Back to the question of what we will replace the present welfare-warfare state with once it has finished running itself down, an event that is likely to occur soon enough. We should aspire to establish the foundations for a civilization that can endure and be preserved not merely for decades or even centuries, but for millennia. The Icelandic Kingdom survived as quasi-anarchy for three centuries and even then fell under the rule of only the Norwegian monarchy. The Holy Roman Empire endured for nine centuries before the rise of the absolute monarchs and the god-awful nation-state system during the sixteenth century. And the traditional civilizations of Russia and China enjoyed a similar lifespan. Indeed, Matthew Raphael Johnson reveals an astonishing truth about Russia prior to the coup d’état of Lenin and Trotsky in 1917:
. . . there were 5,000 full time policemen in the entire empire of 180 million souls, which would make Russia one very poor example of a police state. In fact, the total number of government workers, including the zemstvo employees, policemen and employees at all levels never exceeded 330,000. By contrast, much smaller France, in 1906, had budgeted for 500,000 employees.
How can we replicate this on an even greater level? The primary dangers to any political order are plutocracy, bureaucracy, and mobocracy. Plutocracy can be avoided by the establishment of a cultural foundation that devalues material pursuits and glorifies learning, knowledge, and wisdom in the ideological realm, and the decentralized control over resources by individuals, families, workers, and community groups in the structural realm. Bureaucracy can be avoided through decentralized political systems involving small states governing small populations with limited amounts of resources and an expansive voluntary sector. Mobocracy can be avoided in part by the principle of radical decentralization so that “voting with your feet” actually becomes feasible.
If any society is to advance itself, it must make a painstaking effort to insure that its heretics are safe from persecution, whether by greedy plutocrats, power hungry bureaucrats, or ignorant mobs. Those who are familiar with the internal operations of modern democratic regimes know well that legislation is typically for sale to the highest bidder. In other words, democratic governments constitute a type of marketplace for coercion, a shopping mall of political repression and plundering. Those who wish to order government on the market seem to forget that there exists a market for coercive violence. And if the proprietors of interest group democracy are not constrained by the Bill of Rights or the constitutional separation of powers, there is little reason to believe that the proprietors of quasi-feudal insurance agencies will be constrained by Murray Rothbard’s “Libertarian Law Code.”
“Participatory democracy” (or “directdemocracy” as it is sometimes called) brings with it the flaws endemic to all democratic orders. If Plato’s warnings about the susceptibility of the masses to the demagogue and Thomas Aquinas’ fears of mobocracy apply to modern parliamentary states, would they not apply much more to unbridled popular democracy? The historical track record of these kinds of regimes is not a particularly appealing one. As previously mentioned, it was popular democracy that killed Socrates and initiated the Salem witch trials, and some of the more appealing aspects of the traditional US constitutional system are those existing outside the reach of majority rule, such as the Bill of Rights. Personally, I am more into the idea of limited government than popular government. We should consider the words of Proudhon on this question:
. . . because of this ignorance of the primitiveness of their instincts, of the urgency of their needs, of the impatience of their desires, the people show a preference toward summary forms of authority. The thing they are looking for is not legal guarantees, of which they do not have any idea and whose power they do not understand, they do not care for intricate mechanisms or for checks and balances for which, on their own account, they have no use, it is a boss in whose word they confide, a leader whose intentions are known to the people and who devotes himself to its interests, that they are seeking. This chief they provided with limitless authority and irresistible power. Inclined toward suspicion and calumny, but incapable of methodical discussion, they believe in nothing definite save the human will.
Left to themselves or led by their tribunes the masses never established anything. They have their face turned backwards; no tradition is formed among them; no orderly spirit, no idea which acquires the force of law. Of politics they understand nothing except the element of intrigue; of the art of governing, nothing except prodigality and force; of justice nothing but mere indictment; of liberty, nothing but the ability to set up idols which are smashed the next morning. The advent of democracy starts an era of retrogression which will ensure the death of the nation . . .
If we reject both plutocracy and mobocracy when searching for the most optimal system of social management, we might wish to consult the “wisdom of the ancients” on the matter. It was Socrates who was among the first to postulate the concept of consent as the foundation of political legitimacy. For Socrates, the rules of the polis were “just” if they were predicated on the right of emigration, whereby the dissenting citizen could leave the city with his family and property. It is essential to recognize Socratic notions of consent as explicit and conventional in nature, as oppose to the implicit or metaphysical conceptions of “consent” later found in the works of liberal thinkers like John Locke. Explicit consent as the foundation of legitimacy necessitates that political units be highly localized and autonomous in nature, a fact recognized by Aristotle. Such arrangements allowed for a wide plurality of political or cultural identities.
The notion of explicit consent continued into the medieval era, when “no taxation without consent” would often be the battle cry of subjects in revolt against their exploitative lords. Explicit or direct consent is to be differentiated from the conception of “no taxation without representation” found in early liberal theory, whereby the process of “consent” is removed from the individual subject to political functionaries claiming to speak for entire communities. Obviously, “consent” of this type is bogus and impossible. Indeed, it was in response to the failure of liberal regimes to curb the usurpations of the state that classical anarchism arose as a revolutionary force in the nineteenth century. So for consent theory to maintain legitimacy, it should be obvious enough that the highest and primary unit of social organization should be the sovereign local community, the polis of Aristotle. The implementation of the Socratic-Aristotelian-Jeffersonian-Proudhonian ideal would require the dismantling of conventional nation-states into autonomous provinces, and the subsequent decentralization of the provinces into confederations of free cities, supreme counties, townships, and village communities, with each of these in turn organized as an aggregate of sovereign citizens (indeed, a conceptually interesting “sovereign citizen movement” has taken root among elements of the American “far right” in recent years).
From American history, we see the Puritan founding of Massachusetts, the Anglicans in Virginia, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, Mormons in Utah, and so on. Norman Mailer offered a similar vision in his campaign for the independence and decentralization of New York City:
I ran for mayor of New York in the hope that a Left-Right coalition could be formed and this Left-Right pincers could make a dent in the entrenched power in the center. The best to be said for that campaign is that it had its charm. I am not so certain, however, that this idea must remain eternally without wings. It may yet take an alchemy of the Left and Right to confound the corporate center. Our notion was built on the premise that we did not really know the elements of a good, viable society. We all had our differing ideals, morals, and political ethics, but rarely found a way to practice them directly. So, we called for Power to the Neighborhoods. We suggested that New York City become a state itself, the fifty-first. Its citizens would then have the power to create a variety of new neighborhoods, new townships, all built on separate concepts, core neighborhoods founded on one or another of our cherished notions from the Left or the R
ight. One could have egalitarian towns and privileged places, or, for those who did not wish to be bothered with living in so detailed (and demanding) a society, there would be the more familiar and old way of doing things—the City of the State of New York—a government for those who did not care—just like old times.
In addressing this question of how to best avoid the combined dangers of plutocracy and mobocracy, I can only roll out a few meager suggestions. As Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn said of the political outlook of Plato:
According to Plato, there can be no good government unless the philosophers are kings and the kings philosophers, by which he does not mean Ph.D.s and crowned heads. What he does mean is the rule of those well-informed and knowledgeable. But do not forget there are two aspects to this: There is knowledge, and there is experience, and they have to go together. Knowledge alone is insufficient; practice alone is insufficient. To be a good ruler, one needs the combination of knowledge and practice.
Kuehnelt-Leddihn contrasted the Platonic view with that of modern plutocratic democracies:
In the United States illiterates are now admitted to the polls. Sometime in the coming century, people will rack their brains pondering how nations with tremendous scientific and intellectual achievements could have given uninstructed and untrained men and women the right to vote equally uninstructed and untrained people into responsible positions.
If anarcho-capitalism brings with it the danger of plutocracy and if “participatory democracy” of the type favored by most left-anarchists brings the danger of mobocracy, perhaps a third alternative would be something akin to the classical Chinese civil service examination system. In that system, a citizen typically studied for decades in order to pass the most rigorous of examinations in order to be allowed admittance into political management. The examination system was rather egalitarian in nature, allowing entry by qualified persons from all social classes. Its main weakness was the fact that the scholarly elite were still subject to the dictates of the Emperor and his broader system of nepotism and patronage, so the scholars ended up being little more than court intellectuals for the ruling class. However, a way to reverse this would be to make the highest body of government into a type of monastery of scholars, where only the most demonstrably brilliant minds were admitted into positions of leadership. Even then, there is the danger of a new caste system developing whereby the scholarly caste simply becomes the new priesthood or the new Brahmins.
The best check on this problem might be to make the policies and plans formulated by the scholarly elite subject to public accountability by means of public assemblies, public juries, and popular referendums. For example, a federation of anarchies might conduct foreign policy through a “council on national defense” composed of the most experienced and best trained minds in the fields of history, military science, international relations, cultural studies, social psychology, diplomatic history, political economy, and so forth, with the general council then being assisted by sub-councils of an even more specialized nature. However, the “council on national defense” could not simply decide to make war on its own initiative. A proposal for war would have to be approved by a super-majority vote of the entire affected population. Matters of supreme importance (like war and peace) might be subject to approval by general referendum, while matters of lesser importance (like a treaty establishing an agreement to share a particular seaport with another country) might need to be approved only by a popular assembly composed of recallable delegates sent by local community or occupational committees. Similarly, any law enacted (whether by legislation or by judicial precedent) would be subject to ongoing approval by popular juries and competing private judges or judicial panels enjoying the full legal right of nullification.
Let us now summarize what I regard as the core propositions we must postulate. First, we need a “vanguard” of radically anti-state and anti-ruling class activists and intellectuals to come together as the brains trust and leadership corps of a broad anti-establishment populist movement. The most optimal method of pursuing this objective in modern America would be the creation of a coalition of minor political parties and activist organizations and the consolidation of these into a larger party, organized as a federation of local parties. The national party would deal only with pressing national matters on which there is common agreement among all of the radical camps, with matters of specific economic, political, or cultural arrangements, or matters of religious, ethnic, and social conflict, being left to the local parties. The principal purpose of the party would be the creation of a “coalition of coalitions” organized around anti-state and anti-ruling class issues, with the programs of the local party units orienting themselves towards local political culture. In the electoral arena, we would boycott major national elections on the ground that these are fraudulent, and instead seek local and regional positions which might be more reasonably attainable. It is essential that the electoral organizations be both assisted and policed by networks of grassroots activist organizations as well as anarcho-Machiavellian advisors who are largely directing things from behind the scenes. Electoral action would be regarded not as an end but as a means to an end, along with militant strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, riots, the creation of alternative infrastructure, tax resistance, and other subversive actions.
In breaking down the state, we should seek to bolster local and regional secessionists and other separatist movements. We should also work to create a plurality of power structures that can effectively challenge the state. This has sometimes been referred to as “building the new society within the shell of the old.” We can agitate for an end to the states’ monopolistic courts system in favor of competing private, common law, merchant, or customary courts, systems of negotiation, mediation, or arbitration, and an end to the bureaucratic police forces maintained by the state in favor of citizen posses, militias, and so forth. We can also form popular assemblies that run parallel to the state’s legislatures and demand the legal empowerment of these. We can agitate for the decentralization of state governments to the municipal or county level and the subsequent decentralization of the county and city governments to the neighborhood or village level. Another effort might be a push for the closing of the federal and state prison systems and the relocation of prisoners to penal colonies with more normalized living conditions. We can demand an end to the use of patronage in political appointments in favor of a system of meritocracy perhaps drawn on the model of the Chinese civil service examination system. This model might be particularly beneficial as a process for the staffing of appeals courts, the supervisory staffs of penal institutions, and, as mentioned, institutions of defense and diplomacy. Localities and regions can begin to assert their traditional Jeffersonian right of nullification of the decrees of objectionable central authorities just as juries can begin to reclaim their traditional Magna Carta right of jury nullification of objectionable prosecutions. On the economic level, we can develop organizations whose purpose is to agitate for the conversion of state or state-corporate industries and services into worker, consumer, or municipal cooperatives. These can be supplemented by independent labor organizations and organizations formed for the defense of alternative economic enterprises.
8. Extremism Without Apologies
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
—Barry Goldwater (speech written by Karl Hess)
The most frequent objections I encounter to my own political outlook and agenda are typically those summarized or accompanied by the labels of “extreme,” “inflammatory,” “fanatical,” or “violent.” To these charges, my plea would be one of “guilty, but proud.” Those who make these charges are typically middle-class Americans with little or no experience of direct conflict with the System. However, when I test my views on those who know what it means to be on the bottom end looking up, they pick up on what I am saying right away and are frequently in complete sy
mpathy. The classical anarchist Mikhail Bakunin recognized that the class vanguard in the struggle against the state must come from those with the least to lose. I agree. Bakunin’s recognition of the necessity of the role of principled militants as the intellectual and activist vanguard of the revolutionary struggle is also consistent with Friedrich von Hayek’s observation that new and revolutionary ideas typically begin with the intellectual and philosophical elite and then “trickle down” into the ranks of the masses, finding their way into the minds of dissident intellectuals, their student radical followers, bohemians, counterculturalists, the lumpenproletariat, the conventional poor, the working classes, the middle classes, and then, finally, the establishment. Over time, all ideas that begin as radical or revolutionary ideas are compromised and moderated as their popularity and acceptance increases. For better or worse, success tends to breed moderation. However, in its initial stages a revolutionary outlook must seek not popularity and passive acceptance but fervent commitment. For this reason, those who would seek to build an authentic insurgent movement against the present American regime and ruling class must be unapologetic extremists.
This does not mean that we do not produce propaganda campaigns oriented towards appealing to the ordinary sensibilities of the commoners. However, it does mean that attitude is just as important as strategy or ideology. Far too many North American radicals are have fallen prey to the delusions of liberalism, democratism, pacifism, humanism, and other “feel good-do good” mentalities. This kind of attitude needs to be abandoned in favor of the Nietzschean warrior spirit. We need to cultivate among ourselves and our sympathizers a mindset that more closely resembles that of the Islamic jihadists or the guerrilla fighters of Latin America. In the nation of Colombia, a substantial portion of the insurgent forces consists of teenage girls. These young women no doubt display a much greater warrior spirit that what is typically found among adult males in the North American radical milieus. A determined resistance force could launch an effective assault on the decadent and decaying US regime and ruling class with relative ease. Kevin Carson aptly describes the crimes of our enemies:
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