Hacker News Reader

Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

So you're an anarchist?

Because if you're going to pretend that anarchy or proprietarianism is somehow not politics, then I've got some news for you.

View on HN

Or a libertarian, pretending that a police state enforcing a total ordering of property and any contract that can be conceived of isn't politics.

Not all libertarians advocate anything resembling a "police state enforcing a total ordering of property and any contract that can be conceived of."

I wouldn't call any person who advocates an oppressive police state a libertarian.

pessimizer's point is that he believes the very institution of property requires something he calls a state. I would disagree, and point to the fact that territorialism in the animal kingdom is an institution of private property without anything most people would call a state.

I already said "proprietarian". Please use the proper terminology rather than Applause Light words like "libertarian", which imply that "liberty" and "This Specific Ideology" are equivalent.

I don't know what proprietarian means, and I tend to call people what they want to be called.

There's no point in arguing semantics without being clear on the definitions I'm using. I use "politics" to refer to the practice of participating in an organization that governs. By "governs," I mean has the legal authority to exercise physical control over a region or group of people. In the context of modern Western nation-states, I use "politics" to refer only to participation which is condoned by the government. So I consider voting, running for office, helping with election campaigns, lobbying, etc. to be political acts. I don't consider other attempts to influence governments to be inherently political acts, like civil disobedience, participating in black markets, and other forms of counter-economics.

Obviously, in the broadest sense, anarchism is relevant to political philosophy because it is the suggestion that governments and therefore politics shouldn't exist. Analogously, atheism is relevant to religion because it is the suggestion that religion is incorrect. And yet, with the definitions I'm explicitly using, anarchism is not politics and atheism is not religion.

And to be clear, there are certainly anarchists (and, much more commonly, minarchists) who blatantly use political methods to achieve their desired results. A prominent example would be Ron Paul, who is arguably an anarchist, but seems to believe that using the condoned political methods to move the USA toward a smaller and more constitutional government is useful. I disagree with these people.

> I don't consider other attempts to influence governments to be inherently political acts, like civil disobedience, participating in black markets, and other forms of counter-economics.

Then your definition of politics satisfies you assumption of what politics means but that doesn't mean that those acts are not political as understood by many if not most others. By your understanding of politics, only governments and those participating to elect/support them are political entities. Even if we take that definition, whatever system theoretical (or in some parallel universe, practical) society you envision there are going to be small pockets of political governance that sets rules and enforces them. It could be as small as a family or a pack of 15 travelers, or as large as a village. There will be pack leaders who will enforce the minimal rules that you have set up, probably using physical force and there will be rules to avoid physical force unless necessary. There will be clashes between packs, which is just going to be a decentralized version of current international politics and there is going to be protection money taken from the physically weak likes of me, so that I don't get killed in such clashes.

I prefer better politics (your definition of politics) than no politics.

> Then your definition of politics satisfies you assumption of what politics means but that doesn't mean that those acts are not political as understood by many if not most others.

I believed that it was quite clear from context what I meant by "politics." It should be obvious that I was not talking about all forms of social organization, as in "office politics." I don't believe it's reasonable to believe I meant that all social interaction should be avoided, but when several people claimed to take this interpretation, I was very clear about the definitions I was using.

> By your understanding of politics, only governments and those participating to elect/support them are political entities.

Yes, that is correct. This is also, to my knowledge, the standard definition of the term outside of obvious casual adaptations of the term like "office politics."

Actually, I think I understand what the root issue of this semantic disparity may be. Some dictionary definitions of politics relegate it to government / state organization.

Others, particularly political scientists, view it as the universal process of resolving power interrelationships among individuals.

To an anarcho-capitalist, most (all?) individual interactions that involve transfer of power are voluntary market exchanges. That implies a social structure that is non-political in the sense that no state need be involved in society. But to a political scientist it is just one of many potential political systems to be debated and evaluated, with its own power structures, etc.

Communists didn't feel their preferred system was political either but rather a scientific inevitability. This is often why some half-joke that Libertarianism is the Marxism of the rich...

As I understand it, the field of political science deals almost exclusively with the state. The fact that political scientists can often provide useful insights to other organizations like companies is obvious, but I would call that an inevitable extension of the field rather than a primary concern.

> As I understand it, the field of political science deals almost exclusively with the state. The fact that political scientists can often provide useful insights to other organizations like companies is obvious, but I would call that an inevitable extension of the field rather than a primary concern.

Corporations are exercises of state power, as well as being structurally somewhat similar to "ministates", so I wouldn't exactly see insight from political science (if viewed as being "the study of the state") into corporations as outside of the primary concern.

There is a significant branch of study in political science (often overlapping with economics, history, and philosophy) called political theory or philosophy that is not specific to the study of the state. It is this area where academics inquire into political first principles that don't necessarily presume a state.

John Rawls and Robert Nozick's works, or Edmund Burke, and MIchael Oakeshott fall into this area of inquiry, along with some of the works of Peter Drucker, Murray Rothbard, Fredric Bastiat, etc.

Yes, I have mentioned this before in this thread. Of course the ideas of refraining from political action are relevant to the field that studies political workings, in the same way that atheism and other forms of religious skepticism are relevant to religious studies.

We are going in circles. There is a big difference between rejecting the definition of a word and rejecting an entire field of inquiry.

Rawls works are largely about the ends of the state rather than the means by which states achieve those ends.

What do you mean, joke? That's what's actually going on. Proprietarianism is Marxism seen from the side of the bourgeoisie.

I attempting to be polite.

> the standard definition of the term outside of obvious casual adaptations of the term like "office politics."

From my limited reading about the topic, that is not the case. According to wikipedia, politics is the practice and theory of influencing other people on a civic or individual level[1]. I have taken just one, very 101 like course on Governance and the most prominent theories that were discussed used politics in the broader sense (but detailed from a narrower perspective due to the scope of the class). Group theory[2], for instance, calls nearly all interactions between interest groups as political. Elite Theory [3], also used similar connotations.

  [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_(political_theory)
  [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics
  [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_theory

I previously skimmed the Wikipedia article on politics, and it does mention companies once and "individual level" once. And yet, everything else I can find in the article assumes that the state is the topic of discussion.

The same goes for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_science. I also did a quick Google search for political science curriculums, and everything seems to deal with governments.

Ron Paul is a proprietarian, not an anarchist.

http://www.infoshop.org/AnarchistFAQAppendix1

Reply on news.ycombinator.com