The essential problem of freedom-based politics is indeed consent, and the only (perpetually incomplete by definition) answer I’ve found until now of is to work towards consensus politics, as only them can respect both relative inertia and radical change.

A constitution only has true moral precedence over people’s better judgment in very religious countries such as the US. Only through resorting to transcendent authority can some writings (or any kind of traditional symbols) be given such power. Indeed, the very notion of a “constitution” relies on the authority of tradition to trump people’s autonomy.

An apparent counter-argument might be that “even” consensus can lead 99.99% of the people to legitimate pointless coercion. A closer analysis makes it obvious that any constitution is subject to a criticism of the same nature. All sacred principles enshrined in constitutions or whatever sacred scriptures can ever reflect nothing but what a given community of politicians (usually people with authority) agreed on (in other words, consented to) at a given time. And as history shows, in politics, all great fundamentals have been questioned – and improvement often required radical change.

Yes, consensus politics aren’t perfect, and can’t completely prevent coercion of the minority due to the ignorance of the masses. And that is irrelevant. The point of consensus politics is to recognize that ignorance is an inherent part of the human condition, and that learning – that is, change – is the only possible solution. Constitutional politics, on the other hand, rely on traditional authority of historical lawmakers to enforce rules upon people.

It is unwise to pretend to know scriptural truth and use these claims to coerce others. Politics are no exception, and the dialectic of openness and closeness is as essential on a social plane than an individual plane. You might think that your system would imply the least coercive (or otherwise “best”) system, but those claims are never anything but the reflect of the state your own consent.

Nothing but consent should be given sacred status. That is the essential definition of freedom-based politics.

The debate on property is probably the most fundamental debate among anarchists, and there is no clear consensus on this issue within the anarchist movement. Worse still, I’m not even sure of my own opinion on this topic!

Here is an evaluation grid of your degree of support for “private property”, inspired from this grid on ozarkia.net. Each question contains multiple choices . The higher your score, the more your normative recommendations for a property system resemble historical capitalism. My own positions are italicized.

1. Which mode of “property” should apply to the means of production: machines, factories and other goods used for production?

A) 0 pt = Usus only, through State coercion if necessary.
B) 1 pt = Usus only, through voluntary collective agreements.
C) 2 pts = Possession, through State coercion if necessary.
D) 3 pts = Possession, through voluntary collective agreements.
E) 4 pts = Private property, through voluntary collective agreements.
F) 5 pts = Private property, legitimizing private property acquired in the past through statist coercion (State expropriation) or other forms of violence, but without endorsing violence in the present or future.

2. Which mode of “property” should apply to individual consumption goods resulting from work and production? (Note: in general, anarchists agree that “private property” should apply to personal good such as clothes or a toothbrush.)

A) 0 pt = Usus only.
B) 2.5 pts = Possession.
C) 5 pts = Property.

3. Which property mode should apply to land and housing?

A) 0 pt = Usus only, through State coercion if necessary.
B) 1 pt = Usus only, through voluntary collective agreements.
C) 2 pts = Possession, through State coercion if necessary.
D) 3 pts = Possession, through voluntary collective agreements.
E) 4 pts = Private property, through voluntary collective agreements.
F) 5 pts = Private property, legitimizing private property acquired in the past through statist coercion (State expropriation) or other forms of violence, but without endorsing violence in the present or future.

4. What is your opinion on “work”?

A) 0 pt = Nobody should work.
B) 2.5 pts = Nothing against work, but it shouldn’t be linked to survival.
C) 4 pts = Work is essential to survival, but is not an absolute virtue.
D) 5 pts = Work is essential to survival and is an absolute virtue.

5. What is your opinion on “profit” (i.e. becoming rich off other people’s work)?

A) 0 pt = Profit is a crime that should be abolished by the State.
B) 1 pt = Profit is a crime that shouldn’t exist, but State coercion is a greater crime and shouldn’t be used to eradicate it.
C) 2 pts = Profit is a vice that should be stolen, in part or whole, by the State.
D) 3 pts = Profit is a vice that should be discouraged voluntarily through free-trade mechanisms.
E) 4 pts = Profit is a good thing, but the State should not encourage it.
F) 5 pts = Profit is a good thing that should be encouraged by the State.

6. What is your opinion on “barter” and “money”?

A) 0 pt = Neither barter nor money should be used.
B) 0.5 pt = Money shouldn’t be used, but barter is good.
C) 1 pt = Nothing against money, but it shouldn’t be the main means of exchange; barter is better.
D) 2 pts = Money is not bad, but should have a real value anchored in a tangible counterpart, without statist control, and should be linked to effort put into work.
E) 3 pts = Money is good, but should have a real value anchored in a tangible counterpart, without statist control.
F) 4 pts = Money is good, but should have a real value anchored in a tangible counterpart, and with statist control (or without tangible value, without central banking, with fixed monetary mass, such as in Panama).
G) 5 pts = Money is good, but should be closely controlled by the State which can print and control its value as it wishes.

My score = 14/30

Answers to specific questions are more interesting than the overall score, which is a mere indicator. Furthermore, my answers aren’t quite definitive (apart from 4.) and I’m open to new arguments.

On the other hand, the quest for objective coherence remains necessary for any political system to exist, and the only known way to reliably assess theoretical coherence is its inter-subjective acceptance. Two broad attitudes are possible when faced with this dilemma of ideological coherence:

1. Recognizing irrationality: fundamental normative beliefs are too often anchored in the subjective aspects of one’s own reality to serve as Law enforced on everyone.
2. Denying irrationality: claims of knowledge of pure objective rationality legitimize authoritarian legislation.

Now, claiming that pure rationality is impossible in political discourse doesn’t mean that we should give up altogether on rational politics, nor that we should move away from the axioms of democracy. If anything, it means that we should move closer to the underlying principles of democracy. Empowering the People, which I believe to be a commendable ideal, shouldn’t be about empowering 50%+1 of it while the remaining minority obeys to whatever irrational demands the majority – or powerful minority – has.

As theoretical grounds for a “new rationality”, I would echo various libertarian and anarchist thinkers in suggesting that as politics are to be assumed as fundamentally irrational, the only fundamental basis for political “rationality” we have, beyond consensus acceptance, is the maximal possible respect of the individual free will of all. Without this one ethical rule, consensus is worthless. That one ethical guideline is thus a synonym of political rationality if we recognize the fundamental presence of irrational beliefs in political thought. It logically leads to libertarian ideals.

So, if politics are irrational, what did I learn about myself and the Universe during those past 3-4 years of meditations on the topic? Mainly that there are several conflicting paradigms that all make some sense to me for different reasons. My personal aesthetic ideal would be anarcho-communism. My “rational”, ethical ideal would be panarchism, seen as the ultimate libertarian system. The practical means I suggest to get there is an economically centrist but socially radical form of libertarian socialism.

Economic structures throughout history have first and foremost served the purpose of reinforcing existing power structures. But unlike Marxists, I don’t (more precisely, no longer) believe that changing the economic system will magically change the authority structure of society, which until now has simply spontaneously re-instituted itself under different forms. Socialism and eventually communism will emerge from a strongly libertarian society, not the opposite.

I would hypothesize that intuitive knowledge of this is one reason capitalists are overwhelmingly authoritarian. So-called “libertarian” Market fundamentalists are probably deluding themselves when they think their system will ever be anything more than a fringe movement and a literary phenomena. If they care about freedom in large liberal democracies, they should accept compromise on economic issues and join hands with economically centrist and left-wing libertarians. Only then might we be able to counter the authoritarian capitalists – authoritarian socialism mostly died with the USSR – that is so powerful only due to the fragmentation of the libertarians.

This was my last post on the topic of political philosophy (and politics in general) for a while.

More precisely, let us assume that if something is right, people will gradually come to see it as such if proper rational education and dialogue happens: irrationality in the modern world originates from authority structures. Now, the current unidimensional capitalist world entraps people, especially the weak and the poor, into such an authority structure, symbolized by a cycle of “work” and “consumption”. Panarchism would undermine this entrapment and free everyone from the chains of any specific economic system.

Let us now take the hypothesis that socialism is right. What can be inferred from this is that – provided socialism is right – the poor and weak would likely massively turn themselves to socialism in a panarchist system. The richest capitalists would lose the workforce that is the basis of their wealth and survival. They would be implicitly forced to either:

- in a utopian scenario, trade amazing services or products to the socialists and keep their wealth afloat;
- in a good-case scenario, sell off their “excess” resources at minimal profit;
- in an average-case scenario, give off much of their resources as “charity”;
- in a worst-case scenario, attempt to survive eating gold bars (the socialist workers don’t want to trade them food or essential services) and die miserably.

Therefore, the rich would be less rich and the poor less poor. Everyone would benefit from this scenario, from both left-wing and right-wing perspectives on fairness. In any case, economic inequalities that people don’t find genuinely legitimate would be largely stamped out. Furthermore, if any magical option emerges in the future that is superior to both socialism and capitalism, panarchism would allow for a relatively easy transition.

In summary, panarchism, being a political meta-system devoid of ideological uniformity, would provide people with enough cognitive freedom that they would freely choose the option that they consider to be fair. Global ethical safeguards, in turn, would be provided through the decentralized social feedback produced as response to the actions of each individual.

“This is only his box. The sheep you asked for is inside.”
I was very surprised to see a light break over the face of my young judge:
“That is exactly the way I wanted it! [...]”

~The Little Prince, Chapter 2

Beyond this core, political thought can be seen as a system composed of two poles in what can be hypothesized to be a dialectical interaction: descriptive/interpretive “reality” and prescriptive ideals. The roots of this dichotomy can be traced back at least to Platonic idealism, although it should be emphasized that as far as this analysis is concerned – unlike what is claimed by Plato and religion, among others – ideals have, a priori, no existence outside of people’s minds.

First, “reality” refers to the world as it is perceived and interpreted by a given individual or group. This is roughly equivalent to what we could call the context, understood as the sum of “objective” constraints stemming from the natural and social environment. It is however critical to note that these constraints become “contextual” only when we focus on a small part of the global reality and interpret the whole through the nature of that part. By definition, the focus of politics is humans, in all their subjective, irrational glory.

Second, “ideals” refer to how the world should be, according to a given individual or group. Ideals are always different from “reality”, if to varying degrees. Everyone might not wish to change the world radically, but it seems safe to assume that everyone would change at least something – everyone that engages in political thought, that is. These changes are envisioned according to subjective ethics, which led me many times to define the main subject-matter of politics as something like “community ethics”.

We can thus notice that political thought is doubly relative: both context and ideals are subjectively defined, consciously and unconsciously. This is where [] comes into play: one’s perspective is wholly dependent on one’s core self. One’s [] will reflect his satisfaction with the current political system, his natural tendency to empathize with – or to hate, for that matter – other people, his desire to avoid cognitive dissonance… and a myriad of other aspects that make someone a unique being.

But politics aren’t simply the dialectics of reality and ideals, as these dialectics also accurately describe the global mechanics of individual hopes and fears. That isn’t to say that one’s hopes and fears are unrelated to political thought (they certainly are closely related), but rather that politics can’t be reduced to those hopes and fears we have for ourselves. Politics are social, not individual; that is, political ideals are defined as to affect many people by default.

With all the above in mind, we can define politics more precisely as the multidimensional dialectical process of, on one hand, individual reality and ideals, and on the other, collective reality and ideals.

In short, politics are a huge mess of contradictions and uncertainty. That’s also what makes them fascinating.

[image source]

We can thus split “wealth” into two core aspects: the “objective” aspect of materiality and the “subjective” aspect of satisfaction. These concepts can be complemented by those of “exchange-value” and “use-value“, which further relativize the meaning (or, in this case, “value”) of wealth. The materiality of wealth implies that globally, fundamental resources are finite, and – disregarding pseudo-metaphysical notions of “property” – shared between all human beings. It also implies that land and untapped resources within it have inherent “value” because of their potential to be used. And if some “have” them, this naturally implies that others don’t, in an equal proportion: we can’t create land or resources out of thin air.

That brings us to the second aspect of wealth, inseparable from the first: the satisfaction it provides to human beings that have it. Satisfaction is not a linear, logical concept. It is rather subjective and contextual. That said, this subjective side of human reality is what makes life worth living, and thus should be that which matters to the political sphere. Objective assessments of the nature of reality should be no more than tools to provide everyone with the greatest possible (or rationally thought as such) subjective satisfaction.

That said, the satisfaction produced by any given good is not equal everywhere to everyone. More specifically, two inequalities in the way “satisfaction” is socio-individually produced are relevant here. First, it should be noted that although matters of services such as education or health care, or the fulfillment of basic needs, can be assumed to produce purely individually assessed satisfaction, what is known as “material wealth” in modern industrialized societies often produces satisfaction – or dissatisfaction –  mainly through social recognition. As such, a large part of the satisfaction produced by wealth is wholly dependent on the socio-economic context of individuals.

That aspect is however minor compared to that of individually, psychologically produced relativity. The human mind is fundamentally comparative; subjectivity cannot be understood in absolute terms, and therefore neither can be “wealth”. A simplistic example of this would be that a steam room (or hot tub) and a pool are both “comfortable” and “normal” when you’re there, so long as they are within the mechanical limitations of the human body. However, when one suddenly jumps from one state to another, the difference is shocking. In the context of material resources: the more you have, the less satisfaction each hypothetical “unit of resources” your peers recognize your authority over will produce.

Conversely, to those who have very little current resources, a modest increase of resources are expected to produce a relatively enormous amount of satisfaction. This relativity can be illustrated in considering a hypothetical situation where someone on a deserted island, who has no food, is handed (or picked) an apple. Mathematically, this has infinite value over the previous situation. If one gains another apple, one has doubled one’s objective wealth. If one had a hundred apples, and gains another apple, one has increased one’s material wealth less than a percent. To the human mind, after enough objects enter a group, it becomes difficult to comprehend the individual objects as not being “just part of a group”, and thus individually appreciate them.

Additionally, this disregards that any apple that one knows will rot before it can be eaten is of no, or even of negative, value. One may have storage problems after a specific amount. One’s pile of rotting food is likely to attract animals that would eat other food he plans on eating. In other words, the apples that objectively exist – and thus, by the programming Western culture has ingrained in people, should be worth more – instead are a risk or liability.

As long as we play out programming that only makes us unhappy at great waste, those with resources will be miserable; not to mention that “the rich” have also been taught that it is good for other people to have comparatively less. So “the rich” are left paranoid, hoarding things they have no plans of ever using, worrying about other people’s thoughts about them, and overall not enjoying the new material wealth they gain, while “the poor” are left with bad nutrition and no hope of personal control of their own life: for example, “an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption ends up in the landfill.” [1]

Heylighen outlines four main factors correlated with subjective happiness worldwide: wealth, access to knowledge, personal freedom and equality [2]. He says of equality that its correlation is “somewhat less pronounced [...] inequality implies less control for those who are in the weaker position, and more risks of losing their privileges for those in the stronger position”. However, as for wealth:

It is interesting to note that the correlation between purchasing power and happiness becomes less important for more wealthy societies, implying that once the basic material needs of nutrition and shelter are satisfied, further prosperity adds little to happiness.

Thus, the goal of the production of wealth in modern, “developed societies” should not be to produce ever more things, which could end up producing significantly less subjective satisfaction, but rather to maximize the satisfaction that this wealth produces. A zero-growth economy (or close), from this perspective, appears to be the most ethical choice because of its sustainability and the equilibrium of satisfaction that it produces. In any case, it seems obvious that providing free access to an open education and maximising personal freedoms are universal keys to happiness.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/weekinreview/18martin.htm?_r=1

[2] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HAPPINES.html

This is the third installment of the series of joint posts by Azarius and Reikoku on the topic of panarchism. You are unlikely to understand much of it if you haven’t read the two previous posts yet.

Creating a system from scratch requires that a large amount of resources be gathered. This initial purchase of resources needed to establish the system was probably the one point where finding a compromise was the most difficult. We agreed quite fast on the idea of a “joining fee” or “one-time tax” to serve this purpose, but the specific nature of this tax was to be the object of, quite literally, many hours of heated debate.

There is very little common ground between the authors’ economic positions, as they imply diametrically opposite views on what “fairness” even means. This debate pushed the boundaries of our views of what is acceptable and what is not as far as economic policies go; the result may very well be the weirdest tax system ever created for serious purposes.

Azarius’ ideal form of “taxation”, barring the effective collectivization of all wealth above the essentials, is a fully progressive percentage imposing a limit on individual wealth. Reikoku’s ideal form of “taxation”, in contrast, is a flat fee. These extremes, as well as some possible intermediate positions, are illustrated below [Click to enlarge]:

The first element of compromise introduced was the notion of “essentials”. The poorest people, that have nothing but such “essentials”, should not have to pay to join the system. Furthermore, these “essentials” should not be included in any calculation of tax rates or “individual wealth”. This amounts to adding a progressive aspect to the tax as the tax rate applied to the poorest would be less – that is to say, zero – than that applied to wealthier individuals.

The second element of compromise was the most difficult to agree on: the upper limit of taxation. Azarius being strongly against such a limit, and Reikoku being against fully progressive taxation, we ended up with a tax system with a rate that is initially progressive, then regressive until a point where it becomes linear. This system, including elements of progressive, regressive and linear taxation could be described as a “semi-regressive poverty-protected uncapped tax system”, and is illustrated below:

Theoretical tax rate [Click to enlarge]:

Effective tax rate [Click to enlarge]:

Several implications of this visualisation of political opinions are novel to my thought:

- The examples of utopias on the sides of the outer square correspond roughly to the examples given by Mannheim in Idéologie et utopie. He also added fascism, which appeared at first glance to fit somewhere between the authoritarian left and right. However, it is quite obvious that fascism is globally more authoritarian than either socialism-communism or historical and bureaucratic conservatisms. This led me to the conclusion that the extremes of either axis require to compromise between the extremes of the other axis. The choice of panarchism as the penultimate libertarian system is, of course, biased: the “ultimate” systems included in the corners of the square (and therefore at the tips of each axis) should be treated as mere examples and not absolute answers. There is no such thing as an absolute answer.

- The diagonal arrows refer to the level of congruency of the utopia with the current socio-historical context. These examples are meant to represent the current world and will most certainly become irrelevant in the future, just as they are mostly irrelevant to describe most of the past. It is however likely that the structure of change has remained, and will remain, similar throughout eras, assuming that social change is indeed driven by “utopian thought” (cf. Mannheim).

- Many people who claim to be “free-market capitalists” are in fact closer to the bourgeoise liberal or historical conservative utopias as described by Mannheim. Similarly, many “left communists”, are closer to radical anarchism (e.g. myself) or socialism-communism. The fact that Reikoku is quite close to believing in the bourgeoise liberal utopia while I am close to radical anarchist utopian thought is most likely why we agreed on panarchism.

- A society can’t be half communist. Or half panarchist. It either is or isn’t. And if a society is not communist – which means the absence of private property – it is necessarily capitalist; if a society is not anarchist it is necessarily authoritarian to a degree. On the other hand, there is no limit to how “capitalist” a society can be. People could come to “own” the air people are breathing. People could even “own” the stars in the sky (cf. The Little Prince). Hey, we can “own” ideas, so why not? The same can be said about authoritarianism : Big Brother anyone? In summary, utopias are mostly a fixed set of ideals, while the “established order” is constantly changing.

- In light of the above: in any political orientation test, determining just how much one is in favour of the current established order (principles, beliefs, etc.) relies exclusively on historical precedent. The “established order” is always threatened by utopian thought such as, in the current era, those embodied by left communism, radical anarchism, panarchism, and to a lesser degree socialism-communism or bourgeoise liberalism. On the contrary, the conservative “utopia” is paradoxically extreme stability – the negation of utopian thought. In current times, “fascism”, “historical and bureaucratic conservatisms” and “free-market capitalism” all embrace the established order of competition and consumption, albeit in quite different ways.

- In conclusion, the outer limits of the diagram are highly vague, to the point where it is difficult to properly assess the validity of the above claims. I would suggest that they be used as general orientations for further research/theorising.

Sources:

ADORNO, Theodor W. et al., The Authoritarian Personality, Harper & Brothers, 1950; via ANESI, Chuck, The F Scale : Final Form [http://www.anesi.com/fscale.htm]
MANNHEIM, Karl, Idéologie et utopie, 1956 (1929), [http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1522/cla.mak.ide1 ]
PACE NEWS, The Political Compass [http://politicalcompass.org/]
Azarius and Friends’ Political Orientation Test 3.0 [http://test.cogitatus.info/] (which I host…)

Given this initial similarity, the great problem of freedom, namely that of its necessary limits, was to be the essence of our debates. As a starting point, we used as working definition of freedom the idea that one’s freedoms should end where another’s begin. Furthermore, freedom was to take precedence over security due to the fundamentally authoritarian nature of the latter: protecting one’s security through social means necessarily curtails the freedom of many.

Our stance is a socially individualistic one: the main goal of society should be to provide individuals with the greatest possible autonomy. This is also where our approaches diverge. Azarius, as an adherent to far-left positions, namely anarchist communism, sees property laws as a curtailment to people’s freedoms. Reikoku, as an adherent to far-right positions, namely laissez-faire capitalism, sees property laws as a necessary component of freedom. Finding through dialogue a workable compromise between such diametrically opposite economic positions, to our knowledge, has never been attempted before.

We have not only attempted such a feat, but we believe to have succeeded. On the plane of ethics, our approach is centered on the values of tolerance, peace and transparency. We would unashamedly say that we have probably found the libertarian system which would satisfy the greatest number of people. This system, or rather its ideal archetype, is panarchism.

On a practical level, panarchism can be conceived as a rough translation of the “network society” into the world of nations and government; it is indeed made possible through modern technology and knowledge. In this aspect, the main feature that distinguishes it from other theoretical political structures is that it dissociates government from geography whenever possible, therefore allowing true cohabitation of many ideologies within a single territory. In this regard, it is a political meta-structure rather than structure. It is arguably a form of anarchism, as it allows any “responsible adult” to opt-out of external governance in the statist sense at any time.

Laws, in such a system, would be divided in two:

- “Universal” laws, common to all systems and people, and ideally to all humanity. These should be defined through consensus, and be kept to a bare minimum: they would penalize non-consensual aggression such as murder and rape. They will be the specific object of a later post.

- “Specific” laws would be defined by the constitution of any given system, and people would be able to view these constitutions before joining any system. These laws would not be able to remove the universal code, only to add to it. They might include, but are by no means limited to: privacy or property laws, explanations of what a person could take – physically or symbolically – when leaving the system, an age of majority for the system, or a provision for contractual law.

Both standards would be enforced by each system independently as long as both the plaintiff and the defendant are part of the same system. Crimes between different systems, defined a priori by the legal system of the plaintiff, would be dealt with by a jury composed of an equal number of people from the plaintiff’s and the defendant’s systems, plus an additional, lower number of people from other systems – that both sides would have agreed on. Therefore, at least 3 different systems would have to be involved. This would, we believe, simplify the original solution of panarchism to this issue, which is to treat crimes between systems roughly the same as the current world applies international law.

[Next post: Transition and Progress -->]

To all the technocrats and economic deterministico-evolutionists out there, stop caring about hypothetical “progress” in the future so much. Many people are living miserable lives right now, and would be significantly better off with very little more. Yet, other people accaparate ludicrous amounts of resources mainly because they had the luck of being born at the right place at the right moment. Meritocracy through trade is a myth, given the existence of an elaborate, and easily abused, system of wealth accumulation.

What gives some the right to live in outlandish luxury while others simultaneously starve? Long-term effects are irrelevant in this case. As humans, and provided that we accept social individualist axioms, I would argue that we have an ethical obligation to prevent the sacrifice of some people’s lifetimes – or even part of them – for the sake of others. As much as humanly possible while not sacrificing our own lifetimes, that is.

As for trade, it is a significantly more difficult issue. It would be highly impractical to attempt to police all trade and punish someone for, say, trading a painting for his friend’s homemade pie. The ethical problems begin when your neighbour can live in a castle because his granddad won the loto, while you live in a slum because you’re the descendant of a people colonised centuries ago. Sure, social mobility is possible, but without proper wealth redistribution, it remains a highly marginal phenomena.

Both past and modern history have consistently shown that community-enforced (or in most cases State-enforced…) wealth redistribution is essential to modern de facto capitalism, as the absence of such mechanisms usually leads to public outrage, and in many cases to bloody revolutions. Capitalism devoid of proper wealth redistribution also correlates with a greater vulnerability of the People to authoritarian ideals, as they offer apparently simple answers to despair and misery.

Now, I do not inherently mind people living in castles. What I do mind, however, is that a great number of people live miserable lives while unused facilities and resources have seldom – if ever – been so abundant through human history, even in relation to the number of people alive. Nobody deserves misery, not even the less qualified and less educated of the world.