP ordered spankings

   I feel compelled to spank my child as well too but I don’t. I would if she acted like some of these punks though. How are they going to learn if there is no discipline? time out? I would take a time out from the spanking. There is your time out.

   — lachancla, reader comments (2008-06-11) on Emma Perez-Trevi?@c3;b1;o, The Brownsville Herald (2008-06-10): More families file against spanking judge

9. Quibble over semantics:

   What do you mean by ordering a forced beating? If it falls under the category of abuse causing bodily harm, then I don’t think it’s legal.

   — harmony, comments (2008-06-05): on Nikki W., Digital Journal (2008-06-05): Judge Sentences Children To Spankings By Parents And One Family Is Fed Up

   As we were growing up we got spanked, not beat, and we grew up just fine.

   — I. Flores, Mid Valley, comments on KGBT 4 (2008-06-05): Lawsuit: Los Fresnos JP ordered spankings

   Spanking is without the use of an aide. A beating uses such, although corporal punishment is different than parental discipline.

   Parents do not spank with a belt, flyswatter, switch – they bust ass or administer a whoopin!

   They spank with a hand. And if the mark remains, it is child abuse.

   — Nikki W., comments (2008-06-05): on Nikki W., Digital Journal (2008-06-05): Judge Sentences Children To Spankings By Parents And One Family Is Fed Up

   @ Connie M (Catana) I don’t consider being hit with a board a spanking. It’s a beating, plan and simple.

   If there are no marks, bruises or broken bones, it’s a spanking, plan and simple. If there are no marks, bruises or broken bones, it’s a spanking, plan and simple.

   — harmony, comments (2008-06-05): on Nikki W., Digital Journal (2008-06-05): Judge Sentences Children To Spankings By Parents And One Family Is Fed Up

   [Alberto Gonzales and Donald Rumsfeld would be proud. –R.G.]

10. Ramble aimlessly about the good old days and the decline of patriarchal traditions:

    Hoping Good Old Times Come Back

    As we were growing up we got spanked, not beat, and we grew up just fine. I believe in spanking on the buttom. It is even in the bible. Back in the days teenagers were allowed to work too if this was brought back up we would not have as much trouble today. We would go to school, work after school and we would respect our elders. There was not as much trouble as we have now. There was no time for trouble because we were occupied. I did all this and I grew up to be a responsible, repectable adult.

    — I. Flores, Mid Valley, comments on KGBT 4 (2008-06-05): Lawsuit: Los Fresnos JP ordered spankings

    What is with all these women not taking their husbands name? Do they jump around so much that it is too much to keep up with their last names, so they keep their’s?

    — peepaw, reader comments (2008-06-11) on Emma Perez-Trevi?@c3;b1;o, The Brownsville Herald (2008-06-10): More families file against spanking judge

When people engage in violence against children for victimless crimes like ditching school or mouthing off to adults; when they claim that the violence is to teach its victim a lesson; when you spend the first two decades of your life being indoctrinated and ridiculed and beaten and extorted into believing in, or at least acquiescing to, this kind of violent, legally-backed authoritarianism, and when this is dignified as raising a child the right way, when howling mobs of sado-fascist blowhard bullies can be expected to ridicule and blame any parent who doesn’t toe that line and enthusiastically beat their own children, when that same bellowing blowhard bully brigade looks looks for absolutely any and every excuse they could possibly find to justify beating a child or a teenager and compete to see who can get the most down and dirty in their efforts to smear the victim and cheer on the violence; what sort of lessons do you think that violence and that rhetoric teaches? What sort of a life, and what sort of a society, do you think that this kind of physical and verbal environment prepares these children for?

Further reading:

• GT 2008-05-11: Cops are here to protect you (#4)
• GT 2008-03-01: Perpetual state of supervision

You talk of simplification. But if you can simplify in one point, you can simplify in all. Instead of a million laws, a single law will suffice. What shall this law be? Do not to others what you would not they should do to you: do to others as you would they should do to you. That is the law and the prophets.

But it is evident that this is not a law; it is the elementary formula of justice, the rule of all transactions. Legislative simplification then leads us to the idea of contract, and consequently to the denial of authority. In fact, if there is but a single law, if it solves all the contradictions of society, if it is admitted and acceptedby everybody, it is sufficient for the social contract. In promulgating it you announce the end of government. What prevents you then from making this simplification at once?

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1851), General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, Fourth Study, The Principle of Authority, § 2.2 ¶Â¶ 9–10.

Over at newsrack, lefty Thomas Nephew kindly took notice of GT 2008-05-16: Women and the Invisible Fist. Nephew wrote:

Via Jim Henley, who seems lately to be about metamorphosing your father’s (and/or mother’s) libertarianism into something more honest, multifaceted, and interesting. See also in this respect Henley’s Art of the Possible post, and the site as a whole: Liberals and libertarians on common ground... and otherwise. Henley says that the challenge is to correct spontaneous malign orders without the tool of state violence. I’m not sure that circle can be squared — some countervailing force is needed against spontaneous malign orders, and that force will need some agreed on norms of justice and enforcement. But I’m interested that libertarians are thinking about the challenge.

— Thomas Nephew (2008-05-24): Worth reading

That lead to some interesting discussion in the comments thread. I replied:

Thomas,

Thank you for the kind mention, and for the thoughtful comments.

You write: “Henley says that the challenge is to ‘correct spontaneous malign orders without the tool of state violence.’ I’m not sure that circle can be squared — some countervailing force is needed against spontaneous malign orders, and that force will need some agreed on norms of justice and enforcement”

There are a couple of different kinds of malign spontaneous orders that need to be differentiated here.

The first are malign undesigned orders that emerge, in part, from diffuse forms of violence — what I called “invisible fist” processes, as with the socio-cultural ripple effects of stranger-rape and other prevalent forms of violence against women.

The second are malign orders that don’t emerge from diffuse forms of violence, but rather from voluntary interactions. Unlike some libertarians, I believe that there are plenty of examples of these, too (for example, certain kinds of widespread credentialism and elitism that have emerged over the past century, and which have a big effect on education and on the workplace). These malign undesigned orders are often intimately connected with social orders that have coercive elements (for example, I’d say that certain pernicious forms of credentialism and managerialism, which contribute to classism and to the exploitation of working folks, have an awful lot to do with consistent government intervention on behalf of the managerial class and against the deskilled proletariat over the past century — cf. for examples my essay Scratching By at http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=8204 or Kevin Carson’s Mutualist Blog at http://mutualist.blogspot.com/) — but, while intimately connected, are not identical with them (it’s likely that even without that government intervention they might live on through institutionalized cultural prejudices, unless deliberately confronted and undermined).

Libertarians and anarchists can consistently endorse the use of physical force as part of the response to the former (violent) sort of undesigned order; they can’t consistently endorse the use of physical force as part of the response to the latter (non-violent, but still ugly) sort of undesigned order.

In the second case, though, I ought to stress that not abandoning the use of force doesn’t mean abandoning the use of confrontation or hardball tactics–they just have to be carried out through tactics and institutions outside the political arena, the legal arena, or the regulatory bureaucracy. (On what should be done instead, I’m really an old Leftist at heart: I think people should form fighting unions and community organizations, build counter-institutions and mutual aid societies, use targeted and general strikes, boycotts, work-to-rule, hardball forms of social ostracism, stage sit-ins, etc. etc. etc. Forget about the government; we can do this ourselves.)

In the first case, the use of countervailing physical force in defense of self or others is defense, not aggression, so it need not offend any libertarian or anarchist sensibilities (unless one is a principled pacifist–which I’m not, and which most libertarians and anarchists aren’t either). You worry that that force will need some agreed on norms of justice and enforcement. I’m inclined to agree with that (although we might disagree on what the importance of agreement is here). But supposing that we do agree, I don’t think it tells against Jim’s point. Agreed-upon norms of justice and enforcement aren’t in and of themselves a problem for anarchism or libertarianism. The question is how the agreement on those norms is brought about: whether the agreement comes about by general acquiescence to privileged demands, or whether it comes about by means of a broad consensus among equals.

Government ensures agreement upon these norms by erecting privileged institutions which are legally empowered to force everyone else to acquiesce to the norms they propound and act on.

Anarchy, on the other hand, doesn’t mean chaos or the break-up of any agreed-upon norms of justice or enforcement. (At least, that’s not what anarchy means in the mouths of anarchists who use the term.) What it does mean is that any agreement upon those norms should be brought about through the free interactions among equals and by the emergence of a broad social consensus.

Further, anarchists generally believe that that kind of consensus can rightfully be acted on by any free association that puts reasonable norms for justice and enforcement into practice — rather than being limited to a privileged class of government-approved cops, judges, etc. The idea here being that the justice of judgments and the righteousness of enforcement are things that ought to be assessed on the merits of the conduct itself, not according to the identity or the political status of the judge or the enforcer. That is to say, that it should be considered as a matter to be resolved by appeals to the content of the norms, rather than to the political status and prerogatives of the body propounding them.

So the ideal here is not to abolish any general norms of justice or enforcement, but rather to keep the ideal of consensus on norms while detaching the crafting of the consensus from the imposition of exclusive government-granted prerogatives.

Does that help clarify, or does it muddify?

— Rad Geek (2008-06-01): Comments on Worth reading

Thomas replied with some comments on professionalization and specialization in the law, which are the main thing that I want to focus on today. In part because the issue is interesting and important in itself; in part also because the way that police forces and the legal system operate today is, in many different ways, ideologically dependent on the idea that we need to turn a great deal of our lives and freedom over to a cadre of trained, specialized legal professionals for our own protection and in order to ensure justice and social peace. He wrote:

Thank you very much for your comment — it’s really an excellent post in its own right. I think I understand what you’re driving at; I’m trying to decide what I think about it, and that takes me longer than maybe it should. My thoughts so far:

1. I suppose I have a sneaking agreement that there’s too much that’s privileged and mysterious about judges, lawyers, and law enforcement. But I also think there’s specialization and craft in these pursuits, just as there is in, say, cabinetmaking or watchmaking. Those are pursuits I leave to others; maybe so is law enforcement or judging. Even just a policeman has to master tons of information and training — knowing the law, when to wait, when to intervene, how to gather evidence, how to avoid violating rights while pushing back against spontaneous malign orders.

2. But I also see the difficulty with that analogy: unlike with the cabinet or watchmaking trades, I recognize I have a citizen’s responsibility in understanding my political system and helping point it in the right direction, to the best of my puny abilities.

— Thomas Nephew (2008-06-02): Comments on Worth reading

By way of reply, I argued that the need for specialized expertise and training (1) isn’t an argument for monopoly, and also (2) is itself a function of the expansiveness and authoritarianism of the State:

Thomas,

Thank you for your kind words.

You write: “But I also think there’s specialization and craft in these pursuits, just as there is in, say, cabinetmaking or watchmaking.”

Probably so, although I’m inclined to think that there is, or ought to be, much LESS specialization and craft than the professionalized government enforcers and judges would have you believe. To be sure, the government laws that are on the books today are tremendously complicated and require years of specialized training and practice to even begin to get a good grip on a relatively small specialty. But I think that that’s precisely because the people who make and use the laws have a political and a professional interest in making those laws extremely complicated, and in having them cover an extremely wide and not very well defined scope of human affairs. Libertarians and anarchists believe that regularized enforcement should cover a much more precisely delimited and a much, much smaller field than it currently does, so to some extent the problem vanishes along with the laws that libertarians and anarchists believe ought to be abolished.

For example, labor relations law as it presently exists is extremely complicated — it requires making a lot of very fine distinctions, balancing many different prerogatives granted to and regulatory limitations imposed upon unions, individual employees, and employers, etc. etc. etc. It takes a lot to even understand the basics of the situation, and the tricky details of a concrete case often can’t even be resolved without hashing out the issues in bureaucratic negotiations through the NLRB or in federal court. But the complexity of the legal situation is clearly a function of its being channeled through the federal regulatory bureaucracy. That situation clearly benefits NLRB bureaucrats and professional labor lawyers; it’s much less clear that it benefits the rank-and-file workers for whose benefit this sort of thing was supposedly constructed, but who are substantially deprived of any real control over the process by putting so much of it into the hands of professional legal experts. If agreed-upon norms of justice and enforcement were (as anarchists believe that they should be) limited only to the issue of protecting innocent people from being attacked by physical force, or vindicating their rights after the fact if they should be attacked — with all the rest to be handled by free contracts between the individual parties, unregimented by a government bureaucracy, and by whatever forms of nonviolent leverage and activism that the creativity of organized workers and a fighting union might devise — then it’s much less clear what need for specialization or professionalization there would be. (There might still be a lot of need for impartial arbitrators; but impartiality is distinct from technical expertise, and is something you can get by finding any third party of good will and good sense for the duration of the arbitration; it doesn’t require a distinct class of professional arbitrators.)

Generalizing from that case, I agree with Lysander Spooner that if the realm of enforcement were strictly limited to questions of interpersonal justice, then, quote:

No objection can be made to these voluntary associations upon the ground that they would lack that knowledge of justice, as a science, which would be necessary to enable them to maintain justice, and themselves avoid doing injustice. Honesty, justice, natural law, is usually a very plain and simple matter, easily understood by common minds. Those who desire to know what it is, in any particular case, seldom have to go far to find it. It is true, it must be learned, like any other science. But it is also true that it is very easily learned. Although as illimitable in its applications as the infinite relations and dealings of men with each other, it is, nevertheless, made up of a few simple elementary principles, of the truth and justice of which every ordinary mind has an almost intuitive perception. And almost all men have the same perceptions of what constitutes justice, or of what justice requires, when they understand alike the facts from which their inferences are to be drawn.

Men living in contact with each other, and having intercourse together, CANNOT AVOID learning natural law to a very great extent, even if they would. The dealing of men with men, their separate possessions and their individual wants, and the disposition of every man to demand, and insist upon, whatever he believes to be his due, and to resent and resist all invasions of what he believes to be his rights, are continually forcing upon their minds the questions, Is this act just? or is it unjust? Is this thing mine? or is it his? And these are questions of natural law; questions which, in regard to the great mass of cases, are answered alike by the human mind everywhere.”

— Lysander Spooner (1882), Natural Law, or the Science of Justice, section 4.

And I would follow up your second point by urging that it is dangerous, and to some degree irresponsible, to adopt large-scale systems of law and practice that practically require ordinary citizens to abandon the questions of political and interpersonal justice to a privileged, insular, and easily corrupted class of specialists.

But, secondly, I would also argue, further, that even if the requirements of justice ARE complicated enough in some particular case that it requires some specialized training and expertise to sort them out, or where correctly applying and implementing them requires specialized training and expertise in something else (e.g., for enforcers, training and expertise in de-escalating potentially violent situations may be a form of specialization well worth having), that seems to me like an argument for leaving the field open to many specialists, who can offer their services to anyone who is interested in retaining them (e.g. many private associations for arbitration and/or defense, which people go to on the basis of choice rather than being forced to go to one in particular on the basis of fixed territorial monopolies). Not so much an argument for limiting the field to a single fixed, institutionalized class of specialists (e.g. a government court or a government police force with rigidly and exclusively defined territorial or topical jurisdictions).

The first (non-monopolistic) solution really would make the business of law a skilled trade or profession, much like watchmaking or medicine, where people go to acknowledged experts freely, but aren’t forced to choose one particular expert on the basis of political status, and can choose another, on the basis of their own considered judgment and comfort levels, or for that matter can still choose none at all, if they decide to hazard the risks and trouble of doing it for themselves.

The second, monopolistic solution doesn’t make the business of law so much like skilled trades and professions, but rather like a feudal or command economy, in which people are assigned particular experts and forced to turn matters over to that particular expert rather than another, on the basis of the political status of the experts rather than on the basis of broadly and consensually acknowledged expertise. It’s that which, as an anarchist, I really object to.

Does that help? What do you think?

— Rad Geek (2008-06-02): Comments on Worth reading

In reply, Thomas raised some fairly common counter-objections and worries, especially about the dangers supposedly posed by the devolution of policing from public control to private defense — or, to spin it another way, from government to civil society.

But the complexity of the legal situation is clearly a function of its being channeled through the federal regulatory bureaucracy. That situation clearly benefits NLRB bureaucrats and professional labor lawyers; it’s much less clear that it benefits the rank-and-file workers for whose benefit this sort of thing was supposedly constructed, but who are substantially deprived of any real control over the process by putting so much of it into the hands of professional legal experts.

This seems like blaming the chickens for the fox’s raid on the chicken coop. At least lately, the situation you refer to clearly benefits management in most NLRB disputes. I’d put down most of what’s wrong with NLRB to its being an easily subverted agency, most of the blame for that to corporations achieving via the back door of a compliant board what they couldn’t via the statutes authorizing the NRLB in the first place … and most of what’s wrong with those statutes to earlier corporate influence in making things like unionization far too difficult in the first place. Rightly administered and empowered, NLRB ought to be a counterweight to moneyed and propertied interests that have no interest in worker’s rights. The fact that it isn’t rightly administered and empowered seems to me a measure of the strength of the forces arrayed against it, not of the weakness of the idea of an NLRB itself.

The first (non-monopolistic) solution really would make the business of law a skilled trade or profession, much like watchmaking or medicine, where people go to acknowledged experts freely, but aren’t forced to choose one particular expert on the basis of political status, and can choose another, on the basis of their own considered judgment and comfort levels, or for that matter can still choose none at all, if they decide to hazard the risks and trouble of doing it for themselves.

At least for legal representation, that — in theory — is already the case, isn’t it? The problem is when the innocent can’t afford a Clarence Darrow, a Johnny Cochrane, or an F Lee Bailey to get them off but the guilty can.

I don’t see how to bid out for police functions, though, without that turning into yet another part of society baldly favoring the rich and privileged over the poor and disenfranchised. While that may be too much the case even with a police force as public monopoly, I think it would surely be worse in a “Deadwood“-type services-to-the-highest-bidder world. But maybe I’m misunderstanding you in how police functions ideally ought to work.

— Thomas Nephew (2008-06-02): Comments on Worth reading

To which I made some counter-counter-objections, and raised what I think ought to be some obvious questions:

Thomas,

You write: “This seems like blaming the chickens for the fox’s raid on the chicken coop.”

I’m not sure what you mean. I don’t blame rank-and-file workers for the way the NLRB functions. I blame the politicos, the “Progressive” bosses, and the conservative union bosses who pushed to create the system. (Radical unions, like the I.W.W., rightly opposed the system as an effort to promote conservative unionism and to capture and domesticate unions through a combination of government patronage and government regulation.)

You write: “Rightly administered and empowered, NLRB ought to be a counterweight to moneyed and propertied interests that have no interest in worker’s rights.”

Two things.

First, I have no confidence in anyone’s ability to craft a regulatory agency that successfully resists being substantially captured by the interests that it regulates. I can’t think of any example in the history of American regulatory bodies where this has been pulled off for any length of time, and I don’t think it should be particularly surprising that, since political entities respond to political incentives, they will tend to be administered in a way that systematically benefits the wealthiest and most politically-connected people.

Second, even if the NLRB were ideally administered, the system is designed from the ground up as a means of constraining union demands and restricting unions to the most conservative and least effectual methods. (Thus, the Taft-Hartley bans on secondary strikes, secondary boycotts, union hiring halls, wildcat strikes, etc. etc. etc.; thus the emphasis on a heavily regulated process of collective bargaining, controlled by very elaborate legal requirements that are often next to impossible for rank-and-file workers to understand, in place of extremely effective and very simple to understand tactics, like work-to-rule and other forms of direct action in the workplace.)

You write: “At least for legal representation, that — in theory — is already the case, isn’t it?”

Well, not entirely — you can choose one lawyer rather than another, as long as you can afford their fees, but you can’t choose anyone as your advocate except those who have been officially approved for membership in the government-created and government-regulated lawyer’s guild. But lawyers weren’t the “experts” I was referring to; I was referring to the fact that the government forces people to take legal disputes before specific judges (with jurisdiction fixed by the issue in dispute and by accidents of geography), and excludes other no-less qualified and impartial experts from taking up the dispute simply because the privileged judge has a particular political status and the other would-be arbitrator doesn’t. If we are really talking about a form of specialized expertise here, like that of the watchmaker or of the doctor, then anyone should be able to take the case, not just a judge deemed to have that topic and that location within his bailiwick by the government.

You write: “I don’t see how to bid out for police functions, though, without that turning into yet another part of society baldly favoring the rich and privileged over the poor and disenfranchised.”

Well, I don’t know. Isn’t that already how government policing works?

Tax funding doesn’t prevent government cops from treating poor people pretty shitty, or from acting as an instrument of class power. In fact, the fact that poor neighborhoods have no real control over who provides policing in their neighborhoods, and no way of cutting off their portion of the funding for neglectful or abusive police forces, is part and parcel of the problem.

Anyway, I’m not sure what you mean by bid out for police functions. If you mean the government outsourcing policing to private security corporations (Wackenhut, Blackwater, whatever), I’m not for that, and I don’t consider it an example of free market self-defense. I think that all government involvement in policing (whether in-sourced or out-sourced) should be abolished.

If you mean individual people choosing to cover the costs of policing, and having a choice about who, if anyone, they get police services from, then I don’t think there’s any guarantee that the result will be (even more) plutocratic policing. It’s true that, if all policing were based on free association and not on government monopoly, there might well be some policing that is done by private goon squads for hire, and those might have an incentive to favor the rich over the poor. But (1) again, I’m not convinced that they’d have more of an incentive to do so than government cops already have; and (2) there are lots of other ways of using free association to get self-defense and neighborhood defense done. For example, the Black Panthers and the Young Lords organized historically oppressed people to arm themselves, and to patrol and defend their own neighborhoods (including defending them from the predation of abusive white cops). In any case, where there are many, competing and countervailing associations that serve defensive functions, if one association becomes especially neglectful, or, worse, predatory, against marginalized people, other associations can move in to compete, or new associations can be formed, to check the first. But when policing is monopolized by a single institution, there is no real reason for them to try to please anybody outside of their firmest base of support (in the case of political monopolies, that means the ruling class–as is confirmed by how police departments already operate today). If they don’t please marginalized people, why would they care? They stay paid anyway, and there’s no countervailing force to hold them to account for their abusiveness.

My own view is that the need for any form of professional policing at all would be dramatically less in a free society than it is in the present day. (For example, in a free society there would be no drug laws, vice laws, or border laws, and thus no narcs, no vice cops, and no La Migra. There would also be much less entrenched urban poverty, because — for reasons I discuss in the Freeman article — ghettoized urban poverty as we know it is largely a function of interlocking government interventions against poor people’s survival strategies and attemtps to flourish through creative hustling; hence much less economically motivated crime, and also much less of certain kinds of antisocial behavior. So, again, this is, to a great extent, a problem that vanishes along with the needless government laws and endless government “wars” on consensual behavior, which I already favor abolishing. But, even if the demand for specialized policing were to remain just as high as it is today, I still think that it is far, far better to have a situation in which people are free to withdraw their support from abusive agencies, and where there are many acknowledged experts to keep each other in check, than a situation in which people are forced to pay for their own abuse, and in which cops are never held to account for wrongdoing by any means other than “handling it internally” and issuing the occasional “Oops, our bad”.

— Rad Geek (2008-06-01): Comments on Worth reading

It’s a fairly wide-ranging discussion, and you ought to read the whole thing if you want to follow up on some of the sub-threads about, for example, organizing, class, tactics, immigration, and so on. For now, I want to highlight the discussion about specialization and professionalization in policing. On that note, I want to stress that it’s precisely those ideals in lawyering and law enforcement that lead directly to things like this, and this, and this. And, less directly but very quickly, gets us from those to this and this. And that from there it doesn’t take a very slippery slope to get down to this and this and this.

And the perceived need for specialization, professionalization, and expertise is a need which only exists because of the very system of law and enforcement it is invoked to justify. On a related note, consider this video (thanks to Jeremy at Social Memory Complex 2008-06-04: Don’t talk to the police), which provides both excellent legal advice, from the standpoint of simple self-interest, and some solid analysis of our present predicament how ordinary folks like you and me ought to relate to government cops under these conditions.

Without that system, without its politically-fabricated complexity, and without the tremendous latitude deliberately created by that complexity for government police to exercise arbitrary power in stopping, detaining, fining, and arresting suspect people — the 10,000 or more crimes that government law has fabricated, the crimes so numerous that not even the government itself can count them all anymore, and so potentially ruinous for anyone in trouble with the law that you have little choice but to regard anyone threatening to exercise their specialization and craft in the law as little more than a dangerous soldier in a hostile, occupying force — without all that, I say, there would be no basis, no need, and no call for that complexity or that arbitrary authority, or for the privileged, professionalized retinue of lawyers and enforcers who are expected today to go around navigating that complexity and exercising that arbitrary authority, in order to solve the very problems that the same complexity and arbitrary authority created in the first place.

Further reading:

• GT 2007-11-03: Opinion Columns of the Libertarian Left

As I was saying the other day, I've been thinking that my readers might be interested in some of the topics that Terence Irwin raises in his book, Plato’s Ethics. The book is published by Oxford University Press. I thought you might enjoy thinking about some material which I've quoted here for educational purposes under principles of fair use, such as the material in the Preface, where he sets out his plans for the book and its relation to other work on Plato’s ethical theory. Thus:

Preface

Anyone who is interested in the contribution of Aristotle, Hume, or Kant to moral philosophy can turn to at least one book in English that tries to give a fairly full and detailed account of the philosopher’s main ethical views. The same cannot be said about Plato’s ethics. Admittedly, the questions that face the interpreter of Plato are different from those that face us in interpreting these other philosophers; still, I believe that what has been done for their ethical views can be done for Plato’s ethical views. That is what I have tried to do in this book. It is not comprehensive, since it leaves out several important aspects of Plato’s ethics, but it focusses on what I take to be central questions.

I have tried to present Plato’s reasons for holding his ethical views, his reasons for changing his mind about some of them, the content and implications of his views, and some reasons that might incline us towards accepting or rejecting them. With these aims in mind, I hav traced the development of Plato’s views in the earlier dialogues, laying special emphasis on the defence and (as I claim) re-statement of Socratic ethics in the Gorgias. I have devoted a large part of the book to the examination of Plato’s most important contribution to moral theory, in the main argument of the Republic. I have added a very brief discussion of some aspects of the later dialogues, to show how they throw further light on questions raised in the Republic.

A proper understanding of Plato’s moral philosophy requires some understanding of his views in moral psychology, epistemology, and metaphysics (the same is true, of course, of the other philosophers I mentioned), and so I have discussed these areas of his philosophy as well. Socratic method and Socratic ethics help to explain each other, and we can see the same sort of mutually explanatory connexions between Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology (growing out of his reflexions on Socratic method) and his ethical theory. My discussion of some features of Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology is evidently not a full treatment, but I hope it describes an aspect of the Theory of Recollection and the Theory of Forms that we may not appreciate sufficiently if we study these doctrines without reference to Plato’s ethics. The different threads in my argument combine in the discussion of the Sun, Line, and Cave in the Republic.

These claims about Plato’s development require a decision about the nature of Plato’s Socratic dialogues, and, more generally, about Plato’s relation to the historical Socrates. I have presented the early dialogues as embodying both the views of the historical Socrates and the views Plato held when he wrote these dialogues. This view of the early dialogues is defended briefly in Chapter 1.

My attempt to attribute an ethical theory to Plato may suggest to some readers that I have misconceived the character of the dialogues altogether. I have ascribed a relatively systematic body of doctrines to Plato on the strength of the dialogues; but some readers strongly reject this doctrinal view of the dialogues. I acknowledge an element of truth in those approaches that emphasize Plato’s distance from the characters in his dialogues; still, I believe doctrinal view is broadly correct, and that it finds strong support both in Aristotle’s comments on Plato and in a fair and scrupulous examination of the dialogues. It seems to me that a doctrinal approach will be most convincing if it allows us to attribute a significant philosophical position to Plato; and so my main aim is to describe the position that he holds.

I began this book intending it to be a second edition of Plato’s Moral Theory. The Press agreed to a moderate increase in the length of the earlier book, in the hope that a new edition would (1) offer a less one-sided presentation of some controversial issues than I gave in the earlier book; (2) expound the main issues less cryptically, with the hope of making the book more accessible to readers who are not specialized students of Plato; (3) include some discussion of the later dialogues; and (4) take account of what has been written on this topic since the publication of the earlier book. The constraints of lengt have meant that the first two aims have taken priority over the last two.

Recent discussion has influenced my decisions about the relative length of different parts of the book. Many critics of the earlierbook focussed on the chapters that dealt with the Socratic dialogues. Moreover, these dialogues have been intensively studied in recent years (largely through the influence of Gregory Vlastos); indeed, they seem to have been discussed more intensively than the Republic has been. This trend has been salutary in many ways, but I have not followed it. Much of the increase in length of this book over PMT results from a fuller discussion of the Republic. It seems to me that the changes Plato introduces in the Republic are–as far as concerns the topics of this book–changes for the better. If PMT made it difficult to see my comparative evaluation of the Socratic dialogues and the Republic, I hope this book will make my view clearer.

In this book I have added two short chapters on the Philebus, Statesman, and Laws. They are by no means a full treatment of the ethical argument of these complex and rewarding dialogues. I confine myself to some suggestions about what the late dialogues add to Plato’s views on some of the questions that I have explored in the early and middle dialogues.

To make room for the main text, I have (with some regret) deleted or curtailed most of the more discursive and argumentative footnotes I had written for this book. Many of the notes give bare references or the briefest indication of my reasons for taking a particular view; they do not attempt either a full report or a full discussion of the different views expressed in the secondary literature. On some points, then, the notes and bibliography are less full than those in PMT. In a few cases I have simply referred to one of the longer notes in PMT. The length of the notes has been determined, not by the importance of different issues for the understanding of Plato, but by their importance for the argument of this book.

Since the book is meant to be accessible to people who are beginning to thnk seriously about Plato’s ethics, I have not emphasized the differences between it and PMT. After writing an appendix describing the main objections raised against PMT, and the ways I now want to accept or answer these objections, I decided not to include the appendix in this book, since it would probably be more interesting to me than to most of my readers. I do not mean, however, to seem unappreciative of the helpful suggestions and objections of the many critics–friendly, hostile, or neutal–who have taken the trouble to explain what they thought was wrong with PMT. I am grateful for the stimulus that these criticisms have given me to think again about Plato’s ethics; even though I have probably learnt less han I ought to. I am sure that the present book has been improved by the criticisms of PMT, whether or not I have accepted them.

Though I began with the idea of a second edition of PMT, it has turned out a bit differently. None of hte text of the earlier book reappears in this book, and so it seemed reasonable to present this as a new book rather than as a second edition of an old book. In one important way, however, it is more like a second edition. I have not tried to achieve the degree of distance from PMT that would be necessary for a fresh examination of the primary texts and the secondary literature; instead, I have re-read the primary texts, and surveyed the secondary literature, in light of the earlier book.

In the notes I have tried to give some idea of the main contributions to discussion that have appeared since the earlier book was published. I have learnt a great deal from recent work, especially from the books of Julia Annas, Richard Kraut, and Gregory Vlastos, and from papers by Terry Penner, John Cooper, and Nicholas White. I have also indicated some new debts to older works that I have read or re-read in the course of writing this book. I had already used (for instance) Grote, Moreau, Joseph, and Murphy for the earlier book, but in re-reading them I found many suggestive remarks that had not made the proper impact on me before.

The task of working out some second thoughts on Plato’s ethics has been both more complicated and more interesting than I had expected it to be, and I am very pleased to be able to thank those who have helped me in it. The Delegates and staff of Oxford University Press have always been helpful and encouraging, by publishing the earlier book, by keeping itin print,and by agreeing to an extensive revision; I have especially benefited from Angela Blackburn’s advice and support at different stages. In 1990–91 I was fortunate enough to have a sabbatical leave from Cornell University and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. My views have developed in response to questions by undergraduate and graduate students at Cornell over several years, most recently in a seminar in the autumn of 1991. I have learnt so much from collegues in the Sage School of Philosophy that it is difficult to keep track of specific debts, but inthis case I am especially conscious of having learnt from Sydney Shoemaker, David Lyons, Harold Hodes, Nicholas Sturgeon, and Allen Wood. Jennifer Whiting and Susan Sauvé Meyer made useful comments and suggestions on particular points. Daniel Devereux and David Brink gave me detailed and searching criticisms of a draft of the whole book, and I have often benefited from their suggestions. My ideas on Plato have developed on many points as a result of Gail Fine’s work. She is responsible for so many changes that I cannot exclude the possibility that she has led me into new errors, but I am fairly confident that almost all the changes are improvements. Several drafts of this book have been benefited, in large and small ways, from her vigorous castigation and continual encouragement.

Finally, I must express my gratitude for the help of two colleagues and friends who have recently died. Michael Woods encouraged me in my work on Plato ever since 1974 when he read a draft of Plato’s Moral Theory and invited me to contribute a volume on the Gorgias to the Clarendon Plato Series, which he edited until his death in 1993. I benefited from his perceptive advice and comments on my efforts on the Gorgias, and on many other topics in Greek philosophy. In 1971–72 Gregory Vlastos supervised my dissertation on Plato’s ethics. Shortly before his death in 1991 he began to write a reply to my review of his book on Socrates. In the intervening years he was a constant, severe, sympathetic, and constructive critic of my views on Socrates and Plato. By precept and example, he, more than any other single person, has made the study of Socratic and Platonic ethics the flourishing activity that it is today. I would especially like to have known what he thought about my latest effort, in this book, to carry on a discussion with him that has been an important part of my intellectual life for over twenty years. I know I wouldn’t have convinced him, and I know his criticisms wouldhave thrown still further light on the questions.

T.H.I.
Ithaca, New York
September 1994

–Terence Irwin, Plato’s Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1995), vii–x

(Via Lew Rockwell 2008-05-19: Cold War Murder and Roderick Long 2008-05-25: Anarchocide in South Korea.)

Charles J. Hanley, The Huffington Post (2008-05-18): Mass Killings In South Korea In 1950 Kept Hidden From History:

SEOUL, South Korea — One journalist’s bid to report mass murder in South Korea in 1950 was blocked by his British publisher. Another correspondent was denounced as a possibly treasonous fabricator when he did report it. In South Korea, down the generations, fear silenced those who knew.

Fifty-eight years ago, at the outbreak of the Korean War, South Korean authorities secretively executed, usually without legal process, tens of thousands of southern leftists and others rightly or wrongly identified as sympathizers. Today a government Truth and Reconciliation Commission is working to dig up the facts, and the remains of victims.

How could such a bloodbath have been hidden from history?

Among the Koreans who witnessed, took part in or lost family members to the mass killings, the events were hardly hidden, but they became a public secret, barely whispered about through four decades of right-wing dictatorship here.

The family couldn’t talk about it, or we’d be stigmatized as leftists, said Kim Chong-hyun, 70, leader of an organization of families seeking redress for their loved ones’ deaths in 1950.

Kim, whose father was shot and buried in a mass grave outside the central city of Daejeon, noted that in 1960-61, a one-year democratic interlude in South Korea, family groups began investigating wartime atrocities. But a military coup closed that window, and the leaders of those organizations were arrested and punished.

Then, from 1961 to 1988, nobody could challenge the regime, to try again to reveal these hidden truths, said Park Myung-lim of Seoul’s Yonsei University, a leading Korean War historian. As a doctoral student in the late 1980s, when South Korea was moving toward democracy, Park was among the few scholars to begin researching the mass killings. He was regularly harassed by the police.

Scattered reports of the killings did emerge in 1950 — and some did not.

British journalist James Cameron wrote about mass prisoner shootings in the South Korean port city of Busan — then spelled Pusan — for London’s Picture Post magazine in the fall of 1950, but publisher Edward Hulton ordered the story removed at the last minute.

Earlier, correspondent Alan Winnington reported on the shooting of thousands of prisoners at Daejeon in the British communist newspaper The Daily Worker, only to have his reporting denounced by the U.S. Embassy in London as an atrocity fabrication. The British Cabinet then briefly considered laying treason charges against Winnington, historian Jon Halliday has written.

Associated Press correspondent O.H.P. King reported on the shooting of 60 political prisoners in Suwon, south of Seoul, and wrote in a later memoir he was shocked that American officers were unconcerned by questions he raised about due process for the detainees.

Some U.S. officers — and U.S. diplomats — were among others who reported on the killings. But their classified reports were kept secret for decades.

— Charles J. Hanley, The Huffington Post (2008-05-18): Mass Killings In South Korea In 1950 Kept Hidden From History

William Gillis, Human Iterations (2008-05-22): Mass Graves:

The commission estimates at least 100,000 people were executed, in a South Korean population of 20 million. That estimate is based on projections from local surveys and is very conservative, said Kim. The true toll may be twice that or more, he told The Associated Press.

In 1945, as the Japanese Empire finally went into retreat, the Korean people were left without an occupational authority for the first time in decades. In that brief moment something amazing happened. The Korean Anarchists, long the champions of the resistance struggle, came out of the woodwork and formed a nationwide federation of village and workers councils to oversee a massive project of land reform. Korea graduated from feudalism overnight. Aside from some struggles with the Socialists and Nationalists, the peninsula was at peace.

When WWII concluded, however, the responsibility of securing peace and order in Korea was assigned to the Americans and Soviets. By all accounts in this instance the US actually had no imperialist intentions. While the Soviets moved quickly to deploy their forces and occupy the North, the Americans took their time showing up, and were largely content to let the South Koreans manage themselves.

The Koreans, culturally steeped with anti-authoritarian values, were fond of America and openly despised the Soviets. While a few socialists fled North hoping that the Soviets would give them a hand against the Anarchists, they were overwhelmed in numbers by a mass migration south. Everyone assumed the Americans would assist or at least respect their autonomy.

This did not last.

The Americans Military commanders who eventually arrived had trouble understanding or dealing with the anarchy they found. They had no protocol for dealing with regional federations and autonomous communes. So they helped the dispossessed aristocracy form a military government. In order to make the map simple. In order to get things under hand.

Most importantly they did not understand that the Korean Anarchists and Anti-Authoritarian activists that saturated the countryside were different than–and in fact vehemently opposed to–the Communists, going so far as to organized and launch insurrectionary attacks on the Soviet Occupation before the Americans arrived.

The Americans couldn’t understand anarchists. But leftists, they knew, meant Soviets. And they had the gall to ignore or resist their puppet military government. So they started killing them.

By the start of the Korean War, the slaughter was in full swing. Having arrested every anarchist organizer or sympathetic peasant they could get their hands on, they started executing them en masse.

The Korean Anarchist movement was, historically, one of the strongest in the world. It survived half a century of brutal occupation and economic exploitation. It survived a three way assault by the Chinese, Japanese and Soviets. It has survived many, many massacres and exterminations. It is even still around today. So strong that in the last few years they’ve been known to evict the police from the streets. But the worst injury it ever suffered was initiated and orchestrated by the United States military. In a single campaign so horrific it borders on genocide.

This was truly, objectively, one of the worst things the US has ever done. And there are some big fucking contenders.

Most north american papers ran front-page stories this Monday about the latest mass graves being uncovered while I was riding the Empire Builder from St. Paul to Portland. I found a copy wedged between Amtrak seat cushions. And there was an ancient photo of piled corpses as far as the eye could see. The papers euphemistically used the term leftists. But I know the history, I did the research.

They were almost all anarchists.

However lovely America may be. Remember, the US government is not our friend. It will never be. It can never be.

— William Gillis, Human Iterations (2008-05-22): Mass Graves