Pantarchy: Voluntary State and a New Catholic Church: Stephen Pearl Andrews

Pantarchy: Voluntary State and a New Catholic Church: Brief Overview of the Views of the Individualist Anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews by Nicholas Evans

What is the State?

The state is a form of government with involuntary taxation. 1.

What is Capitalism?

Capitalism is a market system where labor (mental or physical) is not generally factored into the price of the products (if the majority of people factored labor into the price of their products it would be a form of the labor theory of value which Andrews advocated) and Capitalism is a market system where there is not equality of opportunity on the market so workers are forced to accept lower paying jobs just to survive. If there was equality of opportunity on the market through free housing and all basic needs having been met people would not settle for low wages just to survive and hence employers would raise their wages in order to entice workers to work for them hence the workers would receive their full wages or entire product on the market. Such a system would be a form of market socialism with non-exploitive employers. Another way for workers to receive their full value from employers is through Mutual Banks that charge one percent or less to cover overhead. The banks would allow people to easily go into business for themselves and hence employers would raise their wages to entice workers to work for them hence the workers would receive their full value or entire product. 2. In other words Capitalism is a market system where workers are paid less than the full value of their labor due to labor in general not being factored into the price of their products due to the absence of equality of opportunity on the market.

What is Anarchism?

Anarchism is a society with voluntary institutions or voluntary government and where there is some form of socialist economics. 3. Andrews advocated for a society based on a voluntary state funded through voluntary taxation and for employers to pay their employees the full value of their labor which is a form of market socialism. 4. For this reason Andrews is an Anarchist of the Individualist variety due to his support for markets and non-exploitive employers.

This is why Anarcho-Syndicalist Rudolf Rocker called Andrews a significant exponent of Libertarian Socialism in America. 5.

Andrews advocated specifically for a society called Pantarchy. They Pantarchist society would consist of a voluntary state supported by voluntary taxation which would also be closely connected with a form of the Catholic Church. Andrews states:

“The Pantarchy is a new spiritual Government for the world, including a new Church and a new State, with all other Subordinate Institutions, Educational, Informational, Honorary, etc., etc., etc.; which are universal in their scope and nature, and which can be devised and established as subservient to the collective wants of mankind….

The New Church, called the New Catholic Church, concerns Itself especially with the culture of the Emotional and Sensational attributes of man, and more especially of these in their higher and Universal Aspect, known as Religion. Government, strictly speaking, belongs, therefore, to the Church only in a subordinate degree, and as relates to its own spiritual and temporal affairs. To this extent it is rightly entrusted to the Hierarchy, Deaconarchy, and Judicatory of the Church, subject still to the superintendence of the State. The design, extent, and attributes of the Church are specially set forth in another document,—the Constitution, or Organic Basis of the New Catholic Church.” 6.

The Pantarchy voluntary state consists of 3 branches. Andrews states:

“The State consists of a Legislative, an Executive, and a Judicial Department. The Legislative Department is denominated the Politarchy, .and the body of Superior Legislators is called the Areopagus…. The Pantarchy consecrates the same principle of Voluntaryism in the Church and in the State. Taxes are only levied by voluntary contribution; authority only exercised over those who intelligently accept its rightfulness;...” 7.

Andrews also spoke of equity in his Pantarchy. By equity he meant a system where people (employers and employees) were paid according to the labor theory of value. Andrews notes about his Pantarchy:

“Beginning with the world still lying in poverty, oppression, and wretchedness, the Pantarchy assumes to be able, through New Science, the Science of Organization, aided by all benign spiritual revelations and influx, to conduct society to its true Harmonial destiny on earth; until the whole people shall be housed in palaces; until the earth shall be cultivated like a garden; until Equity, and Honor, and Religion, shall reign universally; until health and beauty shall be the common inheritance; until all human affairs shall be radiant with a True Millennial Glory.” 8.

Andrews states his labor theory of value or what he calls Equity in more detail in The Science of Society:

Wage labor is “…essentially proper and right. It is a right to that one man employ another, it is right that he pay him wages, and it is right that he direct him absolutely, arbitrarily, if you will, in the performance of his labor, while, on the other hand, it is the business of him who is employed implicitly to obey, that is, to surrender any will of his own in relation to a design not his own, and to conceive and execute the will of the other...It is right that the great manufacturer should plan, and either alone, or through the aid of assistants under his direction, organize his mammoth establishment. It is right that he should employ and direct his hundreds, or his five hundred men...It is not in any, nor in all of these features combined, that the wrong of our present system is to be sought and found. It is in the simply failure to do Equity. It is not that men are employed and paid, but that they are not paid justly…” 9.

Like many of the Individualist Anarchists, Andrews believed his society would be created through peaceful gradual change through education.

Notes:

1. Tucker, Benjamin. Instead of a Book. Forgotten Books. (2012) Please also see: Marx, Karl. Capital Volume 1. Penguin Classics: England. (1990)

2. Ibid.

3. Kropotkin, Peter. ‘Anarchism’ Entry in the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/britanniaanarchy.html

4. Andrews, Stephen Pearl. The Science of Society. Leopold Classic Library: Middletown, DE. (2016)

5. Rocker, Rudolf. Pioneers of American Freedom. J. J. Little and Ives Co.: New York. (1949) pp. 85. Available online at:

https://libcom.org/files/Rocker%20-%20Pioneers%20of%20American%20Freedom.pdf

6. Stephen Pearl Andrews, Constitution or Organic Basis of the Pantarchy (New York: Baker & Godwin, printers, 1860). Available online at: http://library.libertarian-labyrinth.org/items/show/31

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Andrews, Stephen Pearl. The Science of Society. Leopold Classic Library: Middletown, DE. (2016) pp. 234.