Colin Ward disguised as Jimmy Carter
I’m saddened to learn that Colin Ward has died.
Jesse Walker has rightly called Ward’s Anarchy in Action the left-wing equivalent of The Machinery of Freedom.
Ward may or may not have called anarchy the cement that holds the bricks of society together, but the quote is a nice summary of his outlook – that spontaneous, voluntary, non-hierarchical cooperation is all around us, in the interstices of statist society, routing around authority to get things done.
The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by a mass media notoriously phony.
— Paul Goodman
Check out the Paul Goodman Essay Contest. (CHT Joel Schlosberg.)
A reader tipped me off that Noam Chomsky has agreed to answer the top-rated questions submitted via this reddit page; the reader suggested that I condense my “Chomsky’s Augustinian Anarchism” gripes into a question.
So I did. Here’s my question for Chomsky:
Although as an anarchist you favour a stateless society in the long run, you’ve argued that it would be a mistake to work for the elimination of the state in the short run, and that indeed we should be trying to strengthen the state right now, because it’s needed as a check on the power of large corporations.
Yet the tendency of a lot of anarchist research – your own research most definitely included, though I would also mention in particular Kevin Carson’s – has been to show that the power of large corporations derives primarily from state privilege (which, together with the fact that powerful governments tend to get captured by concentrated private interests at the expense of the dispersed public, would seem to imply that the most likely beneficiary of a more powerful state is going to be the same corporate elite we’re trying to oppose).
If business power both derives from the state and is so good at capturing the state, why isn’t abolishing the state a better strategy for defeating business power than enhancing the state’s power would be?
Users can vote comments upward or downward on the list; so if you’d like to see Chomsky answer the above question, go here and try to boost it up the list. (Or ask one of your own, of course!)
“Do you or your organization directly or indirectly advocate, advise, teach or practice the duty or necessity of controlling, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States, the state of South Carolina or any political division thereof?”
If so, fill out a “Subversive Agent Form,” listing your organisation’s core beliefs and the names of all your members, and send it along with $5 to the South Carolina secretary of state.
I am not making this up. I can’t tell whether this form is genuine, but the enabling legislation certainly is. (CHT Kevin Carson.)
Charles Johnson is both inviting participants and raising money for the Southern Nevada branch of ALL to have a presence at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair next month. This is an outreach-to-the-antistatist-left event, to complement the outreach-to-the-antistatist-right event we’ll be involved in a month later.
I wish I could go, but I’ll be in Prague. But – want to go to San Francisco and hang out with anarchists? Or want to donate for this worthy cause? Details here.
Paul Raven reviews Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic novel The Dispossessed, a tale of the confrontation between an anarcho-syndicalist culture and a state-capitalist culture. (CHT François.) Though Le Guin’s personal sympathies were with the anarchists, she doesn’t stack the deck (unlike most political science fiction): the anarcho-syndicalist culture is actually pretty sucky. But the state-capitalist culture is even suckier. (I didn’t say it was a cheerful book. But it’s a very good book.)
Related whereunto, some random items:
Addendum: I remembered something else I’d intended to mention: in addition to Ken MacLeod’s The Cassini Division being partly inspired by The Dispossessed in its theme, I’ve wondered whether MacLeod’s earlier novel The Stone Canal might be partly inspired by The Dispossessed in its narrative structure, with one storyline being told through the odd-numbered chapters while a “flashback” background story, featuring the same viewpoint character – in both cases an anarchist scholar – runs through the even-numbered chapters (though of course other writers have done such things as well).