local autonomy enjoyed, for instance, by the patchwork of city states that
composed the northern Italian Peninsula during the Renaissance. Not so
desirable was their continuous, pointless fighting among themselves, and in the
end their weakness in defending their autonomy against the centralized
powers France, Spain, and Austria who moved in and took away their
autonomy. Better if they were able to overcome their divisiveness, to get
organized and to develop for themselves a balance between local autonomy and
centralized coordination. They didn't, so they and countries like Poland who
couldn't get it together, find themselves partitioned and gobbled up by the big
boys.
Because little fish get eaten by the big ones, local autonomous
communities need to organize/centralize themselves to defend their autonomy.
This is my basic critique of movements like Occupy. They are very conscious of
the will to power and the iron law of oligarchy, and identify it with
any kind of centralized authority structure. I understand their concerns, but
the challenge is to find an accountable, centralized structure that strikes the
right balance between the need for centralized coordination and local
autonomy and decision making. It's very hard to do, but getting gobbled up is
what happens if you don't.
Mutually Assured
Destruction prevents the great powers from going to war with one another, so I think we will see 'will
to power' in American and other societies shifting from the military to the economic spheres, and we will see the primary focus
of the security state moving away from concerns about external threats from hostile states to internal threats from stateless subversives waging asymmetric campaigns of sabotage. The Bush administration's response to 9/11 was absurd because it misconstrued the threat and response to it in military rather than police terms. With the revelations of the extent of the NSA surveillance program, we're seeing how far we have come in moving toward the police state.
I'm not all that clear
how this is going to play out over the next several years, but two observations. First, as the authoritarian police state in China becomes more like the US in adopting neoliberal economic policies, the U.S. will become more like China in adopting authoritarian police-state policies. China's embrace of state capitalism gives it the advantage in any kind of economic warfare with the U.S. because it has the more centralized model.The US will gradually realize that it will have to adapt.
Second, in the meanwhile, it looks as though the US government is gradually transforming into the appendage of competing economic warlords. As such, government will
function more as corporate security services in the locales in which
they operate. These warlords will use regional governments and
their high-tech surveillance and security infrastructure to keep the workers
docile and dependent. We're not there yet, but we appear to be transitioning
into something like this.
If this is the direction in which we are headed,
the NSA and other government surveillance systems are not a problem because of
their potential abuse by politicians, but because of their potential abuse by the
corporate powers these politicians serve. If Snowden, a man who works in the
private sector, has access to the information that he does, who's to say that
others haven't been using the same information for other extra-legal purposes. Why would we assume that that no one is?
It no longer matters much what is technically legal or illegal, because these corporations are writing
their own laws, and even if they break laws, who is there to hold them
accountable? If there is no power (or will) to make laws in the public
interest and to enforce them, it doesn't matter what's legal or illegal
regarding abuses of power. If government continues to evolve into a mere
appendage of the big corporations, we should have no expectation that anyone
powerful is accountable to the public. The law will be used exclusively to
keep the public in line.
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