Unpopular opinion: there is no fundamental difference between acts described as ‘mutual aid’ and the kind of social assistance provided by States, only different degrees of organisation and formality.
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Ben Harris-Roxasreplied to Liam :fnord: last edited by
@liamvhogan agreed in general, but in emergencies I don't think this always holds true. State assistance is slow for most material needs. I know you have direct experience, but I think you'd acknowledge that money and goods can be slower to flow than we'd like.
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Liam :fnord:replied to Ben Harris-Roxas last edited by
@ben_hr and I acknowledge Solnit’s very good point about the State in disasters (in A Paradise Made In Hell) that police and army response typically has a very negative effect, swamping immediate goodwill with violence.
I just don’t think there’s a meaningful distinction between State and non-State assistance, and where assistance provided by NGOs and charities come in, there’s a very great overlap.
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@ben_hr the other part of this is displacement of acts over time—e.g. the requirement of rural landowners to maintain spare full water tanks for the use of firefighting is extremely good, and that kind of providing-for-neighbours is classically mutually aidive. But only a State can require it as a rule.
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@liamvhogan @ben_hr Ostrom's work on management of common-pool resources disagrees.
Depending on what you mean by 'require' and 'State' and 'rule', of course.
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@daedalus @ben_hr well this is kind of my point. At some stage of complexity, when you start managing resources of a large population who aren’t immediately known to each other, with a mutual aim, and social rules to be abided by, you’ve invented a rudimentary State. Even the smallest common aid efforts tend to emerge backed by informal ‘leaders’.
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Deborah Pickettreplied to Liam :fnord: last edited by
@liamvhogan @daedalus @ben_hr Liam, you can’t go calling everything a “State” just because it’s got organized accounts!
*Liam points to church. “State!” Points to RSL club. “State!” Points to ant hill*
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Liam :fnord:replied to Deborah Pickett last edited by
@futzle @daedalus @ben_hr if you point to a beehive, you’re stealing Bernard Mandeville’s schtick, and also the original argument that large agglomerations of individuals doing their thing amorally at scale was a way to run a complex society.
If there’s a bright line you can draw in human organisations between good, community based, aidive, and bad, centralising, Statist, I’d like to see it.
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What I’m trying to say is that there can be absolutely no bright line drawn between different levels of human organisation where one is virtuous and others not. Companies and firms act as private governments, local governments act as social clubs, small towns can be horribly oppressive.
And at the extremely macro level, even States form associations with aspects of mutual aid to them: at one level NATO is a mutual aid activity.
[a bunch of people jump into my feed telling me to go and fuck myself in Serbian]
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@liamvhogan the only problem I have with mutual aid is a few thousand years ago we all agreed*to establish and live under a “state” that would then supply that aid, and we’d pay for it collectively. This has not worked out.
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@liamvhogan @daedalus @ben_hr or you've invented a rudimentary Mafia
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@liamvhogan So this sent me on a journey. It rang a bell with a story Arthur Frank retells in The Renewal of Generosity, about Michael Ignatieff thinking about his elderly neighbours in the post office. I found the source and it’s just been reissued: Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers: On solidarity and the politics of being human (1984).
“As we stand together in line at the post office, while they cash their pension cheques, some tiny portion of my income is transferred into their pockets through the numberless capillaries of the state. The mediated quality of our relationship seems necessary to both of us. They are dependent on the state, not upon me, and we are both glad of it.”
Obviously as others have pointed out this benign imagined equilibrium doesn’t work as the wealthy taxpayer imagines, and never has.
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@liamvhogan Arthur Frank picks it up to talk about the tension between justice and generosity. Ignatieff’s neighbours, he says, should not have to depend on his remembering or choosing to be generous to them. Just distribution of taxation by the state is safer, (even if also never actually just, or enough actually to redistribute wealth). But both of them worry that this means we underestimate the generous potential of a moral community, that we could look after each other in mutually assistive ways.
Frank is I think trying to find the evidence that it’s not either/or.
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@kate I’m a great fan of Ignatieff, despite his flaws (which like you say are a misty eyed sentimentalism about what the State is). I like Ignatieff because the big theme of his work isn’t what the State should do, it’s about who belongs in the society that to him coincides with the State, and to him it’s everyone.