http://www.panarchy.org/ward/organization.1966.html
In the above-mentioned article, Ward argues that it is, in fact, not paradoxical to describe anarchism as a form of organisation. It is about finding a new way to fulfil the functions that the State performs through needless bureaucracy. Here is an interesting quotation from the article:
'George and Louise Crowley, for example, in their comments on the report of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, (Monthly Review, Nov. 1964) remark that, "We find it no less reasonable to postulate a functioning society without authority than to postulate an orderly universe without a god. Therefore the word anarchy is not for us freighted with connotations of disorder, chaos, or confusion. For humane men [and women!], living in non-competitive conditions of freedom from toil and of universal affluence, anarchy is simply the appropriate state of society".'
Perhaps it would be wise not to forget that the raison d'être of the modern nation state, since its inception 500 years ago, is WAR. According to that original formulation, the state became a highly sophisticated, complex yet efficient machine of war-making. Its organisational capacity was, up to that point, unsurpassed by any other form of human organisation. That capacity made it possible to send millions of troops to the frontline of battle, i.e. to construct the systems of transport required to move so many humans, to establish and maintain the agricultural systems needed to feed them all, and to construct the national identity that was crucial in determining (like a human immune system) 'self' from 'other' and thus providing a justification for what was often just a process of turning the dangerous energy of internal ethnic- or class-based disputes outward onto 'foreign' peoples in order to maintain 'equilibrium' within any particular nation state. From one point of view, this raison d'être ceased to be, when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. At that moment in history, for the first time it became impossible to wage wars on other nation states in the way that humans had waged war in the past. The concept of 'mutually assured destruction' (MAD) emerged, and thus we entered a period of Cold War because 'hot' (i.e. active) war would be detrimental to too many people - we simply possessed too great a destructive power as a species armed with nuclear technology. So, since then the nation state has no longer been an entity of war-making exclusively, and instead it has been subsumed by the more powerful influence of the corporation, located within the global consumer market. The Iraq war was, of course, not about 'America' versus 'Iraq' - although it was phrased that way by some people in the media, and by the goverment rhetoric of a superpower needing to rush to help the innocent people of an undemocratised, 'savage' land. It was a corporate war, waged to ensure the perpetuation of the global oil-choked 'free' market. Thus, you could argue that the modern nation state is obsolete, replaced by the unharnessed power of the global corporation that does everything in its power to curtail the capacities of the state to regulate corporate activities. So the corporation can do whatever it wishes, which is to make its shareholders rich at any (human or ecological) cost, and meanwhile the nation state is shrivelling like a brain cell starved of oxygen.
You are partly right, I think. Indeed, the energetic (anarchist?) force is being drained from young people by a twisted system of education that only requires obedience. But the government is not the primary architect of this scheme - people like Bush and Cheney are so intimately connected with corporate (i.e. oil) power that the lines between politics and free-market economics are entirely blurred. The government is not in control (or at least, it is not supposed to be, in 'democratic' countries) of the corporate media, and it is this same corporate media that is increasingly shaping the education of young people in the rich world (and the poor world too). The government is too pathetically weak to do anything to regulate, for example, the extreme infringement on public (school) space by advertisers of soft-drinks and candy bars. It cannot regulate corporate activities because that runs profoundly against the maxims of the 'free' (i.e. unregulated) global market. There is no room to manoeuvre here, in the land of 'one dollar, one vote' - not least for individual citizens.rischott wrote:Our government does not supply the young with an oppurtunity for knowledge, for equal existense, for a common dream. We are taught useless facts, and our motivation and spirit is drained from us year after year, until we succumb to the system. In 5 years, we'll believe there are only 2 parties, 1 god, and our allegiance to the flag. But it was government that put those ideas in my face. It was government that consolidated into itself, forgetting about you and me
The nexus of power between the WTO, the G8 and the U.S. government is what rules the planet today - this is the de facto global government. We did not ask for it, we did not vote these people into power, they are there because of their enormous wealth that could only have been earned by impoverishing millions. Yet they collectively take decisions every day that affect the lives of every one of us. Are you worried? I sure am.
