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STATISM KRITIK CONTENTS Shell-------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1-3 Hierarchy Is Hypocritical-------------------------------------------------4 Hierarchy Mechanizes-----------------------------------------------------5 Classism /Division of Labor Bad----------------------------------------6 Capitalism Is As Bad As Feudalism /Monarchy---------------------7 Hierarchy Hurts Workers------------------------------------------------8 Governments Exploit------------------------------------------------------9-11 Governments Kill Liberty------------------------------------------------12-13 Governments Kill Humanity---------------------------------------------14-16 Governments Kill Equality-----------------------------------------------17 Governments Cause Crime-----------------------------------------------18-19 Capitalism Causes Nuclear Extermination----------------------------20 Hierarchy Kills Nature-----------------------------------------------------21-22 AT: Anarchy Would Harm the Wealthy-------------------------------23 Governments Don’t Represent the People------------------------------24 AT: Humans Are Naturally Competitive /No Cooperation---------25-26 AT: We Can Reform the System-----------------------------------------27-28 AT: Some Are Oppressed For the Good of the Whole---------------29 AT: Anarchy Oppresses the Rich----------------------------------------30 Hierarchy-Free Society Saves Nature-----------------------------------31 Anarchy Gives “Plenty For All”------------------------------------------32-33 Anarchy Frees----------------------------------------------------------------34- 35 Anarchy Solves For Crime-------------------------------------------------36 AT: Can’t Reject Capitalism-----------------------------------------------37 Anarchy Solves For War----------------------------------------------------38 AT: Governments Would Take Over Communes---------------------39 AT: Anarchy Promotes Chaotic Individualism------------------------40 AT: No Incentive To Work In Anarchy---------------------------------41-42 Anarchy Is Better Than Authoritarianism------------------------------43 Representative Democracy Is Oppressive-------------------------------44 AT: Permutation--------------------------------------------------------------45 AT: Anarchy Would Lead To Primitivism------------------------------46-47 Laws Are Bad------------------------------------------------------------------48 AT: Anarchy Won’t Work With A Large Population-----------------49 Everything Must Be Deprivatized------------------------------------------50 AT: Unfair To Reward Skilled and Unskilled Labor Equally--------51 Wage System Will Fall With Capitalism----------------------------------52 AT: Anarchy Is Utopian---------------------------------------------------- 53-54 AT: Cards Are Too Old------------------------------------------------------55 Must act against Government-----------------------------------------------56 THESIS The file says that the plan goes through the federal government, which enforces the hierarchy. This is bad

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Page 1: Statism Kritik

STATISM KRITIK CONTENTS

Shell--------------------------------------------------------------------------1-3Hierarchy Is Hypocritical-------------------------------------------------4Hierarchy Mechanizes-----------------------------------------------------5Classism /Division of Labor Bad----------------------------------------6Capitalism Is As Bad As Feudalism /Monarchy---------------------7Hierarchy Hurts Workers------------------------------------------------8Governments Exploit------------------------------------------------------9-11Governments Kill Liberty------------------------------------------------12-13Governments Kill Humanity---------------------------------------------14-16Governments Kill Equality-----------------------------------------------17Governments Cause Crime-----------------------------------------------18-19Capitalism Causes Nuclear Extermination----------------------------20Hierarchy Kills Nature-----------------------------------------------------21-22AT: Anarchy Would Harm the Wealthy-------------------------------23Governments Don’t Represent the People------------------------------24AT: Humans Are Naturally Competitive /No Cooperation---------25-26AT: We Can Reform the System-----------------------------------------27-28AT: Some Are Oppressed For the Good of the Whole---------------29AT: Anarchy Oppresses the Rich----------------------------------------30Hierarchy-Free Society Saves Nature-----------------------------------31Anarchy Gives “Plenty For All”------------------------------------------32-33Anarchy Frees----------------------------------------------------------------34-35Anarchy Solves For Crime-------------------------------------------------36AT: Can’t Reject Capitalism-----------------------------------------------37Anarchy Solves For War----------------------------------------------------38AT: Governments Would Take Over Communes---------------------39AT: Anarchy Promotes Chaotic Individualism------------------------40AT: No Incentive To Work In Anarchy---------------------------------41-42Anarchy Is Better Than Authoritarianism------------------------------43Representative Democracy Is Oppressive-------------------------------44AT: Permutation--------------------------------------------------------------45AT: Anarchy Would Lead To Primitivism------------------------------46-47Laws Are Bad------------------------------------------------------------------48AT: Anarchy Won’t Work With A Large Population-----------------49Everything Must Be Deprivatized------------------------------------------50AT: Unfair To Reward Skilled and Unskilled Labor Equally--------51Wage System Will Fall With Capitalism----------------------------------52AT: Anarchy Is Utopian---------------------------------------------------- 53-54AT: Cards Are Too Old------------------------------------------------------55Must act against Government-----------------------------------------------56

THESISThe file says that the plan goes through the federal government, which enforces the hierarchy. This is bad because having the government act and pass laws kills liberty, humanity, and eventually nature. Know the sources well, because very likely, someone might get into a citation debate with you. The link inserts for the second link point are on pages 9-29, and 31. These are all good inserts, but I would suggest the ones pertaining to the environment and nature, because they are closest to the topic. This is a good K if you know how to run it. Be careful because it is susceptible to counter-kritik.Have fun, good debating!

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A) Framework: GOVERNMENT-FREE SOCIAL LIBERTY WOULD TRANSCEND OUR CURRENT CAPITALIST SLAVERY.Bakunin, Mikhail, a labor organizer, 1870, The Commune, the Church, and the State, (Bakunin’s Writings, 1947)

I am a passionate seeker for truth and just as strong an opponent of the corrupting lies , through which the party of order – this privileged, official, and interested representative of all religions, philosophical political, legal economical, and social outrage in the past and present – has tried to keep the world in ignorance . I love freedom with all my heart. It is the only condition under which the intelligence , the manliness, and happiness of the people, can develop and expand . By freedom, however, I naturally understand not its mere form, forced down as from above, measured and controlled by the state, this eternal lie which in reality, is nothing but the privilege of the few founded upon the slavery of all . Nor do I mean that "individualistic," selfish, petty, and mock freedom, which is propagated by J.J. Rousseau and all other schools of bourgeois liberalism. The mock freedom which is limited by the supposed right of all, and defended by the state, and leads inevitably to the destruction of the rights of the individual . No: I mean the only true freedom , that worthy of the name; the liberty which consists therein for everyone to develop all the material, intellectual, and moral faculties which lie dormant in him; the liberty which knows and recognizes no limitations beyond those which nature decrees. In this sense, there are no limitations, for the laws of our own nature are not forced upon us by a law-giver who, beside or above us, sits on a throne.

B) Links 1) The affirmative plan works through the federal government, a structure of social control.2) [insert specific link]

C) Implications:1) STATISM LEADS TO MECHANIZATION AND THE DEATH OF LIBERTY, BEAUTY, AND SCIENCE.Goldman 1940, Emma, a journalist, 1940, Anarchism (1970), p.40

Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty , in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies, and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world are only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence – too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency , our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the king . They do not want to know that centralization is not only the deathknell of liberty , but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clocklike, mechanical atmosphere.

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2) HIERARCHICAL SOCIETY DEVOURS NATURE LIKE AN UNTREATED DISEASE.Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1990, Remaking Society, p.15

Finally, liberal environmentalism suffers from a consistent refusal to see that a capitalistic society based on competition and growth for its own sake must ultimately devour the natural world, just like an untreated cancer must ultimately devour its host. Personal intentions, be they good or bad, have little to do with this unrelenting process . An economy that is structured around the maxim, “Grow or Die,” must necessarily pit itself against the natural world and leave ecological ruin in its wake as it works its way through the biosphere.

3) GOVERNMENT-BASED SOCIETY EXPLOITS AND DEGRADES THE POOR – WE NEED A COMPLETELY NEW SYSTEM.Kropotkin, Peter, editor of Le Revolt, 1880, The Spirit of Revolt (within Le Revolt)

Those who long for the triumph of justice , those who would put new ideas into practice, are soon forced to recognize that the realization of their generous , humanitarian , and regenerating ideas cannot take place in a society thus constituted; they perceive the necessity of a revolutionary whirlwind which will sweep away all this rottenness , revive sluggish hearts with its breath, and bring to mankind that spirit of devotion , self- denial, and heroism , without which society sinks through degradation and vileness into complete disintegration . In periods of frenzied haste toward wealth , of feverish speculation and of crisis, of the sudden downfall of great industries and the ephemeral expansion of other branches of production, of scandalous fortunes amassed in a few years and dissipated as quickly, it becomes evident that the economic institutions which control production and exchange are far from giving to society the prosperity which they are supposed to guarantee; they produce precisely the opposite result . Instead of order they bring forth chaos ; instead of prosperity, poverty and insecurity ; instead of reconciled interests, war; a perpetual war of the exploiter against the worker, of exploiters and of workers among themselves.

4) GOVERNMENTS ARE INHERENTLY DESTRUCTIVE AND CAUSE CRIME.Goldman, Emma, 1940, Anarchism (1970), p.43

The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal , breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.

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5) CAPITALISM AND GOVERNMENTS LEGITIMIZE EVIL AND IMPOVERISHMENT.Einstein, Albert, 1949 (Staff Writer), Monthly Review, New York

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil . We see before us a huge community of producers, the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor – not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production – that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods – may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.

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Hierarchy Is Hypocritical

— HIERARCHY IS HYPOCRITICAL AND DOOMED TO EXTINCTION.Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.33

The system under which we live checks in its turn the growth of the social sentiment. We all know that without uprightness, without self-respect, without sympathy, and mutual aid, human kind must perish, as perish the few races of animals living by rapine, or the slave-keeping ants. But such ideas are not to the taste of the ruling classes, and they have elaborated a whole system of pseudo-science to teach the contrary.Fine sermons have been preached on the text that those who have should share with those who have not, but he who would carry out this principle would be speedily informed that these beautiful sentiments are all very well in poetry, but not in practice. “To lie is to degrade and besmirch oneself,” we say, and yet all civilized life becomes one huge lie. We accustom ourselves and our children to hypocrisy, to the practice of a double-faced morality. And since the brain is ill at ease among lies, we cheat ourselves with sophistry. Hypocrisy and sophistry become the second nature of the civilized man.But a society cannot live thus; it must return to truth, or cease to exist.

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Hierarchy Mechanizes

— CAPITALISM FORCES WORKERS INTO A REPULSIVE AND MECHANIZED EXISTENCE..Marx and Engels, Karl and Friedrich , 1848, The Communist Manifesto

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.

— CAPITALISM MECHANIZES HUMANS.Goldmann, Emma, 1940, The Individual, Society, and the State

One of the insane characteristics of this struggle is the complete negation of the relation of the producer to the things he produces. The average worker has no inner point of contact with the industry he is employed in, and he is a stranger to the process of production of which he is a mechanical part. Like any other cog of the machine, he is replaceable at any time by other similar depersonalized human beings.

— HIERARCHY MECHANIZES AND IMPRISONS SOCIETY.Goldman, Emma, 1940, The Individual, Society, and the State

The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime. The wholesale mechanization of modern life has increased uniformity a thousandfold. It is everywhere present, in habits, tastes, dress, thoughts and ideas. Its most concentrated dullness is "public opinion." Few have the courage to stand out against it. He who refuses to submit is at once labeled "queer," "different," and decried as a disturbing element in the comfortable stagnancy of modern life. ...In pre-war time the individual could at least escape national and family boredom.. The whole world was open to his longings and his quests. Now the world has become a prison, and life continual solitary confinement.

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Classism /Division of Labor Bad

— CLASS INEQUITIES OPPRESS THE MASSES, ROBBING THEM OF THE ABILITY TO AVOID PAINFUL DRUDGERY.Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.26

In our civilized societies we are rich. Why then are the many poor? Why this painful drudgery for the masses? Why, even to the best paid workman, this uncertainty for the morrow, in the midst of all the wealth inherited from the past, and in spite of the powerful means of production, which could ensure comfort to all, in return for a few hours of daily toil?The Socialists have said it and repeated it unwearingly. Daily they reiterate it, demonstrating it by arguments taken from all the sciences. It is because all that is necessary for production – the land, the mines, the highways, machinery, food, shelter, education, knowledge – all have been seized by the few in the course of that long story of robbery, enforced migration and wars, of ignorance and oppression, which has been the life of the human race before it learned to subdue the forces of Nature. It is because, taking advantage of alleged rights acquired in the past, these few appropriate today two thirds of the products of human labor, and then squander them in the most shameful way.

— OPPRESSION OF THE MASSES WILL OCCUR SO LONG AS DIVISION OF LABOR EXISTS.Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.148

We understand that all men have but one dream – that of emerging from, or enabling their children to emerge from, this inferior state; to create for themselves an “independent” position, which means what? To also live by other men’s work!As long as there will be a class of manual workers and a class of “brain” workers, black hands and white hands, it will be thus.

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Capitalism Is As Bad As Feudalism /Monarchy

— CAPITALISM IS AS BARBARIC AS FEUDALISM.Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.31

We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We called those barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die of hunger.The result of this state of things is that all our production tends in a wrong direction. Enterprise takes no thought for the needs of the community. Its only aim is to increase the gains of the speculator. Hence the constant fluctuations of trade, the periodical industrial crises, each of which throws scores of thousands of workers on the streets.

— DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENTS ARE JUST AS OPPRESSIVE AS ANY MONARCHY.Bakunin, Mikhail, 1870, Statism and Anarchy

The essential difference between a monarchy and a democratic republic is reduced to the following: In a monarchy, the bureaucratic world oppresses and plunders the people for the greater benefit of the privileged propertied classes as well as for its own benefit, and all that is done in the name of the monarch; in a republic, the same bureaucracy does exactly the same thing, but in the name of the will of the people.

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Hierarchy Hurts Workers

— CAPITALISM NEVER HELPS WORKERS – IT LEADS TO SEXISM, RACISM, AND EXPLOITATION. MacSimóin, Alan, a mine labor reformer, 1993, Workers’ Solidarity, No.38

Anyone who talks about 'social partnership', about labor and capital working together for the benefit of all is talking nonsense. What rights we have and gains we have made have been the result of long and often bitter struggles. The bosses only give such rights and concessions as they are forced to. In times of recession, such as now, they try to make workers pay through job losses, cuts in real wages, cuts in public spending, productivity deals, etc. for the crisis that is a periodic and inevitable product of capitalism.Although capitalism oppresses people on many different levels, race and sex to name but two; it is the exploitation of our labor that is fundamental to the system. It is on this front that the fight for a new society will be won or lost. If we can reclaim that aspect of our lives, the system can be overturned and replaced with something much better.

— THE WAGE SYSTEM DENIES WORKERS THE NECESSITIES OF LIFE.Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.84

We must offer to the peasant in exchange for his toil not worthless paper-money, but the manufactured articles of which he stands in immediate need. He lacks the proper implements to till the land, clothes to protect him properly from the inclemencies of the weather, lamps and oil to replace his miserable rushlight or tallow dip, spades, rakes, ploughs. All these things, under present conditions, the peasant is forced to do without, not because he does not feel the need for them, but because, in his life of struggle and privation, a thousand useful things are beyond his reach; because he has no money to buy them.

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Governments Exploit

— GOVERNMENT IS THE “NEGATION OF HUMANITY” – THE OPPOSITE OF FREEDOM AND JUSTICE AND THE CAUSE OF WAR.Bakunin, Michael, 1870, The German Crisis

Whosoever mentions the State, implies force, oppression, exploitation, injustice – all these brought together as a system are the main condition of present-day society. The State has never had, and never can have, a morality. Its only morality and justice is its own interest, its existence, and its omnipotence at any price; and before its interest, all interest of humanity must stand in the back-ground. The State is the negation of Humanity. It is this in two ways: the opposite of human freedom and human justice (internally), as well as the forcible disruption of the common solidarity of mankind (externally).The Universal State, repeatedly attempted, has always proved an impossibility, so that as long as the State exists, States will exist and since every State regards itself as absolute, and proclaims the adoration of its power as the highest law, to which all other laws must be subordinated, it therefore follows that as long as States exist wars cannot cease. Every State must conquer, or be conquered.

— CAPITALISM IS THE SOURCE OF ALL OF OUR SOCIAL EVILS AND EXPLOITATION.Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1990, Remaking Society, p.94

Indeed, capitalism completely incarnates Bakunin’s notion of “evil” without the qualification that it is “socially necessary.” Beyond the capitalist system there are no further “turning points in history.” Capitalism marks the end of the road for a long social development in which evil permeated the good and irrationality permeated the rational. Capitalism, in effect, constitutes the point of absolute negativity for society and the natural world. One cannot improve this social order, reform it, or remake it on its own terms with an ecological prefix such as “eco-capitalism.” The only choice one has is to destroy it, for it embodies every social disease – from patriarchal values, class exploitation, and statism to avarice, militarism, and now, growth for the sake of growth – that has afflicted “civilization” and tainted all its great advances.

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Governments Exploit

— GOVERNMENTS DO NOT FOSTER JUSTICE – THEY DEHUMANIZINGLY COERCE.Thoreau, Henry David, 1849, Civil Disobedience

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said, that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect to it, even the well-disposed are daily made agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? Or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power.

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Governments Exploit/Coerce

— GOVERNMENTS CANNOT AVOID POVERTY AND EXPLOITATION.Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.172

Poverty, we have said elsewhere, was the primary cause of wealth. It was poverty that created the first capitalist; because, before accumulating “surplus value”, of which we hear so much, men had to be sufficiently destitute to consent to sell their labour, so as not to die of hunger. It was poverty that made capitalists. And if the number of then poor increased so rapidly during the Middle Ages, it was due to the invasions and wars that followed the founding of States, and to the increase of riches resulting from the exploitation of the East. These two causes tore asunder the bonds that kept men together in the agrarian and urban communities, and taught them to proclaim the principle of wages, so dear to the exploiters, instead of the solidarity they formerly practised in their tribal life.

— GOVERNMENTS COERCE AND DOMINATE, DESTROYING SOCIETY.Carter, April, a professor of political science, 1971, The Political Theory of Anarchism, p.25

But for anarchists and many socialists, society becomes the opposite of the State. Society is the repository of all the good aspects of social life and organization – co-operation, sympathy, affection, initiative, and spontaneity, while the State incorporates all the bad aspects of social interaction – coercion, force, and domination; and politics tends to be seen as the arena of force, fraud, and trickery. The state is an incubus upon society – a distorting factor.

— WE MUST NOT BE COERCED BY GOVERNMENTS – THEY DON’T WORK FOR THE GOOD OF THE PEOPLE.Thoreau, Henry David, 1849, Civil Disobedience

Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They can only force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, “Your money or your life,” why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do.

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Governments Kill Liberty

— GOVERNMENTS ARE INHERENTLY VIOLENT AND OPPRESSING.Bakunin, Michael, 1870, The German Crisis

To strive for international justice, liberty, and perpetual peace, and at the same time to uphold the State, is contradictory and naive. It is impossible to alter the nature of the State, because it is just this nature that constitutes the State; and States cannot change their nature without ceasing to exist. It thus follows that there cannot be a good, just, virtuous State. All States are bad in that sense, that they, by their nature, by their principle, by their very foundation and the highest ideal of their existence, are the opponents of human liberty, morality, and justice.

— ULTIMATE FREEDOM CAN BE ATTAINED ONLY WHEN THE STATE IS DESTROYED.Carter, April, a professor at Somerville, 1978, Nomos XIX: Anarchism, p.323

There are well-known difficulties in defining freedom, but it is reasonable to start from the basic assumption that an individual’s freedom depends on the absence of immediate and hurtful physical constraints and of extreme sanctions: an individual is freer out of jail than in it, freer without the constant threat of arrest and torture, and freer if he is not in fear for his life. Thus freedom in general increases the more the powers of violence wielded by the state against the individual are restricted, and the more the use of these powers is restricted. Anarchists, instead of looking to the rule of law to maximize personal freedom, look to the total abolition of the organs of state violence.

— GOVERNMENTS UNNECESSARILY DESTROY LIBERTY AND FREEDOM.Hocking, William, of Harvard, 1970, Anarchism, p.120

First of them is the restriction of liberty; and liberty, in the anarchist’s ideal, is the chief of all political goods. If liberty is the chief political good, then no sacrifice of it for any other good can be other than a bad bargain.Society stands to lose by every diminution of general freedom; for it runs the risk of checking its most original, and therefore most priceless, developments. Though not every divergent genius is a prophet, the prophets are bound to be among the divergent and intractable. Yet it is not in the name of the social welfare that the anarchist primarily pleads his cause. It is in the name of the individual’s own destiny and right.

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Governments Kill Liberty

— GOVERNMENT, OR A CONTROLLING SOCIAL STRUCTURE – IS THE DEVIL OF HISTORY.Bakunin, Mikhail, 1870, Protestation of the Alliance

The instinct to command others, in its primitive essence, is a carnivorous, altogether bestial, and savage instinct. Under the influence of the mental development of man, it takes on a somewhat more ideal form and becomes somewhat ennobled, presenting itself as the instrument of reason and the devoted servant of that abstraction, or political fiction, which is called the public good. But in its essence it remains just as baneful, and it becomes even more so when, with the application of science, it extends its scope and intensifies the power of its action. If there is a devil in history, it is this power principle.

— CAPITALISM TYRANNICALLY CONTROLS.Chomsky, Noam, a linguist and policy analyst, 1995, interview with Kevin Doyle, http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/rbr/noamrbr2.html

What is called 'capitalism' is basically a system of corporate mercantilism, with huge and largely unaccountable private tyrannies exercising vast control over the economy, political systems, and social and cultural life, operating in close co-operation with powerful states that intervene massively in the domestic economy and international society. That is dramatically true of the United States, contrary to much illusion. The rich and privileged are no more willing to face market discipline than they have been in the past, though they consider it just fine for the general population.

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Governments Kill Humanity

— GOVERNMENTS MECHANIZE HUMANS, CAUSING EVIL.Thoreau, Henry David, 1849, Civil Disobedience

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others – as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders – serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God.

— TRULY HUMAN COMMUNITIES CANNOT DEVELOP UNDER GOVERNMENTS.Bakunin, Mikhail, Letters To A Frenchman

Collectivism can be imposed only upon slaves – and then collectivism becomes the negation of humanity. Among a free people collectivism can come about only in the natural course of things, by force of circumstances: not by imposing it from above, but by a spontaneous movement from below, which springs forth freely and necessarily when the conditions of privileged individualism – State politics, the codes of civil and criminal law, the juridical family and inheritance rights – have been swept away by the Revolution.

— GOVERNMENTS ARE HIDEOUS MONSTERS WHICH CONSUME HUMANITY. Goldman, Emma, 1940, The Individual, Society, and the State

Friedrich Nietzsche called the State a cold monster. What would he have called the hideous beast in the garb of modern dictatorship? Not that government had ever allowed much scope to the individual; but the champions of the new State ideology do not grant even that much. "The individual is nothing," they declare, "it is the collectivity which counts." Nothing less than the complete surrender of the individual will satisfy the insatiable appetite of the new deity.

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Governments Kill Humanity

— CAPITALISM PRODUCES INNUMERABLE SOCIAL ILLS, THREATENING HUMANITY.Kothari, Rajni, of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, April 1997, Alternatives, p.233

It is a model of global integration built on all-round splintering and polarizing, producing destruction and annihilation not through wars and military machines but through starvation, pestilence, crime, social erosion, and loneliness, growing trade in juvenile and gender-based populations, drugs, violence, and free-trade in guns and bombs, urban collapse and unexpected deaths caused by ever more hazardous industries and energy use. Much of the price of all this is paid by the already unprotected, the insecure and vulnerable, the poor, the minorities, the refugees, and the least secure of all, women and children. If it is a global order that is being envisaged, it is a global order built on the social erosion of diverse civil societies and shunting to the margins of existence ideas of individual freedom and primary bonds, of the pride and dignity that comes from belonging to a clan or a community, a caste or a tribal ancestry. This is what capitalist development and the forced urbanization and migration and displacement that are entailed in it will produce, indeed is producing.

— GOVERNMENTS ARE OPPOSED TO THE BASIC HUMAN VALUES.Wolff, Robert Paul, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, 1970, In defense of Anarchism

The defining mark of the state is authority, the right to rule. The primary obligation of man is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled. It would seem, then, that there can be no resolution of the conflict between the autonomy of the individual and the putative authority of the state. Insofar as a man fulfills his obligation to make himself the authors of his decisions, he will resist the state’s claim to have authority over him. That is to say, he will deny that he has a duty to obey the laws of the state simply because they are the laws. In that sense, it would seem that anarchism is the only political doctrine consistent with the virtue of autonomy.

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Governments Kill Humanity

— THE INJUSTICE OF LAWS AND GOVERNMENT TURN OUR LIVES INTO A DELUSIONAL HELL.Thoreau, Henry David, 1854, Slavery In Massachuesetts

At last it occurred to me that what I had lost was a country. I had never respected the government near to which I lived, but I had foolishly thought that I might manage to live here, minding my private affairs, and forget it. For my part, my old and worthiest pursuits have lost I cannot say how much of their attraction, and I feel that my investment in life here is worth many per cent less since Massachusetts last deliberately sent back an innocent man, Anthony Burns, to slavery. I dwelt before, perhaps, in the illusion that my life passed somewhere only between heaven and hell , but now I cannot persuade myself that I do not dwell wholly within hell. The site of that political organization called Massachusetts is to me morally covered with volcanic scoriae and cinders, such as Milton describes in the infernal regions. If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it. ...I feel that, to some extent, the State has fatally interfered with my lawful business. It has not only interrupted me in my passage through Court Street on errands of trade, but it has interrupted me and every man on his onward and upward path, on which he had trusted soon to leave Court Street far behind. What right had it to remind me of Court Street? I have found that hollow which even I had relied on for solid.

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Governments Kill Equality

— GOVERNMENTS DESTROY EQUALITY WITH BRUTAL DOMINATION.Bakunin, Mikhail, 1870, World Revolutionary Alliance of Social Democracy

Equality of political rights, or a democratic State, constitute in themselves the most glaring contradiction in terms. The State, or political right, denotes force, authority, predominance; it presupposes inequality in fact. Where all rule, there are no more ruled, and there is no State.

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Governments Cause Crime

— GOVERNMENT-CAUSED SOCIAL HIERARCHY LEADS TO CRIME.Goldman, Emma, 1940, Anarchism (1970), p.43

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with crime. What does society, as it exists today, know of the process of despair, the poverty, the horrors, the fearful struggle the human soul must pass on its way to crime and degradation?

— GOVERNMENTS ARE THE CAUSE OF CRIME.Hocking, William, of Harvard, 1970, Anarchism, p.121

For however worthy of obedience the law may be, governments, seduced by force-using, seldom are; and the disaffection from rulers extends to the law behind them. There is an element of arrogance in their wielding of principles more sacred than themselves; and if they insist on being inseparable from the law, the resentment due to them will not be withheld because it strikes the law also. Law which allies itself with force begets lawlessness.

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Governments Cause Crime

— GOVERNMENT ACTION CREATES COMPLETE DEPENDENCY.Taylor, Michael, a professor at the University of Washington, 1987, The Possibility of Cooperation, p.168

Men who live for long under government and its bureaucracy, courts, and police, come to rely upon them. They find it easier to use the state for the settlement of their disputes and for the provision of public goods, instead of arranging these things for themselves, even where the disputes and the publics for which the goods are to be provided, are quite local. In this way, the state mediates between individuals; they come to deal with each other through the courts, through the tax collector, and the bureaucracies which spend the taxes.

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Capitalism Causes Nuclear Extermination

— CAPITALISM CAUSES WARS AND RISKS NUCLEAR EXTERMINATION.Leight, Samuel, a professor at the University of Arizona, 1984, The Futility of Reformism, p.31

Second, the cause of war is inherent in capitalism – this is a chronic condition that is both irremovable and incurable as long as the system survives. Given a society organized as a gigantic market place, wars will continue to be fought over private property and related issues when diplomacy and negotiations fail. The big question is: will the “small” wars continue on daily basis, as they have for decades, or will they be interrupted by a worldwide nuclear disaster?

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Hierarchy Kills Nature

— HIERARCHY RISKS ECOLOGICAL EXTINCTIONS. Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1994, Reflecting On Nature (ed. Gruen and Jamieson), p.123

Our present society has a definite hierarchical character. It is a propertied society that concentrates economic power in corporate elites. It is a bureaucratic and militaristic society that concentrates political and military power in centralized state institutions. It is a patriarchal society that allocates authority to men in varying degrees. And it is a racist society that places a minority of whites in a self-deceptive sovereignty over a vast worldwide majority of peoples of color. While it is theoretically possible that a hierarchical society can biologically sustain itself, at least for a time, through draconian environmentalist controls, it is absolutely inconceivable that present-day hierarchical and particularly capitalist society could establish a non-domineering and ethnically symbiotic relationship between itself and the natural world. As long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organizes humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will remain a predominant ideology and inevitably lead our planet to the brink, if not into the abyss , of ecological extinction .

— HIERARCHY IS INHERENTLY DESTRUCTIVE TO ALL LIFE.Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1994, Reflecting On Nature (ed. Gruen and Jamieson), p.124

Capitalist society, whether in Western corporate or Eastern bureaucratic forms, is fundamentally destructive . The power of this society to destroy has reached a scale unprecedented in the history of humanity – and this power is being used, almost systematically, to wreak havoc upon the entire world of life and its material bases. In nearly every region, air is being befouled , waterways polluted, soil washed away, the land desiccated , and wildlife destroyed. Coastal areas and even the depths of the sea are not immune to widespread pollution. More significantly in the long run, basic biological cycles such as the carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle, upon which all living things depend for the maintenance and renewal of life, are being distorted to the point of irreversible damage .

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Hierarchy Kills Nature

— THE CAPITALIST-BASED ECOLOGICAL CRISIS THREATENS SURVIVAL.The Monthly Review, November 1997, Joel Kovel, p.6

The ecological crisis is defined by the brutal fact that the normal course of social production inexorably destroys the natural basis of society. Until as recently as the 1960s nature was able to buffer the effects of production. Now this function is breaking down in a proliferating and incalculable way across multiple ecosystems. Climate change, species loss, disease, depletion of soils and groundwater, intoxication by pollutants... the list can be extended, but its message is clear and harrowing: survival depends upon coming to grips with what is wrong at the mainspring of our civilization.

— CAPITALISM KILLS BEAUTY, THE EXISTENCE OF NATURE, AND THE HUMAN SPECIES.The Monthly Review, November 1997, Joel Kovel, p.12

Wherever capital has its way, the ecological principles that underlie the emergence and flowering of life, beauty, and consciousness are broken down through the intrusion of the commodity form. Quality is replaced by quantity; differentiation and balance are replaced by brutal expansion; and the fruits of billions of years of evolution are transformed into cash. And as ecosystem damage grows and interacts upon itself, the survivability of the species is itself thrown into doubt.

— CAPITALISM DRIVES ALL FORCES WHICH DESTROY NATURE.The Monthly Review, November 1997, Joel Kovel, p.7

It is capital that conditions and drives separate determinations in an ecologically destructive way, and so becomes the efficient cause of the crisis. Development or industrialization, as such, is an empty construct. But development or industrialization under capitalist aegis, in which capitalist corporations, markets, lifestyles, even psychologies and character structure, all interact, is what destabilizes ecosystems all over the planet.

— OPPRESSION OF HUMANS MUST CEASE BEFORE WE CAN STOP OPPRESSION OF NATURE. Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1990, Remaking Society, p.39

Whatever has turned human beings into “aliens” in nature are social changes that have made many human beings “aliens” in their own social world: the domination of the young by the old, of women by men, and of men by men. Today, as for many centuries in the past, there are still oppressive human beings who literally own society and others who are owned by it. Until society can be reclaimed by an undivided humanity that will use its collective wisdom, cultural achievements, technological innovations, scientific knowledge, and innate creativity for its own benefit and for that of the natural world, all ecological problems will have their roots in social problems.

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AT: Anarchy Would Harm the Wealthy1) Extend- Bakunin in 1870: Government-free society would help everyone.

2) CLASSISM CRIPPLES BOTH THE RICH AND THE POOR.Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.182

We know the consequences of the division of labour full well. It is evident that, first of all, we are divided into two classes: on the one hand, producers, who consume very little and are exempt from thinking because they only do physical work, and who work badly because their brains remain inactive; and on the other hand, the consumers, who, producing little or hardly anything, have the privilege of thinking for the others, and who think badly because the whole world of those who toil with their hands is unknown to them.

3) We must not allow a minority of the people to benefit from the suffering of the majority.

4) Today’s upper-class could continue to live excellent lives – they would just have to work for it, rather than exploiting the labor of others.

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Governments Don’t Represent the People

— GOVERNMENTS FAIL TO REPRESENT THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE.Thoreau, Henry David, 1848, Civil Disobedience

I heartily accept the motto, – “That government is best which governs least;” and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, – “That government is best which governs not at all;” and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also be brought up against a standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.

— GOVERNMENTS OPPRESSIVELY IGNORE THE NEEDS OF SOCIETY.Hoffman, Robert, a professor of history, 1970, Anarchism, p.8

The reasons for this conviction are many; most are summed up in the notion that the State, no matter how constituted, is alien from most or all of the society it governs. It can not be the embodiment of the citizenry, but is instead an institution with needs, views, and the goals peculiar to itself. Rather than expressing and enacting the needs and wishes of society’s members, the State has a life of its own, and serves society as it sees, imposing its will on a largely helpless and often resentful population, and prevailing over it only through compulsion.

A FREE SOCIETY CAN ONLY BE CONSTRUCTED FROM THE BOTTOM UP.Bakunin, Michael, The Commune, the Church, and the State

he organization of the society of the future must and can be accomplished only from the bottom upwards, through the free federation and union of the workers into groups, unions, and societies, which will unite again into districts, communes, national communes, and finally form a great international federation. Only thus can be evolved the true vital order of liberty and happiness for all, the order which is not opposed to the interests of the individual or of society, but on the contrary strengthens the same and brings them into harmony .

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AT: Humans Are Naturally Competitive /No Cooperation

1) THE IDEA THAT IT IS HUMAN NATURE TO STRIVE FOR POWER IS FLAWED AND SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED.Dixon, Keith, of Simon Fraser University, 1986, Freedom and Equality, p.72

What most of us take to be “natural”, “ain’t necessarily so!” We may feel that incentives and rewards are necessary to sustain an efficient level of work; that men will necessarily strive for power and status and that human wants are limitless. But these assumptions may be socially derived. Were we to live in a culture where cooperation and not competition were the norm our conception of human nature might be fundamentally different.

2) People compete now because they have been taught to do so. The new society would teach different ideals.

3) HUMANS COOPERATE TODAY WITHOUT GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION.Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.129

Accustomed as we are by hereditary prejudices and our unsound education and training to represent ourselves the beneficial hand of Government, legislation and magistracy everywhere, we have come to believe that man would tear his fellow-man to pieces like a wild beast the day the police took his eye off him; that absolute chaos would come about if authority were overthrown during a revolution. And with our eyes shut we pass by thousands and thousands of human groupings which form themselves freely, without any intervention of the law, and attain results infinitely superior to those achieved under governmental tutelage.

4) This is an utterly pessimistic view of humanity. If you believe that people can never work together, there’s no reason for wanting to live.

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AT: Humans Are Naturally Competitive /No Cooperation

5) COMMUNALISM WORKED UNTIL IT WAS CRUSHED BY THE INEQUITIES OF GOVERNMENTS.Kropotkin, Peter, 1913, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.17

One of the current objections to Communism and Socialism altogether, is that the idea is so old, and yet it has never been realized. Schemes of ideal States haunted the thinkers of Ancient Greece; later on, the early Christians joined in communist groups; centuries later, large communist brotherhoods came into existence during the Reform movement. ...At first sight, this objection seems very serious. However, the moment we consider human history more attentively, it loses its strength. We see, first, that hundreds of millions of men have succeeded in maintaining amongst themselves, in their village communities, for many hundreds of years, one of the main elements of Socialism – the common ownership of the chief instrument of production, the land, and the appointment of the same according to the labor capacities of the different families; and we learn that if the communal possession of the land has been destroyed in Western Europe, it was not from within, but from without, by the governments which created a land monopoly in favor of the nobility and the middle classes.

6) The affirmative team insists that cooperation is impossible, yet you can see multiple examples of it in this debate round. All four debaters have agreed to work alongside their partners and you have agreed to judge the round.

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AT: We Can Reform the System

1) CAPITALISM CAUSES MERE REFORMS TO INTENSIFY PROBLEMS AND CREATE DICTATORSHIPS.Leight, Samuel, a professor at the University of Arizona, 1984, The Futility of Reformism, p.6

Reforms never live up to their expectations because the very nature of capitalism invariably sabotages the performance of the reformers. Even when certain problems get resolved they are replaced with new ones, generally of an equal or greater magnitude. Apart from the wasted energy and time that reformism engenders, the danger of such activity lies in the inevitable apathy and disillusionment that arises in the aftermath. These are the breeding grounds for dictatorial regimes.

2) Extend- Kropotkin in 1880: Hierarchy is inherently destructive. We need a completely new system.

3) IT’S COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO DEMAND REFORM FROM THE GOVERNMENT – INDIVIDUALS MUST ACT AGAINST OPPRESSION.Thoreau, Henry David, 1849, Civil Disobedience

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it. The slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur. Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. Some are petitioning the state to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves, – the union between themselves and the state, – and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury?

4) CAPITALISM DESTABILIZES NATURE IN WAYS THAT CANNOT BE CURED BY MERE REFORMS.The Monthly Review, November 1997, Joel Kovel, p.10

So long as the money nexus is the expression of capital, the actual, concrete limits of nature will continue to be brushed aside. For as long as capitalism endures, it tends to reign; and as long as it reigns it extends itself, and as long as it extends itself it tends to destabilize ecologies by degrading the conditions of production in the hunt for surplus value. Thus the regime of capital leads inexorably to an ecological crisis that cannot be resolved within the terms of capital.

5) Reform-based policy has been tried since the birth of hierarchy and hasn’t worked yet. We have to try something new.

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AT: We Can Reform the System

6) WE MUST HAVE COMMUNAL LIVING NOW – MERE REFORMS ONLY HINDERS THE PROCESS.Leight, Samuel, a professor at the University of Arizona, 1984, The Futility of Reformism, p.3

The deluge of propaganda surrounding the reformist administration of capitalism produces the distractions, confusions and purposeful misrepresentations that have so drastically hampered the presentation of the socialist case. We are always being advised that socialism is for the distant future and that “immediate” needs must receive attention. Quite the contrary – the highest, most urgent, immediate need of the working class is the establishment of socialism within the shortest possible time.

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AT: Some Are Oppressed For the Good of the Whole

1) ANY GOVERNMENT OPPRESSION IS WRONG – WE MUST ADVANCE TO THE NEXT STAGE OF FREEDOM.Thoreau, Henry David, 1849, Civil Disobedience

The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to, – for I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well, – is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a limited democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?

2) Government-free society would allow everyone to be happy while oppressing none.

3) THE ADVANTAGES OF CAPITALISM ARE NOTHING COMPARED TO THOSE OF HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY.Leight, Samuel, a professor at the University of Arizona, 1984, The Futility of Reformism, p.2

Life for the working class under capitalism, past and present, cannot be compared favorably with the social benefits of a classless society in socialism which will convey to all common ownership rights to the means of production and distribution, and democratic privileges that no reformation of capitalism can ever attain. Attempting to make the working class “better off” is no match for the advantages of socialism; and the wages system, irrespective of wage levels, should justifiably be rejected when compared to free access to all goods and services for all human beings.

4) Exploitation is never justified. We must not sacrifice any more lives.

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AT: Anarchy Oppresses the Rich

1) Boo-Hoo

2) Government-free society would not eliminate any rights. It would just stop the privileged from exploiting others. Exploitation is not a “natural right.”

3) By destroying hierarchy, we abolish the source of all oppression. In a totally-free society like ours, it would be impossible for coercion to occur.

4) What the affirmative team sees as oppression, we see as a return of rights to the disadvantaged. Their view is comparable to saying that abolition of slavery oppressed slave owners are taking away their property.

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Hierarchy-Free Society Saves Nature

— HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY WOULD HARMONIZE HUMANS AND NATURE AND FOSTER BEAUTY.Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1990, Remaking Society, p.17

I submit that we must go beyond the superficial layer of ideas created by “biocentricity,” “antihumanism,” Malthusianism, and “deep ecology” at one extreme, and the belief in growth, competition, human “supremacy,” and social power at the other extreme. We must look at the social factors that have created both of these extremes in their many different forms and answer key questions about the human condition if we are to harmonize humanity’s relationship with nature.What, after all, is human society when we try to view it from an ecological perspective? A “Curse?” An unmitigated “blessing?” A “Device” for coping with material needs? Or, dare I say, a product of natural evolution as well as culture that not only meets a wide variety of human needs, but, potentially at least, can play a major role in fostering the evolution of life on the planet.

— DEPRIVATIZATION IS ESSENTIAL FOR HUMAN AND ECOLOGICAL SURVIVAL.Hayward, Tim, of the University of Glasmorgan, 1994, Ecological Thought, p.189

This claim was already forcefully advanced in Murray Bookchin’s seminal writings of the 1960s which argue that ecological and anarchist principles are mutually reinforcing. Bookchin believes there is not hierarchy in nature and that a society free of hierarchy is a precondition for putting ecological principles into practice; decentralization is therefore not only desirable but even necessary for human survival.

— AN END TO HIERARCHY WOULD BRING HUMANITY INTO PEACE WITH NATURE AND ITSELF.Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1995, Re-Enchanting Humanity, p.32

Social life, far from being divided from or placed in opposition to the natural world, would then be rationally integrated with first nature as a self-conscious dimension of a new, creative, richly differentiated, and meaningful whole. These goals, rooted in the still-unfinished Enlightenment, constitute a vision and passion that takes full note of humanity’s singularity and potential ability to ultimately create ecosocial institutions – institutions that will bring human beings into harmony with one another and humanity into harmony with the natural world.

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Anarchy Gives “Plenty For All”

— HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY WOULD PROVIDE PLENTY FOR ALL.Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.38

No, plenty for all is not a dream – though it was a dream indeed in those days when man, for all his pains, could hardly win a few bushels of wheat from an acre of land, and had to fashion by hand all the implements he used in agriculture and industry. Now it is no longer a dream, because man has invented a motor which, with a little iron and a few sacks of coal, gives him mastery of a creature strong and docile as a horse, and capable of setting the most complicated machinery in motion.But if plenty for all is to become a reality, this immense capital – cities, houses, pastures, arable lands, factories, highways, education – must cease to be regarded as private property, for the monopolist to dispose of at his pleasure.This rich endowment, painfully won, builded, fashioned, or invented by our ancestors, must become common property, so that the collective interests of men may gain from it the greatest good for all. There must be expropriation. The well-being of all – the end; expropriation – the means.

— HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY WOULD PROVIDE EVERYONE WITH BOTH FOOD AND LUXURIES.Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.108

We see that the worker, compelled to struggle painfully for bare existence, is reduced to ignore the higher delights, the highest within man’s reach, of science, and especially of scientific discovery; of art, and especially of artistic creation. It is in order to obtain for all of us joys that are now reserved to a few; in order to give leisure and the possibility of developing everyone’s intellectual capacities, that the social revolution must guarantee daily bread for all. After bread has been secured, leisure is the supreme aim. No doubt, nowadays, when hundreds and thousands of human beings are in need of bread, coal, clothing, and shelter, luxury is a crime; to satisfy it, the worker’s child must go without bread! But in a society in which all have the necessary food and shelter, the needs which we consider luxuries today will be more keenly felt.

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Anarchy Gives “Plenty For All”

— ELIMINATION OF HIERARCHY WOULD FREE WORKERS FROM MISERY, GIVING THEM THE LUXURIES OF HUMANITY. Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.148

What interest, in fact, can this depressing work have for the worker, when he knows that the fate awaiting him from the cradle to the grave will be to live in mediocrity, poverty, and insecurity of the morrow? Therefore, when we see the immense majority of men take up their wretched task every morning, we feel surprised at their perseverance, at their zeal for work, at the habit that enables them, like machines blindly obeying an impetus given, to lead this life of misery without hope for the morrow; without foreseeing ever so vaguely that some day they, or at least their children, will be part of a humanity rich in all the treasures of a bountiful nature, in all the enjoyments of knowledge, scientific and artistic creation, reserved today to a few privileged favourites.It is precisely to put an end to this separation between manual and brain work that we want to abolish wagedom, that we want the Social Revolution. Then work will no longer appear a curse of fate: it will become what it should be – the free exercise of all the faculties of man.

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Anarchy Frees

— HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETIES PROMOTE INDIVIDUAL AUTONOMY AND LIBERTY.Goldman, Emma, 1940, Anarchism (1970), p.45

Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities. Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access of the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.

— A HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY WOULD PRODUCE HAPPINESS, LIBERTY, AND JOY.Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.173

For the day on which old institutions will fall under the proletarian axe, voices will cry out: “Bread, shelter, ease for all!” And those voices will be listened to; the people will say: “Let us begin by allaying our thirst for life, for happiness, for liberty, that we have never quenched. And when we shall have tasted of this joy, we will set to work to demolish the last vestiges of middle-class rule: its ‘mine and yours’ institutions. ‘In demolishing we shall build’, as Proudhon said; and we shall build in the name of Communism and Anarchy.

— ANARCHISM ALONE FORWARDS TRUE HUMANITY AND FREEDOM.Goldman, Emma, 1940, Anarchism (1970), p.38

Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are nonexistent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man’s subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man. There is no conflict between the individual and the social instincts, any more than there is between the heart and the lungs: the one the receptacle of a precious life essence, the other the repository of the element that keeps the essence pure and strong. The individual is the heart of society, conserving the essence of social life; society is the lungs which are distributing the element to keep the life essence – that is, the individual – pure and strong.

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Anarchy Frees

— IN A HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY EQUALITY WOULD REIGN.Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.69

So Utopian are we that we go the length of believing that the Revolution can and ought to assure shelter, food, and clothes to all – an idea extremely displeasing to middle-class citizens, whatever their party colour, for they are quite alive to the fact that it is not easy to keep the upper hand of a people whose hunger is satisfied.All the same, we maintain our contention: bread must be found for the people of the Revolution, and the question of bread must take precedence of all other questions. If it is settled in the interests of the people, the Revolution will be on the right road; for in solving the question of Bread we must accept the principle of equality, which will force itself upon us to the exclusion of every other solution.

— A SOCIETY WITHOUT GOVERNMENT WOULD GRANT THE ONLY TRUE FREEDOM.Wolff, Robert, 1976, In Defense of Anarchism, p.81

The argument runs thus: men cannot be free so long as they are subject to the will of others, whether one man or several. But if men rule themselves, if they are both law-givers and law-obeyers, then they can combine the benefits of government with the blessings of freedom. Rule for the people is merely benevolent slavery, but rule by the people is true freedom.

Anarchy Grants Independence

— WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, HUMANITY WOULD BE INDEPENDENT AND FREE.Goldman, Emma, 1940, Anarchism (1970), p.81

In destroying government and statutory laws, anarchism proposes to rescue the self-respect and independence of the individual from all restraint and invasion by authority. Only in freedom can man grow to his full stature. Only in freedom will he learn to think and move, and give the very best in him. Only in freedom will he realize the true force of the social bonds which knit men together, and which are the true foundation of a normal social life.

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Anarchy Solves For Crime

— GOVERNMENT-FREE SOCIETY WOULD ELIMINATE CRIME.Rothbard, Murray, an economist, 1978, Nomos XIX: Anarchism, p.193

I assume with most observers that mankind is a mixture of good and evil, of cooperation 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 anarchist view is correct and the state is indeed the great legalized and socially legitimated channel for all manner of anti-social crime – theft, oppression, mass murder – on a massive scale, then surely abolition of such an engine of crime can do nothing but favor the good in man and discourage the bad.

— GOVERNMENT-FREE SOCIETY IS THE BEST ANSWER TO CRIME.Carter, April, a professor of political science, 1971, The Political Theory of Anarchism, p.40

Where the level of violent crimes is exceptionally high, or gangsterism particularly well entrenched, the anarchist case for abolishing the police may be most persuasive. In the United States, for example, an official Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence has stressed that poverty is the main cause of the crime rate, and urged the need to completely rebuild American cities. Nor does the existence of a police force sufficiently reassure the large number of householders who fear to walk outdoors at night, or have invested in their own guns – a truly Hobbesian picture.

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AT: Can’t Reject Capitalism

1) We have to at least try to undo our mistakes. There are still vestiges of free humanity remaining. These could be expanded.

2) WE CAN REJECT CAPITALISM AND SAVE OURSELVES. The Monthly Review, November 1997, Joel Kovel, p.13

Therefore capitalism must go if we are to survive as a civilization and, indeed, a species; and all partial measures and reforms should be taken in the spirit of bringing about capital’s downfall. Nothing could seem more daunting than this, indeed, in the current balance of forces, it seems inconceivable. Therefore the first job must be to conceive it as a possibility, and not to succumb passively to the given situation. Capital expresses no law of nature; it has been the result of choice, and there is no essential reason to assume it cannot be un-chosen. Conceiving things this way is scarcely sufficient. But it is necessary, in both a moral and a practical sense.

3) I’m rejecting capitalism right now. All we have to do is convince more people to think like me.

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Anarchy Solves For War

— A HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY WOULD BE IMMUNE TO WAR AND MOST SOCIAL PROBLEMS.Leight, Samuel, a professor at the University of Arizona, 1984, The Futility of Reformism, p.9

There can be no poverty in a classless society, technologically capable of satisfying the needs of the population, with free access to all goods and services. There can be no unemployment, when all men and women are co-owners of the means of production and distribution, giving of their abilities in useful work for society as well as for themselves. There can be no insecurity when all “needs” can be satisfied as the result of “common ownership” and “free access.” There can be no war when humanity is united as a whole without states, national boundaries, or armed forces; with production and distribution solely for use, and not for profit, eliminating money, wages, exchange, and the “market place.”

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AT: Governments Would Take Over Communes

1) Societies of free individuals would have nothing to offer nations – they would have no marketable goods.

2) ANARCHIST SOCIETIES COULD DEFEND THEMSELVES.Wolff, Robert, 1976, In Defense of Anarchism, p.81

If we assume a society of anarchists – a society, that is to say, which has achieved a level of moral and intellectual development at which superstitious beliefs in legitimacy of authority have evaporated – then the citizenry would be perfectly capable of choosing freely whether to defend the nation and carry its purpose beyond the national borders. The army itself could be run on the basis of voluntary commitments and submission to orders.

3) Extend- Bookchin in 1971: Once the U.S. acts, freedom will spread, communitizing the possible enemies.

4) ONCE PEOPLE HAVE LEARNED ABOUT THEIR FREEDOM, THEY CANNOT BE ENSLAVED. Douglass, Frederic, civil rights activist, August 4, 1857

Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. 5) It has been empirically proven – hierarchy-free communities don’t go to war.

6) ANARCHIST COMMUNITIES WOULD USE SOCIAL MEANS TO PRESERVE LIBERTY. Sharp, Gene, of the Albert Einstein Institute, 1990, Civilian-Based Defense, p.33

The degree of liberty or tyranny in any political society is, it follows, largely a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free, of their willingness and ability to organize themselves to live in freedom and, very importantly, their ability to resist any efforts to dominate or enslave them. Social power, not technological means of destruction, is the strongest guarantee of human freedom.

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AT: Anarchy Promotes Chaotic Individualism

1) GOVERNMENT-FREE SOCIETIES WOULD BE COMMUNITIES – NOT PLACES FOR CHAOTIC INDIVIDUALISM.McIntosh, Don, a professor of philosophy, 1978, Nomos XIX: Anarchism, p.269

Anarchism, however, is not for the individualist. It is inherently collectivistic. Those who have espoused anarchism on individualistic grounds are in error. Their views have not been internally coherent, or have rested on weak psychological or sociological grounds.

2) Extend- Bakunin in 1870: The new society would not favor individualists.

3) THE VIEW OF HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY AS “CHAOS” IS FLAWED.Chomsky, Noam, a linguist and policy analyst, 1995, interview with Kevin Doyle, http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/rbr/noamrbr2.html

The general intellectual culture, as you know, associates “anarchism” with chaos, violence, bombs, disruption, and so on. So people are often surprised when I speak positively of anarchism and identify myself with leading traditions within it. But my impression is that among the general public, the basic ideas seem reasonable when the clouds are cleared away.

4) Turn/ Today’s society is horribly individualist – People are oppressed for the good of exploiters.

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AT: No Incentive To Work In Anarchy

1) PEOPLE IN A FREE SOCIETY WOULD WORK BETTER AND ATTAIN GREATER WELL-BEING.Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.146

Well-being – that is to say, the satisfaction of physical, artistic, and moral needs, has always been the most powerful stimulant to work. And where a hireling hardly succeeds to produce the bare necessities with difficulty, a free worker, who sees ease and luxury increasing for him and for others in proportion to his efforts, spends infinitely far more energy and intelligence, and obtains first-class products in a far greater abundance. The one feels riveted to misery, the other hopes for ease and luxury in the future. In this lies the whole secret. Therefore a society aiming at well-being of all, and at the possibility of all enjoying life in all its manifestations, will give voluntary work, which will be infinitely superior and yield far more than work has produced up till now under the goad of slavery, serfdom, or wagedom.

2) This assumes modern society’s tendency toward exploitation which will disappear once hierarchy is removed.

3) PEOPLE ARE ONLY LAZY AND BAD WORKERS BECAUSE HIERARCHY FORCES THEM INTO MISERY. Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.156

Somebody has said that dust is matter in the wrong place. The same definition applies to nine tenths of those called lazy. They are people gone astray in a direction that does not answer to their temperament nor to their capacities. In reading the biography of great men, we are struck with the number of ‘idlers’ among them. They were lazy so long as they had not found the right path; afterwards they became laborious to excess. Darwin, Stephenson, and many others belonged to this category of idlers.Very often the idler is but a man to whom it is repugnant to spend all his life making the eighteenth part of a pin, or the hundredth part of a watch, while he feels he has exuberant energy which he would like to expend elsewhere. Often, too, he is a rebel who cannot submit to being fixed all his life to a work-bench in order to procure a thousand pleasures for his employer, while knowing himself to be far the less stupid of the two, and knowing his only fault to be that of having been born in a hovel instead of coming into the world in a castle.

4) Those who refuse to work could be excluded from the community. The majority would not suffer.

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AT: No Incentive To Work In Anarchy

5) FREEDOM WILL ELIMINATE LAZINESS TO THE EXTENT THAT LAWS WOULD BE UNNECESSARY.Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.158

Give the workman who cannot condemn himself to make all his life a minute particle of some object, who is stifled at his little tapping machine, which he ends by loathing, give him the chance of tilling the soil, of felling trees in the forest, sailing the seas in the teeth of a storm, dashing through space on an engine, but do not make an idler of him by forcing him all his life to attend to a small machine, to plough the head of a screw, or to drill the eye of a needle.Suppress the cause of idleness, and you may take it for granted that few individuals will really hate work, especially voluntary work, and that there will be no need to manufacture a code of laws on their account.

6) LIBERATION OF THE SLAVES AND SERFS PROVES THAT PEOPLE WORK HARDER WITHOUT COERCION. Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.144

They fear that without compulsion the masses will not work.But during our own lifetime, have we not heard the same fears expressed twice? Once, by the anti-abolitionists in America before the emancipation of the Negroes, and, for a second time, by the Russian nobility before the liberation of the serfs? “Without the whip the Negro will not work,” said the anti-abolitionist. “Free from their master’s supervision the serfs will Leave the fields uncultivated,” said the Russian serf-owners. It was the refrain -of the French noblemen in 1789, the refrain of the Middle Ages, a refrain as old as the world, and we shall hear it every time there is a question of sweeping away injustice. And each time the actual facts give it the lie. The liberated peasant of 1792 ploughed with an eager energy, unknown to his ancestors; the emancipated Negro works more than his fathers; and the Russian peasant, after having honoured the honeymoon of his emancipation by celebrating Fridays as well as Sundays, has taken up work with an eagerness proportionate to the completeness of his liberation. There, where the soil is his, he works desperately; that is the exact word for it. The anti-abolitionist refrain can be of value to slave-owners; as to the slaves themselves, they know what it is worth, as they know its motive.

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Anarchy Is Better Than Authoritarianism

— WE PROTECT FREEDOM BETTER THAN BUREAUCRATIC SOCIALISTS.Falk, Richard, a professor of International Law, 1978, Nomos XIX: Anarchism, p.65

Bureaucratic socialists, those who seek to seize state power rather than to decompose it, contemptuously dismiss anarchists or libertarian socialists as utopians, or worse, as reactionaries. But the anarchist response is more credible than the challenge here presented. The anarchist quite properly contends that merely to seize power is to default upon the humanist content of socialism and to create a new form of despotism.

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Representative Democracy Is Oppressive

— EVEN REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACIES ARE OPPRESSIVE. Hoffman, Robert, a professor of History, 1970, Anarchism, p.12

Anarchists believe that this ideal can not be fulfilled: those to whom the people’s authority is delegated do not and can not act as their constituents require. Instead, representatives and officials act in their own interests, those of political parties, and those of privileged minorities with powers far in excess of ordinary people. Anarchists are cynical about the possibilities of officials acting disinterestedly; there is too much occasion for corruption by the prerogatives of power and by the methods needed to attain power. Even when relatively uncorrupted and impartial, those in authority are too distant from the bulk of the populace really to know their needs and beliefs.

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AT: Perm

1) Extend- Friedman in 1989: Any remaining government returns society to statism.

2) HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY AND STATISM ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE – GOVERNMENTS CANNOT ACCEPT OUR GOALS.Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1971, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p.78

Anarchism is not only a stateless society but also a harmonized society which exposes man to the stimuli provided by both agrarian and urban life, to physical activity and mental activity, to unrepressed sensuality and self-directed spirituality, to communal solidarity and individual development, to regional uniqueness and worldwide brotherhood, to spontaneity and self-discipline, to the elimination of toil and the promotion of craftsmanship. In our schizoid society, these goals are regarded as mutually exclusive, indeed as sharply opposed.

3) You can’t simply have the affirmative policy standing alone as the sole governance structure. It’s solvency requires enforcement, funding, and political passage – all responsibilities of other government agencies.

4) Extend- Bakunin in 1870: Any act of government control is oppressive.

5) In order for a hierarchy-free society to succeed, a clear message must be sent to the people that government is wrong. The permutation would muddle this message and pervert the counterplan’s ideals.

6) HISTORY PROVES THAT LIMITED GOVERNMENTS EXPAND.Friedman, David, a professor at the University of Chicago, 1989, The Machinery of Freedom, p.146

Would it not be better to have a severely limited government doing those few things which it could do better? Perhaps it would be – if the government stayed that way. Here we run into the problem discussed in Chapter 4. One cannot simply build any imaginable characteristics into a government; governments have their own internal dynamic. And the internal dynamic of limited governments is something with which we, to our sorrow, have a good deal of personal experience. It took about 150 years, starting with the Bill of Rights that reserved to the states and the people all powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government, to produce a Supreme Court willing to rule that growing corn to feed to your own hogs is interstate commerce and can therefore be regulated by Congress

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AT: Anarchy Would Lead To Primitivism

1) Turn/ A hierarchy-free society would actually find more, better, and more liberating uses for technology than exist in the status quo.

2) Our counterplan doesn’t say that we reject technology! For this argument to carry any weight, the affirmative team has to prove that our authors are against technology.

3) A GOVERNMENT-FREE SOCIETY WOULD EMBRACE TECHNOLOGY TO ENHANCE HUMANITY AND NATURE. Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1971, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p.134

A liberated society, I believe, will not want to negate technology precisely because it is liberated and can strike a balance. It may well want to assimilate the machine to artistic craftsmanship. By this I mean the machine will remove toil from the productive process, leaving its artistic completion to man. The machine, in effect, will participate in human creativity. There is no reason why automatic, cybernated machinery cannot be used so that the finishing products, especially those destined for personal use, is left to the community.

4) Kropotkin and Bookchin, primary authors, specifically rely upon advanced technology to reduce drudgery and toil.

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AT: Anarchy Would Lead To Primitivism

— LAWS ARE UNJUST HINDRANCES TO HUMANITY WHICH CAN BE TRANSCENDED.Thoreau, Henry David, 1854, Slavery In Massachuesetts

Will mankind never learn that policy is not morality – that it never secures any moral right, but considers merely what is expedient? chooses the available candidate – who is invariably the Devil – and what right have his constituents to be surprised, because the Devil does not behave like an angel of light? What is wanted is men, not of policy, but of probity – who recognize a higher law than the Constitution, or the decision of the majority. The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls – the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.

— WE MUST TRANSGRESS UNJUST LAWS.Thoreau, Henry David, 1849, Civil Disobedience

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them?

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Laws Bad

— LAWS ARE CORRUPT AND FAIL.Hoffman, Robert, a professor of history, 1970, Anarchism, p.5

Thus, in the anarchist view, people are deluded when they suppose that order and justice are created and regulated by law and powerful institutions. Such order is mere appearance, behind which actually is the chaos of men struggling to subjugate and hurt each other, to gain at the expense of others. Such justice is a sham, called righteous by those able to dominate while making law serve their own interests

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AT: Anarchy Won’t Work With A Large Population

1) Government-free society would consist of decentralized communities. We could liberate the entire world and still have small communities by simply shunning cities.

2) A LARGE POPULATION WOULD NOT HINDER GOVERNMENT-FREE SOCIETY.Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1990, Remaking Society, p.175Nor can populations be so large or the number of assemblies so numerous that they cannot be coordinated in a manner that perpetuates their integrity as face-to-face policy-making bodies. Delegates to town, city, and regional bodies, can be regarded simply as the walking mandates of the local assemblies.

3) With the increase in efficiency of production attained by liberation, government-free society would be able to deal with large populations better than the status quo.

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Everything Must Be Deprivatized

— ALL MUST BE DEPRIVATIZED – ARTICLES OF CONSUMPTION ARE AS IMPORTANT AS THOSE OF PRODUCTION.Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.64

Some Socialists still seek, however, to establish a distinction. “Of course,” they say, “the soil, the mines, the mills, and manufactures must be expropriated, these are the instruments of production, and it is right we should consider them public property. But articles of consumption – food, clothes, and dwellings – should remain private property.”Popular common sense has got the better of this subtle distinction. We are not savages who can live in the woods, without other shelter than branches. The civilized man needs a roof, a room, a hearth, and a bed. It is true that the bed, the room, and the house is a home of idleness for the non-producer. But for the worker, a room, properly heated and lighted, is as much an instrument of production as the tool or the machine. It is the place where the nerves and sinews gather strength for the work of the morrow.

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AT: Unfair To Reward Skilled and Unskilled Labor Equally

1) In modern society, not everybody has the opportunity to get a job which requires skills. The wealthy have great advantages that are inherited by their children while poor families suffer eternally.

2) In a hierarchy-free society, everyone could choose their own job. People who decide to take up skilled labor would do so because they enjoy it.

3) Unskilled labor is no worse than mind work. It’s only in modern society where people are able to get away with exploiting others that physical jobs are seen as degrading.

4) In a free society, everyone would have everything they needed. It would be impossible to give extra bonuses to certain workers.

5) The only advantage to getting paid more than others is that you are brought into a position of greater power. This power can only be used to enslave.

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Wage System Will Fall With Capitalism

— THE WAGE SYSTEM WILL FALL ALONGSIDE CAPITALISM.Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.46

The wage system arises out of the individual ownership of the land and the instruments of labor. It was the necessary condition for the development of capitalist production, and will perish with it, in spite of the attempt to disguise it as “profit-sharing”. The common possession of the instruments of labor must necessarily bring with it the enjoyment in common of the fruits of common labor.

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AT: Anarchy Is Utopian

1) Extend- Kropotkin in 1906: All we have to do to destroy hierarchy is to strike at it once.

2) THE ACTS OF A FEW, BRAVE INDIVIDUALS COULD BE ENOUGH TO SPUR SOCIETAL CHANGE.Kropotkin, Peter, an anarchist theorist, 1880, The Spirit of Revolt (within Le Revolt)

When a revolutionary situation arises in a country, before the spirit of revolt is sufficiently awakened in the masses to express itself in violent demonstrations in the streets or by rebellions and uprisings, it is through action that minorities succeed in awakening that feeling of independence and that spirit of audacity without which no revolution can come to a head. Men of courage, not satisfied with words, but ever searching for the means to transform them into action, – men of integrity for whom the act is one with the idea, for whom prison, exile, and death are preferable to a life contrary to their principles,--intrepid souls who know that it is necessary to dare in order to succeed, – these are the lonely sentinels who enter the battle long before the masses are sufficiently roused to raise openly the banner of insurrection and to march, arms in hand, to the conquest of their rights. In the midst of discontent, talk, theoretical discussions, an individual or collective act of revolt supervenes, symbolizing the dominant aspirations.

3) Hierarchy-free societies existed before in ancient Crete and the Middle-ages. It can happen again.

4) WE CAN REJECT HIERARCHY AND SAVE OURSELVES. The Monthly Review, November 1997, Joel Kovel, p.13

Therefore capitalism must go if we are to survive as a civilization and, indeed, a species; and all partial measures and reforms should be taken in the spirit of bringing about capital’s downfall. Nothing could seem more daunting than this, indeed, in the current balance of forces, it seems inconceivable. Therefore the first job must be to conceive it as a possibility, and not to succumb passively to the given situation. Capital expresses no law of nature; it has been the result of choice, and there is no essential reason to assume it cannot be un-chosen. Conceiving things this way is scarcely sufficient. But it is necessary, in both a moral and a practical sense.

5) We have to at least try to move beyond the current system of enslavement.

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AT: Anarchy Is Utopian

6) WE CAN ADVANCE TO THE NEXT STEP IN SOCIETY TO ATTAIN FREEDOM.Thoreau, Henry David, 1849, Civil Disobedience

The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to, – for I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well, – is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a limited democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?

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AT: Cards Are Too Old

1) Although our evidence is old, it comes from some of most respected thinkers of all time.

2) Issues of slavery and dehumanization don’t change over time. Oppression is always wrong.

3) We do read recent evidence from Bookchin and Friedman, proving that thoughts of a hierarchy-free society still exist.

4) The age of our evidence further proves the fact that hierarchy is always damaging.

5) The affirmative’s evidence is from journalists, authors, and professors. We quote some of the founders of the freedom movement – people who actually experienced oppression in Russia and Germany.

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Must act against Government

— OBEYING UNJUST LAWS AND GOVERNMENTS IS IMMORAL AND COUNTERPRODUCTIVE. Thoreau, Henry David, 1854, Slavery In Massachuesetts

The amount of it is, if the majority vote the Devil to be God, the minority will live and behave accordingly – and obey the successful candidate, trusting that, some time or other, by some Speaker's casting-vote, perhaps, they may reinstate God. This is the highest principle I can get out or invent for my neighbors. These men act as if they believed that they could safely slide down a hill a little way – or a good way – and would surely come to a place, by and by, where they could begin to slide up again. This is expediency, or choosing that course which offers the slightest obstacles to the feet, that is, a downhill one. But there is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of "expediency." There is no such thing as sliding up hill. In morals the only sliders are backsliders.

— IT IS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO DEMAND REFORM FROM THE GOVERNMENT – INDIVIDUALS MUST ACT AGAINST OPPRESSION.Thoreau, Henry David, 1849, Civil Disobedience

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it. The slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur. Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. Some are petitioning the state to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves, – the union between themselves and the state, – and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury?

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