Interrogations - anno II - n. 5 - dicembre 1975

DAVID T. WIECK reasonably think, a society in which recognition of «racial» identity has vanished, or in which racial terms, if indeed sense can be made of them when oppression does not define them, have become minor descriptive terms without social consequence, then it would be foolish to ask what the theory of this raceless society would be or how it would deal with racial relations. For the U.S. integrationist movement of the 1950's the slogan Freedom Now said all that nedeed be said, just as, more than a century before, Abolition, a saying that of course earned one the title 'fanatic,' a title yet to be repealed, was all that needed be said of chattel slavery. A second illustration, less obvious because even now barely thinkable, would be a society, usually called androgynous, in which recognition as male and female would make reference to nothing but certain physiological matters and reproductive capacities and would be non-indicative of personality, economic role, or worth. Sexes would not constitute classes (or more exactly castes) and sexual identity would have only the significance that each chose to give to it. What this means requires no elaborate explanation, only a certain imagination, an ability .to rid oneself of preconceptions and to conceive of what seems incapable of being thought without contradiction. «What will be the relations between the sexes in such a society?» - the question makes erroneous assumptions. From every locus of power, it has always been inconceivable, because contrary to the aprioris of the sustaining ideology, that its system be abolished. From the standpoint of the priesthood it has always been inconceivable that religion dispense with it, that its flock survive bereft of shepherd. With respect to the anarchist concept of social existence, the questions «Who will rule?>>«Who will govern?» and -what is less obvious intuitively- «Who will decide?» become nonrelevant questions. No theory of total-society decision-making would be called for. «Power to the people» «Let the people decide,» although of idealistic intention, perpetuate the sovereignty of the whole and are not anarchist. In practice such qualified (democratic) sovereignty means that «representatives» of the people constitute a class of decision-makers over against a mass that makes no decisions except (perhaps) to choose their rulers, a choice inevitably reconstrued as majoritarian. Where the demos rules, power and its problems remain; a people represented, as Rousseau said, is enslaved. Anarchy means the dissolution and disappearance of democratic sovereignty (or its pretense) also. 44

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