Even evil has standards

[sabotabby]

Wow, check it out! Former "center-left" cyclist turned warmongering fascist Charles Johnson has turned again. Colour me skeptical (like someone pointed out on fengi's LJ, it'll take one more terrorist attack to turn him back, but it's almost heartening to read.

I wonder if he'll apologize for his blog being a gathering place for genocidal maniacs for the last eight years.

If he's serious, though: Welcome back to the reality-based community.

Comments

[flintultrasparc.livejournal.com]

I guess it depends on how you define "nice".

Cities and states do not function without people, generally speaking, being cooperative (in the broad sense of the word, not the economical arrangement). I'm afraid I don't think that you've made much of an argument that people living in big cities don't know how to share. May I ask where you live?

To get back to the substance of our disagreement on small communities versus large ones, I think I'll quote Bookchin:

"integrally the confederal association of cities and towns is part of the development of a free, ecologically oriented society. Localism, in the narrow sense of a virtually autarchial locality that aspires to "self-sufficiency"--in the sense so popular in the ecology movement today--could easily produce a parochialism notable for such evils as racism, cultural insularity, and a stagnant traditionalism. Conceived localistically, municipalities would be as regressive as authoritarian nation-states."
Bookchin, Urbanization Without Cities

"It is a troubling fact that neither decentralization nor self-sufficiency in itself is necessarily democratic. Plato's ideal city in the Republic was indeed designed to be self-sufficient, but its self-sufficiency was meant to maintain a warrior as well as a philosophical elite. Indeed, its capacity to preserve its self-sufficiency depended upon its ability, like Sparta, to resist the seemingly "corruptive" influence of outside cultures (a characteristic, I may say, that still appears in many closed societies in the East). Similarly, decentralization in itself provides no assurance that we will have an ecological society. A decentralized society can easily co-exist with extremely rigid hierarchies. A striking example is European and Oriental feudalism, a social order in which princely, ducal, and baronial hierarchies were based on highly decentralized communities. With all due respect to Fritz Schumacher, small is not necessarily beautiful.

Nor does it follow that humanly scaled communities and "appropriate technologies" in themselves constitute guarantees against domineering societies. In fact, for centuries humanity lived in villages and small towns, often with tightly organized social ties and even communistic forms of property. But these provided the material basis for highly despotic imperial states. Considered on economic and property terms, they might earn a high place in the "no-growth" outlook of economists like Herman Daly, but they were the hard bricks that were used to build the most awesome Oriental despotisms in India and China. What these self-sufficient, decentralized communities feared almost as much as the armies that ravaged them were the imperial tax-gatherers that plundered them.

At the risk of seeming contrary, I feel obliged to emphasize that decentralization, localism, self-sufficiency, and even confederation each taken singly - do not constitute a guarantee that we will achieve a rational ecological society. In fact, all of them have at one time or another supported parochial communities, oligarchies, and even despotic regimes. To be sure, without the institutional structures that cluster around our use of these terms and without taking them in combination with each other, we cannot hope to achieve a free ecologically oriented society."
Bookchin, The Meaning of Confederalism

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

What does he mean about the institutional structures that surround them, in the last sentence? I must read his writings! Sounds interesting.

[flintultrasparc.livejournal.com]

He's talking about democracy and communalism as institutional structures; that is established social relationships.

Let me put it another way... a cooperative farm, a single family farm, and a small farm that uses wage exploited labor, and a farm that uses slave labor might all resemble each other in their material components. What's important is not so much the size of the farm, what it plants or what equipment it has--so much the social institution of how people work together.

Yes, you should definitely look into Bookchin. I suspect that he will be far more appreciated in the 21st century than he was in the 20th.