> "> Just look at how we treat the planet and other living things in the presence of lawful order"
On the contrary, it' and indictment of the current law system, it has utterally failed to protect the environment and other living things, where-as anacistic organisations, charities and protest movement have done a lot for the environment. In fact they are the only ones that have done anything at all.
If a given CEO damages profits for the sake of environment, he can be removed as he is not fullfilling his legal duty, maximising profits. So even if a hypothetical environmentalist became the chielf of ExxonMobil, he wouldn't be able to do much.
> anacistic organisations, charities and protest movement have done a lot for the environment. In fact they are the only ones that have done anything at all.
This is not true at all. Protecting the environment isn’t just about actions like planting trees and buying up the occasional extra property parcel to dedicate as a land reserve. It requires government scale regulation to impose negative consequences on people and companies producing negative externalities.
You can argue that the government hasn’t done enough in this regard, but it’s demonstrably not true to claim that 3rd parties have done more than the government to regulate industry and build national park level land reserves.
This is the problem with most pro-anarchistic stances: They take too much of the current system’s benefits for granted while also assuming that less regulation would somehow produce a more regulated outcome.
I don’t understand the desire to put impossible theories of anarchy on a pedestal instead of simply making incremental improvements to the current systems.
Take the example of pollution. Say you're an employee of a fossil fuel cooperative. Is it in your interest to continue polluting? Yes, because you after all own some of the ressources of that company and control it. So what is the anarchist solution? Well, it's in the interests of everyone to stop pollution, right? So you'd need people to come together, decide that population is a concern, at least a good percentage of people, and offer you to be compensated for your investment in fossil fuels in exchange to stop polluting and find another job or not work in industry at all anymore. You might say that this is unrealistic, but for the government to do anything about pollution we needed hundreds of millions of people to protest and a majority of the people agreeing that pollution is a problem worth fixing. And if that doesn't work either, you elect and randomly chose people to supervise the elected with short term limits in order to have authority against pollution.
This is the anarchist solution to the tragedy of the commons in this case.
As for making incremental change, there are hard limits. There are existing power structures that will hamper you very strongly - the state, private interests, the corporate media, and so on. If you do incremental change that they don't like, they absolutely will use violence to prevent you.
So, the "anarchist solution" to the tragedy of the commons - the avoidance of centralized power - entails a majority of the population banding together and acting as some sort of agent, with the power to set rules and redistribute wealth? I see.
I think that you may be on to something here. It could have limited police powers and perhaps offer up and guarantee, a, I think we'll call it fiat trading systems based on dolloros (we'll call them). Also people can gather in small groups and elect a leader of sorts to travel to the town square and represent them so it won't be so chaotic when making decisions for the group...
No the anarchist solution is to remove the need for that pollution at all. Why frack when wind power works? Sure you don't get as much power but when the whole world isn't spending 1/5 of their day driving from home to office to modify spreadsheets, you'll find some power savings.
I don't think that's a fair characterization at all. To use a network analogy...
Central Planning: [1 Figure 1a]
Functioning Capitalism: [1 Figure 1b]
Anarchy: [1 Figure 1c]
The optimal design lies somewhere between the extremes. 1a seems to be an absorbing boundary condition, so we need stabilization mechanisms to keep the system running near optimal dispersion.
In the past, we had stabilization mechanisms like antitrust law, public jury trials for torts (as opposed to closed-door arbitration), and the tax code. All of these stabilizers have been severely degraded in the neoliberal era.
Elinor Ostrom come up with the 8 design principles[1] for dealing with the tragedy of the commons for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize. She concludes that top-down regulation doesn't work because of complexity and laissez-faire because private companies will try to maximize their profits. So she studied common pools and found out that if they missed these 8 principles between groups involved it would lead to depletion or conflicts. This I think is an anarchist solution to the problem only she called it polycentric governance.
> you might say that this is unrealistic, but for the government to do anything about pollution we needed hundreds of millions of people to protest
Hundreds of millions? The organizers of the biggest climate strikes (September 2019) estimated 7.6 million globally, and that's being generous. It's vastly cheaper, easier and more popular to enforce companies to reduce their pollution from their own funds than to pay to do it for them.
For that to happen though, you need a large portion of people to agree to do so. In an anarchic society where production is essentially communally owned, the cost to stop polluting is the same in the end.
> offer you to be compensated for your investment in fossil fuels in exchange to stop polluting
Do you even think about the obvious problems with this approach? Stick works. Carrot doesn't work, it just encourages more of the same. It's in the interest of everyone to stop shitting in the streets, right? But if I get paid every time I take a shit in the street, then ...
I am just making a narrow argument that the current system is responsible for the environmental damage lock, stock and barrel.
Do a mental experiment - imagine the only form of corporation we had was a cooperative, limited to 10,000 employees. Would you expect environmental damage to increase?
I feel it takes large, hierarchical organisations, where the decision-maker is very removed from the consequences, to create this level of environmental devastation.
Now imagine we went through the 70-year long history of environmental protection and did a score:
Proactive environmental action by the government /proper authority is evidence that the current system is working, 1 point for current system. If a government only acts after mass protests or public outcry, I take that as a point for the anarchic system. If there is mass outcry, and still no action, take it as two point for the anarchic system.
If we did the score we'd have to face the fact that most of environmental laws are only on the books because of some form of public outcry or protest.
You are free to argue that anarchism would be disastrous for our standards of living or crime rates, but specifically on the point of environment, it would probably do a lot better.
What is the basis for your belief that smaller groups of people will intrinsically care more about the environment than larger groups?
In an anarchic society, what mechanism would be limiting these cooperatives to 10,000 employees? How would this be enforced, and what would the consequences be for exceeding 10,000?
> On the contrary, it' and indictment of the current law system, it has utterally failed to protect the environment and other living things.
The fact that our laws have tried to protect the environment and 'utterly failed' is clear evidence that behaviour of individuals and corporations are not, by default, making good environmental decisions.
The idea that these actors, who are bad stewards of the environment when laws are compelling them to be good, would suddenly become good stewards of the environment in an anarchic system, is wishful thinking.
Counterpoint: The legal concept of fiduciary responsibility, and actual de facto laws, legally compel the board of directors and executives of for-profit corporations to produce profit for their shareholders.
There are even special laws for officers of publicly traded companies that make this compulsion even more strict add additional criminal charges for failure.
Now, obviously these laws aren't something most corporate officers think about when they get out of bed. But they absolutely do create powerful incentives and drive the culture of large corporations away from any consideration for ethics.
>absolutely do create powerful incentives and drive the culture of large corporations away from any consideration for ethics.
They absolutely do not. Corporate officers, especially at large corporations, are driven by personal profit, career success, etc. Fiduciary responsibility represents exactly what its name implies: the requirement that you act responsibly on behalf of investors/shareholders. If it was a powerful driver of corporate behavior, then we would expect different behaviors from privately run corporations (I believe that's actually most of them). I do not see that being the case.
> The legal concept of fiduciary responsibility, and actual de facto laws, legally compel the board of directors and executives of for-profit corporations to produce profit for their shareholders.
False. There are no laws that compel a company to produce profits for their shareholders. There is an economic _philosophy_ that argues that since the market economy is the bees knees, it follows that a company that has a higher profit is also 'better', but that does not make it a legal concept. [0]
Fiduciary responsibility in this case simply means that the directors should have the best interest of the company in mind. [1] In most cases shareholders want more money, so making more money is a natural result. But if there is a company whose single mission is to put a colony on Mars, then fiduciary responsibility compels the directors to only focus on that, even if such a colony would be less profitable than setting money on fire.
On the contrary again, look at the death of Lorenzo Anderson at the hands of the Seattle anarchist community.
I’m afraid at the end of everything that happens this year, the data is going to tell us that the only change the anarchists achieved was getting trump re-elected.
On the contrary, it' and indictment of the current law system, it has utterally failed to protect the environment and other living things, where-as anacistic organisations, charities and protest movement have done a lot for the environment. In fact they are the only ones that have done anything at all.
If a given CEO damages profits for the sake of environment, he can be removed as he is not fullfilling his legal duty, maximising profits. So even if a hypothetical environmentalist became the chielf of ExxonMobil, he wouldn't be able to do much.