Nathan Newman:
> 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.
This is not what we observe, however. Certain liberal _theory_ proposes a large, transparent machine whose workings will be clearly visible to its constituents. However, since there are differences of power, and since knowledge is power, it behooves the powerful to restrict the flow of knowledge. Fraud becomes as much a necessary production of the liberal State as force, and, as almost anyone who observes the media and academic systems of liberal states will acknowledge, is provided, well, liberally.
One can observe the same process at work in smaller units of the State, such as corporations. In the initial stages of a corporation's existence, there may be a considerable degree of openness about the conduct of the business. If the corporation expands vertically, however, if more and more hierarchy is established, the value of concealing information becomes greater than the value of publishing it. Eventually it becomes so difficult to find out anything that serious errors occur and the management begins to treat as a problem the very obfuscation which it deliberately created. Or tries to treat, since the treatment itself becomes obfuscated in the same way for the same reasons.
Just so, there will be repeated attempts to open up the general political system to general knowledge, which will be resolutely sabotaged by its managers.
Peter van Heusden:
> Indeed... how? On this score, I find both orthodox Marxist and anarchism
> sorely lacking. Orthodox Marxism, even in its most 'democratic' forms,
> stays within the limits of mediation, calling merely for a more democratic
> administration which will allow your 'free development'. Anarchism, on the
> other hand, tends to identify some Other - in the form of the State, or
> the Boss - as the impediment to 'free development' and suggests that
> without that Other around, we'd be free. (c.f. Gordon Fitch's recent
> argument with Ken)
This isn't quite correct. Obviously, free development can lead to the State, because it did in the past. So, while we have to destroy the present State, we can't expect (as some anarchists of the past did) that simply getting rid of it, perhaps through a single uprising, will suffice to liberate humanity. We have seen lots of uprisings, and the results have only given weight the liberal proverb that the first function of a government is to prevent a worse one from arising.
The only way I can see to proceed is to try to establish non-coercive relationships and communities at a personal level, that is, to create a culture of anarchy (freedom) from the ground up. There's already some of this going on, but it's slow work, since many of the most active and intelligent people are so bemused by the shiny toys I mentioned and tend to overlook the unpleasant side of the toy machine, darkened as it is by design.