Column: This is what happens when you take Ayn Rand seriously

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/column-this-is-what-happens-when-you-take-ayn-rand-seriously/

What was the conflict between Marx and Bakunin, philosophically speaking?

From Reddit:

Most basically, it came down to the role of the state in revolution. Marx had theorized that society would progress from capitalism, the political and economic dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (capitalist owning class), to socialism, the political and economic dictatorship of the proletariat (working class), to communism, which would be classless and stateless. Marx's vision of this transitional socialism entailed a revolutionary state, controlled by the working class. I'd note here that Marx did not use the term "dictatorship" as we now do, to mean autocratic rule, but instead theorized that every society is controlled by a certain class, which is the one that controls productive property, and that the state effectively serves the interest of this class. This is why he theorized that there must be a dictatorship of the entire working class to achieve communism (which would be stateless).

Bakunin, the most influential anarchist of his time, saw the state as a fundamentally authoritarian institution. He held that the abolition of the state was necessary for the true abolition of capitalism and the exploitation and alienation that went with it. On this topic, he wrote, “How can a free and equal society arise from an authoritarian organization? It is impossible.” To Bakunin, the state was not a tool that could be used to reach a stateless society, and any such attempt would lead to a dependence upon that state. While Marxists contended that anarchists could never succeed in the long term, anarchists held that Marxist revolution would not lead to a truly free society.

This difference was really brought to the fore in the aftermath of the Paris Commune of 1871, a two month long revolution in which the workers of Paris seized control of their city, raised the red flag, and instituted the most radical program ever devised at that point in history. See this post for more specifics. Both hailed it as the first great working class revolution, but because of the way the Commune was run, anarchists claimed that it was stateless and Marxists claimed that it represented a revolutionary state in transition to communism. Marx also held that the Commune ought to have centralized power, which put him at odds with Bakunin and the anarchists. Ultimately, this is what pushed the two over the edge, leading to the expulsion of Bakunin and the anarchists from the International Workingmen's Association.

In addition to the role of the state, a major difference was that while Marx was a communist, Bakunin was a collectivist. Anarchist communism would later become the dominant strain of anarchism after Kropotkin's works at the end of the 19th century, but at this point, collectivism dominated organized anarchism. While communism holds "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need", collectivism does not abolish currency and allows for some variation in wealth. However, at this point historically, this difference was not so important as the difference in revolutionary methods. Both were ultimately advocating collective ownership and direction of productive property by the workers, and the ultimate goal of a classless and stateless society.

The rise of American authoritarianism

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism

A surprisingly accurate description of anarchism from TVTropes

TVTropes: Useful Notes - Anarchism

"Anarchy is, and always has been, a romance. It is also clearly the only morally sensible way to run the world." —Alan Moore

Of all the political philosophies that have existed throughout history, anarchism is perhaps the most misunderstood. With general impressions ranging from the idea that Anarchy Is Chaos to scary images of Bomb-Throwing Anarchists from popular fiction, what most probably don't realise is there's actually a wealth of complex and multilayered ideas associated with anarchism that have had an impact on radical politics, the arts, and even mainstream culture.

The definition of anarchism to most people means "belief the state is bad and shouldn't exist." However, while all anarchists are anti-statists, it is not the only or, in most cases, even the primary part of their ideology.

Anarchism is the belief that rulership as a whole, not just the state, should not exist note and that people should instead organize their social relations and institutions though voluntary cooperation without hierarchies of power. So what characterises anarchism is not anti-statism so much as anti-authoritarianism. This means that most anarchists would not welcome a reduction in state power if it meant an increase of other kinds of authoritarianism as a result. For example, privatising a public health service may weaken the state, but increase the power of corporations, and so anarchists would probably oppose doing so, even though generally speaking, they don't support state or private management of things and instead push for voluntary, localised, and cooperative institutions organised from the bottom-up through decentralised networks and run via processes of participatory democracy and workplace self-management.

Another way of thinking about anarchism is that it's "democracy without the state" or "socialism when it occurs on a voluntary basis". This tends to confuse many who

(1) associate the word democracy with representative government; and
(2) especially those who associate the word socialism with statism.

In fact, the word democracy originally meant direct democracy, like in Ancient Greece, and the word socialism originally referred to a number of economic systems in which economic institutions were run by those who actually worked in them. It's the earlier meanings of both words that anarchists use when talking about them. As well as the original political meaning of the word libertarian, which, despite its modern Anglo-American use to mean laissez-faire capitalist, was actually first used by anarchist socialists to mean "anti-authoritarian". A frequently used synonym for social anarchism is libertarian socialism.

In addition to the systems of centralised power found in statism and capitalism, anarchists also support dissolving all forms of social hierarchy and domination (i.e., rulership) - such as sexism, racism, queerphobia, ableism, speciesism, and the domination of nature - and restructuring society on a decentralised and horizontalist basis.

There are two main categories of political anarchist thought, divided chiefly by what kind of economic system they want to build.

Market Anarchists want a stateless free market economy made up of producer and consumer cooperatives and self-employed professionals instead of private corporations and wage-labour. While once very popular, especially in America, market anarchism has ended up becoming a minority in the larger anarchist canon.

Social Anarchists, on the other hand, want what could be called a "free commons", note in which systems of decentralised and localised planning of the economy (by directly-democratic popular assemblies and worker-controlled enterprises) replace traditional market relations. In terms of numbers, this is by far the most prominent anarchist tradition and is what most people are referring to when they talk about "anarchism" without prefixes.

Both of these in turn are sub-divided into four overall proposals for different economic systems, each associated primarily with a different anarchist "founding father", with the first two being forms of market anarchism and the later two social anarchism:

Mutualist anarchism (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon)
Individualist anarchism (Benjamin Tucker)
Collectivist anarchism (Mikhail Bakunin)
Communist anarchism (Peter Kropotkin)

Despite their differences, they all share a social commitment to the ideal of organising things on the basis of "voluntary, non-hierarchical cooperation".

Anarchism was extremely popular in labour movements around the world in the late 19th and early 20th century, so much so that for a time it surpassed Marxism as the principle philosophy of working class struggles. Historian Benidict Anderson makes the case that anarchism was in fact the first "anti-systemic" movement that was fully global in scale, having influence in areas Marxism didn't reach for decades, like Japan, the Philippines, Latin America, Egypt, and Southern Africa.

Its popularity waned somewhat after the Russian Revolution in which Marxists took power for the first time. Then after a last hurrah in the late 1930s, in which there was an anarchist revolution in Spain and Catalonia, it flickered out in terms of appeal in the Global North except for occasional influences within environmental, anti-war, and student movements, though it still maintained an active presence in other parts of the world. After a long time in a relative political wilderness, anarchism has seen something of a resurgence in worldwide political and social movements since the 1999 World Trade Organisation protests in Seattle over corporate-led globalisation policies, and especially since the 2011 "squares movements" around the world like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street.

The anthropologist David Graeber has opined that most social movements in the present day - structured through horizontal networks of cooperation rather than top-down hierarchies - are basically anarchist in their principles, even if they don't necessary use the word to describe themselves.

For those new to anarchist ideas, there's been a massive project aimed at explaining everything about (social) anarchist theory, practice, and history called An Anarchist FAQ available at this link, and a series of introductory videos on social anarchist/left-libertarian ideas is available here and here. Some good book-length intros can be found in Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall, Anarchy in Action by Colin Ward, Red Emma Speaks by Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Its Aspirarions by Cindy Milstein, and A Living Spirit of Revolt by Ziga Vodovnik.

(Note: As social anarchism is by far the majority tendency within anarchism as a whole, most of the following article will address primarily what social anarchists believe, but with occasional explanations of what market anarchists desire when the two differ.note )

Not Just Free Speech, but Freedom Itself

My position on free speech is that it only truly exists for the owners of capital; I can go stand on a street corner and shout to the heavens, but it isn't until I have a platform for my message that my "speech" is heard. These platforms for free speech are capitalist-owned properties: web sites, television networks, etc. Everyone else (99.99% of the population) is forced to couch their speech to fit the framework of whomever owns said platform; Reddit is a good example of this. Supposedly a "bastion of free speech," in actuality it is anything but--take a look at how articles regarding the TPP are censored.

Individual "rights" are ultimately a liberal red herring dangled in front of the working class to give the illusion of liberty: here are the rights you have, because we allow you to have them.

That's just my opinion, though. If you're interested in understanding an additional anarchist perspective on civil liberties, I highly recommend the essay Not Just Free Speech, but Freedom Itself: A Critique of Civil Liberties. It's a short read, but here's a particularly relevant excerpt:

The discourse of free speech in democracy presumes that no significant imbalances of power exist, and that the primary mechanism of change is rational discussion. In fact, a capitalist elite controls most resources, and power crystallizes upward along multiple axes of oppression. Against this configuration, it takes a lot more than speech alone to open the possibility of social change.

There can be no truly free speech except among equals—among parties who are not just equal before the law, but who have comparable access to resources and equal say in the world they share. Can an employee really be said to be as free to express herself as her boss, if the latter can take away her livelihood? Are two people equally free to express their views when one owns a news network and the other cannot even afford to photocopy fliers? In the US, where donations to political candidates legally constitute speech, the more money you have, the more “free speech” you can exercise. As the slogan goes, freedom isn’t free—and nowhere is that clearer than with speech.

Contrary to the propaganda of democracy, ideas alone have no intrinsic force. Our capacity to act on our beliefs, not just to express them, determines how much power we have. In this sense, the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor is strikingly apt: you need capital to participate, and the more you have, the greater your ability to enact the ideas you buy into. Just as the success of a few entrepreneurs and superstars is held up as proof that the free market rewards hard work and ingenuity, the myth of the marketplace of ideas suggests that the capitalist system persists because everyone—billionaire and bellboy alike—agrees it is the best idea.

…So Long as You Don’t Do Anything

But what if, despite the skewed playing field, someone manages to say something that threatens to destabilize the power structure? If history is any indication, it swiftly turns out that freedom of expression is not such a sacrosanct right after all. In practice, we are permitted free speech only insofar as expressing our views changes nothing. The premise that speech alone cannot be harmful implies that speech is precisely that which is ineffectual: therefore anything effectual is not included among one’s rights.

During World War I, the Espionage Act criminalized any attempt to “cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, [or] refusal of duty” or to obstruct recruiting for the armed forces. President Woodrow Wilson urged the bill’s passage because he believed antiwar activity could undermine the US war effort. Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman were arrested under this law for printing anarchist literature that opposed the war. Likewise, the Anarchist Exclusion Act and the subsequent Immigration Act were used to deport or deny entry to any immigrant “who disbelieves in or who is opposed to all organized government.” Berkman, Goldman, and hundreds of other anarchists were deported under these acts. There are countless other examples showing that when speech can threaten the foundation of state power, even the most democratic government doesn’t hesitate to suppress it.

Thus, when the state presents itself as the defender of free speech, we can be sure that this is because our rulers believe that allowing criticism will strengthen their position more than suppressing it could. Liberal philosopher and ACLU member Thomas Emerson saw that freedom of speech “can act as a kind of ‘safety valve’ to let off steam when people might otherwise be bent on revolution.” Therein lies the true purpose of the right to free speech in the US.