Large and Small Organizations
Published at 08:04 on 14 April 2016
This is the first of two posts which I had written down intending to repost here long ago, and only just recently rediscovered.
Any organization the size of Google, Microsoft, GM, Exxon Mobil, etc. should have its autonomy significantly curtailed and restricted by some form of public participation. Only relatively small organizations are deserving of autonomy. And all economic organizations should be non-authoritarian.
That latter one in particular is an ideal that would take serious time to implement throughout society. But the former part would be quite a bit easier. It need not take the traditional state socialist form of nationalization. In fact, in a world of increased globalization, traditional nationalization is less and less relevant.
Requiring such participation will inevitably bog down and restrict large economic players. That’s not a problem; in fact, that’s a large part of the point. Innovations are decisions about the future and such things are too important to be decided by unaccountable authoritarian power structures. The proper role of large organizations is in overseeing and coordinating established economic activities that cannot practically be undertaken by smaller organizations.
Small organizations would still have the autonomy to innovate under this proposal. That is the proper place for innovation to take place, where it subsequently has to prove itself to larger society via competition and other means, rather than having an authority structure clear an artificially easy path for it.
Squaring this with traditional anarchism might not always be easy. In particular the part about the large organizations might be tricky. Autonomy for smaller ones isn’t that different from what anarchism has always proposed.