NEGATIVITY OF ANAkCHISM In an anarchist society every person decides and there is no class of deciders. Cooperative actions result from voluntary agreements. This is easier to visualize in a small society lacking complex relations of production and distribution; larger scale cooperation presumes longer-term agreements, reliance on the good will of others as norm, agreement to standard procedures (non-coercive, non-power-based institutions) to achieve commonly desired ends and to resolve differences and conflicts. (A principle of individual decision and voluntary agreement does not mean that driving on right or left, using metric or nonmetric measures, not to say basic economic practices, are continually in question and one knows not what to expect in a topsy-turvy world.) What must be premissed is that the people involved shall by and large be willing - as the way they live and are, rather than by reflective commitment - to affirm each other's humanity and uniqueness and to pursue their differing interests under conditions of voluntary agreement and responsibility for their actions. In saying that everyone decides, one does not mean that each can cause the world to be as (s)he would wish it: for there can be just one actual world, and if I willed the world effectively then I would will it for, and in lieu of, others. The others, instead, present me with their spontaneity, their choosings, which of course foreclose many practical possibilities for me; in more than compensation for which, one would hope, my possibilities are enriched by living in a world of persons who are themselves choosing rather than living out the consequences of technology, market, and other impersonal forces that have preempted their freedom and mystified their intelligence. Nor, in saying that everyone decides, does one mean that everyone conceivably affected by a particular decision participates in it. No doubt we have, in our everyday experience, little ground for confidence that the people on whom we depend, economically and otherwise, will reliably do their best; and so we put faith in complex systems of control over others, and of course over ourselves. But the anarchist thought is that social cooperation can be founded upon the autonomy and responsibility of individuals and groups in their spheres of activity, so that the society is the product of the decisions of all, both individually and jointly by agreement. But it is obvious that 4'.noclass of deciders,> «non-collectivity,> even if realizable in a moderately complex world, cannot well be applied to all the familiar kinds of social processes, 45
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