[lbo-talk] a post-capitalist future

Jim Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Sat Mar 14 18:39:31 PDT 2009


On Sat, 14 Mar 2009 21:18:15 -0400 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> writes:
>
> On Mar 14, 2009, at 7:13 PM, Eric Beck wrote:
>
> > So, mildly pwoggy food and day-care coops, in which people work
> with
> > other people, are indicative of reactionary individualism but
> mildly
> > pwoggy homeowners associations, in which owners work with other
> > owners, are a stop on the path to socialism? Good to know.
>
> I did say that most of those things were very nice, and I meant it.
>
> But otherwise: scale, dude. Day care is mostly organized around
> small
> proprietorships. Housing, however, is deeply embedded in the capital
>
> markets. I'm not talking about "homeowners associations" - I'm
> talking
> about limited equity co-ops, which are pretty different things.
> They'd
> be a step in getting housing out of the circuits of capital into
> something more stable and protected.
>
> You do seem to like to avoid questions of scale. When I asked you
> about keeping the electricity running, you answered with a silly
> joke
> about "the children." Here again, you're missing the point. I don't
>
> think it's so much a personal thing as a real systematic blindness
> of
> autonomists and anarchists, who can't get their minds beyond the
> very
> local.

The problem is, as I believe Doug pointed out before in an earlier post, that while anarchists might worship the very local, in a modern industrial society most production is not organized that way. And frankly it's difficult to see how the manufacturing of things like computers or refrigerators can be so organized. Of those anarchists who have been willing to confront this issue, a fair number of them are avowedly hostile towards industrial society, although it's hard to see how, if we reversed the Industrial Revolution, we could hope to sustain the six billion or so human beings that populate this planet.

Some anarchists have proposed what they describe as alternative technologies, or what Murray Bookchin liked to call "liberatory technology" which would presumably bring the benefits of modern technology to small scale production. These proposals are certainly not without merit, but we are still stuck with the fact that there are lots of things that we depend upon which cannot, at the present time, being produced efficiently except by means of relatively centralized production systems. And that is likely to remain the case even in a postcapitalist future.

A lot of anarchism still looks a lot like petit bourgeois pipe dreams, hankering for the lost golden age of the petty producer.

Jim F.


>
> Doug


>>

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