Laugh if you can, monkey boy (to paraphrase John Lithgow), but at least I get to both write and eat. To be able to do both in Miami is something just a bit short of hitting the Florida lottery. And I'm afraid I'm not finished writing yet, because I need to go into more detail about why the idea of the police, and of my identity as a Black male, make me have such an ever-growing conviction that I am an anarchist.

I'm puzzled, however, by the currently fashionable concept of "market anarchism." I'm afraid I'm perhaps an old fashioned, collectivist anarchist of the type portrayed by Ursula K. LeGuin in her novel, The Dispossessed. As I take it, "market" anarchism is anarchism in the sense that it opposes hierarchical government control of economic life, particularly in the form of state domination of the economic life of the individual. Domination, as in taxation; as in police force brought to bear to enforce state expropriation of property; as in compulsory military service without even monetary compensation for the soldier's expropriated labor; etc., and so forth.

Though this seems to me in my current neophytic state to be a curiously selective form of anarchism, I nevertheless find that many market anarchists usually oppose the same things about statism that I am questioning and opposing. My suspicion is that the legitimacy of the state as it is, here and now anyway, is false. One of my favorite anarchist columnists lately, Diane Rhodes, a market anarchist, wrote recently that her opposition to the state grows out of her doubt about "the legitimacy of the government to rule me and others," as she puts it. Supposedly, it's based on a social contract. But when did I sign it?

Finally, a friend pointed out that voting is my signature. That was the only thing that made sense to me—and it led me to question whether I should continue to vote, to give my consent to the current government. I intended only to determine whether or not supporting this government, as it stands, is justifiable. I was led through quite a few questions before I was able to get to that issue at all.

What is the nature of government? I knew that the typical answer to this is that of the "holder of force," that force is government's backbone; but this wasn't exactly it. . . The individual is that, an individual, capable of making rational decisions—good decisions, most of the time, if one looks at the people around him. A government is composed of many individuals, yes, but none of those individuals may use his rational decision-making alone; it is the consensus reached by the whole, by the collective-typically democratically. A "collective mind" can never be rational, except by chance; a non-rational mind can never make the best decision about anything, except by chance. And yet, in government, this collective mind has the power to control the rational individual.

For a moment we'll put aside my suspicion that Rhodes is indulging in a convenient reductio-ad-absurdum-an argument that reduces the claims of an opposing argument to fallacy or absurdity through formal logic. What appeals to me about what she has to say here is the idea that a possibly coercive group (such as a government) can (and let's face it, most often does) control the actions of a rational individual who cannot resist the coercion of that group. Rhodes wishes to defend the liberty and by extension the superior rationality of that individual. So, she attacks the idea of the collective and of collective democracy.

What seems problematic to me about what she has to say though is that she does choose to defend individualism through a reductio. Her reductio is structured something like this:

1. (The collective claims that) collective democracy ensures liberty for the individual and is in fact superior to individual attempts as ensuring liberty.

2. (The collective claims that) coercion is the means to sustain the formation of the collective such that there will be liberty; or, it is at least true that, the existence of collective coercion is a necessary condition for the control of those individuals who would reject the decisions of the collective.

3. (The collective claims that) liberty is the absolute principle of democracy.

4. (The collective claims that) liberty must be managed, directed, controlled and policed by the collective, for the sake of democracy.

Therefore:

5. (The collective implies that) liberty is the enemy of liberty, (by 2 and 4) and that in the name of democracy, those who exercise democratic liberty must be restrained (by 1, 2, and 4).

What goes hand-in-hand with her reductio—as is usually the case with George F. Will's ardent use of this form of argument—is the casting of her own argument in an airtight deductive form. When her deductively true argument is compared to the absurdum argument she has outlined, she wins, of course. Her argument in essence claims that:

1. Only lone minds can ever be rational.

2. A collective, by definition, acts as a group mind.

Therefore:

3. Collectives can never act rationally.

I think she proffers the reductio and her own rational, deductive alternative to it in order to beg the question, and to rhetorically defeat the idea of collective legitimacy. Her reductio depends upon deductive truth—a very George F. Will way to structure an argument. He typically sets up premises which are not necessarily true and then argues from those perhaps untrue premises to a conclusion he wants to endorse; a conclusion which may be valid (when the conclusion follows from the premises and so is deductively valid—taken to be "true"), but not necessarily sound (when the conclusion follows from the premises and the premises themselves are true).

Let's see now. The collective must ineluctably exert irrational control over the "rational" individual who is by her very nature rational (by the fact of her solitude and of her anti-collective self-determination)? Seems like begging the question to me. But let's put that aside for the moment, because I want to ask an even more crucial question regarding this claim that the collective produces anti-liberty while the individual produces freedom

How is this claim distinct from Libertarianism, or, God forbid the solipsistic brand of Libertarianism implicit in the themes of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead? Rand's rational individual (an architect, just in case you might doubt just how sagacious, how rational, how gifted he is) must produce freedom as a lonely genius. His quest is for a freedom he's got to produce, over more, against an ignorant, irrational mob—the "collective"—whose brutish, even vaguely Italian passions burn all the more cataclysmically because of their constant need to gather, work, and think in groups.

Rand's fiction is not without a certain gut appeal to anyone who suffers civil, personal or familial repression. Her fictions are particularly appealing to the emotionally tempestuous disposition of the young and immature, but I'm neither of those, and in fact, even when I was an adolescent I found Rand's ideas to be repugnant. "Fountainhead" seemed to me to lionize a protagonist who, however justifiably enraged by repressive civil, social, personal, and corporate forces, was nevertheless boorish, self-righteous, and self-absorbed. Ironically, his haughty contempt for the masses—his oppressors (drawn by Rand in very Spike Lee-ish caricatures of racist ethnic type) is an echo of European noblesse. He perfectly incarnates the anti-humanist root of Randianism's concept of intellectual rigor at the expense of human empathy and compassion. His radical libertarianism's inner face is the image of the elitism of hereditary nobility, and is a very European and patrilineal face at that. This is a form of elitism that is very rampant, I might add, amongst Ivy League English majors.

Noblesse was of course incubated, nurtured and protected by the institutions of monarchy. Rand's protagonists remind me of nothing so much as exiled princes, put-upon patriarchs, and wistful, nostalgic czars. They are (typically men) who've lost their Kremlins to one or two rampaging groups. These groups, like infections let go too long without penicillin, have gone, in Rand's fictive world, from the nuisance of trade unions and worker alliances to the evil of socialist brigades. Or so Rand's protagonists see it. They struggle on in their lonely solitarian pride against the garlic and onion overtaking their own bland, Anglo-Teutonic geist.

To my mind, the alternative to loss of individual autonomy is not solipsism. Hence, my tendency toward collectivism, though not the collectivism of "race" (see my Colin Powell bashing above) nor of class, gender, or family (I remember how when I first read of Wal-Mart's world-conquering philosophy of creating of its underpaid workforce "one big happy family," I was deeply disturbed. From what I know of the exploitative emotional blackmail and the rigidified hierarchical divisions of authority inherent in families, this Wal-Mart tactic was a very troubling notion).

Race, class, and gender groups aside, I've been wondering: is anti-collectivism reconcilable with anarchism as defined by classical anarchists? Proudon, in "What Is Property" defines anarchy as "the absence of a master or a sovereign." Kropotkin points out that 'anarchy' comes from the Greek, Archos, meaning monarch, ruler, director, or authority. So anarchy means "without a monarch or ruler." I find in my reading that women anarchists in particular, such as Emma Goldman and Susan Brown, have tended to be subtle and thoroughgoing in their definitions of anarchism. In The Politics of Individualism by Brown, for instance, she argues that the popular understanding of anarchism "is of a violent, anti-State movement, [but] anarchism is a much more subtle and nuanced tradition then a simple opposition to government power. Anarchists oppose the idea that power and domination are necessary for society, and instead advocate more co-operative, anti-hierarchical forms of social, political and economic organisation."

More over, Goldman writes in "Anarchism: What it Really Stands For" that "Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man's subordination."

Goldman is clearly directing her comments about "God, the State, and society" at the same complex of forces which anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon called, "The somber Trinity of State, Capital, and the Church." Magnon, who inspired the revolutionary communes of Baja, California during the 1911 Magonista Revolt of the Mexican revolution, names the same three aspects of monarchal domination in our lives.

It seems to me that since anarchism as Goldman defines it seeks to defend and engender our liberty (putting aside for now the inevitable and valid reminders we will get from all quarters, of anarchism's historical failure to do so). Anarchism does not simply fetishize "the State" and direct all its energies at that fetish; rather, it seeks to free us from all forms of coercion, authority, domination and exploitation (of our minds, our bodies, our liberty, our spiritual energies, our sexuality, our desires, and our labor). It sees coercion as a complex, not a single point. A continuum, from our most private and personal relations to the largest and most public interactions we must negotiate in a civil society.

There should therefore be a valid reason to want to selectively call ourselves "market anarchists," "Christian anarchists," or "African anarchists" (just to mention a few groups that actually exist and have Web sites!). There should rationally be some reason other than sheer collectivism itself (as in cliquishness, freedom of association between individuals of like mind and like interests, etc.), and other than naked interest (as in economic interest, religious interest, racial interest, etc.). I pose these questions not especially to challenge Diane Rhodes, but to inquire what she and other market anarchists ultimately mean to say about what seems to be their opposition to collectivism.

To be sure, I'm suspicious of the Socialist, utopian left. Look, I've been rejected so much by the editors there that I now suspect I couldn't pay Zeta Magazine to publish me, and I doubt that The Nation would publish me even if I went John Q on them and held hostages up in there. No doubt some people will think I'm merely attacking Rhodes and market anarchism for the hell of it, but hopefully the more thoughtful of you will recognize that I'm doing what any anarchist ought to do: offering dissent. I'd appreciate guidance at my e-mail address <raylena_2000@nospamyahoo.com> from Diane, or anyone else who is willing to defend anti-collectivism as a reconcilable aspect of anarchism.

If it isn't really anarchism, but just another twist on capitalism, why call it that? Perhaps because somebody thinks capital is reconcilable with anarchy? Anarchy rejects government. It is government, which controls, mediates, taxes, restrains, regulates, and interdicts (and gets seduced by) Capital. Capitalists might want to eliminate this last stumbling block to Capital's "liberty."