[lbo-talk] The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons

Tayssir John Gabbour tayssir.john at googlemail.com
Tue Aug 26 03:18:46 PDT 2008


On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 10:00 AM, shag <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> but what bothers me about anarchist-type explanation is that it appears that
> their is no social control, when in fact there is, and must be.

Yes, serious anarchists frequently mention Jo Freeman's "The Tyranny of Structurelessness." http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/hist_texts/structurelessness.html

By "serious" anarchists, I mean like the AnarchistBlackCat forum. http://www.anarchistblackcat.org/search.php?search_id=active_topics

Someone on that forum made an interesting claim:

"What I never understand about 'the anarchist left' is that, while

this is obvious to anyone with any experience of such structures,

as one arm of the communist movement we favour prefigurative mass

organisation, but many of those who ascribe to some our precepts

end up pushing very rigidly hierarchical structures that most

Trot, and even Stalinist groups would consider derisory in terms

of their lack of accountability, lack of cohesion, lack of

collective discipline, lack of member control and so on. I despair

of it. For all that you can slag social democrats like the SSP or

CWI, at least they elect their executive. "Our" leadership is

self-selecting, cliquey, and authoritarian, and our groups are

full of unrealistic liberals who object to the least amount of

accountability."


> bill bartlett is fond of taking this line when it comes to work and the
> question of how we can have a society where some people will lay around on
> beach chairs reading, while others will scrub toilets, grow crops, sweep
> streets, lawyer (*grin*) and teach.
>
> well, they probably won't be inclined to lounge around on beach chairs
> reading b/c societal norms -- enforced by others -- will make it clear that
> people who don't contribute to society's needs are to be shunned as social
> outcasts.

Yes, Ursula Le Guin's influential novel "The Dispossessed" discussed a fictional anarchist society where utterly lazy slackers were shunned. IIRC maybe even physically roughed up.

It may not have been the best possible anarchist society; and a lot of hard work was needed. Maybe we could do better. But they did away with many absurd hierarchies.

Tayssir



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