Have any of the resident anarchists read books like Human Scale and Small is Beautiful?
I'm not familiar with them, although Park might be. It's probably the sort of thing I should look into; I've tended to accept the traditional syndicalist line that you just need to democratise industry, and things'll work themselves out, but the more you think about that, the harder it is to maintain.
How would communities based on social consensus avoid
becoming this?
I think the issue is this concept of an impersonal collective will, the idea that it is possible to state the aspirations or interests of a group independent of any of the actual
people in that group. Feiglin's "Jewish community" is ontologically prior to anything so mundane as an actual
Jewish person, so it isn't necessary consult any such persons to formulate a collective will. Such a formulation hat requires, if not a state, some sort of mediatory authority, something or someone which can represents itself to the individual
as the community. If people address each other directly, I don't think you can develop an impersonal collective will, because any collective will is going to be grounded in the actual process of discussion and consensus-building.
One thing you notice, when you look at a lot of stateless societies, is that communitarianism is actually quite difficult to build and maintain. It's too easy for people to bypass centres of authority, to simply act (or refuse to act) as they see fit. It requires a well-developed culture of conformity or deference to force a majority into a consensus, and such cultures don't seem to develop very readily in the absence of authorities, or at least the experience of authorities, because people have to be trained to think like that, to be trained to believe in a super-personal will.
What's the role of family in an anarchist society?
In the sense of the
nuclear family, I think it would tend to fade away. The nuclear family depends on the household as the basic unity of society, and that's something that's been in decline for two hundred years. Without meaning to fall back onto economic determinism, without the need for the household, I don't think the nuclear family will persist as a norm.
In the sense of kinship more generally, I think it would probably continue to be important. One of the things that Sahlins has pointed out that, when liberal philosophers pontificate on human nature, they always seem to miss kinship, which is quite genuinely universal in human societies. An anarchist society might be expected to supersede this in a glorious blaze of individualism, but I think that such an expectation probably just reflects the alienation of Western anarchists.
Do children have the same rights to non-coercion as adults?
That's a good question, and not one I have a very good answer to. The usual arguments against coercion assumes a certain baseline of rationality or self-control which isn't a given- it won't be found in small children, or in some mentally disabled people. (I think children achieve a capacity for self-government quicker than we give them credit, in part because our culture does a poor job of either fostering or recognising self-government.) And I'm not entirely sure how we'd resolve that one, beyond saying that we should aspire to respect their rationality as much as possible, and endeavour to employ coercion as little as possible. And how much is "as possible"? And does this, by analogy, imply to adults who are not acting with absolute rationality? It's a tricky one, no doubt, and I tend to suspect that we won't ever find an answer so long as our machinery remains so heavily meat-based.
