Anarchy versus Panarchy
Dwight Johnson writes:
"I am always amazed when people cannot distinguish between anarchy and panarchy, between "no government" and "all governments". It is clear to me that anarchy merely replaces one territorial monopoly of coercion with another, which, as Adam Knott pointed out, John Zube's "On Tolerance"1 so brilliantly refutes. Panarchy, on the other hand, is a human rights movement, based on the acknowledgement that each and every person has the human right to choose for themselves which form of government, at every level, is right for them, including no government. Clearly "no government" is but one possible choice.
As for other examples of panarchy, other than al Qaeda2, I believe it was Richard Johnsson who pointed out the independent school districts that, at least at one time, existed in Quebec, one for anglophones, one for francophones. Also, the Amish people, who are exempt from many of the burdens of the US federal government, most noticeably the Social Security system, is important.
Panarchy is not about politics. It is about human rights. It is agnostic where the form of government, including the absence of government, is concerned."
1 "The Worker's Party has, in common with other parties, a basic intolerance: its platform is to be realised for all, even dissenters. The possibility for them to opt out or not to be subjected to the Worker's Party's laws in the first place is not spelled out, or is at most only weakly hinted at or implied in some passages. But such an important truth must be got across as clearly and unmistakably as possible if we want to avoid the usual party struggle."
2 At the 2010 Prague Conference on Political Economy Aviezer Tucker, according to Adam Knott, had used the example of Al-Qaeda to illustrate how difficult and expensive it would be for a territorial state to militarily defeat a panarchist society or community. Adam: In this example, I believe Avi was able to effectively make an important point about panarchism, and also show how panarchism is in fact working today. Granted that Al-Qaeda is not a great advertisement for panarchism. However, it is a society that exists nonterritorially, it exists without much operating expense, and it has proven difficult and expensive to eradicate. These were important points Avi made which showed how the panarchist idea is not merely an abstraction, but something that "works." Avi later added that the point of the Al Qaeda example was to demonstrate the incommensurability between a non-territorial group (evil though it is) and a territorial state. When the latter attempts to fight a non-territorial enemy by territorial means it ends up being very expensive because it wastes resources on controlling territories and inhabitants that are not directly involved, whereas the non-territorials can simply move on to another territory. It would have been far more effective and cheaper to fight Al Qaeda in their own non-territorial universe. But that would have required new non-territorial thinking on part of the powers that be, and they simply can't think in such terms.
