Chirality as a Fundamental Phenomenon
“Chirality” is a fancy way of saying “handedness”. It describes something that, when mirrored, can’t be made to fit with itself. Like so many other inordinately precise terms for everyday things, it springs from mathematics. The easiest example to name – indeed, the example that gives it its name – is your hands. Left and right, almost the same, but not exactly.
A friend of mine recently used the phrase “post-chiral politics”. It arose out of annoyance with the difficulty some people seem to have placing the Pirate Parties on the traditional political spectrum. The argument made is that the Pirate Parties cannot be understood in terms of left and right because they represent a strike beyond the politics of industrial society.
I beg to differ.
The point that anarchism is the logical conclusion of both liberalism and socialism has been put forward by others far more eloquently than I can. It is a point that has been made quite strongly for over a hundred years now. The fact of the matter is that we have not transcended anything; we are not confronted by any kind of new reality previously unthinkable. We have simply reached a point where ideas formerly beyond the pale have become possible to express again. It is our enemies who have chanced upon new vistas, and in the face of a new enclosure movement, the idea of property – this time in ideas – can be questioned. Once questioned, it can be dismissed. The arguments remain the same, as do the conclusions. There have long been movements, ideologies even, which have had no place on the one-dimensional chart of left and right.
But then, we should not forget that the original “men of the left” were liberals advocating for the abolition of noble privilege and economic protection. Their arguments revolved around the nature of monarchy, and against divine right. Left and right, as political terms, started out as a description of pre-industrial politics. Capitalism first took root in that same political environment, which only gradually and over almost a century gave way to the environment we recognise today as “traditional politics”. So left and right represent something other than a set of policies; something other than particular ideologies. But what?
I believe the most sensible way to think of it is in terms of interests. The left represents the general interests, the ideas that would make the majority better off; the right represents the particular interests, the ideas that most benefit the dominant elite. This would explain how the free marketers and liberals who formerly formed the core of the left could become the very definition of what is of the right. It would also explain why they abandoned their ideals but held on to their policies (if only in name, most of the time). But it would also mean that virtually all politics today is of the right.
Around the time our current political system was forming, and quite contrary to what most schoolbooks will tell you, the supreme champions of individual rights and political freedom in the western world were the unions, the socialist parties, and the communists. They were the left; holding the torch of the enlightenment, attempting to burn away the fetters on society. Their descendants, clinging on to policies (in name only, usually) but throwing away ideals at every opportunity, have become a key part of the right. The torch of the enlightenment has been passed on. The pirates have it now. Will they, in turn, cling on to policies and lose sight of ideals?
I am an anarchist, not a pirate. My alignment is with ideals and not policies. But for the moment, that puts me in agreement with the pirates. Hopefully that’ll last for a while.
Social Science – Singular or Plural?
Social science is, at present, divided into a bunch of different disciplines, all pretending their particular branch of human behaviour can be understood quite apart from everything else. (Well, some of them *cough*economics*cough* seem to think everything else is just a variant of their own, but that’s a different story.) This is the model for academia at the moment. Economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, psychology (to an extent). Then you have historians raiding the whole lot to build their funny little narratives about the past.
I don’t think that’s workable in the long run. What’ll happen instead I have no idea … but it’ll hopefully be interesting. And it’ll hopefully be built on well-grounded and empirically defensible theories.
The other sort aren’t really worth thinking about.
Intelligence Organisations
About a year ago, I planned a sequence of blog posts on the subject of intelligence organisations. Not in the usual “that’s the CIA and that’s the NSA and that’s GCHQ and over there you have ГРУ” way. (Although, admittedly, ГРУ tends to be scary enough that people avoid mentioning it at all.) No; my plan was more ambitious: A theoretical look at the work an intelligence organisation did, the different parts such an organisation needed to function properly, and what the operational requirements were. I never did get the posts written, but I did give the matter a fair bit of thought. I viewed it as part of my wider exercise in a theory of state: Significant intelligence organisations have, historically, been closely interlinked with the State, sometimes becoming its most powerful force: Reinhard Heydrich was quite possibly the most feared man in the NSDAP’s upper ranks; Lavrenty Beria may well have been responsible for Stalin’s death. It is no secret that the Soviet Union was more or less run by the КГБ for a substantial period. The customary secrecy of such organisations usually renders them capable of doing things that other arms of the state apparatus would not dare, and lends an additional layer of glamour to the whole affair. Who wouldn’t want to live in the world inhabited by James Bond, with high action and intrigue at every step?
This is where it gets surreal. Ian Fleming, the author of the original James Bond novels, was not making it up. He was close to the centre of intelligence operations during the second world war, directed an assault unit dedicated to the physical recovery of intelligence information and participated in the planning of a (scrapped) operation to obtain Enigma codebooks. The failure to launch this operation is said to have greatly annoyed Alan Turing, a mathematician working at Bletchley Park during the war. Turing’s job, you see, was to read Enigma.
Turing has become the best-known of a number of mathematicians involved in cryptology during the second world war. Another name familiar to information theorists is Claude Shannon. Both men developed mathematical theories to quantify the amount of information contained in a message as a result of their cryptography work; Shannon’s work was published and now essentially forms the basis of modern telecommunications. But the excessive focus on these individuals is distracting. They may have done much of the thinking, but all that thinking would have been useless without a massive staff and computation engines the likes of which had never been seen before. Digital computer technology was essentially the product of WWII codebreaking, a fact that would not be acknowledged for decades afterwards. Am I far enough off track by now?
Two main points so far: First, the drama and intrigue do exist, contrary to what some people will tell you; second, they are confined to operations directorates, which rather resemble the tip of an iceberg. The vast majority of the organisation is dedicated to other tasks, and an operations directorate is really rather an optional extra. An expensive one, even. (Well, unless you’re doing operational intelligence for a military operation. It’s expensive, but not too optional.) But what’s the rest of the iceberg?
“Murky” is probably the best single word to describe it. Analysis, routine information gathering, source cultivation, presentation and archival. Drudge work, mostly, and complicated drudge work at that. Source cultivation is at the border with operations, and probably gets interesting every now and then, but on the other side of the equation you have signals intelligence, which is kind of like searching for a needle in a haystack at the bottom of the sea. Although you can use magnets (or automatic filters), non-metallic needles (or dangerous activities outside of your profile) cause problems – and can still leave you with huge amounts of material to sift through. All of this is also highly dependent on the interests of the recipient – and intelligence organisations always have recipients, even if it’s only their own secretariat. The recipients – or audience, as some intelligence organisations prefer to call them – have a set of interests that shapes the possible output of the organisation. The secretariat of the organisation may have a distinct set of interests that shifts the output within that possible range. The combination of these interests creates a structural bias, both in terms of the information sources sought and the possible interpretations of known facts chosen for presentation. These dynamics are, as far as I can see, inevitable in any intelligence organisation.
Which leads directly on to the next point. This is a surprisingly general model. The specifics of the methods used differ, and the level of secrecy afforded differs, but it can be applied to any intelligence-gathering organisation. Including the newsmedia. Including policy thinktanks. Including, often, marketing departments at large companies.
We will treat an intelligence organisation as an information processing system. From this perspective, it has an input and an output. The input is information it obtains from the environment, either through actively seeking it out or through passively receiving it from collaborating entities. This information can be either secret, semi-public or common knowledge. The output is the analysis of that information; more information, but usually either at a higher level or passed through some filtering to find out what is credible and what isn’t. The exact nature of the output is extremely dependent on the needs of the specific organisation’s recipients. In addition to the input, the output of an intelligence organisation is influenced by structural characteristics of the organisation itself. Means of financing, the editorial apparatus and the significance of an operations directorate (if it exists) are the key here. Particularly important is the fact that the operations directorate has the potential to be intertwined with other organisations and objectives, rupturing our nice clean distinction between intelligence organisation and environment.
We don’t need to treat the intelligence organisation as a black box, however. Specifically, we can distinguish analytically (though usually not in practice – think of Montesquieu’s branches of government) between a number of major components. The first step is acquisition; the component handling the input of new information. Once acquired, information is archived; this archival unit is in some important ways the core of the organisation, as all activity within the system either draws on the information store or feeds into it. Incoming information then feeds into the similar-but-not-identical procedures of validation and analysis. Validation involves attempting to verify (or debunk) the accuracy of incoming (raw) data; analysis involves making use of existing data to extrapolate meaning or further data. Both of these processes feed into publication, which then feeds back into the archival unit. Publication also serves as the output of the organisation as a whole; filtering the information to be released to the organisation’s recipients.
The operations directorate is something of a black sheep here. It is probably most reasonable to consider it receiving information and instructions from analysis and feeding whatever information it obtains into the acquisition directorate. This depends on how strict a conceptual distinction you wish to keep; by relaxing those standards you can find the operations directorate interacting with (and thus influencing) pretty much every other part of the system. This implies than an intelligence organisation with an operations directorate is likely to be controlled by it to a substantial degree.
The big question is this: Does it really make sense to use this approach on all the different groups previously mentioned? In particular, does it make any sense to use the same tools to analyse both the New York Times and the Central Intelligence Agency? How about The Nation and the Federal Bureau of Investigation? Mother Jones and the National Security Agency? Новая газета and Служба Внешней Разведки?
I can see why some people would disagree, but I think so. From an organisational point of view, all of these groups are doing fundamentally the same thing. The chief difference between them lies in the constraints effectively placed upon them, and these can differ almost as much (if not more) within the different groups of intelligence organisations as they do between the groups. These constraints are largely external to the intelligence operations as such: Fiscal, political, legal. For fairly obvious reasons, they are much more effectively applied to non-state, commercial actors working in public than to state actors with secret budgets. The really interesting question is this: How do you enforce constraints effectively on the whole lot?
I’ve come to the conclusion that this is best done by helping intelligence organisations currently under severe constraints to escape them. At first glance, this may seem counterintuitive. The logic is roughly as follows: In order to effectively place constraints on an intelligence organisation, you need to have sufficient information about its activity to know what constraints are required. This, in turn, requires you to have an effective intelligence organisation that is capable of keeping track of the organisation to be constrained – and to be effective, it must not be overly constrained.
This, however, raises questions: How can we escape the constraints currently in place? What are the constraints currently in place? Which organisations should we help avoid them? Do we need to set up new ones?
Oh, hey, look. The post is getting way too long. Seems I’ll need to do that series after all…
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.
The Internet and its Implications for Anarchy
The Internet is the single largest artificial construct ever built. In its current form, it encompasses virtually the whole of the globe’s telecommunications infrastructure, a vast digital computer network. TV is probably the largest hold-out, but the way things are developing it won’t remain so for long. It took a while, but today the Internet Protocol suite lies at the heart of a technical system that is vital for developed societies.
This has implications that most people don’t understand. This is because most people don’t understand the Internet. That, in turn, is because most people are never exposed to the core of the Internet, but instead contentedly surf the web and read e-mail. Increasingly, they read e-mail on the web. What most people see when they make use of the Internet is a collection of fiefdoms, where you can gain access to services only on the sufferance of autocrats with extensive Terms of Service.
That’s not the Internet. That’s something that has been built on top of the Internet. And this layer, built by the corporations and old interests, is doing its level best to hide and suffocate the layer below. Why? Because the Internet is not only anarchic, its very design is anarchist. The unofficial motto of the informal (but very real) organisation that designs the Internet is: “We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.” At the technical level, the Internet consists of autonomous systems federated together using common protocols and neutral information registries. By design, any host is able to contact any other, although a number of practical concerns make this impossible today. This should not be surprising: Large-scale transport and communication systems have long been federated without any sort of central control. Kropotkin pointed as much out when highlighting the examples of the railways and postal system as functioning federations. This also sets the Internet apart from various other proposed network schemes, many of which had military or corporate sponsors with deep pockets. Anarchists should not hesitate to point this out. “Our ideas on how to organise projects,” we should say, “are not unrealistic. In fact, they have won out against much better funded opponents when what matters is technical merit.” The Internet is perhaps the ultimate demonstration that the organisational forms of anarchism are not unrealistic pipe dreams, and that the real reason society is organised as it is must be found in something other than the deficiency of those forms.
There are a few ways in which general users can still see the full power of the underlying layer. Because so many user-visible applications don’t follow the model fully, a new name was invented for the ones who did: Peer to peer, or P2P. The most notable application of peer-to-peer applications today is for filesharing. And it is here that we most clearly see the wrath directed at the Internet’s design by established interests. Not unreasonably: No established distribution channel can compete with the efficiency of internet-based, unrestricted redistribution. And so, large industries have begun flailing around, looking to get the state to intervene and protect their business. In this, they draw the attention and interest of others who need to gain some measure of control over the Internet. Spies, morality guards and wannabe watchers and censors of every description pour out of the woodwork; in the liberal democracies of the west, but no less in the various dictatorships and strong-arm regimes of the global south. They are seeking, in various forms, to enact legislation to protect the status quo and to enshrine the ability of governments to listen in on and control the communications of their citizens; those rules are enacted, usually, either to “protect innovation” or “prevent child pornography”. Fighting those attempts has been the preserve of the technologists, but it shouldn’t be. Defeating them is important for all liberal-minded people; for radicals, it should be doubly so. Properly understood, the Internet is the radical’s greatest tool; not only for communication, but as a practical example that acephalous organisation, while anarchistic, is not anachronistic.
Human Society as an Information-Theoretic Subject Matter
Yes, it’s a dry title. It captures the main point of my argument, however, and so it will stand.
I am a historian, but I also have a fair background in computer technology and the physical sciences. This is, it seems, a rather unusual mixture. That’s a messed-up situation, because my experience is that awareness of both “fields” (as it were) enables you to approach things in a much more powerful way. It also allows you to see some of the glaring deficiencies in approach that are so horribly common. And no, despite what the hard-core physics nerds tell you, the cause of science would not be served by universalising their approach. We will not gain an understanding of all the important phenomena around us through reductionistic mathematical models with single variables that become easy in the right degenerate cases.
On the other hand, idle speculation disconnected from both formal models (or plausibly simulable ones, at the very least) and rigorous examination of repeatable empirical evidence leads to pretty certain doom. Freud’s psychology fell into this trap to a remarkable extent. It is, bluntly, astounding that anyone still believes Freudian theory can be used to explain fragments of human behaviour. They do, though; I’ve talked to modern-day university students who are taught Freudian psychology in the context of studying culture.
If the choice were only between Skinner and Freud, we’d be in a pretty bad state. Fortunately, that’s not where we find ourselves. Around the middle of the twentieth century, people starting seriously studying really complicated systems for real. There were a number of avenues, whose contemporary offspring include information theory, chaos theory and systems theory. One interesting episode in the development story of those fields is the history of the discipline of cybernetics, popularised by Norbert Wiener as the generalised science of control and communication. Cybernetics held that a sharply interdisciplinary approach was the most fruitful, and that all fields dealing with large mechanisms would have something to contribute and something to gain from a unified study of information flows.
Unlike most of the other mathematically-inspired approaches to understanding complex systems, cybernetics was conceived of as interdisciplinary and with significant relevance to the non-mathematical social sciences. This means two things. Firstly, that cybernetics can be seen as providing a very powerful toolbox to students of social science, be it economics, sociology, political science or even history. Secondly, that many of the things already done in those fields may be useful in improving the general model provided by cybernetics. We don’t have to be stuck in a place where some people know the canon of great literature and others know the laws of thermodynamics and neither can understand the other.
Instead, we find a place where human society is a subject matter for information-theoretic research; a large-scale communications network we can, to varying extents, model, analyse and simulate. Social scientists find their work supported not only by basic statistical work but increasingly by formal mathematical models capable of backing up not only the quantitative results but also the logical structure of the qualitative conclusions. The more mathematically inclined in turn gain access to a vast collection of systems to be modeled, generalised from — and, most helpfully, improved.
First post!
Greetings.
I’m going to see if I can get some sort of bloggery going here. Essentially, I’m first and foremost an analyst who hasn’t been doing much analysis in the last year or so. For reasons that should be perfectly clear, I’m going to try and stay away from talk about WikiLeaks and OpenLeaks here.
Instead, the focus will be on fairly high-level political analysis, from the level of what such analysis does and can revolve about to the level of abstract theories on state structure and development, which is my main interest. There will probably also be some talk about the political impact of the internet and related technologies; that’s a field I’m currently rather deeply involved in, whether I like it or not.
In any case; there may be some content here in the future. Also, possibly a comment system of some description, if I find a good one. In the meantime, I go by the pseudonym ‘odin’ and this is my domain. Feel free to email.
