Statism Kritik - WNDI 2006

WNDI 2k6 Statism K 1
Kritik of the State
1. index
2. shell
3. national service serves state agenda
4-5. national service = state ownership of citizens
6. national sercive  totalitarianism
7. voluntary service  mandatory service
8. democracy promotion  war
9-12. threat construction justifies the state
13. “the state helps people” = ultimate form of statism
14. kritik solves benefits of service
15. rejection of state  functioning institutions
16. u.s. rejection of state snowballs
17. state run services fail
18. individual service is best
19. draft links
20. draft  war
21-22 kritik solves oppression, sexism, racism, etc.
23. state  war
24-26. kritik solves war, extinction, environment
27. kritik solves caitalism
28. kritik solves space
29-30 a2 perm
31-32. a2 kritik = utopian
33. a2 transition = violent, a2 heg good
34. a2 excludes people of color, a2 soviet system bad
35. personal action is key
Summary:
The plan not only acts through the US government, but also expands national service, which is a cover for
expanding State power. State power causes lots of bad things like extinction. The alternative is to reject the
State.
A: The Link
National service programs perpetuate elitism, state interests, and imperialism
Amanda Moore McBride, Assistant Professor and Research Director, Center For Social Development,
Washington University, “Limitations of civic service: critical perspectives,” 2006, accessed July 10, 2006 at
http://cdj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/41/3/307
Community, national, and international service policies and programs exist worldwide. Anecdotally, their
prevalence has increased dramatically in recent years. Their proliferation indicates a tacit presumption of
their positive nature. While acknowledging the benefits of these programs, we call attention to the possible
limitations of service, including elitism, state interests, and imperialism. We emphasize implications for
policy, practice, and research.
B: The Impacts
1. In this framework the centralized military authority of the State makes nationalism and war inevitable
Graham Purchase, University of Sydney, ANARCHISM AND SOCIETY, 1997, p 97
Although the Nation-State has greatly exacerbated many of the social and moral evils of nationalism, of
itself, cultural difference has been as much a hindrance as it has been beneficial to social developments.
Unfortunately, international or intertribal wars have been as prominent a feature of human life as that of
cooperation. Racism, ethnocentrism, colonialism, and genocide are all byproducts of nationalism and
cultural diversity. Anarchism has never claimed that conflict can be eliminated or that such problems can be
quickly and easily resolved. All that anarchism asks is that the various parties might solve their differences
amongst themselves without the weight of State-military authority baking one side or the other. Every time
the Russian Republic has driven their tanks into Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, the
Ukraine, etc., they have merely asserted their might, not their right, accomplishing nothing in the peaceful
resolution of such conflicts. The holocaust in Germany during World War II or Stalin’s purges in the 1930s
best illustrate the dysfunctional disintegrating and destructive effects of overzealous nationalist sentiments
which are rendered a thousand times more terrible through the development of the centralized military
authority of the Nation-State.
2. The existence of nuclear weapons in the hands of the State makes extinction inevitable
Joel Kovel, AGAINST THE STATE OF NUCLEAR TERROR, 1983, p xii
The state of being is conditioned by the nuclear state apparatus, while conditioning that apparatus in turn.
The technocracy of the state apparatus and the paranoia of the state of being mutually determine one
another. The fusion of the two states into one is the product of an unholy process of terrorism which I shall
describe in some detail in the main body of this work. But the fact of the fusion itself, the fact that we can
talk of a nuclear state and mean both the missile-bearing apparatus, and the state of being that bears up
under this apparatus, signifies that the nuclear crisis is not a mater of technically adjusting the nature and
number of warheads, but the agony of a whole civilization. By pushing society to the edge of doom, the
nuclear state bursts asunder the seams of rationalization within which the West’s domination of nature and
other people has been contained.
C: The Alternative is to reject the State system

Abandoning the state system makes war unfeasible and undesirable
Kirkpatrick Sale, “The ‘Necessity’ of the State,” in REINVENTING ANARCHY, AGAIN, edited by
Howard Erlich, 1996, p 43
Moreover, the difficulties for any large power trying to subdue a host of smaller societies are truly
formidable and would be additionally so if those societies, in a human-scale world, were effectively
governed, harmonious and homogeneous, and concertedly self-protective. The problems that Nazi Germany
had controlling a Europe of large nation-states were bad enough, but they would have been infinitely
greater if each little community had been independent, without connections to centralized systems of
administration and control, with effective traditions of local autonomy and defense. The material game of
conquering – and controlling – a small society that offered a great deal in the way of resistance and very
little in the way of exploitable riches would hardly seem worth the military candle.
National service is a cover to achieve hidden goals of the State

Doug Bandow, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, FREEDOM DAILY, “Service to Whom?” September
1997, accessed July 15, 2006 at http://www.fff.org/freedom/0997e.asp
For instance, the state of Maryland and a number of local school districts require students to "volunteer" in
order to receive a diploma from high school. Some volunteerism advocates, led by the president, support
this attempt to make compassion compulsory, the worst sort of oxymoron imaginable. It makes a mockery
of the idea of volunteerism.
Similarly, proposals abound to use the tax law to bludgeon business into doing what government considers
to be "responsible" behavior. Some advocates of this approach would add volunteerism to their indicia of
corporate responsibility. But "philanthropy" motivated by such threats would be extortion, not
volunteerism.
Alas, the idea of compulsory compassion is not new. The venerable national service movement goes back
at least a century, to Looking Backward, a novel by lawyer and journalist Edward Bellamy. Bellamy
envisioned compulsory service for all men and women between the ages of 21 and 45, which, he said,
would result in a peaceful and prosperous utopia. Bellamy's book had a tremendous impact. In its time, it
was outsold only by Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur and was translated into 20 different languages. Some
165 Bellamy clubs were started in 1890 and 1891 to push his egalitarian social system.
Two decades later came William James, who spoke of the need for a "moral equivalent of war," in which all
young men would be required to work for the community. He argued that "the martial virtues, although
originally gained by the race through war, are absolute and permanent human goods," and that national
service provides a method for instilling those same values in peacetime.
Today, at least, most national service advocates eschew such far-reaching utopian visions of social
transformation. Nevertheless, the desire to create the good society through service has lived on. Declared
the Potomac Institute in 1979:
"International comparisons also fire some American imaginations. Millions of young people serve social
needs in China as a routine part of growing up, many [are] commanded to leave the crowded cities and to
assist in the countryside. Castro fought illiteracy and mosquitoes in Cuba with units of youth. Interesting
combinations of education, work, and service to society are a part of the experience of youth in Israel,
Jamaica, Nigeria, Tanzania, and other nations. The civic spirit being imbued in youth elsewhere in the
world leaves some Americans wondering and worrying about Saturday-night-fever, unemployment, the
new narcissism, and other afflictions of American youth."
William James's rhetoric 80 years ago remains the touchstone for national service advocates today. In
succeeding decades, a host of philosophers, policy analysts, and politicians proffered their own proposals
for either voluntary or mandatory national service. Their objectives, as indicated by the Potomac Institute's
report, usually involved far more than providing desired social services.
Some advocates saw national service as a means to provide job training and jobs. Others thought it would
encourage social equality. Still others predicted it would promote civic-mindedness. Many backed it in
order to expand access to college. And Margaret Mead saw it as a way to help liberate children from their
parents.
The legislative process always shrunk such grandiose proposals into much more limited programs, such as
the Peace Corps, various local and state initiatives, and, in 1993, the National and Community Service
Trust Act, which established the Corporation for National and Community Service. But many of the
grander goals remain: transforming participants, teaching values, combating balkanization, and expanding
educational opportunity.
Thus, the heritage of national service — the desire that government involvement promote ends other than
service — remains a critical factor in understanding politicians who promote "volunteerism." We have to
ask most fundamentally: service to whom and organized by whom?
National service functions to make everyone a worker of the State

Exhortation by government officials is harmless enough, so long as the veiled fist of punitive policy
changes is not raised in the background. Of course, politicians who spend more time urging others to help
than in helping aren't the best salesmen for the benefits of voluneerism. Moreover, even truly voluntary
contributions are viewed by many firms more as a tool of public relations than as an exercise of moral
responsibility. However, neither hypocrisy nor self-interest diminishes the good that can be done by
volunteers. We all have an enormous capacity to aid those around us.
Nevertheless, encouraging firms to voluntarily drop a few dollars on the less fortunate should not blind us
to the most important issue. Government stands in the way of helping the needy at almost every turn.
Most bizarre are government policies that discourage volunteerism. Mother Teresa's religious order
dropped a planned AIDS facility because New York City insisted that the building include a costly and
unnecessary elevator. Labeling requirements in Los Angeles prevent restaurants from giving food away to
the homeless. The federal government threatened to put Salvation Army rehabilitation centers out of
business when the government proposed applying the minimum wage law to participants. The state of
Texas attempted to restrict the hiring of counselors by Teen Challenge, a religious drug treatment program
with a far higher success rate than government programs. And on it goes.
More subtle is the threat posed by government-funded "service" programs, since they seek to fit
volunteerism into a larger social plan implemented and enforced by government. AmeriCorps is the most
obvious example. Not surprisingly, the federal program has amassed an impressive list of testimonials from
private groups that welcome the corporation's money. But Washington's funds could prove almost as
powerful as its mandates in reshaping the independent sector. Some voluntary organizations recognize the
danger. David King of the Ohio-West Virginia YMCA has warned:
"The national service movement and the National Corporation are not about encouraging volunteering or
community service. The national service movement is about institutionalizing federal funding for national
and community service. It is about changing the language and understanding of service to eliminate the
words 'volunteer' and 'community service' and in their place implant the idea that service is something paid
for by the government."
There is much in American history to give credence to King's fears. The history of the welfare state is the
history of public enterprise pushing out private organization. The impact was largely unintentional but
natural — indeed, inevitable. Increased taxes left individuals with less money to give; government's
assumption of responsibility for providing welfare reduced the perceived duty of individuals to respond to
their neighbors' needs; and the availability of public programs gave recipients an alternative to private
assistance, one which made fewer demands for the reform of destructive behaviors and lifestyles. After
decades of an expanding state, most people today, irrespective of their ideological perspective, recognize
that government has taken over too much of the poverty-reduction enterprise.
The National Corporation, despite the best of intentions of people such as its president, Harris Wofford,
risks doing the same thing to philanthropy. A federal "service" program, especially if it expands over time,
risks teaching that the duty of giving and the job of organizing giving (deciding who is worthy to receive
government grants and, indirectly, private groups' services) belongs to government rather than average
people throughout society. At some point, service to society could become widely equated with work for
the government.
The national service mentality relegates the individual to a servant of the State
Alex Epstein, Writer at the Rand Institute, “Bush's Un-American and Immoral Call for ‘National Service’,”
January 30, 2002, accessed July 19, 2006 at
http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?JServSessionIdr004=7hxca3bbh2.app5a&page=NewsArticle&id=5319
&news_iv_ctrl=1021&printer_friendly=1
Adding his voice to the chorus of intellectuals and politicians who have pushed for a commitment by
Americans to "national service," Bush called on "every American to commit at least two years, four
thousand hours over the rest of your lifetime, to the service of your neighbors and your nation."
Supplementing this call, he proposed a dramatic expansion of existing government service programs: a
doubling of the Peace Corps--with an emphasis on expanding service to Islamic countries--and a
quintupling of the AmeriCorps program, which sponsors volunteers for charitable activities like building
houses for the homeless and caring for the elderly. Bush's proposal closely mirrors Senators John McCain
and Evan Bayh's recently introduced Call to Service Act.
Why must Americans give up two years of their lives to change bedpans at nursing homes or teach children
in Afghanistan? Because national service is a moral duty, its advocates claim, and the government should
teach us that it is an integral part of American citizenship. Robin Gerber, a professor of leadership at the
University of Maryland, writes: "Young Americans should be told they have an obligation to serve, a duty
to actively support their democracy." "We need to convey this expectation, that everyone should expect to
give something back to their country," says Leslie Lenkowsky, President Bush's appointee to head the
Corporation for National Service. Conservative writer David Brooks praises national-service legislation
because it "takes kids out of the normal self-obsessed world of career and consumption and orients them
toward service and citizenship." Brooks favors military-related national service, because under it, "Today's
children . . . would suddenly face drill sergeants reminding them they are nothing without the group."
This collectivist belief in the supremacy of the group over the individual is the foundation of the national-
service ideology, which regards the individual as a servant to the nation. And the proponents of "duty" to
the state, although they claim to be patriots, are espousing a view that is fundamentally un-American.
National service rests on the premise that the State owns you
Bill Winter, editor, LP NEWS, “What’s wrong with National Service,” 2005, accessed July 19,
2006 at http://www.mothersagainstthedraft.org/content/view/384/142/
Who owns you? That simple question is at the core of any discussion about the morality of national service
programs.
If you own yourself, then politicians have no right to force you to perform so-called "public service" jobs or
to serve in the military.
On the other hand, if the government owns you, then politicians have every right to tell you what to do. If
they decide your country needs you to fight a war, tutor poor children, or plant trees, then you have no right
to refuse -- since your labor belongs to them.
Not surprisingly, politicians never justify national service in such stark language. That would conflict with
their constant rhapsodizing about it.
For the purposes of this discussion, we'll define national service broadly: Any government-mandated term
of service, whether in the military, or for private or government agencies, or as a requirement to graduate
from school. We'll also include quasi-national service: Any federal program that pays individuals to
"volunteer" to do good works.
The national service mentality enables totalitarianism

Bill Winter, editor, LP NEWS, “What’s wrong with National Service,” 2005, accessed July 19, 2006 at
http://www.mothersagainstthedraft.org/content/view/384/142/
All this begs the question: If service is so glorious, and has so many benefits, why must it be mandatory?
American politicians never answer that question. And, given the history of national service, that's not
surprising.
The idea that the state has the right to force individuals into "public service" jobs or to serve in the military
has always been irresistible to tyrants and to big-government theoreticians.
For example, in 1848, in The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels called for the
"establishment of industrial armies" to perform (mandatory) work to help build a worker's paradise.
In the 1940s, Adolf Hitler touted pflichterfulling, or "fulfillment of duty." For Germans, that meant an
obligation to "serve the community." The philosophical rationale behind it was encapsulated in the popular
Nazi slogan: "Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz!" ("The common interest before self!")
It's no coincidence that history's most oppressive ideologies have embraced the concept of national service.
As the Ayn Rand Institute's Scott McConnell wrote in the New American (June 9, 1997), national service
"is the essential collectivist idea."
"In Soviet Russia," McConnell wrote, "the requirement was to serve the proletariat; in Nazi Germany, it
was service to the Volk [the people]; in various absolutist monarchies, it was service to the king; in some
religious regimes, it's service to God."
Whatever the particular rationale, individuals were considered a "public good," to be used as the
government directed.
Voluntary service creates the infrastructure to implement mandatory service

Bill Winter, editor, LP NEWS, “What’s wrong with National Service,” 2005, accessed July 19, 2006 at
http://www.mothersagainstthedraft.org/content/view/384/142/
3) Voluntary service programs can be a stepping stone to non-voluntary programs.

Many supporters of voluntary service programs are honest about what they really want: Mandatory service
programs.
For example, Senator McCain supports a mandatory military draft or two-year term of equivalent civilian
service, but says such a plan is "not currently politically practical."
However, as Bandow notes: "Proponents of a mandatory, universal system, such as Senator John McCain,
see voluntary programs as a helpful first step."
David R. Henderson, an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, agrees. As he wrote in
Reason magazine (February 1993): "With the voluntary-service network in place, and with an existing
constituency of organizations that benefit from the artificially cheap labor, the next step is compulsory
service."
Even voluntary service programs lead down the road of compulsory service and totalitarianism
Alex Epstein, Writer at the Rand Institute, “Bush's Un-American and Immoral Call for ‘National
Service’,” January 30, 2002, accessed July 19, 2006 at
http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?JServSessionIdr004=7hxca3bbh2.app5a&page=NewsArticle&id=5319
&news_iv_ctrl=1021&printer_friendly=1
The logical end-road of the belief that you have a duty to serve the nation is legislation that forces you to do
so--i.e., compulsory national service. Robert Litan of the Brookings Institution has proposed that every 18-
year-old be forced to perform one year of compulsory service. This is nothing less than involuntary
servitude of the youth of "the land of the free." While President Bush claims to be in favor only of
voluntary service, his and other proposals are a step in the direction of mandatory service. McCain and
Bayh write that "national service should one day be a rite of passage for young Americans." There is only
one way to make national service a "rite of passage"--by government coercion. McCain has long-favored
compulsory national service, but laments that it "is not currently politically practical." Accepting the
premise that service is a duty, Bush and others who now claim service should be voluntary will be morally
powerless against future bills that seek to make it mandatory.
Every totalitarian society in history has rested on the premise of man's alleged duty to the state. It
was Adolf Hitler, for example, who preached that "the higher interests involved in the life of the whole
must set the limits and lay down the duties of the interests of the individual."
Democracy promotion is used by the State to achieve perpetual war

Anthony Gregory, research analyst at the Independent Institute, “Warmongering Is the Health of Statism,”
accessed July 10, 2006 at http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory98.html, November 23, 2005
And democracy has, for many free-market hawks, become the new goal. There is a theory about
democracies never fighting each other, and how peaceful it would be if the world became more democratic.
Most believers in the theory believe that the U.S. government should democratize the world, even if
through war, so as to secure peace. There are many little problems with imperial democratic peace theory –
the shifting definitions these theorists use, the near unfalsifiability of it, the terrible track record the U.S.
has in actually promoting democracy – but we can only stand baffled by the general notion of perpetual war
for democracy and perpetual democracy for peace. Since when did libertarians and conservatives equate
freedom and democracy? Since when did they conflate elections with freedom, and think foreigners were
free if they could vote? Since when did any of us think that a so-called free country could slaughter
foreigners in mass numbers, so long as it is to minimize non-democratic aggression in the long run?
Say what you will about these arguments, but they run counter to the essence of libertarian philosophy.
Why would a libertarian trust this crude calculus of minimizing mass murder through mass murder with the
bureaucratic central planning of the state? To do so elevates the U.S. to the status of an omniscient and
omnipotent Godlike entity, capable and ethical in its determinations of who should live and who should die
everywhere on the planet. It presumes that the state should grant liberty to the world, that it should manage
not just one domestic industry, but the entire evolution of global humanity towards a more civilized end.
For the adherents to this belief, freedom is just one more big government program.
And of course, all those wars have not been good and necessary for liberty, and there were always
intolerable atrocities committed without even a pragmatic justification. When Wilson and his allies starved
German civilians, when FDR and Truman dropped terror from the skies on innocents in Europe and Asia,
when LBJ napalmed Vietnam and Nixon torched Cambodia, when Bush's army raped Fallujah – none of
these acts were necessary, or defensive.
The construction of external enemies is a tool used by the State to perpetuate itself
Michael E Coughlin, Publisher of “The Dandelion” (a journal of philosophical anarchism), 1977, accessed
June 15, 2006 at http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/object7.html
The Russian state, a monstrous wart on the Russian people, has become a convenient bogeyman for the
American state. My immediate concern, however, is with the domestic monster that has grown up in our
midst. Remember, it's a centuries old and proven tactic of the state to use foreign "enemies" as excuses for
domination and reasons for extending their domestic power in every direction. At what cost do we protect
ourselves from the Russians without installing our own Kremlin in Washington--if we already haven't done
so?
Consider another point. If we are so determined to be free that we won't accept domestic-grown masters, is
it realistic to suppose that we would tolerate foreign-born ones? the cost to a foreign state to dominate us
would be enormous. If such a state were forced to conquer and subjugate a land peopled by individuals who
prize their liberty as one of the chief goods of life, imagine the continuing problem that state would have
maintaining its control. Do you believe that would be possible or feasible? Even if this foreign state did
conquer a free people, how long do you suppose it could maintain its empire? The Russian state is plagued
by internal dissent and in the years to come that dissent is bound to grow. It would multiply geometrically if
the state extended its borders to the American continent. It would be an empire doomed to dissolution as
popular resistance movements would tame, harness and finally rid the land of its masters.
The State uses external threats to justify encroachments on the citizenry

As Murray Rothbard explained in "The Anatomy of the State," the state cannot persist and expand through
force alone; it needs the tacit consent of the people.
Nothing bamboozles the people out of their consent like a war.
People disagree on what the proper roles of government are, but the one that virtually everyone agrees on,
in vague terms, is the defense of life, liberty and property against aggressors. In respect to foreign policy,
practically every American believes that the government should have one. In other words, there is near
universal acceptance of the idea that the government should have a military and should, at times, deploy it
abroad for one reason or another.
The classical liberal movement is not totally immune to this widely held belief. In fact, there have always
been liberals – for example, John Stuart Mill – who believed that active foreign intervention was a
desirable function of the political system. And many or most libertarians do not believe that the government
should completely remove itself from national defense the way it should from healthcare, education, drug
policy or business regulation.
Now, just to be clear, it is one thing to support, as a necessary evil, a government role in mobilizing
American forces to repel an invasion. It is quite another to side with the military industrial complex, its
legions of foreign bases, standing armies and imperial reach; to defend a full-blown military invasion,
bombing, and occupation of a country that didn’t ever threaten America; or to champion a long-term
national project of tearing down foreign states and building new, friendlier ones in their place.
The reason that even many skeptics of the state will make exceptions for war is mostly obvious, indeed,
superficial. No one really wants America to be taken over by foreign tyrants and terrorists. No one thinks
that destroying the World Trade Center and the innocents in it was a good thing. Those concerned with
liberty and justice want to see the monsters who attacked America on 9/11 caught and punished.
Add to the legitimate case for self-defense the real and perceived evils of the Enemy, and we see why faith
in the warfare state is so pervasive. The U.S. government, after all, fought the Nazis and Communists, and
is now posing as the defender of the free world against terrorists said to be bent on obtaining weapons of
mass destruction and killing as many innocents as it can in a demented mission to conquer the free world
and set its clock back several hundred years.
This is pretty scary stuff.
We know how much people will tolerate from government if they think it’s protecting them from common
criminals, or even from less concrete threats such as global warming, drug abuse, illiteracy, racism or
inequality. A leftist who thinks the government is protecting him from high ATM fees, low wages, or dirty
drinking water tends to feel indebted to the state and willing to take its side over liberty and the free market.
A conservative who thinks the government is locking up hooligans and keeping undesirables out of society
will likewise side with power over freedom in all too many cases. And anyone who believes that the
government is the only barrier standing between the American Dream and the fall of civilization into the
hands of fanatics, determined to convert us all to their religion and behead those of us who resist, will
predictably give the government far more leeway than it deserves.
The State uses the rhetoric of war to deprive us of liberty

Anthony Gregory, research analyst at the Independent Institute, “Warmongering Is the Health of
Statism,” accessed July 10, 2006 at http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory98.html, November 23,
2005
If it weren’t for the tendency of people to put up with government growth and abuses during war, it would
be hard to explain why politicians are quick to call any domestic pet project a war on something. Declaring
a war on drugs, illiteracy or poverty is such a common rhetorical device because the partisans of state
power know that there is something about war and the language of war that compels people to tolerate
greater abuses of freedom than they otherwise would. When FDR launched his New Deal, he asked for all
the powers that he would normally be given during war precisely because he knew that the paradigm of war
would inflate his administrative authority like nothing else. And yet, no matter how horrific the domestic
metaphorical wars, foreign wars are worse for liberty and healthier for the state. No matter how much
cultural and material devastation we can lay at the feet of the war on poverty, and regardless of the millions
of lives wrecked by the totalitarian drug war, both almost seem like good government compared to what
evils and transgressions a foreign war is capable of producing.
Talk of war undermines skepticism of political power among the nations’ population
2005
People advised by utilitarianism and convinced that the U.S. government is all that has stood in the way of
a Nazi, Communist, or terrorist takeover, will conclude that their own government can do practically
anything to them and especially to others as long as it is not as bad as what the Nazis, Communists or
terrorists would do. Wartime nationalism has been instrumental in making Americans abandon the
skepticism of political power at the heart of our national heritage. It has turned mainstream America into a
statist culture, and it threatens to do so for all but the most resistant to the temptations and promises of
power. Even many Americans who seem to understand individualism and the wonders of spontaneous order
in the market will side with collectivism and central planning on the issue of war.
Accepting war legitimizes the warfare state

2005
To accept war is to accept the warfare state, and to accept the warfare state is to accept all the fundamental
premises of statism – the collectivism, the aggression, the ability of central planning to succeed.
It was war that made so many opponents of the New Deal become allies of Franklin Roosevelt once the
Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor. It was war that transformed the right from a coalition of anti-
government Americans in the 1940s into bloodthirsty partisans of the military establishment, its spying on
antiwar protesters, its war in Vietnam, its totalitarian bureaucracy at home and abroad. It is warmongering
that has largely changed anti-Clintonian conservatives of the 1990s, who had at least some things in
common with us, into full-blown supporters of the imperial executive.
Ten years ago, middle America was replete with conservatives who, whatever their faults, seemed to have a
general distaste for statism and even imperialism run amok. They resented Clinton's contempt for
Constitutional limits on his power and his abuses of civil liberties without due process. They despised the
media for toeing the administration line. They expressed a hatred for anything having to do with
governmental globalism and the U.N. Although some of their current "red-state fascism," as Lew Rockwell
so well puts it, can be attributed to simple partisanship, it's clear that the war on terror is the largest factor in
turning them into such state-worshippers. And so they do not protest Bush's total disregard for the
Constitution and his abuses of civil liberties without due process. They now despise the media for being too
critical of the administration. And they even uphold Bush's rationale for war that Saddam Hussein failed to
obey United Nations resolutions. And since when was the conservative movement dedicated to enforcing
U.N. dictates? Why, since it could be done with a good old-fashioned war! It's obscene, but what the right
once regarded as the ultimate statism of U.N. hegemony is now seen as part of a legitimate U.S. foreign
policy.
Tyranny will only come to the US under the guise of fighting a foreign enemy
2005
Consider all Bush has done on the home-front to expand statism. His spending increases in education, his
unprecedented farm subsidies, his steel tariffs, his No Child Left Behind, his record deficits, his ID cards,
his homeland security bureaucracy – the conservatives and warmongering libertarians look the other way,
at least more so than they would if a peacetime president pushed these through. If the president is
protecting you from terrorists, after all, how can you complain when your pocket is picked? How can you
complain when he picks the pockets of others?
Whether we look at economic policy, civil liberties, or any other indicator, America got its big,
consolidated government during Polk’s war, Lincoln’s war, Wilson’s war, FDR’s war, Truman’s war,
Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon’s war, and the two Bush wars, far more than it got leviathan
during peacetime. Even the domestic Progressive Era and peacetime New Deal looked like golden eras of
laissez faire when contrasted with the wars that soon followed them. Madison said that tyranny would come
to this land only under the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. One hundred ninety-three years after his
unnecessary war with Britain, I must say he was right.
The assumption that the State can help anyone achieve liberation is the root of the statist ideology
2005
We have seen since 9/11 a startling number of presumably pro-freedom advocates defending some of the
worst violations of liberty in our time. They have made excuses for detainments without trial, for shutting
down the opposition, and for enormous government secrecy. They will take the administration at its word,
echo the government’s account of the war as the truth. To question whether the Iraqi people are better off,
to wonder if the U.S. occupation really is liberation – these are considered uncivil thoughts even by many
who claim to love freedom.
But to take the government at its word – to assume uncritically that the state is the source of anyone’s
liberation – this is not the mark of a person eternally vigilant and jealous of his liberty. It is the mark of a
person who has succumbed to the principal components of statist ideology.
The current government in Washington is fascist and antithetical to liberty

Llewellyn Rockwell, president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, “Red Statism,” March 2005, accessed
July 17, 2006 at http://www.mises.org/freemarket_detail.asp?control=530
Let us never forget that there are two dangers to liberty, not only the socialism of the left but also the
fascism of the right. Why fascist? Because it is not leftist in the sense of egalitarian or redistributionist. It
has no fundamental objection to business, doesn’t sympathize with the downtrodden, labor, or the poor. It is
for all the core institutions of bourgeois life in America: family, faith, and flag. But it sees the state as the
central organizing principle of society, views public institutions as the most essential means by which all
these institutions are protected and advanced, and adores the head of state as a godlike figure who knows
better than anyone else what the country and world needs and has a special connection to the creator that
permits him to discern the best means to bring it about.
For a very long time, we’ve tended to see the primary threat to liberty as coming from the left, from the
socialists who sought to control the economy from the center. But we must also remember that the sweep of
history shows that there are two main dangers to liberty, one that comes from the left and the other which
comes from the right. Europe and Latin America have long faced the latter threat, but its reality is only now
coming home to hit us fully.
There is a clear and present danger to freedom that comes from the right side of the ideological spectrum,
those people who are pleased to preserve most of free enterprise but favor top-down management of
society, culture, family, and school, and seek to use belligerent nationalism to impose their vision of politics
on the world.
America’s service tradition exists independent of the State

Service has a long and venerable history in the United States. It has perhaps become a cliché, but
Americans' generosity and penchant to organize to meet community needs were both noted by Alexis de
Tocqueville in his classic, Democracy in America. And so it continues today. Three-quarters of American
households give to charity. Some 90 million adults volunteer; the value of their time has been estimated by
Independent Sector to approach $200 billion.
Volunteerism gains ever greater political appeal as the "age of politics," historian Paul Johnson's label for
the 20th century, winds down. Today, even liberals are championing civil society. Herds of politicians now
say that families and communities, not governments, hold the answer to America's social problems.
Explains President Bill Clinton: "Much of the work of America cannot be done by government, much other
work cannot be done by government alone. The solution must be the American people through voluntary
service to others." At the very least, they advocate private-public "partnerships," rather than grand new
government social programs.
Increased volunteerism better addresses problems the State sought to solve

Deleon Erlich and Morris Erlich, “Questions and Answers About Anarchy,” in REINVENTING
ANARCHY, AGAIN, edited by Howard Erlich, 1996, p 13
In fact, we can only count on ourselves, or on those with whom we are freely associated in community.
This means that helping functions will be performed by those groups that have always done them, with or
without the state: voluntary associations. However, in an anarchist community, the need for such services
will be less frequent. For example, if there is no longer systematic poisoning of the environment, diseases
caused by this pollution (pesticide poisoning, asbestosis, Minimata disease) won’t happen; if thee are no
longer extremes of wealth and poverty, diseases causes by lack of adequate food, shelter, and medical care
will not exist; if children and adults can freely choose whether or not to live together, much violence
against “loved ones” will disappear; if racism is systematically attacked, then the majority ethnic group
won’t harass minorities. There will, of course, still be a need for mutual aid and protection – but this will be
provided by the community, for all its members.
The State is unnecessary for society to function

Gerald Runkle, ANARCHISM: OLD AND NEW, 1972, p 7, gender paraphrased
Anarchism would permit the individual to ender into whatever voluntary relations (one) chooses with
others. Free cooperation and mutual aid are emphasized. Rules imposed from outside are to be replaced by
natural expectancies of conduct firmly grounded in human nature. (People) may associate as equals without
some being subject to others. Even today, in modern states, “millions of transactions are made without the
slightest interference of government; and those who enter into agreements have not the slightest intention
of breaking bargains.” Kropotkin’s point is that in most actions of ordinary life government is not needed.
With the destruction of the state there will be a reconstruction of society. There can be people without a
peace-keeping body, possession without laws upholding property, marriage without legal contract,
production without wage-slaves, and leadership without coercion.
Absent the state, viable institutions will emerge

Woodcock, George, Turtle Talk, 1990
Social and industrial decentralization, in the sense of the dismantling of the power structure on all levels, is
a logical development from the anarchist criticism of the state. Financial power and individual power have
always been seen as existing parallel to and interdependent with political power and, in one form or
another, the anarchists have always advocated workers’ control of factories and services, and the
administration of industrial as well as social functions by those by those most directly involved. While
there are some currents in modern industrial society that often seem to tend towards decentralization ,
particularly in the more sophisticated newer industries, the general trend is still towards a centralization of
control even if not of function, whether it is a matter of the state control favored by communists and most
socialists, or the corporate control represented by large national and multinational combines. Against the
current reality of centralized control, the anarchist poses the federal model, in which autonomous
undertakings loosely associate in the pursuit of common interests. Essentially, the anarchist believes that,
given the broadest possible freedom to develop, people’s natural tendency to co-operate will produce viable
institutions, and that centralized authority, by discouraging voluntary urges, tends to eliminate natural
instincts. The impossibility of reconciling the two viewpoints means that anarchists have not only opposed
right-wing authoritarian regimes but also the state-oriented tendencies within socialism.
Revolution in the US snowballs worldwide

Murray Boockin, Professor Emeritus of the Institute For Social Ecology , POST SCARCITY
ANARCHISM, 1971, p 237, gender paraphrased
In any case, there is no reason to fear that a quasi-statetist development in the Third World would be any
more than temporary or that it would affect the world development. If the US and Europe took a libertarian
direction, their strategic industrial position in the world economy would, I think, favor a libertarian
alternative for the world as a whole. Revolution is contagious, even when it occurs in a relatively small and
insignificant country. I cannot imagine that Easter Europe could withstand the effects of a libertarian
revolution in Western Europe and the US. The revolution would almost certainly engulf the Soviet Union,
where massive dissatisfaction exists, and finally the entire Asian Continent. If one doubts the fulfillment of
this possibility, let (them) consider the impact of the French Revolution on Europe at a time when the world
economy was far less interdependent than it is today.
Government-run service programs undermine service in the long run

A more subtle problem is the long-term effect of federal funding on the volunteer groups and those who
normally support volunteer groups. To some it might seem hard to criticize grants to organizations such as
Habitat for Humanity (which until recently refused to accept government funding), Big Brothers-Big
Sisters, and the Red Cross. These groups do good work and money given to them, in contrast to that
donated to some other organizations, is likely to be well spent.
Who, however, should do the giving? It is certainly simpler if the IRS empties pockets nationwide, hands a
bit of the money collected to the National Corporation, which, in turn, gives it to charity. But the right way
is for individuals to send their money directly to deserving groups.
Indeed, at its most basic level, real charity doesn't mean giving away someone else's money. As Marvin
Olasky, author of The Tragedy of American Compassion, has pointed out, compassion once meant to
"suffer with." Over time, it came to mean writing a check. Now it seems to be equated with making
someone else write a check. It's bad enough that we do that for public welfare programs, which are at least
theoretically accountable to taxpayers for their activities. Doing it for private charities, especially those
with philosophical or theological viewpoints that may conflict with those of many taxpayers, is especially
dubious.
Nor is dependence on government healthy for private philanthropic groups. Although they get to choose
and train volunteers funded by the Corporation, it seems inevitable that government will end up favoring
some activities and disfavoring others. Such preferences may not be nefarious, but they are likely to be
arbitrary, and groups will be tempted to adjust their mission and activities to ensure eligibility for federal
funding. A report issued by Public-Private Ventures noted that the Corporation has taken an aggressive role
in shaping service programs.
Even if the Corporation eschews the natural temptation to meddle, recipient behavior is likely to change. If
nothing else, groups are also going to be tempted to shift their fundraising from private appeals to "public
education" and formal lobbying. After all, government checks tend to be larger and may seem easier to
obtain than private donations.
Moreover, turning the job of funding private groups, however worthy, over to government is likely to
encourage people to further abdicate their civic responsibilities. If we are serious about strengthening civil
society and recreating a sense of individual duty to help those in need, we must emphasize contributing as
well as volunteering.
In fact, thoughtfully choosing which charities to support and monitoring the activities of those charities are
themselves important forms of volunteerism. Sending money off to Washington for distribution to private
groups benefits the recipients but no one else. In contrast, people's informing themselves, giving
voluntarily, and getting involved strengthen the sinews of community. Getting more people to give more
and to take more time considering where to give should be one of our highest priorities as we attempt to
end the welfare state. But government-funded service, though implemented in the name of volunteerism,
makes it less necessary for people to volunteer time and money in this fashion.
Government run service is ineffective

There are other, more practical objections to programs such as Americorps, of course. Presumably some
good is being done by government-paid "volunteers." After all, it is hard for even Washington to spend
hundreds of millions of dollars without achieving something. But there is no guarantee that taxpayer-
funded "service" will be worth its cost.
Even attractive-sounding jobs won't necessarily produce significant social benefits. Some waste is almost
inevitable. Local organizations are not likely to use "free" labor from the federal government as efficiently
as if they had to cover the costs themselves. Moreover, there is an opportunity cost to government use of
money seized from private individuals: tradeoffs must be made, yet national service treats some jobs as
sacrosanct while ignoring other, disfavored tasks. And there have been the inevitable political abuses. In
sum, government "service" is a good deal for no one.
Individual service is a better alternative

In short, what we need is a renewed commitment to individual service. People, in community with one
another, need to help meet the many serious social problems that beset us. Public officials should eliminate
the thousands of public programs that discourage personal independence and self-responsibility, disrupt and
destroy communities and families, and hinder the attempts of people and groups to respond to problems
around them.
The private activism that would follow would need neither oversight nor subsidy from Uncle Sam. Some of
the volunteerism could be part time and some full time; some could take place within the family, some
within churches, and some within civic and community groups. Some might occur through profit-making
ventures. The point is, there is no predetermined definition of service, pattern of appropriate involvement,
set of "needs" to be met, or tasks to be fulfilled. America's strength is its combination of humanitarian
impulses, private association, and diversity. We need freedom, not government-mandated, government-
funded, or government-directed service.
The draft negates all individual rights – it is the worst offense a government can commit
Peter Krembs, “An Idea Not Worth Drafting: Conscription is Slavery,” January 20, 2003, accessed July 10,
2006 at http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=2346
But the fundamental case against compulsory military service is because it is simply bad in practice, but
because it is immoral on principle. Or, to quote the philosopher Ayn Rand in her Capitalism: The Unknown
Ideal,
"Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an
abrogation of rights. It negates (our) fundamental right--the right to life--and establishes the fundamental
principle of statism: that a (person’s) life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling
(them) to sacrifice it in battle. If the state may force a (person) to risk death or hideous maiming and
crippling, in a war declared at the state's discretion, for a cause (they) may neither approve of nor even
understand, if (their) consent is not required to send (them) into unspeakable martyrdom--then, in principle,
all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not (our) protector any longer. What is there left to
protect?"
The draft justifies any abuse, even slavery

2005
When even libertarians are this trusting and forgiving of the state, we see how dangerous warmongering
can be in cultivating statism. They say it's because the state is protecting our lives and, as Cathy Young put
it, "even in the Declaration of Independence, the right to liberty is preceded by the right to life."
Objectivists, in particular, have come to embrace the warfare state as the source of their freedom and well-
being. On a message board recently, John Hospers, the LP's first presidential candidate, invoked Ayn Rand's
statement that an 80% tax rate would be quite tolerable if it were for defense spending. And of course, most
of them think this war is defensive. I asked one of them what government actions he'd tolerate at this time
of war, and he said anything, so long as it kept him alive. This is a more common view among supposed
individualist thinkers than some in this room might imagine. What was once the libertarian, indeed the
American, slogan, of "give me liberty or give me death" has now become "take whatever you want – just
please don’t let me die!"
So we know that war is tempting, even for people who are otherwise predisposed to question the state’s role
in society. It is largely because of this universal acceptance of foreign wars as a normal part of our
existence that the state is so quick to rally the public behind a war. War is popular. It is easy to get people
behind a war, and war makes it easy for the state to grow.
The phenomena of increased statism and government growth during wartime have been thoroughly
examined by Robert Higgs, senior fellow at The Independent Institute and author of such books as Crisis
and Leviathan and his forthcoming Depression, War, and Cold War. Never else does government grow as it
does during war. And Americans tolerate it, for their ideology has moved from one of Jeffersonian
skepticism of central power to an embrace of it, and especially its imperial executive. People have been
scared into clinging onto the state, onto Daddy government, for the alternative is presented as certain death
and enslavement at the hands of another people who threaten our way of life.
During Lincon's War on the Southern States, the federal government implemented conscription for the first
time, an income tax, and censorship in the form of locking up thousands of war critics and closing down
hundreds of newspapers. During World War I, even criticizing the flag was deemed a crime, and dissidents
were imprisoned and even deported. During World War II, America saw censorship and Japanese
Internment, today defended by some on the more warmongering right. In the Cold War era, the feds spied
on war protestors and conscription returned. We are seeing erosions of civil liberties today, with the war on
terror, including in the suspension of habeas corpus to cage alleged terrorists, many of whom have been
freed for their innocence, and many of whom have not but probably should be. In every case, the state only
commits such acts with the tacit consent of many Americans.
The ideology of wartime statism, and what it leads people to tolerate, is well demonstrated in conscription,
which Higgs refers to as the "keystone" of leviathan. As Higgs points out, during World War I the Supreme
Court would argue that because it deemed conscription to be constitutional, given the necessity of the war,
it could not logically overturn any lesser expansion of government into civil society. The Supremes were
being somewhat consistent here, and pragmatic. If you can get people to defend military slavery – which is
of course what the draft is – you can get them to defend practically anything the government will do to its
subjects. And only war seems to make so many people open to slavery.
Faith in the warfare state enables any atrocity to be committed in our names—war becomes inevitable
2005
This faith in the warfare state, as bad as it is in allowing for domestic government criminality, is even worse
in desensitizing people to the horrors of war that they can't see. When we’re up against evil incarnate such
as Osama bin Laden or a new Hitler such as Saddam Hussein or Milosevic, Americans will remarkably
acquiesce to nearly any atrocity committed in their name – as long as it has a humanitarian veneer,
perversely enough. The idea is that if, for example, the imperial Japanese government is brutal and
murderous, it is somehow justifiable to firebomb sixty of their cities and drop two nuclear weapons on
hundreds of thousands of civilians. If the U.S. government is fighting the evil Korean or Vietnamese
communists, it is allowed to kill hundreds of thousands in strategic bombing of civilian targets and
indiscriminate napalm attacks on villagers. If the U.S. government is combating Milosevic’s ethnic
cleansing, it can kill as many innocent Serbs and Albanians as necessary. And if it’s uprooting Saddam’s
regime, virtually any number of innocents killed by U.S. tactical missiles and shootings is tolerable, so long
as Saddam killed more.
The Warfare State makes us targets for attack

Furthermore, the U.S. government has a stunning legacy of teaming up with freedom fighters today that
become Satan’s vanguard tomorrow. The U.S. allied with Stalin during World War II and was at times quite
obliging of him, such as with Operation Keelhaul, when the U.S. and other allies forced 2 million refugees
onto planes, boats and boxcars and shipped them back to certain slavery and death under Stalin. Then the
U.S. turned around and said Stalin's evil empire justified the expansion of an American empire. Fighting in
the Cold war for some reason involved financing, funding and training various two-bit dictators, including
some of the tyrants, despots and terrorists who are now considered worth inciting orgies of death abroad to
combat.
Even if you don't like the methodological individualistic view that the U.S. government shouldn’t be
allowed to dispose of some liberties and lives for the sake of saving others, a look at the historical record
should dissuade you from favoring war. It does seem, however, that most who reject the moral arguments
also reject the practical ones. They have made up their minds. The state is on their side, and in return they
will look the other way when it is revealed that intolerable evil has been committed on their behalf.
But it is these intolerable evils that have put America at risk. The 9/11 hijackers acted in response to a
foreign policy that had killed many thousands of innocents in the Middle East. This should have been the
main point made by all friends of liberty immediately following the attacks – not only to point blame at the
U.S. warfare state, but also to show the way to actual security. As long as the U.S. empire continues to butt
its nose into the affairs of other countries, we are in danger. These wars undermine our liberties and our
national defense. For all these reasons, we must count our blessings for institutions such as
LewRockwell.com, Antiwar.com, The Mises Institute, The Independent Institute, and the Future of
Freedom Foundation; and for every libertarian who opposes the warfare state as the greatest threat to our
freedom and safety.
Elimination of the State solves the full range of social problems

Murray Bookchin, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies at Ramapo College, “Whither Anarchism?
A Reply to Recent Anarchist Critics,” 1998, accessed July 10, 2006 at
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/whither.html
Between these two extremes lie a host of anarchistic tendencies that differ considerably in their theoretical
aspects and hence in the kind of practice by which they hope to achieve anarchism's realization. Some of
the more common ones today, in fact, make systematic thinking into something of a bugaboo, with the
result that their activities tend to consist not of clearly focused attacks upon the prevailing social order but
of adventurous episodes that may be little more than street brawls and eccentric "happenings." The social
problems we face--in politics, economics, gender and ethnic relations, and ecology--are not simply
unrelated "single issues" that should be dealt with separately. Like so many socialists and social anarchists
in the past, I contend that an anarchist theory and practice that addresses them must be coherent, anchoring
seemingly disparate social problems in an analysis of the underlying social relations: capitalism and
hierarchical society.
Anarchism is a natural ally to any movement aimed at ending oppression

Susan L Brown, “Beyond Feminism: Anarchism and the Human Freedom” in REINVENTING
Not only is anarchism inherently feminist, but also it goes beyond feminism in its fundamental opposition
to all forms of power, hierarchy, and domination. Anarchism transcends and contains feminism in its
critique of power. This implicit opposition to the exercise of power give anarchism a wider mandate, so to
speak, than feminism or other liberatory movements such as Marxism. Anarchist political philosophy and
practice is free to critically oppose any situation of oppression. While race, class, age, gender, sexuality, or
ability, for instance, may pose analytic problems for other movements, anarchism is capable of dealing with
all these issues as legitimate because of its fundamental commitment to freedom for all people. No one
oppression is given special status in anarchism – all oppression is equally undesirable. Anarchism fights for
human freedom against each and every form of power and domination, not just a particular historical
manifestation of power. This gives anarchism a flexibility not available to other movements. Not only can
anarchism address any form of oppression that exists today, it is versatile enough to be able to respond to
any form of oppression that may emerge in the future. If tomorrow, for instance, left-handed people were
proclaimed criminals for their lack of right-handedness, anarchists would have to oppose such oppression
in order to remain true to anarchism’s underlying anti-authoritarianism principle. It is this fundamental anti-
authoritarianism that leads anarchists to fight for the dignity and freedom of such groups as women, people
of color, gays and lesbians, people with AIDS, the differently abled, the poor, and the homeless, among
others. Anarchism goes beyond other liberatory movements in opposing oppression in whatever form it
takes, withought assigning priority to one oppression over another.
Anarchy undermines any hierarchy or domination

Murray Bookchin, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies at Ramapo College, “Anarchism: Past and
Present,” May 1980, accessed on July 18, 2006 at
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/pastandpresent.html
But allow me to conclude with this very important consideration. At a time when the proletariat is quiescent
-- historically, I believe -- as a revolutionary class and the traditional factory faces technological extinction,
Anarchism has raised almost alone those ecological issues, feminist issues, community issues, problems of
self-empowerment, forms of decentralization, and concepts of self-administration that are now at the
foreground of the famous "social question." And it has raised these issues from within its very substance as
a theory and practice directed against hierarchy and domination, not as exogenous problems that must be
"coped" with or warped into an economistic interpretation subject of class analysis and problems of
material exploitation.
Anarchy solves oppression

Murray Bookchin, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies at Ramapo College, “Social Anarchism or
Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unabridged Chasm,” June 1995, accessed July 12, 2006 at
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bookchin/soclife.html
Social anarchism, in my view, is made of fundamentally different stuff, heir to the Enlightenment tradition,
with due regard to that tradition's limits and incompleteness. Depending upon how it defines reason, social
anarchism celebrates the thinking human mind without in any way denying passion, ecstasy, imagination,
play, and art. Yet rather than reify them into hazy categories, it tries to incorporate them into everyday life.
It is committed to rationality while opposing the rationalization of experience; to technology, while
opposing the 'megamachine'; to social institutionalization, while opposing class rule and hierarchy; to a
genuine politics based on the confederal coordination of municipalities or communes by the people in
direct face-to-face democracy, while opposing parliamentarism and the state.
Anarchy solves racism and sexism

Deleon Erlich and Morris Erlich, “Questions and Answers About Anarchy,” in REINVENTING
Anarchists usually talk about the illegitimacy of authority, basing their arguments on the premise that no
person should have power over another. A logical extension of this argument is to attack the power
relationships in which men dominate women and some racial and ethnic groups dominate others. Thus
anarchism creates the preconditions for abolishing sexism and racism
Anarchism is philosophically opposed to all manifestations of racism and sexism. Equally important at its
philosophical commitments is the fact that with anarchism there would be no economic basis to support
racist or sexist ideas or practices. Work and income would be divided equitably, so there would be no need
to subordinate a class of people to do the dirty work or work at low pay to support the dominant class.
No governmental formula can address totalitarianism

Murray Bookchin, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies at Ramapo College, URBANIZATION
WITHOUT CITIES, 1992, p 254-255
The result is that consciousness—not pat formulas—ultimately determine whether humanity will achieve a
rich sense of collectivity without sacrificing a rich sense of individuality. A creative politics without a
creative citizenry is as unattainable as a creative citizenry without a creative politics. The guarded mind,
whether we call it “class consciousness” or “social consciousness” is the sole guarantor of a social and
personal life that will be guided by the thin line of truth. The tendency of radicals and liberals who
emphasize abstractions such as “class” and “social” over the more essential need for consciousness is the
true “betrayal of the intellectuals” that was mourned in earlier times. Any expectation that a formula, even a
salad of democratic institutions, will in itself rescue us from any impulses that yield totalitarianism,
whether in its “futuristic” or atavistic forms, is sheer myth. The guarded mind, informed by knowledge and
a humane sense of solidarity, is all that we possess as a fortress against authoritarian “reversion” at one
extreme and authoritarian “progress” at the other. Indeed the “dark past” has become the counterpart of the
“dark future” in an age that seeks form rather than content to guide us through its modern dilemmas and
panaceas.
The Statist system perpetuates war

Alger Chadwick, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Ohio State University, CONFLICT IN
WORLD SOCIETY, 1984, p 143-144
Demands for autonomy can only be tackled peaceable if a more flexible approach is adopted, combined
with a diminution of the hierarchical control of external relations by national governments. If the rigid
nation-state model did not confine the thinking of national leaders, both they and the grass-roots leaders of
ethnic groups would have many more options for devising external relationships for these groups that fulfill
the needs of peoples desiring a greater measure of self determination.
In the same way, border disputes could be defused. Borders in many parts of the world are now the foci for
arms buildups that threaten violence. In most cases border areas have families, communities, regions and
nations that are fragmented. The local people on both sides are hostages to competing interest in distant
capitals. As local communities and regions develop competence for external relations that fulfill their
needs, borders could become the hinges, rather than the barriers and battlegrounds of humanity. More
generally, periphery peoples throughout the world are rebelling against the unequal distribution of wealth
and opportunity. Their fate is tragic, and it is compounded by the conversion of their struggle into a
battleground for big power intervention. As the struggles develop and the foreign advisers and armies
arrive, it is the lives, homes, farms and towns of the periphery people that suffer destructions. This
continual pattern of disaster might be avoided as periphery people become more effective global strategists,
steering away from involvement in conflicts among external centers of power, and acquiring the
competence and opportunity for building politically effective relationships with other periphery peoples.
The State structure uniquely enables war

To begin with, it is likely that a small society, particularly if concerned with a steady state equilibrium,
would not amass the kinds of glittering riches that would attract some predatory outsider; the riches of the
stable community are likely to be in its air, its range of foods, its quiet streets, its heightened participation,
not the sorts of things inspiring envy and conquest. By the same token, a small society already enjoying
stability and some prosperity might well be reluctant to sacrifice that for a war whose economic benefits
would be so unclear; as the University of Chicago’s famed economist Henry Simons once put it, “No large
group anywhere can possibly gain enough from redistributing wealth to compensate for its predictable
income losses from the consequent disorganization of production.” Nor would such a society particularly
want to divert from its economy the kind of human and material resources that would be necessary for it to
amass a strong fighting force capable of successful aggression.
The statist status quo risks war, economic havoc, and environmental collapse
Murray Bookchin, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies at Ramapo College, REMAKING
SOCIETY, 1990, p 20
This lack of social identity and meaning is all the more stark in the face of mounting problems that confront
us. War is a chronic condition of our time; economic uncertainty, an all-pervasive presence; human
solidarity, a vaporous myth. Not least of the problems we encounter are nightmares of an ecological
apocalypse—a catastrophic breakdown of the systems that maintain the stability of the planet.
Absent the state, self-interest will address violence

Andrew Rutten, Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell, CORNELL LR, July 1997, lexis
On the theoretical side, game theorists have recently developed models of anarchic order rooted in
traditional economic notions of rational self-interest. These models build on the theory of repeated games, a
theory that takes into account a central fact of social life – not everyone is a stranger. Whether at work or
play, most of us find ourselves dealing over and over with the same people. This fact turns out to make a
huge difference for strategic behavior. Put crudely, the fact that we will see someone again gives us a
powerful incentive to be nice to them – if we are not, they may not be nice to us in the future. In the face of
this threat, even the most narrowly self-interested, brutally calculating egoist might find that it pays to act
like Mother Teresa.
The nature of anarchy prevents violence

Murray N Rothbard, NOMOS XIX: ANARCHISM, 1978, p 193, gender paraphrased
The second criticism I would like to defuse before beginning the main body of the paper is the common
charge that anarchists “assume that all people are good” and that without the state no crime would be
committed. In short, that anarchism assumes that with the abolition of the state a New Anarchist (Human)
will emerge, cooperative, humane, and benevolent, so that no problem of crime will then plague the society.
I confess that I do not understand the basis for this charge. Whatever other schools of anarchism profess—
and I do not believe that they are open to this charge—I certainly do not adopt this view. I assume with
most observers that mankind is a mixture of good and evil, of cooperative and criminal tendencies. In my
view, the anarchist society is one which maximizes the tendencies for the good and the cooperative, while it
minimizes both the opportunity and the moral legitimacy of the evil and the criminal. If the anarchists view
is correct and the state is indeed the great legalized and socially legitimated channel for all matters of
antisocial crime—theft, oppression, mass murder—on a massive scale, then surely the abolition of such an
engine of crime can do nothing but favor the good of (humanity) and discourage the bad.
Decentralization solves war

Alger Chadwick, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Ohio State University, CONFLICT IN
WORLD SOCIETY, 1984, p 41
Evolution towards a decentralized world society could release new potential for coping with four of the
seemingly intractable world problems confronted within the constraints of a nation-state system: aspirations
for human rights, for a new international economic order, for a new international information order, and for
a reduction of violence and war. Issues on these topics are being debated continually in a multitude of
United Nations and regional international bodies. The outcomes will vitally affect all people in the world
for years in the future. But most people in the world know little of the debates and have had the opportunity
to express their views The United States can be used as an example for illustrating how the nation-state
paradigm has walled off the people from these issues and debates, preventing them from seeing how their
participation in world society could help to ease these problems.
Moving away from the State system solves nuclear war

Yet all that supposes rationality, and since the history of warfare is marked just as much by madness as by
calculation, we would have to expect that somewhere war is bound to erupt even when it seems most
illogical. Still, the very nature of that warfare depends on the size of the society waging it; with limited
populations and limited resources for weaponry, wars cannot have the sweep and severity they do when
waged by powerful nation-states. Nuclear warfare would certainly be almost impossible, not only because
of the expense of such weaponry would be beyond any stable economy, but, at bottom, because no small
society could think of sacrificing millions of people and still surviving in the way current superpowers can.
Moving away from the State system is needed to prevent human extinction
Murray Bookchin, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies at Ramapo College, POST-SCARCTY
ANARCHISM, 1971, p 69, gender paraphrased
It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the anarchist concepts of a balanced community, face-to-face
democracy, a humanistic technology and a decentralized society—these rich libertarian concepts—are not
only desirable, they are also necessary. They belong not only to the great visions of (humanity’s) future,
they now constitute the preconditions for human survival.
Abandoning the state system is necessary to realize the benefits of a post scarcity society – an end to war
and suffering
Murray Bookchin, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies at Ramapo College, TOWARD A POST-
SCARCITY SOCIETY, 1969, accessed July 10, 2006 at
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_archives/bookchin/sds.html, gender paraphrased
Technologically, we can now achieve (humanity’s) historical goal - a post scarcity society. But socially and
culturally, we are mired in the economic relations, institutions, attitudes and values of a barbarous past, of a
social heritage created by material scarcity. Despite the potentiality of complete human freedom, we live in
the day-to-day reality of material insecurity and a subtle, ever-oppressive system of coercion. We live,
above all, in a society of fear, be it of war, repression, or dehumanization. For decades we have lived under
the cloud of a thermonuclear war, streaked by the fires of local conflicts in half the continents of the world.
We have tried to find our identities in a society that has become ever more centralized and mobilized,
dominated by swollen civil, military and industrial bureaucracies. We have tried to adapt to an environment
that is becoming increasingly befouled with noxious wastes. We have seen our cities and their governments
grow beyond all human comprehension, reducing our very sovereignty as individuals to ant-like
proportions - the manipulated, dehumanized victims of immense administrative engines and political
machines. While the spokesmen for this diseased social 'order' piously mouth encomiums to the virtues of
'democracy,' 'freedom' and 'equality,' tens of millions of people are denied their humanity because of racism
and are reduced to conditions of virtual enslavement.
Abandoning the state fosters a consciousness shift that can avert environmental collapse
Murray Bookchin, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies at Ramapo College, POST-SCARCITY
ANARCHISM, 1971, p 80-81
A relatively self-sufficient community, visibly dependent on its environment for the means of life, would
gain a new respect for the organic interrelationships that sustain it. In the long run, the attempt to
approximate self-sufficiency would, I think, prove more efficient than the exaggerated national division of
labor that prevails today. Although there would doubtless be many duplications of small industrial facilities
from community to community, the familiarity of each group with its local environment and its ecological
roots would make for a more intelligent and more loving use of its environment. I submit that, far from
producing provincialism, relative self-sufficiency would create a new matrix for individual and communal
development—a oneness with the surroundings that would vitalize the community.
Revolution is key to avoid extinction from ecological collapse

Murray Bookchin, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies at Ramapo College, POST-SCARCITY
ANARCHISM, 1971, p 21-22, gender paraphrased
In utopia (humanity) no more returns to (its) ancestral immediacy with nature than anarcho-communism
returns to primitive communism. Whether now or in the future, human relationships with nature are always
mediated by science, technology, and knowledge. But whether or not science, technology and knowledge
will improve nature to its own benefit will depend upon (humanities) ability to improve (its) social
condition. Either revolution will create an ecological society, with new ecotechnologies and
ecocommunities, or humanity and the natural world as we know it today will perish.
The state props up capitalism

Errico Malatesta, ANARCHY, 1974, p 46
This contempt for democracy does not mean that capitalists are anti-state. Far from it. As previously noted,
capitalists depend on the state. This is because Liberalism, is in theory a kind of anarchy without socialism,
and the3refore is simply a lie, for freedom is not possible without equality. The criticism liberals direct at
government consists only of wanting to deprive it some of its functions and to call upon the capitalists to
fight it out amongst themselves, but it cannot attack the repressive functions which are of its essence: for
without the gendarme the property owner could not exist.
Capitalism can only thrive in a statist society

Albert Meltzer, Founder of Cuddon's Cosmopolitan Review and the Anarchist Black Cross, “Anarchism:
Arguments for and against,” May 15, 1996, accessed July 6, 2006
http://www.spunk.org/texts/writers/meltzer/sp001500.html
It is only possible to conceive of Anarchism in a form in which it is free, communistic, and offering no
economic necessity for repression or countering it. Common sense shows that any capitalist society might
dispense with a "State" (in the American sense of the word) but it could not dispense with organised
Government, or a privatised form of it, if there were people amassing money and others working to amass
it for them. The philosophy of "anarcho-capitalism" dreamed up by the "libertarian" New Right, has
nothing to do with Anarchism as known by the Anarchist movement proper. It is a lie that covers an
unpleasant reality in its way -- such as National Socialism does in another. Patently unbridled capitalism,
not even hampered by a reformist State, which has to put some limits on exploitation to prevent violent
clashes in society, needs some force at its disposal to maintain class privileges, either from the State itself
or from private Armies. What they believe in is in fact a limited State -- that is, one in which the State has
one function, to protect the ruling class, does not interfere with exploitation, and comes as cheap as
possible for the ruling class. The idea also serves another purpose beyond its fulfillment -- a moral
justification for bourgeois consciences in avoiding taxes without feeling guilty about it -- just as pacifism
sometimes serves as an excuse for bourgeois consciences in avoiding danger without feeling guilty.
Capitalism leads to environmental destruction

Murray Bookchin, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies at Ramapo College, “Whither Anarchism?
A Reply to Recent Anarchist Critics,” 1998, accessed on July 15, 2006 at
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/whither.html
What is basic to my views is that the ecological crisis is more the result of the capitalist economy, with its
grow-or-die imperatives, than of technology or "mass technics." Capitalist enterprise employs technologies
to produce on a wide scale for the market, but in the end these technologies remain the instruments of
capitalism, not its motor, amplifying the effects of a grow-or-die economy that is ruinous to the natural
world. Yet as devastating as the effects of technology can be when driven to maximum use by capitalist
imperatives, technologies on their own could not have provided the imperatives that produced the
ecological damage we are now witnessing.
Anarchy solves space!

Michael Albert, director of Participatory Economics Project, November 27, 2000, accessed July 10, 2006
@ http://www.zmag.org/ParEcon/archaskalb.htm
>Do you think a parecon society would have a space program? I think is would be so hard to justify that
space research would be limited to backyard star-gazing, at least for a while.
I think it would, yes. I doubt, in fact, that the amount of resources and labors devoted to all kinds of
research would drop, in toto, at all...more likely rise, pretty substantially, I would think. Because I think that
the amount of resources and labors freed from elimination of other truely worthless pursuits (defense), or
counter-productive pursuits (product duplication, advertising manipulation, pollution creation and removal,
repression of deprived constituencies, defense of advantage, drug trafficing, etc. and from the use of new
potentials (full employment, full training, etc.),. would be so stupendous that there would be plenty of
productivity to improve people's immediate material and social well being, as well as to extend and expand
human knowledge, even in realms where the only pay-off is likely to be insight.
It is in the nature of government to grow—total rejection of the State is key

Michael E Coughlin, Publisher of “The Dandelion” (a journal of philosophical anarchism), 1977, accessed
June 15, 2006 at http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/object7.html
OBJECTION #7: We grant that government has grown too big and with that growth has come admitted
problems. But the answer lies in limiting the scope of the government, not eliminating it. We must make it
our servant, not our master.
ANSWER: This is the plaintive cry of the "limited government" preachers. To this Benjamin Tucker
replied: "If limited government is good, the perfection of government is no government."
Somehow, somewhere, given a properly intelligent, some say, "objective" populace, the limited
government buff suggests that it will be possible to create a machinery of government that will be
controllable. Some of these little-government people may even go so far as to tell you how they will do it.
But for most it is pure dream and hope out of which they build their plans for a utopian government.
In many instances this thing they want to create and call a limited government has no relationship and none
of the essential characteristics, of any government that has ever existed. Generally, these model states have
no power to tax and no absolute jurisdiction over a given territory. Without these essential powers there can
be no government.
Government grows; that is its nature. Government is a power broker and an instrument for creating
privilege. It must continually take on new functions in order to survive.
Not even the most holy Ayn Rand, followed as she might be with an army of the most objective of
objectivists, can change this. It is a fact; it is history. It is the very nature of government.
Regardless of the lessons of history, these limited governmentalists assure us that it is within their power to
create a limited government. And these are people who insist on calling anarchists "dreamers" and
"utopians."
Total elimination of government is needed to solve

David Freidman, Professor of Law and Economics, University of Chicago, THE MACHINERY OF
FREEDOM, 1989, p 147
The logic of limited government is to grow. There are obvious reasons for that in the nature of government,
and plenty of evidence. Constitutions provide, at the most, a modest and temporary restraint. As Murray
Rothbard is supposed to have said, the idea of a limited government that stays limited is truly utopian.
Anarchy at least might work; limited government has been tried.
Half measures fail—cooptation

Samuel Kim, Professor of Political Science at Monmouth College, THE QUEST FOR A JUST WORLD
ORDER, 1984, p 334
The liberal reformist strategy of social change, concentrating on the injection of technocratic prescriptions
into the established policies, practices, and institutions, merely alleviates symptomatic pains of system
pathology in specific situations. Although this strategy can contribute to short-term crisis management, its
long-term systemic impact seems insufficient. The recent history of UN peacekeeping, arms control, and
NIEO underscores the inherent limitations of the liberal reformist strategy as an agent of system
transformation in world politics. The “reform measures” have proved to be no more than short-term
palliatives, leaving the dominant values, structure, and behavior of the international system more or less
intact. The reformist strategy seriously underestimates the damage-limitation capacity of system
maintainers to divert and detract the expressions of discontent through first-aid or cooptation measures.
What is needed is a revolutionary process calling for a radical shift from the present system to a new one.
There is no middle ground when it comes to ideas

Fulton Huxtable, Professor of Political Philosophy at Purdue, “Fatal Blindness: America’s decades of
declining freedom and the rise of its dictators,” 1998, accessed July 5, 2006, www.fatalblindness.com
When it comes to political debate, to the debate about the validity of certain ideas, there is only one
standard: the truth—and when it comes to the truth, there are no degrees—something is either true or it is
not—there is nothing in between and, therefore, the concept of extreme does not apply to ideas: ideas are
either true or false, but never extreme. There is no such thing as “extreme” truth or “extreme” falsehood:
something is only true or false. Many are confused about the latter issue because it is possible for an
individual to make a statement which is partly true and partly false, leading them to believe there are
degrees of truth. For instance, someone might declare it is day and it is night. But the truth of the matter is
that, if it is day, then the part of the statement that declares it is day is true and the part of the statement that
declares it is night is false—there is nothing in between.
The perm is a trick to maintain state power

Michigan Review, “Statism and Speech,” February 14, 1996, accessed July 12, 2006
http://www.umich.edu/~mrev/archives/1996/2-14-96/ed1.html
The use of language can be a powerful tool of persuasion. Its use, however, can border on the menacing, for
the skilled yet disingenuous linguist may use it for the purposes of deception. To the detriment of individual
liberty, it is this latter use that members of the government have invoked over the course of this century,
creating artificial public support for themselves and, ultimately, an expanded role of the state.
Anarchism is not utopian thinking—it is a targeted response to oppression

Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at MIT, NOTES ON ANARCHISM, 1973, gender paraphrased
One might ask what value there is in studying a “definite trend in the historical development of
(humankind)” that does not articulate a specific and detailed social theory. Indeed, many commentators
dismiss anarchism as utopian, formless, primitive, or otherwise incompatible with the realities of a complex
society. One might, however, argue rather different: that at every stage in history our concern must be to
dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been
justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic development, but than now contribute to
– rather than alleviate – material and cultural deficit. If so, there will be no doctrine of social change fixed
for the present and future, nor even, necessarily, a specific and unchanging concept of the goals towards
which social change should tend. Surely our understanding of the nature of (humanity) or of the range of
viable social forms is so rudimentary that far-reaching doctrine must be treated with great skepticism, just
as skepticism is in order when we hear that “human nature” or “the demands of efficiency” or “the
complexity of modern life” requires this or that form of oppression and autocratic rule.
Utopian thinking is necessary

Murray Bookchin, Professor Emeritus of the Institute For Social Ecology, 1993, DEFENDING THE
EARTH, p 79
The highest form of realism today an only be attained by looking beyond the given state of affairs to a
constructive vision of what should be. It is not enough to merely look at what could be within normal
institutional limits of today’s predatory societies. This will not yield a vision that is either desirable or
sufficient. We cannot afford to be content with such inherently compromised programs. Our solutions must
be commensurate with the scope of the problem. We need to muster the courage to entertain radical visions
of which will, at first glance appear “utopian” to our cowed and domesticated political imaginations.
Rejecting the State is the least utopian alternative

Murray Bookchin, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies at Ramapo College, URBANIZATION
WITHOUT CITIES, 1992, p 298-299
Impossible? Unless we are to believe that nationalized property (which reinforces the political power of the
centralized State with economic power) or a private market economy (whose law of “grow or die” threatens
to undermine the ecological stability of the entire planet) is more workable, I fail to see what viable
alternatives we have to the confederated municipalization of the economy. At any rate, for once it will no
longer be privileged state bureaucrats or grasping bourgeois entrepreneurs – or even “collective” capitalists
in so-called worker-controlled enterprises – all with their special interests to promote – who are faced with
a community’s problems, but citizens, irrespective of their occupations or workplaces. For once, it will be
necessary to transcend the traditional special interests of work, workplace, status, and property relations,
and create a general interest based on shared community problems.
Confederation is thus the ensemble of decentralization, localism, self-sufficiency, interdependence – and
more. This more is the indispensable moral education and character building – what the Greeks called
paideia – that makes for rational active citizenship in a participatory democracy, unlike the passive
constituents and consumers that we have today. In the end, there is no substitute for a conscious
reconstruction of our relationship to each other and to the natural world.
The alternative to utopianism is a death wish

Jonathan Schell, staff writer for the New Yorker, THE FATE OF THE EARTH, 1982
In this timid, crippled thinking, “realism” is the title given to beliefs whose most notable characteristic is
their failure to recognize the chief reality of the age, the pit into which our species threatens to jump;
“utopian” is the term of scorn for any plan that shows serious promise of enabling the species to keep from
killing itself (if it’s “utopian” to want to survive, then it must be “realistic” to be dead); and the political
arrangements that keep us on the edge of annihilation are deemed “moderate,” and are found to be
“respectable” whereas new arrangements, which might enable us to draw a few steps back from the brink,
are called “extreme,” or “radical.”
Utopianism is key to ensure survival

Murray Bookchin, Institute for Social Ecology, POST-SCARCITY ANARCHISM, 1971, p 43
Thus the means and conditions of survival become the means and conditions of life; need becomes desire
and desire becomes need. The point is reached where the greatest social decomposition provides the source
of the highest form of social integration, bringing the most pressing ecological necessities into a common
focus with the highest utopian ideals.
A2 Transition is Violent
The only successful revolution would adhere to non-violent principles
Gerald Runkle, ANARCHISM: OLD AND NEW, 1972, p 93, gender paraphrased
The second principle (and agreement on this in not as widespread as on the first) is to recognize the
consistency of means and end. This is the general principle under which some anarchists subsume their
decision to stay out of politics. Why use the state as a means for eliminating the state? The accommodating
means chosen by unionism and socialism, for example, have corrupted their grand aims: they are no longer
revolutionary. Emma Goldman distinguished the outlook of the anarchists sharply from the Jesuits and
Bolsheviks, who hold that the end justifies any means. Actually, she says, methods cannot be separated
from the ultimate aim:
The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final
purpose; they influence t, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical…. The whole
history of (humanity) is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one’s methods of ethical concepts
means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization…. No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of
liberation unless the MEANS used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the purposes to be
achieved.
A2 Heg
Hegemony relies on subjugating other nations
Michael Bakunin, STATISM AND ANARCHY, 1990, p 14, gender paraphrased
Hegemony is only a modest, possible display of this unrealizable ambition inherent in every state. But the
primary condition for hegemony is the relative impotence and subordination of at least all surrounding
states. Thus the hegemony of France, as long as it existed, was conditional upon the impotence of Spain,
Italy, and Germany. To this day French states(people) – and foremost among them, of course, Thiers –
cannot forgive Napoleon III from having allowed Italy and Germany to unify and consolidate themselves.
US heg is a thing of the past

Der Standard, June 20, 2006, lexis
Bush and the entire movement that elected him twice see the United States more or less capable of forcing,
if necessary, the will of the United States on the world. However, even the obliging part of the world does
not want to tolerate this one, and the malevolent one has sufficient means to destroy the claim of the
Bushies. This part or, to be more precise, this movement in the world would consider as an enemy also a
United States led in a less dubious way, because it sees the basic values of the West - democracy, human
rights, women's rights - as a threat to its own narrow and authoritarian ideology.
However, Bush is the worst possible US president to defend and spread freedom, even though it is precisely
what he has made his programme. "The world does not accept the United States as its master," writes
Martin Wolf, top columnist of The Financial Times. "However, it still depends on US leadership."
The Europeans, even those who are sceptical of the United States, instinctively know this. But what is
frustrating is that one is at the mercy of a system for choosing the US president that has developed over the
past 10, 20 years in a way that it produces absurd results, such as Bush junior. After all, there is no
guarantee for improvement when we have survived George W. Bush. The Republicans have reacted to a
changed world with the alleged panacea of military pressure. The Democrats would probably not unleash
any unjustified wars, but they have no idea how to deal with the new powers - Iran, China, India - and the
radical Muslims' declaration of war to the West.
Bush's presidency probably constitutes already the end of the US hegemony, which was valid from the
overthrow of Soviet Communist Interior Minister 1990 to the failed second Iraq war in 2003 (despite the
shock, 9/11 was not a real challenge to the US position).
Bush has accelerated this process with his disastrous narrow-mindedness. This is the place in history that he
likes to look for and that he imagines quite differently.
A2- Excludes people of color

People of color are increasingly represented in the anti-authoritarian movement
Tom Wetzel, August 29, 2003, accessed July 16, 2006 at
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=5&ItemID=4106
The emphasis upon class and mass struggle seems to have grown quite a bit in the past decade. One
longstanding pro-organizational tendency that rejects the class struggle approach, however, is the social
ecologists -- the group influenced by Murray Bookchin's ideas. Like the syndicalists and platformists, they
are social anarchists who reject the more individualistic or primitivist tendencies in anarchism. Part of their
emphasis is upon developing a kind of direct democracy approach to local city politics, which they call
"libertarian municipalism."
A weakness of the American anarchist milieu has been its difficulty setting down roots in communities of
color. This seems to be changing a bit, with involvement in some anti-racist struggles and formation of
groups like Revolutionary Anti-authoritarians of Color (RACE).
A2 – Soviet Union = bad alt

Anti-statists do not universally advocate a Soviet style system
I should also mention that quite a few anarchists (some of the Platformists for example) use a conception of
class close to that of Marx, in which there are only two main classes in capitalism, capital and labor. This is
reflected in the common anarchist view that the old Soviet Union was "state capitalism." On the other hand,
there are some anarchists who argue that class is derived not from ownership per se but from power
hierarchy, that class is the differentiation from power hierarchies in social production.
A2 dropouts
Few anarchists are dropouts from society
I think some of the difference may be due to different circumstances of life. Some adopt anarchism as a
kind of personal repudiation of capitalism, or "industrial civilization," a dropout mentality. I think the
primitivists seem to have a different set of values, but they are a minority I think.
Most anarchists are ordinary wage-earners. It's possible that there could be more convergence if there were
a larger oppositional movement, which might then play a kind of defining role or pole of attraction for
people.
Personal action is key to realizing a better future for our society

The idea is not to be "utopian" in the sense of plotting out how people are to live in some proposed future
society -- but to indicate how the structure of society needs to change so that people can control their own
lives, that is, how it is possible to have a viable economy that isn't still a class system.
But I think the aims or values or vision needs to be tied to some strategic conception of social change,
based on what actually exists, that provides some guidance on how society might change in the direction of
self-management, dissolving the structures of oppression. I can't see how a restructuring of society on the
basis of self-management could come about other than by very large-scale mass movements, mass
organizations, that develop the capacity in people for running their own lives, the capacity for democratic
self-management.
The anti-authoritarian tradition suggests that it is through the direct involvement, direct struggle, of those
affected, and the development of organizations of struggle that are self-managed by the rank and file, that
this sort of change can come about. The importance of building movements and organizations today that
are self-managed, as a means to creating a self-managed society, is an enduring insight of the anti-
authoritarian left.

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WNDI 2k6 Statism K 1

Kritik of the State

C: The Alternative is to reject the State system

National service is a cover to achieve hidden goals of the State

National service functions to make everyone a worker of the State

The national service mentality enables totalitarianism

Voluntary service creates the infrastructure to implement mandatory service

3) Voluntary service programs can be a stepping stone to non-voluntary programs.

Democracy promotion is used by the State to achieve perpetual war

The State uses external threats to justify encroachments on the citizenry

The State uses the rhetoric of war to deprive us of liberty

Accepting war legitimizes the warfare state

The current government in Washington is fascist and antithetical to liberty

America’s service tradition exists independent of the State

Increased volunteerism better addresses problems the State sought to solve

The State is unnecessary for society to function

Absent the state, viable institutions will emerge

Revolution in the US snowballs worldwide

Government-run service programs undermine service in the long run

Government run service is ineffective

Individual service is a better alternative

The draft justifies any abuse, even slavery

The Warfare State makes us targets for attack

Elimination of the State solves the full range of social problems

Anarchism is a natural ally to any movement aimed at ending oppression

Anarchy undermines any hierarchy or domination

Anarchy solves oppression

Anarchy solves racism and sexism

No governmental formula can address totalitarianism

The Statist system perpetuates war

The State structure uniquely enables war

Absent the state, self-interest will address violence

The nature of anarchy prevents violence

Decentralization solves war

Moving away from the State system solves nuclear war

Revolution is key to avoid extinction from ecological collapse

The state props up capitalism

Capitalism can only thrive in a statist society

Capitalism leads to environmental destruction

Anarchy solves space!

It is in the nature of government to grow—total rejection of the State is key

Total elimination of government is needed to solve

Half measures fail—cooptation

There is no middle ground when it comes to ideas

The perm is a trick to maintain state power

Anarchism is not utopian thinking—it is a targeted response to oppression

Utopian thinking is necessary

Rejecting the State is the least utopian alternative

The alternative to utopianism is a death wish

Utopianism is key to ensure survival

US heg is a thing of the past

A2- Excludes people of color

A2 – Soviet Union = bad alt

Personal action is key to realizing a better future for our society

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