Drugs and Anarchist Ethics
I have always felt a strong distain for anyone who preach the persecution of drug users. To me, intuitively, they aren’t harming anyone else, so they should be given freedom to make their own choices. However, that isn’t a sufficient justification for being against drug use criminality. In fact, it is this very style of moralistic thinking which drives the persecution of drug addicts in China.
The overwhelming stigma against drug use in China stems from the historical experience during the Opium Wars, when a great number of Chinese were addicted to opium sold to the country by Great Britain. Many Chinese in the modern day consider this a humiliating portion of the nation’s history. There is then a moral imperative, driven by nationalistic pride, to heavily discourage drug use of any kind. Of course, there are other reasons for why a government would want to criminalize drug use, including labor efficiency or, as Noam Chomsky argues, as a means of controlling sections of the population. However, these concerns exist for any government regardless of the country’s political status. We see, though, that Asian countries such as South Korea and the Philippines have much harsher drug laws compared to western countries such as Canada and the Netherlands. What exists here embedded in the legal system of Asian countries is a cultural and moral force, similar to the enforcement of hijab laws for women in certain middle eastern countries and anti-abortion laws in certain US states. These laws exist because of the dominance of certain moral beliefs in society: Muslim values for the middle east and Judeo-Christian values for the US. Similarly, China is subject to the moral values of national pride and the avoidance of what it treats as historical shame. Morality, or rather the sovereignty of morality, is the source of political domination in this specific scenario. In this way, moral laws enforced by a state apparatus are no different from religious laws enforced by a state apparatus. As Max Stirner commented in The Unique and Its Property, “These [people] fight for the faith of the church, he for the faith of the state, or the state’s moral laws; for articles of faith, both condemn anyone who acts differently than what their faith will allow. The stigma of “crime” is stamped upon him, and he may languish in houses of correction, in prisons. Moral faith is as fanatical as religious faith!”
So how does this connect to anarchism, exactly? Well, for starters, moral coercion is still coercion. Both Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta advocated for a different, more humane way of dealing with people who present themselves as a danger to others: attempting to heal/reform them as sick, not lock them up as criminals. However, as Foucault diligently demonstrates in Discipline and Punish, this is actually the reasoning behind the modern prison/judicial system. Punishment has gone from public torture of the physical body and execution to a more intentionally hidden deprivation of freedom and rehabilitation of the soul. If there is a dominant moral system, no matter the one upheld by contemporary politicians or the one probably believed by Kropotkin and Malatesta, and a coercive system which derives from it, there will always be a power structure.
However, one might wonder how society would be able to function if coercion wasn’t possible. Am I not allowed to stop a friend from suicide, or prevent them from taking drugs that could potentially kill them? The Foucauldian view of resistance, taken to its logical extreme, seem incompatible with the general wellbeing of society. What about children, the mentally ill, and so on? Indeed, it is a difficult balance to maintain. On one hand, any power structure results in domination. We have seen homosexuals be labeled as mentally ill and sent to conversion therapy camps against their will. We are also currently witnessing cannabis users in China being imprisoned for decades. One the other hand, certain people that we think are actually mentally ill do seem like they need to be treated. It appears to be a matter of classification and not domination. The difference between unjust and just authority.
But the problem with authority is that it inherently deprives us of the ability to discern between unjust and just authority. What seems correct to you might not be correct to someone else. I know the disagreement problem is a cliche, but I am not trying to have a debate about morality itself. The problem with moral authority is that it violently upholds its own moral system, which prevents the possibility for anything else. It is unsatisfactory for yet another political revolution to succeed, another regime to take power, and it simply repeating the mistakes of the previous one. Does democracy solve this issue? Obviously not, since having more than half of your population believe something does not mean much. “Having the correct people in power” is never going to happen when nobody can even agree on what is correct. This is not a metaethical issue but a practical one.
Going back to the previous point, there still needs to be some ethics in a society. The mentally ill need to be treated, and people who present themselves as a danger need to be pacified so they do not harm others. This necessarily entails some sort of classification and therefore power. For Foucault though, power is something that is unavoidable in any society. He advocates for resistance against these structures, but never describes a society without them. For Noam Chomsky, anarchism in the process of repeatedly challenging hierarchies that exist, and determining whether they are just. An ideal society, therefore, necessarily involves structures of power but leaves enough room for them to be challenged. One must eliminate the centralization of political and economic power to the greatest extent possible. That can only be achieved through a violent (not necessarily physically violent), dramatic change in the thought processes for all members of a given society. Foucault might describe this as a shift in the discursive formations, but this idea is commonly understood as the social revolution.
References and Suggested Readings:
Anarchy - Errico Malatesta
The Unique and Its Property - Max Stirner
Discipline and Punish - Michel Foucault
The Politics of Postanarchism - Saul Newman
