Kerry Thornley - In Defense of Libertarian Communism

[LMNO]

"If the State didn't exist, it would be neccesary for the corporations to invent one."

(with apologies to Voltaire)

[Triple Zero]

Same goes for the entertainment and advertising industry, btw.

[BabylonHoruv]

Same goes for the entertainment and advertising industry, btw.

That they need the state?  I think they do, as corporations, but I also think that entertainment has been around about as long as language, and if you view preagricultural tribes as essentially stateless societies, as many Anarchists do, then entertainment certainly can exist without the state.

[Triple Zero]

No what I meant was:

If the entertainment and advertising industry didn't exist, it would be neccesary for the corporations to invent one.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I think the key here is Industry...

The X Industry is likely made up of Y Corporations (Y being a vanishingly small number, lately). Without a government to legally believe in them, Corporations die like faeries and no amount of clapping can bring them back. "Limited Liability" would be a joke, you the CEO would be as 'liable' as the people interested would decide.

Advertising and entertainment etc would still happen, they would just be a vastly different creature than we have today...

I think.

[BabylonHoruv]

No what I meant was:

If the entertainment and advertising industry didn't exist, it would be neccesary for the corporations to invent one.

I wouldn't say neccesary.  They did do so, but there were corporations before there was the sort of entertainment and advertising we currently have.

[The Buddha Dada]

I figure this thread is a decent one to draw attention to a couple other parallels to Thornley's Zenarchist politics. The first is this essay by Max Cafard. So far as I could tell with the search function, it hasn't been posted here before, but I could be wrong:
http://raforum.info/spip.php?article3503&lang=fr

And the second is Ken Knabb's Rexroth archive:
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/
(Ken Knabb, of course, is the prolific translator of Situationist texts)

Rexroth was a skeptical/empiricist Buddhist poet and anarchist. He may be a little too overburdened with seriousness, but I get a lot out of his essays. Here's him in a very Zenarchist mood:
"This is the essence of the teaching of Buddha: that the religious experience is self-sufficient. Behind it lies no god, no immortality, none of these things. He always refused to answer questions on these subjects: 'What happens after nirvana?' 'Is there a God?' – the answers are not relevant. And as for politics? A life lived according to the Buddha law will not need much from politics. If Christianity was put into effect tomorrow every state on Earth would collapse within twenty-four hours."
- Kenneth Rexroth

And I love this passage from his essay on Buber:
"There is amongst men no absolute need. The realization of this is what makes Homer and the Greek tragedians so much sounder a Bible than the Old or New Testaments. Love does not last forever, friends betray each other, beauty fades, the mighty stumble in blood and their cities burn. The ultimate values are love and friendship and courage and magnanimity and grace, but it is a narrow ultimate, and lasts only a little while, contingent on the instability of men and the whims of 'Nature viewed as a Thou.' Like life, it is Helen's tragedy that gives her her beauty or gives Achilles and Agamemnon their nobility. Any art which has a happy ending in reserve in Infinity is, just to that degree, cheating. It is, I think, this pursuit of the absolute, the Faustianism of Spengler, which vitiates most Western art. We feel embarrassed at Goethe's paeans to the Eternal Feminine as the conclusion of his pitiful drama."

Anyway, just some items of possible interest.