JCWisc at aol.com:
> OK, fair enough. Part of what I've been trying to say is that if anarchists
> or anyone else think that human beings can live in radically different ways,
> just go ahead and do it. Show dense people like me the way. That's what
> Fourier and Owen thought--so did the Shakers and the other 19th century
> communalists. They thought that their way of life was so attractive that if
> they could only realize it in a small-scale form, everyone else would follow.
>
> A lot of so-called "anarchists" of my acquaintance talk about doing away with
> the state and permanent institutions, seem hostile to technology, and seem to
> have in mind some sort of "back-to-the-land" idea. Back-to-the-land is in
> any case implicit in doing away with the state and big institutions. (I
> don't know you, so maybe you're different. I'm afraid I just don't buy the
> "self-organizing" idea). Anyway, so far as "back-to-the-land" goes, I say,
> OK, fine. If you really want to go back to the land, there's still enough
> room in this society for you to do so. My sense is that for most of the
> people who talk like that, it's just that--a lot of talk. They want to pluck
> chickens or chop wood or dig post holes about as much as Doug or I do.
I don't agree that everyone has to go back to the land. Anyway, it's an aesthetic choice rather than a practical or political one -- some people just want to live that way and are in no way anarchists. The connection with anarchism that led me to mention them is that such establishments offer possibilities of escape, if only partial and temporary, from the capitalist system, and experiencing them may give people ideas of a sort I wish to encourage.
And then of course there's the humor.
You don't say why you reject the idea of self-organizing systems. To some extent it is merely a family of abstract mathematical theories, but obviously it impinges on areas of anarchist concern, like ecology and economics.
JCWisc at aol.com:
> Actually, on a purely personal level, I find a lot of the "back-to-the-land"
> stuff kind of attractive. I actually LIKE to chop wood and split rails and
> dig post holes (within reason). To me, though, that's an idiosyncratic
> personal taste, not the basis for a social philosophy, and I still prefer to
> live in town.
>
> I'm not waiting for the revolution. I'm a democratic socialist (my sort-of
> political hero is Michael Harrington), into incremental reformism and messy,
> compromising politics. Those who wish for a wholesale social transformation
> so sweeping that it will bring about a society totally different from what we
> know today, and who believe that this will come about through something
> called a "revolution," which will happen without a trace of "coercion" are
> chiliasts. They have basically religious demands which masquerade as a
> politics. So it seems to me, anyway.
Well, my demands are certainly religious, but I try to keep my public discourse on a materialistic basis, since the material world is what we believe all believe in. I don't think it can be said that the anarchism being put forward in this mailing list lately is chiliastic, howeve. There may still be some sudden-great-uprising anarchists around, but I think the 20th century has dissuaded most of them.
The problems with messy, compromising politics, in my view, are (1) the sort of mess one becomes involved with, and (2) the lack of results one tends to find at the end. For example, Michael Harrington went from hanging out at the Catholic Worker to hanging out with imperialist playboy Jack Kennedy, who needed a soc-dem program to sell himself in the big cities. This got some money for the poor, paid (although I think most of it went to bureaucrats and landlords) and, since the actual program was uninformed by radical politics and was paid for mostly by the working class, led to the Reagan "revolution" -- the revolt against the poor. And here we are. No power had actually been shifted out of the ruling class, and so when the bujis tired of the game, the poor had no way to defend themselves. _Plus_ Harrington had to endure rubbing up against the people who were starting the war in Vietnam and the possibility that he was being used to cover their quite different, quite nasty politics. On the other hand he did get something for people who needed it for awhile, so maybe it was worth it. I don't know. It's not a choice I think I would have made, but fortunately social democracy doesn't want me anyway.
--
"Alec Ramsdell" <aramsdell at yahoo.com>
> > Not that it's important, but I've yet to be convinced
> > that anyone arguing in these related threads from a
> > simple authoritariansim vs.
> > anti-authoritariansim/working class vs. ruling class
> > perspective is drawing from solid class analysis.
Ian Murray:
> Sympathetically, this begs the question as to who gets to
> determine what solid class analysis is and elides the issue
> of just who feels the need to be *doing classifications* of
> human beings. It seems obvious to me that some anarchists
> cannot distinguish authority from authoritarianism and anyone
> who *draws that boundary* differently than they do they feel
> free to label as authoritarian as well. Question begging as
> a substitute for dealing with the fact that human beings
> disagree on too many substantive issues and desire to
> institutionalize various ways of managing conflict; as if we
> could extinguish disagreement from human communication and
> the ways it leads to the production of everything from airplanes
> to brain surgery.....
However, if you're going to set up or support permanent institutions of social coercion, that is, a state, as a strategy for securing the production of certain kinds of goods (e.g., airplanes and brain surgery, above) it seems to me you ought to be able to say who it is who is going to be coerced, and how, rather than hand-wave the question. That is, class analysis needs to be brought down to the ground so we can see who winds up under it. By coercion I mean the opposite of freedom: certain people's desires are overridden, their will is frustrated, their interests are ignored, they may be the object of violence and fraud, and so forth. (I don't know why this is a such a conundrum, but I'm willing to pick it apart if necessary.)
There is probably no way of completely eliminating cases of one person taking power over another; for one thing, we're born helpless in the power of our parents, and many never escape from that situation or simulacra of it. However, as a _political_ decision, we can choose to move our general social arrangements towards freedom, equality, and autnomy, or not. If there is some exception to this movement, one should say what it is. Liberals know the answer for liberalism: freedom must stop where it impinges on private property and bourgeois privilege, although for the social- democrat variety of liberalism, the edge of privilege is supposed to be mitigated and hidden. There will be no transfer of real power out of the Natural Aristocracy, however.
Left radicals presumably have some other intentions in mind. Yet if production of goods is made the paramount issue for determining one's politics, it may well be that capitalism or fascism can do a better job. Slavery certainly increased the production of surpluses as compared to tribal life and provided for many armies, wars, conquests, and more slaves. More recently, I assume the "deformations" of the Soviet state began as responses to a perceived need to imitate the industrial and military prowess of Western nations, instead of relying on revolutionary processes. Stuff is great, but one must be conscious of what price one is paying for it.
-- Gordon