"Gordon Fitch" <gcf at panix.com>
> > I seized upon your remark because I'm trying to provoke people
> > into answering my question as to whether they think coercion,
> > that is, holding a gun to someone's head, is necessary for the
> > building of airplanes or computers, and if so, why they think
> > so and whether and why the airplanes and computers are worth
> > it. So far I haven't seen much development of either of these
> > propositions. A _reductio_ based on one facet of anarchist
> > thought won't do.
Ian Murray:
> Don't you think it's a bit of an analogical stretch to say that the workers at Boeing and
> Airbus have guns held to their heads?
I said "holding a gun to someone's head", actually, not that each worker had a gun held to his head. The latter is more poetic and poetically true, though. Yes, the workers at Boeing and Airbus are surrounded by guns, by institutions and culture based on and soaked through and through with force, coercion, violence. I can assure you a gun is being held to _someone's_ head. I am astonished that such a question would be asked in this venue, although I admit I myself had to see it done in physical actuality to believe in it and begin to understand it.
JCWisc at aol.com:
> I don't disagree that present society has far too much coercion
> and hierarchy.
>
> That said, yes I do think that hierarchy of some kind will
> always be needed to carry out tasks of any size or complexity.
> Does hierarchy rest simply and solely on coercion? I don't
> like the word "coercion" in this context because it seems too
> simplistic, even if one is only talking about present society.
>
> Reducing it all to a simple matter of coercion, as it were,
> at gunpoint, as though we were all simply being herded into
> the mines and galleys, ignores the complexity of modern society.
>
> At a minimum, some people just *are* more experienced,
> knowledgeable, capable,or what have you, than others, and so
> *ought* to direct the work of other people. Is it, for example,
> intolerable coercion, in some ultimate sense "at gunpoint,"
> if a senior scientist, let's say, assigns her grad students
> to do a lot of boring scut work in the lab?
Probably. I can comment only on the American scene, where academic institutions are firmly integrated with other aspects of the State, like the government (especially the military) and the corporations. Unless one is born rich (and sometimes even then) one generally finds oneself obliged to seek a job, a career, in a context where failure to find one may mean destitution, homelessness, vulnerability to attack, and even death. The senior scientist, then, is a State functionary armed with the same class power over her grad students as a corporate manager has over his subordinate submanagers and employees -- the sort of situation fundamentalist liberals construe as voluntary but which most leftists believe is essentially coercive.
Possibly, this leads to a more efficient production of science of some sort. But is such coercion tolerable, much less desirable? Well, to a believing bourgeois, certainly; it's an important tool of his trade. Others might differ. To me it looks like the Hobbesian argument for a monarch, but now not to suppress the brutal war of all against all, but merely to enhance industrial efficiency, to which the bourgeoisie have a right. Having been for a good while at the dirty end of the capitalist (and military) sticks, I'm agin' it.
It might be interesting, however, so explore the social complexity which is and isn't coercion. Inspired maybe by Ursula LeGuin's _Those_Who_Walk_Away_From_Omelas_, I'll ask: who are those who are worthy to be coerced for the sake of airplanes and computers, and in what ways should they be coerced? How will this differ from the capitalist model?
-- Gordon