It took about 1800 years for Christians to decide slavery was an evil that must be stamped out, and Moslems about 1200 years. The USA is the only modern country that still provides for slavery in its constitution.
Today we see the kind of defense of the state we once saw in the defense of slavery. Perhaps it will take another 1800 years for Christians to realize the state is evil (in the theological sense of “no good.”) And if Moslems take a mere 1200 years, it will no doubt emerge as the leading religion 600 years before the Christians.
There are Christians who abhor the state, one in fact on her way to be proclaimed a saint, Dorothy Day, of the Catholic Worker movement. Althugh she used the word anarchy to describe her goals, those around her sanitized her words.
The founders of the Catholic Worker movement preferred to use the word personalism instead of anarchism because of the confusion of the word anarchy with chaos.
I say yield not an inch to those who would destroy your argument by confusing your listeners with their definitions.
Dorothy Day wrote
“Kropotkin wanted much the same type of social order as Father Vincent McNabb, the Dominican street preacher, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and other distributists advocated, though they would have revolted at the word anarchist, thinking it synonymous with chaos, not ‘self-government,’ as Proudhon defined it. Distributism is the English term for that society whereby man has sufficient of this world’s goods to enable him to lead a good life. Other words have been used to described this theory, mutualism, federalism, pluralism, regionalism; but anarchism–the word, first used as a taunt by its Marxist opponents, best brings to mind the tension always existing between the concept of authority and freedom which torments man to this day.”
Just so.
Kropotkin traced the source of this problem to the factory system of production. One man, because he owned the factory and the machines, could profit by the work of many laborers, without having to actually produce anything himself.
Hang on, management is productive work. The problem is usury and its effect of concentrating power in the hands of the few.
The workers, by contrast, produced all the wealth of the society, but were allowed to keep almost none of it, because they did not control the means of production, (namely the factory and the raw materials).
Here is the error in thinking, the workers did control the means of production for it was their hands on those means. What the workers did not control was the bankers, because the workers had no means for suing the bankers for fraud. The bankers owned the cops, and the cops protected the bankers.
Individual artisans could not make things as cheaply as factories could, so they were forced to go out of business and seek work in the factory, for a wage. Under this system, a small minority were allowed to attain fabulous wealth, while the vast majority of people endured grinding poverty, malnutrition, hellish working conditions, and a polluted environment.
Hang on, artisans make different things than factories, of a different quality (usually better.) the grinding poverty, etc, was the result of the triple whammy of farm finances laid waste by usury and property rights laid waste by the courts, and economies organized for war.
One thinks of the decline of the family farm as a recent phenomenon, but Kropotkin was aware of it over 100 years ago, and warned of its dangerous implications for society. In The Conquest of Bread, he blamed the poverty of peasant farmers on three groups: “We know in what a wretched condition European agriculture is. If the cultivator of the soil is not plundered by the landowner, he is robbed by the State. If the State taxes him moderately, the moneylender enslaves him by means of promissory notes, and soon turns him into the simple tenant of a soil belonging in reality to a financial company.”
Right, I just said that... so let’s not get confused as to where the problem lies...
“The modern ideal of a workman seems to be a man or a woman, or even a girl or a boy, without the knowledge of any handicraft, without any conception whatever of the industry he or she is employed in, who is only capable of making all day long and for a whole life the same infinitesimal part of something: who from the age of 13 to that of 60 pushes the coal cart at a given spot of the mine or makes the spring of a penknife, or ‘the eighteenth part of a pin.’ Mere servants to some machine of a given description; mere flesh-and-bone parts of some immense machinery; having no idea how and why the machinery performs its rhythmical movements.
If that was the case at the time Kropotkin was writing, it certainly is not the case today. People change their jobs with distressing regularity, and many are fighting to keep or get such a job.
He conceded that, from the standpoint of the profit motive alone, the division of labor made sense. Goods could be manufactured in mass quantities much more cheaply in big factories than in small workshops. But, Kropotkin insisted, it was not in the best interest of society for individuals to be treated this way.
Kropotkin was good at reporting, but short on prescriptions. But here he misses a crucial point: factories make cheap products, not products more cheaply. A factory bangs out a cheap wire basket, not a handwoven reed basket cheaply. Enough people will pay more for a handwoven reed basket to keep that work viable. But no farm, no reed basket. If you get this point wrong, you quickly go off the rails.
Besides its being hurtful to the human spirit, Kropotkin saw a purely commercial disadvantage in the division of labor. He noted that where small factories did exist, either using running water to turn a wheel, or obtaining power by some other method, they were often the source for new inventions and technologies. When the workers were familiar with the entire manufacturing operation, and understood what was going on, they were able to perceive ways to improve the system.
A good call on Kropotkins part, the result of him actually working with peasants in a small factory. But "intellectual property" laws forbid the emergence of new ideas at the rate a transforming society needs.
The only valid reason for the existence of huge factories, in Kropotkin’s analysis, was for the production of huge commodities like locomotives and ocean liners. Everything else that a free people might need could be produced in small factories and workshops, for local consumption, not for trade or export.
Boeing is 3000 subcontractors and their “big factories” are really just assembly plants. Everything a free people need IS produced in small factories.
Instead of competition between manufacturers driving the prices down, and tempting them to mistreat workers for the sake of their profit margin, each cooperative would (to the absolute best of its ability) produce its own food, clothing, shelter, and luxury items. Each local group could have its own set of small factories to meet its own needs. Clothing could be made, from raw material to finished garment. Homes and furnishing could be made. Metals could be smelted and tools could be forged. In short, there was no barrier to total self-sufficiency, and therefore no need for speculators, middlemen, or brokers.
A middleman manages bringing buyers and sellers together, so they have a value. The largest factories do not make locomotives, they make the small consumer items, like the iPhone.
Dorothy Day described Kropotkin’s vision of cooperatives in The Long Loneliness: “Kropotkin looked back to the guilds and cities of the Middle Ages, and thought of the new society as made up of federated associations, co-operating in the same way as the railway companies of Europe or the postal departments of various countries co-operate now.”
A better way is for co-operatives like REI, PCC, Group Health, and so on. But upon whose ears do such prescriptions fall? Change must be nonviolent, or it is no change, it is the same old thing. Change must be back to that which worked, or adapt what is working now. It cannot require that people change, or people be “smart” or somehome limited to certain people. Change is possible only if people voluntarily change. Or more precisely:
The second reason was that Peter Maurin had recognized that the revolution was primarily a matter of personal transformation, not mass conversion. Everyone must make their own unique break with the dominant culture.
Just so. And how did the Catholic Worker prescriptions work out?
(T)he communal lifestyle of the Catholic Worker did not attract large numbers of people. Kropotkin expected whole towns and cities to be reorganized into free communes. Instead, handfuls of people came together in semi-permanent communal groups. Hundreds or even thousands of the poor were helped each year, but the vast majority did not stay and join in the work. For these reasons, the houses of hospitality did not replace government. Kropotkin’s voluntary associations, by performing all the worthwhile tasks of the state, were supposed to make the state superfluous and obsolete. When there was no need for a government, it would be disbanded. What happened was just the opposite. Throughout the century, the size and power of the state continued to grow.
Yes. The state exploits resources worldwide, say in the Congo. It takes some of its ill-gotten gains and gives it to the Catholic church to pass out in the form of welfare to blacks in USA, which results in genocide in both the Congo and USA. The state has demanded the Church obey state rules if it takes state money. The Church claims it cannot do this. The Church believes it will win this fight.
I think it will lose the fight. if so, the Church will be reviewing its alliance with the state. That could be good news.
It must see what Catholic Worker Maurin saw, no cooperation with the state:
While other papers, monthly, weekly, and daily, displayed the ‘blue eagle’ of the National Recovery Administration, he would have no part in cooperating with the state.”
Just so. The state is the arm of the powers that be that when replaced with human institutions we see peace and prosperity. We'll get there one person at a time. if not, the journey is better anyway.
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
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