To answer your hypothetical, I want to break it into two implicit parts. The first is a critique that decentralization doesnt address segregation and the long history of racial oppression. You’re absolutely right! Decentralization of the economy was a demand taken up by people who had been craftsmen and commoners and were watching themselves get pushed into monopolistic economic arrangements like factory production and tenant farming. In this context, decentralization made a lot of sense! In the same regard, the hyper-centralization of the economy proposed by the Soviet Union was designed to, and successfully facilitated, rapid industrialization. We saw similar centralization and intensification of state power happen in capitalist developing countries like Singapore, Taiwan and Occupied Korea. To this day, most housing in Taiwan is state owned and leased by the occupants.
Segregation and white supremacy are related, intertwined but seperate issues from industrialization and inclosure. They require different responses. You point out that just communizing the south without addressing Segregation would be deeply problematic. I agree! Its trying to solve a problem of the long 20th century with tools of the 17th through 19th centuries!
But where we possibly disagree and definitely have a difference in emphasis is the best way to solve the problem of Segregation. You ask “is it authoritarian to march on the south?” And I would reply by saying that it depends on how you do it. Is there a way to do it that garners mass participation from the oppressed? I think there is.
When Lincoln announced that any slave who fought for the union army would be freed, slaves freed themselves en masse, and left the plantations without labor. Imagine how history could have played out if the North had said “all former plantation land is yours, go claim your 40 acres and the government will grant you the deed.” You would have seen land reform in the US from the bottom-up!
Compare this to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which was also, clearly just. It was between a socialist party with developmentalist and democratic aspirations in power vs warlords and monarchists. There was a right and a wrong side. But they didn’t have a mass base. There were no peasants ready to seize the farms, no workers ready to seize the factories. That was a just but authoritarian invasion (since we’ve insisted on using an imprecise and emotionally loaded word).
And once the workers have the factories and the peasants have the land and the baristas have the roastaries the question of administration becomes incredibly important and lines between dictatorship and democracy become more clear cut. Once we invade the south, who controls the land and in what manner? If we have Federated communes, who are their constituencies‐‐are they segregated? Do they include former bosses? Do they include the disabled?
These questions are where we need anarchism as a guiding moral beacon to say “no, Trotsky should not have ended elections in the Red Army” or “yes, the Bundists should have been given their autonomous zone”
To answer your hypothetical, I want to break it into two implicit parts. The first is a critique that decentralization doesnt address segregation and the long history of racial oppression. You’re absolutely right! Decentralization of the economy was a demand taken up by people who had been craftsmen and commoners and were watching themselves get pushed into monopolistic economic arrangements like factory production and tenant farming. In this context, decentralization made a lot of sense! In the same regard, the hyper-centralization of the economy proposed by the Soviet Union was designed to, and successfully facilitated, rapid industrialization. We saw similar centralization and intensification of state power happen in capitalist developing countries like Singapore, Taiwan and Occupied Korea. To this day, most housing in Taiwan is state owned and leased by the occupants.
Segregation and white supremacy are related, intertwined but seperate issues from industrialization and inclosure. They require different responses. You point out that just communizing the south without addressing Segregation would be deeply problematic. I agree! Its trying to solve a problem of the long 20th century with tools of the 17th through 19th centuries!
But where we possibly disagree and definitely have a difference in emphasis is the best way to solve the problem of Segregation. You ask “is it authoritarian to march on the south?” And I would reply by saying that it depends on how you do it. Is there a way to do it that garners mass participation from the oppressed? I think there is.
When Lincoln announced that any slave who fought for the union army would be freed, slaves freed themselves en masse, and left the plantations without labor. Imagine how history could have played out if the North had said “all former plantation land is yours, go claim your 40 acres and the government will grant you the deed.” You would have seen land reform in the US from the bottom-up!
Compare this to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which was also, clearly just. It was between a socialist party with developmentalist and democratic aspirations in power vs warlords and monarchists. There was a right and a wrong side. But they didn’t have a mass base. There were no peasants ready to seize the farms, no workers ready to seize the factories. That was a just but authoritarian invasion (since we’ve insisted on using an imprecise and emotionally loaded word).
And once the workers have the factories and the peasants have the land and the baristas have the roastaries the question of administration becomes incredibly important and lines between dictatorship and democracy become more clear cut. Once we invade the south, who controls the land and in what manner? If we have Federated communes, who are their constituencies‐‐are they segregated? Do they include former bosses? Do they include the disabled?
These questions are where we need anarchism as a guiding moral beacon to say “no, Trotsky should not have ended elections in the Red Army” or “yes, the Bundists should have been given their autonomous zone”