Reply #41: Your reference to New Orleans/Mississippi Gulf Coast [View All]

Ultimately, I agree wholeheartedly with the idea that if these people's coalitions had existed prior to Katrina, many people would have been saved if not by FEMA or even the state governments but by the people themselves operating as a single front. (BTW, I am a resident of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. My home and family survived, but everything else is gone)

I sent an article to one of my friends about a potential example of people developing libertarian-socialist-like tendencies in the New Orleans area several months back, specifically in what was left of the French Quarter. At the time, there was no functioning authority in the area, and people had to band together for survival. Small bands of people had decided to set up a primitive economy of sorts.

Labor was divided up among the various tasks that needed to be done. Some of them did the cooking. Others foraged for food or whatever was necessary for survival, and still more cleaned clothes or went out and scavenged clothes from abandoned city blocks. However, the thing that drew my attention was the fact that there was nothing that could be seen as a centralized decision-making structure beyond a model that, from what I could tell, appears to be very close if not was direct democracy. There was no one ordering these people to do things. They were doing these tasks of their own free will, for the mutual survival of all involved. They shared with each other the fruits of their labor.

I remarked to my friend that these survivors discovered the true definition socialism in the fall of civilization, the collapse of the local capitalist driven economy and the impotence of the authorities, but they probably didn't know it because most folks don't know the idea behind socialism except the bastardized, corrupted version taught in the US. Anyway, I suspect these little communities were quickly put to an end after they sent in the national guard to clean out the city and make everybody evacuate.