> I've long thought that anarchism is the infantile "NO!" inflated into
> a political philosophy. That's not an entirely bad thing; I'm pretty
> fond of the "NO!" impulse myself, and there's a lot that I find
> appealing in anarchism. Heinberg sort of confirms this analysis,
> though, when he seems to argue that the whole psychosocial problem is
> having to grow up:
Anarchists have long been reluctant to articulate grand visions of what a "anarchist society would look like." Most of the time, we talk about small stuff, such as worker control of industry, or community-based decision-making. Part of this reluctance to describe a big blueprint is our nervousness about what happened when the communists implemented their big vision in the Soviet Union and China. We all know what happened to millions and billions of people when these grand visions were imposed from above.
This is why anarchists argue that the details of any future anarchistic society would need to be hammered out by the people living in that society. There would be lots of differences in that world, many of which would be based on culture and geography. The Soviet Union tried too impose Western style, wheat belt, agriculture on the peasants of Russia, when the anarchist alternative would be to acknowledge that the peasants are much better at deciding these things than the Politburo back in Moscow.
<< Chuck0 >>
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"...ironically, perhaps, the best organised dissenters in the world today are anarchists, who are busily undermining capitalism while the rest of the left is still trying to form committees."
-- Jeremy Hardy, The Guardian (UK)