HeavenlyPossumNov 14, 2023

It’s often the case that critics of anarchism will demand to know how we might obtain public goods without the state, because their entire frame of reference for public goods is in the context of state monopolies.

And I might reply that all sorts of public goods predate the state by thousands of years or more. Neolithic peoples were building trackway roads and monumental architecture and all kinds of neat things.

And critics of anarchism will often gleefully seize upon this as if it presents some clever gotcha. They think this means that *the best* we can hope to achieve without the state is a Neolithic-level of technology and cooperation.

And I find that response to be…so immensely sad. They see a dead-end; I see incredible achievements with only the barest of technologies and available knowledge, and can only wonder at the marvels we’d be able to achieve together now.

Show threadPassengerNov 14, 2023

@HeavenlyPossum

A critic of anarchism looks around at a country with no healthcare, sewage in the water and crumbling roads.

"But without a state, how would you ensure healthcare, clean water and usable roads?" they ask.

Show threadSteve Randy WaldmanNov 14, 2023

@passenger @HeavenlyPossum we do also see states like the Scandinavians, that provide all of those goods, and a degree of general security nearly unheard of in human history as a universal public good as well.

all states are imperfect, and even some very proud states might deserve the moniker "failed". it's unfair to compare only the worst thought-experiment outcomes under anarchy to only the best states. but there are and have been some remarkable states!

Show threadPassengerNov 14, 2023

@interfluidity @HeavenlyPossum

That's a fair point. Some states are certainly better than others. The one I live in has some of the wealthiest and most educated people in the world, as well as some of the best infrastructure, but this is largely a legacy thing - the state has become a mix of paralysis and capricious cruelty, has been unable to face modern challenges, and is letting things decay. Not all have fucked it to this degree.

There are two-hundred-ish states in the world, depending on how you personally recognise them. Of those two hundred, how many would you class as successful? How many have mobilised the resources within their borders to face their current challenges (or whatever you personally define as "successful"; this is something that nobody's going to define precisely, so some subjectivity is fine)?

Of those successful states, how many are superficially fine but building up to a rupture? Lebanon, for example, was the great Middle East success story, until it suddenly fell apart under the weight of the corruption and inequality it had been accumulating during the good years.

Of those successful states, how many are only successful because other states or other peoples exist in a less-successful situation? South Korea and Taiwan, for example, are wealthy but very dependent on their electronics industries, which depend on rare metals extracted by slave labour in Africa and elsewhere.

Show threadSteve Randy Waldman
@passenger @HeavenlyPossum i think analyzing these questions — why beyond our gauzy fairy tales do some states seem to succeed for a while? what part of that success represents genuine virtue, what part of it is due to awfulnesses we paper over? how can we sustain the success while increasing the virtues and mitigating the awfulness? — these are the crucial questions. 1/
Nov 15, 2023 at 1:38amWeb
Show threadSteve Randy WaldmanNov 15, 2023
@passenger @HeavenlyPossum what i don’t think is sufficient is to say, well, just don’t do the awful stuff and everything will be great. to the degree the apparent success depends on the awful stuff, things won’t be great if you just stop. you have to actually figure out what you can do to make thriving consistent with less exploitation and subordination. and that’s hard, but i don’t think impossible. 2/
Show threadSteve Randy WaldmanNov 15, 2023
@passenger @HeavenlyPossum when you analyze the world in functional terms, what is functional and what is moral don’t magically coincide. our work is to figure out how to make goods that contain strong tensions and contradictions between them able to coexist. /fin