Dustin M. Wax

For 9 months following the peak of the Internet boom, I worked for a dot-com start-up, doing work that was both entirely undefined and completely outside of my interests and talents. It wasn’t meant to be that way, but that way it was. It was a job that, when I came back from a Christmas with my family and discovered I’d been laid off, I was actually relieved. Happy, even.

So maybe I have a strange and morbid fascination with this gallery of farewell pages from defunct dot-coms. My own ex-company isn’t there–they just sort of faded away. Not before sending me about a hundred Chapter 11 notices to make absolutely sure that they didn’t owe me any money before they faded into the Great Electron Sea from which all websites come and to which all websites must go.

Amen.

Humatrope, an Eli Lilly drug developed to treat growth hormone disorders in children, has been approvedfor use on otherwise healthy children who happen to be short. The advisory committee apprently “agonized” over the decision before voting

8-2 to recommend approving Humatrope for the new use after debating whether children who are otherwise healthy should be given multiple injections every week for years in order to grow what may amount to a few inches. At that meeting, Lilly argued that short children often face teasing and bullying, as well as social isolation as adults, and therefore needed a treatment option.

What the article doesn’t say is how much the advisory committee members were paid by Eli Lilly. Because while I sympathize with children who are short or who have any other physical quality that makes them stand out among their peers (I was fat and wore glasses, plus I was Jewish–you got a “treatment option” for Jewish, Lilly?) I can’t see any medically conscientious reason for administering several injections a week for years to achieve, at best, a 4-inch boost in height (and usually around 1 1/2 inch).

“Some kids really benefit more than others,” said Dr. David Orloff, director of the FDA’s division of metabolic and endocrine drug products. Doctors are unsure how to identify which children will respond better, Orloff said.

Great.

An interesting interview with Richard Stallman is posted at GSMBOX. I tried to find an adequate piece to excerpt, but the interview is a translation (from what I don’t know) and too awkward to cut up. But the ideas are there.

Expecially noteworthy is Stallman’s sense of ethical parsimony. Rather than seeing the solution to one ethical problem as the necessary solution to all similar problems, Stallman explicitly disavows the application of his GPL to books and music. Each case, he says, has to be weighed on its own merits, what the work is trying to do and how it might be used.

ALso interesting, although the interveiwer doesn’t follow up, is Stallman’s observation that, although he is a liberal and the ideas behind Free Software come from the Left, many of its advocates come from the Right. I’m not a big believer in the explaining ability of “right” and “left” as political labels, so it would have been interesting to examine a little more closely how Free Software cuts across opposed sets of political and social beliefs.

For a long time, my e-mail signature contained the line “Anarchists of the world, unite!” I always liked that line. On one level, it’s a joke, a play on the common perception of anarchists as radical non-conformists, incapable of and opposed to taking part in any sort of union. On the other hand, though, it’s a lesson in real anarchy, the set of political beliefs actually practiced by folks like Lucy Parsons and Emma Goldman. Because the fact of the matter is that, at its root, anarchy is about uniting. In Utah Philips’ elegant definition, anarchy is “a way to get done together what you can’t get done yourself”.

I’m not an anarchist, I should say straight out. I have great sympathies for anarchistic thought, but I have reservations as well. But I do think there are important lessons to be learned from anarchy, lessons that have nothing to do with wearing strange haircuts or breaking the windows of Starbucks outlets.

The foundation of anarchism is voluntary combination, the uncoerced coming together of people towards a common cause. The IWW–the “Wobblies”–are the most enduring example of this. The Wobblies were a loose coalition of workers united by their common commitment to improving their lot as workers. It’s that “voluntary” that makes the difference; we all belong to dozens of groups that we didn’t choose, or chose from a highly and artificially limited field of options. Some we’re born into: our families, our nation, our religion, our ethnic or cultural group, our race. Others we take on through circumstances: our professions, our class. Some are drafted into the military, others arrested and forced to become prisoners. What all these sorts of identification have in common is that they are ascribed to us from without, through the workings of power, often violent power. They are, in a word, coercive relationships. And as such, they are rejected by anarchism as illegitimate claims on our persons.

Chief among these illegitimate claims, for most anarchists, is the state. Parsons, Goldman, Kropotkin, Sacco and Vanzetti, and whatever other anarchists you’ve likely heard of were of the anti-state variety. Max Weber (who was not an anarchist, just smart) defined the state as a body with a legitimate monopoly on the use of force, whether military force directed outward or police force directed at its own citizenry. To anarchists for whom there can be no legitimate use of force, there can in turn be no legitimate state.

For those of us born and raised into societies that take the state for granted as both the primary means of governance and as a central part of our own identities, this view can seem all too remote, even unimaginable: in the absence of a state, what else is there? I can’t fully answer that question, but I can hint towards it. The fact is, we all take part in relationships that are primarily anarchic every day. Foremost among them are the relationships we build with our friends.

Let me step aside for a moment and point out that, as far as my own experience goes, friendship has gone largely unexplored in our social scientific literature. Compared to reasonably fixed social relations like family, employment, religious group, or class, friendship is diffuse, seemingly random, and difficult to track. While family realtionships can be traced out in a kinship chart or geneaology, labour relations on an organizational chart, religious affiliation on church membership rolls, friendship defies efforts to schematize. For this reason, I think, researchers have tended to overlook the roles friendships play in society, and the forces that structure such relations.

Consider your circle of friends. How do you decide what to do on a Friday night? Among my friends, someone–usually one of three or four people, but could be anyone–calls someone else and make a suggestion: “Wanna catch a movie Friday night?” Or even “Wanna do something Friday?” Calls are made and somehow, out of a number of suggestions, scheduling conflicts, movie reviews, and any number of other factors, a plan is arrived at. While someone or other might take the lead at any given moment, there really is no “leader”, no one calling the shots. There’s no vote or majority rule, but somehow a consensus emerges and consent is achieved.

What if someone steps out of line? Nobody in your circle of friends, I hope, is the designated cop, authorized to use force when someone acts up. Which is not to say that you, as a collective, have no recourse. We have dozens of sanctions to use against friends who buck the system. We gossip, we shun, we refuse favours, or, if things get too far out of hand, we walk away, we expel the unruly member from our group. Like decision-making, though, sanctioning is emergent–there’s nobody authorized to make that decision for the group, nobody might even be aware of acting as a group. But somehow, a kind of harmony is maintained, without the use of force and without any person or persons giving up autonomy.

That’s anarchy, of a sort. Consensus-building, voluntary affiliation, non-coercive sanctioning. The Greens do it very well, at least the ones I’ve been associated with. A secretary is selected to draft an agenda, a chair is selected to make sure conversation doesn’t stray too far from the agreed-upon agenda, and business is done. The other anarchist concern that strongly informs Green practice is the concern with the local, with organizations sized well within a single person’s capacity to navigate. Which is why the Greens split over the decision to run a presidential candidate–many felt that a national Green Party was too far removed from the scope and concerns of the local collective to be practical.

As I said, I’m not an anarchist, though I’m clearly fond of many of anarchy’s principles. There are a couple of reasons, though, why I cannot embrace it fully. The first is that, while violence and coercion are frowned upon within any given unit, some anarchists are not averse to using violent means against outsiders in order to achieve their goals. Since the state is considered the primary target by most anarchists, and since clearly the idea of joining the state to change it is not a reasonable one, anti-state anarchists are fairly limited in their range of strategies. Still, I’m a pacifist, and violence, whether directed at friends or enemies, is still violence. This is my main problem with the Black Bloc anarchists. Although their efforts have been primarily against property and not persons, their manner is expressly cultivated to instill fear, even terror, in non-anarchists–and fear is a form of coercion. So while I can be sympathietic, even appreciative, of some of their actions, I cannot fully endorse them.

The other reason is more complex. While I share with anarchists their concern about the state, I cannot reasonably oppose the state. Call it idealism versus practicality (an opposition that generally finds me on the “idealism” side, to be sure). Given the world we live in, I cannot in good consciousness wish for the dissolution of the state–in fact, most of my efforts are tuned towards the strengthening of the state, at least in the field of social services and welfare. I described above, in miniature, how anarchy deals with conflict–but anarchy is ill-suited to dealing with violent conflict. What do you do if one of your friends takes a swing at you? You may resolve to expel that person from your circle of friends, but not before s/he does some real, maybe permanent or even fatal, damage to your person. Consensus-building and sanctions are slow-acting; violence–rape, murder, theft–demands a quick defense. In such situations, I prefer to know there are police at hand to keep order–better police than what we have today, but police nonetheless.

To be practical, anarchy demands the kind of localized, face-to-face (or at least person-to-person; anarchy works fairly well over the Internet, for instance in unmoderated listservs, where “faces” never enter into it) relationships that we enjoy with our friends. It might be possible at the level of the town or even small city, but given the world we live in and, especially, the immense power of corporations and some individuals to do harm, it is still necessary to have an overarching body strong and powerful enough to restrict the biggest players. Granted, given the current state of affairs, the state–or at least my state–has pretty much given up its one important function, but like I said, I already accept that it is my duty to work for a stronger state.

So there’s anarchy. I think that there are important things to consider in our relationships with each other that anarchism illuminates, but ultimately I don’t see anarchism, at least as its been conceptualized up to now, as providing a practical answer to the problems of “late capitalism”.

And please, don’t call me “Stan”.

As you may know from my About page, I was a Nader supporter in 2000. I don’t really want to get into the whole thing now–maybe I’ll explain how Nader helped Gore win in a later post–but with the anti-Nader and anti-Green rhetoric flying so thick these days, it seemed time to address at least one of the stupider comments I’ve seen. Especially as it comes from a site I generally have a lot of respect for.

During and after the 2000 election, Nader defenders pointed out again and again that the Greens tend to draw equally from both the Left and the Right. For instance, with neither Gore nor Bush willing to take a stand against NAFTA, Nader was left to pick up both the conservative working-class isolationists and the liberal anti-globalizationists. While a great body of Nader’s supporters came from the unaffiliated body of first-time voters and disillusioned non-voters, inasmuch as he drew support away from the established parties, he attracted both left-liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, both tired of watching their parties sell out democracy to corporate rule.

I think the Republicans recognized this early on and figured, “no threat there”. The Democrats, though, were slightly more threatened. Nader made Gore look bad, throwing into high relief Gore’s fundamental hypocricies on almost every issue. For a long time, though, the Gore campaign more or less ignored Nader’s–it wasn’t until 10 days before the election that somebody decided to go on the offensive against Nader and Nader’s voters (an offensive that, I should add, worked). After the election, Nader’s 2.8 million votes were seen strictly as votes “stolen” from Gore.

Which brings us to this from Counterspin Central, by way of Free Republic(!):

“Bush struck a chord with Brian Silvernail, 46, of Livonia, a machinist who said he voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, but will consider Bush in 2004. Silvernail said Bush inherited many of the problems he faces. He said the president has brought honor to the country and saved lives in Iraq by toppling Saddam Hussein from power.

“He’s right on the ball about the economy,” said Silvernail, who wore a baseball cap with a U.S. flag on it. “He said that it’s a proven fact that to fix the economy, you have to help the smaller companies. If they hire more people, the economy will pick up and the deficit will go down.”

Silvernail is clearly just some poor schmuck who either didn’t understand Nader’s campaign, doesn’t understand Bush’s administration, or doesn’t understand economics–take your choice. The important thing is Counterspin’s reading of Silvernail’s statement:

Yet more evidence that many 2000 Nader Voters [especially in a State like Michigan] were more ANTI-GORE than Pro-Nader.

How on earth does this follow? A goodly number of Nader supporters probably will support Bush in 2004–such as the disillusioned McCain Republicans who voted for Nader in protest against their own party’s betrayal of its principles in nominating Bush. Others were in that great mass of undeclared voters, voters Nader particularly targeted and mobilized, but who never held any lasting attraction to Green principles. To assume that Silvernail is somehow involved in the great Green conspiracy to undermine the Democratic Party, and Gore in particular, is a pretty big stretch, isn’t it, especially when Nader held such a great appeal to workers in northern and northeastern states, workers that traditionally vote–that’s right–Republican?

I am the first to agree that Bush is one of the worst things to happen to this country since syphillis, but beating Green voters over the head with such bitter and wrong-headed musings is no way to make sure Bush is shown the door next November, nor is it any way to make sure that the next President isn’t just as bad, or worse. A large group of Greens are urging the national party not to run a candidate (and another group is promising that they will run one–but that’s the Green way) and Nader has already endorsed a Democratic candidate, an endorsement that at least Kucinich is man enough to accept with grace.

The election is 15 months away–that’s a long time for a lot to happen. At this point, nobody has my vote, not Nader, not Kucinich, not Dean. They’re all, in my opinion, making the right noises, but it’s early yet, and I plan to be absolutely certain that the person I vote for has made it clear to me that he (or she–it could happen!) is going to represent me, not some bullshit imagination of what the “average American” will vote for.