On Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:03:53 -0400, shag <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> So I googled and it's from Kropotkin. And it's exactly the kind of fluffy
> folderol that annoys me. Sure, freedom freedom freedom everywhere, you
can
[...]
> have nosy comradly neighbor wondering why you aren't pitching in to gift
> the community with your labor for the day. Chop chop, buddy, get to work!
> Tsk Tsk, that fellah in the unit on the corner? He never does his fair
> share. Slouch!
It is clear from these comments you have not understood the passage at all. None of the above has the slightest to do with Anarchism.
Kropotkin is saying that Anarchism "seeks to establish a certain harmonious compatibility in its midst — not by subjeecting all its members to an authority that is fictitiously supposed to represent society, not by trying to establish uniformity, but by urging all men to develop free initiative, free action, free association."
"free association" is the key point, this is sometimes called "federalism" as well, the idea is not there is no social institutions, nor no rules, but rather that rules are collectively agreed to, association is voluntary, and not based on a territorial (or any other) monopoly.
Those that can only understand the world from the point of view of the nation state have a hard time visualising a distributed commons-based society, just like those than can only understand client-server systems can not comprehend peer-to-peer networks, however it is clear that the world is in fact evolving in this direction.
You can see the struggle between distributed systems and hierarchical systems everywhere if you look around, understanding anarchism will help you understand the emerging possibilities. You can, if you prefer, smugly stick to refuting caricatures of anarchism (indeed many self-professed anarchists are caricatures themselves), but in my opinion you will be missing out on a body of though that is extremely relevant to the world today.
-- Dmytri Kleiner editing text files since 1981
http://www.telekommunisten.net