novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️I've had this sort of intuitive sense for a while that there's a crucial differentiator between different conceptions of how we should live and arrange ourselves, and I was pondering just now and it finally coalesced for me: it's the distinction between arrangement *in situ* and arrangement that is not in situ. A particularly clear example of this distinction that I've been pondering a lot lately and so is most readily available on my mind right now is the difference between vulgar (i.e. Kropotkinite) anarcho-communism and more individualist egoist mutualist anarchism.
The vulgar and Arco communist vision seems to be of a society that is anything but "in situ" — all means of production are collectively owned by a centralized body that involves all of the people of a certain arbitrarily grouped up community, as are all produced goods and natural resources and everything else. Everyone owns everything, all has a right to all, and then there is some sort of centralized decision making mechanism involving this arbitrarily grouped up community that decides how all of these resources are distributed to everyone. Everything is picked up from where it was put in a set control location and then redistributed out from that central location, instead of percolating out from wherever it was produced. And people are picked up from wherever they were working or living and go to this centralized decision-making bureau and receive their assignment and then go out to the assignment instead of living in and defending wherever they were. It's Society in the image of the anarcho-syndicalist system of the dispossessed where it is essentially a bureaucratic-technocratic government by another name. The crucial image and feeling I want to evoke in you here is that image of something being picked up and removed from wherever it was or wherever it was created and stockpiled in a central place from which it is then parceled out according to some logic.
Contrast this with my much broader vision of the world which, to clarify, makes allowances for this sort of arrangement, but does not exclusively rely on it and instead values a much more distributed flat rhizome like organization where coordination and distribution happen horizontally by percolating through a network like a cloth that touches water at one spot and the water stain travels outward. As a mutualist I want a world instead where things belong — in some sense definitely not as absolute as our notion of belonging in the capitalist world — to the people that are actively using them and directly relying on them; where housing belongs to the people that live in it and if no one lives somewhere and you squat there now that place belongs to you; where means of production belong collectively to those who actually use them and produce things with them and the people who maintain them, and what they produce with those means of production is theirs to give to others (although they do not have the right to extract rent from them — you either give something to someone or you don't). See how this conception is very much about being *in situ*? About things belonging where they are into the people that are with them, and in fact rejecting capitalism and private property and so on for the precise fact that it allows a rejection of this ethos of *in situ*ness through allowing people to control things that they are absent from and stretch out their hand to remove something from where it is and put it somewhere else instead of allowing it to percolate naturally.
I'm not sure if this really makes sense because it's still very much just me trying to put words to a general sense I have about different modes of organizing society
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