> Chuck, do you want unions to be replaced by consensus-based affinity
> groups? And is that how the productive apparatus of society should be
> run?
>
> -- Shane
An excellent question.
Doug asked another excellent question on this list some time ago: What is the anarchist utopia of the future going to be like anyway? Will there be restaurants? Airplanes? I can't remember if anyone answered.
The existence of the great new technologies--internet, cell phones, e-mail--touted by some as wonderful new organizing tools is predicated on a high level of social organization, is it not? The internet came into being as a result of a classic, big government R & D project, directed and subsidized, that traces its origins to "defense"-related work done in the late 60s. (There was a long discussion of this history recently in _The American Prospect_). Much of the work was done within government agencies, and much in universities as well. Some of the research was contracted out to private firms, but government direction ensured that the technologies they developed were not allowed to become proprietary. Or, as I used to say to my Repug acquaintances, the internet was not invented by Al Gore, or by Bill Gates. The internet was mostly invented by guv'mint beaury-crats an' pointy-headed perfessers.
I thus see certain affinities (heh!) between techno-enamored anarchists and the average suburban ditto-head. I picture the latter chap driving to work on a government-built and -maintained road in his behemoth SUV, guzzling gas, the supply of which is assured by myriad government interventions, from foreign policy to the geological survey. The SUV itself is manufactured to meet numerous government regulatory specifications concerning everything from safety to air pollution. The cheap and plentiful food he eats (shitty though it may be) is supplied by a heavily subsidized and regulated agricultural sector. He lives in a house which receives a generous tax subsidy in the form of mortgage interest deductibility. He works for a high-tech firm, which relies on a technology developed with government subsidies and under government direction. His company almost certainly derives some share of its profits from government spending, directly or indirectly. His employer provides him and his family with health insurance, which, as was pointed out here recently, is part of a system shot through with government subsidies and interventions. Perhaps he lives in the Rocky Mountain west, land of rugged individualists colored solid Repug blue on the electoral maps, an arid region that would be largely uninhabitable were it not for massive government water projects. He received his education at a university that annually receives millions of dollars in government grants.
As our friend is driving along, thinking to himself what a fine, self-sufficient fellow he is, so different from those shirkers on welfare, he is listening to the radio (to a station with a government-assigned frequency), nodding enthusiatically as a braying Rush Limbaugh tells him that all he really needs is for the government to get off his back. At home in the evening, he will use the same technology he uses at work to check out the equally idiotic Free Republic.
The modern bureaucratic state, and the big bureaucratic institutions that go along with it, from unions to universities, are not going away. With all of their problems, I don't think that in the end we would want them to. I take it that one of Marx's most significant insights was that the production of life's necessities and amenities is ALREADY socialized seven ways from Sunday, a point well-explicated by Michael Harrington. The problem, for now and the foreseeable future, is how to pring this production under democractic control and how to share the bounty that bourgeois civilization has placed within the grasp of all. Marx's notion of the state eventually withering away was a vague, inchoate vision, I think deliberately so. For our lifetimes and for generations to come, the problem will be not how to smash the state, but how to transform it.
Jacob Conrad