A PLG Comment Becomes a PLG Guest-Post

 

Myself and Purple Library Guy have a bit of back-and-forth in the comments section of my last post.  I was too busy to provide a timely reply PLG's last comment but it's also about something that I've been thinking lately.  If I ever do seriously spend time blogging again it won't be to criticize/analyze.  It would be mainly about recommending courses of action.

I've got a few things to do this weekend so I might not get around to making my reply post.  But without further ado, here is PLG's comment:

I think fundamentally what nearly all left uprisings are missing is some way of making decisions that will have enough of a sense of legitimacy that the movement will follow them, something that can translate into at least a rough and ready approximation of governing in areas they control. Otherwise you can have a massive mob of people with legit grievances, and they can swamp the cities, scare the cops away, make the place ungovernable . . . and then what? They got nuthin'. They hang around and wave signs until they run out of steam and leave. They are not capable of taking over city hall, working up a participatory budget and starting to collect the taxes and run the stuff.

(This isn't universal. The Zapatistas totally knew what they wanted to do, had solid mechanisms in place for continuing to figure it out, and that's why they're still there doing it.)

This is partly because modern radical left wing movements are mostly at least tacitly anarchist. And I mean, I'm sympathetic to anarchism, but it's not capable of defeating modern states because radical decentralization can't muster resources and force the way big centralized things can. But it's a cleft stick--we've seen over and over how centralized leftism ends up with leadership that's effectively a different class with different interests from the rand and file, and that leads to either the leadership getting co-opted Third Way style, or to Soviet style oligarchies that pay lip service to the workers while hosing them. Modern radical activism comes out of a tradition that became disillusioned by all that, and for good reason. But they haven't grappled with the need to somehow muster unified force pointing in one direction.

I do think it's possible to avoid both pitfalls. Especially with modern computer/communication technologies. Existing social networks are of course built by capitalists for whom the last thing they ever want to see is the proles using them to organize and make decisions--but it's fairly clear that if you designed them a bit different, they could work for that. In this connection I'm quite interested in loomio.org, which does a platform designed expressly for decentralized leaderless decision-making.

So I'll reply when I get the time.