Aristotle → Politics → Alice Turtle’s Guide to Anarchism

I’ve been trying to read Aristole’s Politics on his terms, but I’ve also been hovering over it from an anarchist viewpoint taking notes.

Aristotle was no anarchist, and there is little evidence in the Politics that he considered an anarchist point of view. Nonetheless, I think we can draw useful lessons for anarchism from what Aristotle taught.

What would an Aristotelian anarchism, or anarchist Aristotelian politics, look like?

I thought I might try to consider the anarchist constitution using Aristotle’s method and some of his initial assumptions about ethics and purpose. Originally I was going to write “Aristotle’s Guide to Anarchism” but that overstates my ability to keep up with the thinking of the original, and would be liable to mislead some poor undergraduate into citing it as a genuine source.

So meet Alice Turtle. Alice Turtle is a wise old creature with an Aristotelian outlook on life and a keen interest in human politics. She doesn’t have any patience for the sexist and slavery-condoning aspects of ancient Greek civilization, however, which is fortunate for us, as most modern human anarchists don’t either.

Alice will fill in the gap that Aristotle left in his Politics. But why did Aristotle have this blind spot to anarchist political organization in the first place?

A likely possibility is that his Politics derives from his notes for lectures he was giving to students of political science, who would have been members of the ruling class preparing to take their place ruling or advising the rulers of existing, very archical states in Greece. Advice on how to found and maintain anarchist constitutions just wasn’t what his students were interested in.

It’s also possible that he did have opinions on the subject, but they have been lost. The Politics is fragmentary in many ways, and if Aristotle had anything to say about anarchy it may have fallen through the historical cracks.

Or perhaps Aristotle did express an opinion about anarchism in the Politics, but you just have to look very carefully to find it. There is something of an academic industry that concerns itself with “esoteric” readings of the ancient philosophers. The idea is that for various reasons, these philosophers could not explicitly state or record the full extent of their teachings — for example they feared reprisals, or they feared the effect their teachings would have on the mass of untutored people who might get ahold of them. Only those students who engaged with these philosophers in a substantial, non-superficial way would be able to discern the nod-and-wink message under the surface.

If I were going to try to find an esoteric anarchism in Aristotle’s politics, I would start with two sections in particular. In chapter ⅹⅲ of book Ⅲ, he considers the person of extraordinarily superior virtues. What should we do with such a person? Should we put them in charge? Aristotle says no, instead: “such men we must take not to be part of the state… [T]here is no law that embraces men of that calibre: they are themselves law.” Then, towards the end of the same book, he explains that “in the best state… the virtue of a man and of a citizen are identical.”

Explicitly, Aristotle says that men of extraordinary virtues are dangerous to the state and ought perhaps to be exiled. But this is a strange thing for Aristotle to say in light of his other teachings, and seems to invite a search for an esoteric reading, perhaps along these lines:

1. the best man is the most virtuous man
2. such a man is outside of the state and is a law unto himself
3. in the best state, the virtue of a man and of a citizen are identical
4. ∴ in the best state, the best citizens will be outside of the state and a law unto themselves
5. ∴ the best state is anarchy

This reading, in other words, puts Aristotle’s definition of the best citizen in line with Ammon Hennacy’s definition of an anarchist: “someone who doesn’t need a cop to make him behave.”

But another possibility is that Aristotle did not consider the workings of an anarchic society to be a problem that needed solving, or to be a problem for which his framework for solving the problems of monarchies, oligarchies, and democracies would work as well. To admit anarchy under his framework, in some places we will have to stretch it a little, and in others we may need to be more inventive.

That said, Aristotle’s concentration on the political concerns of small, polis-sized units (as opposed to nation-, empire-, or confederation-sized ones) makes it potentially more useful to students of anarchist political constitutions than a lot of what gets taught under the “political philosophy” label today. Aristotle thought that the polis was the final stage of human organization, and he likely would have frowned upon those more ginormous political organizations (he is pointedly silent about empires at a time when his former student Alexander was busy conquering his). It may be easier to stretch his philosophy to cover an anarchic polis than to cover an oligarchic empire.

The name Aristotle gave to the goal accomplished by a successful polis was autarkeia — self-rule, or self-sufficiency. So it will be Alice Turtle’s task, and ours, to show how this can be accomplished and maintained in an anarchic polis.

To be continued…

Alice Turtle hopes to fill a gap in Aristotle’s Politics by extending it to cover the anarchist polis. Today she explains what she means to accomplish by this.

Lots of anarchist philosophy concerns what is just, and why a coercive state and other such institutions are not. It justifies why anarchism is correct, and why various justifications for a coercive state are flawed.

I’m going to leave all that aside and take it as a given that you hope to live in a healthy anarchist polis and are more interested in the how — how to make that happen if it isn’t so already, or how to defend an anarchy from the various potent and often successful threats to its success.

As Aristotle pointed out, good political systems are constantly under threat of political instability and decay. They don’t just take care of themselves, but must be tended and nurtured. Anarchy is no different.

I’m not going to wade into the debates about which kind of anarchism is best, how property is established and what sort of ownership is just, and so forth. I will be largely agnostic about the many debates that have roiled anarchist political philosophy over the years and the various hyphenated-anarchist tendencies. I will even go so far as to say that while it’s indeed important that your anarchist community come to define property (for example) in a way that is just, it is perhaps more important that everyone is on the same page about how property is to be defined. Harmony > Justice may turn out to be a good general rule of thumb here, as much as it may stick in the craw of a good anarchist philosopher.

The constitution of an anarchy (not to be confused with a written document like “The Constitution”) includes an understanding of the meaning of things like property, as well as a set of processes for handling collective action problems of many sorts, problems of authority, defense & crime, free riders, how to take care of those who can’t take care of themselves, and so forth. These problems don’t go away under anarchy just because their coercive, institutional solutions are out-of-bounds, so we’ll need to consider different sorts of solutions, or maybe, on a more meta-level, consider the ways in which the best such solutions can be arrived at.

But I won’t spend a lot of time mapping out the finer details of the anarchist utopia. For such things you would be better off, I think, leaving the armchair philosophers like me behind and looking instead at the empirical evidence of how existing or historical anarchist cultures have solved such problems (for example, the studies by Elinor Ostrom and of James C. Scott).

Instead I will give a high-level overview of what the citizen of an anarchy ought to be concerned with in order to promote the health, thriving, and security of her or his polis and those within it. The reader may find that this feels as fragmentary and incomplete as Aristotle’s Politics. So be it.

To be continued…

Alice Turtle hopes to fill a gap in Aristotle’s Politics by extending it to cover the anarchist polis. Today she explains what this “anarchist constitution” amounts to.

Anarchy has of course the popular meaning of disorder and chaos, and of course that isn’t what we mean by it in the realm of politics. Etymologically, it means without-rule, which makes it a sort of void, which alternatives like demo-cracy, aristo-cracy, etc. fill. For our purposes this won’t do either.

Even some anarchists tend to describe anarchism mostly in terms of absences or lacks. No ruler, no states, no classes, no hierarchy… things of that sort. But this is rarely helpful and sometimes misleading. It would be better to start by defining anarchy positively, by what it is.

To begin with, anarchy is a description of a variety of political constitution with a collective purpose. In this, it is like most of the other forms of government that Aristotle discussed (kingship, aristocracy, oligarchy, polity, and democracy), and so it is amenable to being analyzed in a similar way.

It might be objected right away that anarchy either does not have a collective purpose (that it is merely haphazard, or that it is at most a collection of individuals with individual purposes) or that it is not a variety of political constitution. I think these objections are mistaken, and I hope you will see why as I explain how a healthy and stable anarchy requires both things.

Anarchy as a Variety of Constitution

When Aristotle described his varieties of constitution, he said that for each, there is a good form and a bad form. In the good form, the rulers rule for the benefit of everybody and for the good of the polis; in the bad form, the rulers rule for themselves only. I think the same can be said for anarchy, though in an anarchy the rulers are everybody (not just many, few, or one). So let’s update his table:

So “anarchy” in this sense is the variety of constitution in which everyone rules on an equal basis, and these rulers rule for the benefit of the polis, something which also redounds to the general benefit of those in it.

But this talk of “rule” and “constitution” does not at first sound very anarchic, so let me clarify: By “constitution” I just mean “how things are constituted.” It’s a shorthand way of referring to the forms, customs, understandings, and practices that govern (there’s another dirty word we should get used to reclaiming) how people behave in the political environment (the environment of the polis — the community). A constitution can be codified more or less formally but doesn’t have to be, and a formal written constitution isn’t necessarily a very reliable guide anyway: it typically fails to capture more than a tiny slice of the whole constitution, and even what it does capture is rarely accurately represented.

And by how such people “rule” I mean to a great extent how they “govern themselves,” as it’s the usual principle of anarchy that everyone is expected to govern themselves rather than be governed by others. If people under anarchy govern themselves in a manner that is short-sightedly selfish and damaging to the polis, they will not long govern themselves at all. If they govern themselves in a way that contributes to a thriving anarchy, they may be able to keep at it.

Enlightened Self-Interest

This is more a matter of enlightened self interest than of noble sacrifice for the collective. Once you realize the importance of the health of the community to your own thriving, you will leave vulgar individualism behind and see that your place as a pillar of such a community is better for you individually than some sort of lone wolf thing would be. A human being thrives best in community, community is an inherently political thing, and so the political life is not something forced upon us from outside, but is a natural outgrowth of the sort of beings we are: the polis is our natural habitat that we evolved in. You should distrust political philosophies that treat people as though we were a gas of rarely-colliding particles. We’re more of a liquid: we tug and pull and jostle one another and collectively create emergent behavior similar to how water can have waves and streams and convection in ways that lone molecules of H₂O cannot.

This also means, as we will see later in more detail, that the “night watchman state” of the minarchists — in which the state concerns itself only with defense and basic criminal law enforcement — is a pitifully impoverished one. A real and healthy constitution will have a much broader set of concerns than this, and it is one of the challenges of anarchy to coordinate this in the absence of the short cuts of a ruling class and coercive state.

It’s too much to ask that everybody in the anarchist community have this understanding of enlightened self interest. Fools and sociopaths will likely always be with us. And that certainly is one vulnerability of anarchy that we can identify right away, but not one that’s unique to anarchy. In a monarchy, there’s a chance you have a noble-minded ruler, and a chance you have a base ruler. In an oligarchy, some oligarchs will have an aristocratic bent, while others will just be out for #1. In a democracy, sometimes the people will be restrained, other times the majority will flex its muscles destructively. With anarchy as with these other cases, deviations from the ideal are inevitable. But also, the more that the rulers (in an anarchy, most everyone) rule wisely, the healthier the constitution will be; the more the rulers deviate from healthy rule, the more vulnerable to decay the constitution becomes and the more danger the community is in. Don’t demand or expect perfection, but don’t stop aiming for it.

Freedom from Drudgery?

Aristotle thought that another reason people come together into a political community is in order to be free from drudgery. What he meant by this seems to have been that you come together to find someone else to do the drudgery for you. In his time that meant slaves, women, migrant workers, and the lower classes. Under the sort of anarchy we’re considering, options like these are unlikely to be open to you. But someone will still need to do the drudgery, and it might just be you.

Is this perhaps a drawback? Is it too much to ask for someone under an anarchic system to be devoted to the health of that system and the flourishing of those in it, and also to take out the trash? Or is this perhaps an advantage? Aristotle had to consider how to get buy-in to his systems from the people who did have to do the drudgery, who were supposed to serve the state but whom the state was not set up to serve. What did they get out of the deal? How were they expected to tolerate seeing the citizens of the ruling class living on easy street? Questions like these are less of a worry under an anarchic constitution that does not automatically privilege a distinct ruling class.

Some have suggested a “post-scarcity anarchy” is a possible path our technological future might take, which could free everyone from (most) drudgery. Would such a thing improve the drive to form healthy anarchies, or reduce the eagerness to swindle people into other forms of government, or would it imply such changes to human society as to make previous political philosophy obsolete? I will not hazard a guess.

Justice

A third reason Aristotle gives for forming a political community is that this is the only way to really allow for the virtue of justice to shine forth. In the absence of a political community, when two people come into conflict, the stronger or more ruthless (or the one with more allies, or whose allies are stronger or more ruthless) comes out on top. It takes coordination, collective action, subordination to group-held norms and processes, etc. — the constitution of a community, in short — to replace this with some approach to justice. How closely it approaches justice, or on the other hand how much it just becomes a more cumbersome form of might-makes-right, depends on the virtues of the community and on the health of its constitution.

(I’ll take a more in-depth look at justice in a future episode.)

In Aristotle’s models of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy, the definition of a citizen was someone who took an active role in the government, typically a policy-making one, but perhaps also administrative or judicial. The citizenry were those who took part in ruling the polis.

Under anarchy, everyone rules themselves, but everyone is also responsible (or ought to be) for guiding, defending, and promoting the flourishing of the anarchic community as a whole. This is what it means to be a citizen of an anarchy, and while it’s open to all, it’s also opt-in. You are a citizen if you participate in promoting the health of the community; if not, you’re just another schmoe. So there is a ruling class, of sorts. Anarchy is ruled by those who show up and pitch in.

Aristotle might argue that this is a sort of spon­ta­ne­ous ar­is­toc­ra­cy of those who give a damn, and he might be right. I can even imagine cases in which a spon­ta­ne­ous mon­ar­chy emerges of that one person who knows what they’re doing for a specific project, or a spon­ta­ne­ous de­mo­cra­cy of people who are just con­tent to go along with the ma­jor­i­ty opin­ion on some sub­ject be­cause that seems about as good as any other option. What dis­tin­guishes an­ar­chy is that none of these things becomes in­sti­tu­tion­al­ized and per­ma­nent. No­body gets in­stalled in the ruling class or ban­ished from it, but in­stead it is as it does.

The trick is making sure it stays that way. Power corrupts, and a temporary aristocracy, or monarchy, or majority, may forget that it is temporary and begin to become accustomed to its privileges. But more about that later. Next I want to consider more about how to be a citizen of an anarchy.

To be continued…

Alice Turtle hopes to fill a gap in Aristotle’s Politics by extending it to cover the anarchist polis. Today she considers the question of how to be a good citizen in an anarchy.

In Aristotle’s framework, only a minority of residents of a polis were considered citizens, where a citizen is defined as someone who participates in the governing of the polis in policy-making and administrative roles.

Under anarchy, on the other hand, participation in the governing of the polis is open to everyone, and everyone governs herself or himself, and so everyone is a citizen or citizen-like in that way. There is no exclusive ruling class. Instead there is an inclusive ruling class, one that is opt-in rather than voted-in or born-into or last-one-standing-atop-of.

By opt-in, I mean that it is an option for everyone in the community. As a practical matter, it is only really open to those who are more or less in harmony with shared community values. You can’t just wander into a community, not bother to learn the prevailing rules of the road (who owns what, which things are part of the commons and which are not, and so forth), and start throwing your weight around and expect anyone to respect what you’re up to.

It remains an option for any resident of an anarchy to try to remain aloof from politics. They might remain a hermit, or just shyly avoid expressing their opinion or helping to make community decisions. They might distrust their own judgment and cede to someone else’s.

As a result, there is a ruling class, of sorts: it’s the class of people who show up and take part. Aristotle calls a member of the ruling class a “citizen” and says that ideally this title ought to belong to those who contribute to the association of people living together for the sake of noble action. Such people are entitled to more policy-making authority and are the natural leaders of a society.

Something of this nature remains the case in anarchy. Those who contribute the most are entitled to more policy-making authority, but it’s not a quid-pro-quo. They de facto exercise such authority by virtue of the contributions they make. Who decides how wide to make the sidewalk? The people who pay for it and design it and build it do.

This makes the citizen/non-citizen difference something of a continuum. Do you understand the prevailing community understandings enough to participate in their adjudication? do you participate in community events and tasks? The more you can say “yes” the more citizenish you are. The least citizen-like members of the anarchy are nourished by its constitution but do little to help preserve, defend, and improve it. The most citizen-like members of the anarchy do the most to keep it healthy and strong.

I used to have a view of anarchist citizenship that might have been summed up as “mind your own business, and let everybody else mind theirs.” Now I think of that as not anarchy at all, but some sort of suspicious isolationism. You can care about others without being an interfering busybody, and you can take a healthy interest in the well-being and character of your neighbors without doing so at either end of a gun.

Aristotle noted that a political constitution works best when the citizenry have a common desire for its continued success (when there are few who feel they would be better off under a different system). This remains the case for anarchy, and so a good anarchist citizen who is concerned with the health of the anarchist constitution will be concerned as well with the satisfaction of all of those in it.

A good anarchist citizen is willing to defend the anarchy against internal and external threats to the constitution from those who would establish a ruling class, and from the sort of decay that makes the constitution more vulnerable to such threats. Anarchy, like other good political constitutions, is fragile; a good constitution is a precious thing, important for human thriving, and so it is foolish to try to pretend aloofness from political concerns. The health of the polis is the proper concern of every individual.

This perhaps implies a certain level of prosperity in the anarchy. If people spend all of their time and energy scraping to get by, they will not have anything left over to devote to the health of the community, and anarchy may fall victim to rule by the few who are wealthy enough to spare time to take the reins. For this reason also, an ethos of simplicity may be useful to cultivate in an anarchy. If people have a sensible understanding of what the necessities of living really are, they will be better able to prioritize those things that are above and beyond the necessities. Whereas if they have a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses sense of what is necessary, they may never feel secure enough in their material possessions to begin to devote their time and resources to good citizenship.

A good anarchist citizen participates in the collective decision-making and responsibilities of the polis. Who decides where to dig the well? The citizens do — that is, the people who show up when a decision has to be made and who devote time and effort to understanding and deliberating. Who digs the well? The citizens do — that is, the people who put on the gloves and grab the shovels. If you examine it closely, anarchy becomes a sort of fluid aristocracy of those people who are willing and able to take responsibility and get their hands dirty.

But a good anarchist citizen neither cares to do all of this citizenship alone, nor aspires to assume a permanent and overarching leadership role. For the health of the polis, and for her or his own peace of mind, such a citizen will want the virtues appropriate to leadership and civic participation to be found widely in the community, and so will encourage others in exercising them.

In the best state, Aristotle says, the virtues of a good person and of a good citizen are the same. This is true of anarchy more than it is of any other form of constitution. This means that a good anarchist citizen will also take an interest in the characters of those around her or him. In Aristotle’s system, it was important that members of the ruling class develop the complete virtues. Under anarchy, this extends to everybody. We all need to carefully tend our characters, and if people around us need help in this process, we need to extend that help willingly, knowing that this is both generous and in enlightened self-interest.

A good anarchist citizen models good behavior, and also rewards good behavior and calls out bad behavior in others. She or he will take a keen interest in the education of the youth of the community, and will take care to encourage community-enhancing customs and traditions like generosity. (I will go into more detail about both of those points in the next episode.)

To be continued…

Alice Turtle hopes to fill a gap in Aristotle’s Politics by extending it to cover the anarchist polis. Today she considers the crucial role of education and custom in anarchy.

Anarchic Citizens

A constitution grows out of the character of the citizenry, at least to a great extent. Parts of it may be imposed on the citizenry initially, but unless the citizens grow into the proper characters to take their places within it, such a constitution is liable to fall.

Monarchist or oligarchical or democratic people will see anarchy as a void that they are called upon to fill with a ruling class, and a ruling class will certainly take the opportunity to fill that void. A community of anarchic citizens, on the other hand, will set about establishing a healthy anarchy.

In the previous installation of this series of articles, I discussed the roles of a good anarchist citizen. Today I will consider how such citizens might be nurtured.

There are certain skills that anarchist citizens need to have, and these skills need to be widespread. In anarchy there is no royal family, aristocratic class, or small set of fully-fledged citizens who are entrusted with the responsibility of maintaining the health of the polis. Instead, that responsibility is spread over the whole population.

In addition to skills, there are also certain understandings that will be need to be made explicit so they can be shared and passed on. For example, though political philosophers are fond of discovering intricate justifications for what does and doesn’t count as “property”, as though their definitions were a natural law of the universe, in the real world what counts as property is decided by the consensus of the ruling class. In anarchy, where the ruling class is everybody, that means there needs to be a widespread, shared understanding of the basic contours of how property rights are established, how inheritance works, and so forth. In any system there will be edge cases and unanticipated complications that will provoke conflict, but if people diverge on even the basics, conflict is inevitable.

How do we deal with people who violate social norms: thieves, cheats, murderers, and the like? How do we operate with people who do not share our norms and understandings: foreigners, immigrants, or people on the borders of our community? How do we defend our community against outside aggression? What are the temptations to monarchy, oligarchy, or democracy, and how can these be resisted? These are all things that need to be part of the conversation before they become a problem, not just at the moment they arise.

Implicit and Explicit Learning

All of this is taught in both implicit and explicit ways. Implicitly, people learn by observing the behavior of those around them and discovering patterns that become heuristics they can apply to their own choices. Explicitly, people are taught as children and through the stories and admonitions they hear.

A bridge between the implicit and explicit is the child’s “why?” (“why do we do things that way?”). Proverbs are one way of crossing that bridge: quick, pithy heuristic summaries of the wisdom of a particular line of action, or of how it fits into the rest of the constitutional structure. I’ll consider the role of proverbs and proverb-makers in a moment.

In any human society, customs, norms, shared understandings, myths, ritual practices, and other such things — “folklore,” in short — are going to be important. In anarchy they also bear much of the weight that is borne by coercive institutions and governing hierarchies under other constitutions. Those other constitutions are a recent development in our evolutionary history. If we put them aside and listen to the wisdom natural selection has implanted in us, we can learn a lot. Human beings are political animals, and we have evolved a variety of methods for regulating our social habitats. Our domestication by coercive political institutions has atrophied these skills, but there is every reason to expect them to blossom again if we escape the zoo.

As a student of Aristotelian political science, you are in training to be a physician for bodies of citizens who have associated in various ways. One way you can help an anarchy is to identify those aspects of the shared culture that contribute to a healthy and harmonious constitution, and which tend to cause friction and decay.

It can be instructive to study the time-worn methods that have developed in other cultures in other places and times. But you can no more expect to successfully graft a bunch of other cultures’ practices on to your own than you could expect to combine the powers of all the animals by splicing them together Frankenstein’s monster style. Careful, humble experimentation with elements of the best practices of other cultures — not slapdash, wholesale disruption of existing processes — ought to characterize your technique.

Many norms will develop implicitly over time in well-functioning groups of all sorts. Some might as well be in the “things I learned in kindergarten” category of getting-along-with-people. One possible line of work for the anarchist political scientist might be to explicitly articulate these norms and to show how they remain useful and sufficient in complex political scenarios.

Proverbs and Stories

As I mentioned before, some norms and guidelines will take the form of proverbs. For example, it may be a useful norm in an anarchy that those who take the most responsibility for the maintenance of some aspect of the commons ought to have more policy-making authority over that aspect. Such a norm might be passed down from generation to generation as “don’t cry about how thick the onions are sliced unless you cried while they were being cut.”

Proverbs have been one of the best cultural technologies for collecting and passing on best practices information for the community. For example, these passages from the biblical book of Proverbs are all about recommended behavior for maintaining the health of the community:

The Lord detests dishonest scales, but accurate weights find favor with him.

When the righteous prosper, the city rejoices; when the wicked perish, there are shouts of joy.

Through the blessing of the upright a city is exalted, but by the mouth of the wicked it is destroyed.

Whoever derides their neighbor has no sense, but the one who has understanding holds their tongue.

A gossip betrays a confidence, but a trustworthy person keeps a secret.

For lack of guidance a nation falls, but victory is won through many advisers.

Whoever puts up security for a stranger will surely suffer, but whoever refuses to shake hands in pledge is safe.

A kindhearted woman gains honor, but ruthless men gain only wealth.

A generous person will prosper; whoever refreshes others will be refreshed.

People curse the one who hoards grain, but they pray God’s blessing on the one who is willing to sell.

Whoever seeks good finds favor, but evil comes to one who searches for it.

There’s a lot of redundancy in that and subsequent chapters of Proverbs, suggesting that this was probably a compilation of the parallel efforts of a multitude of cultures and generations to come up with ways of quickly teaching heuristics for maintaining a harmonious community, ensuring personal prosperity, dealing with outsiders, and keeping a good reputation.

The poet who is able to encapsulate good lessons like these in pithy phrases is a boon to the community. Ben Franklin saw himself in this role when he used his “Poor Richard” persona to issue advice like:

• Whate’er’s begun in anger ends in shame.
• A quarrelsome Man has no good Neighbors.
• Better is a little with content than much with contention.
• Search others for their virtues, thy self for thy vices.

We do the same sort of thing today, for instance when we deploy proverbs like “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” to warn people away from get rich quick scams. This is a protective incantation that covers cases the law cannot or is not interested in covering.

Music can be a powerful way of transmitting proverbs. Lyrics stick in the memory more than mere phrases, and the form of the melody and rhythm can impart additional meaning or nuance. A wise songwriter may be able to shape a constitution more effectively than a legislator.

It is important for anarchist citizens to be on guard against the temptations of other forms of constitution. Some advice I remember hearing a counselor give to addicts dealing with temptation was “play the tape forward.” What was meant by this was that the addict should not stop at thinking about what will happen when the cravings are satisfied by giving into the drug, but should then think about what will happen next, and then after that, and all the way through to the end. Make sure all the consequences of the decision are explicitly considered as part of the package — “I am satisfying my craving and easing into my comforting high (and violating probation, and spending money I need for other things, and risking my job and my relationship with my children, and harming my health, and…)”

Stories are a great way to do this. Tell the story of the person who becomes king promising to solve all the problems, but ends up being the tyrant causing more problems than they solved. There’s a great example of this in the Bible too (1 Samuel 8):

Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”

But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.”

When Samuel heard all that the people said, he repeated it before the Lord. The Lord answered, “Listen to them and give them a king.”

When a cautionary story like this is part of the common folklore, it’s easier to point out someone with royalist pretensions and say “I remember you from that story about Samuel. Get out of here with your king-talk! I know what that stuff leads to.”

Which stories you tell and ask to be told, which lyrics you sing and which songs you play, which proverbs you repeat — all of these are political acts, under any constitution. In anarchy, the political acts of ordinary people are of more importance; there are no offsetting rites of a ruling class to counterbalance them. So a good anarchist citizen will choose wisely.

Currently many of the new stories and lyrics that are dominant in our culture are produced with a primarily commercial motive (we even look to explicitly commercial advertisements to carry the weight of the health of our culture). They are designed to be sold (or to capture “eyeballs” that can then be sold), and so they unfortunately often pander to and amplify choices and behaviors that are harmful to community. Such things make anarchy more difficult to establish and maintain because they discourage responsible decision-making and thereby increase the temptation to establish a responsible institutional authority over people instead.

Anarchists and libertarians have an honorable history of standing for freedom of expression and against government censorship. Because of this, we have typically been arrayed against people who have argued that certain sorts of expression are harmful to individuals, degrading of public morality, and encouraging of bad behavior. If the response “even if that is so, government censorship is a cure worse than the disease” did not seem adequately persuasive, we often tried to argue that there’s no evidence that exposure to expression (e.g. birth control information, pornography, blasphemy, violent video games, etc.) has any such harmful effects. I think, though, that this argument is not (in general) a good one. We need to acknowledge that culture is powerful, and some of it tends to make people better and some to make people worse, and that as good anarchist citizens we need to make good choices about what to amplify and what to turn up our noses at. (Nuance is of course necessary here. Different expressions will have different effects depending on the audience and the context.)

Depending on the health of your anarchy, the messages you want to create or amplify may be different. Do you have a problem of wealth inequality that threatens to pull things apart at the seams? Stories that encourage generosity among the wealthy and denigrate misers and scrooges, or proverbs that promote thrift and hard work among the poor might be what you’re after. Threatened by a burgeoning oligarchy? Stories about what happens to people who get too big for their britches and start ordering others around ought to be ready in the quiver.

Education

The goal of the education of children in a healthy anarchy diverges from that in other constitutions.

When children are educated, they are being instructed by, and, at least initially, governed by grown-ups. The goal of anarchist education is to usher them through this period of apprenticeship into adulthood. The goal of archist education is to do this only for the emerging ruling class; the rest of the children are meant to retain their subordinate child-status into adulthood. Education trains those children to continue to behave as children even when they are grown-up: to stunt their growth, to adopt the neoteny of domesticated animals. To this end, these children continue to be governed largely by adults as they continue through their schooling, rather than being trained to gradually replace their adult governors and to govern themselves.

In preparation for lives as adult children, such students are drilled constantly in the skills they need to be interns, grad students, employees, inmates, soldiers, and subjects. In Aristotle’s framework, such people are typically considered non-citizens at best, slaves at worst.

Anarchist education, on the other hand, has the goal of transitioning children into adulthood with the skills and understandings they need to join the community of adults as responsible equals. Children begin in a position of childish subordination, but transition over the course of their education into ever-greater responsibility over their lives, their learning, their day, and into ever-tighter integration into adult activities.

Children will learn to lead and to follow, to understand how conflicts arise and to learn techniques for resolving them (without running to an authority figure to do it for them), to make decisions for themselves and to cooperate to carry out projects.

The weird transition in which a person is “a student” until they abruptly leave school and assume a place in the adult world is no way to raise anarchic citizens. Inevitably such students cast about for some child-like role that resembles the one they have been trained for (isn’t there some job where I can sit at a desk and do what someone tells me to do?), so they can earn pocket money to spend on comic books, now available as blockbuster movies suitable for all ages.

Gatherings

Opportunities for the community to come together in person may be important in order to maintain common understandings and folklore. Communal meals in the Spartan style (I think it sounds nicer, and no less accurate, to just call them potlucks) are one excellent way of doing this. There’s something about sharing a meal at the same table that does wonders to bond a community.

In the absence of an official “in charge” of things like registering titles, marriages, and the like, public declarations at gatherings like these may regain some of the importance they once had. A wedding ceremony today is often mostly a kind of expensive party, but it once had the purpose of letting everyone know that something important had changed that they should know about. A marriage had important social implications — families might reorganize, property change hands, lines of inheritance change. People with prior or competing claims were given their last chance to put them forward (“If any have reason why these two should not be joined together in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace.”).

But most things will not need the close attention of the larger community, and people who feel the need to bring every gripe up “in general assembly” or something like that ought to be encouraged to work on their working-things-out skills or to seek out a respected arbitrator. If people have to come together and make collective decisions every time there is a conflict, they’ll get sick of it and may demand professionals to do the job for them (and soon your anarchy is swallowed up by a judiciary).

Written Laws

Do codified, written laws have a place in the anarchist constitution? As I have discussed, an anarchist constitution isn’t one without laws but one without a ruling class. Instead of law being orders-from-above, law is collective-understanding: more like the laws of grammar than the Penal Code.

But just as it can be helpful for understanding and study to have the laws of grammar written out and made explicit, perhaps it is also useful for someone to collect and write out the laws in effect in an anarchy from time to time.

Grammarians can be said to come in two flavors: prescriptive and descriptive. The prescriptive grammarians come up with sensible, logical rules that proper speakers ought to follow. The descriptive grammarians look at the messy and sometimes contradictory ways people actually use language and try to understand its contours.

The archic “lawgiver” is like a prescriptive grammarian of law. The anarchic law-recorder is the descriptive counterpart of this. For example, Elinor Ostrom is a notable descriptive law-recorder of anarchic law.

Such a record of laws can be useful for education, for keeping people “on the same page” about community standards, and for enforcing a conservatism that can be useful for an anarchy to resist legal innovations that can destabilize it. It can also be a good way of making explicit the flaws in the existing legal order that might be candidates for reform. However there is also a danger that a written law book can morph over time from descriptive to prescriptive if it comes to be revered or over-relied-on, and also that it can attract a tribe of judges and law-interpreters who come to covet oligarchical political power.

To be continued…

Alice Turtle hopes to fill a gap in Aristotle’s Politics by extending it to cover the anarchist polis. Today she considers foreign relations, immigration, and other such tricky issues.

Incompatible Understandings

I’ll start with a simplified example. Imagine your anarchy has in its domain a grove of trees that the community treats as common property. Anyone can gather firewood there, or even chop down some trees to build a fence if they want. But nobody chops down the willows. The willows are where the spirits and remembrances of people take up residence when they die. Chopping down the willows for fenceposts would be as disrespectful as going to a graveyard and collecting gravestones to pave your driveway with.

A stranger comes to town, or a group of nomadic people, or folks from the polis down the road who don’t have a grove of their own… and they don’t hold willows holy in the same way you do and they seem apt to start chopping them down.

Now you’ve got a collective problem on your hands. It’s a conflict of rights, certainly, but it can’t be resolved by normal means because your groups have utterly different ideas of ownership, commons, and what’s sacred. Is the tree “unowned” or “owned by those in the spirit world” or “owned by the community as a whole”? If the spirit owners of the trees don’t even exist to you, the whole question may seem ridiculous.

If you don’t have some way of finding common ground and resolving the conflict, because you do not have a common political understanding, things revert to a might-makes-right state-of-nature scenario.

Anarchist Foreign Relations

To prevent that, an anarchy has to have some sort of “foreign relations” policy. How do you coexist alongside other communities that have different and possibly conflicting understandings and policies? How do you welcome the stranger into your community and under what conditions? How does someone go from being an outsider to being an insider (or on the other hand, what conditions lead to shunning or outlawry)? Under what circumstances ought you to feel obligated to come to the defense of your neighbors against others, and under what circumstances is your neighbor on their own in their conflicts (or even ought to be surrendered for extradition if they have committed a crime against another group)?

What would it mean for an anarchic community to negotiate a treaty? Who would negotiate? Who would such a treaty be binding on? Could those who enter the community or mature to adults within it after the treaty is agreed to be said to be bound by it? Bound how?

Foreign affairs seem likely to be trickier in this way. It seems at first glance comparatively easy to negotiate with a king, get a king’s signature on parchment next to a fancy wax seal and ribbon, and be confident that the king can compel his subjects to go along with it. Negotiating with an anarchy means getting widespread buy-in that is genuine enough that the terms of the treaty become part of the consensually-agreed-to constitution of the anarchy. This is not impossible, or even necessarily more difficult, but it may be harder to understand or navigate for those foreign powers that are used to dealing with a smaller ruling class or a designated institution.

Anarchist Defense

How does an anarchy defend itself from outside aggression? History is full of examples of anarchies being preyed on by neighboring peoples with other forms of constitution, and anarchies have often fared poorly and have either been utterly conquered or have had to reorganize themselves as a sort of subterranean parallel constitution operating in territory that is formally under the control of another sort of state (see for example James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed).

Both traditional militia-style defense and the emerging science of nonviolent, civilian-based state defense can easily be imagined in anarchist forms. Indeed, the latter seems most likely to succeed in an anarchist population: people who are used to governing themselves and refusing the temptations of a ruling class are most well-equipped to make themselves ungovernable by an invading aggressor.

But both of these options are most likely to succeed if the population is well-trained, and, at least in the case of a militia-style defense, well-equipped. This presents another coordination problem an anarchy will have to solve if it wants to be able to defend itself well.

States rely not only on their actual defense capabilities, but on deterring aggressors by signaling their ability and willingness to inflict discouraging harm on anybody who attacks them. It may be harder for an anarchy to broadcast a legible signal of this sort. Aggressor states may not find it credible that an anarchy can defend itself or can inflict harm on them that they will regret. History is full of examples of powerful, arrogant states stomping confidently on poorer, smaller, less-well-equipped nations and underestimating the harm that will rebound on them. Defeating an aggressor state may be easier than deterring their aggression in the first place, which is of course the preferable option.

To be continued…

Alice Turtle hopes to fill a gap in Aristotle’s Politics by extending it to cover the anarchist polis. Today she considers how Justice works in the Aristotelian anarchy.

Justice Is a Virtue

When people talk about justice these days, we often do so in terms of rights and results: Does a particular outcome or process respect the rights people have, and does it result in the right disposition of goods or people or privileges or what-have-you?

Aristotle instead wanted us to consider justice as a variety of virtue — a habitual state of character possessed by the just person and expressed by the desires the just person has and the acts those desires induce the just person to take.

What motivates a just person to not try to craftily get more than their fair share? The fact that it’s better to be just and have less than to be unjust and have more. One’s eudaimonia (thriving, flourishing, happiness) is improved more by being just than by getting more stuff or more glory or whatever.

Becoming a just person, in Aristotle’s framework, is primarily about developing the sort of character that desires to be just, and only secondarily about becoming better informed about the nuances of what makes certain acts more just than other ones. Contrast that with most modern ethical philosophy, which can split hairs about trolley problems until the cows come home, without ever addressing how to incorporate a love for justice into one’s character.

“How convenient it is to be a reasonable creature,” Benjamin Franklin noted, “since it enables one to make or find a reason for whatever one has a mind to do.” If you have a sophisticated enough understanding of ethics, but no just character, you will have the tools you need to enable you to justify anything you want to do. If, on the other hand, you want to be just, you will study just enough ethics to help you make a just decision, without getting lost in a swamp of sophistry.

However, since not everybody is going to be self-motivated by virtue in this way, you may find that in your anarchy it is important to call out and praise just actions in others, and to disparage unjust ones. In this way you bestow honor to compensate those who for the sake of justice forego material advantages and feel this to be a sacrifice, and depreciate the gains of the unjust with public shame.

Justice is Socially Constructed

But Aristotle also thought that to be just and to practice justice requires a certain sort of political context. Indeed he felt that one of the primary reasons people form political communities in the first place is to enable them to develop and cultivate this virtue.

To some extent, justice is only possible in a political community that defines some standards against which to weigh competing claims. Also, for a person to (for instance) “own” a piece of property means that other people respect that ownership in certain ways. That means those other people must become aware of and respectful of things like changes of ownership via contracts, transactions, judicial procedures, movement of boundary markers, and so forth, and must have protocols for understanding which such transactions are valid and which are bogus, and this can only happen in a political context.

There is a sort of baseline justice — not preying on people with violence or deceit, and not submitting to the violence or deceit of others — that anyone can and should practice anywhere. But the more advanced and nuanced justice of the political community requires a well-tuned understanding of how people relate and have related to one another, to the shared understandings and values of the community, and to the processes of negotiation, adjudication, and rectification that people respect. This sort of wisdom is specific to a particular community at a particular time.

Ideally these two sorts of justice are in harmony with one another: the sophisticated political justice supplements a more baseline universal justice. But it’s not uncommon for them to conflict. Some traditional and accepted practice of your community, on closer inspection, turns out perhaps to be fundamentally unjust (e.g. slavery), or to have unusual corner cases where its heuristic value fails and it conflicts with baseline justice.

There may be legitimate reasons in any particular such case for either valuing justice absolutely and so challenging and behaving “unlawfully” in the face of the community’s unjust customs — or for permitting certain injustices to remain unredressed in favor of community harmony and the stability of the anarchy. Thoreau was weighing just such cases when he wrote:

If the in­jus­tice is part of the nec­es­sary fric­tion of the ma­chine of gov­ern­ment, let it go, let it go: per­chance it will wear smooth, — cer­tainly the ma­chine will wear out. If the in­jus­tice has a spring, or a pul­ley, or a rope, or a crank, ex­clu­sively for it­self, then per­haps you may con­sider whether the rem­edy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a na­ture that it re­quires you to be the agent of in­jus­tice to an­other, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter fric­tion to stop the ma­chine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend my­self to the wrong which I con­demn.

Sometimes also, human laws and customs come into conflict with each other. Some act which is mandatory under one law is simultaneously forbidden under another. This happens all the time with intricate law codes designed by carefully precise lawyers, and so we should not be surprised to see this also in the fuzzier heuristics of the anarchist community. I can imagine Antigone playing out much the same way, and being just as tragic, without a King Creon.

Aristotle taught that there was another virtue, equity, that supplements justice and permits those who possess it to make decisions that improve on the strict commandments of law and tradition. When laws conflict, or when the application of a law would lead to a poor result, the person with a sense of equity will know how to break the letter of the law in favor of the spirit of the law. This is more of an art than a science, and it requires careful discretion since the parties in a conflict will naturally have self-interested motives to plead the cause of equity to bend the law in their own favor.

Aristotle described equity this way, which seems to be pretty good advice:

It is equity to pardon human failings, and to look to the [intentions of the] lawgiver and not to the law; to the spirit and not to the letter; to the intention and not to the action; to the whole and not to the part; to the character of the actor in the long run and not in the present moment; to remember the good rather than evil, and good that one has received, rather than good that one has done; to bear being injured; to wish to settle a matter by words rather than by deeds; lastly, to prefer arbitration to judgment, for the arbitrator sees what is equitable, but the judge only the law, and for this an arbitrator was first appointed, in order that equity might flourish.

Political Equality

Aristotle taught that justice between people requires that those people have some minimum level of political status as well. One does not treat one’s slaves or one’s children with “justice” or “injustice” except perhaps metaphorically.

So in a tyranny, where the only real law is “what the tyrant says, goes,” there is little hope of establishing justice. In an oligarchy, there is one set of rules for the oligarchs, and another for the rest of us, so there may be political justice of a sort within or without, but at the boundary between the oligarchs and the rest of the population something else takes place. The systems most of us live under today are notorious for setting up some people above the law, and oppressing others by using the law as an arbitrary billy club.

This is certainly one of the selling points of anarchy: that it does not give some class of people special legal privileges, but treats everybody as a “citizen” — that is, as having equal political rights. An equal, inclusive form of justice — something so attractive that most other systems at least pay lip service to it — is actually achievable under anarchy.

Aristotle had to start pulling out the equations and ratios and geometry when he discussed distributive justice because, in his view, people have discrete social statuses in society, and so transactions between people in order to be just must respect those different social statuses and not disrupt them. In anarchy, this is greatly simplified. Privileges and common goods and just rights don’t need to be divvied up proportionally depending on people’s ranks, but can just be distributed equally.

This isn’t to say this happens automatically and without attention. Iniquitous discrimination can poison the constitution of an anarchy as it can any other. However anarchy denies a common avenue for small-minded people to leverage their bigotry via state coercion, and so limits the damage it can do.

Economic inequality can disrupt political equality. Can an anarchy survive the division of the polis into haves and have-nots? It may be that in the interest of preserving a healthy anarchist constitution, steps will need to be taken to discourage destabilizing economic inequality.

Laws and Customs

In constitutions with a formal legal code, and a ruling class of legislators, prosecutors, judges, executives, and so forth, there is usually something of a sharp distinction between what is legal/illegal on the one hand, and what is customary/frowned-upon on the other. Law covers some things, custom others. In the constitution of an anarchy, this distinction is likely to be much fuzzier.

Custom in some parts of life has the force of law, and woe to whoever violates it. In other parts it is more like the rules of manners, and violators at worst risk being seen as disrespectful clods (though reputation and character are much more valuable under the constitution of an anarchy, so this means more than it does under other constitutions). In other parts, custom is more like good advice, and violators are seen only as foolish and harming themselves.

Ideally the “laws” of the anarchist polis, in addition to defining conventional things like property and explaining best-practice processes, enjoin people to the virtues, that is, they tell everyone to be (and how to be) the best sort of flourishing people. In such a heavenly polis obedience to law coincides exactly with virtue: to be law-abiding is to be virtuous which is to be operating in your own best interest as well as the interest of the healthy constitution.

Another advantage to an anarchist constitution without a ruling class is that it is easier for people to submit gently to law/custom than to rulers/officers, because this is less likely to trigger feelings of being dominated or losing face.

To be continued…

Alice Turtle hopes to fill a gap in Aristotle’s Politics by extending it to cover the anarchist polis. Today she considers some of the sources of instability that threaten anarchy and how to prevent or ameliorate them.

First, Remember What Aristotle Taught

Aristotle identified several sources of instability that threaten the constitutions of democracies, oligarchies, and monarchies. Without repeating them here (see ♇ 1 January 2019 for some of Aristotle’s list), I will instead say that most of them have their counterparts in the anarchist constitution.

You might think that anarchy would at least be free from destabilization by people who pursue profit and honor through the devices of government. Without any government to bestow profit and honor, a healthy anarchy does indeed keep this at bay. But if there is any deviation from anarchy — for example “temporary,” “just this once,” “during the crisis” forms of government — this tendency will seep into the cracks and widen them.

So it would be wise for the anarchist Aristotelian political scientist — the physician of the body politic — to consult Aristotle’s list of suggestions for how to preserve and stabilize a constitution.

Not all of these will be relevant to a constitution without a fixed and distinct ruling class or governing officials. But, for example, the advice that to try to strip citizens away from their old loyalties and attach their loyalties to the polis remains sound. It has a kind of dreadful ring to it when it is put starkly that way, but benign examples of this would include efforts to reduce ethnic or religious divisions in society, to create truces between rival gangs, and so forth.

The Corrupting Power of Wealth

Commerce and money-acquiring is potentially corrupting, causing people to get caught up in accumulation at the expense of providing for their needs and developing the virtues.

A society with much wealth can also be an encouragement for hostile neighbors to invade, so there’s a security aspect to keep in mind as well.

That said, economic growth helps the success of the polis and prosperity allows people the leisure time they need to pursue the complete set of virtues, so there’s a tension here.

In economics as in other things, be cautious about innovation, and conservative about reform. Consider the likelihood of unintended consequences of large-scale societal changes. Be skeptical of utopian ideas like sharing all property in common, or dissolving family ties into one big communal family. Such things are unlikely to succeed in reality as well as they do on paper. A good polis is a harmonious mixture of diversity, not a blending into homogeneity. Diversity is less brittle than uniformity.

That said, some amount of property held-in-common is a good idea. And an ethos of voluntary generosity that evens out wealth inequality ought to be encouraged. Involuntary redistribution of wealth is unlikely to turn out well, and probably implies that your anarchy has been undermined by some other constitution.

More important than reducing inequality or reducing poverty is inculcating the virtues so that people have a healthier attitude towards money and possessions and justice. Do this, and the rest will follow. Redistribute wealth without instilling the virtues and you’ll end up just causing more problems than you solve.

What to Do with the Oligarchs

As I’ve mentioned previously, anarchy allows for a sort of fluid aristocracy-of-the-willing, and so it can be very satisfactory to particularly virtuous aristocrats, who fit right in. Ordinary oligarchs, however, coasting on their wealth or their family name, are likely to feel short-changed, as they do not get the respect or authority they feel they are owed. This too can be a source of instability.

You might want to give such people some token ceremonial roles of pomp and dignity that they can occupy without causing much trouble but that will keep them satisfied. But keep an eye on them.

What to Do with the Democrats

Temptations to majoritarian democracy will crop up periodically. If there is an issue that requires group buy-in but on which there is a strong difference of opinion — an issue that by its nature must be decided one way or the other with no compromise or middle ground — genuine consensus may be out of reach. It will be impossible to make everybody happy.

In such a case, the party that can marshal the majority opinion will be eager to come up with good-sounding reasons why that should be enough to decide the question. If those self-serving reasons are repeated often enough and earnestly enough, they may start sounding like wisdom to the unwise.

You might be better off tossing a coin than making an exception to use a vote. While majoritarian decision-making ensures that the people with the hard feelings are always in the minority, it can also mean that the same minority gets screwed again and again. This will be a source of instability in your constitution, and may indicate that you have already lost your anarchy to the temptations of democracy.

An Ounce of Prevention

How do you prevent the majority, or the rich, or the strong, from trying to muscle their views into enactment once they realize their strength? Perhaps one way is to seek out ways to give them some sort of extraordinary advisory roles or something so they feel adequately respected without permitting them to be actually coercive.

There’s always the temptation, once a faction realizes its strength, that it will try to force its way. “Who’s going to stop us?” This is of course not just a problem of anarchies; other systems claim to prevent this, but they really just enshrine it, at best.

The Aristotelian political scientist will anticipate these attempts and head them off one way or another. It is easier to discourage such a faction before it has had a taste of success than after.

To be continued…

Alice Turtle hopes to fill a gap in Aristotle’s Politics by extending it to cover the anarchist polis. Today she wraps things up with some thoughts about the structure of the anarchist “government”.

Anarchist Government

Is “anarchist government” an oxymoron? To say that an anarchy is “self-governing” or that it is governed by “spontaneous order” is nice, and perhaps even true, but it is not very revealing. Self-governing how? What kind of spontaneous order?

Do some things need to be decided by an assembly in which everyone in the polis is notified so that they may be present? How is this accomplished? Who does the work of making sure the assembly runs smoothly and stays on-topic, and how is that person compensated for their work?

How are the commons maintained? Who adjudicates disputes and how are they compensated? Who keeps records of contracts, dispute resolutions, treaties, and so forth, and how are they motivated to maintain the integrity of these records? Who represents the polis in diplomatic negotiations with foreign institutions, with how much authority, and how are they compensated for their work? How is the militia or nonviolent defense force structured, how does it train, and how is it coordinated? How do we help those who cannot help themselves? How are we to be protected from people who cannot control their vicious behavior?

These are among the hard questions that people under any form of constitution must solve. In states with a ruling class that runs a standing, institutionalized government, the solutions usually take the form of adding a new wing onto that governmental structure: add a department, appoint an official, fit them into the hierarchy, write some regulations, and there you have it: some patched-together attempt at a solution.

Anarchies have to be more creative, which is sometimes harder and more frustrating, but can lead to much better solutions than boilerplate bureaucracy building. A disadvantage is that states leave lots of written records, which other states can use as templates for their own systems. Anarchies have fewer precedents they can rely on. There are many theoretical systems, and some promising anthropological studies of self-organized governance systems, and there are some things we can learn from the “Occupy” assemblies and from experiences we have in temporary autonomous zones in which we can experiment with new forms of organization outside of the control of the governments we are subjected to, but this remains a relatively-understudied and untried area.

In many cases, however, the solutions are hidden in plain sight. The government has absorbed things that had previously been happily provided in non-coercive ways, and all we have to do is relearn the ways we used to accomplish this. Take libraries, for instance. Public libraries, supported by taxes, are ubiquitous today, but privately-funded, subscription libraries have also been common and would likely fill the gap if public libraries were to vanish.

Miscellaneous Thoughts

In the case of defense against predatory people, a subscription-based defense organization seems like the sort of solution that might naturally develop. But Robert Nozick has outlined a plausible path by which such an organization becomes a sort of de facto standing state, with those who direct it (the subscribers, at least initially, but eventually possibly the organization’s officers themselves) becoming the de facto ruling class.

The Aristotelian political scientist/doctor may want to keep an eye out for such symptoms in order to suggest possible remedies before things get out of hand and the constitution becomes destabilized.

Aristotle discussed the “wisdom of crowds” phenomenon, in which the judgements of many people are averaged together and (at least in some circumstances) these judgements seem reliably better than the judgements of any particular person in the crowd would be likely to be. Aristotle saw juries and assemblies and other groups as good approximations of this phenomenon, but it strikes me that with today’s technology it should be easier to apply this principle even more widely and less approximately. It seems to me that there are some decisions that an anarchist polis might be able to make through a kind of averaging of this nature, without the drawbacks of majoritarian, winner-takes-all voting.

Aristotle’s definition of slavery and his conception of employees as temporary-slaves or as being slavish-for-the-duration are interesting from the perspective of modern criticisms of “wage slavery”. According to Aristotle, you are a slave to the extent that you are someone else’s tool. But Aristotle thought that some people were naturally tools, and that the master/slave relationship can be of mutual benefit in such cases — he did not see slavery as necessarily exploitative.

Aristotle also anticipated a sort of technological emancipation in which mechanical tools would do the jobs then done by slaves, but this was a sort of throwaway comment and he didn’t enlarge on what the political ramifications of this might be.

How the culture of your anarchy envisions slavery, employment, and human dignity will have important implications for how its economy is structured.

In Conclusion

This has been an interesting exercise. I have been trying to see the issues of the anarchist polis as Aristotle might have seen them, and to use his techniques and assumptions (as much as possible) to examine them.

It has been exhilarating to exercise my imagination in this way. But it’s also been humbling to confront the size of the subject and to see how superficially and incompletely I have had to deal with most of it.

Recent news and links of note:

• Tax resistance has played a role in the Hong Kong protest movement:

  Activists were temporarily able to exploit a loophole in the government’s tax payment system to undermine tax collections. [One Hong Kong activist] shares: “There is a tax resistance going on, so someone developed a ‘If I pay, you pay with us’ platform for taxpayers called PPS Automator.” Because the government pays $1 in transaction fees for each tax payment made through this portal, activists are urging taxpayers to pay in $1 increments, resulting in full loss of their tax revenue due to fees. The government eventually broke the tool by working with the payment provider to require users to manually submit their online payment once every ten attempts.

  Here’s a link to the PPS Automator program.
• I’ve rewritten my “Alice Turtle” appendix to Aristotle’s Politics into this long Medium essay: “Aristotle’s Guide to Anarchy”
• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out, with content including:
  • a recap of the recent NWTRCC national gathering
  • a report on the NWTRCC presence at the School of the Americas Watch and the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 trial
  • a note that the IRS apparently plans to ramp up its unannounced, in-person visits to recalcitrant tax scofflaws
  • and a personal account of such face-to-face meetings between IRS agents and a war tax resister by Paula Rogge
  Rogge shares some of her tactics for reducing the effectiveness of IRS reprisals (excerpt):

  The IRS has seized my car and checking account funds and has repeatedly levied my wages. My strategy has been to work several jobs, so that if a permanent levy were placed on my wages at one work-place, I could either reduce my hours at that job or quit and still have a backup job. When I’ve had the money, I’ve paid rent, health insurance, and food bills in advance.

• The details in the English-language press are vague, but apparently “[h]undreds of Lebanese business owners gathered in central Beirut protesting the delay in forming a new government and threatening a collective tax strike. Organisers said most private businesses have already been unable to pay taxes and are still getting slapped with penalties.”
• The human guerrilla war on traffic ticket robots continues its punishing swarm of attacks, lately in France, Switzerland, and Germany.