"Gordon Fitch" <gcf at panix.com>:
> > If everything is coercion, then nothing is coercion, and the
> > recent apparent objections to Pol Pot, as well as the likening
> > of anarchists thereto, seem to be vacuous. I actually meant
> > to refer to something, however.
Ian Murray:
> So you're an incremental eliminativist then? Again, we're quibbling
> over the contested contexts of coercion and how to undo the
> processes that generate and perpetuate them. Every single context in
> which one could claim coercion had been eliminated or mitigated
> could be contested is all I'm saying if someone is *disadvantaged*.
> Exhaustion by contesting the specificity of whether or not coercion
> has been undone at any scale of observation/description is always an
> option.
>
> If all the weapons enabling coercion were dispensed with tomorrow
> the *legacy* of coercion would persist for indefinite *periods* of
> *time* and it would be contested as to when the absence of all
> coercion obtained. Agreement as Utopia.....or not?
>
> Can you trace where and when Boeing or Airbus' supply chain
> manifests direct 'gun to the head' coercion? If so what's your
> specific, at the point of contestation, recommendation for conflict
> elimination. Then pick all the other supply networks of contemporary
> commodity production and see whether the solution[s] you think
> you've come to is transposable into other contexts without the
> proposed solution[s] themselves becoming a potential source of
> conflict and coercion .
>
> Clearly there are domains of human communication where/when coercion
> is absent; how to enlarge the scale and scope of those practices is
> part of a *practical* agenda. It remains to be seen whether we can
> predict/mitigate the cessation of all forms of coercion any more
> than we can predict/mitigate all the typhoons of the 21st century.
Shucks, I don't know if my ideas are worth a whole _ism_, much less one qualified by a four-syllable adjective. As I said in some other message, anything we (the anarchists) do has got to be interstitial or marginal, that is, incremental. We've got to sneak up on the system, because if we're proceeding on the principles of non-violence, autonomy, and _satyagraha_, which I think are common-sense requirements for anarchism, we can't just put armies in the field or pull off coups d'etat or win elections, or any other war act: War is the State, just as the State is war. The primary thing, at this point in history, is to get rid of or at least weaken the gross, violent, obvious forms of coercion, like the class war, the race war, the sex war, the imperial war, and the war war, meanwhile building up noncoercive relations, associations and activities -- I would call them institutions -- which people can join and thus deprive Capital and its attendant midget feudal and fascist dwarfs of support. (No offense meant to actual non-fascist dwarfs.) At some time in the future, if anarchists make any progress, they can start dealing with subtler and more ambiguous modes of coercion.
At this point the great difficulty seems to be to convince people that eliminating coercion even in its most overt forms is desirable, much less possible. If you look back over the conversation around this issue for the last few days, you'll see more than one person on this list positively _clinging_ to the idea that anarchism means no more airplanes or in fact any form of advanced technology, for them a keen deprivation. And this is a leftist mailing list -- you can imagine what you'd get from a broader, less enlightened (heh) audience. That's why I keep asking just _who_ is to be coerced; to take a look at the faces of the targets, the victims. It might be that someone will say, No, I don't want to do this. I'm going to put down the gun. If they follow out the logic of that idea, they'll be moving towards anarchism.
-- Gordon