Why I Am Not an Anarchist Anymore, part I

[frandroid]

The use of laws is to depoliticize daily life, or rather to reify the politics of an issue so to end the debate until the time the law is rewritten. Law reifies a ethical decision, and thus ends a political debate, or at least puts the political debate outside of the reach of daily life. The law can be "ethical" or "unethical" depending on your view, but once the law exists and is applied properly by civil society (i.e., known offenders are prosecuted, and efforts are made to find offenders that are not known), the application of the law thus becomes "just".

The vision I have had of anarchism has been of extreme decentralization of power. You either have small communities that don't answer to much else, or you have intense federalism, communities cities within regions within provinces, alouette. The latter differs from our current power structure in this way: if Canada worked under anarcho-federalism, federal politicians would answer to provincial politicians, provincial politicians would answer to regional politicians, region to city, city to neighbourhood, etc. The structure is turned on its head, but also, people wouldn't "vote" for anyone as much as be part of community/neighbourhood/street councils, what have you, and each entity would send delegate(s) to a larger entity to carry the smaller entity's will and opinion.

Under each system, every citizen participates fully in the political process. Now I don't know about anyone, but I want less politics in my personal life, not more. The vision of anarchism is that every person is politically empowered, but in the process, this empowerment also implies permanent political struggle. This implication is never discussed. When everyone is politically empowered, it is inevitable that struggle will happen over every issue, down to the smallest issues. In a loose power context, where you make all the laws/decisions, people's natural propensity is to make laws that favour them. That is plain self-interest. Anarchists that think that this won't happen because everyone will have the same goals in an equalitarian society are deluded at the best, hypocrits at the worst. Self-interest is an inherent human characteristic. (I am not intimating here that people cannot recognize that their self-interest is better served by the common interest. The fact that we're all paying taxes to maintain vibrant healthcare and education systems in this country is a testament to that.) Even when someone is not too bothered their own self-interest, another person trying to vye for their interest will force that someone to stand up for their own interest, else it be taken away.

(Hmmm, had to leave, lost my train of thought.)

One thing that bothers me about super-decentralized power structures is that it would be hard to come to large decisions. even if people coming to a higher assembly could agree on an agenda, then they would have to go back to their lower assembly to report which compromise would have been attained, and if people from this assembly are dependent on a lower assembly, decisions would have to be passed on until you reached the neighbourhood/street assemblies. That seems like an insane political process that would never come to any decisions.

to be continued.