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Comment by pixl97 | Hacker News Reader

>unjustified authority

That is a tautology. Who provides the justification and who gave them that authority. The king? The nobles? The learned? The majority? The masses? The individual?

The problem with power is it is self justifying. If you have power you can justify anything, and if you do not, you exist at the mercy of those that do. One would think the most rational behavior would be to give those power that want it least (such as anarchists), but human psychology shows that significant portions of humanity want hierarchies and will gladly give their power to put a dictator/king into power.

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Noam Chomsky - "Anarchism is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified. It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them. Their authority is not self-justifying. They have to give a reason for it, a justification. And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just. And, as I understand it, anarchy is just that tendency. It takes different forms at different times."

This is just a continuation of the tautology...

In this statement Noam manages to stick his head so far up his own ass that you can see his face inside his mouth...

> And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by

By fucking what. Oh yes, by someone/something/some group with power. If you have the power to do this, you have the same power as a brutal dictator. If you have power to tear down these non-self justifying systems, you can use any fucking justification you want to tear it down. At the end of the day power is power. You just hope this power is wielded towards more freedom, but you're just a single orator away from tyranny.

> By fucking what.

By the workers, not the owners of capital. That is justified authority.

Now pull yourself out of the 1800's and ask that question of the face of further automation and replacement of employees by 'intelligent' machines.

Workers rights are just a bullshit statement of the same classification as 'landowner rights'. Human rights should be paramount regardless if you have a job or not.

But to have these rights, you must organize and concentrate this power or you'll just be scattered by the owners of capital that have already concentrated their power highly effectively.

The topic of the article this thread is about is Anarchism in the 1900s.

I would have assumed at least your insults would have been consistent with the article.

A couple interesting points here. One is the supposition that something which is more “justified” is better. We humans do a lot of things which cannot be justified and are good, so this seems an odd position to me.

The other is that “something more free” is coupled with something “more just”, and that that is also better than something which is less justified. The implication here would be that adding more freedom is always more just than something “unjustified”. I don’t think this logically holds, either.

By this definition virtually every political system could be argued to be compatible with "anarchism". Dante justified the authority of the church. Hobbes justified the rule of the king. People all across the centre of the political spectrum - and further right from that - are happy to justify state monopoly on violence with the need to enforce rules. Justifying various kinds of authority has been the work of political philosophers for millennia.

You're asking the question "who" has to justify the authority.

In the case of governments, it's the population. Not political philosophers.

I think I'm asking what constitutes a "justification", not who.

The "population" justified the Iranian Revolution handing authority to the Ayatollah and the IRGC. Is Iran a model of the anarchic state?

Without literal Democracy, it is incorrect to argue the population justified the government. It would have to be consistent, and continual justification by decree by the population through Direct Democracy.

Is the anarchism Chomsky has in mind literally just direct democracy then?

It's not limited to governments, but in the case of governments, yes. Noam Chomsky is for democracy, and democratic institutions.

In the workplace, it's the workers who should have all of the decision making.

When you bring your kids to school, you expect the teacher to have some authority over them: to give them homework, ask them questions and stay quiet for at least part of the past. But you dont expect from the teachers corporal punishment, or religious indoctrination, etc.

I think most reasonable people would accept this line of thinking without problem.

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