Chris Wyatt
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Bridging the Marxist–anarchist divide
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This short chapter brings together in a few summary paragraphs the new forms of associational anarchism’s hybrid constitution, the kernel of which is a democratic pluralism organised through a specific functional devolution. It is true that certain social anarchist tenets have been modified. This is especially so with regards to a role for a body-politic, an ethic of representation, hierarchical structures, self-legislation and centralisation, together with a weakened commitment to strict economic equality of outcome. The chapter indicates though that the content of associational anarchism’s essential maxims – in particular the new forms of local decision-making, self-governance and the universalisation of creative forms of labour – are still very much anarchist in essence. In order to minimise the powers of the commune to the absolute minimum, a subordinated role for a market mechanism in the field of consumption goods had to be admitted. But the mild guild market system, regulated horizontally through the networks of public agencies – rather than through hard markets forces, plutocrats or intervening states – is constituted through a pluralised egalitarian control over the means of production, where there is neither a capitalist class nor a dominant role for capital. As huge concentrations and centralisations of capital and wealth cannot accumulate, equality of opportunity is more sustainable than it is in systems of untrammelled markets. The chapter concludes by confirming the ways in which the institutional arrangements within and between the guilds and consumer councils complement the twentieth-century anarchist notion of developed selfhood.

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Associational anarchism

Towards a left-libertarian conception of freedom

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