>>17387You're being a pedant, they could have just as easily said "No authority without consent."
>>17386You can't. This was a point of discussion at the last BASTARD conference - how do we as anarchists interact with beneficent authority? Parenting was a commonly used reference point. There were a myriad of views, but the person who organized the discussion believes that there is no beneficent authority, and that anarchists should be opposed to all forms of authority, even though living outside the scope of any authority is unfeasible. He kind of just threw it in at the end, since he didn't want his views as moderator to set the direction of the discussion that heavily, so I couldn't get a full explanation, but I interpreted it as such: Much like we can't always be happy, nor should we always be happy, we should always strive to be happy, as much as possible. For example, the moderator has a job as instructor for some construction-related thing, and is therefore in a position of authority. They would like to see that job cease to be necessary, but for now, it is (at the very least, for them, for survival). Contrast this with other ideologies, like fascism, where where you construct as much authority as possible, or liberalism, where you try to make authority as beneficent as possible.
Another view given was the one you're replying to, where the important factor is consent, succinctly described by Bakunin as "In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker". While the moderator at the BASTARD panel believed that authority should be opposed in all forms, as much as we possibly can, people who value consent of authority believe that as long as both the entity with authority and the entity subjugated to that authority, are in agreement that this relationship should exist, it's fine. This view gets into a gray area around children, and whether children are capable of consent. One example someone gave is at their job as a kind of social worker, there was an orphaned teenager living in the person's collective house, who had problems with school. One day, the teen did something so egregious, the social worker told them to go to their room. The teen got pissed, but did it anyway. How does consent factor into this story? The teen had no real obligation to do this - the social worker was maybe 5 years older than the teen was, and had no actual recourse if they didn't listen. So why did they? The answer could be either 1. some kind of consent, or 2. the very definition of authority, which is an inherently social construct, and its distinction from power. That is to say, if you physically stop someone from doing something, well that's not authority, it's power. If you use a social position to stop someone from doing something, well that's definitely authority, but where does the distinction lie between "consenting" to this social phenomenon and not? Coercion, maybe?
It's definitely something I'm interested in hearing some opinions on, including ones that aren't explicitly anarchist.
