Greek Theater

What is wrong with that picture? Or this one:

Flights were grounded and trains suspended amid a nationwide general strike Thursday, as Greek police fought running street battles with anarchist youths in fresh and violent signs of anger at the government's austerity plans.

Stop there. The anarchists are protesting cuts in government spending? Doesn't it sound like there are several thousand words missing from that paragraph?

Anarchists are supposed to be opposed to the very existence of government. Surely cutting government spending would get them a little bit closer to that goal. Of course, it's a lot more fun to be an anarchist when the government covers your health care costs and living expenses, so you don't actually have to get a job.

Those who think that the American Tea Party movement encourages violence might take a look at what real political violence looks like. Those who wonder what the Tea Party people fear might take a look at Greece. From the London Times:

Economists regard the bloated civil service with its jobs for life and generous pensions as a cancer consuming the country's resources. The older generation, the experts grimly concur, turned the state into a giant cash machine to be plundered at will.

The Times takes a closer look at the Greek cancer.

Public sector workers are virtually unsackable, can retire as early as 45 and get bonuses for using a computer, speaking a foreign language and arriving at work on time.

Some of them get as many as four extra months' salary a year, compared with the 14 months that are paid to other Greek workers. One of the most generous bonuses is paid to unmarried daughters of dead employees in state-controlled banks: they can inherit their parents' pensions.

Maybe I should check, but I believe that there are only twelve months in a year. Apparently Greek workers get paid fourteen months out of the year, and public sector workers get paid eighteen months out of the year. The Greek government doesn't just need to reduce its spending, it needs to reduce its calendar.

It's not just generosity that is the problem. The Greek government makes it hard to generate productive business in the first place.

When [Konstantinos] Michalos started a commodities trading business in London in the 1980s, the paperwork took him 48 hours, he said. In Greece's "Soviet-style" economy he had to go through 117 bureaucratic procedures to get the right government permits. A wealthy friend of his had taken 10 years to win permission to put up a hotel.

The New York Times is also offended by the Greeks. But what is eating the Times is not that public employees enjoy ridiculous benefits or that regulatory strangulation renders the economy sclerotic. It's that too many Greeks aren't paying their taxes. I humbly suggest that this is all the same problem. Ridiculous spending leads to ridiculous taxes, which leads in turn to massive tax evasion. Ask the Russians.

Greece is going belly up financially, and because of the Euro it threatens to take down the rest of Europe with it. The PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain) are the most vulnerable, but apparently Britain is not far behind. I hope it's not bigoted of me to say that. Keep Gordon Brown's microphone on, please.

Meanwhile back in the States California is going belly up due to exactly the same causes as operate in Greece. On the Federal level, we are running trillion dollar a year deficits, and the majority party deals with this by passing a 900 billion per ten year health care reform that is really a trillion and a half per ten year program. Not to worry. They are also pushing an energy bill that would intentionally retard economic growth.

The American Left has always wanted to make America more like Europe. Well, we are getting there.

Comments

[William]

Pay heed, if we continue on the path we're on, this is our future. (and this is just the start of the Euro breakdown.)

[twitchard]

I think it'd be a good idea to clarify that these European "anarchists" are the Pierre-Joseph "property is theft" Proudhon-type anarchists--who are really socialists who just like to call themselves anarchists. Very different from the libertarianish Anarcho-capitalist types we have a lot more of in the United States (and even in the tea party movement.)

[Guard]

William, we were already headed there...this is the great Global Economic Collapse that pretty much makes everything else we discuss on this blog...meaningless.

[KB]

William and Guard: I do not claim to know where all this will lead, but it does look like the U.S. Government is on the path to Greece. California is already there. I am not predicting global collapse. At least in the near term, the system will weather this crisis. But the weather may be very unpleasant.

twitchard: thanks for the clarification. I don't know my anarchists very well, but I think that one cannot really be a socialist and an anarchist at the same time. I suspect you are right about them, they are in fact the first but not the second.

[Guard]

KB, I was wrong. Things are actually going great for a change. Nothing is going to happen here. Let's continue to par-tay!!!

[Patrick]

Anarchists have traditionally been extremely egalitarian and socially minded. Anarchists do not even technically envision a world "without government", only a world in which no social or economic relationships are based hierarchy and coercive force, and all forms of exploitation are abolished. This brings anarchist into conflict with capitalism, western representative democracies, and authoritarian leftist regimes. After almost every communist revolution, Anarchists have been imprisoned or executed.

Anarchists and other, more authoritarian leftists have their antagonisms, but they are both extremely in favor of providing support for the labor movement and social programs that encourage redistribution and collectivization.

Another term to describe them would be Libertarian Socialists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

[KB]

Patrick: thanks for the thought-provoking comment. If indeed anarchists don't "even technically envision a world "without government"," but instead "encourage redistribution and collectivization," then they aren't anarchists. They are socialists. I am not sure what the phrase "libertarian socialists" could possibly mean.

[Patrick]

Check it out, I provided a link to the wikipedia article for the term. Here it is again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

Anarchism and Socialism are not mutually exclusive terms. To understand this, one must have a clear understanding of the word "socialism". Socialism is too often in America lazily associated with hyper-authoritarian regimes like the USSR under Stalin. Despite this, Socialism has no explicit implications of authoritarianism. Socialism concerns itself with the ownership of the "means of production" in a given society, with workers having direct ownership over their workplaces and the instruments that make society work. Anarchists advocate socialism because it is a system that seeks to remedy many of the injustices of capitalism.

Again, Anarchists are not against governance or order. Anarchists envision an extremely orderly society and equally elaborate apparatuses to organize it. The difference is, to anarchists, stripping these systems of coercive control and hierarchy.

[twitchard]

"Anarchists are not against governance?" But I thought anarchy meant "rule by none."

And it seems to me that socialism _does_ have explicit implications of authoritarianism. If your goal is to reallocate the means of production in a society to eliminate the capitalist-worker system because it is supposedly coercive, you must inevitably use 'coercive control' to prevent workers from voluntarily entering into these relationships in the first place.

Therefore any 'elaborate apparatuses' which these so-called 'anarchists' envision to achieve their ideal society will require the use of coercive force itself, you might as well call it a government, or an "archy."

[twitchard]

...and "an archy" is very different from "anarchy".