| >how we could reduce "concentrated powers" The abolition of private property, which as Oscar Wilde and Bookchin have noted is restricting to one's individualism and the freedom of many. It goes beyond being pro or anti-business, it goes down the route of Proudhonist and Stirnerist anarchists as you mentioned earlier. >you have to explain to me a better solution I'd say that for many people, the current situation in which there is a government is better than the proposed solution of minarchy or the whole abolition of the state. "Better" is a matter of perspective here; Stalin (who I do not admire) one said "It is difficult for me to imagine what 'personal liberty' is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment." However I'm currently reading into the works of Murray Bookchin, who advances what he calls Communalism, which is a social anarchist mode of social organisation. Libertarian in the original sense of the word. >Isn't that what exchange, association and charity are about ? I don't think so. The way Mutual Aid is described by the social anarchists and Communists is a kind of society built around helping each other out in a structured way such that the whole of society engages, because it makes sense to do so. Relying on charity is not that - it implies a kind of one-way relationship, it's rare that the person on the receiving end of the donation helps mutually, mostly beacuse he is disadvantaged in the first place. The point of a mutual aid society is such that everyone firstly has the capacity to help everyone else out. A society based on charity would seem to me to be opposite. Kropotkin wrote about mutual aid in one example, "It hardly need be said that a great number of mutual-aid habits and customs continue to persist in the Swiss villages. The evening gatherings for shelling walnuts, which take place in turns in each household; the evening parties for sewing the dowry of the girl who is going to marry; the calling of "aids" for building the houses and taking in the crops, as well as for all sorts of work which may be required by one of the commoners; the custom of exchanging children from one canton to the other, in order to make them learn two languages, French and German; and so on – all these are quite habitual; while, on the other side, divers modern requirements are met in the same spirit." The point is that charity shoudn't be a core value of a free society. Democratic Socialist Oscar Wilde said: "We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it." |
So why all people like you don't try to launch a new modern version of theses things ? If you don't need the state to do this then it should work without trying to influence governments to your benefit (because you supposedly don't need it).
Sounds like you want to talk about exchanges, but don't want to use that filthy word. What's the difference between exchange and mutually aid ?