[lbo-talk] a post-capitalist future

[wrobert at uci.edu]

>
> There is definitely an idealization of small, localized communities in a
> lot of anarchist thought, but there are it's also important to remember
> there are strands of libertarian socialism that promote economies of scale
> (which is a different thing than coercive economies) -- or at least are
> not opposed to them -- and entertain high-tech visions of a
> post-capitalist future. Notably, Noam Chomsky, of course, a long with a
> lot of the IWW, anarcho-syndicalism, Diego Abad de Santillan, Rudolf
> Rocker, whom "green anarchists"/primitivists denounce as "workerist
> productionist" types.
>
> Bakunin himself, for example, believed states might be superseded by
> "industrial units":

     This is a question that I have given some thought.  I think that B is
right.  There are a number of non-local theories of an anarchist
society.  In fact, Doug's bete noire Parecon is one of them.  I think
that the real gap in anarchism has always been in the question of
transition, or what Wallerstein would call mid-term strategy. 
Anarchists can point to the new society, and tactics for working in
the old, but not how to get from point a to b.

      One could perhaps argue that this is also true for Marxism, but I
think that the difference is that Marxism does provide a framework
for thinking about this question under the guise of the dictatorship
of the proletariat.  The more I think about this term, the more I
think it should be understood as the structuring of thinking through
a problem, rather than a solution.  So that thinkers ranging from
Marx (in the Critique of the Gotha Program), Lenin, Luxemburg, and
Althusser and beyond have used this as a sort of problematic to
conceptualize a framework for considering how to transition to a new
form of society when there is a class of people that benefit from
the early system, a group that will invariably experience this
transformation in terms of non-consent.  They frame this in a number
of ways, but nonetheless, it considers both the question of force,
and the need to transition from one structure of common sense to
another.

        robert wood


> "Workers' cooperative associations are a new historical phenomenon; today
> as we witness their birth we cannot foresee their future, but only guess
> at the immense development which surely awaits them and the new political
> and social conditions they will generate. It is not only possible but
> probable that they will, in time, outgrow the limits of today's countries,
> provinces, and even states to transform the whole structure of human
> society, which will no longer be divided into nations but into industrial
> units." [M. Bakhunin]
>
> ("Industrial" is not necessarily synonymous with Dickensian heavy
> manufacturing, btw.)
>
> This type of left-libertarian thinking, which shares a lot of ground with
> council communism (Anton Pannekoek) exists in a state of tension with the
> "back to nature"/"dismantle technological civilization" stuff.
>
> -B.
>