In Defense of Guilty Associations

I remember when I read this book, all of 20 years old at the time. At the time I was a socialist of sorts, but one who'd fallen out of the faith. The Berlin Wall had just come down, and despite dire predictions that East Germany would promptly bankrupt West Germany, the reunion went relatively smoothly and rather than the West getting poorer, the East started getting more to eat and better clothes.

Cuba was, as it still is, a brutal totalitarian regime with no excuses whatever. The previous summer China had shown the world just what contempt for human rights could mean, machine-gunning unarmed protesters in Tiananmen Square. Never mind The Killing Fields.

Sure, there was Western Europe, boring semi-socialist countries, 'mixed economies' was the term of the day. But what if what made those countries wealthy was not the State? I had not at this point thought of the market as the opposite of the State. Rather, I thought of it in terms of the dictatorial versus the voluntary. The notion that dollars could act as ballots in the ultimate democracy was a few years off for me yet.

So a teacher I'd had a previous semester at JCCC asked me what I was up to (as I smoked a Player's Navy Cut in the last remaining indoor smoking areas), and I said I was trying to come up with a coherent theory of anarchism.

'Good God, why?' he asked. This was a philosophy teacher, so you know.

I don't think I gave him a good answer, but he said to me, 'Check out In Defense of Anarchism. It's short, and it'll give you something to chew on.'


He said it in the way a philosophy teacher would, as if next semester he'd meet me and suggest a work that would get me really going on French Existentialists or whatever.

I promptly got the book from the school library. Barely a book: if it was fiction, it'd be a novella. I read it in an evening.

And Robert Paul Wolff had been reading my mail. It wasn't a pro-market tract, if that's what you're thinking. It was a philosophical deconstruction of what the nature of government is. It's been twenty years since I read it, but my basic view is in line with it as far as I recall.

Government is the use of coercion or deception to control the behavior of others.

That's it. That is 100% of what the State amounts to. Can it be used for good? Sure. Murder laws being enforced amounts to the State's use of force to control the behavior called homicide.

But Tony Soprano muscling in on an HMO executive with a gambling addiction is also a government. He provides services (gambling venues, presumably, and loans to gambling addicts), but extracts knee caps and more if they don't pay the vig. The only reason the so-called 'legitimate' government is after Tony is he's competition. The taxes you pay for police protection, if you then have to pay for mob protection, why pay the first one?

So anyway, there are lots of good reasons not to vote for Barrack Obama. He's a socialist of sorts, and he's lying when he says he can cut taxes for 95% of wage earners because 95% of wage earners is far more than pay any income tax now. He's also lying when he says McCain keeping the Bush tax cuts in place is giving some massive tax break to the wealthy, including his friend Franklin Reigns (who rode Freddie Mac to conservatorship and pocketed a Powerballish $90 million).

Of course, McCain is a piece of shit, too. He voted against the tax cuts he now wants to keep as 'irresponsible,' which by itself disqualifies him from any public office.

For that matter, if you want guilt by association, McCain is guilty of not seeking W.'s prosecution for war crimes.

But lately, I hear about Bill Ayers' association with Barrack Obama. As I say, Obama is a disaster in the making, but his association with Ayers is par for the course: he came from the Daley machine in Chicago. Vote Early, Vote Often. Break their legs if you have to.

And Ayers should be in prison or worse for his Weatherman bombings, instead of letting his wife take the fall while he plays professor.

This does not credit, however, the latest anti-Ayers thing I hear, which is a sound-bite from a couple years back where Ayers talks about being half an anarchist. I wonder if he really understands anarchism, because it's hard to reconcile with some of his other views and statements. But assuming we both understand the nature of the state to be the same, you just found my common ground with this playground-strafing terrorist.