A Couple of Thoughts
First thought: Probably best I stop thinking of this as a place to get more-or-less well-formed ideas into the open. It’s not like anyone reads it, so I should be safe throwing out half-formed nonsense. I think. The real problem is a psychological block I need to deal with.
Second thought: “International Relations” as a distinct discipline makes so little sense it’s not even funny. Or maybe that’s not entirely accurate. Let’s branch it out a bit: The study of international relations as a distinct subject affiliated with political science doesn’t really work. The chief reason is probably that the central dogma of political science is imported and laid down as the cornerstone of more or less all thinking on the subject: The State is assumed to be legitimate and placed at the centre of analysis. As a result, all you’re really allowed to think about is how multiple state entities interact. The significance of intra-state dynamics is almost completely denied, even in theories that don’t take the Hobbesian lie as their starting point. (There are some Marxists using class-based analysis, rather than state-based, but they usually wind up constructing a model of a class-divided society of states. An interesting model, but still not quite what I’m looking for.) It also means you’re somewhat stuck to analysing the current states system; in particular, states justifying themselves in terms of national self-determination are all but required. And those only developed somewhat gradually through the nineteenth century. Suzereinty, a basic feature of countless historical regimes, is not possible. And strangest of all, this inability to comprehend what existed before is claimed as a strength of contemporary theories. WTF?
I’m a historian, somewhat influenced by early sociological theories. The grand sweep of those theories is impressive, not least because they’re usually not left without a linkage between individual and social effects. They are, in essence, theories about emergent phenomena, long before that concept had developed. They also tend to integrate fields often treated as distinct. In particular, the basic structures of the economic and political systems are tightly intertwined with causal links in Oppenheimer’s account of The State. The issue, of course, is the question of empirical validity. How do you check whether a model like that conforms with either history or the present? How do you use it to make specific and falsifiable predictions? For most non-trivial models of society, these problems appear to be analytically intractable; that is, impossible to solve for general cases. Although the physical sciences learned a while ago that analytical solutions are not always possible, and have found alternative ways to solve many of those problems in the time since, that message seems to have passed most social scientists by. Instead, social science largely abandoned the analytically intractable models and replaced them with others that were easier to deal with.
I’d like to participate in reversing that trend…
Drafts of a Theory of State
The origin, structure and development of the institution typically known as “the state” is my chief interest. This is not because I consider the state to be a particularly worthy institution; quite the contrary. Every indication is that the state arose from violence and represents nothing whatever except the efficient organisation of exploitation. It is not necessary, and its abolition is vital for the progress of humanity. This is not a view shared by the mainstream of academics, whether their discipline of choice is history, sociology, economics (although they will claim otherwise, the bastards), or something else relating to studying the social structure we live in. Political science is perhaps the worst of the lot: Although questions regarding the nature of the state should be at that discipline’s foundational base, they are conventionally just assumed in favour of the state. I’d like to construct an alternative theory that I believe to be rather more in keeping with the empirical evidence than standard accounts of the origin of the state.
A related concept is that of nation; a construct that became the gold standard for the validity of states following the first world war; just over a hundred years after the first states claiming to represent nations came into existence. Nations have been described as Imagined Communities by political scientist Benedict Anderson; a description that I feel can barely be improved on. The current states system, predicated as it is on the nation-state, cannot be understood without also understanding what the nation is or can be — another question of origin.
In addition to the origin of the state, it’s pretty important to understand the dynamics driving its development. The unfolding of those dynamics is extremely complex in each individual case, but complex behaviours can arise from simple rules. Can we map the structure of society and state and find a way to explain how the state comes to dominate so utterly over alternative forms of organisation? Can the same dynamics perhaps even explain the transition from state-less to state-dominated societies, turning our origin theory into simply a special case of the more general theory of state dynamics?
This is an ambitious project, but I believe many, if not most, of the components are in place, needing mostly to be assembled. Fundamentally, there is nothing conceptually new involved, but perhaps some work in welding together structures and ideas from different backgrounds, that haven’t shared a language before. And some of those ideas may need a bit of dusting off; their obstinate failure to be of use to capitalism and non-threatening dissent has in some cases relegated them to the shelves, overlooked by most. Others have perhaps been rather too esoteric to be taken up by academics from distant fields — let alone non-academics devoting their free time to trying to understand what’s going on.
What’s the point of it, you ask?
Firstly, I suppose it’s a morbid fascination with the tools used to subject us all. (Also known as “academic curiosity”.) Secondly, the conviction that a solid understanding of the issues involved will have political implications; implications that will strengthen the hand of those arguing in favour of radical change — and make it clear what pitfalls to avoid in that change.
So here’s a basic sketch.
The ways of obtaining the requirements of life can be divided into two spheres, the political and economic. The economic means consist of resource gathering, production and uncoerced equal exchange. The political means consist of appropriation by force, direct or indirect, of the products of the economic means. The political means cannot be used before the economic means have developed to an extent where there is a surplus of goods beyond subsistence. Once such a surplus exists, however, the political means become a viable way of obtaining goods. At this point, the capital base of society can be divided into two rough categories: Economic assets, used for production and distribution; and political assets, used to coerce others to act in accord with the holder’s requirements. Society is a network of individuals sitting atop these capital assets. This network contains control mechanisms elaborating who has access to the economic and political assets, and who directs the use that is made of them.
But what is the state? We can adopt the definition proposed by Max Weber: The State is an institution that successfully claims monopoly of the legitimate use of violence within a bounded geographical region. Although not perfect, it has the dual advantages of not presupposing any specific institutional structure and not specifying a purpose for the uses made of this monopoly. An equivalent statement, using terminology consistent with that introduced above, is that the state holds a monopoly on the permissible use of the political assets over a specific area. The question of the origin of the state then resolves into the question of how political assets come to exist, and then become monopolised by a single institution.
The dynamics of the state’s development are also bound up with the social network and its structure. The driver here is the interest of actors within the control mechanism of the political assets; those tasked with maintaining and controlling the state. This group is in a unique position within the system, in that its control over the political assets makes it able, to the extent that control is real and the political assets sufficient to the purpose, to enforce adherence to its views. Historically, this group appears initially to have developed through gradual differentiation from a similar group in control of the economic assets; that is, the state seems to have originated as a mechanism to protect the interests of the wealthy.
As stated, this is just a rough initial sketch. Certain aspects need to be filled out; in particular, the interaction between multiple state structures (and associated economic elites) becomes more complicated on this explanation than most theories in international relations today would contend. The theory also depends implicitly on an understanding of the political utility of violence that is significantly broader than is usual today; on the score of this understanding of state, it is little other than the effective organisation of political violence, and the groupings we more traditionally associate with political violence are not fundamentally different from the state, but are instead simply its less successful cousins.
I think it’s a model worth pursuing and elaborating. Missing from this sketch are two significant segments; nationality and the economic control mechanism. They are related to the scheme in a slightly non-obvious way, and will be elaborated on alongside later clarifications of this model. I welcome any comment or question regarding the subject, whether through this site or any other way of contacting me you may find.
On Irreducible Complexity
Class.
Hooo-boy. There’s a term that gets the blood boiling in most cases. Who’s rich and who’s poor; aren’t we all middle-class? Isn’t the industrialised west as a whole the global rich, while the south of the globe gets the short end of the stick? Can we talk about a class-divided society without invoking the spectre of class warfare?
One interesting thing about class is that people tend to claim, today, that it doesn’t matter in western societies. This denial has two main forms:
- The contention that the industrialised countries have become so predominantly middle-class that there is effectively no significant working class or ruling class
- The contention that the western countries as a whole so completely dominate the rest of the world that populations in the rich countries are all actively complicit in exploitation
Neither is a particularly useful way to look at things. Both paper over very real tensions in global society and create an overly simplistic vision. The first pretends that “we’re all in it together” whereas the second pretends that the interests of everyone in the developed countries aligns against the interests of those in the less developed countries. The most sophisticated advocates of class irrelevance combine both. But ultimately, neither position is tenable. Why?
Because of irreducible complexity. Bear with me for a moment; that’s not as preposterous as it may seem at first. At base lies the question of how you model society: My model of choice is a network with extremely complicated interconnections. (Graph with many and varied edges. Individuals are vertices; their relationships are edges.) You should immediately take note of one important factor: The base unit is the individual. Those individuals are positioned inside a structure (the graph) which they have only very limited control over. So far, so good. This model is relatively non-controversial; we can build pretty much any sort of social structure on top of this grid. What causes tension is the empirical question of how the network is structured.
Obviously, the network is far too complex for anyone to map it out in full. (Not that that has stopped facebook from trying.) But we can discern features in it. The first, and most important feature, is simply the realisation that it is a network. It’s a massive network, and one that scales enormously. That means it should be possible to identify subnets; systems that are internally very tightly interconnected but have looser connections to the larger network. Within those subnets, we should also be able to detect segments. Viewed as a communications network, there are very likely to be trunk lines, of a sort, between various subnets. Picking away the pieces, these subnets are liable to be highly interdependent, but in a limited way. We’re fond of saying “everyone is connected” and that is true in the abstract. But when it comes to concrete analysis, it’s not. Understanding the specifics of social structure means reconstructing pieces of an inordinately complex system.
And that’s the snag. A full representation of this highly complex system must be at least as complex as the system itself. This is a fundamental limit that cannot be overcome; it lies in the nature of information. Only if we imagine that the extremely complex system can be generated from a simpler description — not impossible, but unlikely given the role of chance in relationship formation.
“Uh-oh”, says the typical proponent of class-based analysis at this point. “Doesn’t this also mean that the contention of primacy of class is untenable?” Well, yes, it does. What it means is that no single way of dividing up the world is going to give you an accurate picture of human society. It means we have to take a multitude of factors into account and restrict our models appropriately. It means we have to take into consideration the edges of what we’re investigating; the fact that, for instance, the social elites are international and usually more tightly interconnected with each other than they are with the general population of their origin or residence. The fact that, although on a global scale the west is built on exploitation of vastly larger areas (and populations), the spoils go almost exclusively to small groups within those societies who also exploit the vast majority of their own populations. The fact that “middle-class“ has no meaningful definition and instead masks very real differences between a number of social groupings — some of which are surprisingly powerful, and others of which are surprisingly powerless.
As for the spectre of class warfare: Perhaps the spectre needs to be raised again, because if there’s anything we need to be mindful of on this earth, it is the fact that not everyone’s interests are harmoniously aligned.
Revolutions Deserved
Everyone gets the revolution they deserve.
A curious statement, if ever there was one. It was made shortly after references to the lawyer from Arras and the (very real) threat of a western uprising going very wrong indeed. Now, as it happens, I have an interest in revolutions; both generally and particular ones. And though I say so myself, I’m not the worst-informed about the French Revolution, the appearance of the Terror, and the roles played by Robespierre, Danton and Marat.
And what a revolution it was! There’s a reason it’s often considered to be the dawn of modernity. Preceded, comparatively shortly, by the American Revolution and immediately followed by the Napoleonic Wars, this is where the contemporary concept of state reaches full maturity and becomes inextricably intertwined with that of nation. It’s also where the horrors of placing ideals above humanity are first to be seen in their unadulturated form in European history. You see, Maximilien Robespierre was sometimes known as “the incorruptible”. He was principled to an extent we scarcely believe politicians can be today. The problem? His principles were those of Rousseau. The General Will, absolute and undivided, represented the true interests of France; the Convention interpreted the General Will, and the Committee of Public Safety protected the Convention and implemented its decrees. Those who opposed the Committee opposed France, and must therefore be either forced to comply or be done away with.
Was this revolution deserved by Louis XVI? By the general population of France, who were overwhelmingly the victims of the guillotine, despite disproportionally many aristocrats and priests being executed? By even Robespierre himself, a man of unquestioned virtue and principle, however much we may despise his ideas and actions?
Any revolution is an extremely complicated interplay of factors. They are all unique, and the precise course of events is usually hard to understand, even with copious documentation. There are, nevertheless, a few commonalities and generalisations that can be made, and one of them is this: Things will go wrong. To be sure, that doesn’t have to include the execution of sixteen thousand people in a few months — not, all things considered, the worst of excesses in political conflict in the last two-and-a-bit centuries — or the imprisonment, extermination or deportation of anyone who seriously disagrees with you. Those are, indeed, avoidable mistakes, and we should make an effort to avoid them. But it is a little harsh to say that anyone ever deserved these things; something unmistakably implied by the quote at the top. And that’s quite apart from the rather important point that revolutionaries are usually the ones doing things to other people, and not on the receiving end. Well, unless you happen to be a revolutionary that disagrees with the revolutionaries that for one reason or another — usually ruthlessness — got to the top. The fate of the Russian anarchist movement in the years after the Bolshevik coup is one example of revolutionaries who paid a cost of a revolution directed by others. They are not alone: Robespierre, Danton and Marat all died during the French Revolution, along with innumerable others who had badly-timed quarrels with whatever group of revolutionaries happened to be in charge at the time.
These are not simple consequences of a revolution happening “unprepared”, so to speak. Indeed; they happen chiefly when small but well-organised groups are able to gain enough traction to take over the violent enforcement apparatus from the old regime. Those small groups usually have a very well-defined agenda, and they tend to be extremely dogmatic about that agenda. (Which is not the same as saying “they’ll keep their campaign promises”.) There are reasons to suspect movements of precisely this description exist within the overall banner of the Occupy movement; a cause for worry. There are also reasons to believe that the recent crackdown will result in a more insurrectionary atmosphere amongst protesters; again a cause for worry. The police, largely forced to follow the dictates of the ruling class — although it must be admitted that some of them like it — has been directed to be harsher; yet another sign of trouble. But a revolutionary situation it is not. If things ferment for a little while more; perhaps. To be honest: I hope so.
But to suggest that it is inevitable, or even likely, that a Robespierre-like figure, purging the banking sector with a righteous Terror should arise from the present Occupy movement seems strange. And if one did, and that was the revolution we got — what have we done to deserve it?
The Rule of Law
I did not say that I do not want rules and regulations. I said to you that I don’t want a Government, and by government I mean a power that makes laws and imposes them on everybody.
Anarchists have a somewhat … tense relationship with the concept of the rule of law. Depending on how you understand the concept, its applicability in an anarchist society ranges from non-existent to being an absolute prerequisite for any just society. Added to this is a strong shift between classical anarchism and the variety of positions today claiming the title. That shift is, broadly speaking, away from liberal conceptions of freedom towards a notion of autonomy that is more hostile to the very notion of law. Even so, I will try and make the case that anarchists not only should but must adopt the rule of law.
The term “rule of law” is contested, and nowhere clearly and unambiguously defined. The only things that virtually all definitions agree on are the first three principles below, but many of the others appear in at least some of them. I believe that all of these principles, however, are things that anarchists can agree on. In fact, I would contend that violations of them are, in many cases, precisely what motivates opposition to the state and to capitalism.
- No person or institution is exempt.
- Everyone is considered equal.
- Everyone can acquaint themselves with the laws.
- All decisions on a point of law are made by parties disinterested in the dispute.
- Both parties must be required to lay out their case in full, and allowed reference to all available evidence, including witnesses; that is, there must be a fair trial.
- The burden of proof lies with the accuser, not the accused; that is, innocence is presumed until otherwise proven.
- A law made later cannot condemn an action; the law may not be retroactive.
It should be immediately noted that these principles can be applied in regimes that are substantially different from present society. They do not require the existence of judges or lawyers; let alone police or prisons. The one and only presumption made is that there exist previously-established rules (laws) to which people should adhere. How these rules come to exist is not relevant. In other words: There is nothing whatever to prevent these principles from being applied to anarchist societies or organisations.
It would be belabouring the point to trace the development and importance of each of those principles. Instead, let’s point out that a number of them are inherent in anarchist thought: Nobody is exempt, everyone is considered equal, everyone can acquaint themselves with the rules of society, and rules cannot apply retroactively because no rules should be considered valid unless they are voluntarily acceded to by everyone concerned. Decisions on a point of law — the specific interpretation of a rule — should be made by disinterested parties, because otherwise you are giving one party power over the other, something that is complete anathema to anarchist thought. This leaves two principles to be defended: That of fair trial, and that of the presumption of innocence.
The principle of fair trial should be fairly self-explanatory. It is difficult to respond to accusations when you don’t know what they are; harder still to dispute the accuracy of evidence you are not allowed access to. Allowing one party to submit evidence that the other is not allowed to see compromises the impartiality of the adjudicator, and thus shifts the balance in their favour; it does, though not as transparently as when one of the parties is themselves the adjudicator, grant greater power to the side submitting secret evidence.
The presumption of innocence shouldn’t be difficult either. Or should it? This is an argument about where the burden of proof should lie; which means we risk getting into a conversation about whether it is better to find against the innocent or for the guilty. Sometimes, proof of misconduct is difficult to establish; and where does that leave us? All in all, I am aware of no argument to conclusively demonstrate that the presumption of innocence is for the better in every case. That it is a better general rule than the presumption of guilt, however, follows from the argument that it is harder to abuse the adjudicating process in such a case. Where guilt is presumed, accusation alone is enough to place the accused in a an extremely difficult position, faced with proving a negative: that something didn’t happen. This is generally speaking so much harder than proving that something did happen that it is worth assuming that the person claiming something happened is able to prove it if the claim is accurate.
As a last point: Although these principles are most important when dealing with accusations of rule-breaking, some of them are also useful when considering any allegation of behaviour, whether virtuous or malign. I think it is appropriate for those of us who aspire to a society better than the one we have now to keep them all in mind; not only in considering a future just society or a conflict resolution mechanism for a collective project, but also when considering allegations of misbehaviour in real life.
There is a reason that I write this; and that reason is this: I have been absolutely astonished by the readiness of some people to give credence to entirely unsubstantiated allegations of misbehaviour or bad faith by individuals or institutions they dislike, while at the same time absolutely refusing to acknowledge any possibility that those they like can have done anything wrong. I find this disturbing. It betrays, at best, a lack of critical thinking that is worrying. At worst, it represents intentional deception. Hero worship contains the seed of far worse power imbalances.
The indisputable fact that the state does not — and almost certainly can not — live up to the principles of rule of law is no licence for its opponents to throw those principles aside. Not even when the accused is the state itself.
