Damen

here's a video response I made to everything in my Facebook feed, following the Orlando massacre. <iframe src="https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fdamen.e.liebling%2Fvideos%2F10101718320005036%2F&show_text=0&width=560"width="560" height="315" style="border:none;overflow:hidden" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" allowFullScreen="true"></iframe> Oh, looks like that ^^ didn't work.

I'm in Portland. Bi in my history. Mostly gay these days I guess.

Here are some notes I wrote on Facebook. I've gotten some positive feedback, including people letting me know that I got them thinking differently. That was very rewarding. Hope you enjoy! https://www.facebook.com/notes/damen-easton-liebling/i-hope-you-are-not-annoyed/10153925659376800 https://www.facebook.com/notes/damen-easton-liebling/message-for-my-bernie-maniacs/10153886968176800 https://www.facebook.com/notes/damen-easton-liebling/on-noam-chomsky-and-anarcho-syndicalsim/10153886948011800 https://www.facebook.com/notes/damen-easton-liebling/anarchy-for-liberals-and-everyone-else/10153653398281800

A friend posted a video of Noam Chomsky entitled “Abolishing the State” Is Not A Strategy, and he asked me for my thoughts on it. This is the url: This was my response: Oh boy, so many problems here. Unfortunately I find some of them very typical of Chomsky. Ok, so he talks about about the problems in the practical mechanics of dismantling the state. I basically agree but there's more to it and I will not get to this until the end. It will be in the part labeled 3). But now I'll do point number 1. 1) He avoids the more essential part of the question, which is talking about the theoretical absence of the state (not actual strategy for dismantling it) simply as a theoretical tool for examining the relationship between corporations and the state. Is it not true that the evils of corporations are only possible because of the state, and that these are things that a private company could not do in the absence of a state? The questioner gave a fairly good, though brief and minimal, case for why this is true. Chomsky totally bypassed addressing it. When he finally got around to saying anything about state power and corporate power, he merely asserted that corporate power is worse. He didn't actually give an explanation of how/why it is worse. He just asserted it. He didn't bother addressing any point that the questioner had made about why corporate power is only possible through state power and, more essentially, how all of the parts of corporate power that are evil ARE state power. These powers arise from the fascistic merging of big business and state, and could never exist through business on its own. The questioner described this dynamic briefly. I did it less briefly in my original post and expanded on that in my response to Daniel. You can look back over those descriptions if you missed them. -an editing note here: these posts can be found in another note, entitled A message for my Bernie-Maniacs- However, in the cursory overview I just finished in this post, I already addressed it much more thoroughly than Chomsky did. So did the questioner. Two extra points that I will add here: a) In the absence of government we can't even call it corporate power. A corporation is a business model which could never exist without being defined through laws that make no sense. It is a model where the business can go bankrupt without any actual person going bankrupt because the business is considered a person unto itself. It's a legal fiction designed to protect rich people from being fully economically responsible for the results of their choices -to protect them from risk. This is totally unnatural, nonsensical, and can only exist because law protects it. Law is violence -that is, its enforcement is the initiation of violence, unless the crime is specifically a violent crime. If you take a person to court because they owe you money and refuse to pay because their business went bankrupt, and they claim that their business is it's own person separate from them, then this is certainly not you initiating violence. And yes there can be courts (professional dispute resolution) without government. Anything that people generally find useful about government can be accomplished in voluntary (non-aggressive/non-violent/non-coercive) ways without a state. But that is a different discussion and we can have it if you like. Or you can look up what has been written about this issue yourself and bring to my attention anything that you find unresolved or fallacious in the best theories that are out there. b) Something I didn’t get to in my response to a previous post -the issue of corporations having “slaves” in foreign countries. This is another case of looking at the surface reality and seeing that it looks very wrong, but not looking at the actual mechanics of how this situation comes about. In classic slavery, people were violently captured, put in chains, transported somewhere where someone bought them, and then put into a life of servitude where it was completely legal to beat them, and they could never get out. This, by the way, was a state program which free market could never have supported on it’s own. That is because the government covered the costs of catching runaway slaves, because it was legal and so the slaves were “property” and the government was obligated to right the “theft” of them running away. Once these costs are transferred to the slave owner, it becomes financial unsustainable to have slaves, especially when everyone around, who’s not a slave owner and whose labor is devalued by the existence of slaves, has an interest in helping them get away (and there’s not much danger in helping this if the government isn;t enforcing slavery). I know that at lease in one other country (I believe Brazil, and it may have been true in other countries as well) slavery ended just because the government just stopped catching runaway slaves. Now, as for sweat shop “slavery”, there are many similarities in some places. In China there is a common relationship between employers and employees where the employer is like a total life master to them. They tell them when they can get married etc. They also put out those nets we’ve all heard about, to catch the people trying to jump off the building to kill themselves. The people there are generally very automatically deferential to authority, and so they’re very prone to being taken advantage of. The government has also written the law so that people can be thrown in jail just for attempting to form a union. The government is also totally corrupt and bribable and will let many businesses get away with beating their workers, while assault is officially banned for everyone. And so the people have no recourse. They have to take extremely low paying jobs in terrible circumstances. They do choose those jobs (they’re not forcefully captured and put in chains like classic slaves) but they don’t have any good options, it would seem. This is all very terrible. And American corporations have not created any of it. In relation to what is going on in China, between the people and their government, the only thing that an American corporation is doing is offering those people (specifically the ones who end up working in their factories) a slightly BETTER deal than ANYONE in China will offer them. That situation should improve, and if their government shrunk a lot and the people generally developed an attitude that was less deferential to any authority, then it would improve. That is not the business of American CEOs who are only fulfilling their contractual, and therefore legal, responsibilities to do anything within their ability to maximize profits for shareholders. I don’t think that they should choose to take advantage of such a bad situation but if they don’t their competition will. They are doing the best thing they know to do to survive in the immoral, violence-based environment set up by governments their own and those of the countries in which they hire these sweat shop employees. 2) As usual Chomsky is presenting a ton of facts and being completely unclear about any sort of basic principles, for logical/ethical assessment of these facts, that he may or may not be working with. For example (and I would say most essentially) I have listened to quite a few hours if Chomsky's lectures and interviews and I still have no idea whether he is is fundamentally against the initiation of violence/force, or whether he thinks that it is a legitimate tool in some situations, or what those situations would be, or what the criteria would be for determining when force is appropriate. This is the most essential ethical question in my view. It is the most basic and important thing to establish if anyone is going to have a truly serious discussion about the value and/or legitimacy of the state, or the lack thereof. By what criteria are we determining that corporate or government power (or any particular kind of power) is bad/unethical/unacceptable? This is never clear in any of his talks that I've seen. He just spouts off facts that he assumes people will find emotionally repulsive/triggering, and he arranges these facts in his speech in a manner so as to suggest an order of causation that is not actually argued for/logically shown. In this video he talked about lots of little facts about things that are currently hard for people: price of healthcare, etc. He ordered the facts he listed in a way to seem as though the ones about the plight of the poor are directly caused by this thing called corporate power, without actually showing the mechanics of how they are caused by corporate power, or explaining exactly what this corporate power is and why it is essentially separate from/independent of state power (and indeed worse, as he asserts). This manner of argument, or rather non-argument is so tiresome, so unproductive, and such a distraction, such a waste of time. He is skating on the surface of things and not digging to any basic principles, any fundamental questions. This goes all the way to his version of "Anarchy". He has said that it is simply a skepticism of authority where you ask the authority to justify itself. This is so superficial and incomplete. What is the criteria for determining legitimacy in authority? As usual, any principle as basic as this is absent. So I will help him out by giving one, and in so doing I may just clear up some glaring confusions for any participants of the occupy movement who may be reading. Anarchy is not a simple sentiment of "fuck the man". That is just unresolved childhood trauma. As adults we have to actually look at the mechanics of why things are the way they are if we want to claim that there's a problem and look for a solution. If we're questioning someone's authority, the first question is "how did they attain that authority and how do they maintain it. The first part may be educational but the second is more important since it is directly about how things work in the present (past wrongs may have been righted after all), Does one do what the authority figure says because one recognizes that the authority knows more (or guesses that they probably know more) about the job at hand, and therefore are in a better position to allocate tasks for the good of the whole group and of the task itself? Or perhaps one does what the authority figure says because they simply find him/her to be captivating and charismatic, and it feels good to be around them, and so one obeys them simply to be able to stay around them. Or perhaps one obeys the authority because one is afraid that if they do not obey, then they will be subject to violence. The authority figures who elicit the first two follower reactions would be most appropriately called "leaders". The last one would be most appropriately called a "ruler". The last one is the only completely illegitimate kind because the other two are voluntary. It may be that the first one is a better/wiser leader-follower relationship, but since they're both voluntary I'm no one to restrict others choices for how they choose what to follow/pursue. So authority maintained through fear of violence is illegitimate. Authority maintained through any voluntary means is legitimate because any time anybody chooses, they can take it out of the category of "authority" in their lives. They can simply choose to not follow it because there is no violence to fear in this option. It may be a less profitable option. But it is a fact of life that, which event the super rich can not avoid, that sometimes the most profitable option is not the most comfortable or otherwise desirable. That's the kind of clarity for which Chomsky is totally useless. He's good if you want to stagnate on a mental hamster wheel by being eternal distracted from the essential questions of any situation, and instead drowned in an ocean of emotionally stimulating minutia. And so i can't see him as a philosophical anarchist. He is an emotional anarchist, like the occupy protestors. They just seem to have a sentiment of not liking authority (whatever that happens to be seen as) and a great many facts ready to recite, that really feel like they support this sentiment. He and they can't seem to even understand the difference between socialism (huge state) and anarchy (no state), the fundamental difference between a commune/intentional community where people choose to share their resources with each other (voluntary/Non-aggressive) and a state where redistribution is achieved through taxation, under penalty of jail (coercive/aggressive/violent). They are true opposites - mutually exclusive. These "Anarcho-socialists/syndicalists" seem to think (based on what why advocate) that having a socialist state is a halfway compromise to having a world composed of voluntary communities of sharing and cooperation. No, it is not a half way point. It is completely the opposite direction. It makes such communities more and more difficult to have, and makes such a world impossible. Coercion never begets cooperation. Violence never begets voluntarism. I'll get to a definition of a true philosophical anarchist in part 3. Last point before part 3. All these little difficulties he brings up, that people are having to face right now, these are unavoidable. They can perhaps be delayed by more short term government tampering with the economy, but delaying painful inevitabilities only intensifies the suffering when it catches up to you. What we have been doing - the way that we have achieved our standard of living, and the expectations that make us ripe for the emotional exploitation Chomsky is utilizing - it is all unsustainable. We know this. We know about fiat currency, fractional reserve banking, and the artificial lowering the prices of goods an services through corporate subsidization. We know it's all unsustainable. And Chomsky must know it. This means he's either being very manipulative, or he has kept certain areas of his knowledge walled off from certain avenues of thought, and only available to avenues of thought where they will support the belief systems to which he is committed. He's using the suffering people are facing as evidence of corporate crimes upon them, when this suffering is the direct result of things that people generally have desperately wanted, and gotten from their governments: gasoline, plastics, and junk food that are cheaper than they naturally can be (achieved through subsidies), quick fixes to financial crises, welfare without regard to debt, deficit, or unsustainable rates of immigration which totally throw off the ratio of those paying into welfare with taxes and those only receiving it. Not to mention that a lot of the population was actually pretty gung-ho about the wars we got into when they started. None of the above mentioned things are financially sustainable even for the most powerful nation on the planet. We're starting to feel the effects of that. We're going to feel a whole lot more. It's not because of any particular new thing that any politician or corporation does. It's because of economic mathematics. As I have said, the corporate evils are merely the shadows cast by state evils. But on a deeper level than this, the state evils are the shadow cast by the corruption within each of us. We make excuses for why the initiation of violence is ok here and ok there. Mostly, we generally accept violence as legitimate if it comes from authority. This finally brings me to... 3) Now I'll get to the whole dismantling of the state thing. First I'll repeat: we generally accept violence as legitimate if it comes from authority. In the pure and ideal theory of democracy (which never actually works out in reality, but for the sake of this exercise we'll assume it somehow could) all authority is simply the will of the majority. So, understanding that all the tools of government are violent (taxation is theft, law is an opinion with more guns than you have) democracy just means that it's ok for a majority to use violence against a minority. So by that logic, slavery was totally moral until the majority of people in any given country didn't like it anymore. This includes the slaves of course, but the whole point of what I'm saying is that they are a minority, so based on the fundamental principles of democracy, there feelings don't matter until enough other people agree with them. Now none of this makes any sense but people never buy into legitimizations of violence because they make perfect logical sense. They buy into them because they make emotional sense. And they make emotional sense because most people are raised under rulership. And so the propaganda about the states legitimacy makes sense because it's just like how our household worked growing up -the same hypocrisy, the same double standards for the rulers and the ruled, the same right to dictate without justification of authority, and for many the same enforcement of authority through fear and even violence. This is not the only way it can be. Peaceful parenting is not just a theory. It is something that people actually do, and to wonderful effect. And it is not simply permissive or neglectful parenting. It's something very worth looking into, as is the work of Dr. Gabor Mate, which shows how addictions and behavioral disorders are based in early childhood environment & trauma (including infancy and prenatal state). Peaceful parenting is still relatively rare and so it will be some time before there can be a truly anarchist world. As Noam Chomsky says, getting rid of the state is not a strategy. There is no action a person, or group, can take that tears down the government without replacing it with more government. Not within the context of our current world. But an anarchist state is possible and inevitable once a certain threshold is reached. This threshold is when group A outnumbers group B. Group B are people who are willing to use force to get what they want. Group A are people who will not use force (unconditionally non-aggressive) AND are prepared to defend against those who will use force. Absolute pacifists (not even defensive violence under any circumstances) are group C and they don't tip that balance much either way, cause they mostly just get killed unless group A steps in. We won't get to that world without a lot more peaceful parenting and so it is a multigenerational project. Though some people do unconditionally reject aggression in their adult-hood, this is a steep hill to climb. However, humanity has been growing less and less violent statistically so I think it really is inevitable. It just takes time. And so philosophical anarchy is not about a "strategy" for taking down the state. It's just about not being part of what upholds it. Sure you pay your taxes and do what you have to to get by in an immoral environment. When the mafia comes to shake you down, you pay them of and carry on with life (if you don't stand a chance against them). I wouldn't ask anyone to be a willing martyr and I don't think it's necessary. The etymological definition of anarchy is "no rulers". Unfortunately it's dictionary definition has adopted synonyms like chaos, disorder, and violence. But this is just the result of centuries of state propaganda telling us that law = order. Absurd. Law is violence. Violence begets violence. So anarchy is the absence if rulers. On a fundamental, person to person level, when you use violence (against one person or many) to get your way, you are attempting to be a ruler. So there can never be a logically/philosophically consistent anarchist who initiates violence. There can be no anarchist uprising in the streets that burns down the capital building with all the politicians inside. Fighting back against the police, when they've already attacked, is certainly morally sound but I wouldn't advise it strategically. A philosophical anarchist is simply someone who doesn't use violence to get their way. That means they also don't ask others to do it on their behalf, whether it be the mafia or the government. So that means no voting. I mean you can do it. I can't dictate what you're allowed to do. I'm an anarchist. But I can notice the logical mutual exclusivity between being a philosophically consistent anarchist and asking the government to do things. I also can't really see how it could make any sense for an anarchist to have a preference for who gets elected to a government office. There's no lesser of two evils on the ballot. There's only the maximum evil of more state power (legitimized violence). I mean it might be a thought experiment, but in the end there's no point to fighting for one candidate or another. If one wants to reduce the government, this only matters if most people want them and want them for that reason. And it only matters for that reason -because it's what people want. It doesn't matter who's in the evil office. It matters where the culture's at. And culture isn't created from the top down. That's the statist megalomaniacal fantasy. Little superficial trends may be created that way but the progress of humanity is a process if learning and maturing through experience. Some of us will be ahead of the pack on the nonviolent front. And if we are that then we just have to be that and let others encounter us as they do. When I talk about the virtue of anarchy and the evil of the state, and of all initiation of force, I am not strategizing or planning for the revolution. I am actually doing the revolution. It's a slow process of changing of hearts and minds. And it's done through peaceful conversation, certainly not through legislation. That would be like using slavery to end slavery. It will take a long time (probably not within my lifetime) but as soon as non-aggressors (prepared to defend) are a majority, people will be able to go about peacefully with our cooperative, voluntary, anarchist lives. It doesn't matter if I don't get to see a stateless world. The joy is in the living and being of non-violence.