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Americans and socialism (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/memes@lemmy.ml
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[–] -4 points 2 years ago (10 children)

With a world wide net of councils, all connected but not centralized

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    I see this in various flavors of anarchism and I don't get how it would work in practice. Hierarchies form to simplify the logistics and social cohesion of a disorganized network of subunits.

    As a basic example, how the hell do collectives even communicate with those on other continents? It took millenia for humans to develop reliable seafaring technology, only made possible through the direction of state actors. Sea cables cost millions to maintain; satellite communication is even harder to achieve.

    Assuming that any of these could even be accomplished strictly via collectives ("Why the hell should I give you my Chilean copper so you can throw it in the ocean to talk to Europe?"), operating these essential services gives access to power and coercion.

    Somebody has to launch the ships or run the heart of the telegraph network. Will you centralize the authority of multiple collectives to regulate and monitor it?...

    And if you don't do anything to bridge the ocean, what's to prevent ideological drift for that continent; getting a little too centralized for more efficient resource use? Even if your accessible web remains strong and ideologically pure, you have to pray that completely separate webs will be just as strong.

    Anarcho-primitivism is the only critique that seems to own the inherent anti-civilization logic, but even then there's nothing stopping a collective-of-collectives from making a bigger pile of sharp rocks to subjugate you.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    This retains class, though. If your councils only have ownership of their own jurisdictions, then the members of each council are Petite Bourgeoisie. Marx specifically advocated for full centralization because chiefly it becomes a necessity anyways with increasingly complex production, but also because it gives more democratic control over the whole of the economy, not just individual bits.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    So we have a factory council open to all workers in the factory to make decisions and send revocable delegates to the city council where they talk to the delegates of farmer councils, consumer councils, .... If the factory council makes unfair decisions (and I assume you mean all the workers in the factory belong to the petite bourgeois since they all can attend the council), the consumer council can take collective action to counter it.

    So who is the ruling class? Certainly not the bureaucracy as in liberal and bolshevik states since it doesn't exist here. Or is it the city council? They are revocable, not elected for a given period. Like the soviets before the Bolsheviks ruined everything.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    First off, bureaucracy is not a "class," the Socialist states like the USSR were controlled by the Proletariat. The formation is described in Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan, or you can check this infographic if you prefer:

    Anyways, back to your question. In the instance of single-unit factory councils, it isn't so much as a "ruling class" as it is that these workers have control only within their immediate domain, and no real control outside of it. The Soviet model is different, it laddered upwards and extended equal ownership over all within it.

    The Marxist critique of the cooperative model is that trade between these cooperatives will result in the resurgance of Capitalism, not the elimination of class society, as time goes on and some cooperatives swell in power and others fall under their control, without equal ownership between them. Engels elaborates on this in Anti-Dühring. Cooperatives don't scale without administration, either, which means at that point you may as well extend ownership equally across the whole economy so that it may be democratically controlled by all, even if those more local to an issue have more of a voice.

    Now, that doesn't mean cooperatives are bad, it's just that they only really serve to play a role of "filling in the cracks" large industry leaves behind, as said large industry should be publicly owned. Cooperatives being small can remain as such, and only make themselves able to be properly folded into the public sector when they grow to include large networks of administration, at which point they have outscaled their original cooperative nature anyways.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    How is that different from a state, aside from the decentralization of power?

    What would prevent centralization of power?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    aside from the decentralization of power?

    That's the whole point. If your state concept is broad enough to entail any organization of a certain size, be my gast in a council republic

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    If your state concept is broad enough to entail any organization of a certain size, be my gast in a council republic

    It's somewhere along the lines of "any organization that handles the administrative work and protection for a given territory".

    And I don't think that's all that broad of a definition, and it includes your world wide net of councils as a state.

    Importantly, you didn't answer the second question:

    What would prevent centralization of power?

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Would these councils be elected by the people they represent?

    Would they sit in a parliament and form a legislature?

    That just sounds like Canada.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Not exactly. The lowest level of councils is free for everyone to attend to. These neighborhood councils send delegates to the city level and so on. These delegates are revocable so when they don't do what the basis wants, they are gone. Also on each level, each group can opt out if they want. And decisions are made on the lowest level possible so much more voluntary and less central than Canada

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