libertarian left: ideas and history

[wallflower]

When I came online yesterday I saw that many blogs were posting video of Larry Kudlow--an economist and TV presenter--and quoting him:

The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that.

I had no interest in actually seeing him say that on tape, but his quote make me sick. It's not as if I hadn't heard essentially the same message in the media before, the question on journalist's minds seems to be: "What's this catastrophe going to cost us?" Kudlow's comment made me sick because I've had time to read some accounts of the events unfolding in Japan and more importantly to see photographs and videos. The magnitude of the disaster is staggering, but in photos and videos people are so evident. Unlike the horror the pictures of the changed landscape evoke, the pictures of people inspire a sense of dignity. Kudlow's comments were excruciating.

In leafing through "Understanding Power" at Google books Chomsky had this to say in relation to an anarchist approach to our global environmental predicament:

The interest of the general population is to preserve human life; the interest of corporations is to make profits--those are fundamentally different interests.

Kudlow's comment was so widely offensive because most people identify more strongly with our fellows in Japan coping as best they can in the midst of destruction, than we do corporations. "Well, d'uh!"

Chris Dillow has a post up today "TIME FOR REVOLUTION?" http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2011/03/time-for-revolution.html#comments

I’m thinking of a lack of class consciousness. One manifestation of this is an ignorance of the source of inequality. Bankers' bonuses are routinely ascribed to greed. Such moralizing misses the point - that they arise from power. Whilst anti-Marxists sometimes like to snark that it is workers rather than shareholders who are appropriating wealth, this exemplifies Marx’s more general point - that the powerful exploit the powerless, and that the capitalist economy is only superficially “a very Eden of the innate rights of man.”

John Holloway wants us to oppose this power, but how to resist isn't exactly clear.

Dillow is looking through an economic lens and makes a point which seems to me something like capitalism makes problems, but there are predicaments not entirely caused by capitalism. He cites old people living longer requiring either more savings for old age or longer employment and the relative increase in the cost of education as examples. Richard Falk's list of normative political priorities for th 21st century also make me feel that capitalism or not, the predicaments will be with us.


Dillow poses a question which ought to be asked:

What’s not being asked is: what (if any) forms of economic organization would both develop productive forces/technology and at least ameliorate “the awful rat-race of laboratory rodent-like relationships?”

SEK3 posists a counter economy

The Counter-Economy grows, the statist White Market shrinks and chokes on its own dysfunctional regulation and creativity-draining tax plunder, throughout the West.

That seems a reasonable response, but still leave lots of imagining and doing to make. And Dillow is pointing to the need to do more of that work.

Any way we imagine the counter-economy, or try to imagine other forms of economic organization the current forms of organization will persist. In the debate between Hilary Wainwright and John Holloway my greater sympathies were with Holloway, that is to proceed from the negative. But reading through the exchange found Wainwright more convincing. Clearly it's important to resist, but it seems also important not to resist so much that no positive formulation of economic arrangements is conceivable.

The discussion between Wainwright and Holloway presents the conundrum posed by moving toward potential arrangements along with contemporary arrangements. Wainwright writes:

We can’t stand by and leave political institutions to those who want to be free of the pressures of the power of self-determining citizens. We need to occupy those institutions where we can while at the same time organising to replace them.

Holloway thinks that's taking a wrong turn. I guess Holloway suggests the correct turn is toward a counter-economy like SEK3 or more broadly counter-social arrangements. In either case what to do in the meantime; that is the time before new ways replace the old is hard part. From the debate between Holloway and Wainwright I'm left believing that what's needed is resistance plus building the new.

[vanlose kid]

"The fact is, is that, the lesser of the so called, I should say this, so called "lesser" of the evil is still evil. That's like saying: Would you like to die by hanging or by execution? Our response should be: I choose not to die at all. The word "liberal" as afr as I'm concerned, is like brother Malcolm said, you foxes and your wolves. And the liberals are the foxes. And in this case the so called conservatives or republicans are the wolves. But they both want to devour you." – Larry Pinkney, Black Agenda Report (from the movie).

"If I must choose between the lesser of two evils, I choose neither." – Karl Kraus.

h/t maccruiskeen

*

[vanlose kid]

I've placed this here, instead of the libertarian thread, because it treats authoritarianism in a larger context. And larger contexts sometimes help us to understand their subcomponents.

http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/sevenpersp.html
Seven Perspectives

Although my intuition leads me to believe that there is, ultimately, only one reality -- infinite and eternal -- experience leads me to believe that there are as many views or perspectives of that reality as there are conscious creatures. Each of us has a different genetic inheritance, different health histories, different cultural backgrounds, different upbringings, unique individual experiences... and so on. It is a surprise to me that we agree about the world as much as we do! Even more: Our views of reality change over the years and even from moment to moment as our situations and moods change. It would seem, at first pass, that any attempt to reduce these views or perspectives to a few categories or types would be doomed before it began!

But then, study of the history of ideas and the development of individual minds suggests to me that, perhaps, there are a few clusters we can point to -- complexes of ideas that gravitate to each other, perhaps because they share some logical connectedness that goes beyond individual variation.

The idea of some number of epistemological “types,” “categories,” “stages,” or “levels” is, of course, nothing new. Toynbee, Sorokin, Piaget, Kohlberg, Perry, and many, many others, have put forth their thoughts on the matter -- and I would like to do the same. The following ideas are an extension of my Perspectives Theory and were inspired by the work of Rachel Lauer. To be succinct, I have come to believe that we can separate out seven such perspectives and that we can further organize them into three broader categories as well as into a rough developmental hierarchy.

The autistic perspective

The first perspective I call the autistic. I don’t believe that anyone is ever completely involved in this perspective, but it is best seen in infants, autistic children, and severely psychotic adults. On the other hand, we all slip into this perspective from time to time, most obviously when we are dreaming, but also when we engage in instinctive, automatic, or defensive behavior.

A person taking the autistic view believes that their personal subjective perspective is, in fact, the only perspective, and that, to the extent that the consciousness of others is recognized at all, everyone sees reality this same way. It is, in other words, egocentric and self-oriented, even solipsistic. In infants (and one might presume, in animals), the autistic perspective is one that stays very close to immediate reality as presented by the senses and feelings. In older children and adults, it is likely to include a perfect faith in one’s own construction of reality, including all the differentiations one has learned. In the case of the psychotic, those differentiations might include some very sophisticated constructions developed prior to the slide back into autism.

“Symptoms” of autistic perception and cognition in normal children and adults include ideas of magic, especially magical efficacy, and animism, i.e., the idea that other entities, including animals, plants, and even physical phenomena, also perceive and respond to events as the person does.

The authoritarian perspective

The authoritarian view is a common one -- perhaps the most common one. It is a step above the autistic in that, although it is a subjective view, it takes into account the views of others. In fact, it may be said to absorb the views of others. Developmentally, the simple fact of living among other human beings leads one out of the autistic into the authoritarian. The child must inevitably broaden his or her perspective to encompass that of “significant others,” if only to survive. In most circumstances, this process is enormously simplified by the fact that all of a child's immediate contacts share most of a single social reality.

This is the perspective that most fully accepts social reality. This means, however, that an authoritarian person accepts only one social reality, and understands it as universal. Someone who does not accept the same social reality is seen as either an infant or insane. When the social reality is threatened, either by another social reality or by more immediate experiences, the tendency is for defensive mechanisms to engage, although further epistemological development is another possibility.

Most children, as well as the adults of a primitive, isolated, or highly structured traditional societies, will take this position. There is a tendency to legalistic thinking and an inordinate respect for tradition, even when painful. Further, authoritarians tend to classify events, objects, and even people in pigeon-hole types or categories, with relatively few gradations. And they tend to believe in universal dualities -- black vs white, good vs bad, us vs them... -- with little room for “in between” or “both.”

Both the autistic and the authoritarian views are “subjective“ views, in the sense that they believe in and value the interpretation, whether individual or social, of experience more than the experience itself. In the autistic, the value of events relative to individual needs and desires is more important than truth as some of the higher perspectives would understand it. In the authoritarian, the weight of valuing has simply shifted to the social surround.

In either case, at least when we consider people beyond the infancy stage, there is in addition a particular faith in the power of words, which is in keeping with their attachment to constructed reality.

The rationalistic perspective

The next three perspectives (rationalistic, mechanistic, and cybernetic) together constitute the “objective” views, in contrast to the previous “subjective” ones. They share the idea that truth has an objective existence to be discovered outside of either personal or social realities. Developmentally (and historically) speaking, we see in these objective perspectives an acknowledgement that we may be mistaken, as individuals and as societies.

For this reason alone, it is not surprising that we only see these objective perspectives among the exceptional intellects and the well-traveled of traditional societies, and that these perspectives only become more common in multi-cultural societies, especially the world-spanning cultures of the last few centuries. Even then, these perspectives are not available to everyone, and may very well be defended against. It should also not be surprising that, in modern societies, it is still only the child in the second half of elementary school that begins to exhibit these objectivist qualities.

The rationalistic perspective values reason, logic, technicalities, words, and, if sufficiently sophisticated, mathematics. It is an idealistic perspective in that the objective truth it seeks is held to be contained by the mind. When someone brought up in the authoritarian tradition is exposed to other social realities beyond his or her own, he or she is most likely to begin by seeking commonalities among those social realities, commonalities that inhere in the words and other symbolic approaches of the societies or cultures involved. These are, by nature, psychological or ideal.

Developmentally, the late elementary school child and early adolescent are the best examples, with all their well known tendency to argument and idealism. Historically, the ancient Greeks, most especially Pythagoras and Plato, are the best examples, although Aristotle, with his enormous contributions to logical thought, can hardly be left out. We might also include the rationalists -- Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz -- although much of their philosophies include mechanistic, cybernetic, and higher epistemological qualities. Likewise, Piaget has certain qualities we could call rationalistic, but those are even more supplemented by other, higher perspectives.

The mechanistic perspective

The mechanistic perspective is the perspective we find in classical science: Though not disdainful of logic and mathematics, it views truth as something to be discovered outside the mind, in the world. It is empirical in emphasis rather than rationalistic, and materialistic rather than idealistic. In fact, it tends to denigrate the ideal, even while it seeks universal laws! It, more than the rationalistic or the cybernetic, is the most likely view to condemn subjectivism and to emphatically strive for a pure objectivism. Since the goals of the mechanistic perspective involve independence from all subjectivity, it tends to focus on quantity as the only significant quality, and on cause and effect (even when understood as non-necessary) over all other relations. And these emphases in turn make the mechanistic view notably reductionistic, especially when it addresses psychological phenomena.

The mechanistic view often goes so far as to deny the existence of non-material qualities, even consciousness itself. This is in strong contrast to the rationalistic view, which instead tends to denigrate matter, considering it corrupt or degenerate, and sometimes dismissing it altogether. Unlike the cybernetic and higher perspectives, however, the mechanistic view seems oblivious to the contradictions involved in these denials, the effects of the observer on the observed, and the nature of the scientific approach as an epistemology. This commonly results in a tendency to replace older explanatory structures, without consideration of the possible truths they may contain, with the “religion of science” we might call scientism.

The mechanistic is most likely to be found, in people growing up in a modern society, among adolescents and young adults. It is a youthful, exuberant perspective, with a great deal of power and practical application. Much of the successful side (and some of the dark side) of the modern world is due to mechanistic thinking.

The cybernetic perspective

The cybernetic tends to be the most mature of the three objective views because it requires certain realizations that are rare among rationalistic and mechanistic people: The cybernetic person has fully recognized that the observer influences the observed, that there is no empirical demonstration of the existence of matter, that there is some sort of reality to non-material events, and that the mechanistic understanding of cause and effect is far too limiting -- too linear -- an understanding of relationships.

In some senses, the cybernetic view is a synthesis of the rationalistic and the mechanistic. Accepting both reason and empiricism, and both material and non-material realities, it adopts a philosophy of neutral monism (or similar views such as pluralism or double-aspectism) and a methodology of modeling. The experimental method is now viewed not as a testing of causal connections but as an effort at comparing the functioning of a model with the functioning of the larger reality. Originally, that model was a verbal theory, but as the cybernetic view develops beyond the mechanistic, models begin to include other structures and their processes, the most obvious being the use of computer simulations.

Our own society is being rapidly pulled into the cybernetic perspective, and we can see its impact in the prevalence of systems approaches in all fields of science. We see ecology as a (or is it the?) major approach in biology, a revolution in computer and software design, the cognitive revolution in psychology, and so on. We see everywhere an acknowledgement of the implications of relativity and uncertainty, both in their “physics” senses and their more generalized senses. Perhaps the best sign of the dominance of the cybernetic approach is the use of the word information, which is, pretty clearly, the preferred term for that neutral substance which is neither material nor mental.

In psychology, this cybernetic approach is the newest wave after the collapse of the highly mechanistic behaviorist tradition. There is great pride being taken in the impact that psychology is having on other fields, although the credit may have to go more to linguistics than psychology. Nevertheless, it does seem that many humanistic and social science fields are now more aware of the psychological side of their fields, especially the idea that the observer has a significant impact on the observed -- e.g. that societies and cultures and art and literature and music and so on are “in the eyes of the beholder.”

Even the idea that logic and truth are psychological qualities has become popular. Unfortunately, few seem to recognize that making logic dependent on the individual means there is no true logic at all -- including the logic it took to come to the conclusion that logic is psychological to begin with!

Another criticism of the cybernetic perspective is that, by turning to the neutral substance of information, it has turned away from immediate experienced reality quite completely. Where is truth? In the cybernetic view, it certainly can’t be in the colorful, noisy, warm-blooded, emotional world we experience directly. It must instead be in the cold gray on-off world of information! Even the mechanistic view has its solid material, and the rationalistic world its forms and images.

Although the rationalistic, mechanistic, and cybernetic are rather equal in terms of complexity, they do tend to arise, both historically and in individual development, in the order given. The rationalistic view allows easier transition from the authoritarian valuing of symbols; the mechanistic is the most representative of the three (so perhaps less “contaminated” by authoritarian and epistemic perspectives); and the cybernetic begins to acknowledge the problems that the epistemic attempts to address.

The epistemic perspective

The last two perspectives can best be understood as a synthesis of the subjective views and the objective views. The epistemic approach accepts the immediate experienced reality of individual consciousness as true, yet recognizes that there are as many of these “realities” as there are perceivers. The true, ultimate reality is therefore understood as the sum of all these perspectives, plus much that is unperceived. Unlike the objectivist approaches, which insist that we subtract our subjectivity from our observations to arrive at an ultimate reality much reduced from experience, the epistemic view sees ultimate reality as all views added together, and then some!

The perspective, then, could be labeled intersubjective, rather than subjective or objective, or we could use the term phenomenological. Whatever label we give it, it is accepting of multiple perceived realities and deals well with the difficulties of relativity and uncertainty, yet maintains a “faith” (which is nonetheless founded empirically and rationally) in ultimate reality. If it isn’t yet clear to the reader, this is the perspective adopted by Perspectives Theory itself.

There are, however, some negative points to the epistemic approach: It is, for example, far less “efficient” than the mechanistic or cybernetic approaches, because it tends to shy away from the kind of closure required for action. The epistemic person often has very little need for closure, and will tend to continue to wait for more views on the matter. Although this is may be a virtue in regard to psychological or sociological understanding, it may be an unnecessary drag in technological sciences and issues. In other words, epistemic people may not be terribly practical.

They may also appear authoritarian. Since all views have some value, they may tend to support a particular view, perhaps a minority position, to the point of seeming dogmatic. However, when others begin to see their point, they may very well switch their allegiance to another position. So then they appear indecisive or equivocal, if not argumentative or contrary. There is a lot to be valued here, however: What they are really exhibiting is their openness and tolerance.

The epistemic is rather naturally liberal. Another potential flaw, then, is what I call the liberal fallacy: All alternative perspectives are equally valuable and deserve equal defense. Liberals in all fields often find themselves defending fringe positions and people of unusual, if not psychotic, character. This then undermines their otherwise sophisticated and generous positions on issues. A psychologist, for example, who believes that the schizophrenic’s view of reality must be respected in order to be understood runs the risk of being considered psychotic himself by his colleagues. Likewise, the person of liberal politics may find he or she is supporting the rights of others that he or she would otherwise find quite unsavory. Another way of putting it is that people, in all the previous perspectives, tend to move to a single clear position, even so far as to say “this is the way it is.” The epistemic perspective is the first that tends to avoid such conclusions.

The transcendental perspective

There is one more perspective I can see, even though I’d be the first to admit that I am rarely, if ever, “in” it: the transcendental perspective. It is even more “open,” “impractical,” and “flaky” than the epistemic, from the perspective of most of modern society, although primitive and traditional societies seem more accepting of it. It involves, as the name implies, transcending the multiple perspectives of the epistemic and coming into contact with the ultimate reality. This is done by stripping away constructed reality altogether, through various techniques, most especially meditation, and concentrating on immediate reality. This ultimately involves the diminution of desire and self. That means moving closer and closer to an unconscious state while retaining the ability to retain the experience. In a very real sense, it is a matter of dying -- or almost dying -- and returning to everyday reality with a new perspective on life --- the transcendental perspective!

Since eastern traditions have made quite an impact on the west in the last century or so, quite a number of words have become current as labels for this perspective: satori, buddhahood, enlightenment, nirvana, cosmic consciousness, and so on. A particularly good label is Maslow’s peak experiences, in that it distances the phenomenon from particular religious practices and philosophical points of view, and especially recognizes that the experience is one that normal people can have in their everyday lives, not one only available to monks seated in the lotus position. It describes any experience in which one loses one’s sense of individual separateness and feels instead a strong sense of union with all consciousness, life, the universe, or God.

A couple of things should be made clear about the transcendental perspective: One is that it is, like the autistic, more a direction than a stage. One simply can’t stay there and continue to exist. It is more an attitude that is reinforced by brief and occasional experiences of transcendence. Another is that, by its very nature, the transcendental perspective is not one amenable to much discussion. Words and other symbols are part of the problem of constructed reality, in that we tend to reify them and then think of them as prior to their referents.

So, although words are not in and of themselves an anathema to transcendence, they are potential pitfalls along the path. The very first chapter of the Tao te Ching, for example, warns us that the Tao that can be talked about isn't the true Tao. And Zen warns its students to never mistake the finger that points at the moon for the moon itself.

With those points made, I will take my own advice and cease to discuss the transcendental perspective.

It is a good idea to mention at this point that I am not constructing these perspectives as hard and fast pigeon holes of personality. Each of us operates at all these levels, often simultaneously. In fact, I would suggest that we need to use each of these perspectives at various times. I don’t want to be epistemic when shoveling snow, or authoritarian with a client, or mechanistic with my children. I do want to be autistic in my dreams, transcendental concerning death, and cybernetic with my computer! Nevertheless, there are likely to be perspectives that we are more proficient at, that we use more often, or that we feel more comfortable in. Perhaps we could visual ourselves as a string of pearls, the largest one somewhere in the middle, strung out over the seven perspectives.

I should also point out that I am not thinking of these as static either: We move among these perspectives, and along them to the extent that they have a developmental validity. In fact, as you will see, I believe that a lack of movement is cause for serious concern!

Morality

Each of the seven perspectives has a view of value -- good and bad -- as well, which follows pretty clearly from a perspective’s overall description. For the autistic perspective, good is what pleases oneself, bad what hurts. Morality is a simple, innocent hedonism. The autistic morality is fairly congruent with Piaget's pre-operational morality, Kohlberg’s preconventional level, and Bronfenbrenner’s self-oriented morality.

In the authoritarian view, the good is founded in tradition and in the authoritarian promotion of that tradition. As Sorokin would put it, this is a morality of absolute principles, usually viewed as being handed down to humanity by God. It is similar to Piaget’s concrete operations morality, Kohlberg’s conventional level, Bronfenbrenner’s other-oriented type, and Perry’s authoritarian stage.

The objective views are similar to Piaget’s formal operations morality, Kohlberg’s post-conventional level, and Bronfenbrenner’s objectively-oriented morality. Perry’s term for these perspectives is relativism, which makes a crucial point about values from the objectivist perspective: Since valuing appears to be a subjective thing, the objective approaches, being aware that the individual or societal view is limited and likely biased, tends to be quite confused about values, if they don’t avoid values altogether. The tendency is epitomized by the mechanistic view.

The rationalistic perspective is one that focuses on universal principles. We can see more clearly here why the rationalistic fits best between the authoritarian and the mechanistic: The rationalistic view takes the absolutes of various authoritarian perspectives and seeks the commonalities among them, ultimately to discover what, presumably, any rational person might agree to. There is often the idea, as Sorokin points out, that these ultimate principles come from God, while subordinate principles, accounting for all the varieties of moral systems, come from Man. Note that this is similar to Kohlberg’s stage of universal principles, the sixth and final stage of his system. I place it before the mechanistic view, which is comparable to Kohlberg’s fifth stage, the stage of the social contract.

The mechanistic view is utilitarian, often focused on social contract. As Sorokin puts it, morality is relativistic and founded on man-made principles. In its extreme form, the mechanistic view sees morality as purely subjective and without universality. Moral or value judgments, therefore, are a matter of individual taste or social custom, i.e. relative. At first glance, this may seem rather epistemic, in that the mechanistic sees each person’s moral perspective as equally valid. But if you look closer, you see that they are equally valid in that they are equally empty of meaning! Where there is no God (universal values), anything is permitted! At its worst, the mechanistic view reduces values to material force -- i.e. might makes right, survival of the fittest, and so on.

The cybernetic view of values is, true to form, an interactive one. The impact of the valuer becomes important, and moral judgments are viewed as having contexts. It makes a distinction between relativistic morals and situated morals. It is this view that I think better accounts for the highly moral women that Kohlberg’s student, Carol Gilligan, wrote about. These women, because they kept moral judgments in the context of social expectations, individual pains and pleasures, and so forth, were judged by traditional Kohlberg standards as being of rather low moral development, conventional (authoritarian) if not lower. Instead, I see them as a higher form, approaching the epistemic. However, unlike Gilligan, I see this as more advanced than either universal principles or social contract, and as not at all restricted to women, though certainly more commonly found among them in our society.

The epistemic perspective views moral value as phenomenological, that is, as necessarily involving consciousness, yet having its own ontological reality. That is, good is to be found in the interaction of mind and world, yet is not to be dismissed as therefore somehow unreal -- especially when you consider that all reality, to the extent that we have anything to do with it, is a matter of such interaction! Another way to understand it is to see goodness (and badness) as another real qualitative dimension.

While the great majority of differences between cultures or individuals have nothing to do with moral judgement, other differences are moral. Hence, the epistemic person respects the variety of individual and social perspectives, yet does not shy away from recognizing that some perspectives are better than others. We could say that the good is a direction in which we prefer to move, a direction, perhaps of self-actualization (or even life-actualization), which is quite real, yet which cannot be expressed in the form of absolute universal principles.

In terms of day-to-day choices and decisions, I think this approach works by adopting certain principles as guidelines to action. Hence, the epistemic morality at least functions like Perry’s idea of commitment. It is also similar to the existentialist idea of the project, in which one declares a value system (among other things), and commits oneself to it. However, it should be noted that existentialism -- especially in its Sartrean form -- can be terribly relativistic.

Finally, in the transcendental mode of morality, the good is what is done. It is an expression of one’s intimacy with the universe, with the needs of all life, the desire of all consciousness. The good is an expression, as Spinoza might put it, of God-or-Nature, and we are capable of recognizing it intuitively. Again, I’m only speculating rather than describing when it comes to this perspective.

Development

As mentioned earlier, there is a degree to which these perspectives can be organized from simplest to most mature, even if each view has its situational strengths and weaknesses. Only among the three objective views is there much room for argument. And certainly, if we disregard this taxonomy altogether for a moment, there is a movement towards a richer, more complex, more encompassing understanding of reality throughout life. At least there should be if the person can be said to be healthy and self-actualizing.

Movement towards complexity via continued interaction with the world and adaptation when one’s knowledge fails is an aspect of self-actualization which I call elaboration. We can discern two “moments” in this movement: differentiation and integration.

In childhood, it seems that differentiation dominates. It is really a simple matter of needing to accumulate data before one is even faced with the task of integrating it. So children, from the adult perspective, seem like sponges, absorbing even trivia at astounding rates. There is, of course, a great deal of integration going on as well, but it is not as salient as the simple differentiation.

In adulthood, on the other hand, much of the differentiation our lives require has already been accomplished, and integration becomes more salient, at least in adults that continue to elaborate. And in a rich and complex society such as our own, there is even a great deal of pressure towards integration: Many adults feel a degree of “information overload,” and the reduction and simplification of this overload becomes a strong motivation.

Bringing this back to our taxonomy of perspectives, we can see a rough (and only rough) parallel between the perspectives and developmental ages: The autistic is the stage of infancy; the authoritarian, early childhood; the rationalistic, late childhood; the mechanistic, adolescence; the cybernetic, young adulthood; the epistemic, late adulthood; the transcendental, old age.

Mental Illness

There are innumerable circumstances which lead to a halt or even a reversal in the movement towards elaboration. In the developmental sense, these are a matter of being faced by situations that are too complex to be dealt with, either in terms of differentiation or integration. On a more immediate level, these are situations where knowledge cannot keep up with reality, where anticipation fails, yet adaptation is not immediately possible. Emotionally, we are talking about episodes of fear that are not resolved and so lead to continued anxiety and the defensive maneuvers that may accompany it, as well as long-term sadness and anger (i.e., depression and hostility).

These situations may be a matter of a single traumatic event or long-term problems that could even be rather insignificant were it not for their continuity or repetition. There are certainly physical problems that could have these results, such as the trauma of natural disasters or the long-term effects of chronic illness. Most physical events, however, have been well-covered by the evolution of genetically based physiological mechanisms, and so are fairly well dealt with unless extreme. On the other hand, traumas and continual incongruencies within the social reality are more often than not insufficiently addressed by physiological mechanisms, even to the point of damaging those mechanisms, as in psychophysiological disorders. Because constructed reality is in fact constructed, it is much more likely to contain within it conflicts with immediate experience as well as internal inconsistencies such as the famous “catch 22” or “damned if you do -- damned if you don’t.”

Traumas -- social or physical -- are a fairly simple matter, in the sense that the symptoms (such as phobic responses, compulsive behaviors, specific amnesias, etc.) can usually be directly tied to the traumatic event (although this does not mean they are easily taken care of!). I believe many more of our problems derive from the day-to-day difficulties of dealing with a reality -- especially a social reality -- that is beyond our capacity, that is just a little too complex for us, that is just a bit too chaotic. In fact, I think the term “chaotic environment” may cover the great majority of causes for human unhappiness in modern society, and especially in the less-precisely defined disorders.

In the following examples, it should again be understood that we are talking about an interaction of physical and social environments with specific temperaments as well as specific individual experiences. A “weak” temperament is much more likely to be overwhelmed by traumas or a chaotic environment than is a “strong” one. On the other hand, a “strong” temperament may nevertheless develop certain problems, given strong-enough trauma or chaotic-enough environment. To make things even more complicated, a weak temperament may be compensated for with strong learning experiences, or a strong temperament weakened with inadequate learning.

The autistic disorders

This understood, we can see autistic children and schizophrenic adults as people who have been driven back into an autistic perspective by the complexities or violence of a reality they are not prepared, temperamentally or cognitively, to deal with. Their autistic view is not natural to them, as it might be to an infant, in that they already have a degree of experience with the world, including social reality. It must therefore be supported by a defensive avoidance of difficult situations -- i.e. of situations that they paradoxically need to face and adapt to in order to progress beyond their autistic perspective.

We must always begin where the patient is. So, in the case of the autistic or schizophrenic person, we must begin with their personal reality and the defenses which they use to maintain it. In other words, we must first take great pains to shelter them from perceptions of danger. Only when they feel safe, in an often highly simplified environment, can we begin to gradually introduce the kinds of complexities, in watered down versions, in which they may find the differentiations they need to adapt and move out of their personal world. These differentiations cannot lead in any direct fashion to mature perspectives, but must only be directed at an authoritarian world-view. Ironically, in order to help schizophrenics, we must lead them towards conventionality!

Please keep in mind that this is not a theory of types and categories! “The autistic perspective” as well as “autism” and “schizophrenia” should really be used only with such quotes around them. They are convenient fictions to aid in communications, and should not be reified. In reality, people perceive and behave in certain ways at certain times in certain places with certain others, and each person is a unique entity that defies consistent classification. Thus there are plenty of “intermediate” terms, such as the schizoid personality and paranoia, which should be made use of when we make diagnoses, and we must ultimately rely on detailed description and personal interaction to understand the individual.

The authoritarian disorders

The authoritarian neurotic is a person who retreats from the complexity of life into the authoritarian structures of a social reality. Again, the neurotic is not a child, nor a peasant in some traditional society, so this authoritarian world-view must be supported by defensive mechanisms that help him or her to avoid full recognition of traumas and chaos. Because it is that very complexity that will lead them further towards elaborative development, it is especially the neurotic who is responding to a chaotic environment who will be most broadly effected, while the neurotic responding to specific traumas may well develop further in domains not tied to that of the trauma.

The authoritarian neurotic will tend to exhibit his or her rigid sociality in one of two ways: Depending on such factors as temperament, upbringing, and specific social situation, they will be either aggressive or compliant. Aggressive neurotics, predominantly men (due to both temperament and upbringing), tend to expect others to bend to their will, and are likely to be angry and even violent if their expectations are not met. Compliant neurotics, predominantly women (again, due to both temperament and upbringing), tend to expect to yield to the will of others. They suffer from sadness and spend much of their cognitive time trying to adapt, i.e. trying accept into themselves changes that would be more efficiently accomplished by changing others (most often, the aggressive males they keep company with!).

But please notice that both aggressiveness and compliance change depending on the people you are interacting with: The aggressive man is likely to become quite compliant when faced with a clear social superior; the compliant woman is likely to be quite aggressive towards her children or servants. In a traditional society, these relations operate quite smoothly, with very little overt anger or sadness, and certainly without much sadism or masochism. Among neurotics, the defensive mechanisms change the anxiety that is at the root of the neurosis into anger or sadness, even to the point of sadism and masochism. As Freud pointed out, these are just two sides of the same coin, which is the authoritarian perspective.

To help someone grow out of their authoritarian perspective, one must begin with authority. It is these people that are most influenced by the therapist’s status, and are particularly susceptible to suggestion. The point is to use authority to move the authoritarian beyond the confines of his or her rigid social reality, so that they might recognize the variety of perspectives possible. They are far from being ready to adopt the non-closure attitudes of the epistemic, but they can learn tolerance of others and a habit of looking for the commonalities or the broader view. They must learn to reason independently of social categories, to stop seeing all issues as black and white, to entertain an experimental attitude towards their problems, and to see the complexities of issues -- i.e. to become familiar with rationalistic, mechanistic, and cybernetic views, at least to the extent that they can move beyond their authoritarian rigidity. All this must occur within a very secure environment, one that does not engage their defensive mechanisms.

The rationalistic disorders

When we come to the objectivist views, we find that the person has already dealt with much of the complexity of the world, and is in fact more concerned with integrating what he or she has learned. The rationalistic, however, does still face some chaos and trauma which might lead him or her to fixate at this perspective with defensive thoughts and behaviors. Instead of retreating into rigid social structures like the authoritarian neurotic, however, the rationalistic neurotic retreats into rigid personal structures.

Rationalistic disorders can range from full-blown obsessive-compulsive to anxiety neurosis to compulsive personality, but is best represented by the rather mild but enormously common personality type we could call the perfectionist. Among the qualities perfectionists tend to exhibit are a love of order in their own lives, including neatness and punctuality, and a tendency to foist that order onto others, sometimes to the point that they resemble authoritarian types, except that the order they demand is not so much society’s order, but an order that they feel they themselves best represent -- all this stemming, of course, from their fear of the chaos they see on the horizon.

They may also appear rather narcissistic, especially to the degree that they consider themselves ideal specimens, but again that narcissism isn’t a true autistic one, but rather a defensive reaction to their fears and anxieties. The give-away that they are rationalistic, rather than authoritarian or autistic, is that they consider their rigid structures universal rather than just social mores, while nevertheless being fully aware of the reality of other ways of being. They love logic and reasoning and tend to consider themselves supremely logical whether it is among their talents or not, and consider the lack of logic to be the major flaw of others.

I believe that the best way to help the perfectionist is to reason with him or her. By carefully introducing arguments that lead beyond the rationalistic approach, in such a way as to resolve the issues of chaos that frighten them, they may come to terms with their fears. Some of the approaches, such as Horney’s, Ellis’s, and Raimy's, that emphasize problems of thought or conception, might be more fruitful than others.

Beyond the rationalistic

Once we get beyond the rationalistic, we find ourselves on what we might want to see as a downward arc, involving a preference for integration which may even include a desire for problems, incongruities, paradoxes, and chaos as recognized aids to further development. But, while they are less likely to be frightened, they may very well become confused! We can look at Maslow’s long list of “metapathologies” for inspiration here, or at the literature of alienation.

The kinds of pathologies the mechanistic perspective leaves us most open to are ones that can be traced from the mechanistic view’s tendency to reduce self to physiology, mind to brain, consciousness to epiphenomenon, values to tastes, morals to customs, and truth to opinion. The feeling that nothing is tied down, that nothing, including myself, is real, that the whole world is some kind of illusion -- i.e. depersonalization and derealization -- is very common to this view. So is the sense that everything I do is meaningless, that not much of what I do has any effect anyway, and most especially that there is no right and wrong. With all values relative, perhaps the supreme symptom of mechanistic unhappiness is directionlessness.

The cybernetic perspective may suffer from the same difficulties as the mechanistic, although it is less likely to have problems dealing with the complexities of reality in the first place. However, the “neutral monism” of information that the cybernetic view takes as fundamental is even further removed from the richness of immediate experience than the materialism of the mechanistic view. A complaint we may expect from the cybernetic person is one of emptiness or deadness and the desire to return to a simpler but more sensuous mode of being. Fortunately, with the cybernetic’s capacity for complexity, sensitivity to context, and awareness of the place of the observer, as well as his or her acceptance of a cybernetic, self-guiding value system, it is more likely that the cybernetic person will slip into the epistemic mode on their own.

The epistemic person is least likely to suffer from neuroses or alienation, but most likely to suffer from indecisiveness. One of the most likely pathologies at this level is withdrawal from society and a refusal to be involved. That this is a pathology can be seen in how this contradicts with other epistemic principles, such as responsibility towards others.

But the epistemic’s acceptance of the lack of closure also goes against our basic conservative nature: The mind, with all its anticipation and adaptation and elaboration of knowledge, is geared towards “swallowing the universe,” that is increasing comprehension of reality. It is paradoxical, to say the least, that at the epistemic level, one must give up the possibility of this ideal in order to continue to satisfy our need to accomplish it!

Fortunately, the epistemic is so close to the final transcendent perspective that, even without the insights that transcendence implies, he or she is aware of their potential existence, and so is more likely than any other stage to be encouraged by problems rather than discouraged. The problems of the epistemic view are more likely founded in those other aspects of a person that are fixated at lower levels, and not from the epistemic view itself.

At any of the perspectives beyond the rationalistic, a person with problems is likely to be best helped by a form of therapy that emphasizes their freedom and responsibility, rather than one that demands the following of rules or authority. These people have quite some resources available to them -- reason, habits of experiment, systems analysis, phenomenological observation -- that will serve them to solve their own problems in their own unique fashion, if they are only given encouragement and support. I would suggest that Kellian “homework” might be especially suitable for mechanistic people, systems therapies might be appropriate for cybernetics, and that pure Rogerian or existentialist approaches might be best for epistemics, but each of these suggestions is only that -- a suggestion.

In summary, then, pathology can be considered a matter of getting “stuck” on a curve of epistemological development due to trauma or chaotic environment, and therapy can be considered any technique that, beginning with the client’s present view of things, shelters them enough, supports them enough, and encourages them enough to face the problems, resolve them, and begin to move further in their own elaboration and self-actualization.

Societies

Societies do not have epistemologies; only individuals do. So we should not expect our taxonomy to so neatly reflect societal development as it does personal development. We can, however, place societies on the basis of the level of the mass of a society's people, or at least the level of the power-elite. Permit me to go out on a limb:

1. At the autistic level, we can only expect anarchy moderated by instinct -- something I doubt has ever truly existed in the history of human beings.

2. At the traditional level, we find a large number of societies that Sorokin (1937-1940) calls, perhaps euphemistically, familistic: They tend to be universalistic, have realistic conceptions of the corporate "person" (i.e. the tribe, the state, the race...), tend to assume free will, and take a cyclical view of history. Modern "isms" that might be so characterized include absolute monarchy and fascism.

3. At the rationalistic level (Sorokin calls them "mixed") we might find constitutional monarchy and republicanism, as well as capitalist economics.

4. At the mechanistic level, we have what Sorokin call the contractual: Singularism predominates, as does a nominalistic conception of the corporate "person," a belief in determinism, and a progressive approach to history. Modern "isms" might include federalism, representational democracy, and welfarism.

Beyond this point we run into a problem finding examples or even conceptions.

5. Cybernetic societies, we might predict, should be slightly less efficient and somewhat more person-oriented than the mechanistic societies. We might expect referential democracy, meritocracy (in the best sense), and moderate socialism. Sorokin does mention "harmonism," including a dialectic approach to history, as a higher synthesis of the familistic and the contractual.

6. At the epistemic level, we might expect a decentralized, participatory democracy and a "grass roots" capitalism (communism at its best!). As it should be considerably less efficient than the mechanistic, we can expect its arrival only when the world is safe from physical and economic aggression, and indeed only when others find it in themselves to tolerate such developments.

7. And, finally, the transcendental society would presumably be an anarchy in the most positive sense. I suspect this will forever remain an ideal.

All this said, it should still be understood that all the perspectives, if they are indeed in some way universals, should be represented in all societies, from the most primitive to the most futuristic. Of course, the expression of each perspective will differ tremendously from society to society: The “mechanistic” in a primitive society may be represented by the practical, down-to-earth views of the village craftspeople, the “epistemic” by the leadership skills of a chief, and the “transcendental” by the ritual of the shaman. And perhaps the rationalistic and cybernetic have little meaning for a pre-literate culture.

On the other hand, some of what makes today’s life difficult can also be understood: In a society as complex, pluralistic, and swiftly changing as ours, it may become increasing difficult for many of us to face and transcend the “chaos” of our lives. It is a serious question, I believe, whether more and more of us will suffer from alienation and mental illness as we move into our future. I like to think that speculating on our psycho-social future in this way may help us deal with these problems successfully!

from here: viewtopic.php?p=390646#p390646

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[vanlose kid]

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I'm off-track, still trying to make connections to the topic of this thread--left-anarchism--and Merton. Possibly of interest in re Weil is this essay by Anne Carson, which surely is related to Father Kelty's view if not Merton http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/common_knowledge/v008/8.1carson.html

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... One of the reasons I pointed to the Anne Carson link http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/common_knowledge/v008/8.1carson.html "Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil Tell God" is that a relationship triangle seems an important theme running through the essay.

...

i've been reading and re-reading the Carson piece and i have to say, as a literary conceit in the form of an academic/critical study it probably scores way above average in the cleverness stakes. for it is extremely clever.

as far as substance goes, however, there's very little there. it's an academic curiosum. a piece of mental-literary gymnastics that is, admittedly, finely done. but Carson's "admiration" is a velvet glove inside of which is a condemning fist of steely incomprehension.

as the links are set in the quotes i won't post the piece here, but only some remarks on what Carson, funnily enough in line with the clerics who opposed Margeurite Porete and condemned her to the stake, deemed "problematic" re the three poets/writers on Love, i.e Sappho, Porete, and Weil.

to begin with they are exemplary as individuals, but they are not so when considered as exemplars of an ages old tradition or strain of human thought and more importantly praxis of devotion, or love.

Carson is right is saying that "granted this is a poem all about love, do we need to limit ourselves to a reading of it that is merely or conventionally erotic? After all, Sappho is believed by some historians to have been not just a poet of love and a worshiper of Aphrodite on Lesbos but also a priestess of Aphrodite's cult and a teacher of her doctrines. Perhaps Sappho's poem wants to teach us something about the [End Page 190] metaphysics or even the theology of love. Perhaps she is posing not the usual lovesong complaint, Why don't you love me? but a deeper spiritual question, What is it that love dares the self to do?" – where she goes wrong, or rather falls short, is due to the fact that she herself finds such praxis imcomprehensible, if not reprehensible, because it is "irrational". Viz: "Society is all too eager to pass judgments on the authenticity of women's ways of being but these judgments can get crazy. As a case in point, the book for which Marguerite Porete was burned in 1310 was secretly preserved and copied after her death by clerics who transmitted the text as an anonymous devotional work of Christian mysticism, until 1946 when an Italian scholar reconnected The Mirror with the name of its author. At the same time, it is hard to commend moral extremism of the kind that took Simone Weil to death at the age of thirty-four; saintliness is an eruption of the absolute into ordinary history and we resent that. We need history to be able to call saints neurotic, anorectic, pathological, sexually repressed or fake. These judgments sanctify our own survival (emphasis added)."

i have trouble seeing these women, as the clerics and Carson does, albeit from different viewpoints, as irrational.

the tradition of love is that of the non-theoretical, non-dogmatic, that of the mystic. and the mystic usually speaks in plain terms which the common folk understand in order to circumvent the dogmatism and intermediary power of the clerics/academics.

the main characteristic of the tradition as found in western christian culture is precisely this: that love has no need of intermediaries, that is no need of church authority nor priesthood. no one stands between the lover (Sappho, Porete, Weil) and her love.

if you read these and others of the same school of thought, e.g. the albigensians, Teresa, St. John, St. Francis, etc., you will see that their conception of love completely bypasses clerical authority altogether. and they root this conception in the teaching and praxis of Jesus. here is the connection with the christian anarchists, as expressed in the words of Ammon Hennacy: "The dictionary definition of a Christian is one who follows Christ; kind, kindly, Christ-like. Anarchism is voluntary cooperation for good, with the right of secession. A Christian anarchist is therefore one who turns the other cheek, overturns the tables of the moneychangers, and does not need a cop to tell him how to behave. A Christian anarchist does not depend upon bullets or ballots to achieve his ideal; he achieves that ideal daily by the One-Man Revolution with which he faces a decadent, confused, and dying world."

this "one-(wo)man revolution" is precisely the "moral extremism" that clerics and academics equally find "hard to commend".

in the quote from Hennacy you also find an entirely orthodox, or unorthodox depending on what you identify as orthodoxy, conception of law, as expressed e.g. in the ten commandments which can be summed up in one: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

love, not tolerate. (dissociate love and sexual attraction.) the thing with love is that one cannot force someone to love, nor can one force oneself to do so, but one can will it – it involves self-discipline. and as love is rooted in voluntary consent on one's own part it also implies that one extend the same to all one's neighbors, i.e. fellow human beings – that is turning the other cheek.

one cannot will another to love, yet one can teach it by speaking (as Sappho, Porete, Weil do) of one's own path to love. one can bear witness and no more than this.

this understanding of the commandments is predicated on free will, that is to say choice. that is where love comes in. to love one's neighbor is not to harm him/her, not by way of fear of punishment, fines, imprisonment, but out of love for him/her. this is not law in the "ordinary" or "contemporary" sense of legal statutes, courts, etc.

"thou shalt not lie" is a command, yes, but if you love your fellow human being you, in a sense, "command" yourself not to harm him/her and therefore choose not to lie. you give your consent to the law voluntarily. this is what the mystics mean when they say the law is no longer necessary: that when you love the law is there in what you do. it is not something imposed from the outside but arises naturally as an expression of love.

this understanding is missing in Carson's piece of academic/scholastic analysis. it lacks heart, basically.

as for the three-person trope Carson makes much of, this is a way of expressing what is common and known to every one of us, our inner dialogue with ourselves, between who we are, who take ourselves to be, and who we strive to be. it's merely an expression of this constant daily struggle. – how a poet images this is arbitrary and according to conventions and times and teachings.

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re Tolstoy and christian anarchism, and where i think its roots are to be found in his writings:

Tolstoy's Gospel

By Eric Mader

Leo Tolstoy: The Gospel in Brief
University of Nebraska Press: 215 pp.

Are you acquainted with Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief? At its time, this book virtually kept me alive. . . . If you are not acquainted with it, then you cannot imagine what an effect it can have upon a person. --Ludwig Wittgenstein

With his Gospel in Brief, Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy offered the world his interpretation of Jesus' teachings in the most brazen way possible: by rewriting the four Gospels. Tolstoy justified his work by arguing that the biblical Gospels themselves could not be taken as entirely reliable historical documents, and that therefore getting a correct understanding of Jesus meant sifting and winnowing.

[I]t is a gross error to represent the four Gospels, as is often done, to be books sacred in every verse and every syllable. The reader must not forget that Jesus never Himself wrote a book, as did, for instance, Plato, Philo, or Marcus Aurelius; that He, moreover, did not, as Socrates did, transmit His teaching to informed and literate men, but spoke to a crowd of illiterate men. . . . The reader must not forget that it is the teaching of Christ which may be sacred, but in no way can a certain measure of verses and syllables be so. . . . (20-1)

Tolstoy could not accept the argument that the Scriptures, every verse and syllable, were written under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. In this he agreed with Thomas Jefferson, who also sought a pared down Gospel and reworked the biblical texts to create a new version. But the two men approached the task of "rewriting the Gospels" differently. Oddly, Tolstoy, though closer to orthodoxy than Jefferson, showed less respect for the received biblical text. Jefferson limited himself for the most part to removing passages he considered inauthentic; he left intact the sayings and other material he accepted. Tolstoy rewrote everything, leaving no single passage quite as it appears in the Bible. How could this be justified?

As there is breathtaking human magnitude in Tolstoy's novels, putting him near the rank of Shakespeare, so there's obvious hubris in his attempt to rewrite the Gospels. But Tolstoy was by no means trying to present a "new" version of Jesus, a novelistic character cut to fit his own philosophy. Rather, after much suffering and study, Tolstoy believed he'd discovered the core of Jesus' teaching, the kernel that made sense of the parables as well as Jesus' actions and death. He discovered this through sifting and comparing the accounts and words in the four biblical Gospels. That he decided to write his own version didn't mean, then, that he thought Jesus' message was somehow absent from the biblical Gospels. No, he believed the message was there but was at risk of being missed because the Gospel writers themselves only partly understood it and so, to a degree, misrepresented it.

It is remarkable that Tolstoy's understanding of Jesus' meaning has key elements in common with a group of sayings in the recently discovered Gospel of Thomas. Though the debate is far from settled, and will most likely never be settled, many scholars believe the sayings in Thomas have as decent a chance of authenticity as the sayings in the New Testament. Since Thomas was only discovered mid-20th century, however, Tolstoy could have known nothing about it. Yet Jesus as presented in The Gospel in Brief is in crucial respects similar to the Jesus we hear in Thomas. One might argue that the two have more in common with each other than either does with Jesus as found in any of the canonical Gospels.

As with Thomas, Tolstoy's Jesus stresses that the Kingdom of the Father is latent in the world already: it is not to be waited for as something God will inaugurate in some future time or place. Here is Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas:

If your leaders say to you, "Look! The Kingdom is in the sky!" then the birds will be there before you are. If they say that the Kingdom is in the sea, then the fish will be there before you are. Rather, the Kindgom is within you and it is outside of you. When you understand yourselves you will be understood. And you will realize that you are Sons of the living Father. If you do not know yourselves, then you exist in poverty and you are that poverty. (Saying 3)

Here is Tolstoy's Jesus:

[T]he kingdom of God is on earth, and . . . he who makes an effort can enter into it.

And the orhtodox came to Jesus, and began asking him: "How, then, and when will the kingdom of God come?" And he answered them: "The kingdom of God which I preach is not such as former prophets preached. They said that God would come with divers visible signs, but I speak of a kingdom of God, the coming of which may not be seen with the eyes. And if anyone shall say to you, 'See, it is come, or it shall come,' or, 'See, it is here or there,' do not believe them. The kingdom of God is not in time, or in place, of any kind. It is like lightning, seen here, there, and everywhere. And it has neither time nor place, because the kingdom of God, the one which I preach, is within you. (61-2)

Of course these sentences from Tolstoy are a reworked version of what we find in Luke, and so cannot be particularly unorthodox. In Luke we read:

Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, "The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, 'Here is it,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you."

Then he said to his disciples, "The time is coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it. Men will tell you, 'There he is!' or 'Here he is!' Do not go running after them. For the Son of Man in his day will be like the lightning which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other." (Luke 17:20-25)

But beyond considerations on the time and place of the Kingdom, Thomas and Tolstoy share other crucial theological or christological assertions: first, that the Kingdom announced by Jesus is to be entered while one still lives on the earth; second, that one must make an effort to enter the Kingdom (it is not gained "by grace through faith"); third, that Jesus himself is not in essence different from any other person who might realize or enter the Kingdom. Thomas is slightly more ambiguous on this last point, but Tolstoy makes it very clear: Jesus considered himself a man with a special relationship to the Father who sought to awaken other men to the same relationship to the Father, a relationship which, he would insist, they already had in potential. In Tolstoy's version, the title "Son of man" is not one Jesus applies only to himself, but is a name for the spiritual core of each individual: that part which is awoken to life when one serves the will of the Father. Tolstoy's thinking here approaches Gnostic formulations of the heavenly "spark" at man's core, only in Tolstoy the spark is not understood as "trapped" here on earth as a result of some cosmic Fall, but is rather the divine gift of life God gives us:

For no man has ever gone up to heaven, but there is only man on earth, come down from heaven, and himself of heaven. Now this same heavenly Son in man it is that must be lifted up, that everyone may believe in him and not perish, but may have heavenly life. For God gave His Son, of the same essence as Himself, not for men's destruction, but for their happiness. He gave him in order that everyone might have life without end. For He did not bring forth His Son, this life, into the world of men in order to destroy the world of men; but He brought forth His Son, this life, in order that the world of men might be made alive through him. (63-4)

Tolstoy's interpretation of the "Christ" is parallel with his concept of the "Son of man":

And one of the orthodox said: "Teacher, what, in your opinion, is the chief commandment of the whole law?"

The orthodox thought that Jesus would get confused in the answer about the law. But Jesus said: "It is, to love the Lord with all one's soul, in whose power we are. From it the second commandment follows, which is, to love one's neighbor. Because the same Lord is in him. And this is the substance of all that is written in all your books."

And Jesus said further: "In your opinion, what is Christ? Is he someone's son?" They said: "In our opinion, Christ is the son of David." Then he said to them: "How, then, does David call Christ his Lord? Christ is neither son of David, nor anyone's son after the flesh; but Christ is that same Lord, our Ruler, whom we know in ourselves as our life. Christ is that understanding which is in us." (171-2)

Such teaching is of course heresy in any orthodox church, and Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief is heretical on many points. Yet I wouldn't for this reason discourage Christian readers, of whatever denomination, from reading it. Quite the contrary. Tolstoy's version of the Gospels opens up new possibilities of interpretation: angles that will add to one's understanding of Jesus even if one disagrees with Tolstoy on many of the essentials.

Clearly Tolstoy's rewriting is not done as if to say, "This is how Jesus must have said it." Tolstoy knows he cannot know exactly what Jesus said. Rather he rewrites and rearranges the material so as to bring forward an interpretation. To show the importance of a specific parable or saying, for example, he will put it in a particular context, one intended to shed new light on it. Often, in this procedure, I would judge him to be successful. Sometimes he is not. Readers who know the Gospels well will recognize Tolstoy's novel use of sayings in the following characteristic passage:

You cannot judge, because you, all men, are blind, and do not see the truth. How, with obstructed eyes, will you discern the mote in your brother's eye? You must first clear your own eye. But whose eyes are clear? Can a blind man lead a blind man? Both will fall into the pit. Thus, also, they who judge and punish, like the blind, are leading the blind.

They who judge and condemn people to violent treatment, wounds, maiming, death, wish to teach people. But what else can come from their teaching, than that the pupil will learn his lesson, and will become quite like the teacher? What, then, will he do, when he has learnt his lesson? The same as the teacher does: violence, murder.

And do not think to find justice in the courts. To seek legal justice, to hand matters over to human courts, is the same as to cast precious pearls before swine; they will trample upon them, and tear you to pieces. (78)

This passage is characteristic both in its success and failure. The discourse moves logically; Jesus' point about human courts and judgment is here stated more trenchantly and completely than in Matthew (if indeed we can even call this Jesus' point). Yet I do not find the use of the saying about casting pearls before swine to be as effective as its use by the biblical writers. Also, there is a flatness in the wording of the saying regarding the mote in one's brother's eye. The biblical version is stronger.

The weaknesses in this passage raise two issues, one a matter of accident, the other more substantial. The first issue is that of the translation, which, although I can't personally compare it to the Russian, is wooden and often awkward. Certainly Isabel Hapgood's English is not an accurate reflection Tolstoy's Russian. The man who wrote Anna Karenina could never have written sentences like many one finds in this volume. The English is stylistically weak.

The second concerns the very style of Jesus' teaching, and how Tolstoy, by changing it, perhaps to a degree undermines it. Jesus spoke in parables for a reason, and his sayings were most likely preserved as sayings (logia) because that is how his teaching was remembered. Jesus was almost certainly a master of irony and gnomic utterance. There is a terseness and mystery to the figure we encounter in the Gospels, especially in the (more authentic) first three Gospels. Jesus' parables, especially those about the Kingdom, do not reveal themselves easily, if at all. Yet in Tolstoy's version Jesus typically tells the parable, then explains it at length, which then leads to further discourse or the next parable. Disciples or others ask one sentence questions and Tolstoy's Jesus responds with a handful of paragraphs. There's a sense in which Tolstoy's title The Gospel in Brief is incorrect.

Again rather like the Gospel of Thomas, in The Gospel in Brief the teaching is all. Whereas in the biblical Gospels Jesus' actions are as important as his words, in Tolstoy's version very little happens: the text is almost entirely a matter of lecturing. The writer begins with the birth and temptations in the desert and ends with the crucifixion, but there's nothing in terms of the many healings. Perhaps Tolstoy avoids narrating the miracles (and this will irk many Christians) because he doesn't really believe in them, or perhaps it's because he simply wants to focus on the teaching. This is how he explains it in his introduction:

These passages are omitted in this abridgement, because, containing nothing of the teaching, and describing only events which passed before, during, or after the period in which Jesus taught, they complicate the exposition. However one takes them, under any circumstance, they bring to the teaching of Jesus neither contradiction nor confirmation of its truth. Their sole significance for Christianity was that they proved the divinity of Jesus Christ for him who was not persuaded of this divinity beforehand. But they are useless to one whom stories of miracles are powerless to convince, and who, besides, doubts the divinity of Jesus as evidenced in His teaching. (20)

It is hardly necessary to point out how wrong Tolstoy is in writing that the miracles "[contain] nothing of the teaching." But I believe he is right to assert that the miracles are "useless to one whom stories of miracles are powerless to convince." In fact there are many modern men and women who are kept from considering Jesus' teaching because they immediately react negatively to the stories of miracles. Offended that so many around them should believe such things, they get it in their head, without even studying it, that the whole of Jesus' teaching must be offensive. Perhaps if they approached the teaching first, studying it as a teaching about the Spirit and humanity, about humanity's place in relation to God and the (always potential) Kingdom of God, they may find much more in Christianity than they expected.

Finally there is something compelling in the way Tolstoy's vision makes such clear sense out of the most basic concepts of Jesus' teaching: God the Father, the Kingdom, the imperative of love and forgiveness, the imperative of humility, the imperative to give one's life for others. To bring out his sense of the spiritual light in the Gospels is his goal, as he states in his introduction:

The source of the Christian teaching is the Gospels, and there I found the explanation of the spirit which animates the life of all who really live. But along with the flow of that pure, life-giving water I perceived much mire and slime unrightfully mingled therewith . . . .
. . . despite the false commentaries of the Churches . . . when I reached the source of light I was dazzled with its splendor . . . . (23)

Tolstoy's work is written then in service to the light he has perceived and against "the false commentaries of the Churches." This anti-ecclesial edge is evident in his choice throughout not to characterize Jesus' antagonists as "Pharisees" or by any of the other Jewish sectarian names but by the words "orthodox teachers" or "orthodox leaders." In fact, in a departure which I at least find excessive, he doesn't use the word "synagogue" where the Gospels do but replaces it on occasion by "church." Tolstoy certainly saw this as a way to make his point that Jesus struggled against the same kind of religious legalism and obscurantism that could be found in his contemporary Russia. But it is surely going too far.

Jesus inaugurated something new, as the saying of the new wineskins and much else in Christian scriptures make clear. But where the Gospels as a whole imply a two-part movement to the new dispensation--first, that men must repent, because, second, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand as something that will soon overturn the earth from the outside: a sudden divine intervention in the form of a Day of Judgment--Tolstoy's stress is on humanity and how this newness of the Kingdom must be brought about in the hearts of men and women.

When Philip knew Jesus, he went and found his brother Nathanael, and said to him: "We have found the chosen of God, of whom the prophets and Moses wrote. This is Jesus, the son of Joseph, from Nazareth." . . . Nathanael went with his brother, and met Jesus; and, when he had heard him, he said to Jesus: "Yes, now I see that this is true, that you are the Son of God and the King of Israel." Jesus said to him: "Learn something more important than that. Henceforth heaven is opened, and people may be in communion with the forces of heaven. Henceforth God will no longer be separate from men." (42-3)

And why can the Kingdom of Heaven be "opened" to people? Why is there no longer a separation? According to Tolstoy, it is not no much because the blood sacrifice of the Christ has redeemed our sins and opened a bridge over which we might enter Heaven. Rather it is because, already at the heart of man, there is something that precedes creation and the fall, something that men must realize (here in the double sense of know and bring about). This is what Jesus announces, what Tolstoy calls the Son of man. As Tolstoy's Jesus prays it in the Garden of Gethsemane:

Thy understanding is the truth, My Father! I wish them to be as I am; to understand as I do, that the true life began before the beginning of the world. (200)

Does Tolstoy intend to say by this that the spirit in man is uncreated? If so, it would mean in effect that any man would be able to say, along with Jesus in the Gospel of John: "Before Abraham was, I am." Again Tolstoy parallels ancient Gnosticism. For the Gnostics, to know this kind of being, this uncreated "I am," was a necessary precondition of knowing and entering the Kingdom. Another passage in The Gospel in Brief suggests the same interpretation:

[Jesus said:] "Your orthodox teachers go about everywhere, and compel people to swear and vow that they will fulfill the law. But by this they only pervert people, an dmake them worse than before. It is impossible to promise with one's body for one's soul. In your soul, God is; therefore people cannot promise for God to men." (165-6)

God is in the soul of man. Man has a divine element in him. These passages and much else in The Gospel in Brief may be seen to lower the status of Jesus as the unique Son of God. Of course one might also insist that they don't lower the status of Jesus so much as raise the potential status of those who would realize the Kingdom. Doesn't the biblical Jesus also perhaps imply a similar potential?

Then the disciples came to Jesus in private and asked, "Why couldn't we drive [the demon out of the boy]?"
He replied, "Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you." (Matthew 17:19-20)

Humanity has the power, if only it had the faith.

One should note that although there are parallels between Tolsoy's thinking and ancient Gnosticism, Tolstoy cannot really be called a Gnostic, at least not in the classical sense, because he does not subscribe to the doctrine of a flawed demiurgic creation. Tolstoy's cosmos is not the scene of disaster it is for most of the ancient Gnostics.

Tolstoy's understanding of the End Times is also formulated in terms of the teaching and its reception among men, rather than in terms of a particular divine Judgment Day:

And Jesus said: "I tell you truly, the whole of this temple, with all its embellishments, shall be destroyed, and nothing shall remain of it. There is one temple of God; that is, the hearts of men when they love each other."
And they asked him: "When shall there be such a temple?"
And Jesus said to them: "That will not be soon. People will yet long be deceived in the name of my teaching, and wars and rebellions will be the result. And there will be great lawlessness, and little love. But when the true teaching shall spread among all men, then will be the end of evil and temptations." (174-5)

Does Tolstoy's Jesus teach that the coming of the Kingdom is entirely a matter of something that happens in humanity itself? I don't believe so. I would say that here the Kingdom is a matter of a relationship that comes about between humanity and God--that the Kingdom comes when humanity realizes in itself the will of the Father.

Serious students of the Gospels, especially those who consider Jesus' teaching a matter of revelation, will find much to challenge and fascinate them in this book. How Tolstoy's Jesus might relate to the real Jesus is a complex question, one we probably will never be able to answer. Was the "historical Jesus" more like the man we find in Matthew or the man we find in The Gospel in Brief? I myself would vote for Matthew. Even so, Tolstoy's burning need to find the truth combined with his genius as interpreter of humanity illuminate this work with flashes of undeniable insight. There are instances where he may indeed have found out Jesus' deeper meaning. And isn't this struggle to interpret Jesus one of the great tasks tradition has given us?

August 2007

http://www.necessaryprose.com/tolstoysgospel.htm

*

[82_28]

Leo Tolstoy: The Gospel in Brief
University of Nebraska Press: 215 pp.

You know what the "N" on the Nebraska football helmet stands for don't you?

Knowledge. (old growing up in Colorado joke)

Sorry. Great bit there and thanks for sharing. I'm sending it to my dad now as I am getting him into gnosticism and linux at the same time. I think he's just stoked I don't "hate" Jesus anymore.

[vanlose kid]

... gnosticism and linux ...

*

[vanlose kid]

The contention that Americans are culturally anarchistic deserves further discussion.

Anecdotally, I have found the contrary to be true.

Acquiescence to a coercively authoritarian government isn't an anarchistic attribute, IMO.

picking up on this: americans, the americas, etc. there are many americas, and the one front and center in the media and academia isn't the sole existing "version". american history as officially recorded isn't the sole history. these "other" americans also have descendants, in flesh and in spirit.

Pirate Utopias
Under the Banner of King Death


from Our Own Correspondent

"In an honest Service, there is thin Commons, low Wages, and hard Labour; in this, Plenty and Satiety, Pleasure and Ease, Liberty and Power; and who would not ballance Creditor on this Side, when all the Hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sower Look or two at choaking. No, a merry Life and a short one shall be my Motto" - Pirate Captain Bartholomew Roberts.(1)

During the 'Golden Age' of piracy in the 17th and 18th centuries, crews of early proletarian rebels, dropouts from civilization, plundered the lucrative shipping lanes between Europe and America. They operated from land enclaves, free ports; 'pirate utopias' located on islands and coastlines as yet beyond the reach of civilization. From these mini-anarchies - 'temporary autonomous zones' - they launched raiding parties so successful that they created an imperial crisis, attacking British trade with the colonies, and crippling the emerging system of global exploitation, slavery and colonialism.(2)

We can easily imagine the attraction of life as a sea-rover, answerable to no-one. Euro-American society of the 17th and 18th centuries was one of emergent capitalism, war, slavery, land enclosures and clearances; starvation and poverty side-by-side with unimaginable wealth. The Church dominated all aspects of life and women had few options beyond marital slavery. You could be press-ganged into the navy and endure conditions far worse than those experienced on board a pirate ship: "Conditions for ordinary seamen were both harsh and dangerous - and the pay was poor. Punishments available to the ship's officers included manacling, flogging and keel-hauling - the victim being pulled by means of a rope under the hull of the ship from one side to the other. Keel-hauling was a punishment which often proved fatal."(3) As Dr. Johnson famously observed: "no man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in jail with the chance of being drowned... A man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company."(4)

In opposition to this, pirates created a world of their own making, where they had "the choice in themselves" - a world of solidarity and fraternity, where they shared the risks and the gains of life at sea, made decisions collectively and seized their life for themselves in the present, denying its use to the merchants as a tool for the accumulation of dead property. Indeed, Lord Vaughan, Governor of Jamaica, wrote: "These Indyes are so Vast and Rich, And this kind of rapine so sweet, that it is one of the hardest things in the World to draw those from it which have used it for so long."(5)

The Rise of Piracy

The era of Euro-American piracy is ushered in by the discovery of the New World and the enormous empire seized by the Spanish in the Americas. New technologies allowed long sea voyages to be made with regularity and accuracy, and the new empires that emerged were not based so much on control of the land as control of the seas. The Spanish were the world superpower of the 16th century, but did not go unchallenged for long; the French, Dutch and English all struggled to overtake the Spanish in the scramble for empire. In their quest to do so they were not above using piracy to attack the hated Spanish and fill their coffers with the vast wealth the Spanish had plundered from the Native Americans. In wartime this raiding would be legitimised as legal privateering but the rest of the time it was simply piracy with state-sponsorship (or at least toleration and encouragement). Over the course of the 17th century these embryonic empires finally overtook the Spanish and established themselves. With the new technologies shipping was no longer just used for luxury goods but became the basis of an international trading network essential to the origin and growth of capitalism. The massive expansion of sea-borne trade in this period necessarily also created a large population of seafarers - a new class of wage-workers that had not previously existed. For many of them piracy seemed an attractive alternative to the harsh realities of the merchant service or the navy.

But as the new empires - especially the British Empire - matured, attitudes to piracy changed: "The roistering buccaneer did not suit the hard-headed merchants and imperial bureaucrats, whose musty world of balance sheets and reports came into violent conflict with that of the pirates." The ruling class recognised that stable, orderly, regular trade served the interests of a mature imperial power far better than piracy. So piracy was forced to evolve in the late 17th and early 18th century. Pirates were no longer state-sponsored gentleman-adventurers like Sir Francis Drake but dropout wage slaves, mutineers, a multi-ethnic melting pot of rebellious proles. Where there had once been a blurring of the edges between legitimate commercial activity and piracy, now pirates found they had few of their old friends left and were increasingly regarded as "Brutes, and Beasts of Prey." As mainstream society rejected the pirates, they likewise became increasingly antagonistic in their rejection of it. From this point onwards the only pirates were those who explicitly rejected the state and its laws and declared themselves in open war against it. Pirates were driven further away from the centres of power as the American colonies, originally beyond state control and relatively autonomous, were brought into the mainstream of imperial trade and governance. There developed a deadly spiral of increasing violence as state attacks were met with revenge from the pirates leading to greater state terror.(6)

[IMAGE]

"a dunghill wheron England doth cast forth its rubbish"

The Caribbean islands in the second half of the 17th century were a melting pot of rebellious and pauperised immigrants from across the world. There were thousands of deported Irish, Liverpool beggars, Royalist prisoners from Scotland, pirates caught on the English high seas, highwaymen caught on the Scottish borders, exiled Huguenots and Frenchmen, outlawed religious dissenters and the captured prisoners of various uprisings and plots against the King.

The proto-anarchist revolutionary movements of the Civil War of the 1640s had been suppressed and defeated by the time of the dawn of the great age of piracy in the late 17th century but there is good evidence to show that some of the Diggers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchy Men etc. fled to the Americas and the Caribbean where they inspired or joined these insurrectionary pirate crews. Indeed, a group of pirates settled in Madagascar at a place they had "given the name of Ranter Bay."(7) After the defeat of the Levellers in 1649, John Lilburne offered to lead his followers to the West Indies, if the government would foot the bill. It also seems that the Ranters and Diggers lasted longer in the Americas than in Britain - as late as the 1690s there were reported to be Ranters in Long Island. This isn't surprising really as the New World territories were used by Britain as penal colonies for its discontented and rebellious poor. In 1655 Barbados was described as "a dunghill wheron England doth cast forth its rubbish." Among these undesirables there would have been numbers of radicals - those who had provided the spark for the revolution of 1640. "Perrot, the bearded ranter who refused to doff his hat to the Almighty, ended up in Barbadoes," as did many others such as the Ranter intellectual Joseph Salmon. That the Caribbean had become a haven for radicals did not go unnoticed: in 1656 Samuel Highland advised Parliament not to sentence the Quaker heretic James Nayler to transportation lest he infect other settlers. It was clear at this time that the new British colonies to the west were seen as a haven of relative religious and political liberty; that much further beyond the grasp of law and authority.(8)

Before European merchants discovered the African slave trade and the commercial possibilities of shipping Africans to the Caribbean, thousands of poor and working class Europeans were shipped to the new colonies as indentured servants - effectively a slave trade of its own. The only difference between the trade in indentured servants and the African slave trade was that in theory the slavery of these immigrants was not considered eternal and hereditary. However, many were tricked and their contracts extended indefinitely so they never won their freedom. Slaves, a lifetime investment, were often treated better than the indentured servants.(9)

However, the masters had great difficulty holding on to their servants who tended to go native and abscond to the freedom of the myriad islands of the Antilles, or to isolated bits of coastline or jungle. Here they often formed little self-governing bands or tribes of dropouts and runaways, in many ways mimicking the native peoples before them. These men - sailors and soldiers, slaves and indentured servants, formed the basis for the Caribbean piracy that emerged in the 17th century - maintaining their egalitarian tribal structure even when at sea. As their numbers grew and more men flocked to the red flag, their attacks on the Spanish became more audacious. After a raid they would make for a city like Port Royale in Jamaica, to spend all their money in one great binge of whoring, gambling and drinking before returning to their hunter-gatherer existence on out of the way islands.(10)

There were also of course up to 80,000 black slaves working on the plantations who were prone to frequent and bloody revolts, as well as the last few remaining indigenous Indian inhabitants of the islands. In 1649 a slave rebellion on Barbados coincided with a white servants' uprising. In 1655, following a common pattern, the Irish joined with the blacks in revolt. There were similar rebellions in Bermuda, St. Christopher and Montserrat, whilst in Jamaica transported Monmouthite rebels united with 'maroon' Indians in revolt. This hodge-podge of the dispossessed were described in 1665 as "convict gaol birds or riotous persons, rotten before they are sent forth, and at best idle and only fit for the mines." To which a lady colonist of Antigua added "they be all a company of sodomists." This was the seething multi-racial hotbed of anger and class tension into which our transported or voluntarily exiled Ranters, Diggers and Levellers would have arrived and out of which the great age of Euro-American piracy took shape with the emergence of the buccaneers in the Caribbean around the middle of the 17th century.(11)

Arrgh, Jim Lad!

The overwhelming majority of pirates were merchant seamen who elected to join the pirates when their ships were captured, although a small number were mutineers who had collectively seized their ship. "According to Patrick Pringle's Jolly Roger, pirate recruitment was most successful among the unemployed, escaped bondsmen, and transported criminals. The high seas made for an instantaneous levelling of class inequalities."

Many pirates displayed a fine sense of class consciousness; for example, a pirate named Captain Bellamy made this speech to the captain of a merchant vessel he had just taken as a prize. The captain of the merchant vessel had just declined an invitation to join the pirate crew:

"I am sorry they won't let you have your Sloop again, for I scorn to do any one a Mischief, when it is not for my Advantage; damn the Sloop, we must sink her, and she might be of Use to you. Tho', damn ye, you are a sneaking Puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by Laws which rich Men have made for their own Security, for the cowardly Whelps have not the Courage otherwise to defend what they get by their Knavery; but damn ye altogether: Damn them for a Pack of crafty Rascals, and you, who serve them, for a Parcel of hen-hearted Numskuls. They villify us, the Scoundrels do, when there is only this Difference, they rob the Poor under the Cover of Law, forsooth, and we plunder the Rich under the Protection of our own Courage; had you not better make One of us, than sneak after the Arses of those Villains for Employment?"
When the captain replied that his conscience would not let him break the laws of God and man, the pirate Bellamy continued:

"You are a devilish Conscience Rascal, damn ye, I am a free Prince, and I have as much Authority to make War on the whole World, as he who has a hundred Sail of Ships at Sea, and an Army of 100,000 Men in the Field; and this my Conscience tells me; but there is no arguing with such sniveling Puppies, who allow Superiors to kick them about Deck at Pleasure."(12)
Piracy was one strategy in an early cycle of Atlantic class struggle. Seamen also used mutiny and desertion and other tactics in order to survive and to resist their lot. Pirates were perhaps the most international and militant section of the proto-proletariat constituted by 17th and 18th century sailors. There were, for example, some hardcore trouble-makers like Edward Buckmaster, a sailor who joined Kidd's crew in 1696, who had been arrested and jailed a number of times for agitation and rioting, or Robert Culliford, who repeatedly led mutinies, seizing the ship he was serving on and turning pirate.(13)

During wartime, due to the demands of the navy, there was a great shortage of skilled maritime labour and seamen could command relatively high wages. The end of war, especially Queen Anne's War, which ended in 1713, cast vast numbers of naval seamen into unemployment and caused a huge slump in wages. 40,000 men found themselves without work at the end of the war - roaming the streets of ports like Bristol, Portsmouth and New York. In wartime privateering provided the opportunity for a relative degree of freedom and a chance at wealth. The end of war meant the end of privateering too, and these unemployed ex-privateers only added to the huge labour surplus. Queen Anne's War had lasted 11 years and in 1713 many sailors must have known little else but warfare and the plundering of ships. It was commonly observed that on the cessation of war privateers turned pirate. The combination of thousands of men trained and experienced in the capture and plundering of ships suddenly finding themselves unemployed and having to compete harder and harder for less and less wages was explosive - for many piracy must have been one of the few alternatives to starvation.(14)

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

Having escaped the tyranny of discipline aboard merchant vessels the most striking thing about the organisation of pirate crews was their anti-authoritarian nature. Each crew functioned under the terms of written articles, agreed by the whole crew and signed by each member. The articles of Bartholomew Roberts' crew begin:

"Every Man has a Vote in Affairs of Moment; has equal Title to the fresh Provisions, or strong Liquors, at any Time seized, and may use them at Pleasure, unless a Scarcity make it necessary, for the Good of all, to vote a Retrenchment."(15)

Euro-American pirate crews really formed one community, with a common set of customs shared across the various ships. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity thrived at sea over a hundred years before the French Revolution. The authorities were often shocked by their libertarian tendencies; the Dutch Governor of Mauritius met a pirate crew and commented: "Every man had as much say as the captain and each man carried his own weapons in his blanket." This was profoundly threatening to the order of European society, where firearms were restricted to the upper classes, and provided a stark contrast to merchant ships where anything that could be used as a weapon was kept under lock and key, and to the navy where the primary purpose of the marines stationed on naval vessels was to keep the sailors in their place.(16)

Pirate ships operated on a 'No Prey, No Pay' basis, but when a vessel was captured the booty was divided up by a share system. This sort of share system was common in mediaeval shipping, but had been phased out as shipping became a capitalist enterprise and sailors wage labourers. It still existed in privateering and whaling but pirates developed it into its most egalitarian form - there were no shares for owners or investors or merchants, there was no elaborate hierarchy of wage differentiation - everyone got an equal share of the booty and the captain usually only 1 or 1 1/2 share. The wreck of Sam Bellamy's pirate ship the Whydah, which was discovered in 1984, provides good evidence of this - among the artefacts recovered was rare West African gold Akan jewellery which "had been hacked apart with clear knife marks, which suggested that there had been an attempt to divide it equally."(17)

The harshness of life at sea made mutual aid into a simple survival tactic. The natural solidarity of fellow tars was carried over into pirate organisation. Pirates often went into 'consortship' with one another, where if one died the other got his property. Pirate articles also commonly included a form of mutual aid where injured shipmates unable to participate in the fighting would receive their share as a pension. Pirates took this sort of solidarity very seriously - at least one pirate crew compensated their wounded only to discover they had nothing left. From the articles of Bartholomew Roberts' crew: "If... any Man should lose a Limb, or become a Cripple in their Service, he was to have 800 Dollars, out of the publick Stock, and for lesser Hurts, proportionably." And from those of George Lowther's crew: "He that shall have the Misfortune to lose a Limb, in Time of Engagement, shall have the Sum of one hundred and fifty Pounds Sterling, and remain with the Company as long as he shall think fit."(18)

Pirate captains were elected and could be de-elected at any time for abuse of their authority. The captain enjoyed no special privileges: He "or any other Officer is allowed no more [food] than another man, nay, the Captain cannot keep his Cabbin to himself." Captains were deposed for cowardice, cruelty and revealingly, for refusing "to take and plunder English Vessels" - the pirates had turned their backs on the state and its laws and no lingering feelings of patriotism were to be allowed. The captain only had right of command in the heat of battle, otherwise all decisions were made by the whole ship's company. This radical democracy was not necessarily very efficient; often pirate ships tended to wander rather aimlessly as the crew changed its mind.(19)


The crew of Thomas Anstis ridicule the law by holding a mock trial. The judge, using an old tarpaulin as a robe and a mop-end as a wig, sits in a mangrove tree and declares: "I'll have you know, Raskal, we don't sit here to hear Reason - we go according to Law."

The original buccaneers had called themselves the 'brethren of the coast' - an apt term as pirates swapped ships, met up at rendez-vous points, joined together with other crews for combined raids and met up with old ship mates. Although it might seem surprising that over the whole expanse of the world's oceans the pirates kept in touch and met up with each other, they continually returned to the various 'free ports' where they were welcomed by black market traders who would buy their goods. Pirate crews recognised each other, didn't attack each other and often worked together in large fleets. For example in 1695 the crews of Captains Avery, Faro, Want, Maze, Tew and Wake all met up for a combined raid on the annual Muslim pilgrim fleet to Mecca, the six ships containing at least 500 men. They also met up and had parties together; like the "saturnalia" when the crews of Blackbeard and Charles Vane joined forces on North Carolina's Ocracoke Island in 1718 (see picture on page 71). There is even evidence that there was a unique pirate language, which is a real sign the pirates were evolving their own distinct culture. Philip Ashton, who spent sixteen months among pirates in 1722-3, reported that one of his captors "according to the Pirates usual Custom, and in their proper Dialect, asked me, If I would sign their Articles". There is also a hilarious account of how a pirate captive "sav'd his life [by] meer Dint of Cursing and Damning" - suggesting that one feature of this pirate language was the liberal use of blasphemy and swearing. Through splitting and coalescing and men jumping from ship to ship a great continuity existed amongst the various pirate crews, sharing the same cultures and customs and over the course of time developing a specifically 'pirate consciousness.' The prospect that this pirate community might take a more permanent form was a threat to the authorities who feared that they might set up "a Commonwealth" in uninhabited regions, where "no Power in those Parts of the World could have been able to dispute it with them."(20)

[IMAGE] The crew of Thomas Anstis ridicule the law by holding a mock trial. The judge, using an old tarpaulin as a robe and a mop-end as a wig, sits in a mangrove tree and declares: "I'll have you know, Raskal, we don't sit here to hear Reason - we go according to Law."

Revenge

One particularly important part of what we might call the 'pirate consciousness' was revenge upon the captains and masters who had previously exploited them. The pirate Howell Davis stated: "their reasons for going a pirating were to revenge themselves on base Merchants and cruel commanders of Ships." On capturing a merchantman pirates would commonly administer the 'Distribution of Justice', "enquiring into the Manner of the Commander's Behaviour to their Men, and those, against whom Complaint was made" were "whipp'd and pickled." Interestingly, one of the favourite torments inflicted upon captured captains was the 'Sweat' - a word meaning to drive hard or to overwork - in which the offender was made to run round and round the mizzenmast between decks to the tune of a merry jig while he was encouraged to go faster by the surrounding pirates jabbing his backside with "Points of Swords, Penknives, Compasses, Forks &c." It seems the pirates were determined to give the master a taste of his own medicine - creating a literally vicious circle or treadmill reminiscent of the seaman's labouring life. The most militant of these sea-borne righters-of-wrong has to be Philip Lyne, who when apprehended in 1726 confessed he "had killed 37 Masters of Vessels."(21)


'The Pirates Striking off the arm of Captain Babcock': Babcock's ship was intercepted en route from Bombay, some of the crew joined the pirates and turned against their own captain - apparently cutting his arm off.

Radical historian Marcus Rediker has uncovered interesting evidence of pirates' concern with retribution in the names of their ships - the largest single group of names are the ones involving revenge, for example Blackbeard's ship the Queen Anne's Revenge or John Cole's wonderfully named New York Revenge's Revenge. Merchant Captain Thomas Checkley got it just right when he described the pirates who captured his ship as pretending "to be Robbin Hoods Men." There is further evidence for this in the name of another ship - the Little John belonging to pirate John Ward. Peter Lamborn Wilson says: "[this] offers us a precious insight into his ideas and his image of himself: clearly he considered himself a kind of Robin Hood of the seas. We have some evidence he gave to the poor, and he was clearly determined to steal from the rich."(22)

The response of the state to these merry men of the seven seas was brutal - the crime of piracy carried the death sentence. The early years of the 18th century saw "royal officials and pirates [locked] into a system of reciprocal terror" as pirates became more antagonistic to mainstream society and the authorities ever more determined to hunt them down. Rumours that pirates who had taken advantage of the 1698 royal pardon were on surrendering denied the benefits of the pardon only increased mistrust and antagonism; the pirates resolved "no longer to attend to any offers of forgiveness but in case of attack, to defend themselves on their faithless countrymen who may fall into their hands." In 1722 Captain Luke Knott was granted £230 for the loss of his career, after turning over 8 pirates, "his being obliged to quit the Merchant service, the Pirates threatening to Torture him to death if ever he should fall into their hands." It was by no means an empty threat - in 1720 pirates of the crew of Bartholomew Roberts "openly and in the daytime burnt and destroyed... vessels in the Road of Basseterre [St. Kitts] and had the audaciousness to insult H.M. Fort," avenging the execution of "their comrades at Nevis". Roberts then sent word to the governor that "they would Come and Burn the Town [Sandy Point] about his Ears for hanging the Pyrates there." Roberts even had his own pirate flag made showing him standing on two skulls labelled ABH and AMH - 'A Barbadian's Head' and 'A Martinican's Head' - later that same year he gave substance to his vendetta against the two islands by hanging the governor of Martinique from a yardarm. As bounties were offered for the capture of pirates, the pirates responded by offering rewards for certain officials. And when pirates were captured or executed, other pirate crews often revenged their brethren, attacking the town that condemned them, or the shipping of that port. This sort of solidarity shows that there had developed a real pirate community, and that those sailing under 'the banner of King Death' no longer thought of themselves as English or Dutch or French but as pirates.(23)

Piracy and Slavery

The Golden Age of piracy was also the hey-day of the Atlantic slave trade. The relationship between piracy and the slave trade is complex and ambiguous. Some pirates participated in the slave trade and shared their contemporaries' attitude to Africans as commodities for exchange.


A group of pirates, among them Gibbs and Wansley, burying their treasure on Barron Island. This engraving is unusual for the rare depiction of an African-American pirate, although in fact there were many of them.

However, not all pirates participated in the slave trade. Indeed large numbers of pirates were ex-slaves; there was a much higher proportion of blacks on pirate ships than on merchant or naval vessels, and only rarely did the observers who noted their presence refer to them as 'slaves'. Most of these black pirates would have been runaway slaves, either joining with the pirates on the course of the voyage from Africa, deserting from the plantation, or sent as slaves to work on board ship. Some may have been free men, like the "free Negro" seaman from Deptford who in 1721 led "a Mutiney that we had too many Officers, and that the work was too hard, and what not." Seafaring in general offered more autonomy to blacks than life on the plantation, but piracy in particular, could - although it was a risk - offer one of the few chances at freedom for an African in the 18th century Atlantic. For example, a quarter of the two-hundred strong crew of Captain Bellamy's ship the Whydah were black, and eyewitness accounts of the sinking of the pirate vessel off Wellfleet, Massachusetts in 1717 report that many of the corpses washed up were black. Pirate historian Kenneth Kinkor argues that although the Whydah was originally a slave ship, the blacks on board at the time of the sinking were members of the crew, not slaves. Partially because pirates, along with other tars, "entertain'd so contemptible a Notion of Landsmen," a black man who knew the ropes was more likely to win respect than a landsman who didn't. Kinkor notes: "Pirates judged Africans more on the basis of their language and sailing skills - in other words, on their level of cultural attainment - than on their race."(24)

Black pirates would often lead the boarding party to capture a prize. The pirate ship the Morning Star had "a Negro Cook doubly arm'd" in the boarding party and more than half of Edward Condent's boarding party on the Dragon were black. Some black pirates became quartermasters or captains. For example, in 1699, when Captain Kidd dropped anchor in New York, two sloops were there to meet him, one of whose "Mate was a little black man... who, as it was said, had been formerly Captain Kidd's Quarter Master."(25)

In the 17th century blacks found on pirate ships were not tried with the other pirates because it was assumed they were slaves, but by the 18th century they were being executed alongside their white 'brethren'. Still the most likely fate for a black pirate, if he was captured, was to be sold into slavery, whether he was a freeman or not. When Blackbeard was captured by the Royal Navy in 1718, five of his eighteen man crew were black and according to the Governor's Council of Virginia the five blacks were "equally concerned with the rest of the Crew in the same Acts of Piracy." A "resolute Fellow, a Negroe" named Caesar was caught just as he was about to blow up the whole ship rather than be captured and most likely returned to slavery.(26)

In 1715 the ruling Council of the Colony of Virginia worried about the connections between the "Ravage of Pyrates" and "an Insurrection of the Negroes." They were right to be concerned. By 1716 the slaves of Antigua had grown "very impudent and insulting" and reportedly many of them "went off to join those pirates who did not seem too concerned about color differences." These connections were trans-Atlantic; stretching from the heart of Empire in London, to the slave colonies in the Americas and the 'Slave Coast' of Africa. In the early 1720s a gang of pirates settled in West Africa, joining and intermixing with the Kru - a West African people from what is now Sierra Leone and Liberia, renowned both for their seamanship in their long canoes and when enslaved for their leadership of slave revolts. The pirates were probably members of Bartholomew Roberts' crew who had fled into the woods when attacked by the Navy in 1722. This alliance is not so unusual when you consider that of the 157 men who didn't escape and were either captured or killed on board Roberts' ship, 45 of them were black - probably neither slaves nor pirates but "Black saylors, commonly known by the name of gremetoes" - independent African mariners primarily from the Sierra Leone region, who would have joined the pirates "for a small demand of wages."(27)

We can see the way these connections were spread and the how the pirates' legacy was disseminated even after their defeat in the fate of some of those captured on Roberts' pirate ship. "Negroes" from his crew grew mutinous over the poor conditions and "thin Commons" they received from the Navy. "Many of them" had "lived a long time" in the "pyratical Way", which obviously for them had meant better food and more freedom.(28)

Going Native

Lionel Wafer was a French surgeon who joined the buccaneer crews in the Caribbean in 1677. While returning from a voyage to the East Indies he met with an accident and was forced to recuperate in an Indian village, eventually adopting Indian customs. This is his description of the return of some English sailors to the village:

"I sat awhile, cringing upon my hams among the Indians, after their fashion, painted as they were, and all naked but only about the waist, and with my nose-piece hanging over my mouth. 'Twas the better part of an hour before one of the crew, looking more narrowly upon me, cried out, "Here's our doctor," and immediately all congratulated my arrival among them."(29)

This sort of dropping out and going native was not always accidental. The buccaneers of the Caribbean originally got their name from boucan, a practice of smoking meat they had learnt from the native Arawak Indians. The buccaneers were originally land squatters on the large Spanish owned island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) - they turned to piracy following Spanish attempts to oust them. On Hispaniola they followed a way of life essentially identical to the native peoples who had preceded them. This sort of 'marooning life' was very clearly identified with piracy - apart from the buccaneers of Hispaniola and Tortuga the main other group of European dropouts in the New World were the logwood cutters of Bay of Campeche (now Honduras and Belize), a "rude drunken crew" who were considered by most observers to be interchangeable with pirates. They consciously chose a non-accumulative life living in independent communal settlements on the world's periphery.(30)

The pirates' relations with the native peoples they encountered were split. Some pirates would enslave peoples they encountered, make them work, rape the women and steal. But other pirates settled down and intermarried - becoming part of the society. Particularly in Madagascar, the pirates mixing with the native population had produced "a dark Mulatto Race there." Contacts and cultural exchange between pirates, seamen and Africans led to the clear similarities between sea shanties and African songs. In 1743 some seamen were court-martialled for singing a "negro song". These sort of connections went in both directions and were not as rare as you might imagine. A pirate called William May, stranded on the Madagascan island of Johanna got a shock when he was addressed in fluent English by one of the "negroes". He learned that the man had been taken from the island by an English ship and had lived for a while in Bethnal Green in London, before returning home. His new friend saved him from being captured by the English and taken to Bombay and hanged.(31)

It is a common feature of what you might call 'pirate ideology' that pirates thought of themselves as free kings, as autonomous individual emperors. This was partly to do with the dream of wealth - Henry Avery was idolised for the enormous wealth he plundered; some believed he had set up his own pirate kingdom. Yet there was a pirate who achieved an even more remarkable rags-to-riches story, for he started out as a slave in the French colony of Martinique: Abraham Samuel, "Tolinor Rex", the King of Fort Dauphin. Samuel was a runaway slave who joined the crew of the pirate ship John and Rebecca, eventually becoming quartermaster. In 1696 the pirates captured a large and valuable prize and decided to retire and settle down in Madagascar. Samuel ended up in the abandoned French colony of Fort Dauphin where he was identified by a local princess as the child she had borne to a Frenchman during the occupancy of the colony. Samuel suddenly found himself declared heir to the vacant throne of the kingdom. Slavers and merchants flocked to do business with "King Samuel" but he retained sympathies for his pirate comrades, allowing and assisting them to loot the merchants who came to trade with him. There were a number of similar, if less flamboyant, characters in the ports and harbours of Madagascar - pirates or slavers who had become local leaders with private armies of as many as 500 men.(32)

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Sex and Drugs and Rock n' Roll

The pirates certainly seem to have had more fun than their poor suffering counterparts on naval or merchant vessels. They sure had some pretty wild parties - in 1669 just off the coast of Hispaniola, some of Henry Morgan's buccaneers blew up their own ship during a particularly riotous party, which like all good pirate celebrations included much drunken firing of the ship's guns. Somehow they set light to the gunpowder in the ship's magazine and the resulting explosion totally destroyed the ship. On some voyages alcohol ran "as freely as ditchwater" and for many tars the promise of unrestricted grog rations had been one of the main reasons behind leaving the merchant service to become a pirate in the first place. However this sometimes backfired - one group of pirates took three days to capture a ship because there were never enough sober men available. Sailors in general loathed a "drink-water" voyage - one reason being that in the tropics the water tended to get things living in it and you had to strain it through your teeth.(33)

No pirate celebration would be complete without music. Pirates were renowned for their love of music and often hired musicians for the duration of a cruise. During the trial of "Black Bart" Bartholomew Roberts' crew in 1722, two men were acquitted as being only musicians. The pirates seem to have employed music in battle, as it was said of one of the men, James White, that his "business as music was upon the poop in time of action."(34)

For some men the freedom that piracy offered from the constrained world they had left behind extended to sexuality. European society of the 17th and 18th centuries was savagely anti-homosexual. The Royal Navy periodically conducted brutal anti-buggery campaigns on ships on which men might be confined together for years. In both the navy and the merchant service it was considered that sexuality was inimical to work and good order on board ship, as Minister John Flavel wrote of seamen to merchant John Lovering: "The Death of their Lusts, is the most Probable Means to give Life to your Trade." B.R. Burg in Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition suggests that the vast majority of pirates were homosexual, and although there isn't really enough evidence to support this, nevertheless to indulge in these things a pirate colony was probably just about the safest place you could be. Some of the early buccaneers of Hispaniola and Tortuga lived in a kind of homosexual union known as matelotage (from the French for 'sailor' and possibly the origin of the word 'mate' meaning companion), holding their possessions in common, with the survivor inheriting. Even after women joined the buccaneers, matelotage continued with a partner sharing his wife with his matelot. Louis Le Golif in his Memoirs of a Buccaneer complained about homosexuality on Tortuga, where he had to fight two duels to keep ardent suitors at bay. Eventually the French Governor of Tortuga imported hundreds of prostitutes, hoping thereby to wean the buccaneers away from this practice. The pirate captain Robert Culliford, had a "great consort," John Swann, who lived with him. Some men bought "pretty boys" as companions. On one pirate ship a young man who admitted a homosexual relationship was put in irons and maltreated, but this seems to have been the exception rather than the rule. It is also significant that in no pirate articles are there any rules against homosexuality.(35)

Pirate Women

The freedom of life under the Jolly Roger extended to another perhaps surprising group of sea-robbers: women pirates. Women weren't quite as rare at sea in the 17th and 18th centuries as you might imagine them to have been. There was a fairly well established tradition of women cross-dressing in order to seek their fortune, or to follow husbands or lovers to sea. Of course the only women we know about are the ones that got caught and exposed. Their more successful sisters have sailed off into anonymity. Even so, it would seem that women aboard pirate ships were few. Ironically this may have contributed to the pirates' downfall - they were relatively easy for the state to crush because the pirate community was widely dispersed and inherently fragile; they found it hard to reproduce or replenish their numbers. By comparison, the much longer lived and more successful pirates of the South China Seas were organised in family groups with men, women and children all at sea together - thus there was always a new generation of pirates to hand.(36)

Just as pirates in general defined themselves in opposition to the emerging capitalist social relations of the 17th and 18th centuries, so also some women found in piracy a way to rebel against the emerging gender roles. For example, Charlotte de Berry, born in England in 1636, followed her husband into the navy by dressing as a man. When she was forced aboard an Africa-bound vessel, she led a mutiny against the captain who had assaulted her, cutting off his head with a dagger. She then turned pirate and became captain, her ship cruising the African coast capturing gold ships. There were also other less successful women pirates; in Virginia in 1726, the authorities tried Mary Harley (or Harvey) and three men for piracy. The three men were sentenced to hang but Harley was released. Mary's husband Thomas was also involved in the piracy but seems to have escaped capture. Mary and her husband had been transported to the colonies as convicts a year earlier. Three years later in 1729, another deported female convict was on trial for piracy in the colony of Virginia. A gang of six pirates were sentenced to hang, including Mary Crickett (or Crichett), who along with Edmund Williams, the leader of the pirate gang, had been transported to Virginia as a felon in 1728.(37)

However, the women pirates about whom we know the most are Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Mary Read was born as an illegitimate child, and brought up as a little boy by her mother in order to pass her off to her relatives as her legitimate son. She had to be tough to deal with the harsh circumstances of her life and by the time she was a teenager she was already "growing bold and strong." Mary seems to have liked her male identity and enlisted herself as a sailor on a man-of-war and then as an English soldier in the war in Flanders. At the end of the war she joined a Dutch ship bound for the West Indies. When her ship was captured by 'Calico' Jack Rackham's pirate crew, which included Anne Bonny, she decided to throw her lot in with the pirates. She seems to have taken to pirate life and began a new romance with one of the crew. When her lover got into an argument with a fellow pirate and was challenged to settle it in the pirate's customary way "at sword and pistol", Mary saved her lover by picking a fight with the contender, challenging him to a duel two hours before that he was due to fight with her lover and then running him through with her cutlass.(38)

Anne Bonny was born the illegitimate child of a "Maid-Servant" in Ireland and raised in male disguise, her father pretending she was the child of a relative entrusted to his care. He eventually took her to Charleston, South Carolina, where they no longer needed to keep up the pretence. Anne grew up into a "robust" woman of "fierce and couragious temper." Indeed, one time "when a young Fellow would have lain with her against her Will, she beat him so, that he lay ill of it a considerable time." She ran away to the Caribbean where she fell in love with the captain of a pirate crew called 'Calico' Jack Rackham (so-called because of his outlandish and colourful clothing). Anne and 'Calico' Jack, "finding they could not by fair means enjoy each other's Company with Freedom, resolved to run away together, and enjoy it in Spight of all the World." They stole a ship from the harbour and for the next couple of years Bonny was Rackham's shipmate and lover as their crew (which soon also included Mary Read disguised in male clothing, who joined them from a ship they captured) raided shipping in the Caribbean and American coastal waters.(39)

One of the witnesses at their trial, a woman called Dorothy Thomas, who had been taken prisoner by the pirates, said the women "wore Mens Jackets, and long Trousers, and Handkerchiefs tied about their Heads, and that each of them had a Machet[e] and Pistol in their Hands." Despite the fact Read and Bonny were in men's clothing, their prisoner was no fool; she said that "the Reason of her knowing and believing them to be Women was, by the largeness of their Breasts."

Other prisoners taken by the pirates reported that Bonny and Read "were both very profligate, cursing, and swearing much, and very ready and willing to do any Thing on board." Both women appear to have exercised some leadership; for example, they were part of the group designated to board prizes - which was a role reserved for only the most fearless and respected members of the crew. When the pirates "saw any vessel, gave Chase or Attack'd," the pair "wore Men's Cloaths," but at other times, "they wore Women's Cloaths."(40)

Rackham, Bonny and Read were all caught in 1720 by a British navy sloop off Jamaica. The crew were all totally drunk (a common event) and hid in the hold - there was only one other apart from Bonny and Read who was brave enough to fight. In disgust, Mary Read fired a pistol down into the hold "killing one and wounding others." Eighteen members of the crew had already been tried and sentenced to hang by the time the women came to court. Three of them, including Rackham, were later hung in chains at prime locations to act as a moral instruction and "Publick Example" to the seamen who would pass their rotting corpses. However, Mary Read insisted that "Men of Courage" - like herself - did not fear death. Courage was a primary virtue amongst the pirates - it was only courage that ensured their continued survival. 'Calico' Jack Rackham had been promoted from quartermaster to captain when the then current captain, Charles Vane, had been deposed by his crew for cowardice. So it was an ignominious end for Rackham to be told by Anne Bonny before he was due to be hanged that "if he had fought like a Man, he need not have been hang'd like a Dog." Both Bonny and Read escaped execution because they "pleaded their Bellies, being Quick with Child, and pray'd that Execution might be staid."(41)

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Misson and Libertalia

The most famous pirate utopia is that of Captain Misson and his pirate crew, who founded their intentional community, their lawless utopia of Libertalia in northern Madagascar in the Eighteenth century.(42)

Misson was French, born in Provence, and it was while in Rome on leave from the French warship Victoire that he lost his faith, disgusted by the decadence of the Papal Court. In Rome he ran into Caraccioli - a "lewd Priest" who over the course of long voyages with little to do but talk, gradually converted Misson and a sizeable portion of the rest of the crew to his brand of atheistic communism:

"...he fell upon Government, and shew'd, that every Man was born free, and had as much Right to what would support him, as to the Air he respired... that the vast Difference betwixt Man and Man, the one wallowing in Luxury, and the other in the most pinching Necessity, was owing only to Avarice and Ambition on the one Hand, and a pusilanimous Subjection on the other."

Embarking on a career of piracy, the 200 strong crew of the Victoire called upon Misson to be their captain. They collectivised the wealth of the ship, deciding "all should be in common." All decisions were to be put to "the Vote of the whole Company." Thus they set out on their new "Life of Liberty." Off the west coast of Africa they captured a Dutch slave ship. The slaves were freed and brought aboard the Victoire, Misson declaring that "the Trading for those of our own Species, cou'd never be agreeable to the Eyes of divine Justice: That no Man had Power of Liberty of another" and that "he had not exempted his Neck from the galling Yoak of Slavery, and asserted his own Liberty, to enslave others." At every engagement they added to their numbers with new French, English and Dutch recruits and freed African slaves.

While cruising round the coast of Madagascar, Misson found a perfect bay in an area with fertile soil, fresh water and friendly natives. Here the pirates built Libertalia, renouncing their titles of English, French, Dutch or African and calling themselves Liberi. They created their own language, a polyglot mixture of African languages, combined with French, English, Dutch, Portuguese and native Madagascan. Shortly after the beginning of building work on the colony of Libertalia, the Victoire ran into the pirate Thomas Tew, who decided to accompany them back to Libertalia. Such a colony was no new idea to Tew; he had lost his quartermaster and 23 of his crew when they had left to form a settlement further up the Madagascan coast. The Liberi - "Enemies to Slavery," aimed to boost their numbers by capturing another slave ship. Off the coast of Angola, Tew's crew took an English slave ship with 240 men, women and children below decks. The African members of the pirate crew discovered many friends and relatives among the enslaved and struck off their fetters and handcuffs, regaling them with the glories of their new life of freedom.

The pirates settled down to become farmers, holding the land in common - "no Hedge bounded any particular Man's Property." Prizes and money taken at sea were "carry'd into the common Treasury, Money being of no Use where every Thing was in common."

The Empire Strikes Back: The End of the Golden Age of Piracy

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The Golden Age of Euro-American piracy was roughly from 1650 to 1725 with its peak in about 1720. There were very specific conditions and circumstances that led to this hey-day on the high seas. The period opens with the emergence of the buccaneers on the Caribbean islands of Hispaniola and Tortuga. For most of this period piracy was centred around the Caribbean, and with good reason. The Caribbean islands provided innumerable hiding places, secret coves and uncharted islands; places where pirates could take on fresh water and provisions, rest up and lie in wait. The location was perfect; lying just on the route taken by the heavily laden treasure fleets from South America back to Spain and Portugal, the Caribbean was effectively impossible for any navy to police and many islands were unclaimed or uninhabited. All in all it added up to a freebooter's paradise.

In 1700 a new law was introduced to allow for the swift trial and execution of pirates wherever they may be found. Previously they had to be transported back to London to stand trial and be executed at the low tide mark at Wapping. The 'Act for the More Effectual Suppression of Piracy' also enforced the use of the death penalty and gave rewards for resisting pirate attack, but most importantly, it was not trial by jury but by a special court of naval officers. The famous Captain Kidd was one of the first victims of this new law - indeed the law was partially rushed through specifically so that it could be applied to him. He was hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping and his body was then placed in a gibbet, coated with tar to help preserve it, and hung at Tilbury Point to be a "terror to all that saw it." The blackened and rotting corpse was intended to serve as a very clear reminder to the common seaman of the risks of resisting the disciplines of wage labour.(43)

Kidd's case was unusual in that he was executed in London. After 1700, under the provisions of the new law the war against the pirates would increasingly take place around the peripheries of Empire, and it wouldn't just be one or two corpses that dangled from crosstrees down near the tidemark but sometimes twenty or thirty at a time. In one particularly significant case in 1722 the British Admiralty tried 169 pirates of Bartholomew Roberts' crew and executed 52 of them at Cape Coast Castle on the Guinea Coast. The 72 Africans on board, free or not, were sold into slavery, which perhaps some of them had escaped for a short while.(44)

It was the disappearance of the unique favourable conditions of the Golden Age that ended the reign of the pirates. With the development of capital in the 17th century came the rise of the state, fostered by the imperial wars that wracked the globe from 1688 onwards. The requirements of conducting these vast wars necessitated a huge increase in state power. When, in 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht ended war between the European nations, the state's ability to actually police piracy was massively increased. The end of the war also allowed naval ships to concentrate on hunting down the pirates and granted the British even larger commercial interests in the Caribbean, giving an extra incentive to these efforts. As the new, more powerful state consolidated its monopoly on violence, the colonies were brought into line. The practice of dealing with pirates and investing in pirate voyages had continued in the colonies long after it had become unacceptable at home; it was wiped out by an extension of state power from the mother country to enforce discipline on the colonies. The beginning of the end was marked by ex-buccaneer Sir Henry Morgan's return to Jamaica as Governor with express orders to destroy the pirates. Naval patrols flushed them from their lairs and mass hangings eliminated the leaders. Ultimately the pirates' war on trade had become too successful to be tolerated; the state was fighting to allow commerce to flow unimpeded and capital to accumulate, bringing wealth to the merchants and revenue to the state.(45)

If we want to look for the heirs of the libertarian piracy of the Golden Age we shouldn't necessarily only be looking at more recent pirates, but rather at how piracy fed into the Atlantic class struggle. Just as some of the initial impetus behind the piracy of the 17th and 18th centuries had come from land-based radical movements like the Levellers, the flow of ideas and practices circulated around the Atlantic world, emerging in sometimes surprising places. In 1748 there was a mutiny aboard the HMS Chesterfield, near Cape Coast Castle off the west coast of Africa. One of the ringleaders - John Place - had been there before; he was one those captured with Bartholomew Roberts back in 1722. It was "old hands" like John Place who kept alive the pirate tradition and ensured the continuity of ideas and practices. The mutineers hoped pirate-fashion "to settle a colony". The term 'to strike' originated in mutiny, particularly the "Great Mutinies" at Spithead and the Nore in 1797 when sailors would strike their sails to disrupt the ceaseless flow of trade and the state's war machine. These English, Irish and African sailors established their own "council" and "shipboard democracy" and some even talked of settling a "New Colony" in America or Madagascar.(46)

The pirates prospered in a power vacuum, during a period of upheaval and war that allowed them the freedom to live effectively outside the law. With the coming of peace came an extension of control and an end to the possibility of pirate autonomy. This is not so surprising really when we consider that periods of war and turmoil have often allowed for revolutionary experiments, enclaves, communes and anarchies to flourish. From the pirates of the 17th and 18th centuries, to D'Annunzio's piratical Republic of Fiume in the First World War, the Paris Commune in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, The Diggers' land communes in the English Civil War and the Makhnovist peasants in the Ukraine during the Russian Revolution, it is often in interstice and interregnum that experiments in freedom can find space to flower.

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"Is this Utopian? A map of the world which does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias." - Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism(47)

(BOX) The Black Flag



"Why is our flag black? Black is a shade of negation. The black flag is the negation of all flags. It is a negation of nationhood which puts the human race against itself and denies the unity of all humankind. Black is a mood of anger and outrage at all the hideous crimes against humanity perpetrated in the name of allegiance to one state or another."(48)
We all know that pirates flew the 'Jolly Roger' - the skull and cross-bones flag. The most likely derivation of the name 'Jolly Roger' is as an Anglicisation of the French Jolie Rouge - the red or 'bloody' flag that pirates originally used before the more well-known black. The red flag is widely known as the international symbol of proletarian revolution and revolt and the black flag has historically been the flag of the anarchist movement. (These two colours were most famously combined in the anarcho-communist red and black flags of the Spanish revolution of 1936.) (49)

The earliest definite report of the black flag being flown by anarchists or used in working class revolt is of the famous anarchist Louise Michel leading a crowd of rioting unemployed to ransack bakers' shops with a black flag on March 9th 1883. However there are reports that she had flown a skull and cross-bones flag 12 years earlier in 1871, while leading the women's battalions of the insurrectionary Paris Commune. The Paris Commune even had a daily paper called Le Pirate.(50)

In June 1780 when the prisons of London were broken open and the prisoners freed during the Gordon Riots we find this description: "A giant of a man had been seen riding a cart-horse and waving an immense black and red flag, like the standard bearer of an opposing army." This man's name was James Jackson and he led the masses to destroy London's main prison with a shout of "A-hoy for Newgate!" It would not be reading too much into it to suggest that this "a-hoy!" might indicate Jackson was a sailor - sailors had always been the most militant section of the working class, in which case this black and red flag signalling a call to freedom on the streets of London could easily have direct links to the black and red flags of the Caribbean several years earlier. This thus considerably pre-dates Louise Michel and almost puts us back in the hey-day of the pirates.(51)

The red and black flew again in the Caribbean in 1791. After a huge slave revolt, part of the old pirate stronghold of Hispaniola took instead the Native American name "Haiti" and became the world's first independent black republic. Led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, the rebels defeated the forces of three empires to win their liberty. The red and black flag of Haiti became a banner of freedom to eighteenth and nineteenth century blacks, especially to sailors who would sail to Haiti, become Haitians and then return home flying a red and black flag. American slaves aboard naval and merchant vessels would flee and seek refuge in Haiti.(52)

Of a certain William Davidson, we are informed: "at a demonstration he protected the black flag with skull and cross bones, 'Let us die like Men and not be sold like Slaves,' the flag said." Davidson was a black man born in 1786 and executed in 1820. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica - erstwhile 'wickedest city on the earth' and notorious pirate capital. He spent three years at sea, was a trade unionist, read Tom Paine and may have had some connection to Toussaint L'Ouverture and the revolution in Haiti. He was finally executed on Mayday 1820 with others for being part of the 'Cato Street conspiracy' to assassinate the entire cabinet while they were at dinner. This was intended to lead to attacks on Mansion House and the Bank of England, the seizing of artillery and to give the spark for a revolution in Britain!(53)

Be Proud to fly the Jolly Roger!

(BOX) Waging War on the Whalers

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Since 1977, modern-day, real-life pirates Sea Shepherd have roamed the world's oceans attacking and sinking whaling vessels and driftnetters. The black ship with a black pirate flag is equipped with spikes for ripping open the sides of enemy vessels and bows reinforced with 18 tons of concrete for ramming them. Flying their own version of the Jolly Roger - a skull above a crossed shepherd's crook and trident - 'Neptune's Navy' have engaged in over 20 years of guerrilla war for marine ecology: "Any whaling ship on the ocean is a target for Sea Shepherd."

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
3107A Washington Boulevard
Marina del Ray
CA 90292
USA
Tel: +1 (310) 301 7325

Source: David B. Morris - Earth Warrior (Golden, Colorado, Fulcrum, 1995)

(BOX) Further Reading

Cordingly, David - Life Among the Pirates: The Romance and the Reality (London, Little, Brown & Co., 1995)

Cordingly, David (ed.) - Pirates (London, Salamander, 1996)

Hill, Christopher - Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth Century Controversies (London, Penguin, 1996)

Hill, Christopher - 'Radical Pirates?' in Collected Essays, Vol. 3 (Brighton, Harvester, 1986); and in Margaret Jacob and James Jacob (eds.) - The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1984)

Klausmann, Ulrike, Marion Meinzerin and Gabriel Kuhn (trans. Nicholas Levis) - Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger (Montreal, Black Rose Books, 1997)

Rediker, Marcus B. - Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo- American Maritime World 1700-1750 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987)

Rediker, Marcus B. - 'Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger: The Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, Pirates' in M. Creighton and L. Norling (eds.) - Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Atlantic Seafaring, 1700-1920 (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1995)

Ritchie, Robert C. - Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, Harvard University Press, 1986)

Wilson, Peter Lamborn - Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes (New York, Autonomedia, 1995)

Notes

Daniel Defoe (Captain Charles Johnson) - A General History of the Pyrates, Edited by Manuel Schonhorn, (London, Dent, 1972), p. 244
For example, the East India Company was brought near to collapse by piracy in 1690s. Robert C. Ritchie - Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates, pp. 128-34
Larry Law - Misson and Libertatia, (London, A Distribution/Dark Star Press, 1991), p. 6
Marcus B. Rediker - Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo- American Maritime World 1700-1750, p. 258
Op. Cit. 4, p. 255; Op. Cit. 2, p. 29, 142
Op. Cit. 4, p. 272 n52, 274 - "as more pirates were captured and hanged, the greater cruelty was practiced by those who were still alive"; Op. Cit. 2, p. 2
Marcus B. Rediker - 'Libertalia: The Pirate's Utopia' in David Cordingly (ed.) - Pirates, p. 126
Christopher Hill - 'Radical Pirates?' in Collected Essays, Vol. 3, pp. 162, 166-9; Peter Lamborn Wilson - 'Caliban's Masque: Spiritual Anarchy and the Wild Man in Colonial America', in Sakolsky and Koehnline (eds.) - Gone to Croatan: The Origins of North American Dropout Culture (New York/Edinburgh, Autonomedia/AK Press, 1993), p. 107; Op. Cit. 2, pp. 14-15
Jenifer G. Marx - 'Brethren of the Coast' in Cordingly (ed.) - Pirates, pp. 47, 49-50; Op. Cit. 4, pp. 69, 81- 2; Op. Cit. 2, pp. 65, 211, 226
Richard Platt and Tina Chambers (Photographer) - Pirate (Eyewitness Books) (London, Dorling Kindersley, 1995), pp. 20, 26-7; Op. Cit. 2, pp. 22-23
Hill - 'Radical Pirates?', pp. 169-170
Op. Cit. 4, p. 258; Hakim Bey - T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (New York, Autonomedia, 1991) pp. 23, 139; Op. Cit. 1, p. 587
Op. Cit. 2, pp. 65, 117-8
Ibid. pp. 42, 234
Op. Cit. 1, p. 211
Op. Cit. 2, p. 124
Lawrence Osborne - 'A Pirate's Progress: How the Maritime Rogue Became a Multicultural Hero' Lingua Franca March 1998 http://www.linguafranca.com/ 9803/osborne.html (unpaginated) [ They've stopped publishing 22/7/02 ]
Op. Cit. 2, p. 59, 258 n38; Op. Cit. 4, p. 264; Op. Cit. 1, pp. 212, 308, 343
Op. Cit. 4, p. 262
Op. Cit. 2, pp. 87-88, 117; Douglas Botting and the Editors of Time-Life Books - The Pirates (Time Life's The Seafarers Series) (Amsterdam, Time-Life, 1979), p. 142; Op. Cit. 4, p. 278; Op. Cit. 1, p. 7
Cordingly - Life Among the Pirates, p. 271; Op. Cit. 2, p. 234; Botting - The Pirates, p. 61; Op. Cit. 4, pp. 269-272
Op. Cit. 4, p. 269; Peter Lamborn Wilson - Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes, p. 57
Op. Cit. 4, pp. 255, 274, 277; Op. Cit. 2, p. 234; Botting - The Pirates, pp. 48, 166; Platt and Chambers - Pirate, p. 35
Op. Cit. 7, pp. 133-4; W. Jeffrey Bolster - Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 12-13; Op. Cit. 1, p. 228; Op. Cit. 20 (unpaginated)
Op. Cit. 7, p. 133; Bolster - Black Jacks, p. 15
Op. Cit. 20 (unpaginated); Op. Cit. 7, pp. 133-4, 249 n37; Bolster - Black Jacks, p. 14; Op. Cit. 1, p. 82
Op. Cit. 7, pp. 134, 249 n42, 250 n44; Bolster - Black Jacks, pp. 50-1
Op. Cit. 7, p. 134; Op. Cit. 1, p. 273
Lionel Wafer - Voyage de Mr. Wafer, Ou l'on trouve la description de l'Isthme de l'Amérique (Publisher not stated, Paris? 1723) http://www.buccaneer.net/piratebooks.htm
Platt and Chambers - Pirate, pp. 26-7; Op. Cit. 4, p. 146; Cordingly - Life Among the Pirates, p. 7
Op. Cit. 1, p. 131; Op. Cit. 2, pp. 86-7, 104, 118
Op. Cit. 2, pp. 84-5
Ibid. pp. 59, 69, 72-3; Cordingly - Life Among the Pirates, p. 64
Cordingly - Life Among the Pirates, p. 115
Ibid. pp. 122-5; Marcus B. Rediker - 'Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger: The Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, Pirates' in M. Creighton and L. Norling (eds.) - Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Atlantic Seafaring, 1700-1920 (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 9; Op. Cit. 2, pp. 123-4; Marx - 'Brethren of the Coast', p. 39
Rediker - 'Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger', pp. 8-11, 233 n26; Op. Cit. 1, p. 212; Platt and Chambers - Pirate, pp. 32-3, 62; Op. Cit. 4, p. 285; Ulrike Klausmann, Marion Meinzerin and Gabriel Kuhn (trans. Nicholas Levis) - Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger, pp. 36-7
Platt and Chambers - Pirate, p. 33; Rediker - 'Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger', pp. 10, 232-233 n24, n25
Rediker - 'Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger', pp. 3-5, 8, 13; Platt and Chambers - Pirate, pp. 32-3
Rediker - 'Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger', pp. 5-7, 13-16, 234 n41; Platt and Chambers - Pirate, pp. 32-3; Op. Cit. 1, pp. 623-6
Rediker - 'Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger', pp. 7-8
Ibid. pp. 2-3, 5-7, 13-14; Platt and Chambers - Pirate, pp. 32, 35; Op. Cit. 1, pp. 158-9
The whole of the following narrative is drawn from Captain Charles Johnson's General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, published in London in 1728, (Op. Cit. 1, pp. 383-439). Because Johnson's book is the only source for the history of Captain Misson, the story is almost universally asserted to be fictional. However the overall credibility of Johnson's book has been established - it would appear that this is the only fictional episode in an otherwise reliable work of history. The General History was published only a very few years after the events it recorded took place, and yet no one at the time denounced the Misson story as fiction. The story of Misson was believed. And it was believed because it was believable. There were radical, libertarian pirates, and there were pirate settlements on Madagascar - all the elements of the story fit with what we know of pirates. Perhaps the Misson story is a fiction with a solid basis in fact; perhaps like the story of Robin Hood it collects together a wide range of different experiences in one narrative. In either case the story of Libertalia represents the literary expression of the living traditions, practices and dreams of the Atlantic proletariat. On the Misson story and the reliability of the General History see: Maximillian E. Novak - 'Introduction' to Daniel Defoe (Captain Charles Johnson) - 'Of Captain Misson' (1728) extract from the General History - Augustan Reprint Society, Publication number 87 (W. A. Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 1961), pp. i-iii; Op. Cit. 3, pp. 6-8; Op. Cit. 7, pp. 125-7, 249 n2, n7; Manuel Schonhorn - 'Introduction' to Op. Cit. 1, pp. xxxvii-xxxviii; Rediker - 'Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger', pp. 230-1 n4, n11; Botting - The Pirates, pp. 6, 21-22; Cordingly - Life Among the Pirates, pp. 10-11, 77
Op. Cit. 2, pp. 153-4, 228, 235; Cordingly - Life Among the Pirates, p. 237
Op. Cit. 2, p. 235; Botting - The Pirates, pp. 174-5
Op. Cit. 2, pp. 7, 128, 138, 147-51; Op. Cit. 20 (unpaginated)
Op. Cit. 7, pp. 137-8
The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Glasgow, Harper Collins, 1994), p. 1184
Howard J. Ehrlich (ed.) - Reinventing Anarchy, Again (Edinburgh, AK Press, 1996), p. 31
Cordingly - Life Among the Pirates, pp. 2, 138-143: "Red or 'bloody' flags are mentioned as often as black flags until the middle of the eighteenth century"; Op. Cit. 2, p. 22; Platt and Chambers - Pirate, p. 35
Woodcock - Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (London, Penguin, 1963), p. 284; Jason Wehling - 'History of the Black Flag: Why Anarchists fly it. What are its origins?', in Fifth Estate (Vol. 32, #1, Summer 1997), p. 31; Le Pirate: Journal Quotidien #1-4 (1871) in University of Sussex Commune Collection - continuation of Le Corsaire.
John Nicholson - The Great Liberty Riot of 1780 (London, Bozo, 1985), pp. 44-46
Bolster - Black Jacks, pp. 152-3
For more on this check out two excellent pieces by Peter Linebaugh - ' Jubilating: Or, How The Atlantic Working Class Used the Biblical Jubilee Against Capitalism, With Some Success' in 'The New Enclosures': Midnight Notes #10 (1990), p. 92; and 'All the Atlantic Mountains Shook', in Eley and Hunt (eds.) - Reviving the English Revolution: Reflections and Elaborations on the work of Christopher Hill (London, Verso, 1988), p. 214. All you Sussex bioregionalists out there will be thrilled to discover a Brighton connection to this notorious conspiracy - one of the three executed was a Brighton butcher called James Ings (perhaps recruited for his skill with a carving knife?), who said: "I will cut every head off that is in the room and Lord Castlereagh's head and Lord Sidmouth's I will bring away in a bag. For this purpose I will provide two bags." See Rocky Hill - Underdog Brighton: A Rather Different History of the Town (Brighton, Iconoclast Press, 1991), pp. 23-4, and John Stanhope - The Cato Street Conspiracy (London, Johnathan Cape, 1962), p. 87
Do or Die DTP/web team: doordtp@yahoo.co.uk

http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no8/pirate.html

*

[vanlose kid]

reposting this here because it's relevant to the thread:

A Conversation with Stephen Toulmin
By Amy Lifson

Endowment Chairman Sheldon Hackney talked recently with philosopher Stephen Toulmin about postmodern society and the shifting of power. Toulmin, Henry R. Luce Professor at the Center for Multiethnic and Transnational Studies at the University of Southern California, is the author of many books, among them Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, The Abuse of Casuistry (with Albert R. Jonsen), The Return to Cosmology, and Wittgenstein's Vienna (with Allan Janik). Toulmin is this year's Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities.

Sheldon Hackney: There is a great deal of talk about posteverything these days, especially postmodernity. Would it be fair to say that in Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity you provide, not an explanation of postmodernity, but an alternative understanding of modernity?

Stephen Toulmin: That's what I set out to do, and I did so as much for my own edification as for other people's sake. I grew up accustomed to a particular, slightly rosy view of how much the modern era had done for us, and it was only as my career went along that I found the darker side of the picture pressing itself on my attention. I had to explain to myself how it was that there was this divergence between the optimistic view of scientific progress and philosophical clarification, and how the world seemed to have gone and what the role of these new ideas had truly been since 1600.

Hackney: These new ideas I take to be the Cartesian- Newtonian version based on rationality, faith in science, progress.

Toulmin: It includes Descartes and Newton but also embraces Thomas Hobbes and the founders of the various political traditions that one thinks of as characteristic of the modern world.

Hackney: What is the central notion of that received notion of modernity?

Toulmin: The central thing, which was the one I found most attractive to attack, is the belief that rationality has to be understood in terms of formal argumentation, in terms of rather strict ideals of argument, which, in the ideal case, should become geometrical in the kind of way that Plato explains -- whether he advocates it or not is another matter -- in antiquity, and which Descartes makes explicit in his discourse.

Hackney: You use the term "the quest for certainty" or "the search for certainty."

Toulmin: Yes. I'm consciously associating myself with John Dewey, who also, in the late 1920s, picked on the quest for certainty as a perennial disease of modern thought, although he never sat down and thought enough from a historical point of view about why this quest for certainty had the kinds of attractions it had in the first half of the seventeenth century and provided the kind of mold or template on which modern science, modern politics, modern philosophy were shaped.

Hackney: Exactly. But someone in that tradition would object to your notion that it is to be explained by events outside of the discipline itself and in society.

Toulmin: I wouldn't say it is explained. Throughout history there has been -- and I think in all of us there is -- a tension between a concern for precision and a concern for particularity, a concern for getting things stated in an absolutely rigorous way and a concern for the broader humane streams of understanding that we find flowing around these technical arguments and providing a context for them, providing a situation for them.

In fact, there's one thing about the book Cosmopolis that you're mainly alluding to.

Hackney: Right.

Toulmin: There's one thing that I slightly regret. I repeatedly use words like "conceptualized" and "decontextualized" in that book when I would have preferred (and should have preferred) to use words about situations [Toulmin does ("corrects") this in Return to Reason, also worth reading, vk]. It's not a question of the relation between one text and another text. It's a relation between how intellectual thought has progressed and the situations to which it has been responsive. It's not outrageous to suggest that the beginnings of modern philosophy have to be seen in a context, or have to be seen against a background of a situation in which it has ceased to be possible to get any general agreement about the overall framework of human understanding, for reasons of theological deadlock.

To this extent -- and we know that Descartes and his colleagues were exposed to this terrible final religious war between rulers of different European states who professed to be defending the interests of Protestantism on the one side, Catholicism on the other -- we know that this made a deep impression on Descartes and Leibniz. It's been naive of a lot of us to think that Descartes and Leibniz and their successors could dissociate the arguments they put forward entirely from the rest of the experience they had, which must have been a searing and indigestible kind of experience.

Hackney: Yes, making the search for certainty more attractive.

Toulmin: Making it seem more urgent. Leibniz, who was born right at the end of the Thirty Years' War, long after Descartes by humane standards, spent the whole of his career afraid that the argument might go in a way that enabled the religious wars to break out again. Since his family had seen much of Germany destroyed and about a third of the population of Germany killed in the course of those thirty years, it's understandable that he felt an intellectual mission to create a basis for people to agree on foundations about which they need no longer fight.

Hackney: It's interesting that you prefer the word "situation" to "context." I haven't been infected enough by the literary theorists to misunderstand your use of context.

Toulmin: No. I only mention it because in the last resort it was quite an achievement of Wittgenstein, with whom I studied, to have taken the argument behind texts to the life within which texts have a life. Literary theory discussions which treat everything as a text, even life, put the cart before the horse, and I stay on Wittgenstein's side of the fence in this respect. [NB! vk]

Hackney: But they have contributed another element to your sense that knowledge has to be seen as contingent and situational. I'm paraphrasing now what I take to be a literary theorist's approach: If everything we know, we know through language and we communicate through language, and language is not the thing itself but a representation of the thing, that's simply another barrier between us and the ideal thing, is it not, that we're trying to understand?

Toulmin: I don't want to quibble over the word, but if you're saying that contemporary literary theory is itself as much a response to our present return to a respect for contingency, a respect for happenstance, then, as my own work or the work of Richard Rorty and others who have been moving in the same direction shows, over that I agree.

Hackney: But they go beyond that.

Toulmin: They're coming at it from a different starting point, and we all bear the impress of our starting points on the ways we think, and even more on the ways we express ourselves.

Hackney: Yes. And you do also.

Toulmin: It's inevitable. We do the best we can given where we start from, and there's nothing to despair about. There's nothing in the way of absurdity involved in acknowledging that fact.

Hackney: Is that a fundamental error of Descartes?

Toulmin: It's an interesting thing. I feel about Descartes as I feel about Plato, that he had at least two things at stake in his philosophizing. I talk about him in the book as partly a cryptanalyst, partly a foundationalist; by which I mean part of the time he thought he was, in the spirit of a scientist, deciphering the code in which the book of nature is written, and so developing an account of the world of nature in which God's fundamental language is translated into a form that humanists could follow. But, of course, that pursuit is not one that necessarily gives one absolute certainty.

The other part of the time he was infected with Dewey's quest for certainty. He was hoping that we could find some absolute foundation for our ideas, and that's the point on which his rationalist successors seized. But whether it's fair to call Descartes a Cartesian is a bit like, is it fair to call Plato a Platonist, or even more, Aristotle an Aristotelian.

Hackney: You are much more sympathetic to the other, the alternative arc of modernism from Montaigne. Why is that? Or, maybe even first, what is that?

Toulmin: Cosmopolis is intended as a balance-redressing book. There is so much in high school textbooks, in orthodox philosophy of science, in all kinds of much published, much read, much assimilated public thought, which takes it for granted that Galileo and Descartes and Hobbes were embarking on a great new positive direction and that this mathematization of thought was a splendid and admirable thing. In some ways, it's true. It bore all kinds of fruit. But, at the same time, these formal achievements have been allowed to cloud our vision of the other half of our modern inheritance, which goes back a bit further to Erasmus and Thomas More, to Cervantes and Rabelais, to Montaigne and Shakespeare, and people who lived and wrote and contributed before the beginning of modern science and modern philosophy as the academies and schools know it.

At the present time what we see is a convergence of these two traditions. The domination of an ideal of rationality rather than a reasonableness has been receding, so that now we find people in all kinds of fields recognizing that the technicalities and mathematical formulations of that tradition need always to be looked at as contributing or failing to contribute to humane ideals and to humane achievements.

Forty years ago, you would never have discovered in the daily newspapers of this country or any of the other industrialized countries discussions about the moral problems in medicine, for instance. Medicine was a technical art which the doctors were responsible for. To the extent that ethical questions arose in the practice of medicine, the doctors, as professionals, were expected to take care of them, and, indeed, took good care that it was they who took care of them. Twenty years ago, there was quite a tussle between people who argued that it was time for the public to be allowed into this discussion and people who still wanted to hang onto a professional monopoly in the resolution of these problems.

The debate about whether people should be allowed to die when they feel their time has come, to say nothing of all the debates about abortion -- all of these questions are now public property. Leaving aside the question about how they're argued in actual practice, I think it's an excellent thing.

It goes along with the environmental critique of engineering. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used to build canals and locks and cut up the countryside quite lightheartedly on the basis of technical specifications, which their theories have yet to justify. Now the whole question of environmental impact and ecological consequences is a central part of the public face of engineering.

Technicality, technical excellence, is no longer an end in itself. It's something which has to be kept in balance with humane consequences.

Hackney: So you're urging us to keep in balance these two traditions.

Toulmin: This is one of the extraordinary things about the last thirty-five years or so. It still strikes me as amazing that Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, appeared as recently as 1962.

Hackney: That is very recent.

Toulmin: Thirty-five years. At that time, if you had said to Rachel Carson in her last years that by the mid 1990s no government in the world with any pretension to respectability would fail to have some kind of environmental protection agency, it would have appeared quite incredible to her.

This is a major change in the agenda of politics, and it's a change which moves precisely in the direction that represents a return from, shall we say, Descartes to Erasmus. I remain charmed by Erasmus's famous essay, In Praise of Folly [link], which is a prophylactic against the quest for certainty.

Hackney: Yes, exactly. And you recall the humanistic or the more humane . . .

Toulmin: Well, yes, yes. This is the beginning of the tradition which the academic world knows as the humanities in the way in which Galileo and Descartes are the beginning of the tradition which the academic world knows as the exact sciences. Because I myself began my professional training as a physicist and have been spending the decades opening all the doors that lead out of physics into other areas of reflection, I welcome any evidence that this broadening of the agenda of the exact sciences is being reflected in the way in which human life is being led on the public as well as on the private level.

Hackney: That raises the question of your teacher, Wittgenstein, and his own professional progress or the changing agendas of his intellectual career. He did change several times in his own intellectual pursuits.

Toulmin: Wittgenstein was deeply preoccupied with two questions throughout his life. To talk about him as though he had a professional career as a philosopher is a mistake. Wittgenstein was, as Ray Monk shows in his biography, a person in whom one can't draw a distinction between the life and the career, the personality and the proficiency. He was a struggling person in the kind of way in which, for instance, Kierkegaard was a struggling person.

One of the things he was struggling with was the question, how communication is possible, how human modes of expression are capable of being meaningful at all. It is characteristic of him that he saw that if indeed there were any real doubt about the possibility of human communication then even to raise the question of the possibility of human communication should itself be open to challenge. This is a view he shares with Sextus Empiricus in antiquity and with Montaigne at the end of the sixteenth century, and it finds expression in this image of the ladder which the philosopher climbs up and then throws away as being itself deceptive and illegitimate.

The interesting thing is that this very same image, which appears at the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, also appears at the end of Sextus Empiricus's book, Against the Dogmatists. This is that kind of commonplace which traditional skeptics have been familiar with.

I said there were two things he was preoccupied with. In relation to that question, which is the question that professional philosophers continue to tussle with, it's true that there is a shift. He thinks in the early stages of his career, when he's generating the Tractatus, that he can give us a kind of technical model which will show us what's the trouble about communication. Later on, he realizes that this technicality is itself unsatisfactory, and he comes back and adopts a quite different way of helping us to bring ourselves around to the point at which we'll see the necessity for the skepticism which he continues to hold.

There is the other question. The other question is an ethical question, about which Wittgenstein never fully reconciles the personal puzzlement he has in the realm of ethics with the intellectual puzzlement he has in relation to language in general and communication. In this respect, I think he is like the French seventeenth-century writer, Blaise Pascal, who was a brilliant mathematician and a wonderful controversialist for half the time, but the other half of the time retired to the abbey of Port-Royal outside Paris and meditated on the question whether his intellectual brilliance was a temptation that God had imposed on him as a test for his faith. As a good Jansenist, he was inclined to suspect his own motives in being an intellectual and to reject his own intellectuality. Wittgenstein had something of the same duality, torn between his own intellectual brilliance and feelings of deep personal inadequacy which he struggled with, not entirely successfully.

Hackney: But not the question of whether we can reach some general agreement about what is ethical behavior and what is not?

Toulmin: The one thing he was sure about was that any agreement that we could reach would not be a matter of intellectual consensus. It would be a convergence of humane attitudes. He was clearly attracted by the way in which Leo Tolstoy expresses much the same point.

In Anna Karenina, for instance, Tolstoy has as one of his characters a professor of philosophy whom he makes look rather ridiculous because he's theorizing about things which amaze Levin -- as the hero of the book and as an expression of Tolstoy's own personal points of view -- in terms of the way in which dealing with these matters on a purely intellectual basis trivializes them and fails to address the deep conflicts which one is faced by in the course of life -- especially those which people like Tolstoy or Wittgenstein faced as a result of inheriting a large fortune in a world full of poverty.

Hackney: Yes. But you speak as if you think that Wittgenstein's own intellectual journey is a matter of internal dynamics. That is, he has these two important questions in his life which he pursues in slightly different ways at different times, but he is not influenced by the world he sees around him.

Toulmin: I suppose this is really what a career in philosophy tends to be like. Ray Monk subtitles his biography of Wittgenstein The Duty of Genius. The implication is that to be a philosophical genius is a calling, a vocation, and the best we can do is to see how the different strands that go to express the nature of this vocation for a particular writer weave together. I think one can do this in the case of Pascal; I think one can do it in the case of Wittgenstein. It is one of the things I try to do in the case of Descartes in Cosmopolis.

Hackney: Oh, yes, indeed.

Wittgenstein is mainly known from his students. He wrote, or, published, relatively little.

Toulmin: He published almost nothing in his lifetime. He published the Tractatus, and he let one or two other essays be put into print. Even the Philosophical Investigations, which he was working on throughout his last years, was published only posthumously. He is a person who left behind him a lot of influences on teachers and students who see themselves as the inheritors of a tradition.

There's a curious article -- "The Philosophers That Sophie Skipped" -- in the December 7, 1996, issue of the Economist which is a discussion of Russell versus Wittgenstein in the history of twentieth-century philosophy. The writer of this article is clearly on Russell's side and takes some satisfaction in the fact that the profession of philosophy has never been so populated. There have never been more professional philosophers than there are now, and this is something which he thinks that Russell would have welcomed. Certainly, Wittgenstein wouldn't have. Wittgenstein saw his vocation as having to clean the Augean stables of the intellect. He thought that the brilliant young were being distracted from urgent tasks by pursuing these intellectual dead ends. I think he would have been deeply depressed if he'd lived long enough to see how many thousands of philosophers are earning a living that way.

This is not the first time in history that something of this kind has happened. Plato was caustic about Gorgias and the other Sophists who set up what he dismissed as "thinking shops" and, he implied, prostituted their skills for pay.

Hackney: Let's shift to the future, about which you've also thought philosophically. I assume there is a future out there, even though we're living through a brief period in which many authors and public intellectuals are using postsomething, "postmodernism," in the titles of their books.

Toulmin: I think there's a lot to be said for Jurgen Habermas' criticism of this habit. He pokes fun at what he calls the posties, for whom everything is postsomething. There is a giveaway in the fact that this label implies that the people in question don't see what directions there are available for going in.

In this respect, I don't like being called a postmodernist myself, because I hope one can see that actually there was, as Habermas also insists, a lot that we must value and treasure in the things that were achieved between 1600 and 1950, or whatever -- choose your own date. What we have to do is make the technical and the humanistic strands in modern thought work together more effectively than they have in the past.

When I look back at my own life, it is my good fortune that, although I started being trained professionally as a physicist, I was able, after the Second World War, to start opening the doors out of physics into other neighboring subjects, so that, beginning with the philosophy of science and going on to the history of science and sociology of science and the history of ideas, I have been concerned with establishing the possibility, and also the value, of knitting together the strands that come from the technical, exact sciences with the strands that come from history, sociology, and the rest. We're seeing all kinds of important inquiries developing which are very constructive in their own ways.

At USC there's a professor in the law school -- Christopher Stone, whose father was I. F. Stone, the well-known political journalist and commentator. Christopher Stone has done some very striking things by developing environmental law. Some years ago he wrote the famous paper, Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects. This was a beginning. He argues that it should be possible to go into court and say, "The redwoods don't deserve to be destroyed. They deserve to be protected. The tradition of common law should devise new ways of making this possible and of justifying injunctions against acts which would be threatening to endangered species just as much as to human beings." This is the sort of discussion which eighty years ago would have been regarded as dotty.

Hackney: I'm thinking here again about how we get into the future. You write very sensibly about the future, there being a number of futures that we ought to understand.

Toulmin: Yes. There's a whole set of issues we haven't talked about up to this point which have to do with the parallelism that I trace between the evolution of intellectual theory and the political evolution of the state system.

Hackney: I was trying to get into that.

Toulmin: This is more speculative than the arguments that I put forward in looking at the relations between the exact sciences and the humanities; though, indeed, the arguments that I speculate about in Cosmopolis have been taken up by colleagues in the international relations profession. There is a very active discussion about the ways in which political organization is having to be reconsidered in a period in which the old claims about the absolute sovereignty of the nation-state are losing their plausibility. It's striking that when people start banging the drum about outsiders not being allowed to criticize the way they're running their States, they complain that this is an infringement on their absolute sovereignty. I find the people who do this highly suspect. They tend to be the Burmese military or Saddam Hussein.

Hackney: Exactly. They're complaining for a reason.

Toulmin: Yes, and when the prime minister of Malaysia complains that we are seeking to impose Western values on other cultures unjustifiably, the run-of-the-mill Malaysian probably doesn't like being arbitrarily imprisoned any more than the run- of-the-mill Frenchman or American.

Hackney: That's true, and it is arising here in regard to Serbia and China and many other states.

Toulmin: Indeed. We're living in an extraordinarily exciting and fascinating, though also frustrating, time because we're seeing the emergence of a set of institutional relationships which are not, as some people fear, moving in the direction of world government. World government could easily turn into world tyranny. We're seeing the emergence of a whole set of patterns of association, of mechanisms of agreement, of ways in which people from different countries can work together to place limits on the arbitrariness and propensities to tyranny of people who still think that they're entitled to run a country as they please.

Hackney: Does that critique from the outside depend on our being able to agree among ourselves internationally on some universal concept of tyranny?

Toulmin: Here I would make a distinction. I'm sure that it will never be possible to get the governments of the members of the United Nations and the rest to sign a common document. On the other hand, I think on the nongovernmental level there is in practice a strong and large consensus which governs the way in which people do things. And if ethics is more a practical matter than an intellectual matter, that may be what really is important.

Hackney: That's what I thought you would say, that it's not so much discovering the platonic ideal of justice universally but people talking with each other across their differences and reaching some agreement.

Toulmin: Indeed. In this respect I've been increasingly struck by the role which nongovernmental organizations play in the world. To the extent that people look for the creation of what they call civil society we can find the beginnings of it on an effective level more by looking at the way in which these transnational nongovernmental organizations operate than by looking at the ways in which official nation-state governments operate. That, for me, is a genuinely new feature of the world, and one which leads us back to look with interest at things that happened long ago, before the beginning of modernity.

Hackney: Do you detect echoes of the late sixteenth or seventeenth century today?

Toulmin: It really was very difficult during these three hundred years for people to put forward from outside intellectual critiques of the ways in which governments ran what they regarded as their own affairs. On the other hand, if we go further back, King Henry II of England was forced to go to Normandy and bow the knee before a papal legate in order to shrive himself of the sins involved in being associated with the murder of Thomas … Becket. At that stage, there was an outside body, namely the church, which had the power to put rulers in shame, which meant that they were simply not acceptable on the international scene.

One of the great virtues of nongovernmental organizations is that they are able, in a new kind of way, to practice the politics of shame rather than the politics of force. The moment Amnesty International buys its first machine gun, its moral authority would be destroyed. It's the fact that they are speaking for a very widespread consensus about what is and is not tolerable behavior by governments that gives them political influence.

Hackney: That's true. That sort of moral authority though does depend on a couple of things: on a government's thinking that it has to respond in some sense to its own population; and on an enlarging agreement among different populations about what standards are or what tyranny is.

Toulmin: Yes, but then the question becomes, how do you define, how do you differentiate populations, and I argue that the entire transnational medical profession say is a population. We have to stop thinking about effective populations as being the populations of a particular country or a particular state. What binds us together in a moral network is very often the fact that, for example, we're all doctors and that we share the values that the profession of medicine embodies for all who practice it.

Hackney: I suppose you would also say that the more people from different political entities talk to each other the more they would develop some shared experience and a shared sense of proper behavior, shameless behavior.

Toulmin: Yes. None of this, of course, is entirely new. The first modern nongovernmental organization to be truly effective was the Red Cross, founded in Switzerland -- a neutral state -- in the second half of the nineteenth century. It's much older than Amnesty International and the rest, which are essentially post-World War II foundations.

There are interesting but not irrelevant facts, such as, there is a legal difference between the status of a soldier who operates in the United States medical corps and all other members of the armed forces. It is against military discipline for a soldier in war to have anything to do with a member of the enemy forces, except in response to an explicit command. On the other hand, a member of the United States medical corps is entitled to pick up wounded members of the enemy forces and treat them. All the rules against fraternization, all the rules against illegitimate association between soldiers and the enemy, are heavily qualified in the case of members of the medical corps, who are seen as being as much doctors as they are Americans, and as having obligations which are on them as doctors, which they have to reconcile with the obligations which are on them as Americans.

Hackney: Very interesting.

Toulmin: None of these ideas, none of these traditions, has ever been lost. They've always been there, but somehow the preoccupation with the sovereignty of the nation-state, like the preoccupation with the rigor and necessity of theoretical argument, has kept our attention directed away from these considerations which are now coming back to the center of our picture.

Hackney: You've written and talked about so many different subjects that we could go on much longer, but we must not. Thank you so much.

Humanities, March/April 1997, Volume 18/Number 2

http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/1997-03/toulmin.html

*

[vanlose kid]

food for thought...

Guest Post: Thoughts On The Liberty Dollar Debacle

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/25/2011 19:14 -0400

Thoughts On The Liberty Dollar Debacle

By Brandon Smith of Alt-Market.com

I was in the midst of the Save America Convention in Tampa, Florida when I heard, first, that Libya was under bombardment by the UN (led by U.S. forces), and, that Bernard von NotHaus of Liberty Dollar had been convicted of “counterfeiting”. It was a stressful day, to say the least. For those not familiar with the Liberty Dollar incident, In November of 2007, federal officials raided the group’s headquarters nestled in a strip mall and seized all documents and the gold and silver that backed up the paper certificates and digital currency being distributed through the Liberty Services website. The Justice Department asserted that Von NotHaus was placing gold and silver coins, along with precious metals currency, into circulation with the purpose of mixing them “into the current money of the United States.”

To be clear, NotHaus made some serious mistakes, including pressing his coins to look semi-similar to standard federal currency, and also using language which could be interpreted to insinuate that his currency was “legal tender”. There are many barter networks in the U.S. that use gold and silver that do not have these kinds of problems with the government simply because they are careful not to make the same blunders.

However, it wasn’t the conviction itself that struck me, so much as the language of the prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Anne Tompkins, in her post trial statement. Let me reprint my favorite parts for you here:

“Attempts to undermine the legitimate currency of this country are simply a unique form of domestic terrorism,”

“While these forms of anti-government activities do not involve violence, they are every bit as insidious and represent a clear and present danger to the economic stability of this country,”

“We are determined to meet these threats through infiltration, disruption and dismantling of organizations which seek to challenge the legitimacy of our democratic form of government.”

Some in the Liberty Movement have interpreted this statement to be a warning to all of us that the Federal Government is declaring open season on alternative currencies. Others see it as a preliminary move towards the confiscation of all privately owned gold and silver. And yet others see the statement as dire prophecy, now cowering behind their 1040’s at the thought of the smallest barter transactions, as if the IRS is the all seeing eye of Sauron waiting to catch them in the act of trading apples for oranges and sending agents to crush them with their slimy orc-like fists of doom.

Perhaps I am the only one, but in contrast, I see the prosecutor’s statement as an expression of blatant fear. I’ll explain, but first, let’s dissect the nonsensical and irrational idiocy behind the saber rattling of Anne Tompkins.

First, U.S. prosecutors prevailed over NotHaus on a conviction of COUNTERFEITING! Unless I am confused, and he was using his silver currency to fashion a McGuyver-esque thermonuclear sound money bomb, it is more than just a stretch to try to equate his actions with domestic terrorism. In fact, the post trial statements of Tompkins are so insane it makes one question her level of paranoia, and perhaps her prescription drug habits. After finding no obvious hint of crazy eyed drool mouth in her photographs, I realized that perhaps she was not a zealot, but simply a messenger.

My feeling (and this is only an intuitive notion) is that Tompkins had little to do with the writing of those statements, or had much “coaching” from the Department of Homeland Security, which has been expanding its absurd definition of terrorism to include almost anyone who does not agree with the philosophies of establishment elites and corporate global banks. Even returning military veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have been listed as possible domestic terrorist threats. Why not proponents of gold and silver?

What we see here is the not so subtle conditioning of average Americans towards categorizing certain innocuous behaviors as being related to possible criminal or terrorist motives. Owning guns is anti-social, and you are a naughty bad person for liking big boom boom stick. What’s that? A pocket Constitution!? Didn’t McVeigh or one of the 9/11 hijackers carry around something like that? You have a survival garden? Hmm, that sounds fishy. I better call the FDA and make sure everything you’re doing is on the up and up. You want to trade gold and silver? Privately?! That’s obviously “black market” barter, and you are the reason the economy is so unpleasant. I don’t get as many food stamps and free big brother goodies as I used to, and I blame you and your dastardly sense of self sufficiency! The IRS should have your head! And so it goes…

So, I promote private barter networking and precious metals to safeguard communities from impending inflationary crisis, and am therefore a “non-violent domestic terrorist which represents a clear and present danger to the economic stability of this country”? How does Tompkins or anyone else, with a straight face, declare alternative markets and sound money as a danger to economic stability, when the U.S. economy has already been annihilated by the derivatives bubble conjured by international banks and the private Federal Reserve? What about the constant fiat injections by our central bank which have created an atmosphere prime for dollar devaluation and hyperinflation? Why in the hell hasn’t the U.S. Attorneys Office or Anne Tompkins placed the terrorist label squarely on the doorstep of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, or the Fed itself? I mean, if we are going to start equating the destabilization of the economy with white Al-Qaeda, then let’s be fair at least. Global banks have had far more to do with our financial downfall than gold or silver trade ever will.

What about the follow up chest beating proclamations of “infiltration and disruption” of any organization which seeks to “challenge the legitimacy of our democratic form of government”?

Wow. Isn’t that comment loaded with bile and stupidity. To begin with, if anyone, including Tompkins, can show me how our current form of government is legitimately “democratic” while both major parties are headed by globalists and corporatists who promote the same exact ideology and support the same exact legislation, while refusing to represent even a minority of Americans beyond the elite, then I welcome them to try. (By the way, Tompkins, I know they didn’t teach you this in public school, and probably not in college either, but America was founded as a REPUBLIC, not a democracy.)

If the IRS or anyone else wants to “infiltrate” barter markets or gold and silver organizations and attempt to record every chicken egg or gallon of milk traded, then I welcome them to try. Please, expend all your precious energies in a futile attempt to chill barter economies or sound money movements. We would like nothing better. Why? Because you cannot stop barter networks from forming. They are inevitable. Every culture in history which has seen a severe economic implosion has reverted to barter, trade, gold, and silver to counter the resulting poverty and lack of mainstream commerce. The need for survival will far outweigh the populace’s fear of government reprisal. That is simply the nature of man. The only difference in respect to the Liberty Movement is that we are working to preempt collapse with supporting networks of commodity trade and community barter. We are not working to “undermine” the current economy, we are simply preparing for its eventual fall, and allowing for the safety of cities and states across the country. Why is this considered devious behavior? Why would the government react with such vitriol, not towards Liberty Dollar, but to the very concept of alternative currencies and economies? Because it is something they cannot control…

Ultimately, what I see hidden in Tompkins statements are the wringing hands of bureaucracy, sweaty and shaking with a fear of the unknown. When people are desperate, and dominated by emotions, they become predictable, and this is exactly the kind of mindset governments like to insert into the collective unconscious. There are only two paths for any society in the midst of a full spectrum crisis; beg for more government and more dependency, even if that government created the crisis in the first place, or, move away from the ailing government, and towards independence. Today, in the face of possibly the greatest economic catastrophe in the history of the world, Americans are beginning to show an aptitude for independence. We are becoming unpredictable, and this frightens government. If our cities and states become fully sovereign, with our own insulated commerce, our own industries, our own food sources, our own defense, and, god forbid, our own currency, then we may then demand a government which actually represents us, and our Constitutional foundations, instead of global banks, for a change. They are moving to call us terrorists, because they truly are terrified of alternative market systems. They have tipped their hand. Which means, we must keep doing exactly what we are already doing.

We do not live in a country built upon the rule of law anymore. Corrupt leaders have no concern for law as a means of balance, only as a means of dominance. Laws therefore change upon the whims of tyrants to fit whatever goals they happen to hold at the edge of the moment. Unjust laws do not deserve the respect or the compliance of the masses. At bottom, we are human beings. Truth and conscience take precedence over all things. If a law does not follow the inherent auspices of freedom and integrity, if it does not serve the true best interests of the people, then it should not be followed. Period. This goes for any law, current or pending, which would force Americans to abandon their ability to personally protect themselves, their families, and their communities, from financial disaster. I leave you with my final statement given at the Save America Convention to drive the point home:

“Today, we stand at a bottleneck in the flow of history; a nexus of events which challenge our values, our resolve, and our better natures. Our deepest social and political beliefs will be called into question, our sacred principles of individuality and freedom will face an onslaught of malicious legislation and misguided cultural doubt. These principles always do in the face of global crisis.

To waver is not an option. To retreat is unimaginable. To compromise our core, in this kind of conflict, is to welcome defeat. At bottom, we live in an age of wills that only the strongest of hearts can endure.

As overwhelming as these kinds of struggle can be, as frightening as this kind of responsibility sounds, these are also days of truth and providence. Opportunities to right so many past wrongs in the single breath of an era are rare and precious. Men dream of living in the midst of such moments.

As a people, Americans have been challenged. The test is not only one of might, but one of honor and benevolence. How far are we willing to go to not only save ourselves, but to save each other? What are we really fighting for? Personal survival? The temporary stability and solace of the present? Or something more?

Do we intend to hide away, to merely eek out an existence at the dawn of economic and political catastrophe, or to stand steel faced and immovable in the very wake of the storm? To return to our foundations and hold fast. To not only subsist, but to prosper. To leave for the future something truly better than what we now have.

The most powerful position of defiance we can commit to as a movement is to teach average Americans to stand on their own. To become the purveyors of their own destinies. For me, what we call the Liberty Movement is not only a political entity but a vital philosophy driven by decentralized action and intensified by the growing uniqueness of its participants. It is the anti-thesis of globalization, which aspires only to diminish and dominate the individual, and replace sovereign thought with weak minds and absolute tyranny.

Ultimately, the greatest leaders do not actually seek to lead, but to teach. They do not seek power for themselves; they seek to empower the common man. This is an act of real survival, for a country of steadfast individuals is unconquerable. It is a place without fear.”

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/guest- ... ar-debacle

from the comments:

by CPL
on Fri, 03/25/2011 - 19:54
#1101652

During the early 90's with the Canuck economy in the crapper and all the banks on the ropes, Canada built a barter economy. It was weird. Buses were popular in Ottawa. A bus would pull up, drop money in the meters, and it was an instant store. Considering sparks street had nothing left on it except borded up shop windows and bank street looked like a Irish ghetto.

It worked, Canucks even setup exchange programs. Nobody had any money, but everyone had skills. Worked for a while, then TaxCan came into the groups and started pushing people around, lots of threats, couple of fines. Then it all closed down. They even went after garage sales for a couple of years.

Now in the country, the way it works. TaxMan shows up, phone tree happens. I'll go to find them, they need a lift back to where ever they came from. They are tagged and marked. No cars for rent. No taxis are available after the sugar bag is in their tank and they are 300 kms from home. No rooms to rent. No food to eat unless they go to the grocery store. TaxCan always comes back with more jackasses, but we repeat the process , local law enforcement is privy and understanding and tickets the shit out of the cars and the tents they pitch. Make sure to point out to our kids where they pitch their tents. Misery...complete misery is the only way to keep a civil servant away.

Be careful Stateside cousins. If you want the maggots out of your bread, make sure it's wrapped up tight. If the little beasties can't eat, then the vermin, bloodsuckers die. Give them nowhere to go.

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by Green Leader
on Fri, 03/25/2011 - 20:07
#1101682

Awesome, simply awesome.

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by victor82
on Fri, 03/25/2011 - 20:19
#1101711

By God, I didn't know the Canucks had it in them!

And here we just line up and take it up the poop chute like it's nobody's business while the Poodle hires 16K IRS agents to use as his Party Gestapo.

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by CPL
on Fri, 03/25/2011 - 20:35
#1101746

It's passive agressive therefore Canuck. We don't have guns. But we have the ability to annoy the shit out of people. We apologise in advance for Justin Beiber btw, we will all be listening to the little shit for a long time to come.

*

edit: more from the comments:

by CPL
on Fri, 03/25/2011 - 20:33
#1101741

You should see it now. Chinese and Indian come in and bid, 20% over asking for basic commodities and pay in silver and gold. Not just the Ottawa valley, New Brunswick...Alberta...anywhere the grows food. China has been in here, in person, as in the co-op in a month will have Chinese nationals from different interests along with the Indian folks, bidding on output per 100 acres.

You know where the people bidding on Euro and US food supply are. Some building, at a desk, rotting...panicking. Plus the silver and gold exchange is nice, it's not taxable until it's turned into fiat. As far as the Valley is concerned, we're all happy Canada is electing another minority government of conservatives under the guise of back room deals. No one I know could give a shit who is in the post of PM after May 2nd. The system can rot and I doubt you'll find anyone outside of Ottawa, Toronto or Vancouver that gives a shit if it mattered.

Again want to kill a tax man, think like a farmer. If there is vermin in your house, you starve it to death, cut it off from the ability to escape and let it eat itself to death. Make it quit all by itself. You can't kill all the vermin, but remove the environment it needs to live and it will happily kill itself or never return. Same goes for any occupational force.

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by Cursive
on Fri, 03/25/2011 - 21:57
#1101946

@CPL

Again want to kill a tax man, think like a farmer.

You could also say to think like GE. How is Jeff Immelt not a financial terrorist?

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by slewie the pi-rat
on Fri, 03/25/2011 - 22:46
#1102052

haven't been to ottawa in decades, but it is the capitol, and a pretty nice one, at that. then, one crosses into hull, or one did, decades ago. not a different part of town...

...a different world. planet. galaxy?

black markets are free markets. worldwide. we REALly don't need a NWO! the one we USED to have is still there. but you can't get there with plastic and you you sure as hell aren't gonna be doing things thru banks and brokerages. the IRS publishes 70,000 pages, and GE pays less than we do! and there are other "tax and fee" authorities waiting around for us, too. everywhere. look at yer phone bill! it MAKES NO FUKING SENSE!

it's not that you can't use a bank. but why use a bank if you don't need to use a bank? if i own a business, i don't mind buying and selling for cash. about 20 years ago, i paid a dentist $1200 for $4500 "worth" of dentistry. cash up front. paid in full. winwin. from the pharisee's point of view, he did something "wrong". hell, WE "conspired"---that's a freaking felony, right there! but he helped me out and enabled me to keep functioning with my peeps the way i wished, too. i told him: buy your wife some nice gold! he said, slewie, i think i will!

hey, if enron and the banksters can go "off balance sheet," why can't people who are trying to get along go "off income statement"?

i know! organized crime does that! duh! they're not styooopid! but, shit, at least they don't work for the fuking goobermint! the CIA, defense dept black ops, state black ops, nsa black ops, and so on have been known to go "off line item budget, too." and they DO work for the goobermint! technically, it is "contra" to the rules, isn't it?

we go into the hill countries of the middle east, b/c of "homeland security", start wasting people with drones, and changing commands, and the whole place is now cultivating poppies! surely, i'm not the only Z.head who noticed!

dostoevsky, zola, steinbeck, others you might name, knew what it meant to think like a farmer.

occupational force? about 3/4 of our Bill of Rights deals with our rights NOT to be subject to same. posse comitatus, habeas corpus---stuff that is, right now, hanging by the thinnest of threads---we NEED this shit. wake up!!!

thanks, CPL! all you hozers and hozettes stood tall, on this site, today!

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by msamour
on Fri, 03/25/2011 - 23:33
#1102129

Cool, I am also in the Ottawa Valley, only i'm on the French side. By where I live there are a lot of Irish, Scottish, Germans, and Ukranians descendent (I imagine you know the area of Western Quebec I am referring to.) In the early 90's when the language police used to come to "inspect" the vilagages for compliance they would usually be run out of town by a bunch of guys in pick ups. Usually the local police, (at the time QPP) never intervened, usually because the mayor was in the back of the pick up truck with the other folks.

I heard the one story of the language police guy that was left naked on the edge of town with his car on blocks. That was a long time ago though. I haven't heard of the Quebec government sending anymore language police to the area.

The Irish in this area of Canada have an history of standing up to the government. I'm fairly proud of that.

Cheers, fro Hull.

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by CPL
on Sat, 03/26/2011 - 00:10
#1102168

Yup, Buckingham...I remember that. Not the only fucktard to be pitched in the ditch. They are all lucky to avoid being gunned with the boots and having a mouth to speak out of. The Language police had their day at one point in time, but starve teh fuckers out of a good meal, make sure their is no bed for them to sleep and nothing is friendly. they go away.

Anything left of Montreal is ignored and when Quebec City decides to annoy anyone west of the border they are asking for a hosing. Compte tenu de la dernière fois que le Québec a ouvert la route ou a donné de l'argent à une zone jamais...sorry...last time the place got the roads paved or paid back in the area was never. Even in the southern valley we still pave it ourselves in Ontario like our cousins Gatineau west/east. (Hole in the road? Phone city hall? No. Gimme five minutes.) Even in Ottawa it can been seen the money is running thin. They are cutting bus routes to main lines and the communist bent of services for everyone for nothing is getting scraped bare and fast. Like watching a man at the Hull Casino measure his last twenty in the bar.

As I've mentioned the area is Normandy/Irish/Native/Scottish, kick a family tree and we all fall out. lol We're a good looking people.

G'Day de Prescott mon/ma cousin

*

[vanlose kid]

posting more from the comments in the thread OP above, because it's informative and because it's hellafun...

by Cursive
on Fri, 03/25/2011 - 21:55
#1101937

@CPL

I think our Treasury/SS/US Marshall/FBI/IRS federal agents are bit more aggressive than their Canadian counterparts. Still, congrats on your resisstance and may we develop the same fortitude in the lower 48.

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by CPL
on Fri, 03/25/2011 - 22:54
#1102020

What is someone threw a war and nobody came?

Just a bunch of dumb assholes standing around looking for a fight. If that sounds like street corner thugs...it is. Weird thing I can say about wars from reading blocks and stacks of shit to avoid boredom, it's not really the battle that wins it. It's what people do on the ground everyday. Assassination and complete disinterest in the "ruling" regime, these things play more a part in political change than a land war, most people would be happy doing other things.

In a modern world you have to understand who these people are. They have nice lives, comfortable homes, families that tolerate them and lights that go on. Remove all external validation and watch the violet wilt. Most without a working wi-fi contection turn into complete boobs. Could you imagine people attempting in the field trying to figure out how to get a modem working?

My favorite thing is to watch city people try to use a cell phone here. I have a secret pet fun time. Watch some idiot with an iPhone do something. lol 3G in rural Canada, maybe find a roaming tower connected to a wild turkey or moose.

If you want change, find the cell towers and knock them down instead of let them being built up and simply stop using them. Same goes for cable TV. Find the CO box and have fun with it. Learn enough and give everyone free cable, all it takes is a 12 pack of dollar store gator clips. Same goes for fucking with DSL and cable, looks like R2D2, about hip high and usually one every 400 feet from each other.

Look up the ancient and phun skill of phreaking. Want to knock down communications start there. Want to learn how to develop DSL in a local area and your own "internet", start there. Want to help egyptians put up a cell phone tower in a country that shut it down from nothing, it's great place to start.

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by CPL
on Fri, 03/25/2011 - 22:59
#1102081

I'm an engineer, BUT, I can name ten guys that can build a new communications setup with nothing but imagination and the understanding how a communications connection is made by hacking it together.

All that's different between me and my friends is a degree. Just takes an interest in playing with other peoples toys. That's anonymous.

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by Cursive
on Fri, 03/25/2011 - 23:34
#1102106

@CPL

LOL. Phreaking reminds me of "Captain Crunch." I've already started looking into "packet radio" (http://daily-survival.blogspot.com/2011 ... lypse.html). I've enjoyed your posts for some time now. Tonight is a real treat. I've got some more reading to do. Thank you for that.

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by CPL
on Fri, 03/25/2011 - 23:44
#1102155

Old skool it is then. At one point in time packet tossing between HAM radio guys in the FIDO network on BBSes was pretty popular. Just like the internet but slower and personal to the location. Use PGP 1.0 or lower and you have a promise that you will never have anyone reading your shit, ever. BTW, it's very illegal to even own a copy of PGP 1.0 or lower, suggestions is to find an old amiga version and generate a key. Look up the term emulation and amiga on google. Sometimes to be secure, use old technology. The originator of PGP, that basis of all current online shit-tacular security is based on it. Did so well the original guy that built it in 91 was killed...sorry...accidented. Car accidented...even though he didn't own a car or drive one and was a first year university student. Phrack has a couple of issues on him from a million years ago.

FOr Phreaking.

http://www.textfiles.com/phreak/

Same technology is used today. At least the premise is. The toys may change and if looking for a fix, there is always something hanging around, just has to be cludged into place.

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by CPL
on Fri, 03/25/2011 - 23:47
#1102156

You use the HAM radio as a modem. best speed you are getting is 9600 baud tho. No pictures...just text.

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by mkkby
on Sat, 03/26/2011 - 00:04
#1102178

This is misguided. The internet is the only thing giving people any non MSM news or communication.

Starve the beast by:

1. Buying nothing but food, fuel, necessary med's and PM's.

2. Turn off TV and for gosh sakes don't buy anything advertised on TV

3. Take all money out of interstate banks and put it in locals and credit union.

4. Barter or pay cash/PM's when ever possible.

We all do that and the elite go down without a shot fired. Just go on strike and STARVE THE BEAST.

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by CPL
on Sat, 03/26/2011 - 00:30
#1102216

okay...couple of things..

1. Buying nothing but food, fuel, necessary med's and PM's.

Everyone around you has an ability. Find out what is yours and use it. The idea of a lone survivor in the wilderness is a retarded fantasy. Want to have a NICE life, you work with people.

2. Turn off TV and for gosh sakes don't buy anything advertised on TV

What about my food chopper and my turnip twaddler? It's a form of communication, don't understand most of it is bullshit? then you deserve to buy anything shoveled down your throat. I'm sporting my snuggie holding my slap chopper in hand waiting for my MDG laptop to show up so i can order some of these sick online mortgage deals and medications from Manitoba pharmacies while reviewing nude beaver shots of show celebrity of passing fame.

Again, get suckered in, you deserve the 12 inch cock in the ass.

3. Take all money out of interstate banks and put it in locals and credit union.

Who told you they were any different from one another. They are all fractional reserve banking advocated...otherwise they would not be able to run. When the banking system went tits up in 2008 in the US, libor SUCKED every dollar out of them and left them to die. Most of the banks that went tits up were locals and CU's.

4. Barter or pay cash/PM's when ever possible.

That I can agree with, if I can haggle with a electrician for fixing a PC or validating a design for specification, I'll do that as long as the agreement is honored. But since my experience of skill swap has been pretty good, 80% delivery, I still like to have a fall back point. That ended up making me a loan shark in that situation, I did end up getting my due.

It's amazing how fast people put a zero value on delivery if it's just labour on a promise.

Ever ask friends to help you move? It's like that except without a deadline or friendship. It's all based on trust and honour. What's that worth as a rate of exchange?

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by Fearless Rick
on Sat, 03/26/2011 - 00:49
#1102242

Pure poetry to my ears, my Canadian brother. And an action plan, too. Very instructive.

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by CPL
on Sat, 03/26/2011 - 01:08
#1102263

I would join the Rhino Party to offer my action plan but they were disbanded because they actually got a seat. Part of their mandate of change, "if the world ever changes to accept us, we no longer need to exist as a political party because the world has become insane"

I'm making that last part up, but yes, they did have a mandate to disband first person to be elected to a political chair. I think it was a sock puppet/cartoon/dead guy in Toronto that won in the student ghetto.

Anyone that wants to read up on the Rhino Party of Canada here you go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinoceros ... E2%80%93...

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by StychoKiller
on Sat, 03/26/2011 - 07:11
#1102498

The Rhino party puts the Tea Party to shame! :>(

*

[vanlose kid]

Collective Bargaining for Homeowners: Heroism or Terrorism? My Exclusive Interview with Steven Lerner

Episode #47 – Steven Lerner, former director of the SEIU’s banking and finance campaign. Founder of WheresTheNote.com and Janitors for Justice

Last night, I interviewed the man at the center of a new swirling controversy. Stephen Lerner, a veteran union organizer, wants collective bargaining for homeowners that owe money to the big banks. And this week, he was caught on tape talking about a “mortgage strike” against the big banks. He suggested that a large number of homeowners stop paying their mortgage until the banks agree to negotiate and modify loans.

Glenn Beck pounced on the recording. And so did Congress. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Republican Congressman from Utah, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder wrote to the Department of Justice that Lerner’s threats “clearly constitute domestic terrorism”, and asked for an investigation.

I interviewed Lerner, to get his side of the story – his first interview since being attacked by Beck. Lerner talked about the mortgage strike idea, the big banks, the Tea Party and Glenn Beck’s attack, and being accused of terrorism.

“Glenn Beck and this group of people are basically shilling for Wall Street”
Here’s Lerner on the Tea Party’s defense of the big banks:

You know I can’t explain it. Why Glen Beck and this group of people are basically shilling for Wall St. and the big banks it just makes no sense. So I can’t get into their head on why they’re doing it, what it feels like is that Wall St., sort of the elites at the top are just really, really worried that when people understand all the things you said and when people understand on top of it that the banks get free money from the fed—it was very funny in a number of discussions that I’ve had, I say to people well if you got a billion dollars in free money and then loaned it out at 3% would you make any money? Everybody said yeah I’d make money, I’d say well you’re a brilliant banker. So I don’t know why they’re shilling for the banks, I don’t know why they don’t want to make markets work. And that’s the thing that seems to scare them, you can’t have markets when you have Too Big to Fail, you can’t have competition when you have Too Big To Fail and we’re trying to figure out how to keep people in their homes, how to fix state budgets and how to make the economy work and it’s stunning how some people seem more interested in protecting the super rich who have all our money than in supporting people who are trying to fix the economy and get people to work.

“We’re not going to keep paying you as you said when you got this by stealing”
Here’s Lerner, on a “mortgage strike” and homeowners acting like businesspeople:

What you’re getting as is I think the thing that is so important to realize, that’s the deal the bank makes when they loan you money that if you can’t pay it back or if you don’t pay it back they get the house. What I think is so interesting about this is—I don’t know if you remember I think it’s the Mortgage Banker’s Association after giving speeches on the sanctity of never walking away walked away from their own building and gave the keys back. There’s this very double standard I think is what’s really stirring people up more and more in the country. Everybody has sacrificed, everybody has taken a hit and the only people that don’t want to share in the sacrifice are the people that got us in the mess and that’s why a lot of people are saying individually I may not have a lot of power but if we start to act together we can try to negotiate with Wall St. and the banks and saying we need a better deal, not just for me individually but for the country so we can get the economy working again.

“People start throwing out words like terrorism and try to intimidate people into not speaking.
Lerner, on being accused of terrorism by Congressman Jason Chaffetz:

It really shows that something is off when people talking about doing something that’s completely legal that mirrors exactly how business operate that people start throwing out words like terrorism and trying to intimidate people into not speaking. The only thing I can figure on this, you know you started off by talking about how much money the banks have and their influence and their relationship with government is that there is a whole set of people that just seem to say I have to defend the banks and Wall St. no matter what happens. It’s an attempt to sort of scare people and scare regular people and scare homeowners and scare people who are trying to figure out how to put their economic lives back together, to scare them out of standing up. I don’t think it would work but it’s really a disappointment that people go into that kind of sensationalism instead of saying let’s really fix the problem here and keep people in their homes and get the economy working and lets really say we need to address Too Big to Fail instead of trying to intimidate folks that think the economy is a mess because of the banks.

Lerner is a former director of the Service Employees International Union’s banking and finance campaign. He created the website WheresTheNote.com, a website for homeowners to research which financial institution actually holds their mortgage note after Wall Street banks securitized, repackaged, and sold American’s mortgages en masse.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT – DYLAN RATIGAN INTERVIEW WITH STEVEN LERNER

DYLAN: Today, caught on tape! Sort of. An exclusive interview with Steven Lerner, a union organizer whose mere suggestion of organized demands for principle write-downs from the banks has him being dubbed a domestic terrorist. We’ll talk him first and get his side of the story, starting right now.

Welcome to Episode 43 of Radio Free Dylan. Today, a special caught-on-tape episode. Is it truly a liberal conspiracy to bring down the big banks or something nefarious? We will be joined momentarily by a man by the name of Steven Lerner. He is the Former Director of the SEIU’s Banking and Finance Campaign. He created the website WheresTheNote.com, and has been so insane as to suggest that the banks themselves who have been funded with your tax money, who have collected 100 cents on the dollar and in no-strings-attached bank bailout that the Tea Party purports to object to from a few years ago, and yet continued to collect mortgage payments in full from folks whose houses frequently are worth far less than the mortgage that exists.

So if a bank lends money that was not theirs, because they didn’t have it, and is bailed out when it turns out they don’t have any of the money that they were lending by you, the taxpayer, why is it that the homeowner is left on the hook? Why haven’t we seen the principle write-downs that would share the pain between the banks and the homeowners; that would be the rational resolution if you were to reveal or identify a scam, in which banks were lending money they didn’t have to people who couldn’t pay it? Perhaps it’s because the banks supply 40% of all political funding in America and enjoy an extraordinarily special space in this country, in which they are allowed to collect all the compensation they so choose to pay themselves, and have no responsibility to incur the consequences of any of their losses.

Steven Lerner is familiar with this dynamic of banks lending money that they don’t have, being let off the hook, but then leaning on people to maintain their payments even if the bank themselves was incapable of lending the money that was lent in the first place, but for the bail-outs. Steven, why did you decide to really start to look into what was going on in American banking and housing finance in the first place?

STEVEN: I think a lot of people have been stunned, not just that the banks crashed the economy, not just that they got rich doing it, but how at this moment after we bailed them out, they’re using the very crisis that they created to continue squeezing regular Americans. And it’s just maddening I think to a lot of us to see them really holding the country hostage saying, “Well, if you don’t give us tax breaks, we’ll move our jobs abroad; if you don’t do what we want, then we’re going to continue to put the screws to you.” So we started – we keep thinking about these guys got trillions in bailouts, they got a new and better deal, and the whole country is stuck in recession because they won’t write down principle so folks can stay in their homes and we can fix the mortgage market. They have cities trapped in exotic things like interest-rate swaps so public services that cuts, they can create excess interest in it. It’s really the big bang’s Wall Street that is stopping the economy from recovering.

DYLAN: If you were to look at the relationship between the banks and the government, can you find a better example of the unholy alliance between business and state in this country; an unholy alliance that is allowing dysfunctional corrupt businesses to influence the government in order to benefit themselves, and in the process continue to jack the price of food, reduce the number of jobs, destroy the value of the housing stock, and maintain our dependence on something like oil when we could easily adapt to other fuels, if we were forced to bear the burden of the real cost of oil but for the legislative manipulations of those in the unholy alliance? Can you think of a better example about how unholy the alliance between business and state is than the scenario that we see between banks, homeowners, and the government?

STEVEN: I can’t think of anything more unholy, and it feeds off of each other because the richer they get, they more money they have, the more they buy politicians; you have the whole revolving door. One day, you’re in a regulatory agency, the next day you’re at a big bank or down on Wall Street. And what’s extraordinary I think to a lot of us is that nobody on Wall Street has been arrested for any of this. You know, the economy’s lost trillions in wealth, we have JPMorgan, I think the whole scandal on what’s been happening to servicemen and veterans, and it just seems that no matter what happens, the banks become hungrier and continue to do these things more and more, which is why I think people all over the country are starting to stand up and saying, “Wait a second; there’s a double standard.” There’s one standard, which if the banks get in trouble, they say change the rules, bail me out. And then if you’re in your home and you’re about to lose and you say, “Hey, can you modify my mortgage? Can you write down the principles?” The banks say, “Oh no, that’s a contract; we can’t change it.” And it’s set a core to what’s wrong in the economy now, which is this sort of teeny group of the super elite that feel that no rules apply to them, all the wealth should go to them, and then the rest of us should be stuck cleaning up the mess that they made.

DYLAN: The interesting thing and you were caught on tape trying to organize what exactly?

STEVEN: Well, I wouldn’t even say I was caught on tape because what I was saying in this meeting is what I’ve said in lots of meetings publically and whatever’s writing, which is we were raising the idea – we actually inspired, and I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this guy named Dylan Ratigan, but on February 3rd he wrote something called “They Keep Stealing: Why Do We Keep Paying?” And what people are so frustrated about is for a couple of years now, people have been trying to figure out how do we write down principle, how do we modify mortgages? And the banks, as you know, have – they’ve stopped legislation, they’ve stopped cram-down, they use their political power to interfere with this again and again. And so a lot of mainstream economists, a lot of people have said, “Wait a second; when a business is in trouble, they renegotiate their debt.”

Or if a business – I think it was called Stuyvesant Town, New York, there’s a whole series of things where real estate developers, they were underwater on their properties, so they gave the keys back to the bank and they said give me a better deal or you can have it back. And we said, “If we behaved like rational business people, and said we’re stuck in a bad deal,” a deal, as you said that came out, in many cases, cheating and malfeasance on the bank’s part. If the banks – right now, a lot of people are already on their own sort of spontaneously saying, “Take the keys back; it’s not worth my paying you money that I’m losing everyday when you stuck me in this deal.” And then when we start to talk about what would happen if people did it in an organized way and they said to the banks, “Negotiate with us. Negotiate so we can fix this problem. And if you’re not willing to negotiate with us, then we’ll give you the keys back. We’re not going to keep paying you,” as you said, “when you got this by stealing.”

DYLAN: The other thing I don’t think people understand is that you pay a higher interest rate on your home mortgage than you do, for instance, in your student loan because it has more risk, the risk being that the homeowner might not pay and instead would post the house as the collateral as they indicated they would at the time of the mortgage, whereas with a student loan, there is nothing a student can do to get out of it because the student can’t post their four years of education as collateral.

STEVEN: No, what you’re getting at is, I think, the thing that is just so important to realize. That’s the deal the bank makes when they loan you money, that if you can’t pay it back or if you don’t pay it back, that they get the house. And, I guess, you know what I think is so interesting about this is – I don’t know if you remember that the, I think it’s the Mortgage Bankers Association, after giving speeches on the sanctity of never walking away, walked away from their own building. You know, there was a whole – and gave the keys back. This is a very – this double-standard I think is what’s really stirring people up more and more in the country. Everybody sacrificed, everybody’s taken a hit, and the only people that don’t want to share on the sacrifice are the people who got us in this mess, and that’s why a lot of people are saying, “Individually, I may not have a lot of power, but if we start to act together, we can try to negotiate with Wall Street and the banks in saying, ‘We need a better deal, not just for me individually, but for the country, so we can get the economy working again.’”

DYLAN: The thing that struck me as most interesting about this was that after this sort of came up, that you came under attack specifically by Glenn Beck and the Tea Party crowd. The reason that is so interesting to me having been at the center of the financial crisis in 2008 while I was hosting the closing bell on CNBC and Fast Money on CNBC, was the emergence of the Tea Party in direct rebellion to the corrupt functionality and nature of the bank system, which clearly had overstepped and had gone beyond the bounds of capitalism and had become a vampire that was purely sucking money out of the machine using the leverage of the fact that it’s too big to fail. So halleluiah, here comes the Tea Party, here come the Freedom Fighters, here come the people that really care about American; they’re going to step in, Ron Paul, Karl Denninger, some people that I have a tremendous amount of respect for, are going to come in and they’re going to put an end to the madness where a business can step in there and run itself into the ground, in debt, half the country, and all sorts of nonsense, and then collect all of the compensation from 10 years of chicanery, be bailed out, be propped back up, made bigger than ever, and go forward, and that will not be tolerated, not on the watch of the Tea Party, or let alone Tea Party leaders like Glenn Beck.

These guys are there for the American people, for innovation investment, and honest to God capitalism where the risk resides with the risk-taker and the reward resides with the risk-taker, and the ability to avoid dealing with the consequences of the risks that you’ve taken cannot be tolerated under any version of American patriotism. And yet, when the bank bailout came through and the bank legislation most notably came through, the Tea Party was absolutely nowhere to be found in the need to end to big to fail in the political debate. In fact, they did absolutely nothing in that regard. And then after we watched the Tea Party claim to be in favor of capitalism and claim to be in favor of American justice, marginalized people like Ron Paul, who I actually do believe does advocate for these types of things, marginalized people like Karl Denninger, who I believe does advocate for these types of things, we find that you, when you look to create a scenario in which you can get the leverage necessary to negotiate with a corrupt banking structure. The one that was, again, foundational to the launch of the Tea Party, it is one of the very self-proclaimed leaders of the Tea Party, I believe he gave the keynote at their march on Washington, Glenn Beck, who indicts you and defends the banks. How do you explain that?

STEVEN: You know, I can’t explain it. I mean, why Glenn Beck and this group of people basically are schilling for Wall Street and the big banks, it just makes no sense. So I can’t get into their head on why they’re doing it. What it feels like is that Wall Street, sort of the elites at the top, are just really, really worried that when people understand all the things you said, and when people understand on top of it that the banks get free money from the Feds, so – you know, it was very funny in this – in a number of discussions I’ve had, I’d say to people, “Well, if you got free money, a billion dollars in free money and then loaned it out at 3%, would you make any money?” And everybody said, “Yeah, I’d make money.” I’d say, “Well, you’re a brilliant banker.” So I don’t know why they’re schilling for the banks, I don’t know why they don’t want to make markets work, and that’s the thing that seems to scare them is you can’t have markets when you’re too big to fail, you can’t have competition when you’re too big to fail, and we’re trying to figure out how to keep people in their homes, how to fix state budgets, and how to make the economy work, and it’s stunning how some people seem more interested in protecting the super-rich who have all our money than in supporting who are trying to fix the economy and get people to work.

DYLAN: And it’s even more stunning if they claim to be in favor of fairness and capitalism, and yet when the rubber hits the road, whether it’s bank reform or anything else, they’re nowhere to be found.

STEVEN: I mean, their kneejerk response seems to be to defend the super elite, and I don’t how you have an economy that functions. I think it’s up to 40% of corporate profits are generated by the casino on Wall Street, and unless you somehow reduce the power of Wall Street, or their economic or power, I don’t know how we have a productive economy where there’s a future for our kids and where things work if everything’s based – it’s ironic, I think it’s Warren Buffett who referred to derivatives as financial weapons of mass destruction. These are the guys that destroyed the economy. And I think the thing that is really sticking in people’s goat more and more is they’re now using the disaster that they created to say we should get rid of the minor laws that were passed to try to contain their behavior. It’s like they haven’t learned a lesson – actually, I take that back. They did learn a lesson. They learned that they could crash the economy, get bailed out, and then become even bigger and more powerful. That’s the lesson they learned, and that’s what they’re going to do unless we have a plan to reduce their power.

DYLAN: So let’s talk about your plan for a second. What you’re suggesting is, and I’ve suggested this explicitly, in understanding that when you take out a home loan, you buy a house, that you have entered into a contract, a contract in which you’re being given access to the use of money to buy the house. In exchange for getting use of that money to buy the house, you agree to repay a certain percentage of it each month In the event you are unable or unwilling to live up to your portion of that contract, the bank has the right to take the house away from you, and the bank also has the right to charge you a higher interest rate than loans that you cannot walk away from like student debt, which markets at 3% or 4%, as opposed to housing debt, which markets in a normal economy, if there was such a thing, at the very least lets say 5% to 7% or 8%. That makes sense, and the parallel that is there for the corporate world, you’ve already touched on, corporations renegotiate their debt and do debt restructurings constantly, and it’s in everybody’s interest.

The one thing that strikes me that you could run into in trying to organize a larger group of people around this, is very explicit banking law, unique law that applies explicitly only to banks that effectively makes it illegal to do any form of organizing or work that could directly result, for instance, in a run on the banks. And is there not a risk that a large collection of mortgage holders refusing to pay could run a foul of that law?

STEVEN: It would be a terrific irony because since nobody’s been prosecuted in the massive run of the banks and all the hedge funds and all the deals where people bet against and tripled down on different bets, it would sure be ironic if people interpreted homeowners exerting their right to be causing a run on the bank; that’s not the goal at all. In fact, but going backwards, I think it would be great if people investigated and prosecuted for all the things the banks did that most normal people would consider a form of the run on the bank. I’m not worried about that because what we’re talking about is perfectly legal, it’s perfectly lawful; we’re just saying –

DYLAN: Well, what are you organizing?

STEVEN: Well, I would say it’s not even organizing. It’s an early discussion of saying, “What if a bunch of people all agreed to say to the banks –”. Maybe what people would say is, “We’re going to put our money escrow, even.” But we’re saying we want you to negotiate with us on principle, and we think a lot of us are all going to say at the same time, “Listen, we’re going to sign up, we’re going to say, “You should negotiate with us.” And when we get enough people who are signed on to saying the banks should negotiate, we’d say, “Well now we’ve evened the score a little bit. You’re the biggest, richest guys in the world, but a lot of us have signed up and said we’re ready to potentially walk away. Why don’t you negotiate on reducing the principle?” So what we’re talking about is people making a commitment to each other saying if enough other people agree to it, we’ll demand the banks negotiate and then if they’re not willing to negotiate, then people can take appropriate action and walk away if that’s what makes sense.

But even more than that, what we’re really talking about is encouraging people to make a good business decision because more and more business writers and other people have written, and they’ve written time and time again, that if a business was in the situation of most homeowners, they would walk away. And so what – we’re saying two things. One, we want the banks to negotiate and we want to fix it. But second, we’re saying people should be rational about their financial life. And as you said, the amount of money that people wasting on a home that they’re not going to be able to stay in because they’re stuck in a bad mortgage versus that it may be a good business decision to say, “I’m leaving and I’m going to rent an apartment.” So we’re trying to do two things: help people make a good financial decision for themselves; and second, do it in a way that’s together that maybe we can start fixing the housing problem. And I’d take it a step farther; I don’t know how we fix the economy unless we stabilize the housing market. And we’re not going to stabilize the housing market if we don’t write down principle.

DYLAN: One of the people that agrees with you on that last measure happens to be the largest mortgage bond holder in the world out at PIMCO, Mohamed El-Erian and Bill Gross. They would love, and many others who are mortgage holders, are very open to taking a reduced payment in exchange for a predictable revenue stream. The clear barrier is exclusively not the mortgage bond holders and investors who would like to have a predictable, recoverable, stable revenue stream as opposed to all the potholes that exist right now with all the non-payment, but the barrier is the servicing banks, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, JPMorgan, and Bank of America, who do not own the mortgages on these houses, but own the second equity, the second line of credit, which in the event there’s a principle reduction on the first line, renders the value of their second liens obviously worthless. And that would really create a challenge for those banks to function because right now they are functioning on the lie that those second liens are worth $0.80 on the dollar when a principle write down would suggest those loans are worthless. Have you reached out to any of the mortgage investors who have ironically a similar interest to the mortgage payers of principle write downs?

STEVEN: I mean, I haven’t reached out to them. But as you know, there’s discussions all over about people who, as you said, whether it’s PIMCO, whether it’s pension funds that feel that they were sold a bill of good when they bought secure-ties mortgages, it’s unending how many business people and corporations feel they’ve been jammed by the big banks on this. And I think it’s going to create a very interesting increasing pressure on the banks because more and more people are coming to see that what’s good for a handful of big banks is not good for the country and it’s not good for the economy. I’d even say not good for the world economy.

So I think you have the AG’s investigation going on now, you have in many different states people proposing state legislation. There was just some legislation proposed – introduced in California last week that would fine the banks $20,000 for every house that they foreclose on where they haven’t gone through certain procedures. That more and more people on a local grassroots level are saying, “We’ve got to hold these guys accountable.” We have to look at creative ways, whether it’s local legislation, whether it’s blight legislation, whether it’s AGs investigating, or whether it’s homeowners raising the specter of saying we’re not going to pay if you won’t fix the problem. They’re all pieces of a big puzzle that we need to put together if we’re going to get the economy working and leave ourselves in the hands of these guys who seem to have no end to their greed.

DYLAN: One last question that I want to put to you. Representative Jason Chaffetz wrote a letter to the Department of Justice, Eric Holder, who by the way has offered no prosecutions of any of the frauds or oppressions perpetrated by the banks before 2008 or after, saying that “your threats clearly constitute domestic terrorism.”

STEVEN: I mean, it sort of – it really shows that something is off when people talking about doing something that’s completely legal that mirrors exactly how business operates, that people start throwing out words like terrorism and trying to intimidate people into not speaking. The only thing I can figure on this is – you started off by talking about how much money the banks have and their influence and their relationship with government, is that there’s a whole set of people that just seem to say “I have to defend the banks and Wall Street no matter what happens” and it’s an attempt to scare people and scare regular people and scare homeowners and scare people who are trying to figure out how to put their economic lives back together to scare them out of standing up. And I don’t think it would work, but it’s really a disappointment that people go into that kind of sensationalism instead of saying, “Let’s really fix the problem here and keep people in their homes and get the economy working,” and let’s really say we need to address to big to fail instead of trying to intimidate folks that thinks the economy’s a mess because of the banks.

DYLAN: Steven, a pleasure. Thank you.

STEVEN: Thank you.

DYLAN: Steve Lerner, again, WheresTheNote.com. We’re back right after this. All right, thank you, Steve.

STEVEN: Yep, thank you very much.

DYLAN: Welcome back. The fundamental problem in America right now is this unholy alliance between business and state. Banks are not evil, banks are not bad, banks are simply banks. But when banks’ traditional way of making money is threatened by technology and transparency and all the innovations of the past 10 or 20 years, and the banks, instead of either adapting to a new service model of some kind or adapting to a lower compensation model of some kind, instead exploit the unholy alliance between business and state in order to manipulate either the regulations and/or the subsidies, in this case, from the federal reserve that they get, and the laws that apply to their customers.

We see this over and over and over again, whether it’s in American finance, American healthcare, American energy, American trading, meaning with China and elsewhere, or the military. An unholy alliance forms between those who make the most money from that business, whether it’s the bank or the energy company or whoever, and the politicians who they fund. In the process, ironically, these people, like Glenn Beck and others, hide behind the false rhetoric of the free market while desperately trying to avoid paying the actual consequences of living in a free market, let alone being forced to exhibit the adaptability and innovative spirit required of all of us at this point in time, so that we can adapt to the marketplace, a marketplace in which energy is actually very expensive, a marketplace in which lending can be made very cheap, were it not controlled by the special interests that run it. Same could be said for healthcare.

So the more we can all focus our attention on the unholy alliance in this country that exists between business and state, reward the businesses and encourage the businesses that compete for your dollars through good service and real value, and punish the politicians who cater to the weak and pathetic in the business world who cannot adapt or innovate and so use their dollars to try to legislatively manipulate the environment so that they can survive only to come back out barking and claiming free markets. The sooner we can put an end of the madness that is the trillion dollar problems that plague this country of energy, healthcare, the multi-national trading pirates, military, and the bank system. Those five problems, all in the trillions. You deal with those, and suddenly your million and billion dollar problems seem much more approachable. Thank you for joining us as always on Radio Free Dylan, and we’ll talk to you next time.

http://www.dylanratigan.com/wp-content/ ... Lerner.mp3

http://www.dylanratigan.com/2011/03/25/ ... en-lerner/

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[vanlose kid]

doc Toulmin, an old talk that's still new:

The
Center for
Multiethnic and
Transnational
Studies

Stephen Toulmin (Thomas Jefferson Lecture, March 24, 1997) A Dissenter's Life

I

My story today begins in Washington nearly 200 years ago. Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated as President on March 4, 1801. Less than three weeks later, he wrote to a friend who had come to the United States as a political refugee from England in 1794, and had built up his reputation here as a natural scientist, and as a writer on philosophy and religion. Yours [Jefferson wrote] is one of the few lives precious to mankind, and for the continuance of which every thinking man is solicitous. Bigots may be an exception. What an effort, my dear sir, of bigotry in politics and religion have we gone through! The barbarians flattered themselves they should be able to bring back the times of the Vandals, when ignorance put everything into the hands of power and priestcraft. All advances in science were proscribed as innovations. They pretended to praise and encourage education, but it was to be the education of our ancestors. We were to look backwards, not forwards, for improvement. . . . . This was the real ground ([he continued] of all the attacks on you. Those who live by mystery and charlatanerie, fearing you would render them useless by simplifying the Christian philosophy, - the most sublime and benevolent, but most perverted, system that ever shone on man, - endeavored to crush your well-earned and well-deserved fame. Jefferson was writing to a man whom we know today for books on electricity, oxygen and other scientific subjects, but who was known at the time as the Unitarian Minister in Birmingham, England, and had his church and home burnt down for defending the French Revolution. Joseph Priestley was now settled in Northumberland, Penna., and had three years to live. Why was Priestley's fame of such concern to Jefferson? What made a scientist of Unitarian persuasion the target of politically contrived resentment and violence? This alliance of two distinguished figures [I will argue] throws light on British and American attitudes 200 years ago that had a wider historical significance, and still survive among us today.


Priestley was a Freethinker and Nonconformist - a "dissenter," the term then was. He reached his own opinions on any subject he took up: in religion or philosophy, in science or politics. As well as Science, he wrote on a dozen other subjects: not just the nature of factitious airs (what we call gases) but also rhetoric, free will and the origin of language: Jefferson and he had corresponded since the early 1780s. As Minister of the Unitarian New Meeting in Birmingham, he had taught a common sense Christianity that avoided all doctrinal technicalities. The Trinity and Transubstantiation were [for him] "ideas at which the common sense of mankind will ever revolt." Jesus' teachings were (he said) intelligible today to the kinds of men and women who were the first disciples: this was what Jefferson meant by simplifying Christianity, and defending the laity from power and priestcraft. What then got Priestley into trouble: his theology, science, or politics? Nowadays in the United States, Unitarian Universalism is hardly a matter for scandal, but in 1794 it was still a cutting edge system: at Philadelphia, Priestley gave the series of lectures that firmly linked Unitarian theology to Universalist natural philosophy. Nor need we assume that Unitarianism no longer has political overtones nowadays. The religion of Bosnia (e.g.) originated in the theological debates of 11th century Constantinople. The Bogomils of the Balkans saw Jesus as the best of human teachers, skirting around the mystery of how he could be both God and Man. In a word, they were not Trinitarians, but Monophysites: the nearest thing in the year 1100 to Unitarians. Only later, coming under criticism from the Roman Church to the West and from the Orthodox Church to the East, both of which are Trinitarian churches, did the Bosnian Bogomils join Islam; and they did so for theological as much as political reasons: if Jesus had been a human "messenger" from God, after all, his standing was like that of Muhammad. (At a time when people in this country are tempted to demonize Islam, we need to recall just how much in theological history Islam and Christianity have shared.)


Still, a Birmingham mob in the 1790s would not have rioted about theology alone; so what about Priestley's scientific ideas? There too he took a solitary road, which led him to conclusions that sound more innocent in the 1990s than they did in the 1790s. Though widely respected, he was an idiosyncratic scientist who walked a cusp between the respectable and the unorthodox. From the 17th century on, European discussions of Mind and Body had been (as we say) dualistic: treating Mind and Matter as distinct and separate realms, so that the question was, "How do the two interact?" A minority of writers argued that mental activity needs bodies or brains to support it, not a separate mind or soul; but they were denounced as materialists and Epicureans - wrong headed, immoral, or worse. When news arrived that the liveliest of these writers, Julien de la Mettrie, had died of food poisoning at the Court in Berlin, the reaction was that he had met his just reward. Priestley also belonged to this despised minority, and he put up a plausible defense of his beliefs. The point of the Resurrection [he said] is not that we survive death as immaterial souls: it is that, at the Last Day, God restores our Material Bodies, so that we can resume our interrupted lives in the flesh.


Priestley could afford to take such eccentric positions, because socially he did not belong to the English Establishment. He was always a religious Nonconformist, and this - looking back - was an advantage: as such he was barred, not just from joining Parliament and the professions, but from attending Oxford and Cambridge University, where he would have learned only Ancient Literature and the mathematics of Newton. Instead, he went to the Dissenters' Academy at Daventry in the Midlands, where the students had a richer curriculum. With this as background, he could read La Mettrie's polemic against the narrowness of 17th century physical theory, and speculate about the spiritual potentialities of the material world.


Yet, once again, the Mind-Body Problem was scarcely a reason for riot. What got Priestley into trouble was his support for the French Revolution. He was a colleague of Richard Price, whom Edmund Burke pilloried in his Reflections on the Revolution in France - and he himself wrote a reply to Burke. Why was it so shocking to applaud the French Revolution? At first, many English people saw 1789 as continuing the 1688 English Revolution, when the Dutch Protestant Prince William of Orange replaced the Catholic James II; and also the Revolution of the 1580s, in which the Dutch reacted to Spanish religious persecution by abjuring their earlier loyalty to Philip of Spain. After the Terror of 1791, however, Anglican preachers attacked dissenters as enemies of the British Monarchy, and for 30 years events in France traumatized respectable England, as the Russian Revolution of 1917 traumatized mid-20th century America. Calling Priestley a Dissenter thus meant only a religious Nonconformist, who did not accept the teaching of the Anglican Church. Yet feeling against dissenters cut deep. The Revolution in France convinced many people in England that religious conformity was needed in order to defend the State from sedition. (The word keeps cropping up in sermons and pamphlets in the 1790s.) After the American War of Independence, the British monarchy had been frail, but the execution of Louis XVI was the last straw: from then on, anyone with a good word to say for the French was suspected of plotting against George III, and damned as a "regicide" or King-killer. How wonderful is the power of Denial! In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides tells us how, flushed with pride at their victories over Persia, the Athenians would not let the colony of Melos declare its neutrality between Sparta and Athens, but put to death all the grown men they took, and sold the women and children as slaves. This barbarism was not acceptable in the city of Pericles and Phidias; and the name of Melos - like My Lai for us - was one the Athenians prefered to forget. Likewise, when they executed Charles I in 1649, the English had set an example of the very "regicide" they now chose to condemn; yet, by 1790, most people in England found the memory of that event unacceptable. Priestley might insist that Unitarians had nothing against the Royalty - indeed, had no political agenda at all - but by this time blood was stirred, and a riot was easily whipped up.


The bigotry that burnt Priestley's home and church was just the pigheadedness that led the Founding Fathers to reject any establishment of religion. Before Independence, the history of Europe taught them that, for the sake of civil peace, no country could risk religious war. Priestley's last public act in England was a sermon On the Present State of Europe that forecast a replacement of feudal monarchies by more egalitarian rŽgimes. He spoke in the measured tones of Vaclav Havel today; but, after his own misfortunes, he feared changes as violent as those in France, and looked to America as a Laboratory of Toleration in which the contrast of Establishment and Dissenters finally lost sense. For, in America, there were no established doctrines for Dissenters to dissent from.


Priestley's arrival in Philadelphia did not end his troubles: once here, he was still open to attack. Jefferson hoped to attract him to Monticello, where they might jointly pursue their shared interest in natural science together. As it was, Priestley was active in the American Philosophical Society to which Jefferson (the Society's President from 1797 to 1815) gave papers on paleontology -- e.g., on the large fossils from Paraguay of a clawed animal known to scientists today as the Giant Sloth, Megalonyx Jeffersoni. Still, despite Jefferson's support for education, his scientific interests did him no good politically: notably, when he put the bones of ancient vertebrates on show in the East Room of the White House. Even in religion, Jefferson was an ambiguous ally, for his views made him plenty of enemies among the Churchmen of his time -- The Christian priesthood [he wrote] finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw in Plato materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might give employment for their order and introduce it to profit, power and pre‘minence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms grafted on them. . .for this obvious reason, that nonsense can never be explained -- But, in saying this, Jefferson based his views on ideas set out in Priestley's own book, A History of the Corruptions of Christianity. So, as a refugee from England, Priestley did not set up a new home in Pennsylvania expecting his life to be one of pure peace. It was not obvious that the U.S. he actually came to was exactly the U.S. he idealistically foresaw: a place where religious toleration was the rule in fact, not just an article in the Consitution. But that did not matter to him: he had never shirked a good argument.


To sum up this story: I am not arguing that Priestley was right in all he believed and everybody else was wrong. I am not saying that he was right to be a Republican not Monarchist in politics, a Materialist not an Idealist in philosophy, or a Unitarian not a Trinitarian in religion. None of his dissenting opinions taken alone explains why he was attacked quite as violently as he was. As we shall see, the explosive mixture was made up of all his opinions taken together. But again, even that is not the point: the point is, that he was entitled to hold and argue for his opinions; many of his English contemporaries were too intolerant to respect this right; and the first question to ask is, "Why?"


II

Let me now step aside, and look at the backdrop to this episode. Neither Priestley nor Jefferson was just a scientist or a mere essayist. Neither of them may have been a William Shakespeare or an Isaac Newton, but both combined literary sensibility with scientific talent. Ask my old friend, the late C.P. Snow, which of his "Two Cultures" they belonged to - Natural Sciences or Humanities - and he could not put either of them on one side only: their minds transcended that division, so he would have had to reply, Both. So let me now take a wider angle lens, and set the present episode at a point half way between the Gutenberg revolution of the late 15th century, and the new revolution in communication in which we are living today. Snow's Two Cultures - I will suggest - separated as a result of two different innovations that followed Gutenberg's invention, each of which carried its own distinct philosophical preoccupations. Around 1500, it was at last economic to distribute knowledge in printed form, not as manuscripts. Along with this, came a revival of the old tradition of Humane Letters: what we now know as the Humanities. The worlds of learning and public service were opened to a lay public, who could now study texts that had been closed to them before. Print taught readers to recognize the complexity and diversity of our human experience: instead of abstract theories of Sin and Grace, it gave them rich narratives about concrete human circumstances. Aquinas had been all very well, but figures like Don Quixote or Gargantua were irresistible. You did not have to approve of, or condemn such figures: rather, they were mirrors in which to reflect your own life. Like today's film makers, 16th century writers in the Humanities from Erasmus and Thomas More to Montaigne and Shakespeare present readers with the kaleidoscope of life. We get from them a feeling for the individuality of characters: no one can mistake Hamlet for Sancho Panza, or Pantagruel for Othello. What count are the differences among people, not the generalities they share. As Eudora Welty said in appreciation of V.S. Pritchett, who died just recently at the age of 96: The characters that fill [his stories] -- erratic, unsure, unsafe, devious, stubborn, restless and desirous, absurd and passionate, all peculiar unto themselves -- hold a claim on us that cannot be denied. They demand and get our rapt attention, for in the revelation of their lives, the secrets of our own lioves come into view. How much the eccentric has to tell us of what is central!



What an "unscientific" thought Eudora Welty here offers us - that the eccentric explains the central, rather than the other way around. No wonder the Humanities contributed as little as it did to the creation of the Exact Sciences. As late as 1580, Montaigne still questioned whether any universal theories about Nature were possible at all: let alone, mathematical ones like Newton's were to be. Given the uncertainties, ambiguities and disagreements in our experience, that ambition struck him as presumptuous. The creation of the Exact Sciences was, thus, a separate, 17th-century story, which I turn to now. In 1618, the final and most brutal of Europe's religious wars broke out. Henri IV of France set an example of toleration, by treating his Protestant and Catholic subjects as equal citizens: this had led a fanatic to murder him in 1610. From then on, things went only downhill. From 1618 to 1648 Central Europe was laid waste: during thirty years of war, one third of the population of Germany were killed, half of its cities destroyed. (From Grimmelshausen to Brecht, playwrights have written of this horror.) One event was especially ironic. To commemorate the slaughter of a Protestant army outside Prague, in 1620, a pearl among Rome's smaller churches was built. Dedicated to the Holy Mother of the Prince of Peace, it was called Santa Maria della Vittoria -- or Saint Mary of the Victory. With Europe split by War, the 16th century Humanists' modesty about the human intellect and their taste for diversity came to look like luxuries. Instead, new and more systematic ways of handling problems were devised, what we call disciplines, whose standardized procedures could be taught as a drill, which students learned to perform step by step, in one-and-only-one right way. Devised by the Flemish scholar Lipsius, this method was put to practical use by Maurits van Nassau, the Dutch Prince whose military academy at Breda in Holland was a Mecca for students from all across Europe. Maurits was struck by the consensus achievable in mathematics. If religion had been discussed with the same kind of neutrality, what miseries Europe might have escaped! Even while dying, he was no partisan. A Protestant Minister asked him to declare his beliefs: he replied, "I believe that 2 + 2 are 4, and 4 + 4 are 8. This gentleman here [pointing to a mathematician at his side] will tell you the details of our other beliefs." Soon, this mathematical ideal took a more general hold. In theory and practice alike - in jurisprudence and philosophy, as much as in the training of infantry - Skill gave way to Technique, Artistry to Artisanship.


The young Descartes himself visited Maurits's Academy after dropping out of Law School in 1618, and before he joined the Duke of Bavaria's staff. Caught up in the prevailing Religious War, he looked for a rational alternative to those rival theological systems that had lost their credibility: ideally, for a mathematical system, free of the uncertainties, ambiguities and disagreements that Montaigne had seen as unavoidable. Following Galileo's example, Descartes adopted as goal a universal system of physics in mathematical form. So began both those philosophical inquiries that John Dewey was much later to call The Quest for Certainty, and also the scientific investigations that would lead, in 1687, to Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.


The two independent products of the new print culture - first the Humanities, later the Exact Sciences - embodied different conceptions of philosophy, and also different ideals of human reason. On the one hand, the humanists saw arguments as expressing human disagreements, in whose resolution Rhetoric had a legitimate role: on the other, exact scientists saw arguments as formal inferences, which appeals to Rhetoric could only distort. In the Humanities, the term reason thus referred to reasonable practices: in the Exact Sciences, rather, to rational theories. The Humanities recalled the variety in our experiences: in real life, generalizations are hazardous and certitude too much to ask. The Exact Sciences sought to put everything in theoretical order: formal certainty was their goal. So, a tension between the claims of rationality and reasonableness - the demand for demonstrably rights answers to questions of Theory, and respect for honest disagreements about matters of Practice - posed a challenge which (as we shall see) has lasted to our own time.


III

The Thirty Years War ended in 1648, with the Peace of Westphalia. From it there emerged the forms of the World in which we live in today: forms so familiar we forget they were then brand new. The Peace introduced three novel elements: a new System of States, a new policy in Church/State relations, a new concept of Rational Thought. Political power was vested absolutely in individual Sovereign States: within each State power was exercised from the top by a Sovereign, and outside States did not meddle in each other's affairs. Religious conflict was overcome by compromise: reviving an old formula from the 1555 Treaty of Augsburg - cuius regio eius religio - every Sovereign was free to choose the Church for his or her particular country. So, for the first time, the Westphalian System created Established Churches - Anglican in England, Calvinist in Holland, Catholic in Austria. Finally, the new idea of Reason took as starting point Descartes' claim that true Knowledge must have the certainty of a geometrical system: opinions unsupported by theory were just that -- unsupported opinions. On the face of it, the three parts of the Westphalian system - Absolute Sovereignty, Established Religion, Logical Demonstration - were distinct and separable. As a matter practical politics, they were closely related, in two respects. (1) All of them operated Top Down, and gave power to oligarchies - political, ecclesiastical and academic - that supported one another. (2) They formed a single package. As Voltaire commented, "One leaves Dover, where Space is Empty, and everything happens through Attraction, and lands in Calais, where Space is Full, and everything happens through Vortices." In a word, the three elements of the Westphalian scheme formed, not just a package, but an ideological package. Challenging any one of the three axioms was thus viewed as attacking them all. This was what got Priestley finally into trouble. For late 18th century Englishmen, Newton's physics was part of a larger ideological scheme. As it mapped God's Plan for the Creation, and proved the stability of the Solar System, its success was political as much as astronomical: bolstering the English self-image, of Hanoverian Monarchy, Anglican Church and all. By rejecting the odd blend of Newtonianism, Anglicanism and Monarchism that passed as "respectable opinion" - talking at the same time as a Nonconformist in religion, a Republican in politics and a materialist in philosophy - Priestley was throwing himself into hot water. From then on, he was regarded less as a man of unusual beliefs than as a trouble-maker: less a Dissenter than a Dissident.


It was is, and remains, the fundamental defect of any public ideology, that it makes it impossible for people to put forward unorthodox, or even unfamiliar views, without being accused of promoting hostility to the Powers that Be. The Birmingham Mob was not ready to let Priestley explain his opinions: let alone ready to listen to him, and see if they might learn anything from his views. For them, Priestley was a source of trouble, and they prefered to drive him out of town. Nor was this habit merely English. After 1650, States required that people's loyalties be exclusive: no citizen could be a subject of more than one Sovereign. Established Religions, similarly, expected their adherents to avoid Churches of other Faiths: the English were as harsh to Papists in their midst as the French and Austrians were to Protestants. As for Rational Knowledge: from Leibniz on, most philosophers relied on formal deductions, rejected appeals to Rhetoric as irrational, and so on. The Westphalian Settlement thus imposed exclusive attitudes on religious, political and intellectual life equally. Things had not always been that way. Medieval rulers never exerted the exclusive sovereignty that Nation States later claimed: after Thomas Becket's murder, Henry II of England found that the Church's criticisms could shame him into changing policies. Nor was Sovereignty necessarily linked to Nationhood: the Habsburgs' subjects spoke not just German, but Polish, Portuguese, Magyar and Dutch . Nor is Religion always and everywhere exclusive. It is our custom to practise one-and-only-one religion, and other people's open mindedness can be a surprise. Friends from Tokyo who joined us in Chicago for Christmas sang carols at the Fourth Presbyterian Church on Michigan Avenue from memory. As they told us, many people in Japan build their lives around ceremonies from several religions. Baptised in Shinto, married in a Christian service, buried as Buddists: for them, the three religions peaceably cšexist. Nor have philosophers always been exclusive in demanding formal proofs. When things go well, they have no objection to humane arguments. Diderot's Encyclopedia shows his passion for the activities and instruments of practical crafts: and his concern for physical theory was purely pragmatic. When things went badly, on the other hand - in the Thirty Years War, the French Revolution or the First World War - they are again tempted to insist on rigorous geometrical proofs. So, the history of philosophy has ended as an intellectual see-saw.


The Westphalian Settlement was, thus, a poisoned chalice - a mixture of intellectual dogmatism, political chauvinism and sectarian religion whose effect endured into our century. Priestley was right to decline it: the establishment of religion was, indeed, a policy of temporary necessity for countries that had lost their earlier habits of toleration. In 1794, the American Constitution enshrined the values of toleration, and Priestley seized on the opportunities it provided. To be more exact: the Westphalian System ended as a poisoned chalice. Initially, all its terms met needs of the time. Sovereign States, Established Religions, and Formal Rationality: at the time, all of these served as ways of ordering life and thought, and tempering the conflicts among countries and religions. (Again, a parallel with Bosnia and Dayton is to the point.) From 1650 to 1950, then, the States of Europe lived in an International Anarchy: each went its own way, without fear of outside criticism. Established Churches were emasculated Churches: State and Church were tied at the ankles, in a three legged race that spared any State the indignity of moral reproof. Even in philosophy, the charms of Rationalism were reinforced by the needs of the day. Leibniz had hoped that his formal arguments might succeed where Diplomacy and War had failed: by ensuring agreement between the rival religions that had devastated his native Germany. But, in time, these devices outgrew their initial efficacy; and, at the end of our terrible Twentieth Century, they need to be reconsidered as new ideas or institutions come on the stage. Above all, the facts of global interdependence are no longer reconcilable with claims to unfettered national sovereignty: especially as such claims are expressed most stridently nowadays by such palpable villains as the military rŽgime in Burma. For his image of the 17th century Sovereign State, Thomas Hobbes chose the Sea Monster he called the Leviathan - a natural image for a theorist from the British Isles: nowadays, a nuclear Superpower calls to mind rather a 900-pound gorilla, who sleeps wherever he pleases. The general interest lies in moderating the force of Nation States, not increasing it: so we find States joining together in larger units such as the European Union, which limit their Sovereignty. Meanwhile, on a global level, non-governmental organizations are becoming more influential: "voluntary associations" of the kind that - as George Abdo points out - Hobbes himself, sounding for once like the Government of Nigeria, called "worms in the intestines of Leviathan" that need to be "purged".


These transnational NGOs remind us of an earlier stage when Sovereigns were still subject to reproof. NGOs like Amnesty International are not emasculated: as the voice for the conscience of Humanity, they keep a distance from National States, which are agents of Force. NGOs cannot force Governments to act as they would please, but in suitable cases they can shame them into changing policies: recalling in this way that the politics of shame which the Church used to reprove Henry II is sometimes as effective as the politics of force. Here again, the Westphalian System has outlived its efficacy, and the older tension between the Church and the State is re‘merging on a new level. From now on, the Governments of States need to retune their ears, and listen to those unofficial institutions that speak, not for the special interests of any particular nation or party, but for "the decent opinion of humankind."


IV

In closing this discussion, I have three chief points to make:

(1) We must not unthinkingly assume that Dissenters, as such, are Dissidents. We too easily conclude that we need not listen to those groups that "cause trouble" - Islamic militants, maybe - instead of arecognizing that they may end by causing trouble just because we refuse to listen to them. Having begun as "dissenters", they become "dissidents" in despair that their views will not otherwise be heard. For those who learned from the Thirty Years War, it is no longer permissible to make religious or ideological differences a casus belli; and for serious politicians in the United States to speak of this country as involved in a Religious War is a mark either of ignorance, or of irresponsibility.

(2) We cannot safely leave the building of what is now known as civil society to the Governments of separate existing States that serve as (e.g.) Member States of the United Nations: that perpetuates the Top Down relations of the Westphalian System. States and the power they wield will not, of course, disappear overnight: nor is it wholly desirable that they should do. But, increasingly, their powers will be qualified and criticized by other rival global, or transnational organizations that link together people in different countries: as subscribers to Amnesty International or whatever. As time goes on, indeed, it becomes ever harder for States to control the activities of the transnational organizations: Leviathan can no longer "purge the worms" from its intestines. Here, the renewed revolution in communications has a part to play in overcoming the International Anarchy of the Westphalian System. The Soviet Government's monopoly of power was undermined by e-mail, and the Beijing Government has given up tryng to stop the transmission of Faxes to China from other countries: so, too, the Internet - particularly, the World Wide Web - is becoming a main locus of transnational communication and institution-building. Ever since the 1992 United Nations meeting at Rio de Janeiro, on Environment and Development, the Association for Progressive Communication has provided a channel of communication and exchange of views to non-governmental agencies and individuals on a transnational basis; and these channels serve as foundations for a Civil Society that has a power to bind together peoples and groups that were kept apart by the exclusivity of the Westphalian tradition. (In this we hear echoes of Schiller and Beethoven's "Ode to Joy": deinen Zauber bindet wieder was der Mode streng beteilt.)

(3) Finally, for Joseph Priestley, what made the country we call the United States extraordinary in 1794 is the chance it had to escape horrors to which more ordinary countries were exposed. But it had this chance only to the extent that it understood the inevitable failure of any Established Religion, maintained its policy of religious toleration, and held at bay all the temptations of religious and cultural particularism. The rhetoric of "Americanism" - all attempts to impose ideological conditions on the opinions and activities of America's citizens - thus undermine the central ideals on which the country was built by Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues.


America's poets have captured these truths. Listen, for one, to Wallace Stevens. Writing early in World War II, near the end of his Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, he refers at the contrast I have emphasized here, between reasonableness and rationality. For him, too, Reasonableness is more important than Rationality; and its importance is itself more than an intellectual one. It is the expression - as he puts it - of a "more than rational distortion - the fiction that results from feeling." I recall one of my Chicago colleagues lecturing on the theme, "Is it rational to act reasonably?" Unless reasonable actions could be proved to fit his abstract moral theory with geometrical precision, respect for human frailty was for him intellectually suspect. Yet, rather than ask, "Is it rational to be reasonable?", we might equally well ask, "Is it reasonable to argue in rational terms alone? In what situations can we reasonably rely on formal theories?" Since 1960, we have seen a turn of the tide, which at last lets us overcome this tension. As technological skills in Engineering and Medicine meet the limits of practical wisdom, we are learning to match the virtuosity of the Exact Sciences with the reasonable claims of human need. These days we are not - as some will argue - confronting the End of Modernity so much as its Fulfilment. Rationality did not fail us. It was just that, in a technological age, we did not always ask when or how far formal calculations alone can give us humanly relevant answers, and when or how far practical circumstances leave room to pursue or balance legitimate interests in their human detail. We too easily forget how recent this change is. Forty years ago, you could read the Washington Post or the Chicago Tribune a whole month, without finding any articles about moral issues in medical practice: nowadays, such issues are raised every week. It is not that clinical medicine is now less ethical, but that medicine can no longer be - as we used to say - "clinically detached." We now understand the part that lay people have to play in helping to resolve moral problems in medicine. Increasingly, clinical practice requires a moral analysis of particular cases; and, as the old maxim has it, the Devil lies in the details. So, when physicians today face moral problems, they cannot fasten their eyes on a disciplinary high road, and plug straight ahead. More and more, they have to recognize that other parties to any case - a patient's parents, or life partner, or spiritual adviser - need to be listened to; since the stakes they have in these issues are not merely legitimate, but crucial. The key word here is, once again, Listen. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring appeared 35 years ago, in 1962, at a time when the role of Ecology in politics was near to zero. By now, the environmental effect of technological projects can raise problems of global concern, and no self-respecting government lacks an agency to deal with these issues. Figuring how to build a dam at this or that location calls for rational virtuosity; but the decision to build such a dam at all - asking if we can reasonably accept its side effects - does not call for calculations alone. As in medicine, the Devil lies in the details, and the voices we must listen to most carefully are those of all the other human beings who will be on the receiving end of those side effects.


To sum up: like the uniqueness of names, the individuality or particularity of cases and characters divides the world of practice, in its actuality, from the world of theory, with its abstractions. Behind the contrast of the reasonable and the rational, behind the rival attractions of Nation State and Global Future, underlying the survival in a time of general toleration of the things Jefferson called bigotry and priestcraft, lie abstractions that may still tempt us back into the dogmatism, chauvinism and sectarianism our needs have outgrown. To this extent, the conflict between Joseph Priestley and his English enemies is alive today, even on American soil. Nor is this conflict likely to be resolved permanently. It is another of those conflicts that demand eternal vigilance. So listen again to Wallace Stevens, writing in 1942:

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture,
Pleased that the irrational is rational . . . .
Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.

http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/CMTS/docs/dissent.html

*

[vanlose kid]

“No Messy Politics Please, We’re Anarchists!”

Shift Magazine

SHIFT provides a space for those of us defining as anarchists and based in the UK to ‘constructively’ critique ideas and movements. As the participants from the No Borders network referred to by Dariush Sokolov in his article Cochabamba: Beyond the Complex – Anarchist Pride (printed in Shift issue #9), who took part in the First World People’s Conference on Climate Change (CMPCC), we want to engage with the dialogue opened in #9. We agree with several of the points made, particularly the calling out of “economies based on the same model of petroleum, industrial agriculture, extraction, and growth before everything”. However, we reject a simplistic notion of relishing ‘our’ minority anarchist status. Here we reflect on the chasm we see between maintaining ‘purity’ of ideology and the reality of actually doing politics.

To be clear, we were always critical of what is going on in Bolivia and of other ‘progressive’ governments in Latin America. The glaring contradiction between Evo Morales’ anti-capitalist/eco saviour speeches and his ongoing extractivist industrialisation is just one of the reasons we wanted to attend, to hear what was going on and to report back. In all its complexity we felt that the CMPCC, coming as it did, hot on the tails of the fuck up that was COP-15, was an important event to engage with.

We spent a month in Bolivia participating in the summit working groups, workshops and panels on borders, militarisation, and climate migration, the autonomous parallel process known as Mesa 18, and various mobilisations. The booklet that we co-wrote on our return, Space for Movement – Reflections from Bolivia on Climate Justice, Social Movements and the State, is based on interviews with some of the people we met, and wrestles with big questions that the conference raises.

Dariush’s article suggests that we asked to go as delegates and that this was ‘ejected’ by the No Borders network meeting. The problems of representation in non-hierarchical groups is not our focus here. However, our perspective is that when we sought agreement to refer to ourselves as part of the UK No Borders network, at least some our comrades appreciated that we were asking for input, supported us going as individuals, and understood our reasons. To imply that we were ignorant of the power politics we were entering into was, to be honest, insulting.

The potency of serious political positions are too often trivialised in the mainstream, by reducing people to inaccurate categories (e.g. ‘layabouts’ or ‘violent thugs’ ). On the other side, ‘we’ seem all too ready to resort to equally lazy labelling, when we maybe want to make a real political point? We would like to ask, who are the white, English-speaking, privileged, careerists laden with middle-class guilt that Dariush refers to in his article? What if one of ‘us’ who went to the CMPCC was a working-class queer person of colour, fed up with being invisibilised and treated as a ‘minority’ both within the mainstream and the activist ghetto? For a generalisation to exclude the exception, to make this mistake even once, is to deny the political identity and positionality of all those who do not fit the stereotype. This creates yet another psychological border separating ‘us’ from ‘them’ within our very own movements.

These labels are powerful, isn’t that why we resist categorisations? For example, we highlighted problems with the term climate refugee in draft statements of the CMPCC, and pushed for the inclusion of references to repressive migration controls. A minor change yes, but these battles on the level of discourse are important, especially when we consider how political views are often formed, articulated and negotiated through written and spoken language.

Some of our strengths as anarchists include our refusal to be duped or easily seduced. Our critical minds question everything and, with apparently no positions of privilege to defend, we are willing to call out hierarchy and power wherever we encounter it. But, if the way we do this means that even people involved in anti-authoritarian groups and active in networks are called upon to doubt their political convictions, is it any wonder that others are put off from joining us in struggle? We will continue to honestly debate our actions, but we will also call out problems that we see within ‘our’ minority.

Of course we need shared values and principles but ‘we’ seem too quick to judge, without seeking to understand each other’s motivations. This can lead to a hyper-critical tendency that seeks to defend an imagined ideological ‘purity’. Who is the judge? Who sets the standards? Can someone be polluted by a particular action, the vegan who eats honey, the environmentalist who takes a flight, the No Borders activist who works with the local church-led refugee group? With our almost insurmountable mountain of radical positions, do we exclude those not up to the mark or do they simply choose not to participate? Unchallenged this rigidity inhibits our ability to create strong, diverse movements.

Climate change is here:

This brings us to the elephant in the room. The co-option of climate change discourses, by everyone from the BNP to consumer ad campaigns, seems to have led many anarchists to conclude that there is no point engaging at all with ‘the biggest threat to humanity and the planet’. We see that this position, although an understandable response, risks slipping towards collective denial or nihilism. Climate change is a real and current war on the world’s poor and whether we like it or not it does impact heavily on the global context we are working in. Increased militarisation of borders is just one state response to this reality that negates freedom and equality. We remain committed to fighting for climate justice, even though we are suspicious of how this discourse has already been framed and manipulated.

The Shift editorial made the valid point that fetishisation of carbon emissions associated with flights detracts from the real systemic cause of the crisis, i.e. capitalism. In this they concur with much of the discourse coming from Bolivia, as Evo says, it’s a matter of life and death; patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism are all threatening life on earth. Morales and other ALBA leaders propose their vision of global socialism as the only solution, and that’s where of course we differ. However, sharing some common analysis of causes, even at the level of rhetoric, we saw that it was important to enter into the sticky, grey areas of dialogue in order to distinguish our solutions.

Too often the millions of people that are expected to be displaced by climate change are referred to only in terms of ‘overpopulation’ and a threat to be managed. Statistics get bounded around, numbers of people, black numbers on white paper but what do they mean? At the first major international gathering of social movements which put climate migration on the agenda, we ensured that borders and increased militarisation were visible and argued that freedom of movement for all and freedom to stay are crucial to emerging climate justice discourses (see the article Freedom of Movement and Borders in an age of Climate Chaos on our blog).

As Dariush says, Bolivia does indeed still have borders, an army, prisons. In our work there, we heard different contextual understandings and certainly realised the Eurocentric basis of a No Borders position. For many it is the ability to keep out rich, Northern corporations and NGOs that was seen as the function of a border regime. But in a country where anti-capitalism seems to be the rule rather than the exception, with strong transnational solidarity and indigenous rejection of nation states, we found that what is often a freakish political position in Europe, for many, seemed uncontroversial.

There is much to be said for embracing the outsiderness of being an anarchist, especially in influencing power dynamics within and between movements. However, contrary to Dariush’s assertion that, “our desires and beliefs are largely out of step with those of just about everyone else we ever meet,” we found more in common then we had imagined. Many of the problems we encounter today have come about as a result of minority groups forming around collective ideologies, dreams and demands, which are imposed on the majority through coercion. Whilst the current anarchist movement is a minority in numbers, it is surely our belief in basic shared collective desires within the majority that calls us to organise, to act, to speak out, and to face the consequences. Movements will form, uprisings will happen, whether we are in them or not. But we believe that it is crucial that we locate ourselves in the wider struggle, and to do this we need to create relationships of mutual respect and spaces for dialogue.

Bolivia can be seen as an example of how movements are co-opted, how states can adopt radical rhetoric without relinquishing domination and control. We met with Bolivian political actors both within and against the state, who having fought side-by-side on the barricades now find themselves in very different political territory. There are ongoing struggles and attempts to expose the attacks on the social base that brought the ruling party, Movement for Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo, MAS), to power. However, for many Bolivians who were part of this process, there is no clear good/bad position when it comes to Morales and the MAS government. One compañera spoke passionately of her distrust of their socialist project, and a deep sense of betrayal from former comrades (see recent open letter to Evo Morales at http://narconews.com/Issue67/article4292.html). She was clear though that had we been from the right, she would have articulated her position differently to us. The threat from the European descendent oligarchs and the outside powers and financiers that support them remains strong. There is much to challenge, but also to necessarily defend. Bolivians we met didn’t seem ‘duped’, but repeatedly told us that it wasn’t about one man or one party, but about a wider push for change from below that would inevitably take many paths.

So how does this relate to what’s going on this winter on these islands? Who hasn’t asked themselves recently, why, when the system continues to expose itself; the banking crisis, MP’s expenses, police brutality etc, there isn’t more resistance? In an unfolding climate of coalitions and community organising in the UK against the cuts and the unprecedented attacks on the working-class, it’s crucial that we take ourselves to where politics is happening. This is what we call messy politics. This is also when our ‘ghetto’ can truly serve its purpose, providing nourishment, support, etc. Everytime we step out of our comfort zones, there is a balance to be found between staying true to our beliefs and actually engaging with people. Ultimately, each one of us has to reconcile these tendencies and we don’t argue here for any one strategy; however we echo Bristol Anarchists against the Cuts;

“For us at least is not about tunnel vision on the anarchist utopia and everything else can go to hell…If anarchists only involve themselves with the clandestine then they risk becoming even more marginalised at a time where we could be making headway.”

Despite mainstream media portrayals, the recent student protests were not an anarchist conspiracy shielding itself behind witless and innocent young scholars. They were however, in Bristol at least, infused from within and without with a little of that anarchist pride and rage, and have been practically, tactically and ideologically supported by local autonomous spaces and anarchist groups. Revelling in our minority status stands in contrast to seeing ourselves as part of a much broader struggle. The real work of building bridges, of developing true mutual aid and solidarity entails remembering that we’re not always right, being willing to admit our collective shortfalls and that we have things to learn too. To bring about real transformative, social change, exclusivity in our movements must be challenged, both in the global context of the bio-crisis, and in our locally based struggles. Once we accept that uneasy or unlikely alliances will at times be inevitable, we can begin the real work of how to build internally strong movements that can resist internal break down or external neutralisation. Or are we really more interested in dividing people into friends and foes?

Alice and Yaz live in Bristol and have been involved in the No Borders network for several years. The blog from their time in Bolivia is ayya2cochabamba.wordpress.com. The booklet they co-wrote on their return is downloadable in English and Spanish.

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?st ... 1033116262

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Michael Hudson with a bit of history about the concept of free markets; about the time when there were progressives in the US (even in the Republican party, and no they are practically extinct); back when labor – wait for it – when labor was not taxed. [edit to remove unnecessary and unseemly snark.]



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Errico Malatesta – Anarchy (1891)
One of Errico Malatesta‘s most influential writings was his 1891 pamphlet, Anarchy. In it, he sets forth the basic principles of anarchism. Space considerations prevented me from including these excerpts in Volume One of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. However, I was able to include Malatesta’s 1920 Anarchist Program, adopted by the Italian Anarchist Union at its Bologna Congress, setting forth Malatesta’s mature anarchist position (Selection 112).

ANARCHY


The word Anarchy comes from the Greek and its literal meaning is without government: the condition of a people who live without a constituted authority, without government.

Before such an organization had begun to be considered both possible and desirable by a whole school of thinkers and accepted as the objective of a party, which has now become one of the most important factors in the social struggles of our time, the word anarchy was universally used in the sense of disorder and confusion; and it is to this day used in that sense by the uninformed as well as by political opponents with an interest in distorting the truth.

We will not enter into a philological discussion, since the question is historical and not philological. The common interpretation of the word recognizes its true and etymological meaning; but it is a derivative of that meaning due to the prejudiced view that government was a necessary organ of social life, and that consequently a society without government would be at the mercy of disorder, and fluctuate between the unbridled arrogance of some, and the blind vengeance of others.

The existence of this prejudice and its influence on the public’s definition of the word anarchy, is easily explained. Man, like all living beings, adapts and accustoms himself to the conditions under which he lives, and passes on acquired habits. Thus, having being born and bred in bondage, when the descendants of a long line of slaves started to think, they believed that slavery was an essential condition of life, and freedom seemed impossible to them. Similarly, workers who for centuries were obliged, and therefore accustomed, to depend for work, that is bread, on the goodwill of the master, and to see their lives always at the mercy of the owners of the land and of capital, ended by believing that it is the master who feeds them, and ingenuously ask one how would it be possible to live if there were no masters.

In the same way, someone whose legs had been bound from birth but had managed nevertheless to walk as best he could, might attribute his ability to move to those very bonds which in fact serve only to weaken and paralyze the muscular energy of his legs.

If to the normal effects of habit is then added the kind of education offered by the master, the priest, the teacher, etc., who have a vested interest in preaching that the masters and the government are necessary; if one were to add the judge and the policeman who are at pains to reduce to silence those who might think differently and be tempted to propagate their ideas, then it will not be difficult to understand how the prejudiced view of the usefulness of, and the necessity for, the master and the government took root in the unsophisticated minds of the labouring masses.

Just imagine if the doctor were to expound to our fictional man with the bound legs a theory, cleverly illustrated with a thousand invented cases to prove that if his legs were freed he would be unable to walk and would not live, then that man would ferociously defend his bonds and consider as his enemy anyone who tried to remove them.

So, since it was thought that government was necessary and that without government there could only be disorder and confusion, it was natural and logical that anarchy, which means absence of government, should sound like absence of order.

Nor is the phenomenon without parallel in the history of words. In times and in countries where the people believed in the need for government by one man (monarchy), the word republic, which is government by many, was in fact used in the sense of disorder and confusion—and this meaning is still to be found in the popular language of almost all countries.

Change opinion, convince the public that government is not only unnecessary, but extremely harmful, and then the word anarchy, just because it means absence of government, will come to mean for everybody: natural order, unity of human needs and the interests of all, complete freedom within complete solidarity.

Those who say therefore that the anarchists have badly chosen their name because it is wrongly interpreted by the masses and lends itself to wrong interpretations, are mistaken. The error does not come from the word but from the thing; and the difficulties anarchists face in their propaganda do not depend on the name they have taken, but on the fact that their concept clashes with all the public’s long established prejudices on the function of government, or the State as it is also called.

Before going on, it would be as well to make oneself clear on this word State, which in our opinion is the cause of the real misunderstanding.

Anarchists, including this writer, have used the word State, and still do, to mean the sum total of the political, legislative, judicial, military and financial institutions through which the management of their own affairs, the control over their personal behaviour, the responsibility for their personal safety, are taken away from the people and entrusted to others who, by usurpation or delegation, are vested with the powers to make the laws for everything and everybody, and to oblige the people to observe them, if need be, by the use of collective force.

In this sense the word State means government, or to put it another way, it is the impersonal, abstract expression of that state of affairs, personified by government: and therefore the terms abolition of the State, Society without the State, etc., describe exactly the concept which anarchists seek to express, of the destruction of all political order based on authority, and the creation of a society of free and equal members based on a harmony of interests and the voluntary participation of everybody in carrying out social responsibilities.

But the word has many other meanings, some of which lend themselves to misunderstanding, especially when used with people whose unhappy social situation has not given them the opportunity to accustom themselves to the subtle distinctions of scientific language, or worse still, when the word is used with political opponents who are in bad faith and who want to create confusion and not understanding.

Thus the word State is often used to describe a special kind of society, a particular human collectivity gathered together in a particular territory and making up what is called a social unit irrespective of the way the members of the said collectivity are grouped or of the state of relations between them. It is also used simply as a synonym for society. And because of these meanings given to the word State, opponents believe, or rather they pretend to believe, that anarchists mean to abolish every social bond, all collective work, and to condemn all men to living in a state of isolation, which is worse than living in conditions of savagery.

The word State is also used to mean the supreme administration of a country: the central power as opposed to the provincial or communal authority. And for this reason others believe that anarchists want a simple territorial decentralization with the governmental principle left intact, and they thus confuse anarchism with cantonalism and communalism.

Finally, State means the condition of being, a way of social life, etc. And therefore we say, for instance, that the economic state of the working class must be changed or that the anarchist state is the only social state based on the principle of solidarity, and other similar phrases which, coming from us who, in another context, talk of wanting to abolish the State can, at first hearing, seem fantastic or contradictory.

For these reasons we believe it would be better to use expressions such as abolition of the State as little as possible, substituting for it the clearer and more concrete term abolition of government.

Anyway, it is what we shall do in the course of this pamphlet.

We said that anarchy is society without government. But is the abolition of governments possible, desirable or foreseeable?

Let us see.

What is government? The metaphysical tendency [which is a disease of the mind in which Man, once having by a logical process abstracted an individual’s qualities, undergoes a kind of hallucination which makes him accept the abstraction for the real being], in spite of the blows it has suffered at the hands of positive science, still has a strong hold on the minds of people today, so much so that many look upon government as a moral institution with a number of given qualities of reason, justice, equity which are independent of the people who are in office. For them government, and in a more vague way, the State, is the abstract social power; it is the ever abstract representative of the general interest; it is the expression of the rights of all considered as the limits of the rights of each individual. And this way of conceiving of government is encouraged by the interested parties who are concerned that the principle of authority should be safeguarded and that it should always survive the shortcomings and the mistakes committed by those who follow one another in the exercise of power.

For us, government is made up of all the governors: and the governors—kings, presidents, ministers, deputies, etc.— are those who have the power to make laws regulating inter-human relations and to see that they are carried out; to levy taxes and to collect them; to impose military conscription; to judge and punish those who contravene the laws; to subject private contracts to rules, scrutiny and sanctions; to monopolize some branches of production and some public services or, if they so wish, all production and all public services; to promote or to hinder the exchange of goods; to wage war or make peace with the governors of other countries; to grant or withdraw privileges… and so on. In short, the governors are those who have the power, to a greater or lesser degree, to make use of the social power, that is of the physical, intellectual and economic power of the whole community, in order to oblige everybody to carry out their wishes. And this power, in our opinion, constitutes the principle of government, of authority.

But what reason is there for the existence of government? Why give up one’s personal liberty and initiative to a few individuals? Why give them this power to take over willy nilly the collective strength to use as they wish? Are they so exceptionally gifted as to be able to demonstrate with some show of reason their ability to replace the mass of the people and to safeguard the interests, all the interests, of everybody better than the interested parties themselves? Are they infallible and incorruptible to the point that one could, with some semblance of prudence, entrust the fate of each and all to their knowledge and to their goodness?

And even if men of infinite goodness and knowledge existed, and even supposing, what has never been observed in history, that governmental power were to rest in the hands of the most able and kindest among us, would government office add anything to their beneficial potential? Or would it instead paralyze and destroy it by reason of the necessity men in government have of dealing with so many matters which they do not understand, and above all of wasting their energy keeping themselves in power, their friends happy, and holding in check the malcontents as well as subduing the rebels?

Furthermore, however good or bad, knowledgeable or stupid the governors may be, who will appoint them to their exalted office? Do they impose themselves by right of conquest, war or revolution? But in that case what guarantee has the public that they will be inspired by the general good? Then it is a clear question of a coup d’etat and if the victims are dissatisfied the only recourse open to them is that of force to shake off the yoke. Are they selected from one particular class or party? In which case the interests and ideas of that class or party will certainly triumph, and the will and the interests of the others will be sacrificed. Are they elected by universal suffrage? But in that case the only criterion is in numbers, which certainly are proof neither of reason, justice nor ability. Those elected would be those most able to deceive the public; and the minority, which can well be the other half minus one, would be sacrificed. And all this without taking into account that experience has demonstrated the impossibility of devising an electoral machine where the successful candidates are at least the real representatives of the majority.

Many and varied are the theories with which some have sought to explain and justify the existence of government. Yet all are based on the prejudiced view, whether admitted or not, that men have conflicting interests, and that an external, higher, authority is needed to oblige one section of the people to respect the interests of the other, prescribing and imposing that rule of conduct by which opposing interests can best be resolved, and by which each individual will achieve the maximum satisfaction with the least possible sacrifice.

The Authoritarian theoreticians ask: if the interests, tendencies and aspirations of an individual are at odds with those of another or even those of society as a whole, who will have the right and the power to oblige each to respect the other’s interests? Who will be able to prevent an individual from violating the general will? They say that the freedom of each is limited by the freedom of others; but who will establish these limits and who will see to it that they are respected? The natural antagonisms of interests and temperament create the need for government and justify authority which is a moderating influence in the social struggle, and defines the limits of individual rights and duties.

This is the theory; but if theories are to be valid they must be based on facts and explain them—and one knows only too well that in social economy too often are theories invented to justify the facts, that is to defend privilege and make it palatable to those who are its victims. Let us instead look at the facts.

Throughout history, just as in our time, government is either the brutal, violent, arbitrary rule of the few over the many or it is an organized instrument to ensure that dominion and privilege will be in the hands of those who by force, by cunning, or by inheritance, have cornered all the means of life, first and foremost the land, which they make use of to keep the people in bondage and to make them work for their benefit.

There are two ways of oppressing men: either directly by brute force, by physical violence; or indirectly by denying them the means of life and thus reducing them to a state of surrender. The former is at the root of power, that is of political privilege; the latter was the origin of property, that is of economic privilege. Men can also be suppressed by working on their intelligence and their feelings, which constitutes religious or “universitarian” power; but just as the spirit does not exist except as the resultant of material forces, so a lie and the organisms set up to propagate it have no raison d’être except in so far as they are the result of political and economic privileges, and a means to defend and to consolidate them.

In sparsely populated primitive societies with uncomplicated social relations, in any situation which prevented the establishment of habits, customs of solidarity, or which destroyed existing ones and established the domination of man by man—the two powers, political and economic, were to be found in the same hands, which could even be those of a single man. Those who by force have defeated and intimidated others, dispose of the persons and the belongings of the defeated and oblige them to serve and to work for them and obey their will in all respects. They are at the same time the landowners, kings, judges and executioners.

But with the growth of society, with increasing needs, with more complex social relations, the continued existence of such a despotism became untenable. The rulers, for security reasons, for convenience and because of it being impossible to act otherwise, find themselves obliged on the one hand to have the support of a privileged class, that is of a number of individuals with a common interest in ruling, and on the other to leave it to each individual to fend for himself as best he can, reserving for themselves supreme rule, which is the right to exploit everybody as much as possible, and is the way to satisfy the vanity of those who want to give the orders. Thus, in the shadow of power, for its protection and support, often unbeknown to it, and for reasons beyond its control, private wealth, that is the owning class, is developed. And the latter, gradually concentrating in their hands the means of production, the real sources of life, agriculture, industry, barter, etc., end up by establishing their own power which, by reason of the superiority of its means, and the wide variety of interests that it embraces, always ends by more or less openly subjecting the political power, which is the government, and making it into its own gendarme.

This phenomenon has occurred many times in history. Whenever as a result of invasion or any military enterprise physical, brutal force has gained the upper hand in society, the conquerors have shown a tendency to concentrate government and property in their own hands. But always the government’s need to win the support of a powerful class, and the demands of production, the impossibility of controlling and directing everything, have resulted in the re-establishment of private property, the division of the two powers, and with it the dependence in fact of those who control force—governments—on those who control the very source of force-—the property-owners. The governor inevitably ends by becoming the owners’ gendarme.

But never has this phenomenon been more accentuated than in modern times. The development of production, the vast expansion of commerce, the immeasurable power assumed by money, and all the economic questions stemming from the discovery of America, from the invention of machines, etc., have guaranteed this supremacy to the capitalist class which, no longer content with enjoying the support of the government, demanded that government should arise from its own ranks. A government which owed its origin to the right of conquest (divine right as the kings and their priests called it), though subjected by existing circumstances to the capitalist class, went on maintaining a proud and contemptuous attitude towards its now wealthy former slaves, and had pretensions to independence of domination. That government was indeed the defender, the property owners’ gendarme, but the kind of gendarmes who think they are somebody, and behave in an arrogant manner towards the people they have to escort and defend, when they don’t rob or kill them at the next street corner; and the capitalist class got rid of it, or is in the process of so doing by means fair or foul, replacing it by a government of its own choosing, consisting of members of its own class, at all times under its control and specifically organized to defend that class against any possible demands by the disinherited. The modern Parliamentary system begins here.

Today, government, consisting of property owners and people dependent on them, is entirely at the disposal of the owners, so much so that the richest among them disdain to take part in it. Rothschild does not need to be either a Deputy or a Minister; it suffices that Deputies and Ministers take their orders from him.

In many countries workers nominally have a more or less important say in the election of the government. It is a concession made by the bourgeoisie, both to avail itself of popular support in its struggle against the monarchical and aristocratic power as well as to dissuade the people from thinking of emancipation by giving then the illusion of sovereignty. But whether the bourgeoisie foresaw it or not when they first gave the people the vote, the fact is that that right proved to be entirely derisory, and served only to consolidate the power of the bourgeoisie while giving the most active section of the working class false hopes of achieving power. Even with universal suffrage—and we could well say even more so with universal suffrage—the government remained the bourgeoisie’s servant and gendarme. For were it to be otherwise with the government hinting that it might take up a hostile attitude, or that democracy could ever be anything but a pretence to deceive the people, the bourgeoisie, feeling its interests threatened, would be quick to react, and would make use of all the influence and force at its disposal, by reason of its wealth, to recall the government to its proper place as the bourgeoisie’s gendarme.

The basic function of government everywhere in all times whatever title it adopts and whatever its origin and organization may be, is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses, of defending the oppressors and the exploiters; and its principle, characteristic and indispensable, instruments are the police agent and the tax-collector, the soldier and the jailer—to whom must be invariably added the trader in lies, be he priest or schoolmaster, remunerated or protected by the government to enslave minds and make them docilely accept the yoke.

It is true that to these basic functions, to these essential organs of government, other functions, other organs have been added in the course of history. Let us even also admit that never or hardly ever has a government existed in any country with a degree of civilization which did not combine with its oppressive and plundering activities others which were useful or indispensable to social life. But this does not detract from the fact that government is by its nature oppressive and plundering, and that it is in origin and by its attitude, inevitably inclined to defend and strengthen the dominant class; indeed it confirms and aggravates the position.

In fact government takes the trouble to protect, more or less, the lives of citizens against direct and violent attack; it recognizes and legalizes a number of basic rights and duties as well as usages and customs without which social life would not be possible; it organizes and manages a number of public services, such as the post, roads, cleansing and refuse disposal, land improvement and conservation, etc.; it promotes orphanages and hospitals, and often it condescends to pose as the protector and benefactor of the poor and the weak. But it is enough to understand how and why it carries out these functions to find the practical evidence that whatever governments do is always motivated by the desire to dominate, and is always geared to defending, extending and perpetuating its privileges and those of the class of which it is both the representative and defender.

A government cannot maintain itself for long without hiding its true nature behind a pretence of general usefulness; it cannot impose respect for the lives of privileged people if it does not appear to demand respect for all human life; it cannot impose acceptance of the privileges of the few if it does not pretend to be the guardian of the rights of all. “The law”— says Kropotkin, and by which is meant those who have made the law, that is, the government—“has used Man’s social feelings to get passed not only the moral precepts which were acceptable to Man, but also orders which were useful only to the minority of exploiters against whom he would have rebelled.”

A government cannot want society to break up, for it would mean that it and the dominant class would be deprived of the sources of exploitation; nor can it leave society to maintain itself without official intervention, for then the people would soon realize that government serves only to defend the property owners who keep them in conditions of starvation, and they would hasten to rid themselves of both the government and the property owners.

Today, governments, faced with the pressing and threatening demands of the workers, show a tendency to arbitrate in the dealings between masters and workers; in this way they seek to sidetrack the workers’ movement and, with a few deceptive reforms, to prevent the poor from taking for themselves what is their due, that is a part of well-being equal to that enjoyed by others.

Furthermore, one must bear in mind that on the one hand the bourgeoisie (the property owners) are always at war among themselves and gobbling each other up and that on the other hand the government, though springing from the bourgeoisie and its servant and protector, tends, as with every servant and every protector, to achieve its own emancipation and to dominate whoever it protects. Thus the game of the swings, the manoeuvres, the concessions and withdrawals, the attempts to find allies among the people against the conservatives, and among the conservatives against the people, which is the science of the governors, and which blinds the ingenuous and the phlegmatic who always wait for salvation to come down to them from above.

Despite all this, the nature of government does not change. If it assumes the role of controller and guarantor of the rights and duties of everyone, it perverts the sentiment of justice; it qualifies as a crime and punishes every action which violates or threatens the privileges of the rulers and the property owners, and declares as just and legal the most outrageous exploitation of the poor, the slow and sustained material and moral assassination perpetrated by those who have, at the expense of those who have not. If it appoints itself as the administrator of public services, again, as always, it looks after the interests of the rulers and the property owners and does not attend to those of the working people except where it has to because the people agree to pay. If it assumes the role of teacher, it hampers the propagation of truth and tends to prepare the minds and the hearts of the young to become either ruthless tyrants or docile slaves, according to the class to which they belong. In the hands of government everything becomes a means for exploitation, everything becomes a policing institution, useful only for keeping the people in check.

And it had to be thus. For if human existence is a struggle between men, there must obviously be winners and losers, and government, which is the prize in the struggle and a means for guaranteeing to the victors the results of victory and for perpetuating them, will certainly never fall into the hands of those who lose, whether the struggle is based on physical force, is intellectual, or is in the field of economics. And those who have struggled to win, that is, to secure better conditions for themselves than others enjoy, and to win privileges and power, will certainly not use it to defend the rights of the vanquished and set limits on their own power as well as that of their friends and supporters.

The government, or as some call it, the justiciary State, as moderator in the social struggle and the impartial administrator of the public interest, is a lie—an illusion, an utopia never achieved and never to be realized.

If Man’s interests were really mutually antagonistic, if the struggle between men was indeed a basic essential law of human societies and if the liberty of the individual were to be limited by the liberty of others, then everyone would always seek to ensure that his interests prevailed, everyone would try to increase his own freedom at the expense of other people’s freedom, and one would have a government, not just because it would be more or less useful to all members of society to have one, but because the victors would want to make sure of the fruits of victory by thoroughly subjecting the vanquished, and so free themselves from the trouble of being permanently on the defensive, entrusting their defence to men specially trained as professional gendarmes. In that case mankind would be condemned to perish or be forever struggling between the tyranny of the victors and the rebellion of the vanquished.

But fortunately the future of mankind is a happier one because the law governing it is milder. This law is SOLIDARITY.


Man’s fundamental essential characteristics are the instinct of his own preservation, without which no living being could exist, and the instinct of the preservation of the species, without which no species could have developed and endured. He is naturally driven to defend his individual existence and well-being, as well as that of his offspring, against everything and everybody.

In nature living beings have two ways of surviving and of making life more pleasant. One is by individual struggle against the elements and against other individuals of the same or other species; the other is by mutual aid, by cooperation, which could also be described as association for the struggle against all natural factors antagonistic to the existence, the development and well-being of the associates.

Apart from considerations of space, there is no need to examine in the pages that follow the relative role in the evolution of the organic world played by these two principles: of struggle and of cooperation. It will suffice to state that so far as Man is concerned, cooperation (voluntary or compulsory) has become the only means towards progress, advancement and security; and that struggle—a relic of our ancestors—has not only proved useless in ensuring individual well-being, but also is harmful to everybody, victors and vanquished alike.

The accumulated and communicated experience of the generations taught men that by uniting with other men their individual safety and well-being were enhanced. Thus, as a result of the very struggle for existence waged against the natural environment and against individuals of the same species, a social feeling was developed in Man which completely transformed the conditions of his existence. And on the strength of this, Man was able to emerge from the animal state and rise to great power, and so lift himself above other animals that anti-materialist philosophers thought it necessary to invent an immaterial and immortal soul for him.

Many concurrent causes have contributed to the development of this social feeling which, starting from the animal basis of the instinct of preservation of the species (which is the social instinct limited to the natural family), has reached great heights both in intensity and in extent, so much so that it constitutes the very basis of man’s moral nature.

Man, though he had emerged from the lower order of animal life, was weak and unequipped to engage in individual struggle against the carnivorous beasts. But with a brain capable of great development, a vocal organ capable of expressing with a variety of sounds different cerebral vibrations, and with hands specially suitable for fashioning matter to his will, must have very soon felt the need for, and the advantages to be derived from, association; indeed one can say that he could only emerge from the animal state when he became a social being and acquired the use of language, which is at the same time a consequence of, and an important factor in, sociability.

The relatively small number of human beings, because it made the struggle for existence between men, even without association, less bitter, less prolonged, less necessary, must have greatly facilitated the development of feelings of sympathy, and allowed time to discover and appreciate the usefulness of mutual aid.

Finally, Man’s ability to modify his external environment and adapt it to his needs, which he acquired thanks to his original qualities applied in cooperation with a smaller or larger number of associates; the increasing number of demands which grow as the means of satisfying them grow and become needs; the division of labour which is the outcome of the systematic exploitation of nature to Man’s advantage, all these factors have resulted in social life becoming the necessary environment for Man, outside of which he cannot go on living, or if he does, he returns to the animal state.

And by the refinement of feelings with the growth of relations, and by customs impressed on the species through heredity over thousands of centuries, this need of a social life, of an exchange of thoughts and feelings, has become for mankind a way of being which is essential to our way of life, and has been transformed into sympathy, friendship, love, and goes on independently of the material advantages that association provides, so much so that in order to satisfy it one often faces all kinds of sufferings and even death.

In other words, the enormous advantages that accrue to men through association; the state of physical inferiority, in no way comparable to his intellectual superiority, in which he finds himself in relation to the animal kingdom if he remains isolated; the possibility for men to join with an ever growing number of individuals and in relationships ever more intimate and complex to the point where the association extends to all mankind and all aspects of life, and perhaps more than any thing, to the possibility for Man to produce, through work in cooperation with others, more than he needs for survival, and the affective sentiments that spring from all these—all have given to the human struggle for existence quite a different complexion from the struggle that is generally waged by other members of the animal kingdom.

Although we now know—and the findings of contemporary naturalists are daily providing us with new evidence—that cooperation has played and continues to play a most important role in the development of the organic world unsuspected by those who sought, quite irrelevantly anyway, to justify bourgeois rule with Darwinian theories, yet the gulf separating the struggle of man from that of the animal kingdom remains enormous, and in direct ratio to the distance between man and the other animals.

Other animals fight either individually or, more often, in small permanent or transitory groups against all nature including other individuals of the same species. The more social creatures among them, such as the ants, bees, etc., are loyal to all the individuals within the same ant or swarm, but are at war with or indifferent to other communities of the same species. Human struggle instead tends always to widen the association among men, their community of interests, and to develop the feeling of love of man for his fellows, of conquering and over coming the external forces of nature by humanity and for humanity. Every struggle aimed at gaining advantages independently of or at the expense of others, is contrary to the social nature of modern Man and tends to drive him back towards the animal state.

Solidarity, that is the harmony of interests and of feelings, the coming together of individuals for the well-being of all, and of all for the well-being of each, is the only environment in which Man can express his personality and achieve his optimum development and enjoy the greatest possible well-being. This is the goal towards which human evolution advances; it is the higher principle which resolves all existing antagonisms, that would otherwise be insoluble, and results in the freedom of each not being limited by, but complemented by—indeed finding the necessary raison d’être in—the freedom of others.

Michael Bakunin said that: “No individual can recognize his own humanity, and consequently realize it in his lifetime, if not by recognizing it in others and cooperating in its realization for others. No man can achieve his own emancipation without at the same time working for the emancipation of all men around him. My freedom is the freedom of all since I am not truly free in thought and in fact, except when my freedom and my rights are confirmed and approved in the freedom and rights of all men who are my equals.”

“It matters to me very much what other men are, because however independent I may appear to be or think I am, because of my social position, were I Pope, Czar, Emperor or even Prime Minister, I remain always the product of what the humblest among them are: if they are ignorant, poor, slaves, my existence is determined by their slavery. I, an enlightened or intelligent man, am for instance—in the event—rendered stupid by their stupidity; as a courageous man I am enslaved by their slavery; as a rich man I tremble before their poverty; as a privileged person I blanch at their justice. I who want to be free cannot be because all the men around me do not yet want to be free, and consequently they become tools of oppression against me.”

Solidarity is therefore the state of being in which Man attains the greatest degree of security and well-being; and therefore egoism itself, that is the exclusive consideration of one’s own interests impels Man and human society towards solidarity; or it would be better to say that egoism and altruism (concern for the interests of others) become fused into a single sentiment just as the interests of the individual and those of society coincide.

Yet Man could not in one leap pass from the animal state to the human state, from the brutish struggle between man and man to the joint struggle of all men united in comradeship against the outside forces of nature.

Guided by the advantages which association and the consequent division of labour offer, Man developed towards solidarity; but his development met with an obstacle which led him away from his goal and continues to do so to this day. Man discovered that he could, at least up to a certain point and for the material and basic needs which only then did he feel, achieve the advantages of cooperation by subjecting other men to his will instead of joining with them; and in view of the fact that the fierce and anti-social instincts inherited from his animal ancestry were still strong in him, he obliged the weakest to work for him, preferring domination to association. Perhaps too, in most cases, it was in exploiting the vanquished that Man learned for the first time to understand the advantages of association, the good that Man could derive from the support of his fellows.

Thus the realization of the usefulness of cooperation, which should have led to the triumph of solidarity in all human relations, instead gave rise to private property and government, that is to the exploitation of the labour of the whole community by a privileged minority.

It was still association and cooperation, outside which there is no possible human life; but it was a way of cooperation imposed and controlled by a few for their own personal interest.

From this fact has arisen the great contradiction, which fills the pages of human history, between the tendency to association and comradeship for the conquest and adaptation of the external world to Man’s needs and for the satisfaction of sentiments of affection—and the tendency to divide into many units separate and hostile as are the groupings determined by geographic and ethnographic conditions, as are the economic attitudes, as are those men who have succeeded in winning an advantage and want to make sure of it and add to it, as are those who hope to win a privilege, as are those who suffer by an injustice or a privilege and rebel and seek to make amends.

The principle of each for himself, which is the war of all against all, arose in the course of history to complicate, to sidetrack and paralyze the war of all against nature for the greatest well-being of mankind which can be completely successful only by being based on the principle of all for one and one for all.

Mankind has suffered great harm as a result of this intrusion of domination and exploitation in the midst of human association. But in spite of the terrible oppression to which the masses have been subjected, in spite of poverty, in spite of vice, crime and the degradation which poverty and slavery produce in the slaves and in the masters, in spite of accumulated antagonism, of wars of extermination, in spite of artificially created conflicting interests, the social instinct has survived and developed. Cooperation having always remained the essential condition for man to wage a successful war against external nature, it also remained the permanent cause for bringing men close together and for developing among them sentiments of sympathy. The very oppression of the masses created a feeling of comradeship among the oppressed; and it is only because of the more or less conscious and wide spread solidarity that existed among the oppressed that they were able to endure the oppression and that mankind survived the causes of death that crept into their midst.

Today the immense development of production, the growth of those requirements which can only be satisfied by the participation of large numbers of people in all countries, the means of communication, with travel becoming a commonplace, science, literature, businesses and even wars, all have drawn mankind into an ever tighter single body whose constituent parts, united among themselves, can only find fulfillment and freedom to develop through the well-being of the other constituent parts as well as of the whole.

The inhabitant of Naples is as concerned in the improvement to the living conditions of the people inhabiting the banks of the Ganges from whence cholera comes to him, as he is in the drainage of the fondaci of his own city. The well-being, the freedom and the future of a highlander lost among the gorges of the Appenines, are dependent not only on the conditions of prosperity or of poverty of the inhabitants of his village and on the general condition of the Italian people, but also on workers’ conditions in America or Australia, on the discovery made by a Swedish scientist, on the state of mind and material conditions of the Chinese, on there being war or peace in Africa; in other words on all the circumstances large and small which anywhere in the world are acting on a human being.

In present day conditions in society, this vast solidarity which joins together all men is for the most part unconscious, since it emerges spontaneously out of the friction between individual interests, whereas men are hardly if at all concerned with the general interest. And this is the clearest proof that solidarity is a natural law of mankind, which manifests itself and commands respect in spite of all the obstacles, and the dissensions created by society as at present constituted.

On the other hand the oppressed masses who have never completely resigned themselves to oppression and poverty, and who today more than ever show themselves thirsting for justice, freedom and well-being, are beginning to understand that they will not be able to achieve their emancipation except by union and solidarity with all the oppressed, with the exploited everywhere in the world. And they also understand that the indispensable condition for their emancipation which cannot be neglected is the possession of the means of production, of the land and of the instruments of labour, and therefore the abolition of private property. And science, the observation of social manifestations, indicates that this abolition of private property would be of great value even to the privileged minority, if only they were to want to give up their domineering attitude and work with everybody else for the common good.

So therefore—if the oppressed masses were to refuse to work for others, and were to take over the land and the instruments of work from the landowners, or were to want to use them on their own account or for their own benefit, that is the benefit of all, if they were to decide never again to put up with domination and brute force, nor with economic privilege, and if the sentiment of human solidarity, strengthened by a community of interests, were to have put an end to wars and colonialism—what justification would there be for the continued existence of government?

Once private property has been abolished, government which is its defender must disappear. If it were to survive it would tend always to re-establish a privileged and oppressing class in one guise or another.

And the abolition of government does not and cannot mean the breakdown of the social link. Quite the contrary, cooperation which today is imposed and directed to the benefit of a few, would be free, voluntary and directed to everybody’s interests; and therefore it would become that much more widespread and effective.

Social instinct, the sentiment of solidarity, would be developed to the highest degree; and every man would strive to do his best for everybody else, both to satisfy his intimate feelings as well as for his clearly understood interest.

From the free participation of all, by means of the spontaneous grouping of men according to their requirements and their sympathies, from the bottom to the top, from the simple to the complex, starting with the most urgent interests and arriving in the end at the most remote and most general, a social organization would emerge the function of which would be the greatest well-being and the greatest freedom for everybody, and would draw together the whole of mankind into a community of comradeship, and would be modified and improved according to changing circumstances and the lessons learned from experience.

This society of free people, this society of friends is Anarchy.

Note on the text: These excerpts are taken from Vernon Richards’ translation of Malatesta’s Anarchy, published by Freedom Press in 1974. Originally, I posted excerpts I found on the internet from an unidentified source (perhaps the original English translation which Richards’ was meant to replace). This other translation is often misidentified as the Richards translation. I think the Richards translation is better and will be posting the entire pamphlet as part of a Malatesta page that I am working on.

//http://robertgraham.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/errico-malatesta-anarchy-1891/

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Malatesta’s Anarchy, Part 2
This is the second half of Vernon Richard’s 1974 Freedom Press translation of Malatesta‘s 1891 pamphlet, Anarchy. I posted the first half earlier.


Organ and function are inseparable terms. Take away from an organ its function and either the organ dies or the function is re-established. Put an army in a country in which there are neither reasons for, nor fear of, war, civil or external, and it will provoke war or, if it does not succeed in its intentions, it will collapse. A police force where there are no crimes to solve or criminals to apprehend will invent both, or cease to exist.

In France there has existed for centuries an institution, the louveterie, now incorporated in the Forestry Administration, the officials of which are entrusted with the task of destroying wolves and other harmful creatures. No one will be surprised to learn that it is just because this institution exists that there are still wolves in France and in exceptional winters they play havoc.

The public hardly worries about the wolves as there are the wolf-exterminators who are there to deal with them; and these certainly hunt the wolves but they do so intelligently, sparing the dens long enough for them to rear their young and so prevent the extermination of an interesting animal species. French peasants have in fact little confidence in these wolf-catchers and consider them more as wolf-preservers. And it is understandable: what would the “Lieutenants of the louveterie” do if there were no more wolves?

A government, that is a group of people entrusted with making the laws and empowered to use the collective power to oblige each individual to obey them, is already a privileged class and cut off from the people. As any constituted body would do, it will instinctively seek to extend its powers, to be beyond public control, to impose its own policies and to give priority to its special interests. Having been put in a privileged position, the government is already at odds with the people whose strength it disposes of.

In any case, even if a government wanted to, it could not please everybody, even if it did manage to please a few. It would have to defend itself against the malcontents, and would therefore need to get the support of one section of the people to do so. And then the old story of the privileged class which arises through the complicity of the government starts all over again and, in this instance, if it did not seize the land would certainly capture key posts, specially created, and would oppress and exploit no less than the capitalist class.

The rulers accustomed to giving orders, would not wish to be once more members of the public, and if they could not hold on to power they would at least make sure of securing privileged positions for when they must hand over power to others. They would use every means available to those in power to have their friends elected as the successors who would then in their turn support and protect them. And thus government would be passed to and fro in the same hands, and democracy, which is the alleged government of all, would end up as usual, in an oligarchy, which is the government of a few, the government of a class.

And what an all-powerful, oppressive, all-absorbing oligarchy must one be which has at its service, that has at its disposal, all social wealth, all public services, from food to the manufacture of matches, from the universities to the music-halls!

But let us even suppose that the government were not in any case a privileged class, and could survive without creating around itself a new privileged class, and remain the representative, the servant as it were, of the whole of society. And what useful purpose could this possibly serve? How and in what way would this increase the strength, the intelligence, the spirit of solidarity, the concern for the well-being of all and of future generations, which at any given time happen to exist in a given society?

It is always the old question of the bound man who having managed to live in spite of his bonds thinks he lives because of them. We are used to living under a government which takes over all that energy, intelligence and will which it can direct for its own ends; and it hinders, paralyzes and suppresses those who do not serve its purpose or are hostile—and we think that everything that is done in society is carried out thanks to the government, and that without the government there would no longer be any energy, intelligence or goodwill left in society. Thus (as we have already pointed out), the landowner who has seized the land gets others to work it for his profit, leaving the worker with the bare necessities so that he can and will want to go on working—and the enslaved worker imagines that he could not live without the master, as if the latter had created the land and the forces of nature.

What can government itself add to the moral and material forces that exist in society? Would it be a similar case to that of the God of the Bible who creates from nothing?

Since nothing is created in what is usually called the material world, so nothing is created in this more complicated form of the material world which is the social world. And so the rulers can only make use of the forces that exist in society—except for those great forces which governmental action paralyzes and destroys, and those rebel forces, and all that is wasted through conflicts; inevitably tremendous losses in such an artificial system. If they contribute something of their own they can only do so as men and not as rulers. And of those material and moral forces which remain at the disposal of the government, only a minute part is allowed to play a really useful role for society. The rest is either used up in repressive actions to keep the rebel forces in check or is otherwise diverted from its ends of the general good and used to benefit a few at the expense of the majority of the people.

Much has been said about the respective roles of individual initiative and social action in the life and progress of human societies, and by the usual tricks of the language of metaphysics, the issues have become so confused that in the end those who declared that everything is maintained and kept going in the human world thanks to individual initiative, appear as radicals. In fact this is a commonsense truth which is obvious the moment one tries to understand the significance of words. The real being is man, the individual. Society or the collectivity—and the State or government which claims to represent it—if it is not a hollow abstraction, must be made up of individuals. And it is in the organism of every individual that all thoughts and human actions inevitably have their origin, and from being individual they become collective thoughts and acts when they are or become accepted by many individuals. Social action, therefore, is neither the negation nor the complement of individual initiative, but is the resultant of initiatives, thoughts and actions of all individuals who make up society; a resultant which, all other things being equal, is greater or smaller depending on whether individual forces are directed to a common objective or are divided or antagonistic. And if instead, as do the authoritarians, one means government action when one talks of social action, then this is still the resultant of individual forces, but only of those individuals who form the government or who by reason of their position can influence the policy of the government.

Therefore in the age-long struggle between liberty and authority, or in other words between socialism and a class state, the question is not really one of changing the relationships between society and the individual; nor is it a question of increasing the independence of the individual at the expense of social interference or vice versa. But rather it is a question of preventing some individuals from oppressing others; of giving all individuals the same rights and the same means of action; and of replacing the initiative of the few, which inevitably results in the oppression of everybody else. It is after all a question of destroying once and for all the domination and exploitation of man by man, so that everyone can have a stake in the commonweal, and individual forces, instead of being destroyed or fighting among themselves or being cut off from each other, will find the possibility of complete fulfillment, and come together for the greater benefit of everybody.

Even if we pursue our hypothesis of the ideal government of the authoritarian socialists, it follows from what we have said that far from resulting in an increase in the productive, organizing and protective forces in society, it would greatly reduce them, limiting initiative to a few, and giving them the right to do everything without, of course, being able to provide them with the gift of being all-knowing.

Indeed, if you take out from the law and the entire activity of a government all that exists to defend the privileged minority and which represents the wishes of the latter themselves, what is left which is not the result of the action of everybody? Sismondi said that “the State is always a conservative power which legalizes, regularizes and organizes the victories of progress” (and history adds that it directs them for its own ends and that of the privileged class) “but never introduces them. These victories are always started down below, they are born in the heart of society, from individual thought which is then spread far and wide, becomes opinion, the majority, but in making its way it must always meet with and combat the powers-that-be, tradition, habit, privilege and error”.

Anyway, in order to understand how a society can live without government, one has only to observe in depth existing society, and one will see how in fact the greater part, the important part, of social life is discharged even today outside government intervention, and that government only interferes in order to exploit the masses, to defend the privileged minority, and moreover it finds itself sanctioning, quite ineffectually, all that has been done without its intervention, and often in spite of and even against it. Men work, barter, study, travel and follow to the best of their knowledge moral rules and those of well-being; they benefit from the advances made in science and the arts, have widespread relations among themselves—all without feeling the need for somebody to tell them how to behave. Indeed it is just those matters over which government has no control that work best, that give rise to less controversy and are resolved by general consent so that everybody feels happy as well as being useful.

Nor is the government specially needed for the large-scale enterprises and public services requiring the full-time employment of a large number of people from different countries and conditions. Thousands of these undertakings are, even today, the result of individual associations freely constituted, and are by common accord those that work best. Nor are we talking of capitalist associations, organized for the purpose of exploitation, however much they too demonstrate the potentialities and the power of a free association and how it can spread to include people from every country as well as vast and contrasting interests. But rather let us talk about those associations which, inspired by a love of one’s fellow beings, or by a passion for science, or more simply by the desire to enjoy oneself and to be applauded, are more representative of the groupings as they will be in a society in which, having abolished private property and the internecine struggle between men, everybody will find his interest in that of everybody else, and his greatest satisfaction in doing good and in pleasing others. Scientific Societies and Congresses, the international life-saving association, the Red Cross, the geographical societies, the workers’ organizations, the voluntary bodies that rush to help whenever there are great public disasters, are a few examples among many of the power of the spirit of association, which always manifests itself when it is a question of a need or an issue deeply felt, and the means are not lacking. If the voluntary association is not world-wide and does not embrace all the material and moral aspects of activity it is because of the obstacles put in its path by governments, by the dissensions created by private property, and the impotence and discouragement felt by most people as a result of the seizure of all wealth by a few.

For instance, the government takes over the responsibilities of the postal services, the railways and so on. But in what way does it help these services? When the people are enabled to enjoy them, and feel the need for these services, they think about organizing them, and the technicians don’t need a government licence to get to work. And the more the need is universal and urgent, the more volunteers will there be to carry it out. If the people had the power to deal with the problems of production and food supplies, oh! have no fear that they might just die of hunger waiting for a government to make the necessary laws to deal with the problem. If there had to be a government, it would still be obliged to wait until the people had organized everything, in order then to come along with laws to sanction and exploit what had already been done. It is demonstrated that private interest is the great incentive for all activities: well, when the interest of all will be that of each individual (and this would obviously be the case if private property did not exist) then everyone will act, and if we do things now which only interest a few, we will do them that much better and more intensively when they will be of interest to everybody. And it is difficult to understand why there should be people who believe that the carrying out and the normal functioning of public services vital to our daily lives would be more reliable if carried out under the instructions of a government rather than by the workers themselves who, by direct election or through agreements made with others, have chosen to do that kind of work and carry it out under the direct control of all the interested parties.

Of course in every large collective undertaking, a division of labour, technical management, administration, etc., is necessary. But authoritarians clumsily play on words to produce a raison d’être for government out of the very real need for the organization of work. Government, it is well to repeat it, is the concourse of individuals who have had, or have seized, the right and the means to make laws and to oblige people to obey; the administrator, the engineer, etc., instead are people who are appointed or assume the responsibility to carry out a particular job and do so. Government means the delegation of power, that is the abdication of initiative and sovereignty of all into the hands of a few; administration means the delegation of work, that is tasks given and received, free exchange of services based on free agreement. The governor is a privileged person since he has the right to command others and to make use of the efforts of others to make his ideas and his personal wishes prevail; the administrator, the technical director, etc., are workers like the rest, that is, of course, in a society in which everyone has equal means to develop and that all are or can be at the same time intellectual and manual workers, and that the only differences remaining between men are those which stem from the natural diversity of aptitudes, and that all jobs, all functions give an equal right to the enjoyment of social possibilities. Let one not confuse the function of government with that of an administration, for they are essentially different, and if today the two are often confused, it is only because of economic and political privilege.

But let us hasten to pass on to the functions for which government is considered, by all who are not anarchists, as quite indispensable: the internal and external defence of a society, that is to say war, the police and justice.

Once governments have been abolished and the social wealth has been put at the disposal of everybody, then all the antagonisms between people will soon disappear and war will no longer have a raison d’étre. We would add, furthermore, that in the present state of the world, when a revolution occurs in one country, if it does not have speedy repercussions elsewhere it will however meet with much sympathy everywhere, so much so that no government will dare to send its troops abroad for fear of having a revolutionary uprising on its own doorstep. But, by all means, let us admit that the governments of the still unemancipated countries were to want to, and could, attempt to reduce free people to a state of slavery once again. Would this people require a government to defend itself? To wage war men are needed who have the necessary geographical and mechanical knowledge, and above all large masses of the population willing to go and fight. A government can neither increase the abilities of the former nor the will and courage of the latter. And the experience of history teaches us that a people who really want to defend their own country are invincible; and in Italy everyone knows that before the corps of volunteers (anarchist formations) thrones topple, and regular armies composed of conscripts or mercenaries, disappear.

And what of the police and of justice? Many suppose that if there were no carabineers, policemen and judges, everyone would be free to kill, to ravish, to harm others as the mood took one; and that anarchists, in the name of their principles, would wish to see that strange liberty respected which violates and destroys the freedom and life of others. They seem almost to believe that after having brought down government and private property we would allow both to be quietly built up again, because of a respect for the freedom of those who might feel the need to be rulers and property owners… A truly curious way of interpreting our ideas! …of course it is easier to brush them off with a shrug of the shoulders than to take the trouble of confuting them.

The freedom we want, for ourselves and for others, is not an absolute metaphysical, abstract freedom which in practice is inevitably translated into the oppression of the wealthy; but it is real freedom, possible freedom, which is the conscious community of interests, voluntary solidarity. We proclaim the maxim DO AS YOU WISH, and with it we almost summarize our program, for we maintain—and it doesn’t take much to understand why—that in a harmonious society, in a society without government and without property, each one will WANT WHAT HE MUST DO.

But supposing that as a result of the kind of education received from present society, or for physical misfortune or for any other reason, someone were to want to do harm to us and to others, one can be sure that we would exert ourselves to prevent him from so doing with all the means at our disposal. Of course, because we know that man is the consequence of his own organism as well as of the cosmic and social environment in which he lives; because we do not confuse the inviolate right of defence with the claimed ridiculous right to punish; and since with the delinquent, that is with he who commits anti-social acts, we would not, to be sure, see the rebel slave, as happens with judges today, but the sick brother needing treatment, so would we not introduce hatred in the repression, and would make every effort not to go beyond the needs of defence, and would not think of avenging ourselves but of seeking to cure, redeem the unhappy person with all the means that science offered us. In any case, irrespective of the anarchists’ interpretation (who could, as happens with all theorists, lose sight of reality in pursuing a semblance of logic), it is certain that the people would not allow their well-being and their freedom to be attacked with impunity, and if the necessity arose, they would take measures to defend themselves against the anti-social tendencies of a few. But to do so, what purpose is served by people whose profession is the making of laws; while other people spend their lives seeking out and inventing law-breakers? When the people really disapprove of something and consider it harmful, they always manage to prevent it more successfully than do the professional legislators, police and judges. When in the course of insurrections the people have, however mistakenly, wanted private property to be respected, they did so in a way that an army of policemen could not.

Customs always follow the needs and feelings of the majority; and the less they are subject to the sanctions of law the more are they respected, for everyone can see and understand their use, and because the interested parties, having no illusions as to the protection offered by government, themselves see to it that they are respected. For a caravan travelling across the deserts of Africa the good management of water stocks is a matter of life and death for all; and in those circumstances water becomes a sacred thing and no one would think of wasting it. Conspirators depend on secrecy, and the secret is kept or abomination strikes whoever violates it. Gambling debts are not secured by law, and among gamblers whoever does not pay up is considered and considers himself dishonoured.

Is it perhaps because of the gendarmes that more people are not killed? In most of the villages in Italy the gendarmes are only seen from time to time; millions of people cross the mountains, and pass through the countryside far from the protecting eye of authority, such that one could strike them down without the slightest risk of punishment; yet they are no less safe than those who live in the most protected areas. And statistics show that the number of crimes is hardly affected by repressive measures, whereas it changes dramatically with changes in economic conditions and in the attitudes of public opinion.

Anyway, punitive laws are only concerned with exceptional, unusual occurrences. Daily life carries on beyond the reach of the codicil and is controlled, almost unconsciously, with the tacit and voluntary agreement of all, by a number of usages and customs which are much more important to social life than the Articles of the Penal Code, and better respected in spite of being completely free from any sanction other than the natural one of the disesteem in which those who violate them are held and the consequences that arise therefrom.

And when differences were to arise between men, would not arbitration voluntarily accepted, or pressure of public opinion, be perhaps more likely to establish where the right lies than through an irresponsible judiciary which has the right to adjudicate on everything and everybody and is inevitably incompetent and therefore unjust?

Since, generally speaking, government only exists to protect the privileged classes, so the police and the judiciary exist only to punish those crimes which are not so considered by the public and only harm the privileges of the government and of property-owners. There is nothing more pernicious for the real defence of society, for the defence of the well-being and freedom of all, than the setting up of these classes which exist on the pretext of defending everybody but become accustomed to consider every man as game to be caged, and strike at you without knowing why, by orders of a chief whose irresponsible, mercenary ruffians they are.

That’s all very well, some say, and anarchy may be a perfect form of human society, but we don’t want to take a leap in the dark. Tell us therefore in detail how your society will be organized. And there follows a whole series of questions, which are very interesting if we were involved in studying the problems that will impose themselves on the liberated society, but which are useless, or absurd, even ridiculous, if we are expected to provide definitive solutions. What methods will be used to teach children? How will production be organized? Will there still be large cities, or will the population be evenly distributed over the whole surface of the earth? And supposing all the inhabitants of Siberia should want to spend the winter in Nice? And if everyone were to want to eat partridge and drink wine from the Chianti district? And who will do a miner’s job or be a seaman? And who will empty the privies? And will sick people be treated at home or in hospital? And who will establish the railway timetable? And what will be done if an engine-driver has a stomach-ache while the train is moving? And so on to the point of assuming that we have all the knowledge and experience of the unknown future, and that in the name of anarchy, we should prescribe for future generations at what time they must go to bed, and on what days they must pare their corns.

If indeed our readers expect a reply from us to these questions, or at least to those which are really serious and important, which is more than our personal opinion at this particular moment, it means that we have failed in our attempt to explain to them what anarchism is about.

We are no more prophets than anyone else; and if we claimed to be able to give an official solution to all the problems that will arise in the course of the daily life of a future society, then what we meant by the abolition of government would be curious to say the least. For we would be declaring ourselves the government and would be prescribing, as do the religious legislators, a universal code for present and future generations. It is just as well that not having the stake or prisons with which to impose our bible, mankind would be free to laugh at us and at our pretensions with impunity!

We are very concerned with all the problems of social life, both in the interest of science, and because we reckon to see anarchy realized and to take part as best we can in the organization of the new society. Therefore we do have our solutions which, depending on the circumstances, appear to us either definitive or transitory—and but for space considerations we would say something on this here. But the fact that because today, with the evidence we have, we think in a certain way on a given problem does not mean that this is how it must be dealt with in the future. Who can foresee the activities which will grow when mankind is freed from poverty and oppression, when there will no longer be either slaves or masters, and when the struggle between peoples, and the hatred and bitterness that are engendered as a result, will no longer be an essential part of existence? Who can predict the progress in science and in the means of production, of communication and so on?

What is important is that a society should be brought into being in which the exploitation and domination of man by man is not possible; in which everybody has free access to the means of life, of development and of work, and that all can participate, as they wish and know how, in the organization of social life. In such a society obviously all will be done to best satisfy the needs of everybody within the framework of existing knowledge and conditions; and all will change for the better with the growth of knowledge and the means.

After all, a program which is concerned with the bases of the social structure, cannot do other than suggest a method. And it is the method which above all distinguishes between the parties and determines their historical importance. Apart from the method, they all talk of wanting the well-being of humanity and many really do; the parties disappear and with them all action organized and directed to a given end. Therefore one must consider anarchy above all as a method.

The methods from which the different non-anarchist parties expect, or say they do, the greatest good of one and all can be reduced to two, the authoritarian and the so-called liberal. The former entrusts to a few the management of social life and leads to the exploitation and oppression of the masses by the few. The latter relies on free individual enterprise and proclaims, if not the abolition, at least the reduction of governmental functions to an absolute minimum; but because it respects private property and is entirely based on the principle of each for himself and therefore of competition between men, the liberty it espouses is for the strong and for the property owners to oppress and exploit the weak, those who have nothing; and far from producing harmony, tends to increase even more the gap between rich and poor and it too leads to exploitation and domination, in other words, to authority. This second method, that is liberalism, is in theory a kind of anarchy without socialism, and therefore is simply a lie, for freedom is not possible without equality, and real anarchy cannot exist without solidarity, without socialism. The criticism liberals direct at government consists only of wanting to deprive it of some of its functions and to call on the capitalists to fight it out among themselves, but it cannot attack the repressive functions which are of its essence: for without the gendarme the property owner could not exist, indeed the government’s powers of repression must perforce increase as free competition results in more discord and inequality.

Anarchists offer a new method: that is free initiative of all and free compact when, private property having been abolished by revolutionary action, everybody has been put in a situation of equality to dispose of social wealth. This method, by not allowing access to the reconstitution of private property, must lead, via free association, to the complete victory of the principle of solidarity.

Viewed in this way, one sees how all the problems that are advanced in order to counter anarchist ideas are instead an argument in their favour, because only anarchy points the way along which they can find, by trial and error, that solution which best satisfies the dictates of science as well as the needs and wishes of everybody.

How will children be educated? We don’t know. So what will happen? Parents, pedagogues and all who are concerned with the future of the young generation will come together, will discuss, will agree or divide according to the views they hold, and will put into practice the methods which they think are the best. And with practice that method which in fact is the best, will in the end be adopted. And similarly with all problems which present themselves.

It follows from what we have said so far, that anarchy, as understood by the anarchists and as only they can interpret it, is based on socialism. Indeed were it not for those schools of socialism which artificially divide the natural unity of the social question, and only consider some aspects out of context, and were it not for the misunderstandings with which they seek to tangle the path to the social revolution, we could say straight out that anarchy is synonymous with socialism, for both stand for the abolition of the domination and exploitation of man by man, whether they are exercised at bayonet point or by a monopoly of the means of life.

Anarchy, in common with socialism, has as its basis, its point of departure, its essential environment, equality of conditions; its beacon is solidarity and freedom is its method. It is not perfection, it is not the absolute ideal which like the horizon recedes as fast as we approach it; but it is the way open to all progress and all improvements for the benefit of everybody.

Having established that anarchy is the only form of human society which leaves open the way to the achievement of the greatest good for mankind, since it alone destroys every class bent on keeping the masses oppressed and in poverty; having established that anarchy is possible and since, in fact, all it does is to free mankind from the government and obstacles against which it has always had to struggle in order to advance along its difficult road, authoritarians withdraw to their last ditches where they are reinforced by many who though they are passionate lovers of freedom and justice, fear freedom and cannot make up their minds to visualize a humanity which lives and progresses without guardians and without shepherds and, pressed by the truth, they pitifully ask that the matter should be put off for as long as possible.

This is the substance of the arguments that are put to us at this point in the discussion.

This society without government, which maintains itself by means of free and voluntary cooperation; this society which relies in everything on the spontaneous action of interests and which is entirely based on solidarity and love, is certainly a wonderful ideal, they say; but like all ideals it lives in the clouds. We find ourselves in a world which has always been divided into oppressors and oppressed; and if the former are full of the spirit of domination and have all the vices of tyrants, the latter are broken by servility and have the even worse vices that result from slavery. The feeling of solidarity is far from being dominant in contemporary society, and if it is true that men are and become always more united, it is equally true that what one sees increasingly, and which makes a deeper impression on human character, is the struggle for existence which each individual is waging daily against everybody else; it is competition which presses on everybody, workers and masters alike, and makes every man into an enemy in the eyes of his neighbour. How will these men, brought up in a society based on class and individual conflict, ever be able to change themselves suddenly and become capable of living in a society in which everyone will do as he wishes and must do, and without outside coercion and through the force of his own will, seek the welfare of others? With what single-mindedness, with what common sense would you entrust the fate of the revolution and of mankind to an ignorant mob, weakened by poverty, brainwashed by the priest, and which today will be blindly bloodthirsty, while tomorrow it will allow itself to be clumsily deceived by a rogue, or bow its head servilely under the heel of the first military dictator who dares to make himself master? Would it not be more prudent to advance towards the anarchist ideal by first passing through a democratic or socialist republic? Will there not be a need for a government of the best people to educate and to prepare the generations for things to come?

These objections also would not have a raison d’être if we had succeeded in making ourselves understood and in convincing readers with what we have already written; but in any case, even at the risk of repeating ourselves, it will be as well to answer them.

We are always faced with the prejudice that government is a new force that has emerged from no one knows where, which in itself adds something to the total forces and capacities of those individuals who constitute it and of those who obey it. Instead all that happens in the world is done by people; and government qua government, contributes nothing of its own apart from the tendency to convert everything into a monopoly for the benefit of a particular party or class, as well as offering resistance to every initiative which comes from outside its own clique.

To destroy authority, to abolish government, does not mean the destruction of individual and collective forces which operate in society, nor the influences which people mutually exert on each other; to do so would reduce humanity to being a mass of detached and inert atoms, which is an impossibility, but assuming it were possible, would result in the destruction of any form of society, the end of mankind. The abolition of authority means, the abolition of the monopoly of force and of influence; it means the abolition of that state of affairs for which social power, that is the combined forces of society, is made into the instrument of thought, the will and interests of a small number of individuals, who by means of the total social power, suppress, for their personal advantage and for their own ideas the freedom of the individual; it means destroying a way of social organization with which the future is burdened between one revolution and the next, for the benefit of those who have been the victors for a brief moment.

Michael Bakunin in an article published in 1872, after pointing out that the principal means of action of the International were the propagation of its ideas and the organization of the spontaneous action of its members on the masses, adds that:

“To whoever might claim that action so organized would be an assault on the freedom of the masses, an attempt to create a new authoritarian power, we would reply that he is nothing but a sophist and a fool. So much the worse for those who ignore the natural and social law of human solidarity, to the point of imagining that an absolute mutual independence of individuals and of the masses is something possible, or at least desirable. To wish it means to want the destruction of society, for the whole of social life is no other than this unceasing mutual dependence of individuals and masses. All individuals, even the most intelligent and the strongest, indeed above all the intelligent and strong, each at every moment in his life is at the same time its producer and its product. The very freedom of each individual is no other than the resultant, continually reproduced, of this mass of material, intellectual and moral influences exerted on him by all who surround him, by the society in the midst of which he is born, develops, and dies. To want to escape from this influence in the name of a transcendental, divine, freedom that is absolutely egoistic and sufficient unto itself, is the tendency of non-being. This much vaunted independence of the idealists and metaphysicians, and individual freedom thus conceived, are therefore nothingness.

“In nature, as in human society, which is no other than this same nature, all that lives, only lives on the supreme condition of intervening in the most positive manner, and as powerfully as its nature allows, in the lives of others. The abolition of this mutual influence would be death. And when we vindicate the freedom of the masses, we are by no means suggesting the abolition of any of the natural influences that individuals or groups of individuals exert on them; what we want is the abolition of influences which are artificial, privileged, legal, official.”

Obviously, in the present state of mankind, when the vast majority of people, oppressed by poverty and stupefied by superstition, stagnate in a state of humiliation, the fate of humanity depends on the action of a relatively small number of individuals; obviously it will not be possible suddenly to get people to raise themselves to the point where they feel the duty, indeed the pleasure from controlling their own actions in such a way that others will derive the maximum benefit therefrom. But if today the thinking and directing forces in society are few, it is not a reason for paralyzing yet more of them and of subjecting many others to a few of them. It is not a reason for organizing society in such a way that (thanks to the apathy that is the result of secured positions, thanks to birth, patronage, esprit de corps, and all the government machinery) the most lively forces and real ability end up by finding themselves outside the government and almost without influence on social life; and those that attain to government, finding themselves out of their environment, and being above all interested in remaining in power, lose all possibilities of acting and only serve as an obstacle to others.

Once this negative power that is government is abolished, society will be what it can be but all that it can be given the forces and abilities available at the time. If there are educated people who wish to spread knowledge they will organize the schools and make a special effort to persuade everybody of the usefulness and pleasure to be got from an education. And if there were no such people, or only a few, a government could not create them; all it could do would be what happens now, take the few that there are away from their rewarding work, and set them to drafting regulations which have to be imposed with policemen, and make intelligent and devoted teachers into political beings, that is useless parasites, all concerned with imposing their whims and with maintaining themselves in power.

If there are doctors and experts in public health, they will organize the health service. And if there were none, the government could not create them: all it could do would be to cast doubts on the abilities of existing doctors which a public, justifiably suspicious of all that is imposed from above, would seize upon to get rid of them.

If there are engineers, engine drivers and so on, they will organize the railways. And if there were none, once again, a government could not create them.

The revolution, by abolishing government and private property, will not create forces that do not exist; but it will leave the way open for the development of all available forces and talents, will destroy every class with an interest in keeping the masses in a state of brutishness, and will ensure that everyone will be able to act and to influence according to his abilities, his enthusiasm and his interests.

And this is the only way that the masses can raise themselves, for it is only through freedom that one educates oneself to be free, just as it is only by working that one can learn to work. A government, assuming it had no other disadvantages, would always have that of accustoming the governed to timidity, and of tending to become always more oppressive and of making itself ever more necessary.

Besides, if one wants a government which has to educate the masses and put them on the road to anarchy, one must also indicate what will be the background, and the way of forming this government.

Will it be the dictatorship of the best people? But who are the best? And who will recognize these qualities in them? The majority is generally attached to established prejudices, and has ideas and attitudes which have already been superseded by a better endowed minority; but among the thousand minorities all of which believe themselves to be right, and can all be right on some issues, by whom and with what criterion will the choice be made to put the social forces at the disposal of one of them when only the future can decide between the parties in conflict? If you take a hundred intelligent supporters of dictatorship, you will discover that each one of them believes that he should be if not the dictator himself, or one of them, at least very close to the dictatorship. So dictators would be those who, pursuing one course or another, succeed in imposing themselves; and in the present political climate, one can safely say that all their efforts would be employed in the struggle to defend themselves against the attacks of their enemies, conveniently forgetting any vague intentions of social education, assuming that they ever had such intentions.

Will it be instead a government elected by universal suffrage, and thus the more or less sincere expression of the wishes of the majority? But if you consider these worthy electors as unable to look after their own interests themselves, how is it that they will know how to choose for themselves the shepherds who must guide them? And how will they be able to solve this problem of social alchemy, of producing the election of a genius from the votes of a mass of fools? And what will happen to the minorities which are still the most intelligent, most active and radical part of a society?

In order to solve the social problem for the benefit of every- body there is only one means: to crush those who own social wealth by revolutionary action, and put everything at the disposal of everybody, and leave all the forces, the ability, and all the goodwill that exist among the people, free to act and to provide for the needs of all.

We struggle for anarchy, and for socialism, because we believe that anarchy and socialism must be realized immediately, that is to say that in the revolutionary act we must drive government away, abolish property and entrust public services, which in this context will include all social life, to the spontaneous, free, not official, not authorized efforts of all interested parties and of all willing helpers.

Of course there will be difficulties and drawbacks; but they will be resolved, and they will only be resolved in an anarchist way, by means, that is, of the direct intervention of the interested parties and by free agreements.

We do not know whether anarchy and socialism will triumph when the next revolution takes place; but there is no doubt that if the so-called programs of compromise triumph, it will be because on this occasion, we have been defeated, and never because we believed it useful to leave standing any part of the evil system under which mankind groans.

In any case we will have on events the kind of influence which will reflect our numerical strength, our energy, our intelligence and our intransigence. Even if we are defeated, our work will not have been useless, for the greater our resolve to achieve the implementation of our program in full, the less property, and less government will there be in the new society. And we will have performed a worthy task for, after all, human progress is measured by the extent government power and private property are reduced.

And if today we fall without compromising, we can be sure of victory tomorrow.

//http://robertgraham.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/malatestas-anarchy-part-2/

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