"Anarchists, I discovered, did not believe in anarchy as it is usually defined - disorder, disorganization, chaos, confusion, and everyone doing as they like. On the contrary, they believed that society should be organized in a thousand different ways, that people had to cooperate in work and in play, to create a good society. But, anarchists insisted, any organization must avoid hierarchy and command from the top; it must be democratic, consensual, reaching decisions through constant discussion and argument. What attracted me to anarchism was its rejection of any bullying authority - the authority of the state, of the church, or of the employer. Anarchism believes that if we can create an egalitarian society without extremes of poverty and wealth and join hands across all national boundaries, we will not need police forces, prisons, armies, or war, because the underlying causes of these will be gone."
(Howard Zinn, Passionate declarations).
Highly utopic, but I like utopies, without them life would be flavourless...
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4 comments:
This is second life. The online virtual world. Maybe you should try quickly. Some people are already thinking about developping a political organisation...
You didn't get it, it is about not developping another political organisation but thousands of local organisations so that decisions are taken on a local scale, with all people interested participating, instead of delegating all decisions to remote bureaucrats who care nothing less about what matters to you ! This would be real democracy. You are laughing, but this is really serious ideas worth exploring more...
I am not laugthing
Second life is not a joke
Very interesting experiment
Oh, I had not heard about this concept, so I thought you were being ironic !...
But after reading a bit about it on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life), I am not sure this is really what Howard Zinn was thinking about. This looks more like libertarianism theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism), which says that people should not be forced to do anything they don't want to do, and which would lead to a very selfish world I think.
What Howard Zinn was referring to is more something like libertarian socialism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism), where both authoritative institutions and private properties would be abolished, to get rid of the root causes of violence. This takes many ideas of communism, but without the need for an authoritative state, which is what have corrupted the original ideas of communism in the world.
So I guess that it does not bring an alternative to left and right, since we have also to choose between individualist anarchism or social anarchism !...
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