random notes from my Little Book of Ideas

In November, I started jotting down random ideas I get at random moments in a Little Book of Ideas. The problem, I noticed, is that I rarely go back to my notes to get reminded of previous ideas and see how I can build on them. As a therapeutic measure, I will thus now, live, go through my Little Book of Ideas and take out what I can. (my notes are written in a mix of English-German. It's actually become much easier to write and think in German now than in English. And my French has now reached the level of external foreign language for me. In any case, I'll try to write it all in English, but there will be noticeable German influences hovering over my choices of concepts.)

The starting point of the Little Book of Ideas was to keep track of the development of ideas and questions for my next research project. Thus the first page states my broad interest for solidarity economy and the range of organisation forms it covers, from radical emancipatory communes to co-operatives working within the economic system. This is one of the main themes of interests throughout my notes and the semester - and even the last couple of years: The relation between institutions willingly working within the "system" (a label for the mix of representative political institutions geared towards the culling of technocratic elites and generally accepting economic logic based on the anthropological assumption of the Homo Economicus) and initiatives attempting to create spaces of freedom within this system, based on a Homo Cooperativus.
I was first confronted with this dichotomy state/emancipatory initiatives when I tried to write a paper on the Zapatistas. The teacher I had for this class worked as a consultant for the government on issues of security. His focus was thus finding ways to tame initiatives questionning the authority and value of given institutions, from a state perspective. I found myself supporting the Zapatistas (a social movement started in Chiapas, southern Mexico, and basically gradually developping its own collective political rules and institutions following ideals of direct democracy) and absolutely unwilling to come up with suggestions on how to deal with their movement from a state perspective. I was frustrated by my impossibility to find a pleasing way to combine State and emancipation in one society. The one is, from its very nature, made to stop the other's efforts if they become so important that they intrude on the other's domain. Yet I find both, state and the implementation of emancipatory utopia, necessary.
Luhman (Zukunft der Demokratie, 1986) speaks of Despontaneifikation and Rechaotisierung to describe this constant battle between self-limiting state institutions and alternative political groups who refuse to let their actions be ruled by technocratic rules - such as the German Green party in its youth. The German green party is a good example of despontaneifikation after it tried to chaotify the system a bit.
And with all this in mind, I suddenly remembered, as I was sitting in the U-Bahn and going to Uni, the deep horror I felt as I realised, as a 6 or 7-year-old, that grown ups HAVE TO work. I pictured life after school as Absolute Freedom - a bit like summer holidays only for ever - until mum put an end to these dreams and announced the horrible truth. I asked why people had to work - I really couldn't fathom it. She said to earn money and live. But, I objected, what if I take a piece of land and just live off my own vegetables? Then you have to work to pay taxes, she said. On that very moment, I instinctively felt a strong anarchic streak in me. I couldn't accept the fact that there was no escaping the State. Of course, in my rudimentary model, I wasn't thinking of the advantages provided by the State in terms of health care for instance. That wasn't my priority as a 6-year old. My priority was freedom. The anarchic streak fell asleep quickly but has been waking up slowly over the past couple of years.
In short, I am increasingly interested in the attitude of States towards attempts to organise parallel societies. Taking this interest further would necessarily lead me to look at the United States, possibly at the state of New Hampshire as the only libertarian state (The problem there being the lack of solidarity ideals I suspect to find in the Libertarian utopia).

That's all for today from my Little Book of Ideas. More themes will be developped on a random basis.