to hell with the Inclosure Acts!…or: the lesson of the Commons
December 19, 2010
Imagine for a moment that the Bolsheviks had chosen, on principle, not to do away with the worker’s councils (i.e., the soviets), not insisting, as they nevertheless did, upon a “temporary”, top-down, controlling vanguard—i.e., taking their cue from Marx (his essential error?). Further—and in contradistinction to that failed attempt, and the ruin that ensued—Bakunin’s view is that one can never undo “old” top-down control (Tsarism, the kulaks, feudalism in Russia, etc.) by instilling “new” top-down control, however transient.
That is, the essential fact of our lives is that we must work, and, therefore, it makes nothing but good sense to establish the democracy we insist we want—i.e., a participatory democracy—at the syndicalist level, that being a decentralized matrix of worker’s collectives, or unions.
There, we establish the distinct possibility of 1) ongoing dialogue, 2) effective arbitration, 3) mutuality, and 4) participation of the kind sorely lacking in the highly centralized, top-down, hierarchical arborescent-model (i.e., Ponzi?) construct under which we suffer.
Hayek (Mises, and, more recently, Summers, et al.) argue to the necessity of control via “the unseen hand of the market”—i.e., the centralized market. If, however, we prescind from the idea of the Federal-as-God-as-needed-control mantra and consider the reality of “smaller,” decentralized (i.e., the rhizome model of, e.g., Deleuze and Guattari) local collectivization with localized, non-hierarchical communication displacing the virtually religious idée fixe of control, then a space of negotiation exists when one was lacking a moment ago.
Localized union consent via dialogue—i.e., consent which prescinds from individual greed as the salient, malign dynamic in this equation—has a better than equal chance at establishing a sustainable environment in which to flourish, not merely survive. This is not a utopian moment proffered here. It is highly workable, pace Hayek, Mise, Greenspan, and the other supposed Ivy-League “geniuses” in our midst.
Anarchism, as posited here, has nothing to do with lawlessness, chaos, disorganization, nihilism, etc. Rather, it is adult men and women determining the course of their own lives. The element of “organization” comes from the radical (i.e., fundamental) fact of the basic necessities we all need on an equal basis. That “equal”—when acknowledged as such—is all the foundation, organization, management, order, etc., we, as a collective will ever need.
When, however, we move away from the logical construct of a community of adult men and women—considered as a localized, non-hierarchical collective existing via ongoing consent—towards an eminently adversarial construct—i.e., capitalism—we have consented to (tacitly or otherwise), aided and abetted an abiding 1) dissonance, 2) antagonism, 3) contention, 4) rancor and wars of every stripe.
We do not need the “unseen hand of the market” for the commonweal. That is an academic (institutionally-derived) ruse—and an ersatz substitute—for what is essential (unremittingly so) to us for the long haul.
Capitalism is not a fait accompli! The history of civilization in the West does not begin with the Inclosure Acts!
primitive accumulation of capital
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