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Shag, your whole argument may or may not hold; I simply lack energy now to follow the whole of it _or_ to formulate the whole of my own position here. But I think you are mistaken here, and the mistake appears within your own words:
.a) "tendency for power to operate outside of the state"
.b) "the way they, themselves, as people creating alternative institutions, are capable of reinstantiating relations of repressive and oppressive power."
This is the same mistake writ small. Power, apparently, is something people create, exercise: Crudely, it is an intentional or unintentional act. They are conscious that is of their own tendency to exercise, to want to exercise, power over others. Put otherwise, power is state power, but there can be little states (a given anarchist project).
But where then is the overwhelming power of commodity relations. When capitalists exercise the kind of power anarchists see, they are acting to preserve, protect, those social relations. The state has (fundamentally) no desire to exercise power in the anarchist sense; it exercises power in giving support to capitalist endeavors to maintain the freedom of capitalist relations.
Now in practice, sometimes, the only protection working people have against the (blind, unintentional until challenged) power of normal capitalist practice, is THE STATE.
Working conditions. Hours. Safety on the job. And so forth. In one of their episodes of upsurge, workers impose on the state this responsibility. And in a more or less effective, etc. way the state continues to exercise this protective role, this power over capitalists, even as labor militancy declines. OSHA is not 100% a dead letter. It does give woerkers some protection. That is state power in operation. It doesnot come from some innate urge to power on the part of bureaucrats or of "The State" reified as an Evil Power.
Take another instance from actual practice. Last spring, energized by Wisconsin and by viewing (all by himself) the video put out by West & Pleven (sp?) on a National Teach-In, Sonny G (of LUC) put out a series of ambitious peopoala. One of them did not impress me at first, but fortunately other comrades responded first and a series of meetings resulted, leading to what we called Coming to together for Democracy; we contacted any group in town that seemed even vaguely "left," to send a spokesperson to a planned forum in which he/she would report on what their group was doing and its aimes. The first two came off with some success, & we are planning a third for next month, this time on campus, with campus groups reporting.
O.k. In the planning sessions for the first Forum, a crucial parti ci pant was Common Action (Free School), a local anarchist group. They are not primarily students and are pretty sophisticated in their embodiment of the anarchist tradition. Several of its members, including its leaders, think I'm about the 8th wonder of the world, which helps in conversation. Now one of the slogans we played with and have used some is "Fight the Corporate Attak on Democracy." The Common Action person on the committee objected. We don't have democracy so it is incoherent to speak of defending it. We got over that hurdle by my enthusiastically agreeing with him but pointing out that lots of people thought we did so it was a good agitational slogan. We (various othere groups; various projects) continue to work with Common Action (or rather it continues to work with us). But there are bumps ahead I fear.
Why? Because it is essential in the coming battles to make demands on the state, and sometimes those demands will involve not evil things the state is doing but evil things the state is failing to prevent. In other words, a Mass Movement, even one ultimately aied at the overthrw of the state, must in part see the state as a 'friend' failing in its duties.
We want higher taxes. We do, don't we? We want the state, that is, to ecxercise its power. Anarchists are going to be iffy partners in this. We need to work on this, but those of us who aare not anarchists need to recognize the difficulty of forming working coalitions with people who do, really, overlap the libertarians. Carrol
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