The Street That Cut Everything

[Dahut]

Last night on BBC one there was a programme called: 'The Street That Cut Everything'. As the UK government is making massive cuts to public services BBC 1 decided to carry out a social experiment. The residents of 'the street' were returned their council tax for six weeks, the duration of the experiment, then all the services normally provided by the council were withdrawn. The residents got no refuse collection, street lights, welfare etc. More challenges such as graffiti and fly tipping were then thrown at them. This was an experiment to see if David Cameron's 'Big Society' could work, how people would work as a community to replace those cut services. In the end the conflict of the experiment destroyed the community. One man observed: "The community is in tatters. It will be a long time, if ever, before it recovers."


Now I realise this is nothing to do with anarchism but it just made me think about a stateless society and autonomous communes. We like to think that as communities we would pull together, cooperate and make a better society for us all. But is this the case? How long would it take for people to throw off their capitalist mindsets of competition, conflict and hostility and work together? What's to stop someone seizing control and turning the commune into an oligarchy?

[caramelpence]

It was awful. Not only in the sense of being politically crap, it also made for boring viewing. It has no relevance for a future society of autonomous communes and local councils because a system of councils would (or more accurately could) not take place in circumstances of scarcity, given that most of the conflicts on the show arose from people not agreeing on how to spend their household council tax rebates, and a post-capitalist society would still involve functions like rubbish collection and lighting and transport being organized on a large scale, but in a much more democratic fashion than under current systems of local government.

[agnixie]

Its relevance to RevLeft? Well, it made me think about a stateless society and autonomous communes. We like to think that as communities we would pull together, cooperate and make a better society for us all. But is this the case? How long would it take for people to throw off their capitalist mindsets of competition, conflict and hostility and work together? What's to stop someone seizing control and turning the commune into an oligarchy?

There's no expectation of running things as commons, private property is still the rule, etc.

It's not anarchism, it's gilded age capitalism.

[Dahut]

I realise it's nothing like anarchism but it just raised those questions for me.

[Manic Impressive]

I thought it was funny:laugh:

I thought some of the extra stuff they did to them cheapened the experiment. There was no need to send the fridges back and fine them on top of that as if there was no social infrastructure and no camera crew filming your every move they would have got away with it. I don't think it says anything about a socialist stateless society for the same reasons caramelpence said but more about a stateless capitalist society where the only way they were able to cope as a community was to resort to disorganized communal situation where they pooled their money and shared the responsibilities.

[Tim Finnegan]

Now I realise this is nothing to do with anarchism but it just made me think about a stateless society and autonomous communes. We like to think that as communities we would pull together, cooperate and make a better society for us all. But is this the case? How long would it take for people to throw off their capitalist mindsets of competition, conflict and hostility and work together? What's to stop someone seizing control and turning the commune into an oligarchy?
I don't think you properly understand exactly how a workers' revolution would come about. It would not be a political event, but a social process; not a brief period in which one set of authorities are pitched out and another- however broad- is installed in their place, with the intent of realising communism at some later point, but a process through which the working class comes together as a revolutionary forces, and in the act of its organisation as a class and its rejection of the bourgeoisie generates the new communist society. The toppling of the bourgeois state would not simply be the removal of the state with the hope of some spontaneous "pulling-together", but a struggle in which the autonomous organisational bodies of the working class- be they councils, revolutionary unions, or what have you- arise and challenge the political hegemony of the bourgeois state, establishing themselves, if successful, as the new basis of social organisation.
If you look at historical revolutionary periods, such as the Paris Commune, Anarchist Catalonia, or the Soviet Republics of 197-1919 you will see that proletarian political organisation precedes a worker-lead social revolution (rather than an intellectual-lead political revolution, as later seen in China, Vietnam, and so forth), rather than being something which emerges afterwards.