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ronya posted:duly note that Foucault was writing at a time before tax revolts showed the limits of top-down socialization in effecting acceptance Foucault was also writing before the time of "providing sources" 
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Nov 12, 2020 01:43
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Purple Prince posted:Foucault would have a thing or two to say about this. Well hopefully Foucault would've read how the Aragonese collectives operated, which you clearly haven't. They didn't centralise decision making they did the opposite. And no in the UK most services I directly interact with are run by private often national or even global in scale businesses. Local Council's outside of a handful have very little input into how services are run, and what power they do have comes to them from the central government which can be revoked. Over the years there have been many situations where a council simply has to vote in favour of a policy, because if they don't they will be breaking the law.
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Nov 12, 2020 01:45
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Baka-nin posted:I've always found the private/personal property distinction to be needlessly confusing, especially since it was coined in the 1800s as a way to describe what for many was the new mode of ownership (capitalism) which was replacing most of the older forms. Factory ownership was called private ownership because unlike clerical estates or aristocratic titles in theory any private citizen could own it hence private. This is also why private schools in the UK are called public schools because they're open to the public provided they can afford the fees. This is a fair critique, but a lot of it comes from the transition to industrial production. The whole point was owners of the means of production having capital that was worked by wage laborers. No one would say rural peasants laboring in piecework cottage industries were capitalist, though they owned their means of production. Similarly someone who does mechanical Turk tasks (is that still a thing?) wouldn’t be classified as a capitalist, even though they own the computer they work on. Private/personal draws the line between privately owned property, including means of production, used by an individual, versus those labored on by wage labor. You can own a loom and it can by personal property. The second you hire a guy to works on it, boom, private property. It’s been a while since I dove into Marx, so I may have biffed it (and I think I smeared some of the discussion of “what is capital” in there), but it’s kinda like drug paraphernalia, until it’s used to do drugs it’s just a tobacco pipe. All that is to say yes, the phrase is confusing, but it’s less about who can own it and more about how it’s used.
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Nov 12, 2020 01:50
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Disnesquick posted:I am genuinely interested in your line of thinking on this point. My general position in life is that ideology is, in general, axiomatic, and science is deductive. I think the manifesto is a call to arms, whereas Capital is a more phlegmatic dissection of long-term forces. Well, except for the final line ("Working men of all countries, unite!") the manifesto isn't really an exhortation to action or attempt at persuasion. It lays out why capitalism is already doomed, why all the individual rights that liberals fear the communists will take away are already gone, and so forth. "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." I'd call the Manifesto a series of predictions about the way history is going to unfold given the conditions on the ground. What are those conditions on the ground? Well, the Manifesto itself actually goes into some detail about wages and the means of production and the role of the state in mediating class conflict, just not into sprawling, exhaustive detail because it's meant to be light and snappy. Capital goes into much, much more depth when it comes to the complex organ systems pumping away beneath liberal democracy's skin, but basically comes to the same conclusion as the Manifesto, namely that capitalism is founded on violence and exploitation and is shaking itself to pieces. And while the start is pretty dry (though by no means humorless), Marx actually gets pretty worked towards the middle and end when he's talking about minting children's blood into coin and histories written in blood and fire and so on. To take a different tack, I once met someone who blinked at me in confusion when I told them that their beloved Jordan Peterson was a right-wing ideologue. They told me, he's not right wing at all! He's just making neutral observations about history and society! And, of course, you and I can say the same thing about Marx, and there's a sense in which we'd be right, but while Peterson calmly and dispassionately observes that the feminine principle will destroy society unless suppressed by the patriarchy, Marx calmly and dispassionately observes that capitalism is going to kill us all unless we kill it first.
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Nov 12, 2020 01:59
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OwlFancier posted:I can't say I can think of a better answer to the question than taking power out of the hands of the minority and spread it around as much as possible... What is climate change if not the result of a society structured to benefit a handful of people at the expense of everyone else? What is the cause of continued inaction if not the unwillingness to change that model of organization? How can that form of organization possibly not result in killing millions of people? It's because there's nothing about a fishing village that produces no commodities for trade being swallowed by the ocean as a result of climate change that intrinsically gives the concrete factory syndicate-commune five hundred miles away a reason give up their production output to save that village, or (even harder to swallow) to idle their concrete factory to slow down and halt the emission of GHGs even though that will require them to receive mutual aid from others still in order to continue to be able to feed themselves. Like, no one is arguing for capitalism not needing to be abolished here except maybe for Black Book of Communism guy, but bottom-up federated decision-making doesn't auto-resolve all of the problems inherent in living in a world of finite resources, opportunity cost, and mutually exclusive interests. Also, some of the favored socialist solutions to these problems themselves create cracks in society through which capitalism can creep back in and once more become the dominant mode of production and the owning class that results can assert control over others.
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Nov 12, 2020 01:59
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Nor is there anything about capitalism or top down socialism that gives the decision makers a reason to give a poo poo either. I am sure either of those ideologies would be more than capable of declaring a great many people to be acceptable losses to preserve "society" and I am equally sure that they would be willing to sacrifice even more people to specifically preserve the specific society in which they remain the decision makers. It is not a perfect solution, but I have far more faith in democratic decision making to maximise the welfare of as many as possible than I do any society where those in charge have a vested interest in preserving their own position of being in charge. I do not think hierarchical societies are capable of maximising human welfare because they will always choose to maximise the perpetuation of the hierarchical structure instead.
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Nov 12, 2020 02:03
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OwlFancier posted:It is not a perfect solution, but I have far more faith in democratic decision making to maximise the welfare of as many as possible than I do any society where those in charge have a vested interest in preserving their own position of being in charge. I do not think hierarchical societies are capable of maximising human welfare because they will always choose to maximise the perpetuation of the hierarchical structure instead. It seems you're arguing that democratic decision making in this context is the best response because it's the most utilitarian response, but doesn't a threat on the scale of climate change necessitate a response of a scope that requires a level hierarchical leadership that is incompatible with this vision of strict democracy or bottom-up decision making? Or, to provide a counter example to that above (why should a factory owner care about sea levels a thousand miles away from their factory): why should a village a thousand miles from a coast care about climate change, even if its democratically run?
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Nov 12, 2020 02:08
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A lot of people treat historically-existing socialist regimes as if the people living there had never heard of voting or something. They'll be like "well in a good socialist society there'd be bottom-up decision making and recallable officials and so on" when in fact this is exactly what went on: https://drive.google.com/file/d/174Y2CYVVaMumINW1ApKRO5DiC7JOyCI8/view The above link is one I've posted in C-SPAM a bunch of times but will never stop slinging around, because it's a really interesting historical document: a narrative of life in the Soviet Union by a British national who'd been visiting there for a few years, before the Cold War had gotten properly spun up such that there was a need for negative propaganda. Instead, since the USSR and UK were allies in ongoing second world war, they were trying to cast the Soviets in a good light such that citizens of the UK could develop some understanding of who it was they were working with. In particular I like the details in there about the creation of the famous Five Year Plans - the Supreme Soviet would draft one, then pass it down to subsidiary soviets, which would pass it down further, and further, and so on, and only once the plan had reached the capillaries and been annotated with criticisms, requirements, etc by all and sundry would it get passed back up to the heart to get revised and finally implemented.
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Nov 12, 2020 02:11
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Well the Mexican town of Cheran, famously found itself beset by cartels, corrupt police and politicians, and the forests were being devastated by illegal logging, to the point the local water sources were in danger of disappearing. So with no help from above they rose up, chased out the police, politicians and cartel and run their community by themselves, and have been steadily replanting the forest. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-37612083 And in Rojava they're very interested in experimenting with what they call Democratic Confederalism which is really heavily into repairing environmental damage and enabling humanity to live sustainable. https://makerojavagreenagain.org/ I'm not as familiar with the effects of this, but they seem to be dedicating themselves to it even while in the middle of a war.
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Nov 12, 2020 02:13
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Baka-nin posted:Well hopefully Foucault would've read how the Aragonese collectives operated, which you clearly haven't. They didn't centralise decision making they did the opposite. That’s what I was saying, they were successful because they distributed decision making across lots of people, and having a larger republic impose their will on the collective directly damaged that structure irreparably. Regarding the UK (I’m also British) local government is still responsible for social services, police, and so on even if in practice many of these functions are outsourced coercively or by choice. Coming from more of an authcom perspective I’m somewhat interested in how the technologies of governance used by capitalists can be co-opted to achieve socialist goals, rather than being dedicated to destroying the coercive technologies as more liberal socialists might be.
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Nov 12, 2020 02:20
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Aruan posted:It seems you're arguing that democratic decision making in this context is the best response because it's the most utilitarian response, but doesn't a threat on the scale of climate change necessitate a response of a scope that requires a level hierarchical leadership that is incompatible with this vision of strict democracy or bottom-up decision making? Or, to provide a counter example to that above (why should a factory owner care about sea levels a thousand miles away from their factory): why should a village a thousand miles from a coast care about climate change, even if its democratically run? As I said, why should the central planners or ultra rich care about either? Why should they care about even the people they could save the lives of if doing that diminishes their own immediate wealth or power? Are they just expected to have a more prominent sense of noblesse oblige than the factory commune? What I am asking is what incentive is there for this top-down response to fix the problem? Do you not look at the lack of action thus far, the delays, the ineffectuality of the responses, and wonder why that is? Like do you think the political pushback against climate change is just an inexplicable anomaly or is it not better understood as the logical result of a system whereby people can gain immediate power and wealth from denying it and saying it's a hoax and pushing the burden of it onto other, poorer countries? At the very least I think that capitalist overproduction occurs because of that lack of democratization, that is why we make so much useless poo poo, that is why people have to go to work so much to pay rent which the extraction of is supported by the legal system that exists to entrench the power of the wealthy. That is why people are made to do inefficient commutes because capitalism is predicated on poo poo like land values and rent and selling cars to people and lovely sandwiches from chain stores and why they're desperate to get people back to working in offices rather than from home because the arse has collapsed out of their loving racket while people have been working more efficiently from home. I think democratization has a far stronger chance to scale back human economic activity and production than either capitalism or state socialism, and I think that there is also greater opportunity for democratic organization to create interdependence between different regions and thereby a desire for mutual assistance, rather than just letting everyone loving drown to save wherever the most expensive real estate is, which is already not far removed from what capitalism normally loving does. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Nov 12, 2020 |
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Nov 12, 2020 02:21
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any model of the politics of environmental regulation needs to consider e.g. how European directives have successfully compelled rivers management and postindustrial cleanup over varying degrees of cooperation or resistance from muni/regional/national governments manichean, zero-sum models of power and self-interest don't fare well as explanations this is not to assert that existing institutions are necessarily capable of ever-larger challenges, mind - but rather than one's model of how institutions and stakeholders and interests interact might be flawed ronya fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Nov 12, 2020 |
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Nov 12, 2020 02:33
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Purple Prince posted:
I'm not British I just live there and was also at one point on a council, they are not responsible at all for any of those things unless they kept them since the 80s. The most responsibility a council has is tendering to bidders, once a contract is available, and serving as an auditing and accountability service for them, but that's mostly done by the council staff, with at most a report delivered to a council meeting which may or may not be voted on. They have no say whatsoever on the police, police forces in the UK don't even correspond to local council jurisdictions so I have no idea how they could run them and there pay and conditions and the laws they enforce is determined by the national government. Or the Scottish parliament in Scotland. And again what little a council can or can't do is determined by the central government. There is very little the elected part of a council can do besides negotiate rates within boundaries determined by the government, or it acts as another enforcement arm for the central government.
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Nov 12, 2020 02:45
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Guys, just want to say this is a great discussion and I hope to contribute soon.Baka-nin posted:Well hopefully Foucault would've read how the Aragonese collectives operated, which you clearly haven't. Let's try and avoid adversarial language like this. You have an interesting point, but let's be careful of phrasing.
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Nov 12, 2020 02:48
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Ferrinus posted:Well, except for the final line ("Working men of all countries, unite!") the manifesto isn't really an exhortation to action or attempt at persuasion. It lays out why capitalism is already doomed, why all the individual rights that liberals fear the communists will take away are already gone, and so forth. "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." I'd call the Manifesto a series of predictions about the way history is going to unfold given the conditions on the ground. What are those conditions on the ground? Well, the Manifesto itself actually goes into some detail about wages and the means of production and the role of the state in mediating class conflict, just not into sprawling, exhaustive detail because it's meant to be light and snappy. I think you've set a very high bar here so I'm going to reread the manifesto before I attempt to respond. That's not an attempt to hand-wave or evade the points you've raised but more an admission that I need to have my house in order before trying to make appropriate response. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Nov 12, 2020 |
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Nov 12, 2020 03:39
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ronya posted:any model of the politics of environmental regulation needs to consider e.g. how European directives have successfully compelled rivers management and postindustrial cleanup over varying degrees of cooperation or resistance from muni/regional/national governments Why must any model consider this? Why is this important in comparison to e.g. the externalisation of the costs of capitalism either to the future (i.e. imisseration of future generations) or geographically (i.e. immiseration of the global south). I'd expect an imperial core to look out for its own well being and degrade the periphery.
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Nov 12, 2020 03:55
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ronya posted:any model of the politics of environmental regulation needs to consider e.g. how European directives have successfully compelled rivers management and postindustrial cleanup over varying degrees of cooperation or resistance from muni/regional/national governments We must also then consider that these directives and power structures also are responsible for environmental damage. Global Warming, for one, is completely the result of a profit-driven model of resource production and consumption. The cost of fossil fuels is far greater than the benefit of abandoning them. There are also countless examples of dumping and pollution that has done unquantifiable damage to e.g. the ocean ecosystem as a result of profit-driven oil spills. It unfair to make the larger assumption that hierarchical systems have outweighed the harm they've done to our environment with positive contributions. If anything, the climate has been irreparably destabilized, not improved, by these lopsided structures.
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Nov 12, 2020 04:07
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Disnesquick posted:Why must any model consider this? one's apparent macrohistorical-moment left-wing movement in the continent might be blindsided by liberal green parties seizing the moment instead, for instance... and lead left movements, both parliamentary and extraparliamentary, to have trouble explaining why their programme is the unique answer to climate anxiety being able to articulate concerns shared by the masses is not the same as translating that concern to support for given ideological outlook (never mind programme) - it's not unique to contemporary issues, you can see this problem recurring in left responses to mass anxieties over nuclear annihilation (where support for disarmament was not the same as support for unilateral disarmament, and yes, the distinction mattered)
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Nov 12, 2020 04:09
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Ferrinus posted:A lot of people treat historically-existing socialist regimes as if the people living there had never heard of voting or something. They'll be like "well in a good socialist society there'd be bottom-up decision making and recallable officials and so on" when in fact this is exactly what went on: https://drive.google.com/file/d/174Y2CYVVaMumINW1ApKRO5DiC7JOyCI8/view Yeah, like part of the problem with the narrative that 'Mao is responsible for famines' for example is that the local agricultural cooperatives actually had a lot of autonomy in choosing what and how to grow stuff. I definitely agree with people that when we are theorycrafting socialist systems we need consider stuff like principal-agent problems and perverse incentive structures and etc. But the reality is that arguing over wether 'central planning' or 'strong federalism' or 'localized democracy' are better systems is a little silly because in practice any society wide system if governance is going to be a wierd mish mosh that is contingent and complicated and can involve elements of all of those things. I do think the cement factory question is really important, as in how do we build meaningful solidsrity between geographically distant workers in different industries thay may find themselves at cross-purposes. Heterogeneity of needs is difficult but not impossible to manage, however the specific arrangement that navigstes the conflict is going to be idiosyncratic in basically every case.
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Nov 12, 2020 04:23
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ronya posted:one's apparent macrohistorical-moment left-wing movement in the continent might be blindsided by liberal green parties seizing the moment instead, for instance... and lead left movements, both parliamentary and extraparliamentary, to have trouble explaining why their programme is the unique answer to climate anxiety Ok, let's break this down piece by piece: ronya posted:one's apparent macrohistorical-moment left-wing movement in the continent ronya posted:liberal green parties seizing the moment instead, for instance... and lead left movements, both parliamentary and extraparliamentary, to have trouble explaining why their programme is the unique answer to climate anxiety I have no idea what problems you have with the left's approach to nuclear disarmament.
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Nov 12, 2020 04:27
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Crumbskull posted:But the reality is that arguing over wether 'central planning' or 'strong federalism' or 'localized democracy' are better systems is a little silly because in practice any society wide system if governance is going to be a wierd mish mosh that is contingent and complicated and can involve elements of all of those things. I'm less interested in theorycrafting The Best System and more in discussing Socialism Technology that can be spread about and used to a) further the immediate needs of the movement, like replicable and ideologically grounded mutual aid movements to support people's immediate material needs in this time of The Fuckening, and to resist the onset of bad outcomes, like the leaders or major figurehads of such cooperatives gaining outsized authority and then abusing people (as happened in Portland multiple times). For example, the concept of recallable delegation is something normies are just not ever taught about and I'm interested in learning about others.
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Nov 12, 2020 04:39
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I did say 'in the continent'... I'm alluding to the recent successes of the green wave in France, Germany, and Austria, set against the apparent stagnation the left parties now seem to be mired in, after initial successes in the wake of the GFC
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Nov 12, 2020 04:47
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Baka-nin posted:British council chat Thanks for the discussion. I wasn’t aware that police forces aren’t run by local authorities in the UK. Re social services and tendering, I believe this differs by area as when I lived in London the district council were in the process of trying to bring more services in-house to reduce costs and retain expertise versus relying on outside contractors. While the Conservatives have historically made that pretty difficult it’s not mandatory as far as I could tell. It’s true that local authorities have their hands tied by the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government and the Local Government Association however, specifically in how they’re not allowed to run a deficit budget or borrow to invest in capital projects. Nonetheless power is diffused in the UK through the various local organisations, quangos, and so on that actually provide the services (or not...) dreamed up in Whitehall which is all I meant in the original post cf Foucault on governance. A centralised government for Foucault looks like an absolute monarchy with power concentrated at the centre (a punishment regime), not merely a state with a powerful central government. Learning about the techniques of government used by capitalists and liberal regimes seems to be important to me if we want to build a socialist state, so we can understand what works, how it works, and how it can be rearranged to create socialist rather than capitalist citizens.
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Nov 12, 2020 05:01
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Crumbskull posted:Yeah, like part of the problem with the narrative that 'Mao is responsible for famines' for example is that the local agricultural cooperatives actually had a lot of autonomy in choosing what and how to grow stuff. The literal loving CPC described it as 30% natural disaster and 70% human error 
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Nov 12, 2020 05:01
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OwlFancier posted:As I said, why should the central planners or ultra rich care about either? Why should they care about even the people they could save the lives of if doing that diminishes their own immediate wealth or power? Are they just expected to have a more prominent sense of noblesse oblige than the factory commune? I'm trying to engage with this discussion but I'm kind of lost as to why there seems to be this impression that "top-down socialism" is not also democratized? Like, if the worry is about whether central planners are going to be willing to sacrifice large swaths of population, why wouldn't a socialist polity vote them out? It's a central tenet to socialist democracy, even Soviet democracy and not just anarchist principles, that representatives to the government should be subject to recall.
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Nov 12, 2020 05:14
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the main instrument the Soviet system used to render local elections predictable was not to invalidate voting itself but to stop candidates from ever showing up on the ballot, fwiw "should a socialist electoral system allow candidates whose platform is that they will dismantle institutions or measures we regard as critical to the continued success of Socialism" was a real question the Soviet bloc (and eventually also Chinese bloc) had to contend with, and well, its answers are all well-known
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Nov 12, 2020 05:21
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Acerbatus posted:The literal loving CPC described it as 30% natural disaster and 70% human error "Human error" suggests that there were in fact more people involved than just Mao, despite the term being singular
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Nov 12, 2020 05:43
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"Human error" also means that it wasn't deliberate. Ultimately, the reason why there's pushback on this sort of topic is because "there were famines under (if not specifically committed by) communism" is used as a rhetorical cudgel against never ever ever wanting to try socialism / communism ever again. For people to then point out that there were also famines under (again, if not specifically committed by) capitalism is not "whataboutism", or an attempt to excuse communism's failures by accusing capitalism of having done the same, but rather as an attempt to apply a level of consistency to the argument: if communism is never to be tried because of all the failures that have occurred under it, why are we not saying the same of capitalism? if we believe that capitalism can be regulated, can be reformed, can have its sharpest edges ground down to prevent the disasters and calamities that it was unable to successfully address, should not communism be granted the same benefit of the doubt? To suggest otherwise would be ideological dogmatism.
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Nov 12, 2020 06:34
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the CPC of today also has an interest in minimising mao's achievements, because the idea that mao failed in socialism justifies their capitalist reforms. of course mao did fail, quite a bit - the question is whether that was because he was attempting socialism or because he was doing something wrong other than that. just as an aside, i love the "70% this 30% that" chinese communists seem to use a lot. its just a great expression to me. its got nuance built in!
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Nov 12, 2020 06:45
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The hundreds of thousands dead in a single year from corona proves the failures of both liberalism and capitalism. It's too risky to try either one again.
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Nov 12, 2020 07:01
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Working my way through Capitalist Realism, saw this discussion wanted to post a particularly relevant passage:quote:Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level
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Nov 12, 2020 08:16
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The Oldest Man posted:I'm less interested in theorycrafting The Best System and more in discussing Socialism Technology that can be spread about and used to a) further the immediate needs of the movement, like replicable and ideologically grounded mutual aid movements to support people's immediate material needs in this time of The Fuckening, and to resist the onset of bad outcomes, like the leaders or major figurehads of such cooperatives gaining outsized authority and then abusing people (as happened in Portland multiple times). For example, the concept of recallable delegation is something normies are just not ever taught about and I'm interested in learning about others. Consumer cooperation is basically a mistake but don't tell anyone I said that.
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Nov 12, 2020 09:38
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gradenko_2000 posted:I'm trying to engage with this discussion but I'm kind of lost as to why there seems to be this impression that "top-down socialism" is not also democratized? I have no faith in the ability of the elected representatives in large, hierarchical societies to actually look out for the people below them. I think those sorts of socieities regardless of their professed ideals, structurally encourage the privileged few to lie to and exploit the majority, via the media, state or bourgeois and via the very nature of centralization of power. There may be individual exceptions but I do not think the majority of such a government can actually care about the people it governs. I do not think people can have that much empathy and even if they could, the very attempt to govern millions of people from a central government means people will be discarded simply because it is so easy to do. I am also rather skeptical that society that practice things like mass incarceration can really be considered "democratized" and not simply oligarchies. Why do things like that happen if not to protect the power structure and its component people? As others have noted, I think the existence of things like that are what lead to the slide back towards capitalism, nationalism, and the exploitation of the majority at the whim of the minority. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 13:16 on Nov 12, 2020 |
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Nov 12, 2020 12:55
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Seeing the latest rise in COVID cases makes me wonder - how would a decentralized anarchist society solve something like this, an emergency which requires immediate, directed, centralized coordination at the national scale in order to solve?
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Nov 12, 2020 23:10
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Some questions I have about anarchism: Witnessing the chaotic nature of having multiple differing and competing/at odds standards of responses instead of a unified and organized one to crises like climate change and pandemics - going 'yes, even more of this please' is baffling to me. Why wouldn't a centralized pooling of resources, information sharing, and response standardization be better? Anarchists seem to be always banging on about state coercion. If you have voluntarist substates or whatever, what's the mechanism to stop them competing with each other and one or a few hogging resources to the detriment of others. How do you enforce regulations like carbon emissions without 'coercion'? How is this different in a practical sense from right wing libertarianism? The anarchist answer always seems to be 'but we can't trust the state/people in charge to do the right thing'. Every system can be gamed, and every system is only workable to the extent the people in it want it to work. A badly run state is bad, but the fetishizing of decentralization as if it's something that'll last is weird when it might just be transitory. Organized beats disorganized, and the dissipation of power doesn't get rid of it, it creates a power vacuum where the strongest warlord /oligarch / corporate interests win.
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Nov 12, 2020 23:18
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DrSunshine posted:Seeing the latest rise in COVID cases makes me wonder - how would a decentralized anarchist society solve something like this, an emergency which requires immediate, directed, centralized coordination at the national scale in order to solve? Unless you mean some strange strawman version of anarchism, then they are immune to covid bc they don't exist in the real world. ezln also had a statement on their covid response procedures, you can go look for it.
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Nov 12, 2020 23:21
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DrSunshine posted:Seeing the latest rise in COVID cases makes me wonder - how would a decentralized anarchist society solve something like this, an emergency which requires immediate, directed, centralized coordination at the national scale in order to solve? Better than most national governments did, as it turns out https://schoolsforchiapas.org/this-is-how-they-protect-themselves-from-covid-19-in-zapatista-territory/
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Nov 12, 2020 23:23
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DrSunshine posted:Seeing the latest rise in COVID cases makes me wonder - how would a decentralized anarchist society solve something like this, an emergency which requires immediate, directed, centralized coordination at the national scale in order to solve? Personally I would suggest that part of the reason it is such a problem is because of the centralization of production and reliance on long distance travel (and a lot of not strictly necessary work) If you have decentralized economically you might find it much easier to keep populations separate from each other and reduce the risk of massive, immediate infection of an entire country while perhaps even keeping more of the economy operating. If you look at a lot of the failures in response a lot of them are the unwillingness (or outright inability) of governments to actually stop the unnecessary parts of the economy (like rent extraction) to allow people to simply... not go to work. And part of the reason it spreads at work is because people are crammed into tight, poorly ventilated workspaces. Political decentralization does hamper your ability to coordinate a nationwide response but so does political centralization because there is the impulse with political centralization to simply sacrifice people to keep pursuing the policy of the central authority, which as we have seen is often to kill people to make money. Part of the reason you need that response is to put a stop to things that capitalism demands and which fuel the spread in the first place. While some nations have managed to control it through use of their national governments, I think it is equally important to suggest that those which haven't controlled it have primarily not done so also at the conscious direction of their national governments, and many of them have actively pursued policies which cause further harm for perceived (or actual) political gain. Also as we've seen there is a problem with trying to impose centralized restrictions anyway if people aren't willing or able to comply with them. You fundamentally need people to buy into them for them to work, and if that's the case, if anything you are reliant on fundamentally decentralized compliance in many respects already. There would be nothing stopping a scientific or medical federation putting out an advisory on the dangers of the disease and it would be up to people to follow it, as it is primarily up to people to follow it now. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Nov 12, 2020 |
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Nov 12, 2020 23:27
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For me, things like COVID really highlight the weird way people talk about concepts like "authoritarianism", "accountability", etc. China took what you'd classically call authoritarian measures to contain the virus, mandating strict lockdowns, forcing people to stay home, etc. An ELZN-wide mandate against inter-village travel could easily receive the same criticism, and I could imagine that, if the West started to view the Zapatistas as a real threat, you'd suddenly start hearing a lot about the tyrannical, top-down control of the populace as enacted by Subcomandante Marcos on the word of just a few elitist doctors or whatever. On the other hand, the US basically did gently caress all, thereby preserving its citizenry's individual liberties to go out whenever and wherever they want, wearing whatever they want. The thing is, the end result is that Chinese citizens have their personal freedoms curtailed far less by the novel coronavirus than US citizens do. In fact, the clear takeaway is that the Chinese government is actually much more accountable to its people (at least on this one issue) than the US government is, because they felt the need to mobilize resources to keep people alive and healthy on a scale that we simply did not and may never. Is it more cruel, aloof, and hierarchical to impose a lockdown and save the populace or to do nothing and let the populace be riven by disease?
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Nov 12, 2020 23:37
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OwlFancier posted:Personally I would suggest that part of the reason it is such a problem is because of the centralization of production and reliance on long distance travel (and a lot of not strictly necessary work) If you have decentralized economically you might find it much easier to keep populations separate from each other and reduce the risk of massive, immediate infection of an entire country while perhaps even keeping more of the economy operating. This seems to be wrong and not actually answering the question asked. A few points: - A lot of the bungling of the pandemic responses HAS been from relatively decentralized systems, like the various and differing state government responses in the USA and Canada. - Strongly centralized government systems like Vietnam and the PRC have handled it pretty well, without fundamentally requiring decentralized compliance. - The question wasn't about how a centralized authority can bungle the response, the question is how the ideal anarchist system would go about it. 'Well everyone would need to buy in to it, if they didn't whatever' is not a solution to a global pandemic.
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Nov 12, 2020 23:41
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