Few things are more certain to elicit righteous anger from anarcho-libertarians than mention of State security forces: overt and covert police, armed forces, and intelligence agencies. For sure, even when they are those possessed by the liberal democracies and not merely the tools of some outright dictator or particularly vile political or religious creed, there are often very good reasons for this. For example, their enforcement of laws incompatible with individual liberty; their role in suppressing ‘extremist’ ideologies such as anarcho-libertarianism that threaten the status quo; their overly enthusiastic support of many of the world’s despots in the name of ‘national interest;’ and of course their all-to-frequent engagement in abuses of power and outright criminality that even the liberal democracies deplore in principle.
Instead, the real reason for anarcho-libertarians’ hostility to the security forces is not so much what they do, but rather what they are: amongst the most important creatures of ‘the State,’ a concept that anarcho-libertarians simply regard as a fictitious warrant for certain individuals to acquire and exercise aggressively coercive power over others. But this is to miss what ought to be the real reason behind anarcho-libertarians’ hostility towards the security forces, and it is a trap into which many can and do fall and end up looking like fools. For if one is to take this empirical approach and enumerate all the bad things that State security forces actually do, then honesty requires one to admit that—again at least in the liberal democracies—they also do a lot of desirable things as well, a concept that many anarcho-libertarians find quite heretical. For example, they can detect and apprehend— perhaps even fend off beforehand—those who commit crimes that would be considered wrongs in the most anarchistic of societies such as physical assaults or the theft of personal property; they can deter the armies of a mad despot who has a cowed people and the resources of a country upon which to call; and yes it needs to be admitted that they can suppress terrorist-inclined political and religious movements of a collectivist nature compared to which liberal democracy seems like paradise on earth.
The problem comes when, having rejected the notion of the State and thus regarding as inherently illegitimate any coercive power that an individual or organization exercises in the name of the State, anarcho-libertarians sometimes are perceived to—and sometimes actually do—reject reflexively everything that the so-called State and its agencies do. Anarcho-libertarians also oppose compulsory schooling and ‘public-sector’ healthcare, both of which are funded out of coercively expropriated taxation and which place severe limits on individual choice by, for example, many forms of more-or-less mandatory occupational licensing. Yet we emphatically do not oppose either education or healthcare. Indeed, we say that a freer life will enrich these very things by allowing greater experiment and innovation outside of the straightjacket imposed by the State. What we do say, however, is that no one should be forced to ‘participate’ in these services, whether as a funder or a consumer. So too with the security forces. It is not security as such that anarcho-libertarians reject, but the illegitimately coercive nature of State security.
Another aspect of this is the crypto-world-revolutionaryism and (in its pejorative sense) utopianism that still afflicts many anarcho-libertarians. To put it simply: that anarcho-libertarianism ‘will come about’ (a) very rapidly via some mass uprising, (b) more-or-less simultaneously throughout the world, and furthermore that (c) all of the flaws of mankind will disappear once liberated from the corruption of Statism.
Sensible anarchists and libertarians have long eschewed revolution as a realistic mechanism for advancing their cause. Firstly, at any give stage, there is only so far that even the most ‘liberal State—or rather the individuals who benefit from promoting the fiction—can be pushed, and the asymmetry of power in the even semi-advanced nations—not least from the very security forces under discussion here, of course—is these days such to ensure the revolution’s defeat. Second, that history shows—with the partial exceptions of the three English revolutions in the 1640s, the 1680s, and in the American colonies in the 1770s—that the winning side in revolutions tend to espouse even more despotic beliefs than the various regimes that they overthrew and that furthermore they tend to be led by men with a personal predilection for violence. What this inescapably leads to—except for those who wish and are able to live as self-sufficient hermits away from the world—is the belief in some form of generally peaceful gradualism. This means that at any given moment some aspects of the State might be more sensibly—from both a tactical and ethical point of view—attacked by word and (non-violent) deed than others.
If this is true within our existing countries, then so too is it true amongst the many different countries in the world today. Even if an anarcho-libertarian society was established in a country—or a sufficiently large portion of it so that by that stage the remaining Statist-inclined had accepted defeat in at least that region—there would still most likely remain other Statist countries, often controlled by men and ideologies of astonishing aggressiveness and cruelty. In short, the newly-founded anarcho-libertarian society, having achieved success against domestic Statists, must either now defend itself against often malignant and militarily well-equipped foreign Statists or die soon after its birth. This can only be done—assuming that it is not also a wholly pacifist society—by the retention of troops and hardware in sufficient numbers, training, and modernity to see off the threat. Anarchism is not ‘disorder.’ but voluntary and spontaneous order formed from the one unifying purpose of defending mutual individual liberty.
The point is that anarcho-libertarians need to be careful that they do not in fact, nor even in appearance, ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater.’ They need to demonstrate that they take security seriously, both in showing that they are not naive about the realities of human nature or international politics, that even in the most anarcho-libertarian society there will be remain a need for security forces to counter both domestic (‘criminal’) and foreign (‘military’) threats, and also that there are in reality only a certain number of effective ways that this can be arranged.
Finally, anarcho-libertarians, in common with most other reasonable observers of the world as it actually is, fully recognize that one does not have to be a Marxist to acknowledge that social systems can have a profound impact on the attitudes, beliefs, behavior, and social psychology of people. This is why, for example, even within the parameters relating to the various political settlements that we see in the world today, corruption tends to be positively associated with (relative) political authoritarianism: despotism breeds distrust and mendacity. Nevertheless, it is credulous in the extreme to think that criminality—the tendency of some individuals to choose to act as invasive human parasites—will wholly disappear in an anarcho-libertarian society. Therefore, some form of security and police—by whatever name they are known—will still be needed.
The point is that anarcho-libertarians need to be careful that they do not in fact, nor even in appearance, ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater.’ They need to demonstrate that they take security seriously, both in showing that they are not naive about the realities of human nature or international politics, that even in the most anarcho-libertarian society there will be remain a need for security forces to counter both domestic (‘criminal’) and foreign (‘military’) threats, and also that there are in reality only a certain number of effective ways that this can be arranged.
Finally and vitally for the promotion of the cause of liberty, anarcho-libertarians need steadfastly to maintain that effective security most assuredly can be arranged in a voluntaristic way absent of the aggressive and coercive ‘State.’ This needs to be done in a threefold manner: by arguing the theoretical case; by noting whatever examples of voluntaristic security—and, indeed, other ‘emergency’ services—already exist and have survived formal prohibition and informal ‘crowding out’ by the State; and where it might be possible, setting up parallel security agencies that are run in accordance with anarcho-libertarian principles.