Right-wingers confuse rights and entitlements.

I’ve been talking a great deal about both rights and entitlements because they are key concepts in framing socio-political issues. They are, to a certain extent, opposites: rights are things we believe people are rightfully owed, and entitlements are things people believe they are owed on the sole basis of their social role. The former is seen as reasonable and legitimate, the latter as unjustified greed.

This can lead people to make switcharoos by framing rights as entitlements or vice-versa. Right-wingers rant that poor people feel “entitled” to get free food or money. This is linked with hatred for the poor. This is also applied to other segments of society.

Why do lazy people and abominations feel entitled to the money of those who work?

Why do people assume it is fair to take money from somebody who bothers to get out of bed and work, to feed the lazy cockroaches who don’t bother to take responsibility for their lives and such?

It is not. To force somebody to pay for the idle and unworthy is no more than an abomination.

In the view of many commentators and pundits, all citizens have an entitlement to be relieved of their poverty, which they believe, would best be accomplished by throwing other people’s money at the poor. This article makes the case that not only do the impoverished not have any such right, but the attempt to furnish them with wealth earned by others constitutes theft and does not help them in any case.
Sexual harassment and child rape advocate Walter Block

Feminists as a whole have a sincere belief that they are entitled to having society – and in particular men and taxpayers – adapt to and support their absurd beliefs. They feel women are entitled to murder their unborn babies if they can’t be bothered look after them, with the taxpayers picking up the bill. The feel entitled to maternity leave on full-pay, compensation if their feelings are ‘hurt’ in the workplace, jobs they’re not qualified for through positive discrimination. They feel the world not only owes them a living but that it owes them a comfortable and responsibility-free life as well, and they feel entitled to carry on whining even when they’ve largely achieved this.

There is a strong link with the concept that this “entitlement” is wrong because it’s about taking “other people’s money.” But this argument is predicated upon an atomistic view of labor, that those who are rich “earned their money through their own labor,” which right-wingers also hold. This of course is nonsense. If we earned our resources through our own labor, we would not have cars, computers or electricity, as no one person has all the knowledge to produce any of these things. Everyone’s labor is intricately linked to everyone else’s labor. So however much money you have, it’s not “your money,” and if you claim more than your share of the social product, you are the thief.

From the right-wing perspective, an entitlement is something we “assume,” something we “feel,” it is a “belief.” This language demonstrates that they believe they are the rational response to the “emotional” minority (as minorities are always portrayed as irrational and angry). So we find that their distinction is based on the same old stereotypes that they use to stigmatize poor people, black people, women, and so on; they are rational, fact-based and honest, and poor people are irrational, belief-based and dishonest thieves who are just looking for an opportunity to steal people’s hard-earned money (if you’re a poor woman, then you’re doubly irrational and dishonest).

In the right-wing view, rights can only be negative rights (i.e. rights to not be subjected to something), and there is no such thing as positive rights. So welfare must necessarily be an entitlement, not a right, since it involves receiving something from others. But as I’ve argued before, it does us no good to say a person has a right to something if ey does not have access to the resources necessary for that something (e.g. talking about a right to health in a society where most cannot afford health care). There is no difference between stating an exclusively negative right and no right at all; a right that cannot be expressed or enforced in any way is a mere theoretical curiosity, not a reality.

It’s interesting that these right-wingers, who berate poor people for feeling entitled to welfare, don’t identify their dependence on firefighters when a building goes up in flames as “a culture of entitlement,” or the presence of lifeguards on a beach as “swimmers feeling entitled.” The difference, of course, is that people who need the help of firefighters or lifeguards are not as easily stereotyped as poor people, so they are bad targets for right-wing prejudice.

What is the root of the right-wingers’ complete confusion between rights and entitlements? It is quite obviously a case of projection. Right-wingers constantly accuse the dispossessed of feeling entitled because they themselves are, or support, entitled assholes:

Britain, like much of the developed world, is imploding under a culture of entitlement, a species of socio-economic pestilence that collapses the superstructure of modern life into its soft and rotten core. The trouble is that the people with this dangerous and misplaced sense of entitlement aren’t jobseekers, homeless youngsters and single mothers. They’re the people sitting on the boards of investment banks, none of whom will be worried by the Prime Minister’s recent proposal of further cuts to the welfare budget – including stopping housing benefit for under-25s.

Entitlement, you see, is relative. Poor people tend to feel entitled to three meals a day and a place to live that doesn’t make their kids sick. Rich people occasionally feel entitled to enormous tax breaks, speedboats and, in some cases, actual titles. Only the first type of entitlement is being outlawed, even though a reasoned, widespread sense of entitlement to a decent basic standard of living has been one of the few things dragging human progress forward over the past several centuries.

So we’re talking here about a level of blaming-the-victim as insane as right-wingers claiming that “immigrants” are responsible for sinking the economy or taking away jobs, or that women are responsible for their own rape. We are the victims of rich people’s sense of entitlement, and their supporters deflect attention by talking about the “entitlement” of people who just want three square meals a day. The rhetoric of entitlement is a strategy used to nullify human needs and human rights so the rich can benefit. But furthermore:

Evidence suggests it is rich, well-educated, higher-status people who feel entitled, not the poor.

A Berkeley University study last year found that people in the upper echelons of society were more likely to lie, cheat, take things meant for others, cut off other road users and endorse unethical behaviour in others. Why? Because they feel entitled. They are clever and have the money to cut corners and hire lawyers if needed. These elite are less empathetic to others, less altruistic, more individualistic and more greedy.

Another study by Professor Howard Gardner at Harvard University, on the meaning of ”good work”, asked professionals how they juggled their ambition to succeed against their desire to work responsibly and ethically. They claimed that values such as fairness, scientific objectivity, truthful reporting and work-life balance were important to them. But, in practice, many compromise these principles to advance in their professions. They will, they say, change their behaviour once established and successful.

Note that, unlike right-wingers who believe that all poor people are lazy dishonest cheats, I am not arguing that rich people are all lazy dishonest cheats: people are people, no matter how much money they have. But radicals are well aware that, while they are decried as angry and irrational and do their very best to remain objective and fair in order to escape that stereotype, they face off against opponents who have no incentive or desire to be objective or fair. Anything from beating up protesters up to genocide is fair game to “suppress dissent.” Any excuse can justify attacking people’s basic human rights, as long as it sounds good.

So we must state clearly that having enough food and having a place to live in are basic human rights, and that no amount of elitist whining can turn it into an entitlement. We must state clearly that the equality of all persons is necessary and that arguing against this is bigotry. We must state clearly that people who already are equipped with everything they need not only to live but to flourish should not be laying claims over those who do not or suppressing their rights. We must state clearly that we are sick and tired, as workers, as consumers and as taxpayers, of subsidizing rich people’s lifestyles.

Ayn Rand was wrong: the leeches, the moochers, the second-handers, are not the socialists, but the capitalists. Incidentally, Ayn Rand herself made a fortune off preaching the trader principle and a neo-liberalist government, and then drew government assistance for the rest of her life, so she truly is a great symbol for the current parasite class.

Another entry against self-ownership.

Rajiv Shah has written an entry about the nonsense of “self-ownership” and all its standard problems: it is self-referential, it assumes a specific version of property, and the bizarre logic of “if I don’t own myself, then others do.” A great read.

As Ed Feser (2005) argued, if Cartesian dualism is true (and it is not incoherent for the self to own itself) then the body is a form of external property. This means that provisios relating to its use such as (on one interpretation) Nozick’s Lockean provisio and Eric Mack’s Self Ownership provisio would also apply to it. This means that there will be constraints on how one can use one’s body. This is a conclusion inconsistent with the traditional implications of SO.

In his article Feser goes through various conceptions of personal identity and considers their implications for SO. He concludes that none of them yield the standard Rothbardian view.

To conclude, there are two possibilities. (1) (If one rejects a dualist conception of the self) SO is incoherent (2) (Assuming the self referential aspect of SO does not make it incoherent) not all conceptions of the self will yield libertarian conclusions; indeed it might be that no conception of the self yields those conclusions. Either way, asserting SO is not enough a libertarian would also have to defend a particular conception of the self.

Socialism a Clear and Present Danger

QUOTE: “Two of the Ten Commandments presuppose the legitimacy of private property.”

On the inconvenient truths about human sacrifice.

From Matt Bors.

A lot of what I post about is on sensitive issues, so I have come to expect the usual denial and obfuscation from my opponents. I expect a lot of denial on this issue also. Human sacrifice? HAR HAR HAR! Surely that’s a relic of past, ignorant ages!

Not really. We still practice human sacrifice and praise it, but we just do it without the pomp and circumstance. Human sacrifice happens when you know someone will die but you justify it as being for some higher purpose (be it religious, social, economic, or other). Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while may remember this example.

However, we need not restrict ourselves to this kind of example. The simple fact is that anyone who rejects the “do no harm” principle to the point that they find some number of deaths “justifiable” supports human sacrifice in some form. I am not saying that such a position is automatically invalid, but it does have the burden of proof, and “well, I think it’s justified” doesn’t cut it.

The problem is that people who support human sacrifice also refuse to admit that they support human sacrifice. This is understandable; anyone who would openly make such an admission would discredit emself as a normal human being. So they have to finagle, whine and bitch.

A good example of that is the commenting rules I applied for a while on the pro-abortion series. I asked people the following questions:

What maximum number of women dead from botched back alley abortions per year under an anti-abortion scheme do you consider a fair and just tradeoff to prevent all abortions that would happen under a pro-abortion scheme? (for anti-abortion people)

What maximum number of children afflicted with spina bifita/Tay-Sachs/leukemia/cancer/Downs Syndrome/etc a year born under a pro-choice scheme do you consider a fair and just tradeoff to prevent the distress of women who would not be allowed to have a child under a pro-abortion scheme? (for pro-choice people)

My reasoning behind these questions was two-fold:

1. To get my opponents to admit that they support the deliberate sacrifice of human beings for their goals.

2. To get them to quantify their support of human sacrifice, so we can advance the debate beyond rationalizations and get to the heart of the matter.

Of course my attempt failed. Some people claimed they were unable to answer because the question didn’t apply to them, and tried to finagle their position so it wouldn’t apply. Other people refused to consider the issue because it was too damageable for their position. Yet others simply didn’t answer. It’s the elephant in the room.

One person tried to return the question to me, asking me how many lives my beliefs are worth. But that’s a misfire, because I can always hit that one out of the park: the answer is, and always will be, zero. I don’t give a shit who you are or what you believe, no one’s beliefs are worth the lives of innocent human beings.

When I say, “do not impose harm,” I don’t mean “do not impose harm unless you’re not doing it to a specific person.” I also don’t mean “do not impose harm unless it’s on someone you don’t like or who you think deserves it.” I also don’t mean “do not impose harm unless it’s legal.” I mean “do not impose harm.”

One may reply, what answer do I expect? Do I expect an exact number? No, not really, but at least an order of magnitude. If it is justified to have people die for your beliefs, it would be nice to have an idea of how much death is warranted, and whether the current death rate is warranted.

And there are people who are able to be clear-headed about this and answer the question, such as Biting Beaver in this entry. We need more people with her high level of honesty. I still think her position is fucking disgusting and wrong, but at least it’s something we can debate. Without some kind of starting point, how can there even be a debate?

Let’s go back to the abortion question. If you are pro-choice, it is an incontrovertible fact (no matter how much you try to finagle out of it) that you support the birth of compromised children, some of which will die in horrible sufferings, and others who will experience lives of suffering. So how many child deaths are pro-choice policies worth? It’s a simple question that demands an answer.

Sure it’s uncomfortable to advocate the death of children, but if that’s the problem, then stop advocating positions that entail the death of children. And if you really believe that the pro-choice position is right beyond pragmatic considerations, then don’t be ashamed of its consequences and answer the question. It’s as simple as that.

Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me,please? It’s beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers’ crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn’t grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh,Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived criesaloud: ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.’ When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can’t accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child’s torturer, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ but I don’t want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for.

These questions apply to any issue where people’s beliefs entail suffering or death. Natalists blather on and on about how happy they are and how life is a gift, so we have to ask: how many horrible deaths is your happiness worth? It is a fact that perpetuating the life-system entails not only natural deaths but also horrible torture for billions.

Darwin’s Hamster talks about it on this video. His point is that for the debate on natalism to advance, natalists need to answer this question. Until they continue to refuse to answer, the debate will always remain stalled.

Darwin’s Hamster also points out that this question is no different from the atheist argument that religion harms people, and that therefore it is hypocrite for an atheist to agree with the atheist question but not the antinatalist question. You can’t point out the harms of religion and claim it’s a good argument while claiming that a look at the harms of natalism is a bad argument.

When faced with this question, natalists have to divert the issue and argue that death is just a fact of life and we should accept it, that we antinatalists are just whiners who want perfect lives. The trouble is that this is a straightforward lie: we humans are the ones producing this suffering, it is not a “fact of life,” it does not need to exist or have to exist.

But like pro-choice advocates, they must ignore the fact that we are the ones producing the suffering, that we are responsible for its existence and continuation. If they can silently reclassify suffering and death as an inevitability, they get themselves off the hook. It just happens, don’t you see? Babies just pop out of thin air, I’m tellin’ ya! They just appear and there’s nothing we can do about it! In the same way, capitalism is validated because human life just is a contest for survival and there’s nothing we can do about it (when in fact it is capitalism that creates most of these rigged “contests”).

Misogynists use the same “inevitability” gambit towards pornography and prostitution. So we have to ask, how many deaths of female prostitutes are justified in order to serve men’s supposed needs? Well, prostitutes are not really human, you see, so it’s better to just forget about it. So there is an inevitability argument, but also simple bigotry. Both will do equally well.

In a more abstract way, I also talked about a similar problem relative to God giving people free will. It seems to me to be a conclusive argument against Christianity that God giving us free will implies all the crimes people have committed in history, including all murders, wars, torture, rapes, and so on.

We can also ask, how many deaths of innocents are justified in order to maintain a State? Or how many deaths of workers are justified in order to maintain coal mines? People still die of coal mining accidents every week even in the most advanced countries. How many deaths at the hands of mafias and drug impurities are justified by the War on Drugs? And so on, and so forth.

The basic principle, I hope, is clear: if you are proposing a policy that entails innocent people’s deaths, you have the burden of proof to show that such a policy is worth it. For example, having hospitals entails many deaths due to lack of hygiene (hundreds of thousands of people die every year because of it), but it’s still better than not having health care. A decentralized system would probably be far healthier and less deadly, but if we simply compare hospitals to nothing at all, I think the choice is pretty clear. Sure it takes lives, but its primary purpose is to sustain life. The medical establishment, on the other hand… the less said about that the better.

So what’s the point of these questions? Am I just trying to shut people up and drive them away? No, the topic of my entries already does that for me, and besides that wouldn’t be very productive. This is not going to be a big surprise given the topic of this blog for these past months, but it obviously has to do with radicalism.

The prevalent utilitarian worldview tells us that human sacrifice is justified if the sacrifice is of some benefit to us, no matter how small (such as in our economist believing that horrible deaths are justified by relieving a headache). That is quite a trivialization of the right to life: your life may be worth as little as a headache, so it’s barely worth even considering. Like most economists’ constructs, the mockery of ethics used by economists serves ruling class interests and trivializes workers’ lives and values, and therefore is fundamentally anti-radical.

From the voluntaryist standpoint, I imagine all these questions are pointless, because a person who believes in any of these positions is not necessarily creating harm. A goose-stepping statist may not necessarily use violence against dissenters, or even support violence against dissenters (although eir statist belief still aids and abets the people who do the violence). So why should we attack the statist for eir belief? Ey’s “doing nothing wrong.”

Radical analysis tells us that it is possible for a person to voluntarily and harmlessly participate to a coercive and harmful system. One may work at some retailer or other and be completely ignorant that one’s work is subsidizing corporations that have financed or are still financing death squads (Chiquita, Dole, Chevron, General Motors, Ford, IBM… the list goes on and on). Admittedly this is unlikely to convince anyone to leave their job because, after all, we all need a job. But my point is that the actions of the worker are harmless, while serving a genocidal system.

So no, I am not saying that every single advocate of natalism, pro-choice, misogyny, statism or Christianity is committing harmful actions. Like all radical analysis, this is not about individual actions but about institutions and the harm they perpetuate on individuals. Because of their scope, institutions can magnify evil, bigotry or ignorance a million fold. One person cannot perform genocide, but an army can. Implicit in the concept of an army is not just a group of people but an ethic of obedience and violence, political aims, wages, buildings, weapons, provisions, an economy that can produce these things, and so on.

There can be no step taken towards making an equal and just society if one is unable to analyze existing institutions and their effects on society, as well as imagining institutions which are structured around egalitarian and just values. There can be no more fundamental principle for such a society than the principle that we should not impose harm. As Anarchism tells us, hierarchies are the root of the problem, and the goal of hierarchies is to exploit others for an elite’s benefit, no matter who the elite is.

As such, human sacrifice is only part of one extreme end of a spectrum that goes from genocide, to slavery, to exploitation, to alienation, to freedom. Our goal is to analyze institutions from the other end of the spectrum, that of individual freedom and social autonomy. The fact that some people openly support human sacrifice and its logic merely tells us that they are no friends of freedom.

In answer to the question “how many human lives can be justifiably sacrificed for your beliefs?”, most people will just hem and haw, argue that you don’t understand their position, that the question is not fair, that human sacrifice is worth it, and will basically do anything but answer the question. My answer is simple: zero.

To end on another quote from The Brothers Karamazov, which reiterates my challenge to my opponents:

“Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.”

Come on people, tell me the truth. Can you do that?

Contract theory as an attack against human rights

(above: a contract of indentured servitude)

Contract theory is at the center of voluntaryism. This alone should be enough to make it suspect. Strangely, despite its centrality, voluntaryists talk very little about the nitty-gritty of contracts and how they are to be enforced. Molyneux fans blather on and on about defense contracts as a substitute for law, but the enforcement and limitations of such contracts, which raise numerous questions, remain unexamined.

As I’ve pointed out in the case of the child renter argument and Block’s corollary, voluntaryists who uphold contracts as absolute must therefore reject the concept of human rights. This is a very difficult dilemma for them: either they reject human rights or they reject contracts as absolute standard. Voluntaryists fail to give a satisfactory answer to this dilemma, because they know very well that giving up either is the death knell for their beliefs.

Consider the concept of self-ownership, which treats living, thinking bodies as pieces of property. If something is property, then it can be given away or exchanged at will. But this must be done by contract, since any person could otherwise retract their agreement at will, since the person is the body. The contract provides a written binding agreement that continues to exist beyond consent.

The most obvious example would be the constitution of any country. Constitutions bind people who are long dead, and yet they are still assumed to legally hold today, despite the lack of consent from people currently living. The only way to make sense of this contradiction is to assume that citizens are, to some degree, property of the State through the expired agreement of “their” constitution. But this only makes sense to us because we’ve been indoctrinated to believe in self-ownership and in absolute contracts. In no other context would the concept of a constitution make any sense: as Lysander Spooner points out, most contracts we enter into are not this absurd.

Suppose an agreement were entered into, in this form:

We, the people of Boston, agree to maintain a fort on Governor’s Island, to protect ourselves and our posterity against invasion.

This agreement, as an agreement, would clearly bind nobody but the people then existing. Secondly, it would assert no right, power, or disposition, on their part, to compel their “posterity” to maintain such a fort. It would only indicate that the supposed welfare of their posterity was one of the motives that induced the original parties to enter into the agreement.
…
[T]hese men who claim and exercise this absolute and irresponsible dominion over us, dare not be consistent, and claim either to be our masters, or to own us as property. They say they are only our servants, agents, attorneys, and representatives. But this declaration involves an absurdity, a contradiction. No man can be my servant, agent, attorney, or representative, and be, at the same time, uncontrollable by me, and irresponsible to me for his acts. It is of no importance that I appointed him, and put all power in his hands. If I made him uncontrollable by me, and irresponsible to me, he is no longer my servant, agent, attorney, or representative. If I gave him absolute, irresponsible power over my property, I gave him the property. If I gave him absolute, irresponsible power over myself, I made him my master, and gave myself to him as a slave. And it is of no importance whether I called him master or servant, agent or owner.

Lysander Spooner, The Constitution of No Authority

The notion of a contract, while not by far ideal, is not in itself absurd; the union of contracts and self-ownership is what leads to absurdities. It led to the belief, which has only recently been dispelled, that marriage contracts make uxorial rape logically impossible. It leads to the belief that work contracts make all sorts of attacks against human rights valid, and the belief that the social contract (as instantiated by the Constitution) makes assault and murder valid, although as time goes on, the range of possible attacks gets narrower.

If this reminds you of the way Christians approach the Bible, that’s no coincidence. The more that permissible contracts lag behind social mores, the more incentive there are for legal reforms, just like how religious doctrines get progressively left behind as social mores change. Sexual harassment used to be an accepted (implicit) part of a work contract: nowadays, not so much, because sexism is somewhat more toned down from where it was a hundred years ago. In the case of political crimes, it’s hard to say that there’s really been any progress, and that’s because people still have as much faith in the law and law enforcement as they did a hundred years ago, a faith which is not always extended to corporations.

So contracts-as-ethics is ultimately a subjective standard. The more self-ownership we grant people, the more human rights we imagine them being able to surrender, and the fewer human rights we will see as absolute. The less self-ownership we grant people, the less human rights we imagine them being able to surrender, and the more human rights we will see as absolute.

This may seem counter-intuitive because it goes counter to the capitalist way of thinking, with which we are indoctrinated and therefore seems intuitive. The standard reasoning is that self-ownership is the basis of rights, and that therefore both are proportional. But this is usually an ad hoc rationalization: the more we see people respecting each other, the more we arbitrarily assume that self-ownership is granted. Logically, this makes no sense. Slavery and other attacks on basic rights can only make sense if we first assume that bodies are a kind of thing that can be owned, a property which can be trespassed upon.

Likewise, the marriage contract have supported the enslavement of women for centuries. For more on the relation between marriage contracts and other hierarchical forms of contracts, see The Sexual Contract, by Carole Pateman (I haven’t yet read it, so I won’t comment further).

Voluntaryists sussed out a long time ago that full self-ownership should mean that people can sell themselves into slavery. This conclusion is distressing to most of them, so they have concocted various rationalizations to get around this. But this does not improve the situation, since virtually all attacks on human rights are not outright slavery, but rather degrees of slavery (if we use “slavery” in the more colloquial sense of one person having control over what another says and does). While rejecting slavery contracts, voluntaryists cannot get themselves to reject work contracts or social contracts, demonstrating their failure to grasp the commonality between all these contracts.

Can contracts be a valid means of formalizing agreement? Sure, but we have to introduce issues of consent. Consent cannot exist unless viable alternatives exist as well. Much like we shouldn’t evaluate individuals as if they lived in a social vacuum, or evaluate actions as if they took place in a causal vacuum, a contract can not, and should not, be judged in a vacuum, but rather must be contrasted with the institutions that sustain it. A contract may or may not be valid in itself, but if these institutions do not provide or allow any alternatives, then the contract cannot possibly be justified.

Suppose a group of equals come together and decide on how they are to live. They may decide upon something like a constitution, and this form is not necessarily problematic, as long as every person bound to it consents beforehand. But when such a constitution is applied to people who never consented to it, and provides no other choice, then it cannot be justified (the work contract, on the other hand, is in itself invalid because of its illogical nature).

Don’t consent to the cops.

I don’t know how much help this can possibly be against men hopped up on steroids and armed to the teeth, but legally you should refuse to consent to cop searches, formal or informal.

What’s really scary is when the police threaten to take your kids or pets away, if you don’t consent to a search. The less-subtle threats sound like this:

• You want to do this the easy way, and just let us in? Or
you want to do it the hard way—we go get a warrant
and while we’re at it, we call Child Protective Services?

• That’s a nice little dog you got there. Why don’t
we come in and do a walk-through, to make sure
everything’s okay? Or, we can go get a warrant.
Then we’ll come back, bust you, and send your
dog to the pound. You might get out of jail before
they put him to sleep, or then again you might not…

Whatever the threat is, you shouldn’t consent to let them in. If the police don’t come back, then they couldn’t really get a warrant and you’ll have called their bluff. If the police do come back, you’ll at least have had time to call friends or family to come get your children or pets. And you’ll have been able to call a lawyer for advice or help during the search.

A plan for a counter-economic space.

This may be of interest to Anarchist organizers and thought leaders: “Proposing a Counterhegemonic Economic System” by Enric Duran.

What we’re proposing isn’t anything new—it’s about recovering the community economic spaces that small towns had before money and the market invaded almost every aspect of life. To this day, many indigenous communities function internally without the use of money, and their experiences is one of the best insights that we have. Along with these examples of community economies, we can look to the anarchist collectivizations during the [Spanish] Civil War, despite that fact that they lasted only briefly and occurred in an unprecedented context. Currently, we have a few small examples of these community economies in social centers, in the form of “free stores” in which everyone leaves what they don’t need to be taken by someone who does.

On the same note we can’t forget about direct barter, which has utilized up to this point in certain spaces and exchange markets such as Xaingra in Gràcia5; despite the limitations of this practice it wouldn’t have to be dropped as a complement to the monetary economic system…

In our proposal, money is created as income for the population, not as debt. This is a fundamental change compared to the dominant system as well as small alternative systems such as LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems) and social currency. In the dominant system, money is a debt that only banks have the privilege of creating; the most powerful members of society can receive it at very favorable conditions, while the poor simply don’t have access. As a result, the distribution of the money created invariable benefits the rich and powerful.

In our proposal, on the other hand, income is divided equally among individual participants at the beginning of the month or trimester. The amount of monthly income would vary, being determined by a few standards that we can chose according to what we consider to be fair. Moreover, the creation of money would have to be decentralized (by town and neighborhood) from a set of standards based on common criteria (we’ll expand on this point when we discuss the decentralization and autonomy in neighborhoods).

“Who would replace the police?”

The police exist in order to protect the rights of citizens from criminals.

Such a statement reflects either ignorance or extreme naivete. Let us be clear that the role of the police in a statist society is not to protect citizens, but to enforce the law. The fact that the police enforces the law is a known fact; that they protect citizens is an article of faith which is not supported by any observation.

There is a gigantic gulf of difference between these two assertions. The law is a product of the power elite and is constructed to serve its interests: by limiting their scope (e.g. the way murder by private individuals is prosecuted v murder by corporate negligeance or by police/military), by redefinition (e.g. taxes are not theft because we say it is, corporations are persons because we say they are), by subsidies and laws which protect corporations from competition.

But the most important way in which the law serves the interests of the power elite is in its hierarchical nature: the politicians make the laws, the police enforce them, and the citizens obey. Statists argue that citizens can influence the laws by voting, but voting has never by itself brought about positive change (unless you mean the Obama kind, which means “more of the same”). G. William Domhoff gives real-life example after real-life example that demonstrate how the elite’s policy-formation network dominates law-making, regardless of voter intent, and that when it seems that voter intent wins out, it is only with the support of a significant proportion of the power elite (moderate conservatives).

Domination by the power elite does not negate the reality of continuing conflict over government policies, but few conflicts, it has been shown, involve challenges to the rules that create privileges for the upper class and domination by the power elite. Most of the numerous battles within the interest-group process, for example, are only over specific spoils and favors; they often involve disagreements among competing business interests.

Similarly, conflicts within the policy-making process of government often involve differences between the moderate conservative and ultraconservative segments of the dominant class. At other times they involve issues in which the needs of the corporate community as a whole come into conflict with the needs of specific industries, which is what happens to a certain extent on tariff policies and also on some environmental legislation. In neither case does the nature of the conflict call into question the domination of government by the power elite.

G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America?, p287

Yes, obviously sometimes the police does end up protecting citizens. I am not denying that fact. What I am denying is the bizarre faith that this is its primary function. Like all organizations and institutions, the police is funded and supported on the basis of its continued activities, and, like how corporations cannot continue to exist without ever-increasing profits, its activities cannot continue without ever-increasing crime, or the perception of ever-increasing crime.

Arrest statistics may be the primary statistical indicator of police performance, but it is not the only important statistic used in bargaining for larger police budgets. Milakovich and Weis noted that police have a “vested interest” in keeping crime rates relatively high. If crime rates drop too much, then support for more police and larger budgets declines; and “like all bureaucracies, criminal justice agencies can hardly be expected to implement policies that would diminish their importance.” Thus, additional funding need not lead to a substantial decrease in reported crime rates, since high crime rates are clearly an important element in arguments for expanded criminal justice budgets. This reinforces the incentives police face because arrest statistics are viewed as an indicator of performance. In order to keep crime rates up and make growing numbers of arrests, for example, police have strong incentives to seek criminalization of increasing numbers of activities.

Bruce L. Benson, The Enterprise of Law, p136

Now, I just want to make clear that I do not share Benson’s bizarre belief that privatization of police and prisons will make a better and more compassionate system. In fact, since we live in a time when private prisons are widespread in the United States, we now know that the opposite is true: private prisons only make the situation worse in terms of increasing prison sentences, increasing the scope of law enforcement and increasing cruelty to prisoners. Private police would only be more of the same: same evil incentives as for public police, but with profit added to the mix. What we call corruption when done in the public sector would become commonplace policy.

Don’t take my quoting of The Enterprise of Law as a support of private police. My point in quoting this was to reiterate the concrete goal of a police force (successful arrests) and the condition for its continued funding (high crime rates). Neither of these are concordant with “protecting people,” and in fact they are often divergent goals. So even if laws and policies were written in the interest of the general population, the police as a whole would still not be a liberating institution, because it would still be predicated on hierarchy, abuse of power, and endangering people’s lives.

The police is a special class of people who are given special rights, such as having access to, and being allowed to use, firearms regardless of local laws, being free to threaten, assault and kidnap whoever they can justify, being free to use mental torture against adults and children who are deemed suspects, being free to kill innocent people if they have the slimmest justification for doing so, and so on.

These rights are not the result of abusive people but powers naturally granted by the State to a class of people who enforce State laws (there are slight exceptions, but in most of the world these powers are more or less the same). Regardless of how nice they are, and many cops are, they are necessarily traitors to the working class because that’s their job. They will always suppress popular movements for civil rights and economic justice because they serve the power elite by definition.

So why can people not look at different solutions? The first problem arises because people confuse the function of protection with the police, and therefore they believe that any rejection of the police is also a rejection of the function of protection in society; astonishingly, even some Anarchists believe this and have decided that the ideal society is one where no one does anything against aggressors, which is just silly. Realistically, few people want to live in a society where they are afforded no protection at all from crime. This leads some people to reject the Anarchist worldview on that basis alone.

Of course we should defend ourselves against crime, and do our best to mitigate it. But that doesn’t mean we need a class of people with special rights, or even a hierarchy, to do this. Actually, the very concept of a non-egalitarian justice system is a contradiction in terms. If the role of a justice system is to prevent aggression, then having an elite which permits itself to use aggression on a massive scale while preventing others from doing the same in the name of their monopoly is counter-productive.

Another problem is that people think the only alternative to our elitist, militarized police is vigilante justice, by which they understand a bunch of angry hicks hanging people from trees. Of course it’s possible to redefine the terms so much that vigilante justice is defined as the only alternative, but that’s just a bad use of words. Otherwise it’s simply false: it’s like saying that the only alternative to having schoolteachers beat up your kids is to beat your kids yourself. Surely it would be more reasonable to simply not have one’s kids beat up at all. Surely we would be better off finally introducing a little of this mythical element we call “civilization.”

So what is it we do need to protect ourselves from crime? First, we need to address the root causes of crime. We cannot even think about protecting ourselves from crime unless we actively reduce the incentive for crime, otherwise we’re just treading water. That means re-examining social institutions and how they pervert incentives for the average person. For Anarchists, this should go without saying, as we are the victims of these incentives and are all too familiar with them.

The fact that incarceration rates are highly variable (from the United States- 730 prisoners per 100,000- to Iceland- 47 prisoners per 100,000) demonstrates that incarceration rates could be dramatically cut in most countries with relatively little change. The fact that homicide rates, to take one example, are also highly variable (from 12 per 100,000 in Russia to 0.56 in Austria) tells us that crime itself is very “elastic,” because tiny differences between capital-democratic States obviously create vast differences in crime rates. So any improvement in the incentive system would be vastly beneficial for the society as a whole.

But what can be done beyond what statism has to offer? Well, for one, we can set rules in accordance with our values, not in accordance with institutional values. We can set up an institution of protection which aims primarily at the prevention of crime, not profit motive or arrest statistics.

Obviously these two points are related, but as I said before, to have an egalitarian institution of protection means more than setting laws based on human values. We also need to apply Anarchist organizational principles, such as rotation of posts, direct accountability of representatives, and a socialist organization of protection agents where every agent has a say in the way the organization is run.

Furthermore, we need to apply principles of justice. We need to hold protection agents accountable for their own crimes, that there is no substantial difference between an agent killing, assaulting or torturing an innocent person for no or little good reason, and another person doing the same thing. We need to break the omertà that currently prevails in police forces by destroying the concept of the police as a separate, higher class.

Finally, as I argued in my entry on gun control, a proportional disarmament of the population and the protection agents would provide great incentive for the protection agents to try to minimize the abuse of firearms in the general population, which would go ways towards preventing crime in general (although this is highly variable from society to society). But this would remain a palliative measure unless the underlying causes of gun violence can be addressed.

Coercion is only acceptable to prevent aggression, but the only way to ensure that only aggressing individuals are stopped is to base our justice system on truth. No system based on money or law can ensure that we are finding the truth.