“Anarchist Conference Devolves Into Chaos”

Who could have predicted?

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More here. In fairness to the cause, I have been to plenty of anarchist events that did not devolve into chaos; that this one did and that that was notable says something.

In this particular case, I think the culprit is not anarchism per se as much as it is the culture of aggressive victimhood that seems to be taking hold among college-age youth. People seem to feel they have a right to not have their feelings hurt that trumps everything else. This is very broken and I hope it fixes itself, and I say this from a leftist position. This preoccupation with internal feelingns and symbolic action is the enemy of real political action.

It is completely unclear from the video and any associated links what the speaker, Kristian Williams, had done to merit being shouted down. As best as I can figure out it is stems from an article he wrote called The Politics of Denunciation where he dives into this exact issue. So of course the fact that he was shouted down is excellent evidence for his own thesis. He notes that attempts to police the movement for purity are counterproductive:

At issue here are strikingly different visions of what a political movement ought to be.

In one vision, a movement and the people who make it up should be in every respect beyond reproach, standing as an example, a shining city on a hill, apart from all the faults of our existing society. To achieve this perfection, we have to separate the sheep from the goats, the good people from the bad, the true feminists from everyone else. This outlook produces, almost automatically, a tendency to defer to the dogma of one's in-group. It is not enough simply to do the right things; one must also think the right thoughts and find favor with the right people.

In contrast, in the other vision, a movement should attract people to it, including damaged people, people who have done bad things, and those who are still in the process of figuring out their politics. It will require us, therefore, to address sexual assault and other abuse by actually engaging with the people who do such things. We have to struggle with them as much as we struggle against oppression.

Seems about right to me. Of course both Mr. Williams and I have (at least some subset of) white male straight cis privilege, so wtf do we know?

One more note: this whole fracas may seem ridiculous to anyone who is not involved in alternative politics or is over the age of 25. I don՚t think so, because: the world desperately needs some well-organized opposition to entrenched power. Episodes like this just means that the alternative cultures are just as fucked as the mainstream; both are fiddling to amuse themselves while the planet burns.

On the unpower of words

In the East poets are sometimes thrown in prison – a sort of compliment, since it suggests the author has done something at least as real as theft or rape or revolution. Here poets are allowed to publish anything at all – a sort of punishment in effect, prison without walls, without echoes, without palpable existence – shadow-realm of print, or of abstract thought-world without risk or eros. ... America has freedom of speech because all words are considered equally vapid.   

           — Hakim Bey

[not really inspired by current events, but resonant with this little episode.]

It is Forbidden to Forbid

I made my annual pilgrimage to the Anarchist Bookfair this past weekend (previous years here). As usual, had trouble embracing the scene. Bought The Art of Not Being Governed which I've been meaning to read for awhile, and some others.

One thing that always interests me, but it's sort of a forbidden topic, is how all these people who are vehemently anti-capitalist and anti-existing-system manage to survive. Somehow they feed themselves after all, and if it's through the underground economy that's still an economy of some sort. They don't all live on communes in the country.

This question arises on a different level when it comes to the vendors, who are running little businesses promoting an anti-business attitude. Some of these seem to be fairly large-scale and stable affairs. If I was hostile I would use this to dismiss the whole scene, but I'm not really – any revolutionary or agent of change has to simultaneously live within the world as it is while plotting to overthrow it, and thus has to live the contradictions.

Anyway, for some reason the day before my own mental barriers between anarchy and entrepeneurmanship suffered a partial collapse which led me to open up this t-shirt shop. So far it has neither enriched me very much nor done much to subvert the dominant paradigm, but it's early days.

Caught a bit of activist Scott Crow's presentation; the takeaway I got from him was that open collectives (where anybody can join) don't work very well; closed tightly focused groups with shared values work better. That makes a lot of sense, but raised a lot of unanswered questions on just what anarchist governance could mean. The same largely unspoken question hovered over a panel on anarchist parenthood.

On OWS

It's pretty exhilarating to see a mass movement that actually seems to be getting some traction and also seems to be largely independent from the usual political actors, at least for now.  Some links:

• Business Week profile of David Graeber, who seems to be at the intellectual center of the movement:

  David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for the year: promote his book, learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. The first is going well, the second has proven challenging, and the third is looking up.

• Here's a discussion of an article by Barbara Eherenreich on the relationship of the homeless to OWS, with some thoughts about the developing culture;
• Mike Godwin reports on the Oakland police violence;
• Teenager denied cancer treatment becomes the voice of Occupy SF
• One more: It's always been about equality vs aristocracy, says Gordon S. Wood:

Looking for something deep to say about this rare phenomenon, a bottom-up spontaneous large-scale collective action with no clear goal and no clear boundaries. What binds it together? The slogan "we are the 99%" is brilliant. There's a deep vein of anger at the manifest economic injustices that have become baked into the structure of society. "Banks got bailed out, we got sold out" was another good slogan being chanted the last time I was there.

I believe that a sense of injustice, rather than mere resentment at the economically fortunate, is what animates most of the participants. The sense of fair play, that everyone in society is playing by the same rules, has been virtually destroyed in the last few decades; we want to get it back.

And about that "we": it feels odd for me to include myself in anything this massive and populist, to use the first person plural as if I can speak for it, but also feels oddly right. I don't pretend to be near the center of it, or even a fraction as involved as many other people, but it doesn't matter. We're all doing what we can.

Inanearchy

[updated below][and again]

Since it was a nice day to go to the park, I dropped in on the annual Anarchist Bookfair, feeling even more out of place than ever now that I am charging my time to government research contracts (previous visits described here and here). "Anarchist" ought to indicate a state of mind, a constant rebelligon against any kind of fixed, stagnant order whatsoever, including political labels. The first duty of an anarchist should be to violate whatever expectations are raised by the term "anarchist". Instead, it seems to be yet another counter-cultural tribe, people seeking an identity as radicals or punks or something, and devoted not to changing the world but supporting a bohemian lifestyle.

Alright, that is not really fair to the fair. One of the panelists, Cindy Milstein, who spoke on "horizontalism" (good new word), seemed like a normal person, and thus serious. And there are a good number of people involved in radical labor unionism and seemed like genuine working class types. And many of the people there are actual activists, who are trying to do their best to fix the world. That's better than my complaining (and jeeze, I'm noticing how many posts I make involve me encountering some vaguely promising group, meeting, movement, or book, and then kvetching about how it doesn't meet my expectations exactly. That must get tedious for the reader).

All this opposition to "capitalism" seems misguided. Capitalism has its flaws but it's not an institution, it's a fucking force of nature. Or rather, it's a set of social practices that harnesses a fundamental force of nature (self-interest, aka greed) in ways that are astonishingly powerful for both good and ill, and ultimately promise to end in civilizational self-destruction. Tackling it head-on as an enemy seems like a stupid move, and fits in with my image above of these anarchists as more about attitude than actual change.

I suppose that it's due to a generally technophobic atmosphere (somewhat refreshing actually compared to the normal Bay Area vibe) that I heard nothing there of the most successful subversion of capitalism in our time -- the free software movement. They successfully created an entirely new mode of production, one in which the work product is not owned but freely available to all. And this new mode of production is not confined to some obscure vegan food co-op but has produced the software that powers the communication infrastructure of the entire planet (Linux, Apache, and much else), not to mention one of the most visited and useful sites on the Internet (Wikipedia). No capital, no capitalists, no ownership, no cash nexus. That seems more radical than anything I saw at the fair.

[update: you know, the above is entirely too negative, based largely on me being uncomfortable in a crowd of bohos. But I'm uncomfortable in any kind of crowd whatsoever, so discount all that. On looking over some of the literature I took home, particularly the catalog from PM Press, one of the more solid-seeming institutions that were displaying there, I'm actually quite glad that this subculture exists and is active and self-sustaining and keeping certain parts of the human spirit alive. If it's often self-indulgent and more interested in itself than the world, well, what group isn't?

But I'm keeping the title since Google says it's an original coinage and I kinda like it.]

[update again: on looking over some videos from radical speakers, I've decided it's something like a church -- people don't listen to these guys for information or for critical analysis, they listen to have their faith renewed. The faith is that we are in the grip of the devil (capitalism) but a savior will appear any day now (in the form of working class solidarity) and bring about heaven (a classless society). I'm hardly the first person to make that kind of observation, but it suddenly clicked just now. Like many other forms of spiritual fervor, I feel somewhat drawn in but my resistance to being swept up is much stronger. And it makes me feel somewhat jerkish for criticizing it, since people's spirituality is their own business.]

Nobel Prize in Anarchy

For awhile now I've been saying that economists should be paying attention to open-source and other commons-based models of production. How often does a radically new way to organize production come along, after all? It seems like academic economists should be studying the hell out of it. There are some books by Yochai Benkler and Steven Weber but they barely scratch the surface.

I was making this argument to Herbert Gintis, a prominent political scientist with a good book-review blog on Amazon. Gintis is a smart guy but has some weird blind spots (Israel and open source, for starters) which I could not resist poking at. Anyway, in the middle of the conversation, the Nobels in Economics were announced. I had never heard of the awardees but it turns out that one of them, Elinor Ostrom, won it specifically work on the structures of economic governance for in-common resources such as fishery stocks, water resources, and also "knowledge commons" such as open-source software projects. Huzzah! Well, I felt somewhat vindicated and also somewhat embarrassed to find that the economics profession was actually ahead of my recommendations. On the other hand, Ostrom is not an economist, she's in political science, and apparently a couple of famous economists who write for the New York Times were unfamiliar with her as well. Gintis was very familiar with her work but for whatever reason that didn't seem to affect his view of open source as economically trivial.

One of the famous economists who had not heard of Ostrom, Steven Levitt said: "...the short answer is that the economics profession is going to hate the prize going to Ostrom even more than Republicans hated the Peace prize going to Obama." I'm not sure that's true. I see many libertarians on the net trying to get in front of this wave, even though her work is essentially a complete refutation of the libertarian framework of thought.

Libertarianism is erected on a foundation of individual rights, private property, self-interest, and markets. Notice what's missing? Any notion of society and in particular institutions, the very thing both of this years laureates were studying. People like Somin would like to think that because the institutions Ostrom is studying are not (in general) states that she's on his side. But Ostrom's work (OK, I haven't actually read it yet so I'm just going on net commentary) has more in common with critics of capitalism such as Karl Polanyi and left-anarchist theorists of cooperation like Kropotkin.

On reading some more of the Hayekian blogs I fear I may be doing an injustice to them (and maybe Ostrom), probably because I tend to conflate idiocies of net.libertarians with the more sophisticated theories of academics. Perhaps her work transcends left and right, which wouldn't bother me, those categories from the French Revolution seem to be increasingly stale. Not that they don't have some validity but for the last hundred years or so the two sides seem to spend most of their time taking on each other's worst characteristics. It would be nice to have some new ideas about how society should be governed and it would be nice to have those solidly grounded in empirical research. Ostrom's work seems to fit the bill.

One question I have is how these cooperatively-owned resources enforce their rules. For things like fisheries, there are community and peer enforcement of rules, but at some scale this turns into a state or something indistinguishable from it, I would think. Of course, with informational commons like Wikipedia or open-source their is no scarcity and hence no need to patrol for cheaters. Unfortunately we can't yet eat information, so the extension of open-source models to the physical world is questionable.

Some links:
Ostrom's win is a blow against simplistic private, market-based economies.

Academics debate just how Hayekian Ostrom's work is.

Creative Commons notices.

Here's Ostrom talking on "Beyond the Tragedy of the Commons":


I note she cautions against "top-down solutions".

Anarchy of Mind

Thanks to reader bhyde's recommendation I've been reading George Ainslie's Breakdown of Will, which is on the whole excellent. I can't quite believe that I never ran across it before, since I did my graduate work on somewhat similar issues. But while I explored all sorts facets of the control of behavior by networks of loosely-coupled goal-directed units, I was innocent of economics or utility theory, so missed out on some things.

The underlying idea of Ainslie's work is that we prefer more immediate rewards to longer term ones, and that the discount curve for such preferences is hyperbolic rather than the more rational exponential curve predicted by standard utility theory. The hyperbolic discount curve leads us to preferences that are not consistent over time, and thus to a process of "inter-temporal bargaining" between different versions (or parts) of ourselves.

The phenomenon of akrasia -- acting against one's own better judgement and values -- has been recognized for millenia, and has its most obvious manifestation in the form of addictions and the failure to overcome them. Ainslie extends his scope way beyond that, however, and attempt to explain everything from scratching intolerable itches to empathy using his framework. I'm not completely convinced, but I probably need to make another pass over the book to fully understand the theory.

Most interesting to me, he posits that the need to manage intertemporal relations between parts of the mind are the root of the self itself. Mental phenomena like will and selves results from attempts to build internal structures that constrain and rationalize divergent preferences. The structure of the person mirrors what we know of the structure of social institutions:

The historic difficulty of specifying what the self consists of doesn't come from its superfluousness, but the fact that it's a set of tacit alliances rather than an organ. The logic of limited war relationships naturally creates a population of cooperating processes, a fringe of outlaw processes, and a means of determining which will be which. And since limited warfare is conducted among individuals as well as within them, we can observe some of its properties in interpersonal examples.

Societies settle disputes within legal systems. Some depend on legislators...who lay down procedural principles. They've been the model for conventional allegorical theories of intrapersonal governance. But the most successful legal system in history, the English common law, has no lawgiver and no written constitution, only a tradition...

Like the common law, this process doesn't require an executive function to steer it. Nevertheless, a person's efficiency at developing personal rules s probably ncreased by executive processes....Thus "ego functions" may be learned on the bass of how they improve intertemporal cooperation.

Ironically, this picture of the person mirrors what our picture of a corporate hierarchy has become...people in corporations don't blindly follow orders, but act only when they're confident of each other's commitment to act. Executives don't function effectively by rationally analyzing facts as by finding facts that make good rallying points.

(p. 98-100)

All this is very reminiscent of Minsky's Society of Mind, which also had a large focus on competition between different parts of an individual's mind. Both theories paint a picture of the self as radically discordant, a network of semi-independent processes whose coordination is not given, but has to be achieved. However, Minsky focused more on cognition and mechanism and less on utility and reward.

Ainslie writes in a highly compressed style that is sometimes difficult to follow. His ideas raise more questions than they answer (for instance, they suggest ways to re-think some standard psychological ideas like the Freudian superego, authoritarian personality characteristics, and "disorders of volition" like depression). And when I read this kind of stuff I always worry a little bit if it is psychologically harmful -- given the effort we put into constructing coherent selves, subverting that effort by pulling the curtains aside and revealing the backstage machinery seems to entail a risk of spoiling the show. But these caveats aside, I found this book extremely worthwhile.

Here's a musical accompaniment:

Alternative Procedures

Trying to get the bad taste of wingnuts out of my mouth, I dropped in at the Anarchist Bookfair, a yearly gathering of left-wing extremists in San Francisco that always feels to me like it's trying to make the worst stereotypes of the right come true. A few years ago Ward Churchill was there. I feel out of place and try to pretend I'm not a capitalist sellout. What the hell in anarchism to me, these days? I have a family and a house and I want a society that works, that is capable of acting sanely, that is capable of solving the many small and large collective action problems that modern industrial civilization requires. Sad to say, I don't much like the state but where's your alternative? I can't see hierarchy-free collectives that operate by consensus as capable of scaling up much past groups of 20 or so people.

Anarchism seems like an excusable folly in the young, but not the old. Nevertheless the most appealing thing about this gathering is the old-timers, people who've been doing this for fifty years and have conncetions back to the original Wobblies or Sacco and Vanzetti. There's something about being connected to an tiny, obscure, yet vibrant thread of history. I can't abide the young punk anarchists for the most part, but the geezers I like. I bought a copy of The Match, an anarchist journal that has been publishing since 1969 and still looks like it's pasted up by hand like old underground newspaper (ah yes, it says "No computers are ever used in this production" -- guess I won't be linking to their website, but they are in Wikipedia). Much to my non-surprise, anarchists seem to spend a good deal of effort arguing with each other -- the guy who publishes The Match, for instance, has no truck with the sort of anarchists who disrupted the WTO in Seattle.

So it's an exercise in fake nostalgia for me, not a serious political movement that I'm going to support. Yet on the same day Mark Danner has a piece in the NYT and a longer version in the NYRB detailing some new torture revelations that have come to light. Essentially, the Bush administration allowed the International Committee of the Red Cross to interview some of its detainees in order to produce:

The result is a document -- labeled "confidential" and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials to whom the CIA's Mr. Rizzo would show it -- ”that tells a certain kind of story, a narrative of what happened at "the black sites" and a detailed description, by those on whom they were practiced, of what the President of the United States described to Americans as an "alternative set of procedures." It is a document for its time, literally "impossible to put down," from its opening page:”

Contents
Introduction
1. Main Elements of the CIA Detention Program
1.1 Arrest and Transfer
1.2 Continuous Solitary Confinement and Incommunicado Detention
1.3 Other Methods of Ill-treatment
1.3.1 Suffocation by water
1.3.2 Prolonged Stress Standing
1.3.3 Beatings by use of a collar
1.3.4 Beating and kicking
1.3.5 Confinement in a box
1.3.6 Prolonged nudity
1.3.7 Sleep deprivation and use of loud music
1.3.8 Exposure to cold temperature/cold water
1.3.9 Prolonged use of handcuffs and shackles
1.3.10 Threats
1.3.11 Forced shaving
1.3.12 Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food
1.4 Further elements of the detention regime....

-- to its stark and unmistakable conclusion:

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Such unflinching clarity, from the body legally charged with overseeing compliance with the Geneva Conventions in which the terms "torture" and "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" are accorded a strictly defined legal meaning, ”couldn't be more significant, or indeed more welcome after years in which the President of the United States relied on the power of his office either to redefine or to obfuscate what are relatively simple words.

So, this is what states do. Sadly, the transition to a new and presumably more enlightened administration is not going to solve the problem. Anyone for anarchy?

An-arrgh-chy

As Talk Like a Pirate Day approaches, let's remember that pirates are the original ontological anarchists:

An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization
Peter T. Leeson, Department of Economics, West Virginia University

This paper investigates the internal governance institutions of violent criminal enterprise by examining the law, economics, and organization of pirates. To sectively organize their banditry, pirates required mechanisms to prevent internal predation, minimize crew conflict, and maximize piratical profit. I argue that pirates devised two institutions for this purpose. First, I analyze the system of piratical checks and balances that crews used to constrain captain predation. Second, I examine how pirates used democratic constitutions to minimize contact and create piratical law and order. Remarkably, pirates adopted both of these institutions before the United States or England. Pirate governance created sufficient order and cooperation to make pirates one of the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history.

This is the kind of political economy I can get behind. From the conclusion

Second, the institutions that comprised the pirates' system of governance -- democratic checks, the separation of power, and constitutions -- are remarkably similar to those governments employ to constrain ruler predation in the legitimate world. Government does not have a monopoly on these institutions of governance any more than it has a monopoly on the ability to generate cooperation and order...organized criminals are as interested in creating order among themselves as non- criminals. They, too, have an incentive to develop solutions to obstacles that otherwise prevent them from cooperating for mutual gain. The fact that their cooperation is directed at someone els's loss does not alter this. Thus, while Captain Charles Johnson described the pirates' criminal organization as "that abominable Society," it is important to acknowledge that, however abominable, it was nevertheless a society (Johnson 1726-1728: 114).

Some anarchists/libertarians get stuck on the idea that governments are nothing more than very successful criminal gangs. There is some truth in that, but not that much. Governments dont simply deploy force, they deploy force in ways that are legitimated by various rationales in a way that makes them more or less grudgingly accepted by their citizens/subjects. A good government is one that has tamed its criminality by means of law, institutions, and cultural norms -- but this is never a complete process, as the expanding criminality of the US government demonstrates all too well.

This study comes at this issue from the opposite end, showing that not only are governments criminal gangs, but criminal gangs are governments -- and they too can occupy a spectrum of good and bad, where good means roughly that they successfully implement rules that lead to greater levels of prductive cooperation.

The naive anarchist gets the idea that governments == violence and opposes government. The post-anarchist realizes that violence and coercion are part of reality, and you have a choice of unruly, random, chaotic violence; or violence constrained by productive institutions.

We are ruled by sociopaths

Turns out that 9/11 and the global war on terror is a good thing, because if we didn't have that we'd probably be starting up a war with China.

At the first meeting, one Republican woman on the commission said that the overwhelming threat was from China. Sooner or later the U.S. would end up in a military showdown with the Chinese Communists. There was no avoiding it, and we would only make ourselves weaker by waiting. No one else spoke up in support....

"Her name was Lynne Cheney," Hart said. "I am convinced that if it had not been for 9/11, we would be in a military showdown with China today." Not because of what China was doing, threatening, or intending, he made clear, but because of the assumptions the Administration brought with it when taking office. (My impression is that Chinese leaders know this too, which is why there are relatively few complaints from China about the Iraq war. They know that it got the U.S. off China's back!)

or to put it even more bluntly:

during the 1990s "There was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because they felt that the Republican Party didn't do as well" when foreign policy wasn't on the issue agenda.

Hearing stuff like this awakens the dormant anarchist in me. "Why should anyone be surprised at this?", he says. "Violence and conflict is what governments do, and if there's not enough violence and fear of violence to maintain their power, they'll do their best to manufacture some."

A government's ability to drum up violence is inversely proportional to the political intelligence of the populace. And Americans in particular are political idiots. We have the government we deserve.

Anarchy and mutual aid

The emergence of tribes in state-free New Orleans (from Boing-boing)

NEW ORLEANS — In the absence of information and outside assistance, groups of rich and poor banded together in the French Quarter, forming "tribes" and dividing up the labor.

As some went down to the river to do the wash, others remained behind to protect property. In a bar, a bartender put near-perfect stitches into the torn ear of a robbery victim.

While mold and contagion grew in the muck that engulfed most of the city, something else sprouted in this most decadent of American neighborhoods - humanity.

"Some people became animals," Vasilioas Tryphonas said Sunday morning as he sipped a hot beer in Johnny White's Sports Bar on Bourbon Street. "We became more civilized.

While state-sanctioned violence continues in cruder forms than usual:

Police came through commandeering drivable vehicles and siphoning gas. Officials took over a hotel and ejected the guests.

An officer pumped his shotgun at a group trying to return to their hotel on Chartres Street.

"This is our block," he said, pointing the gun down a side street. "Go that way."

They say disaster uncovers real social relations (presumably, by overturning the everyday structures of survival and forcing people to spontaneously create new, crude, temporary ones where the mechanisms are more obvious).

Meanwhile California is stepping up (and presumably many other locales and individuals are doing the same).

Keywords: anarchy, self-organization, human nature, katrina

Association of Anarchist Parents

The idea for this organization came to me as I was walking along...it captured me due to its inherent irony, or so I thought. Being a parent is kind of a cure for anarchism, or so it seemed to me. Yet many former anarchists or freedom-inclined individuals suddenly find themselves in the position of having to be authority figures, ordering people about and enforcing disciplinary measures. A hard situation, and certainly it deserves a support group.

Well, of course, thanks to the richness of reality and Google, I find that this already exists, sort of, although the ironic aspect seems to be missing.

There's actually a whole spectrum of non-authoritarian parenting thought out there, of course. Most of it seems too naive or ideology-driven for my taste. Take, for instance, the group/movement Taking Children Seriously.

"We believe that it is possible and desirable to bring up children
entirely without coercion (i.e. without doing things to them against
their will, or making them do things against their will), and that
children are entitled to the same rights, respect and control over
their lives as adults. "

They lose me right there. But they are British, and so can at least defend these manifestly silly ideas with great prose and energy.

TCS depends quite a bit on the philosophy of Karl Popper, who I also think is fairly silly.

Anarchy in the USA

"For, whatever was the case in de Tocqueville's day, not the passion for egalitarianism but individualist, that is anti-authoritarian, antinomian, though curiously legalistic, anarchism has become the core of the value system in the U.S.A."

- Eric Hobsbawm (sigh, now paywalled, but excerpted here)

Yes -- and it's especially odd that it's the conservatives who seem to lead in (supposedly) antiauthoritarian attitudes. They portray themselves as insurgents against the supposed liberal establishment, who makes horribly restrictive rules against their freedom to fire guns in restaurants and drive SUVs in duck blinds.

Our politics are twisted up in weird ways that makes it almost impossible for one side to understand itself, let alone the others.