I’m reading some of the “favourite qoutes” from the “Bionomics” website (http://www.bionomics.org/text/dailydose/quotes.html). These are quotes from places like the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, as well as Wired and Karl Marx, but the underlying theme is that planned economies fail and free markets behave in ways similar to ecosystems in order to self-optimize themselves given the changing environments they exist in and the feedback loops that join the economies to their environments. These are not anarchist treatise. But they shadow anarchist thought in a striking way

“It’s time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody’s role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s no surprise that our school system doesn’t improve: It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy”

Source: Why Schools Fail by Bruce Goldberg, 1996″

They also shadow the emerging thinking of, perhaps even more wierdly, the ‘anti-globalization’ movement. They suggest that circumstances are too locally diverse and dynamic to allow any one paradigm or infrastructure to efficienty control human behaviour, and that the best rules are the ones that don’t exist. Compare and contrast:

“But we have reached a point in history where this stability is counterproductive. In today’s fast-changing, globally competitive information age, systems that cannot change are doomed to failure.”

Source: Banishing Bureaucracy by David Osborne and Peter Plastrik, 1997

and

“Respect a diversity of tactics.”

Source: any cheaply photocopied activist’s manual you wish to consult

This convergence has struck me before. The capitalist drive for truly free markets is not unlike the anarchist drive for freedom-period. Which makes for strange friends and enemies. Capatilism beleives in one-dollar one-vote as a method of true democratic, individual control over the world, the anti-capatilistic anti-globalization movement is also AKA the pro-democracy movement, and believes equally fervently in democracy. In both cases, these are not the forms of democracy we in the west usually associate with the D word; it’s not the kind of democracy attached to the end of a voting lever in a ballot booth.

The differences may be in the way we measure success. Economists measure it by the standard of living or something else I don’t understand, and anarchists have, if anything, an even more ethereal and tough-to-pin-down measure of what makes for a happy world. Whatever that measure is, it sure ain’t GDP. And of course, in practice corporations have shown a tendency towards free market rhetoric always and free market behaviour only when government interventionism would benifit them less.

But the notion of self-modifieing, self-optimizing, non permanent-rules-based societal structure seems to have two very different champions.