Both of those arguments are incorrect. Anonymous has no business telling us how anarchic we can be :-) If people want to voluntarily engage in hierarchical relationships, that's still anarchy. And you can still have leaders in anarchies - it's just that if they screw up and find there's nobody following them any more, they can't force their ex-followers to come back. There are versions of anarchist theory that accept private property and versions that don't, but both deal with types of "property" that can be taken or protected by physical force. "Intellectual Property" deals with the rather sillier concept that some ideas belong to some people and it's ok for them to hire guys in blue suits to beat up other people to protect it. Crypto anarchy creates different kinds of protection mechanisms for ideas, in ways that beating people up is neither necessary, useful, or possible, so you can limit most of your transactions to genuinely voluntary ones. This isn't perfect either - if somebody defrauds you, you can't sue them or beat them up, because your only contacts are a bunch of bits on the net. So reputations become important, and you've got to build more incremental transaction mechanisms, and you've got different tradeoffs of risk versus cost (for instance, credit's hard to do.) Crypto-anarchy isn't Sternerism or Kropotkinism. It doesn't say anything about whether you maintain traditional hierarchical relationships with your wives, though it does give you more options for sharing resources with people you like (whether you consider those resources to be property or not.) It doesn't mean that the government or mafia can't collect property taxes on your house - though it may mean they collect them from the resident rather than the "owner", and threaten to kick out the resident if they don't pay. It also doesn't mean your mother or work krewe or syndicate or commune or wives can't tell you to clean the bathroom - but it gives you more options for who "owns" the house, and more options for paying somebody to clean it without the government taking a piece of the action. James is right that getting rid of private property gives you other problems, but he's wrong that this means one huge centralized plan that rules everybody - such things are typically very hard to enforce and maintain, even with modern technology to make it easier. You can, and do, have lots of distributed economic decisionmaking even in most totalitarian states, between black markets, Russian jokes about "they pretend to pay us and we pretend we're working", favors, bribes, etc. And there are socialist alternatives like syndicates and small communes, and there are farming villages or hunter-gatherer villages out in remote areas, and lots of other alternative structures for societies besides just propertarianism and totalitarianism. Many of them don't work very well, or work fine but fall to outside invaders, but that's a separate problem.
At 09:20 PM 10/18/2000 -0600, Anonymous wrote:
Crypto-anarchy is in fact not really anarchy, since it only addresses some kinds of authority, ie government, and only in certain situations. True anarchy involves the dissolution of other hierarchical relationships, including those that spring from private property. Get rid of private property and many of these problems disappear.
At 07:53 AM 10/19/00 -0700, James A.. Donald wrote:
Been tried. Without property rights to separate one man's plan from another man's plan, only one plan can be permitted, and any pursuit of alternate goals, or pursuit of the same goals through alternate methods is "wrecking", and must be crushed. Without property rights in the means of production there there can only be one plan, and one set of planners, to which all must submit.
The alternative to private property rights in the means of production is a single plan, one plan for all, one plan that must be imposed on all, which necessitates unending terror, as we have invariably and uniformly seen in practice.
Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639