File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2003/postanarchism.0306, message 70


Date: Sun, 08 Jun 2003 02:45:16 -0400
Subject: Re: Clarifying Essentialism's Relation to Anarchism
From: Joshua Synenko <jsynenko-AT-accessv.com>


BabblePreacher-AT-aol.com:

> In a message dated 6/7/2003 9:47:45 PM Eastern Daylight Time, JessEcoh-AT-cs.com
> writes:
> 
>> and that means that some sort
>> of decentralized federation, a "commune of communes," is going to be the
>> sort 
>> of structure most compatible with human freedom, because that alone will
>> allow 
>> the maximum degree of real participation in decision-making by everyone
> 
> I recently had a conversation that fell, at one point, into this idea of a
> "decentralized federation", which a friend pondered as something similar to
> the 
> US if every state were to break off into self-governance (a rather comical
> example, but let's toy with it, anyway). We wondered if this would be possible
> or 
> if, instead, a slew of micro-wars would break out, in which each "commune"
> was pining for the land, resources, flora, fauna, weather patterns, etc. of
> another "commune". My apologies for treading so close to an essentialist
> perspective here, but, is decentralization "actually" possible? or do
> (collective)we 
> yearn for a more populous unity? or, if we scrap the latter, how does
> decentralization take up the problems of geography and cultural dispersion
> (how is the 
> center fractured, without creating dissonant "nodes")? how, in a word, do we
> handle the problem of plurality once it is actually acheived? do all that feel
> as "type A" feels shuffle into "node 1", all that feel as "type B" into "node
> 2", and so on? or would the antagonism of the extremes evaporate along with
> the 
> abolition of the center?

It seems reasonable to assume that if the US were to break off into
self-governing units, some wars would invariably break out, or at least a
general state of emergency. I don't know a lot about America, but surely
there are great differences across the various regions, as well as trace
amounts of enmity between groups from their shared violent past. If such a
decentralization were to occur, and conflicts over land and resources were
brought to the surface, wouldn't people in the cities gather together and
form some kind of "node", with police officers as their army? It was
revealed today that almost 80% of Canadian citizens live in the cities, a
reversal that took only 60 years. Yet on the other hand urbanites here don't
seem very interested in where they are, so long as it is a city. And people
are so divided amongst themselves anyways, within the city as well as beyond
it. Take the set up between the provinces and the federal authority, which
is particularly decentralized. The dispersion of the city "node" would be
inerrable, it seems, especially when food shortages break out at large
supermarkets. But the center would not disappear, at least in any
perceptible way, I don't think (in the immediate present). As a node,
wouldn't the city disperse gradually, like a weave becoming undone? Wouldn't
the undoing of the city also depend on the rate of speed of destruction and
"war" *outside* its borders? As for achieved plurality and succesful
decentralized, I'm not sure what you mean. Isn't plurality always moving?
J






   

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