A Model of Anarchism

[777]

I'm looking for some literature that will help describe the practicalities of an Anarchist Society, how it would work and such - the real nitty-gritty. Can anyone help?

[Os Cangaceiros]

Perhaps you should look into the works of Michael Taylor...he's a political scientist who specializes in game/motivational theories, but he's also written a couple of books about the possibility of anarchist and/or stateless societies. I have one of his books called Community, Anarchy and Liberty, and it's OK.

[fa2991]

Anything about the Spanish Civil War would do - also, Kropotkin's "Conquest of Bread" is unusually detailed about a future anarchist society.

[RebelDog]

Parpolity and Parecon. Look them up on znet. They are extensive tracts on how a libertarian society might be run and how we might get there.

[ContrarianLemming]

It's pretty simple really, no book is necessary. welcome to the site

to quote a quote by Syndicat which I like to be as a note (it comes in handy)

First of all, there has to be direct worker self-management of the various workplaces and industries where people work. This means that decisions that affect everyone in a large facility would be made thru, or controlled by, a general assembly of everyone and there would be delegates elected to a coordinating council. For decisions that affect mainly people in one department, there would be assemblies there.

The idea is that there are spheres of decision-making that affect mainly or most importantly a particular group, and there will be an assembly there as the basis for them to control these decisions through direct democracy.

To ensure that workers have the skills and knowledge to be effective participants in planning and decision-making, there would have to be a vast change in the educational system, providing a lifetime access to training so as to develop people's skills and potential, and to break down and eliminate the current relative concentration of expertise into the hands of a few, which is the basis of the power of the bureaucratic class.

But self-management has to be general throughout society. An anarchist social arrangment can be described as generalized self-management. Thus where people live there will be decisions that affect first and foremost the people who reside there, and thus there will be neighborhood assemblies, and they will also elect an administrative council to ensure that decisions are carried out.

But there are decisions that affect people over larger regions, such as the transportation system or the health care system for a region, the educational system for that region, and so on.

So there would also need to be congresses of delegates elected from the base assemblies. And these congresses would work up plans for what the population want in the way of public goods and services. It is the society's obligation to ensure meaningful and self-managing work for everyone, and plans to ensure this need to be made. There will be forms of infrastructure that affect users over a region such as the electricity grid or transit system.

At the same time, workers from various workplaces in the same industry would need to have a way to coordinate production, and there would be congresses of delegates there too.

To ensure that the base of society, the people, are in the driver's seat, the base need to have the right to force decisions at congresses to be sent back to the base assemblies to be discussed and voted on.

Another responsibility of the regional organization would be environmental defense and thus acting as a control on the uses being made of the environmental commons by production organizations. They would need to either ban pollutants deemed too destructive, or if this is deemed impractical, at least requiring that production organizations internalize their enviro costs on their budgets.

Plans for society can be developed through interaction between the various groups in workplaces and neighborhoods, to adjust their plans to each other.

For social self-defense there is a people's militia. A society might decide to make it an obligation of able-bodied adults to be trained for self-defense.

To summarize, then, the features would be:

1. land and means of production would be owned in common by everyone. They would not be owned by production groups, but sub-contracted or allocated to production groups to produce things which they have proposed to produce and which the society has agreed to them producing.

2. Production would be based on or motivated by direct benefit or direct use, not pursuit of profit.

3. Thorough job reorganization, integrating the decision-making and conceputalization and planning work with the physical doing of the work, so that these are not separated into separate classes.

4. There would be some sphere of collectively provided social goods, such as health care, education, housing, local transportation, child care, etc. The extent of this "free sector" would probably vary from region to region depending on the politics or culture of that region. The purpose of this is to ensure that various needs are met, where this makes sense as a form of collective provision.

5. There would be no class hierarchy and no state. There would be no state because the governance power would lie with in the various congresses, councils and assemblies, with power working up from the direct democracy of the assemblies.

6. In the period when this libertarian communist society first emerges from capitalism, it will necessary, as Marx said, to require able bodied adults to work and to pay people in proportion to their work effort. If jobs are re-org'd so that the grundge work and more interesting work are balanced in each person's jobs, we can say that each job would require roughly the same sacrifices and thus we can pay each person at the same pay rate per hour.