Gramsci Redux

Nathan Newman nathan at newman.org
Mon Oct 16 21:17:25 PDT 2000


----- Original Message ----- From: "Lisa & Ian Murray" <seamus at accessone.com> To: "Lbo-Talk at Lists. Panix. Com" <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>


>This is hardly a reduction of the average person to the status of "sheep",
>even if he sees day-to-day activity by party members as subordinate for
>strategic reasons to the democratic will of party as a whole. But
Gramsci's
>continual stress on the idea of "organic" decision-making that ties the
>bottom to the top of his military pyramid is a key part of his thinking, I
>believe. It is a rejection of anarchist consensus in action, but is not a
>rejection of the contribution of all party members to decision-making.

-how do we get a decision making praxis going that dismantles the whole -repertoire of bottom up/top-down categories [damn positional goods,.......]; -and why do they call it the world wide web instead of the world wide -hierarchy? - Ian

The idea that decision-making can happen "everywhere" with no location, no sifting, no representation, and so on is a lovely anarchist conceit that just conceals different hierarchies of privileged position in the information and decision-making web. The explicit top-down structure of decision-making in classic representational and centralized political processes is far more democratic by its very transparency.

-- Nathan Newman



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