From: kurt@eskimo.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum)
Subject: Re: Anarchist Picnic
Summary: removing coercive character of rules makes a completely different society
Organization: >>> Eskimo North (206)-FOR-EVER <<<
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 17:23:40 GMT

In article <cannon.27.718333914@scs.unt.edu> cannon@scs.unt.edu (Dustin Cannon (Lab 3460)) writes:
>In article <BvGt5H.4Gu@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> mwilkenf@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Missi Wilkenfeld) writes:
[...89 lines of quoted article deleted!! pretty thoughtless IMO...]
>
>One would think that an anarchist picnic would not have a schedule.
>_________________________________________________________________
>Dustin Cannon       "For the first time I laid my heart open 
>University of        to the benign indifference of the universe."
>North Texas                           -Albert Camus

Are you trying to be funny or what?? "One would think..."  Well, why
don't you?

Why *wouldn't* an anarchist picnic have a schedule?
There's no principle that says out-and-out that organization is *bad*.
That's prolefeed propagated *by* authoritarians about anarchists.

The point is that there are still going to be "rules", "laws", "axioms",
"guidelines", "postulates", "codes-of-conduct", "taboos", "regulations",
"rules-of-thumb", "collected-wisdom",
"belief-systems", "10-commandments", "lists-of-do's-and-donts", you-name-it,
in the anarchist utopia of the future.  They won't have *coercive* force
backing them up, though.  Anarchists aren't going to say, "...or else" the
way authoritarians do.  Some of these "you-name-its" may, because of some
useful or generally advantageous quality (whether "correctly" preceived or
not), become part of the general "way things get done".

One might *attempt* to "enforce" them, but the outcome in an anarchist
society would be a good deal more uncertain than in an authoritarian
society but no less counterproductive; in an anarchist society, the "masking
factors" that serve to gloss over the unpleasant side-effects of *enforcement*
in an authoritarian society would be absent, since they would require the kind
of effort to maintain them that only a state has the resources to support, and
so the unpleasant side-effects would be much more readily perceived.

For example, I cordially detest those "walk/don't walk" signs at streetcorners
in urban centers, and there is no more pathetic spectacle than to see
some rainbow-haired kid with a circle-A on the back of his jacket standing
at an empty intersection waiting for the walk lite before crossing.
In Bellevue (one of the car-friendly mallworlds in the Pacific Northwest)
the cops now stop and hassle people who jaywalk, trying to get from one
concrete mega-bunker to another, working their miserable shitjobs.

But those walk signs, used as *guidelines* or in an *advisory* capacity,
have a completely different character IMO.  They might be genuinely useful
in providing a go/no-go assessment of crossing conditions, that a person
who was disabled or elderly, for example, might find useful.  There's no
reason why such amenities couldn't be maintained by a
cooperative/collective/individual enterprise of some sort, composed of
people who found such things useful.

There will also be collected bits of wisdom about what works best as
social lubricants between diverse and abrasive sovereign free spirits.

The *real* problem IMO is getting those "diverse and abrasive sovereign
free spirits" in the first place, instead of the joiner-type sheep we seem
to be plagued with.  Authoritarians need (and want) a tightly controlled,
coercive society to control sheep [ after all, look at what sheep do when
they get out of control -- viz. LA riots, where it was demonstrated how well the
ghetto kids of So. LA had *internalized* the predominant cultural values of
this society -- the "educational system" really *does* work! :( -- but when
they are under control, they are such *wonderful* subjects! :( ], it's not
at all clear that a bunch of enlightened free spirits would.

I think that people will perceive the advantages of organization (of which
schedules are a tool of), and be able to apply it more effectively (or *not*
apply it, as they choose) when the *coercive* character of organization is
removed.
-- 
kurt@grogatch.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum)
 Nostalgic conservatives will soon be referring to the Bush Era as
 "those Halcion days of yesteryear".