Maverick Philosopher

R. P. Wolff on Anarchism and Marxism

Top o' the Stack. Are they logically consistent?

Notes on Anarchism III

Substack latest.

R. P. Wolff on the conflict between authority and autonomy.

Notes on Anarchism II

Stack leader. Second in a series. Robert Paul Wolff on autonomy.

Notes on Anarchism I: R. P. Wolff on Authority

Top o' the Stack. One of my better efforts. First in a series.

Robert Paul Wolff's In Defense of Anarchism (Harper 1970, 1976) is a good book by a clear thinker and master expositor. Here is a first batch of interpretive and critical notes. I use double quotation marks when I am quoting an actual person such as Wolff. Single quotation marks are employed for scaring, sneering, and mentioning. I am punctilious to the point of pedantry about the use-mention distinction. Numerals in parentheses denote pages in Wolff's text. 'W' abbreviates 'Wolff.'

1. Overview. W's thesis is that "the concept of a de jure legitimate state" is "vacuous" and that "philosophical anarchism" is "the only reasonable political belief for an enlightened man." (19) W. proceeds by first explaining the concepts of authority and autonomy and then arguing that they are irreconcilable. The upshot is that the state lacks moral justification. This entry is about authority. It will be followed by two more, one on autonomy, and one on their conflict.

Of Cats and Mice, Laws and Criminals

Substack

You Want Anti-Government? I'll Give You Anti-Government!

Contrary to the willful  misrepresentations of contemporary liberals, leftists to be precise, conservatives are not anti-government.  To oppose big government is not to oppose government.  The following passage from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851),  conveys a genuine anti-government point of view, one that I share, and one that is the opposite of the one contemporary Democrats are aiming to impose upon us.  The following passage is surprisingly prescient now that Sino-surveillance is upon us and will only get worse.  Needless to say, I do not hold that government must of necessity fit Proudhon's description: there is such a thing as limited government.

To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.... To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

Of course, I don't accept that property is theft. On the contrary! Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.  The problem with private property is not that it is private, but that too few own too little and in a way that is protected from criminal and governmental seizure.  That is why firearms are the most important private property. You can't eat, wear (though you can bear), or live in a gun, but guns are the means for the maintenance of  ownership of the aforementioned.

Contrary to the willful  misrepresentations of contemporary liberals, leftists to be precise, conservatives are not anti-government.  To oppose big government is not to oppose government.  The following passage from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851),  conveys a genuine anti-government point of view, one that I share, and one that is the opposite of the one contemporary Democrats are aiming to impose upon us.  The following passage is surprisingly prescient now that Sino-surveillance is upon us and will only get worse.  Needless to say, I do not hold that government must of necessity fit Proudhon's description: there is such a thing as limited government.

To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.... To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

Of course, I don't accept that property is theft. On the contrary! Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.  The problem with private property is not that it is private, but that too few own too little and in a way that is protected from criminal and governmental seizure.  That is why firearms are the most important private property. You can't eat, wear (though you can bear), or live in a gun, but guns are the means for the maintenance of  ownership of the aforementioned.

What Black Lives Matter and Antifa are About

Matt Rowe (Headings added):

Black Lives Matter: Marxist to the Core

The three co-founders of BLM are Marxists to the core. According to the Capital Research Center, all three worked for front groups of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, one of the largest radical Left organizations in the country. Opal Tometi actively promotes Socialism and anti-Western socio-economics, while Patrisse Khan-Cullors has publicly stated that the leaders of BLM are “trained Marxists.” Even so, it is highly likely that most active members and supporters of BLM are not Marxists at all, but simply believe they are fighting for social justice. The various chapters and voices of BLM don’t always share consistent goals, but what they have in common is a general anger toward the government and its most visible arm, the police.

Antifa: Culturally Marxist

In the United States, Antifa is an anarchist group of mostly young people dissatisfied with various political and economic issues. Like BLM, they have espoused a wide array of objectives across the country and through time. They nominally believe that the country is heading toward Fascism and tout the election of President Trump and his “America First” platform as an example of that. Their initial radical anti-globalism and anti-capitalist rhetoric in the 1980’s, however, only got them so far into the public’s awareness. In joining the anti-racist cause, they greatly legitimized their movement and expanded their opportunities for activism. Antifa is not shy about its Marxist roots either; they have merely modified the traditional conflict of workers versus the owners of capital to “identity conflicts” based upon race, gender, sexual orientation, and the like.

The cynical manipulation of "useful idiots" by people whose concern is not black lives but socialist revolution

The organizers who manipulate these groups are without a doubt dedicated to their Socialist movement. They are sustained by people who may or may not support—or even know—their true objectives. It doesn’t matter what the masses believe, as long as they can be worked into a frenzy as needed. The leaders don’t really care whether the police are targeting black Americans—it’s only important that their supporters believe it.

In essence, the vast majority of BLM and Antifa members, as well as vocal celebrities, college and high school activists, and, yes, Bishop Doherty, make up what are commonly known as the “useful idiots.” That is, they are propagandizing for a cause without really understanding the cause’s objectives. They are cynically used by shrewd leaders to achieve an end state that they may have never intended. This is especially dangerous as we get closer to our national elections. The goal is to keep these people blind to the truth for as long as possible, or better yet, to eventually indoctrinate them into the cause as true Socialists. They are evil, and they are doing exactly what Father Rothrock stated in his message.

Of Cats and Mice, Laws and Criminals

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 101:

Certain rash people have asserted that, just as there are no mice where there are no cats, so no one is possessed where there are no exorcists.

Lichtenberg's observation puts me in mind of anarchists who say that where there are no laws there are no criminals.  That is not much better than saying that where there are no chemists there are no chemicals. 

Just as there are chemicals whether or not there are any chemists, there are moral wrongs whether or not there are any positive laws* prohibiting them.  What makes murder wrong is not that there are positive laws prohibiting it; murder is wrong antecedently of the positive law.  It is morally wrong before (logically speaking) it is legally wrong.  And it is precisely the moral wrongness of murder that justifies having laws against it.

And yet there is a sense in which criminals are legislated into existence:  one cannot be a criminal in the eyes of the law unless there is the law.  And it is certainly true that to be a criminal in the eyes of the law does not entail being  guilty of any moral wrong-doing. There are senseless, incoherent, and unjust laws. 

But the anarchist goes off the deep end if he thinks that there is no moral justification for any legal prohibitions, or that the wrongness of every act is but an artifact of the law's prohibiting it.

As I like to say, anarchism is to political philosophy what eliminative materialism is to the philosophy of mind. Both are 'lunatic' positions. But 'lunacy' has its uses.  It is instructive in the way pathology is.  We study diseases not to spread them, but to contain them. We study diseases of the mind not to promote them, but to work out the principles of intellectual hygiene.

____________

*Positive laws are those posited by a legislature. See here:

In general, the term "positive law" connotes statutes, i.e., law that has been enacted by a duly authorized legislature.  As used in this sense, positive law is distinguishable from natural law. The term "natural law", especially as used generally in legal philosophy, refers to a set of universal principles and rules that properly govern moral human conduct. Unlike a statute, natural law is not created by human beings. Rather, natural law is thought to be the preexisting law of nature, which human beings can discover through their capacity for rational analysis.

 UPDATE (1/24). Tom Anger comments:

I agree with what you say in "Of Cats and Mice, Laws and Criminals"; specifically, this:

 

What makes murder wrong is not that there are positive laws prohibiting it; murder is wrong antecedently of the positive law.  It is morally wrong before (logically speaking) it is legally wrong.

 

But I have a problem with the quoted material in the footnote; specifically, this:

 

[N]atural law is not created by human beings. Rather, natural law is thought to be the preexisting law of nature, which human beings can discover through their capacity for rational analysis.

 

I have never been able to accept that view of natural law. Where does the preexisting law come from?

 

My view is that natural law consists of norms that arise from human nature. An example would be the Golden Rule, or ethic of reciprocity. It seems most likely to have arisen from experience and normalized through tacit agreement before it was enunciated by various "wise men" over the ages.

 

BV: Well, if natural law is grounded in human nature, then there might not be much or any difference between what you are maintaining and what the authors of the footnote say.  Both of you would then be saying that law cannot be wholly conventional.

Of Cats and Mice, Laws and Criminals

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 101:

Certain rash people have asserted that, just as there are no mice where there are no cats, so no one is possessed where there are no exorcists.

That puts me in mind of anarchists who say that where there are no laws there are no criminals.  That is not much better than saying that where there are no chemists there are no chemicals. 

Just as there are chemicals whether or not there are any chemists, there are moral wrongs whether or not there are any positive laws prohibiting them.  What makes murder wrong is not that there are positive laws prohibiting it; murder is wrong antecedently of the positive law.  It is morally wrong before (logically speaking) it is legally wrong.  And it is precisely the moral wrongness of murder that justifies having laws against it.

And yet there is a sense in which criminals are legislated into existence:  one cannot be a criminal in the eyes of the law unless there is the law.  And it is certainly true that to be a criminal in the eyes of the law does not entail being  guilty of any moral wrong-doing.  But the anarchist goes off the deep end if he thinks that there is no moral justification for any legal prohibitions, or that the wrongness of every act is but an artifact of the law's prohibiting it.

Related articles

Lichtenberg on Religion and Stoicism

Ernst Bloch on Law and the State (Revised))

Ad Ignorantiam and the Law

If You Understood Me, You Would Agree with Me!

Why Lichtenberg is not on Facebook

Still Perfect After All These Years

Seductive, but Fallacious

For an anarchist to claim that without laws there would be no criminals would be like claiming that without chemists there would be no chemicals.

Robert Paul Wolff on Anarchism and Marxism

I see that R. P. Wolff has a blog, The Philosopher's Stone.  His post Anarchism and Marxism caught my eye.  In it he addresses the question of the logical consistency of his anarchism and his Marxism.   The answer of course depends on how Wolff employs these terms.

First of all, when I call myself an anarchist, I mean just exactly what I explained in my little book In Defense of Anarchism. I deny that there is or could be a de jure legitimate state. That is the sum and substance of what I call in that book my "philosophical anarchism." This is a limited claim, but not at all a trivial one. [. . .]

My Marxism, as I have many times explained, is not a form of secular religious faith, but a conviction that Marx was correct when he argued that capitalism rests essentially on the exploitation of the working class.

Clearly, *A de jure legitimate state is impossible* and *Capitalism rests essentially on the exploitation of the  working class* are logically consistent propositions.  So if these propositions capture what is meant by 'anarchism' and 'Marxism,' then one can be both an anarchist and a Marxist.

So far, so good.  But suppose one accepts the second proposition.  Wouldn't one naturally want to bring about political change and eliminate capitalism and with it the exploitation of the working class?  (As Marx wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach, "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it.")  Now the implementation of this change and the maintenance of a a socialist order requires the coercive power of the state and with it the violation of the autonomy of all those who resist. 

This fact brings us to a much more interesting consistency question:  How could an anarchist (in Wolff's sense), consistently with his anarchism, be a Marxist in any full-blooded sense of the term?  In a full-blooded sense, a Marxist is not one who merely maintains the thesis that capitalism by its very nature exploits workers, but one who works to seize control of the state apparatus for the purpose of implementing the elimination of capitalism.  The following  two propositions are plainly inconsistent: *The state as such lacks moral justification* and *The state possess moral justification when its coercive power is employed to eliminate capitalism and usher in socialism.*

Now that is the inconsistency that bothers me.  Wolff appears to address it at the end of his post:

I can see no conflict whatsoever between philosophical anarchism and Marxian socialism. The citizens of a socialist society, were one ever to come into existence [Gott sei dank!], would have no more obligation to obey the laws of that state, merely because it was socialist, than they have now to obey the laws of the United States, merely because America is (let us grant for the sake of argument) democratic. Both groups of citizens would stand under the universal duty of judging for themselves whether what the laws command is something that on independent grounds it is good to do. There is no duty, prima facie or otherwise, to obey the law simply because it is the law.

There is something unsatisfactory about this answer.  Wolff obviously wants a socialist society.  But good Kantian that he is, Wolff must appreciate that to will the end is to will the means.  The end is a socialist order; the means is the imposition of  socialism and the eradication of capitalism by means of the coercive power of the state.  (You would have to be quite the utopian off in Cloud Cuckoo Land to suppose that socialism could be brought about in any other way.  And of course once the socialist state has total control, it won't "wither away.")  So it seems Wolff must will and thus find morally acceptable the state apparatus that enforces and maintains socialism.  But then his Marxism contradicts his anarchism.  For these two propositions are logically inconsistent: *No state is morally justified* and *States that enforce and maintain socialism are morally justified.*

The bit about there being no duty to obey the law simply because it is the law seems not to the point.  The point is that if socialism is morally superior to capitalism, and the only route to socialism is via the state's exercise of its coercive power, then one who  wills and works for the implementation of socialism must will and work for and find morally acceptable the existence of a socialist state.

Or maybe Wolff's position just boils down to the triviality that whatever order comes about, whether capitalist, socialist, mixed, or anything else,  there would be no duty to obey the law simply because it is the law.  But then he hasn't shown the consistency of anarchism and Marxism in any full-blooded sense of these terms.

I summarize Wolff's In Defense of Anarchism here , here, and here. 

Hocking on the Value of the Individual

William Ernest Hocking (1873-1966) had his day in the philosophical sun, but is no longer much read – except perhaps by those contrarians who take being unread by contemporaries as a possible mark of distinction. Recently I came across this magnificent passage:

Life itself is individual, and the most significant things in the world – perhaps in the end the only significant things – are individual souls. Each one of these must work its own way to salvation, win its own experience, suffer from its own mistakes: "through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui," yes, and through crime and retribution, "what you are picks its way." Any rule which by running human conduct into approved grooves saves men from this salutary Odyssey thwarts the first meaning of human life. ("The Philosophical Anarchist" in R. Hoffman, ed. Anarchism, New York: Lieber-Atherton, 1973, pp. 120-121.)

The quotation within this quotation is from the last stanza of Walt Whitman's "To You" from Leaves of Grass.

You Want Anti-Government? I'll Give You Anti-Government

Contrary to the willful  misrepresentations of contemporary liberals, conservatives are not anti-government.  To oppose big government is not to oppose government.  This passage from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851),  conveys a genuine anti-government point of view:

To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.... To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

Notes on Anarchism III: Wolff on the Conflict Between Authority and Autonomy

This post is the third in a series. The first discussed authority, the second autonomy. The topic at present is the alleged conflict between them.

The state lays claim to moral authority, to the right to rule and the right to be obeyed. If it has the right to command and be obeyed, then the citizen has the correlative moral obligation to obey. But "the primary obligation of man is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled." (18) Conflict is the result: the obligation to obey contradicts the obligation to be autonomous. We might call this Wolff's antinomy.

There are three ways of responding to a contradiction: deny the first limb, deny the second limb, deny the contradiction. In the present case: deny the legitimacy of the state's claim to authority; deny that there is a moral obligation to be autonomous; deny that there is a genuine contradiction.

Wolff denies the first limb: he asserts that there is no obligation to obey the state's commands. On his view they lack legitimacy, binding moral force. (18) This is not to say that the anarchist will not comply with state commands. He may do so for prudential or even sentimental reasons: they are the commands of the government of his country and his feelings of attachment to his country may incline him to comply with its government's laws. The point, however, is that the laws have "no objective moral basis." (19) American laws have no more moral claim on Wolff than the laws of Sri Lanka. "All authority is equally illegitimate. . . ." (19)

Notes on Anarchism II: Wolff on Autonomy

This post has a prerequisite.  We now explore the concept of autonomy as discussed by Robert Paul Wolff on pp. 12-18 of In Defense of Anarchism.

1. "The fundamental assumption of moral philosophy is that men are responsible for their actions." (12) Wolff intends moral as opposed to mere causal responsibility. But if we are morally responsible, then we are "metaphysically free." W. doesn't explain what he means by "metaphysically free," but since he mentions Kant, we may impute to W the view that we are libertarianly free, that is, free in the 'could have done otherwise' sense. Thus we enjoy more than the compatibilist "freedom of the turnspit" (Kant).

So if we are going to do moral philosophy at all, we must assume both that we are morally responsible for some of our actions and omissions and libertarianly free with respect to those same actions and omissions. So far, so good.

Notes on Anarchism I: Wolff on Authority

Robert Paul Wolff's In Defense of Anarchism (Harper 1970, 1976) is a good book by a clear thinker and master expositor. Here is a first batch of interpretive and critical notes. I use double quotation marks when I am quoting an actual person such as Wolff. Single quotation marks are employed for scaring, sneering, and mentioning. The MP is punctilious to the point of pedantry about the use/mention distinction. Numerals in parentheses denote pages in Wollf's text. 'W' abbreviates 'Wolff.'

Anarchism is to Political Philosophy as Skepticism is to Epistemology

In Nicole Hassoun's NDPR review of Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan (eds.), Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?, Ashgate, 2008, we read:

Anarchism should be of interest [to social liberals] because it plays the role in political philosophy that skepticism plays in epistemology -- raising the question of what, if anything, could justify a state in the way that brains in vats, etc. raise the question of what, if anything, could justify beliefs. The debate between anarchists and libertarians should be of interest because if the anarchists are right then libertarianism commits one to anarchism. So, social liberals who take libertarianism seriously may have to take anarchism seriously too.

I was struck by the notion that anarchism is as it were political philosophy's skepticism.  A fruitful analogy.  The anarchist is skeptical about the moral justifiability of the state in the way in which the epistemological skeptic is skeptical about whether what we take to be knowledge really is knowledge.  There is a strong temptation, one I feel, to revert to a double insistence: first, that we have knowledge of the external world whether or not we can answer every conceivable objection to the possibility of such knowledge; and second, that some states are morally justified whether or not we we can explain to everyone's statisfaction what it is that confers moral justifiability on them.

Perhaps the right atitude is as follows.  Provisionally, we should just accept that some beliefs about the external world amount to knowledge and that some states are morally justified.  Ultimately, however, this is not a philosophically satisfactory attitude.  One wants rational insight in both cases.  And so we should keep working on the problems.  But lacking as we do proof of the impossibility of knowledge and of the moral unjustifiability of the state, we have no good reason to abandon our commonsense views about the existence of knowledge and the moral justifiability of some states.  You cannot be a philosopher without being a procedural skeptic; but if your skepticism hardens into dogmatic denial of the commonsensical, then the burden of proof is on you.

 

Hocking on the Anarchist and the Criminal

William Ernest Hocking explains the anarchist’s attitude toward the criminal as follows:

As for the criminal, his existence is not forgotten; but it is thought that he is either such by definition only, as one who has disobeyed what we have commanded; or he is such by response to the unnatural environment of the state and the inequalities which it fosters; or else he is the unusual individual of determined ill-will who is best dealt with by near and private hands, since the life of the will, whether for good or for evil, is always intimate, individual, and unique. ("The Philosophical Anarchist," in Hoffman ed., Anarchism, Lieber-Atherton, 1973, pp. 116-117)

Suppose we consider Hocking's three points seriatim.