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Title: The Economy and Anarchy Author: Ron Tabor Date: August 18, 2008 Language: en Topics: economy, anarchy, financial crisis, 2008, United States of America, The Utopian Source: Retrieved on 4th August 2021 from http://utopianmag.com/archives/tag-The%20Utopian%20Vol.%207%20-%202008/the-economy-and-anarchy/ Notes: Published in The Utopian Vol. 7.
The economic events of the last few months have raised a lot of
questions about where the US and world economies are headed and what
this means for the political climate in the United States. In what
follows, I have attempted to answer these questions. As much to clarify
my own thinking as to explain my thoughts to others, I have tried to
place the recent economic developments in the context of both my
previous understanding of the economy and a brief, and very sketchy,
outline of the history of the US economy since 1970.
In the late 1960s and early 70s, I developed an analysis that attempted
to explain the nature of the post-World War II era of economic
prosperity in the United States and why that era would come to an end.
At the time I began to develop my ideas, that long period of economic
expansion was coming to a dramatic close with the recession of 1970 and
President Richard Nixon’s imposition of wage-price controls in 1971,
both of which exploded the claims of mainstream economists that
capitalism had solved its major problems. My analysis was based largely
on a reading of Karl Marx’s theory of capital, as elaborated in his
magnum opus, Das Kapital, along with the work of contemporary Marxist
theoreticians, such as Michael Kidron, Paul Mattick, and (I am ashamed
to admit) Lyndon LaRouche, then known as Lyn Marcus.
My fundamental thesis was that the post-war boom, based to a
considerable degree on a vast increase in defense spending (the
“permanent arms economy”), which was financed in part by government
deficits (borrowing), had not solved any of capitalism’s contradictions,
particularly, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Instead, it
had merely covered them over—in effect, “borrowing from the future” to
pump up the economy in the present. In a nutshell, based on the
experiences of the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II, the
capitalists had learned how to temporarily restore conditions of
profitable production through a variety of artificial means, most of
which involved the proliferation of debt, government and private, and
what Marx called “fictitious capital,” claims, in the form of stocks,
bonds, and other securities, to wealth that does not in fact exist.
Based on this analysis, I predicted that at some point in the future,
the US and world economies would experience a 1929-type financial
collapse and an economic crisis similar to the Depression. This in turn,
I thought, would lead to a period of intensified competition between the
major capitalist powers, the growth of radical right-wing movements, a
resurgence of militant working class struggles, intensified regional
conflicts, and possibly, another world war.
Today, I am no longer a Marxist and do not subscribe to Marx’s theory of
capitalism. One of my major reasons for rejecting Marx’s analysis is
that, like mainstream (“bourgeois”) economics, it attempts to describe
our socio-economic system as a self-contained whole, independently of
its relation to nature. Specifically, although Marx recognized that the
products of nature—raw materials, air, water—constituted essential
elements of capitalist production, he insisted that human labor, and
only human labor, is the source of all value. This was based, at least
in part, on his belief that the products of nature were, for all
practical purposes, infinite and therefore free (without cost). Today,
it should be obvious that this is not the case; in fact, it is a
devastatingly erroneous assumption. (One indication of this is the
tremendous environmental destruction that occurred in the former Soviet
Union, where the rulers attempted to plan the economy with methods that
were based on Marx’s theory.) Although the relation between capitalism
and our increasingly severe environmental crisis can be explained in
Marxist terms, such an explanation has an added-on, ad hoc character.
Instead, I believe that a truly revolutionary (and accurate) analysis of
global capitalism must be based on the crucial recognition that nature
and our economic system do not represent two independent realms, and
that, as a result, the economic crisis and the environmental crisis are
integrally connected. Among other things, this requires a new theory of
value, one that recognizes nature’s essential contribution to the
creation of value, and thus a substantively new theory.
Despite this, I believe that my old analysis has general validity. That
is, I believe that capitalism has not solved its fundamental problems,
but that the capitalists (actually, their economists and central
bankers) have learned how to manipulate the system to moderate the
business cycle (previously, the system’s tendency to swing between
speculative booms and depression, “booms” and “busts”) and to engender
conditions of relative prosperity for a period of time through the
expansion of debt and through deferring many of the system’s problems to
the future. A look at the situation confronting Social Security, our
healthcare system, and our public schools—indeed, the entire
infrastructure (including roads and highways, trains, airports, public
transit systems, dams and levees, electric power systems, etc.) of the
country—along with vast public and private indebtedness, suggests the
truth of this position.
The environmental crisis needs to be understood in the same way. Instead
of setting aside resources to replace and/or restore what we take and
have taken from Nature, capitalism, assuming, as Marx did, that natural
resources are infinite, just takes from, or plunders, the planet. Just
as a capitalist firm can boost its profits in the short term by deciding
not to set aside funds to replace its plants and equipment when the
current machinery wears out or becomes obsolete, and instead to include
these funds in its accounts as profits, international capitalism boosts
its profits in the short term by failing to set aside funds to pay for
what it plunders from the Earth. And just as eventually the firm, if it
is to continue, has to come up with the money to replace its equipment,
cutting into future profits as it does so, the economic system as a
whole must eventually come up with the resources to restore the
environment. If it does not, the whole system will stagnate and perhaps
die. (At the very least, the prices of the raw materials Nature
provides, including water, will rise as these materials become harder to
reach and to process or become depleted altogether.)
While the danger of a 1929-style financial crisis and global depression
a la the 1930s is real, I am no longer convinced that such events are
inevitable or even highly likely. As it turned out, the Depression of
the ’30s was exacerbated by unique historical circumstances: (1) the
saddling of Germany, one of the world’s strongest economies, with
enormous reparations payments (debts owed to the Allied powers—France,
Great Britain and the United States) after World War I; (2) in part
resulting from this, the Nazis’ takeover of Germany and their efforts to
turn the German economy inward, toward autarchy, that is, an attempt to
isolate the country from the global economy; (3), the Russian Revolution
of 1917 and the imposition of an embargo against the Russian economy by
the traditional capitalist countries; (4) actions by the US and other
capitalist governments that intensified the crisis, including attempts
to balance government budgets (President Herbert Hoover raised taxes),
and the enactment of high tariffs barriers that drastically curtailed
world trade; (5) an agricultural depression in the United States that
lasted through most of the 1920s and into the ’30s; and (6) some of
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s own New Deal policies, specifically
his measures to prevent prices from falling. (Had prices declined, it
might have been possible to reestablish conditions of profitable
production earlier than they were.) Meanwhile, since the Depression, the
economists and the capitalist class as a whole have learned a great deal
about managing the economy; the aggressive actions taken in the last few
months by the Federal Reserve Bank under Federal Reserve Board Chairman
Ben Bernanke to ease the credit crunch, shore up the investment banks,
and calm the stock markets demonstrate this. As a result, the system has
avoided a serious crisis for now (although the financial sector is still
in turmoil), but only through the continuation of the process I had
described, that is, by postponing dealing with fundamental problems and
running up more debt. A brief look at the economic history of the
country since the 1970s suggests how this played out in practice.
Although there was no dramatic collapse and depression, the 1970s were a
period of substantial economic crisis. (Economically, it was the second
worst decade, after the 1930s, of the 20^(th) century). This included
the OPEC oil embargo, the drastic increase in the price of oil,
significant inflation (rising prices and a declining value of the
dollar) in general, and at least two severe recessions—economic
downturns, less severe than depressions, officially defined as two
consecutive quarters of a decline of the Gross Domestic Product. This
period of “stagflation” (stagnation plus inflation) was brought to a
close in the early 1980s, largely through the Reagan government’s
vicious attack on the labor unions, a lowering of taxes, and a drastic
increase in arms spending. While this led to a huge increase in the
federal budget deficit (and growth of the government’s debt), it also
laid the basis for a significant economic upturn, along with growth of
the stock market (based to a considerable degree on a merger and
acquisition binge), throughout much of the decade. This, in turn, led to
the beginning of the boom in the private housing sector (and the
proliferation of mortgages and mortgage-based debt), which, despite some
ups and downs, lasted until August of last year.
In 1988, the stock market “crashed” (prices of stocks dropped
substantially in a short period of time), but the downturn that usually
follows such events did not occur until two years later. The recession
of 1990–1991 was pretty severe, especially in California, since it
entailed a considerable cut in arms spending and the dismantling of a
significant section of the defense/aerospace industry, much of which was
based in southern California. Although the recovery from that recession
was slow, it did eventually pick up steam, fueled in large measure by
the rapid expansion of the new high tech industries (the development and
distribution of personal computers, the creation of the Internet,
bio-technology, etc.), a substantial rise in stock prices, and, once
again, the growth of the housing sector. Although this upturn was
artificially extended for several years, largely through the efforts of
then Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, Alan Greenspan, to keep
interest rates low, it finally came to an end in the year 2000, when the
“dot.com bubble” burst and the stock market dropped substantially once
again. Although the recession of 2000–2001 was not very deep (among
other things, it did not involve major layoffs of workers), the economic
recovery was, once again, lethargic (the attack on the World Trade
Center significantly dampened economic activity), and stock prices
remained relatively low for quite some time, not reaching their previous
highs until some years later. The ensuing period of economic expansion
(the one that recently ended) was led by the continued but less robust
development of the high tech industries and, increasingly as the boom
developed, the growth of the housing sector that had begun in the 1980s.
The burgeoning of the home-building related industry was fomented in
large measure by the extension of so-called “subprime” and
adjustable-rate mortgages, which appeared to make home ownership
possible for many people who did not in fact have the financial
wherewithal to buy a house. As the economic upturn wore on, it was more
and more impelled by this expansion of debt, and the growth of the
construction, home furnishing, and home financing industries that it
stimulated, and less and less by other sectors of the economy. In
addition, like all speculative booms, this one fed on itself. As home
prices increased while the Federal Reserve Bank kept interest rates
relatively low, more and more people, afraid to miss the boat, got into
the act, buying houses that, as it turned out, they couldn’t afford.
Meanwhile, this bubble spread throughout the rest of the US and global
economy through at least two mechanisms. (1) As homeowners saw the
values of their houses go up (as prices rose), they believed that their
financial assets had also increased and went on a spending spree, mostly
through incurring more debt, via credit cards and installment buying,
with other consumers following suit. (Since 2005, the net savings rate
of people in the country has been negative—meaning that on average,
people have been spending more than they earn— for the first time since
the Great Depression. Today, the household debt-to-income ratio—how much
people owe compared to how much they earn—has reached an all-time high,
over 19%.) Many of the goods people purchased were made abroad,
including in the newly industrializing countries of Asia, such as China,
Malaysia, and India, thus stimulating their economies, but worsening the
US balance of trade and balance of payments deficits. (2) Meanwhile, the
mortgage lenders packaged their mushrooming mortgages into bundles of
securities and then sold them to investors, including and in particular,
vast institutions, domestic and foreign, government and private, that
control enormous quantities of financial assets. This ballooning sector,
based on extremely inflated home prices, was relatively new and entirely
unregulated, and nobody knew (or knows) exactly how much money was/is
involved.
While the economic events I have been describing, that is, those that
occurred during the period from 1970 to the present, were taking place,
we also experienced substantial changes in the structure of the US
economy and of our society as a whole. This included the
“de-industrialization” of the country, as the big industries that had
once been so economically and politically dominant—automobiles, steel,
electrical appliances, textiles, chemicals, aerospace—either shrank,
were displaced by foreign competitors or disappeared altogether.
Increasingly, many US corporations built factories overseas to take
advantage of lower wages and readier access to sources of raw materials
and to foreign markets, while others went under or were bought up by
more efficient foreign firms. Those that survived increasingly automated
their operations, cutting down their workforces. These processes led to
the disappearance of millions of unionized jobs, the drastic weakening
of the trade unions, the implosion of many Midwestern cities, and a
massive increase in the size of the service sector of the economy. While
this led to the expansion of some sectors of the middle class, it also
meant a major change in the nature of the US working class, as millions
of unionized skilled and semi-skilled jobs disappeared. Meanwhile, many
of the newer jobs in the service sectors offered much lower wages, and
were taken by immigrants, legal and illegal. Virtually a whole layer of
the working class was destroyed, and the labor movement, which had
organized and represented these workers, dwindled in size. Meanwhile,
the total amount of debt—federal and state government, private
(mortgages, installment, and credit-card debt), and of the country as
whole in the form of the long-standing balance of payments deficit—has
exploded, reaching staggering levels. Next year’s federal budget deficit
is projected to be about $500 billion, while the national debt (which
does not included the indebtedness of state and local governments, nor
the unfunded liabilities of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) is
nearing $10 trillion.) While all this has happened, the once
overwhelmingly dominant position of US imperialism in the global economy
has been eroded.
As all speculative bubbles eventually do, the most recent one burst, and
the fictitious capital, represented by the inflated home prices and the
billions of dollars of mortgage-based securities, began to be
liquidated. Beginning in August of last year, homeowners who had bought
their homes through questionable mortgages began to default (fail to
meet their payments), houses began to be repossessed, and, as a result,
housing prices ceased their decades-long rise and started to decline.
As these developments occurred, the holders of the mortgagebased
securities began to demand higher interest rates to offset the
increasing risk of default. And this, to make a complicated story less
so (hopefully), led to a drastic “credit crunch,” as various banks and
other lenders panicked and essentially refused to extend credit to
anybody on any terms. Consumers also got scared, as they saw their
assets shrinking, and cut back their spending. (Consumer spending
accounts for about two-thirds of the economy.) Meanwhile, the prices of
stocks dropped dramatically and the economy slowed to a crawl.
Fortunately, the Federal Reserve Bank acted quickly to cut interest
rates and to extend credit to the investment banks (including financing
the buy-out of the cash-strapped Bear Stearns investment bank). This
tended to calm the fears of both investors and consumers, at least
temporarily. Meanwhile, stock prices, which started to drop in November
and continued to fall through the first three months of this year,
seemed to bottom out in March and turn up afterward. However, the stock
market has remained extremely volatile and stock prices have recently
dropped below the level reached in March. (Stock prices, which broadly
reflect investor confidence, tend to lead the economy by several
months.) Although the Fed’s intervention may well have prevented a
financial meltdown, it did not forestall an economic slowdown.
Up to now,, the actual decline in economic activity has not been great.
(Nationally, less than 600,000 jobs have been lost, far less than in
most of the other post-World War II recessions.) Although the housing
sector is shrinking rapidly (and will likely continue to do so for some
time), there have not yet been massive layoffs in other sectors, and it
is possible that the economy may stabilize at or not too far below its
present level. (This seems to have been a pattern of the last two
recessions—this one and the one in 2000–2001—so much so that some
economists have come up with a new economic category, the socalled
“modern recession.”) On the other hand, the decline may continue for
some time, perhaps leading to a severe recession in the US and a global
slowdown, if not an outright contraction. Recent developments, such as
increases in unemployment, continued volatility in the financial sector,
and a collapse in the level of consumer confidence, suggest that this
may be happening now. Moreover, home prices, however much they have
already fallen, are still far above historic levels. They will mostly
likely continue to decline for some time, as the banks write off
billions of dollars of bad loans. (As of this writing, the banks have
written off over $300 billion; some experts predict that this figure
will top $1 trillion).
Even if we avoid a deep recession, economic problems, including
inflation, will continue. We have already seen a rapid rise in the price
of oil. This is in part caused by speculation (investors buying and
selling oil-based securities for short-term gains), but it is also the
result of a combination of other factors, including the increased demand
of newly industrialized countries, the filling of various countries’
strategic petroleum reserves, production cutbacks by a number of foreign
oil producers, and a global slowdown in oil exploration over the last
period. Food prices have also shot up, impelled in part by the fact that
many previous countries that once exported food are now, because of
their industrialization (their people can afford to buy more food), no
longer doing so or are even importing food, by speculation in
foodstuffs, and by the diversion of agricultural resources to the
cultivation of ethanol and other biofuels. While the rate of increase
may slow as speculators move out of commodities and into other areas,
the underlying pressures are still inflationary, as the high price of
oil, which is used in the production of many other commodities, will
make its way to and through the rest of the economy. To these will be
added the impact of the currently low interest rates, the Fed’s
considerable expansion of credit, and, equally important, the declining
value of the dollar (which will tend to raise the prices of imported
goods). So, what is likely for the foreseeable future is some kind of
recession, perhaps quite severe, followed by a period of very slow
economic growth coupled with inflation, somewhat like the stagflation of
the 1970s.
This will put the Federal Reserve Bank in a quandary, particularly as
the economy bottoms out and starts to recover, since while the bank
might like to keep interest rates low and credit easily available in
order to boost the economic activity, it runs the risk of fueling
inflation if it does so. On the other hand, if it keeps interest rates
too high in the interests of keeping a lid on inflation, it may choke
off or at least hamper an economic recovery. The federal government’s
budget deficit puts it in a similar bind. Cutting the deficit will mean
raising taxes and/or cutting back on government programs, either of
which will dampen economic growth. On the other hand, allowing it to
grow, which means more borrowing, will tend to increase inflation. The
role of the dollar as an international reserve currency will also limit
the Fed’s ability to act, since a rapidly depreciating dollar will wreak
havoc with the global monetary and financial system.
One of the effects of this entire situation will be to lower the living
standards of millions of people by cutting real incomes and increasing
unemployment or underemployment (people employed but not earning enough
to meet their expenses). In addition, given the continued decline in
home prices, many more people will lose their homes, while they and
others will be pushed downward, toward and under the poverty line.
Meanwhile, the long-term problems of the economy, including the decayed
infrastructure and the tremendous indebtedness, will continue to mount.
At the same time, the environmental crisis will increasingly have
directly economic effects. We are already seeing this in rising food
prices, not counting the cyclone (hurricane) that swamped southern
Myanmar (Burma) and the Hurricane Katrina disaster of several years ago,
possibly caused or made worse by global warming, and the flooding in the
Mississippi Valley. To address the growing environmental problems will
require increasing amounts of economic resources, which will not be
available for other uses. While this may result in the development of
new technology and new sectors of the economy, it will also weigh on
economic growth as a whole, increasing the risk of stagnation.
Whatever precisely happens, the overall economic situation is likely to
have an impact on the political scene in the country. Normally, the
responsibility for economic conditions is placed on the sitting
president and his political party, even though their policies, in fact,
have little to do with determining those conditions. Thus, Ronald Reagan
was credited with the expansion of the 1980s, while George H. W. Bush
was blamed for the ensuing recession. Bill Clinton was considered a
genius for supposedly overseeing the longest economic expansion in the
country’s history, while avoiding being blamed for the downturn that
followed. (That, it turned out, didn’t help Democratic presidential
candidate Al Gore enough to win the 2000 election.) I think it likely
that the current economic crisis will be blamed on George W. Bush and
the Republicans more broadly.
However, given the other issues involved in this year’s presidential
contest, specifically, the possibility of electing an African American
to the office, this may not determine the outcome of the election. (I
dare not try to predict the victor in November. I have almost always
gotten it wrong, perhaps because I am not really in tune with the
American voters. It is safe to say, however, that it is the Democrats’
election to lose.)
Even if Republican John McCain were to prevail over the Democratic
candidate in November, one of the key planks of the current conservative
program in the United States, and of the Republican party more broadly,
will be seriously damaged. Indeed, it already has been. I am referring
to the insistence that the “market” and the capitalist system as a whole
function best when they are allowed to operate freely. It should now be
apparent that left to itself, the economy does not always do well; while
at the moment, the question is not whether the government should
intervene in the economy, but how much and in what ways. Clearly, some
form of government action is needed. In fact, the recent actions of the
Federal Reserve Bank, occurring (ironically) during a Republican
administration, represent a historically significant increase in the
power and role of what is basically the US government’s central bank.
The economic situation also makes it likely that demands will rise for
serious measures to address the long-standing issues facing the country.
When the economy is growing rapidly, and everybody, or at least most
people, appear to be prospering or likely to prosper in the future, it
is easy to sweep problems under the rug. Eventually, the explicit or
implicit argument goes, economic prosperity will take care of everything
and everybody. In today’s economic climate, that kind of talk rings
hollow. People are going to start asking, with increasing vehemence,
questions like the following: What are we going to do about Social
Security, about the health care system, about the schools, about the
highways, airports, public transit, etc., about the millions of people
who have lost their homes or are about the lose them, about the millions
of people who, even working several jobs, can’t cover their monthly
expenses, let alone pay off their debts? What are we to do about
immigration, the world food crisis, and—oh yes—the environment?
(Unfortunately, the rise in oil prices will create political pressure
for measures, such as the resumption of off-shore drilling, that will
make the environmental crisis worse, once again “solving” problems in
the short-run, while makings things worse in the future.)
It is already quite clear, if one listens to the debates of the
candidates and would-be candidates for the presidency, that the major
parties have no serious proposals to address these (and the other)
issues facing the country. During the Democratic primary campaign,
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton argued over whether to have the oil
companies pay the gasoline tax; Clinton was for it, Obama against. Obama
rightly insisted that it wouldn’t make a dent in the problem, but what
is his proposal? I have never heard it. The various ideas put forward to
address the crisis in healthcare are similarly vacuous. And what about
the other problems? Nobody is putting forward anything that remotely
deals with them. Hopefully, this will lead to a broadening of the
political debate in the country, granting some space to ideas that have
been off the political map for a while, and offering at least the
appearance of relevance to more radical—left and right—ideas and
ideologies.
This opening of the political debate is likely to get a significant
boost from what I expect (and hope) will be at least some increase in
popular struggles. Although it is possible, I find it hard to believe
that people losing, or in danger of losing, their homes are going to sit
back and do nothing about it. Already there are the equivalent of
shanty-towns, but now made of more high-tech materials, springing up
near major cities to house those who have lost their homes. How high
does the price of gasoline have to go before people start to take
action? I don’t know, but I do believe that, sooner or later, people
will. When the increasing price of food really starts to hit, how long
will people remain content? And how long will undocumented immigrants
allow themselves to be made scapegoats for the problems of the country
that are not of their making?
If the political debate does open up, what will we, as libertarian
socialists and anarchists, have to say about the issues the country and
world are facing? While we certainly need concrete proposals to address
specific issues, we also need to make clear what our starting point is.
Here is how I look at it, put in the most general terms:
First, the fundamental crisis we are confronting is global. The
environmental crisis is obviously so, while the increasing globalization
of the economy means that more narrowly economic issues are also
international in scope. Consequently, our problems must be addressed
internationally. Any plan of action that pits the people of the United
States against other nations and other peoples will ultimately fail. For
example, if the US raises tariff barriers in an attempt to protect US
industries from foreign competition, other countries will probably
retaliate (this is what happened in the 1930s). Then global trade will
shrink and we will see an international depression, which will affect
everybody. In addition, merely attempting to raise
productivity/efficiency, through more automation, layoffs, speedup,
etc., but without dealing with global warming and other environmental
issues, will only work in the short term, at best. The problems of the
US and international economy are far too great to be dealt with via the
methods that have been utilized in the past. In fact, the situation we
are confronting is not just an economic crisis or an environmental
crisis. It is a crisis of humanity. The way we have been living
throughout our entire history, among other things by attacking and
brutalizing the natural world without bothering to replenish it, cannot
continue for long. It is already having and will increasingly have a
direct impact on our economic and social system, making capitalist-based
economic growth ever more difficult to achieve.
Second, to really address the crisis will require a truly cooperative
approach, not only among nations but among the peoples making up each
nation and across the globe. The problems of the world—economic, social,
and environmental—are too vast for any one country, for any small group
of countries, or for a tiny global elite to solve. Real solutions will
require the massive mobilization of group and individual efforts. Even
now, the world food crisis is not being addressed primarily by
governments, but by so-called “non-governmental organizations.” If that
crisis and other crises, including the environmental one, are to be
addressed, the cooperation of large numbers of people will be required.
And if this cooperation is to be meaningful, it will have to involve
giving those people both a real say in whatever discussions take place
and real power to effect decisions, not only local ones, but national
and international decisions as well. Truly effective feedback mechanisms
will have to developed to determine what works or what doesn’t work and
why, while implementing decisions will require the mobilizing of
millions of people. If all this is to be real, it will require a drastic
equalization of wealth and political power throughout the world. For how
else is true cooperation going to be possible if a few people have most
of the money and, therefore, most of the power, while the vast majority
have little or none?
Finally, this drastic equalization of wealth and power amounts to what
many of us used to call a socialist revolution, and what today I prefer
to call an anarchist transformation of society. This revolution does not
have to be violent, in the sense of being an orgy of killing and
bloodletting. Most of the revolutions we have seen in the last few
decades have involved very little violence. While they have not been
totally non-violent or against violence in principle, they have been
carried out with relatively little killing, let alone the massacres that
characterized previous revolutions. The danger of truly violent
overturns, such as the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions, is that
entire countries are devastated while millions of people are
slaughtered. Equally important, many of those involved in these
revolutions, including and in particular their leaders, become morally
corrupted, too willing to kill large numbers of human beings and to
resort to brutal, coercive measures to get their way.
Aside from being at least relatively pacific, the kind of transformation
I am talking about must be, above all, a moral or spiritual one. Human
beings must learn a new way of relating to their fellows and to the
natural world: working together rather than competing, sharing instead
of taking, discussing rather than killing. And this will not be possible
if millions (billions?) of people become brutalized by violence.
Many anarchists have long insisted that human beings naturally
cooperate. This, to them, is the real basis for the possibility of an
anarchist—a truly democratic, egalitarian, and cooperative—society. But
it is easy to overlook the fact that this cooperation has almost always
taken place in hierarchical, competitive settings; masters and slaves,
bosses and workers, politicians and voters, preachers and congregations,
leaders and followers. Some people like to point to the existence of
what Marx called “primitive communism,” that is, small, locally-based
societies, usually centered around kinship groups and lacking social
stratification and formal governments, as a kind of proof that a
non-hierarchical, cooperative society is possible. If it happened once,
it is implied, it can happen again, but on a more advanced level. But
they forget that even where these groups were/are truly
non-hierarchical, they almost always existed/exist in conflict with
other groups of people. It seems as if human beings have only been able
to work together, to truly unite and cooperate, when they do so against
outsiders, against an “other,” in other words, by dividing humanity into
“us” versus “them.” In fact, the human species has never been able to
cooperate on a truly global, pan-human scale. But what we need now, and
will need even more in the coming years, is precisely this, human beings
uniting and cooperating on an Earthwide—species-wide—level. And this
will require a change in our attitudes toward our fellow humans, so that
we increasingly see them (all or most of them) as “us” rather than
“them.” Thus, a revolution that even has a chance of solving our global
problems has to be based on a profound psychological/social
transformation of human beings. (As the great Russian writer, Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, put it (in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, his work
criticizing capitalist societies of 19^(th) century Western Europe):
“There has to be a change of heart.” And it won’t do to believe, as some
have argued, that this psychological transformation will occur by
itself, during the process of the revolution, as people in struggle are
supposedly impelled to unite and develop solidarity; as we have often
seen throughout our history, people often unite in order to attack
others. Panhuman unity needs to be posed as an explicit goal and fought
for, devising methods of argument and struggle that embody this
principle in action.
The creation of the kind of global, species-wide cooperation that I have
been talking about really adds up to an evolutionary step for humanity,
the human species evolving to a higher level. I do not believe there is
anything inevitable about this. (To be frank, I am not even sure it is
possible.) History (and literally, the Earth) is littered with the ruins
of societies that collapsed because they destroyed the natural
environment on which they depended. (For those who would like to read
about this, I suggest Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to
Fail or Succeed.) There is no guarantee that this won’t happen to the
human species as a whole. True, there are things that might help
facilitate the transformation I am describing. Today, human technology
is capable of feeding and clothing everybody on the planet (but how long
will this be the case?). The global economy is bringing more and more
people into economic and social contact with each other. Equally
important, global communications make an Earth-wide, humanity-wide
discussion possible; for the first time in our history, we can actually
have an international conversation about what we, as a species, need to
do to survive. But there is no dynamic that will necessarily move us in
the right direction; there is no God, no transcendental logic or Reason,
no “laws of history” that will force us to make the right decision(s).
The responsibility and the choice rests with us. It involves, as the
Danish existentialist philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, put it in another
context, a “leap.” People have to decide that they want to cooperate;
they have to be aware of the necessity of working together and then
choose to do so. (This is why I have no interest in the discussions and
debates among anarchists about the precise form of property or
society—collective, communal, etc.—that best embodies our ideals. When
human beings decide that they really want to cooperate with their
fellows, in their own country and around the world, the abstract
question of precisely what forms this cooperation might take—forms of
property and forms of organization—will virtually disappear; the answers
will be worked out as we go along.)
And just as we need to see our fellow humans as part of “us” rather than
“them,” and to cooperate rather than compete with them, we must begin to
see the Earth in the same way; not something we can attack and plunder,
but something that is really part of us, something with which we need to
cooperate.
This posing of the need to cooperate with ourselves and our planet is
the other side, the potentially positive side, of the
economic/environmental crisis that we are currently struggling with. It
may finally force us to come to grips with who we are and what we are
doing to our home, the Earth. Like the rapidly rising waters of a river
in flood, it may be what finally convinces human beings that they need
to unite, to cooperate on a world scale, and to throw ourselves into
what needs to be done, to fill the sandbags, as it were, and to stack
them at the river’s edge while there is still time.