An LP Anarchist Caucus has just formed.
I’m not a big fan of the “five key points” – taken literally, there’s a couple of them that I actually disagree with, and taken humorously, they’re just not especially funny. But hey, I’ll join. See also Tom’s comments.
I’m still waiting for someone to take Brad up on his suggestion of a Libertarian Socialist Caucus ….
Tags: Anarchy, Democracy, Left-Libertarian
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4’s obviously right out — but I don’t know if I’ve heard your thoughts on nukes before.
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Hey Roderick,
what’s your take on the social anarchist argument that capitalism would have collapsed if not for the NLRA, worker’s strikes, and miscellaneous government intervention like the 40 hour work week over the course of the early 20th century? Was there ever a time before the 20th century that a “real” free market existed in North America?
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what’s your take on the social anarchist argument that capitalism would have collapsed if not for the NLRA, worker’s strikes, and miscellaneous government intervention like the 40 hour work week over the course of the early 20th century?
I’m not sure, but it might well be true (assuming by “capitalism” you mean, roughly, the separation of labour from ownership/management); the govt. certainly did its best to defang the radicalism of the labour movement by co-opting it into the govt/corp hierarchy and meeting its milder demands. (But why is “worker’s strikes” on your list?)
Was there ever a time before the 20th century that a “real” free market existed in North America?
Oh, that one’s easy: No. Even leaving aside the fact that women and nonwhites had virtually no access to anything resembling a free market, even white males were subject to, for example, the constraints that Kevin describes.
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I lean toward Rothbard’s position, though I’d probably add more qualifications than he did. Nothing wrong with using ’em for asteroid mining.
I might quibble with (3) too, if it’s taken to imply that toddlers have the right to secede ….
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Sorry, that last was a reply to William, not to Anon73.
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Just to clarify, do you have a opposition to simply owning nukes without using them in any capacity?
Sorry, I have to take the obligatory “weapon-rights” position.
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do you have a opposition to simply owning nukes without using them in any capacity?
I worry about that issue, which is why I said I “lean” toward his position rather than embracing it. I haven’t fully worked out where I stand on this. Also related is the question of how great a risk one can impose on one’s neighbours before it becomes a rights-violation, and whether that level varies with other considerations.
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One thing I should point out to people that might be unaware of this:
There have been nuclear weapons designed with yields on the order of less than one kiloton, and which could be used to defend against large troop formations moving through otherwise unpopulated areas, and thus without killing anyone else or damaging their property. They were initially designed during the Cold War with exactly that purpose in mind; a role which is now filled by more advanced conventional explosives.
Knowing that, would it be alright to own one and, say, play with it in the Nevada desert?
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Depends on fallout issues, I suppose; the wiki page didn’t say much about them.
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Roderick,
Like Soviet I wonder about possession as opposed to use. And I characteristically quibble with whether or not we can even make distinctions between weapons of mass destruction and simply powerful tools. A few lines of RNA or certain 1s and 0s in the nanobot goo seem like a rather fragile boundary. Nuclear weapons pose relatively little danger in comparison (what’s a city or two compared to a continent of zombies) but, as you note, there are circumstantial advantages to nukes and certainly there are reasons to utilize or dabble in things quite close to them. (Centrifuge issues and the like being ultimately just a limit of present-day engineering, I can quite easily see a nuclear reactor in the future being remade and repurposed on the drop of a hat with a lot less effort.)
I’m interested in the rights-ist take on all this. There’s a lot of slippery slope in taking away tools simply because they can be used to negatively affect a lot of people. Anarcho-Transhumanists are often portrayed as writing everyone who doesn’t embrace all that we do off as primitivists or conservative statists, but it’s really hard to imagine how these sort of WMDs can be outlawed without outlawing entire classes and realms of Tools, and how, in turn, to do such outlawing without appealing to state-like power or smashing civilization and wrecking the surface until high-level metallurgy becomes impossible.
I’m a long time intuitive supporter of nuclear proliferation into the hands of individuals (albeit hopefully at some as yet undetermined time in the future after everyone has evolved into enlightened anarchs) and a lot of my personal imperative as an activist (and intimacy with the redder forms of anarchism) stem from an analysis of technological development that says we’d better all develop the capacity to function together with some level of consensus because science and technology are fast moving us to the point where everyone will have their hands on a VETO button for humanity.
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william:
I’m interested in the rights-ist take on all this. … I’m a long time intuitive supporter of nuclear proliferation into the hands of individuals (albeit hopefully at some as yet undetermined time in the future after everyone has evolved into enlightened anarchs)
Well, either people have an unconditional right to possession of atomic weapons or they don’t. If they lean towards the position that you say you intuitively support, then the rights-based case is pretty easy to make out. (Right to nonviolently possess powerful tools as long as you don’t threaten to use them aggressively against any identifiable victims, etc.)
If you lean more towards a position that would allow forcible disarmament, then the challenge is to come up with a non-strictly-consequentialist argument to the effect that it doesn’t violate the rights of the person being disarmed. That’s a lot harder but I don’t think it’s impossible. (Presumably it would have something to do with the lack of possible non-aggressive uses for currently-feasible sorts of atomic weapons and some conception of a standing threat. And presumably you could make out much the same case against, say, private possession of some killer nanoplague. If we’re imagining near-future-plausible but not-yet-actual situations where there would be some non-aggressive use — e.g. asteroid demolition, low-yield weapons, whatever — then that would tend to undermine the rights-based case for forcible disarmament in those cases. But it’d also tend to undermine the demand for such a case, since those are just cases where it looks like the intuitive demand for forcible disarmament is as weak as the theoretical case for its legitimacy.)
For someone like Roderick, who holds that considerations about what has good or bad results can actually play a role in deliberation about what rights people have (and vice versa, in deliberation about what would count as a good or bad result), there are a lot of further nuances that I haven’t mentioned.
Either way, it seems to me like this issue is probably orthogonal to the consequentialist-natural rights debate. Or if it’s angled a bit, the angle actually would tend to tilt rightsers more towards your own expressed position than it would consequentialists.
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I don’t think it’s entirely orthogonal although I agree that there’s no more an inherent tilt tying consequentialists to forcible disarmament, but what I’m interested in is the particulars of the standing threat argument on rights approaches.
My raw intuition on the subject obviously comes in rights-ist packaging (although obviously said intuition is not my ACTUAL approach which is pure consequentialism: tool component increases material freedom; can’t outlaw WMD component in the long run without completely eradicating freedom) and I’m interested in how it might be structured as an argument taking into account the standing threat concern and the like. Threats are obviously murky waters because you’re introducing intentionality as a critical component to an otherwise relatively simplistic system defined by distinction of positive and negative action. But rights-centered ethical systems seem to fall rather flat without some recognition of threat. And it’s really hard to see building a nuclear warhead in the light of anything else besides a threat.
>” If we’re imagining near-future-plausible but not-yet-actual situations where there would be some non-aggressive use… then that would tend to undermine the rights-based case for forcible disarmament in those cases. But it’d also tend to undermine the demand for such a case, since those are just cases where it looks like the intuitive demand for forcible disarmament is as weak as the theoretical case for its legitimacy.”
I don’t see this. Just because Genocide is not the ONLY use for my Genocide Device, doesn’t diminish the existential threat possessing it poses. My point in bringing up the Viral or Nanogoo hypotheticals was to reduce our capacity to recognize intent. Pointing a gun is rather clear, but if everyone has access to DIY designer genetics kits and the vast majority of their uses (and statistically desired uses) are positive or at least non-Genocidal, doesn’t diminish the very real threat they pose. Tweaking the e coli genes one way as opposed to the other (or just suddenly and unexpectedly pressing the button on your otherwise asteroid-mining nuke) is an obscured action with effectively immediate results. The rights-ist case for retaining one’s capacity to bioengineer your own supper can remain strong while conflicting with a very strong standing threat case.
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When I said “worker strikes” I meant wildcat strikes that supposedly “terrified” the captains of industry into giving workers better working conditions. Many social anarchists seem to think along with Kevin that the wildcat strikes did the real work on such things as the 40-hour-week with government only stepping in to formally declare it afterward.
At any rate my thinking was inspired by a thread on Somethingawful dot com where a UPS manager mentions he is being “requested” to write his senator to support some upcoming legislation which favors UPS over their competitor FedEx. Some people mentioned being “asked” to donate to the United Way, or their bosses “suggesting” that they do X, etc. The scare quotes, obviously, mean that they felt they might be fired if they refused. Marx believed that such intimidation and domination of workers would continue to the point where society collapsed, and I’ve always wondered whether it was free-market competition, government intervention, or Kevin Carson-like worker direct action that mostly contributed to the amelioration of the worst ills of the Industrial Revolution (notwithstanding some of the arguments at Mises.org that factories were actually offering better working conditions than farms, etc).
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Um … Keynesian crap, I’d say. The stinkeroo Keynesian line: “It depends on consumers.”
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Yeah, I’d agree the consumerism stuff can be silly. But, I was thinking you’d agree the economy was false.
Reich doesn’t say interest rates were artificially low, or that credit was unjustifiably extended. But he doesn’t rule it out either.
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So what are consumers supposed to do in Reich’s opinion? Buy things they don’t want?
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I think he’s suggesting that consumers demand a new economy–a new kind of interaction and exchange.
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Your herculean capacity for charitable crypto-libertarian interpretations of mainstream statist apparatchiks never ceases to fill me with wonder and awe.
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I have a pathological need for bridges.
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About Roderick T. Long
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
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