Professional Documents
Culture Documents
A) Framework: GOVERNMENT-FREE SOCIAL LIBERTY WOULD TRANSCEND OUR CURRENT CAPITALIST SLAVERY. Bakunin, Mikhail, a labor organizer, 1870, The Commune, the Church, and the State, (Bakunins Writings, 1947) I am a passionate seeker for truth and just as strong an opponent of the corrupting lies, through which the party of order this privileged, official, and interested representative of all religions, philosophical political, legal economical, and social outrage in the past and present has tried to keep the world in ignorance. I love freedom with all my heart. It is the only condition under which the intelligence, the manliness, and happiness of the people, can develop and expand. By freedom, however, I naturally understand not its mere form, forced down as from above, measured and controlled by the state, this eternal lie which in reality, is nothing but the privilege of the few founded upon the slavery of all. Nor do I mean that "individualistic," selfish, petty, and mock freedom, which is propagated by J.J. Rousseau and all other schools of bourgeois liberalism. The mock freedom which is limited by the supposed right of all, and defended by the state, and leads inevitably to the destruction of the rights of the individual. No: I mean the only true freedom, that worthy of the name; the liberty which consists therein for everyone to develop all the material, intellectual, and moral faculties which lie dormant in him; the liberty which knows and recognizes no limitations beyond those which nature decrees. In this sense, there are no limitations, for the laws of our own nature are not forced upon us by a lawgiver who, beside or above us, sits on a throne. B) Links 1) The affirmative plan works through the federal government, a structure of social control. 2) [insert specific link] C) Implications: 1) STATISM LEADS TO MECHANIZATION AND THE DEATH OF LIBERTY, BEAUTY, AND SCIENCE. Goldman 40, Emma, a journalist, 1940, Anarchism (1970), p.40 Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies, and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world are only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the king. They do not want to know that centralization is not only the deathknell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clocklike, mechanical atmosphere.
2) HIERARCHICAL SOCIETY DEVOURS NATURE LIKE AN UNTREATED DISEASE. Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1990, Remaking Society, p.15 Finally, liberal environmentalism suffers from a consistent refusal to see that a capitalistic society based on competition and growth for its own sake must ultimately devour the natural world, just like an untreated cancer must ultimately devour its host. Personal intentions, be they good or bad, have little to do with this unrelenting process. An economy that is structured around the maxim, Grow or Die, must necessarily pit itself against the natural world and leave ecological ruin in its wake as it works its way through the biosphere. 3) GOVERNMENT-BASED SOCIETY EXPLOITS AND DEGRADES THE POOR WE NEED A COMPLETELY NEW SYSTEM. Kropotkin, Peter, editor of Le Revolt, 1880, The Spirit of Revolt (within Le Revolt) Those who long for the triumph of justice, those who would put new ideas into practice, are soon forced to recognize that the realization of their generous, humanitarian, and regenerating ideas cannot take place in a society thus constituted; they perceive the necessity of a revolutionary whirlwind which will sweep away all this rottenness, revive sluggish hearts with its breath, and bring to mankind that spirit of devotion, self-denial, and heroism, without which society sinks through degradation and vileness into complete disintegration. In periods of frenzied haste toward wealth, of feverish speculation and of crisis, of the sudden downfall of great industries and the ephemeral expansion of other branches of production, of scandalous fortunes amassed in a few years and dissipated as quickly, it becomes evident that the economic institutions which control production and exchange are far from giving to society the prosperity which they are supposed to guarantee; they produce precisely the opposite result. Instead of order they bring forth chaos; instead of prosperity, poverty and insecurity; instead of reconciled interests, war; a perpetual war of the exploiter against the worker, of exploiters and of workers among themselves. 4) GOVERNMENTS ARE INHERENTLY DESTRUCTIVE AND CAUSE CRIME. Goldman, Emma, 1940, Anarchism (1970), p.43 The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation. 5) CAPITALISM AND GOVERNMENTS LEGITIMIZE EVIL AND IMPOVERISHMENT. Einstein, Albert, 1949, Monthly Review, New York The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers, the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.
Hierarchy Is Hypocritical
HIERARCHY IS HYPOCRITICAL AND DOOMED TO EXTINCTION. Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.33 The system under which we live checks in its turn the growth of the social sentiment. We all know that without uprightness, without self-respect, without sympathy, and mutual aid, human kind must perish, as perish the few races of animals living by rapine, or the slave-keeping ants. But such ideas are not to the taste of the ruling classes, and they have elaborated a whole system of pseudo-science to teach the contrary. Fine sermons have been preached on the text that those who have should share with those who have not, but he who would carry out this principle would be speedily informed that these beautiful sentiments are all very well in poetry, but not in practice. To lie is to degrade and besmirch oneself, we say, and yet all civilized life becomes one huge lie. We accustom ourselves and our children to hypocrisy, to the practice of a double-faced morality. And since the brain is ill at ease among lies, we cheat ourselves with sophistry. Hypocrisy and sophistry become the second nature of the civilized man. But a society cannot live thus; it must return to truth, or cease to exist.
Hierarchy Mechanizes
CAPITALISM FORCES WORKERS INTO A REPULSIVE AND MECHANIZED EXISTENCE.. Marx and Engels, Karl and Friedrich , 1848, The Communist Manifesto Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. CAPITALISM MECHANIZES HUMANS. Goldmann, Emma, 1940, The Individual, Society, and the State One of the insane characteristics of this struggle is the complete negation of the relation of the producer to the things he produces. The average worker has no inner point of contact with the industry he is employed in, and he is a stranger to the process of production of which he is a mechanical part. Like any other cog of the machine, he is replaceable at any time by other similar depersonalized human beings.
HIERARCHY MECHANIZES AND IMPRISONS SOCIETY. Goldman, Emma, 1940, The Individual, Society, and the State The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime. The wholesale mechanization of modern life has increased uniformity a thousandfold. It is everywhere present, in habits, tastes, dress, thoughts and ideas. Its most concentrated dullness is "public opinion." Few have the courage to stand out against it. He who refuses to submit is at once labeled "queer," "different," and decried as a disturbing element in the comfortable stagnancy of modern life. ... In pre-war time the individual could at least escape national and family boredom.. The whole world was open to his longings and his quests. Now the world has become a prison, and life continual solitary confinement.
THE WAGE SYSTEM DENIES WORKERS THE NECESSITIES OF LIFE. Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.84 We must offer to the peasant in exchange for his toil not worthless paper-money, but the manufactured articles of which he stands in immediate need. He lacks the proper implements to till the land, clothes to protect him properly from the inclemencies of the weather, lamps and oil to replace his miserable rushlight or tallow dip, spades, rakes, ploughs. All these things, under present conditions, the peasant is forced to do without, not because he does not feel the need for them, but because, in his life of struggle and privation, a thousand useful things are beyond his reach; because he has no money to buy them.
Governments Exploit
GOVERNMENT IS THE NEGATION OF HUMANITY THE OPPOSITE OF FREEDOM AND JUSTICE AND THE CAUSE OF WAR. Bakunin, Michael, 1870, The German Crisis Whosoever mentions the State, implies force, oppression, exploitation, injustice all these brought together as a system are the main condition of present-day society. The State has never had, and never can have, a morality. Its only morality and justice is its own interest, its existence, and its omnipotence at any price; and before its interest, all interest of humanity must stand in the back-ground. The State is the negation of Humanity. It is this in two ways: the opposite of human freedom and human justice (internally), as well as the forcible disruption of the common solidarity of mankind (externally).The Universal State, repeatedly attempted, has always proved an impossibility, so that as long as the State exists, States will exist and since every State regards itself as absolute, and proclaims the adoration of its power as the highest law, to which all other laws must be subordinated, it therefore follows that as long as States exist wars cannot cease. Every State must conquer, or be conquered. CAPITALISM IS THE SOURCE OF ALL OF OUR SOCIAL EVILS AND EXPLOITATION. Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1990, Remaking Society, p.94 Indeed, capitalism completely incarnates Bakunins notion of evil without the qualification that it is socially necessary. Beyond the capitalist system there are no further turning points in history. Capitalism marks the end of the road for a long social development in which evil permeated the good and irrationality permeated the rational. Capitalism, in effect, constitutes the point of absolute negativity for society and the natural world. One cannot improve this social order, reform it, or remake it on its own terms with an ecological prefix such as eco-capitalism. The only choice one has is to destroy it, for it embodies every social disease from patriarchal values, class exploitation, and statism to avarice, militarism, and now, growth for the sake of growth that has afflicted civilization and tainted all its great advances.
GOVERNMENTS DO NOT FOSTER JUSTICE THEY DEHUMANIZINGLY COERCE. Thoreau, Henry David, 1849, Civil Disobedience It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said, that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect to it, even the well-disposed are daily made agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powdermonkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? Or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power.
Governments Exploit/Coerce
GOVERNMENTS CANNOT AVOID POVERTY AND EXPLOITATION. Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.172 Poverty, we have said elsewhere, was the primary cause of wealth. It was poverty that created the first capitalist; because, before accumulating surplus value, of which we hear so much, men had to be sufficiently destitute to consent to sell their labour, so as not to die of hunger. It was poverty that made capitalists. And if the number of then poor increased so rapidly during the Middle Ages, it was due to the invasions and wars that followed the founding of States, and to the increase of riches resulting from the exploitation of the East. These two causes tore asunder the bonds that kept men together in the agrarian and urban communities, and taught them to proclaim the principle of wages, so dear to the exploiters, instead of the solidarity they formerly practised in their tribal life. GOVERNMENTS COERCE AND DOMINATE, DESTROYING SOCIETY. Carter, April, a professor of political science, 1971, The Political Theory of Anarchism, p.25 But for anarchists and many socialists, society becomes the opposite of the State. Society is the repository of all the good aspects of social life and organization co-operation, sympathy, affection, initiative, and spontaneity, while the State incorporates all the bad aspects of social interaction coercion, force, and domination; and politics tends to be seen as the arena of force, fraud, and trickery. The state is an incubus upon society a distorting factor.
WE MUST NOT BE COERCED BY GOVERNMENTS THEY DONT WORK FOR THE GOOD OF THE PEOPLE. Thoreau, Henry David, 1849, Civil Disobedience Thus the State never intentionally confronts a mans sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They can only force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, Your money or your life, why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do.
State politics, the codes of civil and criminal law, the juridical family and inheritance rights have been swept away by the Revolution. GOVERNMENTS ARE HIDEOUS MONSTERS WHICH CONSUME HUMANITY. Goldman, Emma, 1940, The Individual, Society, and the State Friedrich Nietzsche called the State a cold monster. What would he have called the hideous beast in the garb of modern dictatorship? Not that government had ever allowed much scope to the individual; but the champions of the new State ideology do not grant even that much. "The individual is nothing," they declare, "it is the collectivity which counts." Nothing less than the complete surrender of the individual will satisfy the insatiable appetite of the new deity.
Kothari, Rajni, of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, April 1997, Alternatives, p.233 It is a model of global integration built on all-round splintering and polarizing, producing destruction and annihilation not through wars and military machines but through starvation, pestilence, crime, social erosion, and loneliness, growing trade in juvenile and gender-based populations, drugs, violence, and free-trade in guns and bombs, urban collapse and unexpected deaths caused by ever more hazardous industries and energy use. Much of the price of all this is paid by the already unprotected, the insecure and vulnerable, the poor, the minorities, the refugees, and the least secure of all, women and children. If it is a global order that is being envisaged, it is a global order built on the social erosion of diverse civil societies and shunting to the margins of existence ideas of individual freedom and primary bonds, of the pride and dignity that comes from belonging to a clan or a community, a caste or a tribal ancestry. This is what capitalist development and the forced urbanization and migration and displacement that are entailed in it will produce, indeed is producing. GOVERNMENTS ARE OPPOSED TO THE BASIC HUMAN VALUES. Wolff, Robert Paul, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, 1970, In defense of Anarchism The defining mark of the state is authority, the right to rule. The primary obligation of man is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled. It would seem, then, that there can be no resolution of the conflict between the autonomy of the individual and the putative authority of the state. Insofar as a man fulfills his obligation to make himself the authors of his decisions, he will resist the states claim to have authority over him. That is to say, he will deny that he has a duty to obey the laws of the state simply because they are the laws. In that sense, it would seem that anarchism is the only political doctrine consistent with the virtue of autonomy.
THE INJUSTICE OF LAWS AND GOVERNMENT TURN OUR LIVES INTO A DELUSIONAL HELL. Thoreau, Henry David, 1854, Slavery In Massachuesetts At last it occurred to me that what I had lost was a country. I had never respected the government near to which I lived, but I had foolishly thought that I might manage to live here, minding my private affairs, and forget it. For my part, my old and worthiest pursuits have lost I cannot say how much of their attraction, and I feel that my investment in life here is worth many per cent less since Massachusetts last deliberately sent back an innocent man, Anthony Burns, to slavery. I dwelt before, perhaps, in the illusion that my life passed somewhere only between heaven and hell, but now I cannot persuade myself that I do not dwell wholly within hell. The site of that political organization called Massachusetts is to me morally covered with volcanic scoriae and cinders, such as Milton describes in the infernal regions. If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it. ... I feel that, to some extent, the State has fatally interfered with my lawful business. It has not only interrupted me in my passage through Court Street on errands of trade, but it has interrupted me and every man on his onward and upward path, on which he had trusted soon to leave Court Street far behind. What right had it to remind me of Court Street? I have found that hollow which even I had relied on for solid.
HIERARCHY IS INHERENTLY DESTRUCTIVE TO ALL LIFE. Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1994, Reflecting On Nature (ed. Gruen and Jamieson), p.124 Capitalist society, whether in Western corporate or Eastern bureaucratic forms, is fundamentally destructive. The power of this society to destroy has reached a scale unprecedented in the history of humanity and this power is being used, almost systematically, to wreak havoc upon the entire world of life and its material bases. In nearly every region, air is being befouled, waterways polluted, soil washed away, the land desiccated, and wildlife destroyed. Coastal areas and even the depths of the sea are not immune to widespread pollution. More significantly in the long run, basic biological cycles such as the carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle, upon which all living things depend for the maintenance and renewal of life, are being distorted to the point of irreversible damage. OPPRESSION OF HUMANS MUST CEASE BEFORE WE CAN STOP OPPRESSION OF NATURE. Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1990, Remaking Society, p.39 Whatever has turned human beings into aliens in nature are social changes that have made many human beings aliens in their own social world: the domination of the young by the old, of women by men, and of men by men. Today, as for many centuries in the past, there are still oppressive human beings who literally own society and others who are owned by it. Until society can be reclaimed by an undivided humanity that will use its collective wisdom, cultural achievements, technological innovations, scientific knowledge, and innate creativity for its own benefit and for that of the natural world, all ecological problems will have their roots in social problems.
CAPITALISM DRIVES ALL FORCES WHICH DESTROY NATURE. The Monthly Review, November 1997, Joel Kovel, p.7 It is capital that conditions and drives separate determinations in an ecologically destructive way, and so becomes the efficient cause of the crisis. Development or industrialization, as such, is an empty construct. But development or industrialization under capitalist aegis, in which capitalist corporations, markets, lifestyles, even psychologies and character structure, all interact, is what destabilizes ecosystems all over the planet.
GOVERNMENTS OPPRESSIVELY IGNORE THE NEEDS OF SOCIETY. Hoffman, Robert, a professor of history, 1970, Anarchism, p.8 The reasons for this conviction are many; most are summed up in the notion that the State, no matter how constituted, is alien from most or all of the society it governs. It can not be the embodiment of the citizenry, but is instead an institution with needs, views, and the goals peculiar to itself. Rather than expressing and enacting the needs and wishes of societys members, the State has a life of its own, and serves society as it sees, imposing its will on a largely helpless and often resentful population, and prevailing over it only through compulsion. A FREE SOCIETY CAN ONLY BE CONSTRUCTED FROM THE BOTTOM UP. Bakunin, Michael, The Commune, the Church, and the State he organization of the society of the future must and can be accomplished only from the bottom upwards, through the free federation and union of the workers into groups, unions, and societies, which will unite again into districts, communes, national communes, and finally form a great international federation. Only thus can be evolved the true vital order of liberty and happiness for all, the order which is not opposed to the interests of the individual or of society, but on the contrary strengthens the same and brings them into harmony.
3) ITS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO DEMAND REFORM FROM THE GOVERNMENT INDIVIDUALS MUST ACT AGAINST OPPRESSION. Thoreau, Henry David, 1849, Civil Disobedience The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it. The slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur. Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. Some are petitioning the state to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves, the union between themselves and the state, and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury? 4) CAPITALISM DESTABILIZES NATURE IN WAYS THAT CANNOT BE CURED BY MERE REFORMS. The Monthly Review, November 1997, Joel Kovel, p.10 So long as the money nexus is the expression of capital, the actual, concrete limits of nature will continue to be brushed aside. For as long as capitalism endures, it tends to reign; and as long as it reigns it extends itself, and as long as it extends itself it tends to destabilize ecologies by degrading the conditions of production in the hunt for surplus value. Thus the regime of capital leads inexorably to an ecological crisis that cannot be resolved within the terms of capital. 5) Reform-based policy has been tried since the birth of hierarchy and hasnt worked yet. We have to try something new.
ELIMINATION OF HIERARCHY WOULD FREE WORKERS FROM MISERY, GIVING THEM THE LUXURIES OF HUMANITY. Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.148 What interest, in fact, can this depressing work have for the worker, when he knows that the fate awaiting him from the cradle to the grave will be to live in mediocrity, poverty, and insecurity of the morrow? Therefore, when we see the immense majority of men take up their wretched task every morning, we feel surprised at their perseverance, at their zeal for work, at the habit that enables them, like machines blindly obeying an impetus given, to lead this life of misery without hope for the morrow; without foreseeing ever so vaguely that some day they, or at least their children, will be part of a humanity rich in all the treasures of a bountiful nature, in all the enjoyments of knowledge, scientific and artistic creation, reserved today to a few privileged favourites. It is precisely to put an end to this separation between manual and brain work that we want to abolish wagedom, that we want the Social Revolution. Then work will no longer appear a curse of fate: it will become what it should be the free exercise of all the faculties of man.
Anarchy Frees
HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETIES PROMOTE LIBERTY. INDIVIDUAL AUTONOMY AND
Goldman, Emma, 1940, Anarchism (1970), p.45 Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities. Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access of the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations. A HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY WOULD PRODUCE HAPPINESS, LIBERTY, AND JOY. Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.173 For the day on which old institutions will fall under the proletarian axe, voices will cry out: Bread, shelter, ease for all! And those voices will be listened to; the people will say: Let us begin by allaying our thirst for life, for happiness, for liberty, that we have never quenched. And when we shall have tasted of this joy, we will set to work to demolish the last vestiges of middleclass rule: its mine and yours institutions. In demolishing we shall build, as Proudhon said; and we shall build in the name of Communism and Anarchy.
ANARCHISM ALONE FORWARDS TRUE HUMANITY AND FREEDOM. Goldman, Emma, 1940, Anarchism (1970), p.38 Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are nonexistent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through mans subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man. There is no conflict between the individual and the social instincts, any more than there is between the heart and the lungs: the one the receptacle of a precious life essence, the other the repository of the element that keeps the essence pure and strong. The individual is the heart of society, conserving the essence of social life; society is the lungs which are distributing the element to keep the life essence that is, the individual pure and strong.
Anarchy Frees
IN A HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY EQUALITY WOULD REIGN. Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.69 So Utopian are we that we go the length of believing that the Revolution can and ought to assure shelter, food, and clothes to all an idea extremely displeasing to middle-class citizens, whatever their party colour, for they are quite alive to the fact that it is not easy to keep the upper hand of a people whose hunger is satisfied. All the same, we maintain our contention: bread must be found for the people of the Revolution, and the question of bread must take precedence of all other questions. If it is settled in the interests of the people, the Revolution will be on the right road; for in solving the question of Bread we must accept the principle of equality, which will force itself upon us to the exclusion of every other solution. A SOCIETY WITHOUT GOVERNMENT WOULD GRANT THE ONLY TRUE FREEDOM. Wolff, Robert, 1976, In Defense of Anarchism, p.81 The argument runs thus: men cannot be free so long as they are subject to the will of others, whether one man or several. But if men rule themselves, if they are both law-givers and lawobeyers, then they can combine the benefits of government with the blessings of freedom. Rule for the people is merely benevolent slavery, but rule by the people is true freedom.
6) ANARCHIST COMMUNITIES WOULD USE SOCIAL MEANS TO PRESERVE LIBERTY. Sharp, Gene, of the Albert Einstein Institute, 1990, Civilian-Based Defense, p.33 The degree of liberty or tyranny in any political society is, it follows, largely a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free, of their willingness and ability to organize themselves to live in freedom and, very importantly, their ability to resist any efforts to dominate or enslave them. Social power, not technological means of destruction, is the strongest guarantee of human freedom.
2) This assumes modern societys tendency toward exploitation which will disappear once hierarchy is removed. 3) PEOPLE ARE ONLY LAZY AND BAD WORKERS BECAUSE HIERARCHY FORCES THEM INTO MISERY. Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.156 Somebody has said that dust is matter in the wrong place. The same definition applies to nine tenths of those called lazy. They are people gone astray in a direction that does not answer to their temperament nor to their capacities. In reading the biography of great men, we are struck with the number of idlers among them. They were lazy so long as they had not found the right path; afterwards they became laborious to excess. Darwin, Stephenson, and many others belonged to this category of idlers. Very often the idler is but a man to whom it is repugnant to spend all his life making the eighteenth part of a pin, or the hundredth part of a watch, while he feels he has exuberant energy which he would like to expend elsewhere. Often, too, he is a rebel who cannot submit to being fixed all his life to a work-bench in order to procure a thousand pleasures for his employer, while knowing himself to be far the less stupid of the two, and knowing his only fault to be that of having been born in a hovel instead of coming into the world in a castle. 4) Those who refuse to work could be excluded from the community. The majority would not suffer.
liberated peasant of 1792 ploughed with an eager energy, unknown to his ancestors; the emancipated Negro works more than his fathers; and the Russian peasant, after having honoured the honeymoon of his emancipation by celebrating Fridays as well as Sundays, has taken up work with an eagerness proportionate to the completeness of his liberation. There, where the soil is his, he works desperately; that is the exact word for it. The anti-abolitionist refrain can be of value to slave-owners; as to the slaves themselves, they know what it is worth, as they know its motive.
AT: Permute
1) Extend- Friedman in 1989: Any remaining government returns society to statism. 2) HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY AND STATISM ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE GOVERNMENTS CANNOT ACCEPT OUR GOALS. Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1971, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p.78 Anarchism is not only a stateless society but also a harmonized society which exposes man to the stimuli provided by both agrarian and urban life, to physical activity and mental activity, to unrepressed sensuality and self-directed spirituality, to communal solidarity and individual development, to regional uniqueness and worldwide brotherhood, to spontaneity and selfdiscipline, to the elimination of toil and the promotion of craftsmanship. In our schizoid society, these goals are regarded as mutually exclusive, indeed as sharply opposed.
3) You cant simply have the affirmative policy standing alone as the sole governance structure. Its solvency requires enforcement, funding, and political passage all responsibilities of other government agencies. 4) Extend- Bakunin in 1870: Any act of government control is oppressive. 5) In order for a hierarchy-free society to succeed, a clear message must be sent to the people that government is wrong. The permutation would muddle this message and pervert the counterplans ideals. 6) HISTORY PROVES THAT LIMITED GOVERNMENTS EXPAND. Friedman, David, a professor at the University of Chicago, 1989, The Machinery of Freedom, p.146 Would it not be better to have a severely limited government doing those few things which it could do better? Perhaps it would be if the government stayed that way. Here we run into the problem discussed in Chapter 4. One cannot simply build any imaginable characteristics into a government; governments have their own internal dynamic. And the internal dynamic of limited governments is something with which we, to our sorrow, have a good deal of personal experience. It took about 150 years, starting with the Bill of Rights that reserved to the states and the people all powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government, to produce a Supreme Court willing to rule that growing corn to feed to your own hogs is interstate commerce and can therefore be regulated by Congress.
Laws Bad
LAWS ARE CORRUPT AND FAIL. Hoffman, Robert, a professor of history, 1970, Anarchism, p.5 Thus, in the anarchist view, people are deluded when they suppose that order and justice are created and regulated by law and powerful institutions. Such order is mere appearance, behind which actually is the chaos of men struggling to subjugate and hurt each other, to gain at the expense of others. Such justice is a sham, called righteous by those able to dominate while making law serve their own interests.
hand, to the conquest of their rights. In the midst of discontent, talk, theoretical discussions, an individual or collective act of revolt supervenes, symbolizing the dominant aspirations. 3) Hierarchy-free societies existed before in ancient Crete and the Middle-ages. It can happen again. 4) WE CAN REJECT HIERARCHY AND SAVE OURSELVES. The Monthly Review, November 1997, Joel Kovel, p.13 Therefore capitalism must go if we are to survive as a civilization and, indeed, a species; and all partial measures and reforms should be taken in the spirit of bringing about capitals downfall. Nothing could seem more daunting than this, indeed, in the current balance of forces, it seems inconceivable. Therefore the first job must be to conceive it as a possibility, and not to succumb passively to the given situation. Capital expresses no law of nature; it has been the result of choice, and there is no essential reason to assume it cannot be un-chosen. Conceiving things this way is scarcely sufficient. But it is necessary, in both a moral and a practical sense. 5) We have to at least try to move beyond the current system of enslavement. 6) WE CAN ADVANCE TO THE NEXT STEP IN SOCIETY TO ATTAIN FREEDOM. Thoreau, Henry David, 1849, Civil Disobedience The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to, for I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well, is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a limited democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?
Laws Bad
LAWS ARE TRANSCENDED. UNJUST HINDRANCES TO HUMANITY WHICH CAN BE
Thoreau, Henry David, 1854, Slavery In Massachuesetts Will mankind never learn that policy is not morality that it never secures any moral right, but considers merely what is expedient? chooses the available candidate who is invariably the Devil and what right have his constituents to be surprised, because the Devil does not behave like an angel of light? What is wanted is men, not of policy, but of probity who recognize a higher law than the Constitution, or the decision of the majority. The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning. WE MUST TRANSGRESS UNJUST LAWS. Thoreau, Henry David, 1849, Civil Disobedience Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them?
IT IS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO DEMAND REFORM FROM THE GOVERNMENT INDIVIDUALS MUST ACT AGAINST OPPRESSION. Thoreau, Henry David, 1849, Civil Disobedience The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it. The slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur. Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. Some are petitioning the state to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves, the union between themselves and the state, and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury?