There's an interesting looking event at the Echo this week, hosted by Ruben Martinez (the guy on KCET), and the theme is anarchy and Ricardo Flores Magon, who lived in L.A. for a while.

http://www.attheecho.com/2011/06/16/saturday-07-09-11-variedades-the-echo/

The description was somewhat irksome, though, because it reiterated a mistaken idea about anarchism, in that it's opposed to government.

Quote:

100 years ago, Mexican journalist and revolutionary Ricard Flores-Magón lived in Los Angeles at a time of tremendous political ferment—on both sides of the border. The term “anarchy” had widely divergent meanings depending upon who uttered and who heard it and it was often linked in the popular imagination with violent radicalism—the “terrorism” of the day.

But then there were the anarchists themselves, a motley cohort united only by their belief that a world free of capitalism and government in general was not just a theoretical possibility but realizable here and now.

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Anarchism is against hierarchy. Hierarchies are social structures that put one person above another person. Some hierarchies are worse than others. For example, a hierarchy based on skill - not so bad, if the skilled share the skills.

Hierarchies based on gender, religion, wealth, employer/employee, race, are all bad. The hierarchy of government is also bad, but government is simply something that emerges when people work together to make society.

An anarchist government would be small and direct, and necessarily democratic. There would be no President. Power would be sited at the local level, where the scale of government could be kept small.

Much of government would focus on the usual things: land use, production of necessary goods, and so forth. The style of living would be communal, and increasingly so, out of a general desire for leisure rather than work.