TraditionalAnarchism/Talk

Traditional anarchism is a poor choice of words since anarchists usually find themselves working against tradition. One might be forced to say that "traditional anarchism eschews tradition, including its own" .... Unreformed anarchism would be better since anarchists reject the notion of political reform. It would also be funny though I find I cannot explain the humour in it. Probably just the meta-syntactic thing. -- RichardKulisz

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I wrote:

A simple and common objection to anarchism is that any notion of communal control implies something akin to a StatE??. Anarchists reply

I was hoping someone would supply the reply. I don't actually know that the objection is common, but it seems simple and obvious to me, and I infer that it must be common. Therefore, I also infer that there are some ordinary ways of replying. :-) -- LarrySanger

The State is what you get under private property, in the modern corporation. Cooperatives, credit unions and mutual aid societies are the principal instances of cummunal control and they do not involve the kind of authoritarianism found in corporations. The similarity between the power hierarchies of corporations and the layered division of labour in cooperatives is superficial. If you compare both organizations using the items on the Psychopathy Checklist as a guide then it's becomes clear that cooperatives act like normal humans, humane, warm, feeling, intelligent and rational while the corporation can only be described as a psychopathic entity that cold-bloodedly uses workers for its own ends and acts on one impulse after another. As an example, one of the items on the PCL-R is "criminal versatility". Corporations have it, Microsoft demonstrates it when it buys companies expert in areas MS knows nothing about. In contrast, cooperatives cannot do this because it would violate their charters.

Communal control is subject to the danger of a state developing. The Mondragon system of cooperatives in Spain is slowly devolving. There was a crucial flaw in the charter of the Caja Laboral Popular; the capability and incentive to accumulate vast cash reserves to the point where it can (almost) act independently of its members. Anarchists don't claim that people will be able to slack off after the revolution.