Was My Life Worth Living? (1934)

http://ucblibrary3.berkeley.edu/goldman/Writings/Essays/lifework.html

by t0dd • 13 years ago

132 101 13 years ago

ucblibrary3.berkeley.edu

ljlolel• 13 years ago

Where are today's anarchists?

rquantz• 13 years ago

Right here.

thenerdfiles12• 13 years ago

I leave my books on Post-scarcity Anarchism on the table when in public. I talk about Planned Economies openly in public.

I decided not to pursue academia to show you what an Anarchist looks like.

But a majority of society needs to feel validated by the exploits of Miley Cyrus and needs to feel connected with the limits of Obama's sermon-like ratiocinations or the GOP's economic exploitation strategies.

aaronem8• 13 years ago

Have you considered the possibility that you're just nonsensical and really annoying?

CitizenMe• 13 years ago

We are all over the place. Uniforms for easy identification aren't really our thing.

angersock• 13 years ago

Cataloged meticulously.

moxie• 13 years ago

See: http://www.crimethinc.com

Also, it looks like you're in the Bay Area. You can stop by Bound Together Books in SF, The Long Haul Infoshop in Berkeley, or The Holdout in Oakland.

The East Bay Anarchist Conversation and Book Event is next Saturday at Humanist Hall in Oakland: http://eastbayanarchist.com/the-second-annual-east-bay-anarc...

As an entrepreneur, you might also be interested to read about the anarchist community's overlap with the creation of projects such as Twitter (see the Institute for Applied Autonomy), as well as the early emphasis on self-publishing through projects like Indymedia.

cinquemb2• 13 years ago

I just came across iSee[0]. Do you know if it has an API? It would be really cool to try to automatically plot routes to places without surveillance cameras.

[0] http://66.93.183.118:8080/isee/s1?zm=0&id=5876

Joeboy• 13 years ago

I don't know about today, but yesterday a pretty large number of them were at the 2013 Anarchist Bookfair at Queen Mary's College in London. http://www.anarchistbookfair.org.uk/

anachrokate• 13 years ago

There's a host of radical spaces in the bay beyond the ones Moxie mentioned. But hackerspaces like Noisebridge and Sudoroom have a large quantity of explicit and involved anarchists as core members, as well as a long tradition of using anarchist organizing models and even on occasion referring to themselves as anarchist projects.

marmaduke2• 13 years ago

Reading this essay gives the impression that this person was singular, and her time singular as well.

I was always told anarchism implied violence and generally other bad things, but after reading Graeber's "Debt: the first 5000 years", I chanced upon "Anarchy works"

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anar...

which is interesting to read, for at least the depictions of how anarchism has played out in several previous situations, socially and economically.

thenerdfiles12• 13 years ago

Robert Tucker, Kropotkin, Chomsky, etc. all give us a clear idea as to how and why anarchism MUST work.

Governments (where before religions, but at a moral level, religions still do) exist as a function of hegemonic markets (corporations) such that governments limit the powers of liberty of individuals through the frameworks of blind justice (corporations are just like us).

This is not new. Corporations are not just like us. What do economic categories have to do with the rightness or wrongness of action? What does economic stratification have to do with the limits of human freedom? If our autonomy is limited, we do not need an Indexed Dollar to inform us of this; the market will tell us all by itself.

Just like as J.S. Mill argued in terms of Women's Suffrage — Why do we need a government to legislate what Women can or cannot do when Nature will determine this all on her own?

Why do we need a Government to legislate what we are economically capable of or not? (We don't.)

mynameishere• 13 years ago

Why do we need a government to legislate what Women can or cannot do when Nature will determine this all on her own?

What an odd think to say. It's the nature of humans to form government, and the most natural one is despotism. Shut down the macro-governments we have now and you'll have millions of micro-tyrannies overnight. And the role of woman there would be about that of a slave.

Similar stuff about god giving "inalienable rights" is rhetorical hocus-pocus.

rubidium2• 13 years ago

That was a nice read. Thanks for the link.

I also read Graeber's Debt, and then his Democracy Project. The one thing I can't shake in all of the anarchist literature is what seems to be a fundamental assumption that an individualist altruism can be the foundation of all societies worldwide. It may work sometimes and in certain societies (with certain natural economies), but the abuse and indifference so often found in human society makes a strong case against such human governance possible on any large scale.

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary."

thenerdfiles12• 13 years ago

How can we know if we are not angels with a handful of milleniums of governments and religious institutions actively engaged in telling us we are not?

Structural Oppression is a real thing.

marmaduke2• 13 years ago

    individualist altruism can be the foundation

I have the impression that, more than individual's altruism, it is voluntary participation that makes such systems work, i.e. voluntary participation in distributed altruism. (reads like a CS thesis on multithreading..)

defen• 13 years ago

I was always told anarchism implied violence and generally other bad things

Well, she was involved in a plot to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, the stated purpose being to "strike terror into the soul of his class" and "bring the teachings of Anarchism before the world"

mb0• 13 years ago

If you want to dig a little deeper into anarchism & like gelderloos' writing, he also wrote a popular book called "How nonviolence protects the state", which raises some points in support of violence as a revolutionary tactic:

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-how-...

Main argument is, violence is necessary because the state always uses violence. He also raises some points about nonviolence empowering the state's violence, as well as nonviolent radicals' criticism of violent radicals being a form of oppression.

If you want to get real deep into anarchist literature, Derek Jenson's Endgame will tell you about how necessary it is for us to destroy civilization in order to promote the survivability of the planet.

aaronem8• 13 years ago

That's the trouble with anarchism and its fellows: you can start from whatever set of premises you like, but sooner or later, you always find yourself either mired in irrelevance or earnestly explaining how, in order to bring about a better world for everyone, it is absolutely necessary and morally imperative to murder millions of people and build mountains out of their skulls, which is okay, because it's not everyone but just the bad people, and if they weren't bad people then you wouldn't have to murder them, so it's all their fault really, and it's easy to tell how bad they are by the way you're murdering them.

javajosh2• 13 years ago

There is definitely a thick, deep, wide current of "gov love" in pop culture, and it's good to question it. It's expressed in movies (and TV shows) where government representatives solve problems for the common people. Those reps can be cops, James Bond, S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, or what have you. They are the heroes, the saviors. In these narratives, the government heroes swoop in to protect the weak from being preyed on by the strong.

And yet there is no shortage of stories that highlight the incompetence, corruption, and even out-right malicious intent of government, even popularly elected ones. So it's not one-sided, at least.

In my view, what's missing from all such arguments is any kind of frame of reference. The anarchist claim is unsatisfying, to say the least, that the governments role is to maximize individual expression. To me, the best possible world is not the one where people can express themselves. Specifically, the best possible world is the one which can colonize other worlds. And it could very well be that dictatorship would work for that purpose (but I hope not).

Why is spreading life beyond earth so important? Because without doing that, in the long run, life will end. And that is the closest I have come to having an article of faith: that we humans are the stewards, and the hope, of all life on earth. Unless we act, every living thing is doomed in the long run. (Of course, the question arises: what if we colonize other worlds successfully? What then? To which I answer: let's cross that bridge when we get to it.)

With that frame, one can start to answer the question "Is Anarchy right?" The answer that I come up with is: probably not. We have a lot of problems with the way the US gov is structured, and particularly problems with how the judicial branch oversees the executive and holds it accountable. That important check seems to have degraded at virtually every level of society, federal, state and local, and I believe represents the greatest societal challenge we face. But is it a problem that is inherent to democracy, and something only something like anarchy can fix?

Society is a lot like a life-raft, making high density human habitation possible. Laws are the framework that any government provides and constitute the lowest level interface you must support to participate in the maintenance and growth of the life-raft. Basically: Don't speed. Don't kill people. Don't steal stuff. Pay your taxes. If you do these things, you're mostly going to be okay.

The real craziness starts with regulation, particularly when that regulation doesn't fit the popular view of what that regulation is or what it's purpose is. The three big national regulators that people think about when it comes to "government interference" would be the FDA, the FCC, and the SEC. We find it problematic when these organizations actively stop (and punish) small entities looking to compete with larger ones, often for arbitrary and clearly corrupt reasons. There is a revolving door between industry and government that is difficult for non-specialists to penetrate. But it is my view that these battles must be fought, and leadership (which starts with the President) must pro-actively root out corruption and misapplication of the law. And the best place to start with that, is simplicity. We need a profound reduction in the size of the legal corpus. Adding a rule that, for the next 20 years, Congress must repeal 2 laws for every law pass would be a good start.

In any event, my point is that I don't think anarchy could lead us to the highest goal of human society, the colonization of other worlds. Authoritarianism, as distasteful as it is, is handy for large-scale, complex tasks like that. I don't like it. But I don't see another option.

hsitz• 13 years ago

I think Bertrand Russell's comments about the eventual extinction of human race are, as a matter of psychology, much closer to the way most people think:

". . . if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.

I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that, they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries about much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation -- it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things." from "Why I Am Not a Christian: http://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html

javajosh2• 13 years ago

Our risk profile is slightly higher than that: the odds of a big meteor-strike, or a Yosemite caldera eruption, are non-zero. This is ignoring man-made (and so man-preventable) threats like global nuclear war or catastrophic climate change. But yes, I see it as an exciting challenge, not a reason to be depressed. I suspect that there is plenty of life in the universe - and I further suspect that precious few ecologies manage to reproduce. The challenges are mind-boggling: first, you need intelligent life. Second, that species needs to advance technologically to the point of being able to get off planet, and then (a much, much bigger leap) to get to another star. Heck, it may not even be possible. But we've got to try.

md2242• 13 years ago

Why is spreading life beyond earth so important? Because without doing that, in the long run, life will end.

Why is that? Which existential threat are you referring to? Overpopulation? The sun's transition into a red giant? (Not trying to be snarky, just looking for clarification.)

I'm not sure I agree that prolonging the survival of life should be an overriding goal that takes precedence over all other concerns. Firstly, there is nothing intrinsically good about life. It's a complex physical process, one which has resulted in incredible emergent behaviors, but if all life were to vanish tomorrow, the Universe wouldn't really be worse off. The Universe has no goal, no desires (or at least none that we could claim to have knowledge of at this point); it's simply a bunch of atoms interacting. So this whole idea that "we must preserve the existence of life no matter what" has no objective basis. It's more a result of our own struggle to find meaning in the Universe, our own psychological need to believe that all of this isn't just cosmic dust in the end.

My point: I don't think that human misery should be allowed in service of the "greater goal" of keeping life around. Because why bother? What's the point of sustaining life if misery is a prerequisite? If we can colonize other planets and explore the Universe, that's great; I'm just saying that we shouldn't use that as an overriding goal above all other concerns. The "best possible world" would be one in which everyone has the opportunity to pursue their desires, as long as their desires don't conflict with the desires of other living things (the feasibility of this scenario is another discussion altogether).

And yes, I realize that if a giant asteroid were to strike the Earth tomorrow, that would interfere with a lot of people's desires. I just think that "spread at any cost" is a bad goal for humanity. If I had to choose between 100 more years of life on Earth in which everyone lived peaceful, fulfilling lives vs. one million more years of life spreading throughout the Universe at the cost of significant anguish and poverty, I think I'd lean towards Option #1.

sliverstorm4• 13 years ago

You could have simplified that a lot:

I disagree with you because I subscribe to hedonism and you don't

Houshalter2• 13 years ago

The Universe has no goal, no desires (or at least none that we could claim to have knowledge of at this point); it's simply a bunch of atoms interacting.

I don't think the universe has a goal but I wouldn't care if it did. I only care about my own goals and I prefer the human race survive.

Just because the universe has no goal doesn't mean we shouldn't do or care about anything.

meric• 13 years ago

Life ends, why not just have a good time?

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Houshalter2• 13 years ago

Your goal of going to other planets seems extremely arbitrary. Also pointless. People have survived for millions of years until now, the Earth isn't going anywhere. If you mean the long long term then sure we eventually need to leave, but getting there decades or even centuries sooner isn't going to make a difference. If something happens on Earth to destroy all life like Global warming or nuclear war (both I think are unlikely to cause full extinction, if they occur at all) it'd be far simpler to solve those problems or build shelters on Earth than to create a sulf-sufficent colony in space.

I also don't think it will make any difference anyways. I believe in a few decades we will have smarter-than-human AI. At that point it can design better AIs and so on, and eventually get machines hundreds or thousands of times more intelligent than humans. They can design spacecraft that make ours look like paper-airplanes. Any space programs before that are futile and not likely to help.

daviddaviddavid• 13 years ago

I am as taken by the form as I am by the content. What beautiful writing. While there's something to be said for concision, an essay like this shows that medium-to-large sentences can be deployed to great effect. It almost feels like she's establishing a cadence at points.

t0dd• 13 years ago

I'm happy to hear you've had the same reaction to it I've always had. The words flow with some supernatural precision. I always return to it, for the beautiful writing, for reminders of her lifelong commitment to an ideal. If you want to read more from her, check out her autobiography: "Living My Life" http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-living-m...

ahultgren4• 13 years ago

I've never understood (even after reading this article) how anyone who's anti-authoritarian can honestly believe that removing a government is a good idea. The author claims that it's human nature to abuse power as an argument in favor of anarchism. But to me it seems very obvious that that is exactly what will happen if people are left without constraints. Those who can get some power will get more, and there's nothing to stop them.

So, is there anyone who sympathise with the author who would like to explain how a society could become more equal/fair/anything positive without a government?

jes3• 13 years ago

I agree with your comment.

I want a society that understands and cherishes individual rights, and a government that is limited to and efficacious in protecting them.

cinquemb2• 13 years ago

I suppose that the amount of people that are willing to work in quantifiable/effective ways that give the individual, as much as any society, the incentive to push towards a society that understands and cherishes individual rights, and a government that is limited to and efficacious in protecting them will be less than the amount who want it, so in the logical conclusion of things:

we will get neither until that imbalanced can be addressed.

mhurron3• 13 years ago

a government that is limited to and efficacious in protecting them (individual rights).

Oddly, you just provided the downfall of such a government. From the obvious 'think of the children' type of abuse of power you would also have those that see protecting some rights as infringing on others.

The FDA is an example of the latter. The FDA is a consumer rights organization, yet there are no shortage of people that see any protections as infringing on their rights.

jahaja5• 13 years ago

I do sympathise with the author and I think that on the countrary, if people were more involved in their society, which is a major part of anarchism and the decentralisation it promotes, such people would have a much harder time aquiring such power than today. Today, those kind of people have whole instutions adjusted to such aims, the government and capitalism.

Thus, the aim is to build a society that people want to defend by themselves, not just a paid subgroup - e.g the police or military.

Regarding fairness and equality there's a lot of things that anarchism promotes, here's a few controversial:

* Socialism

* Decentralisation and organisation from the bottom up.

* Abolishment of the ownership of land and private property.

And no, the last point does not mean that someone will steal your toothbrush, rather that someone should not be able to amass the tools of explotation, such as more industry/machines than one can use by oneselve or acquire land that one cannot possibly culativate by their own.

Nursie2• 13 years ago

>if people were more involved in their society

I think I see the flaw in your plan...

Most folks would rather delegate AFAICT.

ahultgren4• 13 years ago

It's obvious that this ideal society of yours is modelled for a rather small group. Complete lack of delegation can't possibly scale very far at all. But to me it seems a society has to grow and specialize to become more effective. If for not other reason than because there will be competition from external groups.

If you have two or more of these decentralized groups, how would conflicts be handled between them? If two or more wants to trade or create an alliance, some kind of organizing unit has to formed to ensure all parties play by the rules. Voila, a government.

I assume you're not advocating for going back to some tribal farming-style society? If so, can you explain how the anarchist society you're proposing would perform more complex tasks such as trade, or just large-scale manufacturing, without a government?

yetanotherphd2• 13 years ago

I was a "left-anarchist" or "ultra-leftist" in my early 20's so I can explain this point of view in a moderately sympathetic way. The following is not my actual opinion, but rather a summary of the beliefs I once held. As far as I'm aware it's also fairly different from Goldman's viewpoint too.

The starting point is to identify classical liberalism as a veneer over power structures based on arbitrary authority. For example, the same society that claimed to support freedom of expression would lock women away in mental institutions for acting in a way deemed inappropriate (not so much nowadays, but definitely in the 30's). Today we still see a lot of arbitrary authority (often illegal) exercised by the government and its agents. Only a small portion of this is deemed "political" enough to gain media attention, and perhaps be corrected in the courts.

Furthermore, the ideology of individual rights can be used to create "rights" that couldn't even be justified from a natural rights perspective, but are rather created to bolster the idea of an atomized society. Government subsidization of roads (rather than public transport) is a good example of this. While there is no natural right to drive a car on a government subsidized road, the ideology of individualism leads people to suppose that people are somehow more "free" under this setup than under a regime of mainly public transportation.

To summarize, left-anarchists view classical individual rights as a chimera, where the real agenda is a society of atomized individuals with no sense of community, all subject to the authority of the state. The main claim of left-anarchists is that in the absence of this oppression, a natural order based on community enforcement will evolve, in which strict legal rights are not necessary to protect individual's wellbeing, because the community is good and cares about its members. Various examples are given for this, such as primitive tribal societies, temporary anarchistic situations such as during the Spanish civil war, working class communities who self-police rather than cooperating with law enforcement, and social orders that arise around the use of common property, such as with surfing.

ahultgren4• 13 years ago

First of all, thanks for just the kind of explanation I was looking for.

The main claim of left-anarchists is that in the absence of this oppression, a natural order based on community enforcement will evolve[...]

And my problem with such claims is that it seems like you're actually just proposing another kind of government; a local and decentralized one. After all a government is just an agreement between a set of people to organize affairs of mutual interest, right?

Would it be correct to say that anarchists (in general or the left kind) actually prefers several smaller societies rather than one big central one?

Also one could argue (as you kinda did) that once upon a time there were only such tribal societies, and that the societies we see today have evolved from those. So if you (with the belief you once held) argue that we should revert to such a system, how would you propose to prevent the inevitable "degradation" to the current system?

sliverstorm4• 13 years ago

it seems very obvious that that is exactly what will happen if people are left without constraints. Those who can get some power will get more, and there's nothing to stop them

Then clearly after we abolish government, we just need to establish some kind of power structure to limit this effect. Perhaps to keep things fair, we can put this power structure subject to votes by the people.

There. Solved. Anarchy!

Millennium• 13 years ago

But the moment you've done that, you've established a de-facto government, thus violating the definition of anarchy. This happens with a lot of utopian schemes, actually: the logistics of maintaining them require them to mutate into something decidedly other than the original intent. Eventually, in the case of anarchy, the de-facto government inevitably finds a way to cement its power in a more de-jure fashion, and from there corruption proceeds as normal.

InclinedPlane2• 13 years ago

Pure anarchism has many of the same problems as pure communism. In practice it's a system that is typically unstable and rapidly degenerates into simple autocracy or oligarchy.

nutball4• 13 years ago

Humans have lived for nearly 200,000 years without states. States, which for their ~10,000 year history have been very ephemeral. Civilization keeps barreling on while states collapse and begin again. The forces that lead to the flux of states like internal power struggles, class conflict, and environmental destruction wouldn't exist in anarchy/communism.

Check out Clastres who argues that pre-civilization human communities had mechanisms to ward off the formation of states.

marsay• 13 years ago

I seems to me that hackers are by nature anarchists and even a simple idea of authoritative power(goverment) is repulsive to them. I don't see point arguing for or against goverment, it's just the attitude that matters in my opinion.

TausAmmer• 13 years ago

Anyone seeking power to "lead" people, never done it for the benefit of people.

When you outlaw "leaders" then you might get somewhere.

confluence• 13 years ago

Great essay in its early stages, where she talked about how we should always fight for freedom and equality. But she lost me on the second half. Anarchy is the same as having a government, except instead of having one entity terrorizing the population, you get thousands of psychopaths terrorizing the population. People are fundamentally shitty organisms. Giving them free rein, either as a dictator of one government, or as the leader of a band of marauding anarchists, is never a good idea. Monopolizing violence and creating protections against the corruption of government by the strong at the expense of the weak should be the goal.

Democratic balanced government with strong individual protections is a good thing if it is protected from corruption. If not, you just end up with a kleptocracy.

Government is just another tool. It can be used for good or evil. It's up to us to make it stay on the right side of the line.

CamperBob2• 13 years ago

Also, it's not useful to refer to "government" as the thing being opposed by anarchism. What they are really opposing is hierarchical organization in general.

I used to be more sympathetic to that point of view, but I eventually realized that too many nifty things (such as the computer I'm typing on) could not possibly have come into existence without a disciplined, well-managed hierarchy of some sort. Somebody has to be the boss, or we might as well all go climb back into the trees.

donniefitz22• 13 years ago

The article was interesting as I haven't had much exposure to anarchist thought. But I'm bothered by one glaring assumption and that is, just what does she mean by freedom or liberty?

Obviously she means freedom from external forces such as governments and other institutions, but the way she refers to it, it's as if it's something more than that. What she's referring to seems more comprehensive, idyllic or transcendent even.

Anyone, any anarchists, care to elaborate on a rough definition of freedom within that frame of thinking?

nutball4• 13 years ago

Good question. Early anarchists use the words 'freedom' and 'liberty' in a vague manner. This is OK, because anarchy isn't a theory that needs to be based on logical assumptions. It's not a theory at all, but a tendency and a force against the existent. Goldman is using the words in a transcendent fashion, so that when (old) anarchists say 'freedom,' they mean a vague situation beyond the State, unknowable for now- a dream worth fighting for.

Present-day anarchists almost never use the two words in part because of their vagueness and inherent liberalism and in part because of their modern co-optation by neoliberalism and the right. Liberals use the words 'freedom' and 'liberty' to mean the agency of property owners to do what they will with their property and the right to possess things so that others may not use them. It's about markets and money. Freedom of speech, 'having your say,' is important in the marketplace of ideas, where ideas are flattened and life is exorcised.

The anarchist tendency views 'freedom' as the ability to live one's life in a way of their own choosing. It's certainly freedom in the communist sense: the ability to freely access the goods, food, housing, clothes, etc. necessary for life. But anarchy is also freedom from the influences of the State, patriarchy, civilization, white supremacy, all of the great forces which seek to corral us and fuck with our lives and desires.

donniefitz22• 13 years ago

Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks.

tomcam• 13 years ago

We do get that she was an admitted terrorist and conspired to murder a man, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman#Homestead_plot

camdez4• 13 years ago

Allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment...

Most of us, for fairly obvious reasons, decry the use of violence by individuals, yet we are all complicit in the use of violence by the state. Our democratic governments imprison and kill in our names both in war and for the enforcement of our laws. Sometimes (often?) wrongfully.

Why is our collective violence de rigueur but individual violence is immediately presumed to be evil and wrong?

Presumably use of violence by the state is intended to be "justified"; i.e. it is not random, emotional, or for gain (except, perhaps a societal gain of increased safety), but either for the cause of "justice", or for safety--and these calculated, functional properties with an aim of public good make the action acceptable.

The obvious difficulty of individual violence is the tendency for it to be emotional or for personal gain, or for a lack of rigor in establishment of guilt in the presumed crime of the victim. But if guilt has been firmly established, if the target of violence has, beyond a shadow of a doubt, committed heinous acts, then what is the fundamental difference? Isn't the elimination of a destructive force by an individual precisely the same in outcome as the elimination of the same force by a collection of individuals?

And in a thoroughly corrupt system which promotes, protects, and encourages these destructive forces--or a system which feigns to protect and represent its citizens (but doesn't actually do so)--mustn't the responsibilities of protecting and shepherding at some point eventually fall to the citizens themselves? Surely evil carrying your banner is still evil?

Now don't get me wrong, I'm no proponent of violence. I think (even) our government should commit considerably less violence. I think we generally need to scorn violence by the individual because of the likelihood that it be unrigorous, emotional, or selfish. But I don't know that the difference in emotional weight between "kill" and "murder"--that is to say "unlawfully kill"--should be so great. It seems to me that the philosophical basis for the two should be the same, rather than scorning one and supporting the other because it carries a badge.

vasilipupkin• 13 years ago

when you conspire to kill another human being for whatever reason - it is a decision that you alone are making and have the full power to stop at any time, so you bear the full responsibility for it. When your state orders you to nuke Hiroshima, for example, it's a much more complicated situation, however horrific. So the two situations cannot be compared directly

saraid2164• 13 years ago

Why is our collective violence de rigueur but individual violence is immediately presumed to be evil and wrong?

The difference is one of authority. Goldman's authority to kill isn't accepted by society at large, whereas the due process of election, appointment, induction, training, and periodic evaluation is so accepted. You can argue about whether or not that acceptance is a good thing or a bad thing, and Goldman likely felt it was a bad thing, but that acceptance is the fundamental difference.

The presumption that individual violence is wrong follows from this systemization of it. When it wasn't, we did commit individual violence with no reason. This is rapidly apparent in watching children interact without intervention: they exhibit the full range of human extremes in both cooperating spectacularly but also in conflicting violently. By systematizing it, we've made it rare and remarkable.

And because it stands out, it's now considered wrong.

nutball4• 13 years ago

Systemic violence so drastically outweighs "individual violence" in quantity and affect that there's just no real comparison. Me smacking a dude for talking shit doesn't even come close to the totality of systemic violence: war, poverty, houselessness, rape, abuse, racism, hunger, prison, policing, immigrant concentration camps, border security, alienation, queer bashing, trans murders, environmental catastrophe on a global scale. And that's just the present situation. This violence is felt by individuals very personally, but it is systemic in cause, affect, and result.

The police, media, and state point the finger at a very specific subset of activity and call it violence in order to distract from the overwhelming violence they perpetrate. This is particularly true of those who resist the current state of affairs. Rioters are "violent" because they smash windows. The cops who beat them are merely restoring order. Police are rarely described as "violent" even though they frequently shoot people and control populations with the use of force. Prisoners are the violent ones, not the ones who lock people up in cages. The most oppressed are the violent ones, not those who maintain the system of violence.

To give a little perspective on anarchy and violence:

Anarchism tends to reject moralism. The question isn't whether it's good or bad to kill Frick. It's not about punishing a person for a bad behavior as that sounds awfully like what the state does and it's so-called "Justice." Rather, it's about what force this activity will generate. If a hated figure is assassinated, will this spark revolt? This idea was called "propaganda of the deed" and a similar idea lives on in smashing windows and similar small-scale activities among current North American anarchists: activities that can be picked up by others easily and may spread among the wider population. Other ideas tend to focus on blowing shit up and stuff, like the CCF and FAI. That's cool and all, but I don't think that spectacular acts of violence against the state will do anything to hasten its demise.

Was My Life Worth Living? (1934)

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