“Your ideas can only work on a small scale!”

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A Liberal in Lakeview's picture

Francois Tremblay wrote,

"[b]ut the accusation that Anarchism, or any other radical system, cannot scale up is nonsensical. The federative model, in which groups send representants to a higher-level group, which itself sends representants to a higher-level group, and so on, is very much scalable. THIS IS a popular form of generalized Anarchist organization, but only one of many." I added the emphasis for "THIS IS", though not for "Anarchist". [ahem]

One should wonder if the highest level of Tremblay's "federative model" would be a world government. And would the highest level be dominated by a Stalin or a committee of Stalins? Whatever the correct answers, Tremblay is a collectivist, a statist, a socialist, and a disingenuous knave, as betrayed by Tremblay hisself.

Also, he imagines that "both modes [cooperation and competition] of operation are scalable without limits." Here, too, he needs a reality check. The number of people is finite, the amount of work that they can do is finite, and the amount of matter, though theoretically infinite, is finite for all practical purposes. In fact, the resources at hand are so limited that a price system has developed to ration distribution and usage of much of those resources. I write "much" b/c other means, too, are used. For example, there are the communized lands of the the USA's national park system. Furthermore, experience shows that "the federative model" tends toward a Stalin or a committee of Stalins, so freedom to cooperate would be very limited in Tremblay's socialistic paradise.

So, no, it's not the case that "both modes...are scalable without limits". In fact, neither mode is scalable without limits. Worse still, it seems that he thinks there cannot be both cooperation and competition at the same time, as there would be in capitalism uncontaminated by socialism. Since Tremblay is a despiser of private property and capitalism, it stands to reason that his use of “competition” is a red herring and that "cooperation" and "federative model" are code for absolute despotism, which is exactly what you can expect if Tremblay achieves his goal, "Anarchism".