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Title: Demagoguery Not Anarchism
Author: William Gillis
Date: March 15th, 2012
Language: en
Topics: market, post-leftism
Source: https://c4ss.org/content/9905

William Gillis

Demagoguery Not Anarchism

You know what I love most about the milieu? The level of our discourse.

Magpie Killjoy’s lobbed a short trollish broadside at Markets Not

Capitalism calling it “racist” and “disgusting.” Of course he’s couched

his hodgepodge assembly of emotionally-charged misreads with a few notes

about how he has no fundamental objection to market anarchism per se and

that many of the views inside Markets Not Capitalism are legitimately

anarchist, but nuance doesn’t bring the pageviews and rallying the

troops against teh ancap scourge–tendrils to be found in your very

collective!–does.

There’s not much to work with here but I’ll throw down for the heck of

it, if only because there’s a thread of reasonableness to his

objections, however inaccurately they fit his target.

We can all agree that any society that allows centralized power is not

anarchist. But more than that any society that allows power relations in

any form, decentralized or not, is not anarchist. True anarchists do not

even countenance diffuse or interpersonal lines of control, abuse, and

constraint. Here’s the deal though, the economic realm is but one facet

of a society; not every problem can or should be solved within it. We

draw such distinctions imperfectly, but they can be an extraordinarily

good rule of thumb. If someone spites you at a party we’d hopefully

frown on getting your friends together and burning down their farm. The

point is it can be a good idea to have social norms that place limits on

the community’s purview and delineate appropriate realms of reaction and

conflict. Sad to say but if someone says something a smidgin racist we

shouldn’t necessarily go breaking their kneecaps in response. In fact,

not to police anyone’s rage, but that’s almost certainly an overreaction

that can lead dark places. I by no means mean to equivocate with

something as institutional as Jim Crow or suggest that we shouldn’t do

our best to navigate these issues, but it is worth noting exclusion from

spaces can and frequently does become contentious within our community.

What constitutes legit grounds for exclusion, who gets to decide to

expel someone from a space and how that expulsion will go down… these

are issues our communities deal with constantly. For all the good that

we do, cattiness and messed up stuff does happen. Part of what minimizes

it is that we do generally default on respecting certain divisions of

property and categories of behavior.

Of course while they’re often useful it would be a profound mistake to

make too much of these distinctions. As with that old self-described

“capitalist” Voltairine de Cleyre I’ve always stood on the “if you’re

starving take bread” side of things. All good anarchists are

utilitarians. We cannot afford to rule out any tactic or approach

wholesale. In this manner I probably differ to some degree with a few of

the other authors published in Markets Not Capitalism who default on

what I consider the naive language of “rights” and speak strongly on the

limits to our approaches. I doubt they’re as absolutist in practice as

their rhetoric waxes, but it is somewhat regrettable. That said, it must

be noted that similar deontological stances on tactics like nonviolence

and veganism carry wide currency within the social anarchist milieu. As

implicitly absolutist positions on tactics and behavior they must be

called out and countered, but they do also deserve reading in a

charitable light. For just as there is serious content to the arguments

for veganism and nonviolence so too is there serious content to the

argument that segregation can be countered without recourse to state

violence or even strong violations of personal property.

In one small article (literally less than four pages) reprinted within

Markets Not Capitalism one author talked about the successes of the

sit-in movement against segregation in the Jim Crow South, explicitly

attempting to persuade a right-libertarian audience that the ostensibly

“non-coercive” racism they might poo-poo does in fact at the very least

justify actions involving trespassing into someone else’s

space/property. This article introduced itself as an audience-specific

follow-up to another piece by editor Charles Johnson speaking about the

cooption of the civil rights movement by the state,

Woolworth’s lunch counters weren’t desegregated by Title II. The sit-in

movement did that. From the Montgomery Bus Boycott onward, the Freedom

Movement had won victories, town by town, building movements, holding

racist institutions socially and economically accountable. The sit-ins

proved the real-world power of the strategy: In Greensboro, N.C.,

nonviolent sit-in protests drove Woolworth’s to abandon its whites-only

policy by July 1960. The Nashville Student Movement, through three

months of sit-ins and boycotts, convinced merchants to open all downtown

lunch counters in May the same year. Creative protests and grassroots

pressure campaigns across the South changed local cultures and

dismantled private segregation without legal backing.

Should lunch counters have been allowed to stay segregated? No—but the

question is how to disallow it. Bigoted businesses shouldn’t face

threats of legal force for their racism. They should face a force much

fiercer and more meaningful—the full force of voluntary social

organization and a culture of equality. What’s to stop resegregation in

a libertarian society? We are. Using the same social power that was

dismantling Jim Crow years before legal desegregation. [emphasis mine]

Let’s be clear here: Would these sort of nonviolent sit-ins be enough to

crack every conceivable racist society or situation? Obviously not. And

any discussion of Jim Crow that fails to take into consideration the

diffuse but systemic effects of private violence (the KKK as well as a

broader culture of white supremacy) and centuries of state interference

in society by gun and dollar that created the entire social context of

segregation would be a waste. Even if we were to posit a more

right-libertarian deontological ethics, there’s a strong argument to be

had that the effect of historical injustice and coercion completely

invalidates any existing title to property and wealth in our society.

But Charles and Sheldon still have an extremely legit point here that

shouldn’t be lost: While there’s room to argue about whether something

else would be more effective and just what the ramifications might be of

violence or more aggressive disregard for property, we can at least take

comfort that history has proved that sit-ins work quite well — even

against freaking Jim Crow level segregation. Their main point is that we

don’t need state violence to fight grassroots racism, and that’s a point

every anarchist should encourage. Magpie’s “critique” is that while

Sheldon heroically takes right-libertarians head-on, arguing that

trespass is justified even on their own terms, he shies away from

opening the can of worms of more aggressive violence or property

violations on the scale of say destroying spaces or forcibly invading

personal homes. But such hesitancy should be understandable at the very

least. Social anarchists recognize these kind of distinctions all the

time in practice. When folks formed a bloc and confronted someone with a

history of abuse at their home they still deliberately avoided invading

that home. It’s totally valid for someone to find “we have problems with

your space’s exclusion policy so we’re going to burn you to the ground”

to be an ethically troublesome escalation and a worrying precedent.

It’s true that Sheldon drives home the emphatically non-violent

character of such sit-ins (to his article’s original right-libertarian

audience), to help establish how unassailably ethically justified such

actions are. There’s a danger here of implying that violation of

property can be justified only through its nonviolent character. Sheldon

immediately publicly repudiated this misread of Magpie’s in no uncertain

terms and has also acknowledged how problematic it can be to speak even

abstractly about the most ideal tactics a subjugated group might choose,

“it’s too easy for me to sit safely in Conway, AR, and tell people in

bad situations what it is right or wrong for them to do with respect to

an oppressive situation.” That should really be the end of it.

I’m of the opinion that ideological pacifism can be racist in effect,

yet even if that characterized Sheldon’s piece there are differing uses

of the term “racism” and I don’t know about you but I’m not going to go

around calling pacifist anarchists like Tolstoy and Utah Phillips

disgusting racists and loudly decry any intentionally diverse

compilation of Anarchist material that happens to include their writings

as “racist” and “despicable” as a result. I mean, props to any troll

that does that I suppose, but please, a little consistency.

A second tiny article in Markets Not Capitalism focuses on explaining

how we don’t necessarily need to use the state to win environmental

victories and that illegal direct action can get the goods. That there

are downsides to legislative approaches and feasible bottom-up

alternatives is a pretty elementary anarchist point. Magpie of course

nonsensically characterizes this as arguing that the foremost enemy of

an environmentalist in our present context should be environmental law

and our efforts should be focused on repealing it. Beyond being an

insanely willful misread it should go without saying that this would, of

course, usually be a terrible prescription. Although when viewed as a

one-liner in the proud anarchist tradition of troll statements with

serious substance below the surface (“property is liberty“/”property is

theft“, “anarchy is order“, etc) it would also be kinda admirable.

Reformist tactics occasionally have their place; when a tree-sit

implicitly works to pressure the passage of environmental legislation

one way or the other that can be strategically valid. While I have no

patience for Social Democrats like Chomsky telling us to wait another

century and vote Democrat, I’ve long argued the strategic utility of

things like Food Stamps while the state continues to exist. Many market

anarchists agree. And even when we fully oppose something we should

still be sane about our priorities. However such calculations are

complex to say the least and there should obviously still be space for

critiques of statist means. It’s more than a little ridiculous for

Magpie to lob charges of “reformism” at someone coming at the issue by

critiquing statist means. I do not think that word means what you think

it means.

One might be tempted to laugh if the whole affair wasn’t so

transparently in bad faith.

Kevin Carson has been writing the clearest and most substantive economic

and systems analysis the anarchist movement has seen in possibly a

century. His work is the backbone to much of Iain McKay’s AFAQ. He’s

built a global reputation over a decade by painstakingly revealing the

various mechanisms of state coercion underpinning every facet of

capitalism from workplace hierarchies to the class system and attacking

the multitude of private forces complicit in it even in the most

intangible of ways. …Magpie apparently spends half a minute skimming

Kevin’s site and decides that the argument that capitalism is built on

historical violence and wouldn’t be sustainable without constant

government violence disrupting and manipulating people’s free

association is a redefinition of “capitalism” to mean merely any form of

government interference. Well okay. If you’re looking for anything to

confirm your fervent hope that we’re all capitalist apologists (maybe to

avoid having to actually consider the basic mathematical realities of

economics), I’m sure you’ll be able to drum something up. Even if it’s

chortling about a contributor’s last name.

I began this response by talking about centralized power. The danger of

processes by which those with something get more and those without are

forced to continue going without is always a legit issue. Feedback loops

are important. Ferreting them out, understanding them and addressing

them is central to the anarchist project. Even things like making

contacts more easily because you already have contacts fall within our

purview. Economies of scale, logjams in communication and barriers to

entry are basic building blocks of power and oppression and left market

anarchists have been practically the only ones writing about these

mechanisms, much less constructing or discovering viable

counter-mechanisms. Folks like Kevin Carson have done far more to

explore and solidly flesh out the anarchist analysis than anyone in the

social milieu. Which is a shame because there are important

interpersonal and cultural issues that social anarchists were

historically more sensitive to, yet have done very little to map out.

Further, as with anything the precise mechanisms of enforcement (or

encouragement or discouragement) always matter. No one should be able to

get away with merely saying “my economic system is no making money with

money” or “no runaway accumulation of power” because that doesn’t speak

one whit to how precisely you mean to stop such. “We’ll have townhall

meetings and vote on who we don’t like” or “we’ll just beat up and take

the stuff of anyone who does something like let a friend rent their car

for a week in exchange for kombucha“. The anti-market peanut gallery has

offered next to no substantive thought on this front, while market

anarchists have written volumes on the particulars of the particulars.

Possessions, exchange and thus markets can be brought into existence by

a range of possible delineations about what to enforce with what means.

Respect for property/possession titles does not necessarily depend on

coercive means, as reputation/goodwill mechanisms are also viable. This

is discussed at length in several pieces in Markets Not Capitalism. Heck

Jeremy Weiland’s got a bit essentially cheering on prole sabotage of and

theft from the wealthy as a core and vital free market mechanism.

But of course just as economic feedback loops are not the whole of the

problem of power relations, market mechanisms cannot be the whole of our

solution. Throughout pretty much everything he’s written Charles Johnson

has worked tirelessly to drive home the reality that markets will be the

result of what we put into them. Markets are an organizational tool. And

while building the world we’d like to see might involve markets in

certain economic facets of society, it will still and should involve

activism, action, cultural and interpersonal struggles. Freed markets

are part of a platform on which to build a better world. A necessary

condition perhaps, and no small step, but hardly the end of the story.

This reality is strongly and explicitly stated in Charles’ and Gary

Chartier’s lengthy introduction to Markets Not Capitalism and comes to

bear implicitly and explicitly throughout. …So of course Magpie declares

that we mean the opposite.

I mean it’s just staggering.

While it always behooves us to work to improve the presentation of our

ideas, the nature of anti-intellectualism is to do absolutely no work to

empathize with others’ arguments or challenge your own perspectives and

then lounge back in the defense that they haven’t persuaded you.

If there are in lines Markets Not Capitalism on which an extremely

hostile and suspicious anarcho-communist might leap and topics touched

without the entirety of “The Orthodox Left Market Anarchist Position”

discussed in nuance, that is not surprising. It was never meant as “A

Complete FAQ to Left Market Anarchism for Social Anarchists In Their

Preferred Language Never Making Complex Points“. The book is a

scattershot collection of writing from the left market anarchist milieu.

Like Daniel Guerin’s No Gods, No Masters, Robert Graham’s A Documentary

History of Libertarian Thought, and countless other anthologies it seeks

to provide a wide sampling of discussions and partial perspectives on

numerous topics rather than a complete map. It goes without saying that

completeness is impossible. Hell, the editors faced the herculean task

of keeping it even partially accessible to both social anarchists and

the right-libertarians we argue so tirelessly to convert or at least

diffuse.

I’m told that Magpie was offered a chance to air his views on C4SS in a

feature before a wider audience with as much space as he needed to back

up these haphazard charges and defend them in the face of logic and

evidence. He of course declined. I wish this were surprising. His

“review” reads less as an attempted critique than it does a desperate,

floundering, out-of-depth attempt to cherry-pick two brief discussions

glancing on side topics, disingenously phrase things in the most

uncharitable way possible, triumphantly slander the whole of the

compilation as a result, and get away with it by appealing to the most

churlish of jingoistic instincts among the anti-market crowd. Christ,

I’m sick of being embarrassed on behalf of anarcho-communists I expect

better from. Since he’s gone ahead and publicly labeled the entirety of

a compilation I was part of “racist” I’ll return a barb: Doing nothing

more than confirming and reinforcing your audience’s preconceived

notions may win you some popularity but it’s pretty much the lowest form

of writing possible.

As the mortifying paucity of economic thought rampant in social

anarchist circles comes under the light (“yay communes and sharing we’ll

just talk out whatever problems arise in meetings”) some have

increasingly taken to vicious outbursts, searching for anything to

mischaracterize or popularize against. This kind of unfair, borderline

abusive behavior is what first drove me from anarcho-communism and

prompted my exploration of market anarchist thought so many years ago.

And for all the ways such behavior poisons our discourse and culture I

can at least take comfort that it is still driving people into left

market anarchism all around the world.

I’m a share-bear at heart; I only support markets because I see them as

the best tool available to build an egalitarian mass society of

abundance. And even though we argue that they’re counter-weighed and

addressed by other mechanisms there are certainly dangers to certain

functions within market dynamics and I would love to see those so

abjectly afraid of markets seriously engage with us about them. Or even

pose alternatives that don’t crumble under the mathematical limitations

of large-scale collective decision-making et al, without throwing up

their hands and declaring that sitting in the mud / leeching from

friends is good enough. Maybe then the dialogue will have opened to the

point where market anarchists can start presenting critiques about the

ways the amorphous collective mechanisms of anarcho-communists open the

door to runaway interpersonal power dynamics.