Doug Henwood wrote:
> Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between
> antistatisms of left and right.
Last night I had drinks with a comrade (who wrote an excellent piece on Islamophobia and Homophobia which deserves a wider audience: http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/klauda121107.html )
Anyway, my comrade is working his way right now through Foucault's College de France lectures on Governmentality. To the extent that I've understood things correctly, Foucault's usage of "government/governmentality/governance" is pretty much the opposite of Carrol's usage, but nonetheless points to a similar distinction that I think Carrol is trying to get at, namely, the age old Marxist distinction between the rule over people and the management of things.
My comrade points out, correctly I think, that a communist future, though it would by definition dispense with the rule over people, cannot forgo the management of things. And frankly, we both agree that there is no reason for the management of things not to be conducted in a centralized, hierarchical manner. It is the only way which is up to the tasks of a complex, industrialized society.
Water has to be transmitted to households, electricity, sewage, etc., and frankly, I find nothing appealing in the anarchist utopia of decentralized workers councils having to decide upon these things. I would much rather stay home watching movies and listening to music.
One of Marx's most valuable contributions is the criticism of petit bourgeois, decentralized productivist utopias. Those sort of communalist blueprints for a future society are completely unappealing to me. Anyway who knows anything about small villages and towns, and why people leave them for places like Berlin, knows exactly why.
Any communist society cannot fall behind the level of emancipation already achieved by the modern welfare state, a concession that Hardt & Negri seem prepared to make. A centralized management of things would free up the rest of us to read books, watch movies, engage in social activity and play, and generally be lazy.
The problem of the collapse of the really existing socialist countries was not the central management of production, but rather the political oppression of people (admittedly not an easy problem to deal with in the face of hostility from the capitalist west).
Am I the only one who finds anarchist conceptions of the post-capitalist future to be a dystopian nightmare, "socialism as an endless meeting"? I would prefer to continue to live in a capitalism with a moderate welfare state than be subjected to the overbearing productivist fantasties of "Parecon" and the like.
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