I don’t often cite Gary North, but this is worth a read.
Tag Archives | Anarchy
Famous Blue Raincoat
A while ago I started using “Socks” and “Caps” as shorthand for social anarchists and anarcho-capitalists respectively. But then I drifted away from it, mainly because there seemed to be no useful article-of-clothing shorthand for us lefty individualist types in the middle.
Murray Bookchin manifesting deep ideologico-sartorial confusion
But there is! “Mack” (or “Mac,” but I’d prefer to avoid the association with either computers or hamburgers) is an abbreviation for an article of clothing – a Mac(k)intosh raincoat – and also works as an abbreviation for “FMAC,” itself an acronym for Kevin Carson’s phrase “free-market anti-capitalist.”
Okay, it’s a bit less intuitive than “Sock” or “Cap” – but on the other hand it has the advantage that macks are generally worn between socks and caps, which is just where we Macks generally find ourselves – because, y’know, we’re the vital center, while Socks and Caps are bewildered deviationists.
Also, it’s more embarrassing to be caught wearing only socks, or only a cap, than to be caught wearing only a mack – thus reinforcing our dialectical superiority. Plus Zerzanites can denounce all three groups, since Zerzanites don’t approve of clothing of any kind.
Programmable Reality
Progress is a matter of the real world becoming more and more like the internet.
That has the virtue of sloganesque pithiness and the vice of being subject to obvious counterexamples. But I think it captures an important truth. Anarchism, for example, in effect calls for the open-source abundance, multiplicity of choice, and non-hierachical flatness that characterise the internet to be extended to the realms of politics, economics, and law. (And 3-D printing does the same thing for production.)
At a less substantial level, this story about how customers may soon be able to determine which movies are playing at their local meatspace theatres is another example of the same phenomenon.
Who Said This?
The individual is the true reality in life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called “society,” or the “nation,” which is only a collection of individuals. Man, the individual, has always been and necessarily is the sole source and motive power of evolution and progress. Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against “society,” that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship.
Anarchists Under Ron Paul’s Bed
One of the makers of the Anarchism in America video (about which I’ve previously blogged) has a piece up at HoughPough on Ron Paul, Libertarianism, and the Anarchist Connection. Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Ezra Heywood, Angela Heywood, Emma Goldman, Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Karl Hess, and Murray Bookchin all get name-checked.
The friendly words quoted from Bookchin do not reflect his later views (on which I’ve blogged glancingly).
Tolstoj on Self-Ownership
Since the concept of “self-ownership” is usually rejected by social anarchists, it’s interesting to see that at least one, Lëv Tolstoj, embraced the idea. But unlike most self-ownership theorists, Tolstoj invokes self-ownership not as a foundation for property rights to external objects, but on the contrary, precisely to rule out such rights. In his 1886 What is To Be Done? (the second of three famous works by that title), Tolstoj writes:
What then is property?
People are accustomed to think that property is something really belonging to a man. That is why they call it ‘property’. We say of a house and of one’s hand alike, that it is ‘my own’ hand, ‘my own’ house.
But evidently this is an error and a superstition.
I own my beard!
We know, or if we do not know it is easy to perceive, that property is merely a means of appropriating other men’s work. And the work of others can certainly not be my own. It has even nothing in common with the conception of property (that which is one’s own) – a conception which is very exact and definite. Man always has called, and always will call, ‘his own’ that which is subject to his will and attached to his consciousness, namely, his own body. As soon as a man calls something his ‘property’ that is not his own body but something that he wishes to make subject to his will as his body is – he makes a mistake, acquires for himself disillusionment and suffering, and finds himself obliged to cause others to suffer.
A man speaks of his wife, his children, his slaves, and his things, as being his own; but reality always shows him his mistake, and he has to renounce that superstition or to suffer and make others suffer.
In our days, nominally renouncing ownership of men, thanks to money and its collection by Government, we proclaim our right to the ownership of money, that is to say, to the ownership of other people’s labour.
But as the right of ownership in a wife, a son, a slave, or a horse, is a fiction which is upset by reality and only causes him who believes in it to suffer – since my wife or son will never submit to my will as my body does, and only my own body will still be my real property – in the same way monetary property will never be my own, but only a deceiving of myself and a source of suffering, while my real property will still be only my own body – that which always submits to me and is bound up with my consciousness.
Only to us who are so accustomed to call other things than our own body our ‘property’, can it seem that such a wild superstition may be useful, and can remain without consequences harmful to us; but it is only necessary to reflect on the reality of the matter to see that this superstition, like every other, entails terrible consequences. …
What then does property mean? Property is that which belongs to me alone and exclusively, that with which I can always do just what I like, that which no one can take from me, which remains mine to the end of my life and which I must use, increase, and improve.
Each man can own only himself as such property.