The response was staggering. 134 comments on a single blog post here is a record likely to stand for quite a while. The post also spawned an enormous (182 comments) reddit thread on /r/anarchism and a smaller (34 comments) one on /r/libertarian, plus an essay (with footnotes!) by Alex Peak and a point-by-point reply by b psycho of the Psychopolitik 2.0 blog.

I responded to b psycho on his post, but Alex’s site doesn’t allow commenting so I’ll follow up here on two things he wrote there.

First, Alex asks: “But what does it mean to say that private property might be ‘impossible’ in a free society?” Here, my wording was poor. A better formulation would have been to ask about one’s preferences regarding the proposition that private property wouldn’t exist in a free society. I missed the mark with my language, but stimulated the discussion I wanted to create anyway.

I haven't read it either.

Alex then objects to my statement (in a comment) that property is a social construct, bringing in an argument regarding someone going and living off the land by themselves. I suggest that the isolated individual’s notions of property are irrelevant until he or she comes into contact with other human beings. It is only in interactions with other people that claims to property become worthy of consideration, and it is thereby a social process which determines what particular claims will be respected and which will not. Questions regarding Robinson’s property claims absent interactions with others simply vanish from relevance.

I’d now like to ask my dear readers a similar set of questions, again with the necessary caveats: the formulations of the questions also reflect my preferences, may be poorly worded, and are asked given the context that we can’t know what a free society looks like. Additionally, when I refer to “free societies”, I do not mean static, crystalline things never subject to change. Take the term, rather, as meaning “the early stages of a flexible, free society, subject to any number of changes going forward” if that makes you more comfortable.

Comrade Murray ripped Bob good for this one.

• If all things (except people and abandoned or never-owned things) are private property in a free society, do you prefer the state?
• If free societies are such that states never arise from them, even if things are so awful that a minimal state might seem justified, do you prefer retaining the state against that risk?
• If free societies are rife with beliefs and practices you condemn (domineering religion, poison culture, sexism, bigotry, racism), do you prefer the state?
• If living in a free society means that more children than today are beaten, abused, indoctrinated or otherwise harmed, do you prefer the state?
• If free societies are characterized by more crime, random violence and fraud than statist ones, not counting the crimes of states themselves, do you prefer the state?
• If transitioning to a free society requires those you love to change big portions of their lives — in ways perhaps unimaginable now — do you prefer the state?
• If mega-corporations along the Exxon-Lockheed-Monsanto model thrive in free societies, do you prefer the state?
• If intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc.) is stronger than today in a free society, do you prefer the state?
• If wage labor, profit, rent and interest are common and desired by many in free societies, do you prefer the state?
• If pollution of any sort is worse in free societies, do you prefer the state?

I assert, of course without proof, that if you answer “yes” to any of these questions, you’re not really an anarchist. Or a libertarian.

Join the lively discussion by posting your objections, critiques, arguments, disputes and complaints below!

More than anything else, Keith pushes a sort of meta-strategy for anarchism which aims at pluralism and ecumenicalism and which suggests that all anti-state tendencies ought to unite against the principal enemy of liberty, the state itself, in preference to choosing lesser targets of activist action such as sexism, racism, homophobia and so on. The biggest tent possible, in other words, for the advance of anarchism as anti-statism, absent the baggage of a myriad of other issues.

Of itself, I believe this has great strategic value.

In his posting yesterday, though, Keith unambiguously betrays his own ugly prejudices in a bilious piece entitled “Is Extremism in the Defense of Sodomy No Vice?“:

Do we really attract more people into our ranks by having so many self-hating whites, bearded ladies, cock-ringed queers, or persons of one or another surgically altered “gender identity” in our midst? Is this really something the average rebellious young person wants to be associated with? Could we not actually attract more young rebels into our ranks if all of this stuff was absent? I believe we could.

Suffice it to say this I find this offensive on many levels.

Now, I’m all for Keith’s right to free speech. But I find that I don’t really care about Keith’s strategy.

The anarchist tent may, indeed, need to be bigger in order to achieve strategic goals. But here I see one arguing for a big-tent strategy giddily pushing marginalized groups out of the tent and encouraging others to do the same.

Not only is this a contradiction of the big-tent strategy itself, but it also pushes away all those who sympathize with those marginalized, traditionally hated out-groups. I, for one, am not going to be found standing up for the rights of bigoted assholes to be bigoted assholes, let alone lending them whatever credibility might attach in a given reader’s mind to finding such linked to at my own website.

And so today Keith disappears from my blogroll, and good riddance. For the moment he remains in my RSS reader, since I recognize that there is a fine mind at work in Keith, and one often worth reading, despite what I view as a clear deficit of empathy.

Without substantial work at repentance, Keith will not be welcome at my table, nor in my tent.