The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.
Social Contract: do we own ourselves?
Charlotte Gore's started a discussion looking for an argument that would enable us to counter the assertion of an interlocutor of hers, Joe, to the effect that the "social contract" trumps "civil liberties". IanB and CountingCats have both had a go at suggesting arguments, and there's been plenty of good discussion in the comments to all three posts - far more eloquent than I am sure I can manage here.
Now naturally, lots of discussion of the "social contract" centres around whether we have all entered into this contract, if it is a contract at all, and if we have, whether we did so voluntarily, and what the alternatives are if one claims not to have agreed to it. Do we enter into it merely by being born, or merely by living in a territory with a more or less democratic government that asserts such a contract as the will of the majority for the time being? What if we do not vote - are we agreeing to it or repudiating it? If we say we are repudiating it, or never agreed to it in the first place, is the only option to go and live in some other jurisdiction?
Now I don't want to rehash any of that here, but rather further to explore a line that NickM, also at Counting Cats in Zanzibar, seems to have begun to explore in his contribution to the debate, namely that we are all individuals, unique and irreducibly so; that we cannot experience exactly what another experiences without somehow becoming that other and abandoning ourselves. This, he says, rightly, is ignored by any kind of social contract.
I want to go a little further, however. I want to show that the social contract is by nature totalitarian, and amounts to enslavement; both of which I am quite sure Charlotte's original sparring partner, Joe, would recoil from in horror.
We can deal with the totalitarian issue very swiftly; it hardly needs more than a sentence. If the social contract is something which we are all deemed, somehow, to have agreed to, by birth in a particular territory or adoption of that territory and its government by immigration, and we cannot get out of that contract except, as is commonly argued, by moving somewhere else outside that territorial jurisdiction, then surely it conforms to Mussolini's dictum of "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." Simply substitute "social contract" for "state" in that dictum to see what I mean. To escape this charge of totalitarianism the social contract would have to be explicitly agreed to by everyone who wanted to and an accommodation made within that territory for those who didn't so agree.
The claim of enslavement does require a little more exploration though, I will admit, and in doing so I enlist the assistance of the contemporary Austrian economist and anarchist philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Hoppe has written about this many times, but perhaps the best piece for my purposes is his "The Ethics and Economics of Private Property". In this he explains the logic behind the age-old anarchist and liberal (such as in Locke's "Second Treatise of Civil Government" enunciated first in Chapter 2) ethic that we have an inalienable right to "self-ownership".
All of political economy is directed at finding a solution to what he calls the "problem of social order": in a world of scarcity we need to find a way of managing, preferably avoiding, the conflicts that are inevitable when some good or other is scarce. This, even Hoppe the anarchist agrees (as do all thinking anarchists), will require some rules governing who has the right of ownership of scarce goods. But even in a world of total plenty, where nothing else is scarce (in Hoppe's analogy this would be the "Garden of Eden"), two things are nonetheless still scarce: ones-self and the ground one's own body occupies. So if nothing else there needs to be a universally applicable rule about who owns, has the right to control, one's body and physical faculties.
If you attest that you do not have the right of self-ownership, there are two alternatives: that someone else owns you, or that everyone owns each other in common. If someone else owns and controls your body and faculties, it cannot be a universally applicable ethic, since it creates two classes of people, those who own and control themselves and also the bodies and faculties of others, and those who do not own themselves because they are owned by others. If everyone owns everyone else, then whilst it satisfies this idea of a universal ethic in that the same rule applies to everyone, it is an impossible arrangement, since if everyone needs the consent of all his owners, i.e. everyone else, to do anything, then everyone also has to obtain the consent of everyone else in order to permit the first to do anything, and so on ad infinitum.
This, one might argue, is where a "social contract" becomes useful and legitimate. To get round this problem of everyone having to have the permission of everyone else even in order to consent to someone else's actions, they may establish some form of collective government to take the decisions on everyone's behalf. But in that case we are back creating two classes of people, the rulers, who have the ability to control everyone else's bodies and faculties on behalf of everyone else, and the ruled, so we are back to a problem of it not being universally applicable. As Hoppe says elsewhere, this norm of self-ownership is not merely a convention; for a convention is something to which an alternative exists that you simply choose not to use. There can be no legitimate, logical, universally ethical alternative to self-ownership.
So, a "social contract" denies the possibility of "self-ownership" and when one does not have a right to self-ownership one is, to a greater or lesser extent, enslaved, if not by an individual, then by the collective. And, whilst it is possible voluntarily to submit to some degree of enslavement, if it is to be an act of an individual with an a priori right to self-ownership, such a "social contract" must, once again, be voluntary and explicitly agreed to.
Those who assert that we must implicitly agree to some "social contract" then, are demanding that we submit to the two things they would probably most revile: totalitarianism and slavery.
NOTE: I have deliberately steered clear of touching on aspects of ownership of property external to ourselves. As most of you know, I myself have some conflicting opinions on, for example, ownership of economic "land" - scarce goods of nature including land itself. But more importantly, if I have successfully demolished the idea of a "Social Contract" solely on the incontrovertible right of self-ownership, then discussion about legitimate rights in property other than our own bodies becomes the subject of a separate debate about how to manage such rights in a system without an inherently coercive "social contract".
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About Jock
Name: Jock Coats
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Comments
An interesting analysis. I too have come across the 'Joes' of this world, and struggled to find some killer aguments to shake their collectivist ideas. The concept of 'who owns you' is a good place to start for libertarians, becasue I suspect pretty much everyone, when asked 'who owns you, your body, your thoughts and the fruits of your labour' will reply that they own themselves. From there one can progress on an anti collectivist road.
Jock
I think it highly perverse to use Locke (as quoted by Hoppe) against contractualism in political thought, or what you refer to as the Social Contract.
Locke was a major contract theorist. The phrase ‘social contract’ comes from Roussseau, but everyone understand that to be the same thing as what Locke means by contract. though Rousseau’s results are somewhat different. The contract in Locke is to found a society, so is a social contract.
It was John Locke, usually taken as one of the key figures in Classical Liberalism/Libertarianism, and maybe the founder, who placed contract at the centre of his theory, and who said that the right to leave a country and go somewhere else is a key aspect of freedom and of the contractual basis of government. This right emphasised by John Locke is something you try to connect with Mussolini poor old Locke. Anyway, the quotation you give from Mussolini saying there is nothing outside the state is nothing to do with Locke’s point about the right to leave a country. And I have to say really , defending your argument by quoting an infamous totalitarian dictator, and so associating everyone who disagrees with you with Mussolini, it’s not the highest level of argument is it.
If we look at recent Libertarian thought, not everyone is contract thinker, but the most influential libertarian in political theory is Robert Nozick who is a Lockean contract theory. Nozick thinks the only role for the state is to enforce contracts and punish use of violence, and he thinks that rests on a contract. No he does not think every one explicitly agreed to the contract, or got together to agree on it. That is not the point of contract theory, certainly not in recent years and even in the original theorists like Locke, it serves as a useful fiction, or hypothesis, about what people probably would agree to as the role of government. The point is the implicit contract between individuals and government in which we obey government, if and only if, it limits itself to certain spheres. In the case of Locke, that means life, liberty and property; in the case of Nozick it’s the same thing but with a much more constrained minachist view of how that can be interpreted.
You give a lot of weight to Hoppe, self styled anarchist and conservative. Hoppe’s view of the state is that the monarchical state is better and more efficient than the democratic state, because the monarch has property in the state he wishes to preserve. Hoppe’s ideal is small self-governing communities, outside any state, which would be free to discriminate and should discriminate against immigrants to preserve cultural homogeneity. Given the existence of nation states, Hoppe thinks they should prevent immigration and that integration of immigrants is a ‘leftist’ and destructive idea. Hoppe is an interesting character, he wrote his doctorate with the Marxist philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and still uses Habermas’ ideas about discourse ethics. This perhaps illustrates the danger of labelling people and throwing accusations of Facism around (a habit I normally associate with the far left). Ideas are used by different people in different ways, which is why attacking the Social Contract is such a bad idea, the idea of contractualism has been used in so many different ways. Even the worst ways though strike me as preferable to a fanatical ‘cultural conservative’ , and open enemy of democracy. like Hoppe. What an extraordinary thinker for a Geo-Mutualist and Liberal Democrat to quote, extensively and positively.
You recently linked to Peter Leeson’s article on Somalia, a great read from one of the best libertarian economists and social thinkers around. You should see his stuff on pirates. As you quite correctly say, Leeson shows how Somalia functions better now without an effective government than under Said Barre. What you don’t mention is that Leeson quite clearly says in the article that he is not arguing for anarchism, and that be believes that government enforcing property rights, respect for life, and other public goods, is better than anarchy. The Somalia situation, on his account, is an exceptional in which the grotesquely disfunctional totalitarian government of Barre was even worse than an-archic situation, which still uses some legacy items from Barre, like currency. Leeson is certainly interest in what the situation tells us about what the state should not do, in essence the state should refrain from turning the whole economy into the private property of a few rulers.
regards
Barry
Anonymous's last blog post... Plato's Dialogues and The Trial of Socrates
Hi Barry, thanks for that critique. You are right, there are some apparent contradictions in all of this.
First to deal with your point about Locke - I merely cited Locke to show how far back the idea of self-ownership went in the panoply of liberal/libertarian thought. What I believe Hoppe does is to take that notion and using logic and natural rights show it not only to be true, but why it must necessarily be true and that no other alternative can exist to it without it involving some form of coercive enslavement.
And yes, I suppose, in the sense in which I have used it, that means he would, as I do, end up contradicting Locke's idea that "yes to self-ownership but you can give up some of that to the social contract". Hoppe, and I, are both trying to say that you cannot, at least you cannot simply be deemed to have accepted someone else's partial ownership over you - you could do it explicitly and voluntarily but not implicitly or by dint merely of being born (you could I suppose by immigrating).
As to Mussolini, of course my two points about social contract were intended to be separate, but I see what you are getting at. Nonetheless, one could still argue that, since even Locke's minimal "social contract" denies people the ability to repudiate it without going someone outside the jurisdiction, even he falls into the trap I was highlighting of "nothing outside the state". Now, of course, neither he, nor most contractarians would say that the social contract ought to bind every aspect of everyone's lives into the state in the same way as Mussolini's approach intended to. However given that I am now convinced (yes, by Hoppe) of the impossibility of a limited state, I think I am still right to say that *any* social contract has a tendency, like *any* state, to move towards totalitarianism. The fact that Charlotte's friend Joe was using it to justify the ID database for example just goes to prove that.
As to Hoppe, I am aware of his views on immigration. Personally I don't think they make one jot of ddifference to whether he is right or not on private law, private property theory, and in particular the impossibility of limited government and the inherent badness in the democratic system. I think he's wrong on immigration, as do very many other libertarians who otherwise hold many of Hoppe's other ideas in high regard. It's an opinion he is welcome to hold - and in a world based on private property rights of course when every piece of land were owned by someone already in a statelet, then immigration could become next to impossible except for those who can secure access to someone else's land and a means of supporting themselves (a job with someone in the destination country).
That said, in that ideal anarchic world, it is to be hoped that the vast majority of migration of people wouldd no longer be needed - if poeple were not being tyrannized, if they have their property rights respected "back home", and a genuinely free market enables them to compete on a level playing field against people in any other state, many of the reasons for mass migration would be removed (which I do feel would generally be better for most people - it can't be terribly nice ripping yourself out of a life-long community just in order to find work or get away from someone who is using your state's monopoly of power to attack you or your rights). After that, "genuine" migration would be engaged in mainly by those whose comparative advantage in skills enhanced something in the destination country who would then likely to be very happy to have you.
As to whether a "geo-mutualist or Liberal Dmeocrat" should be quoting someone like Hoppe, I agree, in a sense it sits uneasily. I don't really see the contradiction with mutualism - which is essentially a more evolutionary way of achieving what Hoppe would probably rather achieve more quickly - ie an anarchist revolution. But I do see the problem with someone claiming the label "Democrat". And indeed, I have pretty well decided that I am not a "Democrat" in the sense of a majority of voters being able to enslave the minority who disagree with them through elections and big governments. I do believe that a genuinely free market grounded in anarchist principles of self- and property-ownership would be a *more* "democratic" society. I would be voting, with every interpersonal transaction and contract, with my money and my feet many times a day.
You make a basic error in confusing the state and the nation, but considering you use your opponent's definitions to argue against rather than starting from a more secure standpoint then it's not surprising you come away with that conclusion.
I really don't think the right questions are being asked. It's not whether there is or isn't a social contract, but what precisely is contained within it, how it is comprised and what conditions are specified as to trigger sanctions.
You attack the power of the state over the individual, but you fail to accept even the possibility that an individual can make a difference regarding policy - which is barmy. Why else would you bother making the effort unless you understood that demonstrating solidarity pays dividends? Look at the Gurkha campaign as a recent example - Brown was squeezed until the pips were squeaking and every last concession was gained because of the natural justice afforded by the social contract - their sacrifices couldn't go unrewarded, and it would have been wrong to backtrack on the promises given.
As I tried to point out the concept of a social contract is historically derived from the charter of liberties - which should indicate something.
Oranjepan's last blog post... The Social Contract
I'm not clear what the "basic error" is. It seems to me that it is the state, the government, which is wrapped up in the idea of "social contract" rather than the nation, the people.
As an anarchist, I do disagree that there needs to be some overarching monopoly of force either to guarantee our liberties or to carry out the functions we are deemed to have ceded to it in the social contract for the greater good.
I'll post on that separately in response to yours.
The idea of self-ownership depends on your sense of self. If your self is the thinking self-aware part of your nature,the part to which is attached the idea of guilt in legal senses, then thinking is dependent on language which is entirely contructed by society.You cannot think like an Inuit because you don't have his language,all those different words for snow and so on.
Some of these post-structuralists like Derrida ,Paul der Man etc( spellings? I have n't studied this stuff for years) insist that they are not really the authors of their own work.One of them suggests that you do not express yourself through the language; the language expresses itself through you.
One quote I am fairly sure of : "there are no problems of philosophy ,only problems of language" Wittgenstein.
I am not sure that old-fashioned English linguistic philosophers would base an argument on "self",used as an abstract noun.
Well as someone whose liberal tendencies go towards autonomism rather than anarchy I'm still glad that there is available a recourse to group decision-making.
I accept that this situation has changed the way the 'social contract' has and is being interpreted, but this is an argument against the interpretation, not against the concept. In fact I think the distortion creates a logical justification and advises practical means to change the current postholders in order to revert the interpretation.
Clearly the current state appears to have moved beyond identifying as the executive agent for the nation and has allowed its' ego to grow to the point where it assumes the two are synonymous, but this is getting into the realms of political psychology and away from philosophy, though the one often explains the other.
"So if nothing else there needs to be a universally applicable rule about who owns, has the right to control, one's body and physical faculties.
If you attest that you do not have the right of self-ownership, there are two alternatives: that someone else owns you, or that everyone owns each other in common."
But I do not "own" my body and faculties: I am my body and faculties.
I am not sure where this takes the debate, but your whole way of talking sounds odd to me.
Oranjepan, do you labour under the misconception that there is a fundamental contradiction between "anarchism" and "group decision making"? The only type of "group decision making" that is incompatible with anarchism is that of a group which is compulsory for all and has a protected monopoly such that no other group is possible in that field of action or location - i.e. a territorial monopoly of final arbitration: the state.
Jonathan: strangely enough I was listening to another lecture today in which someone raised the same point. There isn't really much of a distinction. You are your body and faculties therefore only you a priori can own the right and ability to control that body and faculties (short of putting some kind of electrodes in your head so someone else can trigger nervous responses I guess). Some libertarians and anarchists (not myself) would make the distinction, if it helps, that you could be legitimately made to give up some of that control for example if you had been convicted of a crime and were physically restrained or incarcerated. In such a case you would remain your body and faculties but would have given up some of the right to control it.
David, I'm not sure it matters - it is first and foremost about control of your bowady as Hoppe pronounces it in his north German accent.
It probably does matter.All those linguistic philosophers, Austin etc ( now described as "ordinary-language philosophers") let alone the more modern deconstructionists, would probably say that English could not be used to discuss "the self",as in ordinary usage the word is rarely, if ever, used as a noun and so cannot carry all the extra meanings that are imputed to it by political philosophers.
Remember Wittgenstein's Eureka moment was when he was given a V-sign by a girl on a bike after he nearly caused a collision in a Cambridge street.He realised that the sign had no objective correlative and that its meaning was entirely bestowed on it by common usage or society: that language is socially created.(It is a mere hop,skip and a jump ,as the Stand-up Economist would say ,to asserting that the mind/self is socially created which is what some deconstructionists,in fact, do.)
There is a correspondence with land values: both the values put on words and those on land are created by society en masse.(Which is handy for Lefty land taxers)
If you are going to shift to talking about the body instead of the self you are not only going into dodgy Cartesian dualism, you are entering a very much less fraught argument,because your rights over your own body are more clearly understood.
If I'm reading you right, you're arguing that because individual liberties can't be equated because liberties has no universal standard, nor should they require enforcement (both sides - policing and teaching) to ensure as much. In which case, is it 'liberty' at all (rather than just resistance to authority)?
I don't agree that it is a misconception to say there is absolutely no contradiction between anarchism and group decision-making. For one this is contingent on the size of the social group and the technical ability (thus feasability) to ensure all members participate to their desired extent. I see the representative function as filling that gap currently, otherwise we'd be limited to a maximum size of polity to that of large village (10-20,000) if that.
This representative function is an inversion of your static cartel, without which war arises. And this is a difficulty: where one says competition, another says conflict; where one says universe, another says monopoly. Therefore some realism and moderation is required and we must ask ourselves, where are the limits to 'liberty'?
oops - should read "because individual liberties can't be equated liberties have no universal standard" it's still too early for me. Now gtg
David, I'm not "shifting" anything. The basis on which these natural rules arise is that of the scarcity of physical goods. In a world of perfect plenty, two goods remain scarce, the human body (there's only one of each) and the space each one occupies at any given time (more than one cannot occupy the same space at the same time). These remain "contestable" even when nothing else does and so even in that perfect world would require a "problem of social order" that requires solving in order to prevent conflict.
Perhaps the thing that has obfuscated this in my article was my use of "and faculties" which is more airy-fairy than simply "physical bowady" and which was maybe a descriptive that by adding I have confused the matter.
Oranjepan, I don't really understand what you are saying in the bit you clarified in the additional comment. The whole point is that there is, absolutely, one universal liberty - which is the ownership/control of one's body as opposed to someone else, or everyone else controlling it. And the whole thrust of the post is that *anything* that seeks to impose on that without voluntary agreement is breaching, to a greater or lesser extent, that one fundamental and universal liberty. For that to be breached, there had better be a jolly good reason, achieving something that cannot conceivably be done any other way and in which the ends ("the greater good" in this case) are important enough a different between what can be done without breaching it to justify such an intrusion on such a basic and universal liberty.
Incidentally I didn't say there was "absolutely no contradiction" - I set out precisely the one contradiction - where such group decision making involves compulsory submission to the group's decisions which are operating as a forcible monopoly. I happen to tink there would not be a great need for large group decision making structures in a world in which a properly free market were delivering most goods (and where your daily participation is in choosing one supplier over another by your consumer behaviour). I would expect that such group decision making might be restricted to a street, a condominium or some similar small geographical collective. But I do not see any reason why participation in larger, non-state, non-coercive structures is impossible. For example, I am a member of an organization of some 1.3 million members, UNISON, and another of 3 million - the Co-operative Group.
I don't see where cartels come into it. Cartels tend to be made possible by the barriers to entry imposed by the proto-monopoly - the state, and its legislation. Without such regulatory structures to make it attractive to throw away some of your competitiveness in order to gain a share of the protected market, cartels are generally not economically efficient (one member of the cartel is usually giving up higher profits effectively subsidizing someone who would be less efficient making lower profits if left on their own).
But here we're getting into the realms of my next post "why can only monkeys ride bikes?". For now I merely assert that there is no function which people generally seem to say must be done by the state, and tehrefore must involve some of the compulsion implied by a "social contract" that could not be done in some other, more consensual and competitive way. What remains to be decided is whether there is some reason why only a coercively collectivist state could do something so much better than any other possible mechanism that justifies the territorial monopoly of force and arbitration that contains within it the seeds of totalitarianism and slavery.
[...] Gore's blog Oranjepan has further developed some of Barry Stocker's critique in the comments on my last piece and on Charlotte's summary with an historical context. I hope I don't misrepresent them - Barry is [...]
I wae realy glad to read what you write.The claim of enslavement does require a little more exploration though, I will admit, and in doing so I enlist the assistance of the contemporary Austrian economist and anarchist philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe.i realy like this words
"Oh, naturally I don't share Hoppe's ideas on immigration, but I believe he made some valid points all the same. Another Sherry, old bean?"
Looking forward to Gobineau and "Mein Kampf" being quoted with a similar disclaimer.
"Anyone with a name like Hitler can't be all bad, old bean. Naturally one feels he went a little too far, but he had a few good ideas and should be given all due credit."
This is where a professed love of Social Darwinism leads.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/hoppe-margins.pdf
Hmm, this is rather BNP' ish isn't it?
Not remotely. In fact his argument is quite the opposite of nationalism - that it is nationalism and states that, by their enforcements of borders, and their choices as to who to allow through or not, create these sorts of tensions the BNP preys on.
Absent the state and migration, any migration, would be an issue only for the communities, neighbourhoods and individuals into whose area or property the migrant wanted to move. Further, much migration is caused by the actions of states, either as aggressors, such as the UK in Iraq, or as predatory governments as in Saddam before that.
Migration for economic reasons would be a non-issue as it would be in response to a need on the part of the destination community for additional people - as workers, say.
As to whether anything Hoppe says on immigration makes anything else he has written about invalid, that is merely a genetic fallacy.
There are libertarians and anarchists on both sides of the immigration argument, however they largely agree that it is the state by its political decisions that makes the resolution of problems of scarcity much more difficult and can cause problems of resentment. For example, where in-migrants are sometimes seen as getting some kind of special treatment over existing residents.
Without the state making these allocations, and preventing alternatives wherever possible, immigrant communities, or ex-patriate communities, would address their own needs, such as for education, as, indeed, already happens in ex-patriate communities around the world. In such communities you frequently get British Schools, American Schools, French Schools, Lebanese Schools, and even International Schools for those who want to mix in with other groups, residential compounds dedicated to one nation's ex-pats, churches, doctors and so on.
Besides, Hoppe's other ideas on, for example, private law, point to ways in which such differing communities could co-operate and integrate where both they and earlier residents think it is beneficial and retain their own customs and legal systems within those communities if they wish to do so.
The essential issue is allowing differing communities the option of being allowed to discriminate and decide what kinds of people they employ. It is about a return to a tribal like society where people of the same ethnic groups group together and decide which people they allow within their communities. It is predicated on the same BNP basis that white people have an instinctual suspicion and dislike for blacks and asians and vice versa and aims to give power to the nastiest, most ignorant and viscious members of all the communities.
Rather like with the private educational arguments, it is about seperation and non-cooperation. It is an outlook that would quite happily rebuild the Berlin Wall and maintain the kind of sectarian divides that plagued Northern Ireland.
As for things that can cause tensions (housing allocations etc), it is down to a lack of political transparency. Nothing to do with State Intervention. Your kind of society would be a whites only one where people awarded things like houses to their buddies. State intervention should mean that you cannot get away with tricks like that.
"As to whether anything Hoppe says on immigration makes anything he writes about invalid, that is merely a genetic fallacy."
So if Hoppe was to advocate mass genocide, for example, that would also have no bearing on the validity of his other opinions? Mmmm intriguing.
Presumably as a loyal LibDem you believe that any right to "own oneself" does not apply to Untermensch whose dissection, while still alive, to provide body parts is one of your party's prouder achievements.
Why do you presume that whilst writing in terms that do not reflect party policy (clearly they do not support "self-ownership" as they support taxation for example) I am in any way a "loyal LibDem"?
And what are you on about anyway? In what way do they support organ sales? If they do they are more libertarian than I had thought! Or do you mean something coercive?
Jock, a Lib-Dem? Come on now, he's a Tory in denial. Instead of "Sell it off, String 'em up", however, his mantra is "Sell it off, Starve 'em off."
That's what distinguishes Tories from Libertarians. About the only thing that does though.
Don't get thinking that because someone else has joined the conversation I'm going to bother responding to you, Page.
You responded to tell me your not going to respond? How very Post-Modern and Rad!! Anarchy Rules!! But only after tea and pikelets old boy. Musn't let the side down, there's a good chap. Oh and do get a haircut old boy. One may be an anarchist, but one need not be a messy anarchist. Frightfully bad show.
Anyway must get along, Chlamydia has spotted a simply DARLING little delicatessen where they serve a nice range of pre-cooked organic seaweed. Not my sort of thing, but one has to consider the enviroment and such things. That's why we never accept placcy bags. Did you know that placcy bags have choked the equivalent of the whole population of Papua New Guinea in Dolphins? Absolutely shocking!!! As I said (rather loudly) to Rupert after a shared Cocaine binge: "It's really inconsiderate of Supermarkets to hand out such environmentally dubious articles. Something should be done!!"
So glad to have you onside!!!
Alan Page, I have decided I no longer want you making your snide, sarky, comments on my blog. This is my property. I pay for it and its hosting. I am therefore asking you politely to refrain from making your trolling comments on my property. So far as I am concerned you have signally failed to grasp anything I'm advocating through anarchism. You seem to think your arguments are clever. To me they are merely willfully ignorant, for I feel sure that you are a vaguely intelligent man, and whilst in many cases I would make an attempt to explain something further if I thought my explanation was lacking, I do not think it is worth it with you, because you seem utterly indifferent.
Obviously, I would prefer for you to read my blog and learn from it, however I find your comments unbearably rude. And if you continue to comment I shall attempt to prevent you even reading the site let alone being able to comment.
In other words - FUCK OFF AND LEAVE ME ALONE YOU INSUFFERABLE TROLL.
"Git orf my Land before I set the dogs on you !!" Yes, very anarchist indeed.
I think the level of your self delusion must surely be apparent even to you now.
And don't make me laugh, Coats, you could teach me absolutely nothing. You have neither the reading or the depth of thought and reasoning. You just spout a lot of banal self serving tory platitudes and try and dress it up with learned references. It is rather like reading a Telegraph editorial with annotations citing Plato out of both historical and philosophical context. Typically Bourgeois in other words.
Wheras I am probably far closer to the spirit of true Anarchy. The fact you regard me as a troll demonstrates that.
"Democracy" is an interesting word Mr Coats. You should look it up sometime.
You are absolutely right about "Untermensch" though. The hilarious thing about Jock and his pals is that wheras they regard laws that prevent them touring the world blowing drugs out of their arses and "consensually" shagging children as unfair infringements on their civil liberties, they are very keen on imposing micro management techniques on their own workforces.
Civul liberties only extend in so far as it fills their swimming pools, beyond that it's disposable.
And here is glimpse of the kind of world Jock and his pals want to return us to. The attempt to link Capitalism (which is itself a coercive hierarchical ideology) with Anarchism is Oxymoronic. It requires a subordinate class being coerced (through economic strategies like abolishing things like state support for the unemployed etc.) into working for another class, preferably at the lowest cost.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhE58YYKzs8
It was state intervention that passed things like the Factory Act which stopped the parasitical bastards Jock so clearly adores and supports from having their way. Any suggestion that such degenerates hold the key to some kind of all beneficient utopian future is the product of pure fantasy.
And as for taxation being coercive. If it wasn't for the labourers who generate the profits for the fat bloated officeboys in the first place, there would be no taxation to pay. Taxation is the only way the average worker sees any of his hard work put back into the system, rather than stashed away offshore. The Jocks of this world may sit in their cosy air-conditioned offices talking vacuous crap and blowing drugs out of their corpulant behinds, but it is the people on the factory floor that actually generate the income/wealth. Taxation paid into the educational system/health system etc. is THEIR reward.
Anyway, back to Plotinus. Far more enlightening.
As for Libertarians being Anarchists?
http://www.spunk.org/library/otherpol/critique/sp000713.txt
Whining bourgeois is a far more apt description. It is the Establishment pretending to rebel against itself.
I take it you are also censoring my reply since you are unable to dispute my accusation of genocide. Widespread censorship makes a complete mockery of liberal values in general & even moreso of the alleged subject of this thread.
Something from Herbert Spencer:
http://www.newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-4-learning-civics/herbert-spencer-on-the-survival-of-the-fittest
Now tell me. Would somebody who advocated this kind of social policy approve of the abolition of child labour?
Neil, What are you on about. I have not censored anything. Don't make accusations you cannot substantiate.
Do you think that if I was censoring *anyone* I would be letting through this crap from Page?
"What they are saying about Jock elsewhere"
"From what I've read of his site so far, the man comes across as a total idiot"
You are giving my Facebook friends hours of fun. Keep it up.
Now that is being less than honest isn't it? For a while yesterday, my status was "reader only". My inbox was full of "replies" that didn't actually exist. Lots of tinkering around?
You do practice censorship, the articles I linked regarding the war on child porn being as futile as the war on drugs were also not published. Essentially because it undermined your anti-prohibitionist rhetoric.
So let's have a bit of honesty here.
Alan, I've also recieved the same notifications, but frankly I'm glad nothing appeared because they are spam.
Not only are you diverting the thread on to your own unrelated pet topic, but you are doing so with malice and in ignorance of the opinion of Jock who you are intent on making a partisan attack against.
As for Neil, well, maybe it's post-traumatic stress disorder or something, but random generalised accusations against people he has no idea about is not serious comment.
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Getting back to the topic, it is a false classification and a category mistake to suggest humans own ourselves (our bodies). We are ourselves; I am myself. It might help to make distinctions between psychological components, but at this technological juncture identity still hasn't formally be separated from physicality, whatever proposed ID cards scheme is being developed.
Oranjepan's last blog post... The Showdown Of The Cynics
Honesty works two ways, Page. You have misrespresented virtually everything I have argued on here since you started commenting however many months ago.
I have not now nor never previously censored or deleted responses. I have asked you not to bother commenting. I have tinkered to see if I could cut posts, but have never actually done so. I was looking for a way yesterday that I could force your and your only comments to go into an approval queue because I considered that some of your comments yesterday amounted to libel. I may still implement that. I'm glad you confirmed that it appeared to have worked. Now I know I can do so, I may very well, in your case in particular.
This is not a "public forum". It is my blog. It is hosted by me and paid for by me. I think I have a right to ask someone who has so consistently been rude and who will not even bother paying the slightest nod to civilized discussion to leave my property. If it were a pub I would have had the bouncers throw you out by now, with prejudice.
So I may yet want to stop you commenting without prior approval, which, if you cannot tone down your ascerbic manner I may just decide to do.
You know perfectly well that you are misrepresenting me. You know perfectly well that my focus, my life's focus, is on mechanisms such as social enterprise to undermine both public and private monopolistic behaviour - classic Mutualism. I even have a record of you congratulating me for trying to put together mechanisms for such mutualist action through social enterprises, such as Wireless Oxford.
So why don't you just admit that you have this horribly wrong, you have dug yourself into a corner now where your sole arguments are ad hominem and straw men and don't want to backtrack. Otherwise, why do you still bother to come here if you cannot be civil? If you don't become civil I will put you out of that misery and stop you commenting at all.
You (and Neil) are all very well yelling "censorship" - I rather suggest that *you* are effectively practicing censorship by blocking out any meaningful debate through your shrillness that I know others who have commented, yes even on this thread, have decided it is no longer worth their time bothering to try to participate in. Besides, perhaps you should have a read of Walter Block's "Defending the Undefendable" and in particular the chapter about "The man who yells fire in a crowded theater" - censorship would be where some authority takes it on themselves to ban people doing a certain thing - it is not censorship for the owner of some preoprty to insist that people behave reasonably whilst using their property - that is simply a contract. If you cannot bring yourself to reign in your ad hominem and shrill ranting, I shal invoke the bit of that implied contract that lets you sound off on my property, simples.
Other than land taxation, I probably agree with David Reed, at the top of this thread, on very little, but you don't see him spamming the place with the rudeness that you do, do you?
When you have read some Kevin Carson, who is the main inspiration behind my thinking, you could perhaps come back and try to explain to me why what I write differs from what I think I am trying to expound to people, but until then I cannot take you seriously because of your continual misrepresentation.
Now, are you going to leave me alone, start being civil, or must I block you?
Oranjepan, I still think you are wrong on that. The point believers in natural rules about property are trying to make is that you are not free to have your own identity if you are not free to control the means of expressing that identity - your body. In order to *be* you, you have to *have* you.
You can have a "free mind", a "free spirit" but if someone who presumes to own your body decides to gag you and bind you you cannot express that mind or spirit. That much, surely, is not even controversial within J S Mill's thinking?
It's an interesting point, Jock.
I concede the possibility that the freudian model can be applied differently to different people, so that we can see dominant features or areas working harmoniously together. But altogether the relationship with the physical body is what defines the identity.
However from the point of view of social concepts such as state laws it's only really possible to judge actions, otherwise we're getting into the territory of 'thought crime' and lose the freedom of conscience (for me this is the primary freedom).
I don't actually think we're so far apart in our understanding, only that we're looking at the problem from opposite directions, and yet still coming to some very similar conclusions. I don't think the social contract is about controlling the individual, rather I think it is about liberating the individual by setting out the principles by which individuals control the state by holding it to account.
The perversion is where this process is reversed and individuals are prevented from asserting our rights and freedoms by failing to take up our responsibilities. So when we don't vote and we don't attend council meetings or complain and write letters, or we play truant or stay unemployed etc, we are not expressing our opinions and the balance is able to tip towards authoritarianism.
Competition can take many forms, so we need to be careful that unhealthy competition doesn't begin to overwhelm positive efforts. (As Neil and Alan helpfully provided an ample demonstration).
Oranjepan's last blog post... The Showdown Of The Cynics
So let's get this "self ownership" myth down to fundamentals. Is "self-ownership" possible under market conditions? Is is even conceivable under Capitalism?
When starving Africans are supplied with a fertilizer to help them feed themselves and the central bank tells the supplier to stop because it causes a blip in the market, how does that tie in?
If somebody goes to a prospective employer and demands a certain wage and is told the market would not allow such a thing, how does that tie in with self ownership?
I'm sorry but if you seriously believe that such a vague, though nice-sounding, concept is even compatible with market realities then that's an awful lot of thinking you have left out.
As I said before you can either be a slave of the State or a slave of the market. To claim otherwise is simply ludicrous.
I may concede, Oranjepan, that the original context of Charlotte's discussion - effectively the question of "does our tacit agreement to the social contract permit the state to do *anything* because we've agreed to that incarnation of the state" then you may well be right - that properly speaking the social contract, assuming we exercise our end of that bargain by participating, is meant to give us rights against the potential tyrant.
Further, your point in your own post that in the presence of a potential tyrant the lack of such protection would give that tyrant free rein and be a very bad thing is one I can agree with.
However, both of these positions assume that the state is necessary. Your illustration of Henry I seems moot to me - his concessions to the barons are only necessary because there already exists this authoritarian state without any popular legitemacy and against which people were rightly looking ready to agitate. So surely there the "social contract" is a defensive measure by the tyrant to ensure his illegitemate position of power - you acknowledge my right and power and I'll undertake to give you these rights to question (some of) my actions.
The problem I have with your idea that it ought to all work if only we participate and use our rights seems to ignore that the corollary is that we have to accept the result, even of perfect participation. So even if absolutely everyone votes, 51% vote for ID cards and 49% against, nearly half the population is now condemned to accepting something it finds fundamentally wrong, and paying for it. Do you not accept that that is itself coercive? And is the result of the "social contract"?
As to competition, you are right, there are differing forms, competition in improving the quality or reducing the price of goods is a good thing, but the state always seems to be in a competition for "bads" - a competition to see who can get to that magic 51% figure and thereby impose its will on everyone else.
Alan - you illustrate perfectly with that post how you misunderstand, and therefore misrepresent me. A "central bank" is incompatible with a free market.
Indeed, I welcomed your Wireless Oxford initiative as something positive. Considerably more positive than your desire to flood council estates with legalised heroin and crack.
I do not hold that the salvation of humanity lies with Capitalism and Market Forces. There is over 200 hundred years of evidence to support my argument. The fact you seem to want overide that evidence and assert that you know better than everybody else is what I find most offensive.
To me you are simply regurgitating a long disproven theory that free market capitalism benefits all equally. It does not. Now you may wish to turn a blind eye to the findings of Charles Booth, Henry Mayhew et al for the sake of profit but those of us who actually have a moral conscience find such an outlook (however backed up it is with propoganda) frankly obscene.
Let's face it, the people of your outlook in the 19th century opposed many of the reforms that served to empower and enable working class people to gain some dignity on the grounds that education would provoke a revolution, or that ending child labour would result in a market distortion and affect productivity. So how does your outlook differ?
Capitalism needs a body of "lower class" individuals to feed itself. If everybody strove to be a director, there would be no workforce. It is based on the deliberate cultivation of an underclass and this crap about "self ownership" is only intended to apply to those who profit from that.
Your entire argument is based, therefore, on the assumption of privilege and wealth. It has no relevance to anybody trying to scrape by on a minimum wage. It therefore has no relevance to the vast majority of mankind who are placed (by market forces) in that position.
Until you can absorb that fact and think a little more deeply rather than simply regurgitate the latest fashionable profit-generating crazes, then I reserve the right to undermine your position, by whatever means.
Well then, that eliminates market forces as well. As there is no central regulating body, there are no means of measuring supply and demand. There are no ways of measuring consumer trends and therefore no way of knowing where a specific market lies.
Are going to end up trading beads and trinkets again?
You conception of "capitalism" is so narrowly defined by what we already have. All the anarchists and mutualists that I have ever come across are fundamentally critical of this understanding. We do not promote "actual existing capitalism" as Carson puts it, but free markets. Most, perhaps even literally all, modern corporate power is a result of state action granting it privilege, not a free market based on self-ownership of individuals.
"Your entire argument is based, therefore, on the assumption of privilege"...go look up "privilege". Privilege is a function of having a state capable of enforcing the will of its select constituency over other constituencies - curbing others' self-ownership.
You cannot possibly say that there has been "200 years' evidence" or whatever because that is simply not true. The privilege of millowners to use local militia to coerce their workforces for example was state granted. The ability of them to insist on keeping up the prices of corn to the detriment of the poor was state granted.
And what on earth the notion of a central bank has to do with measuring worth or supply and demand I have no idea. The existence of a central bank to manipulate the supply of money has enabled states to rob its poor through inflation and wage war through the destructive economics of inflation. A central bank does not compute supply and demand, it interferes in it. Just look at who it was that lobbied for the creation of the central banking system? Cui bono, Alan? Cui bono?
Alan, you think yourself well read on this sufficient to berate me - it is absolutely clear that you have not touched on why those great nineteenth century activists like Proudhon, Warren, Tucker, Spooner and so on that that article you linked to mention railed against their contemporary situation as one in whicih privilege was created and entrenched by the state in favour of the haves and against the have nots. That situation persists in spades today, and has been made even worse by the ability of "winner picking" states to manipulate markets in favour of those that support and lobby them.
The fact that one blog post on the fundamental principle of self-ownership is insufficient to convey what took these people and the likes of Carson thousands of pages to explore more fully does not make this post invalid. It was not an attempt to provide some grand unified theory, just to talk about one aspect of it that affects one aspect of a discussion going on elsewhere.
http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/MayLond.html
What happened the last time we listened to people of your persuasion.
PS - if you now wish to explore these things civilly, I think it only right that I *insist* that you cease the sort of gobshite crap above like "The hilarious thing about Jock and his pals is that wheras they regard laws that prevent them touring the world blowing drugs out of their arses and "consensually" shagging children as unfair infringements on their civil liberties, they are very keen on imposing micro management techniques on their own workforces."
I do not view it as censorious refusing to put up with that on my own property.
Jock, I think the example of HenryI depends on an interpretation of the Norman conquest and the transition to a feudal society. William can be seen as an idealised and absolute authoritarian or tyrant who was able to assert sufficient force to conquer the country, following in various 'vacuum of power' theories.
I'm interested to know how the anarchist overcomes this weakness, because it seems to me the lack of organised defences will always enable might to overcome right.
Alan does start to touch upon a slightly similar issue in the black market for drugs, albeit crudely, in that simple legalisation (without a statutory requirement to regulate and respond to various issues) does leave the weak (ie in his example the working-class poor on council estates) vulnerable to be preyed on. Cooperatives and mutual organisations are capable of filling this social gap, but, again, as you widen the scope of consideration there is no universal basic standard which is adhered to. So at some level even as a believer in autonomy I think you have to accept the existence of a minimal state.
Alan, you could do yourself a favour by not behaving like a dickwad.
Oranjepan's last blog post... The Showdown Of The Cynics
Neil: I'm sorry - it is a "condition of membership" that I support everything a party supports?
What utter codswallop. I have stood up against many things the party has supported and for many things the party has refused to support. If that were not possible we would all be in parties of precisely one, matching only exactly that combination of things we believe in and not those things we do not believe in.
I don't support "democracy" yet feel able to be a member. Go figure.
Personally I do not believe in the concept of liberal interventionism in any other state's business. Indeed, one of the reasons why I am against the whole concept of a state is that it has shown itself as the most violent destructive institution invented in human history.