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Title: An Anarchism for Today Author: Ted Trainer Date: 14 Jun 2018 Language: en Topics: introductory, degrowth Source: *Capitalism Nature Socialism* Volume 30, 2019 — Issue 4. DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2018.1482936
A sustainable and just world cannot be achieved without enormous
structural and cultural change. The argument presented below is that
when our situation is understood in terms of resource and ecological
limits, it is evident firstly that getting rid of capitalism is not
sufficient. A satisfactory alternative society cannot be highly
industrialised or centralised, and it must involve highly
self-sufficient local economies and largely self-governing communities
that prioritise cooperation and participation. Above all, there must be
degrowth to a far lower GDP per capita than that exists in rich
countries today, with a concomitant embracing of very frugal material
“living standards.” Only a basically anarchist society can meet these
conditions satisfactorily. Secondly, given this goal the transition to
it can only be achieved via an anarchist strategy. Both these themes
point to the need for substantial rethinking of essential elements in
mainstream socialist and Marxist theory.
Consumer-capitalist society cannot be made ecologically sustainable or
just. The accelerating global problems cannot be solved in a society
driven by an obsession with high rates of production and consumption,
living standards based on affluence, market forces, the profit motive
and economic growth. The only solution to the problems created by such a
society is via a huge and radical transition to some kind of Simpler
Way.
Many on the left do not accept this basic analysis of our situation.
Notable recent examples are given by Phillips (2014) and Sharzar (2012).
The common belief is that when capitalism has been transcended, rational
organisation will release technical advancement to enable all to rise to
high material living standards. However, there is now an overwhelmingly
convincing “limits-to-growth” case stating that we have far exceeded the
capacity of the planet’s resources and ecosystems to sustain the present
levels of production and consumption, and that there is no possibility
of extending the “living standards” of the world’s most affluent
societies to all people.
Of central importance here is the magnitude of the overshoot, i.e. the
degree to which current levels of production and consumption are
unsustainable. A clear illustration is given by the World Wildlife
Fund’s “footprint” index. According to a report from 2013 (WWF 2013), it
takes about 8 ha of productive land to provide water, energy, settlement
area and food for one person living in Australia. So, if 9 billion
people were to live as we do in Sydney, we would need about 72 billion
ha of productive land to provide for a similar material standard of
living for all of them. But that is about nine times all the available
productive land on the planet. Even now footprint analyses indicate that
the world is consuming resources at 1.5 times of the maximum sustainable
rate.
Figures for some other items indicate much worse ratios. For instance,
the top 10 iron ore and bauxite consuming nations have per capita use
rates about 65 and 90 times higher, respectively, than those for all the
other nations (Weidmann, Schandl, and Moral 2014). Mineral ore grades
are falling. All people could not rise to present rich-world levels of
mineral use. The same case can be made with respect to just about all
other resources and ecosystem services, such as agricultural land,
forests, fisheries, water and more. These statistics only describe the
present, grossly unsustainable rich-world levels of production and
consumption. But there is pressure to increase these levels of output
and consumption, living standards and GDP as much as possible and
without an end in sight. In other words, the supreme goal of economic
activity is growth. Few seem to recognise the utterly impossible
implications of this. If the expected 9 billion people were to rise to
the “living standards” Australians would have in 2050 assuming an annual
economic growth of 3 percent, the total global amount of production and
consumption going on would be about 30 times as great as it is now. To
provide that quantity of natural resources sustainably we would need to
harvest them from about 45 Earths.
Why analyse in terms of nine billion people trying to live as we in rich
countries do? The approximately two billion rich people can sustain
their affluent ways only if they go on consuming most of the planet’s
dwindling resources. This is likely to be a recipe for rapid security
deterioration. If it continued to be their goal, they would be well
advised to remain heavily armed, given the certainty of intensifying
resource wars. Conventional wisdom has taught the rest that to “develop”
is to rise to rich-world affluence, so, whether we like it or not, we
will have to think about the quest for a world of nine billion living as
we do.
The common retort to this kind of analysis, as argued by Phillips
(2014), and especially by Blomqvist, Nordhaus, and Shellenbeger (2015),
is that technical advance can solve the problems. The extreme
implausibility of this belief is explained in detail in Trainer 2016.
The faith in technofixes assumes that global GDP can grow to three to
four times its present levels by 2050, while resource use can be cut to
around one-tenth or less of present volumes. Suffice it to say here that
among the many relevant studies there seem to be none that provide any
support for the core tech-fix assumption, i.e. that economic growth and
resource demand can be “decoupled.” For all intents and purposes,
economic growth is closely correlated with growth in resource use. Yet
the tech-fix faith expects us to believe that the ratio can be reduced
by a factor in excess of 30 by 2050.
The enormous magnitude of the overshoot must be the overriding
determinant of thinking about a viable alternative society. It is
difficult to see how anyone aware of these basic numbers could avoid
accepting that the rich countries must transition to far simpler and
less resource-expensive lifestyles and economies. As has been indicated
above, the per capita decreases in resource use in those countries might
have to be around 90 percent, so they could not be achieved without
dramatic reductions in the amount of production and consumption, and
therefore, the economic activity taking place. Needless to say, this
cannot be done in a capitalist society, but it is equally obvious that
far more must be done than merely replacing capitalism with some kind of
socialism.
The magnitude of the overshoot means that the required alternative
society will contradict some of the core assumptions that have been
taken for granted by many left theorists. A sustainable and just society
cannot be affluent, energy-intensive or heavily industrialised. It
cannot have a growth economy, nor, as will shortly be explained, can it
be run by a central state. Above all, present rich-world per capita
resource consumption rates must be more or less decimated. This cannot
be done unless there is a transition to some kind of Simpler Way
embodying the following principles:
or concern with luxury, affluence, possessions and wealth, and much more
concern with non-material sources of life satisfaction. An individual’s
quality of life will be a function of public resources and conditions,
not of personal savings or property. A sustainable society cannot be
achieved unless there is a profound cultural change away from
individualistic, competitive acquisitiveness.
independent of the (remnant) global economy, devoting local resources to
meeting local needs, with little regional, let alone intranational or
international, trade. As petroleum becomes scarce and materials become
expensive there will be no choice about this.
communities to take collective control of their own development, in
order to include and provide for all. In the coming era of scarcity, it
will be obvious that communities must cooperate to ensure that
collective needs are met. This will involve local commons, committees,
working bees (voluntary work parties), as well as town assemblies and
referenda-making and implementation of the important decisions about
local development and administration. Most of the governance will have
to be carried out by citizens via highly participatory arrangements,
partly because large and expensive centralised states will not be
sustainable, but mainly because they could not govern the settlements
indicated. Only the people who live within local economies and have to
maintain them are in a position to make and carry out the right
decisions pertaining to them. The viability of the new systems will
depend largely on the level of conscientiousness, community solidarity,
sense of empowerment and control, and the experienced satisfaction.
These crucial “spiritual” qualities can only thrive in small,
cooperative and largely self-governing communities in control of their
own fate.
Given these arrangements, in the long run relatively little will be left
for centralised state or national governments to do, although their
functions will be important, e.g. in coordinating national rail,
communications, legal and other systems, and locating industries so that
all towns can contribute to the production of items towns cannot produce
for themselves. Very few steel mills, mines and heavier industries will
be needed. The eventual goal (Stage 2 described below) is for these
remnant “states” to have no autonomous power, but to derive all
authority from the town assemblies through classically anarchist
principles of federation and delegation.
A new economic system, one that is a small fraction of the size of the
present economy, is not driven by profit or market forces, produces much
less than the present economy, does not grow at all, and focuses on
needs, rights, justice, welfare and ecological sustainability. The core
unit of this arrangement will be the local economy. It might have many
small private firms and markets, but there must be basic (participatory,
democratic, open and local) social control over what is developed, what
is produced and how it is distributed, in order to make sure needs are
addressed first. Most economic activity will be geared to maximising the
quality of life of all in the region. A top concern must be to ensure
that all are provided for (especially via access to a livelihood
enabling a valuable and respected contribution to be made), that none
are unemployed, poor or excluded, and that individual, collective and
ecological needs are prioritised.
The concern of The Simpler Way project is to show how workable and
attractive this general alternative could be, how it could defuse global
problems and how easily it could be established, if the intention was
there. An illustration of how only integrated localism can dramatically
reduce resource demand is given by egg production. The present
commercial-industrial method of egg production involve global networks
of agribusiness farms, factories, chemicals, ships, trucks, battery
chicken sheds, supermarkets, computers, satellites, pollution flows,
soil damaging agribusiness feed production, people with degrees,
advertising, packaging, soil nutrient loss, necessity of removal of
chicken manure as “waste” and more. All of this generates huge energy,
material, environmental and talent costs. But eggs produced in backyard
chicken pens or neighbourhood co-ops involve almost none of those costs
(quantitative documentation is given in the Remaking Settlements study;
see Trainer 2015a). The same is true of many other goods and services
that can be produced in highly integrated community economies. Localism
and small scale enable high levels of integration of functions, and
these in turn enable huge savings. For instance, manure can be quickly
moved to compost heaps and fish ponds, whereas the waste generated by
industrial systems is typically a long way from the fields that grew the
feed, and thus create energy, transport and other problems. Kitchen
scraps can go directly to chickens, eliminating the need for a feed
production chain that can have global roots. Small pens with access to
free range feeding reduces if not entirely eliminates the need for a
chemical industry producing drugs to control disease in intensive
battery shed production. Free ranging in orchards keeps fruit fly larvae
infestations down. Chickens and other animals add to the locality’s free
leisure resources. Familiarity among participants in these non-monetised
and non-commodified economies enables problem identification and
subsequent spontaneous action. All of the dollar and other costs
generated by the industrial system’s logistics, management and
operations can thus be avoided. The conditions and processes that
proximity and integration make possible are the key to the enormous
resource and environmental gains that can only come via small, highly
self-sufficient and self-governing communities.
The Remaking Settlements study shows how these practices would enable
normal outer Sydney suburbs to be made highly self-sufficient while
possibly cutting dollar and energy costs by an order of magnitude. It
assumes suburbs crammed with “edible landscapes,” i.e. gardens, commons
containing orchards and woodlots, poultry, fish ponds and mini-farms.
These would enable all nutrients to be recycled back to the soil through
animal pens, compost heaps and methane digesters, eliminating the need
for most of the fertiliser industry, sewer systems and animal waste
disposal. Ordinary suburbs could contain fishing industries involving
small backyard tanks and small farms recycling nutrient-rich waters
through aquaponic systems. Bulk supply of a few items, notably grain and
dairy products, would need to be brought in from areas as close to towns
as possible. Meat consumption would be greatly reduced but could mostly
come from small animals such as poultry, rabbits and fish, rather than
cattle. Food quality would be much higher than it is now. There would be
almost no need for food packaging, long-distance transport, dealing with
“waste,” fertilisers, pesticides or marketing, and little need for
fridges, given the proximity to fresh food. The Remaking Settlements
study found that normal outer Sydney suburbs could meet most of their
food needs from within their boundaries.
Voluntary working bees can carry out much cooperative production and
maintenance, such as fruit tree pruning and harvesting, road repair and
building. Consider the abundant time now being devoted to watching
screens that could be given to such activities. The Remaking Settlements
study found that if most adult residents of the suburb gave 2 hours a
week it would be equivalent to the work done by 150 full-time council
employees. The implications for the reduction of existing bureaucracies
are glaring.
Many eco-villages illustrate the way the need for large numbers of
middlemen, professionals, bureaucrats, transport and infrastructures can
be eliminated when these kinds of cooperative local processes are
adopted. Especially important is the way good citizens spontaneously
attend to problems and needs (in mostly low-tech systems) as soon as
they become apparent, without having to refer them to professionals or
officials.
Because most people could be getting to local workplaces on foot or
bicycle, and far fewer goods would need to be imported to settlements,
with far less need for transport. Therefore, many roads could be dug up,
greatly increasing land areas available for community gardens, etc.
Neighbourhood workshops, ideally recycled petrol stations, would include
meeting places, craft rooms, art galleries, recycling racks, tool
libraries and surplus exchanges. Local sources of leisure, along with
leisure committees, would greatly reduce travel for entertainment and
holidays.
An important element would be the many commons developed throughout
neighbourhoods, the community orchards, herb beds, clay pits, sheds,
craft rooms, windmills, ponds, animal pens, woodlots and forest gardens
providing free food, materials and leisure resources. These would be
built and maintained by co-operatives and the voluntary community
working bees, which would also carry out many services such as helping
to care for older people, minding children, assisting teachers, and
maintaining the parks and the (few remaining) roads. These arrangements
would attend to many of the functions councils now carry out. There
would, therefore, be a need for far fewer professional, bureaucratic or
paid services, greatly reducing the amount of income that would be
needed to pay taxes. Involvement in these activities would contribute to
community solidarity and cohesion, volunteering, giving, generosity and
care for the public good.
Unlike present dormitory suburbs, settlements would be leisure-rich,
housing familiar people, small businesses, common projects, drama clubs,
animals, arts and crafts, gardens, farms, forests, ponds, ornamental
architecture and alternative technologies. Ordinary neighbourhoods have
abundant unused potential cultural and leisure resources, including
amateur comedians, actors, artists, musicians, playwrights, acrobats,
jugglers and dancers presently sidelined by corporate media need for
only a few mega-stars. In revised settlements people would be much less
inclined to travel for leisure or go away for holidays, dramatically
reducing energy consumption. A leisure committee would organise
concerts, festivals, celebrations, mystery tours, visiting speakers and
other leisure and educational activities. Towns and suburbs would be
able to completely eliminate unemployment, poverty and homelessness
simply by setting up small firms, cooperative gardens and workshops,
enabling all to contribute to producing the goods and services the town
needs.
A top priority would be to ensure that everyone has a valued and
satisfying livelihood. Most people would need to work for money only one
or two days a week. They would not need to buy much because many of the
things they need would be free (such as fruit from the commons) or could
be paid for by contributions to community working bees. Most significant
here is the capacity to build a small, well-insulated, fireproof, unique
and beautiful dwelling from earth, for under $(A)10,000 (see Trainer
2015a for cost estimates). As Thoreau emphasised, these simper ways of
meeting needs free up time for living. People in eco-villages can spend
the other five or six days working/playing around the neighbourhood.
Surrounding the town or suburban economy there would be a regional
economy in which more elaborate items would be produced, such as shoes,
appliances, hardware and tools. Few items, including steel, would be
moved long distances from big, centralised factories. Very little would
need to be transported from overseas.
Contrary to the common “socialist” assumption, most of the small firms
and farms could (and, in my view, should) remain as privately owned
ventures or co-operatives, so long as their goals did not include profit
maximisation or growth. These family and cooperative businesses would
give people the satisfaction of running their own little joinery, bakery
or farm in their preferred ways. They would of course have to operate
within strict guidelines set by town assemblies. These activities would
be seen as ways people could earn a stable income while being
appreciated for helping to provide items the town needs. Obviously, in a
zero-growth economy it must be possible for some firms to compete to
take more sales and business and become rich, driving others into
bankruptcy. The town will have the (possibly difficult) task of managing
these matters, for instance, working out the best restructuring if one
baker is more efficient than the others, to maximise the welfare of all
concerned. In the longer term it would become clear whether it made
sense to retain this “free enterprise” sector or to move to a fully
cooperative economy; this need not be decided now. The town would have a
“business incubator” made up of experienced people, tasked with helping
firms become and remain viable. If a firm was struggling, or no longer
needed, the incubator would help it work out how best to reallocate the
premises and people (the Spanish Mondragon venture provides one of many
examples).
Most of the real economy would function without money. Most daily goods
and services would come via households, neighbourhood gardens, workshops
and kitchens, and the swapping of surpluses and giving and helping. We
would obtain many goods free from the commons, and many “services,” such
as festivals and concerts, would be free as well. The town would have
its own bank, and during the early years of the transition a town or
region would have its own local currency, enabling it to set up
enterprises to “employ” homeless and other disenfranchised people and to
pay them with IOUs, enabling them to buy goods produced by other town
firms. In the longer term a sensible national monetary system would
obviate the need for local currencies, but it could not involve
interest.
In the early years of the transition these new arrangements would
gradually be built up as an Economy B underneath the old Economy A,
which would continue to operate according to market principles (see
Trainer 2017). As the global situation deteriorated, Economy A would
increasingly fail, leading people to establish collective projects to
provide necessities no longer purchasable, and increasing numbers of
people to move over to the alternative system from businesses failing in
Economy A. As noted, in the longer term a town might opt to retain a
small Economy A in which some people might seek to produce, for
instance, hand-made dresses or works of art to be sold in a more or less
“free” market. Over time the desirability of retaining this sector and
the functions left to it would become evident.
However, the most impressive characteristic of eco-villages is not their
economy, technology or environmental sensitivity, but the level of
solidarity and support in their communities and the resulting quality of
life. No one experiences poverty, isolation or exclusion and all are
looked after and respected as valuable contributors. The major goal here
is to ensure strong community, and the above-described structures and
activities indicate why eco-villages’ achievements in this regard are
not surprising (see the evidence reported by Lockyer 2017).
The Simpler Way is likely to remedy what Bookchin saw as the human
readiness to dominate nature as well as other humans. When our welfare
depends heavily on how well we treat the local ecosystems we are
directly and obviously dependent on, we are likely to care for them
well. But this goes beyond self-interest. When one lives close to the
earth, one is frequently confronted by nature’s miracles and generosity,
and one is, therefore, likely to feel appreciative, in awe, humble, and
likely to treat the environment properly. Thus, living in ways that are
frugal and that minimise resource use should not be seen as an irksome
sacrifice involving deprivation or hardship that must be made in order
to save the planet. These ways, including gardening, making things,
sharing surpluses, joining in working bees and community celebrations
and festivals, can be rich sources of life satisfaction. Indeed, as many
have come to understand, living simply can be a powerful form of
spiritual liberation, especially because it avoids the need to earn much
money (Alexander 2012; Trainer 2015b). These are the kinds of
realisations the Simplicity Institute works to encourage (See Trainer
2012).
It should also be stressed that The Simpler Way does not mean cutting
back on research, universities or advanced technology. It would enable
retention of all the high-tech and modern ways that are socially
desirable, e.g. in medicine, windmill design and public transport. In
fact, we would have far more resources for these pursuits than we devote
to them now. This is because we could transfer over to those pursuits
many of the resources currently wasted on the vast production of
unnecessary items, including arms. In addition, when there is only a
need to work two days a week for money, people will have far more time
to devote to science and technical research, especially into better
plant varieties, mechanical devices and social arrangements.
That this general approach to settlement design could reduce per capita
resource and ecological costs by an order of magnitude is supported by
both the Remaking Settlements study (Trainer 2015a) and the evidence
from Lockyer 2017. The former involved detailed numerical estimates of
the productive potential of a radically restructured Sydney suburb, and
found that reductions in the order of 90 percent were plausible. These
general magnitudes were also arrived at by Lockyer’s study of the
Dancing Rabbit eco-village in Missouri. Per capita electricity, fuel,
car ownership, car use, and waste were around one-tenth or less of the
US average. Both studies also point to the non-economic gains and
benefits, e.g. in soil conditions, food quality, psychological welfare
and community enrichment.
It is most important to recognise that the above has not been a wish
list or a set of utopian dreams to be set alongside other possibilities,
but a brief elaboration of necessary, non-negotiable conditions. Two
fundamental arguments have been put forth. The first is that when the
nature of the limits-to-growth predicament is understood, when the
magnitude of the overshoot has been grasped, there is no alternative but
to work for a transition to some kind of simpler way. Some of the above
detail might be modified with experience, but no other general social
form can get the per capita resource use rates down sufficiently while
enabling a high quality of life for all. This has been explained by the
above discussion of the significance of small scale, proximity and
integration of functions. The second argument is that there is both a
strong theoretical case for the practical adequacy of this vision and
strong empirical evidence for it deriving from the experience within
eco-villages and research conducted on them.
It should be evident that the kind of social organisation sketched above
is a fairly straightforward anarchist vision. To summarise, settlements
enabling a high quality of life for all on very low resource use rates
must involve all members in thoroughly participatory deliberations
regarding the design, development and running of their local productive
and social systems. Their ethos must be cooperative and collectivist,
seeking to avoid all forms of domination and to prioritise the public
good. They must draw on the voluntary good will and energy of
conscientious citizens who are ready to contribute generously and to
identify and deal with problems informally and spontaneously, and to
focus on seeking mutually beneficial arrangements with little or no need
for bureaucracy, paid officials or politicians. These communities must
be self-governing; they cannot be run from the centre, if only because
state bureaucracies cannot know a town’s unique traditions,
personalities, history, soils, climate, problems, or needs and
preferences, and therefore, cannot make the right decisions for it. The
state cannot force people to be conscientious and happy contributors to
largely autonomous communities.
Other anarchist elements of the vision discussed here include the
assumption of spontaneity, i.e. enabling conscientious, collectivist and
caring people to think about, foresee, discuss and fix problems, as
distinct from leaving them for the officials to settle and hand down
orders. The intention is to strive for consensus decision-making. The
impressive Catalan Integral Cooperative is able to run many rather
large-scale projects on this principle (Dafermos 2017). A central role
is assumed here for the establishment of confederations to deal with
issues wider than the town community. As this practice strengthens, the
goal must be for it to eventually embrace all state-level functions (see
Stage 2 of the transition below). Furthermore, the transition process
follows the anarchist principle of “prefiguration,” i.e. of starting to
build elements of the new society in the here and now. These necessary
elements of the alternative way and the path to establishing it mark
this as an eco-anarchist perspective, quite distinct from eco-socialism.
The essential point of difference has to do with the principle of
minimising hierarchy and centrality, which anarchists refer to as
“subsidiarity.”
It is not that these requirements assume impossibly saintly human
beings. It is not surprising that the intolerable conditions oppressive
societies force people to endure cause bad behaviour. It is good
conditions that bring out the best in people. Free them from
deprivation, exploitation, insecurity, worry and fear, and one might be
surprised at how nicely they treat each other. Most people find that it
is much more satisfying to share, cooperate, work together and care for
each other, and be respected and appreciated accordingly, than to
compete with and beat each other and take more than one’s fair share.
Thus, The Simpler Way is characterised by a powerful synergism. The
situations and incentives it involves produce positive feelings and
behaviours. People will live in conditions which make it clear that
their personal welfare is directly dependent on how well the town works
and how well people cooperate, care for and help each other. Being a
good citizen will be enjoyable, and thus the required values will be
powerfully self-maintaining. Again, this is abundantly evident in
eco-villages.
An obvious reason this vision is labelled eco-anarchism is that, as has
been explained, only settlements of this kind can address the ecological
crisis effectively. A less obvious reason is that this vision recognises
that a sustainable settlement is best understood as a complex integrated
ecosystem in which the welfare of the whole is a function of the
mutually beneficial arrangements negotiated between all participants,
rather than decreed by superior authorities. Kropotkin saw that although
nature involves competition, it also involves a great deal of
cooperation and mutually beneficial adjustment. Ecosystems do not need
to be organised by any superior authority; in general, spontaneous
interactions between participants sorts arrangements out. The Spanish
Catalan Integral Cooperative stresses the “integral” element; attention
must be given to interconnections, feedbacks and synergistic effects
within whole, complex socio-ecosystems.
If the goal must be a Simpler Way society, then there are major and
novel implications for thinking about the process of transition to it.
It will be argued that most previous thinking about transition strategy
has been mistaken, including much socialist/left thinking, and that the
path that has to be taken is basically an anarchist one. Marxists and
anarchists have quite similar ideas about the form that society will
take in the long term, i.e. a “communism” in which there are no classes
and no domination of some by the others, no relations of power or
privilege, no state power, and in which things are done cooperatively,
everyone is cared for, and there is no “alienation.” But they differ
sharply on how to get to such a goal.
Those who identify as Marxists (but who might be more accurately
labelled Leninists) believe that getting rid of capitalism requires the
leadership of a strong, centralised and determined revolutionary group,
and that it will involve violence because dominant classes never
voluntarily give up their privileges (see Avineri 1968, among others,
for an argument that this is not Marx’s position). This is a plausible
claim, and these theorists criticise anarchists for failing to accept
the need for direct confrontation, to see that it will be necessary to
be ruthless and violent, and to accept that strong top-down rule will be
essential to establish the new ways. “Marxists” and “socialists” today
generally believe that a leadership group must take state power and push
through the radical changes, but that in the long run, when people have
come to see that the new ways are better, then state power can be wound
back and people will be capable of self-government, with little or no
role for the state as we know it. The argument below is that this puts
the cart before the horse. It might have been the right order of events
in past revolutions, in which the goal was to take control of an
existing socio-economic system basically geared to producing increasing
wealth, and then to run that same economy for the benefit of all, more
efficiently and productively. But that worldview has been decisively
invalidated by the advent of the era of limits and scarcity, and the
goal now has to be a society which not only has no growth but functions
at a much lower level of GDP, industrialisation, trade, production and
consumption. This revolution is far more complex than just replacing
capitalist control of the affluence machine. It is a revolution quite
different from any that came before it. The biggest and most problematic
element in it is not even economic or political, but rather the cultural
reversal it necessitates. This revolution cannot get far unless interest
in material gain is generally abandoned and life purpose and
satisfaction are identified with other-than-material goals. Thus, the
essence of this revolution is the development of such ideas and values.
This was a core principle in the thinking of some of the most important
anarchists, notably Kropotkin and Tolstoy. They realised that there is
no point in trying to get state power in order to establish an anarchist
society if people in general are not interested in governing themselves.
We can add now that there must also be a willingness to live frugally
and self-sufficiently in the new settlements described above. If a
vanguard took state power tomorrow, it could not force or entice or
bribe people to do these things. They could only build and run the kinds
of economies and communities discussed above if and when they have
become strongly committed to The Simpler Way ideas and values. We are at
present a very long way from that situation, so the task for
revolutionaries here and now is not to take state power but to work as
long as it takes to build the world view consistent with new values.
This comprises Stage 1 of the revolution before us. Avineri (1968)
explains that this is in fact close to Marx’s position. Marx’s theory of
the historical development of society focused on the way crucial new
structures and institutions that will sustain post-revolutionary society
emerge within and are produced by the old society, and nothing can be
achieved by trying to take power and to force the new ways if the
required new ways have not yet emerged. He pointed to how this mistake
was evident in various revolutionary attempts, including the French
Revolution and the Paris Commune, and how it led to the resort to
violence.
Of course eventually “state power” will (have to) be taken, primarily
because the national economy will have to be radically reorganised so
that its primary purpose becomes to provide the towns with the
relatively few inputs they need. In The Simpler Way view of transition
this comprises Stage 2 of the revolution, where the macro-structural
changes must be made, including scrapping growth and the market (at
least as the key driver of the economy), cutting down on
industrialisation and trade, assisting with the relocation of people and
firms, and distributing (a few) factories to all towns. But (a) Stage 2
cannot even begin unless Stage 1 has been very effective in developing
the required consciousness and establishing new ways such as
participatory town meetings; (b) working for the Stage 1 goals described
above is the best way to contribute to that consciousness and those
social processes and (c) when that has been done well, a radical
restructuring at the level of the state will probably be carried out
easily (greatly assisted by the increasing failure of the present
system). In general, people will only push these Stage 2 changes through
if and when they have come to see that their towns cannot survive, let
alone thrive, in an era of severe and lasting global resource scarcity
unless the national economy is geared to serving the towns. They will
then move beyond requesting or demanding to initiating them. For
instance, early on people will begin to realise that their towns need
grain and dairy products and bicycle tyres, so they will begin to
organise their own more distant regional co-ops and community-owned
farms, factories and supply chains. This will soon lead to pressure on
governments to facilitate and prioritise these initiatives, to divert
scarce resources from frivolous industries, to rezone bankrupt farms for
cooperative use, to regulate steel production towards producing the
hardware needed by town handymen, etc. But none of this can happen
unless people have first come to regard as normal the social values and
processes such as everyone having an equal say, citizens taking
responsibility for their collective fate, and ensuring that need and not
profit determines what happens in communities.
Stage 1 involves what anarchists refer to as “prefiguring,” that is,
building elements of the post-revolutionary society here and now within
the old. Whereas, the Marxist or Socialist view is that it is necessary
to put all energies into fighting against and eventually defeating and
getting rid of capitalism before it will be possible to start building
the new society, The Simpler Way strategy involves beginning to create,
live in and enjoy elements of it long before the revolution has come to
a head. This increases the existence and capacity to operate the new
systems, but, more importantly, it is the most effective way to help
people see their indispensability and merits, and thus to develop the
crucial new culture. It is not assumed here that just building more and
more alternative things, such as community gardens, will eventually and
automatically result in a radically new society having been built (this
assumption is a major fault in the Transition Towns movement). As has
been explained, there will eventually have to be a Stage 2 in which
quite different goals become focal. This second, much later stage will
be about making the huge and difficult structural changes beyond the
town, at the level of the national economy and the state. But they
cannot be made unless powerful and widespread grassroots support for
them has developed first, and that’s what must be built during Stage 1.
Thus, it should be clear why Simpler Way anarchists think it is a
mistake to focus here and now on trying to take state power. Obviously,
the ultimate goal of the revolution is communities running themselves
without state authority, and people in full control of the few remnant
“state” level agencies. But that situation cannot come to be unless
there has first been a long process whereby people have come to embrace
the prerequisite ideas and values, and enabling this is the core
revolutionary task to be worked on immediately. If that is achieved,
then the revolution effectively has occurred. People will then quickly
push the big structural changes through and convert the national economy
towards supporting communities within a zero-growth economy that is not
determined by market forces etc. These state-level changes, especially
the transfer of state power to the town assemblies, are best seen as
consequences of the revolution.
Probably the most inspiring illustration of these points regarding the
transition process comes from the remarkable achievements of the Spanish
anarchists in the 1930s. During the civil war they were able to
reorganise areas mostly around Barcelona inhabited by about a million
people, rapidly carrying out major improvements in living conditions,
the treatment of women, equality, justice, education, health care,
leisure and culture, etc. Health clinics and hospitals, and even a
university, were set up. Workers ran their own factories. They did these
things via voluntary committees and citizen assemblies of ordinary
people, deliberately refusing to have any politicians or paid
bureaucracy. But this would not have been possible had there not been
within people a deep commitment to anarchist ideas and values. These had
been well established long before by their peasant village origins and
by the work of anarchists since a visit by Bakunin decades earlier
(Trainer 2009).
It can be argued that the remarkable emergence since 2010 of the Catalan
Integral Cooperative is a continuation of the achievements of the 1930s
(Dafermos 2017). The aspect of this movement most relevant here is its
explicit repudiation of both capitalism and the state. The enthusiastic,
collective, voluntary, citizen-led initiatives make what should be the
obvious point that the new ideas and values have to come first.
At this point the socialist is likely to say, “But if we had state power
the whole process could be sped up by efforts to educate.” However,
consider the logical error here. Nothing would be achieved if by some
miracle any of the presently existing socialist parties took state power
by winning an election, because none of them is committed to The Simpler
Way. If a party committed to a Simpler Way platform was elected, then
long before it had 51 percent of the votes, millions of people would
have been building the new systems! That is, the taking of state power
by a party committed to The Simpler Way could not occur unless there had
first been a Stage 1 process in which the society had gone a long way
down the path to new settlements, economies, communities, polities and
values. In other words, in this revolution, there can be no alternative
to a basically anarchist, bottom-up, prefigurative transition process.
Again, the task for revolutionaries here and now is to plunge into the
building of local community alternatives, in order to (a) begin creating
the new systems; (b) be in the best position to help people see the need
to work for the degrowth transition, and eventually for those Stage 2
goals.
A fundamental difference between the anarchist approach and that of Marx
is evident in the (very few) things he said about post-capitalist
society. Avineri (1968) discusses the distinction Marx made between the
first and second stages of post-capitalist society. The first involved
only a “crude communism” in which people would still hold unsatisfactory
attitudes and ideas regarding property, work, bosses, income and
acquisitiveness. In effect, society would have become the capitalist,
the owner of the means of production, and workers would still receive
wages, experience division of labour, obey bosses, not seek
participation and power in the running of the factory, suffer and accept
alienation, and most importantly for this revolution, would still be
focused on competition and acquiring property and material wealth. Marx
thought that only later, at the second stage, would these dispositions
have been overcome via a transformation of mentality/culture. But
because of the unique nature of the new revolution, due to the advent of
scarcity and limits, within the next few decades large numbers of people
must become capable of running local communities focused on willing
acceptance of cooperation, participation, citizen responsibility and
control, and of frugal lifestyles. There will not be sufficient
resources to sustain a long period in which the vanguard party helps
passive, materialistically inclined masses within industrialised systems
to overcome their greed (Avineri’s term) and phase down to eventually
enjoy living simply.
Note the significant problem Marxist theory has here. Marx argues
convincingly that the development of capitalism produces various
institutions and practices that will be important elements in the
post-capitalist synthesis, but willing acceptance of frugality, which,
from the perspective of The Simpler Way is the most crucial now, is not
one of them. He could not have been expected to see how supreme this
requirement has become, given that he wrote long before resource
scarcity and ecological limits were seen to be such overriding
determinants. Any “revolution” that got us to a “crude communism” in
which most people remained as fiercely obsessed with wealth and gain as
they are now would either not be likely to survive very long, or would
set an urgent and gargantuan “educational” task for the vanguard party.
The Simpler Way account of the required alternative society and the
transition to it does not involve this problem. Firstly, it explains
that, yes, the new dispositions and institutions must be built before
significant change at the level of capitalism becomes possible, but it
also holds that when they have been built, a fully fledged “communism”
will be possible, with no need for a distinction or delay between taking
power and achieving the cultural goal. Of course, this assumes that
those psychological and social changes can be achieved, within a few
decades, and this is such a historically gigantic revolution that it is
not at all likely to be achieved. The point, however, is that ecological
limits and resource scarcity leave us no option but to try to do it.
It could be argued that the path capitalism is now taking is in fact
beginning to produce acceptance and practice of frugality, cooperation
and non-material satisfaction. In The Simpler Way strategic vision these
will emerge from and be produced by late capitalism, through its
increasing failure to provide for communities and through the resulting
realisation that these communities must start producing as much as they
can for themselves. But, as noted above, a significant difference
remains. If this Stage 1 of the revolution goes well, we will not have
to deal with the “crude communism” Marx anticipated. We will already
have spread the ideas, values and practices that will enable a direct
transition to a good post-capitalist society.
It should be noted that becoming involved in local prefiguration is not
the only way activists can contribute to the revolution. Some of them
can contribute best by writing and working within media and educational
institutions, and through raising the issues in everyday conversations.
But it would seem that the most effective thing most could do is to try
to influence people they are working with within the many local
initiatives that have sprung up over the past two decades. The anarchist
approach also holds open the possibility of the transition being
relatively peaceful. If most people wanted the transition, it might
occur quickly and without much violence, as they would simply move to
establish the new cooperative local systems. This can be regarded as
“ignoring the system to death.” If this is done well enough in Stage 1,
then, when Stage 2 arrives, it is conceivable that the 1 percent and
those who benefit from serving them will see the writing on the wall and
realise that their ways cannot continue, if only because their resource
inputs and markets are drying up. Interestingly, in Spain many owners of
factories joined the anarchists in helping to run them for the public
good. However, there is obviously a good chance that there will be great
confusion, chaos and conflict, and all will be lost in the die-off of
billions. It hardly needs to be said that the prospects for a Simpler
Way transition must be rated as very poor. Yet the above argument has
been that it is in general the only strategy to work for. The anarchist
approach to transition offers the possibility of experiencing and
enjoying post-revolutionary social systems and relations here and now,
if only to some extent, whereas the socialist can only look forward to
this in the distant future, long after a conflict-ridden revolution.
This has been a fundamental challenge to radical left thinking about
both the alternative to capitalism and the strategy for achieving it. My
experience has been that it is not a very welcome critique, but it is a
friendly one, and not that difficult for the left to take on board. Its
two core challenges are, firstly, to attend much more to ecological
limits and resource scarcity in thinking about the good society and how
to get to it, and secondly, to recognise that it is a mistake at this
stage to focus on centralisation and the taking of state power.
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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