Questions Any Philosophical Anarchist Can Try To Answer

#1. Are humans causing global warming? Whether they are or not, do we as a species have an obligation to stop it? Aside from that question, what amount of pollution constitutes government? If the temperature rises to 130 degrees every summer and people are dying in the streets as a result of gases expelled from inefficient technology, would some form of intervention be necessary to prevent the use of that technology?

#2. If your particular State provides it, look up the sexual predators in your city online. In a properly functioning anarchist system, what social history deserves to be private? Is it a good or bad thing that anyone may at any moment know where any known pathological governor exists?

#3. In one box, I have a healthy calico cat comprised of exactly ten trillion cellular organisms, all cooperating to form the cat. In another box, I have a primordial soup of exactly ten trillion cellular organisms, drifting in gooey anomie among one another.

I decide to put one of these boxes into an incinerator and incinerate it.

Is it more or less moral to incinerate one of these boxes and it’s contents rather than the other?

#4. You are hiding in the secret basement of a shanty of a seedy Vietnamese village.

Foreign troops are coming to slaughter the inhabitants. You and ten other people are holding your breath as you hear the enemy walking into the shanty above you. Suddenly, a woman’s baby begins to cry. If the only possible way to stop the baby from crying is to suffocate it, would you suffocate the baby in order to prevent the soldiers from hearing it and killing all of you?

#5. If someone tells you every day,

“I’m going to kill you, rape your dead body, and set fire to your friend’s houses”, and it seems like they mean it, do you (or anyone) have a right to preemptively restrain this person in a prison because of it?

The Anarchy Of Free Market Socialism

The words “free market” and “capitalism” seem to be equivocal to quite a few anarcho-capitalists. Namely, all of them. Similarly, many socialists dismiss the free market as terminally unfree or an implicit contradiction in terms. This has inspired a great many fruitless arguments wherein the socialist definition of capitalism and the capitalist definition of capitalism (two completely different things) are contrasted in a bout of contrarian confusion. Of course, misunderstandings abound on both sides. Capitalists often assume a socialist policy of centralization, and socialists often assume a capitalist policy of decentralization – two things that in no way entail one another.

In order to proceed with this article, I am forced to define my employment of the ideologies in question. First, capitalism. Capitalism, as I refer to it, is the practice of collecting rent, interest, or profit from someone based upon a claim of ownership.

Socialism, a I refer to it, is the society where every individual is entitled access to the product of their labor. The “market”, as I define it, is simply any place where people congregate to trade the acquired products of their labor, whether those products were acquired justly or unjustly.

Here is the common capitalist objection to Libertarian Socialism – that the positive liberty advocated somehow conflicts with the right of the worker to use the product of their labor. The resolution to this paradox is, “the watch belongs to you, the watch-factory to the people”. What does this mean? It means the factory or farm is controlled “democratically”, and in the most anarchistic way imaginable. There are no quotas, and there is no boss. There is merely an expert on the scene at all times to answer any technical question about production. In this way, anyone who wishes to show up at the farm may exert their labor upon the primitive land to reap their own crop, without being compelled to subject any part of their wealth to some exploitative authority (as would be guaranteed by capitalist employment or purchase). This does not mean that donations to the farm as a whole, or even an individual expert that frequents it, would be banned. It simply means a strict adherence to the principles that:

A. cost is the limit of price

B. labor is the only real cost

Privately owned homes, spaces of personal existence not large enough or fertile enough to qualify as a “means of production” would not be likewise collectivized democratically. The libertarian socialist does not rebel against the private in private property, they rebel against the property (possession used to extract rent, interest, or profit). This allows for what I have termed free market socialism. Another common misrepresentation of socialist motive is the idea that mutually beneficial trade is “capitalistic” or “exploitative”. As long as I’ve been around the anarchist scene, (not that long, but long enough) I’m sure that there are some such misguided socialists out there to which this strawman might apply. But it does not apply to my socialism. If two people, who have justly acquired their possessions wish to trade these possessions, they may. They may even set a time and place for it, making a market.

Now, I can already hear your next question. What definitively qualifies something as a MoP? If, for example, a man were to make himself a hammer through his labor and trade, the hammer would exist as both a product and valid means of production.

The rule is simple – the right of the hammer-maker to access the product of his labor takes precedence. Collectivization in any form must must must must must always be unanimously consensual. In this way, free market socialism is not a “revolutionary” ideology. It is an ideology rooted fundamentally in the doctrine of methodological individualism, which asserts that society as a transcendental meta-organism does not exist. There are only individuals. Before the concerned “social” anarchist misunderstand me, I suggest reviewing the great anarcho-communist Emma Goldman’s immortal treatise “The Individual, Society, And The State”. Even the staunchest collectivists admit some degree of methodological individualism. It is precisely this individualism that entails an opposition to every coercive revolution. Revolutionary anarchists are those anarchists that still harbor the last traces of lust for death on a battlefield, a mystical glory reserved for martyrs and soldiers. A free market socialist believes that if you don’t allow your worst ideological opponent to dance during and through it’s days unscathed, no revolution can be just.

If any questions remain of free market socialism, I will readily answer them at anyone’s sincere behest.

Disgusting Things That Can Be Wonderful

Necrophagy

At first, eating dead human bodies may seem taboo. But think of what a waste it is. There are a billion starving people on this planet, you can’t tell me we’re too good to do a bit of recycling. I mean, people eat crickets. They eat monkey brains. What’s wrong with a dead human body? You’d have to make certain it was dead, of course. Go through all the standard procedures to bring it back to life. But if you’re prepared to call a corpse a corpse, bon apetit! Why let a natural resource as renewable and natural as this just go to waste rotting in the ground? And why waste money and time on all the elaborate ceremony normally associated with dying? Again, for as long as LIVE people are withering away in the gutters, it seems a mite irresponsible to send flowers and love to a dead person. It’s really insane when you think about it. What’s a dead guy gonna do with a beautiful floral arrangement and a custom-carved coffin? Absolutely nothing. And if the grieving are looking for a place and time to mourn, there’s no better place than the thanksgiving table adorned with gourmet remains of the dearly departed.

Nudism

Nudism is wonderful. You might be shy, at first. You might think it’s weird, at first. But there’s nothing WRONG with it. It’s certainly not a punishable offense. You can’t say other people don’t have the right to lack clothing. For as long as you are entitled to close your eyes at immediate command, a nudist is entitled to do whatever they want as naked as they want. Naked babies are cute, but naked adults aren’t? Then stay home and don’t associate with any, dumbass. The law wasn’t established to protect the sensibilities of your petulant aesthetic preferences.

Pansexuality

Under the heading of pansexuality I include all parasexualities. Homosexuality and every possible “philia”. What’s the big damn deal, people? If a man and a woman can get married, there’s no reason a man and another man can’t get garried. That’s right, garriage. It’s like marriage, but with a “g” instead of an “m”. Now that all you sanctity-of-marriage idiots don’t have anything to bitch about, we can start inventing new words for every possible perversion pining for it’s own institutional acknowledgment.

Suicide

Suicide is horrible. You know what’s even worse? A living torture of abject existential destitution and 60 years of writhing in the thrownness of cruelty and human fault. I’m tired of suicide being thought of as it’s own problem. Here are the real problems:

Abuse

Rape

Oppression

Hunger

Thirst

Delusion

All of these thing make someone want to commit suicide, but THEY are the problem, not the suicide! If you aren’t prepared to help a person, if you aren’t prepared to fix the substandard conditions of their miserable life, you aren’t prepared to tell them they have to go on living just for the sake of continuing to clog up this vastly overpopulated planet.

Human Nature and the Prescription of Proscription by Means of Description

The most central question to any serious consideration of anarchism is that of human nature. The debate is an ancient one, and may best be summed up as, absent of any contact with society and it’s chains of conforming conservation – it’s politics, morality, aesthetic opinion, and abstractions – what remains of a single human’s humanity? What are the holds-true-in-all-cases assertions a person is logically entitled to make about their own species?

The term human nature possesses two parts, the adjective and the noun. It may be reconsidered as the nature of humans, or the properties of the natural human, but if those rewordings imply any science differently than the colloquial “human nature”, we will surely prove to be at the mercy of our language, the mercy of ideas we’ve invented after the fact of our humanity. So let us analyze the fullest spectrum of interpretations in order to make our conclusion.

First, to define nature. We’ve all heard the poems and paeans in praise of what is popularly understood to be nature – the trees and the squirrels and the bees and the pearls – but this is nature perceived in a xenophobic frame. It is nature minus what is considered it’s chief production, human society. By this logic does the word unnatural make it’s entrance, that anything man makes is seperate, either above or below, from what made him. It is the synonymization of the words “unnatural” and “artificial”, where all of man is none of nature, and vice versa.

Nature understood more widely, as the deterministic consequences of each moment becoming the next, not only includes man, but includes all the species that may arise after or by his influence: cyborgs, tabletops, lampshades, microwave ovens. Every one the evolutionary consequence of man’s inquiring mind and idle hand. This conception of mother Earth does not dictate that nature existed only in the past, as some “state of affairs” where either the tyranny was red in tooth and claw, or the liberty was white in primitivism and paw. It merely acknowledges the existence of reality as a descriptive entity, and a susceptibility to rapid or gradual fluctuation as it’s prime attribute. Nature, then, is anything that has ever happened or was. Nature is history.

What is human? Well, nothing is, really. Human is a syndrome, a set of attributes possessed by an organism. Humanity is a binary measurement, answers either yes or no to whether a creature meets all the requirements of identicality to some arbitrarily agreed upon stage of transition in the continual process of evolution. So what if we share 50% of our DNA with the banana, does that mean the banana is 50% human? Who knows. But we may say with certainty that while nothing in existence is purely human, all things are to varying degrees more or less human.

So it is, in light of these slippery words, with much care that we should approach human nature. There are many people out there who would attempt to bamboozle you with the term. In fact, the tendency is so common as to have garnished it’s own stature as a fallacy – the appeal to nature (a fallacy of relevance).

The appeal to nature is a fallacy because of what students of philosophy know as the problem of induction. The problem of induction is a conundrum that asks, when we throw an apple into the air and watch it come down, how can we know with certainty it will continue to do so in the future, under the same circumstances? How many times must we observe gravity in order to know that it will always be there?

The answer is: we can’t.

We cannot know anything based upon what was. We can make guesses, certainly. We can perform experiments, and set up conditional guarantees, but we can know nothing absolutely. For example, on the condition that the theory of gravity holds true (and nothing obstructs it), the apple will continue to fall. On the condition that it doesn’t, it may not. Correct conclusions are dependent upon correct precepts, but no precept can be categorically guaranteed, meaning we can never know whether or not they are true.

So, when we speak of human nature, what we really mean is social history. Social history tells many tales, tales of Christians being eaten by lions, tales of celebrated pedophilia, tales of Zeus and Thor. Tales of genocide, war, and an 1,000 year dark age of religious integrity and barbaric practices.

Then came Gutenberg. People began to read, and they began to understand. In a literal sense, humanity had first sunk it’s teeth into that forbidden apple from the tree of knowledge. The spirit of humanism and the Enlightenment bloomed. Monarchies descended (or were violently thrust) into comparatively libertarian Republics and Democracies.

And as the centuries rolled by, government, at least in ratio to population, decreased. No longer is cat burning any man’s idea of a good night out on the town. And that particular attraction was popular even into the 16th century.

So it must be realized that yesterday’s conservatism is today’s reactionism. And so too will today’s conservative be tomorrow's reactionary.

“We know what we are, but not what we may be."

-William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Debunking Common Myths About Anarchism

Anarchism. What is it?

Some will tell you that Anarchism is violence.

Some will tell you it is chaos.

Some will tell you it is Utopian.

Some will tell you it is oppressive.

Some will tell you it is an abandonment of technology.

Some will tell you it is unrealistic.

Some will tell you it is Marxist.

Some will tell you it is tolerance of anything.

All of these people are lying, deliberately or not.

Anarchism is the decision that all relationships can and should be characterized by consent rather than coercion. That is all.

Why is Anarchism not violence?

Because violence has nothing to do with ethics or politics. Violence happens everywhere, even on Venus where the sky is filled with lightning and the ground with lava. Violence is hated by anarchists, but only when it is committed upon a person without that person’s consent.

Why is Anarchism not chaos?

Because chaos is anomie. Anomie is the absence of order, direction, and meaning. Anarchists think that order is wonderful, because when people are free to use their minds to design their own lives, they can best accommodate themselves with others to whatever ends they may desire.

Why is Anarchism not Utopian?

Utopia (or, On the Best State of a Republic and on the New Island of Utopia) was a novel written by Thomas More about an island where, according to Wikipedia:

- Every household has two slaves.

- Premarital sex is punished by a lifetime of enforced celibacy, and adultery punished by enslavement.

- Atheists are despised... as they are seen as representing a danger to the state.

- Women are not given a high degree of equality in the society. Wives are subject to their husbands and are restricted to conducting household tasks.

All of these things are anathema to Anarchy, and all Anarchists rebuke them.

Why is Anarchism not oppression?

Because all oppression is coercive. Some will try to set up the straw man that Anarchy is any place that does not possess a formally recognized State, even places with chieftains and warlords. But that is not true at all. Chieftains and warlords are tyrants, the worst kind of government, and Anarchists hate tyrants arguably more than anything else.

Why is Anarchism not an abandonment of technology?

Because technology helps everyone. Technology is, literally, the study of technicalities. It’s given us bicycles, bifocals, windmills, and houses. It has also given us dangerous things like H-bombs, but anarchists oppose these technologies alone because their sole use is to kill others, in blatant violation of anarchist ethics (unless you count deploying them to blow up incoming apocalyptic asteroids).

Why is Anarchism not unrealistic?

Because it does not violate natural law. If, for example, I were to claim that we should all live in flying houses and use free energy, I would bear a burden of proof that this was possible. Anarchism by itself does not propose anything like this, and is therefore quite realistic.

Why is Anarchism not Marxist?

To put it simply, because Karl Marx was not an Anarchist. He believed in a tightly controlled State where civil liberties are strictly suppressed. His ideas and their effects permanently destroy the idea that Anarchism has anything to do with Leftism.

Why is Anarchism not a tolerance of anything?

Because a tolerance of anything is apolitical ambivalence, not Anarchism. Anarchists are intolerant towards coercively imposed authority and hierarchy. Always. Anarchists do not make the mistake of thinking that fascists can live with fascists, communists with communists, and other illusions of ideological segregation. There is one objective reality, and consequently, one ideology worth promoting. Anarchism, the abandonment of abolition and the prohibition of mandation.

195 States, So Little Time

That is the official count. 195 seperate and mutually contradictory manifestations of rulership, living together not-so-peacefully on planet Earth. Every other standing eternally as each one’s justification. All of them subversively disseminating xenophobia, crime, and bad will towards our fellow man.

Some are undeniably better than others, of course. Who is willing to argue that domestic life in the United States is worse than domestic life in, say, Iran? Indisputably very few. But this no more makes me a patriot than not being murdered makes a rape victim a happily wedded woman.

Too often do people think of “THE government” as a fixed entity, some homogeneous hominid deity making things safe for us from afar. Government is an action. It is a transgression. When I am instructed to be at a certain place by a certain time, by threat of physical retaliation, I am being governed. I may not know it, because I may comply with it’s dictates, out of sloth or ignorance. But when I fail to show up at whatever camp I’m interred at – be it a workplace or school building – then I am introduced to government’s real face, a face inflamed with rage and violence.

It is when one combines the continued occurance of these despicable actions, induced by a majority as an indissoluble given, and a generalization of a variable quantity of humen into a “society” or “nation” (forgetting the obvious truth of methodological individualism), that a State is formed. A State, a celebrated coalition of thieves and liars, claiming necessity in the existence of other thieves and other liars. Without someone deceiving the deceivers, you will be deceived, says the State. Without someone murdering the murderers, you will be murdered, says the State. There is a name for this fallacy – it’s popular name is “two wrongs make a right”.

If you don’t support genocide, don’t commit it. If you don’t support marriage, don’t get married. It’s that simple, and that’s as far as our moral prescriptions to other people should go. Never should we presuppose the necessity of retribution or retaliation, for if one man can be convinced to restrain a murderer, that murderer could just as easily be convinced to restrain himself.

And if that is not the case, what is the use of speaking? Keep your guns close and your suspicions closer, because some men can’t be trusted regardless of your words.

Anarchism is the name given to the struggle for a society wherein each actor has a say in each decision to the degree they are affected by it, as one t-shirt so eloquently puts it.

I couldn’t say it better myself. An anarchist is a person that trusts liberty fully – not conditionally or contractually. And in order for us to realize it, in order to cross out each State from the list of world countries as if we were marking off collected groceries from a grocery list, we’ll have to do more than speak out. We’ll have to live in accordance with our principles. As the saying goes, anarchism does not stop at the doorstep.

Wherever and whenever, we must not choose to rule. We must choose to not permit the continued existence of fallacious self-justifying authority. Do not be offended if your friend is wearing clothes not fit for some occasion you both plan to attend. The stigma is his consequence to reap. If you yourself are bothered by his appearance, be honest and say so, but do not presume to speak for others too afraid to. Do not say, “you cannot wear those clothes because those others will not like it”. If that is the case, let those others speak when the occasion arises!

Anarchism entails liberty, liberty entails honesty, honesty entails personal responsibility. A duty to your own happiness and nobody else’s, a deed to your own life alone. Live, and let live.

Love, and let hate; hate, and let love.

Do any thing, save make it certain for another.

Am I (an Anarchist) Conservative?

http://www.kirkcenter.org/kirk/ten-principles.html

Where is Confucius’ dictionary of political clarity when you really need it? Although, written by a guy named Confucius, it probably wouldn’t turn out all that clear anyway. Today I’m going to introspectively analyze Russel Kirk’s Ten Conservative Principles, currently available at www.kirkcenter.org. Feel free to tag along on this ethical journey, just to see what Socratic falsification we can squeeze out of this clash.

“1. First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order.”

Well, that’s great news, so do I. I’d say that’s the basis for my anarchism, in fact. I love morality and ethics. Especially in hypothetical life-boat situations. It’s fun to intuit discrepancies in my own instincts and what causes them. In general, I subscribe to a ‘choose the path of least harm’ principle, neither overtly pacifist nor overtly activist.

“Our twentieth-century world has experienced the hideous consequences of the collapse of belief in a moral order. Like the atrocities and disasters of Greece in the fifth century before Christ, the ruin of great nations in our century shows us the pit into which fall societies that mistake clever self-interest, or ingenious social controls, for pleasing alternatives to an oldfangled moral order.”

Preach on, brother! With villains like Hitler and Pol Pot and Stalin, I don’t think anyone could possibly disagree here. But that oldfangled moral order line seems a bit metathesiaphobic for my taste. What qualifies for oldfangled? Would Plato’s republic or Athen’s democracy qualify? If so, would you be as eagerly defending man-boy love as you do American conservatism? Just an honest inquiry, as there has to be some other argument for conservatism than the fallacy known as the Appeal to Tradition.

“2. Second, the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity.”

That’s a Yes, Yes, and capital Yes for me. I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone walking around in billowing 16th century garb outside the Ren Fest. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed it. Never public nudity either. And as far as ritual Aztec cannibalism is concerned, you can count me right out, I’ll have no part of it.

But... where are these people that don’t adhere to custom, convention, and continuity? Everyone does! Your championed trait is as distinguishing as any bee that likes being busy! Welcome to sociology 101, this phenomenon is known as socialization. It happens.

“3. Third, conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription.”

“Conservatives argue that we are unlikely, we moderns, to make any brave new discoveries in morals or politics or taste. It is perilous to weigh every passing issue on the basis of private judgment and private rationality. The individual is foolish, but the species is wise, Burke declared.”

I imagine the ancients must have imagined the same thing. That is, except for those individuals we remember them for – Plato, Aristotle, Socrates. They all spent considerable time in personal musing upon man and his place in society, even constructing complex theories to fit their arbitration. Plato’s Re Publica, for example.

Oh, I apologize, I think I just hijacked your appeal to authority. Oops.

“4. Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence.”

“Liberals and radicals, the conservative says, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away.”

I completely agree here. I’m as pensive and prudent as they come, folks. But you might want to PM these folks with that memo:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan

Reactionary revolution. Who’d a thunk it?

“5. Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety.”

Damn, it getting to seem like anarchism and conservatism are a rose by any name! I love variety too (some call it chaos, but I call it liberty).

“They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems.”

Mmmm... I suppose the radical system that was and is the United State’s constitution qualifies as well. I certainly support it’s abandonment.

“6. Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability.”

You’re right, Russel. Why bother? Man is imperfect. Nobody’s individual opinion or judgment can be trusted, and all we end up with is totalitarian plutocracy, time and time again. “Utopian domination” isn’t something to strive for, because it just makes things worse. Let’s strive for ubiquitous liberation (and non-interventionist solitude, in case of imperfection) instead.

“7. Seventh, conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked.”

Well certainly. I think freedom is a nicer synonym for power. And what grants power more than property? Property is a social contract, albeit an injust one, and without the necessities of life, property is nothing more than social blackmail. Property, then, is the means by which the abuse of freedom is preserved.

“8. Eighth, conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism.”

Holy crap! This could pass for the central anarchist creed!

“For a nation is no stronger than the numerous little communities of which it is composed.”

Substituting individuals for communities in the above sentence, I concur.

“9. Ninth, the conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions.”

Me too. These restraints must come from within the power holder, because it is impossible to deprive everyone of any power by which they could oppress another, and even if it was possible, might qualify as oppression itself. Instead, we must each of us recognize the universality of natural consequence, and strive to the maximum personal preference in the expenditure of our own time – a sort of lazze faire hedonism, or epicureanism if you will.

“10. Tenth, the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.”

Reification, my friend. There is no permanence, all is flux.

“he is opposed to the cult of Progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old.”

Bifurcation. You believe I think everything new is superior to anything old, and I suspect you think that everything old is better than anything new. The truth? Neither. Things are better and worse as subjective interpretation dictates. What this entails is your admitted greatest fear: THOUGHT. Arbitration. Judgment. Individual evaluation. Your mind stagnates at the conclusion of a fallacy, mine riddles with eternal paradoxes.

I recall the words of Blake:

“I mock thee not;
though by thee I am mocked
Thou call'st me madman
I call thee blockhead”.

We are not so different, you and I, Mr. conservative. The majority of your sound-bites I applaud. But under serious scrutiny, your conclusions are laughably naive. Get back to me when conservatives of every country agree with one another to the degree anarchists of all countries do. Perhaps then we’ll have enough in common to merit dialouge. Until then, keep servicing the status quo ante.

The Collusion of Domain and Property and a Critique of Pruvlic Allocation

What is public? Were the “whites only” and “blacks only” water fountains of the racist USA, respectively, public property? They certainly weren’t private property. Yet, a black person couldn’t drink from a public water fountain. And a white person either, for that matter, if there ever were any whites in want of drink from the “blacks only” fountains. So we must then ask, what is private?

We must eschew the Hegelian duality of these terms in order to properly understand them. Most people will agree that private property is that which is owned by one person. Most people will also agree that public property is that which is owned by all people. So what were the color-specific fountains of old, in reality? They were Pruvlic property. The property of a few. The property of the function f = (2, n - 1), where n is the number of people eligible to possess property in existence. There has been, until this time, no recognition of this state of ownership, with a continual argument taking place from the peaks of the ivory tower to the slums of the cardboard ghetto, with one side arguing that all that is not private must be public, and the other, vice versa.

Whole ideologies and economic systems have been established and destroyed in terms of these two “p” words. Just look at the definitions of Capitalism and Communism. One espouses the immortal divinity of the private, the other, the public. Then examine their realities. Both of their primary incarnations possessed a government. Both of them possessed massive violations of human rights in some form or another. It was Stalin’s regime, after all, that initiated the Great Purge, in aim of silencing dissent by robbing people of the ownership of their bodies, health, and life. And the homeless and starving of the United States remains an uncalculated number, not to mention their government’s conquests outside their territory, which arguably rival their inner crimes.

But wait! What was that we just tripped over? A clue to this unnavigable puzzle, perhaps? The United States territory. Ah. The United States owns something. What does it own? Perhaps it owns it’s citizenry? Well in that case, how can it’s citizenry own anything? Are there differing degrees of own? Whose ownership is final, the government’s, or it’s citizen’s? Well, according to US law, any citizen’s property may be confiscated by the government, aside proper monetary reimbursement, at any time for any “public” project. Well that answers that question.

What say you? The United States owns merely the property of it’s citizens, but not the citizens themselves? Okay. So if I were to abandon my property and travel to Mexico, there would be no one to stop me? What are border guards there for, then? That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Maybe it would be easier to say that the US owns the space in which all the collective property of it’s citizenry is owned. So then if all the US citizenry were to move to Mexico with me, what would the US own? How many different types of owning are there? Personal, material, spacial, spiritual? And how is it that under the Patriot Act, I can be detained and even tortured without due process of law? How can I be detained and tortured with due process of law? If that’s not the absence of private ownership of yourself, slavery, I don’t know what is.

But now we know the truth. The designation of a state excludes public. The USSR was living a contradiction, and the USA still is, a lie. You see how much easier the distinction of Pruvlic makes things? It’s quite simple. You are the material property of any government you are living under. If it is a government of one person, like a monarchy or dictatorship, then you are privately owned. If it is a gerontocracy or plutocracy, you are pruvlicly owned. Owned by some. To be owned by all, is a state that requires as a prerequisite the fact that you own yourself, rendering null and void the concept of ownership, government, itself, as ownership is in any personal respect, a binary measurement. You either do, or you don’t. Same with property. So to regard the whole of Japanese land as the “public property” of the Japanese citizenry is blatantly false, on multiple levels.

Not only do I not own it, but even they don’t own it. It is the pruvlic property of the Japanese government, or just Japan, for short. Those that have yet to equivocate private property and government could argue that point, (communists, lovers of the government, and anarcho-capitalists, lovers of private property) but straight down the ticket anarchists know better. If the entire island of Japan was forklifted into the air, dropped over the Asian continent and found itself smack dab on top of Beijing, would the island now belong to China? Or would it still belong to Japan? Wouldn’t a theft of this magnitude depracticate retribution and restoration?

This is the example by which I shall advent the differenciation of material ownership, and spacial ownership. Material ownership, or property, is the claim to the rights to alter and unalter a certain substance. Spacial ownership, or domain, is the claim to the rights to dictate what material comprises a certain space. The difference is subtle, but as illustrated with the following example, important. Imagine a person in the comfort and privacy of their own home. They are sitting in their favorite lazy chair reading a book, smoking a pipe, in dim but suitable lighting.

Suddenly, a stranger bursts through the door, walks into the homeowner’s kitchen, and begins to fix himself a sandwich. Now, the capitalist would claim that the main problem with the above scenario was the fact that the stranger has taken the man’s sandwich, which he presumably materialistically owns. The communist might retort that the only reason the stranger would ever dare enter another’s home was that the stranger must have been starving/abused/enslaved, and call for the abolition of the private ownership of sandwiches. What they both fail miserably to realize, is that amongst all this generalizing and posited justification, there is literally no economic difference between these two scenarios that is worth arguing about. In either case, you have the same net worth of sandwich to distribute, and regardless of how it is distributed, somebody is going hungry to whatever extent they don’t end up consuming said sandwich. The real problem with the scenario is not that the stranger is doing anything in particular, rather that he or she was there in the first place, whether they needed to be there or not. What we have, really, is a person reading a book peacefully under the presumption that they can do so alone and in peace, (exerting spacial ownership) and having this presumption violated by a person with no respect for privacy, or the concept of private domain. It would have been just as bad had the stranger walked in and attempted to read over the homeowner’s shoulder. Yet the difference (or similarity) between these cases has no recognized legitimacy by so many of all the political pulpits.

Pruvlic property is kept invisible by the silent collusion of property and domain, and only a few other sleights of mind. In Anarchy, however, these differences are faced and tackled head on, because Anarchy is the best (only) organizational system there is, willing to not just identify but SOLVE these non-ad-hominem problems and others like it. Abolish pruvlic property, be controlled by neither some nor one. An Anarchist pwns the State that owns.