"The point of anarchism is to apply the test: 'is this justified?', and quite often when it comes to the state the answer is 'no'."

Well, that's a much reduced vision of anarchism than I'm accustomed to encountering. Anyway, who determines whether the state's actions meet your test? For many things the actions of the state are not only justified but necessary. Anarchists seem to want to throw the baby out with the bathwater whenever they encounter some action they don't like. There is nothing intrinsic to state power that it need engage in "unjustified" actions.

@Putin - if people accede to government then they should of course be able to keep it. You need a government that is responsive to popular demands, even (and especially) when the demand is that it retracts control over a particular part of social life. Not all anarchists agree, but there you go.

Ideally you decide whether the state's actions meet the test democratically or individually - i.e. you vote, or you leave.

The basic problem is this: Anarchists can't seem to tolerate "losing" in the democratic process. They must win all the time, or else it is tyranny, coercion, unjustified force, etc. That's why I do not believe anarchism has much love for democracy at all. Democracy involves losing sometimes, with the promise that you'll be able to struggle for your view in the future. Sometimes you have to compromise. Sometimes you have to meet people halfway in order to achieve a collective goal.

Octopus: As for the argument, it is primarily at the moment a empirical thing, with a lot though experiments thrown in. Its one of those things that one can't supply really hard evidence for without running some neurosci and sociology experiments.

As for your question of if you're defective, its an interesting one, and I have feeling that you aren't going to like the answer I gave when in my debate.

Here is the basic idea: The Human fundamentally wants to feel both important and equal. At the same time however, the human also shies away from responsibility for their actions (Which assumes the human shies away from pain, and that having only yourself to blame is the most painful situation). In this way The Human prefers to have others make decisions for them so someone else can be blamed if it goes wrong, however doing so makes The Human feel unimportant, despite the gift of being rid of indecision. Which is essentially a paradox. The second paradox is of how a human can both desire equality and hierarchy at the same time. To get beyond this paradox one must consider the ways in which these opposing principles can come together.

Now my assumption is that humanity is a by its nature are rational being. In fact what makes us human is the faculty of reason.

Thus humanity must be ruled by reason. In which they both feel equal and are ruled, and important but someone blameless, important because they can understand the purpose to what they are doing, but blameless because it was the only reasonable thing to do.

Given this desire to bow to reason, (and avoid pain/ hardship) a ruler will inevitably arise (I'm going to skip over a huge chunk of argument here for expediency)

Suffice to say you have ruler. Now a perfect ruler would be one who rules in accordance with reason. Thus only the unreasonable, who are insane, or no longer human. Would not willingly submit. However the imperfect ruler will often act in a way that diverges from reason, as such, The human will lash out and react against this state of unreason, and poor authority, in an attempt to find the true authority. That of reason.

Your rejection of hierarchy arises from a desire to find proper hierarchy, because what we have now is a perversion.

"We can just walk away from our country now too. "

Actually, in a lot of cases, we can't. Witness the communist bloc countries, which erect(ed) walls and guard towers to keep people from leaving. Witness the US Government, which continues to claim ownership of the personage and wages of people who leave the country, and is demanding other countries on the planet inform the IRS about the assets of American citizens held overseas. There are other examples.

There are other differences between a voluntary association and a government/nation state. Modern nation states tend to include everyone who speaks a particular language or is part of a particular culture; leaving it means abandoning everything you are familiar with and joining another group that is quite foreign. But leaving the hunter-gatherer band where the 'alpha male' has gone batshit insane for that other band on the other side of the valley that speaks the same language, has the same cultural practices and social mores, etc. is not a big deal. I can't argue too much with your contention that the difference between pre-government social groupings and modern nation states is largely a matter of scale, but this is a very large detail; if there are very minor impediments to 'voting with your feet', there is a huge incentive for the Authorities to behave themselves than they have in a modern nation-state, where governments will always push their subjects as hard as they can get away with without winding up in line to be guillotined in the public square, knowing it's not so easy to just pick up and leave.

It's really strange to me that its so common an argument against anarchism, that eventually the biggest gang will just take over everything, because thats basically how I see our society today.

@Damian: Thanks, very interesting. But, unfortunately, and as I say - unfalsifiable speculation :P

Sic, Ask a stupid question get a stupid answer. Its all a matter of scale. Deference to authority being a part of human nature. Doesn't mean you have to ask someone else every time you do something. Because you learned it from a figure of authority at some point.

Namely your parent. As a baby caveman you might very well have taken a crap were you slept but you were taught not too, and now you defer to that authority every time you make that decision again.

The only difference is you accept the reason of it, and as such you don't feel like its arbitrary. You feel important and equal.

But it's easy to pick up and leave private organizations? This is what I don't understand, you'll claim that it's so very difficult for a person to leave their nation-state, which I quite agree with. But you claim that it's very easy for people to vote with their feet when it comes to their employer, or private organizations (hunter-gatherer bands). It's just not true. You're holding government to such a ridiculously high standard that you don't hold anything else.

@Putin: You're running very close to setting up a strawman here. I'm here, a real life anarchist, and I don't agree with any of that crap you're attributing to anarchism (I'm a fan of Noam Chomsky, agree with him on quite a lot, and he's one of the most influential anarchists out there). I have no doubt that there are those who make those arguments, I'm just saying you might perhaps benefit from a principle of charity.

Of course its speculation. One can't get anywhere if one doesn't consider things from a theoretical point of view. After all I don't have a bunch of humans I can just run experiments on. Instead I have to rely on building those experiments with words, and trying to make the reader see the logic in a particular conclusion.

Yeah sure, in some places it is hard to leave. I'll grant you that. However this difficulty in leaving is I would say also a matter of scale. As we in the modern world have arrived and more and more unified countries it becomes harder to just migrate to the next village over. However look at the era of italian city states. Each was ruled by a government yet a person could be exiled, or leave for the other city-state, it wasn't a state of anarchy, the problem was the city states were constantly fighting with one another for more power.

I've digressed. The point is, a government doesn't by necessity keep people in, and hell the leader of the tribe could probably keep someone from leaving if he had force on his side.

Oh and Sic. Since you decided to bring it up. I mentioned the conversation with my prof not to back up the points I had already made. But to explain why I didn't go into detail on another point I was asked about. Namely that I'm tired of that particular discussion at the moment.

Well sorry for not being charitable, but that is my impression. You have to admit that as far anarchists go, Chomsky is quite moderate. He still votes, even. That's not something you'll find others of your creed would ever do. I have encountered many a real life anarchist, spent several years working cooperatively with an anarchist-run organization known as Students for a Democratic Society. An organization that spent its first couple of years trying to purge all Communists from the group. So I don't have the best of impressions of this school of thought. If anarchism doesn't even have a general programme, it's quite meaningless to even talk about it. I've never encountered anarchists who were content with government should people like and want it. Their attitude has been, abolish all "vertical" forms of power, period. And any imposition of one group of people's wishes upon another is "vertical" power. So, democracy is vertical power because it has winners and losers. Some people's views prevail over the objections of others. That's anathema within anarchism because very quickly it leads to authority structures.

@ damian

look I know most of us here are scarred from american schooling, but I hardly think learning is the same thing as deference to authority. The point of real teaching is to give another the abilty to do it (whatever it is) for themselves.

also no one said a government by necessity keeps people in. it was merely a tangent branching off from "voting with your feet"
I know by nature this type of conversation has lots of totally relevant tangents, but if you want to start redefining what a government is I suggest it would be best kept for another thread.

Wait, I think you're misinterpreting what I mean by 'principle of charity'. It's a bit counterintuitive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

"very quickly it leads to authority structures. "

how?

Not American. Thank you very much.

Of course teaching is about allowing you to do something for yourself. However a large part of learning is about learning when its appropriate to do certain things. Where its appropriate to do certain things.

Some things you learn on your own by doing, and suffering consequences. Which develops into reason. This principle of reason is the authority you want to bow to. So we look at is as being free.

However some lessons your parents teach you, you simply accept. Either because you trust your parents, or you see the logic of what they are telling you.

If you do not, you later learn the lessons they were trying to teach you on your own, and develop reason.

In either position learning is really a development of reason, which is the authority you want to bow to, by virtue of being human.

On Government: The reason the definition of government keeps coming up, is that we don't have one for this debate, and so we keep dancing around this issue of what is government. With both of us seeming to have different internal definitions.

Ok now you saying reason is really just an authority we bow to? I suppose if you really want to argue it that way you can see it like that, but it sort of seems like what you're saying is that government is natural because deference to authority is the natural state of man, and the example you give is learning. is this correct? I dont want to argue it if its not your point, which I am having trouble believing.

Government
The main function of the state is to guarantee the existing social relationships and their sources within a given society through centralised power and a monopoly of violence. I think it is pretty clear what the real role of the modern state is. It represents the essential coercive mechanisms by which capitalism and the authority relations associated with private property are sustained. The protection of property is fundamentally the means of assuring the social domination of owners over non-owners, both in society as a whole and in the particular case of a specific boss over a specific group of workers. Class domination is the authority of property owners over those who use that property and it is the primary function of the state to uphold that domination (and the social relationships that generate it).

not usually a fan of quoting old white russian anarchists but I found this a seceond ago

"the rich perfectly well know that if the machinery of the State ceased to protect them, their power over the labouring classes would be gone immediately." [Evolution and Environment, p. 98]

PS, since when the fuck is SDS an anarchist organization? they are socialists through and through. I went to an SDS meeting once here in toledo and they even tried to sell my the ISO newspaper.

SDS developed from the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the youth branch of a socialist educational organization known as the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). LID descended from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, started in 1905. Early in 1960, SLID decided to change its name into SDS. The phrase “industrial democracy” sounded too narrow and too labor oriented, making it more difficult to recruit students.

I have not rad all o the thread, but as a direct response to the title I should like to offer this from Edward Abbey:

“Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.”

I thoroughly recommend The Monkey Wrench Gang or Brave Cowboy by the same author. Even better is the marvelous film Lonely are the Brave based on the latter.

Since their new formation in 2005-2006. Many of the anarchists have since left, leaving the hard work to the "authoritarians" in the meantime. But at it began as an anarchist organization and passed resolution after resolution claiming that SDS was an "anti-authoritarian" organization committed to horizontal power and blah blah blah. They tried to get rid of us several times. Look at the local chapters of SDS, and almost all of them will advertise themselves as "anti-authoritarian" (meaning anarchist). The initial founders of the new SDS, Rapchik, Cline and Korte, were certainly of an anarchist-bent. They were all really into Michael Albert's parecon bs.

@ putin

it really seems to me that you have a penchant for taking your limited (limited not to belittle you, as individuals all of us are of limited experience) experience on a topic or group and apply it generally speaking, across the board. It's my experience that the vast majority of socialists are over-priviliged college kids who need a 'safe' way to rebel, but I dont like to paint with so broad a brush, I find it very limiting.

SDS is an anarchist organization in the way that Obama is anti-war.
its just lip service.

Sic, I don't really care what you believe. I participated in the damn organization for way too long. The anarchists are responsible for me being burnt out at a time when I should be doing a lot more activity. Their attempted purges were no joke. The 2007 SDS convention was a very tense affair. Bill Ayers had told SDS to get rid of the communists at a meeting I attended. Listserv rants against communists were common place, with constant chatter about nefarious "authoritarian" plots of infiltration. I really don't care if you believe it or not. I was there. I know what the organization was about. My "limited" experience with this group is far greater than your one time interaction with an ISO member who claimed to be from SDS. Most ISO members were involved with CAN, a rival group to SDS. Sadly for their front group eventually became independent of ISO, to their great embarassment.

There was nothing 'safe' about the way socialist students 'rebelled'. That's a really obnoxious thing to say in light of OWS. And this idea that socialist college kids were "overprivileged" compared to your anarchist buddies is a fucking joke.

BTW "overprivileged" socialists are being rounded in FBI raids, their possessions seized in effort to shut down their organization and arrest leaders on trumped charges of aid to terrorism. So GFY.

I'm not doubting what you are saying.
What I'm saying is that you seem to become closed minded about entire topics if you have had a negative experience with the subject before. I mean, you opened this thread up, maybe read my whole post, promptly brushed it aside with your un-questioned personal opinions as if they were written in the stars. "There is nothing democratic about anarchism." was your complete response to my entire post. A one sentence blurb with no explanation whatsoever.

From Rudolph Rocker:
For two decades the supporters of Bolshevism have been hammering it into the masses that dictatorship is a vital necessity for the defense of the so-called proletarian interests against the assaults of counter-revolution and for paving the way for Socialism. They have not advanced the cause of Socialism by this propaganda, but have merely smoothed the way for Fascism in Italy, Germany and Austria by causing millions of people to forget that dictatorship, the most extreme form of tyranny, can never lead to social liberation. In Russia, the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat has not led to Socialism, but to the domination of a new bureaucracy over the proletariat and the whole people. ...
What the Russian autocrats and their supporters fear most is that the success of libertarian Socialism in Spain might prove to their blind followers that the much vaunted "necessity of dictatorship" is nothing but one vast fraud which in Russia has led to the despotism of Stalin and is to serve today in Spain to help the counter-revolution to a victory over the revolution of the workers and the peasants.
The Tragedy of Spain (1937)

Also whats with the US vs. THEM mentality? college anarchists being priviledged doesnt preclude socialists from being so also. I expect there is quite alot of similarity/overlap in the reasons alot of people become either. Anarchism, absolutely has an over representation of (upper) middle class white kids. I am not denying that, though I think its really humorous that you expected me to be personally insulted by your bringing it up. Anyway my point was that is just my experience (with socialists), but I dont pretend that the entirety of socialism is priviledged college kids trying to distance themselves from the outlook of their parents by championing an underdog political views. I'm not interested in your black and white views about anarchism vs. socialism. I only framed it that way to try to give you a comparison.