Gordon Fitch" <gcf at panix.com>:
> > The anarchist, interested (I would think) in Minute Particulars
> > rather than the greatness of the Great Machine, might suggest
> > that if we need to shoot people to get airplanes, maybe we
> > don't really want airplanes. After all, there are things more
> > important (to this anarchist) than the Great Machine's maximal
> > performance. (Of course, there's also the possibility that
> > we don't have to shoot people to get airplanes, but nobody's
> > interested in it.)
Ian Murray:
> The other question[s] would seem to include whether we would have to
> resort to the very kinds of coercion we claim to abhor in non-order
> to get others to forgo making airplanes and other appliances; how
> can we even predict whether we would/would not simply be shifting
> the structure and content of coercion into other dispositions of
> human behavior?
In the hypothetical no-fly anarchy, our anarchists aren't specifically against airplanes; they're against shooting people merely to get airplanes. Because the shooting is somehow messed up by anarchist activities, the airplanes don't happen to get built. There's no need or desire to stop people from building airplanes voluntarily, but it just doesn't happen to happen because of the decline of shooting people as a regular practice and the (as yet unexplained) connection between shooting people and building airplanes.
Gordon Fitch" <gcf at panix.com>:
> > Naturally, as if imbued with a profound religious belief,
> > liberals and those who accept the liberal world-view (see
> > above) will find any suggestion that shooting seriously
> > taints the desirability of airplanes risible or, if taken
> > seriously, as heretical, blasphemous, contrary to the most
> > fundamental accepted values. Often, dark allusions to Mao,
> > Pol Pot, Stalin, and rural idiocy will follow.
> >
> > "I want my _airplane_!!!!"
Ian Murray:
> Liberalism arose precisely to intimate an escape from the religious
> concepts you use. That it used coercion to do so is irrelevant. Are
> you suggesting there was a non-coercive way out of feudalism?
Liberalism is full of paradoxes, on of them being the melding of an apparent rational skepticism with a set of absolute and unquestioned religious beliefs even when these fly in the face of both experience and intention (e.g. the credo in the Declaration of Independence.) In a way, it's a continuation of feudalism, an improved version, which makes room for and incorporates certain anarchistic ideas like personal autonomy into a (somewhat) cleaned-up context of domination. Given that human beings seem to prefer to deal with social problems in the worst way possible which yet achieves the needed result, maybe there was no other politically possible way out of the feudal state.
Ian Murray:
> Evolving from a condition of zoon politikon and the shifting
> kaleidoscope of coercion may depend on technologies that cannot help
> but trace their origins in coercive actions. The issue then becomes
> how to deal with tragedy and sorrow and anger as sources of
> political/technological/ecological creativity.
It appears to me that, because of that very creativity, we do not have the conservative choice of simply accepting the tragic nature of human life and muddling on. As technology and accumulation make more and more humans more and more powerful, the likelihood that continued aggression, competition and violence will destroy the world steadily increases, so that our choice becomes not one between socialism and barbarism -- we chose! -- but between anarchy and self-annihilation. So we may have to tragically abandon the delights of tragedy.
---
gcf at panix.com
> > The anarchist, interested (I would think) in Minute Particulars
> > ...
Dddddd0814 at aol.com:
> I think we really ought to resist polarizing our own political tendencies,
> and thus those of others, in the course of debate. It seems like the author,
> above, makes binaries out of "anarchism" and "non-anarchism."
I think that was done for me; for instance, the no-airplanes theory of anarchy is certainly such a binary division.
Dddddd0814 at aol.com:
> The fundamental view from a revolutionary socialist perspective is the same
> as that of anarchism: All states are coercive vehicles of class power,
> period. The question is HOW to get to the post-revolutionary (or advanced
> communist) society.
>
> I have never gotten an anarchist to answer this question, beyond the usual
> vague emotionalisms on "freedom," "liberty," etc.
Well, there are a few around. In 1999 I published a short essay on Usenet visible at http://www.etaoin.com/A/anaprax1.htm which contained some very specific ideas for advancing anarchist culture and politics. Subsequently I have discovered that many people have put forward similar ideas here and there. However, at this time they're not taken seriously by very many people because of the widespread assumption, even among leftists, that all politics is and must be statecraft, that is, some kind of technique of violence and domination. I believe that these cannot get us anywhere we want to go for both theoretical reasons and the evidence of history.
-- Gordon