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Title: Exodus
Subtitle: General Idea of the Revolution in the XXI Century
Date: 2021
Source: Author provided the source via email. Additional material and layout reference came from [[https://www.academia.edu/47513528/Exodus_General_Idea_of_the_Revolution_in_the_XXI_Century][author’s Academia.edu page]].
Notes: Published by the Center for a Stateless Society.
Authors: Kevin Carson, Kevin A Carson
Topics: Horizontal organizing, Libertarian municipalism, C 4 SS, Mutualist, Transition
Published: 2021-06-18 09:34:18Z

To the hundreds of thousands or billions

engaged in building the new society

within the shell of the old.

Reviews

“Carson’s writing is always as incisive and informed, as it is mobilizing and bold. Like

Homebrew Industrial Revolution, Exodus will be the source to turn to for historical

insight and contextualizing the maker movement in the political economy of today.”

<right>

— CINDY KOHTALA

researcher on peer production, Aalto University

</right>

“Kevin Carson is the kind of thinker I appreciate most-bold, pioneering, rigorous,

fiercely independent, focused on grand challenges of the day, humble before the

complexities of the world, but willing to grapple deeply with them. His latest book,

Exodus, perfectly exemplifies this. It puts forward a theory of post-capitalist transition

with ordinary people as the main revolutionary protagonists and backs it up with

nearly 500 pages of detailed argumentation. It’s a passionate, but reasoned call to

recognize the agency that all of us already possess and the new possibilities of the day.

The result is illuminating, inspiring, practical, and thus perfect medicine for today.”

<right>

— NEAL GORENFLO

Executive Director, Shareable

</right>

“For all those interested in the assault on working class agency, the decline of

proletarianism, the network revolution, resistance organisation debates, and the

nature of post-capitalist transition, this book is absolutely unmissable!”

<right>

— ATHINA KARATZOGIANNI

researcher on new communications media and resistance movements, Leicester University

</right>

Abstract

Old Left models of postcapitalist transition based on organizational mass, hierarchy,

and revolutionary seizure of power are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Meanwhile, in

the interstices of a dying system in hackerspaces and garage shops, neighborhood

gardens, community land trusts, and municipalist movements from Jackson to Rojava

to Barcelona, people are busy creating the building blocks of a new system within the

interstices of a dying one. Exodus explores a model of social, political, and economic

revolution driven not by violent upheaval but instead, by the process of fostering new

patterns of flourishing social interaction within the shell of an increasingly brittle, unsustainable, and unjust status quo. In this book, Kevin Carson draws on his earlier insights

regarding micromanufacturing technology,

ephemeralization, communication, and stigmergic organization to deepen our understanding

of post-capitalist transition. Examining a broad

range of contemporary trends and employing a

diverse array of theoretical perspectives,

Carson helps us open our eyes to the possibility

of a more humane and flourishing world.

Preface

On the whole, this is a typical Carson book. Like all my books since

Studies in Mutualist Political Economy*, it’s to a large extent a direct outgrowth of my

earlier books insofar as it addresses in depth issues which I was limited to treating on only in passing in the previous books. In this case, *Exodus* applies the

findings of *The Homebrew Industrial Revolution* regarding micromanufacturing

technology and ephemeralization, and those concerning networked communications and stigmergic organization in *The Desktop Regulatory State*, to the

questions of political organization entailed in post-capitalist transition. Three

of my research papers at Center for a Stateless Society were much more limited

preliminary investigations into some of the same subject matter: “Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real,”[1] “The Fulcrum of the Present Crisis,”[2] and

“Libertarian Municipalism.”[3]

Like the previous books, it is a product of its time, in the sense that I was enthusiastically immersed in the vital events of the day during the writing process.

As with *Homebrew* and *Desktop*, I was always two steps behind the news related to

my research, and eventually had to draw a line beyond which I would not incorporate any new material if I was to complete the book at all. And as with the previous books, it was already becoming dated before I wrote down the last word.

Although *Homebrew* and *Desktop* are both considerably dated in many regards, I think much of the analysis is still relevant and holds up fairly well. I hope

the same will be true of *Exodus*.

In any case, if you liked the previous books, perhaps you will also like this

one—or at least find it somewhat useful. I hope so.

Many thanks to my friend Gary Chartier, of La Sierra University, for formatting the manuscripts into a finished book that’s actually pleasing to the eyes.

<right>

January 12, 2021

</right>

[1] Kevin

Carson, “Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real” (Center for a Stateless Society, Spring 2016) <https://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/TechnoUtopiaPDF1.pdf>.

[2] Carson, “The Fulcrum of the Present Crisis: Some Thoughts on Revolutionary Strategy” (Center for a Stateless Society, Winter 2015) <http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/SomeRevCarson.pdf>.

[3] Carson, “Libertarian Municipalism: Networked Cities as Resilient Platforms for Post-

Capitalist Transition” (Center for a Stateless Society, 2018) <https://c4ss.org/wp-content/ uploads/2018/01/community-platforms.pdf>.

Part One: Background

Chapter One: The Age of Mass and Maneuver

I. A Conflict of Visions

I should note, at the outset, that in this section I deal with two

dichotomies which are theoretically distinct, but tend to heavily

overlap in practice. The first is between interstitial visions of change

based on creating the building blocks of the future society within the

present one, and insurrectionary or ruptural visions based on seizure or

conquest of the state and other commanding institutions of the existing

society. The second is between organizational forms modeled on

prefiguring the future society, and organizational forms (defined mainly

by mass, hierarchy and the central imposition of discipline) aimed

primarily at the strategic requirements of seizing power.

In the nineteenth century, prefigurative or interstitial visions

coexisted with visions centered on mass-based institutions and

insurrection. But even the dominant anarchist schools to some extent

emphasized the role of organizational mass and insurrection in the

transition process.

Following a struggle with the Bakuninists in the First International,

the Marxists emerged as the dominant school of socialism — a school that

was both insurrectionary and envisioned the seizure of state power as a

tool for transformation. (Not that Bakunin himself did not advocate a

revolutionary strategy focused on mass and organization; he just saw the

immediate abolition of the state as entailed in the act of seizing it.)

Marx and Engels from the beginning stressed that the transition to

socialism was a thing to be carried out after the working class’s

capture of the state, with the proletarian state playing a central role

in carrying out the transition.

In the *Communist Manifesto*, the first step in the transition to

communism was the seizure of political power, followed by (in Mihailo

Markovic’s words)

a series of steps which eventually revolutionize the entire mode of

production…. [In Marx’s] view the proletariat ‘is compelled by the

force of circumstances’ to use [the state] in order to sweep away by

force the old conditions of production, classes generally, and its own

supremacy as a class…. On the other hand, reformists (e.g. Bernstein)

rejected the idea of a political revolution since they thought the very

economic process of capitalism led spontaneously towards

socialism.[4]

As Marx and Engels themselves described it, “the first step in the

revolution by the working class”

is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the

battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree,

all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of

production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised

as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as

rapidly as possible.

Besides revolutionary policies aimed at smashing bourgeois power, like

confiscating the property of emigres and rebels, and economic policies

aimed at gradually destroying the economic power of the bourgeoisie

(e.g. a progressive income tax and abolition of inheritance), they also

envisioned a large-scale, centrally organized program of economic

reconstruction including:

5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a

national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the

hands of the State.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the

State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement

of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies,

especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual

abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more

equable distribution of the populace over the country.[5]

In both the Manifesto and *Critique of the Gotha Program*, Marx

described a fairly lengthy process of constructing communism after the

working class captured control of the state. The Manifesto included a

detailed economic program that would have to be implemented over a

prolonged period.

As Markovic interpreted it, that specifically ruled out a long process

of evolutionary transition analogous to the transition from feudalism to

capitalism.

In contrast to bourgeois revolution which is an overthrow of the

political power of the aristocracy **at the end **of a long process

of growth of the capitalist economy and bourgeois culture within the

framework of feudal society, the seizure of political power from the

bourgeoisie is, according to Marx, only ‘the first episode’ of the

revolutionary transformation of capitalism into socialism. Marx…

distinguished between the **lower phase **of communism (a mixed

society which still lacks its own foundations) and its higher phase

(after the disappearance of the ‘enslaving of labour’ and of ‘the

antithesis between mental and physical labour’, when such abundance

would be attained that goods could be distributed to each ‘according to

his needs’).[6]

Marx himself, in *The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850* (a

collection of contemporary newspaper articles he had written analyzing

the Revolution of 1848), stressed the mutually determining character of

industrial capitalism and the proletariat in creating both the material

prerequisites of socialism and a revolutionary class capable of building

it.

The development of the industrial proletariat is, in general,

conditioned by the development of the industrial bourgeoisie. Only under

its rule does the proletariat gain that extensive national existence

which can raise its revolution to a national one, and only thus does the

proletariat itself create the modern means of production, which become

just so many means of its revolutionary emancipation.

At its Hague Conference in 1872, under the influence of Marx and Engels,

the International Working Men’s Association adopted Article 7a which

called for the working class to achieve the “conquest of political

power” by “constituting itself into a political party, distinct from,

and opposed to all old parties formed by the propertied

classes.”[7]

And on the occasion of Marx’s death in 1883 Engels reiterated, as his

and Marx’s consistent position, that the proletariat must seize — as

“the only organisation the victorious working class finds ready-made for

use” — the state, the state being “the only organism by which [it] can…

carry out that economic revolution of society….”[8]

The 1891 Erfurt Programme of the SDP, in whose drafting Kautsky played

the primary role, reiterated the themes of small businesses being

destroyed and capital concentrated into “colossal large enterprises,”

leaving as the only response “the transformation of the capitalist

private ownership of the means of production – land and soil, pits and

mines, raw materials, tools, machines, means of transportation — into

social property and the transformation of the production of goods into

socialist production carried on by and for society.” This was to be

accomplished through struggle by the working class; and it fell to the

Social Democratic Party “to shape the struggle of the working class into

a conscious and unified one.”[9]

In his 1895 Introduction to *The Class Struggles in France*, Engels

framed the destruction of capitalism and creation of socialism as the

work of a mass proletarian “army,” based on “big industry” and giant

industrial centers.

History has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong. It has made

it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that

time [ie. 1848] was not, by a long way, ripe for the removal of

capitalist production; it has proved this by the economic revolution

which, since 1848, has seized the whole of the Continent, has really

caused big industry for the first time to take root in France, Austria,

Hungary, Poland and, recently, in Russia, while it has made Germany

positively an industrial country of the first rank…. [T]oday a great

international army of Socialists, marching irresistibly on and growing

daily in number, organization, discipline, insight and assurance of

victory. If even this mighty army of the proletariat has still not

reached its goal, if, a long way from winning victory with one mighty

stroke, it has slowly to press forward from position to position in a

hard, tenacious struggle, this only proves, once and for all, how

impossible it was in 1848 to win social reconstruction by a simple

surprise attack.[10]

Meanwhile the working class in Germany developed, as a model for the

working class throughout the industrialized world, the combination of

universal suffrage and a mass socialist party.

And if universal suffrage had offered no other advantage than that it

allowed us to count our numbers every three years; that by the regularly

established, unexpectedly rapid rise in the number of votes it increased

in equal measure the workers’ certainty of victory and the dismay of

their opponents, and so became our best means of propaganda; that it

accurately informed us concerning our own strength and that of all

hostile parties, and thereby provided us with a measure of proportion

for our actions second to none, safeguarding us from untimely timidity

as much as from untimely foolhardiness — if this had been the only

advantage we gained from the suffrage, then it would still have been

more than enough. But it has done much more than this. In election

agitation it provided us with a means, second to none, of getting in

touch with the mass of the people, where they still stand aloof from us;

of forcing all parties to defend their views and actions against our

attacks before all the people; and, further, it opened to our

representatives in the Reichstag a platform from which they could speak

to their opponents in Parliament and to the masses without, with quite

other authority and freedom than in the press or at meetings….

With this successful utilization of universal suffrage, an entirely new

mode of proletarian struggle came into force, and this quickly developed

further. It was found that the state institutions, in which the rule of

the bourgeoisie is organized, offer still further opportunities for the

working class to fight these very state institutions. They took part in

elections to individual diets, to municipal councils and to industrial

courts; they contested every post against the bourgeoisie in the

occupation of which a sufficient part of the proletariat had its say.

And so it happened that the bourgeoisie and the government came to be

much more afraid of the legal than of the illegal action of the workers’

party, of the results of elections than of those of

rebellion.[11]

Old fashioned revolutionary insurrections characterized by street

fighting and barricades were only successful a minority of the time even

in 1848, Engels observed. Developments in military technology since had

rendered them completely obsolete. Revolution by spontaneous

insurrection and street fighting was no longer feasible, and if it

played a part at all it would be in the later stages of a revolution

whose victory had already been largely secured through political

organization.

If the conditions have changed in the case of war between nations, this

is no less true in the case of the class struggle. The time of surprise

attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at

the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where it is a question of a

complete transformation of the social organization, the masses

themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what

is at stake, what they are going in for…. The history of the last

fifty years has taught us that. But in order that the masses may

understand what is to be done, long, persistent work is required, and it

is just this work which we are now pursuing, and with a success which

drives the enemy to despair.

In the Latin countries, also, it is being more and more recognized that

the old tactics must be revised. Everywhere *[the unprepared onslaught

has gone into the background, everywhere]* the German example of

utilizing the suffrage, of winning all posts accessible to us, has been

imitated…. Slow propaganda work and parliamentary activity are being

recognized here, too, as the most immediate tasks of the Party.

The German Social-Democracy, with its two and a half million voters, was

“the decisive ‘*shock force*’ of the international proletarian army.”

Its central task was to

conquer the greater part of the middle section of society, petty

bourgeois and small peasants, and grow into the decisive power in the

land, before which all other powers will have to bow, whether they like

it or not. To keep this growth going without interruption until of

itself it gets beyond the control of the ruling governmental

system….[12]

The working class would win by using legal methods, and avoiding being

drawn into premature street fighting. The only way the ruling class

would thwart the revolutionary project would be by itself resorting to

illegality and repression; and the proper strategy of the working class

was to so permeate the majority of society, mass political institutions

and the army that — as with the Christian permeation of Roman society —

by the time the ruling class resorted to full-scale repression, it would

be too late.[13]

All this is not to say that Marx had no use for interstitial development

as such. For instance in his 1864 Inaugural Address to the International

Working Men’s Association, he praised the cooperative movement and

particularly the self-organized cooperative factories. Such factories

showed, “by deed,” that

production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern

science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters

employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labor need

not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion

against, the laboring man himself; and that, like slave labor, like serf

labor, hired labor is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to

disappear before associated labor plying its toil with a willing hand, a

ready mind, and a joyous heart.[14]

Worker cooperatives were “transitional forms from the capitalist mode of

production to the associated one….” The growth of joint-stock

companies and the reduction of capitalists to rentiers, furthered by the

national credit system, illustrated the superfluity of industrial

capital to the actual management of industry. And the same national

credit system “equally offers the means for the gradual extension of

cooperative enterprises on a more or less national

scale.”[15]

Nevertheless Marx saw cooperatives mainly as a demonstration effect of

what was possible, and not as a primary approach to constructing

socialism within the interstices of the capitalist economy. Since in the

Inaugural Address* he explicitly repudiated the cooptation of the

cooperative movement by pseudo-”socialist” efforts under the capitalist

state like those of LaSalle and Bismarck, the reference above to the

credit system is presumably a reference to the construction of socialism

by means of a credit system socialized by the socialist state, as per

the *Manifesto*. As an actual means of building socialism, Marx made it

clear, the cooperative movement could only be effective to the extent

that it was subordinated to the political effort to gain control of the

state. Cooperatives,

however, [extraneous comma sic] excellent in principle and however

useful in practice, co-operative labor, if kept within the narrow circle

of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest

the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses,

nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their

miseries.[16]

LaSalle, the founder of the first socialist party in Germany — which was

later incorporated into the SPD and had some influence on its first

Gotha Program — envisioned working through Bismarck’s state to socialize

the economy. His party, the General German Workers’ Association, was

amalgamated into the Social Democratic Party and constituted a LaSallean

wing alongside the Marxist wing of Liebknecht and Bebel, and his ideas

had some influence on the wording of the Gotha Program adopted at its

first congress in 1875. Although he took a more or less Hegelian view of

the state as a force representing society as a whole, he shared with

Marxists the idea that control of the state was essential to

implementing a socialist program.

This was not true only of the Marxists and LaSallians. Many anarchists

and decentralists also put considerable emphasis on the role of

organizational mass, control of the state, or insurrection in the

transition process.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (most notably in *General Idea of the Revolution

in the XIX Century*) articulated an evolutionary model of transition

based on “dissolution of the state into the social body” (or “into the

economy”). However, even though Proudhon opposed violent revolution as

such, his vision nevertheless involved acting through the state itself

to oversee the transition process of devolving state functions into

society. In April 1848 he made an unsuccessful run for the Constituent

Assembly, and approached Louis Blanc, who played a leading role in

creating a parallel state composed of proletarian social institutions

like the state workshops, “to seek Blanc’s sponsorship of his plan to

transform the Bank of France into a Bank of Exchange.” He ran again in

June, this time successfully, on an electoral program of industrial

democracy in which the workers of different industries were to be

organized into corporate bodies and represented by occupational category

in the national assembly. In addition he resurrected his proposal for a

Bank of Exchange, along with a reduction of rents and a redistribution

of all property except work tools and personal

possessions.[17]

Later anarchists like Bakunin and Kropotkin abandoned the idea of

creating a socialist society through the state, but they kept the focus

on abrupt overthrow of the system.

II. The Triumph of Mass in the Old Left

*Leninism.** The Old Left’s emphasis on organizational mass and on

seizure of the means of production was based in part on the large scale

and capital intensiveness of capitalist industry. Because production

technology was extremely expensive, a revolutionary strategy centered on

seizure of existing means of production was necessary; and this in turn

required a workers’ movement with institutions whose mass corresponded

to that of the institutions they would be seizing.

The first large wave of worker cooperatives was created by the labor

movement as counter-institutions in the early 19th century, by skilled

artisans who owned their tools of production and could set up shop

anywhere with little to no capital outlay. This was true both of the

Owenist unions in the UK, as recounted by E.P. Thompson, and of the

National Trades Union in the U.S. according to John Curl.[18]

On both sides of the Atlantic, striking artisan workers frequently

formed workers’ cooperatives, along with bazaars or alternative currency

systems for trading their wares with one another.

But by the 1840s the increasing dominance of factory production and the

cost of the machinery required had largely closed off this possibility.

Most subsequent attempts at worker-organized manufacturing failed

because of the insurmountable capital outlays required — including the

large-scale attempt at creating worker cooperatives by the Knights of

Labor in the 1880s.[19]

The Old Left’s affinity for large-scale organization and centralized

control was also partly cultural and aesthetic: it was influenced by the

ideological hegemony of the dominant organizational mode of

mass-production capitalism.

This was true of the Marxists, in fact, going back to their early days.

Marxism lionized large-scale industry as a progressive force, and

equated scale with productivity. And the proletariat — the industrial

army which capitalism had brought together, and the revolutionary

subject which would usher in communism — was a mirror-image of

capitalist industry. Only a mass revolutionary body, a socialist party

composed of the working class and centrally organized like an army under

a general staff, possessed the size and organization to take on the size

and organization of capitalist industry.

Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal

master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of

labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As

privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a

perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants….

But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases

in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength

grows, and it feels that strength more…. Thereupon, the workers begin

to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois; they club

together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent

associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional

revolts.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real

fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the

ever expanding union of the workers….

This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently

into a political party, is continually being upset again by the

competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again,

stronger, firmer, mightier….

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today,

the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes

decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the

proletariat is its special and essential product.[20]

The emphasis on mass, hierarchy and central coordination to which the

traditional establishment Left is so attached is very much an industrial

age paradigm. There has been a tendency in much of the Left — especially

the Old Left (Marxist-Leninist, syndicalist and social democratic) — to

equate size, capital accumulation and overhead with productivity, to

view the gigantism fostered by capitalism as “progressive,” and to

equate “Revolution” to putting capitalism’s hierarchical institutions

under new management. The mission of revolutionary conquest, or

reformist capture (a la LaSalle, Bernstein or Atlee), of the

institutions of the old society presupposed countervailing institutions

of equal mass. The Old Left model of revolution, and its survivals in

the verticalist/establishment Left to the present day, are direct

analogues of the mass production industrial model of Schumpeter,

Galbraith and Chandler.

There is a great deal of parallelism between the Old Left viewpoint on

this, on the one hand, and the liberal capitalist fixation on “economies

of scale” (both the Chandlerian celebration of “capital-intensive,

management-intensive, high-speed throughput” industry, and the Austrian

equation of “roundaboutness” and accumulation with increased

productivity) on the other.

Lenin in 1917 mentioned that, along with their differences on the state,

Marxists and anarchists also disagreed on their views of industry: “the

[revolutionary Marxists] stand for centralized, large-scale communist

production, while the [anarchists] stand for disconnected small

production.”[21] In his denunciation of “left-wing

communism,” he hit all the main points:

Unfortunately, small-scale production is still

widespread in the world, and small-scale production engenders capitalism

and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a

mass scale….

[T]he experience of the victorious dictatorship of the proletariat in

Russia has clearly shown even to those who are incapable of thinking or

have had no occasion to give thought to the matter that absolute

centralisation and rigorous discipline of the proletariat are an

essential condition of victory over the bourgeoisie.[22]

To be sure Marxism, as such, left considerable room for libertarian and

decentralist interpretations — and indeed there have been significant

libertarian, or “left-wing communist,” currents within Marxism

throughout the 20th century and to the present day.

And there are passages in Marx, Engels and Lenin (most notably Marx’s

The Civil War in France*,[23]** **Engels’s commentary

on it and Lenin’s *State and Revolution*) which are particularly

amenable to such an interpretation. In those works they frequently

implied that the proletarian state or “dictatorship of the proletariat”

would be created after totally smashing the capitalist state apparatus,

and would replace it with a much more horizontally organized and

democratic apparatus directly administered by the working class itself.

Marx wrote, in *The Civil War in France*, that “the working class cannot

simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its

own purposes.”[24] And in an 1871 letter to Ludwig Kugelmann

he cited the struggle of the Paris Communards “[not] to transfer the

bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to *smash*

it,” as the model for all future people’s revolutions in

Europe.[25] In his postscript to *Civil War in France*,

Engels observed that the French working class confronted the immediate

necessity of “do[ing] away with all the old repressive machinery

previously used against it itself” �� a necessity it addressed through

the “shattering of the former state power and its replacement by a new

and really democratic state.”[26]

The proletarian dictatorship would be the height of real democracy on

the pattern of the Commune, with all posts occupied by elected officials

instantly removable by recall and paid the wage of average workers, the

standing army replaced by the workers in arms, etc. The Communards

themselves according to Marx and Engels — quoted with approval by Lenin

— saw the Commune as a model to be replicated in every town and village

in France, with the national government as a whole made up of autonomous

communes. And once class divisions were finally suppressed and the need

for armed force to maintain working class rule disappeared, this

workers’ state would in turn wither away as the habits of daily social

life replaced coercive authority.

In an earlier draft of *The Civil War in France*,** **Marx

described the Commune’s attack on state power in language that echoed

Saint-Simon and Proudhon: “the reabsorption of the State power by

society….”[27] And he expressed openness, in Peter Hudis’s

words, to “an association of freely associated cooperatives as the most

effective form for making a transition to a new society.”[28]

This is actually a paraphrase of Marx’s comment:

if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production

upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an

end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the

fatality of capitalist production — what else, gentlemen, would it be

but communism, “possible” communism?[29]

And based on a critique of Bakunin, he evidently envisioned the

proletarian dictatorship — echoing his commentary in Civil War in

France on the Paris communards envisioning a French republic

composed of horizontally linked local communes — as being something very

decentralized and bottom-up. In reply to Bakunin’s question as to

whether all forty million French would be members of the workers’ state,

Marx said “Certainly! Since the whole thing begins with the

self-government of the commune” (from the context “commune” clearly

referring to local village and town communes on the model of the Russian

Mir or the Paris Commune).[30]

As Hudis characterized it, Marx’s fundamental orientation was in direct

opposition to all forms of institutional authority that treated workers

as a means to an end rather than itself functioning as a means through

which they expressed their agency:

Here is the most important determinant in Marx’s concept of the new

society: social relations must cease to operate independently of the

self-activity of the associated individuals. Marx will oppose any power

— be it the state, a social plan, or the market itself — that takes on a

life of its own and utilises human powers as a mere means to its

fruition and development. Human power, he insists, **must **become

a self-sufficient end — it must cease to serve as a means to some other

end.[31]

This theme of powers that take on a life of their own — also described

in various places as alienation or the inversion of subject and

predicate — is a continuous theme in his writing from his Young Hegelian

days to the end of his life.

At their best, as described by Gramsci scholar Anne Showstack Sassoon,

all these different variants centered on “the theme of the withering

away of politics as a separate sphere uncontrolled by society, and its

substitution by a new type of democracy….”[32]

And Marx’s own vision of planned production as carried out by the

associated workers by no means carried the bureaucratic and centralizing

necessity later read into it by Engels or Lenin; it was entirely

consistent with relatively decentralized models of worker-managed

production or even non-capitalist markets of a sort, so long as the law

of value and the separation of labor from the means of production it

presupposed were eliminated. This is a recurring theme in Peter Hudis’s

book cited above.

On the other hand Engels, in a letter written in 1883, suggested that

the preexisting state apparatus was to be seized and used as an

instrument of revolutionary power rather than smashed and replaced:

But after the victory of the Proletariat, the only organisation the

victorious working class finds ready-made for use, is that of the State.

It may require adaptation to the new functions. But to destroy that at

such a moment, would be to destroy the only organism by means of which

the victorious working class can exert its newly conquered power, keep

down its capitalist enemies and carry out that economical revolution of

society without which the whole victory must end in a defeat and in a

massacre of the working class like that after the Paris

Commune.[33]

And this sounds a lot closer to what the Bolsheviks actually *did* in

power.

Matthew Crossin stresses the ambiguities in Marx and Engels’s conception

of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and its amenability to being

stretched in either statist or quasi-anarchistic directions. His reading

of their works, over the course of their intellectual careers,

demonstrates a fluid, threefold use of the word ‘state’:

a. As a mere synonym for ‘society’; a ‘state’ of affairs. (e.g. a

capitalist state or society as opposed to a communist state or society).

b. Referring to the organisation of class rule. In a socialist context

this amounts to the act of revolution itself; an armed populace actively

carrying out a transformation of social relations by expropriating the

means of production, supposedly establishing the proletariat as ‘the new

ruling class’.

c. To indicate the specific governmental apparatus situated above

society which maintains class relations through its various instruments

of coercion: the legislature, executive, judiciary, army, police,

prisons, channels of information, schools, etc.

He points out that Marx himself (“Conspectus of Bakunin’s Book Statism

and Anarchy,” 1874–75), in response to Bukharin’s demand as to whether

the entire proletariat, collectively, could act as a proletarian state,

stressed the anarchist and decentralist aspects of it.

Marx dismissed Bakunin’s anarchist critique with considerable contempt,

declaring it to be filled with “Schoolboy nonsense!” In expanding upon

his conception of ‘the proletariat as the ruling class’ he first claims

that this refers solely to the collective ‘use of force’ (the

‘employment of coercive, meaning governmental, measures’) against

“enemies and the old organisation of society,” which would “not vanish

as a result of [the proletariat] coming to power.” Simply put, the

‘proletarian state’ is manifested in any instance where the proletariat

“has gained sufficient strength and is sufficiently well organised to

employ general means of compulsion” in the suppression of their former

masters. It is this, rather than any specific form of social

organisation, which would naturally ‘wither away’ following the

disappearance of class struggle (i.e., the victory of that revolution).

Furthermore, in responding to Bakunin’s question about ‘all 40 million

Germans being members of the government’, Marx replies that this is

“Certainly” the case, “for the thing begins with the self-government of

the commune….”

Crossin echoes Sassoon, quoted above, in seeing the boundary between

anarchism and at least one current of Marx’s thought as quite

indistinct.

This notion of the State – though unhelpfully referred to as such –

appears to be entirely in line with the anarchist conception of

revolution, though we are once again faced with complications when Marx

introduces references to elected managers and trade union executive

committees. Nevertheless, if we are to take Marx at his word, this

raises the question as to what the Marxist critique of anarchism

actually is. If the commune is a self-managed assembly, in which no one

is governed by anyone else and ‘the State’ merely refers to the

coordinated (or ‘centralised’) efforts of the communes to expropriate

the means of production and defend this transformation of social

relations, we are forced to conclude that Marx and Bakunin were

simultaneously both anarchists and statists. The accuracy of either

description simply depends on which definition of ‘the State’ is

applied….

…Since Proudhon, the first to call himself an anarchist, the

movement’s major theorists and political organisations were clear in

accepting only the third of Marx and Engels’ definitions. Lacking in a

sufficiently materialist analysis of the state-form, Marx interprets

Bakunin’s rejection of all States as the rejection of an ‘abstraction’.

However, for anarchists, the State has never been understood in such

terms. Instead, the movement has merely taken the common, socialist

understanding of the State’s origin and historical function seriously

and, as a result, reasoned that it cannot be the vehicle through which

capitalist social relations are overthrown.

… In this essay I have argued that the early Marx’s conception of

revolution was fundamentally statist. However, this was later

complicated by more radical statements, many of which appear to have a

more libertarian character, either reframing the State as an abstract

concept or advocating for the construction of a new kind of ‘State’.

Though the description of this ‘transitional’ form was often vague and

contradictory, the democratic statism of Marx and Engels remained

fundamentally different to the distortions most ‘Marxists’ across the

world would come to advocate. The statism of even this later period has

also been transcended entirely by various anti-authoritarian currents

within the Marxist tradition, who drew upon Marx’s more ‘anarchistic’

writings.[34]

Nevertheless, the dominant trend — especially in the version of official

Marxism formulated by Engels, Kautsky et al, mostly after Marx’s death —

was increasingly in favor of the centralizing, statist tendencies and at

the expense of the libertarian, decentralist ones. And it was toward

emphasizing the continuities between the managerial and administrative

styles of monopoly capitalism and those of the proletarian state in the

early stages of socialism.

An early example of this tendency was Engels’ “On Authority” in 1872,

which tied together themes celebrating large-scale industry, managerial

authority and the military discipline of a revolutionary party.

On examining the economic, industrial and agricultural conditions which

form the basis of present-day bourgeois society, we find that they tend

more and more to replace isolated action by combined action of

individuals. Modern industry, with its big factories and mills, where

hundreds of workers supervise complicated machines driven by steam, has

superseded the small workshops of the separate producers; the carriages

and wagons of the highways have become substituted by railway trains,

just as the small schooners and sailing feluccas have been by

steam-boats. Even agriculture falls increasingly under the dominion of

the machine and of steam, which slowly but relentlessly put in the place

of the small proprietors big capitalists, who with the aid of hired

workers cultivate vast stretches of land.

Everywhere combined action, the complication of processes dependent upon

each other, displaces independent action by individuals. But whoever

mentions combined action speaks of organisation; now, is it possible to

have organisation without authority?

Supposing a social revolution dethroned the capitalists, who now

exercise their authority over the production and circulation of wealth.

Supposing, to adopt entirely the point of view of the

anti-authoritarians, that the land and the instruments of labour had

become the collective property of the workers who use them. Will

authority have disappeared, or will it only have changed its form? Let

us see….

…Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to

wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order

to return to the spinning wheel….

We have thus seen that, on the one hand, a certain authority, no matter

how delegated, and, on the other hand, a certain subordination, are

things which, independently of all social organisation, are imposed upon

us together with the material conditions under which we produce and make

products circulate.

We have seen, besides, that the material conditions of production and

circulation inevitably develop with large-scale industry and large-scale

agriculture, and increasingly tend to enlarge the scope of this

authority….

…[The anti-authoritarians] demand that the first act of the social

revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen

ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian

thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes

its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon —

authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious

party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule

by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the

reactionists.[35]

The practical difficulties in distinguishing a strategy of smashing and

replacing the capitalist state, from one of simply taking it over under

new management, was inadvertently highlighted by Engels’ emphasis in

Anti-Duhring of the institutional continuities between monopoly

capitalism and socialism and the extent to which the workers’ state

would take over the organizational machinery of capitalism.

This rebellion of the productive forces, as they grow more and more

powerful, against their quality as capital, this stronger and stronger

command that their social character shall be recognised, forces the

capitalist class itself to treat them more and more as social productive

forces, so far as this is possible under capitalist conditions. The

period of industrial high pressure… tends to bring about that form of

the socialisation of great masses of means of production which we meet

with in the different kinds of joint-stock companies. Many of these

means of production and of communication are, from the outset, so

colossal that, like the railways, they exclude all other forms of

capitalistic exploitation. At a further stage of evolution this form

also becomes insufficient: the official representative of capitalist

society — the state — will ultimately have to undertake the direction of

production. This necessity for conversion into state property is felt

first in the great institutions for intercourse and communication — the

post office, the telegraphs, the railways.

If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing

any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great

establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock

companies and state property shows how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are

for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist are now

performed by salaried employees….

But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state

ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the

productive forces…. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a

head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not

the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical

conditions that form the elements of that solution.

This solution can only consist in the practical recognition of the

social nature of the modern forces of production… And this can only

come about by society openly and directly taking possession of the

productive forces which have outgrown all control except that of society

as a whole….[36]

These tendencies became even more pronounced in practice, once Lenin and

the Bolsheviks faced the task of actually administering a socialist

state.

Lenin insisted in *State and Revolution*, echoing Marx and Engels on the

Paris Commune, that the proletarian revolution would smash the bourgeois

state completely and replace it with a new workers’ state based on the

soviets that was fundamentally different in character.

But as we already noted, it is hard to distinguish in practice between

annihilating the capitalist state and calling an entirely new one into

existence from the void, and simply taking over the capitalist state and

reorganizing it under new management.

Lenin simultaneously claimed that the proletarian state would eliminate

the bureaucracy, while also citing the German Postal Service as an

example of the kind of administrative apparatus that the workers’ state

would create.

A witty German Social-Democrat of the seventies of the last century

called the postal service an example of the socialist economic system.

This is very true. At present the postal service is a business organized

on the lines of state-capitalist monopoly. Imperialism is gradually

transforming all trusts into organizations of a similar type… Once we

have overthrown the capitalists, crushed the resistance of these

exploiters with the iron hand of the armed workers, and smashed the

bureaucratic machinery of the modern state, we shall have a

splendidly-equipped mechanism, freed from the “parasite,” a mechanism

which can very well be set going by the united workers themselves, who

will hire technicians, foremen and accountants, and pay them all, as

indeed all “state” officials in general, workmen’s wages….

To organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service so that

the technicians, foremen and accountants, as well as all officials,

shall receive salaries no higher than “a workman’s wage,” all under the

control and leadership of the armed proletariat — that is our immediate

aim.[37]

To be fair he envisioned this apparatus as a sort

of neutral platform operated by workers that would facilitate his vision

of direct administration of the state apparatus by ordinary workers,

fully consistent with a long tradition of socialist visions of replacing

legislation over people with the “administration of things” from

Saint-Simon right up to the present-day Partner State of Cosma Orsi and

Michel Bauwens.

But in practice, a bureaucratic state on the model Lenin admired so much

required an authoritarian internal culture of the kind described by Max

Weber and Frederick Taylor in order to function. And in practice it is

virtually impossible to separate Lenin’s admiration for the German Post

Office’s bureaucratic model with his admiration for the institutional

values of Weber and Taylor, which were directly at odds with worker

administration of the state and of industry. Indeed, when

Weberian/Taylorist organizational ideas came into conflict with the

administration of the state by workers, Lenin chose the former even at

the expense of forcibly suppressing the latter.

Lenin, when talking of “smashing the bureaucracy,” seemed to define the

latter entirely in terms of entrenched status and high salaries, while

expressing admiration for Weberian values like standardized work rules

that most people who are *not* Lenin consider the defining features of

bureaucracy. And it was the features of managerialist, late-stage

monopoly capitalism most people regard as bureaucratic that Lenin framed

as making bureaucracy no longer necessary.

Capitalist culture has created large-scale production, factories,

railways, the postal service, telephones, etc., and on this basis the

great majority of the functions of the old “state power” have become so

simplified and can be reduced to such exceedingly simple operations of

registration, filing, and checking that they can be easily performed by

every literate person, can quite easily be performed for ordinary

“workmen’s wages,” and that these functions can (and must) be stripped

of every shadow of privilege, of every semblance of “official

grandeur.”[38]

Lenin in fact saw “bureaucracy” not as a mode of operation, but as a

stratum defined by privilege; and he saw the elimination of bureaucracy

as something brought about not by a change in the mode of operation, but

a change in the identities and remuneration of those engaged in it. The

Soviet state and industry might be managed according to all the rules

identified by Weberian bureaucracy, but so long as they were recallable

and paid workers’ wages, and any worker could rotate into superintending

positions, it was not a “bureaucracy.”

Despite his claims regarding the elimination of “bureaucracy,” Lenin —

like Engels in **Anti-Duhring **— saw the administration of the

economy under socialism as a direct outgrowth and continuation of the

administrative forms of centralized monopoly capitalism.

The development of capitalism… creates the preconditions that enable

really “all” to take part in the administration of the state. Some of

these preconditions are: universal literacy, which has already been

achieved in a number of the most advanced capitalist countries, then the

“training and disciplining” of millions of workers by the huge, complex,

socialized apparatus of the postal service, railways, big factories,

large-scale commerce, banking, etc., etc.

Given these economic preconditions, it is quite possible, after the

overthrow of the capitalists and the bureaucrats, to proceed

immediately, overnight, to replace them in the control over production

and distribution, in the work of keeping account of labor and products,

by the armed workers, by the whole of the armed population. (The

question of control and accounting should not be confused with the

question of the scientifically trained staff of engineers, agronomists,

and so on. These gentlemen are working today in obedience to the wishes

of the capitalists and will work even better tomorrow in obedience to

the wishes of the armed workers.)

Accounting and control — that is *mainly* what is needed for the “smooth

working,” for the proper functioning, of the *first phase* of communist

society. *All* citizens are transformed into hired employees of the

state, which consists of the armed workers. *All* citizens becomes

employees and workers of a *single* countrywide state “syndicate.” All

that is required is that they should work equally, do their proper share

of work, and get equal pay; the accounting and control necessary for

this have been *simplified* by capitalism to the utmost and reduced to

the extraordinarily simple operations — which any literate person can

perform — of supervising and recording, knowledge of the four rules of

arithmetic, and issuing appropriate receipts…

The whole of society will have become a single office and a single

factory….[39]

As Simon Mohun noted, with the rapid growth in industrial output in the

late 19th and early 20th century, there was a tendency among Marxists to

regard advanced capitalist technology as the necessary form of

organization of the labour process no matter what the social relations

of production were. That is to say, the technology came to be seen as

class-neutral and its authoritarian and hierarchical nature as a

function of the prevailing relations of production.[40]

In “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,” Lenin set the primary

economic task as introducing the same “strict accounting and control” in

expropriated industry which he discussed in *State and Revolution*, and

increasing the productivity of labor. And he further stressed the

continuities between such methods — which he saw as *eliminating* the

need for bureaucracy rather than *characterizing* bureaucratic style —

and Taylor’s principles of scientific management. In particular, he said

of Taylorism that the Soviet Republic

must at all costs adopt all that is valuable in the achievements of

science and technology in this field. The possibility of building

socialism depends exactly upon our success in combining the Soviet

organization of administration with the up-to-date achievements of

capitalism….

…[I]t must be said that large-scale machine industry — which is

precisely the material source, the productive source, the foundation of

socialism — calls for absolute and strict unity of will, which directs

the joint labours of hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of

people. The technical, economic and historical necessity of this is

obvious, and all those who have thought about socialism have always

regarded it as one of the conditions of socialism. But how can strict

unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the

will of one.

…We must consolidate what we ourselves have won, what we ourselves

have decreed, made law, discussed, planned — consolidate all this in

stable forms of *everyday labour discipline*. This is the most

difficult, but the most gratifying task, because only its fulfilment

will give us a socialist system. We must learn to combine the “public

meeting” democracy of the working people — turbulent, surging,

overflowing its banks like a spring flood—with *iron* discipline while

at work, with *unquestioning obedience* to the will of a single person,

the Soviet leader, while at work.[41]

This mindset led the regime to exclude workers’ factory committees from

all involvement in management decisions, and to implement strict

“one-man management.”

Anyone knowledgeable in industrial history will know that the primary

purpose of standardized procedures and scientific management was to

break tasks down into such simple components that individual compliance

could be easily monitored, and management could exert control over

production workers. Lenin’s language in describing the potential for his

favored techniques of accounting and control is quite evocative to

anyone familiar with Foucault or James C. Scott.

When the *majority* of the people begin independently and everywhere to

keep such accounts and exercise such control over the capitalists (now

converted into employees) and over the intellectual gentry who preserve

their capitalist habits, this control will really become universal,

general, and popular; and there will be no getting away from it, there

will be “nowhere to go.”[42]

If Lenin stressed the potential for this system of control to render

former members of the bourgeoisie and other recalcitrants more legible

from above, it was also eminently suited to maintaining such legibility

and control over the proletarian work force — the management itself

being proletarian in its goals and sympathies by definition, *of

course*.

And as Neil Harding observed, the change from writing about a

theoretical proletarian dictatorship from outside during the Kerensky

regime, to heading a government after the Revolution, had a considerable

effect on Lenin’s perspective.

From the spring of 1918 onwards Lenin’s writings altered considerably in

tone. As chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars he was

confronted by a mounting series of crises: urban famine, collapse of

transport and of the army, foreign interventions and civil war. His

preoccupations now were to ensure the most efficient mobilization of the

regime’s scarce resources, to instill firm discipline and accountability

and to insist upon the authority of the centre.[43]

All this is in keeping with our earlier discussion of the Old Left as an

ideology suited to the mass-production age; it accepted mass production

as a neutral and inevitable outcome of the advanced development of

productive forces, while ignoring the possibility either that multiple

alternative paths of technological advancement might have existed or

that capitalism selected among these alternative paths on some basis

other than neutral technical efficiency.

And the same mindset carried over into the inexorable stripping of the

soviets of real authority and their transformation into transmission

belts for policies made within the Party apparatus. Lenin explicitly

denounced and mocked the “left-wing communists” who objected to the

suppression of both the workers’ committees and the soviets.

As any number of libertarian Marxist and other libertarian socialist

critics have pointed out, the idea of founding “socialism” on the wage

system and on the replication of capitalist relations of authority is

fundamentally flawed. For example, Carl Boggs:

The Leninist monopoly of power in Russia had two main consequences: it

transformed the masses “represented” by the party into manipulated

objects, and it generated a preoccupation with bureaucratic methods and

techniques. Lenin’s whole approach was that of the technician who

stresses the organizational means of political struggle while

downplaying the ends themselves. This suppression of values permits the

utilization of capitalist methods to advance “socialist construction”:

hierarchical structures, Taylorism, the authoritarian-submissive

personality, alienated labor. All stirrings from below were thus

dismissed as “Utopian,” “ultra-leftist,” or “anarchistic.”…

Lenin equated workers’ power with the fact of Bolshevik rule, mocking

the “petty bourgeois illusions” of leftists who clamored for democratic

participation. By 1921, the regime had already destroyed or converted

into “transmission belts” those popular and autonomous institutions —

the Soviets, trade unions, factory committees — that played a vital role

in the revolution….

The idea of “collective ownership” remains a myth so long as the old

forms of institutional control are not destroyed; the supersession of

private management by state or “public” management poses only a

superficial, abstract solution to the contradictions of capitalism….

Only when the workers themselves establish new participatory forms can

alienated labor and subordination be eliminated. This transformation

includes but runs much deeper than the problem of formal ownership — it

penetrates to the level of factory hierarchy and authoritarianism,

fragmentation of job skills, commodity production, and separation of

mental and physical functions that grow out of the capitalist division

of labor. These features, which are often thought to be necessary for

greater efficiency and productivity, can better be understood as a means

of ensuring control of labor.

Anarchism, Libertarian Communism, Syndicalism, Etc.

These technological assumptions regarding large-scale industry — and its

corollary, the centrality of large-scale organization to post-capitalist

transition — were carried over and intensified not only in Leninism, but

in the other major currents of the Old Left. This was true of the major

schools of revolutionary anarchism, and of the more libertarian strands

of socialism.

Revolutionary anarchist approaches, by definition, entail the existence

of mass organization and an emphasis on the wholesale capture of the

means of production in a single insurrectionary assault. Pyotr

Kropotkin’s *The Conquest of Bread*, for example, was devoted from

beginning to end to outlining a scenario of the working class’s seizure

of industry, retail shops, housing, food production, etc., and the

coordination of production and distribution by the working class on a

communistic basis. And he saw such a rupture as an all-or-nothing thing,

impossible to carry out piecemeal.

There are, in fact, in a modern State established relations which it is

practically impossible to modify if one attacks them only in detail.

…[T]he machinery is so complex and interdependent that no one part can

be modified without disturbing the whole….

All is interdependent in a civilized society; it

is impossible to reform any one thing without altering the whole.

Therefore, on the day we strike at private property, under any one of

its forms, territorial or industrial, we shall be obliged to attack them

all.[44]

Daniel De Leon, a libertarian socialist and the father of the main

Marxist tendency native to the United States, argued in 1912 that size —

in the sense of capital-intensiveness — was an indispensable

prerequisite for efficiency. And like Marx, he saw the increasing size

associated with efficiency leading, inexorably, to progressively higher

levels of centralized organization by the working class — a process

which meant capitalism’s doom.

Progress demands large production of wealth. The volume of wealth is the

measure of the possibilities for progress. The measure of efficiency is

the volume of wealth produced with least waste, and with the least

amount of toil possible. Is such efficiency possible without size? It is

not….

There is no help to be looked for by capitalism from a perspective

“breakdown” of efficiency due to size. Size is incited by efficiency.

Efficiency flows from size. And size will wax and wax to the point when

capitalism will “break down,” not because of the stoppage of efficiency,

but because the human agency of efficiency, the wage-slave class, in

whose hands, from captainships down to “high privateships,” the

administration of the plants will be found more and more completely

lodged, will discontinue administering for a parasite class, and will

administer for themselves.[45]

The syndicalist approach, by its very nature, entails a transitional

strategy based on mass organization within industry and coordinated mass

activity like the general strike. This was true of De Leonism, to the

extent that De Leon’s overall approach combined syndicalist federated

industrial unionism in the workplace with electoral politics by a

socialist party, although in his strategy the electoral approach was

primary. The revolutionary transition was to be achieved primarily in

the political realm, but the economy was to be organized by industrial

unions in order to take possession of industry at the moment of

political victory. Industrial unionism also served as a defensive backup

in case the employing class responded to the working class’s political

seizure of power with a general capital strike and lockout. The working

class, instead, would lock out the capitalists and take over

production.[46]

But a much more significant figure was Rosa Luxemburg, a leader of the

Spartakus movement and critic of the growing authoritarianism of the

Bolshevik regime, who was martyred during the suppression of the German

Council Republic. She saw “the progressive increase of the minimum

amount of capital necessary for the functioning of the enterprises in

the old branches of production” as a natural tendency in the development

of the productive capacities of capitalism.[47] Like Marx,

she saw the growing scale of industry and its increasingly centralized

coordination as manifestations of the progressive socialization of

production within capitalism.

The vulgar Marxist nature of her views on the development of industrial

technology under capitalism becomes especially clear in her discussion

of cooperatives under capitalism.[48]

Co-operatives — especially co-operatives in the field of production

constitute a hybrid form in the midst of capitalism. They can be

described as small units of socialised production within capitalist

exchange.

But in capitalist economy exchanges dominate production. As a result of

competition, the complete domination of the process of production by the

interests of capital — that is, pitiless exploitation — becomes a

condition for the survival of each enterprise…. The workers forming a

co-operative in the field of production are thus faced with the

contradictory necessity of governing themselves with the utmost

absolutism. They are obliged to take toward themselves the role of

capitalist entrepreneur — a contradiction that accounts for the usual

failure of production co-operatives which either become pure capitalist

enterprises or, if the workers’ interests continue to predominate, end

by dissolving….

Producers’ co-operatives can survive within capitalist economy only if

they manage to suppress, by means of some detour, the capitalist

controlled contradictions between the mode of production and the mode of

exchange. And they can accomplish this only by removing themselves

artificially from the influence of the laws of free competition. And

they can succeed in doing the last only when they assure themselves

beforehand of a constant circle of consumers, that is, when they assure

themselves of a constant market.

It is the consumers’ co-operative that can offer this service to its

brother in the field of production. Here – and not in Oppenheimer’s

distinction between co-operatives that produce and co-operatives that

sell — is the secret sought by Bernstein: the explanation for the

invariable failure of producers’ co-operatives functioning independently

and their survival when they are backed by consumers’ organisations.

If it is true that the possibilities of existence of producers’

co-operatives within capitalism are bound up with the possibilities of

existence of consumers’ co-operatives, then the scope of the former is

limited, in the most favourable of cases, to the small local market and

to the manufacture of articles serving immediate needs, especially food

products. Consumers’ and therefore producers’ co-operatives, are

excluded from the most important branches of capital production — the

textile, mining, metallurgical and petroleum industries, machine

construction, locomotive and ship-building. For this reason alone

(forgetting for the moment their hybrid character), co-operatives in the

field of production cannot be seriously considered as the instrument of

a general social transformation. The establishment of producers’

co-operatives on a wide scale would suppose, first of all, the

suppression of the world market, the breaking up of the present world

economy into small local spheres of production and exchange. The highly

developed, wide-spread capitalism of our time is expected to fall back

to the merchant economy of the Middle Ages.

Within the framework of present society, producers’ co-operatives are

limited to the role of simple annexes to consumers’ co-operatives. It

appears, therefore, that the latter must be the beginning of the

proposed social change. But this way the expected reform of society by

means of co-operatives ceases to be an offensive against capitalist

production. That is, it ceases to be an attack against the principal

bases of capitalist economy. It becomes, instead, a struggle against

commercial capital, especially small and middle-sized commercial

capital. It becomes an attack made on the twigs of the capitalist tree.

Note the implicit assumption, throughout this long passage, that

capitalism has created the optimal forms of production technology and

means of organizing production — that its historic function has been to

“unleash forces of production” which are objectively more efficient than

the alternatives. Because the scale and the managerial form of

capitalist industry is optimally efficient, it follows that the only way

cooperative industry can compete within capitalism is by imposing the

same standards of efficiency — and of labor discipline over its members,

in particular — as capitalist industry.

Hence it is outside the realm of possibility that the main function of

managerial bureaucracy is to compensate for the basic conflicts of

interest, information and incentives problems, that plague absentee

owned and hierarchical organizations. It is likewise outside the realm

of possibility that a cooperative enterprise might be *more* efficient

than a capitalist one precisely *because of* its lack of a managerial

hierarchy, and its corresponding lack of high overhead costs from

management salaries. (This was, in fact, demonstrated by the

self-managed recuperated enterprises in Argentina, whose worker-managers

discovered that they had solved the problem of unit cost competition by

the simple act of firing their C-suite parasites). And it is positively

absurd, for a vulgar Marxist, to consider that a worker-managed firm

might be more efficient and operate at lower cost — despite paying

better wages — because it is better at innovation and at making use of

distributed knowledge.

Because large-scale, managerial enterprise is self-evidently the most

efficient way to organize production — it is, after all, the product of

capitalism, whose historic role is to unleash all those productive

forces — it follows that producer cooperatives scaled to the market

areas of local consumer cooperatives, being small, will be a regression

to the medieval.

Since it is outside the realm of possibility that for large classes of

goods the most efficient form of production is with tools scaled to

local consumption, we also rule out the possibility that production

undertaken directly for use, with highly-efficient small-scale

machinery, might be more efficient than capitalist production. Hence the

idea of commons-based economies, operating within the interstices of

capitalism and actually outcompeting and supplanting it through superior

agility and efficiency, can only be pure petty bourgeois fantasy.

And her argument that components of a socialist society cannot be built

by workers “within capitalist production”[49] implies, as in

Antonio Negri’s accelerationist version of autonomism, that capitalism

is a system “with no outside.”

For Luxemburg as for Marx, the transition to socialism was to be brought

about through the seizure of state power by the working class, organized

politically. There was no room for even the partial development of

socialist institutions, by the working class itself, within the

interstices of capitalism; the primary significance of trade union

activity and other forms of working class organization within the

present system is that “such activity prepares the proletariat, that is

to say, creates the *subjective* factor of the socialist transformation”

for “the conquest of political power.” All working class organization

and activity in the meantime is geared entirely towards the future

achievement of that end.[50] The task of constructing the

material basis of communism lay entirely with the capitalists until the

Revolution, and with the working class only after the Revolution. In the

meantime, the sole task of the working class was to prepare for the

revolutionary seizure of what the capitalists had built.

From the uppermost summit of the state down to the tiniest parish, the

proletarian mass must therefore replace the inherited organs of

bourgeois class rule – the assemblies, parliaments, and city councils –

with its own class organs – with workers’ and soldiers’ councils. It

must occupy all the posts, supervise all functions, measure all official

needs by the standard of its own class interests and the tasks of

socialism. Only through constant, vital, reciprocal contact between the

masses of the people and their organs, the workers’ and soldiers’

councils, can the activity of the people fill the state with a socialist

spirit.

The economic overturn, likewise, can be accomplished only if the process

is carried out by proletarian mass action…. The workers can achieve

control over production, and ultimately real power, by means of

tenacious struggle with capital, hand-to-hand, in every shop, with

direct mass pressure, with strikes and with the creation of its own

permanent representative organs.[51]

Our assumptions regarding technological history are quite different from

those of vulgar Marxism. As we will argue in the next chapter, the

radical shift towards cheapening and decentralization of production

technology from the late 20th century on has rendered obsolete both the

mass production industrial model and the Old Left focus on

centrally-directed mass organizations. But that is not to say that large

scale production was *ever* objectively necessary. Even in what Lewis

Mumford called the Paleotechnic Age, large-scale steam-powered industry

was simply one path that supplanted alternative paths that might

otherwise have grown out of the possibilities of the Eotechnic

technologies of the late Middle Ages.[52] And it supplanted

it, in large part, through the power of the Paleotechnic coalition of

the state, military, armaments, capitalist landed interests and

extractive industries. Small-scale, distributed machine production was

arguably always technically feasible, absent the political power of

Paleotechnic gigantism. And the introduction of Neotechnic technologies

like electrically powered machinery made small-scale production

incontestably the most efficient form. Unfortunately the allied forces

of state and capital diverted Neotechnic technologies into the less

efficient channel of mass-production industry, and rendered it

artificially profitable through subsidies and state-enforced

cartels.[53] What’s different today is that

micro-manufacturing technology is making small-scale production so much

more comparatively efficient, even over and above its previous superior

efficiency, that the political power of the big corporations is no

longer sufficient to suppress or coopt it.

It would be pointless to tick off all the other specific libertarian

socialist, libertarian communist, syndicalist, and revolutionary

anarchist tendencies in the same regard. In every case, the ideology by

its very definition entails the insurrectionary seizure of the means of

production, if not of the state, by mass action. And its central focus,

accordingly, is on the mass political party or mass industrial union.

*Social Democracy.** Social Democratic parties exhibited essentially

the same tendencies as the Leninist vanguard party — both before and

after taking power — toward bureaucratic oligarchy.

In *Political Parties*, Robert Michels analyzed the functioning of the

“Iron Law of Oligarchy” within all large, hierarchical institutions. “By

a universally applicable social law,” he wrote, “every organ of the

collectivity, brought into existence through the need for the division

of labor, creates for itself, as soon as it becomes consolidated,

interests peculiar to itself.” Since the state “cannot be anything other

than the organization of a minority” or ever “be truly representative of

the majority,” it follows that the majority will never be capable of

self-government through hierarchical institutions based on indirect

representation.[54] To summarize: “It is organization which

gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the

mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators.

Who says organization, says oligarchy.”[55]

In addition, the oligarchies governing theoretically oppositional

institutions frequently wind up, in actual practice, engaging more

cooperatively than adversarially with the institutions whose power they

were originally intended to limit. Hilaire Belloc speculated, in *The

Servile State*, on the likelihood of such a de facto coalition between a

“socialist” state and the capitalists whose power it was in theory put

in power to supplant with working class power.

Belloc noted the tendencies, in particular, in the Fabian movement of

his time. The genuinely principled and egalitarian sort of socialist, he

wrote, might desire to dispossess the capitalists of their power and

their property in the means of production. But they would find their

path to this end blocked by the political realities of the situation,

and would find themselves instead diverted in a completely different

direction.

This idealist social reformer, therefore, finds the current of his

demand canalised. As to one part of it, confiscation, it is checked and

barred; as to the other, securing human conditions for the proletariat,

the gates are open….

…[A]ll those things in the true socialist’s demand which are compatible

with the servile state can certainly be achieved.[56]

The devil’s bargain offered by the servile state is summarized in the

words of an imagined capitalist:

…“I refuse to be dispossessed, and it is, short of catastrophe,

impossible to dispossess me. But if you will define the relation between

my employees and myself, I will undertake particular responsibilities

due to my position. Subject the proletarian, as a proletarian, and

because he is a proletarian, to special laws. Clothe me, the capitalist,

and because I am a capitalist, with special converse duties under those

laws. I will faithfully see that they are obeyed; I will compel my

employees to obey them, and I will undertake the new role imposed upon

me by the state. Nay, I will go further, and I will say that such a

novel arrangement will make my own profits perhaps larger and certainly

more secure.[57]

If the “true” socialist is grudgingly forced into this bargain from the

realities of the situation, another kind finds the servile state or

collective capitalism positively appealing.

In him the exploitation of man by man excites no indignation. Indeed, he

is not of a type to which indignation or any other lively passion is

familiar. Tables, statistics, an exact frame-work for life these afford

him the food that satisfies his moral appetite; the occupation most

congenial to him is the “running” of men: as a machine is run.

To such a man the Collectivist ideal particularly appeals….

Now this man, like the other, would prefer to begin with public property

in capital and land, and upon that basis to erect the formal scheme

which so suits his peculiar temperament….

But all those other things for which such a man cares much more than he

does for the socialisation of the means of production — tabulation,

detailed administration of men, the co-ordination of many efforts under

one schedule…, all these are immediately obtainable without disturbing

the existing arrangement of society…. Let laws exist which make the

proper housing, feeding, clothing, and recreation of the proletarian

mass be incumbent upon the possessing class, and the observance of such

rules be imposed, by inspection and punishment, upon those whom he

pretends to benefit, and all that he really cares for will be

achieved.[58]

This is a description, almost to the letter, of the type of Fabian

represented by the Webbs.

From the worker’s standpoint, the state socialism Belloc describes is a

sort of industrial serfdom administered by the capitalist.

The proletarian accepts a position in which he produces for the

capitalist a certain portion of economic values, and retains out of that

total a portion only, leaving to the capitalist all surplus value. The

capitalist, on his side, is guaranteed in the secure and permanent

expectation of that surplus value through all the perils of social envy;

the proletarian is guaranteed in a sufficiency and a security for that

sufficiency; but by the very action of such a guarantee there is

withdrawn from him the power to refuse his labor and thus to aim at

putting himself in possession of the means of production.[59]

The overall nature of the project, as with the American Progressive

movement, was not socialistic at all. Rather, it aimed at class harmony

and the transcendence of class conflict altogether (in Belloc’s words

“reconciling the interests of capital and labor”[60]) through

the rationalization of society under the supervision of properly

qualified professionals.

An American socialist, William English Walling, in the same year (1912)

addressed many of the same tendencies under the label “state socialism”

(which he used interchangeably with “collective capitalism”).

The “socialist” program of nationalization, social insurance, and labor

reform advocated by the Fabians, even at its most ambitious, was no more

than Bismarck was doing, and was supported by many “progressive”

capitalists — including Churchill and Lloyd-George — who wanted to

“rationalize” capitalism as well.[61]

…[A]s capitalism becomes further organized and gives more attention to

government, and the State takes up such functions as the capitalists

direct, they will double and multiply many fold their long-term

governmental investments in the form of expenditures for industrial

activities and social reforms.

Already leading capitalists in this country as well as elsewhere welcome

the extension of government into the business field. The control of the

railroads by a special court over which the railroads have a large

influence proves to be just what the railroads have

wanted…[62]

Despite Roosevelt’s pose as a “trust-buster” in a few high-profile

cases, the Progressive movement for the most part saw the great trusts

as representing optimal efficiency, and favored an alliance between

forward-thinking capitalists and the state to manage them in the

interest of a “pubic welfare” defined largely in capitalist terms.

Walling quotes Elihu Root:

Germany, to a considerable extent, requires combination of her

manufacturers, producers, and commercial concerns. Japan also

practically does this. But in the United States it cannot be done under

government leadership, because the people do not conceive it to be the

government’s function. It seems to be rather that the government is

largely taken up with breaking up organization, and that reduces the

industrial efficiency of the country.[63]

Walling’s understanding of nationalization of industry by the capitalist

state was essentially the same as that of Engels a generation earlier:

…The industrial capitalists, then, have very [sic] motive… to

nationalize those fundamental industries that can only be made in this

way to subserve the interests of the capitalist class as a whole

(instead of some part of it merely), and to undertake through government

those costly enterprises which are needed by all industry, but which

give too slow returns to attract the capitalist investor.[64]

Walling’s account of the attitudes of Progressives and Fabians on labor

reform echoes that of Belloc: the entire focus is on the effect of

improved working and living conditions on creating a more efficient and

productive work force, and the resulting benefit to

industry.[65]

The minimal program of such state socialists amounts to integrating the

working class as serfs into a new feudalism administered by capitalists,

with the state guaranteeing some minimal degree of welfare to the worker

in the same way a benevolent lord of the manor might guarantee the

welfare of his laborers. But the proper standard of socialism is not the

negative one of how much human misery it abolishes, but the positive one

of what is done with the *surplus* and who has the right to dispose of

it. The state socialism Walling describes is simply a more humane — and

more efficient and productive — form of capitalism, in which the surplus

continues to be administered by the capitalists in service to their own

ends.[66]

Walling shared Belloc’s view that even reformers who saw themselves as

anti-capitalist would most likely naively allow themselves to be coopted

into the capitalist regime as overseers and regimenters of the

poor.[67]

The state socialist agenda as analyzed by Walling did not give equal

power to the organized workers, compared to the power of organized

capital. The power of organized labor was at best a veto designed to

prevent outright abuses and maintain a minimum standard of living, while

remaining integrated into an industrial system directed by the

capitalist class.[68] Compare this to the Wagner Act, which

guaranteed a right to unionize for better wages and hours, while

removing labor’s previous potential for interfering with the right to

manage.

The Fabian movement was almost completely anti-socialist, according to

any definition of socialism current outside the Fabian Society itself.

As an indication of how little of a socialist Sidney Webb was, for

example, he denounced the Liberals on the grounds that they had “the

revolutionary tradition in their bones,” and saw society as “a struggle

of warring interests.”[69] Even the Labour Party as such was

almost completely dominated by the state socialist approach. Ramsey

MacDonald stated in so many words that “Public ownership is

Socialism.”[70]

New Left historian Gabriel Kolko, writing fifty years later, shared

Walling’s view that the Progressive movement in the United States aimed

primarily at rationalizing capitalism. Specifically, Progressive Era

reforms were intended to impose cartels on industry through the

regulatory regime, in order to prevent destabilizing price competition

and facilitate administered pricing.

Political capitalism is the utilization of political outlets to

attain conditions of stability, predictability, and security — to attain

rationalization — in the economy. *Stability* is the elimination of

internecine competition and erratic fluctuations in the economy.

*Predictability* is the ability, on the basis of politically stabilized

and secured means, to plan future economic action on the basis of fairly

calculable expectations. By *security* I mean protection from the

political attacks latent in any formally democratic political structure.

I do not give to *rationalization* its frequent definition as the

improvement of efficiency, output, or internal organization of a

company; I mean by the term, rather, the organization of the economy and

the larger political and social spheres in a manner that will allow

corporations to function in a predictable and secure environment

permitting reasonable profits over the long run.[71]

In the ensuing decades, something very much like Walling’s state

socialism was implemented in the closest approximations to Social

Democracy in the UK and US: the Atlee government and the American New

Deal.

Power Elite sociologist G. William Domhoff and his mentor C. Wright

Mills together created a large body of work showing that the

theoretically “countervailing” institutions posited by pluralist

thinkers like John Kenneth Galbraith in *American Capitalism* — Big

Labor and the regulatory state as limits on the power of Big Business,

etc. — actually turn out in practice to form interlocking complexes of

institutions governed by the same personnel rotating between their

leadership ranks.

Anarchist Paul Goodman noted, in similar terms, the tendency of

institutions to group themselves into complexes based on similarity of

organizational style: “[T]he genius of our centralized bureaucracies has

been, as they interlock, to form a mutually accrediting establishment of

decision-makers, with common interests and a common style that nullify

the diversity of pluralism.”[72]

Goodman formulated a typology of organizations that “cuts across the

usual division of profit and non-profit,” as shown by the prevalence in

large institutions of “status salaries and expense accounts … ,

[and] excessive administration and overhead ….”[73]

To sum up: what swell the costs in enterprises carried on in the

interlocking centralized systems of society, whether commercial,

official, or non-profit institutional, are all the factors of

organization, procedure, and motivation that are not directly determined

to the function and the desire to perform it. Their patents and rents,

fixed prices, union scales, featherbedding, fringe benefits, status

salaries, expense accounts, proliferating administration, paper work,

permanent overhead, public relations and promotions, waste of time and

skill by departmentalizing task-roles, bureaucratic thinking that is

penny-wise pound-foolish, inflexible procedure and tight scheduling that

exaggerate contingencies and overtime.

But when enterprises can be carried on autonomously by professionals,

artists, and workmen intrinsically committed to the job, there are

economies all along the line. People make do on means. They spend on

value, not convention. They flexibly improvise procedures as opportunity

presents and they step in in emergencies. They do not watch the clock.

The available skills of each person are put to use. They eschew status

and in a pinch accept subsistence wages. Administration and overhead are

ad hoc. The task is likely to be seen in its essence rather than

abstractly.[74]

And rather than “countervailing” each other, as argued by Galbraith, the

first category of organizations cluster into coalitions or institutional

complexes: “the industrial-military complex, the alliance of promoters,

contractors, and government in Urban Renewal; the alliance of

universities, corporations, and government in research and development.

This is the great domain of cost-plus.”[75]

Domhoff observed something very like Walling’s state socialism and

Belloc’s Servile State in the New Deal. Its corporatist nature was

evidenced, in particular, in the New Deal labor accord. Its roots lay in

the company unions under what was variously known as Welfare Capitalism

or the American System, most notably implemented at General Electric

under Gerard Swope.

The business coalition behind the New Deal was concentrated primarily in

large, capital-intensive industry, as exemplified by Swope’s GE; Swope

was the most prominent member of FDR’s Business Advisory Council. Labor

was a relatively minor part of the total cost package of such

businesses; at the same time, capital-intensive industry, as Galbraith

pointed out in his analysis of the “technostructure” in *The New

Industrial State*, depended on long-term stability and predictability

for planning. Therefore, this segment of big business was willing to

trade higher wages for social peace in the workplace.

Industrial unionism, from the employer’s viewpoint, had the advantage

over craft unionism of providing a single bargaining agent with which

management could deal. One of the reasons for the popularity of “company

unions” among large corporations, besides the obvious advantages in

pliability, was the fact that they were an alternative to the host of

separate craft unions of the AFL.

Swope, in particular, experimented during the heyday of welfare

capitalism with company unions that offered a grievance procedure, along

with arbitration on disciplinary matters. The purpose of such unions was

to secure workplace peace and stability while reserving questions of

work organization and compensation to management.

By bringing collective bargaining under the aegis of federal labor law,

management was able to use union leadership to discipline its own rank

and file, and to use federal courts as a mechanism of enforcement.

The New Dealers devised … a means to integrate big labor into the

corporate state. But only unions that were industrially organized, and

which paralleled in their structure the organization of industry itself,

could play the appropriate role. A successful corporate state required a

safe industrial-union movement to work. It also required a union

leadership that shared the desire to operate the economy from the top in

formal conferences with the leaders of the other functional economic

groups, particularly the corporate leaders. The CIO unions …

provided such a union leadership.[76]

Collective bargaining did not affect the distribution of wealth, because

firms in an oligopoly position, with a relatively inelastic demand, were

able to pass increased labor costs on to the consumer at virtually no

cost to themselves.[77]

Domhoff saw Wagner as a subsumption of unions by capitalism. “The

benefits to capital were several: greater efficiency and productivity

from labor, less labor turnover, the disciplining of the labor force by

labor unions, the possibility of planning labor costs over the long run,

and the dampening of radical doctrines.”[78] James O’Connor

argued that under Wagner “unions were… the guarantors of ‘managerial

prerogatives.’” Their function was ”to inhibit disruptive, spontaneous

rank-and-file activity (e.g., wildcat strikes and slowdowns) and to

maintain labor discipline in general.”

The UK’s experience with Labour rule under the Atlee government was

quite similar. A socialist or labor party, in theory, is to be the key

representative of the working class and to be indissolubly linked with

it. But, as Stuart Hall observes,

once in government, social democracy is committed to finding solutions

to the crisis which are capable of winning support from key sections of

capital, since its solutions are framed within those limits. But this

requires that the indissoluble link be used, not to advance but to

discipline the class and organizations it represents. This is only

possible if the link — class-to-party — is dismantled and if there can

be substituted for it an alternative articulation: government-to-people.

The rhetorics of “national interest,” which is the principal ideological

form in which a succession of defeats have been imposed on the working

class by social democracy in power, are exactly the sites where this

contradiction shows through…. [But government-to-people] sets Labour,

at key moments of struggle… by definition “on the side of the nation”

against “sectional interests,” “irresponsible trade union power,” etc.

This is the terrain on which Mr. Heath played such destructive games in

the lead-through to the Industrial Relations Act and its aftermath with

his invocation of… the spectre of “holding the nation up to

ransom.”[79]

From its origins the Labour Party was faced by a basic contradiction

between the demands of the labor movement from which it was derived, and

the needs of electoral politics. The existence of the Fabian movement,

as an intellectual arm of the Party dominated by the ideological

perspective of the managerial and professional classes (much like the

circles around the National Civic Federation and the editorial staff of

The New Republic*, which dominated the Progressive movement in the US),

only added to this conflict.

This was already apparent from the end of WWI, when trade union leaders

admonished the radicals in their membership to eschew industrial action

for political purposes, leaving political goals to the Parliamentary

party. There was also, on the part of both mainstream union leaders and

Labour Party parliamentarians, no small element of desire to show

radicals in the rank-and-file who was to be master, and to appear to

their Tory and Liberal fellows as responsible and respectable members of

the governing class.[80] What might have been achieved, had

the labor movement retained its capacity for independent political

action across the board, was suggested by the success of the threat of a

general strike in deterring Lloyd George from military intervention

against Soviet Russia on behalf of Poland.[81] But on the

whole, both trade union and Labour Party leadership valued the

appearance of respectability over the pursuit of a radical agenda, as

evidenced by their betrayal of the coal miners in 1920.[82]

Labour continued its self-limiting approach under the MacDonald

government. He consciously limited the Labour agenda to what he could

achieve through cooperation with other parties in the coalition, and

went so far as attempting to dissuade Labour MPs from singing Red Flag,

and otherwise to show “the country” that the Labour Party was a

respectable party, motivated by “national well-being” and not class

considerations.[83] Among other things, he made it clear that

his government would not hesitate to use troops to break

strikes.[84]

Despite pro forma declarations of support for trade unions in the

General Strike, MacDonald and the rest of the Labour leadership did

their best to appease the Tory Government with assurances that the

Strike was a purely industrial dispute, fully legal and constitutional,

in support of coal miners, and sent out peace feelers to the government

for the duration.[85] The Labour leadership, both in the TUC

and in Parliament, for the most part believed “that a challenge to the

Government through the assertion of working class strength outside

Parliament was *wrong*…. In fact they half shared, indeed more than

half shared, the Government’s view that the General Strike was a

politically and morally reprehensible venture, undemocratic,

anti-parliamentary, subversive. The Labour leadership “flinched” from

the obvious fact that the Strike had “unmistakable social content,”

involving “the assertion of specific working class claims against

property.” This was particularly offensive to Fabian sensibilities.

Beatrice Webb expressed disdain for the General Strike in terms

comparable to those Hillary Clinton expressed in her thesis on Saul

Alinsky: the proper means for achieving “socialism” was through

government policies implemented by professional political

leaders.[86]

The failure of the General Strike was a watershed for the future of the

Labour Party. The Party permanently eschewed, not only all attempts by

itself or by unions “to exercise political influence against the

Government of the day by the use of the industrial weapon,” but also

even “militancy over *industrial* issues.”[87]

The basic contradiction was at no time more apparent than at Labour’s

greatest moment of triumph in 1945, and the period thereafter. The

single biggest failure of the postwar Labour government was Herbert

Morrion’s affection for the capitalist managerial model. This was

foreshadowed by his approach under the national unity cabinet of the

1930s.

‘Public ownership’ to Morrison meant control by bureaucrats selected ‘on

their ability’ by the minister. When he was minister of transport in

1930, he refused to appoint workers’ representatives to the board of his

new London Transport undertaking. He wanted the undertaking to be run

exclusively by ‘men of a business turn of mind’ which, he explained

graciously, ‘might include such people as trade union bodies as well as

men of business experience in the ordinary sense of the

word’.[88]

He was given free rein for his managerialist sympathies in carrying out

the nationalization policy under Atlee, as recounted by Miliband.

Directly related to Morrison’s view of nationalization was the

Executive’s refusal to commit itself to any kind of experiment in

industrial democracy…. At the 1945 Conference, one composite

resolution (later withdrawn) demanded a far more extensive programme of

nationalization and also asked the Party to pledge itself ‘to secure the

democratic control and operation of these (nationalized) institutions by

the workers and technicians’. This latter demand, Morrison said, did not

‘demonstrate good socialization in its method of administration and

management’.[89]

Morrison’s management model was a public corporation on the BBC model,

with essentially no worker influence outside the collective bargaining

process. The sense of betrayal on the part of many trade union militants

was considerable. As one coal miner recalled:

I can remember standing at the pit with the banners, celebrating with my

father and his friends. They thought, this was it…. They thought

nationalisation would bring everything they’d fought for. But within a

very short space of time they found out that they’d swapped one boss for

another. The first boss we got was a major from the Indian Army, six

months later followed by Captain Nicholson …. Later we had a banker!

We really believed it would make a difference. We really thought it was

the beginning of socialism, you know, almost time to hoist the red flag.

I thought that we’d be working for ourselves, that we’d be in control.

But in fact the supervision and bureaucratic administration became a

hundred times worse. You’d get 10 foremen where you only had one; you’d

have to use 10 pieces of paper where before you’d only have one.You’d

always have to go through many more channels to get anything done. That

approach killed nationalisation. A lot of us felt really frustrated.

Mind, I still think nationalisation is the only way, but next time it

will have to be different.[90]

In return for the repeal of significant amounts of anti-union

legislation, the Labour government “expected, and received, from the

trade unions a measure of co-operation in the maintenance of industrial

discipline….” And the Labour government used troops as scabs to carry

out essential functions during many of the strikes that did

occur.[91]

From the beginning, the nationalization proposals of the Government were

designed to achieve the sole purpose of improving the efficiency of a

capitalist economy, not as marking the beginning of its wholesale

transformation….

…[T]he Government’s conception of public ownership ensured the

predominance on the boards of the nationalized corporations of men who

had been, or who were, closely associated with private finance and

industry….[92]

As Belloc predicted,[93] the coal industry made out better

from its compensation under the nationalization regime “than they could

conceivably have done had the industry remained in private

ownership.”[94] So the Labour Government, in effect, simply

acted as managers on behalf of the capitalists.

By the late 50s Labour under Gaitskell, having shifted to a policy focus

centered on “consolidation” of previous gains and then been turned out

of office altogether, was “obsessed” with the need for “electoral

success” — the “essential condition” for which was “to present the

Labour Party as a moderate and respectable party, free from class bias,

‘national’ in outlook.”[95]

From the beginning, Dan Evans argues, the Labour Party was hampered by a

misapprehension of the role both it and the state played in relation to

the rest of society.

Ultimately this unswerving commitment to parliamentarism condemns the

Labour party to remain a permanent hostage to existing structures of

power — both within parliament itself and throughout wider society — and

to be doomed by the limitations these inevitably place on socialists,

both in government and beyond….

The problem with parliamentarism is that it represents a belief that the

state is neutral….

Evans cites Ralph Miliband and John Saville that, far from being a free

hand to reshape society in a post-capitalist direction through the

control of a neutral state, the reality is that

a power elite, united by a shared class background and a deep

ideological conservatism, are spread throughout British society,

controlling all aspects of it, not just parliament. Thus the tory party,

the judiciary, the media, the education system, the armed forces, the

civil service, the police, and so on are all ideologically united and

vehemently opposed to socialism and a Labour government. They therefore

cannot simply be used as tools of the Labour government, for these state

apparatuses will in practice actively push back and attempt to sabotage

any changes to the status quo and undermine the

government….[96]

Not only does this amount to a class system of defense in depth, Saville

said, but the defensive earthworks include the class enculturation of

the Labour Party political elite itself.

What has never been understood is the nature of economic and political

power in industrial Britain, where two fifths of all private property is

in the hands of one per cent of the adult population: where the wealthy

groups are linked by social background, marriage and top business

positions: where the identity between the wealthy and the politicians of

the Conservative Party is very close; and where all the leading social

and political institutions mirror the dominance of the wealthy classes.

Britain is ruled by an élite which has its main economic basis in

industrial and financial capital but with the old landed classes still

important: its younger members use the leading public schools and Oxford

and Cambridge as their private educational establishments, and the

Conservative Party, the administrative grade of the Civil Service and

the top managerial positions in business and banking as their providers

of earned income. Britain is a profoundly conservative society with a

traditional institutional framework within which political decisions are

taken. The limitations upon the real power of the House of Commons are

such that to accept the conventions of Parliamentary Government means to

accept the impossibility of change that is radical in any meaningful

sense. No leader of the Labour Party has ever considered stepping

outside Parliamentary conventions or going beyond the constitutional

proprieties of Parliament. When, as in the days of the 1926 General

Strike, there was being revealed a naked confrontation of class

interests, the Labour and trade union leadership fell over themselves to

reach a compromise, which in the event became

capitulation.[97]

Of course the existence of a hostile and coopting power elite, its

redoubts distributed in depth throughout society, is not the sole

danger. The parliamentary party’s vulnerability to cooptation lies in

large part in the nature of its own internal structure, and the tendency

— already discussed above — for the leaderships of hierarchical

organizations nominally opposed in their goals to develop ties of

affinity based on their common organizational styles and shared

expertise in the subject matter of the policy issues they confront.

III. The Assault on Working Class Agency

Another authoritarian tendency in the main line of official Marxism, as

it developed in the Old Left, was its mechanistic view of history and

minimization of working class agency and subjectivity.

As with our account above of authoritarian administrative styles, it is

likewise true that Marxism was not a monolith in regard to working class

agency; it had parallel currents emphasizing the working class as the

active agent involved in building the socialist successor society, as

well as those treating the working class as the pawn of historical

forces.

If anything, it is arguable that the libertarian focus on the agency of

the working class predominated in the thought of Marx himself — not only

in alleged “juvenalia” like the *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts*

and *Grundrisse*, but as an implicit aspect of “mature” works like

Capital*.

In contrast to Lenin’s claim that workers on their own were incapable of

developing anything more than a “trade union consciousness,” both Marx

and Engels repeatedly reaffirmed that the ongoing process of working

class self-activity would, in itself, further the development of class

consciousness.

In the *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts*, Marx located the origin

of communism as a modern political movement in the conscious experience

of the working class: “The entire movement of history, just as its

[communism’s] **actual **act of genesis — the birth act of its

empirical existence — is, therefore, for its thinking consciousness the

comprehended and *known* process of its

becoming*.”[98]

The development of communism as a new form of society would emerge from

the working class’s self-development as a conscious historical agent,

conscious of its own power, and would be the doing *of* the working

class. Communism would be the outgrowth of humanity’s developing

consciousness of itself, and its assertion of control over society, the

natural world, and human nature itself.

Communism as… the real appropriation of the

human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the

complete return of man to himself as a **social **(i.e., human)

being….[99]

…[T]he positive transcendence of private property—i.e., the

perceptible appropriation for and by man of the human essence

and of human life, of objective man, of human achievements

should not be conceived merely in the sense of *immediate,*

one-sided *enjoyment*, merely in the sense of *possessing*, of *having*.

Man appropriates his comprehensive essence in a comprehensive manner,

that is to say, as a whole man.[100]

Although Marx’s analysis in subsequent works became more concrete and

less philosophical, and he wrote considerably less about working class

subjectivity as a primary theme, what he did write on the specific topic

of working class self-activity is fully consistent with his treatment of

the overcoming of alienation in the *Economic and Philosophic

Manuscripts*. If workers become fully human through communism, and

overcome their alienation from themselves, from their work, from each

other and from nature, it becomes clear in Marx’s work that this

overcoming is a process whose first beginnings are the working class’s

emerging consciousness of itself as a subject through political and

economic struggles, and its continued development of this consciousness

and constitution of itself as a class.

Note that working class subjectivity specifically refers to its growing

awareness of itself as a class with interests of its own against other

classes, and its activity in constituting itself as a class. And

everything Marx writes subsequently on the political and economic

activity of the working class is consistent with an analogous

understanding of the working class as subject.

And the very process of the working class constituting itself as a

class, as a conscious subject with class solidarity and an active agent

in society, at the same time entails creating the first kernel of the

future communist society:

When communist **artisans **associate with one another, theory,

propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result

of this association, they acquire a new need — the need for society —

and what appears as a means becomes an end. In this practical process

the most splendid results are to be observed whenever French socialist

workers are seen together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating,

etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring them together.

Association, society and conversation, which again has association as

its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase

with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us

from their work-hardened bodies.[101]

The revolutionary consciousness of the working class is not the passive

result of their material circumstances, but emerges from their conscious

activity in response to the material conditions they confront.

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism — that of

Feuerbach included — is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is

conceived only in the form of the *object or of contemplation*, but not

as *sensuous human activity, practice*, not subjectively….

The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and

upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is

essential to educate the educator himself….

The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity

or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as

*revolutionary practice*.[102]

In *The German Ideology* Marx argued that the working class would

acquire the capability of ultimately transcending all the various

estrangements of capitalism in communist society through its growing

consciousness of itself and constitution of itself as a class in the

struggle against capitalism.

Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness,

and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass

scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a

practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary,

therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any

other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a

revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become

fitted to found society anew.[103]

Engels argued in *Condition of the Working Class* that strikes, even

when defeated, furthered the development of working class consciousness

and praxis. From the experience of limited success in individual strikes

on an issue-by-issue basis, workers would learn the need to organize on

a class-wide basis.

But what gives these Unions and the strikes arising from them their real

importance is this, that they are the first attempt of the workers to

abolish competition….

The laws determining the rate of wages would, indeed, come into force

again in the long run, if the working-men did not go beyond this step of

abolishing competition among themselves. But they must go beyond that

unless they are prepared to recede again and to allow competition among

themselves to reappear. Thus once advanced so far, necessity compels

them to go farther; to abolish not only one kind of competition, but

competition itself altogether, and that they will do.

The workers are coming to perceive more clearly with every day how

competition affects them; they see far more clearly than the bourgeois

that competition of the capitalists among themselves presses upon the

workers too, by bringing on commercial crises, and that this kind of

competition, too, must be abolished. They will soon learn *how* they

have to go about it.

The incredible frequency of these strikes proves best of all to what

extent the social war has broken out all over England. No week passes,

scarcely a day, indeed, in which there is not a strike in some

direction…. These strikes, at first skirmishes, sometimes result in

weighty struggles; they decide nothing, it is true, but they are the

strongest proof that the decisive battle between bourgeoisie and

proletariat is approaching. They are the military school of the

working-men in which they prepare themselves for the great struggle

which cannot be avoided….[104]

And as the English working class came to perceive bourgeois law as the

instrument of its exploitation, it increasingly turned to political

action in addition to unionism. The Chartist movement, after the

bourgeoisie defected to Liberalism in the face of working class

radicalism and the movement took on a fully working class character, was

the first step in this process.[105]

Marx, in *Poverty of Philosophy*, argued that conflicts like strikes

would continue to escalate into full-scale civil war, causing the

proletariat to emerge as a “class for itself.”

If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages,

combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as

the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and

in the face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association

becomes more necessary to them than that of wages…. In this struggle —

a veritable civil war — all the elements necessary for a coming battle

unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on

a political character.[106]

In his September 1850 remarks to the Central Committee of the Communist

League, he said “You have fifteen, twenty, or fifty years of civil war

and popular struggle to carry out, not only to change the relationships

[i.e. build the “living relationships” that are “the driving force of

the revolution”] but to change yourself and enable yourself to rule

politically.”[107]

As Michael Harrington put it: “In Marx’s perspective, it was the

democratic self-organization of the proletariat that was the truly

radical act — even if it initially took reformist

forms.”[108]

As late as the third volume of *Capital*, Marx writes of humanity as an

active agent in bringing nature under conscious control.

…the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is

determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the

very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material

production…. With his development this realm of physical necessity

expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of

production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this

field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers,

rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under

their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind

forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of

energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their

human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity.

Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in

itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth

only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the

working-day is its basic prerequisite.[109]

Engels himself, in *Anti-Dühring*, describes the victorious proletariat

in terms it’s hard not to read as a celebration of human dignity and

agency:

Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off

from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal

conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the

conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man,

now comes under the dominion and control of man who for the first time

becomes the real, conscious lord of nature because he has now become

master of his own social organisation. The laws of his own social

action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature

foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full

understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organisation,

hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history,

now becomes the result of his own free action…. Only from that time

will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history…. It

is the humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of

freedom.[110]

Nevertheless, the primary effect of Engels, in systematizing Marxism

after Marx’s death, was a negative one. Engels reframed Marx’s

philosophy of history in much more mechanistic terms. Engels claimed to

base his formulation of Marxist historical materialism on a literal

reading of the famous paragraphs in Marx’s *Preface to A Contribution to

the Critique of Political Economy*; but according to James White,

whereas for Marx behind the economic base lurked human Society, the

economic structure being only the materialized form of man’s

species-being, for Engels the economic base was the ultimate determining

factor.

‘Society’ for Engels became not a determining

factor, but one determined. With Engels, history was no longer centered

in human Society, but outside it in the economic

structure.[111]

At the same time, in his pamphlet *Ludwig Feuerbach*, Engels obscured

how Marx’s ideas had emerged from those of Schelling, Hegel and the

Young Hegelians, and substituted an account of his own relationship to

the Hegelians in the 1840s for that of Marx and presented it as

Marx’s.[112]

Plekhanov continued the development of Marxism into a mechanistic parody

of itself. Marx himself saw human nature as constant, of a social

character; the different relations of production and the superstructures

built on them were all alienated versions of this social nature, and

history was a process in which humanity worked through these successive

forms of alienation towards the finalization of its own social nature in

non-alienated form. Plekhanov took the position — which he attributed to

Marx — that human nature was variable and was determined from the

outside by historical influences.[113]

Peter Hudis describes the “objectivist” strains of Marxism — which

understand Marx’s critique of capital as “an analysis of objective forms

that assume complete self-determination and automaticity” — as holding

that

…Marx’s most important contribution lies in his understanding of

capital as an autonomous force that takes on a life of its own, totally

subsuming the will and actions of the human subject…. They therefore

view capital not only as the subject of Marx’s theoretical work but as

the *Subject* of modern society.[114]

Compare the humanism of Marx at its height with the atmosphere of the

Old Left as it emerged in the 20th century. In particular contrast the

consistent focus of Marx, on the subjective experience of the working

class *from the inside*, and its development in political consciousness

as a result of its own experience of struggle, with Lenin’s focus in

What Is To Be Done?* on revolutionary consciousness as something
brought to* the working class *from outside*. In every case the workers

are the recipient of knowledge given to them outside; in every case he

speaks of the intelligentsia “elevating” or “training” workers who, left

to themselves, would never progress beyond “economism” and “trade union

consciousness.”[115]

Of course for all of Marx’s emphasis on the self-activity and growing

self-awareness of the working class, even at his best, it was the

development of an agency and subjectivity whose most important

expression would be seizing power to begin the work of actually building

socialism, after capitalism was finished developing productive forces to

the greatest extent possible under the present system. Cooperatives and

unions were useful as a sort of school of revolutionary consciousness,

but the actual construction of the productive forces of socialism, until

the revolutionary rupture occurred, was largely the work of monopoly

capital itself and not an interstitial process that would be

accomplished to any significant extent before then.

As Rosa Luxemburg put it, trade union activity

creates the *subjective* factor of the socialist transformation, for the

task of realising socialism….

[A]s a result of its trade union and parliamentary struggles, the

proletariat becomes convinced, of the impossibility of accomplishing a

fundamental social change through such activity and arrives at the

understanding that the conquest of power is unavoidable.

But such activity was not, in the orthodox Social Democratic view, a way

to “realize *objectively* the desired social change.”[116]

Although Marx’s position on working class agency and self-activity was

arguably multifaceted and not monolithic, the dominant tendency of his

thought could be summarized by the statement in the 1864 Rules of the

IWMA (of which Marx was a principal editor) “[t]hat the emancipation of

the working classes must be conquered by the working classes

themselves.”[117] And despite his later role in the

formulation of a more mechanistic version of Marxism, Engels himself

stated in his 1872 Preface to the German edition of the Communist

Manifesto that the same principle — slightly reworded as ��the

emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself”

— had been “our notion… from the beginning.”[118]

And if this principle is treated as a mostly consistent theme of Marx’s

thought, it gives the lie to dismissals of the “early humanistic Marx”

as a youthful phase that Marx grew beyond in his “mature” work. The idea

of the working class as author of its own self-emancipation flows

directly from Marx’s early inversions, first of Hegel and then of

Feuerbach, and his focus on humanity’s overcoming of its alienation from

its own self-activity and assertion of mastery over all of nature

including society and human nature. In the words of Isaiah Berlin,

history is

the struggle of men to realise their full human potentialities; and

since they are members of the natural kingdom…, man’s effort to

realise himself fully is a striving to escape from being the plaything

of forces that seem at once mysterious, arbitrary and irresistible, that

is, to attain to the mastery of himself, which is freedom. Man attains

this subjugation of his world… by activity, by labour…. History is

the interaction between the lives of the actors, the men engaged in the

struggle for attaining self-direction, and the consequences of their

activities….[119]

Even so, the mechanistic focus was clearly predominant, first in the

official Marxist ideology of the Second International, and then taken to

self-parody levels in the “diamat” of the Comintern.

IV. Workerism/Laborism

Like its affinity for mass and organization, the Old Left’s workerism —

its tendency to lionize the industrial proletariat as revolutionary

subject and its organizational forms as a paradigm for the future

society — go back to the earliest days of Marxism itself. Witness the

Communist Manifesto*:

In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are

already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his

relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with

the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern

subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as

in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law,

morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind

which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify

their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their

conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of

the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own

previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous

mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to

fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and

insurances of, individual property.[120]

But at least Marx envisioned post-capitalist society in much less

workerist terms than his Old Left disciples of the 20th century.

Communist society entailed the proletariat’s abolition of itself as

such, and the creation of a society which abolished both the

work/enjoyment opposition and the division of labor. In The German

Ideology he wrote that for communists, “the basis of this whole

opposition between work and enjoyment disappears.”[121] And

with the disappearance of the capitalist wage relationship as an

authority over and above the individual capable of imposing a division

of labor against their wishes, would come a society in which

nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become

accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general

production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and

another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear

cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind,

without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or

critic.[122]

Further, in his 1845 draft of a critique of Friedrich List, he treated

labor itself (in the sense of alienated labor imposed by capital and the

wage system as superior authorities) as something to be superseded under

communism.

it is established… that his [the worker’s] activity is not a free

manifestation of his human life, that it is, rather, a huckstering sale

of his forces, an alienation (sale) to capital of his one-sidedly

developed abilities, in a word, that it is “*labour*.”… “*Labour*” is

the living basis of private property, it is private property as the

creative source of itself. Private property is nothing but *objectified*

labour. If it is desired to strike a mortal blow at private property,

one must attack it not only as a *material state of affairs*, but also

as *activity*, as *labour*. It is one of the greatest misapprehensions

to speak of free, human, social labour, of labour without private

property. “*Labour*” by its very nature is unfree, unhuman, unsocial

activity, determined by private property and creating private property.

Hence the abolition of private property will become a reality only when

it is conceived as the abolition of “*labour*” (an abolition which, of

course, has become possible only as a result of labour itself, that is

to say, has become possible as a result of the material activity of

society…).[123]

Marx also makes it clear that these are not goals to be achieved in the

distant future, after a prolonged period of building “full communism.”

Self-actualization through the maximization of free time, and the

transition from the “realm of necessity” to the “realm of freedom,”

rather, are things to be achieved through an ongoing process that begins

the instant workers gain control of society.

From the very beginning, the goal of minimizing work time, prioritizing

free time for all-sided human development, and recognizing the worker’s

sovereignty over their own time, is implicitly recognized in the way

Marx envisions work-time, in *Critique of the Gotha Program*, as the

basis by which the associated workers will divide the product of their

collective labor among themselves. The measure is not work accomplished,

or value, according to some standard of socially necessary labor; it is

work-time, multiplied by comparative “intensity” — which means the

subjective effort or energy expenditure experienced by the worker, not

productivity — which governs the worker’s share of

consumption.[124] Such a measure, by treating the amount of

free time a worker sacrifices and their subjective experience of

difficulty or unpleasantness as a claim to a share in the social

product, implies (1) the primacy of the workers’ claim to their free

time and personal development, and their entitlement to a share in the

product based on their sacrifice of these things, and (2) the social

goal of minimizing their sacrifice. And the reduction of the total

amount of labor expended for an abundant standard of living, and the

achievement of a post-scarcity society in which labor is decoupled from

consumption altogether and the distinction between work and leisure

disappears, is a process that begins with the establishment of

socialism.

Marx’s vision in **The German Ideology **of the abolition of

“division of labor” as something imposed from above, and of the free

individual constantly shifting from one activity to another as she sees

fit, is entirely compatible with even the earliest period of working

class power. If the worker is free to work the number of hours she

pleases, on condition of her consumption share being allocated

accordingly, and she can choose among whatever work openings the

associated workers post that she possesses the skills for, from one day

to the next, this is a state of affairs very close to Marx’s

description.

In comparison, the Old Left’s vision of the role of work in society

resembles a scene from Fritz Lang’s *Metropolis*: grim-faced workers in

overalls trudging in formation into a factory. If this strikes the

reader as hyperbole, consider the celebration of Stakhanovites and other

“Hero Workers” under Stalin, or the CNT’s attempts to enforce

work-discipline over worker-managed factories in Spain.

Guy Standing used the term “labourism” to describe the tendency on the

Old Left (including Leninist Communism, Social Democracy and CIO-style

industrial unionism). Unlike earlier socialist and anarchist models that

looked forward to increasing leisure and autonomy, dissolution of the

boundary between work and the rest of life, and a shrinkage of both the

cash nexus and the wage system, social democracy and industrial unionism

presupposed universal full-time employment at wage labor as the norm.

They aimed at “full employment” with good wages, benefits and job

security, with the understanding that management would be allowed to

manage and labor would stay out of matters regarded as “management

prerogatives” in return for these things. The “full employment” agenda

meant

all men in full-time jobs. Besides being sexist, this neglected all

forms of work that were not labour (including reproductive work in the

home, caring for others, work in the community, and other self-chosen

activities). It also erased a vision of freedom from labour that had

figured powerfully in radical thinking in previous ages.[125]

Chapter Two: Transition

All the justifications for an anti-capitalist movement centered on

large-scale institutions or mass organizations, or for a transitional

model based on insurrectionary seizure of the means of production,

reflect the technological realities of the Industrial Revolution from

the mid-19th century on — and particularly of the mass-production era in

the 20th century.

The material and technological assumptions behind such approaches have

lost their relevance in recent decades, and are entirely obsolete now.

To the extent that the old mass-based, insurrectionist model had any

valid basis in material conditions, it ended with the mass production

age. We no longer need to storm the ramparts of those old state and

industrial hierarchies because most of them no longer perform any

socially necessary function. Cheap, small-scale physical production

technologies and distributed, stigmergic coordination mechanisms have

made it possible to build a society mostly outside the old institutional

framework, and leave the old institutions to crumble.

I. Drastic Reductions in Necessary Outlays for the Means of

Production

Physical Production. The original material rationale

for both the wage system and the factory system, as they emerged in the

First Industrial Revolution (i.e., the application of steam power to

production), was technological. It involved the transition from artisan

production with general-purpose craft tools that were individually

affordable, to factory production with extremely expensive specialized

machinery acquired by one or more rich absentee owners, who then hired

laborers to work it. Large capital outlays for industrial machinery, and

the large scale of production, meant that organizational mass was

necessary to undertake modern forms of production.[126]

Technological change is radically cheapening physical production and

reducing it in scale. As early as 1971, Murray Bookchin was arguing for

a decentralized industrial model based on small-scale craft production

using multiple-purpose machines, switching frequently between short runs

of a wide variety of products on a demand-pull basis as orders came

in.[127] Colin Ward and Karl Hess proposed community

workshops making use of power tools pooled by neighborhood hobbyists,

along with second-hand machine tools from machine shops, high school

shop classes and the like.[128] Such shops could be used for

repairing appliances, custom-machining the replacement parts necessary

to keep them going, or remanufacturing defunct items like refrigerators.

The emergence of relatively small-scale CNC machine tools in the ‘70s

reduced the cost of digitally-controlled production machinery by an

order of magnitude and made craft production in smaller shops feasible.

It enabled the rise of networked cooperative production in

Emilia-Romagna, as well as the corporate outsourcing of a growing share

of production to independent job shops in Asia.

The revolution in even smaller and cheaper tabletop CNC tools since the

turn of the century, along with the open source hardware, Fab Lab and

hackerspace movements, has reduced the cost of necessary machinery by

another order of magnitude and made it possible to carry out, in a

garage shop with a few tens of thousands of dollars worth of open-source

machinery, many kinds of production that would have required a

multi-million dollar factory fifty years ago.

As an example of the possibilities, consider the Global Village

Construction Set, developed by Open Source Ecology at their demo site,

Factor E Farm. It’s an entire modular ecosystem of machines with

interchangeable modules used in multiple machine designs. Along with the

micro-manufacturing machinery (3D printer, laser cutter, drill press and

fourteen other machines), the GVCS includes construction machinery

(sawmill, compressed earth block maker, etc.), farm machinery (tractor,

etc.), and household production goods like a bread oven.

All of the designs are complete, the great majority have been

prototyped, and many or most are in actual production. Most of the

components of the machines — many of which, like the power transmission

system, are modular and used throughout the entire machine ecology — can

be produced with the Construction Set’s own machine tools, and the

inclusion of an induction furnace in the manufacturing collection means

they can smelt metal from local scrap.[129]

Their website has a table of the prices of the various machines, either

materials alone or materials plus labor, compared to their proprietary

commercial counterparts.[130] Most of the individual

manufacturing machines can be made for anywhere from under a thousand to

a few thousand dollars in materials, and hence are suited to an

individual garage-size workshop; a few of the most expensive items (e.g.

$18,000 for an induction furnace, $13,000 for a rod and wire mill, or

$50,000 for a machine to extract aluminum from clay) would obviously

have to be a shared resource between a number of shops in a larger

community.

It’s impossible to overstate the practical significance of this, from

the standpoint of labor. The availability of a garage factory’s worth of

high-tech craft machinery at the equivalent of several months factory

wages — and still rapidly falling — is a direct reversal of the earlier

transition from craft to factory tools.

The cost of capital goods was the central factor in the success or

failure of worker cooperatives. According to John Curl, the first major

wave of American worker cooperatives was organized through the National

Trades’ Union in the 1830s. As with the Owenite trade union cooperatives

in Britain, they were occurred mostly in craft industries in which the

basic tools of the trade were relatively inexpensive.[131]

Worker cooperatives were a frequent resort of striking workers in the

early history of America. For example in 1768 twenty striking journeyman

tailors in New York, in the first strike by wage-workers in American

history, set up their own cooperative workshop. In 1761, journeyman

carpenters in Philadelphia striking for the ten-hour day formed a

cooperative and undercut their master’s price by 25%; they disbanded the

co-op when they went back to work. The same tactic was used by

shoemakers in Baltimore, 1794, and Philadelphia, 1806.[132]

This pattern recurred throughout American labor history so long as

artisan production prevailed, and the organization of cooperatives

expanded from being purely a strike tactic to providing an alternative

to wage labor. Its feasibility depended on the predominance of artisan

production with hand tools in most industries. But by the 1840s, the

rise of factory production with expensive machinery had fundamentally

altered this state of affairs. As the means of production became

prohibitively expensive, the majority of the labor force was relegated

to factory employment for wages, with machinery owned by someone

else.[133]

But with the technological developments described earlier — the rise of

digitally controlled machine tools comparable in price, in relative

terms, to the artisan tools of 200 years ago — this process has

reversed. The cost of physical means of production, in a growing share

of industries, is no longer the bottleneck factor which restricts

cooperative production.

*Immaterial Production.** What cheap micro-manufacturing technology has

done for physical production, the personal computer and Internet did for

immaterial production. As Michel Piore and Charles Sabel argue, the

desktop computer is “a machine that meets Marx’s definition of an

artisan’s tool: it is an instrument that responds to and extends the

productive capacities of the user.”[134]

The desktop computer is the primary item of capital equipment in a

number of forms of immaterial production — music, desktop publishing,

and software, in particular. Supplemented by assorted packages of

rapidly cheapening printing, sound editing, etc., equipment, it can do

things in the publishing, music and broadcast industries that once

required initial capital outlays of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The old mass media, according to Yochai Benkler, were “typified by

high-cost hubs and cheap, ubiquitous, reception-only systems at the

end.” Hence production was limited to “those that could collect

sufficient funds to set up a hub.”[135]

But the new Internet-era communications system is distinguished, rather,

by “network architecture and the [low] cost of becoming a speaker.” The

cost of owning a node is drastically reduced, and the old hub-and-spoke

architecture is replaced by many-to-many connections among all

nodes.[136] And this is made possible, again, by the fact

that “the basic physical capital necessary to express and communicate

human meaning is the connected personal computer.”[137]

Way back in 2003 Tom Coates noted that, thanks to desktop- and

browser-based utilities, open-source productivity software, and the like

— much of which was far superior to the proprietary, gold-plated turd

versions their employers forced them to work with — “the gap between

what can be accomplished at home and what can be accomplished in a work

environment has narrowed dramatically over the last ten to fifteen

years.”[138]

*Distributed Energy Systems.** In addition to all the benefits of

cheap, decentralized physical and immaterial production technology, the

collapse in prices for off-grid (as well as micro-grid connected)

alternative energy generation has greatly increased the possibility for

economic autonomy.

Writers ranging from Murray Bookchin to Whole Earth and the Radical

Technology group to Amory Lovins have been promoting renewable, off-grid

energy as a liberatory technology for decades. But only in recent years

has it increased in generating capacity and fallen in cost sufficiently

to take up the burden of supporting at least a roughly “modern” standard

of living (for want of a better word), even with a rational

reconfiguration of society and the abolition of waste production.

Between 2010 and 2019, solar generation capacity fell 73% in cost, while

that of lithium ion batteries fell 80%.[139] Two aspects of

alternative energy technologies, in particular, are of importance for

their liberatory potential.

…[M]ost renewables take the form of flows, whilst fossil fuels are

stocks. Energy stocks can be stored, which is useful; but they can be

used only once. In contrast, energy flows do not exhaust themselves and

are harder to disrupt.

…[R]enewable energy sources can be deployed at almost any scale and lend

themselves better to decentralized forms of energy production and

consumption. This adds to the democratizing effects of renewable

energy.[140]

*Implications.** As outlays for physical capital fall, “human capital”

— skill, social relationships, distributed knowledge of the work process

— increasingly becomes the primary source of value creation, as well as

of the book value of the enterprise. Even where physical production

technology is a major source of productivity, the primary means of

extracting rents from it is not the necessary material cost of producing

the technology but the legal barriers to replicating it. And even in

physical production, the worker’s unique knowledge of how best to

employ* existing physical capital matters more to productivity than the
amount* of capital employed. Luigi Zingales observes that physical

assets, “which used to be the major source of rents, have become less

unique and are not commanding large rents anymore.” Rather, “the demand

for process innovation and quality improvement… can only be generated by

talented employees….”[141]

This has always been true, of course. But as the cost of physical means

of production implodes from technological advance, and a larger share of

the economy shifts to immaterial production or services, it becomes true

to a much larger degree.

From the point of view of this study the important point is that as the

value of human capital increases, and the cost of physical capital

investments needed for independent production by human capital

decreases, the power of corporate hierarchies becomes less and less

relevant. As the value of human relative to physical capital increases,

the entry barriers become progressively lower for workers to take their

human capital outside the firm and start new firms under their own

control.

The primary source of corporate power over workers is no longer

ownership of the machinery used by workers, but intangible property

rights of various sorts that act as artificial barriers restricting

human capital’s independent right to engage in production. The

capitalists’ profits increasingly depend, not on ownership of the means

of production, but on control of the right to use them — the ownership

of patents rather than machines, along with other monopolies like

non-competition contracts in service industries where human capital is

the main source of equity. But this intermediate stage, capitalism’s

last desperate attempt to snatch scarcity from the jaws of abundance, is

doomed to failure.

So, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt put it, capital plays less and

less of an organizing role, and becomes increasingly entirely parasitic

on the productive organization of the multitude itself.

In general, the hegemony of immaterial labor tends to transform the

organization of production from the linear relationships of the assembly

line to the innumerable and indeterminate relationships of distributed

networks. Information, communication, and cooperation become the norms

of production, and the network becomes its dominant form of

organization…. [E]xploitation under the hegemony of immaterial labor

is no longer primarily the expropriation of value measured by individual

or collective labor time but rather the capture of value that is

produced by cooperative labor and that becomes increasingly common

through its circulation in social networks. The central forms of

productive cooperation are no longer created by the capitalist as part

of the project to organize labor but rather emerge from the productive

energies of labor itself.[142]

…Marx insists that one of the great progressive elements of capital

historically is to organize armies of workers in cooperative productive

relationships. The capitalist calls workers to the factory…, directing

them to collaborate and communicate in production and giving them the

means to do so. In the paradigm of immaterial production, in contrast,

labor itself tends to produce the means of interaction, communication,

and cooperation for production directly…. [I]n immaterial production

the creation of cooperation has become internal to labor and thus

external to capital.[143]

…Produced relationships and communication are by their very nature

common, and yet capital manages to appropriate privately some of their

wealth.[144]

For Negri, this decline in capital’s organizing role is of great

significance. Marx argued that the proletariat was a class** in**

itself because it had been brought together by capital and performed a

functional role. But it could only become a class *for* itself when,

having been brought together by capital and begun to function together

under the direction of capital, it developed its own consciousness as

subject. The growing importance of our self-organization and initiative

outside the factory, however, means that the revolutionary subject no

longer has to come alive like a golem, from materials brought together

by capital.

…[C]ommonism is much more feasible today than in the previous situation,

in which the workers were organized and brought together by capital.

Before, the workers were brought together, they did not come together of

their own initiative. This is no longer the case and precisely this

means an enormous boost for the possibilities….

Marx has said of the working classes that they were made by capital and

that therefore it was necessary for them to become aware of their

situation through a political party, an external organization, an

ideology, et cetera, in order to become political. Today we see a

maturity and an original organization, so to speak, thanks to the

transformation that occurred in labour and society.[145]

Not only capital but rulers have become superfluous, in organizing

society: “the balance has tipped such

that the ruled now tend to be the exclusive producers of social

organization. This does not mean that sovereignty immediately crumbles

and the rulers lose all their power. It does mean that the rulers become

ever more parasitical and that sovereignty becomes increasingly

unnecessary.[146]

Note: None of the material immediately above should be taken to mean we

accept Negri and Hardt’s analytical framework uncritically. Their

analysis refers primarily to the “social factory,” which is subsumed

under capital. But every point they make about the superfluity of

capital within ththat context applies even more strongly to the

“outside” of capital (the counter-economy of direct production for use

in the commons, within the interstices of capitalism but outside

capitalist control).

II. The Network Revolution and the Imploding Cost of Coordination

In the received understanding of the mass-production era, the enormous

cost of production machinery and concomitant large scale of production

required not only large organizations to purchase the production

machinery and coordinate production, but such production by giant

institutions on a national scale required an entire ecology of other

large institutions for providing the necessary inputs and supports,

coordinating the relations between such institutions, and for correcting

and stabilizing their negative externalities.

For the Old Left in particular, this implied a post-capitalist

transition model centered on the political seizure of control over all

these large institutions — and hence the need for large institutions of

their own like vanguard revolutionary parties on the Leninist model,

parliamentary parties like Labour, or One Big Union, and a strategy

based on mass coordination, in order to carry out such a takeover.

Whether for the corporate and state managerial bureaucracies under

capitalism, the large industrial unions and political parties of the

Left, or the central planning and industrial management apparatus of the

post-1917 state socialist regimes, this institutional model required

authoritarian policies like Weberian job-descriptions, Taylorist work

rules, “best practices,” etc., all of which reduced the discretion of

the very people with the most knowledge of the production process and

subjected them to interference from those who knew the least.

The primary characteristic of coordination by a hierarchy is that

everyone needs to be on the same page for anything to get done. Strict

controls must be placed on individual initiative lest any variance

disrupt the performance of the entire organization — even if this means

a severe constraint on individual initiative. As a result, there are

long delays before the organization can react to new events, or assess

the effects of its own policies. And because such organizations are

slow-reacting dinosaurs, and have long planning horizons, they must

minimize the amount of disruption from their outside environment.

Because of the inability to leverage small contributions from individual

actors responding to situations on their own initiative, and the high

cost of formulating any policy with the full resources of the

organization, they must limit their flexibility in dealing with unique

situations and tailor their policies primarily to the most common or

typical situations at the center of the bell curve.

The rise of the World Wide Web with its many-to-many architecture, the

creation of platforms and utilities for organizing projects and making

many forms of clerical work unnecessary, and the rise of networked and

stigmergic organizational models, together mean that activities by many

actors can be coordinated through horizontal relations among the actors

themselves. Large institutions are no longer necessary for most things.

In 2002 Yochai Benkler coined the term “commons-based peer production”

as a “third mode of production,” alongside Coase’s earlier dichotomy

between individual responses to market signals and internal management

by corporate bureaucracy as the two ways of coordinating

production.[147] Commons-based peer production

is better than firms and markets for two reasons. First, it is better at

identifying and assigning human capital to information and cultural

production processes. In this regard, peer production has an advantage

in what I call “information opportunity cost.” That is, it loses less

information about who the best person for a given job might be than

either of the other two organizational modes. Second, there are

substantial increasing returns, in terms of allocation efficiency, to

allowing larger clusters of potential contributors to interact with

large clusters of information resources in search of new projects and

opportunities for collaboration.[148]

Commons-based peer production has emerged on a large scale primarily in

fields associated with networked communications technology. It has done

so because such technology overcomes the transaction costs that Coase

identified with the need for hierarchical coordination.[149]

It has also tended to emerge in areas where human capital, rather than

physical capital, is the main source of value creation, because its

increased efficiency in motivating and coordinating human effort is a

central advantage of commons-based peer production.[150]

The advantage of commons-based peer production is that all decisions are

reserved to those best qualified to make them, and these agents are

identified by self-selection.

Commons-based peer production… relies on decentralized information

gathering and exchange to reduce the uncertainty of participants, and

has particular advantages as an information process for identifying

human creativity available to work on information and cultural resources

in the pursuit of projects, and as an allocation process for allocating

that creative effort. It depends on very large aggregations of

individuals independently scouring their information environment in

search of opportunities to be creative in small or large increments.

These individuals then self-identify for tasks and perform them…. If

the problems of motivation and organization can be solved, however, then

such a system has two major advantages over firms and markets. First, it

places the point of decision about assigning any given person to any

given set of resources with the individual…. What peer production does

is provide a framework, within which individuals who have the best

information available about their own fit for a task can self-identify

for the task. This provides an information gain over firms and markets,

but only if the system develops some mechanism to filter out mistaken

judgments agents make about themselves. This is why practically all

successful peer production systems have a robust mechanism for peer

review or statistical weeding out of contributions from agents who

misjudge themselves.

…Peer production has an advantage over firms and markets because it

allows larger groups of individuals to scour larger groups of resources

in search of materials, projects, collaborations, and combinations than

do firms or individuals who function in markets. This is because when

production is organized on a market or firm model, transaction costs

associated with property and contract limit the access of people to each

other, to resources and to projects, but do not do so when it is

organized on a peer production model.[151]

Benkler’s reservation concerning problems of organization and motivation

is the reason why such stigmergic coordination (a concept which I

discuss below) is ill-suited to the capitalist firm, and instead

requires a third mode of production. A hierarchical, absentee-owned

business firm has fundamental conflicts of interest baked into it that

impede the incentive of production workers to use their best judgement

or give their best effort, and make it unsafe for superiors to trust

subordinates with discretion. The capitalist business firm must resort

to suboptimal forms of coordination, despite efficiency losses, as an

inescapable cost of an organization designed to enable absentee owners

and managerial hierarchies to extract surpluses from those engaged in

production. As Benkler put it, “no one will invest in a project if they

cannot appropriate its benefits.”[152]

Part of the solution to the motivation problem, especially in cases

where the overall project is not a money-making effort and participants

receive no monetary remuneration, is that the specific tasks are

self-assigned based entirely on interest. In addition, when such

stigmergic coordination is incorporated into the operations of a

worker-owned and -managed firm — a case in which Benkler shows

comparatively little interest — the motivation problem is greatly

reduced by the fact that no stratum of absentee owners or managers is

able to expropriate productivity gains created by producers.

*Stigmergy and Permissionless Organization.** “Stigmergy” is a term

coined by biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse in the 1950s to describe the

process by which termites coordinate their activity. Social insects like

termites and ants coordinate their efforts through the independent

responses of individuals to environmental triggers like chemical

markers, without any need for a central coordinating

authority.[153] The concept was subsequently applied to the

analysis of human society.

Applied by way of analogy to human society, Francis Heylighen argues,

stigmergy refers primarily to the kinds of networked organization

associated with wikis, group blogs, and “leaderless” organizations

configured along the lines of networked cells.

The termites do not communicate about who is to do what how or when.

Their only communication is indirect: the partially executed work of the

ones provides information to the others about where to make their own

contribution. In this way, there is no need for a centrally controlled

plan, workflow, or division of labor.

While people are of course much more intelligent than social insects and

do communicate, open access development uses essentially the same

stigmergic mechanism…: any new or revised document or software

component uploaded to the site of a community is immediately scrutinized

by the members of the community that are interested to use it. When one

of them discovers a shortcoming, such as a bug, error or lacking

functionality, that member will be inclined to either solve the problem

him/herself, or at least point it out to the rest of the community,

where it may again entice someone else to take up the

problem.[154]

Mark Elliott, in his doctoral dissertation on stigmergy, contrasts

stigmergic coordination with social negotiation. Social negotiation is

the traditional method of organizing collaborative group efforts,

through agreements and compromise mediated by discussions between

individuals. The exponential growth in the number of communications with

the size of the group, obviously, imposes constraints on the feasible

size of a collaborative group, before coordination must be achieved by

hierarchy and top-down authority. Stigmergy, on the other hand, permits

collaboration on an unlimited scale by individuals acting independently.

This distinction between social negotiation and stigmergy is

illustrated, in particular, by the contrast between traditional models

of co-authoring and collaboration in a wiki.[155] Individuals

communicate indirectly, “via the stigmergic medium.”[156]

Gus diZerega’s discussion of spontaneous orders closely parallels the

concept of stigmergy: Spontaneous orders

arise from networks of independent equals whose actions generate

positive and negative feedback that help guide future actors in pursuing

their own independently conceived plans, thereby continuing the feedback

process. Each person is a node within a network and is linked by

feedback, with each node free to act on its own. The feedback they

generate minimizes the knowledge anyone needs about the system as a

whole in order to succeed within it.

All spontaneous orders possess certain abstract features in common.

Participants are equal in status and all are equally subject to whatever

rules must be followed to participate within the order. All are free to

apply these rules to any project of their choosing. Anything that can be

pursued without violating a rule is permitted, including pursuing

mutually contradictory goals. Finally, these rules facilitate

cooperation among strangers based on certain broadly shared values that

are simpler than the values actually motivating many people when they

participate. Compared to human beings, spontaneous orders are

“value-thin.”[157]

Permissionlessness is a central characteristic of stigmergic

organization. David de Ugarte quotes the Rand theorists John Arquilla

and David Ronfeldt, in “Swarming and the Future of Conflict.” In Netwar,

the

many small units “already know what they must do,” and are aware that

“they must communicate with each other not in order to prepare for

action, but only as a consequence of action, and, above all, through

action.”[158]

Stigmergy transcends the old right-left debates of “individualism” vs.

“collectivism.” It synthesizes the highest realizations of both

individualism and collectivism, and represents each of them in its most

completely actualized form, without qualifying or impairing either in

any way.

Stigmergy is not “collectivist” in the traditional sense, as it was

understood in the days when a common effort on any significant scale

required a large organization to represent the collective, and the

administrative coordination of individual efforts through a hierarchy.

But it is the ultimate realization of collectivism, in that it removes

the transaction costs involved in concerted action by many individuals.

It is the ultimate realization of individualism because all actions are

the free, permissionless actions of individuals; the “collective” is

simply the sum total of individual actions. Every individual is free to

formulate any innovation she sees fit, and every individual or voluntary

association of individuals is likewise free to adopt the innovation, or

not, as they see fit. The extent to which any innovation is adopted

results entirely from the unanimous consent of every voluntary grouping

that adopts it. Each innovation is modular (meaning, as Benkler

explains, that the project “can be broken down into smaller

components… that can be independently produced before they are

assembled into a whole”[159]), and may be adopted into any

number of larger projects if it is found useful. Any grouping where

there is disagreement over adoption may fork and replicate their project

with or without the innovation.

In this regard it attains the radical democratic ideal of unanimous

consent of the governed, which is never completely possible under

any representative or majoritarian system. Consent — the individual’s

participation in the decisions that affected her — was the central value

of Jeffersonian democracy (at least as stated). The smaller the unit of

governance, and the closer it was to the individual, the closer it

approached the ideal of unanimous consent to all acts of government.

Hence Jefferson’s proposed ward republics, whose chief virtue was the

increased role of each individual in influencing the outcome of policy.

But this ideal can only be fully attained when the unit of governance is

the individual. So majority rule was the lesser evil, a way to

approximate as closely as possible to the spirit of unanimous consent in

cases where an entire group of people had to be bound by a single

decision. Stigmergy removes the need for any individual to be bound by

the group will. When all group actions reflect the unanimous will of the

participants, as permitted by stigmergic organization, the ideal of

unanimous consent is finally achieved in its fullness.

Group action is facilitated with greater ease and lower transaction

costs than ever before, but all “group actions” are the unanimous

actions of the participating individuals. As described by Heather Marsh:

With stigmergy, an initial idea is freely given, and the project is

driven by the idea, not by a personality or group of personalities. No

individual needs permission… or consensus… to propose an idea or

initiate a project. There is no need to discuss or vote on the idea, if

an idea is exciting or necessary it will attract interest. The interest

attracted will be from people actively involved in the system and

willing to put effort into carrying the project further, not empty votes

from people with little interest or involvement…. Stigmergy also puts

individuals in control over their own work, they do not need group

permission to tell them what system to work on or what part to

contribute.

The person with the initial idea may or may not carry the task further.

Evangelizing the idea is voluntary, by a group that is excited by the

idea; they may or may not be the ones to carry it out. It is unnecessary

to seek start up funding and supporters; if an idea is good it will

receive the support required…. Secrecy and competition is unnecessary

because once an idea is given, it and all new development belongs to

anyone who chooses to work on it…. All ideas are accepted or rejected

based on the needs of the system….

Communication between nodes of a system is on an as needed basis.

Transparency allows information to travel freely between the various

nodes…. Information sharing is driven by the information, not personal

relationships. If data is relevant to several nodes it will be

immediately transmitted to all, no formal meetings between official

personalities are necessary.

…It is neither reasonable nor desirable for individual thought and

action to be subjugated to group consensus in matters which do not

affect the group, and it is frankly impossible to accomplish complex

tasks if every decision must be presented for approval; that is the

biggest weakness of the hierarchical model.[160]

Benkler uses a hypothetical case to illustrate, in concrete terms, how

stigmergic coordination works:

Imagine that one person, or a small group of friends, wants a utility.

It could be a text editor, photo-retouching software, or an operating

system. The person or small group starts by developing a part of this

project, up to a point where the whole utility — if it is simple enough

— or some important part of it, is functional, though it might have much

room for improvement. At this point, the person makes the program freely

available to others, with its source code…. When others begin to use

it, they may find bugs, or related utilities that they want to add

(e.g., the photo-retouching software only increases size and sharpness,

and one of its users wants it to allow changing colors as well). The

person who has found the bug or is interested in how to add functions to

the software may or may not be the best person in the world to actually

write the software fix. Nevertheless, he reports the bug or the new need

in an Internet forum of users of the software. That person, or someone

else, then thinks that they have a way of tweaking the software to fix

the bug or add the new utility. They then do so, just as the first

person did, and release a new version of the software with the fix or

the added utility. The result is a collaboration between three people —

the first author, who wrote the initial software; the second person, who

identified a problem or shortcoming; and the third person, who fixed it.

This collaboration is not managed by anyone who organizes the three, but

is instead the outcome of them all reading the same Internet-based forum

and using the same software, which is released under an open, rather

than proprietary, license….[161]

In a hierarchy, all communications between members or between local

nodes must pass through a limited number of central nodes. The only

communications allowed to pass from one member or local node to another

are those which meet the standards for distribution of those who control

the central nodes. Only a few nodes within a hierarchy have the

authority to transmit; hence the use of the phrase “one-to-many” to

describe its topology. The version of local news that appears in the

local newspaper under the byline of a local journalist may be far

superior in relevant detail and analysis, but it is the wire service

version — even if far inferior in quality — which appears in local

newspapers all around the world. It is only the communications approved

by the Party Secretariat that are heard by all local cells of a

party.[162]

But in a distributed network, every node has the power to transmit as

well as receive, and any two nodes can communicate directly with each

other without passing through a central node or obtaining the approval

of whoever controls that node.

A network is “plurarchical,” in de Ugarte’s terminology, rather than

democratic. Instead of the individual members simply selecting who

controls the central nodes, “[s]omeone makes a proposal and everyone who

wishes to join in can do so. The range of the action in question will

depend on the degree to which the proposal is accepted.” Democracy is a

“scarcity system” in which decision-making power is rivalrous: “the

collective must face an either/or choice, between one filter and

another, between one representative and another.” In a distributed

network, on the other hand, decision-making power is non-rivalrous. Each

individual’s decision affects only herself, and does not impede the

ability of others to do likewise. “Even if the majority not only

disagreed with a proposal, but also acted against it, it wouldn’t be

able to prevent the proposal from being carried out.”[163]

“[I]n the blogosphere,” he writes elsewhere,

a space where the social cost of an extra post is zero, any blogger’s

publishing his or her information does not decrease anyone else’s

publication possibilities. The marginal cost is zero. The need to

collectively decide what is published and what is not simply disappears.

As opposed to scarcity logic, which generates the need for democratic

decision, abundant logic opens the door to pluriarchy.

In such a universe, every collective or hierarchical decision on what to

publish or not can only be conceived as an artificial generation of

scarcity, a decrease in diversity, and an impoverishment for

all.[164]

Pirate Party co-founder Rick Falkvinge also regards permissionlessness —

the ability to act without first getting everybody on the same page — as

a major advantage of stigmergic organization:

…if you have a large assembly of people who are forced to agree on

every movement, including the mechanism for what constitutes such

agreement, then you rarely achieve anything at all.

Therefore, as you build a swarm, it is imperative that everybody is

empowered to act in the swarm just through what they believe will

further its goals – but no one is allowed to empower themselves to

restrict others, neither on their own nor through superior numbers.

This concept – that people are allowed, encouraged and expected to

assume speaking and acting power for themselves in the swarm’s name, but

never the kind of power that limits others’ right to do the same thing –

is a hard thing to grasp for many….

As a result, somebody who believes the swarm should take a certain

action to further its goals need only start doing it. If others agree

that the action is beneficial, then they will join in on that course of

action….

Traditional marketing says that a message needs to stay constant to

penetrate. My experience says that’s total hogwash….

If somebody comes up to you and tells you a factual statement in a

language that you identify as that of a group you dislike, you are very

likely to discard that message as false, despite its actual truthness.

In the same vein, if somebody that dresses, speaks, and acts in a manner

consistent with your social standards tells you a factual statement,

then you are likely to accept it as plausible and maybe examine it on

its own merits later….

The recipe is ridiculously simple: communicate your vision to everybody,

and let the thousands of activists translate your vision into words that

fit their specific social context. Don’t make a one-size-fits-all

message that everybody has to learn. It will be a

one-size-fits-none.[165]

As Heylighen describes it, stigmergy “can be seen as a fundamental

mechanism of self-organization”:

it allows global, coordinated activity to emerge out of local,

independent actions. Like self-organization in general, stigmergy relies

on feedback: action elicits action, via the intermediate of the trace.

This feedback is typically positive, in that actions intensify and

elaborate the trace, thus eliciting more intense and diverse further

actions. The resulting virtuous cycle explains in part why stigmergic

organization is so surprisingly effective, enabling the construction of

complex structures — such as a termite hill, a network of trails, or a

global encyclopedia — in a very short time, even when starting from

scratch. When needed, feedback can also be negative: errors,

disturbances or “overshoots” that make the trace deviate from its ideal

shape will elicit actions that correct the deviation.[166]

*Agility.** Stigmergic, networked organizations are far more agile than

hierarchical institutions because they require no permission or

administrative coordination to act. A traditional hierarchy, in which

decisions are mediated administratively or socially, incurs enormous

transaction costs getting everyone on the same page before anyone can

act.

Paul Mason points out the irony involved in corporate capitalism — whose

apologists used to contrast its agility to the bureaucratic ossification

of a planned economy — now being lumped together with state socialist

bureaucracy in contrast to the agility of networks.

…[T]he stigmergic, horizontal forms of of organization facilitated by

networked communications have drastically reduced the transaction costs

of coordinating action outside of traditional institutional hierarchy.

They have made the central planning of the large corporation as obsolete

as the central planning of Gosplan.

Economists like to demonstrate the archaic nature of command planning

with mind-games like ‘imagine the Soviet Union tried to create

Starbucks’. Now, here’s a more intriguing game: imagine if Amazon,

Toyota or Boeing tried to create Wikipedia.[167]

Agility is a force-multiplier. A small army that can move rapidly can

defeat a large, slow army in detail by successively concentrating local

superiority of force in a series of places in a short time. Because of

their agility, shortened reaction time, and speed with which they share

information and new techniques, networks are inside what strategist John

Boyd called the “OODA loop” of hierarchies.[168] They react

more quickly than hierarchies to changing circumstances, staying a step

ahead and keeping them constantly off-balance. Networks can go through

many generational cycles of innovation while hierarchies are still

ponderously formulating a response to issues with first-generation

practices. The ability to process new information, and to make

generational changes in praxis more quickly in response to that

information more quickly, results in superior performance. Boyd called

it the Law of Iteration:

the primary determinant to winning dogfights was not observing,

orienting, planning, or acting better. The primary determinant to

winning dogfights was observing, orienting, planning, and acting faster.

In other words, how quickly one could iterate. *Speed of iteration*,

Boyd suggested, *beats quality of iteration*.[169]

OODA loops tend to become shorter as the “distance” decreases or

“friction” is reduced (in informational terms) between the various

stages of the cycle. Anything (like approval processes within a

hierarchy) that increases buffering or delay between the different

sub-processes of the OODA loop, or impedes feedback, will slow down

information-processing and reaction. So a permissionless system in which

the observer is empowered to immediately act on information is ideal,

from an OODA standpoint.

In the case of networked or stigmergic organizations, only successful

iterations matter because their successes become the collective property

of the entire network. A single network is experiencing — in the sense

of benefiting from the experience of — thousands, millions or billions

of constant iterations. So it’s able to undergo generational innovations

with the speed of replicating yeast, because members are free to

innovate on a modular basis on their own initiative and their

contributions are immediately free to anyone in the network who wants to

adopt them.

Compare the network’s anti-fragility and its robust engagement with its

environment, to the hierarchical organization as exemplified by John

Kenneth Galbraith’s corporate technostructure in *The New Industrial

State*. The technostructure survives only by suppressing randomness and

volatility in its surrounding environment and making it predictable — in

other words, it’s fragile.

When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact planned

course, with as little deviation as possible — for deviations are more

harmful than helpful. This is why the fragile needs to be very

predictive in its approach, and, conversely, predictive systems cause

fragility. When you want deviations, and you don’t care about the

possible dispersion of outcomes that the future can bring, since most

will be helpful, you are antifragile.[170]

What makes life simple is that the robust and antifragile don’t have to

have as accurate a comprehension of the world as the fragile — and they

do not need forecasting.[171]

On the other hand what Taleb calls “optionality” — the freedom from not

being locked into a course of action by past investments or a burden of

overhead and debt — means “you don’t have much need for what is commonly

called intelligence, knowledge, insight, skills…. For you don’t

have to be right that often.” Instead, you can gain from random trial

and error and incremental tinkering. In evolution, “nature simply keeps

what it likes…. ”[172] The network benefits from the

long-shot contributions of any members, without any downside risk to the

network as a whole from individual failures.

*Automation of Routine Tasks, Improvement of Tooth-to-Tail Ratio.**

Digital technology also promotes coordination by automating the most

labor-intensive, routine tasks that once engaged most of the

rank-and-file members of organisations, and frees it up for other

things. Cory Doctorow, countering Evgeny Morozov’s facile critique of

networked activism, noted the practical effect of digital technology in

increasing the tooth-to-tail ratio of all kinds of organizations:

As a lifelong political activist, I remember the thousands of

person-hours we used to devote to putting up flyposters, stuffing

envelopes, and running telephone trees simply to mobilise people for a

protest, petition or public meeting…. I’m sure that if we’d been able

to get the word out to thousands of people with the click of a mouse, we

wouldn’t have hung up our placards and called it a day; that drudge work

absorbed the lion’s share of our time and our capacity to think up new

and exciting ways to make change.[173]

Enabling Direct Appeals Outside Institutional Propaganda

Apparatuses. Until the EZLN uprising in Chiapas began the

post-1994 cycle of networked, horizontalist resistance movements,

discussion of the potential of networked communication for radical

organizing was largely theoretical and limited primarily to academic

circles. Just two years before the uprising, in 1992, Harry Cleaver had

speculated on what the transformation of ARPANET into the Internet, the

rise of radical listservs, etc., might lead to.[174]

The Mexican authorities responded to the uprising fully expecting the

same outcome as in previous such confrontations: quick, quiet

suppression, with news coverage limited to the inside pages of the

international news sections of a few major newspapers of

record.[175]

Instead, propagation of news surrounding the Jan. 1, 1994 EZLN uprising

in Chiapas and subsequent attempt at state repression was

unprecedentedly swift thanks to the introduction of networked

communications, and completely blind-sided the Mexican regime.

The first activist analysis of communicational dimension of the conflict

noted that the “most striking thing about the sequence of events set in

motion on January 1, 1994 has been the speed with which news of the

struggle circulated and the rapidity of the mobilization of support

which resulted.” Modern computer communications… made it possible for

the Zapatistas to get their message out despite governmental spin

control and censorship. Mailing lists and conferences also facilitated

discussions and debate among concerned observers that led to the

organization of protest and support activities in over forty countries

around the world. The Zapatista rebellion was weaving, the analysis

concluded, a global “electronic fabric of struggle….”

The power to provoke invitations to dialogue with supranational

capitalist institutions was not always there. Before social movements

demonstrated their ability to organize an embarrassing amount of public

pressure, they were ignored. To build such a level of pressure

opposition movements organized themselves internationally, or globally,

in ways that bypassed all the layers of mediation that previously

protected these institutions. In this way the movements were able to

confront the institutions at their own supranational level….

…[T]he elaborate pattern of connections and linkages within social

movements bring vast numbers of imaginative people into a collective

endeavor where their joint creativity challenges that of a Power often

organized in a more rigid and less-flexible manner. Against a Powerful

rule-making and enforcing institution, grassroots power pits a

rhizomatic constituent force, more capable of innovating and elaborating

new lines of flight in struggle.[176]

In 2006, halfway to the present, Cleaver remarked on “how the rapid

dissemination of information by journalists and others, through a

variety of media, including the Internet, played a central role in the

mobilization of the solidarity and support for the Zapatistas that

helped them survive and continue to elaborate autonomous approaches to

self-organization.”

We also know that not only the dissemination of information but also the

spread of discussion about tactics and strategy in those same networks

circulated the efforts at solidarity and the mobilization of support:

from demonstrations against the Mexican government around the world to

the arrival of international observers and material aid to the

rebellious communities. Moreover, we also know that those networks not

only facilitated the organization of the Continental and

Intercontinental Encounters against Neoliberalism and for Humanity in

the spring and summer of 1996 and the Second Intercontinental Encounter

in Spain in 1997 but led to the formation of Peoples’ Global Action and

the first Global Action Days against the World Trade Organization (WTO)

in Geneva in 1998. Those beginnings led, in turn, to the subsequent

Battle of Seattle and the emergence of Indymedia in 1999 and the many

demonstrations against the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, and the G8 that

followed in places such as Davos, Prague and Genoa, i.e., a global

movement contesting the capitalist neoliberal reorganization of the

world.

The importance of these developments cannot be overestimated. Never

before in history have we seen anything like them. Never before has

there been such intense and interconnected opposition to capitalism.

Capitalism has always been resisted and opposed but never before have so

many moments of resistance and opposition been linked in the ways

achieved during the last ten years.[177]

Note that the movements of 2011 and after, which dwarfed those he was

describing — and whose aftershocks still persist — were yet to come.

Modularity and Granularity. A modular architecture

means that a movement, system or network can expand incrementally, by

the horizontal proliferation of new nodes, rather than as all-or-nothing

thing.

…[W]hen a project of any size is broken up into little pieces, each of

which could be performed by an individual in a short amount of time, the

motivation necessary to get any given individual to contribute need only

be very small. This suggests that peer production will thrive where

projects have three characteristics. First, they must be modular. That

is, they must be divisible into components, or modules, each of which

can be produced independently of the production of the others. This

enables production to be incremental and asynchronous, pooling the

efforts of different people, with different capabilities, who are

available at different times. Second, the granularity of the modules is

important. Granularity refers to the sizes of the project’s modules, and

in order for a peer production process successfully to pool a relatively

large pool of contributors the modules should be predominately

fine-grained, or small in size. This allows the project to capture

contributions from large numbers of contributors whose motivation level

will not sustain anything more than quite small efforts towards the

project…. In addition, a project will likely be more efficient if it

can accommodate variously sized contributions. Heterogeneous granularity

will allow people with different levels of motivation to collaborate by

contributing smaller or larger grained contributions, consistent with

their level of motivation. Third, and finally, a successful peer

production enterprise must have low-cost integration, which includes

both quality control over the modules and a mechanism for integrating

the contributions into the finished product…. Automated integration

and iterative peer production of integration, for example the use of

free software to integrate peer production of some other information

good, are the primary mechanisms by which peer production projects

described in this paper have lowered the cost of integration to the

point where they can succeed and sustain themselves.[178]

Horizontal organizations are one of many examples of the module-platform

architecture. Modular systems achieve economies by replicating and

recombining a limited number of standardized parts. Modular,

building-block structures are ubiquitous. Why? Because such a structure

“transforms a system’s ability to learn, evolve and adapt… Once a set

of building blocks… has been tweaked and refined and thoroughly

debugged through experience… then it can generally be adapted and

recombined to build a great many new concepts… Certainly that’s a much

more efficient way to create something new than starting all over from

scratch. And that fact, in turn, suggests a whole new mechanism for

adaptation in general. Instead of moving through that immense space of

possibilities step by step, so to speak, an adaptive system can

reshuffle its building blocks and take giant leaps.” A small number of

building blocks can be shuffled and recombined to make a huge number of

complex systems.[179]

Modular systems also support emergent phenomena like collective

intelligence. If you start with a large number of modular individuals,

each capable of interacting with a few other individuals, and acting on

other individuals according to a simple grammar of a few rules, under

the right circumstances the system can undergo a rapid phase transition,

according to systems theorist Stuart Kauffman: “The growth of complexity

really does have something to do with far-from-equilibrium systems

building themselves up, cascading to higher and higher levels of

organization. Atoms, molecules, autocatalytic sets, et cetera.” And the

new higher level entities, in turn, can interact among themselves,

perhaps creating another autocatalytic phase transition to a higher

level.[180]

III. The Impotence of Enforcement, and Superiority of Circumvention to

Resistance

We already saw that the means of production and coordination have

undergone a cost implosion, and that a rapidly expanding range of tools

is becoming affordable for direct production for use in the commons.

This means the cost of means of production, and their control by

capitalist owners, is no longer the main barrier to production outside

the control of capital. Rather, artificial property rights, artificial

scarcities, and legal barriers are the main avenues of capitalist

control. Fortunately, these artificial property rights and legal

barriers are increasingly becoming unenforceable.

Our discussion of the superior agility of stigmergic organization

applies, specifically and especially, to the arms race between

technologies of surveillance and control, and technologies of evasion

and circumvention, respectively. Because such organizations are more

agile than authoritarian hierarchies, they are able to get inside the

state’s OODA loop in developing technologies of circumvention faster

than the state can develop technologies of control.

Authoritarian hierarchies respond to attack by becoming more

authoritarian and hierarchical, while networks respond by becoming more

agile and resilient. As Ori Brafman and Rod Backstrom put it, “when

attacked, a decentralized organization tends to become even more open

and decentralized.”[181] Hierarchies, on the other hand,

combat leaks by clamping down on internal communications, erecting

barriers to the transmission of information between their members, and

becoming even more opaque to themselves than previously (and internal

knowledge problems and information hoarding are endemic to hierarchy to

begin with).

The learning capacity of networks is part of what Nassim Taleb calls

“antifragility.” An antifragile system is one that “regenerates itself

continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events,

unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility. The antifragile gains

from prediction errors, in the long run.”[182] Hierarchies,

on the other hand, don’t just improve through experience; they actually

learn the *wrong* things (e.g., look at the Maginot Line as a response

to the lessons of WWI; or how TSA’s reactions to attempted terror

attacks not only make the aviation system less efficient and more costly

in performing its transportation functions, but also less effective

against future attacks).

The resistance’s agility in technical development mean it is able to

develop mashups of existing technology faster than the corporate state

was able to develop the original technologies. It can develop means of

circumvention faster than the state can deal with them.

In the case of copyright law, “piracy” is effectively legal now. It’s

not as widespread as it might otherwise be precisely because, for the

last decade or so, Apple and other companies have dealt with de facto

competition from the threat of file-sharing by making media downloads

cheap and convenient enough that piracy isn’t worth the trouble. With

the recent return to price-gouging walled garden models — for instance

the ongoing replacement of services like Netflix with a proliferation of

company-specific streaming services — it’s quite likely that

file-sharing rates will increase again. Likewise, any technological

advance that increases the convenience of file-sharing will make

In the case of patents on physical goods, the micromanufacturing

revolution is making them much harder to enforce. One benefit of the

implosion of capital requirements for manufacturing is that the number

of producers increases and the average market size shrinks to the point

that they are operating below the regulatory state’s radar.

Traditionally, patent enforcement depended on the low transaction costs

resulting from a small number of large producers marketing a relatively

small number of goods through a small number of nationwide retailers.

Without the ability to enforce their claimed powers, government commands

are about as relevant as the edicts of the Emperor Norton. It’s far more

cost-effective to go directly after the state’s enforcement capabilities

than try to change the law.

In John Robb’s terminology, the state’s enforcement capability is its

Systempunkt* — its weak point — in a systems disruption strategy. It’s

based on the term *Schwerpunkt* from the theory of Blitzkrieg warfare.

The *Schwerpunkt* was

the point of greatest emphasis…, where the enemy front lines may be

pierced by an explosive combination of multiple weapons systems (tanks,

artillery, airpower, and so forth). Once the line is pierced, armored

forces can drive deep into enemy territory to disrupt command, control,

and logistical systems. When these systems are disrupted, the top-heavy

military units they support collapse in confusion.[183]

Just as important, the majority of the enemy’s combat forces can be

bypassed and rendered ineffective by systems disruption, without the

attrition cost of defeating them piecemeal.

And the *Systempunkt*

is the point in a system (either an infrastructure system or a

marketplace), usually identified by one of the many autonomous groups

operating in the field, that will collapse the target system if it is

destroyed. Within an infrastructure system, this collapse takes the form

of disrupted flows that result in financial loss or supply shortages.

Within a market, the result is a destabilization of the psychology of

the marketplace that will introduce severe inefficiencies and

chaos.[184]

According to Robb, traditional strategic bombing of the kind used in

WWII measured success by a metric based on the total percentage of an

infrastructure’s capacity which was destroyed. But by that standard —

destroying a majority of the actual miles of transmission lines or rails

within a network — success was extremely costly. Al Qaeda Iraq, in

contrast, achieves enormous force multipliers disabling entire networks

by destroying a few key nodes. A small attack on a single point of a

critical oil pipeline out of an entire network, at a cost of $2000, cost

the Iraqi government $500 million in lost oil revenue.[185]

In addition, the $8/barrel “terror premium” it added to the price of oil

cost the global economy $640 million.[186] An attack on Shell

Oil’s Forcados loading dock platform in Nigeria, which cost roughly

$2000 to execute, cost Shell $400,000 in lost oil exports and another

$50 million from the shutdown of an adjacent oil field.[187]

In the case of an electrical power grid, attacks on two percent of the

high-load nodes can shut down 60% of an infrastructure’s capacity, and

attacks on one percent can shut down 40% of capacity.[188] A

system can be put out of operation, as if its entire physical

infrastructure were destroyed, at the cost of destroying only a tiny

fraction of its actual physical assets.

Likewise, actually taking control of the state’s policy-making

apparatus, through conventional politics, is extremely costly. But by

attacking the state at its *Systempunkt* —

enforcement — we can render it ineffective against

us at a tiny fraction of the cost. As Charles Johnson argues:

A law that cannot be enforced is as good as a a law that has been

repealed….

If you put all your hope for social change in legal reform, and if you

put all your faith for legal reform in maneuvering within the political

system, then to be sure you will find yourself outmaneuvered at every

turn by those who have the deepest pockets and the best media access and

the tightest connections. There is no hope for turning this system

against them; because, after all, the system was made for them and the

system was made by them. Reformist political campaigns inevitably turn

out to suck a lot of time and money into the politics — with just about

none of the reform coming out on the other end. But if you put your

faith for social change in methods that ignore or ridicule their

parliamentary rules, and push forward through grassroots direct action —

if your hopes for social change don’t depend on reforming tyrannical

laws, and can just as easily be fulfilled by widespread success at

bypassing those laws and making them irrelevant to your life — then

there is every reason to hope that you will see more freedom and less

coercion in your own lifetime. There is every reason to expect that you

will see more freedom and less coercion tomorrow than you did today, no

matter what the law-books may say.[189]

One of the benefits of stigmergic organization is that individual

problems are tackled by the self-selected individuals and groups best

suited to deal with them — and their solutions are then passed on, via

the network, to everyone who can benefit from them. Individual

innovations immediately become part of the common pool of intelligence,

universally available to all. To take Cory Doctorow’s example of

file-sharing:

Raise your hand if you’re thinking something like, “But DRM doesn’t have

to be proof against smart attackers, only average individuals!…. ”

…. I don’t have to be a cracker to break your DRM. I only need to

know how to search Google, or Kazaa, or any of the other general-purpose

search tools for the cleartext that someone smarter than me has

extracted.[190]

It used to be that copy-prevention companies’ strategies went like this:

“We’ll make it easier to buy a copy of this data than to make an

unauthorized copy of it. That way, only the *uber*-nerds and the

cash-poor/time rich classes will bother to copy instead of buy.” But

every time a PC is connected to the Internet and its owner is taught to

use search tools like Google (or The Pirate Bay), a third option

appears: you can just download a copy from the Internet….[191]

Bruce Schneier describes the stigmergic model as automation lowering the

marginal cost of sharing innovations.

Automation also allows class breaks to propagate quickly because less

expertise is required. The first attacker is the smart one; everyone

else can blindly follow his instructions. Take cable TV fraud as an

example. None of the cable TV companies would care much if someone built

a cable receiver in his basement and illicitly watched cable television.

Building that device requires time, skill, and some money. Few people

could do it. Even if someone built a few and sold them, it wouldn’t have

much impact.

But what if that person figured out a class break against cable

television? And what if the class break required someone to push some

buttons on a cable box in a certain sequence to get free cable TV? If

that person published those instructions on the Internet, it could

increase the number of nonpaying customers by millions and significantly

affect the company’s profitability.[192]

This is yet another example of the benefits of reduced cost of

aggregating or replicating small contributions, and of modular design.

In Schneier’s words, expertise is “[e]ncapsulated and commoditized.”

“Take a class break [i.e. a hack], automate it, and propagate the break

for free, and you’ve got a recipe for a security

disaster.”[193]

Open-source insurgency follows this model, with each individual

contribution quickly becoming available to all. Robb writes of the

pattern of guerrilla war in Iraq:

I call this pattern the bazaar. The bazaar solves the problem: how do

small, potentially antagonistic networks combine to conduct war? Lessons

from Eric Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” provides a starting

point for further analysis. Here are the factors that apply (from the

perspective of the guerrillas):

- Release early and often. Try new forms of attacks against different

types of targets early and often. Don’t wait for a perfect plan.

- Given a large enough pool of co-developers, any difficult problem will

be seen as obvious by someone, and solved. Eventually some participant

of the bazaar will find a way to disrupt a particularly difficult

target. All you need to do is copy the process they used.

- Your co-developers (beta-testers) are your most

valuable resource. The other guerrilla networks in the bazaar are your

most valuable allies. They will innovate on your plans, swarm on

weaknesses you identify, and protect you by creating system

noise.[194]

IV. Superior General Efficiency and Low Overhead

We already saw superior agility and faster OODA loops as one of the

efficiencies of stigmergic organization, in particular. It’s also one of

many efficiencies inhering, more broadly, in the new models of

production and coordination as a whole. The postcapitalist economy

enabled by new technologies is more efficient than its predecessor in a

wide range of closely related ways: it is more agile, lower in overhead,

and better at extracting maximum value from minimum inputs.

John Robb uses the engineering analysis template of “STEMI compression”

(Space, Time, Energy, Mass, Information) to summarize a number of them.

- Space. Less volume/area used.

- Time. Faster.

- Energy. Less energy. Higher efficiency.

- Mass. Less waste.

- Information. Higher efficiency. Less management overhead.

In particular, Robb sees his Resilient Communities (substitute the

commons-based local economies we discuss in Chapter Seven and the

concept applies virtually the same) as an example of across-the-board

STEMI compression.

- Space. Localization (or hyperlocalization) radically reduces the

- Time. Wasted time in global transport is washed away. JIT (just in

- Energy. Wasted energy for global transport is eliminated. Energy

- Mass. Less systemic wastage. Made to order vs. made for market.

- Information. Radical simplification. Replaces hideously complex

It’s closely related to the concept of “productive recursion,” which

Nathan Cravens uses to refer to the order of magnitude reduction in

material inputs required to obtain a good when it is produced in the

social economy, without the artificial levels of overhead and waste

associated with the corporate‐state nexus.[196] Savings in

productive recursion include (say) laboring to produce a design in a

fraction of the time it would take to earn the money to pay for a

proprietary design, or simply using an open source design; or reforging

scrap metal at a tenth the cost of using virgin metal.[197]

You can get some idea of the general concept and its potential just from

comparing the prices of (for example) an MRI machine in the US vs.

France, as a result of the difference in overhead from waste and

embedded rents even between two bureaucratic monopoly capitalist

countries, when one is somewhat less bureaucratic than the other. But

Cravens sites a long series of examples from Neil Gershenfeld’s book

FAB*, consisting mostly of the achievements of alternative technology

and hardware hacking groups in Indian villages.

Marcin Jakubowski of the Open Source Ecology group argues, as do Amory

and Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken of the Rocky Mountain Institute, that

the efficiencies of productive recursion are cumulative. Jakubowski

writes: “Cascading Factor 10 cost reduction occurs when the availability

of one product decreases the cost of the next product.”[198]

In *Natural Capitalism* Hawken et al, similarly, contrast the cascading

efficiencies (“Tunneling Through the Cost Barrier”) of whole systems

design to the standard corporate design approach of considering each

component in isolation without regard for its role in a larger system,

or the even greater efficiencies upstream that may be achieved from an

initial efficiency downstream. Improving components in isolation, or

incrementally increasing efficiency, may well increase costs. But

large-scale efficiency improvements in entire designs can reduce costs

by orders of magnitude.[199]

Much of the art of engineering for advanced resource efficiency involves

harnessing helpful interactions between specific measures so that, like

loaves and fishes, the savings keep multiplying. The basic way to do

this is to “think backward,” from downstream to upstream in a system.

They give the example of a pumping system, in which the cumulative

inefficiency losses are so great that the expenditure of a thousand

units of fossil fuel energy at a power plant, by the time the energy

powers the motor, the motor powers the pump, and the fluid works its way

through the pipe, results in only a hundred energy units of flow at the

end. On the other hand, if (instead of just leaving plant layout as it

is and haphazardly laying pipes around obstacles) we design the pipe

layout to minimize friction, we will require a significantly smaller

pump, which will require a smaller motor, which will require less

electricity from the plant. Reducing energy losses from friction in the

pipes by one unit will reduce energy generation needs at the plant by

ten units.[200]

More insulation, or a more energy-efficient furnace or air conditioner

with the same capacity, will cost significantly more taken in isolation.

But if passive solar design is combined with insulation so as to reduce

the capacity of the furnace or air conditioner required by

three-fourths, the overall system will be significantly cheaper because

efficiency is increased systemically.[201]

Likewise, most of a V8 engine’s horsepower remains idle except in very

brief periods of acceleration, like passing on a freeway. And all the

added weight of that heavy engine block requires a much heavier chassis;

the engine and chassis together require power steering, and so on. So

that if you redesign a transportation system to eliminate the need for

rapid acceleration on freeways, you can scale down the engine a great

deal, lighten the chassis even more, eliminate the power steering, etc.,

until the overall system is only a fraction of the former cost.

Now consider a society in which communities are compact and mixed-use,

designed around public transit to get most people from their homes to

work and shopping, and these compact communities are linked in turn by

light rail networks. In this society the automobile is a niche product

(i.e. for those in sparsely populated areas on the outskirts of town not

served by railheads, like truck farmers who need to make periodic trips

into town; or disabled persons not adequately served by public

transportation). There are no freeways. In this society, a vehicle

designed as a utility for this niche market might well have an electric

motor rather than having an internal combustion engine at all. Most of

the components could be built (if molded body panels were replaced by

flat ones) with tabletop machines in a neighborhood shop, and the

assembly could take place entirely in such shops, resulting in still

further savings in transportation.

Generally speaking, the counter-economy is more efficient in its use of

resources because it has developed, and continues to develop, under a

set of constraints and incentives fundamentally different from those

under which capitalism functions. Capitalism has always operated in an

environment of artificial abundance of material resources, and mostly

grown by extensive development (i.e., through the addition of new

resource inputs rather than more efficient use of existing ones) because

of its privileged access to enclosed land and resources and the state’s

socialization of the costs of many material inputs. The post-capitalist

economy we are building, on the other hand, operates without such

subsidies and privileged access to resources, so that it must extract

maximum value from available labor and resources, often making more

efficient use of the castoffs and waste byproducts of capitalism.

Conversely, while the capitalist economy makes information artificially

scarce, expensive, immobile and difficult to share, the post-capitalist

economy makes much more efficient use of information by facilitating

sharing and collaboration and eliminating barriers to the flow of ideas.

*Distributed, Ephemeral Infrastructures.** Infrastructure needs and the

resulting overhead can be reduced significantly just by adopting the

whole systems design approach described above, and designing production

processes according to lean principles.

Most costs come from five percent of point consumption needs, and the

need to scale the infrastructure to cover the extra peak loads that

occur only five percent of the time. Similarly, the tendency of mass

production industry to undertake production without regard to immediate

demand, thus getting production out of scale to demand, requires

additional infrastructure for intermediate storage of in-process outputs

for which there is no immediate need.* *Because mass

production industry optimizes the efficiency of individual points in the

production process (i.e., the unit costs of a particular machine) in

isolation, without regard to maintaining sync with the overall flow of

production, the production flow is filled with eddies of excess

inventory and backlogs that add to overhead costs.

Things like asking whether the needs involved in that five percent peak

demand surge are really necessary, whether the process can be designed

to eliminate them, whether the process can be redesigned on a lean basis

to scale machine output to overall production flow and to scale

production flow to immediate demand — all these things taken together

can reduce the need for infrastructure capacity by an order of

magnitude, along with overhead costs of maintaining it when it’s idle.

But beyond that, additional savings in overhead can be achieved by new

distributed technologies whose infrastructures are embedded primarily in

the endpoints. A distributed infrastructure, Vinay Gupta writes,

provides

the same class of services that are provided by centralized systems like

the water and power grids, but without the massive centralized

investments in physical plant. For example, dry toilets and solar panels

can provide high quality services household by household without a

grid.[202]

Distributed physical infrastructures benefit from modularity in a way

directly analogous to the benefit that immaterial production receives.

Blockbuster infrastructure projects become irretrievable “sunk costs” if

the situation changes so that they cannot be completed. But if “half a

dam is no dam at all, …500 of 1000 small projects is half way to the

goal.”[203]

Modular architectures have the related virtue of what Robb calls “scale

invariance”: the part is able, in case of system disruption, to

replicate the whole. In other words the system is fractal (“across all

scaling factors…, the properties that define the whole are

conserved….”). This means that a networked system of autonomous, largely

self-sufficient local industrial ecologies is extremely resilient to

shock.

…[S]ystem recovery could be catalyzed and the damage largely mitigated,

if our global system was scale invariant. Basically, this means that if

we had communities that could produce at the local level many of the

essential products and services currently produced at the global level,

handling disconnection or buffering turbulence would be of little

consequence (also, it would be much easier for us to find ways of

protecting or making redundant the products/services that ONLY could be

produced at the global level).[204]

V. Conclusion

To summarize, the legacy system of bureaucratic capitalist corporations

and their state, educational, and non-profit counterparts is like a

Tyrannosaurus Rex dying in a swamp; the counter-economy we are

constructing within the interstices of capitalism, using liberatory

technologies, is like a swarm of piranha.

The practical implication of cheap production technologies suitable for

direct, small-scale production for use in the social economy is that we

can secede in place from capitalism with the means of production already

in our possession rather than seizing the factories. The practical

implication of network organization is that large hierarchical

institutions like centralized political parties are no longer needed for

coordinating the resistance to capitalism.

Postcapitalist transition strategy is no longer primarily about seizing

the “commanding heights” institutions of capitalism, but about building

a postcapitalist society and economy outside the control of capitalism.

Our organizations are focused, not on storming the ramparts of the old

system, but on building the new ones. When it *is* necessary to directly

confront the old system, we simply incapacitate it at minimum cost to

ourselves.

Part Two. The Age of Exodus

Chapter Three: Horizontalism and Self-Activity Over Vanguard Institutions

Introduction

New radical ideologies and forms of praxis have emerged, from the

mid-20th century on, that reject the major features of the Old Left.

Although I raise issues in a later chapter about the use of

“prefigurative” in cases where “interstitial” would in my opinion be

more appropriate, the organizational approaches described in this

chapter are prefigurative in the proper sense of the term. That is,

while “interstitial” is arguably preferable for describing an approach

to building the actual *institutional* structure of the successor

society within the shell of the existing one, “prefigurative” is

perfectly suited to horizontalist political movements insofar as they

inculcate the cultural values, habits, or personality styles around

which we envision the successor society being constituted.

Horizontalism, as an organizational style, is prefigurative as Carl

Boggs defines it: “ the embodiment, within the ongoing political

practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations,

decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate

goal.” And a horizontalist approach, in prefiguring the libertarian

society which is our goal, also hampers propagation of the current

institutional culture into post-capitalist society:

Bureaucratization creates obstacles to revolutionary change that were

only dimly foreseen by classical Marxism. The expansion of the public

sphere and the convergence of state and corporate sectors has meant more

centralized and total networks of power and, correspondingly, the

erosion of popular democratic initiative. Bureaucratic logic… helps to

enforce bourgeois ideological hegemony insofar as it diffuses a culture

of organisational adaptation, submission, pragmatism, routine; it

depoliticizes potential opposition by narrowing the range of political

discourse, by institutionalizing alienation, and posing only “technical”

solutions to problems.[205]

More recently, Sofa Saio Gradin described prefigurative politics as “the

politics of organising in the here-and-now in a way that reflects the

society we want to see in the future,” and “about shaping our cultures,

norms and social relations, as well as our formal rules and policies, in

the image of the society we desire.”[206]

The New Left appeared from the mid-50s on, in the West, as a response to

the bureaucracy and managerialism of the Old Left. In the United States

and UK in particular, it was catalyzed by reaction against the orthodox

Communist Parties, and against the politics of the Labour Party in the

UK and the New Deal and official labor movement in the U.S. In the UK it

coalesced around **New Left Review **and the Campaign for Nuclear

Disarmament in the late 50s, with Marxist historian E.P. Thompson as a

leading early figure. In the United States shortly thereafter, the

nucleus of the growing New Left movement included power-elite

sociologist C. Wright Mills (whose “Letter to the New Left” was actually

addressed to Thompson), the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee

(SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (whose Port Huron Statement

was a founding document of the New Left). It was fueled by the Free

Speech Movement at Berkeley and the anti-war movement from 1965 on. In

addition, New Left scholarship was developed by revisionist historians

of “corporate liberalism” like William Appleman Williams at *Studies on

the Left*.

Although the New Left was a diverse movement with a number of

conflicting currents, it had some elements in common. Particular

relevant to our interests are the following:

- A disillusion with bureaucratic institutions and with managerialist

- This latter preference for participatory democracy and direct action

- A shift away from the Old Left’s sole focus on the traditional

Autonomist Marxism was heavily influenced by the New Left, and shared

many of its central values. Autonomism, in turn, later had a close

relationship with Zapatismo and the subsequent cycle of horizontalist

movements.

In the next few chapters we will examine in greater detail the different

aspects of these reactions to the Old Left, and how they constitute a

larger constellation of movements focused on Exodus.

I. The New Left

If there was one defining feature of the New Left, it was a rejection of

the bureaucratic and managerial style of the Old Left’s institutions,

whether the vanguard Party of Marxism-Leninism, or the political

parties, establishment unions and welfare state of Social Democracy and

the New Deal.

In Great Britain and the United States, the New Left was initially

catalyzed by disillusionment with the orthodox Communist Parties in

those countries — first by Khrushchev’s denunciations of Stalinist

brutality, and then by the British and American Parties’ feeble response

to the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

At the same time, a new generation of socialists was growing

dissatisfied with the bureaucratic culture of Atlee’s welfare state and

its American New Deal counterpart, and the ascendancy of liberal “End of

Ideology” frameworks that limited hope for the future to tinkering

around the edges of a managerial apparatus that claimed to have mostly

relegated poverty and injustice to the imperfect past.

They increasingly saw adherents of this managerialist ideology in

liberal politics and government administration as direct counterparts of

the Organization Man in corporate bureaucracy, and more broadly as

comparable to the Soviet Party Apparat which framed the future

achievement of communist abundance and withering away of the state as an

incremental process of minor bureaucratic adjustments by the existing

authorities, within the existing institutional framework. By “ideology,”

Bell and his ilk meant structural critiques of any kind, any analysis

which went beyond the piecemeal and individual or failed to take the

basic institutional structures of post-industrial capitalism as natural

and inevitable, as given.

New Left analysis at this time saw the establishment liberalism —

“corporate liberalism” — as its primary enemy, even more so than the

reactionary Right. This establishment included the Military-Industrial

Complex and other oligopoly corporations, the imperialist foreign policy

establishment and its think tanks, the AFL-CIO, the moderate civil

rights leadership, and the welfare state bureaucracy (whose purpose was

to maintain social control of the surplus population).[207]

In 1959 E. P. Thompson framed the New Left as the reaction of a

generation of leftists who came of age after WWII, against the

organizational styles of “American ‘Power Elite’, Russian ‘Bureaucracy’,

British ‘Establishment’…”

1. *The Establishment of Power.* The increasing size, complexity, and

expertise required in industrial concerns have contributed to the

sense of ‘anonymity’ of the large-scale enterprise, to the power of

the managers, and to the sense of insignificance of the individual

producer….

2. *The Establishment of Orthodoxy.* Two factors have combined to

generate a climate of intellectual conformity: first, the

centralised control, either by great commercial interests or by the

State itself, of the mass media of communication, propaganda, and

entertainment, and the consequent elimination from them of minority

opinions: second, the ideological orthodoxies and heresy-hunting

which have been a by-product of the Cold War….

3. *The Establishment of Institutions.* Here the post-war generation

encounter institutions which had already become ‘set’ in their

leadership, bureaucracy, procedures and policies, in the war or

immediate post-war years…. The younger generation have no memories

of Labour as a movement of storm and protest, a movement of men

struggling and sacrificing to lift themselves and their fellows out

of cramping and de-humanising conditions. They were born, rather,

into the world of the block vote; it is the trade union that tells

them what they can do and what they can’t do. They see restriction

where their fathers saw mutual support….

And the reaction against these establishments, in turn, carried a new

organizational style distinct from that of the Old Left.

[T]he assertion of democracy in the Communist area cannot take place

without a hundred contests with the entrenched bureaucracy, its

institutions and ideology. And, equally, the regeneration of the Western

socialist movement cannot take place without a fundamental break with

the policies and orthodoxies of the past decade. And this two-pronged

offensive is (it becomes increasingly clear) carrying the left Socialist

in the West, and the dissident Communist in the East, towards a common

objective. There is a rediscovery of common aims and principles,

obscured during the violent era of the Third International. This does

not constitute a conversion of sections of the Western labour movement

to Communist orthodoxy, nor of disillusioned Communists to liberal

social-democracy. It represents, rather, a rejection of both

orthodoxies; and the emergence of a New Left which, while it draws much

from both traditions, stands apart from the sterile antagonisms of the

past, and speaks for what is immanent within both societies. It

champions a new internationalism, which is not that of the triumph of

one camp over the other, but the dissolution of the camps and the

triumph of the common people….

…If there is, as yet, no unified theory of the New Left, there are

many common pre-occupations…. Confronted by the authoritarianism and

anti-intellectualism of the Stalinist deviant of Marxism, Communist

dissidence has broken with its scholastic framework and is subjecting

the entire catechism to an empirical critique. But at the same time,

confronted by the idiocies of the Cold War and the facts of power within

Western ‘over-developed societies’, a taut radical temper is arising

among the post-war generation of socialists and intellectuals in the

West. In the exchange between the two a common language is being

discovered, and the same problems are being thrust forward for

examination: the problem of political power and of bureaucratic

degeneration: the problem of economic power and of workers’ control: the

problems of de-centralisation and of popular participation in social

control. There is the same rediscovery of the notion of a socialist

community; in Britain the Fabian prescription of a competitive Equality

of Opportunity is giving way, among socialists, before the re-discovery

of William Morris’s vision of a Society of Equals; in the Communist

world the false community of the authoritative collective is under

pressure from the voluntary, organic community of individuals, which,

despite all the inhumanities of the past two decades, has grown up

within it. There is, East and West, the same renewal of interest in the

‘young Marx’; the same concern with humanist propositions; the same

re-assertion of moral agency, and of individual responsibility within

the flow of historical events. The New Left has little confidence in the

infallibility, either of institutions or of historical processes. A true

socialist community will not be brought into being by legislative

manipulation and top-level economic planning alone. Socialism must

commence with existing people; it must be built by men and women in

voluntary association…. At every stage, before, during, and after the

conquest of power, the voluntary participation of the people must be

enlisted, and the centres of power must themselves, wherever possible,

be broken up. The New Left is made up of revolutionary socialists; but

the revolution to which they look forward must entail not only the

conquest but also the dismantling of State power.[208]

Of the “end-of-ideology” mindset shared by the managerial stratum in the

West and its counterparts in the Soviet bloc, C. Wright Mills wrote:

So reasoning collapses into reasonableness. By the more naïve and

snobbish celebrants of complacency, arguments and facts of a displeasing

kind are simply ignored; by the more knowing, they are duly recognised,

but they are neither connected with one another not related to any

general view. Acknowledged in a scattered way, they are never put

together: to do so is to risk being called, curiously enough,

“one-sided.”

This refusal to relate isolate facts and fragmentary comment with the

changing institutions of society makes it impossible to understand the

structural realities which these facts might reveal; the longer-run

trends of which they might be tokens. In brief, fact and idea are

isolated, so the real questions are not even raised, analysis of the

meanings of fact not even begun….

Underneath this style of observation and comment there is the assumption

that in the West there are not more real issues or even problems of

great seriousness. The mixed economy plus the welfare state plus

prosperity — that is the formula. US capitalism will continue to be

workable, the welfare state will continue along the road to ever greater

justice. In the meantime, things everywhere are very complex, let us not

be careless, there are great risks….

All this is just the sort of thing that I at least have always objected

to, and do object to, in the “socialist realism” of the Soviet Union.

There too, criticism of milieux are of course permitted — but they are

not to be connected with criticism of the structure itself; one may not

question “the system.” There are no “antagonistic contradictions….”

…In Uzbekistan and Georgia as well as in Russia. I kept writing notes

to myself, at the end of recorded interviews: “This man talks in a style

just like Arthur Schlesinger Jr….”

So far as the *historic agency of change* is concerned, the

end-of-ideology stands upon the identification of such agencies with

going institutions; perhaps upon their piecemeal reform, but never upon

the search for agencies that might be used or that might themselves make

for a structural change of society.[209]

The Port Huron Statement of 1962, founding document of SDS, called for

what principal author Hayden called “participatory democracy”:

a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims:

that the individual share in those social decisions determining the

quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to

encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common

participation.

The governing economic principle: “work should involve incentives

worthier than money or survival. It should be educative, not

stultifying; creative, not mechanical; self-directed, not manipulated,

encouraging independence, a respect for others, a sense of dignity, and

a willingness to accept social responsibility….” And “major social

institutions — cultural, educational, rehabilitative, and others —

should be generally organized with the well-being and dignity of man as

the essential measure of success.”[210]

Hayden, writing in *Dissent* four years later, dismissed in much harsher

terms the liberal claim to have transcended the contradictions of

history through the application of proper expertise. The majority of

Americans were

at the bottom, or in the middle, of organizations whose official

purposes are justified in abstract terms. Their views, inherited from

their families or implanted by the school system, and fed every day by

the mass media, permit them to screen out threatening information or

alternative ways of seeing the world.

The usual way to “escape” the trapped condition of ordinary Americans is

to ascend to higher levels of influence and knowledge in some key

institution. But while an overview of society is gained from these

positions, a new trap is waiting. For entry into higher organizational

circles depends upon accepting their general design and purpose. This

means that people in “responsible” positions are most often blind to

immoral consequences of their work….

This national trance depends upon one crucial assumption: that American

society is being improved domestically. The legitimacy gained by the

industrial unions, the liberal welfare legislation which was passed in

the thirties and forties, and now the civil rights and anti-poverty

reforms of the sixties — these are seen as part of a long sweep toward a

society of economic and social justice…

…The tragedy, however, is not simply that these programs fall short of

their goals. Rather, the goals themselves are far from desirable to

anyone interested in greater democracy and a richer quality of social

life. Welfare and public housing policies, for instance, are creating a

new and public kind of authoritarianism. Public relief clients and

tenants, lacking any protective organizations, are subject to the

caprice and cruelty of supervisors, investigators, and local machine

politicians. Similarly, labor and civil rights legislation creates tools

for government intervention at moments of sharp social conflict, without

really changing the tyrannical conditions in which millions of workers

and Negroes live. The full employment and anti-poverty acts, along with

the relief measures of the thirties, give the government power to

cushion the economic situation just short of the point of mass

unemployment. Programs such as urban renewal serve as the major domestic

outlet for investment capital and, consciously or not, as a means of

demoralizing and politically fragmenting the poor. The national

government thus becomes the chief force for stabilizing the private

economy and for managing social crisis. Its interests, institutions and

personnel have merged with those of high finance and industry.

…[I]t appears that the American elite has discovered a long-term way

to stabilize or cushion the contradictions of our society. It does this

through numerous forms of state intervention, the use of our abundant

capacity for material gratification, and the ability to condition nearly

all the information which people receive…. Except for temporarily

boosting income for a few people, this entire reformist trend has

weakened the poor under the pretense of helping them and strengthened

elite rule under the slogan of curbing private enterprise. In fostering

a “responsible” Negro and labor leadership and bringing it into the

pseudopluralist system of bargaining and rewards, a way has been found

to contain and paralyze the disadvantaged and voiceless people….

…Slowly an elite is formed, calling itself the liberal-labor

community. It treats the rank-and-file as a mass to be molded; sometimes

thrust forward into action, sometimes held back….

The pressures which influence these leaders come, not primarily from

below, but from the top, from the most powerful men in the country.

Sometimes bluntly and sometimes subtly, the real elite grooms

responsible trade union and civil rights leaders. The leaders’ existence

comes to depend upon the possibility of receiving attention from the

President or some top aide, and they judge organizational issues with an

eye on this possibility. There is usually no question about the leaders’

primary loyalty to the “national interest” as defined by the

Administration, even though they always believe their judgments are

independently made. Thus most of the civil rights leadership in 1964,

fearing the Goldwater movement and hoping for civil rights legislation

from a victorious Johnson Administration, called for a “moratorium” on

mass demonstrations. The labor leadership performed the same function

for the same reasons during World War II….[211]

To the Free Speech Movement, the university — as exemplified by Berkeley

in particular— “appeared to be the living example of the integration of

liberalism with actual policy,”

for its physical scientists do research on behalf of the military, and

the social scientists provide the government with vast amounts of

material designed to implement foreign and domestic policies.

The university has also achieved a fruitful integration with large

corporations throughout the nation. Its agricultural science departments

are tied closely to the large growers; university graduates are placed

in corporations; and the university provides basic research for every

level of corporate needs.

…It seemed to have defined its educational function as one of

producing for society’s needs as defined by government and the large

corporations….[212]

Various thinkers like Immanuel Wallerstein, and Antonio Negri and

Michael Hardt, have treated the New Left uprisings of 1968 as a

transitional phase to the fully horizontal movements of the 1990s (about

which more later in this chapter).

For some indication of the extent to which the New Left was a departure

from the institutional approaches of the Old Left, and prefigured the

post-1994 horizontalist movements, we need go no further than a debate

within Studies on the Left between two groups adopting positions

respectively framed by one of the parties to the debate as horizontalist

and centralist. In retrospect, their differences appear to be largely a

matter of emphasis; even the supposedly institutionalist side took what

we would consider a highly libertarian and decentralist

approach.[213]

In “Up From Irrelevance,” the self-styled

advocates of horizontalism (Tom Hayden, Norm Fruchter and Stanley

Aronowitz) took specific issue with the editors’ call for

a “radical center” that could serve as a communications and coordinating

agency linking the new insurgents with the traditional left. While this

new center should be built around the insights and needs of the new

radicals, the editorial argued, it should make a basic place for the

older radicals who are now lodged in single-issue groups (traditional

civil rights, educational reform, peace activity) where their radicalism

is subdued and isolated from the new movements….

Proposing a “radical center” assumes there is a sufficiently large

radical movement in need of coordination; or, at least, it assumes that

a “radical center” could forge existing materials into such a movement.

But, as **Studies **also pointed out, the new movements are in

their infancy…. Assuming these movements must and will expand…, it

seems rather early to pull them into a national center. The critical

work still remains at the *base*, and only an overemphasis on the

*image* of a national movement can make one believe it exists. We ought

not to fall into the trap of confusing widespread outbursts [“sit-ins,

teach-ins, freedom votes, wildcat strikes”] with a solid movement.

Hayden et al noted that the left wing of the civil rights movement

(SNCC, Freedom Democratic Party, etc.) was still partially dependent on

the moderate civil rights establishment.

Certainly it is desirable to loosen this conservative grip. But for this

to take place, there must be something to break *toward*: other people

in the society who together can make up an alternative community to the

establishment. But such people are not available at the present time in

sufficient numbers and strength and, unless they are, it is hollow to

call for a “radical center.”

If this is true, it is irrelevant also to “choose” between the political

alternatives which usually are presented to radicals: working within the

Democratic Party for realignment versus independent political action.

The new movements which give us hope **are **realigning the

Democratic Party even though they often work outside the Party and their

values go far beyond those of the Democratic leadership. The new

movements are neither fully dependent nor independent; at present, they

are creating tensions in both directions.

In the case of the Freedom Democratic Party, the movement was forced to

rely to some extent on the establishment Democratic Party, and had

limited ability to push it towards realignment, because it lacked a

sufficiently numerous or mobilized base.

This means that, instead of assuming that a viable radicalism is

present, an assumption which leads to the idea that a “radical center”

is needed, we instead ought to focus on the obstacles to a radical

movement in the first place…. Almost everyone develops a vested

interest of some kind in the American system as a whole, and within the

system there are virtually no legitimate places from which to launch a

total opposition movement. Politically, any group looking for a radical

alternative to liberal-left politics seems to be either isolated and

destroyed, or swallowed into an uncomfortable coalition with the

leadership of labor, civil rights and religious organizations.

…What we seek to make viable, against the grain of an affluent and

coercive society, is a thoroughly democratic revolution, in which the

most oppressed aspire to govern and decide, begin to practice their

aspiration, and finally carry it to fulfillment by transforming

decision-making everywhere…. Power in America is abdicated by

individuals to top-down organizational units, and it is in the recovery

of this power that the movement becomes distinct from the rest of the

country, and a new kind of man emerges….

What we should try to do… is assume that we have failed so far to

discover the relationships and the forms that will free individuals to

think and work as radicals, and build a movement where “everybody is a

leader.” Not until then will a “center” reflect anything radical and

deep in society.

…My own feeling is that too many traditional leftists are still

engulfed by the Communist-anti-Communist debate [or] adhere to overly

bureaucratic conceptions of organizing… to be considered mainstays of

a new movement. The many people who are exceptions to this general

picture should concentrate on organizing the millions of people who

never experienced the history of the American left, instead of

attempting to reconstruct their old-left colleagues.[214]

In reply, the defenders of the previous issue’s editorial (James

Weinstein, Stanley Aronowitz, Lee Baxandall, Eugene Genovese and Helen

Kramer) clarified that by “center” they meant something completely

different from the reading of Hayden et al.

When we spoke of the need for a new radical center we did not have in

mind an organizational short circuit of the new experiments with

community organization. Our use of the term was ideological, not

organizational; what we sought was discussion, analysis, examination of

all these social movements with a view to finding common programs, a

common attitude toward existing American social organization, a common

vision of a new society, and a long-range strategy for putting together

a coalition that might have some political relevance.[215]

Beyond that, they argued, their respective positions were more similar

than Hayden et al made them out to be.

Our proposal was not to solve the problem with new “organizational

formulas,” but to begin the search for effective strategies to challenge

and change this society. Our goals are the same as Hayden’s. We agree on

the need to build a movement that is fully conscious of the need to

transcend the values and priority systems of America’s present rulers.

We disagree on the need for radicals to discuss and work out the

necessary theories and strategy of social change.

Underlying this disagreement is a difference over the nature of

potential radical constituencies, and a confusion between the problem of

organizing the poor and that of working toward a coalition of radical

constituencies capable of becoming an effective political force on the

left. Hayden’s concern is with the former; ours is with the latter. We

focus on different problems, but there is nothing inherently

contradictory or mutually exclusive in our two approaches…. [Hayden

believes that] the poor, both in the rural South and the Northern

ghettoes, are the only potentially radical mass constituencies…

…Assuming that the poor can be fully organized and will become fully

conscious of the need for radical politics, by themselves they must

remain impotent. There are not enough of them, nor do they command

sufficient resources to constitute a political force that can win

power…. [Hayden] presents no prospective for organizing a mass radical

student movement, and explicitly denies or ignores the existence of

other possible components of a radical coalition. Yet if a significant

movement is to be built it must be around a coalition large enough, at

least in theory, to contest for political power…. Programs of action

should be developed to facilitate connections between the various

components — including the poor — when they become sufficiently

conscious to engage in explicitly political action. Such a coalition

needs a common view of the existing society, common programmatic demands

(or at least complementary ones), a common vision of a new form of

social organization designed to satisfy human needs. We feel it is

necessary to begin the theoretical work on which such a movement can be

based.[216]

And in the previous issue’s editorial, the editors were actually in

substantive agreement with Hayden for the most part on the proper

approach towards Old Left radicals: that is, they saw their “new radical

center” as a way of reorienting directionless Old Leftists around the

New Left paradigm.[217]

Likewise, they agreed with Hayden on the organizational style that

distinguished the New from the Old Left.

Those who, consciously or not, adopt a “Leninist” concept of political

organization offer structural or administrative solutions for political

and ideological problems. Such an approach… can only inhibit the

search for new political forms, can only stifle the kind of initiative

and experimentation in the development of radical consciousness and

program which is the strength of SNCC in Mississippi and some of the

ghetto projects in the North. We do not propose “democratic centralism”

or highly disciplined structures when we assert the need for a radical

center. In this sense, the experience of radical organizations in the

United States since the early 1920s is useless. Organizationally one

must go back to the old Socialist Party of Debs to find any meaningful

precedents…. Local Socialist organizations then had their own press,

developed their own programs, adopted different tactics.[218]

II. Autonomism

From the beginning autonomism was about the self-activity of the working

class itself, independently of official institutions like parties and

unions.

Harry Cleaver’s development in the ‘60s and ‘70s as a Marxist — and

particularly as an autonomist — was in large part a reaction against the

“one-sided” nature of dominant Marxists analyses: “the one-sidedness of

most of these Marxist traditions with their focus on the mechanisms of

capitalist exploitation and their inability to theorize working class

self-activity.”[219]

Precisely because of this focus, the interpretations failed to grasp the

initiative of those resisting and attacking capital and, by so failing,

they could not even accurately understand the actions of capital itself

— which always developed in an interplay with that resistance and those

attacks.[220]

A major influence on the development of autonomism was the

Johnson-Forest tendency, which was an offshoot of (Schachtmanite)

American Trotskyism;[221] it held that vanguard parties were

obsolete because the working class had internalized the ideology, and

instead focused on the working class’s own self-action outside of

official socialist parties and unions (e.g. wildcat strikes and direct

action).

Raya Dunayevskaya — the “Forest” of the Johnson-Forest tendency —

objected to the dominant tendency to focus on the objective laws of

capitalist development at the expense of working class agency, and

emphasized the importance of “the strife between the worker and the

machine against dead labour’s domination over living

labour…”[222]

Cleaver was heavily influenced by the other half of the Forest-Johnson

tendency: C.L.R. James. James’s book *Facing Reality* “was distinguished

by the premise… that the socialist society already existed within the

shell of the old society. The task of revolutionaries was to recognize,

record, and enhance its existence.” In developing an analysis focused on

worker self-activity, he was also heavily influenced by the “bottom-up”

histories of E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill, the autonomism of

Negri, the libertarian Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Pannekkoek,

and the anarchism of Pyotr Kropotkin and Emma Goldman.[223]

Italian autonomism was a New Left movement centered on the struggles of

factory workers who took direct action “autonomously from, and often

against, the influence of either trade unions or the

Party.”[224] Similar direct action was meanwhile occurring in

the U.S. as the New Deal labor accord broke down and auto industry

workers engaged in wildcat strikes in direct violation of labor

contracts and direct defiance of their own union leadership.

By “reading *Capital* politically,” Cleaver means reading it from the

perspective of the working class as revolutionary subject. “This I would

argue is the only kind of reading of Marx which can properly be said to

be from a working-class perspective because it is the only one which

speaks directly to that class’s needs for clarifying the scope and

structure of its own power and strategy.”[225]

Autonomism emphasizes a strand of Marx’s own thought that has been

largely neglected in establishment “Marxism” (the mechanistic official

Marxism of the Second International, systematized by Engels, Kautsky and

Plekhanov; which in turn became the primary raw material for the

official Marxist-Leninist “diamat” of the Comintern in the 20th century,

developed largely after Lenin’s death by Stalin).

The one feature that united most Marxist political economy in the Second

International and from WWI on, which transcended divisions between

social democrats and revolutionaries, was that “their restriction of the

scope of Capital and of the derived theories of crisis and imperialism

to the realm of political economy both limited the comprehensiveness of

their analysis, leaving major aspects of the system uncriticized, and

made it one-sided: they analysed capitalist growth and accumulation

independently of working-class initiative.”[226]

The Old Left treated workers as passive in the face of a history

dictated by capital’s laws of motion.

We are presented with elaborately detailed critical interpretations of

this self-activating monster in a way that completely ignores the way

actual working-class power forces and checks capitalist development.

Marx saw how the successful struggle for a shorter working day caused a

crisis for capital. These political economists do not: they see absolute

surplus value as a reified abstract concept. Marx saw how that struggle

forced the development of productivity-raising innovations which raised

the organic composition of capital. He thus saw relative surplus value

as a strategic capitalist response. These political economists do not:

they see only competition between capitalists. Marx saw how workers’

wage struggles could help precipitate capitalist crises. These political

economists see only abstract ‘laws of motion’.[227]

This “Mode of production” analysis treated the working class as a

passive chess-piece moved by the forces of history.[228]

So in summary the Old Left shared a common tendency of leaving politics

(and specifically working class politics) out of their reading of

Capital*.

One basic criticism of reading *Capital* as political economy was that

it accepted the tradition of making a sharp dichotomy between economics

and politics and confined *Capital* to the former sphere…. Whether in

the case of the revived Marxist tradition of crisis theory or in the

case of neo-Marxist Keynesianism, the analysis focuses predominantly on

the development of capital itself — defined autonomously from the class

struggle. Political economy, in short, has concerned the theorization of

the capitalist factory as the site of the production of surplus value

together with the circulation and realization of value. Within the

factory capitalist domination is seen to be virtually complete. Although

workers might legitimately struggle to keep wages from being depressed

in periods of crisis, such ‘economistic’ struggles are ultimately

confined within the dynamic of capitalist growth and cannot pose any

real threat to its existence. The inevitable conclusion of this kind of

analysis is to place all hope for effective struggle in the ‘political’

sphere, which usually implies support for some form of party

organization. In such a situation the discussion of the rise and

organization of class struggle generally turns around the question of

‘class consciousness’…. With respect to this issue, as we have seen,

Marxist orthodoxy has been associated with the answer given by the Lenin

of *What Is to Be Done?*: namely that the workers would be educated by a

specialized party of professional revolutionaries who alone can see

beyond the particular economistic interests of each group of workers to

the interests of the class as a whole.[229]

Social Democratic economism and Stalinist diamat, each in its own way,

minimized the subjectivity and agency of ordinary people relative to

either the material forces of history or vanguard institutions.

Autonomism was a reaction against this tendency. In 1964, Italian

autonomist Mario Tronti wrote:

Capitalist society has its laws of development: economists have invented

them, governments have imposed them, and workers have suffered them. But

who will uncover the laws of development of the working class? Capital

has its history, and its historians write it — but who is going to write

the history of the working class?…

We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development

first, and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn

the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start again from the

beginning: and the beginning is the class struggle of the working class.

At the level of socially developed capital, capitalist development

becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows behind them,

and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital’s own

reproduction must be tuned….

Today the strategic viewpoint of the working class is so clear that we

wonder whether it is only now coming to the full richness of its

maturity. It has discovered (or rediscovered) the true secret, which

will be the death sentence on its class enemy: the political ability to

force capital into reformism, and then to blatantly make use of that

reformism for the working class revolution….[230]

In undertaking a *political* analysis, Cleaver starts from the

perspective of the working class itself — “the struggles of the workers

themselves, not of their ‘official’ organizations (trade unions,

parties, etc.)” — and “the self-activity of the class that makes it more

than a victimized cog in the machinery of capital and more than a

fragmented mass requiring instruction in its class

interests.”[231]

And according to Cleaver “the pattern of development of capitalist

society (including its crisis) is the outcome of the confrontation of

two active class subjects, and involves the growth of the working class

along with the expansion of capital.”

From this perspective, revolution appears when working class struggles

throw capital into a crisis to which it is unable to fashion a

solution…. The rupture of capitalist control spreads and grows,

overthrowing more and more of the social relations that capital created

to reinforce its imposition of work. We understand by the capitalist

“integument is burst asunder” the ripping apart by the working class of

the entire capitalist social system shaped around imposed labor. The

expropriation of the capitalist is not simply the expropriation of their

“property” in any usual sense, it is rather the reappropriation of the

whole social order. Moreover, it is clear enough in Marx that

expropriation here means the freeing of that social order from

capitalist organization such that a wholly new society can be

constructed. Thus it means the end of the commodity form, of the

fetishism of production, the hierarchy of work, the alienation of labor,

and so on.

Although Marx and Engels rarely indulged in utopian speculation about

post-capitalist society, their observations of the pattern and content

of working class struggle led them again and again to emphasize how the

revolutionary destruction of capital would involve, in a fundamental

way, the liberation of people from a life sentence of hard labor.

Already in 1844 Engels saw in his *Critique of Political Economy* how

the development of productivity during the capitalist period would

create the possibility of reducing “to a minimum the labor falling to

the share of mankind.”

This early insight received extensive theoretical elaboration by Marx in

the *Grundrisse*. He clearly perceived how the rise in the organic

composition of capital and in the associated productivity of labor

reduced the need for work, making its imposition more and more

difficult. This creates a problem only for capital. For the working

class, on the other hand, it is a continual expansion of its potential

ability to reduce necessary labor to a minimum. Revolution must be

precisely the creation of a new historical situation in which, as Marx

said, “disposable time will grow for all…. The measure of wealth is

then not any longer, in any way, labor-time, but rather disposable

time.” Of the content of this time, Marx spoke only of the “free

development of individualities,” of the expansion of the

multidimensional self-defined needs and activities of the working class.

Ultimately this is what defines the working class as a revolutionary

subject, not only the negative power to abolish capital but the positive

power to increasingly define its own needs, to carve out an expanding

sphere of its own movement and to create a new world in the place of

capitalism.[232]

In a footnote to a more recent reprint of the article quoted above,

Cleaver adds:

In the time since this essay was written two things have become clearer.

First, that revolution involves the working class going beyond its

status as “working” class to become a multiplicity for which the

activities that we now regroup under the rubric of “work” become but

moments in a broader process of self-realization. Second, that what the

people who make up that multiplicity create in the place of capital is

not “a new world” but, as the Zapatistas have pointed out, many new

worlds whose interaction form the stuff of post-capitalist

politics.[233]

Nick Dyer-Witheford, another autonomist, criticized the Old Left in

similar terms. Their failing is a tendency towards technological

determinism which reduces the agency of the working class — its central

role in its own self-liberation — to almost nothing. Rather an almost

inevitable transition is driven by the forces of production or social

relations of production.[234]

He criticized, similarly, the excessive technological determinism of

theorists of work-discipline like Braverman and Marglin, and David

Noble’s work on deskilling through automated CNC machine

tools.[235] According to such analyses the ruling class, by

definition, always selects among the variety of technological

alternatives for one that best serves its interest; it follows that the

ruling classes’ need for control is built into whatever technology is in

use and therefore is exploitative by its very nature.[236]

This approach is useful, Dyer-Witheford admits, because it sees through

the liberal capitalist techno-utopian project’s treatment of technology

as class-neutral and positive-sum, and points to the very real class

agenda embodied in that project.[237] But its shortcomings

are far more significant. It makes the mistake of equating “capitalism’s

intentions and its capacities,” and “ignores the consequences of

[workers’] counter-strategies and resistances.” In particular, it

neglects “the possibility — particularly apparent in the field of media

and communications technologies — that capital’s laboring subjects may

find real use-values, perhaps even subversive ones, for the new

technologies.”[238]

Autonomism, in contrast, stresses the working class’s role as creative

subject of revolutionary struggle, actively laying the basis for a new

society.

Far from being a passive object of capitalist designs, the worker is in

fact the active subject of production, the wellspring of the skills,

innovation, and cooperation on which capital depends. Capital attempts

to incorporate labor as a object, a component in its cycle of value

extraction, so much *labor power*. But this inclusion is always partial,

never fully achieved. Laboring subjects resist capital’s reduction.

Labor is for capital always a problematic “other” that must constantly

be controlled and subdued, and that, as persistently, circumvents or

challenges this command.[239]

Workers, autonomists argue, “are not just passive victims of

technological change but active agents who persistently contest

capital’s attempts at control.” One of the most important forms this

contestation takes is workers use of “their ‘invention power’ — the

creative capacity on which capital depends for its incessant innovation

— in order to reappropriate technology.”[240]

In both his rejection of workerism and his celebration of working class

self-activity, Dyer-Witheford’s analysis is rooted in Negri’s

Grundrisse*-based approach to Marx, a treatment of class antagonism

framed around the working class as revolutionary subject and

constitutive element of communist society, and its historic role of

abolishing “work” as a conceptual category as it now exists.

The mainstream, mechanistic line of Marxist analysis by the Old Left saw

Capital* as the crowning achievement of Marx’s theoretical system, and

after the discovery and publication of the *Grundrisse* tended to treat

the former as having distilled everything of importance in the latter.

Negri, on the other hand, sees *Capital* as only a partial completion of

the larger project outlined in the *Grundrisse*.[241] Marx

himself, in a letter to Engels in February 1858, outlined a six-volume

project entitled *Critique of Political Economy*:

- Capital

- Landed Property

- Wage Labour

- The State

- International Trade

- World Market[242]

The chapter on labor in Volume One of *Capital* did not at all cover the

ground envisioned by Marx in the projected book on wage labor; he dealt

with it only in part, in “reduced and objective terms” in that chapter,

whereas the analysis in the *Grundrisse* that was never incorporated

into a separate volume on labor, was intended to link “Marx’s critique

of the wage and his revolutionary definition of communism and communist

subjectivity.”[243]

4) The open-ended dynamism of Marx’s “system” is directed wholly towards

identifying the relationship between crisis and the emergence of

revolutionary subjectivity…. In this regard, the Grundrisse

is perhaps the most important—maybe the only—Marxian text on the

question of *transition*, and it is curious to note that among the

thousand and one positions published on the question of transition, this

fact goes completely unregarded.[244]

Translated into plain language, analysis of the working class in terms

of “revolutionary subjectivity” and its role in the transition means

looking at the actual working class as it exists right now, how it

exercises agency through its actual practices, forms of organization and

activity, and how those practices and organizational forms prefigure (or

form the nucleus of) the future communist society it will create.

More recently, in language much like Cleaver’s, John Holloway challenged

the vulgar Marxist focus on capitalism as a closed “system” or

“structure,” framing it instead as a contested process in which he chose

to emphasize the “doing” of the working class in resisting the ongoing

imposition of commodification and abstract labor, and creating

prefigurative cracks in the system where the law of value does not

apply. Starting from the “party-centered thinking that had dominated

Marxist discussion” before the 1994 EZLN uprising, he wrote:

If capitalism is understood as a closed system governed by the “laws of

capitalist development,” then class struggle will be focused on building

the organisation that can break this system with its laws and logic, and

this organisation is generally understood to be the Party. However, if

the nouns are changed into verbs…, then all this changes….

The first thing that changes is the direction of struggle. Instead of

thinking of struggle as being our struggle against an established system

of domination, we come to understand that this “established system” is a

constant and desperate struggle to impose itself as a coherent logical

system and reproduce itself as such. Money is not a thing, nor is it a

stable form of social relations, it is a constant struggle to form

people’s behaviour in a certain way, a struggle that involves the

employment of millions and millions of police, supported by

psychologists, teachers, parents, and so on, and that quite literally

leads to the death of thousands and thousands of people each day from

violence, starvation, and untreated curable diseases. Capitalism is an

attack, an unceasing aggression against us, forcing us out of bed and

off to work each morning, pushing us to work faster in the factory or

the office or the university, coercing students and teachers to direct

their concerns to that which will increase the profitability of capital,

driving peasants off the land, destroying communities. It is an attack

that constantly provokes resistance-and-rebellion and is never sure of

its outcome….

The logic of capital is not separate from struggle: it is

struggle. Marx gives a succinct summary of the laws of capitalist

development: “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the

Prophets!…” But accumulation is constant struggle; there is nothing

automatic about it….

…The struggle against capital is the refusal to accept the

reproduction of its logic; it is… the cracking of its totalising.

These refusals… have not yet broken the constantly renewed drive of

the logic of capital, but they do suggest a very different concept of

revolutionary politics. The possibility of revolution is not a question

of building the organisation that will one day take state power and

break capital: rather it is the recognition, creation, expansion,

multiplication, and confluence of all these breakings of the logic of

capital, all these creatings of different ways of doing

things.[245]

Capitalism is indeed a “system” that follows laws and is subject to

crisis tendencies, but those crisis tendencies are not an impersonal

force we have to wait on to work its dialectical magic while we look

forward to the Revolution that will occur when the augurs of historical

materialism tell us conditions are ready.[246]

Crisis is the expression of capital’s incapacity to exploit us

sufficiently to secure its own profitability, of its inability to submit

us to its logic, to shape our daily activity in a way that guarantees

its constant expansion: in that sense *we* are the crisis of capital,

and capital’s struggle is the struggle to subordinate us more

effectively.

Primitive accumulation is not simply a past event that occurred at the

establishment of capitalism; but an ongoing process that continues to be

written in letters of fire and blood. Indeed the “establishment of

capitalism” itself is an ongoing process, whose success is by no means

guaranteed.

…[T]he reproduction of capital cannot be conceived of in any static

sense as the automatic renewal of pre-given forms of social relations…

[T]here is constant resistance to the reproduction of capitalist

domination and this resistance itself impels the constant reformulation

of the relations of domination…. Inevitably, this reformulation is

always a struggle to impose or reimpose certain forms of social

relations, to contain social activity within or channel social activity

into those (developing) forms.[247]

III. The 1968 Movements and the Transition to Horizontalist Praxis

David Graeber argues that the 1968 movements were “the first move in the

opposite direction” from the Bolshevik Revolution. While the latter was

in the Jacobin tradition of revolutionizing society from above, the

“world revolution of 1968… was more anarchist in spirit”: It was

characterized by “the revolt against bureaucratic conformity, the

rejection of party politics, the dedication to the creation of a new,

liberatory culture that would allow for genuine individual

self-realization.”[248]

Immanuel Wallerstein, going further, saw 1968 as the key event of the

20th century, the beginning of the fracturing of the capitalist world

system: “…it was the most important historical event of the twentieth

century. It dwarfs the Russian Revolution. It dwarfs

1989.”[249] As his interviewer, Gregory Williams, added,

contrary to the mainstream perception that 1968 was a flash in the pan

with no lasting effect, it never died out. 1989, the Seattle movements

and 2011 movements were all aftershocks.[250]

Wallerstein distinguished the movements of the 1968 uprisings from those

of the Old Left. The latter, as he described it, was composed of

movements that “emerged as bureaucratic structures” like political

parties and labor unions, and believed that “the immediate source of

real power was located in the state apparatus and that any attempt to

ignore its political centrality was doomed to failure, since the state

would successfully suppress any thrust towards anarchism or cultural

nationalism.”

The New Left, a loose collection of tendencies that encompassed most of

the 1968 movements, amounted to a considerable break from that model. To

the extent that the Old Left had triumphed either in Social Democratic,

Marxist-Leninist, or radical post-colonial regimes, the successes had

been limited by the countries’ ongoing role in the global division of

labor within the capitalist world system.

The conclusion that the world’s populations drew from the performance of

the classical antisystemic movements in power was negative. They ceased

to believe that these parties would bring about a glorious future or a

more egalitarian world and no longer gave them their legitimation; and

having lost confidence in the movements, they also withdrew their faith

in the state as a mechanism of transformation. This did not mean that

large sections of the population would no longer vote for such parties

in elections; but it had become a defensive vote, for lesser evils, not

an affirmation of ideology or expectations.[251]

There have been some lasting features of the post-1968 movements, in

contrast to the Old Left. Most notably, according to Wallerstein, they

have rejected the primacy or hegemony of the conventional “proletariat”

in the socialist movements of the imperial core, and of the majority

national identity in national liberation struggles. And they have

rejected the demands of those in control of the institutional machinery

of such movements that all other issues be rejected as secondary, and

postponed until “after the revolution.” In 1968 the concept of the

“leading role” of the industrial proletariat “was being challenged on

the grounds that the industrial proletariat was and would always

structurally remain just one component among others of the world’s

working class.” The Old Left treated womens’ liberation struggles,

racial justice movements, etc., as “at best secondary and at worst

diversionary.”

The “old left” groups tended to argue that their own achievement of

state power had to be the prime objective and the prior achievement,

after which (they argued) the secondary oppressions would disappear of

themselves or at least they could be resolved by appropriate political

action in the “post-revolutionary” era.[252]

Despite these official dogmas it had become clear that the stereotypical

“proletarian” of vulgar Marxism was no more representative of the

laboring strata in the mid-20th century than in the mid-19th, and would

probably never be. The national identities lionized by national

liberation movements were likewise largely mythical, constructed at the

expense of national minorities and other oppressed groups. And in

countries where parties of the Left **had **come to power, it was

clear that oppression along racial, gender and other axes had been

addressed “after the revolution” hardly better than before. 1968

reflected the realization of these facts.

After 1968, none of the “other” groups in struggle — neither women nor

racial “minorities” nor sexual “minorities” nor the handicapped nor the

“ecologists” (those who refused the acceptance, unquestioningly, of the

imperatives of increased global production) — would ever again accept

the legitimacy of “waiting” upon some other revolution.[253]

Wallerstein observed that the rise of post-1968 politics had reopened

debate “on the fundamental strategy of social transformation,” and that

it would be “the key political debate of the coming twenty years.” But

given that he wrote in 1989, before both the fall of communism in the

Soviet camp and the beginning of the EZLN insurgency in Chiapas, his

remarks were entirely tentative and inconclusive.[254]

He did note, among the list of unanswered questions, the following:

1. Is it possible to achieve significant political change without taking

state power?

2. Are there forms of social power worth conquering other than

“political” power?

3. Should antisystemic movements take the form of organizations?

4. Is there any political basis on which antisystemic movements, West

and East, North (both West & East) and South, can in reality join

hands?[255]

These questions, written from the standpoint of 1989, carry considerable

irony for those of us today who read them in light of the answers since

given by the Zapatistas, the Seattle movement, the Arab Spring, M15 and

Syntagma, Occupy, and all the offshoots like Black Matters that persist

to the present day. The entire period since 1994 has been an extended

series of answers to the questions Wallerstein asked in 1989.

Writing over twenty years later, Wallerstein himself was able to

characterize the post-1968 period much more definitively with those

events in retrospect. In addition to the fluid and somewhat unpromising

mix of new movements that existed in the late 1980s — Radical Maoist

movements inspired by the Cultural Revolution that fizzled out in the

70s; issue-oriented movements like the Greens and racial and gender

justice groups; and human rights and civil society organizations — had

arisen, far more importantly, the anti-globalization movements of the

90s.[256]

IV. The Post-1994 Movements

Negri and Hardt see the post-1968 wave of movements supplanting the Old

Left as analogous to the social factory supplanting Fordist production.

A focus on self-activity and subjectivity means that the multitude,

which grew out of the post-Fordist model of organizing production,

carries that model over into the conduct of political struggle; and this

model of conducting political struggle, in turn, prefigures the

organization of post-capitalist society. Although for them this was to

some extent a qualitative feature of the Left for the entire post-1968

period, it has been especially true of the post-1994 movements with

their increased reliance on network communications. The post-Fordist

evolution of praxis reached its full development in the “horizontalism”

of the post-1994 networked movements.

Organizations for networked struggle overlap to a large extent with the

organization of post-Fordist production, which permeates society at

large. If post-Fordist production is coextensive with society at large —

the “social factory” — then so is the revolutionary

subject.[257]

All the different forms of waged and non-waged labor throughout society,

and the relationships between them, are creating the body of a new

society. “…[T]he singular figures of postmodern labor do not remain

fragmented and dispersed but tend through communication and

collaboration to converge toward a common social being…”

…This common social being is the powerful matrix that is central in

the production and reproduction of contemporary society and has the

potential to create a new, alternative society. We should regard this

common social being as a new flesh, amorphous flesh that as yet forms no

body. The important question at this point is what kind of body will

these common singularities form? One possibility is that they will be

enlisted in the global armies at the service of capital…. This new

social flesh, in other words, may be formed into the productive organs

of the global social body of capital. Another possibility, however, is

that these common singularities organize themselves autonomously through

a kind of “power of the flesh.”… The power of the flesh is the power

to transform ourselves through historical action and create a new

world.[258]

For Negri and Hardt, the central question is whether this new networked

social body will remain organized as a social factory under the control

of capital, or will cast capital aside as superfluous. To date “the

common productive flesh of the multitude has been formed into the global

political body of capital, divided geographically by hierarchies of

labor and wealth and ruled by a multilevel structure of economic, legal,

and political powers.” Our hope for the future, in contrast, is that

“the productive flesh of the multitude can organize itself otherwise and

discover an alternative to the global political body of

capital.”[259]

…Our point of departure is our recognition that the production of

subjectivity and the production of the common can together form a

spiral, symbiotic relationship. Subjectivity, in other words, is

produced through cooperation and communication and, in turn, this

produced subjectivity itself produces new forms of cooperation and

communication, which in turn produce new subjectivity, and so forth….

Perhaps in this process of metamorphosis and constitution we should

recognize the formation of the body of the multitude, a fundamentally

new kind of body, a common body, a democratic body…. If the multitude

is to form a body…, it will remain always and necessarily an open,

plural composition and never become a unitary whole divided by

hierarchical organs.[260]

The organization of struggle, like the organization of production, is

stigmergic.

In economics we can see numerous instances in which unitary control is

not necessary for innovation and that, on the contrary, innovation

requires common resources, open access and free

interaction.[261]

The multitude’s networked methods of struggle are a direct outgrowth of

the changes in the organization of production by which the multitude

itself has been constituted.

…The global cycle of struggles develops in the form of a distributed

network. Each local struggle functions as a node that communicates with

all the other nodes without any hub or center of intelligence. Each

struggle remains singular and tied to its local conditions but at the

same time is immersed in the common web. This form of organization is

the most fully realized political example we have of the concept of the

multitude. The global extension of the common does not negate the

singularity of each of those who participates in the network. The same

global cycle of struggles organizes and mobilizes the multitude.

This was in contrast to “the dominant organizational forms of our recent

past,” which was “based on the identity of the struggle, and its unity

is organized under central leadership, such as the party.”

At the 1999 Seattle protests, for example…, what most surprised and

puzzled observers was that groups previously thought to be in opposition

to each other — trade unionists, environmentalists, church groups and

anarchists, and so forth — acted together without any central, unifying

structure that subordinates or sets aside their differences…. In

practice the multitude provides a model whereby our expressions of

singularity are not reduced or diminished in our communication and

collaboration with others in struggle, with our forming greater common

habits, practices, conduct, and desires—with, in short, the global

mobilization and extension of the common….

….The new cycle of struggles is a mobilization of the common that

takes the form of an open, distributed network, in which no center

exerts control and all nodes express themselves freely.[262]

And the post-capitalist society of the future, in turn, will be an

extension of this same organizational logic.

If this has all been true of the New Left since the 1960s, the trend has

been intensified by the collapse of both Marxism-Leninism and Social

Democracy in the face of neo-liberalism. As Peter Critchley argues:

With the demise of state socialism — the collapse of Communism and the

internal degeneration of Social Democracy — one is witnessing the

potential re-emergence of an independent socialist politics….

The reemergence of socialism ‘from below’ challenges the way that

socialism has been institutionalised in the form of ‘the party’, Social

Democratic or Communist….

Authors and traditions long suppressed by Second International

orthodoxy, Nazism and Communism, and the Cold War could now be recovered

as the hold of dominant perspectives began to weaken. Individuals like

Luxemburg, Korsch, Pannekoek and Gorter, Mattick and Landauer, whose own

socialisms had been suppressed by dominant political interests, could

now be presented as offering an alternative. Gramsci’s attempts to

define a new socialist politics could now be appreciated without having

to suppress critical insights for reasons of party. The difficulties and

ambiguities that Lukacs’ found himself in within the international

Communist movement could now be resolved on the side of socialist

revolution.

Perhaps the most important development of all is the opportunity that

this collapse of old certainties and orthodoxies affords to actually

read Marx without political blinkers. Marx has been released from the

straight jacket that Social Democracy and Communism have imposed upon

him. And Marx’s emancipatory and critical project has been long

submerged under the claims that Social Democracy and Communism have made

to monopolise socialism and the working class constituency. One need no

longer produce a marxism for the parties, a process which begun with the

Second International.[263]

Graeber, an anarchist who played a major part in the formation of the

Occupy movement, describes the networked movements of the 1990s and

2000s as “a kind of continual series of tiny ’68s….”

After the Zapatista world revolution — they called it the Fourth World

War — began in ’94, such mini-’68s began happening so thick and fast the

process almost seemed to have become institutionalized: Seattle, Genoa,

Cancun, Quebec, Hong Kong… And insofar as it was indeed

institutionalized, by global networks the Zapatistas had helped set up,

it was on the basis of a kind of small-a anarchism based on principles

of decentralized direct democracy and direct action. The prospect of

facing a genuine global democratic movement seems to have so frightened

the US authorities, in particular, that they went into veritable panic

mode. There is of course a traditional antidote to the threat of mass

mobilization from below. You start a war. It doesn’t really matter who

the war is against. The point is just to have one; preferably, on as

wide a scale as possible. In this case the US government had the

extraordinary advantage of a genuine pretext – a ragtag crew of hitherto

largely ineffective right-wing Islamists who, for once in history, had

attempted a wildly ambitious terrorist scheme and actually pulled it

off. Rather than simply track down those responsible, the US began

throwing billions of dollars of armament at anything in sight. Ten years

later, the resulting paroxysm of imperial overstretch appears to have

undermined the very basis of the American Empire. What we are now

witnessing is the process of that empire’s collapse.[264]

Wallerstein, similarly, called the 1994 EZLN uprising “the beginning of

the counteroffensive of the world left against the relatively

short-lived successes of the world right between the 1970s and 1994….

What the Zapatistas did was to remind them (and the world left) that

there was indeed an alternative….” The uprising “paved the way to the

successful protests at Seattle in 1999 and then

elsewhere….”[265]

The EZLN itself, as the movement that launched a quarter-century wave

(so far), is remarkable in that it was an organization with fairly

conventional Marxist-Leninist roots, and was expected to follow the

trajectory of previous such abortive guerrilla warfare efforts — but

instead followed an unprecedented path both in its rejection of the

standard M-L playbook, and in its success. As John Holloway remarks,

it is precisely the fact that they are not an orthodox guerrilla group

that has confounded the state time and time again in its dealings with

them. It is precisely the fact that they are not an orthodox group of

revolutionaries that makes them theoretically and practically the most

exciting development in oppositional politics in the world for many a

long year.[266]

The original founders of EZLN had been members of the Fuerzas de

Liberación Nacional (FLN), a guerrilla organization that was created in

1969 in Monterrey and driven underground in the early 1970s. Its guiding

principles were “the science of history and society, Marxism-Leninism,

which has demonstrated its validity in all the triumphant revolutions of

this century,” and it described its goal as “the taking of political

power by the workers of the countryside and of the cities of the Mexican

Republic, in order to install a popular republic with a socialist

system.” During their time underground they cross-pollinated with

members of other armed Leftist organizations and formed the EZLN in the

early ‘80s.[267]

From then on until their emergence on New Years Day 1994, they engaged

in a process of growing interaction with Indigenous communities in the

Lacandon jungle of Chiapas that led, especially from the late ‘80s on,

to the Indigenous population’s takeover of most leadership functions and

the organization discarding most of the major bullet-points of orthodox

Leninism. As Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos stated in mid-1995, their

“conception of the world and of revolution was badly dented in the

confrontation with the indigenous realities of Chiapas.” The initiative

in this collaboration was taken largely by the local peasants, who

requested EZLN help in their ongoing struggle with the national

government and its attacks on their communal land rights, and who came

to comprise the bulk of EZLN membership. As Holloway described it, “the

EZLN was transformed from being a guerrilla group to being a community

in arms.”[268]

Central to the EZLN’s retreat from orthodox Marxist-Leninist ideology

was its abandonment of vanguardism. As recounted by Marcos in a late

1995 interview, “The original EZLN, the one that is formed in 1983, is a

political organization in the sense that it speaks and what it says has

to be done. The indigenous communities teach it to listen, and that is

what we learn.”[269] And he is quoted elsewhere:

I think that our only virtue as theorists was to have the humility to

recognize that our theoretical scheme did not work, that it was very

limited, that we had to adapt ourselves to the reality that was being

imposed on us.

This was more than just talk. The abandonment of vanguardism was

reflected in two of the basic organizing principles of the Zapatista

movement: “*preguntando caminamos*” (“asking, we walk”) and “*mandar

obedeciendo*” (“to command obeying”), which in practice required

community-wide consensus decision-making, and leadership positions that

were recallable at will.[270]

The significance of all this can’t be exaggerated. The departure from

orthodox Leninist praxis was fundamental. To quote Holloway again:

Above all, learning to listen meant turning everything upside down….

[The revolutionary tradition of talking] has a long-established

theoretical basis in the concepts of Marxism-Leninism. The tradition of

talking derives, on the one hand, from the idea that theory (class

consciousness) must be brought to the masses by the party and, on the

other, from the idea that capitalism must be analysed from above, from

the movement of capital rather than from the movement of anti-capitalist

struggle. When the emphasis shifts to listening, both of these

theoretical suppositions are undermined. The whole relation between

theory and practice is thrown into question: theory can no longer be

seen as being brought from outside but is obviously the product of

everyday practice.[271]

This is a direct repudiation of the tenets of Leninism that “the

struggles of the working class… cannot rise above reformist demands,

unless there is the intervention of a revolutionary party…. The

self-emancipation of the proletariat is impossible.”[272]

Another relevant feature of the EZLN’s new style of praxis is its

adoption of a horizontalist model in its relation to other groups.

Marcos stated that the EZLN saw other groups pursuing their own

struggles — “in the meda, …in the trade unions, in the schools, among

the teachers, among the students, in groups of workers, in peasant

organisations” — as “accomplices” with whom the EZLN’s struggle

resonated, people “tuned in to the same frequency” with whom the EZLN

had many things in common, but over whose struggles the EZLN claimed no

leadership. This was true not only of popular struggles in Mexico, but

of their echoes and mirrors “in the streets of Europe, the suburbs of

Asia, the countryside of America, the towns of Africa, and the houses of

Oceania….”[273]

This organizational and strategic approach evoked no little skepticism

from the orthodox Left, according to Patrick Cuninghame and Carolina

Ballesteros Corona. The more dogmatic sections of the international

radical Left looked askance at the EZLN’s

strategy for revolutionary transformation to a post-capitalist society

which is based not on a vanguardist seizure of the state and the

commanding heights of the economy, let alone parliamentary reformism,

but on an alliance with other grassroots social movements, including the

Colonos, rural migrant squatters on the periphery of the main urban

centres, the students, gay and women’s movements, and the independent

unions of teachers, electrical and transport workers. The EZLN has

refused to lead or hegemonize this gathering network of movements, but

instead has sought to struggle side-by-side with them, consulting civil

society at every stage in its negotiations with the government, also

through self-organised referenda on a national scale to hear their

opinions and suggestions for changes in its strategy.[274]

In terms of attempts at organizational coordination with other

movements, one-off meetings and congresses (e.g. the National Democratic

Convention in Summer 1994 which brought thousands of activists to the

jungles of Chiapas, a 1995 consultation on the future of the EZLN

attended by over a million people, etc.) resulted in astonishing success

and generated significant enthusiasm around the world. On the other hand

attempts at establishing permanent institutional ties with other

struggles nationally and worldwide, with standing coordination bodies,

largely fizzled out. This demonstrates, Holloway infers, that the main

real force of the EZLN has been “the much less structured notion of

resonance…”[275]

The EZLN uprising, and the global movement in support of it, were the

beginning of a wave of networked global insurgencies against neoliberal

capitalism that has lasted to the present day. Aside from some

demonstrations in the 90s in Europe (the 1998 Multilateral Agreement on

Investment and J18 in 1999, in particular), organized through the same

pattern of networking of affinity groups that has characterized the

entire wave of struggles, the next notable large-scale point on the

timeline was the Seattle anti-WTO demonstration of 1999. The Seattle

demonstrations were the first in a series that targeted meetings of

every major multilateral institution through 2000 and 2001, along with

both American major parties’ nominating conventions in 2000. They

largely petered out in the wave of post-9/11 repression, aside from a

large-scale wave of demonstrations in opposition to the Iraq war in

early 2003.

The Wisconsin demos against Scott Walker in 2010 prefigured Occupy. And

in early 2011, sparked by revelations in the Wikileaks dump of State

Department cables by Chelsea Manning, the Arab Spring began with a wave

of protests that brought down the Tunisian government. The Arab Spring

inspired the M15 movement in Spain, Syntagma in Greece, and Occupy in

the United States — a massive wave of protests whose aftershocks (Black

Lives Matter, BDS, prison strikes, and NoDAPL among many others) persist

to the present.

Aside from these summary paragraphs I have no inclination — let alone

space — to recapitulate their history in greater detail. The comments

below are about the wave of movements as a whole.

A common feature of the post-1994 struggles is that such networked

struggles tend to reproduce themselves from place to place. Note that

the following extended passage by Negri and Hardt was written after the

Seattle movement, but before the Arab Spring:

Extensively, the common is mobilized in communication from one local

struggle to another. Traditionally… the geographical expansion of

movements takes the form of an *international cycle of struggles* in

which revolts spread from one local context to another like a contagious

disease through the communication of common practices and desires…. In

each of these cycles of struggles, the common that is mobilized

extensively and communicates across the globe is not only the commonly

recognized enemy — such as slavery, industrial capital, or colonial

regimes — but also common methods of combat, common ways of living, and

common desires for a better world….

A new international cycle finally emerged around the issues of

globalization in the late 1990s. The coming-out party of the new cycle

of struggles were the protests at the WTO summit in Seattle in 1999….

Suddenly the riots against IMF austerity programs in one country,

protests against a World Bank project in another, and demonstrations

against NAFTA in a third were all revealed to be elements of a common

cycle of struggles. The cycle of struggles has been consolidated in a

certain sense at the annual meetings of the World Social Forum and the

various regional social forums. At each of these social forums

activists, NGOs, and intellectuals meet to exchange views on the

problems of the present form of globalization and the possibilities for

an alternative form. Each social forum also functions as a celebration

of the commonality that extends throughout the various movements and

revolts across the globe that form this cycle…. We should emphasize,

once again, that what the forces mobilized in this new global cycle have

is not just a common enem… but also common practices, languages,

conduct, habits, forms of life, and desires for a better future. The

cycle, in other words, is not only reactive but also active and

creative….

The global mobilization of the common in this new cycle of struggle does

not negate or even overshadow the local nature or singularity of each

struggle. The communication with other struggles, in fact, reinforces

the power and augments the wealth of each single one….

The global cycle of struggles develops in the form of distributed

network. Each local struggle functions as a node that communicates with

all the other nodes without any hub or center of intelligence. Each

struggle remains singular and tied to its local conditions but at the

same time is immersed in the common web. This form of organization is

the most fully realized example we have of the

multitude.[276]

It is, accordingly, a mistake to talk about the “death” of networked

movements like Occupy. Even asking “What happened to Occupy?” or “What

happened to M15?” as though they were discrete entities with a beginning

and an end reflects a misconception as to their nature. It makes more

sense to think of the whole trajectory of movements including the Arab

Spring, M15 and Syntagma, Madison, Occupy, and its successors, as one

loose global network of associated networked movements. This networked

movement is always throwing up new avatars, with new names, which appear

to decline after a while. But when something new arises — and it always

does, whether in the same country or halfway around the world — it’s

built on the same infrastructure and foundations, and the same social

capital, as its predecessors. Here’s how Nathan Schneider described the

phenomenon in an interview:

[Occupy] very powerfully succeeded at introducing activists from around

the country to one another and turned a lot of people into activists

that weren’t before. It produced a tremendous number of networks, both

online and offline, which continue to mobilize people on a number of

fronts, though few are still called Occupy.

It also won a ton of disparate victories in communities across the

country, from small and large labor disputes, a dramatic reduction in

stop and frisks in New York, to the overturning of regulations

concerning the policing of the homeless in various cities. It

strengthened and encouraged various types of political organization as

well as turned movements into international networks around the world

that didn’t exist before.[277]

John Holloway dismisses concerns about the institutional continuity or

persistence of any particular movement.

I think there is an accumulation of experience, and also an accumulation

of growing awareness that spreads from one country to another, that

capitalism just isn’t working and that it is in serious problems…

There is a growing confidence perhaps that the cracks we create or the

crazinesses we create may really be the basis for a new world and a new

society, and may really be the only way forward.

What I don’t like about the idea of perpetuation is that it has to be a

smooth upward progress. I don’t think it works like that. I think it’s

more like a social flow of rebellion, something that moves throughout

the world, with eruptions in one place and then in another place. But

there are continuities below the discontinuities. We have to think in

terms of disrupting bubbling movements rather than thinking that it all

depends on whether we can perpetuate the movement in one place. If we

think in terms of perpetuation in one place, I think at times it can

lead us into either an institutionalization, which I think is not much

help, or it can lead us into a sense of defeat, perhaps, which I don’t

think is right.[278]

The 2011 movements have permanently changed the general environment. As

Stacco Troncoso put it:

Think of a sugar cube. Held in your hand it is

compact, with a recognizable shape and texture, easy to measure and

describe. Drop the sugar cube into a cup of coffee and stir that around.

Magic! The cube has disappeared. Take a sip, though, and you’ll agree

that the flavor has changed.

As already mentioned, the ripples of the 2011 movements were, in fact,

quite powerful. They include the BDS shutdown of ports, Black Lives

Matter, and NoDAPL. The Bernie Sanders presidential campaign of 2016 was

infused with energy from Occupy, and in Spain the new municipalist

movements of Barcelona and Madrid were driven in large part by veterans

of M15.[279] Since January 2017 the wave has continued in the

form of movements in resistance to Trump, like demonstrations shutting

down ICE headquarters in many cities in protest against children in

cages, and above all as of this writing (September 2020) the BLM

uprisings after the George Floyd murder.

And the arc of movements from 2011 to the present has staying power, in

part, because it reflects the consciousness of a generation that was

galvanized by a set of common experiences. Participants in recent

uprisings in Latin America, Lebanon, and Hong Kong, the Extinction

Rebellion protestors in London, etc., are young Millennials and

Generation Z, the younger brothers and sisters of those who participated

in the 2011 wave — as *The Guardian*’s Jack Shenker puts it, “the

children of the financial crash.”

Each of these upheavals has its own spark – a hike in transport fares in

Santiago, or a proposed tax on users of messaging apps like WhatsApp in

Beirut – and each involves different patterns of governance and

resistance….

And yet it’s clear that we are witnessing the biggest surge in global

protest activity since the early 2010s, when a “movement of the squares”

saw mass rallies in capital cities across the Arab world, followed by

Occupy demonstrations in the global north. Historically speaking, the

past decade has seen more protests than at any time since the 1960s….

The most significant connection is generational. The majority of those

protesting now are the children of the financial crisis – a generation

that has come of age during the strange and febrile years after the

collapse of a broken economic and political orthodoxy, and before its

replacement has emerged.[280]

The most important thing to remember, as Graeber pointed out, is that

“once people’s political horizons have been broadened, the change is

permanent.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans (and not only Americans, of course,

but Greeks, Spaniards, and Tunisians) now have direct experience of

self-organization, collective action, and human solidarity. This makes

it almost impossible to go back to one’s previous life and see things

the same way. While the world’s financial and political elites skate

blindly toward the next 2008-scale crisis, we’re continuing to carry out

occupations of buildings, farms, foreclosed homes, and workplaces —

temporary or permanent — organizing rent strikes, seminars, and debtors’

assemblies, and in doing so, laying the groundwork for a genuinely

democratic culture, and introducing the skills, habits, and experience

that would make an entirely new conception of politics come to

life.[281]

The rise of networked, horizontal resistance movements has given rise to

a growing dichotomy between the old-line, verticalist Institutional Left

and the new autonomous Left. As described by Cristina Flesher Fominaya,

[t]he classic organizational model of the Institutional Left is

*representative*, with vertical structures…, decision-making through a

voting system or through negotiations between representatives, and a

clear division of labour….

…The Institutional Left model defends the transformation of society

through its institutions, either by controlling them or by influencing

them….

The autonomous model, for its part rejects representative democracy and

majority rule; instead, it defends a participatory model, based on

direct democracy and self-governance, with horizontal (non-hierarchical

structures, decision-making through consensus….

The network form of organization and communication allows for the

integration and interaction of multiple issues and identities…. The

networks are ‘biodegradable’, dissolving and regenerating into new forms

of organization and action….[282]

The horizontal movements of the last few decades differ from the

revolutionary movements of the 19th and early 20th

centuries, among other ways, in that the methods of struggle are

becoming more and more prefigurative — in Marina Sitrin’s words,

movements

that are creating the future in their present social relationships.

Unlike past movements, social change isn’t deferred to a later date by

demanding reform from the state, or by taking state power and

eventually, instituting these reforms…. [T]heir strategy for the

creation of a new society is not grounded in either state dependency or

the taking of power to create another state. Their intention is, to

borrow John Holloway’s phrase, to change the world without taking

power.[283]

Sitrin, in the Introduction to her book of the same name, says

horizontalidad* was a word coined to reflect the principles of the new

social movements in Argentina, “a break with vertical ways of organizing

and relating” based on “democratic communication on a level plane.”

They are working class people taking over factories and running them

collectively. They are the urban middle class, many recently declassed,

working to meet their needs in solidarity with those around them. They

are the unemployed, like so many unemployed around the globe, facing the

prospect of never finding regular work, yet collectively finding ways to

survive and become self-sufficient, using mutual-aid and love. They are

autonomous indigenous communities struggling to liberate stolen land.

In Argentina, these active movements are now communicating, assisting,

and learning from one another, and thus constructing new types of

networks that reject the hierarchical template bequeathed to them by

established politics.[284]

S. Tormey’s description of the global movement against the Iraq war in

early 2003 sounds a lot like the networked movements that have arisen

since:

What they (virtual networks) fostered was a form of interaction that

preserved the autonomy and integrity of the constituent parts. No group

was subject to the will of another. No group had to recognize one as a

leading group or as the ‘vanguard’ of the movement. There was no need

for bureaucracy, permanent staffs, officials, ‘leadership’, or even

premises, beyond somewhere to house a server. Here was a form of

interaction that denied the need for the very institutional and

logistical framework that had for a century defined the terms and

conditions of political activism.[285]

Negri and Hardt wrote that the 2011 movements “share[d] their internal

organization as a multitude.”

The foreign press corps searched desperately in Tunisia and Egypt for a

leader of the movements. During the most intense period of the Tahrir

Square occupation, for example, they would each day presume a different

figure was the *real* leader…. What the media couldn’t understand or

accept was that there was no leader in Tahrir Square. The movement’s

refusal to have a leader was recognizable throughout the year but

perhaps was most pronounced in Wall Street. A series of intellectuals

and celebrities made appearances at Zuccotti Park, but no one could

consider any of them leaders; they were guests of the multitude. From

Cairo and Madrid to Athens and New York, the movements instead developed

horizontal mechanisms for organization. They didn’t build headquarters

or form central committees but spread out like swarms, and most

important, they created democratic practices of decision making so that

all participants could lead together.[286]

It is true that these struggles confront the same enemy, characterized

by the powers of debt, the media, the security regime, and the corrupt

systems of political representation. However, the primary point is that

their practices, strategies, and objectives, although different, are

able to connect and combine with each other to form a plural, shared

project. The singularity of each struggle fosters rather than hinders

the creation of a common terrain.

…[T]hese movements were born in something like a communicative

laboratory, and indeed, the glue that hold them together seems initially

to be linguistic, cooperative, and network based (like many forms of

cognitive labor)…. The horizontal decision-making processes of the

multitude require temporal autonomy. The communication of slogans and

militant desires often begins in small community and neighborhood

groups, but then at a certain point spreads virally….

…Small groups and communities find ways to connect with one another

and to create common projects not by renouncing but by expressing their

differences. Federalism is thus a motor of composition.

…The pluralism of struggles that emerge from differing traditions and

express different goals combines with a cooperative and federative logic

of assembly to create a model of constituent democracy in which these

differences are able to interact and connect with each other to form a

shared composition. We have thus seen so far a plurality of movements

against global capital, against the dictatorship of finance, against the

biopowers that destroy the earth, and for the shared open access to and

self-management of the common….

It should be obvious in this context that the modern political party —

either in its representative, parliamentary form or in its vanguard form

— cannot serve as an organ of this kind of decision making. In the past,

parties have frequently sought to recuperate the energy and ideals of

social movements in order to legitimate their own power. You have done

your work in the streets, they tell the multitude; now go home and let

us take up the cause in the halls of government…. [But t]he power of

decision created by the movements must reside with those who are acting

and cannot be transferred beyond that common terrain.[287]

…These movements are powerful not despite their lack of leaders but

because of it. They are organized horizontally as multitudes, and their

insistence on democracy at all levels is more than a virtue but a key to

their power. Furthermore, their slogans and arguments have spread so

widely not despite but because the positions they express cannot be

summarized or disciplined in a strict ideological line. There are no

party cadres telling people what to think, but instead there exist

discussions that are open to a wide variety of views that sometimes may

even contradict each other but nonetheless, although slowly, develop a

coherent perspective.[288]

Harry Cleaver also stressed the plurality of movements involved:

…[T]he common opposition to capitalism is not accompanied by the old

notion of a unified alternative project of socialism. On the contrary,

such a vision is steadily being displaced by a proliferation of distinct

projects and a common understanding that there is no need for universal

rules.[289]

Party lines and official ideologies/platforms raise the thresholds of

coordinated action. With no single official ideology, but only a common

orientation against the system of power, groups with many ideologies can

participate in a direct action based only on their shared immediate

objective, thereby raising the size of the swarm involved. Ideological

litmus tests above and beyond agreement on a particular direct action

change the permissionless nature of participation and exclude all who do

not buy into the entire ideology as a package.

The networked resistance movements of recent years have been governed by

the same stigmergic principles of organization shared by peer-to-peer

culture in general in the networked age. As W. Lance Bennett, Alexandra

Segerberg and Shawn Walker note, peer production includes not only

open-source software and Wikipedia but

collaborative activist projects such as the network of Independent Media

Centers (IMCs) of the global justice movement. Such projects may involve

vast numbers of dispersed and differently engaged individuals that come

together to create a common good — be it protest or software — around

which further collective action will revolve. Despite the open-ended

nature of such participation, peer-produced projects involve

self-motivated production and self-organization: participants ideally

contribute to the project in modular and granular ways and help shape

the conditions of the action so that the projects build on

self-selection and decentralization rather than coercion and

hierarchically assigned tasks.[290]

More recently, Nicholas Hildyard of Corner House sees radical movements

as primarily about developing the agency of oppressed and exploited

people themselves rather than influencing existing institutions. He

doesn’t preclude “making policy demands that are directed at reforming

existing institutions.” But the primary focus, from the perspective of

the producing classes as revolutionary subject, is on demands that

“arise from the pressing need to build alliances and to expand political

space.”[291] Justice becomes a matter of discovery by the

revolutionary subject — “the process of discovery itself shapes

‘justice’ through the relationships it forms and the new class conflicts

that may emerge from those relationships.”[292] And the

coalescence of a revolutionary subject on a macro scale is the result,

not of organizational mass and central coordination on the Old Left

model, but the spontaneous proliferation of horizontal ties of

solidarity between movements engaged in the process of combating the

injustice where they live and creating space for building a new society.

It is a product of those flashes of mutual recognition where people come

to see something of their own struggle in someone else’s, and vice versa

where they come to identify with others who may have quite different

interests and to whom they may previously have been indifferent or even

opposed; and where they are drawn together not so much because they come

from or are ‘embedded in absolute sameness’, but because they come to

realise that their life courses are being ‘determined by ultimately

similar processes and outcomes’. In this process, they open themselves

up to the realisation of something previously unrecognised, shifting the

boundaries of what is ‘possible’ in the process.[293]

We constitute ourselves a revolutionary subject through the

relationships we form in process of our local efforts at building a new

society.

To the extent that struggles emerge from the process of building

counter-institutions at a local level or issue level, and the opposition

we face from power structures in that process, the revolutionary

potential of stigmergic organization reveals itself in its power to

instantly facilitate global awareness, shift resources, and to transform

the struggle of each into the struggle of all in an unprecedented

manner.

Hildyard shows an especial fondness for the kinds of precedents in

working class self-organization described by thinkers like Pyotr

Kropotkin, E. P. Thompson and Colin Ward.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when working-class

culture was being constructed through myriad relationships that brought

an expanded awareness of oppression, working class life went on ‘more or

less entirely outside of society’: unions, dissenting church groups,

workers’ clubs, reading groups, worker-run creches, mutual aid societies

and other cornerstones of working-class communities arose partly because

wider society ignored working-class needs for schooling, healthcare and

childcare…. To survive, workers were reliant on their own institutions

and support networks. These were not only a response to the deprivations

suffered: they were also a conscious attempt to build an ‘alternate

social and moral order’.[294]

And today, the increasingly precarious and lumpenized working class “is

re-emerging to forge new cultures of provisioning, nurturing and mutual

support to weather the destruction that the whirlwind of neoliberalism

is inflicting.”[295] “Rather than looking for a ‘to do’ list

that will be implemented by someone else, they are building their own

power ‘to do’….”[296]

Chapter Four: The Abandonment of Workerism

I. The Limited Relevance of Proletarianism in the Mass Production Age

Even at the height of the industrial age, the proletariat *never* became

a unified or homogenous class, or lost its local cultural traditions.

Déclassé* skilled artisans played a leading role in working class

radicalism in the early-to-mid 19th century, and skilled workers on the

shop floor under the gang system later played a leading role in the

development of movements like syndicalism.

And the industrial proletariat never incorporated the entirety of the

producing classes. There were always islands of small-scale production

for use in the social/informal economy even by industrial workers

themselves. They were marginalized by the political power of capital,

not by the superior efficiency of large-scale capitalist production.

There were also islands of self-employment, and the so-called

lumpenproletariat was far more politically significant than made out to

be in Marx’s schema.

For that matter the industrial proletariat itself, as James Scott points

out, never entirely surrendered its “petty bourgeois” dreams of

independence on a bit of village land or in an artisan shop.

Petty bourgeois dreams infuse the imagination of the industrial

proletariat…. The reddest of the red proletarians, the militant coal

miners and steelworkers of the Ruhr in 1919, on whom Lenin reposed his

revolutionary hopes, are a striking case in point. When asked what they

wished for, their desires were remarkably modest. They wanted higher

wages, a shorter day, and longer rests, as one might expect. But beyond

what Marxists would disparagingly call “trade-union consciousness,” they

yearned to be treated honorably by their bosses (and called “Herr X”)

and aspired to have a small cottage with a garden to call their own. It

is hardly surprising that a newly industrialized proletariat would

retain social aspirations from their village origins, but their demand

for the amenities of social respect and for the cultural trappings of an

independent life on the land ill fit either the stereotype of an

“economistic” working class with both eyes fixed on the loot or that of

a revolutionary proletariat.

Over the past several decades, standard opinion polls in the United

States have asked industrial workers what kind of work they would prefer

to factory work. An astonishingly high percentage pines to open a shop

or a restaurant or to farm.[297]

It’s hard not to suspect that many contemporary Marxist-Leninists would

find Marx himself insufferably “liberal” or “petty bourgeois.” The

industrial proletariat’s own ideal existence could be described, only

slightly tongue-and-cheek, as “to do one thing today and another

tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in

the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever

becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” There is a fairly close

parallelism between Marx’s vision of the emancipated communist future,

and of the evicted and proletarianized peasant’s memory of village life

and independence on the commons. And leaving aside the dubious vulgar

Marxist proposition that industrialization on the capitalist model was

more objectively “progressive” than would have been — say — bridging the

gap between eotechnic and neotechnic with a hypothetical Mumfordian

alternative, it is true in any case that the new technologies we

described in Chapter Two open the possibility of achieving this utopian

communist existence of the future without further intervening

proletarianization.

It’s ironic that Lenin said the working class, left to itself, could

only achieve “trade union consciousness.” Proletarianization itself in

the 19th century was a powerful force for de-radicalizing the working

class. The most radical socialist ideas, as recounted by E.P. Thompson,

came from petty bourgeois/skilled artisan elements like master weavers,

printers, etc. And syndicalism emerged mainly from master craftsmen on

the shop floor, when direct organization of factory work was still

carried out under their direction in the gang system.

The industrially organized “army of labor” Marx and Engels had so much

faith in actually habituated workers to being directed by a hierarchy of

labor leaders who, in turn, were vulnerable to the Iron Law of Oligarchy

and cooptation within a reformist labor accord. It also opened the way

to deskilling under the 20th century Taylorist/Fordist mass production

regime, which eliminated the very bases of independence within the

production process from which so much radical/syndicalist thought had

been generated. So the proletariat, Marx’s own hope for the nucleus of a

“historic bloc,” was actually rendered capable only of trade union

consciousness by the process of proletarianization itself.

II. Technology and the Declining Relevance of Proletarianism

The most promising way out is deproletarianizing production technology

that recreates skilled artisan labor as the nucleus of a new,

post-proletarian and post-mass production historic bloc. In which model,

secession will replace conquest of power as the revolutionary model.

And now that cheap, ephemeral tools for small-scale production are

becoming radically cheaper and more efficient, the potential to

challenge the power of capital from outside the organized industrial

proletariat is increasing enormously.

Since the formative period of the Old Left — and especially in the past

two decades — the conventional full-time wage employment model has

become increasingly irrelevant. The size of the full time wage labor

force has steadily shrunk as a portion of the total economy; both the

permanently unemployed and the precariat (i.e. the underemployed,

part-time workers, temporary workers, and guest workers) have grown as a

share of the economy. For these workers the old model of a

workplace-based social safety net does not exist, and it has been

radically scaled back even for remaining full-time workers.

Further, the precariat for the most part do not identify with the

workplace or wage employment in the same way that their parents and

grandparents did, and often have value systems more in common with

earlier socialists who saw their economic identity in terms of social or

guild relations outside the workplace. To quote Guy Standing

Put bluntly, the proletariat’s representatives demand decent labour,

lots of it; the precariat wishes to escape from labour, materially and

psychologically, because its labour is instrumental, not self-defining.

Many in the precariat do not even aspire to secure labour. They saw

their parents trapped in long-term jobs, too frightened to leave, partly

because they would have lost modest enterprise benefits that depended on

‘years of service’. But in any event, those jobs are no longer on offer

to the precariat. Twentieth-century spheres of labour protection —

labour law, labour regulations, collective bargaining, labourist social

security — were constructed around the image of the firm, fixed

workplaces, and fixed working days and work-weeks that apply only to a

minority in today’s tertiary online society. While proletarian

consciousness is linked to long-term security in a firm, mine, factory

or office, the precariat’s consciousness is linked to a search for

security outside the workplace.[298]

III The Abandonment of Proletarianism by the New Left

Meanwhile, new Leftist movements have arisen based on labor’s actual

experience of alienation from the workplace, and resurrecting

pre-existing “utopian” models of socialism based on leisure and the

dissolution of work into social life.

The first step away from the workerism of the Old Left came with the New

Left’s emphasis on marginalized communities outside the industrial

workforce, and on building community-based rather than primarily

workplace-based alliances for social change.

Tom Hayden, writing in 1966, sketched out a Movement centered not on the

industrial proletariat, but on the poor of all races — and particularly

the rural southern black poor and the poor of the northern ghettoes. To

the extent that poor whites had been mobilized alongside them, “these

organizing efforts were led by local people or independent organizers

outside the structure of the labor movement.” And “a coalition of poor

whites with Negroes depends, most of all, on whether a way can be found

to organize workers independent of AFL-CIO routines.” And to the labor

organizations participated in such coalitions, it would be as part of

larger community alliances.

Concretely, that means democratic control by the workers of their union

locals, and the entry of those locals into political activities and

coalitions on the community level. It also means community action and

organization among the millions of low-paid workers presently outside

the labor movement….

An organizational form that suggests the style of such a movement is the

“community union,” involving working-class and poor people in local

insurgency. Open and democratic, the community union offers a real

alternative to the kind of participation permitted in civil rights

groups, trade unions and Democratic party machines. It might take a

variety of forms: block clubs, housing committees, youth groups, etc.

The union’s insistence on the relevance of “little people,” as well as

its position outside and against the normal channels, would create a

rooted sense of independence among the members.

Alongside the poor, another major component of Hayden’s Movement was

radical students rejecting the Organization Man lifestyle of their

parents, which they were expected to pursue as a matter of course. And

the role of students went beyond alliance with the poor in support of

the latter’s goals.

Now it appears that students are finding ways to organize effectively

around other problems too: university reform and peace…. On many

campuses students are beginning to form unions of their own, as well as

independent seminars pointed toward the eventual organization of a “free

university.” In addition, they are beginning to mobilize community

action against the Vietnamese war — thereby encountering their friends

already at work among the poor. These efforts may thread the several

protest movements in the country into a grassroots coalition.

And finally, the Movement took in a growing number of alienated

professionals within the bureaucratic machinery of capitalist state and

corporation, the press, and the welfare apparatus.

Insurgency within American institutions is spreading: professors

fighting their administrations, lawyers against the bar association,

welfare workers against the political machine, muckrakers against the

press establishments. This insurgency is bound to increase as the new

generation of student activists graduates into the professions. And it

is an insurgency which needs a movement of poor people, insistently

demanding new social purposes from the professionals.[299]

Autonomist Marxism continued and further developed the anti-workerist

themes of the New Left. The autonomist Harry Cleaver, writing in the

1970s, observed a shift in contemporary industrial workers’ struggles

from a demand for workers’ control to the refusal of work itself, along

with a shift to struggles outside the wage system altogether and in the

spheres of social reproduction of labor power and a shift from

insurrectionist to prefigurative strategies.

First, the continuing spread of Taylorist and Fordist deskilling

produced such an alienation of young workers from work that, by the

1960s, the desire to take over work and make it less alienating was

being more and more replaced by its simple refusal. They didn’t want

control; they wanted out. Second, the refusal of work on the job was

increasingly accompanied by a refusal of the unwaged work of reproducing

labour power in life outside the formal job. Moreover, the refusal of

both kinds of work was accompanied by new kinds of non-work activity.

Against the ‘cultural’ mechanisms of domination, highlighted and

analyzed by the critical theorists, was being pitted a ‘cultural

revolution’ in the 1960s that continued on into the 1970s and since.

Indeed, the self-activity of the women’s movement, the student movement,

the environmental movement and of many peasant struggles quite

self-consciously set out to elaborate new ways of being, new

relationships among people and between humans and nature. As opposed to

the traditional Leninist view that building a new society could only

occur after revolution-as-overthrow-of- capital, these new movements

that were rapidly undermining the Keynesian capitalist world order

demanded, and indeed were undertaking, the building of ‘the future’ in

the present.[300]

Cleaver saw autonomism as a shift away from “workerism” and to “the

people.” Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, and their followers in the

Monthly Review group,

still defined the working class only as wage workers and thus identified

the struggles of unemployed Black Panthers, militant Students for a

Democratic Society, radical feminists, or welfare rights activists as

being outside that class. All that could be seen of the working class

within this perspective were the hard-hat attacks on antiwar

demonstrators. What place could there be for Marx in a vision in which

the working class had sold out and allied with the capitalist class and

the only true revolutionaries were nonworking-class students, women,

Third World minorities, and peasants? In the place of the vision of the

working class as the major protagonist in the struggle emerged that of

‘the people’.[301]

The dominant forms of Marxist theory, framed around the capitalist

factory and its workers, were becoming obsolete. That is, they were

guilty of

a reading of *Capital* that is not only limited to being a passive

interpretation, but which also, by restricting itself to the ‘economic’

sphere or ‘base’ effectively, makes of political economy the theory of

the capitalist factory and its waged workers alone. This has the effect

of excluding the rest of society from the analysis — not only the state

and party politics but also the unemployed, the family, the school,

health care, the media, art, and so on…. Yet it is precisely in these

‘other’ social spheres that many of the major social conflicts of today

are occurring. At the turn of the century, when working-class struggle

was located primarily (but not uniquely by any means) in the factory,

there was perhaps some excuse for reading *Capital* as a theoretical

model of the capitalist factory. But as a result of the extensive social

engineering of the 1920s and 1930s through which capitalist social

planners sought to restructure virtually all of society, and as a result

of the nature of recent social struggles against such planning, such

interpretations today are grossly inadequate…. Orthodoxy revived

historical materialism and tried to shove peasant revolts into the box

of pre-capitalist modes of production. Student revolts were classified

as either petty bourgeois or lumpen. Women’s revolts were within the

framework of some ‘domestic’ mode of production. All were thus set aside

as unimportant secondary phenomena because they were not truly working

class. This of course set up the Party once again as the mediating

interpreter of the real working-class interests and justified the

attempt to repress or co-opt these struggles.

…We can thus see that one great weakness of reading Marx as political

economy has been to isolate and reduce his analysis to that of the

factory….[302]

The Italian autonomists, according to Cleaver, abandoned the workerism

of the Old Left and in fact adopted in its place the “refusal of work.”

This position was also supported theoretically by the abandonment of the

old leftist perspective on work (which was rooted in the skilled

workers’ experience from the period of early capitalism through the

councils and soviets): that the struggle was to liberate work from

capital, to achieve nonalienated work. As Tronti pointed out, under the

conditions of the unskilled mass worker, work itself could only be seen

as a means of social control to be abolished, not upgraded. This

understanding led directly to the realization that the basic

characteristic of working-class struggle in this period is not only an

escape from capital but also an escape from existence as working class.

The aim of the mass worker is to cease to be a worker, not to make a

religion of work.[303]

According to Cleaver, Marx’s own non-workerist view (i.e., compared to

the dominant form of “official Marxism” formulated by Engels, Kautsky et

al after his death) of political agency in the transition was closely

linked to his views on liberation from work** after **capitalism.

Time and again Marx’s evocation of post-capitalist society involves the

image of the individual (and collectivity) doing many things, not just

working. The transcendence of alienation can only come with such a

quantitative reduction of work that work becomes one, among other,

integral aspects of a richly diverse human existence. The liberation of

work can only come with the liberation from work, that is to say from

the capitalist reduction of life to work. Once we see these things, we

are freed from the productivism of all the old socialist illusions; we

are free to think about struggle, revolution and freedom in terms of the

simultaneous demotion of work from the center of life and its

restoration as one means, among others, of fulfilling human

development.[304]

And working class movement’s goals in Marx’s time were arguably closer

to this vision than to that of the Old Left.

From the very beginning, as illustrated by Marx’s account of the fight

over the working day, the working class resisted the imposition of the

wage system and commodification of labor-power, not so much by fighting

for increased control over work as by fighting to liberate as much free

time as possible. The working class’s struggle was for freedom from work

— leisure.[305]

Cleaver saw the new currents of the Left as seizing on the post-scarcity

vision of the “Fragment on Machines,” abandoning the traditional Old

Left demand for “full employment” in favor of a universally shortened

work week in keeping with the amount of labor needed to produce the

existing standard of living.[306]

Accordingly, the struggle today for escape from labor time and autonomy

is entirely continuous with a vision of the future in which communism is

“free time and nothing else.”

The power of refusal is the power to carve out times and spaces

relatively free of the capitalist imposition of work…. The power of

self-valorization is the power to fill those spaces with alternative

activities and new forms of sociality — to elaborate the communist

future in the present.[307]

…[H]is understanding of both the role of imposed work in capitalism and

the long history of the workers struggle to reduce it led him to believe

that in post-capitalist society free time as the basis for the “full

development of individuality” would replace labor as the source of value

in society. Thus, post-capitalist society would most likely be

characterized, at least in part, by the open-endedness characteristic of

“disposable time,” an expanding sphere of freedom which would allow a

multi-sided development of the individual and of

society.[308]

At the same time, the revolutionary subject ceases to be defined by the

hegemony of a historically progressive industrial proletariat, and

instead becomes an interlinkage of many self-defined struggles against

not only capital’s domination of the workplace but all the interlinked

forms of domination.

There can no longer be any doubt that proliferating interconnections

among diverse, geographically dispersed, grassroots social struggles –

e.g., those of waged workers (often precariously waged), indigenous

peoples, human rights advocates, ethnic and cultural minorities,

environmentalists, women, students, immigrants – are resulting in a

deepening and broadening threat to the contemporary capitalist social

order. On the one hand, it is the very proliferation, intensity and

interlinkages of struggles attacking one or another dimension of

capitalist domination that is so striking – virtually all types of

existing social relationships of control are being

challenged.[309]

The model of revolutionary struggle is no longer an alliance of

progressive forces under the leadership of the proletariat, but “a

diversity of social projects” or “acceleration of struggles,” all

working together to build “a post-capitalist politics of difference

without antagonism.”[310] The goal becomes “circulation of

struggle”:

The question, ‘How can we build our own power to refuse work or to

self-valorise in our own way?’ becomes, ‘How can we link up with others

so that our efforts do not remain isolated but are mutually

reinforcing?’…

…The strength of relatively small groups, such as the Palestinians,

the black freedom movements in southern Africa, or the Zapatistas in

southern Mexico, has always been largely due to their ability to build

networks of alliance to circulate their struggles beyond their specific

locales to other groups in other parts of the world.[311]

Cleaver’s analysis of the collective subject in many ways anticipated,

or was contemporaneous with, Toni Negri’s views on knowledge workers,

the social factory, etc.

With respect to the current period of crisis and restructuring, some

Italian and French theorists of working class autonomy have suggested

that at the heart of the current crisis of capitalism is a new kind of

working class subjectivity which is replacing that of the mass worker.

They suggest that only by understanding the positive characteristics of

that subjectivity, which ruptured capitalist control and continues to

defy its present efforts at subordination, can we understand either

those efforts or the emergent possibilities of liberation. One early

characterization of this new subjectivity (which is actually seen as a

diversity of subjectivities) was that of a new “tribe of moles” — a

loose community of highly mobile, drop-out, part-time workers, part-time

students, participants in the underground economy, creators of temporary

and ever changing autonomous zones of social life that forced a

fragmentation of and crisis in the mass-worker organization of the

social factory. Another characterization has been that of the

“socialized worker” which focuses on how the crisis of the social

factory has been generated precisely by a subject whose self-activity in

all moments of life challenges the fabric of capitalist control. Within

the interpersonal interactions and exchanges of information that they

associate with the “computer and informational society,” these theorists

believe to have identified an increasingly collective appropriation of

(i.e., control over) “communication.” The analysis runs as follows: the

period of mass production was characterized by radical divisions between

and within mental and manual labor (both within and outside of the

factory) that limited daily participation in any kind of collective

system of interactive communication to a small minority of skilled

workers (e.g., engineers and scientists) — this was a continuation of

the same divisions both Kropotkin and Marx condemned. However, the

dynamics of the class struggle has increasingly forced a spatial and

temporal recomposition of work that is undermining that division. On the

one hand, automation has been dramatically reducing the role of simple

manual labor — increasingly in the “service” sector as well as in

manufacturing. At the same time, the needs of global coordination and

continuous innovation have expanded not only the role of mental labor

but its collective character, creating ever more jobs that require the

manipulation of information flows, intelligent and informed decision

making within production, independent initiative, creativity and the

coordination of complex networks of social cooperation. The essential

point is that at a social level, these developments embody the

adaptation of capitalist command to the emergence of an increasingly

independent collective subject whose self-organization of essentially

intellectual work and play repeatedly outruns capital’s ability to limit

and control it.[312]

The analysis of this emerging collective subject has suggested that it

has begun to impose its hegemony on the class composition as a whole,

much in the way the “mass worker” dominated the prior “Fordist” period

of capitalist development. In other words, while during the period of

the “mass worker” (Fordism) neither all nor even most workers were

employed in factories on assembly lines, nevertheless they formed the

paradigmatic core whose organization influenced all others. The argument

is that, in the present period, the new attributes of this collective

subject (interlinked intellectual cooperation, appropriation of social

communication) are constituting differentiated communities with new

values and rejecting traditional politics and labor organization. They

are also increasingly coming to characterize the class as a whole as

they take on, more and more, the political role of igniting, solidifying

and linking social struggles. This grounding of the collective processes

of constitution in communication is a common characteristic in the

development of an array of “new social movements” that have been widely

seen to be the most important components of social confrontation in this

period.[313]

Note that this reference to “new social movements” was written in 1992,

two years before the launch of the EZLN uprising in Chiapas, and long

before the Seattle anti-globalization movement — let alone the Arab

Spring, M15, Syntagma, Occupy, BLM or NoDAPL.

Continuing on to Negri himself, this shift away from workerism is

reflected in his and Hardt’s substitution of the “multitude” for the

traditional Marxist conception of the proletariat. The multitude, unlike

the industrial proletariat, is coextensive with the productive activity

of society at large — basically extending to “all those who work under

the rule of capital and thus potentially as the class of those who

refuse the rule of capital.” This is a major change from 19th and 20th

century conception of the working class, which was limited to industrial

workers — or at most to wage laborers.

The working class is thought to be the primary productive class and

directly under the rule of capital, and thus the only subject that can

act effectively against capital. The other exploited classes might also

struggle against capital but only subordinated to the leadership of the

working class…. The concept [of multitude] rests… on the claim that

there is no political priority among the forms of labor: all forms of

labor are today socially productive, they produce in common, and share

too a common potential to resist the domination of capital…. In order

to verify this concept of the multitude and its political project we

will have to establish that… the conditions exist for the various

types of labor to communicate, collaborate, and become

common.[314]

Those “excluded from waged labor — the poor, the unemployed the unwaged,

the homeless, and so forth” are still part of the multitude, “because

these classes are in fact included in social

production.”[315]

…Today…, to the extent that social production is increasingly

defined by immaterial labor such as cooperation or the construction of

social relationships and networks of communication, the activity of all

in society including the poor becomes more and more directly

productive.[316]

…Just as social production takes place today equally inside and

outside the factory walls, so too it takes place equally inside and

outside the wage relationship.[317]

According to Cleaver the autonomists took the pessimistic Frankfurt

School view of society at large as subjected to Taylorist logic and

turned into an extension of the factory, and turned it on its head. If

society as a whole is a “factory” for reproducing labor-power — not only

materially but culturally and ideologically — then society as a whole

also becomes an arena for class conflict. The struggle against

capitalism ceases to be a project merely of workers in the factories,

and unites diverse struggles of racial minorities, women, students,

environmentalists, etc., in the larger social sphere against the

reproduction of capitalism at a systemic level. Rather than cementing

capitalist control within the factories, the “social factory” forced

capital to defend itself on a society-wide front.[318]

Capital expanded into the “social factory” to incorporate education,

unpaid housework, etc., into underwriting the costs of reproducing

labor-power for free that otherwise might have required increased wages.

Labor correspondingly shifted from a fight over the working day alone

into a refusal of work altogether — fighting not only to reduce the pace

of work or reclaim free time on the job, but contesting the capitalist

nature of so-called “free time” in the social factory outside the job

and fighting to make it actually free.[319]

Negri and Hardt elaborate in greater detail the ways in which capitalist

control is grounded in society at large rather than the factory:

…The center of gravity of capitalist production no longer resides in

the factory but has shifted outside its walls. Society has become a

factory, or rather, capitalist production has spread such that the labor

power of the entire society tends to be subordinated to capitalist

control. Capital increasingly exploits the entire range of our

productive capacities, our bodies and our minds, our capacities for

communication, our intelligence and creativity, our affective relations

with each other, and more. Life itself has been put to work.

With this shift the primary engagement between capitalist and worker

also changes. No longer is the typical scene of exploitation the

capitalist overseeing the factory, directing and disciplining the worker

in order to generate a profit. Today the capitalist is farther removed

from the scene, and workers generate wealth more autonomously. The

capitalist accumulates wealth primarily through rent, not profit — this

rent most often takes a financial form and is guaranteed through

financial instruments. This is where debt enters the picture, as a means

to maintain and control the relationship of production and exploitation.

Exploitation today is based primarily not on (equal or unequal) exchange

but on debt, that is, on the fact that the 99 percent of the population

is subject — owes work, owes money, owes obedience — to the 1

percent.[320]

First, production is now realized at both the local and global levels in

the frame of the common: labor power has become common, life has been

put to work, capitalist development in the form of financialization

centrally involves exploitation of the common, and so forth. Second,

capitalist development is plagued by an irresolvable economic, social,

and political crisis. This crisis can be explained in part, at least, by

the fact that whereas productive forces are becoming increasingly

common, relations of production and property continue to be defined by

individualistic and privatistic rules and norms, which are unable to

grasp the new productive reality and are completely external to the new

common sources of value.[321]

The “dominant forms of subjectivity” that emerge in this crisis period

of late capitalism include “four primary subjective figures—the

indebted, the mediatized, the securitized, and the represented — all of

which are impoverished and their powers for social action are masked or

mystified.”[322]

The hegemony of finance and the banks has produced *the indebted*.

Control over information and communication networks has produced *the

mediatized*. The security regime and the general state of exception have

constructed a figure prey to fear and yearning for protection — *the

securitized*. And the corruption of democracy has formed a strange,

politicized figure — *the represented*. These subjective figures

constitute the social terrain on which — and against which — movements

of resistance and rebellion must act.[323]

The previous state of isolation in these individual prisons is replaced

by a recomposition. And the new sense of subjectivity is expressed by a

refusal and inversion of all the various forms of control. Refusal of

debt is an enormous threat to the system,[324] obviously,

through such means as organized debt strikes in the developed world,

repudiations of foreign debt by developing countries, etc.

The refusal and inversion of mediatization comes from recuperating media

and using social media as a means of coordinating protest, asserting

mastery over it, turning it into “tools for our collective

self-reproduction.”[325]

Refusal of securitization comes from recognizing that power is a

relationship which requires the cooperation of the ruled. We cease to be

securitized by “obeying when the forces of power [are] watching and

subverting that power in hidden spaces.”[326] James Scott’s

treatment of Zomian populations in *The Art of Not Being Governed*, and

their escape by rendering themselves illegible, is relevant here. And

ultimately people often defeat power simply by refusing to be afraid any

more, as when Mubarak was brought down by the refusal of the Tahrir

Square protestors.[327] Consider case studies by civil

resistance scholars of (for example) the Shah’s regime, where every

police repression of a crowd resulted in even more people showing up for

the funerals, and more the next time after that was repressed, and so

on, until finally the Shah’s inner circle melted away and the palace

guards defected and he had to evacuate.

Finally, refusal of representation entails exodus from participation in

the political process, and acting as the constituent power for a new

system.[328]

In this model, revolutionary subjectivity emerges from the shared sense

of indebtedness and other forms of subordination and control that

encompass our relationships in society at large, as opposed to Marx’s

idea of subjectivity emerging among workers in a factory from their

shared experience of participating in production. The subjectivity is

that of the multitude in the social factory, versus that of the

proletariat in an industrial factory.

The identity of the new subject who emerges from the social factory at

large is that of the *commoner*.

The commoner is… an ordinary person who accomplishes an extraordinary

task: opening private property to the access and enjoyment of all;

transforming public property controlled by state authority into the

common; and in each case discovering mechanisms to manage, develop, and

sustain common wealth through democratic participation. The task of the

commoner, then, is not only to provide access to the fields and rivers

so that the poor can feed themselves, but also to create a means for the

free exchange of ideas, images, codes, music, and information. We have

already seen some of the prerequisites of accomplishing these tasks: the

ability to create social bonds with each other, the power of

singularities to communicate through differences, the real security of

the fearless, and the capacity for democratic political action. The

commoner is a constituent participant, the subjectivity that is

foundational and necessary for constituting a democratic society based

on open sharing of the common.

The action of “commoning” must be oriented not only toward the access to

and self-management of shared wealth but also the construction of forms

of political organization.[329]

IV. The Abandonment of Workerism in Praxis

In this last section, we shift our focus to actual resistance movements

engaged in direct struggle. The post-1994 cycle of movements has

continued the move away from workerism that began with the New Left.

The EZLN, whose 1994 uprising in Chiapas kicked off the massive wave of

horizontalist movements that persists to this day, focuses on “civil

society” rather than “class.”

The EZLN do not use the concept of “class” or “class struggle” in their

discourse, in spite of the fact that Marxist theory has clearly played

an important part in their formation. They have preferred instead to

develop a new language, to speak of the struggle of truth and

dignity…. In looking for support, or in forming links with other

struggles, they have appealed not to the working class or the

proletariat but to “civil society.” By “civil society” they seem to mean

“society in struggle” in the broadest sense: all those groups and

initiatives engaged in latent or overt struggles to assert some sort of

control over their future, without aspiring to hold government

office.[330]

In other words, the “revolutionary subject” is all oppressed groups,

united in their struggle against all forms of domination. “Revolution

can only be thought of in this scheme as the cumulative uniting of

dignities, the snowballing of struggles, the refusal of more and more

people to subordinate their humanity to the degradation of

capitalism.”[331]

Holloway’s objection to a primary focus on the working class is related

to his autonomist perspective, in which the struggle against capitalism

is an open-ended struggle to contest its imposition of commodifed labor,

and to prevent its reimposition on a daily basis. The concept of a

working class as the primary agent of struggle presupposes the very

thing that autonomists object to: the idea of capitalism as a closed

system, currently set in place, and the commodification of labor as a

done deal.

In this approach, any definition of the working class is based on its

subordination to capital…. Capitalism, in this approach, is understood

as a world of predefined social relations that are firmly fixed or

fetishized. Thus, working-class struggle is understood as starting from

the pre-constituted subordination of labour to capital.[332]

But autonomism sees the struggle against capitalism as just the

opposite: a struggle, across the whole of society (not just in the

workplace), to contest such subordination in the first place.

…[T]he conflict does not take place after subordination has been

established, after the fetishised forms of social relations have been

constituted: rather it is a conflict *about* the subordination of social

practice, *about* the fetishization of social relations. The conflict is

between subordination and insubordination…. Class struggle does not

take place within the constituted forms of capitalist social relations:

rather the constitution of these forms is itself class struggle. This

leads to a much richer concept of class struggle in which the whole of

social practice is at issue.[333]

Because the expansionary logic of capitalism requires commodifying ever

larger spheres of life, subjecting new areas to the cash nexus,

privatizing and enclosing more areas of common life, imposing neoliberal

models of austerity in new venues, it follows that every area of life —

not just the workplace — is a site of struggle against

capitalism.[334]

And in a very real sense the struggle is not so much by labor as against

labor, in the sense of abstract labor (the commodification of our

activities).

It becomes clear that we cannot think of class struggle as labour

against capital because labour is on the same side of capital, labour

produces capital. The struggle is not that of labour against capital but

of doing (or living) against labour and therefore against

capital.[335]

Drawing on the experience of the 2011 protests and their use of social

media, Negri and Hardt argue for the central role of communications

technology in the emergence of the commoner as subject.

The constituent power of the common is… closely interwoven with the

themes of constituent power — adopting new technologies (cellular

technologies, Twitter, Facebook, and more generally the Internet) as

vehicles of experimentation with democratic and multitudinary

governance.[336]

The centrality of knowledge and knowledge workers to the current model

of capitalism, and the requirements that entails, threaten to undermine

capitalism.

We live in a society in which capital functions increasingly by

exploiting the production and expression of knowledge, a society of

cognitive capitalism. Knowledge constitutes ever more the heart of

social relations, in terms of both capitalist control and the resistance

of living labor. It is thus no coincidence that, in the current cycle of

struggles, a large part of the activists are students, intellectual

workers, and those working in urban service jobs — what some call the

cognitive precariat…. The proliferation of struggles and their

performative character are grounded in the new nature of labor power. As

the centrality of cognitive labor becomes hegemonic, it permeates and is

crystallized in these forms of struggle. In the passage of these

movements from protest to constituent process, then, the demand for the

publicity and transparency becomes central.

Any effort to discipline or repress the curiosity, vitality, or desire

for knowledge of cognitive workers reduces their productivity. These

qualities are essential to contemporary economic production, but they

also open new contradictions regarding the exercise of power and the

legitimacy of representation. In fact, curiosity, vitality, and desire

for knowledge demand that the opacity and secrecy of power be

destroyed.[337]

Things like Chelsea Manning’s document dump — and Snowden’s, which

happened after Negri’s and Hardt’s time of writing in Declaration

— display the problematic character of knowledge work for capital

and the state. “If the state is not willing to initiate a process of

Glasnost, opening its secret vaults and making transparent its

operations, then these militants will help it do so

quickly.”[338]

Subjectivity is produced by such forms of activism — heavily mediated by

the new communications technologies — as “discussing, learning and

teaching, studying and communicating, participating in

actions…”[339]

The declining role of the traditional industrial proletariat as

revolutionary subject, and of control of the workplace, in

postcapitalist transition is closely related to the shift from ruptural

to interstitial transitional models. As Cleaver observes:

…Resources are limited, so Marxists have always looked for those

sectors of the working class that seem to have the most leverage or seem

to be the most dynamic and are those who are most likely to be on the

foreground of the class struggle. It is easy to understand why they have

done it; I just don’t think we can afford to have that attitude anymore.

We need to recognize that capital is global. Struggles are happening all

over the place, and our problem is connecting them up in such a way that

makes them all stronger…. Our problem, our big problem, is to

understand concrete struggles taking place all over, but on the other

hand we need to understand the connections….

What we see by looking historically are these cycles of struggle. What

hasn’t been studied enough is the formation of movements and how they

gel and come together. You have these molecular struggles going on all

the time and all over the place, but under what circumstances do they

begin to link up? How does that linkage catalyze? It is like a formation

of crystal from a liquid.[340]

It makes no sense to look for** the** revolutionary subject, in

other words, because we’re not looking for a vanguard to lead a

revolutionary struggle. We’re looking for those engaged in building the

future society, in the interstices of capitalism, and people are engaged

in that effort in every sector of society. *The “revolutionary subject”

is the entire future society in the making, here and now, and the task

is to keep building it.*

Murray Bookchin argued, likewise, that we are engaged in constituting a

“self” — a subject — through the process of building the new society.

There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the

revolutionary goal. *A society based on self-administration must be

achieved by means of self-administration.* This implies the forging of a

self… and a mode of administration which the self can possess. If we

define “power” as the power of man over man, power can only be destroyed

by the very process in which man acquires power over his own life and in

which he not only “discovers” himself but, more meaningfully, formulates

his selfhood in all its social dimensions.

Freedom, so conceived, cannot be “delivered” to the individual as the

“end product” of a “revolution.”… The assembly and community cannot be

legislated or decreed into existence. To be sure, a revolutionary group

can purposively and consciously seek to promote the creation of these

forms; but if assembly and community are not allowed to emerge

organically, if their growth is not instigated, developed and matured by

the social processes at work, they will not be really popular forms.

Assembly and community must arise from within the revolutionary process

itself; indeed, the revolutionary process must be the formation of

assembly and community, and with it, the destruction of power….

[Assembly and community] must be created as modes of struggle

against the existing society, not as theoretical or programmatic

abstractions.

It is hardly possible to stress this point strongly enough. The future

assemblies of people in the block, the neighborhood or the district —

the revolutionary sections to come — will stand on a higher social level

than all the present-day committees, syndicates, parties and clubs

adorned by the most resounding “revolutionary” titles. They will be the

living nuclei of Utopia in the decomposing body of bourgeois

society.[341]

Chapter Five: Evolutionary Transition Models

Introduction and Note on Terminology

Although I use “gradualism” and “continuity” for lack of other

sufficiently concise terms, they are probably somewhat misleading if

taken without explanation. Non-capitalist and commons-based alternatives

may grow in the interstices of capitalism, and increase in size relative

to the system as a whole, and capitalism may become less extractive over

time. Some government and corporate organizations may survive through

the transition and into some indefinite period of the successor system,

although their character will change along with their relationships to

the surrounding society and the core logic around which it is organized.

That does not mean that the transition will be gradual and continuous in

the sense that there are no abrupt changes or discontinuities. In fact

the tipping point between systems may be quite dramatic. But the tipping

point will be the result of cumulative, less dramatic changes which have

previously occurred within the old system. The systemic tipping point,

as Derk Loorbach (director of the Dutch Research Institute for

Transitions at Erasmus University of Rotterdam) argues, will be the

culmination of long-term processes which have occurred over decades.

Systems have a dynamic equilibrium, in which many small and gradual

changes occur. There are dominant values and structures that give a

lot of stability, it is something that cannot be changed easily. Yet, at

some point, the system itself gets under pressure to change, and the

system itself resists against these changes. This means that the

pressure becomes so high that at a certain moment the whole system

transitions to a different phase, a completely new kind of equilibrium.

This transition process is not gradual. A slow change is followed by a

chaotic period of severe changes when different processes reinforce each

other, until slow adjustments finally occur in a new stable phase….

…It is not possible to predict when and how transitions take place, to

know exactly which crisis triggers or accelerates them, but we do know

that it is inevitable that there are tipping points on which

alternatives break through….

In the early stages of transitions, it is mainly particularly

alternative people who don’t eat meat, or who work with social economy

or install solar panels. But as the system is getting more in crisis,

more people who are part of the system start to think about the change,

as do business people or people in policy. When these two groups can be

connected — the alternatives and the people in the system willing to

change —new combinations will emerge.[342]

It’s comparable to a phase transition between states of matter. A

solution may gradually become super-saturated beyond the crystallization

point, and yet remain entirely liquid until a sudden jar triggers the

actual crystallization. At that point the transition from liquid to

solid will be almost instantaneous and quite dramatic.

The primary difference between the “gradualist” transition model we

consider in this chapter, and the ruptural models of the Marxists and

others on the revolutionary Left, is one of emphasis. Marx saw

revolution as the culmination of a long process of interstitial

development by which the preconditions of communism were created within

the capitalist system. But for Marx, the actual institutions of the

successor society could not function under the control of workers, or

otherwise function as parts of a coherent post-capitalist system, until

the commanding heights of the state and monopoly capital had been seized

through some form of political action.

We, on the other hand, see a fully functioning post-capitalist system

developing here and now, as more and more cooperative or commons-based

institutions arise and coalesce into a whole. If there is violence

involved in the actual tipping point, it will not be because a seizure

of state power is necessary for us to fully construct post-capitalist

society. It will be because the forces of capital and the state attempt

to thwart the construction in which we are engaged. Ideally, we will

either achieve sufficient superiority in the correlation of forces with

capitalism to manage a peaceful transition and persuade the commanding

forces of the old system to accept a negotiated loss of power, or we

will have sufficient superiority to defeat their rear guard action with

minimal violence. But in either case, it is preferable that it be left

to them to initiate violence and that their defeat serve to ratify the

systemic transition.

All these things should be borne in mind as we use “gradual” or

“gradualism,” in the rest of this chapter, as terms of convenience.

I. Comparison to Previous Systemic Transitions

Insofar as rentier capitalism and state/corporate hierarchies, and

networks and commons, respectively, are the characteristic forms of

organization of two successive social systems, the process of transition

— like the previous transitions from the Western Roman Empire to

feudalism, and from feudalism to capitalism — itself becomes a subject

for study.

Along with the shifts we have previously examined — from mass-based

organization to horizontalism, etc. — there has been a corresponding

shift from the Old Left focus on abrupt breaks to new movements’

emphasis of gradualism and continuity.

A common theme among those who envision a gradual transition to

postcapitalism is the parallel with the earlier transition from

feudalism to capitalism, and before that with the rise of feudalism

after the fall of Rome. And as with those previous transitions, they see

the primary indications of the form to be taken by the successor society

as the prefigurative institutions being built “within the shell of the

old.”

James Livingston, for example, explicitly draws on previous transitions

as models for the hierarchy-network transition, in preference to the Old

Left’s preference for transitional models that are abrupt,

insurrectionary, and equated largely to seizure of the state and/or the

means of production (like the French and Russian revolutions). The

transition to post-capitalism could easily be a decades-long, relatively

gradual process resembling the decay of the Western Roman Empire and of

feudalism. He writes:

What happens when we stop looking for socialism in all the wrong places?

Start here. When we think about the transition from feudalism to

capitalism, we take the long view — we scan the four centuries from 1400

to 1800, looking for signs of fundamental but incremental change. To be

sure, we assume that the great bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth,

eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were both symptoms and causes of

this transition…. Still, we know these early modern movements can’t be

compared to the communist parties that created state socialism in

twentieth-century Russia, China, and Cuba, because in these more recent

instances, self-conscious revolutionaries organized workers and peasants

to overthrow capitalism and create socialism….

In short, capitalism was the *unintended consequence* of bourgeois

revolutions, whereas socialism has been the avowed purpose, or at least

a crucial component, of every revolution since 1911….

….We don’t measure the transition from feudalism to capitalism only by

assessing the social origins and political-economic effects of bourgeois

revolutions — we’d have to be daft to do so. Instead we ask when, how,

where, and why social relations were transformed, over many years, so

that a new mode of production and new modes of consciousness, emerged to

challenge (if not supplant) the old. Or rather…, we ask *when*

capitalism became the hegemonic mode in a mongrel social formation that

contained fragments of a residual feudalism and harbingers of a

precocious socialism. We don’t think that capitalism was created

overnight by revolutionary parties….

Why, then, would we look for evidence of socialism only where a state

seized by radicals of the Left inaugurates a dictatorship of the

proletariat? Or, to lower the rhetorical volume and evidentiary stakes,

why would we expect to find socialism only where avowed socialists or

labor parties contend for state power? We should instead assume that

socialism, like capitalism, is a cross-class cultural construction, to

which even the bourgeoisie has already made significant contributions —

just as the proletariat has long made significant contributions to the

cross-class construction we know as capitalism. What

follows?…[343]

Paul Mason, in *Postcapitalism*, also frames post-capitalism as

something emerging primarily through an evolutionary process similar to

the emergence of the feudal from the classical political economy and the

capitalist from the feudal, rather than on the revolutionary models of

the twentieth century.

Capitalism… will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will

be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first,

almost unseen within the old system, but which breaks through, reshaping

the economy around new values, behaviours and norms. As with feudalism

500 years ago, capitalism’s demise will be accelerated by external

shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it

has started.[344]

The socialists of the early twentieth century were absolutely convinced

that nothing preliminary was possible within the old system. ‘The

socialist system,’ Preobrazhensky once insisted categorically, ‘cannot

be built up molecularly within the world of capitalism.’

The most courageous thing an adaptive left could do is to abandon that

conviction. It is entirely possible to build the elements of the new

system molecularly within the old. In the cooperatives, the credit

unions, the peer-networks, the unmanaged enterprises and the parallel,

subcultural economies, these elements already exist.[345]

Mason sees the new social forms as a new system arising “within the

shell of the old,” that will first build local counter-institutions

within the interstices of capitalism, coalesce and finally supplant it.

Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole

swathes of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm.

Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces

have proliferated, and often as a direct result of the shattering of old

structures after the 2008 crisis.

New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a

whole business subculture has emerged over the past ten years, which the

media has dubbed the ‘sharing economy’. Buzz-terms such as the ‘commons’

and ‘peer-production’ are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask

what this means for capitalism itself.[346]

He argues that the technologies and institutions of post-capitalism are

unleashing productive forces that cannot be contained within the

productive relations of capitalism, and therefore must eventually “burst

out of their capitalist integument” and become the basis for a

fundamentally new system.

…[T]he technologies we’ve created are not compatible with capitalism —

not in its present form and maybe not in any form. Once capitalism can

no longer adapt to technological change, postcapitalism becomes

necessary. When behaviours and organizations adapted to exploiting

technological change appear spontaneously, postcapitalism becomes

possible.[347]

*Today, the main contradiction in modern capitalism is between the

possibility of free, abundant socially produced goods, and a system of

monopolies, banks and governments struggling to maintain control over

power and information. That is, everything is pervaded by a fight

between network and hierarchy.*[348]

First, information technology has reduced the need for work, blurred the

edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between

work and wages.

Second, information goods are corroding the market’s ability to form

prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while

information is abundant. The system’s defense mechanism is to form

monopolies on a scale not seen in the past 200 years—yet these cannot

last.

Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production:

goods, services and organizations that are appearing that no longer

respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial

hierarchy.[349]

In the meantime, he sees capitalism attempting to prolong its own life

by incorporating the new technologies and social relationships into a

corporate institutional structure, and enclosing them as a source of

rents.

Once you can copy and paste something, it can be reproduced for free. It

has, in economics-speak, a ‘zero marginal cost’.

Info-capitalists have a solution to this: make it legally impossible to

copy certain kinds of information….

With info-capitalism, a monopoly is not just some clever tactic to

maximize profit. It is the only way an industry can run….

…Only intellectual property law and a small piece of code in the

iTunes track prevent everybody on earth from owning every piece of music

ever made. Apple’s mission statement, properly expressed, is to prevent

the abundance of music.[350]

If the seeds of the successor society already exist within the

interstices of capitalism, as they did in the decaying classical and

feudal orders, there is another side to the equation. The new system may

be already gestating within the shell of the old, but for it to emerge

as a full-blown successor system the old capitalist system must in the

meantime succumb to its terminal crises to make way for it. Just as the

seeds of the new system within the dying body of capitalism parallel the

prefigurative institutions of late antiquity and feudalism, capitalism

is coming up against limits to its further growth that parallel similar

limits reached by previous systems.

Michel Bauwens[351] of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer

Alternatives compares the systemic crisis of capitalism to those of its

predecessors as crises of extensive development, resulting in

replacement by systems that are better at intensive development.

Commons-based peer production is a post-capitalist mode of production

that will succeed capitalism, growing out of it in a manner analogous to

how the manorial economy emerged from the collapse of the slave economy

of classical antiquity and capitalism emerged from late feudalism. And

like the previous transitions, peer-production will evolve as a solution

to the crisis tendencies of late capitalism when the latter reaches its

limits. In every case the phase transition follows the same pattern: “1)

systemic crisis ; 2) exodus 3) mutual reconfiguration of the classes.”

In the Roman Empire, the low productivity of slaves meant expansion was

possible only through spatial conquest. In the transition to feudalism,

the Empire from the third century on ceased to expand because the cost

of expansion exceeded its benefits. As a result, it was unable to pursue

a further course of extensive development based on the expansion of

slave labor because the supply of slaves dried up, as did the tax base

derived from new tributaries. Slaves themselves ran away, as well as

being offered their freedom by Germanic tribes in return for causing the

surrender of their cities.

The successor system solved the problem with more intensive use of

existing resources: “a reorientation of some slave owners, who shift to

the system of coloni, i.e. serfs. I.e. slaves are partially freed, can

have families, can produce from themselves and have villages, giving the

surplus to the new domain holders.” The process took centuries to

complete, with the consolidation of the feudal system occurring only in

the tenth century.

The transition now underway is from capitalism to commons-based peer

production.

Again, we have a system faced with a crisis of extensive globalization,

where nature itself has become the ultimate limit….

What we have then is an exodus, which takes multiple forms: precarity

and flight from the salaried conditions; disenchantment with the

salaried condition and turn towards passionate production. The formation

of communities and commons are shared knowledge, code and design which

show themselves to be a superior mode of social and economic

organization.

The exodus into peer production creates a mutual reconfiguration of the

classes. A section of capital becomes netarchical and ‘empowers and

enables peer production’, while attempting to extract value from it, but

thereby also building the new infrastructures of cooperation.

This process will take time but there is one crucial difference: the

biosphere will not allow centuries of transition. So the maturation of

the new configuration will have to consolidate faster and the political

revolutions come earlier.[352]

Late capitalism, according to Bauwens and Franco Iacomella, is beset by

systemic crises resulting from two main structural irrationalities: an

imperative of permanent growth based on artificially cheap material

resources, and economic rents based on the artificial scarcity of

information goods. So the system simultaneously outstrips the

availability of subsidized material inputs, while hindering the sharing

of innovations and discouraging cooperation.[353]

These structural contradictions have always made for reduced efficiency

and irrationality. But in recent decades they have resulted in

increasingly chronic crisis tendencies, which amount to a terminal

crisis of capitalism as a system. Both artificial abundance and

artificial scarcity have been integral to capitalism since its

beginnings five centuries or so ago, and absolutely essential for the

extraction of profit. But capitalism is becoming increasingly dependent

on both artificial abundance and artificial scarcity for its survival at

the very same time that the state’s ability to provide them is reaching

its limits and going into decline. Hence a crisis of sustainability.

Capitalism has pursued a model of growth based on the extensive addition

of artificially cheap inputs. This has been possible either because the

colonial conquest of the world outside Europe has given the extractive

industries privileged access to mineral deposits, fossil fuels and other

natural resources, or because capitalist states have socialized the cost

of providing important material inputs to the corporate economy like

transportation and communications infrastructure and the reproduction of

trained labor-power.

Western states have engaged in constant wars, not only directly

intervening with military force and maintaining military and naval

forces all over the world, but backing death squads and terrorist

dictators like Suharto, Mobutu and Pinochet, to guarantee continued

global corporate control of local land and natural resources. The main

role of the US Navy is to keep the major sea lanes open at general

taxpayer expense to subsidize the transportation of oil and other looted

natural resources from the Global South, and to provide secure shipping

lanes for container ships hauling offshored production back to the

shelves of Walmart.

The problem is that when a particular factor input is subsidized and

artificially cheap, a business will consume increasing amounts of it as

it substitutes it for other factors. And at the same time, capitalism

has been beset by a long-term tendency, since the depressions of the

late 19th century, towards crises of overinvestment and excess capacity,

demand shortfalls and declining organic rates of profit.

This means that an ever growing amount of state subsidies, and ever

larger inputs of subsidized material inputs, are necessary just to keep

the corporate economy running artificially in the black. In the words of

James O’Connor, in *Fiscal Crisis of the State*, the state must

subsidize a perpetually increasing share of the operating costs of

capital, or utilize an ever growing share of otherwise idle productive

capacity and investment capital, to keep the economy out of depression.

The result is two forms of input crisis. First the fiscal crisis of the

state, as the state must run increasingly large deficits, and incur

increasingly large debt, in order to meet the constantly increasing

demands for subsidized education, transportation infrastructure and

foreign imperial wars. Of course the growing deficits are also necessary

in their own right, for stimulating aggregate demand and countering the

chronic crisis of excess capacity. And the growing debt, which is sold

to the rentier classes, soaks up trillions in surplus investment capital

that would otherwise lack a profitable outlet.

Second, Peak Resource crises like Peak Oil result when capitalism’s

requirement for endless extensive growth encounters the finitude of

natural resources.

Capitalism — like every other class society in history — has likewise

depended since the beginning on artificial scarcities. Such scarcities

include all forms of artificial property rights that erect barriers

between labor and natural productive opportunities, so that producers

can be forced to work harder than necessary in order support privileged

classes in addition to themselves. Capitalism inherited the artificial

property rights in land of earlier systems of exploitation, by which

vacant and unimproved land is engrossed and held out of use on a

continuing basis, such engrossed land is made available to cultivators

only on condition of paying tribute to the engrosser, or a landed

oligarchy is superimposed on existing cultivators; the Whig landed

oligarchy were agrarian capitalists who inherited the concentrated land

holdings that emerged from the enclosures of bastard feudalism. Other

forms of artificial scarcity are regulatory entry barriers that impose

unnecessary capital outlays for undertaking production or limit the

number of producers, regulations that impose artificial floors under the

cost of subsistence, restraints on competition between producers that

facilitate administered pricing, and restraints on competition in the

issuance of credit and currency that enable those engaged in that

function to charge usurious prices for it. Perhaps the most important

form of artificial scarcity today is so-called “intellectual property,”

which is a legal monopoly on the right to perform certain tasks or use

certain knowledge, rather than engrossment of the means of production

themselves.

Artificial scarcity, like artificial abundance, is becoming increasingly

unsustainable. Copyright is rapidly becoming unenforceable, as the

proprietary content industries are learning to their dismay. And the

implosion of necessary capital outlays for manufacturing and of the

feasible scale for micro-manufacturing, coupled with the ease of sharing

digital CAD/CAM files, is raising the transaction costs of enforcing

industrial patents to unsustainable levels. The transaction costs of

patent enforcement were relatively low when a particular manufactured

good was produced in only a few basic models by a handful of industrial

corporations, and marketed through a handful of retail chains; when

proprietary designs and all sorts of unauthorized knockoffs and

modifications can be digitally distributed and produced for local

consumption in tens of thousands of neighborhood garage factories,

enforcement becomes a nightmare.

Intensive growing techniques like Permaculture are far more efficient in

terms of output per acre than factory-farming, thus reducing the

necessity and value of engrossed land for people to feed themselves. And

the explosion of vernacular building technologies, coupled with the

fiscal exhaustion of states that enforce zoning regulations and building

codes and the like, means that the imposition of artificial costs of

comfortable subsistence is likewise becoming unsustainable.

“Cognitive capitalism” is increasingly dependent on p2p productive

relations and communications infrastructures, and is attempting to

incorporate them into its old corporate framework as a way of injecting

life into the dying system. But it is a force that cannot be contained

within the institutional framework of the old society, and can only come

into its full development as the basis for a successor society.

Companies have used these technologies to integrate their processes with

those of partners, suppliers, consumers, and each other, using a

combination of intranets, extranets, and the public internet, and it has

become the absolutely essential tool for international communication and

business, and to enable the cooperative, internationally coordinated

projects carried out by teams…. Politics, culture, and science are

equally changed by distributed practices enabled by the new

technological infrastructure.[354]

So the general conclusion of all the above has to be the essentially

cooperative nature of production, the fact that companies are drawing on

this vast reservoir of a ‘commons of general intellectuality’, without

which they could not function. That innovation is diffused throughout

the social body.[355]

…Just as post- or late feudal society and its absolutist kings needed

the bourgeoisie, late capitalist society cannot survive without

knowledge workers and their P2P practices. It can be argued that the

adoption of P2P processes is in fact essential for competitiveness: a

strong foundation of P2P technologies, the use of free or open source

software, processes for collective intelligence building, free and fluid

cooperation, are now all necessary facets of the contemporary

corporation.[356]

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt explicitly describe postcapitalist

society as growing out of the surplus resulting from the fact that the

multitude creates value faster than it can be appropriated by capital.

The common is a positive externality created by the multitude, which

capital parasitizes on. But more importantly, the multitude creates this

social capital faster than capital can enclose it, and thus builds a new

society in part outside the boundaries of capital.[357] This

surplus produced by the common, which cannot be fully expropriated by

capital, “is the basis on which antagonism is transformed into

revolt.”[358]

As in previous transitions, the gravedigger mode of production and the

gravedigger class which are driving the old system to crisis are also

the core of the successor system which is emerging from it. Bauwens sees

commons-based peer production as the core logic of the post-capitalist

successor society.

A new class of knowledge workers, in its broad sense already the

majority of the working population in the West, and poised to be in the

same situation elsewhere in a few decades, are creating new practices

and tools that enable them to do what they need to do, i.e. knowledge

exchange. As they create these new tools, bringing into being a new

format of social exchange, they enable new types of subjectivation,

which in turn not only changes themselves, but the world around them.

When Marx wrote his Manifesto, there were only 100,000 industrial

workers, yet he saw that this new social model was the essence of the

new society being born. Similarly, even if today only a few million

knowledge workers consciously practice P2P, one can see the birth of a

new model of a much larger social consequence. This new model is

inherently more productive in creating the new immaterial use value,

just as the merchants and capitalists were more effective in the

material economy.[359]

This is fundamentally different from the core logic of capitalism. It

will be steady-state and sustainable, with true cost pricing, in its use

of physical resources, and it will permit the free replication, sharing

and use of information without limit.[360]

The technologies and other developments we surveyed in Chapter Two —

cheap, ephemeral production technologies and networked communications

technologies that are capable of coordination without high

administrative overhead — are the material basis for the more intensive

economic model of capitalism’s successor. And as Douglas Rushkoff

suggested, its logic is fundamentally at war with capitalism’s

requirement for extensive growth. Although he focused on the role of

communications technology, the same phenomenon is occurring in the realm

of physical production thanks to the imploding cost of

micro-manufacturing tools.

The fact is, most Internet businesses don’t

*require* venture capital. The beauty of these technologies is that they

decentralize value creation. Anyone with a PC and bandwidth can program

the next Twitter or Facebook plug-in, the next iPhone app, or even the

next social network. While a few thousand dollars might be nice, the

hundreds of millions that venture capitalists want to–need to–invest,

simply aren’t required….

The banking crisis began with the dot.com industry, because here was a

business sector that did not require massive investments of capital in

order to grow…. What’s a bank to do when its money is no longer needed?

Especially when contraction is not an option?

So they fail, the tax base decreases, companies based more on their debt

structures than their production fail along with them, and we get an

economic crisis. Yes, the Internet did all this.[361]

The post-capitalist social formation will be one in which commons

governance, horizontal networks and p2p organization will replace the

corporate-state nexus as the core, with markets and administration

persisting in reduced, peripheral form and characterized by their

relationship to networks.

Commons-based peer production, as an alternative to both the capitalist

corporation and the state, enables

the direct social production of use value, through new life practices

that are largely outside the control of capital, and with means of

production which have been socialized to a very significant degree.

These new processes are post-capitalist rather than capitalist, in the

sense that they no longer need any specific role of capital for their

reproduction.[362]

Although commons-based peer production first appeared in the immaterial

sphere, new technological possibilities for the widespread ownership of

cheap, small-scale material production tools and distributed aggregation

of capital have laid the groundwork for the same mode of production to

spread rapidly into the physical realm as well.

- P2P can arise not only in the immaterial sphere of intellectual and

- P2P can arise wherever other forms of distributed fixed capital are

- P2P can arise wherever the process of design may be separated from

- P2P can arise wherever financial capital can be distributed….

- P2P could be expanded and sustained through the introduction of

The state and market will continue to exist, but will take on a

fundamentally different character, defined by its relation to the larger

society—with the commons as its hegemonic institution—into which it is

embedded. The markets will be non-capitalist — without the artificially

cheap material inputs or the rents from artificial scarcity — and the

state will increasingly take on the character of a networked support

platform in its relationship to self-managed, horizontal civil society

organizations.[364]

The public sector of the P2P economy is neither a corporate welfare

state at the service of a financial elite, nor a welfare state that has

a paternalistic relation to civil society, but a Partner State, which

serves civil society and takes responsibility for the metagovernance of

the three spheres. The Partner State is dedicated to supporting “the

common value creation of the civic sphere”; the “market” and the

“mission-oriented” activities of the new private sphere; and all the

public services that are necessary for the common good of all citizens….

The essential characteristic of the new system is that the commons is

the new core, and a variety of hybrid mechanisms can productively

coexist around it, including reformed market and state

forms.[365]

Christopher Wright, working from a Marxist perspective, uses the same

gradualist transitional analogies (the transition from feudalism to

capitalism, etc.) as the thinkers surveyed above.

To salvage Marx’s intuition, and in fact to make it quite useful, it’s

necessary to tweak his formulation. Rather than some sort of “absolute”

fettering of productive forces by capitalist relations, there is a

*relative* fettering — relative to an emergent mode of production, a

more democratic and socialized mode, that is producing and distributing

resources more equitably and rationally than the capitalist.

A parallel (albeit an imperfect one) is the transition from feudalism to

capitalism. Feudal relations certainly obstructed economic growth, but

it wasn’t until a “competing” economy — of commercial, financial,

agrarian, and finally industrial capitalism — had made great progress in

Western Europe that the classical epoch of revolution between the

seventeenth and nineteenth centuries burst onto the scene. *Relative to

capitalism*, feudalism was hopelessly stagnant, and therefore, once

capitalism had reached a certain level of development, doomed.

Crucially, the bourgeoisie’s conquest of political power wasn’t possible

until capitalist economic relations had *already*, over centuries,

spread across much of Europe. *There had to be a material foundation for

the capitalist class’s ultimate political victories: without economic

power — the accumulation of material resources through institutions they

controlled — capitalists could never have achieved political power*.

That is to say, much of the enormously protracted social revolution

occurred *before* the final “seizure of the state.”[366]

But this shift in framing requires, in place of the abrupt or

revolutionary transition scenarios of orthodox Marxism, something like

the interstitial approach described in later chapters.

If historical materialism is right, as it surely is, the same paradigm

must apply to the transition from capitalism to socialism. The working

class can never complete its conquest of the state until it commands

considerable economic power — not only the power to go on strike and

shut down the economy but actual command over resources, resources

sufficient to compete with the ruling class. The power to strike, while

an important tool, is not enough. Nor are mere numbers, however many

millions, enough, as history has shown. The working class needs its own

institutional bases from which to wage a very prolonged struggle, and

these institutions have to be directly involved in the production and

accumulation of resources. Only after some such “alternative economy,”

or socialized economy, has emerged throughout much of the world

alongside the rotting capitalist economy will the popular classes be in

a position to finally *complete* their takeover of states. For they will

have the resources to politically defeat the — by then — weak,

attenuated remnants of the capitalist class….

What we must do, then, is to laboriously construct new relations of

production as the old capitalist relations fall victim to their

contradictions. But how is this to be done? At this early date, it is,

admittedly, hard to imagine how it can be accomplished. Famously, it’s

easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

But two things are clear. First, a significant amount of grassroots

initiative is necessary. The long transition will not take place only on

one plane, the plane of the state; there will be a tumult of creative

energy on sub-state levels, as there was during Europe’s transition into

capitalism…. The many forms of such energy can hardly be anticipated,

but they will certainly involve practices that have come to be called

the “solidarity economy,” including the formation of cooperatives of all

types, public banks, municipal enterprises, participatory budgeting,

mutual aid networks, and so on. In a capitalist context it is

inconceivable that states will respond to crisis by dramatically

improving the circumstances of entire populations; as a result, large

numbers of people will be compelled to build new institutions to survive

and to share and accumulate resources. Again, this process, which will

occur all over the world and to some degree will be organized and

coordinated internationally, will play out over generations, not just

two or three decades.

In the long run, moreover, this solidarity economy will not prove to be

some sort of innocuous, apolitical, compatible-with-capitalism

development; it will foster anti-capitalist ways of thinking and acting,

anti-capitalist institutions, and anti-capitalist resistance. It will

facilitate the accumulation of resources among organizations committed

to cooperative, democratic, socialized production and distribution, a

rebuilding of

“[[https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520260009/the-magna-carta-manifesto][the

commons]],” a democratization of the state. It will amount to an entire

sphere of what has been called

“[[https://roarmag.org/issues/dual-power/][dual power]]” opposed to a

still-capitalist state, a working-class base of power to complement the

power of workers and unions to strike.[367]

This “long revolution” will be international because, as Marx

understood, “socialism in one country” is impossible. However:

What he didn’t understand was that the only way a revolution can be

international is that it happen in a similar way to the centuries-long

“bourgeois revolution” in Europe and North America, namely by sprouting

first on the local level, the municipal level, the regional level, and

expanding on that “grassroots” basis.[368]

Wright, in contrast to a view he attributes to “the anarchists,” sees

this counter-power strategy as requiring some engagement with the state.

The second point is that, contrary to anarchism, it will be necessary to

use the state to help construct a new mode of production. Governments

are instruments of massive social power and they cannot simply be

ignored or overthrown in a general strike. However unpleasant or morally

odious it may be to participate in hierarchical structures of political

power, it has to be a part of any strategy to combat the ruling

class.[369]

And he is optimistic that the state will implement many of the

foundations of post-capitalism piecemeal, as non-reformist reforms that

cannot be rolled back, out of sheer strategic necessity. Just as

ordinary people turn to the solidarity economy out of necessity, in the

face of stagnation, unemployment, and retrenchment of the welfare state,

the capitalist state itself will be forced out of necessity to

incorporate elements of the solidarity economy and enlist them as

allies, because of its own hollowing out and fiscal exhaustion.

…[W]hat the retrenchment of government’s public functions is making

possible, for the first time ever, is the paradigm of revolution that I

described above when critiquing Marx’s theory. Given the state’s growing

incapacity to assuage discontent, movements of a decentralized,

semi-interstitial, regional, democratic character are emerging to fill

the vacuum. In the long run they, or the institutions they spawn, will

probably take over many of the functions of the national state, such as

the provision of social welfare. Even more importantly, they will enable

the construction of new production relations in the shell of a corporate

capitalist economy that cannot provide billions of people with a

livelihood.[370]

The process bears considerable resemblance to that by which the Roman

state, similarly exhausted, out of necessity delegated an increasing

share of its security functions to the very Germanic tribes whose

incursions it had been fighting.

One way the future may play out is that such reforms, eventually

supported by much of the elite, continue to spread for many decades as

social instability increases. They build up a constituency that acquires

a vested interest in their maintenance and expansion. Since national

governments and bureaucracies are simultaneously becoming ever more

dysfunctional and inadequate to the task of ensuring social order, the

“reforms” typically amount to a partial ceding of powers to the

regional, local, and international scales. Military and police

repression of far-left movements continues in many places, and such

movements or parties are rarely permitted to capture national

governments (because they’re too important), but on less visible scales,

such as the local and regional, “the people” do have more and more say

in governance — because the elite finds it necessary to make some

concessions, and it’s less dangerous to do so on lower levels of

governance than on higher levels.[371]

And the state will do these things despite the appeal of — and

occasional resort to, from place to place — fascism and repression,

because fascism is not a sustainable long-term strategy.

Activists and organizations will pressure the state at all levels, from

municipal to national, to increase funding for the solidarity economy.

In fact, they already are, and have had success in many countries and

municipalities, including in the U.S. The election of more socialists to

office will encourage these trends and ensure greater successes.

Pressure will also build to fund larger worker cooperatives, to convert

corporations to worker-owned businesses, and to nationalize sectors of

the economy. And sooner or later, many states will start to give in.

Why? One possible state response to crisis, after all, is fascism. And

fascism of some form or other is indeed being pursued by many countries

right now, from Brazil to Hungary to India to the U.S. But there’s a

problem with fascism: by its murderous and ultra-nationalistic nature,

it can be neither permanent nor continuously enforced worldwide. Even

just in the United States, the governmental structure is too vast and

federated, there are too many thousands of relatively independent

political jurisdictions, for a fascist regime to be consolidated in

every region of the country. Fascism is only a temporary and partial

solution for the ruling class. It doesn’t last.[372]

Instead, it will attempt to incorporate as allies the nascent

institutions of the post-capitalist society and economy, just as the

monarchs and landed classes did with the rising bourgeoisie (and the

late Western Roman Empire did with the Germanic tribes).

The other solution, which doubtless will always be accompanied by

repression, is to grant concessions to the masses. Here, it’s necessary

to observe that the state isn’t monolithically an instrument of capital.

While capital dominates it, it is a terrain of struggle,

“contestations,” “negotiations,” of different groups — classes, class

subgroups, interest groups, even individual entities — advocating for

their interests. Marxists from Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin to Miliband

and Poulantzas to more recent writers have felled forests writing about

the nature of the capitalist state, but for the purposes of

revolutionary strategy all you need is some

[[https://www.wrightswriting.com/single-post/2019/07/11/What-will-the-revolution-look-like][critical

common sense]]…. It is possible for popular movements to exert such

pressure on the state that they slowly change its character, thereby

helping to change the character of capitalist society.

In particular, popular organizations and activists can take advantage of

splits within the ruling class to push agendas that benefit the

populace. The political scientist Thomas Ferguson, among others,

[[https://www.wrightswriting.com/golden-rule][has shown]] how the New

Deal, including the epoch-making Wagner Act and Social Security Act, was

made possible by just such divisions in the ranks of business. On a

grander scale, Western Europe’s long transition from feudalism to

capitalism was accompanied by divisions within the ruling class, between

more forward-thinking and more hidebound elements. (As is well known, a

number of landed aristocrats and clergymen even supported the French

Revolution, at least in its early phases.) Marx was therefore wrong to

imply that it’s *the working class vs. the capitalist class,

monolithically*. This totally Manichean thinking suggested that the only

way to make a revolution is for the proletariat to overthrow the ruling

class in one blow, so to speak, to smash a united reactionary opposition

that, moreover, is in complete control of the state (so the state has to

be seized all at once).

On the contrary, we can expect the past to repeat itself: as crises

intensify and popular resistance escalates, liberal factions of the

ruling class will split off from the more reactionary elements in order

to grant concessions. In our epoch of growing social fragmentation,

environmental crisis, and an

[[https://www.wrightswriting.com/nation-state][increasingly

dysfunctional nation-state]], many of these concessions will have the

character not of resurrecting the centralized welfare state but of

encouraging phenomena that seem rather “interstitial” and less

challenging to capitalist power than full-fledged social democracy is.

But, however innocent it might seem to support new “decentralized”

solutions to problems of unemployment, housing, consumption, and general

economic dysfunction, in the long run, as I’ve said, these sorts of

reforms will facilitate the rise of a more democratic and socialized

political economy within the shell of the decadent capitalist one….

Much of the ruling class will of course oppose and undermine progressive

policies — especially of the more statist variety — every step of the

way, thus deepening the crisis and doing its own part to accelerate the

momentum for change. But by the time it becomes clear to even the

liberal sectors of the business class that its reforms are undermining

the long-term viability and hegemony of capitalism, it will be too late.

They won’t be able to turn back the clock: there will be too many

worker-owned businesses, too many public banks, too many

state-subsidized networks of mutual aid, altogether too many reforms to

the old type of neoliberal capitalism (reforms that will have been

granted, as always, for the sake of maintaining social order). The

slow-moving revolution will feed on itself and will prove unstoppable,

however much the more reactionary states try to clamp down, murder

dissidents, prohibit protests, and bust unions….

Just as the European absolutist state of the

sixteenth to nineteenth centuries was compelled to empower — for the

sake of accumulating wealth — the capitalist classes that created the

conditions of its demise, so the late-capitalist state will be

compelled, for the purposes of internal order, to acquiesce in the

construction of non-capitalist institutions that correct some of the

“market failures” of the capitalist mode of production. The capitalist

state will, of necessity, be a participant in its own demise. Its highly

reluctant sponsorship of new practices of production, distribution, and

social life as a whole — many of them “interstitial” at first — will be

undertaken on the belief that it’s the lesser of two evils, the greater

evil being the complete dissolution of capitalist power resulting from

the dissolution of society.[373]

II. The Nature of Post-Capitalist Transition

*Partner State.** The Saint-Simonian idea of replacing legislation over

human beings with the “administration of things” has since appeared in

many iterations, starting with Proudhon’s “dissolution of the state in

society” in *General Idea of the Revolution*. Proudhon continued to

develop this model through his intellectual career, according to Shawn

Wilbur.

In 1887…, more than twenty years after the death of anarchist pioneer

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Frédéric Tufferd wrote:

<quote>

The most incredible confusion is that between the government and the

State. I am an anarchist, as Proudhon was, for like him I want to

abolish government, the principle of authority in the State, in order to

replace it by an responsible and controllable administration of the

public interests; but I do not want, with Bakunin, to abolish the State.

The word State comes from stare, to hold, to persist; the State is thus

the organized collectivity. Just as the commune is the local

collectivity, the State is the national collectivity which has lasted,

lasts, and will last as long as the nation itself.

…Then, during the Second Empire…, Proudhon began to advance an

alternate account, in which he found that government and the State were

indeed separable, and that the non-governmental functions of the State,

though modest in comparison to those attributed to its authoritarian

forms, served vital roles in society — even when the political forms of

society approached *anarchy*.[374]

It was in *The Theory of

Taxation*, also published in 1861, that the

citizen-State finally emerged…. He reaffirmed that the State had a

“positive reality,” manifesting itself as a “power of collectivity,”

issuing from the organized collective, rather than imposed on it from

outside, and thus possessing rights — of the sort introduced in

War an [sic] Peace* — but no

authority. He asserted that in a regime of liberty it too must be ruled,

like the citizens, only by reason and by justice — because, as he put

it, “it is itself, if I may put it this way, a sort of citizen.” This

image of the citizen-State, neither master nor servant, and located “on

the same line” as the other citizens, may be the simplest

characterization possible of Proudhon’s complex and elusive ideal for

the State.[375]

</quote>

The Partner State is very much in this tradition, as John Restakis

describes it:

The idea of the Partner State proceeds directly from the principle that

civil society is the source of political legitimacy in a democracy. In

this view, the state is in the service of civil society as a vehicle to

advance and protect the common good.

Thus, the Partner State is above all an enabling state. Its primary

purpose is to maximize the capacity of civil society to create social

value and to act as the primary agent in the formation of public policy.

It is citizens, acting through civil institutions that they control,

that ultimately decide and direct the implementation of public policy.

The enabling role of the state is not confined to the promotion of

social value. It also entails the promotion of open access to the

economy. It provides space for the operation of many models of

entrepreneurship, including collective and commons-based forms of

enterprise such as cooperatives and peer-to-peer networks, and the

promotion of participatory politics.

The Partner State enlarges the scope of personal autonomy and liberty

and guarantees personal economic security while reinforcing the social

bonds that build healthy communities and a vibrant civil society.

Central to this process is the democratization of the state itself.

Ultimately, the Partner State acts primarily as an administrative

support for the coordination of policies decided upon by institutions of

civil society on the basis of cooperative, direct

democracy.[376]

The idea of the Partner State originated with Cosma Orsi, and was picked

up by Michel Bauwens of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives.

Bauwens, building on Orsi’s work, sees the Partner State as a sort of

“peer-to-peer state,” organized on stigmergic rather than democratic

principles.

First of all, these communities are not democracies. Why is that so?

Because democracy, the market, and hierarchies are all modes of

allocation of scarce resources. In hierarchy, our superiors decide; in

the market, prices decide; in a democracy, “we” decide.

But where resources are abundant, as they are with knowledge, code, and

design — which can be copied and shared at a marginal cost — they are

truly unnecessary.[377]

So the Partner State, arguably, is not so much a “government” as a

system of *governance*. It need not be a state at all, in the sense of

an institution which claims the sole right to initiate force in a given

territory. It is, essentially, a nonstate social association — or

support platform — for managing the commons, extended to an entire

geographical region.

Peer production also rests on a sometimes costly infrastructure of

cooperation. There would be no Wikipedia without the funding for its

servers, no free software or open hardware without similar support

mechanisms. This is why open source communities have created a new

social institution: the for-benefit association…. [T]he new

for-benefit associations have only an active role in enabling and

empowering the community to cooperate, by provisioning its

infrastructure, not by commanding its production processes. These

associations exist for the sole purpose of ‘benefiting’ the community of

which they are the expression….

Now, here is the kicker, how would you call an institution that is

responsible for the common good of all the participants, in this case,

not the people involved in a similar project, but the inhabitants of a

territory? I would argue that this type of for-benefit institution has a

very similar function to what we commonly assign to the state….

Can we then, imagine, a new type of state? Enter the concept of a

Partner State! The Partner State… is a state form that enables and

empowers the social creation of value by its citizens. It protects the

infrastructure of cooperation that is the whole of society. The Partner

State can exist at any territorial level, as a set of institutions that

protect the common good and enable the citizens to create value. It

does, on a territorial scale, what the for-benefit institutions do on a

project-scale. While the for-benefit associations work for the commoners

as to particular projects, the Partner State works for the

citizens.[378]

Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis argue, similarly, that the Partner State is

part of a larger ecology commons. In a commons-based economy, an ecology

of enterprises (ideally mostly cooperative or peer-to-peer) grows up as

a value-added layer on top of information and natural resource commons.

The small-scale institutions for managing and supporting the commons —

e.g. the Mozilla Foundation, Wikimedia Foundation, etc. — are

mini-Partner States. To turn that around, the Partner State is a sort of

commons-administering foundation writ large, a meta-organization

supporting the commons and civil society.

In our vision, a commons-centric society would ideally have:

- a productive civil society that would contribute to the commons,

- a generative market that would create added value around the commons,

- a partner state, which is emerging prefiguratively in some urban

practices, such as the Bologna Regulation for the Care and

Regeneration of the Urban Commons or some policies of the Barcelona

En Comú citizen platform.

In this vision, the partner state would be the guarantor of civic

rights, but also of the equal contributory potential of all citizens.

Without this function, communities could have unequal access to

resources and capabilities, perpetuating inequality. In our vision, the

state form would gradually lose its separateness from civil society, by

implementing radically democratic procedures and

practices.[379]

Another good description comes from Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie

Utratel:

Imagine a radically reconfigured and democratically accountable

structure. One that, while preserving the more desirable characteristics

of the Welfare State — social and public health provision and large

infrastructure management and upkeep — radically democratizes them. It

would do away with the State’s cozy symbiosis with market entities,

while deconstructing its pernicious monopolies over money creation and

exchange, and property and judicial rights. A second radical set of

measures would prohibit the structural enforcement of inequality and the

often violent repression of emancipatory alternatives. This structure

would function in much the same way as foundations do in the Open Source

software economy: providing the infrastructure for cooperation and the

creation and upkeep of commons but not directing the process of social

value creation and distribution. In other words, it would empower and

protect the practice of commoning.

This enabling metastructure — often referred to as “The Partner State” —

would also take on new functions derived from already existing

P2P/Commons practices. Among these, we would see a promotion of real,

needs-oriented entrepreneurship, bolstered by explicit recognition and

support of bottom-up productive infrastructures, such as Open Coops,

mesh wireless networks or community renewables through public-*Commons*

partnerships. It would allow commoners to repurpose or take over unused

or underutilised public buildings for social ends while giving legal

recognition to the act of commoning, whether through copyleft-inspired

property-law hacks or through a longer process of gradually

institutionalizing commons practices. Its grassroots democratizing ethos

would create new financing mechanisms and debt-free public money

creation, which, alongside social currencies, could fund environmentally

regenerative work and the creation of new, distributed Open-source

infrastructure. These would be supported by taxation schemes favouring

the types of labor described above, while penalizing speculation,

parasitic rents and negative social and environmental externalities. The

overall system has to be kept in check through a pervasive culture of

participatory politics — made feasible through its attendant pedagogy —

to involve a newly enfranchised citizenry in the deliberation and

real-time consultation of political and legislative issues and

budgeting. In issues of power, the Partner State shifts to being a fluid

facilitator to assist and emancipate the bottom-up counter-power that

keeps it in check.[380]

For Christian Iaione, it is a platform that follows an open-source logic

and is organized below. And to some extent it recapitulates the

polyarchic systems of governance that predated the Westphalian

nation-state and its model of sovereignty.

For this reason, we need to re-think the organization and the culture of

institutions in a framework of open-source and circularity: we need a

State-Platform that does not want to guide the process but choses [sic]

to act from below, supporting a circuit of relationship and allowing the

above-mentioned actors [public, private, third sector, cultural

institutions such as schools and universities, single citizens and

social innovators] to become authors and actors of general interest. The

State-Platform must break the monopoly of public care of the general

interest, without withdrawing from the care of those interests which are

inescapably public and becoming a system administrator, as it happens in

the web…. We took thirty or forty years to have the social state we

inherited, which was born exactly as the contemporary collaborative

state is emerging in the co-working spaces, in enterprises, in community

cooperatives, in fab labs, in impact hubs, in cultural and creative

collectives and enterprises, in the collective management of the commons

and so on….[T]hese people are reconstructing and regenerating the

State starting from its foundations. If we look back into the history of

the Social State and of its birth, we understand that it originated in

society, in neighborhood associations, in self-managed mutual aid

societies, in the world of cooperation and in workers’ unions of first

generation. From there the first mutual aid insurances against

on-the-job injuries were generated, together with the first forms of

income support. An old fox such as Otto Von Bismarck, who had foreseen

what was happening, before being removed from power was able to build

the Social State. He did so working from above, with a top-down

approach, as he knew that hadn’t he laid the foundations of the social

state, the social state would have anyway emerged from the bottom-up

action of these ante litteram innovators, that would definitely not have

confirmed him in his role.[381]

…[A] new form of State, a State which is plural because distributed,

because it can be found in the different worlds of society, economy and

knowledge and not anymore confined to the offices and hallways our

institutions. Thus, a program of large-scale experimentation is needed

to regenerate institutions, a program able to strengthen

administrations’ institutional capacity to manage change without

suffocating it nor attempting to direct it. The State should accompany,

enable, monitor and value such change by becoming a platform. A

State-Platform will be ready to make his time, competences, human,

technical and logistic resources available in order to organize

processes and territorial laboratories where things begin to happen

regardless of the administration, but in a more controlled and

legitimate way. It will grant everyone the possibility to experiment,

allowing everyone to be informed on what projects others citizens are

undertaking and perhaps to join them. Making sure that basic norms on

security and inclusion are respected, it should provide a free license

to experiment and imagine. The multitude of mistakes made and even more

of lessons learnt should become the base from which we begin to re-think

the State in the XXI century.[382]

The model is closely paralleled by Abdullah Ocalan’s third principle of

Democratic Confederalism, whose “decision-making processes lie with the

communities.”

Higher levels only serve the coordination and implementation of the will

of the communities that send their delegates to the general assemblies.

For limited space of time they are both mouthpiece and executive

institutions. However, the basic power of decision rests with the local

grass-roots institutions.[383]

Tommaso Fattori, an activist in the Italian Water Commons movement,

discussed the Partner State in the context of commonification of public

services:

The field of Commons can be for the most part identified with a public

but not-state arena, in which the actions of the individuals who

collectively take care of, produce and share the Commons are decisive

and fundamental.

In this sense, Commons and commoning can become a means for transforming

public sector and public services (often bureaucracy-bound and used to

pursue the private interests of lobby groups): a means for their

commonification (or commonalization). Indeed, there are many possible

virtuous crossovers between the traditional public realm and the realm

of Commons.

Commonification goes beyond the simple de-privatization of the public

realm: Commonification basically consists of its democratization,

bringing back elements of direct self-government and self-managing, by

the residents themselves, of goods and services of general interest (or

participatory management within revitalized public bodies).

Commonification is a process in which the inhabitants of a territory

regain capability and power to make decisions, to orientate choices,

rules, and priorities, reappropriating themselves of the very

possibility of governing and managing goods and services in a

participatory manner: it is this first-person activity which changes

citizens into commoners….

These are resources which do not belong to and which are not at the

disposal of governments or the State-as-person, because they belong to

the collectivity and above all, to future generations, who cannot be

expropriated of their rights. Distributed participatory management and

self-government, inclusion and collective enjoyment, no individual

exclusive rights, prevalence of use value over exchange value, meeting

of primary and diffuse needs: commons, in this understanding, means all

these things…. This is a road which could be the beginning of a

general transformation of the role of the state and of local authorities

into partner state, “namely public authorities which create the right

environment and support infrastructure so that citizens can peer produce

value from which the whole of society benefits.”…[384]

*Massimo** **De** **Angelis**. Like the other gradualists we’ve looked

at, Massimo De Angelis frames the transition in terms of a shifting

balance between a decaying system in being and a successor system coming

into being within it.

As George Caffentzis writes in his cover blurb, De Angelis does for the

commons what Marx did for capital. He posits the C-M-C circuit as part

of a complementary commons circuit or circuit of social reproduction,

alongside Marx’s circuit of capital (M-C-M).

While for Marx the commodity is the elementary form of capitalist

wealth, so for me common goods are the elementary form of wealth of a

postcapitalist world.[385]

De Angelis criticizes Marx for largely focusing on capital, to the

neglect of the role that the commons play in social reproduction under

capitalism.[386]

C-M-C is a “selling-in-order-to-buy circuit.”[387] The

difference between the two circuits is that “[t]he first has at [sic]

its goals the satisfaction of needs, and money here is a mere means for

the satisfaction of these needs. The second has as its goal the

realization of money: the means becomes here the end.”[388]

This selling-in-order-to-buy circuit is nothing more than a membrane of

exchange between commons and capital systems, the boundary separating

commons from capital. As a subset of a larger commons circuit, the

simple selling-in-order-to-buy circuit only appears as contingently

necessary, and different commons may be distinguished by the degree of

their dependence on capital’s monetary circuits.[389]

***

</center>

The point is that unlike the capital circuit, the simple commodity

circuit is just a means, hence scalable, depending on the external

context, to the structure of needs and desires and the resources that

can be mobilised in non-commoditised forms (through for example pooling,

gift circuits or administrative transfers).[390]

Hence the commons, by growth, can reduce its need for interaction with

the circuit of capital via the cash nexus, and incorporate more and more

basic functions of life into itself.

The commons are constrained by the fact that they coexist with capital

and the state.

It is up to the commons, therefore, to develop their own politics to

attempt to shift these constraints….[391]

The commons and capital circuits have coexisted since the beginning of

capitalism, with the boundary and correlation of forces between them

constantly shifting. The “structural coupling” between the two circuits

“allows one system to access and use the complexity of other systems.”

The correlation of forces at any given time determines the comparative

power of the commons circuit and capital circuit in setting the terms of

their mutual interface through the cash nexus, and whether the boundary

between them is such that capital on net uses the commons as a means to

its own ends more than the commons uses capital, or vice

versa.[392]

…even if it is true that capital can co-opt commons, the opposite is

also true: the commons can access the complexity of capital systems for

their own development.[393]

***

</center>

Commons and capital are two distinct, autonomous social systems; that

is, they both struggle to ‘take things into their own hands’ and

self-govern on the basis of their different and often clashing,

internally generated codes, measures and values. They also struggle to

be distinct autopoietic social systems, in that they aim to reproduce

not only their interrelations but also the preproduction of their

components through their internally generated codes and values. They do

this of course, in a clear, distinctive way. Capital can reproduce

itself only through profit and its accumulation, which ultimately imply

the exploitation of labour, the creation of divisions among the working

class, and the trashing of nature. Commons can reproduce through

commoning, doing in common, which is a social process embedded in

particular values that defines a sharing culture in a given time and

context, through which they reproduce resources and the community that

comprises them…. Commons are generated in so far as subjects become

commoners, in so far as their social being is enacted with others, at

different levels of social organization, through a social practice,

commoning, that is essentially horizontal and may embrace a variety of

forms depending on circumstances…, but ultimately is grounded in

community sharing. Capital, by contrast, tends to objectify,

instrumentalize and impose hierarchical order….

…[T]he commons and capital/state are often linked, coupled through the

buying-and-selling site of the market, that is, the ‘economy’. Both

capital and the commons buy and sell, although with different priorities

and as parts of different movements…. Capital buys in order to sell at a

profit… or as means of production, to turn resources into commodities….

Commons, on the other hand, tend to sell commodities in order to buy

means of sustenance and reproduction. For example, some members of a

household sell their labour power to gain an income in order to be able

to purchase the goods necessary for reproduction of the household; or an

association engages in petty trade to fund itself; or a social centre

sells beer at a concert to purchase the materials to build a kitchen.

Buying in order to sell and selling in order to buy are two opposite

praxes…, the former governed by a life activity ultimately wasted in

accumulation and the latter governed by the needs and desires of

reproduction…. In other words…, while reproduction of labour power is a

feature of the commons production of the commodity labour-power sold to

capital, capital does not necessarily control (or controls only in part

through the state and the education system) the labour of reproduction

which is fundamental to the commons.

…Furthermore, the environment of present-day commons is dominated by

capital loops, the circuits of capital that all wish to enclose and all

wish to turn into a profitable enterprise and overwork or destitution

for others. If we were to take the large, bird’s-eye view of history, of

the original accumulations of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in

South America, Africa, Asia and Europe up to the most recent transition

from the post-1945 Keynesian deal to neoliberal, several books could be

written about the co-evolution of capital and the commons, about how

commons sustained the enclosures of the former by regenerating newer

forms in different areas, and how capital has regenerated itself under

the impulse of commoner struggles on the shop floor, in neighbourhoods,

in bread or antiracist riots or women’s struggles.[394]

I would add that books could be written — and I think a couple actually

have been by Kropotkin at least — on how the commons was the fundamental

basis of human society from the first neolithic open field villages

until the rise of class differentiation and the state, and that

successive systems of class exploitation and class states since then

have been parasitic layers extracting surpluses from the commons.

With the rise of hyper-efficient small-scale means of production not

amenable to centralized capitalist control, and the revolution in

networked many-to-many communications, we’re entering a new transition

period in which the productivity of the commons is becoming too great

for capital to successfully enclose or parasitize upon, and in which the

commons will ultimately reabsorb the whole of life and leave the

parasitic economic classes and their state to starve.

De Angelis refers to the stocks of common goods that accumulate within

commons systems and are available to them for internal use as

“commonwealth.”

Like capital, commonwealth is thus a stock, but unlike capital the flows

it generates possess different goals and it is enacted through different

practices. However, like any other systems including capital, its flows

aim at going back to stocks, reproduce them, replenish them and enrich

them…[395]

And the intensification of capitalist crisis and further proletarization

“creates the conditions for the flourishing of reproduction

commons….”[396]

De Angelis’s picture of the growing commons circuit, as the foundation

for post-capitalist society, is a virtual mirror-image — albeit on a

higher technical level — of Marx’s picture in *Grundrisse* of direct

co-production for use in the commons in pre-capitalist times.

Capitalism could only come into existence, Marx argues, when labor was

made “free,” that is separated from “the objective conditions of its

realization — from the means of labour and the material for labour.” It

was necessary to nullify the right to both small-scale free landed

property and to communal landed property like that of the open-field

village.

In either form of peasant proprietorship, as it existed before robbery

and enclosure, “the individuals relate not as workers but as proprietors

—”

and members of a community, who at the same time work. The aim of this

work is not the *creation of value*… rather, its aim is sustenance of

the individual proprietor and of his family, as well as of the total

community.[397]

*Property* therefore means *belong to a clan* (community)…; and, by

means of the relation of this community to the land and soil, [relating]

to the earth as the individual’s inorganic body; his relation to land

and soil, to the external primary conditions of production… as to a

presupposition belonging to his individuality, as modes of his

presence.[398]

*Property*, then, originally means… the relation of the working

(producing or self-reproducing) subject to the conditions of his

production or reproduction as his own…. This relation as proprietor…

presupposes the individual defined as a member of a clan or

community….[399]

This was true of open-field villages, it was true of individual

household possession by right as members of a clan, it was true of

rights of access by members of an urban commune to the public lands

outside the town walls, and it was true of Roman rights to cultivate a

share of the *ager publicus*. In every case the individual was born with

a right of access, guaranteed by custom, to the means of direct

production for subsistence, as well as membership in a social support

network against incapacitation or old age. “The property in one’s own

labour is mediated by property in the condition of labour…” flowing

from one’s membership in the commune.[400]

The existence of an independent base of guaranteed subsistence, as a

member of a solidaritarian community, was an obstacle to creating an

economy based on the extraction of surplus value from wage laborers. The

necessity of competing with the possibility of direct production for

subsistence undermined the ability of employers to command labor in the

amounts they desired, and for the wages they were willing to pay; it

greatly reduced the rate of profit they could expect to obtain. The

creation of a capitalist wage system required the violent suppression of

peasant rights to the land, either as individual small-holders or

members of a commune, and their reduction to utter dependence on wage

labor — on the employer’s terms — for survival. The circuit of capital

presupposes the divorce of the individual from “their previous relations

to the *objective conditions of labour.*”[401]

Conversely, the renascence of the commons and expansion of the commons

circuit presuppose reuniting productive property with commoners, and

reincorporation of the means of production into the commons. The

commons, as the locus of direct production of use-value, and for

insurance against risk and mutual aid in time of need, again — as before

— undermines the ability of capitalist employers to compel labor on

their own terms, and will create a positive feedback process in which

each expansion of the capacity of the commons further weakens the

extractive capability of capital, and each weakening of capital causes

still more subsistence needs to be met in the commons instead of the

cash nexus. Capitalism imposed wage labor by suppressing the commons, as

described by Marx; and as described by De Angelis, the recomposition of

the commons will break the power of the wage system.

Again, this renewed and expanded commons mirrors the pre-capitalist

commons *on a higher technical level*. Writing of the pre-capitalist

commons, Marx noted that forms of production

in which the community presupposes its subjects in a specific objective

unity with their conditions of production, or in which a specific

subjective mode of being presupposes the communities themselves as

conditions of production, necessarily correspond to a development of the

forces of production which is only limited, and indeed limited in

principle. The development of the forces of production dissolves these

forms, and their dissolution is itself a development of the human

productive forces.[402]

It is questionable whether this was ever true, whether it was ever

necessary to go through another stage of class exploitation, in order

that the forces of production be further developed to overcome scarcity

and lay the foundations for post-capitalist abundance; Lewis Mumford,

for example, lays out plausible scenarios for the development of

productive forces through a continuation of the eotechnic model, and

their direct continuation into something like the neotechnic, without

anything like the Enclosures and Dark Satanic Mills as a necessary means

of accumulation. But in any case — as already noted in a previous

chapter — developments in recent decades of the radical cheapening of

small-scale means of production suited to the household economy and to

the commons makes possible a shift to the commons as the primary locus

of material progress.

His mention of abolishing the worst aspects of capital and state echoes

ideas found in similar thinkers of shifting the nature of states

(ranging from Saint-Simon’s substitution of “administration of things”

for “governance of people” to Proudhon’s “dissolving the state in

society” to Orsi’s Partner State) and corporations (experiments in

self-management, open-sourcing IP, etc.) even under the existing system,

in order to make them somewhat less extractive and hierarchical, and lay

the groundwork for a fundamental alteration in their character when the

larger system they are a part of reaches its tipping point. The nature

of the corporation or state agency is determined by the nature of the

larger system of which it is a part (e.g. the evolution of craft guilds

from a cooperative ethos at the height of the Middle Ages to an

essentially corporate capitalist model dominated by large masters

engaged in the export trade in early modern times). The legacy

institutions that are able to negotiate the transition process and

survive with some degree of organizational continuity in the successor

society may still have the same names, but they will be largely

different in substance.

Chapter Six: Interstitial Development and Exodus over Insurrection

Introduction

If the New Left did not altogether abandon the ideas of insurrectionary

assault and seizure of control of the preexisting institutions of state

and corporation, it at least favored, far more than the Old Left, a

concurrent interstitial approach of building counter-institutions as the

nucleus of a future society.

Tom Hayden, writing in 1966, put it in language that would sound

entirely familiar to those involved in the Italian social centers of the

70s, the Argentinian recuperated factories, or today’s municipalist

movements in Barcelona and Madrid:

To summarize: the Movement is a community of insurgents sharing the same

radical values and identity, seeking an independent base of power

wherever they are. It aims at a transformation of society led by the

most excluded and “unqualified” people. Primarily, this means building

institutions outside the established order which seek to become the

genuine institutions of the total society. Community unions, freedom

schools, experimental universities, community-formed police review

boards, people’s own anti-poverty organizations fighting for federal

money, independent union locals — all can be “practical” pressure points

from which to launch reform in the conventional institutions while at

the same time maintaining a separate base and pointing towards a new

system. Ultimately, this movement might lead to a Continental Congress

called by all the people who feel excluded from the higher circles of

decision-making in the country. This Congress might even become a kind

of second government, receiving taxes from its supporters, establishing

contact with other nations, holding debates on American foreign and

domestic policy, dramatizing the plight of all groups that suffer from

the American system.[403]

And if this is only partly true of the New Left, it is much more fully

true of subsequent phenomena like autonomism and the post-1994

horizontalist resistance movements.

Note on Terminology. The term “interstitial” overlaps

somewhat in meaning with “prefigurative,” and the two words are often

used more or less interchangeably among the same general currents of the

Left. I used “prefigurative” more myself in earlier drafts of this book

than in the final one, but decided it had shades of meaning that were

unsatisfactory.

For me “prefigurative” carries a whiff of

idealistic lifestylism, whereas “interstitial” suggests actually

building the new society here and now rather than just prefiguring it.

As an illustration: Marx saw worker worker cooperatives as “prefiguring”

postcapitalist society in that they showed what was possible, but he

didn’t consider them feasible on any significant scale under the

material conditions of capitalism; rather, they were something that

could only become actual building blocks of society “after the

Revolution.” The new municipalist movements today, to take a contrasting

example, see community land trusts, alternative currencies, neighborhood

gardens and workshops, etc., not just as “prefigurations” of the future

society but as the actual beginnings of it: things that will grow and

coalesce into the core of the postcapitalist system and eventually

supplant capitalism.

And among its advocates, prefigurative politics is used more in the

first sense — that is, as Marx saw cooperatives — than in the second.

Present-day writer Sofa Saio Gradin, for example, describes it as “the

politics of organising in the here-and-now in a way that reflects the

society we want to see in the future,” and “about shaping our cultures,

norms and social relations, as well as our formal rules and policies, in

the image of the society we desire.” It’s more about the attitudes it

encourages (“the daily behaviours, assumptions and relationships of the

general population”) than any actual post-capitalist institutions that

will persist through the phase transition.[404]

And one of the first people to use the term in its current sense, Carl

Boggs, defined it as “the embodiment, within the ongoing political

practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations,

decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate

goal.”

The interstitial approach is ideally suited to remedy the defects of

prefiguration, as Boggs complained of it:

The dilemmas of modern prefigurative movements came from the legacy of

the entire prefigurative tradition, which in contrast to Leninism and

structural reformism sought to affirm the actuality of revolutionary

goals. In rejecting a vanguardism, they often ignored the state and the

problem of power; in stressing the prefigurative side, they downplayed

the task of organization. And like the organized Marxist movements, they

ultimately failed to articulate a democratic socialist theory of

transition. The instability and vulnerability of dual power necessitates

rapid movement toward a broad system of nationwide revolutionary

authority; without this, as history shows, local structures are unable

to translate popular energies into a sustained movement that is both

prefigurative and politically effective. What is required, and what the

entire prefigurative strategy lacks, is a merging of spontaneism and the

“external element,” economics and politics, local democratic and state

power struggles. But the recent experiences of radical movements in

capitalist countries reflect a continued polarization between

prefigurative and statist strategies that is harmful to such a

possibility.[405]

Interstitial development is precisely the organizational approach,

addressing the problem of power and providing the theory of transition,

that Boggs found lacking.

I. The Split Within Autonomism

Although autonomism shares many areas of commonality, there is a major

difference in approach between (on the one hand) Antonio Negri and

Michael Hardt, and (on the other) Harry Cleaver, Silvia Federici, John

Holloway and Massimo De Angelis. Both sides of the split stress the

importance of interstitial development and of working class agency and

subjectivity in post-capitalist transition. But Negri et al see

capitalism as a totalizing system without an outside, which has already

enclosed the whole of society via the social factory. The intangibles we

already occupy (the knowledge we carry in our heads, the social

relationships in society outside the factory, etc.) are the primary

sources of productivity, but they are all within the circuit of capital.

It therefore remains only to understand that we’re already *in*

communism, in the sense that capitalism has created all the

prerequisites of communism within itself, that we’re already in

possession of most of the means of production, and that all that remains

to us is to cut off capital as a superfluous node. As Angelos

Varvarousis put it:

Hardt and Negri do not view the commons as relatively independent social

systems of resource management. Instead, they focus on the more abstract

level of the production of “the common” as an inseparable social force

that is already taking shape due to the informatization and

“cognitivization” of production. For them, the expansion of commoning

practices and of the “common” as a distinct mode of social relations

does not take the form of a counterpower or resistance to capital but is

immanent in capitalism’s process of evolution….[406]

On the other hand, Federici et al deny that capitalism is a completed,

totalizing system. The circuit of capital has totalizing imperatives of

valorization and accumulation; but it is in a constant struggle to

reproduce itself against other contending spheres like the commons,

which are resisting enclosure. So building a post-capitalist system

requires treating the autonomous commons as building blocks and

expanding them.

If we first strip away Negri et al’s false understanding of capitalism

as a totalizing system with no outside, we’re still left with two areas

of emphasis by the contending sides that are more complementary than

contradictory. What’s needed is a synthesis that incorporates the

positive sides of both.

II. The Shift From the Factory to Society as the Main Locus of

Productivity

A major theme of the Negri, Hardt and Dyer-Witheford wing of autonomism

is the way in which workers’ own social relationships have become the

main source of productive capital, as physical capital has declined in

importance relative to human capital and production has taken on a

networked, horizontal character. And at the same time, the boundaries

between this increasingly social production process and the rest of life

— the spheres of consumption, family life, lifelong learning and the

reproduction of labor-power — are becoming more and more blurred. As

Nick Dyer-Witheford writes:

The activities of people not just as workers but as students, consumers,

shoppers and television viewers are now directly integrated into the

production process. During the era of the mass worker, the consumption

of commodities and the reproduction of labor had been organized as

spheres of activity adjunct to, yet distinct from, production. Now these

borders fray…. Work, school, and domesticity are re-formed into a

single, integrated constellation.[407]

And the growing centrality of network communications and information to

all forms of production, and the penetration of this networked culture

into the entire cultural sphere, means that it becomes a familiar part

of the worker’s life.[408]

When workers’ skills and social relationships become the main form of

capital, the converse is that —in contrast to the days when “capital”

was expensive, absentee-owned physical capital that workers were paid to

come to a physical location and work — workers are in direct possession

of a much larger share of the prerequisites of production.

Likewise, as Dyer-Witheford paraphrases Negri, “the new communicative

capacities and technological competencies manifesting in the

contemporary work force…”

exist in “virtual” form among the contingent and unemployed labor force.

They are not so much the products of a particular training or specific

work environment but rather the premises and prerequisites of everyday

life in a highly integrated technoscientific system permeated by

machines and media.[409]

In Negri’s own words, “the raw material on which the very high level of

productivity is based — the only raw material… which is suitable for

an intellectual and inventive labour force — is *science, communication

and the communication of knowledge*.” To extract profit from the

cooperative relationships between workers, capital “must… appropriate

communication. It must expropriate the community and superimpose itself

on the autonomous capability of manufacturing knowledge…”

The socialized worker’s labour is more productive than that of the mass

worker. It is endowed with a very high level of productive potential

because it is capable of setting in motion the productive potentiality

of the whole of society…. At all levels and in all contexts, community

has increasingly become the foundation of the productivity of labour….

Today capitalist expropriation no longer takes place through wages

alone. Given the conditions we have described, expropriation no longer

simply consists in the expropriation of the producer, but, in the most

immediate sense, in the expropriation of the producers’ community….

Advanced capitalism directly expropriates labouring cooperation. Capital

has penetrated the entire society by means of technological and

political instruments… to anticipate, organize and subsume each of the

forms of labouring cooperation which are established in society in order

to generate a higher level of productivity. Capital has insinuated

itself everywhere, and everywhere attempts to acquire the power to

coordinate, commandeer and recuperate value.[410]

But in doing this, capital must diffuse the informational tools of

production into workers’ hands. And the skills and social relationships

capital profits off of become an inseparable part of the worker’s mind

and personality. Unlike the case of the physical factory, where

management could search workers’ lunchboxes for tools and parts on the

way out the door, employers cannot force workers to upload their

knowledge and skill, or their social relationships, to a company

mainframe when they clock out. The implication, as Dyer-Witheford sees

it:

By informating production, capital seems to augment its powers of

control. But it simultaneously stimulates capacities that threaten to

escape its command and overspill into rivulets irrelevant to, or even

subversive of, profit.[411]

In many areas of production, I would add, the communication and

information processing tools used in the workplace are becoming

virtually indistinguishable from those used in the social sphere. Wikis

and blogs, and social media like Twitter, developed primarily for use

outside the workplace, have been seized on by champions of the “Wikified

Firm” or “Enterprise 2.0” as tools for coordinating production within

the workplace. At the same time, open-sourced desktop or browser-based

utilities are frequently more productive and usable than the proprietary

“productivity software” forced on workers in the workplace. As Tom

Coates put it, “the gap between what can be accomplished at home and

what can be accomplished in a work environment has narrowed dramatically

over the last ten to fifteen years.”[412]

Since Marx’s day, according to Negri and Hardt, his simple schema of the

circuit of capital (production and circulation) has expanded to

encompass virtually all of society, including both the reproduction of

nature and the reproduction of labor-power—the “social

factory.”[413]

The concept of the social factory was introduced in “Factory and

Society,” Mario Tronti’s 1962 article in *Quaderni Rossi*: capital

colonizes “the whole of society” with the result that society becomes “a

function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination

over the whole of society.”[414]

Negri argued that Marx himself anticipated this concept in *Grundrisse*.

Capital is forced to overcome every barrier to realization in the

circulation process by transcending it and incorporating it into itself,

so that an ever greater share of all social activity is incorporated

into the circuit of capital.

Circulation produces the socialization of capital. Marx fully

appreciates this passage to social capital and stresses it: “there

opened up for us the prospect, which cannot be sharply defined yet at

this point, *of a specific relation of capital to the communal, general

conditions of social production*, as distinct from the conditions of a

*particular capital* and its *particular production process*.” Therefore

the leap to “social capital,” like the leap to “social labor” is not a

generic one. It is a *qualitative leap which* *permeates the category of

capital*. Society appears to us as capital’s society. It is through this

passage that all social conditions are subsumed by capital, that is,

they become part of its “organic composition.”[415]

Harry Cleaver cites Negri’s observation that capital has pursued the

“subsumption of society”:

(i.e., reshaping of all of human activities as work that contributes to

its expanded reproduction)….

As all human activities are being subsumed by capital as work, Negri and

others argue, it becomes impossible to distinguish work from nonwork,

“the division between work time and non-work time” breaks down. Under

such conditions, he argues, appropriating a concept from Foucault, life

becomes “biopolitical labor,” and it becomes impossible to quantify and

measure labor that produces value (abstract labor) as something distinct

from other human activity.[416]

III. Negri et al vs. the Commons

Negri does not envision a transition strategy based on shifting to

direct production for use in the commons sector outside capitalist

control, but rather envisioned working class self-valorization as

something taking place *within* the totalizing sphere of capital as a

result of the contradictions of an overall system that capital itself

has created. For him the primary significance of working-class

self-valorization as an antagonist to the circuit of capital is the

expansion of the scale of necessary labor and consumption entailed in

both the reproduction of labor power and the realization of capital;

this increased scale shifts the balance of power between labor and

capital so that the former attains the capability of ending capitalism

from *within*, not from *outside*.

Here a fundamental law of the transition to communism is clarified: *the

transition is possible when the working class, instead of being moved by

capital, moves itself and subordinates capital to its own forms of

behavior*. This material and objective dictatorship of the class over

capital is the first fundamental passage of transition, most obviously

when the relationship does not result in the capitalist mediation of

development, but rather in the workers’ mediation of capital’s

crisis.[417]

Self-valorization does include some interstitial and prefigurative

effort, but the primary focuses of this effort are the refusal of work

and direct appropriation — i.e. demanding a greater share of the social

product created by capitalism with less work, not building alternative

institutions.[418] Refusal of work increasingly comes to

forefront as a spontaneous phenomenon. “The communist contents of the

program begin to be expressed from the lowest level of worker behavior

such as absenteeism, sabotage, direct-individual and

group-appropriation, etc.”[419] For Negri the refusal of work

is “*the content of the process of self-valorization*,” and the refusal

of work “*is first and foremost sabotage, strikes, direct

action*.”[420] He sees the shifting balance of power as

significant insofar as it empowers working class struggle against

capital *within* the social factory, rather than the direct creation of

a postcapitalist society in spaces outside the control of capital.

Negri at times uses language that could be interpreted as referring to

direct production for use in the social sector: “the progress of the

process of self-valorization is measured positively by the

multiplication of socially useful labor dedicated to the free

reproduction of proletarian society.”[421] But as Michael

Ryan clarifies in his Epilogue to *Marx Beyond Marx*, this refers to

obtaining a space for independent reproduction (“developing the

independence of its own processes of reproduction”) through a “social

wage,” or something like a Basic Income (“the class’ reappropriation of

the mechanisms of its own reproduction (via public

expenditure)”).[422] Still, Negri’s “refusal of work” is

fully consistent with — and magnificently exemplified by — Massimo De

Angelis’s later advocacy of direct production for use in the commons.

Autonomist thinkers like Federici, Holloway and De Angelis have

subsequently developed these possibilities in explicit form, in

contradiction to Negri’s vision of capitalism as a system without an

outside. It follows from all this that the main form of revolution

ceases to be seizing the factories, whether social or literal, and

instead becomes — in the term coined by Negri and Hardt in

Commonwealth* — “exodus.” It is feasible to undertake an ever larger

share of production of life’s necessities in the social sphere, in

self-provisioning in the informal economy, through commons-based peer

production, or through cooperative labor by workers using affordable

high-tech tools in their own homes and shops. And the social

relationships which capital has enclosed as a source of profit are

vulnerable to being repurposed in the form of counter-institutions.

IV. Theoretical Implications

*The Vulnerability of the Social Factory.** The concept of “Exodus,”

developed in the last book of the *Empire* trilogy (*Commonwealth*),

envisioned the share of capitalist production that was directly

administered by workers, based on their direct occupancy of the means of

informational production and the superfluity of capital, enabling

workers to simply cut capital out of the process altogether.

…the trend toward the hegemony or prevalence of immaterial production in

the processes of capitalist valorization…. Images, information,

knowledge, affects, codes, and social relationships… are coming to

outweigh material commodities or the material aspects of commodities in

the capitalist valorization process. This means, of course, not that the

production of material goods… is disappearing or even declining in

quantity but rather that their value is increasingly dependent on and

subordinated to immaterial factors and goods…. What is common to these

different forms of labor… is best expressed by their biopolitical

character…. Living beings as fixed capital are at the center of this

transformation, and the production of forms of life is becoming the

basis of added value. This is a process in which putting to work human

faculties, competences, and knowledges — those acquired on the job but,

more important, those accumulated outside work interacting with

automated and computerized productive systems — is directly productive

of value. One distinctive feature of the work of head and heart, then,

is that paradoxically the object of production is really a subject,

defined… by a social relationship or a form of life.[423]

Capitalist accumulation today is increasingly external to the production

process, such that exploitation takes the form of expropriation of the

common.[424]

…[C]lass struggle in the biopolitical context takes the form of

exodus. By exodus here we mean… a process of subtraction from the

relationship with capital by means of actualizing the potential autonomy

of labor-power. Exodus is thus not a refusal of the productivity of

biopolitical labor-power but rather a refusal of the increasingly

restrictive fetters placed on its productive capacities by capital….

As a first approximation, then, think of this form of class struggle as

a kind of maroonage. Like the slaves who collectively escape the chains

of slavery to construct self-governing communities and quilombos,

biopolitical labor-power subtracting from its relation to capital must

discover and construct new social relationships, new forms of life that

allow it to actualize its productive powers. But unlike that of the

maroons, this exodus does not necessarily mean going elsewhere. We can

pursue a line of flight while staying right here, by transforming the

relations of production and mode of social organization under which we

live.[425]

But this vision is of a communist society already in being, which

workers simply take over from inside. There is another, entirely

different, autonomist vision which we will examine below.

*The Vulnerability of the Social Factory to the “Outside.”** The other

autonomist vision, rather than treating capitalism as a totalizing

system with no “outside,” which is creating communism through its own

internal laws of motion, views the reproduction of capitalism as a

contested process in which we constantly create our outside to the

system, in the form of commons-based counter-institutions which together

constitute a parallel counter-system in process of withdrawing resources

from capitalism and supplanting it. Bengi Akbulut describes the role of

the commons in this tendency:

In particular, this approach [the Autonomist Marxist approach epitomised

by the works of Caffentzis, Federici, De Angelis and more broadly the

Midnight Notes Collective] conceptualises the commons as social spheres

of life the main characteristics of which are to provide various degrees

of protection from the market. That is, the commons form modes of social

reproduction and accessing social resources that are not mediated by the

market. They are non-commodified forms of fulfilling social needs such

as obtaining social wealth and organising social production….

Seen this way, commons are no longer limited to shared forms of natural

and social wealth, but include forms of relationships, networks,

practices and struggles that provide (varying degrees of) access to

means of material and social reproduction outside of the mediation of

the market. This conceptualisation goes beyond an understanding of

commons as existing, pre-defined entities, and rather points to the

amalgam of social relations and practices that produce and reproduce

commons…. Moreover, this emphasises not only the commons as process

but also the particular characteristics of their constitutive social

practices. Accordingly, commons are forms of non-commodified wealth to

be used by all, sites of collective cooperative labour and regulated

non-hierarchically. More specifically, then, commons emerge as spaces of

social reproduction accessed equally by all, autonomous of

intermediation of the State or the market, where reproduction and

production takes place under collective labour, equal access to means of

(re)production and egalitarian forms of decision-making.

Within this context, time banks, urban gardens, land and urban squats,

food coops, local currencies, ‘creative commons’ licenses and bartering

practices, in addition to communal control and use of resources, emerge

as contemporary forms of commons. These examples represent practices in

self-provisioning outside the logic of markets and, to varying extents,

embody a collective form of self-reproduction…. They are also venues

of knowledge production, intergenerational transmission/ exchange and of

reproduction of social relationships, as well as a medium for the

encounter of diverse cultural practices. Similar examples of commoning

are: appropriations of unused plots of public land for subsistence

farming by landless rural and urban women; local currencies and

bartering practices that represent networks of exchange outside of

market relations; and community governance of water through committees,

such as those set up in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

As the examples above suggest, this approach defines commons not

necessarily (or exclusively) by their common-pool resource

characteristics (rivalry in consumption and non-exclusion of users), but

rather by the degree of autonomy they provide from capital and State,

and the type of social relationships that constitute

them.[426]

This autonomist counter-tendency arguably goes back at least to Harry

Cleaver who, even while promoting Negri’s thought, quietly shifted his

emphasis. Rather than viewing all of society as already subsumed in the

“social factory,”* *Cleaver promotes a “ruptural”

strategy (in a somewhat idiosyncratic use of the term) of creating and

expanding areas of life that are outside capitalist control. He does so,

however, in a way that shares some of Negri’s and Hardt’s terminology

(e.g. “refused work”) and maintains some commonalities with their

worldview.

Against the capitalist project of infinite totalization and expansion,

people have resisted commodification, defended the commons, and refused

work. Every successful resistance, every rupture of existing

capital-labor dialectics, whether in the factory, office, school, or

home, has limited or set back capitalist expansion.[427]

…The rupture of [capital’s] command… often involves the destruction

of existing relationships only in the sense of freeing them from

capital’s grip and of reorganizing them in healthier, more appealing

ways.[428]

Cleaver also borrows Negri’s term “self-valorization,” although

developing it in directions that imply a significant divergence from his

totalizing view of capitalism.

Negri’s concept of “self-valorization” aimed at… showing how the power

of refusal could and must be complemented by the power of constitution.

In many ways his concept expressed the side of workers struggles,

especially those of young workers, which was coming to the fore in the

late 1960s and early 1970s: the creative use of times, spaces and

resources liberated from the control of Italian and multinational

capital — uses such as the proliferation of “free radio stations” or the

widespread development of women’s spaces which, along with many other

self-managed projects, helped constitute what many came to call “the

counter-culture….”

…Alongside the power of refusal or the power to destroy capital’s

determination, we find in the midst of working class recomposition, the

power of creative affirmation, the power to constitute new practices….

The relationship between the refusal of capital’s determination and the

affirmation of self-valorizing activities is an intimate one. The power

of self-valorization is largely the power to fill the spaces liberated

from capitalist domination with alternative, autonomous projects….

An important part of Negri’s elaboration of the concept of

self-valorization is his recognition that, unlike valorization and

unlike most socialist visualizations of communism, it does not designate

the self-construction of a unified social project but rather denotes a

“plurality” of instances, a multiplicity of independent undertakings —

not only in the spaces opened within and against capitalism but also in

their full realization. Communism, for Negri, is thus not only a

self-constituting praxis, but also the realization of “multilaterality”

of the proletarian subject, or better, of a subject which in its

self-realization explodes into multiple autonomous

subjects.[429]

As the above quote suggests, one major form of such self-valorization is

building a parallel society and economy outside the control of capital,

in which we can replace commodified relationships and production with

direct production for use.

De-commodification therefore involves the bypassing of sales and

exchange-value in favor of folks directly realizing the use-values of

goods, services, and their own abilities. Such a bypassing happens

sporadically, when goods and services are directly appropriated by

workers, on the job or off, and it happens much more systematically in

activities such as peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, especially of

software, music, video, and film. Such activities, by appropriating

goods directly, remove them from the market and undermine the ability of

capitalists to realize surplus value and profits, and thus the

continuing value of the labor employed as a means of social control. The

adaptation and diversion of workers’ abilities to their own autonomous

pursuits also undermines their employers’ control….

Another kind of bypassing takes place when we undertake to meet our

needs and satisfy our desires directly — without the mediation of money,

markets, or commodities — in ways that go beyond the mere reproduction

of our lives as labor power to be sold in some capitalist labor market

for a wage or salary. On a small scale, such direct meeting of needs has

a long history, especially in small rural communities, not only in the

behavior of families but also in collective collaboration for raising

houses and barns, sharing seeds, gathering crops, or fishing. In cities

there have always been communities, especially immigrant working-class

ones, where folks help each other out in a variety of ways, many of

which involve no money or exchange.[430]

This amounts to taking our creativity, which is currently appropriated

and alienated from us by capitalism, outside capitalist control.

One of the most important insights of Marx’s analysis of capitalism is

that it is a way of organizing life that is intrinsically lifeless, it

endlessly reproduces itself (where it has the power) but the only

newness in that reproduction comes from those aspects of people’s

imagination and creativity which it has been forced, and able, to

harness, to constrain within the limits of its own reproduction….

Once we recognize that the source of invention and innovation in society

lies not within the system of domination itself (which can only harness

it at best — and often represses it) but in the autonomous activities of

the people within the system, once we see that we are the real source of

change and the architects of the future, then we can see two other

things: first, that our task is to eliminate the constraints on our

creativity imposed by capitalism (or any other system of domination) and

second, between the millions of moments of creation and the moments of

repression or cooptation, there exist spaces in which new things, new

ways of being are created that go beyond the way things are. It is only

the content of these spaces that can provide us with alternative

futures.[431]

In his Introduction to *Marx Beyond Marx*, he stresses this theme in

Negri’s work in a way that subtly shifts the emphasis away from Negri’s

original intent. The replacement of capitalism by socialism, and the

construction of a post-capitalist society, is an ongoing, interstitial

process.

Because capital’s central means of social domination is the imposition

of work and surplus work, the subordination of necessary labor to

surplus labor, Negri sees that one of the two most fundamental aspects

of working class struggle is the struggle against work. Where profit is

the measure of capitalist development and control, Negri argues that the

refusal of work measures the transition out of capital. The refusal of

work appears as a constituting praxis that produces a new mode of

production, in which the capitalist relation is reversed and surplus

labor is totally subordinated to working-class need.

The second, positive side to revolutionary struggle is the elaboration

of the self-determined multiple projects of the working class in the

time set free from work and in the transformation of work itself. This

self-determined project Negri calls self-valorization. Communism is thus

constituted both by the refusal of work that destroys capital’s imposed

unity and by the self-valorization that builds diversity and “rich,

independent multilaterality.”[432]

(Of course Negri, unlike Cleaver, sees this interstitial development as

something the workers are doing *within* capitalism, taking advantage of

the changing structure of production brought about by capitalism itself

and simply taking it over as a whole. In this he resembles the

accelerationists.)

Cleaver sees the future post-capitalist society as an outgrowth and

coalescence of the working class’s projects here and now. Rather than

drawing up blueprints for the future, he commends Kropotkin’s approach

of identifying tendencies in the existing society and the direction in

which they are developing. Like Kropotkin, Cleaver sets us the task of

“how to discover tendencies in the present which provide alternative

paths out of the current crisis and out of the capitalist

system.”[433] Thus the autonomist approach

redefines the ‘transition’ from capitalism to communism in terms of the

elaboration from the present into the future of existing forms of

self-valorisation or commons. Communism is reconceptualised in harmony

with Kropotkin’s views, not as a some-day-to-be-achieved utopia but as a

living reality whose growth needs only to be freed from constraint.

Like Kropotkin’s studies, such efforts to discover the future in the

present were based not only on a theory of collective subjectivity but

also on empirical studies of real workers in action.[434]

Silvia Federici, John Holloway and Massimo De Angelis likewise treat the

commons as a challenge to capitalist hegemony from outside, but go

beyond Cleaver in making their break with Negri fully explicit.

Federici refers dismissively to Negri’s belief that capitalism, by

informatizing production and organizing the economy around networked

communications, is already creating a society based on the commons. She

likewise dismisses the corollary view that the only remaining task for

the Multitude is to cut the capitalists out of the communist society

they’ve created.[435]

In her own thought, going back to the 70s, she has emphasized the agency

of ordinary people — women in particular — in building the structure of

communist society, and criticized the vulgar Marxism of the conventional

Left in viewing capital as the main progressive agent of history in

laying the groundwork for communism.[436]

But you don’t need to enter a factory to be part of a working class

organization. When [Carol] Lopate argues that “the ideological

preconditions for working class solidarity are networks and connections

which arise from working together” and “these preconditions cannot arise

out of isolated women working in separate homes,” she writes off the

struggles these “isolated” women made in the 1960s (rent strikes,

welfare struggles etc.). She assumes that we cannot organize ourselves

if we are not first organized by capital; and since she denies that

capital has already organized us, she denies the existence of our

struggle.[437]

She stresses above all the importance of organizing the social sectors

involved in the reproduction of everyday life as a commons outside the

control of the circuit of capital, in order to provide a base for

resistance and for the construction of post-capitalist society.

If the destruction of our means of subsistence is

indispensable for the survival of capitalist relations, this must be our

terrain of struggle….

Like every form of self-determination, women’s liberation requires

specific material conditions, starting with control over the basic means

of production and subsistence….[T]his principle holds not only for

women in the “Third World,” who have been major protagonists of land

struggles to recover land occupied by big landowners but also for women

in industrialized countries. In New York, women are defending from

bulldozers their urban gardens, the products of much collective work

that brought together entire communities and revitalized neighborhoods

previously considered disaster zones.[438]

***

</center>

What is needed is the reopening of a collective struggle over

reproduction, reclaiming control over the material conditions of our

reproduction and creating new forms of cooperation around this work

outside of the logic of capital and the market. This is not a utopia,

but a process already under way in many parts of the world and likely to

expand in the face of a collapse of the world financial system.

Governments are now attempting to use the crisis to impose stiff

austerity regimes on us for years to come. But through land takeovers,

urban farming, community-supported agriculture, through squats, the

creation of various forms of barter, mutual aid, alternative forms of

healthcare — to name some of the terrains on which this reorganization

of reproduction is more developed — a new economy is beginning to emerge

that may turn reproductive work from a stifling, discriminating activity

into the most liberating and creative ground of experimentation in human

relations.

As I stated, this is not a utopia. The consequences of the globalized

world economy would certainly have been far more nefarious except for

the efforts that millions of women have made to ensure that their

families would be supported, regardless of their value on the capitalist

labor market. Through their subsistence activities, as well as various

forms of direct action (from squatting on public land to urban farming)

women have helped their communities to avoid total dispossession, to

extend budgets and add food to the kitchen pots. Amid wars, economic

crises, and devaluations, as the world around them was falling apart,

they have planted corn on abandoned town plots, cooked food to sell on

the side of the streets, created communal kitchens… thus standing in the

way of a total commodification of life and beginning a process of

reappropriation and recollectivization of reproduction that is

indispensable if we are to regain control over our lives. The festive

squares and “occupy” movements of 2011 are in a way a continuation of

this process as the “multitudes” have understood that no movement is

sustainable that does not place at its center the reproduction of those

participating in it, thus also transforming the protest demonstrations

into moments of collective reproduction and cooperation.[439]

She also criticized conventional Marxism in language in much the same

way she criticized Negri — and compared it unfavorably to Kropotkin’s

approach — for treating the organization of cooperative labor as a

progressive function of capital and something imposed on the working

class as a passive object.

…[Marx] discussed “cooperation” only in the

process of commodity production overlooking the qualitatively different

forms of proletarian cooperation in the process of reproduction which

Kropotkin later called “mutual aid.”

Cooperation among workers is for Marx a fundamental character of the

capitalist organization of work, “entirely brought about by the

capital[ists],” coming into place only when the workers “have ceased to

belong to themselves,” being purely functional to the increase in the

efficiency and productivity of labor. As such, it leaves no space for

the manifold expressions of solidarity and the many “institutions for

mutual support” — “associations, societies, brotherhoods, alliances” —

that Kropotkin found present among the industrial population of his

time. As Kropotkin noted, these very forms of mutual aid put limits to

the power of capital and the State over the workers’ lives, enabling

countless proletarians not to fall into utter ruin, and sowing the seeds

of a self-managed insurance system, guaranteeing some protection against

unemployment, illness, old age and death.

…Feminists have rejected the centrality that Marxism has historically

assigned to waged industrial work and commodity production as the

crucial sites for social transformation, and they have criticized its

neglect of the reproduction of human beings and labor power. The

feminist movement’s lesson has been that not only is reproduction the

pillar of the “social factory,” but changing the conditions under which

we reproduce ourselves is an essential part of our ability to create

“self-reproducing movements.”[440]

She saw the commoning of the reproduction of everyday life as a form of

“the cooperation we develop among ourselves,” and “the seeds of the new

world.” “These efforts need to be expanded. They are essential to a

reorganization of our everyday life and the creation of nonexploitative

social relations.”[441]

Like Massimo De Angelis (as we will see below) she viewed the

reclamation of the agricultural commons and food security/sovereignty as

especially vital in creating a commons-based sphere of social

reproduction outside the sphere of capital.

Land is the material basis for women’s subsistence work, which is the

main source of “food security” for millions of people across the planet.

Against this background, I look at the struggles that women are making

worldwide not only to reappropriate land, but to boost subsistence

farming and a noncommercial use of natural resources. These efforts are

extremely important not only because thanks to them billions of people

are able to survive, but because they point to the changes that we have

to make if we are to construct a society where reproducing ourselves

does not come at the expense of other people nor present a threat to the

continuation of life on the planet.[442]

…[S]ubsistence agriculture has been an important means of support for

billions of workers, giving wage laborers the possibility to contract

better conditions of work and survive labor strikes and political

protests….[443]

As we have seen, in cities across the world, at least a quarter of the

inhabitants depend on food produced by women’s subsistence labor. In

Africa, for example, a quarter of the people living in towns say they

could not survive without subsistence food production. This is confirmed

by the UN Population Fund, which claims that “some two hundred million

city dwellers are growing food, providing about one billion people with

at least part of their food supply….”

We can also see that subsistence production is contributing to a

noncompetitive, solidarity-centered mode of life that is crucial for the

building of a new society. It is the seed of what Veronika

Bennholdt-Thomsen and Maria Mies call the “other” economy, which “puts

life and everything necessary to produce and maintain life on this

planet at the center of economic and social activity” against “the

never-ending accumulation of dead money.”[444]

In another essay she discusses the potential of commons as “the

foundation of a noncapitalist economy,” stressing in particular the

importance of urban gardens and the food commons as engaging in direct

production for use, thereby presenting a way of restoring people’s

control over part of the reproduction process outside the control of the

state or the market economy.[445]

Taken all together, then, shifting all the prerequisites for

reproduction of human life from the cash nexus to commons-based

institutions in the social economy gives us the basis for immediate

resistance against the exploitative power of capital, and a foundation

for the further construction of post-capitalist society. It’s also a way

for people in the Global North to combat imperialist wealth extraction.

For us, in North America, an added lesson is that by pooling our

resources, by reclaiming land and waters, and turning them into a

common, we could begin to de-link our reproduction from the commodity

flows that through the world market are responsible for the

dispossession of so many people in other parts of the world. We could

disentangle our livelihood, not only from the world market but from the

war-machine and prison system on which the hegemony of the world market

depends….

The times are propitious for such a start. As the capitalist crisis is

destroying the basic element of reproduction for millions of people

across the world, including the United States, the reconstruction of our

everyday life is a possibility and a necessity. Like strikes,

social/economic crises break the discipline of the wage-work, forcing

upon us new forms of sociality…. Today, as millions of Americans’

houses and cars have been repossessed, as foreclosures, evictions, the

massive loss of employment are again breaking down the pillars of the

capitalist discipline of work, new common grounds are again taking

shape, like the tent cities that are sprawling from coast to coast. This

time, however, it is women who must build the new commons, so that they

do not remain transient spaces or temporary autonomous zones, but become

the foundation of new forms of social reproduction.

If the house is the oikos on which the economy is built, then it is

women, historically the house-workers and house-prisoners, who must take

the initiative to reclaim the house as a center of collective life…,

allowing for the sharing and circulation of community possessions, and

above all providing the foundation for collective forms of

reproduction.[446]

John Holloway, another thinker in the autonomist tradition, argues for

treating capitalism, not as a completed totality, but as a system that

is recreated every day using our own labor.

…The problem is not to destroy that society but to stop creating it.

Capitalism exists today not because we created two hundred years ago or

a hundred years ago, but because we create it today. If we do not create

it tomorrow, it will not exist.

…We take an active part in constructing the domination that oppresses

us, the obscenity that horrifies us. We create surplus value, we respect

money, we accept and impose unreasoned authority, we live by the clock,

we close our eyes to the starving. We make capitalism. And now we must

stop making it….[447]

…When Marx says at the beginning of *Capital* that the commodity

stands outside us, alien to us, but its secret is that we made it…, then

our reaction is one both of horror and of hope. We are astonished that

we should spend our lives making objects that deny our existence, that

are alien to us and dominate us, but at the same time we see hope,

because those objects depend totally upon us for their existence: our

doing is at the centre of everything, our doing is the hidden sun around

which everything revolves.[448]

For Holloway the way to stop re-creating capitalism is to progressively

shift more and more of our doing into activities that create a different

way of doing things.

A sustained global mass strike would destroy capital completely, but the

conditions for that do not exist at the moment. It is hard to see how

everybody in the world could be persuaded to refuse to work for capital

at the same time.

For the moment at least, the only way of thinking of revolution is in

terms of a number of rents, tears, holes, fissures that spread through

the social fabric. There are already millions of such holes, spaces in

which people, individually or collectively, say, “NO, here capital does

not rule, here we shall not structure our lives according to the

dictates of capital.” These holes are refusals, disobediences,

insubordinations. In some cases (the EZLN in Chiapas, the MST in Brazil,

the uprising in Bolivia, the piqueteros and asambleas barriales

in Argentina, and so on), these insubordinations, these holes in

the fabric of capital are already very big. The only way in which we can

think of revolution is in terms of the extension and multiplication of

these disobediences, of these fissures in capitalist

command.[449]

But refusals aren’t enough by themselves because refusal, by itself —

refusing to sell our labor power — leaves us facing the threat of

starvation. “Refusal to work under capitalist command is difficult to

maintain unless it is accompanied by the development of some sort of

alternative doing.”[450] Such alternative doings include

people occupying factories or schools or clinics and trying to organise

them on a different basis, creating community bakeries or workshops or

gardens, establishing radio stations of resistance, and so on. All these

projects and revolts are limited, inadequate and contradictory (as they

must be in a capitalist context), but it is difficult to see how we can

create an emancipated doing other than in this interstitial form,

through a process of interweaving the different struggles against doing

work, knitting together the different doings in-and-against-and-beyond

capital….

…The emancipation of doing is the movement of anti-fetishisation, the

recovery of creativity. Only in this way can the fissures become poles

of attraction instead of ghettos, and only if they are poles of

attraction can they expand and multiply.[451]

Stop making capitalism: refuse. But this involves a second moment: do

something else instead. This something else is a prefiguration, the

embryo of a society yet to be born. To what extent can this embryo grow

in the womb of existing society?…

Rupture does not mean that capitalism vanishes. The fissures do not mean

that capitalism disappears. But rather than think of revolution as an

event that will happen in the future (who knows when) and be relatively

quick, it seems better to think of it as a process that is already under

way and may take some time, precisely because revolution cannot be

separated from the creation of an alternative world.[452]

Holloway uses “communising” as a collective term for these rents, holes

and fissures, amounting cumulatively to something very like the

commons-based counter-economy Massimo De Angelis (see below) envisions.

Communising not just as verb but in the plural: communisings. The

flowing of many babbling brooks and silent streams,coming together,

parting again, flowing toward a potential sea….

Not communism-in-the-future but a multiplicity of communisings here and

now. Does this mean that there can be no radical break with capitalism?

Certainly not. We have to break the dynamic of capital, but the way to

do it is not by projecting a communism into the future but by

recognising, expanding, and multiplying the communisings (or cracks in

the texture of capitalist domination) and fomenting their influence. It

is hard for me to imagine the overcoming of capitalism other than

through the confluence of communisings into a torrent that marginalises

capital as a form of organisation and renders its violence

ineffective.[453]

Holloway pointed out, in an earlier quote, that while capitalism could

be destroyed by a universal mass strike, such a strike is not feasible.

But as he suggests here, the changing correlation of forces between

capitalism and the ecosystem of interstitial alternatives we are

building creates a state of affairs in which the success of such rutural

efforts may become more likely.

As the commons-based counter-economy gradually grows and progressively

greater shares of both effort and consumption are withdrawn from the

sphere of commodity exchange and accumulation, we gradually achieve

larger and larger amounts of slack, and the ability to walk away from

the table for longer periods of time; at the same time, as the sphere of

society in service to capitalism’s accumulation imperative shrinks,

capitalism becomes increasingly fragile to shocks. And as participants

in the successor system, on their side, obtain more resources and slack

and space as a margin against short-term vulnerability, they will

inevitably be emboldened to inflict more, more frequent, and larger

shocks on capitalism at the very time it becomes more vulnerable to

them.

The universal strike is far from the only large-scale shock to which

capitalism is vulnerable. For example as capitalism becomes increasingly

dependent on credit expansion, investment bubbles and the FIRE economy

for maintaining aggregate demand, it becomes to that extent vulnerable

to other mass actions like debt strikes by the population of the

imperial core, and coordinated national debt defaults by debtor nations

of the Global South. And in an era of distributed, just-in-time

capitalism, even partial labor strikes against key nodes in the logistic

system can have mass disruptive effects far beyond their immediate

scale.

Like Federici, Massimo De Angelis not only treats interstitial,

commons-based development as the basis for constructing post-capitalist

society, but he explicitly distinguishes his approach from Negri’s

quasi-accelerationism.

Thus, despite a common root in the theoretical milieu of what has been

called autonomist Marxism, there is a difference between, say, a

politics that looks to the ‘creative,’ ‘immaterial’ workers almost as

the ‘vanguard’ of the revolution and those like myself who look instead

to the Zapatistas and other similar commoners, especially the

indigenous, the peasants, the just-in-time factory workers in the ‘free

trade zones’ of the third world, the peasant mothers, the slum

communities struggling in a variety of contexts for livelihoods and

dignity.[454]

Although he refers to it as “traditional Marxism” in general, his

critique applies specifically to Negri’s and Hardt’s version of

autonomism:

To simplify, the narrative goes something like this: *before*

capital**ism** there are enclosures or ‘primitive accumulation’.

These processes of expropriation are preconditions of capitalism,

because they create and develop markets for commodities such as labour

power and land. Once the job is done, we can stop talking about

enclosures (or primitive accumulation) and must instead talk about

‘capital logic’. ‘Primitive accumulation’ and ‘capital logic’ are thus

distinctly separated, and therefore become the subject matter of two

distinct *Marxist disciplines*….

In this [i.e. the real] world, enclosures are a value practice that

clashes with others. It is either capital that makes the world *through

commodification and enclosures*, or it is the rest of us — whoever is

that ‘us’ — that makes the world through counter-enclosures and commons.

The net results of the clashes among these social forces and their

corresponding value practices Marx calls ‘class struggle’…

…The ongoing struggles for commons within the current global justice

and solidarity movement are… not appreciated for what they are:

budding alternatives to capital. Marxian-inspired thinking cannot join

the intellectual and political endeavours to shape alternatives in the

here and now because its framework is *for* another ‘ism’ projected into

an unqualified future, and generally defined by a model of power that

needs a political elite to tell the rest of us why power cannot be

exercised from the ground up, starting from the now. Thus, while current

movements around the world are practising, producing and fighting for a

variety of different commons… traditional Marxist theoreticians cannot

conceptualise these movements in terms of categories familiar to them.

They thus endeavour to *reduce* these movements to those familiar

categories, and when they do that, their contribution to the rich debate

on alternatives is poor indeed, of the type: ‘one solution,

revolution’.[455]

For De Angelis the establishment of the precondition of capitalism — the

separation of workers from their means of production — is not a one-time

process in the founding era of capitalism, but an ongoing process by

which commons are continually enclosed. And it is a contested process in

which subject populations resist enclosure of their commons, and create

and expand new commons as bases of resistance.[456] From this

it follows that the separation of workers from their means of production

is never complete, but only a matter of degree; and from this it

follows, further, that at any given time there is a correlation of

forces of production between those owned by capitalists and incorporated

into the expansionary circuit of capital, and those in the social

economy or commons which are engaged in direct production for use

outside the cash nexus.

As for the role of the commons in De Angelis’s own vision, he sees them

as a “means of access to social resources independently from

disciplinary markets. In other words, we need to extend the realm of

commons in more and more spheres of our social doing…, to reduce the

level of dependence on the markets and run our lives as free social

individuals.”[457]

He refers, in language much like David Graeber’s “everyday anarchism,”

to the “non-capitalism of our lives”:

the spheres of relations, value practices, affects as well as forms of

power relations, conflict and mutual aid that we constitute beyond

capitalist relations of production, perhaps within its reach, but yet

constituted in different modes and therefore articulated by different

value practices.[458]

Commons-based counter-institutions are a barrier to the expansion and

valorization of capital, and an impediment to its imperative to

accumulation. If they can be coalesced and expanded as a coherent

counter-system at the expense of capital, or even halt its growth, it

will amount to ring-barking the tree of capitalism and causing its

eventual decay and collapse. Building the commons starves expansionary

capital of oxygen, removes resources from it, and deploys those

resources to building a system under our control

instead.[459]

This struggle is *class* struggle in so far as the social forces guided

by non-monetary values posit themselves as limits, in given contexts and

conditions, to capital’s accumulation, to the pursuit and accumulation

of monetary value at whatever scale of social action.

…Unless the different value practices posited by these movements are

able to weave themselves into self-sustaining social feedback processes

that are alternative to the parametric centre of capital’s value

mechanism and its corresponding mode of relations, these struggles risk

being either repressed or assimilated into capitalism’s evolving forms.

We need to work through a politics of value that problematises

strategically how we sustain new social relations of production, new

value practices through which we reproduce our individual livelihoods

and their articulation, vis-a-vis the value practices of capital that,

through enclosures and a pointless competitive rat race, reproduce

scarcity while we could be celebrating abundance….

Indeed, in order to be subsumable, struggles must to some extent be

dispersed across the social field, because their dispersion and relative

isolation facilitates their integration into capitalist markets. If

struggles circulate and coagulate, there emerges a political

recomposition that is able to articulate all these values opposing

capital’s value, to sustain them, to give force to their constitutive

action as a new mode of relations, an** absolute** limit to capital

in that it is a limit to the production of its value.[460]

In a subsequent work, *Omnia Sunt Communia*, he ties his hopeful vision

of a post-capitalist future constructed on the commons together with the

promise of the wave of horizontalist movements that occurred since *The

Beginning of History*.

[I]n the last few years we have witnessed several cases of alignment of

social movements to the commons, a commons which offers great

potential….

…I believe there is a social revolution in the making that, if

recognised and able to attract more energies from people around the

world, could give us a chance to embark on a process of transformation

towards postcapitalist society. My underlying conception of revolution

is aligned to that of Marx which sees social revolutions — that is, the

growth of alternative modes of production — as the material condition

for any political revolution. A radical transformation of our world

implies that people come together into communities that develop these

alternatives to the logic of capitalism, multiply them and interconnect

them: I understand commons to be such alternatives.[461]

A huge portion of our lives takes place within the commons, particularly

those social functions involving the reproduction of labor power and of

the larger social fabric.

We are generally born into a commons, even if it only consists of

interactions with our parents or carers, siblings and friends…. Values

practices, such as loyalty to friends, conviviality, mutual aid, care,

and even struggles, are developed in the commons….

As soon as these networks of social cooperation develop into systemic

patterns in neighborhood associations, cooperatives, social centres,

food networks and social movements (and given the development of

communication and information technologies), these commons-based forms

of social cooperation have the potential to expand and reshape their

boundaries… and give rise to commons ecologies, that is, plural and

cooperating commons with institutions and arrangements we cannot

predict.[462]

He advocates a synergy between the commons and the new horizontalist

social movements, such that

…they are weaved [sic] in virtuous cycles with their own task: the

social movement to shift the subjective and objective constraints set in

place by state and capital, and the commons to expand in this new space

with new commons-based modes of production.[463]

The strategic problem faced by postcapitalist commons is… how to

extend the boundaries of their operations, through development, boundary

commons and commons ecologies [i.e. uniting commons into larger

interconnected systems], to include the ecological and capitalist

systems with which they interrelate.[464]

He argues that the most critical area of expansion of the commons is

“all those activities that serve the immediate purpose of reproducing

life….” like “accessing healthy food, housing, water, social care and

education.”

How can commonwealth be used to create a new commons system, one that

increases the incidence of alternative modes of production, and

increases the independence of commoners from capitalist systems…? How

can commonwealth be used in order to increase the power of the commons

vis-a-vis capital?… Capital can reproduce itself only by putting to work

the physical, mental, and affective energies of people for its own

purpose: accumulation…. But the one thing upon which the power of

capital is ultimately based, the one thing that enables it to deploy all

the other means of its power, is… its ability to control, manage,

distribute and shape the meaning of resources that are directly

responsible for sustaining human and social life: water, land, food,

energy, health, housing, care and education and their interrelated

cultures in the first place. An increased ability to govern collectively

these resources, to democratise their reproduction, to commonalise them

by keeping state and market at bay, are conditions for emancipation for

all in all other spheres of life and for make [sic] these spheres of

life into a type of commonwealth that is enabled to feel a distance from

capital…. To have access to these resources would allow people and

communities not only to grow more resilient, to share conviviality and

enjoy life, but to build a common social force to expand their power

vis-a-vis capital….

In summary, commons that make use of the commonwealth more directly

linked to (re)production of bodies and the earth is a condition for the

expansion of commoners’ empowerment vis-a-vis capital, and a condition

of the reduction of the degree of dependence on capital markets…. It

corresponds to the development of a sphere of autonomy from

capital….[465]

This fundamental stratum of commons would, in turn, “form the material

basis of a new commons renaissance in many spheres, building its

foundation on these reproductive commons.”

This is because not only would they give us the benefit of new

communities, new cultures, and new methods of establishing wellbeing,

security and trust within complex organisation, they would also protect

us from the whims of financial markets, and especially, increase our

security and power to refuse the exploitation of capitalist markets. The

more that capital can blackmail us into poorer conditions, higher

insecurity and ever-more gruelling work rhythms, the less we have the

power to refuse its logic. Conversely, this power grows the more we have

alternative means for our reproduction.[466]

The Parliamentary Enclosures of common pasture, wood, and waste in the

UK were carried out to facilitate the kind of blackmail De Angelis

writes of; they were motivated by the fact that independent access to

the means of subsistence enabled labor to accept or refuse wage labor on

its own terms. In the propertied classes’ press of the late 18th century

capitalist farmers complained that, because of access to subsistence

from pasturing livestock on the commons, gathering food and firewood

from common woodland, and the possibility of the landless cottaging on

the waste, the rural laboring classes only felt the need to work for

wages intermittently. Because of their ability to fall back on the

commons, they could not be forced to work as long or as hard as their

employers wished.

For De Angelis, the circuit of capital coexists alongside a

complementary circuit of the commons.

…C-M-C describes not only the general metabolism of the reproduction

of labour-power, but also the circuit of production of commodities

involving self-employed, petty producers, craft people, small organic

farmers, reclaimed factories, water associations and so on, as they

bring their commodities to the market and couple their system circuits

based on needs to the economy…. The point is that unlike the capital

circuit, the simple commodity circuit is just a means… to the structure

of needs and desires and the resources that can be mobilised in

non-commoditised forms (through for example pooling, gift circuits or

administrative transfers).

In this sense, the commodities in C-M-C circuits are a moment of a

social process of production that runs parallel to and is socially

integrated with, in specific forms and modes of coordination, a

non-commodity production.[467]

The commons circuit’s analog to capital’s expansionary circuit (closely

parallel to Negri’s concept of working class self-valorization, as

Cleaver interprets it) is “boundary commoning.”[468] As more

activities and sources of sustenance are incorporated into the commons

on a non-commodity basis, and the necessary inputs of those activities

in turn are recursively incorporated, the boundary between circuits

shifts in favor of the commons circuit and incorporates a larger share

of society, the balance of power shifts from the capital circuit to the

commons circuit and the commons has increasing say over the terms on

which it interfaces with the capital circuit.

This parallels the writing of Jane Jacobs and Karl Hess on import

substitution — in both cases starting with repair, gradually expanding

piecemeal via the production of selected spare parts, progressing to

filling in gaps in supply chains, and culminating in the production of

entire ecosystems of goods — as a way of achieving community.

Through commoning, the commons not only can develop new forms of social

cooperation with other commons to meet new needs, or increase the

non-commodity… diversity of its resources…, it can also establish new

markets (such as participatory guarantees or some aspects of fair

trade), and bring to the markets goods that fill an old need in new

ways, with attention to environmental issues, producer pay, quality or

minimisation of distance travelled of goods. Commoning also produces

local supply chains to reduce the dependence of an area on capitalist

commodities and revitalise a local economy. Commoning can thus

organically articulate existing skills and resources over a territory,

helping a depressed region to realise the wealth that resides hidden

with it.[469]

De Angelis denounces the “fallacy of the political,” which sees radical

change as an abrupt process brought about through the seizure of

political power. Rather, it is a long-term process that involves “the

actual production of another form of power” by building commonwealth

over time and expanding it at the expense of the capital circuit.

This conception obviously implies that for a historically defined

period, both commons and capital/state cohabit the social space, their

struggles and relative powers giving shape to it, with the result that

unevenness and contradictions are many, as well as strategic games to

colonise the other’s space with one’s own values and decolonise one’s

own space from the other’s values. The struggle is therefore

continuous.[470]

He calls for a social revolution based on the “multiplication of

existing commons,” and “coming together and interlacing of the different

commons so as to leverage social powers and constitute ecology and

scale” and “*growing commons powers vis-a-vis capital and the

state.*”[471]

The process of social revolution is ultimately a process of finding

solutions to the problems that capital systems cannot solve…. This

implies the establishment of multi-scalar systems of social action that

reproduce life in modes, systemic processes, social relations and value

practices that seek an alternative path from the dominant ones and that

are able to reproduce at greater scale through networking and

coordination….[472]

…The effect of a significant number of commons ecologies in a single

area is intense: it produces a new culture, norms, networks of support

and mutual aid, virtuous neighborhoods and villages. For sustained

social change to occur, commons ecologies need to develop and intensify

their presence in social space up to a point where they present a viable

alternative for most people. This point is the point of *critical

mass*.[473]

“Territorialisation” — building up an interlinked ecology of commons,

and particularly those involving survival and subsistence, in

recuperated areas—is especially important.

I suggest we should take Marx’s warning about radical transformation

beyond capitalism seriously, when he says in Grundrisse that if we do

not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of

production and the corresponding relations prerequisite for a classless

society, then all attempts to explode it would be

quixotic.[474]

Similarly, Bengi Akbulut argues that the multiplication and

interconnection of commons serves as a buffer, making the need to sell

one’s labor on the capitalists’ terms less pressing and immediate.

A congelation of alternative economies (such as

cooperatives/collectives) would offer concrete pathways of solidarity

and mutual support by relieving the pressure of market competition,

acquiring start-up capital or securing inputs. It would thus provide a

leeway, so to speak, to keep alternative economic organizations afloat

in times of economic hardship or unexpected expenses.[475]

The corollary is that the formation of the successor society will be an

open-ended process, not the blueprint of any vanguard leadership, and

its form will emerge from the self-creation of the commoners as creative

subject.

It is only when a class of social subjects emerges out of a new mode of

production that they helped to shape, sustain and develop that there

emerges a new social force to contrast with capital and the state, to

deeply transform them, even to commonise them and abolish their worst

aspects. Thus the *class for itself* that Marx contrasts with the class

*in itself* defined by capitalist exploitation, is the class of

struggling *commoners*, the new subjectivity empowered by the new

ecology of social systems they have set in place and intertwined: the

commons.[476]

De Angelis sees a cybernetic principle called Ashby’s Law, or the Law of

Requisite Variety (“in order to have a system under the control of a

regulator, the variety of the regulator must match the variety of the

system”; “the greater the variety of the system in relation to the

regulator, the greater is the need of the regulator to reduce the

system’s variety or increase its own variety”) as both a source of hope

and a strategy for victory.[477]

State regulations like health and safety rules are often a means by

which capital artificially simplifies society by suppressing the

commons, either by imposing administrative costs and technically

unnecessary capital outlays on the commons that small-scale production

cannot absorb, or forcing it into illegality and thereby marginalizing

it. For example: “Different households are discouraged from trusting

each other when they cannot share at a school party their cakes and

biscuits made at home, but instead have to show that they have purchased

the product.” Likewise organic certification regimes with such high

costs that only relatively large producers can afford them, effectively

keeping small producers from legally using the “organic” label. The

commons sector has in some cases responded by devising its own

certification regimes enforced along Ostromite lines by the participants

themselves, although the formal legality of such practices varies from

location to location and the attitudes of local political authorities.

To achieve victory the commons sector must increase its internal

capacity to self-regulate, while overloading its variety relative to the

regulator in order to overload the latter with information, so that “the

state/capital regulator… is left with the increasingly impossible task

of matching society’s variety in order to regulate.”[478]

I would add that a self-governed system’s regulatory capacity is

inherently greater in variety relative to the internal matter to be

regulated because the complexity and enforcement costs of regulation are

directly proportional to the conflict of interest between regulators and

regulated.

In addition, new technologies of decentralized and small-scale

production that make the commons increasingly efficient relative to

state and capital also have the effect of increasing the complexity of

the commons relative to state regulators. For example, the enforcement

of industrial patents traditionally assumed very low transaction costs

because most production was carried out by a few large manufacturing

corporations, consisted of a few major variations in product design, and

was marketed through a handful of major retail chains served by a

centralized distribution network. When the product ecology expands by

orders of magnitude to include a whole host of open-source designs or

pirated proprietary ones available as CAD-CAM files on a

micro-manufacturing version of The Pirate Bay, and they’re produced for

neighborhood consumption by hundreds of thousands of garage factories

run by workers cooperatives of a few people each, the transaction costs

of enforcement become astronomical.

Finally, in the event that state and corporation attempt to render the

commons more governable by forcibly simplifying them (making them more

legible, in James Scott’s terminology), the enforcement of such measures

is itself a form of regulation that can be thwarted by making the task

of enforcement more complicated than the regulators can cope with (in

particular, technologies of evasion or circumvention like encryption).

The disruptive effect on the regulator’s ability to cope with complexity

can be greatly intensified, as well, when commons-based social movements

engage in the kinds of leaderless swarming or saturation attacks

described by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt in their work on networked

resistance.

If commons movements become the expression of a political recomposition

that is one with a *mode of production* to expand, to develop and to set

against the dominant mode of production, then we have acquired a common

sense-horizon, not one that establishes a future model, but a present

organisational unit that seeks to evolve and have a place in the

contemporary cosmopolitan and globalised world because its power resides

in diversity, variety and complexity….

A society is in movement because a large part of it is constituting

itself in terms of a growing web of interactive commons, capable of

sustaining livelihoods… and of deploying its social force not only to

resist enclosures but to sustain and expand its commons. In short,

emancipatory social transformation is predicated not only on increasing

complexity, but also on the multiplication of commons governing such a

complexity.[479]

Like De Angelis, Nick Dyer-Witheford proposes a strategy of interstitial

development based on the commons, with an entire ecosystem of

counter-institutions coalescing into a successor system (what he calls

the “circulation of commons”) on De Angelis’s boundary commoning model.

Let’s suppose that a publicly-funded education institution (social

commons) produces software and networks that are available to an open

source collective (networked commons), which creates free software used

by an agricultural cooperative to track its use of water and electricity

(ecological commons). This is a micro model of the circulation of the

common.

This is a concept of the common that is not defensive, not limited to

fending off the depredations of capital on ever-diminishing collective

space. Rather it is aggressive and expansive: proliferating,

self-strengthening and diversifying. It is also a concept of

heterogeneous collectivity, built from multiple forms of a shared logic,

a commons of singularities…. It is through the linkages and

bootstrapped expansions of these commons that commonism emerges.

This concept has a clear affinity with the movements of solidarity

economics that emerged from Latin America and are now gaining increasing

attention in North America and Europe. Broadly defined, these aim to

link self-managed and worker-owned collectives, cooperative financial

organisations and socially-responsible consumption practices to create

expanding economic networks whose surpluses are invested in social and

ecological regeneration. Euclides Mance, one of the theorists of the

movement, writes of such ‘socially based cooperation networks’

reinforcing their component parts until ‘progressive boosting’ enables

them to move from a ‘secondary, palliative or complementary sphere of

activity’ to become a ‘socially hegemonic mode of production’. This type

of activity… seems to resemble the sort of cell-growth of commons

envisaged here….[480]

Although his focus is on interstitial development, like Erik Olin Wright

and others he sees it as not excluding a parallel strategy of

non-reformist reforms.

In my view… a commonist project would gain coherence and focus by

agreement on a set of high level demands to be advanced… at the

national and international level, demands that could be supported by

many movements even as they pursue other more local and specific

struggles and projects. These demands might include some briefly

discussed here: for example, a guaranteed global livelihood,

carbon-emission rationing and adoption of free and open-source software

in public institutions.

Such demands would be radical but not, in a negative sense, utopian.

Success would not mean we had won: it is conceivable that capitalism

could persist with these provisions, although they would represent a

planetary ‘New Deal’ of major proportions. But achieving them would

mean, first, that the movement of movements had won something, averting

harms to, and bestowing benefits on millions; and, second, it would mean

that we were winning: these altered conditions would create

opportunities for new collective projects and waves of organising that

could effect deeper transformations, and the institutions of new

commons.[481]

Elsewhere he defines the circulation of commons as the process in which

“eco-social labour and networked commons each reinforce and enable the

other: in which the common goods and services generated by associations

at one point in the circuit provide inputs and resources for

associations at another.”[482]

Writing with Greig de Peuter, he repeats his call — which we saw above —

for “the *circulation of the common*.”[483]

…From the perspective of cultivating economic autonomy, the

development of links within the cooperative sector itself is of great

significance. The sixth principle in the Statement of Cooperative

Identity is “cooperation among cooperatives” — an ethos of mutual aid

that encourages individual coops to support one another and contribute

to the development of a parallel economy through practices of

inter-cooperation. In this way, coops would reduce their dependence on,

and seek to gain autonomy from, conventional capitalist enterprises….

In addition to the formation of coop associations (e.g. International

Cooperative Alliance), one possible manifestation of cooperation among

cooperatives is inter-cooperative sourcing — the sourcing of products

and services from other coops…. These are examples of a “cooperative

economy,” in which an objective is “the creation of a social structure

capable of supplanting … profit-making industry….”

Another example of inter-coop cooperation is the development of means of

financing for coops. Under-capitalization is a chronic problem in the

coop sector; this explains the disproportionate number of worker-coops

in lines of business that are often more labour intensive rather than

capital intensive. Credit unions are hence of strategic importance in

the development of a cooperative sub-system….

There are also examples of coops and associations based in the North

establishing education programs where groups of people visit the South

and aid communities in setting up coops, as an approach to cooperative

international development….

Practices of cooperation among coops suggest the possibility that within

the overall global system of capital a non-capitalist sub-system might

grow its counter-power, reduce reliance on the primary system, and

potentially render it redundant. In inter-coop cooperation we see at

least a nascent possibility of how the social product of the labour

commons can contribute to the expansion of a new system which seeks to

continually enlarge its autonomy.[484] [485]

For example, “Brazil’s solidarity economy system… arises from

movements of workers and landless peasants, infused by liberation

theology traditions, and by the history of quilombos (self-governing

communities) of escaped slaves.”

Strongest in agricultural production, the sector also includes

industrial, service, and software components. It links workers

cooperatives and self-managed enterprises with alternative financial

institutions, consumer cooperatives, and fair trade systems in an

attempt to create a self-reinforcing network of economic activities in

which participants’ activities are informed by an ethical and political

sense of shared social responsibilities. The units of these networks are

conceived not just as individually following principles of social and

environmental justice, but providing inputs for each other, to create an

inter-cooperative, self-expanding system.[486]

Because of its stigmergic, modular architecture, Negri argues, the

circulation of commons model has advantages of low overhead and agility

for outcompeting the capitalist system within whose bowels it is

growing. For the same reason, it is something that can develop gradually

without requiring an all-or-nothing transition.

…[W]e can start to build it now. Such a project need not predicate an

instant abolition of the market, only the transformation from central

system to a sub-system, surrounded by, and subordinated to a more

powerful ‘commons’ dynamics…. This does not preclude a punctual moment

or moments of radical crisis. It suggests that the circulation of the

commons have to precede such a moment, to establish its preconditions,

and extend beyond it, to actualize its potential.[487]

Finally, his strategy of engaging with the state — a subject we will

address in more depth in a later chapter — involves pushing in the

direction of something like a Partner State: “Zizek is correct when he

says the true task is neither to take over the state, nor to smash the

state, but to ‘make the state itself work in a non-statal mode’ — as a

machine for incubating and growing commons.”[488]

And of course engagement with the state does not alter the secondary

character of such engagement.

This is not necessarily a model of changing the world without seizing

power. The role of the state in co-management initiatives, such of those

of the Venezuelan and Brazilian governments we noted earlier, may be

vital in allowing the circulation of commons to attain a critical mass.

Our concept does, however, suggest that growth and interconnection of

the commons have to precede such state interventions, to prefiguratively

establish the necessary preconditions. It must also grow beyond the

moment of such direct interventions, in a proliferation of self-starting

components that exceeds centralized control. In this sense, the idea of

the circulation of the commons is a concept from and for the Marxian

tradition of autonomous free association.[489]

J.K. Gibson-Graham (actually a composite of Katherine Gibson and Julie

Graham) are another significant contributor to this tradition. Their

book *A Postcapitalist Politics*, in particular, is a full-scale,

head-on assault and demolition of what vulgar Marxists call “historical

materialism” — as well as on similar approaches by

left-accelerationists. They took the successes of second-wave feminism

as a model in their human- and agency-focused analysis of economic

struggles.

The achievements of second-wave feminism provide, for us, the impetus

for theorizing a new global form of economic politics. Its remapping of

political space and possibility suggests the ever-present opportunity

for local transformation that does not require (though it does not

preclude and indeed promotes) transformation at larger scales. Its focus

on the subject prompts us to think about ways of cultivating economic

subjects with different desires and capacities and greater openness to

change and uncertainty. Its practice of seeing and speaking differently

encourages us to make visible the hidden and alternative economic

activities that *everywhere* abound, and to connect them through a

language of economic difference. If we can begin to see noncapitalist

activities as prevalent and viable, we may be encouraged here and now to

actively build on them to transform our local economies.[490]

In the realm of economic struggle, “[l]ocally based social movement

interventions all over the world” (e.g. slum dwellers movements,

community-based enterprises, and other movements “spearheaded by the

poor themselves”) “are already embodying many of the features of the

political imaginary we have been tracing, building new economic futures

within a clearly enunciated commitment to a politics of

possibility.”[491]

Their approach is the direct opposite of the vulgar Marxist self-parody

version of “historical materialism,” which they characterize as

a historical stage theory of economic evolution in which capitalism is

situated at the pinnacle of development and all other forms of economy

are represented as precapitalist or as forms of primitive capitalism.

For the remnant true believers, communism, capitalism’s other, is posed

as a future utopia, yet to be realized in any concreteness, while

capitalism remains the present, fully developed form of

economy.[492]

This vulgar Marxist approach, accordingly, puts its focus on political

action to achieve postcapitalist transition almost entirely at the

systemic level (“a global-scale apparatus of power that must be

addressed and transformed before [local struggles’] activities can

succeed or be extended”).[493]

Gibson-Graham, in contrast, see transition as the outgrowth of millions

of local actions.[494] Like Holloway, they stress the

complexity and open-endedness of reality and the contested nature of

capital’s self-reproduction process, and dismiss the idea of capitalism

as a totalizing system which must inevitably coopt any attempts at

building a postcapitalist society “before the Revolution.” Instead they

propose a “weak theory” that

couldn’t know that social experiments are already coopted and thus

doomed to fail or to reinforce dominance; it couldn’t tell us that the

world economy will be transformed by an international revolutionary

movement rather than through the disorganized proliferation of local

projects.[495]

Rather than seeing present-day society as a hegemonic capitalist system

that incorporates and coopts all attempts at non-capitalist

construction, they see it as a “landscape of economic difference,

populated by various capitalist and noncapitalist institutions and

practices…”[496]

In their approach to local organizing, they use an iceberg to illustrate

the majority of total production that is not commodity production by

wage labor within capitalist firms. The latter is represented by the

portion of the iceberg above the water line. Below the water is a much

larger portion consisting of productive activity within schools, on the

street, in neighborhoods, within families, unpaid, in church/temple, the

retired, between friends, gifts, self-employment, volunteer, barter,

moonlighting, children, informal lending, not for market, illegal, not

monetized, self-provisioning, under-the-table, producer cooperatives,

consumer cooperatives, and non-capitalist firms….

By marshaling the many ways that social wealth is produced, transacted,

and distributed *other* than those traditionally associated with

capitalism, noncapitalism is rendered a positive multiplicity rather

than an empty negativity, and capitalism becomes just one particular set

of economic relations situated in a vast sea of economic

activity.[497]

They take child care as an example of “reading for difference”; the

function is performed by a large range of commodified and

non-commodified, capitalist and non-capitalist, formal and informal,

etc., actors. A conventional Marxist emphasizing capitalism as a

totalizing system would treat the informal, non-waged forms of child

care as simply being coopted into the capitalist function of reproducing

labor-power. But they note that they’re part of an informal economy that

exists alongside capitalism and reproduces itself for its own purposes

as well as to some extent reproducing labor power for

capital.[498] I would argue, in addition, that the actual

role of reproductive activities in the informal sector — whether it

serves primarily itself or capital — depends on a shifting balance of

power between the commons and capitalism. The commons can be coopted to

create a positive externality for capital, but it can also serve as a

base of independence that increases our bargaining power *against*

capital.

To follow through with the project of constructing a counterhegemonic

politics…, we need to identify an alternative fixing of economic

identity around a new nodal point…. [O]ur concern for creating an

environment for the cultivation of new economic subjects leads us on to

tentatively propose the community economy as an

alternative.[499]

The community economy is basically a way to take all the different forms

of production in the non-capitalist, underwater portion of the iceberg

mentioned above, and “multiply, amplify, and connect” them as a

counterhegemonic alternative to capitalism.[500] Given the

wide array of non-capitalist ways of meeting needs already in existence,

their approach is one of “starting with what is at hand to begin to

replenish and enlarge the commons…”[501]

A full audit of livelihood practices, including the contribution of

nonmarket transactions and unpaid labor, allows for reflection on what

the community is nourished by (rather than what it lacks) and for public

discussion of which of these practices could be strengthened or

extended.[502]

Some of their research projects in creating community subjectivity

involved encouraging a change in local perceptions of the economy,

including a shift in focus to all the non-capitalist economic activities

in the submerged part of the iceberg, and “mapping” those activities to

create awareness of just what resources were available to a community

economy outside the control of capital.[503]

One of the goals of the action research projects was to flesh out,

through a community inventory, a diverse economy in which capitalist

enterprises, formal wage labor, and market transactions occupy only the

visible tip of the economic iceberg…. By giving a place in the diverse

economy to activities that are often ignored (collective enterprises,

household and voluntary labor, transactions involving barter, sharing

and gift giving, and so forth), we hoped to refigure the identity and

capacities of the regional economy. And by recognizing the particularity

of people’s economic involvements, including their multiple economic

identities (in addition to being unemployed with respect to capitalist

employment, for example, a person can be employed in household,

neighborhood, and other noncapitalist activities), we were attempting to

reframe the identities and capacities of individuals. We undertook

slightly different reframing exercises in each site, but central to each

exercise was the involvement of community researchers. Initially it was

they who were the subjects of reframing within a new discourse of

economy and region.[504]

This was followed up by “a brainstorming session to imagine the

community-based projects they could be interested in building,”

resulting in the suggestion of almost fifty ideas for “actual activities

that might be undertaken by newly authorized subjects of the community

economy.”[505] These included, among many things, tool

libraries, repair shops, assorted forms of craft and small shop

production, community gardens, seed banks, rainwater harvesting systems,

and free schooling arrangements that connected would-be pupils with

those who had things to teach.[506]

The result in one community (Monash, a former one-industry region in

Australia abandoned by its main state-capitalist employer), was a shift

from a sense of powerlessness in the face of a totalizing entity called

“the Economy” that was run by “them,” to a gradually developing sense of

agency and empowerment as they employed their large inventory of

resources and skills outside the capitalist system.[507]

Note on Synthesis. Again, if we strip away Negri’s

framing of capitalism as a completed and universal system, and his

excessive focus on the technical and information workers as a

quasi-vanguard or core of the Multitude, his treatment of the

progressive dematerialization of production and the possibility of

cutting capital out of it is actually quite relevant to the

commons-based interstitial models of Federici, De Angelis et al.

Dematerialization, arguably, can be applied not only to the growing role

of information and coordination as a source of productivity, but also to

the cheapening and ephemeralization of physical production technology we

considered in Chapter Two. This development makes high-tech, small-scale

direct production for use in the commons increasingly feasible. So

dematerialization not only makes possible worker control of existing

production *within* the sphere of capital, but also shifting a great

deal of production *from* the sphere of capital and into the sphere of

the commons.

*The Broader Interstitial Milieu.** Although I’ve focused on autonomism

so far, autonomism is only one part of a much broader milieu of

movements that share an interstitial approach. It’s commonly associated

with the Wobbly slogan, from the Preamble to the I.W.W. Constitution,

“forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”

The term “interstitial strategies” itself — as opposed to “ruptural

strategies” — was coined by Erik Olin Wright. (In Wright’s schema the

interstitial strategy is one of two “metamorphic” strategies; the other

metamorphic strategy is “symbiotic,” which envisions treating the state

as terrain for struggle “in which the possibility exists of USING THE

STATE to build social power both within the state itself and in other

sites of power.”

In ruptural strategies, “*classes organized through political parties*”

are the primary actors, and the goal is seizure of state power by a

“*frontal attack on the state*” in order to transcend capitalism through

state policy.[508]

Interstitial strategies “operate *outside the state* and try as much as

possible to avoid confrontations with state power.”

The core idea is to build counter-hegemonic institutions in society.

There might be contexts in which struggles against the state could be

required to create or defend these spaces, but the core of the strategy

is to work outside the state.

Rather than being brought about by a sharp revolutionary break followed

by state-driven transformation, interstitial transition is “more like a

complex ecological system in which one kind of organism initially gains

a foothold in a niche but eventually out-competes rivals for food

sources and so comes to dominate the wider environment.”[509]

Like other theorists considered earlier in this chapter, Wright mentions

the transition from feudalism to capitalism as an example of

interstitial transformation. He mentions the reference to “forming the

structure of the new society within the shell of the old” in the I.W.W.

Preamble and Colin Ward’s statement that “the parts are already at hand”

in *Anarchy in Action* as examples of interstitialism as a conscious

strategy. He also cites the WSF slogan “another world is possible”:

much of what they have in mind are anarchist-inflected grass-roots

initiatives to create worker and consumer cooperatives, fair-trade

networks, cross-border labor standards campaigns, and other institutions

that directly embody the alternative world they desire in the here and

now.[510]

Although interstitial and symbiotic strategies are conceptually

distinct, and many of the advocates of each disparage the other, Wright

considers them potentially complementary.

These differ primarily in terms of their relationship to the state. Both

envision a trajectory of change that progressively enlarges the social

spaces of social empowerment, but interstitial strategies largely

by-pass the state in pursuing this objective while symbiotic strategies

try to systematically use the state to advance the process of

emancipatory social empowerment. These need not constitute antagonistic

strategies — in many circumstances they complement each other, and

indeed may even require each other.[511]

Even the more insurrectionary anarchist schools, although they pursue

ruptural strategies, differ on average from vulgar Marxists insofar as

they see the revolutionary rupture as the culmination of a previous

interstitial process.

Where they differed sharply was in the belief of what sorts of

transformations were needed within capitalism in order for a

revolutionary rupture to plausibly usher in a genuinely emancipatory

alternative. For Marx, and later for Lenin, the central task of

struggles within capitalism is to forge the collective capacity of a

politically unified working class needed to successfully seize state

power as the necessary condition for overthrowing capitalism. The task

of deep social reconstruction to create the environment for a new way of

life with new principles, new forms of social interaction and

reciprocity, would largely have to wait until “after the revolution.”

For revolutionary anarchists, on the other hand, significant progress in

such reconstruction is not only possible within capitalism, but is a

necessary condition for a sustainable emancipatory rupture with

capitalism. In discussing Proudhon’s views on revolution, Martin Buber

writes,

<quote>

[Proudhon] divined the tragedy of revolutions and came to feel it more

and more deeply in the course of disappointing experiences. Their

tragedy is that as regards their positive goal they will always result

in the exact opposite of what the most honest and passionate

revolutionaries strive for, unless and until this [deep social reform]

has so far taken shape before the revolution that the revolutionary act

has only to wrest the space for it in which it can develop unimpeded.

If we want a revolution to result in a deeply egalitarian, democratic,

and participatory way of life, Buber writes,

the all-important fact is that, in the social as opposed to the

political sphere, revolution is not so much a creative as a delivering

force whose function is to set free and authenticate — i.e. that it can

only perfect, set free, and lend the stamp of authority to something

that has already been foreshadowed in the womb of the pre-revolutionary

society; that, as regards social evolution, the hour of revolution is

not an hour of begetting but an hour of birth – provided there was a

begetting beforehand.

A rupture with capitalism is thus necessary in this strategic vision,

but it requires a deep process of interstitial transformation beforehand

if it is to succeed.[512]

</quote>

The strategy of seeing contemporary counter-institutions within our own

society as the seeds of the future society is, in part, a rejoinder to

Marx’s dismissal of utopians as “writing recipes for cook-shops of the

future.” As the authors of a book on dual power from the Next System

Project argue:

Karl Marx famously criticized utopians as trying to “write recipes for

the cook-shops of the future.” By this, he meant that utopians imagine

they can design a new society from scratch and bring it into being by

sheer force of will…. By contrast, Marx’s method of analysis grapples

with the complex and dynamic process by which societies change. He

believed that only by carefully examining the social relations,

incentive structures, and class dynamics of a society can we understand

its path going forward. In Marx’s view, every social system is a complex

process rather than a static essence, and each system contains the seeds

of its successor, which need only be encouraged to grow for change to

come about.

In our view, the answer to political change lies between the utopians

and Marx. There is some truth to Marx’s claim that describing a desired

future is a waste of time; devising complex utopias does little to guide

us politically or strategically if it is divorced from the process

through which such ideas could feasibly come about. Yet neither can we

sit by critiquing the current economic and political landscape while we

wait for “inevitable” revolution. The next-system vision spelled out

here can and must be enacted in our communities today as an essential,

intermediate step toward realizing a revolutionary vision for the

planet.

The next system is more likely to succeed and endure if we steadily

transform existing institutions, modes of production, and ways of

relating to one another rather than try to conjure up a whole new system

out of thin air…. Filling in the gaps between “scientific” socialist

analysis and utopian imagination, we have attempted something the Left

has always struggled to create: a realistic transition model to a

post-capitalist world.[513]

Further, citing Hannah Arendt’s argument that all political systems

depend on popular cooperation for their survival, and that systems are

ultimately overthrown by the withdrawal of public support, they point

out that counter-institutions are needed to empower such withdrawal.

The understanding that power emerges from collective action, rather than

from force, is a key component of our transitional vision.

As a revolutionary political strategy, however (rather than a mere

description of certain past political events), Arendt’s theory of power

requires several modifications. First, without preexisting mass

organization, the public has no way to collectively withdraw its

support….

Second, most people will never even consider retracting support for

governing institutions if they don’t see viable alternatives…. The

organization of unions, worker-owned firms, and housing cooperatives is

what makes socialism a real, lived possibility around which greater

movement-building can occur.

Third, withdrawal has serious costs. Even absent violent repression (a

feature of even today’s most liberal democracies), we are made dependent

on capitalist and state institutions for access to basic survival needs

and avenues for collective action. Transcending capitalism and the state

thus requires having alternative institutions in place to meet those

needs and organize people to act powerfully in concert with one another.

Fourth, we cannot neglect the preformation of the post-revolutionary

society — the need to actively create institutions to replace the ones

we have now.[514]

In their treatment of the dual power institutions building the future

post-capitalist society, the co-authors focus heavily on the local.

In early stages, crafting the political infrastructure of radical

democracy and libertarian socialism will be mainly local, through

outgrowths and codifications of existing social processes that can be

expanded into mainstream practice and incorporated into a broader

strategy. The community institutions proposed here are modular. They can

stand alone as individual projects, fine-tuned to solve specific

problems created by the current system’s failures, but they are designed

to be organized as a network. By working together and mutually

reinforcing one another, these institutions can qualitatively change the

power relations of a city or neighborhood, and lay the groundwork for

new macro-structures of self-governance and civil society….

Particular institutional arrangements will likely depend on local needs

and conditions, but possibilities include worker-owned cooperatives,

neighborhood councils, community land trusts, local food distribution

systems, mutual aid networks, community-owned energy, popular education

models, time banks, childcare centers, community health clinics, and

more.[515]

The interstitial approach, in which the successor society is an emergent

system coalescing from seeds that develop in the present, differs from

the “recipes” Marx derides (what some might call “bike shedding” today)

in that it treats the development of the future society as an open-ended

process whose details can be left to the future.

Chris Dillow, a Marxist economist in the UK, argues against such

cookshop recipes or bikeshedding from the standpoint of bounded

rationality and unintended consequences,[516] and quotes Erik

Olin Wright on the proper approach. Wright advised against drawing up

detailed blueprints in advance.

What can be worked out are the core organizing

principles of alternatives to existing institutions, the principles that

would guide the pragmatic trial-and-error task of institution-building.

Of course, there will be unintended consequences of various sorts, but

these can be dealt with as they arrive “after the revolution.” The

crucial point is that unintended consequences need not pose a fatal

threat to the emancipatory projects themselves.[517]

David Bollier makes a similar argument for an open-ended approach based

on complexity science:

By the lights of complexity science, stable, successful systems cannot

be constructed in advance by having brilliant minds devise sophisticated

blueprints – the model of God as the absent watchmaker. Rather,

successful systems must evolve organically through the self-organized,

free interplay of adaptive agents which follow simple principles at the

local level. No definitive big-picture knowledge or teleological goals

can be known at the outset. Instead of presuming that an a priori,

comprehensive design system should be followed to produce the best

outcomes, complexity theory takes its cues from biophysical evolution

and asserts that the best results will arise if intelligent, living

agents are allowed to evolve over time toward optimum outcomes in

supportive environments. The schemas or agents that survive and thrive

will be the ones capable of prevailing against competitors and

reproducing; less capable agents will be shunted to niches or die,

according to principles of natural selection….

What results through this process is a higher level of organization

known as emergence. “Living systems always seem to emerge from the

bottom up, from a population of much simpler systems,” writes science

journalist M. Mitchell Waldrop. A mix of proteins, DNA, and other

biomolecules coevolved to produce a cell. Neurons in the brain come

together to produce cognition, emotions, and consciousness. A collection

of ants self-organize themselves into a complex ant colony.

“In the simplest terms,” complexity author Steven Johnson write, complex

systems “solve problems by drawing on masses of relatively stupid

elements, rather than a single, intelligent ‘executive branch.’ They are

bottom-up systems, not top-down. They get their smarts from below.”

Johnson continues: “In these systems, agents residing on one scale start

producing behavior that lies one scale above them: ants create colonies,

urbanites create neighborhoods; simple pattern-recognition software

learns how to recommend new books. The movement from low-level rules to

higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence.”

The agents within any complex adaptive system do not deliberately plan

or create a higher, more sophisticated level of social organization;

they are motivated chiefly by local circumstances and knowledge. And

yet, when the micro-behaviors of agents relying on Vernacular law reach

a critical stage of interconnection and intensity, they actualize new

flows of energy and vision. An *emergent new

system* arises in an almost mysterious

fashion.[518]

The same theme was tied to the concept of attractor institutions in an

extended Twitter thread by a polymathic leftist who goes by the handle

Yung Neocon. The proper strategy, he argued, was to eliminate the core

axes of extraction in the present system (in his opinion prisons and

private land ownership), set up a handful of “attractor institutions”

around which the new society could crystallize, and then let emergence

do its thing.

A bad faith critic would be inclined to say I am all negative (by

focussing on ending extraction, enclosure, retribution, prisons, and

private land monopoly), but this isn’t fair — I’m simply an

agnostic/pluralist about what the positive post-emancipation project

would be

There are many social systems, when stated in ‘ideal’ terms, I would be

fine living with, for the most part — gift economies, communization,

FALSC, mutualist hobby markets + common ownership, Parecon/Participatory

Planning, cybernetic socialism, council communism, etc.

Would I be comfortable positing any of these as the final state? or

sufficient? or perfect? or superior to the other alternatives presented?

or the only available options? absolutely not on all counts.

I also trust people, and do not think we can, let alone need, to figure

out every detail ahead of time — such arrogant confidence in the ability

to predict, plan, control, and address contingencies, localities,

novelties, etc, is fatal to success & emancipation.

If I were to somewhat mis-use the terminology of complexity & systems, I

think our positive projects are best seen as ‘attractors’ — focal points

around which dynamic systems adapt & to which they tend; catalysts &

resources for action, but not pre-determined outcomes.

On the other hand, it IS really easy to see what in the current world,

and in history, we want destroyed — so, for example, for me these

basically come down, at the end of it, to prisons and private

landownership, two vices which interpenetrate nearly every other….

Thinkers, ranging across eras, disciplines & ideologies as Aristotle,

Ibn-Khaldun, Smith, Darwin, Kropotkin, Hayek, Taleb, Ostrom, Meadows,

Bookchin, Scott, Polanyi, Collins, Sahlins, Ward, Graeber & others,

emphasize complex, evolved, decentralized, organic systems.

These emerge in time & space through slow plodding, tacit knowledge,

learning, trial & error, cooperation, evolution, selection,

internalization, canalization, and so on, without unitary top-down

planners global/universal in time & space….[519]

Perhaps the best explanation of the interstitial strategy comes (again)

from Erik Olin Wright, the person most famously associated with that

term:

It is grounded in the following idea: all socioeconomic systems are

complex mixes of many different kinds of economic structures, relations,

and activities. No economy has ever been — or ever could be — purely

capitalist. Capitalism as a way of organizing economic activity has

three critical components: private ownership of capital; production for

the market for the purpose of making profits; and employment of workers

who do not own the means of production.

Existing economic systems combine capitalism with a whole host of other

ways of organizing the production and distribution of goods and

services: directly by states; within the intimate relations of families

to meet the needs of its members; through community-based networks and

organizations; by cooperatives owned and governed democratically by

their members; though nonprofit market-oriented organizations; through

peer-to-peer networks engaged in collaborative production processes; and

many other possibilities.

Some of these ways of organizing economic activities can be thought of

as hybrids, combining capitalist and noncapitalist elements; some are

entirely noncapitalist; and some are anticapitalist. We call such a

complex economic system “capitalist” when capitalist drives are dominant

in determining the economic conditions of life and access to livelihood

for most people. That dominance is immensely

destructive.[520]

(We should note here that many Marxists and adherents of other

revolutionary traditions deny that significant non-capitalist elements

can function in a non-capitalist way within a predominantly capitalist

system. They are either coopted or forced into de facto

self-exploitation. So the only way to achieve non-capitalist

alternatives on a significant scale is to overthrow system as a system

all at once. It’s either all or nothing. Wright and other

interstitialists, like Federici and De Angelis and others we discussed

earlier, hold on the contrary that there is an “outside” to capitalism

here and now, that can be built on and expanded and challenge it from

the inside. For them, capitalism is not a total, all-or-nothing system

but something that can change in character over time as non-capitalist

elements develop within it.)

One way to challenge capitalism is to build more democratic,

egalitarian, participatory economic relations in the spaces and cracks

within this complex system wherever possible, and to struggle to expand

and defend those spaces.

The idea of eroding capitalism imagines that these alternatives have the

potential, in the long run, of expanding to the point where capitalism

is displaced from this dominant role.

An analogy with an ecosystem in nature might help clarify this idea.

Think of a lake. A lake consists of water in a landscape, with

particular kinds of soil, terrain, water sources, and climate. An array

of fish and other creatures live in its water, and various kinds of

plants grow in and around it….

In such an ecosystem, it is possible to introduce an alien species of

fish not “naturally” found in the lake. Some alien species will

instantly get gobbled up. Others may survive in some small niche in the

lake, but not change much about daily life in the ecosystem. But

occasionally an alien species may thrive and eventually displace the

dominant species.

The strategic vision of eroding capitalism imagines introducing the most

vigorous varieties of emancipatory species of noncapitalist economic

activity into the ecosystem of capitalism, nurturing their development

by protecting their niches, and figuring out ways of expanding their

habitats. The ultimate hope is that eventually these alien species can

spill out of their narrow niches and transform the character of the

ecosystem as a whole….

[The process of transition from feudalism to capitalism] may have been

punctuated by political upheavals and even revolutions, but rather than

constituting a rupture in economic structures, these political events

served more to ratify and rationalize changes that had already taken

place within the socioeconomic structure.

The strategic vision of eroding capitalism sees the process of

displacing capitalism from its dominant role in the economy in a similar

way: alternative, noncapitalist economic activities emerge in the niches

where this is possible within an economy dominated by capitalism; these

activities grow over time, both spontaneously and, crucially, as a

result of deliberate strategy; struggles involving the state take place,

sometimes to protect these spaces, other times to facilitate new

possibilities; and eventually, these noncapitalist relations and

activities become sufficiently prominent in the lives of individuals and

communities that capitalism can no longer be said to dominate the system

as a whole….

The only hope for an emancipatory alternative to capitalism — an

alternative that embodies ideals of equality, democracy, and solidarity

— is to build it on the ground and work to expand its

scope.[521]

Chapter Seven: Interstitial Development: Practical Issues

I. Post-1968 (-1994?) Movements

Unlike the old revolutionary movements, the new horizontal movements for

the most part aren’t fighting to *capture* anything. Richard Gunn and

Adrian Wilding argue that “Occupy is not to be assessed strictly in

terms of… its effect upon government policy,” but rather in terms of

“the alternative public space that it creates and the mutual recognition

between individuals that… it brings into existence….”[522]

This applies not just to Occupy, but more generally to all the

horizontalist movements of the past two decades.

According to Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt the EZLN (Zapatista

National Liberation Army) was perhaps the first movement with both feet

— or at least one and a half — firmly planted in the networked world.

The Zapatistas, which were born and primarily remain a peasant and

indigenous movement, use the Internet and communications technologies

not only as a means of distributing their communiques to the outside

world but also… as a structural element inside their organization….

Communication is central to the Zapatistas’ notion of revolution, and

they continually emphasize the need to create horizontal network

organizations rather than vertical centralized structures.

Despite some hat tipping to the old guerrilla army model in their

nomenclature, “their goal has never been to defeat the state and claim

sovereign authority but rather to change the world without taking

power.”[523]

Of course even the guerrilla model itself had already undergone some

transformation post-1968:

The most obvious change was that guerrilla movements began to shift from

the countryside to the city, from open spaces to closed ones. The

techniques of guerrilla warfare began to be adapted to the new

conditions of post-Fordist production, in line with information systems

and network structures. Finally as guerrilla warfare increasingly

adopted the characteristics of biopolitical production and spread

throughout the entire fabric of society, it more directly posed as its

goal the production of subjectivity — economic and cultural

subjectivity, both material and immaterial. It was not just a matter of

“winning hearts and minds,” in other words, but rather of creating new

hearts and minds through the construction of new circuits of

communication, new forms of social collaboration, and new modes of

interaction. In this process we can discern a tendency toward moving

beyond the modern guerrilla model toward more democratic network forms

of organization….

The real transformation of guerrilla movements during this period…has

little to do with urban or rural terrain…. The small mobile units and

flexible structures of post-Fordist production correspond to a certain

degree to the polycentric guerrilla model, but the guerrilla model is

immediately transformed by the technologies of post-Fordism. The

networks of information, communication, and cooperation—the primary axes

of post-Fordist production—begin to define the new guerrilla movements.

Not only do the movements employ technologies such as the Internet as

organizing tools, they also begin to adapt these technologies as models

for their own organizational structures.[524]

As John Holloway puts it, Zapatismo’s nature as an “open-ended” movement

“is summed up in the idea that it is a revolution not a Revolution….”

It is a revolution, because the claim to dignity in a society built upon

the negation of dignity can only be met through a radical transformation

of society. But it is not a Revolution in the sense of having some grand

plan, in the sense of a movement designed to bring about the Great Event

that will change the world. Its revolutionary claim lies not in the

preparation for the future Event but in the present inversion of

perspective, in the consistent insistence on seeing the world in terms

that are incompatible with the world as it is: human dignity. Revolution

refers to present existence not to future

instrumentality.[525]

This small-r revolution means that “the concept of revolution can no

longer be instrumental.”

Our traditional concept of revolution is as a means to achieve an end,

and we know that in practice this has meant using people as a means to

an end. If dignity is taken as a central principle, then people cannot

be treated as a means: the creation of a society based on dignity can

only take place through the development of social practices based on the

mutual recognition of that dignity. We walk, not in order to arrive at a

promised land, but because the walking itself is the revolution. And if

instrumentalism falls as a way of thinking, so too does the lineal time

that is implicit in the traditional concept of revolution, the clear

distinction between before and after. There is no question of first

revolution, then dignity: dignity itself is the

revolution.[526]

And once revolution ceases to focus on a big Event like seizure of

power, or ruptural confrontation with capital at some specific future

point in time, what becomes central instead is

the construction of our own world…. This is still class struggle, it is

still confrontation with capital…. But insofar as possible, we seize the

initiative, we seize the agenda…. By making the development of our own

creativity (our own power-to-do) the centre of the movement, capital is

revealed as a parasite, constantly forced to run after

us.[527]

To the extent that the EZLN has carried out governance functions in

liberated portions of Chiapas, it has done so in a prefigurative manner,

including — much like the Black Panthers in Oakland — a robust program

of counter-institution building.

Comandante Hortensia went on to explain how over the past two decades,

they have constructed their own autonomous government, complete with

their own health and education system, based in the indigenous

traditions of their ancestors. Despite the continual efforts of the

“neoliberal bad government” to displace them from their land, the

Zapatistas have successfully recuperated thousands of acres of land on

which they have constructed communities that are governed “from the

bottom up.”[528]

And David Graeber argues that the cycle of struggles from 1994 to the

present had its origins in anarchist praxis.

The very notion of direct action, with its rejection of a politics which

appeals to governments to modify their behaviour, in favour of physical

intervention against state power in a form that itself prefigures an

alternative — all of this emerges directly from the libertarian

tradition. Anarchism is the heart of the movement, its soul; the source

of most of what’s new and hopeful about it.

It was an international network called People’s Global Action, for

example, that put out… the original call for protest against the 1999

WTO meetings in Seattle. And PGA in turn owes its origins to the famous

International Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, which

took place knee-deep in the jungle mud of rainy-season Chiapas, in

August 1996…. People from over 50 countries came streaming into the

Zapatista-held village of La Realidad. The vision for an

‘intercontinental network of resistance’ was laid out in the Second

Declaration of La Realidad: ‘We declare that we will make a collective

network of all our particular struggles and resistances, an

intercontinental network of resistance against neoliberalism, an

intercontinental network of resistance for humanity’….

This, the Declaration made clear, was ‘not an organizing structure; it

has no central head or decision maker; it has no central command or

hierarchies. We are the network, all of us who resist.’[529]

Like many of the prefigurative movements that came after it (notably the

alternative economy experiments arising out of Syntagma in Greece),

Argentine horizontalism included lots of grass-roots projects in

building a counter-economy to support some degree of secession and

pursuit of livelihood independent of the capitalist economy. “Projects

range from bakeries and organic gardens, to alternative medicine

clinics, education and schools, to raising animals and taking over land

for housing and food production. Many of the hundreds of recuperated

factories and other workplaces formed horizontal linkages to barter

their respective outputs with one another (for example, a cooperative

clinic providing free healthcare to printing factory workers in return

for free printing of all their material).[530]

There’s been a fundamental shift, in the post-1994 wave of movements,

from what Gramsci called a “war of maneuver” (contesting control of the

“commanding heights” of political and economic institutions) to a “war

of position” (a prolonged process of culture change and

institution-building within civil society with the goal of surrounding

the state as the last bastion of capitalist power). But there’s a major

difference even with Gramsci’s formulation. Gramsci intended the war of

position only to be undertaken as a period of preparation for eventually

storming the bastions of political control. He still saw a War of

Maneuver as the final step; it was just to be postponed until the

cultural sappers had finished their preparatory work.

The new movements see the modes of production and social organization

facilitated by new technologies as opening the possibility for seceding

and building a new society within the interstices of the old one,

without ever attempting a seizure of power. We no longer need the

obsolescent institutions of state and capital. We just need to tear down

their enclosures of the social economy we’ve already built – and that

can be done, to a large extent, by circumvention rather than conquest.

In modern networked organizations — perhaps better called networked

counter-societies — the attacks and resistance against the

enemy are primarily aimed at defending the internal space for

self-organization against attempts at suppression.

Negri and Hardt, in *Declaration*, likewise see the role of violence in

a ruptural transition as largely in defense of, or ratifying, changes

that have already taken place interstitially. They counsel continuing to

work, “building the new society within the shell of the old,” against

that day.

Even when tempted by despair, we should remember that throughout history

unexpected and unforeseeable events arrive that completely reshuffle the

decks of political powers and possibility. You don’t have to be a

millenarian to believe that such political events will come again. It’s

not just a matter of numbers. One day there are millions in the streets

and nothing changes, and another day the action of a small group can

completely overturn the ruling order. Sometimes the event comes in a

moment of economic and political crisis when people are suffering. Other

times, though, the event arises in times of prosperity when hopes and

aspirations are rising. It’s possible, even in the near future, that the

entire financial structure will come crashing down. Or that debtors will

gain the conviction and courage not to pay their debts. Or that people

will en masse refuse to obey those in power. What will we do then? What

society will we construct?

We can’t know when the event will come. But that doesn’t mean we should

just wait around until it arrives.[531]

They cite Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society, Friedman and the Chicago

School (with their focus on laying the intellectual infrastructure to be

ready to take advantage of a crisis to impose neoliberalism through

Crisis Capitalism) as a positive example for the Left.[532]

This paradoxical task of preparing for an unforeseen event may be the

best way of understanding the work and accomplishments of the cycle of

struggles of 2011. The movements are preparing ground for an event they

cannot foresee or predict. The principles they promote, including

equality, freedom, sustainability, and open access to the common, can

form the scaffolding on which, in the event of a radical social break, a

new society can be built. Moreover, the political practices that the

movements experiment with — assemblies, methods of collective decision

making, mechanisms for not only the protection but also the expression

and participation of minorities, among others — serve as a guide for

future political action. Much more important, though, than any of the

constitutional principles or political practices, the movements are

creating new subjectivities that desire and are capable of democratic

relations. The movements are writing a manual for how to create and live

in a new society.[533]

Going beyond their direct comments, the “scaffolding” being built is not

simply ideological or intellectual, and not just a toolkit of governance

practices. And the “new society” is not something to be built “in the

event of a radical social break.” The scaffolding includes economic and

social counter-institutions here and now. And as much as possible of the

new society should be built and already in place, from the coalescence

of these counter-institutions into an emergent counter-*system*, when

the radical social break occurs. However long it takes until the final

break occurs, in the meantime the crisis tendencies of late capitalism

continue, along with growing precarity and underemployment, and both

state- and employer-based social safety nets continue to erode.

Responding to the mounting material pressures under which people are

placed by these crisis tendencies is the “killer app” of the

counter-institutions here and now, and it is by responding to these

material realities in a way that offers a material alternative to

capitalism that we will build the new society within the shell of the

old. When the radical break occurs, it should simply amount to a

breaking of the shell and a putting paid to the last of the old society.

Electoral politics in the UK and US: a libertarian shift on the Left?

In the United States in the 1970s, for several years after the collapse

of Consensus Capitalism, there appeared to be potential for an

alternative path based on further exploiting the disintegration of the

New Deal labor accord and pushing further left with a refusal of work,

subversion of the wage system and capital accumulation, etc., and

promotion of decentralist, left-libertarian models of organization.

These possibilities were exemplified by Harry Boyte’s *The Backyard

Revolution*, *Radical Technology*, the People’s Bicentennial Commission

and their *Common Sense II*, and a wide variety of policy experiments

with employee ownership and self-management. Instead the danger from

this nascent decentralist and populist movement was headed off, and

coopted, by the fake populism of the New Right.

In the UK this approach, broadly speaking, focused on economic

decentralization and economic democracy. Under Tony Benn, Wilson’s

secretary of state for industry, there was some experimentation with

worker cooperatives and economic democracy.[534]

One Labour response to de-industrialization involving the placement of

failing industrial enterprises under worker management and their

conversion to new forms of production. Robin Murray, an activist on the

Labour left, describes the movement’s encounter with the libertarian

possibilities of post-Fordist production:

Throughout the 1970s, and right up until the drafting of Labour’s London

Manifesto for the 1981 municipal elections, the predominant economic

paradigm was Fordism: left economic industrial strategy was based on the

idea of scale and rationalisation. The critique of industrial Britain

across the political spectrum was that it was backward. It had too many

old family firms, who underinvested and weren’t good at managing. What

was needed was to modernise them, by encouraging amalgamations,

increasing investment and appointing professional managers. That

approach underpinned industrial policy in the 1960s, but it was then

given a ‘leftward flip’ in the 1970s, when Tony Benn (a key figure of

the Labour left in the 1970s and 1980s) took it up, with the idea of

marrying these modern ‘forces of production’, with greater democratic

control.[535]

Murray and some others on the Labour left, from the late 70s on,

encountered information from the Italian flexible specialization

industrial model, and scholarly specialists on it like Charles Sabel and

Piore, that undermined the Party’s archaic Galbraithian/Chandlerian

industrial technology. Networked industrial ecologies of dozens of firms

of dozens of workers each in northern Italy were collectively producing

output on the same scale as a single British firm employing thousands,

but with two-thirds the unit cost. This seemed to open up the

possibility of a production model that made real democratic control on

the shop floor feasible in a way that it wasn’t feasible under

Fordism.[536] Unfortunately, the triumph of Thatcherism was

at the very same time closing off this decentralist path; and when the

Party did regain power, it was under a Blairite platform.

And today, following the mass reaction to the perceived failure of

neoliberalism in the Great Recession, we once again see the rise of a

new Left with libertarian socialist sensibilities, centered on the

Millennials and Gen Z, Great Recession/Occupation generation, etc.,

exemplified by Sanders in the US and Miliband and Corbyn in the UK,

respectively.

The reaction against neoliberalism was accompanied by a renaissance of

heterodox economic thought on the Left, as described by Andy Beckett.

The new leftwing economics wants to see the redistribution of economic

power, so that it is held by everyone — just as political power is held

by everyone in a healthy democracy. This redistribution of power could

involve employees taking ownership of part of every company; or local

politicians reshaping their city’s economy to favour local, ethical

businesses over large corporations; or national politicians making

co-operatives a capitalist norm.

This “democratic economy” is not some idealistic fantasy: bits of it are

already being constructed in Britain and the US… “If we want to live

in democratic societies, then we need to … allow communities to shape

their local economies,” write Joe Guinan and Martin O’Neill, both

prolific advocates of the new economics, in a recent article for the

Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)….

The new economists’ enormously ambitious project means transforming the

relationship between capitalism and the state; between workers and

employers; between the local and global economy; and between those with

economic assets and those without. “Economic power and control must rest

more equally,” declared a report last year by the New Economics

Foundation (NEF), a radical London thinktank that has acted as an

incubator for many of the new movement’s members and ideas.

In the past, left-of-centre British governments have attempted to

reshape the economy by taxation — usually focused on income rather than

other forms of economic power — and by nationalisation, which usually

meant replacing a private-sector management elite with a state-appointed

one. Instead of such limited, patchily successful interventions, the new

economists want to see much more systemic and permanent change. They

want — at the least — to change how capitalism works. But, crucially,

they want this change to be only partially initiated and overseen by the

state, not controlled by it. They envisage a transformation that happens

almost organically, driven by employees and

consumers….[537]

Under Miliband and Corbyn, Labour not only shifted further to the left

but increasingly focused on economic democracy (e.g. cooperative

governance and self-management, as opposed to the Morrisonian model of

managerialism) to an extent never before seen.

Labour’s 2019 manifesto aimed at “a bold transformation of the British

economy organised around ownership, control, democracy, and

participation.”

…‘Co-operatives, shared ownership, and workplace democracy’, John

McDonnell has stated, ‘all have a central role to play here’…. Corbyn,

for his part, has promised ‘decisive action to make finance the servant

of industry not the masters of all’ and called for local councils to be

given more freedom to run utilities and services in order to ‘roll back

the tide of forced privatisation’ and allow communities to shape and

secure their economic future. Not since the ’seventies and early

’eighties – when the Party was committed to bringing about what Tony

Benn termed ‘a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of

power and wealth in favour of working people and their families’ – has

Labour put forward as bold a plan for the transformation of Britain.

Instead of the extractive and concentrating forces of corporate

capitalism, the emerging new political economy is circulatory and

place-based, decentralising economic power, rebuilding and stabilising

regions and local communities, allowing for the possibility of real

democracy and participation, and providing the long-run institutional

and policy support for a new politics dedicated to achieving genuine

social change…

The Labour Party started to face up to the limitations of ‘merely

redistributive’ economic strategies under the leadership of Ed Miliband,

whose thinking on predistribution offered at least the beginnings of a

radical reinvention of social democracy…. In this sense, Miliband was

ahead of his time – and it’s encouraging to see more ambitious

institutional thinking now coming from sources such as the Institute for

Public Policy Research (IPPR), with ideas around the transformation of

corporate governance and the creation of a citizens’ wealth fund

emanating from the promising Commission on Economic Justice….

…For socialists, responses to capitalist private ownership of the

economy have traditionally divided along two main lines. In greatly

simplified terms, state socialism placed ownership and control of

capital with the state, whereas social democracy left it largely in

private hands but sought to redistribute the returns through taxation

and transfers. A neglected third tradition, however, largely eclipsed by

the left’s great twentieth-century projects, is to be found in the

long-running socialist commitment to economic democracy.[538]

Labour’s Land for the Many program, aimed at remedying the concentrated

ownership of half the UK’s land by one percent of the population,

envisioned forced sale of abandoned or derelict properties, replacement

of council taxes with land value taxation, and the creation of community

land trusts.[539]

In Preston, the local Labour government experimented with a municipalist

model inspired in part by the work of Gar Alperovitz.

Preston’s hilltop city centre, which had been fading for decades, now

has a refurbished and busy covered market, new artists’ studios in

former council offices, and coffee and craft beer being sold from

converted shipping containers right behind the town hall. All these

enterprises have been facilitated by the council. Less visibly, but

probably more importantly, the city’s large concentration of other

public sector bodies — a hospital, a university, a police headquarters —

have been persuaded by the council to procure goods and services locally

whenever possible, becoming what the Democracy Collaborative calls

“anchor institutions.” They now spend almost four times as much of their

budgets in Preston as they did in 2013.[540]

But immediate hopes for the new-model Left in the UK were resoundingly

smashed by the December 2019 General Election.

An analysis in *The American Prospect* published shortly before the

election is even more relevant in its aftermath. At a Chingford

community assembly in the London area,

People wonder if a universal basic income trial could be run in their

area, and they discuss sustainable local farming and business tax breaks

that could be linked to environmentally sustainable practices. One woman

suggests giving local councils the power to reclaim vacant storefronts

in order to house the homeless; later in the summer, Labour proposes

such a policy, under which local authorities could take properties which

have been vacant for 12 months and offer them to startups, cooperative

businesses, and community projects. Another participant suggests

training green mechanics, which, [Director of the Centre for Labour and

Social Studies and unsuccessful Labour MP candidate Faiza] Shaheen tells

me, sticks out to her because her father was a car mechanic and it had

become hard for him to work with new engines…. This is one of the

major goals of these events and of the COU in general: to build Labour’s

policy manifesto from the grassroots….

“When Thatcher closed down the pits and the steelworks, it was not only

those jobs that went, but it was also the kind of collective political

community culture and institutions,” [Labour Party Director of Community

Organising Dan] Firth says. “Part of what we are trying to do is to

rebuild that culture and to put the Labour Party back in the center of

communities which it hasn’t been part of for some time.”

One local fight is the fight to stop the demolition of both private and

council flats in Westminster on land owned by “the 28-year-old Duke of

Westminster, a multibillionaire,” whose company “plans to bulldoze the

buildings to build luxury housing there….”[541]

In the immediate aftermath of the loss, Chris Smaje proposed an ecology

of libertarian community economies as the new social base for

post-Corbyn Labour.

…[T]he Labour Party’s malaise has deep historic roots that long pre-date

Corbyn’s tenure, relating to the demise of the organized industrial

working-class and its forms of community-building and self-education.

What’s now needed to create an electable left populism is longer-term

community-building of another kind, promoting locally shared spaces and

resources, environmental care and economic autonomy that tries to build

bridges among whoever’s locally in place.[542]

Labour MP Alex Sobel similarly proposed a new approach based on

community activism and rebuilding municipal economies on a democratic

basis:

One idea is an organising model [in post-industrial communities] based

on visible, practical and helpful grassroots action, delivered all year

round. Advice hubs providing support could take the form of co-ops or

social enterprises. They might provide benefits help, housing advice or

a warm meal. They could be funded by the party, local fundraising

efforts or trade unions and run with voluntary support. Some groups

could aspire to owning the buildings from which they operate, creating

real and long-term community anchors.[543]

II. Strategy

From a strategic standpoint, Exodus confers enormous advantages on those

who adopt that approach. Our fight no longer requires us to contest the

ruling class’s control of the means of production and state

administration, as in previous revolutions, but only to create a society

of our own without interference.

Individualist anarchist Katherine Gallagher outlined the strategy

several years ago in a series of tweets on Twitter:

For me it’s about stretching out our networks of what’s possible across

borders, about decentralizing… “We” will be transnational, and

distributed. We won’t be encircled by “them,” but woven through their

antiquated structures, impossible to quarantine off and finish. I’m not

a pacifist. I’m not at all against defensive violence. That’s a separate

question to me of overthrow. But to oversimplify, when it comes to

violence, I want it to be the last stand of a disintegrating order

against an emerging order that has already done much of the hard work of

building its ideals/structures…. Build the society and defend it,

don’t go forth with the guns and attempt to bring anarchy about in the

rubble.

I think technology is increasingly putting the possibility of meaningful

resistance and worker independence within the realm of a meaningful

future. So much of the means of our oppression is now more susceptible

to being duplicated on a human scale (and so much of patent warfare

seems to be aimed at preventing this).

And I think we should be working on how we plan to create a parallel

industry that is not held only by those few. More and more the means to

keep that industry held only by the few are held in the realm of patent

law. It is no longer true that the few own the “lathe” so to speak,

nearly as much as they own the patent to it. So we truly could achieve

more by creating real alternative manufacture than seizing that built.

Yes, there will be protective violence, but it’s not as true as it was

in the past that there is real necessary means of production in the

hands of the few. What they control more now is access to the methods of

production and try to prevent those methods being used outside of their

watch. Again, I’m not saying that the “last days” of the state won’t be

marked by violence. But I am saying we now have real tactical options

beyond confronting them directly *until* they come to

us.[544]

Indeed, when the state brings about the revolutionary rupture by

initiating force against the nascent system emerging in its midst, the

resulting violence may serve only to ratify the transition after the

fact.

In most cases, the work being done to build decentralized systems, will

be opaque to the people running the existing system. It won’t look like

a threat until they have already won (the model for this is how

feudalism was replaced by markets — the nobles didn’t know they had

lost, as an institution, until they lost their castles to

creditors).[545]

Whatever violence does occur at the final transition will be primarily

defensive, not constitutive. The 500-odd-year-old capitalist system,

like previous historic systems, is not a monolithic unity but a

collection of mutually interacting social formations — some in

ascendancy, some in decline. It follows that the supplanting of

capitalism need not involve a dramatic rupture on the part of a

monolithic unity of progressive forces. As Eugene Holland argues,

the requirement of such a radical systemic break is necessary only when

you conceive of a society or mode of production as a total system in the

first place…. Construing such elements in terms of dominant, residual,

and emergent improves utopian prospects considerably, inasmuch as there

would presumably be positive elements to affirm (the “emergent” ones)

alongside the negative ones to critique and reject (presumably all the

“dominant” ones)….[546]

Negri and Hardt, likewise, take the position that if violence occurs it

will be when the forces of the old order attempt — and fail — to thwart

the transition.

…our current situation is propitious… because the constituent power

of the multitude has matured to such an extent that it is becoming able,

through its networks of communication and cooperation, through its

production of the common, to sustain an alternative democratic society

on its own. Here is where the question of time becomes essential. When

does the moment of rupture come?… Revolutionary politics must grasp,

in the movement of the multitudes and through the accumulation of common

and cooperative decisions, the moment of rupture… that can create a

new world.[547]

And in this context, they argue that the primary role of violence in the

transition is not the revolutionary seizure of power, but defensive

violence to protect the counter-institutions we have built against a

final, last-ditch attempt at suppression by the capitalist state. They

note that Moses and Aaron had to defeat Pharaoh’s pursuing forces in

order to complete the exodus successfully. “Every exodus requires an

active resistance, a rear-guard war against the pursuing powers of

sovereignty.”[548]

An important corollary of this principle of defensive violence is that,

from the perspective of democracy, violence cannot create anything but

can only preserve what has already been created…. Democratic violence

can only defend society, not create it. This is equally true in

revolutionary situations. Democratic violence does not initiate the

revolutionary process but rather comes only at the end, when the

political and social transformation has already taken place, to defend

its accomplishments.[549]

To quote Holland again, however abrupt and dramatic the final rupture

may seem, it is only the culmination of a long preexisting process of —

again — “building the structure of the new society within the shell of

the old.”

Following 1640, 1776, 1789, 1848, 1917, and 1949, we have been fixated

on the image of revolution — of punctual, violent, wholesale

transformation — as the most desirable (and often the only acceptable)

mode of social change. But revolution is not the only mode of social

transformation: feudalism, for instance, arose piecemeal following the

decline of the Roman Empire, in a process that took centuries to

complete…. Immediate and total social transformation of the

revolutionary kind is not absolutely necessary for a number of reasons,

not the least of which is that capitalism is not a total system to begin

with. Alternatives are not only always possible, they in fact already

exist. Inasmuch as the secret of so-called primitive accumulation is

that it is actually first and foremost a process of dispossession —

ongoing as well as primitive — one answer… to the question of what is to

be done is thus to initiate a slow-motion general strike. Seek out

actually existing alternative modes of self-provisioning — they are out

there, in Remarkable number and variety — and also develop new ones;

walk away from dependence on capital and the State, one step, one

stratum, at a time, while at the same time making sure to have and

continually develop alternative practices and institutions to sustain

the movement. To effectively replace capitalism and the State, a

slow-motion general strike must indeed become-general or reach critical

mass or bifurcation point eventually, but it doesn’t have to be all

encompassing right from the beginning or produce wholesale social change

all at once: it can start off small and/or scattered and become-general

over time….

Hegemonic thinking (i.e., thinking that social change is always and only

a matter of hegemony)… leads to the double impasse of “revolution or

reform”: given its totalizing view of society, one must either seek the

total and utter demolition of that society through revolution or settle

for piecemeal reforms that ultimately have no decisive effect on it. But

society is not a totality: it is a contingent assemblage, or assemblage

of assemblages. Nomad citizenship thus proposes… a variety of

“small-scale experiments in the construction of alternative modes of

social, political and economic organization [as] a way to avoid both

waiting forever for the Revolution to come and perpetuating existing

structures through reformist demands.��[550]

…[T]he key difference between every ordinary strike and the general

strike is that while the former makes demands on capitalist employers,

the latter simply steps away from capital altogether and — if it is to

succeed—moves in the direction of other form(s) of self-provisioning,

enabling the emergence of other form(s) of social life — for example,

nomad citizenship and free-market communism.

…[T]he slow-motion general strike is, in an Important sense, neither

reformist nor revolutionary. It does not employ violence in direct

confrontation with the capitalist State and is therefore unlikely to

provoke State violence in return, yet neither does it rely on and

thereby reinforce the existing practices and institutions of capital and

the State….

…Vital to the success of a slow-motion general strike is its

sustainability: the unrelenting process of dispossession of capital

known as *primitive accumulation* must actually be

reversed….[551]

The large-scale transition may appear to take place as a comparatively

sudden phase change, but only after the ground has been prepared by a

prolonged Gramscian “war of position” in civil society. To quote Jay

Ufelder, “revolutionary situations [are] an emergent property of complex

systems.”

One of the features of complex systems is the possibility of threshold

effects, in which seemingly small perturbations in some of the system’s

elements suddenly produce large changes in others. The fragility of the

system as a whole may be evident (and therefore partially predictable)

from some aspects of its structure, but the timing of the revolutionary

moment’s emergence and the specific form it will take will be impossible

to anticipate with any precision.

In this version of politics, the emergence of rival organizations is as

likely to be a consequence of the system’s failure as a cause of

it.[552]

Capt. B.H. Liddell-Hart, an apostle of maneuver warfare and the indirect

approach, cited Lenin’s “vision of fundamental truth” that

‘the soundest strategy in war is to postpone operations until the moral

disintegration of the enemy renders the delivery of the mortal blow both

possible and easy’. This is not always practicable, nor his methods of

propaganda always fruitful. But it will bear adaptation — ‘The soundest

strategy in any campaign is to postpone battle and the soundest tactics

to postpone attack, until the moral dislocation of the enemy renders the

delivery of a decisive blow practicable.’[553]

And attempts at transition by revolutionary or insurrectionary means —

Gramsci’s so-called “War of Maneuver” — tend overwhelmingly to be

counterproductive in the modern era, according to Amador

Fernández-Savater.

Okay, so, the key features of the “war of maneuver” are: speed, limited

appeal, and frontal attack. Gramsci makes his arguments via Trotsky’s

“permanent revolution,” George Sorels’ general strike, Rosa Luxembourg´s

worker insurrection and, particularly, the Leninist power grab. These

images of revolutionary change clash, time and again, with European and

Western reality: the bloody repression of the Spartacist movement in

Germany (1918), the disbanding of worker’s councils in Italy during the

*Bienno Rosso* (1919–20), and so on. To avert a predictable sense of

frustration and to keep actively aspiring to social change, we have to

*reimagine revolution*.[554]

Previous struggles, of course, have involved efforts to reduce

dependence on the wage system. In the early to mid-19th

century, for example, Owenite craft unions set up cooperative shops for

independent production by the unemployed, and traded their output with

that of other unions using labor notes. But their goal was to win the

strikes and go back to work in their old shops on better terms.

And according to John Curl, later attempts by the Knights of Labor to

create worker cooperatives foundered on the capitalization requirements.

This struggle is different, in that such economic secessionism is at the

heart of it. There’s no need for us ever to go back to the capitalists’

factories, let alone fight for control of them. We can feed ourselves

using intensive cultivation techniques like Permaculture on small

amounts of land, and let the giant subsidized agribusiness plantations

go back to prairie. We can produce for ourselves in neighborhood garage

factories, home microbakeries, open-source ride-sharing platforms, and

the like, and let their giant factories full of obsolete machinery turn

to rust.

As technological progress makes the physical capital required for

production cheaper and cheaper, and brings it back within the realm of

ownership by individuals and small cooperative groups — like the craft

tools that prevailed before the industrial revolution — the main source

of productivity becomes human cooperation itself, and knowledge as a

commons.

This means that the rentier classes can no longer extract surplus labor

from the population by controlling access to the physical means of

production. It must enclose our social relationships themselves as a

source of rents.

According to Negri and Hardt, class struggle increasingly takes the

form, not of an attempt to storm the physical means of production, but

of “exodus” — ”a process of subtraction from the relationship with

capital by means of actualizing the potential autonomy of labor-power.”

For them, of course, this autonomy referred to the autonomy of labor

processes created by capitalists themselves — not to commons-based

institutions created *outside* capitalism. But the principle applies

equally well in the latter case. For the first time in two hundred

years, the radical cheapening of physical capital and the primacy of

human capital mean that we can adopt a revolutionary strategy that’s not

based on somehow obtaining control of the ruling class’s institutions

and concentrations of capital.

Massimo De Angelis, as we saw in the previous chapter, views the history

of capitalism as a continually shifting correlation of forces between

capital and the commons sector. And his strategic approach to the

postcapitalist transition, much like that of these other thinkers, is to

build up the commons sector at the expense of capital and the state.

In this environment, large-scale demonstrations are still useful. But

their purpose is no longer the same as in the cities of Europe in 1848,

Petrograd in 1917, or Barcelona in 1936. Their purpose is no longer to

organize and fight pitched battles in the process of contesting control

of the state and the means of production. Their purpose now is

educational: to undermine the legitimacy of the regime in the eyes of

the general public, to show people they don’t need to be free, and to

serve as a giant school and clearing house — in the wonderful phrase of

Ralph Borsodi and Mildred Loomis, a “school for living.”

As Angelos Varvarousis argues, horizontalist protest movements exist in

symbiosis with commons-based counter-institutions, with the protest

movements giving birth to waves of institution-building, and the ecology

of counter-institutions in turn serving as the base from which future

waves of protest are launched.

Commoning that takes place during the most contentious and visible

phases of social movements does not always evaporate after mobilizations

are over, but it can be disseminated within the social fabric and, at

the same time, it can create new social fabric. This expansion of the

commons especially in periods of crisis and destabilization usually

takes place rhizomatically. The commons of the social movements, thus,

are not just temporal forms of commoning but liminal commons; commons

that facilitate transitions and may transform into or give rise to

other, more stable, forms of commoning in their wake….

…[T]he rhizomatic expansion of the commons was not simply related to the

Greek movement of the squares but to a great extent can be regarded as

its “transmutation.”… [T]he commons that multiplied in Athens and

Barcelona (and partly in Istanbul) in the wake of the respective

movements of the squares should be conceptualized as social outcomes of

these social movements. Social outcomes signify the “alternative social

infrastructure within different spheres of social production and

reproduction like health and care provision, education, food production,

housing, finance and others. They are characterized by their dynamic

interaction with the more visible periods of the social movements, as

they incarnate practices, imaginaries, collective memories and

innovations emerged and practiced during such periods and disseminated

through the social fabric afterwards.”[555]

…Examples of these initiatives [commoning projects in Greece after the

2011 protests] include social clinics and pharmacies, workers’

cooperatives, occupied urban spaces, time banks and alternative

currencies, neighborhood assemblies and solidarity exchange networks,

urban gardens, farmer or consumer cooperatives, farmers’ markets without

intermediaries, artist and publishing collectives, and a single occupied

factory….

Social clinics are ventures that aim at providing healthcare services to

those excluded from the public health system. Some also aim at resisting

and toppling dominant public health policies, as well as developing a

new model for a different provision of healthcare services. They hardly

existed before 2011 but have multiplied afterwards. In 2014 there were

72 known initiatives. The majority of them were initiated between 2011

and 2012.

Solidarity hubs are ventures mainly active at the local neighborhood

level, which aim at reconstructing broken social cohesion through a

series of actions such as social kitchens, distribution of “food

parcels,” free lessons or clothing distribution. Some appeared and

disappeared quickly, while others have been more enduring and exist to

this day; this fluidity makes it difficult to estimate their number. In

any case, while they were non-existent before 2011 (or at least there

were very few and had different names and repertoires of action), there

were over 110 of them in 2014.

Direct producer-to-consumer networks were also popularized after 2011,

especially between 2012 and 2014. Indicatively, while they were

non-existent or unknown before 2011, there were 47 recorded networks in

2014. Other forms of social and solidarity economy did also emerge

during the crisis and after 2011. 70% of the existing social and

solidarity economy organizations were created after 2011. The

organizations in this economic field are both formal and informal and

range from social enterprises to informal time banks and alternative

currencies. In 2017 the total number of organizations across the country

was estimated at 1500.[556]

To quote one Syntagma participant: “There is no doubt that the days of

the squares were, and to some extent still are, a point of reference

both for our lives and for the projects we are developing since then. It

was like a train that came through Athens in those days, and many of us

jumped on to go towards the unknown.”[557]

Of course the relationship between movements and commons is mutual and

symbiotic.[558]

Not only do social movements create social outcomes, but also social

outcomes become the basis upon which new social movements may develop.

This is evident in the relation between the December 2008 revolt and the

2011 movement of the squares. For instance, popular assemblies were

direct social outcomes and commoning projects that sprung from the

revolt; after being briefly suspended, they were reactivated to form

part of the alternative social infrastructure of the commoning projects

that developed out of the square. To be sure, every movement creates its

own forms of organization, narratives and sets of practices; my aim here

is not to promote a reductive view of the Syntagma movement as a mere

continuation of the December revolt, as it was not…. However, an

important element of continuity between the 2008 and 2011 mobilizations

lies indeed in the practice of commoning.[559]

The expansion of commoning institutions in 2011 was rhizomatic:

“a-centered, unplanned and non-linear…” The individual nodes,

severally, were established independently of one another, and not

through seeding or mitosis from pre-existing nodes. There was no

“organic relation or pre-planned agenda” connecting them. The explosion

of (for example) hundreds of cooperative clinics “just

happened.”[560]

This is not to say that the organizers of new nodes were unaware of

similar activity elsewhere — simply that they acted on their own

initiative. As Varvarousis describes it, rhizomatic expansion sounds

like stigmergic coordination, in which individual nodes coordinate their

activity with larger movements through a background medium rather than

direct negotiation:

Rhizomatic expansion is characterized by the simultaneous emergence of

various commoning projects in different places and times, a phenomenon

that in biology is called punctuation. This happens within a highly

accelerating spiral, in which new projects do not know each other and

are very loosely connected, primarily through unforeseen

encounters.[561]

Mass and scale, and the seizure of major institutions from the ruling

class, are no longer of primary importance.

Anthropologist David Graeber has been influenced by the same autonomist

tradition Hardt and Negri come from. In response to Russell Brand’s

query about formulating “a centralized revolutionary movement to

coordinate transition,” he replied:

well, my own approach is to avoid constituting any sort of new

authority, … my dream is to create a thousand autonomous institutions

that can gradually take over the business of organizing everyday life,

pretty much ignoring the authorities, until gradually the whole

apparatus of state comes to seem silly, unnecessary….[562]

This focus on building counter-institutions rather than insurrectionary

assault has obvious advantages from a strategic perspective.

A strategy of building the new society within the interstices of the old

one has the notable advantage of not presenting large, high-value

targets to the enemy. As a character in Kim Stanley Robinson’s *2312*

argued:

“Build housing or do land work. Make it that kind of revolution, one of

the nonviolent ones. If something happens fast enough they call it a

revolution whether guns go off or not.”

“But the guns are there.”

“Maybe they are, but what if no one dares to shoot them? What if what we

did was always too innocuous? Or even invisible?.”…

“If you are clear about your intentions, Swan, there will be

opposition…. Any change will be opposed. And by serious opposition. I

mean violence.”

“If they can find the way to apply it. But if there’s no one to arrest,

no one to beat back, no one to scare…”[563]

The Byzantine general Belisarius’s strategic approach — the strategic

offensive combined with tactical defensive — was an excellent

illustration, by way of military analogy, of Gramsci’s War of Position.

His reconquest of North Africa, Italy and Spain was, military historian

B.H. Liddell-Hart writes,

the more remarkable because of two features — first, the extraordinarily

slender resources with which Belisarius undertook these far-reaching

campaigns; second, his consistent use of the tactical defensive. There

is no parallel in history for such a series of conquests by abstention

from attack. They are the more remarkable since they were carried out by

an army that was based on the mobile arm — and mainly composed of

cavalry. Belisarius had no lack of audacity, but his tactics were to

allow — or tempt—the other side to do the attacking.[564]

…Belisarius had developed a new-style tactical instrument with which

he knew that he might count on beating much superior numbers, provided

that he could induce his opponents to attack him under conditions that

suited his tactics. For that purpose his lack of numbers, when not too

marked, was an asset, especially when coupled with an audaciously direct

strategic offensive. His strategy was thus more psychological than [an

attack on the enemy’s logistics]. He knew how to provoke the barbarian

armies of the West into indulging their natural instinct for direct

assault; with the more subtle and skilful Persians he was able at first

to take advantage of their feeling of superiority to the Byzantines, and

later, when they learnt respect for him, he exploited their wariness as

a means of outmaneuvering them psychologically.[565]

Gallagher’s model for transition from one system to another in the quote

above is a perfect illustration of the principle of avoiding direct

battle when possible and forcing the enemy to initiate it on unfavorable

ground when it does occur. To quote Liddell-Hart again,

For even if a decisive battle be the goal, the aim of strategy must be

to bring about this battle under the most advantageous circumstances.

And the more advantageous the circumstances, the less, proportionately,

will be the fighting.

The perfection of strategy would be, therefore, to produce a decision

without any serious fighting.[566]

The difference between being the first to occupy superior ground and

then assuming the tactical defensive, and a head-on assault to destroy

the enemy physically, is the difference between an alternate history

Longstreet occupying Little Round Top on July 1, 1863 and Pickett’s

Charge. T. E. Lawrence characterized advocates of the latter responses

as those “who would rather fight with their arms than with their

legs.”[567]

The proper goal is “not so much to seek battle as to seek a strategic

situation so advantageous that if it does not of itself produce the

decision, its continuation by a battle is sure to achieve

this”[568]— by a battle, I would add, which is initiated *by

the enemy*.

On the other hand, committing prematurely to a particular line of attack

renders our own position less advantageous by reducing the number of

options that remain open for the future. One of the recurring methods

Liddell-Hart points to as an example of the “indirect approach” is

pursuing a route of advance that always threatens two or more alternate

objectives at the same time; the enemy must divide its defensive forces

between them, while the attacker can either decide at the last minute

which one of them to concentrate its forces against — or even bypass all

defending enemy forces and keep pushing to the rear. A dedicated line of

attack,, on the other hand, enables the enemy to concentrate its

available forces along a known axis.

Applying the same principle to the revolutionary transition, pursuing a

strategy of counter-institution building without attempting a decisive

frontal assault on the old system has the effect of *creating*

alternative objectives, in the sense of leaving the entire system in a

state of vulnerability.

Counter-institutions starving the corporate state and engaging in

constant, partial disruption will result in incremental state retreat

from marginal areas based on cost-benefit ratios, without ever posing

enough of a one-time threat to make an all-out counter-assault worth the

state’s while. The state will simply retreat into smaller and smaller

islands of governability.

At the same time, a strategy of counter-institution building is also

much more compatible with a prefigurative approach to politics. The

demands for insurrectionary conquest of the state and capital are often

directly at odds with the kind of successor society we want to build.

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Chapter Eight: Interstitial Development: Engagement With the State

The primary tendency of leftist movements with interstitial development

models has been to emphasize Exodus and the building of

counter-institutions as a reaction, not only against seizing political

power, but against engagement with the state in all its forms.

According to Negri and Hardt, the role of the state in the

postcapitalist transition will be quite secondary compared to its role

in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The relationship between

the dominant class and the state is the opposite of that Hobbes

described at the dawn of the modern era. The “nascent bourgeoisie”

was not capable of guaranteeing social order on its own; it required a

political power to stand above it…. The multitude, in contrast to the

bourgeoisie and all other exclusive, limited class formations, is

capable of forming society autonomously….[569]

And this approach, as we have already noted, has largely characterized

the post-1994 networked movements. David Graeber cited the “Buenos Aires

strategy” from the Argentine meltdown as a model for Occupy:

Essentially, the strategy is to create alternative institutions, based

on horizontal principles, that have nothing to do with the government,

and declare the entire political system to be absolutely corrupt….

Hence after the popular economic collapse in Argentina in 2001, a

popular uprising that ousted three different governments in a matter of

months settled into a strategy of creating alternative institutions

based on the strategy of creating alternative institutions based on the

principles of what they themselves called “horizontality”; popular

assemblies to govern urban neighborhoods, recuperated factories and

other workplaces…, self-organized unemployed associations…, even,

for a while, an alternative currency system.[570]

John Holloway argued, in similar terms, that Occupy shouldn’t be

concerned with influencing state policy or taking control of the present

system — which is becoming increasingly impossible — but with seceding

from the system and telling capital to go to hell.

…[P]erhaps we can hope that non-state oriented politics will become

more and more common and more widespread throughout society….

As a refusal?

Yes, as a refusal. As a kind of total breakdown of the old way of doing

things, which might bring a few little benefits but really it didn’t

take anybody very far. And I think that more and more people are being

forced to reinvent their politics or reinvent their ideas about

politics, both in terms of protests — but also I think in terms of

creating alternatives. If the system has no room for us, if the system

simply leaves 50% of young people unemployed, if state benefits are cut

back, if the state absolutely refuses to negotiate, if the police become

more repressive, then I think we are forced not only to think of

creative forms of protest but also ways of how we actually survive and

how we actually create alternative ways of living…. But I think what

the crisis is also telling us is that **that’**s the way to go, but

that we haven’t gone far enough yet. We’re not yet in a situation where

we can just tell capital to go to hell and survive without it…. But I

think that’s the direction we have to go in.[571]

Holloway refers to that approach as “changing the world without taking

power.” That means

to create, within the very society that is being rejected, spaces,

moments, or areas of activity in which a different world is prefigured.

Rebellions in motion. From this perspective, the idea of organization is

no longer equivalent to that of the party, but rather entails the

question of how the different cracks that unravel the fabric of

capitalism can recognize each other and connect….

…In the last twenty or thirty years we find a great many movements

that claim something else: it is possible to emancipate human activity

from alienated labor by opening up cracks where one is able to do things

differently, to do something that seems useful, necessary, and

worthwhile to us; an activity that is not subordinated to the logic of

profit.

…The world, and each one of us, is full of these cracks….

If we’re not going to accept the annihilation of humanity…, then the

only alternative is to think that our movements are the birth of another

world. We have to keep building cracks and finding ways of recognizing

them, strengthening them, expanding them, connecting them; seeking the

confluence or, preferably, the commoning of the cracks.

…[L]et’s bear in mind that a precondition for the French Revolution

was that, at a certain point, the social network of bourgeois relations

no longer needed the aristocracy in order to exist. Likewise, we must

work to reach a point where we can say “we don’t care if global capital

isn’t investing in Spain, because we’ve built a mutual support network

that’s strong enough to enable us to live with dignity.”[572]

Holloway sees socialist models based on taking state power as

reproducing rather than abolishing the capital-labor relationship in

many ways. It takes for granted the existence of alienated wage labor

under capitalism, set over against institutional structures like

corporate management and the state which are separate from and above

labor. The traditional Left aims at capturing these structures and using

them for the benefit of labor:

…a movement that struggles to improve the living standards of workers

(considered as victims and objects) immediately refers to the state.

Why? Because the state, due to its very separation from society, is the

ideal institution if one seeks to achieve benefits for people. This is

the traditional thinking of the labor movement and that of the left

governments that currently exist in Latin America.[573]

The state option, including the seizure of state power by movements like

Syriza and Podemos,

entails channeling aspirations and struggles into institutional conduits

that, by necessity, force one to seek a conciliation between the anger

that these movements express and the reproduction of capital. Because

the existence of any government involves promoting the reproduction of

capital (by attracting foreign investment, or through some other means),

there is no way around it. This inevitably means taking part in the

aggression that is capital. It’s what has already happened in Bolivia

and Venezuela, and it will also be the problem in Greece or

Spain.[574]

As Holloway observes in his analysis of the Zapatista rejection of state

power, “The state, any state, is so bound into the web of global

capitalist social relations that it has no option, whatever the

composition of the government, but to promote the reproduction of those

relations….”[575]

Ana Cecilia Dinerstein echoes Holloway’s framing of the essentially

capitalist nature of the state.

The problem of translation became evident to me during my research with

social movements in Latin America during ‘the pink tide’ period, at the

beginning of the XXI Century. On the one hand, new autonomous movements

emerged and regarded themselves as *prefigurative*, for they offered a

myriad of autonomous initiatives that shaped the politics of the time

through radical pedagogies; cooperative work, art, entertainment and

care; new forms of defending indigenous traditions and customs;

horizontal democracy; environmental awareness and territorialized

resistance cultivated in imaginative forms on a day-to-day basis in

neighbourhoods, squares, the countryside, jungles, and harbours. This

change in social movements and activism that expanded into Europe,

(particularly but not exclusively Southern Europe), a decade later,

indicated a shift from a *claim-making role* to a *prefigurative role*

based on the articulation of alternative practices, which I have called

‘concrete utopias.’

However, what also became apparent during ‘the pink tide’ period, was

that the integration of movements’ concrete utopias into the political,

legal and policy instruments of governability required their

deradicalisation. As left governments worked to incorporate movements’

ideas, demands and practices into state institutions, legal apparatuses

and other state structures, (after initially repressing them, in some

cases) they rendered *invisible* everything that does not fit into the

State’s existing parameters of legibility. In doing so, they inhibited

social movements’ most important innovations….

We should know by now that the state will never be

*the* political form of organisation for radical change, but it is a

political mediation. By political mediation I mean that the State is not

simply an instrument of regulation, co-optation, coercion, and

oppression. It is the political form of capitalist social relations and

therefore intervenes in the process of shaping our form of existence and

resistance. As a mediation, the state ‘intervenes’ in the appropriation

of grassroots autonomous practices by power by legalising them or

monetising them. In doing so, it works to force grassroots autonomous

practice into forms which fit the capitalist/ patriarchal/colonial

demarcation of reality.

The Left must come to terms with the idea that the State is not

synonymous with the government. It must recognise that the State is not

a state *in* a capitalist society, i.e. a neutral arena on which the

common good is decided, but a **capitalist **state. The state is a

class state. Its ‘relative autonomy’, makes both reform on behalf of the

working class and capitalist accumulation possible, but the state will

*ultimately* function to preserve a legal order based on private

property.[576]

The new networked, horizontalist movements take just the opposite

approach from the reproduction of capitalist relations — inadvertent or

not — by leftist parties in the state:

The rejection of alienated and alienating labor entails, at the same

time, a critique of the institutional and organizational structures, and

the mindset that springs from it. This is how we can explain the

rejection of trade unions, parties, and the state that we observe in so

many contemporary movements, from the Zapatistas to the Greek or Spanish

*indignados*.[577]

In any case a movement focused on electoral politics will entail a

selection of some priorities over others, and if allowed to will divert

all the resources at its disposal to those priorities at the expense of

the rest.

No matter how much lip service is paid to the movement and its

importance, the goal of the conquest of power inevitably involves an

instrumentalisation of struggle. The struggle has an aim: to conquer

political power. The struggle is a means to achieve that aim. Those

elements of struggle which do not contribute to the achievement of that

aim are either given a secondary importance or must be suppressed

altogether: a hierarchy of struggles is established. The

instrumentalisation/hierarchisation is at the same time an

impoverishment of struggle. So many struggles, so many ways of

expressing our rejection of capitalism, so many ways of fighting for our

dream of a different society are simply filtered out, simply remain

unseen when the world is seen through the prism of the conquest of

power. We learn to suppress them, and thus to suppress ourselves. At the

top of the hierarchy we learn to place that part of our activity that

contributes to ‘building the revolution’, at the bottom come frivolous

personal things like affective relations, sensuality, playing, laughing,

loving. Class struggle becomes puritanical: frivolity must be suppressed

because it does not contribute to the goal. The hierarchisation of

struggle is a hierarchisation of our lives and thus a hierarchisation of

ourselves.

The party is the organisational form which most clearly expresses this

hierarchisation. The form of the party, whether vanguardist or

parliamentary, presupposes an orientation towards the state and makes

little sense without it. The party is in fact a form of disciplining

class struggle, of subordinating the myriad forms of class struggle to

the overriding aim of gaining control of the state. The fixing of a

hierarchy of struggles is usually expressed in the form of the party

programme.[578]

States, as Theodoris Karyotis writes of Syriza, are “much more

understanding of the type of struggles that envision a stronger state as

the mediator of social antagonisms.” Unfortunately, the Greek public’s

relieved welcome for Syriza, motivated by a desire for a

“demobilization, and… institutionalization of the struggles,” resulted

“the curtailing of demands that did not fit into a coherent program of

state management — including most projects that revolve around popular

self-management of the commons.”

The “real constituent power,” he notes, “the real agents of social

change,” are “tangible, everyday collectives and individuals rooted in

concrete struggles at the local level, disrupting the flow of power and

bringing forward alternatives.”

Karyotis warns that “we should beware the transformation of the party,

initially approached as an “instrument” of the movement, into an

organizational and discursive center point,” and that “getting sucked

into the discourse of state administration and electoral politics

entails a visible danger of incorporation of movements into the dominant

political order.” Rather:

To approach self-determination, organized society should find creative

ways to constitute itself as a counterpower, without becoming absorbed

within the existing institutions of power. There is no doubt that the

movements’ relationship with the state, even with a nominally

“progressive” government, should remain autonomous, confrontational and

antagonistic.[579]

David Bollier and Silke Helfrich observe, similarly, that “the Greek

political coalition led by Syriza discovered that its stunning electoral

victory, nominally giving it control of a sovereign state, was not

enough.”

The Greek state was in fact still subordinated to the power of

international capital and the geopolitical interests of other states.

The rise of Indigenous politician Evo Morales to the presidency of

Bolivia revealed a similar lesson: even smart, well-intentioned

electoral movements have trouble transcending the deep imperatives of

state power because the state remains tightly yoked to an international

system of capitalist finance and resource extraction.

They cite Pablo Solón Romero, a Bolivian activist and former Bolivian

ambassador to the UN, on the example of his country:

Fifteen years ago [in the early 2000s], we had a lot of commoning in

Bolivia — for forests, water, justice, etc. To preserve this, when our

enemy was the state and privatizing everything, we decided we would take

the state. And we succeeded! And we were able to do good things. Now we

have a plurinational state. That’s positive. *But* … ten years later,

are our communities stronger or weaker? They are weaker! We can’t do

everything that we wanted to do via the state. The state and its

structures have their own logic. We were naïve. We didn’t realize that

those structures were going to change *us*.[580] —p. 296

Andreas Karitzis ascribes the failure of Syriza in Greece to its almost

exclusive focus on popular mobilization and electoral politics. He “came

to the conclusion that one major failure of the Left is that it lacks a

form of governmentality which matches up with its own logic and values.”

He recommends, instead:

A network of resilient, dynamic and interrelated circuits of

co-operative productive units, alternative financial tools, local cells

of self-governance, community control over infrastructure facilities,

digital data, energy systems, distribution networks etc. These are ways

of gaining a degree of autonomy necessary to defy the despotic control

of the elites over society.[581]

Rather than selling them out as in Greece, the Chavez (to some extent)

and Maduro (much more so) administrations actively coopted or suppressed

the communalist counter-institutions of the Bolivarian movement. As

described by Katrina Kozarek, the role of the communes in Bolivarian

ideology is quite impressive:

Within the communes, and the Bolivarian Revolution in general there are

several types of property, there is of course private property, what

belongs to individuals, there is public property which belongs to the

state, there is social property, which belongs to the state, but the

people are involved in the control of the property and direct social

property, which belongs directly to the communes or the communal

councils.

This is important for the principal [sic] of sovereignty of the communal

system, because it allows the communes to acquire goods, services,

resources and even businesses that do not serve individuals, but rather

the common good under collective administration. And this is necessary

for the execution of communal policies.

Every commune has a communal bank, which is a bank account that is

communal property, and is administrated by the commune for the execution

of its own projects and policies. In theory, at least, the communes

should develop direct social companies which create not just employment,

but resources that can then be used for the execution of policies and

projects….

The organic law of the Communes states that the purpose of communes is

to promote the Communal state, setting up a political, social and

economic horizon for the Bolivarian Revolution and 21st century

socialism, the realization of “*a system of government that opens with

unlimited amplitude the necessary spaces where the people, the popular

masses, are deployed creatively and effectively, for them to obtain

control of power in order to make the decisions that affect their daily

life and their historical destiny*.” as Chavez put it in his manifesto

Libro Azul.

When we talk about the communal state, it means gradually replacing

almost the entire current political and economic system with a new

system based on the communes integrated in communal cities and regional

federations that then articulate policies, production and projects on

national level. It implies going from a concept of government that is

“top down” to a concept that is “bottom up” as well as transforming on a

national level the relations of property, production and administration

of resources.[582]

George Ciccariello-Maher stresses that the communalism represented by

the Bolivarian movement has much older roots in Venezuela than Hugo

Chavez, and that in order to maintain its own integrity and independence

it must exist in something of a dual power situation with the Venezuelan

state:

…Decades ago, revolutionary militants struggling to connect with the

masses jettisoned any expectation of a “Winter Palace” moment in favor

of a more profound understanding of the importance of prolonged

processes and hegemonic struggles. More recently, the contours and

dynamics of the Bolivarian Process have made it clear to anyone in doubt

that the state — and especially the bloated bureaucratic monstrosity

that is the Venezuelan state — is not something to be simply “seized” by

either the ballot or the bullet. As a result, in the words of [Roland]

Denis, “The old slogan of ‘dual power’ (bourgeois and working-class)

valid for the summit of the revolutionary movement today becomes a

permanent strategy in accord with the need for the organization of a

socialized and non-state power.” What once expressed the revolutionary

*moment* par excellence now becomes a continuous process…, dual power

no longer understood “from above” but “from below” and in a tense

interplay with existing institutions.[583]

María Pilar García-Guadilla writes that “[t]he experience of the

communes reveals a central truth about Chavismo: it contained both the

decentralizing, horizontal dynamics of community organizations and

social movements alongside centralizing, vertical dynamics.”

The latter have proved deeply damaging to the democratic aspirations

that many had for the Chavista experiment….

After the coup d’etat of 2002 — in which Chávez was briefly removed from

office — and the oil strike of 2002–2003, Chávez radicalized his

discourse and political project. He excluded the opposition from playing

a role in public policy and tried to take control of state institutions,

including the state oil company, PDVSA. Meanwhile, the Chavista project

of inclusion and social justice relied on an economic development model

dependent on the extraction of natural resources, most notably oil but

more recently including large-scale mining projects such as the Orinoco

Mining Arc. Although the government has labeled this project

“sustainable,” it involves opening more than 40,000 square miles in a

fragile ecosystem inhabited by indigenous communities to transnational

corporations…. This model does not break with neoliberal

developmentalism and contradicts the government’s anti-globalization

discourse….

The achievements of the policies that tried to bring about the

participation of popular organizations and social movements in the

management of local, regional, and national levels of government have

been uneven…. On the one hand, communal council policies were based on a

Gramscian conception of democratic participation at the local or

community level, compatible with representative democracy; on the other

hand, participation was linked to an orthodox Leninist conception of

direct democracy intended to substitute representative democracy at the

local and regional levels with a radical democracy at the national level

through the communal state. These tendencies created acute conflicts.

While many urban commune experiences have been a failure, there are some

successful experiences of rural communes. One of the most emblematic,

given its high agricultural and livestock production and its high levels

of participation, is known as El Maizal. Spanning two states and

including more than 9,000 people as of 2018, El Maizal is an important

part of the local economy. The means of production are held in common

and decision-making is done through a Communal Parliament composed of

fifty-two members and three executive spokespeople.

Nonetheless, even in the few successful experiences, there are frequent

conflicts between the state and the communes due to bureaucratic

requirements, the state’s pressure to institutionalize them, and the

communes’ attempts to defend their autonomy. For example, El Maizal has

taken over abandoned state projects and experienced troubles with the

state-run agricultural enterprise, which is supposed to purchase the

commune’s surplus and provide it with supplies. In May 2018, one of the

commune’s leaders was briefly arrested for buying black market supplies

when the state-run supplier did not provide necessary materials on time

(because those materials were also being sold on the black market). Some

communes also complain that when there were disagreements with the

government guidelines and policies, the government did not consult with

them. They also argue that leaders were often imposed by the state, and

that they responded to political rather than social needs and were under

increasing control of the state, the ruling party, and more recently the

military.[584]

García-Guadilla quotes Roland Denis, former Vice-Minister of Planning

and Development, in a 2006 interview:

We tried to deepen community control, that is to say, to give to the

communities the power that is needed to develop new relations with the

state; relations of co-governance and co-management. This practice

caused resistance from the existing institutions, from the “old state”

that continues to exist in Venezuela, in spite of the changes. There is

no concrete vision within the Chávez government, as to how bureaucratic

and economic interests could be effectively eliminated, so as to deeply

transform the state.

The communes and communal institutions were, for the most part,

effectively coopted by the state’s distribution of oil revenue

patronage, and converted into de facto transmission belts of state

policy in a manner similar to what happened to the soviets and factory

committees under the Bolshevik regime.

Within a highly corrupt and inefficient system, the communes became a

mechanism to redistribute oil revenue and, in moments of political

crisis, to mobilize political support for the government….

The communal network, born under state tutelage, has produced serious

dilemmas for communes and social movements. Joining the state

organizational network makes it more difficult to preserve their

autonomy and creates debilitating compromises. For this reason, members

of the most successful communes developed dual memberships, as members

of the commune and of the “movimiento comunero” (commune movement) at

the same time. In some cases, the state officially tried to replace

social movements it accused of “excessive” radicalism — in other words,

of taking critical positions — by promoting para-movements and excluding

social movements from events like the World Social Forum.

The economic crisis has deepened the politics of clientelism, in which

political loyalty is rewarded with economic benefits. The new Local

Committees on Food Supply (CLAPs), which distribute basic goods in

coordination with the military and the ruling party, have relegated

communal councils to a distant secondary role.[585]

Kozarek echoes this analysis, stressing the dependence of the communes

on distribution of revenues from the central government: “most of the

resources allocated to the communal bank come from the national

government on the basis of projects sent to institutions for their

approval, undermining two necessary elements of sovereignty, production

and self-determination.”[586]

Venezuelan sociologist Edgardo Lander describes the dynamic in similar

terms. The state under Chavez’s and Maduro’s leadership has pursued

largely the same developmentalist, authoritarian high modernist model as

its neoliberal predecessors. And the entire project has been weakened by

the fact that the social sector is almost entirely dependent on the

distribution of oil revenues from the state, rather than developing

autonomous productive capacity outside of both the state and capitalist

sectors. “Most of the popular base organizations had no possibility of

autonomy because they lacked their own productive capacity.”

Unfortunately, the cooptation of communalist institutions, and their

subsumption into the apparatus of the state, were to a large extent

built into the legal and ideological framework established under Chavez.

Although the 1999 Constitution placed at least equal emphasis on

communal and participatory democracy compared to representative

democracy, this was counteracted in practical terms by the vesting of

sovereign authority in a unitary, monolithic “people” from whom all

power derived.

Chávez’s revolution interpreted “constituent power” to be embodied by

the “people” — its sole source of authority. The elected constituent

assembly not only had the power to write a new constitution but also

authority above all “constituted” powers, including the existing

legislature and judiciary. Chávez’s first constituent process was

nonpolarized, inclusive, participatory, and institutional; it included

diverse organizations, institutions, and citizens. As a result, the 1999

Bolivarian Constitution reflects political-ideological differences.

Despite these differences, the constitution defines the government’s

source of power as the unitary “people” (*el pueblo*), rather than

employing the liberal democratic concept of pluralism, where competing

individual interests coincide. This view of the people as a homogenous

whole would become the primary source of polarizing

political-ideological conflicts.

One of the first polarizing conflicts in fact involved the definition of

the *constitutional sovereign*, or source of constitutional authority,

and how to best interpret the *will* of the people. In the 1999 National

Constituent Assembly, the *sovereign* was defined as a unitary,

indivisible mandate, rather like Rousseau’s concept of a singular and

unequivocal “general will.” In contrast to the 2008 Ecuadorian and 2009

Bolivian constitutions, Venezuela’s constituent members defined

themselves as representing the will of the people, as opposed to the

will of different regions; ethnic groups; or religious, social,

economic, and political interests.[587]

From the beginning, this ruled out the conception of democracy as

something flowing upwards as an emergent property of polyarchic

institutions below, or of the state as being simply a platform to

facilitate the self-governance activity of such institutions. And in

practical terms, it meant that despite the lip-service paid to

participatory democracy in the communes, the communes would tend to be

treated as municipal corporations subject to the unitary sovereign

authority of the “people” emanating from above. So Venezuela wound up

once again reenacting the Westphalian state model of early modern

Europe, with all that it entailed — absolute,indivisible sovereignty,

“no state within the state,” etc. — in the minds of the civil lawyers

and politiques.

Miriam Lang, an associate professor for

Environmental and Sustainability Studies from Ecuador, adds that it

represents a broader problem of vanguardist culture in leftist electoral

movements undermining the autonomy and initiative of social movements.

One problem is that the progressive governments,

to the degree that their members came from social movement processes and

protests with a left-wing political identity, have taken on a sort of

*vanguard* identity, as if they know what people need. So spaces for

real dialogue and partnership with people of a diverse nature have been

lost. And political participation has become a type of applause for

whatever project the government leaders are proposing…. There are many

examples in European history that incline me to think this is an

inevitable dynamic, one that we underestimate a lot. The lefts that come

to lead in the state apparatus end up immersed in powerful dynamic

characteristic of those apparatuses and they are transformed as persons,

through the new spaces in which they move, because the logics of their

responsibilities provide them with other experiences and begin to shape

their political horizons as well as their culture. Their subjectivity is

transformed, they embody the exercise of power.[588]

Despite all this, in my opinion a primary focus on constructing

counter-institutions — “building the new society within the shell of the

old” — and not attempting to initiate a rupture, should not imply a

refusal in principle to engage with the state in any way. Building

prefigurative institutions at the municipal level is not sufficient by

itself, without recognizing the real danger of repression by reactionary

forces at the nation-state level. Efforts like Syriza and Podemos have

been failures to the extent that they were tried as primary venues for

implementing post-capitalist transitional agendas; but they are

indispensable for running interference on behalf of the local,

prefigurative movements and giving them a safe space in which to grow.

Erik Olin Wright, while sympathetic to the interstitial approach, doubts

that it is sufficient by itself. Although he advocates interstitial

development of post-capitalist institutions as the primary strategy, it

is necessary to combine it with some form of social democratic

electoralism.

Interstitial strategies may create enlarged spaces for non-commodified,

non-capitalist economic relations, but it seems unlikely that this could

sufficiently insulate most people from dependency on the capitalist

economy and sufficiently weaken the power of the capitalist class and

the dependency of economic activity on capital accumulation to render

the transition trough in the revolutionary scenario short and shallow.

And while interstitial strategies may expand the scope of social

empowerment, it is difficult to see how they could ever by themselves

sufficiently erode the basic structural power of capital to dissolve the

capitalist limits on emancipatory social change.[589]

Elsewhere he writes: “Eroding capitalism is not a fantasy. But it is

only plausible if it is combined with the social-democratic idea of

taming capitalism.”

We need a way of linking the bottom-up, society-centered strategic

vision of anarchism with the top-down, state-centered strategic logic of

social democracy. We need to tame capitalism in ways that make it more

erodible, and erode capitalism in ways that make it more

tamable.[590]

One reason for his pessimism is that Wright rejects the assumption that

capitalism is necessarily a system with an end as well as a beginning,

or that interstitial processes of creating counter-institutions can

exploit its systemic crises.[591]

Nevertheless, Wright is not necessarily pessimistic about the idea of

post-capitalist transition as such. As noted in a previous chapter, he

sees a role for the symbiotic approach of engaging the state alongside

that of interstitial evolution in a larger metamorphic

strategy.[592]

While he is wrong to neglect the fundamental shift in correlation of

forces resulting from the terminal crises of capitalism interacting with

new technical possibilities for production in the commons, he is

entirely correct in my opinion in refusing to treat the state as a

monolithic entity and raising the possibility of engaging or

transforming parts of it. And the possibility of “non-reformist reforms”

should not be dismissed.

Negri and Hardt modified their strategic approach to some extent after

completing the **Empire **trilogy, accepting the need for some

admixture of verticalism within the overall horizontalist approach.

For one thing, there are pressing needs (the imminent dangers we face

from austerity, ecological destruction and the advance of fascism) that

won’t wait until the constituent process is complete and we’ve built a

new form of governance…. Another realm where counterpowers are needed…

regards the human necessities for food, health, and shelter, which can

be addressed in part through access to the common.[593]

Despite her seemingly pessimistic analysis quoted earlier, Dinerstein

offered some hopeful advice for dual power movements on the ground and

leftist electoral parties, in their relations with each other. The

advice amounts, essentially, to the leftist parties standing to the side

and handing the mic to the prefigurative movements, and to the movements

constructing dual power to pressure the state toward a Partner State

institutional model coextensive with civil society.

The question then is not how can left governments encourage radical

change from the very institutions, political dynamics and structures of

the State? The question is in what ways can prefigurative movements,

grassroots innovative practices, and citizens’ initiatives push for a

*prefigurative translation* from the government? How can they prevent

the government of the Left from transforming their radical action into

governable practices, institutions, ideas, and legislation that will

obliterate the concrete utopian element of their actions?…

By prefigurative translation I mean an engagement with the creative

process of transformation that is already taking place at the

grassroots, within what I call the ‘beyond zone of movement collective

action’. Prefigurative translation is a form of translation that

requires co-construction of policy. But not only this. Such

co-construction must engage with what is already being proposed and

experienced by grassroots movements instead of attempting to filter

radical elements to prevent them from entering the policy realm….

If the party recognises that change comes from below, from the process

of deployment and expansion of movements’ alternative-creating capacity,

that is being experimented with in what I call *the beyond zone* of

movements activity, policy should be *prefigurative too*. This means

that the left in power should render *visible* what is already being

proposed and experienced at the grassroots. This does not mean to

‘learn’ from the movement’s alternatives, but to facilitate the

emergence of a collective intellect that can create alternative forms of

politics. That is to let the society in movement govern….

The vital goal of autonomous struggles is to overcome the

differentiation between the state and civil society.[594]

Even acting from outside the state, elements of the existing system like

the procedural rules of the regulatory bureaucracies and the judicial

system can be turned against it and used as counterpowers. Negri and

Hardt write:

Absolutely essential in this effort is the work that so many are doing

today that use the legal means of national and international systems as

a kind of counterpower. Class action suits against polluting

corporations; human rights demands against war, torture, and police

abuse; and advocacy for refugees, migrants and inmates — these actions

use the power of the judge against that of the king, exploiting elements

of the legal system against the sovereign power.[595]

Exploiting the capitalist state’s rules against it is a powerful,

low-cost weapon to impede their functioning. The state, like a demon, is

bound by the laws and internal logic of the form it takes. To borrow a

line from Ghostbusters, “Choose the form of the destructor.” When a

segment of the bureaucracy is captured by its own ideological

self-justification, or courts by the letter of the law, they can be used

as a weapon for monkey-wrenching the larger system. Bureaucrats, by

following the letter of policy, often unwittingly engage in

“work-to-rule” against the larger system they serve.

The state, like any authoritarian hierarchy, requires standing rules

that restrict the freedom of subordinates to pursue the institution’s

real purpose, because it can’t trust those subordinates. The state’s

legitimizing rhetoric, we know, conceals a real exploitative function.

Nevertheless, despite the overall functional role of the state, it needs

standard operating procedures to enforce predictable behavior on its

subordinates.

And once subordinates are following those rules, the state can’t send

out dog-whistles telling functionaries what “real” double-super-secret

rules they’re “really” supposed to follow, or to supplement the

countless volumes of rulebooks designed to impose predictability on

subordinates with a secret memo saying “Ignore the rulebooks.” So, while

enough functionaries may ignore the rules to keep the system functioning

after a fashion, others pursue the letter of policy in ways that impair

the “real” mission of the state.

Unlike the state and other authoritarian institutions, self-organized

networks can pursue their real interests while benefiting from their

members’ complete contribution of their abilities, without the hindrance

of standard operating procedures and bureaucratic rules based on

distrust. To put it in terms of St. Paul’s theology, networks can pursue

their interests single-mindedly without the concupiscence — the war in

their members — that weakens hierarchies.

So we can game the system, sabotaging the state with its own rules.

In *Declaration*, Negri and Hardt advocate a sort of symbiotic

relationship or division of labor between the horizontalist movements,

on the one hand, and more-or-less allied progressive parties within the

state.

…From the 1990s to the first decade of this century, governments in

some of the largest countries in Latin America won elections and came to

power on the backs of powerful social movements against neoliberalism

and for the democratic self-management of the common. These elected,

progressive governments have in many cases made great social

advances…. When these governments are in power, however, and

particularly when they repeat the practices of the old regimes, the

social movements continue the struggle, now directed against the

governments that claim to represent them.

A quasi-institutional relationship has thus developed between social

movements and governments. Throughout the twentieth century, socialist

practices established a typology of such relationships as *internal* to

the political structure — the dynamic between trade union and party, for

example, was internal to the functioning of the party, and when in

power, socialist governments configured the activities of social

movements as within their ruling structures. That internal relation

derived from the fact (or assumption) that the union, the party, the

social movements, and the government operated according to the same

ideology, the same understanding of tactics and strategy, and even the

same personnel….

The socialist tradition that posits such an internal relationship

between social movements and parties or ruling institutions, however,

has been broken. Instead one of the characteristics we have observed in

these Latin American countries during this period is the decisive

*externality* and thus separation of the social movements with regard to

organizational practices, ideological positions, and political goals….

This external relationship between movements and governments has the

power to set in motion a significant transformation (and diminution) of

the directive aspects of government action. It could, in other words,

force the mechanisms of government to become processes of governance;

the sites on which different political and administrative wills are

engaged could become multiple and open; and the governing function can

dilute sovereign power to become instead an open laboratory of

consensual interventions and plural creations of legislative

norms.[596]

Richard Bartlett (a cofounder of Loomio and participant in Enspiral)

hints at a similar division of labor, or rather cooperative coexistence,

in the new municipalist movements:

Another uncomfortable coalition you see in Spanish cities is the

collaboration between A) the people who understand the state apparatus

as a means of redirecting civil unrest into channels that support the

status quo, and B) the people who understand the state apparatus as one

of the most effective levers in catalysing social change. In most parts

of the world, this is a boring argument between radicals and liberals,

an endless ping pong match where each team claims to have the One True

Strategy while the Evil Others are undermining the struggle. In Spain

activists have made peace with this tension, courageously taking the

reins of institutional power while maintaining the grassroots mandate

and accountability. For example, the most radical political conference

I’ve been to was mindblowing not just because the speakers were

incredible, but especially when you consider the event was hosted by the

same people who run the Barcelona city government.

To name this tension between street movements and institutional power,

in Madrid they coined the term extitution…[597]

Bernardo Gutiérrez described the concept this way: “If institutions are

organizational systems based on an inside-outside framework, extitutions

are designed as areas where a multitude of agents can spontaneously

assemble. Liquid, flexible, inclusive, itinerant, post-it

extitutions.”[598]

Daniel Chavez, in Uruguay, also takes a nuanced view of the division of

effort between social and political action, based on “my increasingly

pessimistic interpretation of the outcomes of our progressive of [sic]

left governments” in the so-called Pink Tide.

After having followed very closely the processes of Venezuela, Ecuador,

Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, and to a lesser extent also those of

Bolivia and Nicaragua, I think we should ask ourselves up to what point

is it possible for the left to get involved in government without losing

autonomy and our utopian perspective. In other word: is it possible to

operate within the state apparatus without being caught in the

demobilising logic of institutional power? Unlike some of the friends I

mentioned before, I don’t have a single or categorical answer to such

question. I still believe that the state has a very important role to

play, but I’m also convinced that it is now imperative for the left to

get rid of its obsolete state-centric vision and open up to fresh

perspectives like those of the commons.[599]

In actual practice, governments like those of Evo Morales in Bolivia and

Chavez/Maduro in Venezuela which officially proclaimed an alliance with

social movements outside the state and avowed their support for popular,

libertarian socialist, or horizontal institutions, wound up frequently

undermining or sucking energy from such institutions, and pursuing the

kinds of developmentalist or extractivist agendas typically associated

with the authoritarian Left.[600]

As part of a possible solution, Chavez suggests importing aspects of the

European municipalist model.

The side of the European left most active side in the promotion of the

commons is that linked to struggles around the right to the city and the

citizen platforms that won local office in several Spanish cities.

Today, an important part of the European left perceives the city as the

privileged space for political, social and economic experimentation,

without seeing cities as isolated entities or at the margin of processes

aimed at changing the state on a national scale, but recognising their

growing significance in the new regional and world order. It’s not by

chance that the fight against climate change or for the recovery of

public services are led by networks of progressive local

governments.** Barcelona En Comú,** the citizen coalition that now

governs the Catalan capital, in particular, is a very powerful source of

inspiration of regional and world importance…. Barcelona is today a

laboratory for the design and testing of multiple initiatives inspired

by the principle of the commons.[601]

He also finds inspiration in Jeremy Corbyn’s proposals to reverse

Thatcher’s privatizations — but without organizing public enterprises on

Morrison’s managerial-statist model this time around.

But renationalisation, from this perspective, does not simply implies

that the state retakes control by going back to the obsolete state-owned

companies of the past, but rather the combination of different forms of

public ownership and management. In short, Labour proposes not merely to

re-nationalise companies that had been privatised during Thatcherism and

Blairism, but to reconvert the big banks and other financial

institutions that during the crisis had been saved from bankruptcy with

public monies into a network of local banks based on mixed ownership

(state and social), or the creation of new municipal utilities. The

party is committed to create new municipal utilities… that propose the

de-privatisation of power through the launch of new public enterprises,

rooted in a more democratic type of management based on the active

participation of users and workers, being environmentally sustainable,

and securing services with affordable rates for the entire

population.[602]

Even for Holloway, pressuring the state from outside occupies a

significant place in political strategy:

The problem of revolutionary politics is not to win power but to develop

forms of political articulation that would force those in power to obey

the people (so that, fully developed, the separation between state and

society would be overcome and the state effectively

abolished).[603]

Paul Mason is in the general autonomist tradition, insofar as he

envisions putting the primary emphasis on the spontaneous rise of new

institutional forms like peer networks, and treating state action as

simply a way to run interference for or boost these institutional forms,

rather than (as with the Old Left) the primary instrumentality for

actually *creating* the new society.

Still, he also sees the state playing a vital role in managing the

transition, certainly to a greater degree than in Holloway’s model, or

in Negri and Hardt’s horizontalist vision. All the individual elements —

cooperatives, peer-networks, and the like — will only coalesce into

post-capitalism if “we… promote them with regulation just as vigorous

as that which capitalism used to drive the peasants off the land or

destroy handicraft work in the eighteenth century.”[604]

Post-capitalism may offer an “escape route” —

but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and

protected by a massive change in what governments do.

…Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods

and services that work only when they are free, or shared, defines the

route beyond the market system. It will need the state to create the

framework….[605]

At the same time, he tries to leave open the possibility of diversity of

strategic approaches.

What happens to the state? It probably gets less powerful over time —

and in the end its functions are assumed by society. I’ve tried to make

this a project usable both by people who see states as useful and those

who don’t; you could probably model an anarchist version and a statist

version and try them out.[606]

(And in fact what Mason calls the “wiki-state”[607] is a lot

like the “Partner State.”)

Finally, most of these thinkers have largely abandoned, along with the

Old Left’s emphasis on insurrectionary transitions or abrupt changes of

regime, the distinction between “reform” and “revolution.”

Indeed Negri and Hardt, in *Multitude*, treat the distinction between

the two as meaningless.

We say this not because we think that reform and revolution are the same

thing, but that in today’s conditions they cannot be separated. Today

the historical processes of transformation are so radical that even

reformist proposals can lead to revolutionary change. And when

democratic reforms of the global system prove to be incapable of

providing the bases of a real democracy, they demonstrate even more

forcefully that a revolutionary change is needed and make it even more

possible. It is useless to rack our brains over whether a proposal is

reformist or revolutionary; what matters is that it enters into the

constituent process.[608]

Harry Cleaver reads Marx as at least suggesting the possibility of a

gradual transition process. In his discussion in *Critique of the Gotha

Program* of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, Cleaver

notes, “Marx raises the question, but does not answer it, as to ‘what

social functions will remain in existence [in communist society] that

are analogous to present state functions?’” This amounts, among other

things, to “a general prophecy that capitalism — a mode of social

organization that itself took centuries to transform, to some degree,

virtually every nook and cranny of society — will not be done away with

all at once.” And, he adds, Marx himself does not specify what social

functions will remain in existence in communist society. At any rate

working class power is not an all or nothing thing. Over the years

workers have sometimes had, to a greater or lesser extent, “ the power

to determine elements of transformation and new alternatives.” And they

have exercised this power, at various times and places, “in many

different ways.”

We have often successfully struggled to transform aspects of the

capitalist world to better meet our needs and desires. We have also,

repeatedly, crafted more appealing alternatives. That we have not

succeeded in transforming all, or even most, aspects of capitalism and

that we have sometimes been unable to prevent our alternatives being

either crushed or co-opted, should neither blind us to our successes nor

prevent us from building on them to further transform “the present state

of things.”[609]

Cleaver proposes, in place of the old distinction between reform and

revolution that dominated the Old Left, a new one by the Midnight Notes

Collective between “*inside* capitalism (i.e., consistent with its

dynamic) or *outside* of it (i.e., *autonomous*, constituting real

alternatives).” He quotes the Collective from their *Promissory Notes*

pamphlet:

autonomous struggles strive to create social spaces and relations that

are as independent of and opposed to capitalist social relations as

possible. They may directly confront or seek to take over and reorganize

capitalist institutions (a factory, for example) or create new spaces

outside those institutions (e.g., urban gardening or a housing

cooperative) or access resources that should be common. They foster

collective, non-commodified relations, processes, and products that

function to some real degree outside of capitalist relations and give

power to the working class in its efforts to create alternatives to

capital.

This takes us back to Cleaver’s ruptural strategy of opening, expanding

and linking up spaces outside the logic of capital:

If Marx’s perception was correct, and I think our historical experience

since his time has confirmed it, we are no more likely to be able to

abolish money all at once than we are to abolish capitalism as a whole.

If so, then it seems to me, the most practical and productive way to

proceed is to examine the steps that we have taken in the past, and that

we might take in the future, to figure out how to advance progressively

toward both objectives. Those steps include both those that restrict the

sphere of money and exchange — while expanding spheres free of it — and

those that involve the diversion of money for our own purposes,

including funding programs designed to reduce or eliminate the need for

it. As we strive to marginalize and ultimately squeeze money, exchange,

markets, and capitalism entirely out of our lives, both kinds of steps

constitute a subversion of capital’s own use of money.[610]

I don’t think any of the old privileged strategies of attacking the

state with the objective of abolishing it immediately and in toto, or

trying to build a cadre of professional revolutionaries to talk everyone

else into uniting to overthrow the government and seize state power, are

likely to be any more effective in getting us beyond capitalism in the

future than they have been in the past. Instead it seems to me that the

best we can do is to be clear about what, concretely, we want to get rid

of, and then set about trying to do so, while simultaneously fighting

for more time, space, and resources to experiment with, and elaborate

alternatives to virtually every aspect of capitalist

society.[611]

The time and space he writes of entail, specifically, the fight for

increased free time outside the wage relationship, and social spaces

that (to quote **Promissory Notes **again) “strengthen the commons

and expand de-commodified relationships and spaces.”

Social democratic versions [of the commons] include such things as

health care, education, social security — however imperfectly realized.

However, does the struggle also support bringing the bottom up,

expanding inclusiveness and participatory control? On the other hand,

are autonomous sectors able to avoid commodification (avoid being turned

into business products or services for sale)? Even if they cannot do so

completely, can they maintain a political stance and active behavior

that pushes towards non-commodity forms? More generally, how can the

working class on small or large scales create forms of exchange that are

or tend toward being de-commodified? Create markets (forms of exchange)

that do not rule lives and livelihoods? Reduce the reach of

commodification and capitalist markets on people’s life?[612]

Marx himself, Cleaver also notes, supported reforms involving the

shortening of the work day, increased pay, and the like — not just as

exercises in building working class consciousness for the future

revolution, but in altering the balance of power here and now and

expanding the realm of freedom.

None of these objectives would end capitalism, but making gains in each

of these battles would strengthen workers, rupture existing forms of

capitalist command and exploitation, and bring about material

transformations in the organization of class relationships. It was the

success of workers’ struggles in forcing down the length of the working

day… that drove capitalists to invest more heavily in machinery,

reducing the amount of work required to produce each unit, and at least

potentially reducing the amount of work required to meet workers’ needs.

Success in increasing wages could have the same effect. Struggles to

either raise wages or limit capitalist efforts to reduce them could not

only preserve the material grounds of workers’ strength but also provide

experience in self-organization and militant action that would

facilitate future struggles.[613]

André Gorz’s distinction between “reformist” and “non-reformist” reforms

is useful here. Gorz argued that, if the choice between capitalism and

socialism is seen as a one-time, all-or-nothing thing, so that no

evolution towards a post-capitalist society is possible so long as

capitalism exists, then labor is put in the strategically untenable

position of postponing all fights for material improvement until “after

the Revolution.” Although the workers’ movement risks having any

particular reform coopted by capitalism for its own purposes, it’s a

necessary risk compared to the certainty of irrelevance otherwise; since

insurrectionary seizure of power is impossible, doing nothing in the

meantime weakens labor’s position. Given this, one safeguard against

cooptation is to be consciously guided by the “non-reformist” standard

in pursuing reforms.[614]

Is it possible from *within* — that is to say, without having previously

destroyed capitalism — to impose anti-capitalist solutions which will

not immediately be incorporated into and subordinated to the

system?[615]

…[A non-reformist reform bases the possibility of attaining its

objective on the implementation of fundamental political and economic

changes. These changes can be sudden, just as they can be gradual. But

in any case they assume a modification of the relations of power; they

assume that the workers will take over power or assert a force (that is

to say, a non-institutionalized force) strong enough to establish,

maintain, and expand those tendencies within the system which serve to

weaken capitalism and to shake its joints….

…The only possible line for the movement is to seize, from the present

on, those powers which will prepare it to assume the leadership of

society and which will permit it in the meantime to control and to plan

the development of the society, and to establish certain limiting

mechanisms which will restrict or dislocate the power of

capital.[616]

In other words, whether a reform is “reformist” or “non-reformist”

depends not on whether it presents an obvious and objective appearance,

to both capital and labor, of incompatibility with the present power

structure. It depends on how it will affect the long-term balance of

power between labor and capital, and be exploitable by the former as

leverage against the latter to impose still further concessions in the

future.

Another criterion for distinguishing reformist from non-reformist

reforms is who controls the implementation.

Structural reform is by definition a reform implemented or controlled by

those who demand it. Be it in agriculture, the university, property

relations, the region, the administration, the economy, etc., a

structural reform *always* requires the creation of new centers of

democratic power.

Whether it be at the level of companies, schools, municipalities,

regions, or of the national Plan, etc., structural reform always

requires a *decentralization* of the decision making power, a

*restriction on the powers of State or Capital*, an *extension of

popular power*, that is to say, a victory of democracy over dictatorship

of profit. No nationalization is *in itself* a structural

reform.[617]

The alternatives can also be framed as “subordinate” vs. “autonomous”

powers. The pursuit of autonomous power is “a strategy of *progressive*

conquest of power by the workers…”[618]

…To assert that every reform, so long as political hegemony does not

belong to the working class, is of a reformist character and only

results in a preservation of the system, making it more tolerable, is to

argue from a fallacious schematicism insofar as workers’ power is

concerned. For while it is true that every reform (for example,

nationalization and economic planning) is absorbed a system and ends up

by consolidating it so long as it leaves the power of the capitalist

state intact, and as long as it leaves the execution and administration

of the reform in the hands of the State alone, it is also true,

inversely, that every conquest of *autonomous* powers by the working

class, whether these powers be institutionalized *or not*, will not

attenuate class antagonisms but, on the contrary, will accentuate them,

will yield new opportunities for attacking the system, will make the

system not more but less tolerable by sharpening the conflict between

the human demands of the workers and the inert needs of capital. One

must indeed be a poor Marxist to believe that in the framework of the

capitalist relationships of production, the fundamental contradictions

between labor and capital can be attenuated to the point of becoming

acceptable when the workers’ local conquest of power gives them a richer

and more concrete consciousness of their power as a

class.[619]

Paul Mason writes, similarly, of policy measures that, by shifting

bargaining power and lowering the rate of extraction, simultaneously

promote both postcapitalist transition and liberal capitalism in the

interim. In the event of a city like Barcelona adopting basic income and

promoting commons-based peer production, he asks,

Would capitalism collapse?

No. The desperate, frantic “survival capitalists” would go away — the

rip-off consultancies; the low-wage businesses; the rent-extractors.

But you would attract the most innovative capitalists on earth, and you

would make the city vastly more livable for the million-plus people who

call it home.[620]

Regarding the rather slippery distinction between “reform” and

“revolution,” and the question of the relationship of commons-based

counter-institutions to the existing system in the interim, Vangelis

Papadimitropoulos’s threefold classification schema of analytic

approaches is useful.

Whereas the liberal theory places the Commons between the state and the

market, the reformist theory argues for the reforms necessary that could

force capitalism to adjust to the Commons in the long run. In contrast

to both the liberal and the reformist, the anti-capitalist theory

supports the development of the Commons against and beyond

capitalism.[621]

That is, the liberal theory assumes the commons will coexist alongside

state and market, as parts within a functional division of labor, as a

normal state of affairs which persists indefinitely. The reformist

theory views capitalism as a system with an end, but sees that end as a

gradual process that will be brought about by capitalism adjusting to

the commons over the long run. The commons will “replace capitalism from

within, just as capitalism did with feudalism…. Commons-based peer

production can beat capitalism on its own ground: that is, competition.

Technology can render the Commons more competitive in relation to

capitalism and pave the way for a post-capitalist ethical economy

supported by a partner state.”[622]

The anti-capitalist view, as represented by George Caffentzis and Silvia

Federici, agrees with the reformists that capitalism will come to an

end. In the meantime, the commons serve as an ecology of

counter-institutions that protect us from the worst aspects of

capitalism and also serve as the seeds of the post-capitalist society:

From the ‘free software’ to the ‘solidarity economy’ movement, a whole

world of new social relations is coming into existence based on the

principle of communal sharing, sustained by the realization that

capitalism has nothing to give us except more misery and divisions.

Indeed, at a time of permanent crisis and constant assaults on jobs,

wages, and social spaces, the construction of commons – ‘time banks’,

urban gardens, Community Supported Agriculture, food coops, local

currencies, ‘creative commons’ licenses, bartering practices –

represents a crucial means of survival. In Greece, in the last two

years, as wages and pensions have been cut on average by 30 percent and

unemployment among youth has reached 50 percent, various forms of mutual

aid have appeared, like free medical services, free distributions of

produce by farmers in urban centres, and the ‘reparation’ of the

electrical wires disconnected because the bills were not paid.

However, commoning initiatives are more than dikes against the

neoliberal assault on our livelihood. They are the seeds, the embryonic

form of an alternative mode of production in the make. This is how we

should view also the squatters’ movements that have emerged in many

urban peripheries, signs of a growing population of city dwellers

‘disconnected’ from the formal world economy, now reproducing themselves

outside of state and market control.[623]

Anti-capitalist commons, then, should be conceived as both autonomous

spaces from which to reclaim control over the conditions of our

reproduction, and as bases from which to counter the processes of

enclosure and increasingly disentangle our lives from the market and the

state. Thus they differ from those advocated by the Ostrom School, where

commons are imagined in a relation of coexistence with the public and

with the private. Ideally, they embody the vision that Marxists and

anarchists have aspired to but failed to realize: that of a society made

of ‘free associations of producers’, self-governed and organized to

ensure not an abstract equality but the satisfaction of people’s needs

and desires. Today we see only fragments of this world (in the same way

as in late Medieval Europe we may have seen only fragments of

capitalism) but already the commons we build should enable us to gain

more power with regard to capital and the state and embryonically

prefigure a new mode of production, no longer built on a competitive

principle, but on the principle of collective

solidarity.[624]

They differ from the reformists in that they see no point in trying to

change the character of capitalist institutions in the interim, or shift

the capitalist system from within. In fact attempting to do so carries

the risk of cooptation, with capitalism incorporating free and

open-source information into its physical production models and thereby

prolonging its own life.

They argue that the digital or immaterial Commons cannot have an

autonomous substance in their own right, as they depend for their

reproduction on both capitalism and the material commons. The digital or

immaterial Commons should connect instead to the material Commons and

form an alliance of anti-capitalistic Commons developing against

capitalism….

But as Papadimitropoulos points out, the fact that both reformists and

anti-capitalists see the end of capitalism as a prolonged process, in

which the commons exist within the interstices of the old society,

renders the precise boundary between them rather unclear.

[625]

What both the liberal and the anti-capitalist versions of the Commons…

miss is the likelihood of technology bridging the gap between material

and immaterial production, thus challenging the monopoly of capitalism

on the means and resources of production. The combination of the

Internet, free software, 3D printers and artificial technology may

render large-scale material production redundant, forcing corporations

to adapt in the long run to the decentralisation and commonification of

production. Therefore, the model of an open cooperativism between

ethical market entities, the partner state and the Commons carries

significant potential for the future development of the Commons, since

corporatism and the state are not going to wither away anytime

soon.[626]

What the anti-capitalist version misses in comparison to the reformist

is a ‘realistic’ plan of a transition from capitalism to the

commons….[627]

Most importantly, I would argue, the two approaches — exodus by means of

a counter-economy created outside the capitalist system, on the one

hand, and shifting the character of the overall system and its legacy

institutions from within on the other — are not mutually exclusive.

Regardless of what terminology is used, the fact of the matter is that

all commons-based institutions, no matter how anti-capitalist the intent

of those participating them, will interact to some extent with the

capitalist system as a matter of simple necessity. Since the

anti-capitalists themselves recognize that the commons will exist

alongside capitalism for some indeterminate period of time, there’s no

reason the commons cannot condition the institutions of capital and

state at the same time they’re constructing the successor society.

What’s more, institutions that were governed by the core logic of one

system may well navigate the systemic transition while maintaining the

same name and some degree of institutional continuity, despite a change

in character corresponding to their relationship to the changing larger

system in which they are embedded. A craft guild in 1500 might have the

same name as, and organizational continuity with, a craft guild that

existed in 1200; yet in the one case it would be a mercantile capitalist

corporation, and in the other a democratically governed federation of

master craftsmen, with its character in both cases defined by the

respective capitalist and feudal systems of which it was a part.

Massimo De Angelis sees the task of the commons movement as not only to

build a counter-economy outside the state and capital, but also to shift

the character of the state and capital themselves in a more commons-like

direction through engagement with them.

A commons movement is not simply a movement against the valuation

processes and injustices of capital as well as the hierarchies of the

state, but a movement that seek [sic] to commonalize many functions now

both in private and state hands, especially those functions that have to

do with social reproduction, and that define the quality and the quality

of services available….

Aside from the strategy of creating commons from the ground up…, another

strategy is to *commonalize* its existing private or public systems and

transform them into resilient organisations, which in turn imply [sic],

much deeper democratisation and cooperation, namely basic commons

coordinates.

The objective to turn more and more spheres of societies into

sustainable and resilient spheres thus coincides with that of adopting

commons as a central kernel of the architecture of a new mode of

production integrating many types of modes of production….

Commonalisation means to shift a public or private organisation into a

commons or, more likely, into a web of interconnected and nested commons

giving shape to metacommonality, with the overarching goal of

resilience….

For a public institution or private corporation, commonalisation does

not mean that a given final result is optimal, but that a process has

begun along which there is a collective effort, through the commoners’

democratic management of constraints, costs, and rewards, to increase

all sorts of commoning across different social actors involved in the

corporation or public service….

- the parameter of democracy: democratisation of a state service or a

corporation along a scale that has as its two opposite poles

management versus direct democracy…;

- maximum accountability and transparency and the ability to recall

every public servant… and other stakeholder involved in the

production of the service;

- opening the boundaries between different types of practices and

subjects thus allowing maximum cognitive diversity as well as

increasing the porosity of the system boundaries to a variety of

subjects, knowledges and practices….[628]

He mentions Barcelona en Comu as an example, with experiments like

participatory budgeting and open policy proposal wikis.[629]

Likewise, he refers to the commons being able to make use of capital on

favorable terms “because there is an echo of the commons inside capital

or state systems, and thus it is possible to define meta-commonal

relations across capital, state and commons.”[630] It is

important to remember that state agencies and capitalist corporations

are not monoliths; they are governed by hierarchies precisely because

the individuals and social groups within them all have interests that

may not coincide with the official goals of the organization or the

interests of its leadership, so that it becomes necessary to resort to

power relations in order to enclose their cooperative interactions —

interactions that may function, internally, on the basis of something

like Graeber’s “everyday communism” — as sources of value for the

organization.

As previously noted, authoritarian institutions are always subject to

concupiscence, the kind of “war within their members” that St. Paul

described in the individual. We already saw how this plays out in

bureaucracies being hamstrung by their own internal rule. But it also

shows itself through the converse: the fact that they’re made up of

human beings with minds of their own who sometimes *don’t* stick to the

script.

The commons sector can often hope to find friendly individuals and

subcultures within the “Belly of the Beast.” We can pursue tactical

alliances with dissident subgroups within the state bureaucracy,

appealing to their genuine attachment to the stated missions of the

agencies they work for in ways that undermine their real missions.

Bollier and Helfrich take a similar view of the state, arguing that an

understanding of how state power works leads to the inference that there

is “no such thing as the state.”

A relational approach to state power helps us envision all sorts of

piecemeal ways of advancing the commons. All can contribute to a more

consequential, transformative agenda that will reconfigure power

relations 1) within the state institutions; and 2) between them and

commoners. If we can focus on the different agents and layers of state

power instead of the fictional monolith known as “the state,” we can

imagine other ways of involving the public in the day-to-day business of

governing. We can get a glimpse of the possibilities in open platforms

that invite citizens to help city councils in urban planning, government

websites that encourage citizen feedback about public services,

participatory budgeting programs that let citizens make spending

decisions, and government support for co-housing and volunteer networks

for the elderly. A fruitful collaboration between a commons and the

state can arise because commoners can provide services that neither

commercial enterprises nor government agencies can or want to

provide.[631]

Once we choose to see the state not as an omnipotent monolith but as a

configuration of power that varies a great deal and is even parochial

and vulnerable in certain respects, we can begin to imagine ways to

alter state power in piecemeal ways, as opportunities arise. We can see

how social practices and relations can help us transform state power, at

least at some incremental level. While modalities of governance and

state authority vary immensely, people in more intimate local contexts

experience politics as more accessible, adaptable, and

accountable.[632]

Much of the disagreement on the Left about the role of electoral

politics results from the lack of a common understanding of its purpose.

Take, for example, the conflict between those who vote for an

establishment Democratic Party nominee in the interest of harm

reduction, and those who say “the two parties are the same.” It is a

mistake in my opinion to view electoral politics as the primary means of

pursuing progressive change. Voting for the “lesser evil” is not

necessarily “liberal” or “reformist”; rather, it is fully compatible

with an interstitialist approach that sees the development of

counter-institutions outside the state as the primary means of building

the successor society. In this view, one votes the lesser evil — e.g.,

voting for an establishment Democrat against Trump — in order to stave

off the worst of the immediate fascist threat and buy time, and to

create breathing space for the primary project of building

counter-institutions. The purpose of electoral politics is not to build

the successor society, but to create the least unfavorable background

conditions for doing so.

So while promoting candidates like Sanders or Corbyn is worthwhile as a

long-shot effort at creating an especially favorable environment — who

wouldn’t prefer pursuing interstitial development against a background

of universal healthcare, basic income, drastically reformed copyright,

or cooperatively-governed public services? — even replacing Trump with

someone who is not Trump is a real and significant improvement. To argue

otherwise entails some accelerationist assumptions (“the worse, the

better,” etc.) that do not bear close scrutiny.

Immanuel Wallerstein advocated a similar strategy of simultaneously

engaging the state with the primary goal of mitigating harm, and

building independent social structures of our own. There is no way of

avoiding the necessity for

short-term defensive action, including electoral action. The world’s

populations live in the present, and their immediate needs have to be

addressed. Any movement that neglects them is bound to lose the

widespread passive support that is essential for its long-term success.

But the motive and justification for defensive action should not be that

of remedying a failing system but rather of preventing its negative

effects from getting worse in the short run.

But this must be combined with “the establishment of interim,

middle-range goals that seem to move in the right direction.”

I would suggest that one of the most useful — substantively,

politically, psychologically — is the attempt to move towards selective,

but ever-widening, decommodification…. Industries, especially failing

industries, should be decommodified. This does not mean they should be

‘nationalized’ — for the most part, simply another version of

commodification. It means we should create structures, operating in the

market, whose objective is performance and survival rather than profit.

This can be done, as we know, from the history of universities or

hospitals — not all, but the best. Why is such a logic impossible for

steel factories threatened with delocalization?[633]

In my opinion, the key to a division of labor is adopting ahead of time

an understanding aimed at preventing political parties from sucking the

energy and life out of the counter-institution building effort in civil

society, and diverting it instead into parliamentary politics. The

solution is to establish ahead of time that the primary axis of

post-capitalist construction is interstitial, i.e., actually building

the successor society here and now. Electoral politics and participation

in the policy process is entirely secondary and auxiliary.

But it requires a realist approach to the division of labor, which will

persist regardless of whether the political arm achieves state power.

The social movements must be firm in their understanding that their

purpose is to construct the successor society within the interstices of

the existing one, through the creation and development of

counter-institutions, regardless of who controls the state. And they

must be openly resolved not to defer to the party in power, even if it

is an offshoot of their own movement, or allow it to constrain their

range of alternatives. As Bollier and Helfrich put it,

social movements are more likely to be transformative if they develop

parallel economies with *structural independence* from the conventional

market/state. This means also that commons are more likely to survive

and retain their independence if they are *less* entangled with the

conventional economy and state power, and if they can rely on internal

systems (Peer Governance, knowledge-sharing, federated support from

other commoners) for resilience. At the same time, it is imperative to

engage with state power through elections and traditional advocacy, if

only because that field of action can change the conditions for widening

spaces of commonality. It is too consequential to be ignored.

So commoners need a two-track mindset in dealing with state power: a

primary focus on building the new — keeping the conceptual insights

above in mind — while also attempting to neutralize the

old.[634]

And while the electoral or revolutionary party is still entirely an

opposition party, with no immediate hope for power, it must be given to

understand that the social movements will not recognize its authority to

restrain their efforts in constructing the successor society. The

political arm’s central purpose, whether in or out of power, is to run

political interference on behalf of the social movements, and to

maximize their space for independent action — whether it be through

popular mobilization against domestic and international forces, or in

negotiations with neoliberal actors abroad. In face both the political

and social arms must operate from the explicit understanding that the

latter will always maintain their entire independence, and will not be

bound by any concessions made by the political arm (as was the case with

Syriza in its negotiations with the European Central Bank). Rather, it

is to be understood that the entire autonomy of the social movements

will serve to cloak the political arm with plausible deniability,

enabling it to play “good cop” in negotiating with the United States,

IMF or whomever, and to say “We’d like to grant this concession, but we

have no authority to enforce it on the local communes. If we make a deal

they don’t like, they’ll just do something even more radical than

they’re doing now.”

Part Three. Seeds beneath the Snow

Chapter Nine: The Commons Sector and the Theory of Municipalism

Introduction

Throughout this book, we have made repeated references to the existence

of a parallel commons-based economy alongside the capitalist one, the

terminal crisis tendencies of capitalism, and the interstitial

coalescence of the commons-based economy as a successor to the dying

capitalist system. But the discussion has been mostly theoretical up to

this point, and needs to be fleshed out in concrete terms.

Accordingly, this final section of the book has two general themes (both

of which will be frequently referenced throughout, rather than being

treated sequentially). First, the actual building blocks of the

post-capitalist society. We already examined, in Chapter Two, the ways

in which changes in production and communications technology have

rendered obsolete the Old Left focus on seizing the means of production;

and we examined, in subsequent chapters, the implications of general

trends like the social factory and the growing importance of our social

relationships as sources of productivity for revolutionary strategy.

Now, having examined the forest, we take a closer look at the trees.

We’re not simply adopting more decentralized production technologies or

organizational forms, but coalescing all these building blocks into a

fundamentally different economic paradigm. The problem to date is that

technologies have been selected for or against based on the values of a

larger system of control. Fortunately, for reasons already discussed,

this system has become unsustainable and is in the process of

disintegrating. In creating the successor system, we must select for the

technologies and organizational forms that serve our needs for survival,

as the system we formerly depended on decays.

These new technologies and social forms by themselves would be of

limited significance if we had no reason to expect their widespread

adoption. Regardless of their abstract superiority in terms of material

efficiency or amenability to human nature, these things might remain

largely theoretical for the indefinite future absent some plausible way

of overcoming the inertias and path dependencies of the present system.

This leads us to our second theme: the crisis conditions of capitalism

as a system, and the crisis conditions of capitalism in everyday lives

of ordinary people, intersect with the new liberatory possibilities of

the new technologies and social forms to create a “perfect storm.” In a

time of declining total work hours, underemployment and precarity, and

the collapse of state- and employer-based social safety nets, the

“killer app” of the commons-based counter-economy and direct production

for use is survival. As Neal Gorenflo explained the inspiration for the

title for an anthology:

About six months ago, a weather-beaten, middle-age man asked me for

money on the platform of the Mountain View Caltrain station.

I gave him three dollars. He thanked me, and asked what I did for work.

I introduced myself, learned his name (Jeff) and we shook hands. I

pulled out a card from my computer bag, and handed it to him as I told

him that I publish an online magazine about sharing.

Jeff lit up, “Oh I get that, when you’re homeless, it’s share or

die.”[635]

This “killer app” function of direct production for use, in the parallel

social economy, is at the heart of the “Plenitude” that Juliet Schor

promotes as a model for post-capitalist transition.

As individuals take up the principles of plenitude, they are not merely

adopting a private response to what is perforce a collective problem.

Rather, they are pioneers of the micro (individual-level) activity that

is necessary to create the macro (system-wide)

equilibrium….[636]

It amounts to a “parallel economy developing” — of necessity — “amid the

wreckage of the collapse.”[637]

Luis Razeto Migliaro, in a book on the solidarity economy, frames it as

something like the stone that the builders refused:

The skills and competencies of the popular sector, which are superfluous

to the demands of the market and the world of formal economy, have not

gone unused just because the companies and the State fail to employ

them. Having been excluded from both employment and consumption in the

formal sector, and still facing the crucial challenge of subsistence,

the world of the poor has become economically activated, giving rise to

the many different activities and organizations which make up what we

call the “popular economy.”

The popular economy combines traditional resources and capacities for

labor, technology, organization, and commerce with others of a modern

type, giving rise to an incredibly heterogeneous and varied

proliferation of activities oriented to securing subsistence and the

means of daily life. It thrives and expands by seeking out interstices

and opportunities in the market, finding ways to make use of benefits

and resources provided by public services and subsidies, and inserting

itself into projects promoted by non-governmental organizations.

Sometimes it even manages to reconstruct reciprocal and cooperative

economic relations of the type that predominated in more traditional

forms of economic organization.[638]

He divides it up into three main categories of activity:

a. Labor for personal benefit, performed by innumerable independent

workers who create goods, provide services, or sell on a small scale, be

it at home, on the street, in the public square, on public transport, at

community fairs, or other places where people gather. In a study of

self-employed workers in Chile, three hundred distinct informal

“occupations” were identified.

b. Family micro-enterprises, operated by one to three people, preparing

goods or selling on a small scale, using their living space or an

adjacent space for a workplace and store. The phenomenon of

micro-enterprises has become so widespread in the popular districts of

the big cities of Latin America that it is normal to find them in one of

every four or five homes.

c. Popular economic organizations, that is, small groups or associations

of people or families who collectively manage their scant resources so

as to develop activities that generate income or provide services to

satisfy the basic needs of work, food, health, education, housing, etc.

on a basis of cooperation and mutual aid. Solidarity workshops, housing

committees, “buying together,” community utilities, “building together,”

family gardens, and community development programs are some of the most

widespread types.

And this popular economy has arisen and expanded, not as a temporary

phenomenon, but as a long-term response to crisis tendencies of

capitalism which force “the poor and the marginalized to find in

themselves the necessary forces for subsistence.”[639]

Ben Reynolds describes it, similarly, as capitalism eroding its own

foundations:

At the same time, capitalism gnaws away at its own foundations. While

industrial capital centralizes, distributed production places a widening

range of productive technologies in the hands of individuals. Some of

these technologies facilitate capitalism’s growth, but others foretell

something different. Instead of producing things for exchange and

profit, people cooperate with one another and produce things directly

for their own use. They eschew private property and copyright, sharing

goods freely.

In this new world, scarcity is artificial. Armed with their own

machines, the people square off against industrial capital and they

often win. There is a cost to this victory. The rise of a mode of

production based on freely shared work and use cannot simply coexist

with wage labor and exchange value. While it remains trapped within a

capitalist society, distributed production cannot flourish to its full

extent. Instead, it acts as a steadily growing vision of a new world

within the shell of the old: a world without scarcity and a world

without labor.[640]

Silvia Federici sees such measures as a response not only to economic

pressures in the wake of the 2008 crash, but to the austerity promoted

around the world by the Washington Consensus over the past several

decades.

It is not a coincidence that in the last few years, in Greece, as wages

and pensions have been cut on average by 30 percent and unemployment

among youth has reached 50 percent, several forms of mutual aid have

appeared, including free medical services, free distributions of produce

by farmers in urban centers, and the ‘repair’ by electricians of wires

that were cut because the bills were not paid.[641]

But all these expedients are more than just a reaction to immediate

circumstances. They’re the beginnings of a new world that will be

thriving long after capitalism is gone.

We must stress, however, that the commoning initiatives we see

proliferating around us — ‘time banks,’ urban gardens,

community-supported agriculture, food co-ops, local currencies, Creative

Commons licenses, bartering practices, information sharing — are more

than dikes against the neoliberal assault on our livelihood. They are

experiments in self-provisioning and the seeds of an alternative mode of

production in the making. This is also how we should view the squatters’

movements that have formed in many urban peripheries throughout the

world since the 1980s, products of land expropriations but also signs of

a growing population of city dwellers ‘disconnected’ from the formal

world economy, now organizing their reproduction outside of state and

market control. As Raúl Zibechi suggests, these urban land squats are

better envisioned as a “planet of commons.”…[642]

I. The Growth of the Commons Sector As a Lifeline

Although many Leftists dismiss exodus-based strategies as “lifestylism,”

they are in fact building a counter-system that — for all the reasons

examined in Chapter Two — uses resources more efficiently than

capitalism.

We live in a time of terminal crisis for centralized institutions of all

kinds, including their two most notable forms: states and large

corporations. Both a major cause and major symptom of this transition is

the steady reduction in the amount of labor needed to produce a given

level of output, and consequently in total aggregate demand for wage

labor. This shows up in shrinking rates of workforce participation, and

a shift of a growing part of the remaining workforce from full-time work

to part-time and precarious employment (the latter including temporary

and contract work). Another symptom is the retrenchment of the state in

the face of fiscal crisis and a trend towards social austerity in most

Western countries; this is paralleled by a disintegration of traditional

employer-based safety nets, as part of the decline in full-time

employment.

The same technological trends that are reducing the total need for labor

also, in many cases, make direct production for use in the informal,

social and household economies much more economically feasible. Cheap

open-source CNC machine tools, networked information and digital

platforms, Permaculture and community gardens, alternative currencies

and mutual credit systems, all reduce the scale of feasible production

for many goods to the household, multiple household and neighborhood

levels, and similarly reduce the capital outlays required for directly

producing consumption needs to a scale within the means of such

groupings

Put all these trends together, and we see the old model of secure

livelihood through wages collapsing at the same time new technology is

destroying the material basis for dependence on corporations and the

state.

But like all transitions, this is a transition not only from something,

but *to* something. That something bears a more than passing resemblance

to the libertarian communist future Pyotr Kropotkin described in *The

Conquest of Bread* and *Fields, Factories and Workshops*: the

relocalization of most economic functions into mixed

agricultural/industrial villages, the control of production by those

directly engaged in it, and a fading of the differences between town and

country, work and leisure, and brain-work and muscle-work.

In particular, it is to a large extent a transition to a post-capitalist

society centered on the commons.

*Micro-Manufacturing and Self-Provisioning.** It’s fortuitous that the

same cheap, ephemeral small-scale production technologies that are

helping to bring about the terminal crisis of capitalism from surplus

capital, are also offering a safety net for those unemployed or

underemployed by the dying capitalist system.

Historically, the household sector has presented something of a dilemma

to capital. Throughout the history of capitalism, according to Immanuel

Wallerstein, workers have used the household as a unit for pooling

risks, costs and income among laborers and non-laborers. Capital has

encouraged this household economy insofar as it externalizes the

reproduction of labor power on society at large, so that unpaid labor

carries out the reproduction of labor power. At the same time, it has

balanced this strategy against the need to prevent the household from

getting so large that its risk and cost-pooling functions lead to an

unacceptable increase in the bargaining power of labor. “The household

as an income-pooling unit can be seen as a fortress both of

accommodation to and resistance to the patterns of labor-force

allocation favored by accumulators.”[643]

This is true of the commons in general, as Brigitte Kratzwald argues:

The ambivalence of the commons in capitalism stems from one of

capitalism’s biggest contradictions: capital cannot reproduce itself. In

order to survive, it needs resources from outside. This is one reason

why, in opposition to other opinions, capitalism can never be a

totality; several modes of production exist simultaneously in every

society. The sources from which capital takes what it needs so that the

production of added value can function are unpaid work (usually from

women), natural resources, and commons. Capital is very successful in

making commons and other resources outside of itself useful for its own

ends.

On the other hand… the production, use, and tending of commons creates

a certain amount of independence from the dominant system for

people.[644]

As James O’Connor noted in *Accumulation Crisis*, mass consumption has

been “an Achilles heel of capitalism.”

This is so because of the irreducible autonomy of the process of

reproduction of labor-power…. [Reproduction takes place] outside

capitalist relations of production. This means that in the model of full

capitalism individual workers and their families utilize accumulated

stocks of “means of subsistence production,” e.g., housing, consumer

durables. While this creates potentials for capital to shift the burden

of reproduction costs of labor-power to the household and community, it

also creates potentials for the working class to hoard labor-power or

withdraw labor-power from capital on a mass basis.[645]

In regard to the latter, “the accumulated stocks of means and objects of

reproduction within the household and community took the edge off the

need for alienated labor.”[646]

Further, O’Connor observed, labor has tended to respond to cyclical

periods of reduced employment by shifting the means by which it obtains

its needs in part from wage labor to self-provisioning, or direct

production for use in the household and social sector.

Labor-power was hoarded through absenteeism, sick leaves, early

retirement, the struggle to reduce days worked per year, among other

ways. Conserved labor-power was then expended in subsistence

production…. The living economy based on non- and anti-capitalist

concepts of time and space went underground: in the reconstituted

household; the commune; cooperatives; the single-issue organization; the

self-help clinic; the solidarity group. Hurrying along the development

of the alternative and underground economies was the growth of

underemployment (full employment at less than a living wage), which

originated in the expulsion of living labor from large-scale capitalist

enterprise, and mass unemployment associated with the crisis of the

1980s. “Regular” employment and union-scale work contracted, which

became an incentive to develop alternative, local modes of production.

During the 1970s, localized, fragmented, anarchic, and half-formed

struggles squeezed capital from all sides. New social relationships of

reproduction and alternative employment, including the informal and

underground economies, threatened not only labor discipline, but also

capitalist markets. Demands to employ local savings in credit unions and

local cooperatives threatened capital’s control of money and credit.

Alternative technologies threatened capital’s monopoly on technological

development. Environmental movements which fought to prevent resources

from becoming commodities (or to decommodify resources) threatened

capital’s control of land, natural resources, and energy sources.

Hoarding labor-power threatened capital’s domination of production.

Withdrawal of labor-power undermined basic social disciplinary

mechanisms and capital’s control of the supply of labor.[647]

And the present ongoing decline in demand for labor — i.e., since 2000 —

is not cyclical. It’s systemic. It follows that workers will, as a

matter of necessity, permanently shift a growing share of production

into the social or informal economy. As Juliet Schor describes it:

Work less in the declining market, but use those freed-up hours

productively, to invest in new skills and activities. Some of the time

will be deployed to replace higher-priced food, energy, and consumer

goods with homemade or community-produced alternatives. Some will be

used to invest in social relationships, another form of wealth. And some

hours will be spent in high-return leisure activities requiring

relatively little monetary outlay. These substitute for the expensive

commodities of the faster-paced, higher-income

lifestyle.[648]

Schor cites a University of Michigan scholar, Frithjof Bergmann, who

wrote during the recession of the early ‘80s of what he called the New

Work — a strategy for dealing with industrial stagnation and

unemployment — in terms much like O’Connor’s:

Bergmann’s system had three components: First, radically cut hours in

factories, to about twenty per week, in a bid to preserve jobs. Second,

help under- and unemployed workers figure out their life’s calling, that

is, the type of work they most wanted to be doing, and support them to

get going with it, irrespective of whether it would yield income. And

third, promote a series of advanced or smart-technology methods for

producing the basics of life without arduous labor. His term was

high-tech self-providing.[649]

Thanks to open-source tabletop CNC routers, milling machines, lathes,

cutting tables, 3D printers and so on that can be built for tiny

fractions of what their proprietary commercial counterparts cost, direct

production of consumption goods and household appliances for use is more

economically feasible than ever.

As far back as the 1920s and ‘30s, Ralph Borsodi was arguing that the

growing proliferation of small-scale powered machinery was making it

more economical to produce a major share of consumption goods directly

in the household than to work for wages to buy them from factories.

Colin Ward advocated community workshops as a means by which the

employed and unemployed could pool their individually owned tools,

reduce idle capacity, and satisfy an increased share of consumption

needs outside the wage system.

Couldn’t the workshop become the community factory, providing work or a

place for work for anyone in the locality who wanted to work that ay,

not as an optional extra to the economy of the affluent society which

rejects an increasing proportion of its members, but as one of the

prerequisites of the worker-controlled economy of the

future?[650]

He quoted Keith Paton, writing in a pamphlet for the Claimants’ Union,

that “electrical power and ‘affluence’ have brought a spread of

intermediate machines, some of them very sophisticated, to ordinary

working class communities.”

Even if they do not own them… the possibility exists of borrowing them

from neighbours, relatives, ex-workmates. Knitting and sewing machines,

power tools and other do-it-yourself equipment comes in this category.

Garages can be converted into little workshops, home-brew kits are

popular, parts and machinery can be taken from old cars and other

gadgets. If they saw their opportunity, trained metallurgists and

mechanics could get into advanced scrap technology, recycling the metal

wastes of the consumer society for things which could be used again

regardless of whether they would fetch anything in a shop. Many hobby

enthusiasts could begin to see their interests in a new

light.[651]

Karl Hess advocated a similar approach — “shared machine shops” — in

Community Technology*. It might be hosted in “some other public

facility, used in its off hours,” he wrote, or hosted in its own

dedicated space. Besides pooling individual power tools, as Ward

described, Hess also suggested stocking it with “cast-off industrial

tools, with tools brought from government surplus through the local

school system,” etc. Such a machine shop in an inner city might be used

“for the maintenance of appliances and other household goods whose

replacement might represent a real economic burden in the neighborhood.”

Combined with a neighborhood storehouse for left-over construction

materials, defunct appliances, and so on, the machine shop could:

redesign cast-off items into useful ones. Discarded refrigerators, for

instance, suggest an infinity of new uses, from fish tanks… to

numerous parts as each discarded one is stripped for its components,

which include small compressors, copper tubing, heat transfer arrays,

and so on. The same goes for washing machines….[652]

A good example of the potential of present-day technology is the Global

Village Construction Set, a collection of open-source machine tools

designed, prototyped and built at Open Source Ecology’s Factor e Farm

demonstration site. It’s an entire ecosystem of machine tools. Along

with the micro-manufacturing machinery (3D printer, laser cutter, drill

press and fourteen other machines), the GVCS includes construction

machinery (sawmill, compressed earth block maker, etc.), farm machinery

(tractor, etc.), and household production goods like a bread oven. Most

of the components of the machines — many of which are modular and used

throughout the entire ecology of designs — can be produced with the

Construction Set’s own machine tools, and the inclusion of an induction

hearth in the manufacturing collection means they can not only smelt

metal from local scrap, but their own production is

closed-loop.[653] Most of the individual manufacturing

machines can be made for anywhere from a thousand (most common) to a few

thousand dollars in materials; a few super expensive items (e.g. $50,000

for a machine to extract aluminum from clay) would obviously have to be

a shared resource between a number of shops in a larger community. And

the open-source car, truck and combine run a mid-range price of $8,000

or more.

Local industrial ecologies grow, as Jane Jacobs described it in *The

Economy of Cities*, by discovering creative uses for locally generated

waste and byproducts, and using such innovative technologies to replace

imports.[654] Here’s how she describes the process of import

substitution:

Cities that replace imports significantly replace not only finished

goods but, concurrently, many, many items of producers’ goods and

services. They do it in swiftly emerging, logical chains. For example,

first comes the local processing of fruit preserves that were formerly

imported, then the production of jars or wrappings formerly imported for

which there was no local market of producers until the first step had

been taken. Or first comes the assembly of formerly imported pumps for

which, once the assembly step has been taken, parts are imported; then

the making of parts for which metal is imported; then possibly even the

smelting of metal for these and other import

replacements.[655]

Hess’s earlier reference to appliance repair is the logical beginning of

such a chain of import substitution. As the national transportation

infrastructure and freight industry capacities both shrink under the

impact of Peak Oil and fiscal exhaustion, small garage, backyard and

neighborhood shops can take up the slack of the crumbling corporate

logistic chains by custom machining replacement parts that are no longer

available through regular channels, in order to keep aging appliances

working. As the number of shops engaged in such production increases,

and the variety of products produced, they can produce parts for an

increasing share of entire appliances, and then proceed to producing

original modular accessories for existing appliances, and then producing

open-source appliance designs from scratch.

Hess and David Morris, in *Neighborhood Power*, suggested a progression

from retail to repair to manufacturing: “repair shops begin to transform

themselves into basic manufacturing facilities….”[656]

Retail outlets might rely on community-supported agriculture as their

main source of supply, move on to a small cannery, and then to a glass

recycling center to trade broken bottles and jars for usable ones on

arrangement with the bottling companies.[657]

That’s exactly the process by which the Japanese bicycle industry

developed, according to Jane Jacobs (Hess and Morris — perhaps in an

uncredited allusion to Jacobs — also suggested bike retail shops adding

maintenance facilities and then producing the most vital parts, and

finally entire bicycles). Jacobs writes:

…[S]hops to repair [imported bicycles] had sprung up in the big

cities…. Imported spare parts were expensive and broken bicycles were

too valuable to cannibalize the parts. Many repair shops thus found it

worthwhile to make replacement parts themselves — not difficult if a man

specialized in one kind of part, as many repairmen did. In this way,

groups of bicycle repair shops were almost doing the work of

manufacturing entire bicycles. That step was taken by bicycle

assemblers, who bought parts, on contract, from repairmen: the repairmen

had become “light manufacturers.”[658]

As a contemporary example, today in India, according to Don Tapscott and

Anthony Williams, villagers use fab labs “to make replacement gears for

out-of-date copying machines….”[659]

*Cohousing, Microvillages, and Other Units for Organizing Co-Production

and Pooling Costs, Risks, and Income.** Under 20th century capitalism,

the ideal household from the employer’s standpoint was a nuclear family

severed from the local community and extended kin network. But as labor

force participation continues to decline, we can expect average

household size to increase and for multiple households to aggregate into

larger communities. In *The Desktop Regulatory State*, I predicted that

economic trends would lead to a shift from the social model centered on

the nuclear family household as the basic unit in a larger atomized

society to one organized around larger primary social units, ranging

from extended family compounds and cohousing projects of a few families

to larger micro-villages.

…First, we will experience a period characterized by “hollowed-out

states,” in which the eroding tax base coupled with rising unemployment

means states’ obligations for public services (fire, police, schools,

streets, utilities, etc.) and the social safety net will far outstrip

their revenues. As a result, states will steadily retreat from the

social field and take an increasingly minimalist approach to public

services. Second, total work hours per capita will gradually decline and

rates of unemployment and underemployment will creep slowly upward.

Third, as a matter of necessity, the unemployed and underemployed will

shift a growing share of their needs from purchases with wages to

self-provisioning, gifting and barter in the household and informal

sectors. Fourth, as both the government and employer-based welfare

states erode, the informal sector will of necessity evolve mechanisms

for pooling income and risks and spreading costs.

This is likely to take the form, specifically, of people coalescing into

primary social units at the residential level (extended family compounds

or multi-family household income-pooling units, multi-household units at

the neighborhood level, coordinated self-provisioning in micro-economies

organized on residential blocks or cul-de-sacs, urban communes and other

cohousing projects, squats, and stand-alone intentional communities), as

a way of pooling income and reducing costs. As the state’s social safety

nets come apart, such primary social units and extended federations

between them will fill the vacuum.

At the end of the shift, the social norm would be for the individual to

be “born into a framework in which they are guaranteed a share in

possession of communal land [and/or access to the community workshops]

and are offered social safety net protections in the event of illness or

old age, in return for observance of communally defined social

obligations.”[660] In this, they would be a return to many of

the features of early human communities (hunter-gatherer, horticultural,

etc.) founded on sense of common blood ties whether real or mythical,

bonds of reciprocity, etc. As Murray Bookchin describes their features:

complete parity or equality between individuals, age-groups and sexes;

usufruct and later reciprocity; the avoidance of coercion in dealing

with internal affairs; and finally, what Radin calls the “irreducible

minimum” — the “inalienable right” (in Radin’s words) of every

individual in the community “to food, shelter and clothing” irrespective

of the amount of work contributed by the individual to the acquisition

of the means of life.[661]

Economically, such primary units would function as integrated village

economies of intensive horticulture and high-tech micro-manufacturing,

much like — as I mentioned above — Kropotkin described in *Fields,

Factories, and Workshops*.

Eric Hunting echoes this vision of hollowed-out states, with people

turning to relocalized production and community sharing economies, in

Solarpunk*. Here are some passages in which he describes the lifestyle

of the early and mid-Solarpunk Era:

Increasingly, we can no longer count on ‘the system’, the authorities,

our political leaders, and their institutions to do the right things in

a crisis or maintain the essential social contract all government and

the market economy represent. Upper levels of government are becoming

decrepit and dysfunctional, corrupted by corporate influence and

afflicted by an endemic cultural nihilism. Increasingly, we see certain

demographic groups, certain communities, abandoned and betrayed by

government and corporate/finance interests in times of crisis — often of

those institutions’ own making. That’s the basic story of Flint

Michigan. And it’s happening to a growing number of communities around

the globe. With increasing frequency of environmental disasters and

economic disruptions, this can only get worse….

In response we see some towns and cities assuming more local

responsibility for their critical needs. They adopt open source software

when they realize the exploitation and unreliability inherent to branded

software. They develop municipal/cooperative telecommunications and

power when corporate services turn into exploitative hegemonies. They

cultivate urban farming in response to the often racially-motivated

abandonment of poor communities by large corporate supermarket chains.

They adopt local scrips — local money — to encourage patronage of

locally-owned business and try to prevent that economic extraction by

outside interests. And most recently, they are beginning to cultivate

the local use of the new technologies of production in the hopes of

encouraging more reliance on locally-made goods rather than those of

extractive, distant, corporations. The envelope of ‘municipal utility’

is expanding in people’s minds to cover more of what our lifestyles

depend on. This is the beginning of the Global Resilience Movement,

though it still remains small in proportion to the emerging threats.

There’s resistance, of course, but the trend persists because the

‘system’, at a fundamental level, simply isn’t doing its job anymore and

people don’t just lay-down and die when that happens. They find another

way.

And with this increasing local-reliance, be it on the household level,

the community/neighborhood level, or regional networks of communities,

will come the realization of an increasing economic and political

autonomy and a waning of the upper levels of state authority — starved

as it will soon be of tax revenue as the middle-class hollows-out and

after the huge expenses of futile Global Warming abatement projects.

***

</center>

Grandiose sea level abatement projects, intended to preserve the

wealthiest or most politically important cities and their historic

landmarks (and invariably planned far too late…), have generally turned

into boondoggles and broken the backs of regional or national economies.

The insurance industry has abandoned whole states or geographic regions,

triggering real estate market collapse and general economic failure.

Poorer communities are increasingly abandoned by their government to

their growing spectrum of problems. There are shortages and

infrastructure failures. Mass protests, riots, and looting. Violent

crackdowns by increasingly desperate authorities. Mass migrations inland

and northward. New settlements — with and without authorization — emerge

in unlikely places, some created by the displaced and poor, some by

militarized gangs, others by Survivalists and eco-activists, others by

followers of crazed demagogues, religious fanatics, some fortress-like

enclaves of the wealthy. Some communities turn into antagonistic armed

camps, but often illicit a violent response from what remains of

national militaries — their armories shrinking but deep. All sorts of

community ‘movements’ are ascendent in the wake of waning central/upper

authority.

***

</center>

…Land is being reconsolidated into regional commons and individual

land ownership is slowly disappearing in most places, replaced by

Georgist property models after real estate markets collapsed. No mass

confiscation of property was ever needed, except in places deemed

uninhabitable due to climate impacts. Once the real estate market

collapsed, there was no point to hoarding it. No money to be made when

there’s no money to be had…

***

</center>

…These interventionists would be highly skilled in approaches to

adaptive reuse of existing older buildings, with this dominating the

architectural aesthetic of the time. Much as obsolete urban industrial

buildings saw adaptation by a generation of artists and hipsters with

the ‘lofting’ movement of the past, we would expect a similar fate for

today’s office buildings, corporate and light industrial ‘parks’, and

retail structures…. We can imagine them transformed by clever retrofit

into eclectic self-contained communities akin to Hans Widmer’s Bolos….

We would also anticipate the growth in temporary or accidental

settlements compelled by the forced migration of populations due to

Global Warming impacts. Here a ‘nomadic’ approach to architecture would

be the convention with the immediate demand for basic shelter, sometimes

made with makeshift and recycled/upcycled elements like shipping

containers, container shelter frames, and upcycled old vehicles, that

transition over time to more permanent habitation should such ‘camps’ be

allowed or compelled to remain persistent.[662]

William Irwin Thompson envisioned post-capitalist village economies —

“metaindustrial villages” — as recapitulating the four stages of human

economic history (paleolithic hunter-gatherer, horticultural, industrial

and cybernetic) in a higher synthesis based on post-scarcity technology.

DECENTRALIZATION of cities and the miniaturization of technology will

alter the center-periphery dialectic of traditional civilization and

make a whole new cultural level possible. What will take place in the

metaindustrial village will be that the four classical economies of

human history, hunting and gathering, agriculture, industry, and

cybernetics, will all be recapitulated within a single deme. We will

look back to where we have been in history, gather up all the old

economies, and then turn on the spiral in a new direction.

The hunting and gathering economy could focus on the gathering of wood,

wind, and sun. In a way, the work of the New Alchemy Institute is to

create a food and energy base for a small tribal band of people living

in isolated circumstances…. New Alchemy is not a civilized strategy;

it is not going to feed the huddled masses of New York and Calcutta; it

either will be co-opted and absorbed by conglomerate NASA as the ecology

of a space colony or will enable small groups to live in dispersed

settlements — or both.

The agricultural economy of the metaindustrial village would focus on

organic gardening and the replacing of fossil-fuel agribusiness with

natural cycles in the food chain. Since the shift from gardening to

field tillage with the plow originally displaced women from food

production, the return to ecologically sophisticated gardening enables

women to return to take up significant roles in the economy of the

village, and thus to overcome the sexual alienation characteristic of

industrial society.

The third economy of the community would be industrial, and this is

where I part company with many critics of contemporary culture. The

metaindustrial village is not anti-industrial and Luddite; there will be

industry and technology, but they will be brought down to scale as

workshops in converted barns. A village could produce artistically

beautiful glass bottles which could be kept as art objects or reused as

containers in place of plastics. Or the village could produce bicycles,

clothing, rotary tillers, or other well-crafted and durable instruments.

In a return to the mystery of the craft guild, particular communities

could focus on the revival of particular crafts and industries. Whatever

the industry chosen, the scale of the operation would be small, in

harmony with the ecosystem of the region, and devoted more to a local

market than an international one.

The fourth economy of the community would be postindustrial, or

cybernetic. The characteristic feature of a postindustrial economy is

the emphasis on research and development and education. Since the entire

village would be a contemplative educational community…, the adventure

of consciousness would be more basic to the way of life than patterns of

consumption. Everyone living in the community would be involved in an

experiential approach to education, from contemplative birth… to

contemplative death…. And at the various stages of life in between,

the entire community would function as a college, in which children and

adults would work together in gardening, construction, ecological

research, crafts, and classes in all fields of

knowledge.[663]

In many ways, all this is a recapitulation of the pre-capitalist past,

on a higher post-capitalist technological level. William Morris and

Pyotr Kropotkin, apostles of the decentralizing potential of electrical

power, were both inspired by an idealized vision of the late medieval

towns.

The separation of the household from the locus of economic production

largely paralleled the separation of the producing classes from the

means of production.

In the medieval commune, the workshop was a home: it was the locus not

only of highly individualized technical activities, but also… of

complex personal and cultural responsibilities. With the emergence of

the factory, home and work place are separated. The factory is a place

to which the worker goes in order to expend his human powers — powers

that are steadily degraded to the degree that they are abstracted and

quantified as mere “work time” — in the service of increasingly

anonymous owners and administrators….

…The guild, which unites homes that are also workshops, imparts a

distinctly domestic character to the commune: it turns the city into a

home, into an authentic human community that graduates personal

affiliations and responsibilities to a social level.

…The factory requires the separation of the small, independent

producer from the means of production….[664]

Compare this to the high-tech craft shops in Emilia-Romagna, which have

once again become integrated with the home: the upper floors of the

factory are living quarters.

And the reintegration of food production into urban life — cities and

towns largely self -sufficient in fruits and vegetables and small

livestock, owing to rooftop and empty lot gardening and a shift to

edible landscaping, and supported by cereal grains and other staple

field crops in an immediately surrounding belt — is very much a return

to older and in many ways more efficient models. As Bookchin noted, “the

immense development of industry over the past century has created a

remarkable opportunity for bringing land and city into a rational and

ecological synthesis. The two could be blended into an artistic unity

that would open a new vision of the human and natural

experience.”[665]

And in fact there has been a renaissance of the urban village model

around the world as an actual practice. As Amanda Abrams explains,

“urban village” refers both to communities with mixed-use design, and to

the relationships between the people living in them.

Search for “urban village” online and many of the entries that come up

will refer to an urban planning concept of residences clustered near

shops and offices. In the U.S. in particular, it’s a fairly new idea

that focuses on neighborhood design. But an urban village is

traditionally much more than a physical space. It’s a network of

relationships; a community of interrelated people. Similarly, a true

urban village isn’t just a real estate grid and the marketplace

exchanges that occur there. Among those who focus on sharing and the

commons, it’s a term that refers to a collaborative way of life — a

relatively small, place-based urban community where people cooperate to

meet one another’s many needs, be they residential, economic,

governmental, or social. In the process, they wind up transforming their

own experience of that community.

And these kinds of urban villages are on the rise around the world,

especially throughout northern Europe. Metropolises like Berlin and

Copenhagen host do-it-yourself communities like Holzmarkt and the

long-running Christiania. Israel is seeing a growth in urban kibbutzim.

In South Korea, Seoul is aiming to establish “sharing villages”

throughout the city. While ecovillages and intentional communities are

still more popular in rural areas, where agriculture plays a key role,

urban villages are seen by their proponents as a natural and obvious

antidote to the problems of climate change, economic inequality, and

social isolation….

While cohousing complexes may qualify, an urban village doesn’t have to

be a physical space that’s built from the ground up. It can simply be a

concept and an activity that’s overlaid on an existing urban community —

a much faster process than the seven years the average cohousing project

requires to come to fruition.[666]

There is a great deal of potential in the retrofitting suggested in the

second paragraph of the above quote. Unlike James Kunstler who envisions

split-level ranch homes and shopping districts decaying in the abandoned

suburbs post-Peak Oil, I believe such areas can be modified fairly

quickly into real, mixed-use communities in the face of strong

incentives to do so. Given the availability of cheap tabletop machinery,

intensive gardening techniques, household baking, brewing, and sewing

equipment, and the like, turning a cul de sac into a productive economy

of small workshops, edible landscaping, home-based micro-enterprises and

neighborhood bazaars is entirely feasible. Likewise, it’s easy enough to

imagine a former shopping mall filled not only with small shops but

residential quarters and workshops, the parking lot covered with raised

beds and fruit trees, and the roof with solar panels, rainwater

harvesting, and more garden beds.

Solidarity Economy in Brazilian Favelas. This is one of

the most relevant examples for our* *purpose, because it

involves some of the most impoverished people in the Global South,

improvising housing and infrastructure and bootstrapping a subsistence

economy with decentralized technologies out of material necessity. In

this regard, they are a case study of how people in a variety of

contexts will develop commons-based economies to support themselves, not

as a lifestyle choice, but because the corporate and state support

infrastructures they depended on have collapsed.

In the face of public neglect, favela residents are expert at doing

things for themselves, many times coming together to do so

collectively….

There are many examples of this in both consumption and labor: favelas

have been practicing collective consumerism since their inception (and

well before the “sharing economy” was trendy); favelas come together in

*mutirão* collective work sessions for infrastructure upgrades, such as

building sewerage systems or cleaning up abandoned lots; and *favelados*

(favela residents) have come together in work collectives, such as the

baking and skills sharing collective Mangarfo….

These grassroots collective economic practices are all examples of the

“solidarity economy” that exists in favelas and in other communities all

over Brazil and the world. Solidarity economy has many definitions but,

most broadly, is both an umbrella term and a movement that seeks to

promote alternative economic structures based on collective ownership

and horizontal management instead of private ownership and hierarchical

management. Such structures include community banks, credit unions,

family agriculture, cooperative housing, barter clubs, consumer

cooperatives, and worker cooperatives or collectives, most well-known in

Brazil in the industries of recycling and crafts. The goal is to

decentralize wealth, root wealth in communities, and financially and

politically empower stakeholders participating in these structures

toward another, more just, economy….

As Brazil’s former National Secretary of Solidarity Economy, Paul

Singer…, said in a public assembly in Porto Alegre [in 2016]:

Solidarity economy is predominantly “spread by women, young people, the

unemployed — by all of the victims of capitalism.”[667]

If there’s a test case for the argument that cheap, ephemeral production

technologies (small-scale manufacturing with open-source tabletop CNC

tools, DIY Bio, high-yield intensive horticulture, etc.) can enable

economic bootstrapping on small amounts of capital, and enable secession

or “Exodus” from capitalism by reducing capital intensiveness of

production, it will be in such communities.

*Secession of the Commoners vs. Accelerationism.** From the perspective

of the individual household in the near to medium term the main question

will be how to survive now in the face of under-/unemployment. And that

means a radical shift to self-provisioning. In the medium-term, the

closest approach to abundance from the subjective standpoint of a

household will not be the availability of goods approaching “zero

marginal cost” via automated supply chains and the “Internet of Things”

(as envisioned by Jeremy Rifkin, the left-accelerationists and others).

It will be, rather, an updated version of Borsodi’s import-substitution

and Vinay Gupta’s “buying out at the bottom” (i.e. taking advantage of

the possibilities of ultra-efficient, ephemeral technology for

supporting a comfortable lifestyle by doing more with the waste

byproducts of capitalism than capitalism could do with the original

resource inputs), to engage in direct production for use outside the

wage economy.

The biggest failure of accelerationism is its assumption that

capitalism’s path of globalization is efficient and just needs to be

socialized and taken to its logical conclusion, instead of seceded from.

Automated global supply chains and the Internet of Things may well be

part of the final post-scarcity package, but only for those goods that

can genuinely be produced more efficiently for large market areas than

in Kropotkinian/Borsodian agro-industrial villages.

And perhaps more importantly, the hypothetical timelines for the

accelerationist and secessionist scenarios are mostly incompatible. The

same economic forces that drive growing underemployment and necessitate

shift to self-provisioning as a matter of survival — Peak Oil, falling

direct rate of profit, economic volatility, falling aggregate demand and

idle capacity — are likely to simultaneously drive economic

relocalization and the shortening of industrial supply and distribution

chains.

II. Municipalism: The City as Commons and Platform

If the building blocks of commons-based societies are appearing at a

time when the commons are most needed for survival, these trends are

coming together most significantly at the municipal level in particular.

Resurrected forms of the pre-modern natural resource commons, modern

commons for mutual aid and social reproduction functions, and most

recently the new information commons, are all becoming intertwined into

larger systems.

And as right-wing authoritarian governments proliferate across the West,

and even nominally leftist national governments fall victim to blackmail

by global neoliberal forces, the municipal level offers the most hope

for fundamental institutional change.

The election of Trump has not occurred in a vacuum. Across the West, we

are witnessing a wholesale breakdown of the existing political order;

the neoliberal project is broken, the center-left is vanishing, and the

old left is at a loss for what to do. In many countries, it is the far

right that is most successful in harnessing people’s desire to regain a

sense of control over their lives. Where progressives have tried to beat

the right at its own game by competing on the battleground of the

nation-state, they have fared extremely poorly, as recent elections and

referenda across Europe have shown. Even where a progressive force has

managed to win national office, as happened in Greece in 2015, the

limits of this strategy have become abundantly clear, with global

markets and transnational institutions quickly bullying the Syriza

government into compliance.[668]

Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel start from Gramsci’s epigram “The

old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the

time of monsters,” arguing that it’s the triumph of monsters like Trump

and other authoritarian national leaders that seems to block the

transition from a capitalist to a post-capitalist society. The answer,

they say, is to bypass the national state and organize a commons-based,

P2P successor society by building counter-institutions “one city at a

time.”

So, where is the margin for action, if change from within is effectively

blocked by the structural constraints of statist politics and the

electoral arena?…

Amid this increasingly bleak political landscape, affinity-based

networks and communities using P2P dynamics and building commons have

been taking action. Small-scale innovations in many fields are paving

the way for true, sustainable resource management and grounded social

cohesion. In governance, food growing, service provision, science,

research and development, education, even finance and currency, these

community-enabled developments demonstrate how differently our lives

could be organized. Many of these place-based efforts are being

documented and replicated worldwide through the Internet, in the process

re-seeding the knowledge Commons from which they draw. This is done

through commons enabling, aka P2P (peer-to-peer, person-to-person,

people-to-people) technologies, which are gaining momentum as forces for

constructive change. They enable small group dynamics at higher levels

of complexity and enable the reclamation of power.

With this power, people can create innovations in production, open book

accounting, and the stewardship of natural, cultural or digitally

derived commons — but also in governance. Together, all of this forms

the building blocks of a truly bottom-up system.[669]

Contrast the victory of reaction and the failure of left-wing challenges

at the national level — e.g. Trump’s election in the United States,

Brexit and Johnson in the UK, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the failure of

Syriza’s national government in Greece — with the accomplishments of the

Spanish Left at the municipal level.

In 2014, activists in the country were wrestling with a similar

conundrum to their counterparts in the US today: how to harness the

power of new social and political movements to transform institutional

politics. For pragmatic rather than ideological reasons, they decided to

start by standing in local elections; the so-called “municipalist

wager.” The bet paid off; while citizen platforms led by activists from

social movements won mayoralties in the largest cities across the

country in May of 2015, their national allies, *Unidos Podemos*, stalled

in third place at the general elections in December later that same

year.

In Spain, this network of ‘rebel cities’ has been putting up some of the

most effective resistance to the conservative central government. While

the state is bailing out the banks, refusing to take in refugees and

implementing deep cuts in public services, cities like Barcelona and

Madrid are investing in the cooperative economy, declaring themselves

‘refuge cities’ and remunicipalizing public services.[670]

The most notable example is Barcelona, as we will see below. But M15

activists have created Left governments in other Spanish cities as well,

like A Coruña and Valencia, and promoted commons-based local agendas.

Even in the supposedly conservative city of Madrid, the *Ahora Madrid*

movement won control of local government.[671] Ahora Madrid

itself was elected with a peer-produced platform:

The fact that we built a totally open platform that people could trust

was one of the big draws for Ahora Madrid…. A month before the

election, we thought that there was no way we could win the elections,

it was totally impossible! No one knew about our party….

But we were really open, and our attitude was like, “ok, *you* take

control of it! You can control the campaign, control everything. It’s

*your* party, you can do whatever you want!” And that’s how we built

trust, people really trusted this…. In one or two months, we had a

very good shot at winning — and with no money. The money we had was

raised through crowdfunding, and it wasn’t all that much either. We did

it… without any of the kind of power that everybody assumes is

necessary to win elections: money, the media, etc…. Common citizens

who self-organized…and won![672]

The local citizen-based parties in Spain pursue agendas that involve

turning city governments into something resembling the Partner State

model discussed in previous chapters; they

are trying to transform government itself and political norms. Inspired

by Occupy-style movements working from the bottom up, local municipal

parties want to make all governance more transparent, horizontal, and

accessible to newcomers. They want to make politics less closed and

proprietary, and more of an enactment of open source principles. It’s

all about keeping it real….

To devise a party that avoids hierarchical control, centralized power

and celebrity-leaders, Ahora Madrid developed an open process that

invites anyone to join and participate. One tool is an online

proportional voting system called Dowdall — the same one used for a

European singing contest, Eurovision. The system allows citizen-voters

to give differently weighted points to people running for different

positions in the government. The party leader cannot automatically

dictate the party’s slate of candidates. This allows for a wider

diversity of party leaders. Ahora Madrid’s people in city government

include ecologists, political independents, traditional party people,

and others. Ahora Madrid’s party program was similarly built through an

open, collaborative process, said [Director of Citizen Participation

Miguel] Arana. There were working groups and then Internet voting on the

proposed agenda.

The city’s open-source approach to government includes citizen

initiatives (when online policy proposals are backed by 1% of voters,

they go to a referendum and if approved become official policy), and

participatory budgeting with control over 60 million

euros.[673]

For that matter, people in Greece are responding to the failure of

Syriza by turning increasingly to local counter-institutions. In Athens,

informal local movements are reclaiming public spaces like parking lots

and unused municipal office buildings. For example, a former parking lot

on the edge of the Exarchia community was dug up to build Navarinou

Park, a community garden now administered by a committee of neighborhood

residents.

“What we are witnessing is an explosion of social networks born of

bottom-up initiatives,” says [architecture professor Stavros] Stavrides,

who was among the activists whose spontaneous efforts stopped the lot

being turned into a parking space in late 2009. “Navarinou heralded this

new culture, this new spirit of people taking their lives into their own

hands. They know that they can no longer expect the state to support

them and through this process, they are discovering how important it is

to share….”

Increasingly, local associations, resident committees, and solidarity

groups are forging ties, exchanging know-how, giving shape to new

concepts of co-existence, and in so doing, reshaping public

space.[674]

Of course, this isn’t all just a response to the disappointing

performance of the Syriza government. Despite being eclipsed in

visibility by the political activity of the Syriza party, commons-based

economic counter-institutions were a major part of the Greek

population’s way of coping with the post-2008 economic crisis, and had

close ties to the Syntagma insurgency.

Hollowed out by the corrosive effects of austerity, large tracts of

Athens’ inner city have become a landscape of decay that has allowed

others to move in. Public buildings — from abandoned municipal offices

to theatres, market places, and cafes — have been squatted and taken

over.

An unofficial support network has evolved with self-managed health

clinics, collective kitchens, neighborhood assemblies, community groups

and language schools mushrooming. Backed by people from all walks of

life, the initiatives have taken off on a wave of solidarity following

the demise of the welfare state. At last count, there were over 400.

“There are initiatives scattered throughout the city that show it is not

paralysed by the crisis,” Stavrides says. “And they are happening when

most of us feel powerless in front of policies and decisions taken in

our name.”[675]

The Social Cultural Centre of Vyronas, established in an abandoned

municipal building by a public occupation to prevent it being

“privatized,” serves “workers, the unemployed, pensioners, migrants, and

youth”; “gives lessons in foreign languages, history, philosophy, tai

chi, traditional dance, guitar and photography. A collective kitchen

operates twice a week alongside a library and cinema.”[676]

These initiatives take place against the backdrop of a relatively

commons-friendly city government.

Giorgos Kaminis, Athens’ progressive mayor, has created a municipal post

that actively courts community initiatives in a bid to modernise local

administration and improve the quality of life. Amalia Zepou, a former

documentary-maker who holds the post as vice mayor for civil society and

municipality decentralisation, has created a platform for community

projects, SynAthina, where citizens exchange information, find partners,

and get in touch with city hall and potential sponsors. The aim, she

says, is to reinvigorate the democratic process.[677]

Such “Rebel City” projects are the most promising avenue for resistance

to neoliberal capitalism and the rising neo-fascist movements, for

implementing post-capitalist alternatives, and for weathering the

post-capitalist transition. Those of us in the anarchist milieu and the

rest of the Left, who are interested in models for building the

institutions of a successor society, should devote a great deal of

attention to the role of local community as a platform for change.

Partner State, Rebel Cities, Libertarian Municipalism and Other

Theoretical Models. If there* *is any hope of

government evolving into something less statelike, it lies at the

municipal level. Stacco Troncoso argues that the commons-based state is

most prevalent, and most feasible, at the city level.

I think the city level is where the commons are most embedded at the

moment. If you look at the experiences of Barcelona, at Seoul in Korea,

at Frome in the UK or at Grenoble in France, at the Co-Bologna

experiment in Italy (as well as Co-Mantova, Co-Palermo, Co-Battaglia) —

these represent a poly-centric governance model where policy-making is

actually done at the grassroots level. It empowers citizens’ groups to

make policy proposals…. Policy-making is opened up to citizen

collectives, while the city becomes an enabling mechanism to realise

these projects. Cities cooperate in new ways through a new translocal

urban level that didn’t exist before. So, for example, 40 cities

worldwide have coalesced to regulate Uber and I think it would be

worthwhile to actually start mapping these initiatives. The same with

fighting climate change and the coalitions of cities going much further

than the state level. Another level is what I call ‘neo-tribes’ — mostly

knowledge-workers travelling around the world, working from different

places, and creating this whole infrastructure of global cooperation in

physical places, like co-working and fabbing. So, give that another

10–15 years and we’ll have different types of transnational structures,

like guilds of the Middle Ages. There are a lot of forces on the ground

doing urban gardening, using fab-labs co-working, alternative

currencies, community support of agriculture… These people *are there,*

but I don’t think they are sufficiently mobilised for political

projects.[678]

David Bollier, in a talk in the Netherlands, cited Graeber’s observation

that the mainstream Left has no answer to bureaucracy. He suggested the

commons as such an alternative, to state bureaucracy as well as to the

market. Instead of the bureaucratic state, we get a model of the state

as facilitator or partner, collaborating with the public rather than

issuing rules.[679]

The Partner State can be seen as a paradigm shift, from the state

conceived as a managerial hierarchy to the state conceived as a

stigmergically organized peer-network. To quote Antonio Negri and

Michael Hardt:

We might also understand the decision-making capacity of the multitude

in analogy with the collaborative development of computer software and

the innovations of the open-source movement. Traditional, proprietary

software makes it impossible for users to see the source code that shows

how a program works…. When the source code is open so that anyone can

see it, more of its bugs are fixed, and better programs are produced:

the more eyes that see it and the more people allowed to contribute to

it, the better a program it becomes…. As we noted earlier with regard

to “swarm intelligence,” we are more intelligent together than any one

of you is alone…. One approach to understanding the democracy of the

multitude, then, is an open-source society, that is, a society whose

source code is revealed so that we all can work collaboratively to solve

its bugs and create new, better social programs.[680]

Among the Co-Cities Protocol’s “design

principles… for transitioning from urban commons projects to the city

as a commons,” LabGov includes the “Enabling State,” which is

the design principle that expresses the role of the public authority or

the State in the governance of the commons and identifies the

characteristics of an enabling state that facilitates collective actions

for the commons. As highlighted by Sheila Foster in her first study on

the urban commons, the presence of the State acting as an enabling

platform for collective actions might represent a key factor for the

success of community projects on the urban commons.[681]

The Enabling State or Partner State also has its counterpart at the

neighborhood level as well:

Social and Economic Pooling is the dimension that helps understand the

distinction between an urban governance scheme based on co-governance,

where different neighborhood actors (i.e. public, private, knowledge,

social, civic) share, co-manage, regenerate the urban commons, and an

urban governance scheme based on urban pools, where the aforementioned

actors coalesce to transform the neighborhoods into social and economic

enabling platforms thereby creating self-standing collective

institutions based on sustainable, social and solidarity, collaborative,

cooperative and circular economic ventures.[682]

As we noted in a previous chapter: regardless of the abstract nature of

the state, on the concrete level it is made up of individual human

beings — many of whom are amenable to working with prefigurative social

movements, promoting them “within the belly of the beast” to the extent

of their individual abilities. As Graeber argues:

…I have been excited by the Corbyn phenomenon because I know the

people involved, and I know they’re actually serious about trying to

create a synergy between people working in the system and those working

outside. Syriza never was, really; they co-opted and destroyed

everything they touched. Podemos seems very uneven and often very

disappointing in this regard. The Corbyn and McDonnell people, by

contrast, really want to see if they can do it right. And this is

important because if anti-authoritarian movements actually are going to

win, it can only be by creating that sort of synergy in the short to

medium term — unless we’re talking about some catastrophic collapse,

which of course might happen, but is nothing we can in any way bank on.

We have to figure out a way for those who want to preserve a

prefigurative space where they can experiment with what a free society

might actually be like — which necessarily means not having any

systematic relation with political parties, funding bodies, anything

like that — to actually work with those who are trying to create more

modest and immediate changes within the system, which is beneficial to

both of them. So one piece of advice would be: think hard about how to

do this.[683]

This is similar to the phenomenon Hillary Wainwright describes, where

grass-roots citizens coalitions operating outside conventional political

parties engage in electoral politics, but retain their quasi-official

character even when elected, and retain as well their ties to movements

outside the state.

I think the key feature of the present political situation is the

development of movements often associated with new political parties,

or, in the case of Britain for example, within and without the

traditional Labour party. These movements are not just about protest and

demonstrations, they reflect the alienation of citizens from the

political process, including parties and the state. They reflect a

process that’s gone on since 1968, which is citizens asserting

themselves as knowledgeable, productive actors. The logic of

alternatives created in the here and now and the refusal of existing

relations, based on the presumption that things could be different, is

continuing today through the environmental movement, energy

cooperatives, community gardens, alternative care systems, and so on.

What the commons captures is that notion of self-organisation and the

creation of a material force, autonomous from the existing political

sphere. And this is where the participation element comes in, based on

the notion of people as knowing citizens. Citizens are alienated from

the way the state treats them, as mere cogs; a

statistic.[684]

Rob Hopkins remarked, in the specific context of Transition Town

Monteveglio, on how exciting

it starts to look like when that bottom-up approach that is Transition

meets an engaged, proactive local authority who are also thinking in

terms of localisation and resilience. And that interface where those two

things meet is really, really important and a fascinating area that’s

starting to emerge. How can a council best support the Transition

process rather than drive it?[685]

Ross Beveridge and Philippe Koch argue that the municipal level of

governance requires us either to redefine the features traditionally

attributed to the state (so that significantly less “sovereign” or

“Westphalian” entities qualify), or to blur the distinction between

state and non-state at the local level. On the one hand, the various

functions and components conventionally bundled together in the

conception of state power are to a large extent “disaggregated” at the

municipal level. On the other, the entities formally subsumed under the

“state” at the local level take on an “everyday” character that overlaps

both in functions and personnel with non-state social and economic

institutions.

…[A] transformed local state entails opportunities for political actions

that are not at hand in a context where the state preserves its

sovereignty, bureaucratic domination and legitimacy either on the

national or local level. Thus it should not come as a surprise that many

anti-austerity struggles perceive formal politics, representative

channels of interest articulation and implementation, as wanting and

unproductive. Some activists aim to transform parts, nodes or processes

within the local state for their own advantage. A slowly disaggregating

state does not imply that political authority or the legitimacy of

collective forms of governance dissolves at all scales. But it does mean

that the (local) state in its institutional form is not the only,

possibly not even the most important, addressee of political demands….

The vision of the local state apparent is one more embedded in urban

society and more nurtured by the urban everyday, not the sole arbitrator

or source of political authority. This can be read as an attempt to make

the local state more hybrid in the sense of encouraging the enmeshing of

local state organisations and non-state organisations grounded in urban

society.

In a context where the division between state and autonomous forms of

collective actions is blurred, the local state as a plane of politics

becomes problematised. The idea of a new, radical municipalism can be

perceived in this manner…. The local state as an organisational form

of collective action remains important but only as fair [sic] as

institutional logics and practices are adapted to claims for

self-government and everyday needs.[686]

…The local state becomes a crucial political field of contestation

against austerity programs but, at the same time, turns into the site

where urban society experiments with forms of self-government and

activism embedded in the everyday experiences of

citizens.[687]

Davina Cooper, similarly, conceptually breaks down the local state into

a plural or even contradictory system, and renders many of its

components “quotidian”:

…Alongside those who see the only “good” states as workers’ states, or

states in the process of “withering away,” are those who find

transformative potential even in the depths of liberal capitalist states

as they uncover contradictions, inconsistencies, and plurality in state

systems, logics, actors and rationalities…. Progressive actions may

also be unofficial, or initiated by subordinate state actors drawing on

residual or unintended resources….

…Given such variety, given also the state’s rich conceptual history,

and apparent capacity for new conceptual futures, is it possible to

reimagine the state in ways that displace the currently “vertical”

tropes of “the state as an institution somehow ‘above’ civil society,

community, and family”?…. Adopting a more pluralist, quotidian account

of the state, by contrast, offers a different political strategy in

which the state is embedded and enmeshed with everyday life, while also

cut down to size; where the nation-state, with its histories of

exclusions, dominations, exploitative extractions and claims to prestige

and grandeur, is just one kind of state among others in a list that

could also include guerrilla, micro, city, regional, and global

states.[688]

And Bertie Russell proposes, in place of “a political strategy that

identifies the institution as a ‘thing’ to be captured,” instead framing

the local “governing infrastructure” as “a series of processes and

social relationships to be ‘hacked’ and opened

outwards….”[689]

In fact, it is arguably quite possible to sever the Partner State

altogether from even residual forms of sovereign police power over all

the individuals in a contiguous geographical area. It is possible to

have an entire polycentric ecosystem of commons-based institutions with

self-selected memberships, or made up of users of a particular common

resource, with substantially overlapping memberships, and large

minorities or even majorities of those in the same area being members of

most of them. In that case adjudication or negotiation of the

relationships between them will cause a body of “common law” to emerge

for the system as a whole, with a substantial degree of de facto

coordination over a common geographical area.

Neighborhoods and communities do not have to be subject to a single

majority rule, as such, in order to have democratic governance.

Neighborhood coordinating bodies as such, in a post-state society, may

not include every single resident as a participant, and therefore not

exercise binding authority. Their governance processes may affect only a

majority, or even a plurality, of residents who choose to participate in

the governance bodies and abide by their decisions. But the

infrastructures and resources serving a majority of those who live in a

neighborhood or community may well be cooperatives or commons subject to

communal governance. It is likely that the various infrastructures

serving a neighborhood or community will constitute an overlapping

series of bodies within that geographical area. And those bodies —

governed as cooperatives, or on Ostrom’s common pool resource model —

will coexist as parts of a polycentric framework, with a body of common

law arising to adjudicate relations between them. This body of common

law will be binding internally on the members of the associations which

agree to them — thus effectively coordinating, directly or indirectly,

the entire population of the area in one way or another.

Matthew Thompson uses the label “autonomist” for municipalist projects

that are driven primarily by social movements and counter-institutions

rather than engagement with local government. Autonomist municipalism

aims “for a stateless polis of confederated cooperatives, communes and

assemblies through collective self-organising, motivated by anti-statist

struggles for bio-regional and cultural

self-determination…”[690] As we will see in more detail

later, Thompson sees Cooperation Jackson as a project that straddles the

line between the autonomist approach and the more conventional political

approach of Cleveland and Preston, but has steadily gravitated to the

autonomist side of the line (especially since the death of Mayor Chokwe

Lumumba).[691]

David Harvey sees “Rebel Cities” as the primary base for struggle

against capitalism, as well as the organizational core of the successor

society. A model of radicalism centered on the city as a geographical

base can be class -oriented, but will have to abandon the Old Left’s

workerist emphasis and focus on workplace-based struggles.

When a city-wide struggle does acquire an iconic revolutionary status,

as in the case of the Paris Commune of 1871, it is claimed (first by

Marx, and even more emphatically by Lenin) as a “proletarian uprising”

rather than as a much more complicated revolutionary movement — animated

as much by the desire to reclaim the city itself from its bourgeois

appropriation as by the desired liberation of workers from the travails

of class oppression in the workplace. I take it as symbolic that the

first two acts of the Paris Commune were to abolish night-work in the

bakeries (a labor question) and to impose a moratorium on rents (an

urban question). Traditional left groups can therefore on occasion take

up urban-based struggles, and when they do they can often be successful

even as they seek to interpret their struggle from within their

traditional workerist perspective.[692]

I see no reason why it should not be construed as both a class struggle

and a struggle for citizenship rights in the place where working people

lived. To begin with, the dynamics of class exploitation are not

confined to the workplace. Whole economies of dispossession and of

predatory practices… with respect to housing markets, are a case in

point. These secondary forms of exploitation are primarily organized by

merchants, landlords, and the financiers; and their effects are

primarily felt in the living space, not in the factory. These forms of

exploitation are and always have been vital to the overall dynamics of

capital accumulation and the perpetuation of class power. Wage

concessions to workers can, for example, be stolen back and recuperated

for the capitalist class as a whole by merchant capitalists and

landlords and, in contemporary conditions, even more viciously by the

credit-mongers, the bankers, and the financiers. Practices of

accumulation by dispossession, rental appropriations, by money- and

profit-gouging, lie at the heart of many of the discontents that attach

to the qualities of daily life for the mass of the population. Urban

social movements typically mobilize around such questions, and they

derive from the way in which the perpetuation of class power is

organized around living as well as around working. Urban social

movements therefore always have a class content even when they are

primarily articulated in terms of rights, citizenship, and the travails

of social reproduction

The fact that these discontents relate to the commodity and monetary

rather than the production circuit of capital matters not one wit [sic]:

indeed, it is a big theoretical advantage to reconceptualize matters

thus, because it focuses attention on those aspects of capital

circulation that so frequently play the nemesis to attempts at worker

control in production. Since it is capital circulation as a whole that

matters (rather than merely what happens in the productive circuit) ,

what does it matter to the capitalist class as a whole whether value is

extracted from the commodity and money circuits rather than from the

productive circuit directly? The gap between where surplus value is

produced and where it is realized is as crucial theoretically as it is

practically. Value created in production may be recaptured for the

capitalist class from the workers by landlords charging high rents on

housing.[693]

Traditional Marxist analysis plays up the vanguard role of the

industrial proletariat at the expense of community institutions.

Most struggles waged by factory-based workers turn out, on inspection,

to have had a much broader base. Margaret Kahn complains, for example,

how left historians of labor laud the Turin Factory Councils of the

early twentieth century while totally ignoring the “Houses of the

People” in the community where much of the politics was shaped, and from

which strong currents of logistical support flowed. E. P. Thompson

depicts how the making of the English working class depended as much

upon what happened in chapels and in neighborhoods as in the workplace.

The local city trades councils have played a much-underestimated role in

British political organization, and often anchored the militant base of

a nascent Labour Party and other left organizations in particular towns

and cities in ways that the national union movement often ignored. How

successful would the Flint sit-down strike of 1937 have been in the

United States had it not been for the masses of the unemployed and the

neighborhood organizations outside the gates that unfailingly delivered

their support, moral and material?

Organizing the neighborhoods has been just as important in prosecuting

labor struggles, as has organizing the workplace. One of the strengths

of the factory occupations in Argentina that followed on the collapse of

2001 is that the cooperatively managed factories also turned themselves

into neighborhood cultural and educational centers. They built bridges

between the community and the workplace. When past owners try to evict

the workers or seize back the machinery, the whole populace typically

turns out in solidarity with the workers to prevent such action. When

UNITE HERE sought to mobilize rank-and-file hotel workers around LAX

airport in Los Angeles, they relied heavily “on extensive outreach to

political, religious and other community allies, building a coalition”

that could counter the employers’ repressive strategies. But there is,

in this, also a cautionary tale: in the British miners’ strikes of the

1970s and 1980s, the miners who lived in diffuse urbanized areas such as

Nottingham were the first to cave in, while those in Northumbria, where

workplace and living-place politics converged, maintained their

solidarity to the end. The problem posed by circumstances of this sort

will be taken up later.

To the degree that conventional workplaces are disappearing in many

parts of the so-called advanced capitalist world (though not, of course,

in China or Bangladesh), organizing around not only work but also around

conditions in the living space, while building bridges between the two,

becomes even more crucial. But it has often been so in the past.

Worker-controlled consumer cooperatives offered critical support during

the Seattle general strike of 1919, and when the strike collapsed

militancy shifted very markedly towards the development of an elaborate

and interwoven system of mainly worker-controlled consumer cooperatives.

As the lens is widened on the social milieu in which struggle is

occurring, the sense of who the proletariat might be and what their

aspirations and organizational strategies might be is transformed. The

gender composition of oppositional politics looks very different when

relations outside of the conventional factory (in both workplaces and

living spaces) are brought firmly into the picture. The social dynamics

of the workplace are not the same as those in the living space. On the

latter terrain, distinctions based on gender, race, ethnicity, religion,

and culture are frequently more deeply etched into the social fabric,

while issues of social reproduction play a more prominent, even dominant

role in the shaping of political subjectivities and

consciousness.[694]

Harvey points to Fletcher and Gapasin’s recommendation, in *Solidarity

Divided*, that the US labor movement should organize cities as well as

workplaces, and empower cross-sector urban councils. Unions must build

alliances with metropolitan social blocs.[695] Among the

examples of city-based radicalization Harvey notes are “Red Bologna” in

the 1970s,[696] and the Water Wars of Cochabamba, Bolivia, in

2000. The latter forced out Bechtel and Suez corporations. Uprisings in

El Alto, a city overlooking La Paz, subsequently forced out two

neoliberal presidents in 2003 and 2005, and paved the way for the Evo

Morales administration. Another uprising and occupation in Cochabamba,

which forced out the conservative city administration, thwarted a

right-wing attempt to oust Morales in 2007.[697] The

political environment out of which these uprisings occurred in El Alto

included a number of overlapping radical traditions: the neighborhood

assemblies and their federal organization for the city as a whole;

associations of vendors, transport workers and precarious/informal

workers of all sorts; more conventional trade unions (the most important

of which was the teachers’ union which, like that in Oaxaca, was quite

militant).[698]

He goes on to speculate on how the same Rebel City model of struggle

might be duplicated elsewhere.

Imagine in New York City, for example, the revival of the now largely

somnolent community boards as neighborhood assemblies with

budget-allocation powers, along with a merged Right to the City Alliance

and Excluded Workers Congress agitating for greater equality in incomes

and access to health care and housing provision, all coupled with a

revitalized local Labor Council to try to rebuild the city and the sense

of citizenship and social and environmental justice out of the wreckage

being wrought by neoliberal corporatist urbanization….[699]

Policies for a postcapitalist transition that can be adopted at the

local level include a local basic income, replacing the “privatization”

of public assets with commons governance, promoting collaborative forms

of organization and production, and in particular promoting the data

commons. In the case of Barcelona, Paul Mason has an extensive laundry

list:

Suppose Barcelona did these things:

- Brand itself as a city of commons and collaborative production

- End privatisation

- Massively reduce the cost of basic services like housing, transport,

education, and health so that being in the precariat became more

survivable

- Build an agent-based, complex model of the economy, with real inputs,

so that participatory democracy could model complex decisions

- Prefer and promote collaborative organisations over both the

centralised state and the market solutions

- Institute a citizens basic income, conditional on some participation

on non-profit activities

- Decree that the networked data of the population as it uses public

services is non-ownable. Would capitalism collapse?

No. The desperate, frantic “survival capitalists” would go away — the

rip-off consultancies; the low-wage businesses; the rent-extractors.

But you would attract the most innovative capitalists on earth, and you

would make the city vastly more livable for the million-plus people who

call it home.[700]

David Bollier argues that cities are “[o]ne of the most promising places

to start building a new polity.”

In Barcelona, Bologna, Seoul, and many other cities, citizen movements

based on the ideas of “the city as a commons” and of “sharing cities”

are taking root. Both approaches assert the shared interests of ordinary

residents over those of the usual overlords of city government — real

estate developers, economic elites, “starchitects,” and urban planners.

They recognize the city and its public spaces, communities and

opportunities as products of commoning. A commons framing is

deliberately invoked to make new moral and political claims on common

resources in urban settings — and so inaugurate a self-feeding spiral of

social practice and a new discourse. Citizens acting as commoners can

insist on greater citizen participation not just in policymaking but in

directly developing innovative projects and solutions. Network platforms

can foster all of these goals.

In Bologna, for example, the city government is undertaking a landmark

reconceptualization of how government might work in cooperation with

citizens. Ordinary people acting as commoners are invited to enter into

a “co-design process” with the city to manage public spaces, urban green

zones, abandoned buildings and other urban resources. The formal legal

authority for this innovation, the Bologna Regulation for the Care and

Regeneration of Urban Commons, is now being emulated by other Italian

cities.

City governments could augment this general approach by building new

tech infrastructures that enable greater citizen engagement. For

example, instead of ceding the software infrastructure for taxi service

or apartment rentals to Uber, Lyft, Airbnb and other well-financed “gig

economy” corporations, city governments could require the use of shared

open platforms for such market activity. This could enable multiple

players to compete while improving regulatory oversight of basic labor

and consumer protections, and privacy protection for personal data….

Network platforms are an especially attractive way to actualize the idea

of “the city as commons” because they can enact all sorts of open source

principles: low barriers to participation, transparency of process,

bottom-up innovation, social pressure for fair dealing and resistance to

concentrated power and insider deals.

One powerful way to advance commoning in cities is through the skillful

use of open data. The ubiquity of computing devices in modern life is

generating vast floods of data that, if managed cooperatively, could

improve city life in many creative ways. Open data systems could be used

to host participatory crowdsourcing, interactive collaborations among

citizens and government, and improvements in municipal services (street

repairs, trash removal, transportation).

City governments (or state or federal governments, for that matter)

could leverage bottom-up, interactive collaborations… by developing

their own open APIs [application programming interfaces] on electronic

networks — similar to those used by the iPhone and other platforms. This

would enable governments to collect real-time data and make more

dynamic, responsive choices “in cooperation” with its citizens. City

governments could also perform automatic oversight of regulated entities

without the complexities of conventional regulation. Sensors for water

or air quality, for example, could provide real-time data portraits of

an airshed or watershed. By using tamper-proof data-flows from remote

devices, some of the expense of in-person inspections could be avoided

and the quality of enforcement improved.

The huge potential of open data networks raises important questions

about governance structures, however. How should crowdsourced

information be managed and governed — by proprietary companies? City

governments? Citizens as commoners? As the controversial growth of Uber

and Airbnb has shown, there are great risks in such power being held by

a few large tech companies answerable primarily to investors. Yet very

few city governments have shown leadership in using networked systems to

advance public designs for public purposes. There is a need to set forth

some commons-based governance alternatives because they are the most

likely to align civic needs and realities with the ultimate policies and

decisions.

Fortunately, there are a number of pacesetter projects experimenting

along these lines. In addition to the Bologna Regulation…, the

European Cultural Foundation is actively exploring the role that

artistic and cultural commons can play in improving cities. The

Ubiquitous Commons project is developing a prototype legal/technological

toolkit to empower people to control the personal data they generate

from countless devices, especially in urban contexts. The Open Referral

Initiatives is developing a common technical language so that

information systems can “speak” to each other and share community

resource directory data. The beauty of these and other initiatives is

that they invite broad participation and address immediate, practical

needs while contributing to a very different paradigm of governance —

one that fosters commons and commoning.[701]

For both the municipality as a platform and transnational networks of

municipal platforms, the primary function of the one-time state as

governance institution is to legally define and enforce rights to the

common. Along with this goes the infrastructural function of actively

supporting and encouraging a wide variety of commons-based institutions,

and promoting their coalescence into a coherent whole. The primary

actors in building the new system are “ordinary people acting as

householders, makers, hackers, permaculturists, citizen-scientists,

cooperativists, community foresters, subsistence collectives, social

mutualists, and commoners”; the municipal and federal “governments” are

merely supportive.[702]

Through network-based cooperation and localized grassroots projects,

millions of people around the world are managing all sorts of bottom-up,

self-provisioning systems. There are also many new types of

citizen-actors and mobilizations seeking system change, ranging from

cultural surges such as Occupy, the Arab Spring and the Las Indignadas

to more durable long-term movements focused on cooperatives, degrowth,

the solidarity economy, Transition Towns, relocalized economies, peer

production, and the commons. These movements are developing new visions

of “development” and “progress,” as seen in the *buen vivir* ethic in

Latin America, for example, or in “go local”movements in the US and

Europe, and the FabLabs and makerspaces. The new models also include

alternative currencies, co-operative finance and crowd equity

investments to reclaim local control, transition and indigenous peoples’

initiatives to develop sustainable post-growth economies, the movement

to reclaim the city as a commons, and movements to integrate social

justice and inclusive ethical commitments into economic life. These

movements are not only pioneering new types of collective action and

provisioning, but also new legal and organizational forms. The idea of

“generative ownership” as a collective enterprise is being explored by

leaders of co-operative finance, community land trusts, relocalized food

systems and commons-based peer production. Each is attempting to

demonstrate the feasibility of various commons-based ownership

structures and self-governance – and then to expand the use of such

models to show that there are attractive alternatives that can mature

into a new economic ecosystem.

The general approach here is to change the old by building the new. The

demonstration of feasible alternatives (renewable energy, cooperativism,

relocalization, etc.) is a way to shift political momentum, constitute

new constituencies for system change, and assert a new moral center of

gravity. To work, however, the alternatives incubated *outside* the

existing system must achieve a sufficient coherence, intelligibility,

scale, and functionality.

The commons can act as a shared meta-language among these highly diverse

groups because the commons expresses many of the core values and

priorities of many “system-change” movements. Like DNA, which is

under-specified so that it can adapt to local circumstances, the commons

discourse is general enough to accommodate myriad manifestations of

basic values and principles. More than an intellectual framework, the

commons helps make culturally legible the many social practices

(“commoning”) that are often taken to be too small and inconsequential

to matter – but which, taken together, constitute a different type of

economy. In this fashion, the commons discourse itself has an

integrative and catalytic potential to build a new type of networked

polity.[703]

Professor Christian Iaione (who heads the Laboratory for the Governance

of Commons, or LabGov, at LUISS University) has been active in promoting

the Partner State model at the municipal level. He was a primary figure

in drafting Bologna’s Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban

Commons, adopted in 2014, which came out of LabGov’s “City as a Commons”

project. “This regulation allows citizen coalitions to propose

improvements to their neighborhoods, and the city to contract with

citizens for key assistance. In other words, the municipality functions

as an enabler giving citizens individual and collective autonomy.”

The Bologna regulation is a 30-page regulatory framework outlining how

local authorities, citizens and the community at large can manage public

and private spaces and assets together…. As such, it’s a sort of

handbook for civic and public collaboration, and also a new vision for

government. It reflects the strong belief that we need a cultural shift

in terms of how we think about government, moving away from the

Leviathan State or Welfare State toward collaborative or polycentric

governance.[704]

Since then dozens of Italian cities have adopted similar regulations,

including the CO-Mantova project in Mantua — which Iaione was also

involved in developing – “set up for citizen-based social innovation

using a multi-stakeholder approach….”

CO-Mantova is a prototype of a process to run the city as a

collaborative commons, i.e. a “co-city.” A co-city should be based on

collaborative governance of the commons whereby urban, environmental,

cultural, knowledge and digital commons are co-managed by the five

actors of the collaborative/polycentric governance — social innovators

(i.e. active citizens, makers, digital innovators, urban regenerators,

rurban innovators, etc.), public authorities, businesses, civil society

organizations, knowledge institutions (i.e. schools, universities,

cultural academies, etc.) — through an institutionalized

public-private-citizen partnership. This partnership will give birth to

a local peer-to-peer physical, digital and institutional platform with

three main aims: living together (collaborative services), growing

together (co-ventures), making together (co-production).

The project is supported by the local Chamber of Commerce, the City, the

Province, local NGOs, young entrepreneurs, SMEs [small and medium-sized

enterprises], and knowledge institutions, such as the Mantua University

Foundation, and some very forward-looking local schools.

The first step was “seeding social innovation” through a collaborative

call for “Culture as a Commons” to bring forth social innovators in

Mantua. The second step was the co-design laboratory “Enterprises for

the Commons,” an ideas camp where the seven projects from the call were

cultivated and synergies created between projects and with the city. The

third phase was the Governance camp, a collaborative governance

prototyping stage which led to the drafting of the Collaborative

Governance Pact…, the Collaboration Toolkit and the Sustainability

Plan, which was presented to the public during the Festival of

Cooperation on November 27th last year.

The next step is the fourth and final phase: the governance testing and

modeling through the launch of a public consultation in the city on the

text of the Pact and a roadshow generating interest in CO-Mantova among

possible signatories belonging to the five categories of collaborative

governance actors. We are also [sic] may have CO-Mantova opening up a

Commons School.[705]

Applying the Partner State concept at the local level, we get something

resembling, in some ways, Murray Bookchin’s Libertarian Municipalism.

But there are also major differences.

Bookchin proposes a fairly uniform model of “municipalized economies,”

in which “land and enterprises [are] placed increasingly in the custody

of the community more precisely, the custody of citizens in free

assemblies and their deputies in confederal councils.”[706]

Communalism

seeks to integrate the means of production into the existential life of

the municipality such that every productive enterprise falls under the

purview of the local assembly, which decides how it will function to

meet the interests of the community as a whole.[707]

Bookchin’s model is, in my opinion, far too monolithic — a monoculture

of municipal enterprises, controlled by popular assemblies with

monopolies on power in their respective neighborhoods, rather than a

diverse ecosystem of commons-based projects. In contrast to the

emergent, stigmergic evolutionary models celebrated by most advocates of

commons-based institutions, Bookchin argues for “One Big Movement” to

promote a uniform model of municipal ownership and make sure all its

local iterations are on the same page.

In fact Bookchin comes across as actively hostile to stigmergic,

permissionless, or polycentric governance — the variety of what he

patronizingly dismisses as “communitarian” counter-institutions like

“so-called alternative economic and living situations such as food

cooperatives, health centers, schools, printing workshops, community

centers, neighborhood farms, ‘squats,’ unconventional lifestyles, and

the like.” In their place he fetishizes politics and majoritarianism as

such even when agreement and permission are unnecessary, using “popular

power center” and “collective power” as god terms, and envisions local

economic institutions uniformly subject to popular assemblies which

democratically work out a common political vision governing everything

subordinate to them.[708]

In this regard, despite all his criticism of the Old Left for its

emphasis on centralization and hierarchy, Bookchin himself is very much

in the tradition of the Old Left insofar as he lionizes organizational

mass and coordination, and envisions a future society organized around a

schematically imposed template rather than an organic mixture of diverse

institutions. For Bookchin, the city, rather than being an emergent

ecosystem made up of many different types of horizontally linked

institutions, is simply a set of institutions all owned and managed by

the popular assemblies. By requiring deliberation and majority votes

even when agreement on common policy is unnecessary, his model

effectively destroys the very basis of networked institutions’ superior

agility over the dinosaur hierarchies they’re replacing.

Bookchin strawmans anarchism as somehow ignoring the middle realm

between “a workaday world of everyday life that is properly social”

including the home and workplace, and all the individual

counter-institutions like the cooperatives and such that he lists above,

on the one hand, and the state on the other. At the same time, he

accuses anarchists of conflating the political realm — which amounts to

what most people would call “governance” and involves the coordination

of social life — with the state. But he himself conflates the middle

realm of civil society, and the governance function, with the particular

organizational form of the municipal assembly, and pretends that the

only choice is between his Rosetta Stone model of popular assemblies and

the atomism he attributes to the anarchists.[709] Municipal

assemblies are the one, true, only possible form that coordination and

governance can take; either they do it, or it doesn’t get done. “Either

municipalized enterprises controlled by citizens’ assemblies will try to

take over the economy, or capitalism will prevail in this sphere of life

with a forcefulness that no mere rhetoric can diminish.”[710]

Contrast Bookchin’s monoculture of “municipalized enterprises controlled

by popular assemblies” with a polycentric governance model characterized

a wide variety of overlapping commons-based institutions, cooperative

enterprises, community-owned enterprises and so forth, with partially

interlocking memberships and a loose “common law” of governance rules

worked out horizontally between them.

A good example of this can be found in the fictional northern New

England society of the 22nd century, which has emerged from the 20th

century “Time of Troubles,” in Roy Morrison’s *Eco* *Civilization 2140*.

Some, but nowhere near all, local economic functions in Warner, N.H. are

carried** **out by community stakeholder cooperatives; some are

socially owned rather than being municipal government property

(community-based), while others are actually municipal property

(town-based). The people of Warner meet as owners of Warner Community

Enterprises to make business decisions for the cooperatives on the same

week the annual Town Meeting is held. The dividing line between

community-based and town-based is really not very sharp; some

community-based cooperatives are fairly closely intertwined with town

governance, while some town-based cooperatives have charters that grant

them a high degree of autonomy in their operations.

And the community-based and town-based cooperatives coexist with a wide

variety of other local consumer or worker cooperatives. In some cases,

the municipal cooperatives or socially- owned stakeholder cooperatives

have partial ownership stakes in private cooperatives.[711]

Beyond institutions for pooling costs and risks and providing common

access to productive resources on the retail level — like the

multi-family cohousing arrangements, micro-villages and sharing

institutions we looked at in the previous section — cities as a whole

can provide commons infrastructures and platforms at the municipal level

to support the variety of smaller projects within their bounds.

And this does not by any means have to be done under the auspices of

official municipal government — even one domesticated as a Partner

State. Urban-based resistance movements have a long history of providing

alternative infrastructures for social support. Consider, for example,

the school lunch programs, daycare centers and community patrols

organized by the Black Panthers Party. Or — as David Harvey notes — the

construction by Hamas and Hezbollah “of alternative urban governance

structures, incorporating everything from garbage removal to social

support payments and neighborhood administrations.”[712]

Commons-based institutions — platform cooperatives for sharing spare

capacity of assets like cars and housing, community gardens, Fab Labs,

community land trusts, information commons, and community currencies —

can integrate horizontally to form an interlocking, mutually supporting

post-capitalist ecosystem for the city as a whole.

Bollier envisions commons-based urban economies with components like

- Creative Commons Licensing, which enables people to share and freely

use creative works

- FabLabs and Makerspaces, which are new social forms for creating

valuable stuff through a commons-based collaboration

- Platform Cooperatives, which create shared platforms “as an antidote

to the so-called death stars” of the sharing economy

- Alternative Currencies as a way to retain some of the value created

regionally as opposed to having it siphoned away

- Non-digital commons projects, including land trusts, urban

agriculture and community gardens, and participatory budgeting

projects which empower citizens to work with city leaders to create

budget priorities.[713]

<right>

=[October 7, 2020]=

</right>

Chapter Ten: Municipalism: Local Case Studies

I. North America

Cleveland’s Evergreen Initiative. The Evergreen

Cooperative Initiative,* *according to Guy Alperovitz, is

heavily influenced by the example of Mondragon,

the world’s most successful large-scale cooperative effort (now

employing 100,000 workers in an integrated network of more than 120

high-tech, industrial, service, construction, financial and other

largely cooperatively owned businesses).[714]

It was the first in a series of municipalist movements, later including

the Preston Model in the UK among others, based on the “community wealth

building” model promoted by Alperovitz and the Democracy Collaborative.

As described by Joe Guinan and Martin O’Neill:

</quote>

Community wealth-building is a local economic development strategy

focused on building collaborative, inclusive, sustainable and

democratically controlled local economies. Instead of traditional

economic development through locational tax incentives and

public-private partnerships, which wastes billions to subsidise the

extraction of profit by footloose corporations with no loyalty to our

local communities, community wealth-building supports democratic

collective ownership of the economy through a range of models. These

include worker cooperatives, community land trusts, community

development financial institutions, so-called ‘anchor’ procurement

strategies, municipal and local public enterprise, and – as it is hoped

will increasingly become the case – public and community banking.

Community wealth-building is economic system change, but starting at the

local level.[715]

</quote>

The project had its origins in a study trip to Mondragon sponsored by

the Cleveland Foundation,[716] and is described by Andrew

MacLeod as “the first example of a major city trying to reproduce

Mondragon.”[717] Member enterprises are expected to plow ten

percent of pre-tax profits back into the development fund to finance

investment in new cooperatives.

The Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, which opened in late 2009, was the

first of some twenty initially projected cooperatives (most of which, as

it turned out, didn’t materialize). The second, Ohio Cooperative Solar,

installs solar power equipment on the roofs of local government and

non-profit buildings). The laundry intended to market its services

primarily to Cleveland-area hospitals and other healthcare institutions.

A third and fourth enterprise, a cooperative greenhouse and the

Neighborhood Voice* newspaper were (as of early 2010) scheduled to open

in the near future. The greenhouse was projected to produce “more than 3

million heads of fresh lettuce and nearly a million pounds of (highly

profitable) basil and other herbs a year, and will almost certainly

become the largest urban food-producing greenhouse in the

country.”[718] The greenhouse did, in fact, open in early

2012.[719]

Evergreen is backed by “stakeholders in the local economy, local

government and universities.” In addition to marketing to the local

community, the new enterprises are geared to “serving local ‘anchor

institutions’ — the large hospitals and universities — that will provide

a guaranteed market for a portion of their services.” The Evergreen

initiative gets financing from the Cleveland Foundation and “other local

foundations, banks, and the municipal government.” As of early 2010, the

Evergreen Cooperative Development Fund was capitalized at $5 million and

is expected to raise $10–12 million more.[720]

Besides the Cleveland Foundation, other important stakeholders are the

Cleveland Roundtable and the Democracy Collaborative. The Roundtable is

a project of Community-Wealth.org; Community-Wealth, in turn, is a

project of the Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland,

College Park. All three organizations are cooperating intensively to

promote the Evergreen Cooperative Initiative.[721]

Apparently, the planned rollout of twenty enterprises was too ambitious;

the initiative suffered some setbacks at the outset, trying to expand

too quickly into too many areas at once before its core laundry business

was operating at full capacity. It regrouped under a new CEO in 2014,

and in mid-2016 a business writer described it as “emerging from its

startup phase.” It still consisted of the original three core

enterprises, the laundry, solar installation enterprise, and greenhouse,

employing about 120 people with revenues of $6 million.[722]

Evergreen Business Services is an incubator organization within the

Evergreen umbrella that provides advice and support (including business

plan reviews, feasibility studies, shared services consulting and

business consulting) for new cooperative enterprises built on the model

of the original three Evergreen enterprises.[723]

Alperovitz described it as “one of the largest and most promising

experiments in cooperative economics ever attempted in the United

States, with an unprecedented number of local stakeholders at the

table.”[724]

On the negative side, some observers feel the central role of

conventionally structured legacy institutions as anchors or hubs has

influenced the organizational style of the Evergreen cooperatives for

the worse. Matthew Thompson describes the Cleveland model, much like

Preston, as a “technocratic, think tank project.”

Although crucial local government support was eventually secured, the

scheme was created by the US-based Democracy Collaborative and funded

primarily by the Cleveland Foundation, one of the largest American

philanthropic ‘community foundations’, endowed with $1.8 billion. These

technocratic and philanthropic origins place it outside local democratic

control and arguably more in the realm of international

municipalism.[725]

Laurie Charles and her friends in the Bay Area cooperative movement

compared the Evergreen “community anchor” model unfavorably to what they

called the Bay Area’s “sourdough” model of finance:

Financialisation increases alienation, in a Marxist sense. A

self-financed cooperative, or a cooperative seeded and financially

linked to local communities and other cooperatives rather than to banks

and financial markets, is less burdened by the drive for primitive

accumulation and growth-to-survive, and less likely to have its purpose

twisted by a creeping Toyotist model of production in which its labour

is dictated to it by a customer who has only signed a contract with a

WSDE [worker self-directed enterprise] to make it harder for its

workforce to unionise….

The Arizmendi model of finance is lauded both by radicals within NoBAWC

[Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives] member workplaces and by

supporters of the tax-funded Evergreen model, because it funded itself

without the need for a bank…. Innosanto, my informant from the radical

Design Action Collective in Oakland…, was a worker-owner at Inkworks,

a progressive printing cooperative, before founding Design Action. He

explained to me that as design technology and the demands of the

industry changed, the workflow of graphic design became different to

that of printing, so the cooperative split voluntarily because stopping

the workflow of heavy printing for graphic design projects would have

been inefficient. Innosanto and his co-founder initially wanted to

finance Design Action with seed funding from Inkworks, inspired by the

Arizmendi model, but due to the “inertia of an older co-op” the plan was

dropped, which he told me was “one of my disappointments about it.”

Fortunately the set-up costs for the enterprise were low, which meant

that it was secure from being trapped by a rentier — but being seeded

from another cooperative rather than private finance would have made its

founding faster and more efficient, and less capital would have been

extracted from it through debt….

A pleasant metaphor frequently used by Tim to promote how Arizmendi

grows new cooperatives and how it helps the individual to grow is that

of a sourdough culture, a metaphor with several layers. The first is

literal: when a new Arizmendi bakery is opened, one of the mature

bakeries provides a part of their original sourdough culture to the new

one, which then “takes on a unique flavour at its new location.” This is

analogous to the economic model, in which not only does the finance come

from other bakeries, so too does the experience, with personnel for the

new bakery being taken on to train in an existing Arizmendi with

experienced worker-owners to learn both the trade and how to practice

democracy on a daily basis. This intersects with the third layer; that a

person joining an existing cooperative becomes, like a daily sourdough

starter of flour and water, a part of the culture (what a fortunate

symbol for an anthropologist to stumble upon!)….

Dave laughed when I asked his view on the sourdough metaphor…, but

later confirmed much of its relevance when I asked him about his view of

the Evergreen cooperatives. Aside from his concern that the board of

directors is populated by CEOs from the anchor institutions and the

workers’ control is less than that of the clients, he pointed out that

it costs the Cleveland taxpayer over a million dollars per job created

by the Evergreens.

*“If we had a fraction of that money we’d be able to do a lot more with

it…the culture in the Bay Area is different than it is in the Mid

West. We have the greatest concentration of worker cooperatives in the

country, and the lowest number of professional consultants. In the Mid

West you have very few worker cooperatives but they have a huge number

of consultants, and centres, and think tanks, and to me it’s a little

bit strange because you’ve got all this infrastructure and nothing to

show for it, while here you have a lot of co-ops and we’re developing

the infrastructure after the coops have been in existence rather than

the other way around, and so sometimes people get excited about the

Evergreen project because it’s big numbers, and intellectuals like

Alperovitz and Richard Wolff seem to not be as interested in us because

it’s not glamorous and they can’t point to this giant example, rather

they should point to these 250 smaller examples that have been in

business for a long time. I’m concerned about creating this giant

structure out of a vacuum and hoping for the best. I’d rather build in

areas that already have something and put resources in areas where

people have done it themselves”*.[726]

Aside from the high overhead, the involvement of more conventional,

hierarchical legacy institutions more generally pushed the new

cooperatives towards a conventional corporate or bureaucratic model.

When I brought the question to Dave he was more sceptical, partly, he

said, because “I belong to an anarchist tradition” where nationalism is

regarded at best with unease — part of his concern about the Evergreen

model’s anchor institutions is that “though some of them are public,

like the university, they’re run like a corporation, even if they’re an

industry where profit should not be the primary role…education,

healthcare — it IS in the United States.”[727]

Jackson. The Jackson Plan was a community development

initiative in Jackson, Mississippi,* *growing out of

decades of previous activism by the New Afrikan People’s Organization

and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. In the 1970s the Detroit-based

Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika, which grew out of

the New Afrikan Independence Movement, purchased land to settle in

Mississippi. Former Jackson mayer Chokwe Lumumba was part of that

project. Its slogan was “Free the Land.”

That slogan and the idea of self-determination converge into the

agrarian question as Fanon and Cabral framed it – land as the

irreducible basis for a people to control their lives and take hold of

society’s productive forces, alongside the need not merely for juridical

ownership but political control over that land.

In 1984, Lumumba broke with the NAIM to found the New Afrikan People’s

Organization, which argued land “constitutes the material basis upon

which we can exercise our collective will.” It went on to establish the

Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) as its wing for political action

and mass work. Multiple streams then came together into Cooperation

Jackson. First was the Jackson branch of the MXGM. It did base work in

the area. It built up youth programs and helped hundreds of young people

to make it to college….

Based on their assessment that a coherent developmental alternative and

a path to reach it was needed, MXGM drafted the Jackson-Kush

Plan….[728]

The MXGM elaborates on the more recent history of the movement of the

Jackson Plan, which

is being spearheaded by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) and the

Jackson People’s Assembly….

The Jackson Plan has many local, national and international antecedents,

but it is fundamentally the brain child of the Jackson People’s

Assembly. The Jackson People’s Assembly is the product of the

Mississippi Disaster Relief Coalition (MSDRC) that was spearheaded by

MXGM in 2005 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of Gulf

Coast communities in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Texas. Between

2006 and 2008, this coalition expanded and transformed itself into the

Jackson People’s Assembly. In 2009, MXGM and the People’s Assembly were

able to elect human rights lawyer and MXGM co-founder Chokwe Lumumba to

the Jackson City Council representing Ward 2.[729]

The Three Pillars of the Plan include direct democratic People’s

Assemblies and the support for progressive political candidates. But

most interesting for our purposes is the third pillar,

to build a local Solidarity Economy that links with regional and

national Solidarity Economy networks to advance the struggle for

economic democracy.

Solidarity Economy as a concept describes a process of promoting

cooperative economics that promote social solidarity, mutual aid,

reciprocity, and generosity. It also describes the horizontal and

autonomously driven networking of a range of cooperative institutions

that support and promote the aforementioned values ranging from worker

cooperatives to informal affinity based neighborhood bartering networks.

Our conception of Solidarity Economy is inspired by the Mondragon

Federation of Cooperative Enterprises based in the Basque region of

Spain but also draws from the best practices and experiences of the

Solidarity Economy and other alternative economic initiatives already in

motion in Latin America and the United States. We are working to make

these practices and experiences relevant in Jackson and to make greater

links with existing cooperative institutions in the state and the region

that help broaden their reach and impact on the local and regional

economy. The Solidarity Economy practices and institutions that MXGM is

working to build in Jackson include:

- Building a network of cooperative and mutually reinforcing

enterprises and institutions, specifically worker, consumer, and

housing cooperatives, and community development credit unions as the

foundation of our local Solidarity Economy

- Building sustainable, Green (re)development and Green economy

networks and enterprises, starting with a Green housing initiative

- Building a network of local urban farms, regional agricultural

cooperatives, and farmers markets. Drawing heavily from recent

experiences in Detroit, we hope to achieve food sovereignty and

combat obesity and chronic health issues in the state associated with

limited access to healthy foods and unhealthy food environments

- Developing local community and conservation land trusts as a primary

means to begin the process of reconstructing the “Commons” in the

city and region by decommodifying land and housing i, Louisiana,

Alabama and Texas.

- Organizing to reconstruct and extend the Public Sector, particularly

public finance of community development, to be pursued as a means of

rebuilding the Public Sector to ensure there is adequate

infrastructure to provide quality health care, accessible mass

transportation, and decent, affordable public housing,

etc.[730]

Cooperation Jackson’s Kali Akuno explains the

background of the project’s solidarity economy vision in, among other

places, the Mondragon system and Emilia-Romagna’s cooperative economy.

One of my major contributions to that plan was really incorporating the

Solidarity Economy framework within it and contributing what I had

studied from a deep, deep dive into a study of the Mondragon and Emilia

Romangna cooperatives — as well as some of the work that was being done

by that Zapatistas. So, I just really brought that to the fore and tried

to incorporate that within the Jackson-Kush Plan, which eventually wound

up becoming a core component of debate and study within that

organization. As we launched a major phase of that plan’s execution in

2013 with the election of Chokwe Lamumba [sic] to Mayor of Jackson, one

of the main things that we were trying to move and shift as a result of

pursuing that office was changing some of the municipal policies to make

it so that it would be easier for a grassroots communities,

working-class communities, to actually develop cooperatives to make a

contribution towards the local economy, but also to put more direct

control in worker hands. Unfortunately, Chokwe died shortly after, too

soon before we could really execute what we all had in mind in terms of

those policies. But the plan to move forward and to try to execute that

vision, that moved forward and that became Cooperation Jackson.

And as his comments on the original vision for the first Mayor Lumumba’s

campaign suggest, the electoral movement was intended to empower the

creative work of ordinary people already engaged in building the

solidarity economy — not to build it for them.

A core element that cooperatives speak to are questions of self-reliance

and self-sufficiency, particularly regarding historically oppressed,

exploited, and marginalized communities. In order to change that

situation it has to start from within, and with the resources and the

talents that you yourself possess. We’ve got to be very clear that there

are no external saviors coming to save the day. And that our liberation

is in our own hands ultimately….

Another key thing that I will say is that the solidarity economy is not

something that we have to invent or parachute or convince people of.

Given the vast majority of people’s economic situation, if there wasn’t

some level of solidarity that people were practicing — particularly with

their families and their extended loved ones — many people just wouldn’t

make it through the day or the month. You know, paying bills, eating,

providing child care support to each other. There’s a great deal of

solidarity that already exists as an informal solidarity economy, and

what we’re just trying to do in many respects is to build on that

foundation and move it from an informal set of practices and

relationships to a more formal set of practices and relationships, and

create a dynamic wherein, you know, people can exchange, trade, and

barter, and still share with each other across familial relationships or

just basic communal relationships. And trying to scale that up so that

we can do time-banking, perhaps throughout the city in the next couple

of years. We’re also working on an alternative currency. You know, so

this organic composition already exists in that community and our

challenge is how to connect it much more explicitly to the formal

piece.[731]

Akuno “envisions an entire economy of co-ops working together, and

running independently from the dominant economy — co-op farms selling to

co-op restaurants, co-op dry cleaners taking out loans from co-op

banks.”

His dream is to create a “sister network” of co-ops across the globe,

all working with one another to create an economy parallel to the one we

live in but governed by different rules.

“It’s not just about surviving,” he emphasizes. “We want to build a new

economy, a new society. In order to do that, you have to survive, but

you have to also grow and reach out and change people’s minds in the

process.”

Cooperation Jackson aims to become the nucleus of a worker-owned and

-controlled local economy for the black population, outside the

capitalist system. It currently operates an “urban farming

collaborative” called Freedom Farms, and the Chokwe Lumumba Center for

Economic Democracy and Development, “a community center and

small-businesses incubator.” It’s currently in process of building a

cafe that includes a catering business. It’s buying up land —

twenty-five lots so far, with the intention of buying fifty more — in

order to create a community land trust. In addition, it’s crowdfunding

“a production and fabrication center — essentially a flexibly configured

factory that can be used for small-time manufacturing.”[732]

Max Ajl elaborates on the way the various components of the solidarity

economy are intended to work together:

These principles take on programmatic form in the dense network which

Cooperation Jackson is trying to build. First, the local cooperatives.

Second, a cooperative incubator. Third, a cooperative school and

training center. And fourth, a cooperative union and bank. This last

component is crucial, because capital is necessary for systematic and

harmonized development. We are accustomed to thinking of capital as the

monopoly of the wealthy. This has truth. But capital also exists in

banks, and banks have capital in part because they have depositors.

Credit unions need not use their capital for stock-market speculation or

bond purchases. They could equally use it to support communities and

municipalities like Jackson trying to take control of their productive

future. Although, it must be noted that that [sic] such a stage can only

be intermediary, given that currency itself is a tool of capitalist

domination. Hence part of Cooperation Jackson’s pedagogy involves

discussion and interest in alternative- or crypto-currencies, as

technologies useful for breaking with that tool of

control.[733]

And as Kali Akuno explains, Cooperation Jackson’s project of building a

local solidarity economy is meant to be undertaken in parallel with, and

solidarity with, a number of other struggles providing political cover

and creating space for each other:

Organizing is the answer [for dealing with betrayal and dismissal of the

Green New Deal from centrist Democrats like Pelosi]. We have to organize

a strong independent base to advance the transition program we need, be

it the Green New Deal or anything similar. Without that this epic issue

will be held hostage to forces seeking to maintain the capitalist system

as is, whether it be the Democratic or Republican variety of this

worldview and its articulated interests. And we have to build this base

to advance two strategies at once.

One, we have to organize a mass base within the working class,

particularly around the job-focused side of the just transition

framework. We have to articulate a program that concretely addresses the

class’s immediate and medium-term need for jobs and stable income around

the expansion of existing “green” industries and the development of new

ones, like digital fabrication or what we call community production,

that will enable a comprehensive energy and consumption transition. This

will have to be a social movement first and foremost, which understands

electoral politics as a tactic and not an end unto itself.

For our part, one of the critical initiatives that we as Cooperation

Jackson are arguing for is the development of a broad “union-co-op”

alliance that would seek to unite the three forms of the organized

working-class movement in this country — i.e. the trade unions, workers’

centers, and worker cooperatives — around what we call a “build and

fight” program. It would seek to construct new worker-owned and

self-managed enterprises rooted in sustainable methods of production on

the build side and to enact various means of appropriation of the

existing enterprises by their workers on the fight side, which would

transition these industries into sustainable practices (or in some cases

phase them out entirely). We think this is a means towards building the

independence that is required to dictate the terms of the political

struggle in the electoral arena.

The second strategy calls for mass civil disobedience, as we witnessed

at Standing Rock. We have to recognize that the neoliberal and

reactionary forces at the heart of the Democratic Party are only part of

the problem. The main enemy is and will be the petrochemical

transnationals. We have to weaken their ability to extract, and this

entails stopping new exploration and production initiatives. This is

critical because it will weaken their power, particularly their

financial power, which is at the heart of their lobbying power. If we

can break that, we won’t have to worry about the

centrists….[734]

Following the death of Chokwe Lumumba his son, also named Chokwe, was

elected mayor on June 7, 2017 with 93% of the vote.[735]

Matthew Thompson characterizes Cooperation Jackson, despite some

municipal government involvement under both Mayors Lumumba, as an

“autonomist” municipalist movement focused primarily on social and

economic counter-institutions rather than on the kinds of state-centered

initiatives in Cleveland and Preston. It has been

moving progressively away from engaging with the local state towards

building autonomous alternatives. Activists describe their approach as

‘dual power’ – “building autonomous power outside of the realm of the

state” in the form of popular assemblies and a “broader platform for a

restoration of the ‘commons’” whilst only engaging electoral politics on

a limited scale in order to build radical voting blocs and elect

candidates drawn from the ranks of the assemblies themselves. Wielding

the power of formal municipal institutions is a means to incubate and

protect the development of a democratic solidarity economy from

racist-state-capitalist incursion. Elected in 2013, the radical

socialist mayor Chokwe Lumumba embodied dual power in his pledge to make

Jackson the “most radical city on the planet” and to materialise

Cooperation Jackson’s aim: to socialise the means of production and

democratise society. Since his untimely death in 2014, and his son’s

election with a weaker mandate, Cooperation Jackson has turned away from

electoral politics to focus on socioeconomic autonomy and Black

self-determination. Economic autonomy, ecological self-sufficiency and

non-monetary exchange are being pursued through interconnected

experiments in alternative currencies, time banking, food growing,

renewable energy, circular waste reuse, community-owned housing, digital

fabrication laboratories, makerspaces and worker-owned co-ops. The

co-ops are organised as a federation democratically accountable to the

community. A cooperative school provides political education; a

community loan fund patient capital. All developed on land owned by a

community land trust, reinvesting surpluses to create (relatively)

autonomous circuits of value.[736]

On the downside, Lumumba’s freedom of action has been limited by

preemptive action from the Republican-controlled state government — at

the same time as a growing split between Cooperation Jackson and

Lumumba’s electoral arm.

…[T]wo years into his administration, the relationship between city

hall and the grassroots has soured. Without an alliance with city hall,

hopes of leveraging city procurement, labor law, or other aspects of

municipal power to build cooperatives have diminished. The rupture has

been made worse by an exodus of grassroots activists to city hall.

According to Themba-Nixon, “Virtually all the organizers working on the

People’s Assembly were called into service for the administration with

MXGM, even recruiting organizers and staff from outside Mississippi.”

The movement is coming under pressure from the state as well. The state

legislature, dominated by Republicans, maneuvers to put municipal

resources that bring money into the city, such as the airport and the

city zoo, under state authority….

With a city government hemmed in by state authorities and starved for

cash, and a split between elected reformers and the grassroots, today

Cooperation Jackson focuses on the economic self-determination aspect of

the Jackson-Kush Plan. Following the cooperative model of Mondragón in

Spain, it aims to create a federation of workers’ cooperatives.

Cooperation Jackson operates at the same time as a vehicle for political

education, and a structure enabling administrative, financial, and

material solidarity.

In a vision evocative of Afrofuturism, Cooperation Jackson hopes to help

Jackson residents fabricate their own affordable housing at a “FABLAB”

outfitted with 3D printers, computer numerical control machines, and

other tools of what some call the fifth industrial revolution. It has

also launched Freedom Farm Cooperatives, aiming to realize food

sovereignty through urban farming. Cooperation Jackson is also working

to buy property to create a community land trust to secure affordable

housing and to prevent gentrification in West Jackson, currently one of

the poorest neighborhoods in the city.

The movement in Jackson faces unrelenting pressure from the

white-supremacist Mississippi power structure. The Lumumba

administration itself is reckoning with the limitations of municipal

power, at times caving to austerity imperatives — for example, through

the regressive sales tax to pay for infrastructure improvements. And in

2018 the city ended up in the uncomfortable role of cutting off water

for households that cannot pay their bills. The split between the

Lumumba administration and Cooperation Jackson has weakened the

movement, depriving solidarity economy initiatives of the lever of

municipal government power. Cooperation Jackson is working through the

difficulties of inventing new forms of social relations under the

constant pressure of capitalism and racism; many obstacles to achieving

the movement’s more ambitious goals remain ahead.[737]

Akuno himself has sometimes obliquely hinted at this split:

The Jackson Plan is a major initiative in the effort to deepen democracy

and build a solidarity economy. To the extent that this plan calls for a

critical engagement with electoral politics, we take heed of the lesson

and warning issued by Guyanese professor Walter Rodney:

‘I say this very deliberately. Not even those of us who stand on this

platform can tell you that the remedy in Guyana is that a new set of

people must take over from an old set of people and we will run the

system better. That is no solution to the problems of Guyana. The

problem is much more fundamental than that.

‘We are saying that working-class people will get justice only when they

take the initiative. When they move themselves. Nobody else can give

[freedom] as a gift. Someone who comes claiming to be a liberator is

either deluding himself or he is trying to delude the people…. So long

as we suffer from a warped concept of politics as being leadership,

we’re going to be in a lot of trouble.’

We draw two lessons from this statement and the history associated with

it. One, that to engage is to not be deluded about the discriminatory

and hierarchal nature of the system, nor deny its proven ability to

contain and absorb resistance, or to reduce radicals to managers of the

status quo. We have to fight in every arena to create democratic space

to allow oppressed and exploited people the freedom and autonomy to

ultimately empower themselves.

The second lesson regards leadership. MXGM believes that leadership is

necessary to help stimulate, motivate, and educate struggling people,

but that leaders and leadership are no substitutes for the people

themselves, nor for an autonomous mass movement with distributed or

horizontal leadership.[738]

So has Cooperation Jackson as an organization:

We, Cooperation Jackson, were not largely responsible for the election

of the current administration in Jackson, many of our members were part

of the broad coalition that helped the administration get elected. This

is critical for everyone to note and learn from in regards to

understanding municipal politics and power.[739]

And Akuno, elsewhere, expressed himself much less obliquely:

…[W]hile I disagree with many of the policy and programmatic

priorities articulated by the Mayoral administration of Chokwe Antar

Lumumba thus far, as well as Mayor Lumumba’s increasing public alignment

with the Democratic Party (particularly the so-called Bernie wing of the

Party), I have a vested interest in doing all that I can to help the

Lumumba administration succeed. I am committed to struggling with the

administration internally where possible and externally when necessary,

to stay the course of pursuing radical social transformation as

articulated in the Jackson-Kush Plan.

…[O]f all the things that the J-K Plan conveys, the component of it

that has far and away drawn the most attention has been its electoral

component. Like it or not, this has been the primary source of

inspiration engendered by this document. Given how the media is focused

in this society, and how power is too often narrowly understood, this

sadly is what the overwhelming majority of people focus on in reference

to the radical work in Jackson. …[T]he electoral component of the

strategy was originally intended to be an adjunct component of a broader

objective, which was to build a transformative, anti-colonial power from

the ground up through the People’s Assembly as an autonomous vehicle of

self-governance that would engage in a developmental process of

socialist construction by building a dynamic social and solidarity

economy on the local level to create new social relations and means of

production (which is the mission of Cooperation Jackson). Building a new

independent political party that would engage in electoral politics, but

not be bound by its pursuits, was just one component of this radical

strategy….

When me and my comrade Kamau Franklin first conceived of the idea and

advanced the proposal to NAPO and MXGM that Chokwe Lumumba run for mayor

in 2008, our primary objective was to use the campaign to: a) gather

concrete information about who and how many people in Jackson believed

in and would openly support the pursuit of New Afrikan (Black)

self-determination and sovereignty, and b) to use the data gathered from

this social experiment to advance our base building work in the city

(and beyond) to build power. The power we were focused on building was

the enhancement of the capacity of a self-organized community to

collectively exercise its will by transforming the social means to meet

its material and social needs. The focus was on changing social

relationships from below, by moving people to pool their resources,

skills, and intellectual capacities to more effectively utilize what

they have to improve their lives and to struggle to either build or

appropriate the resources (land, capital, and social institutions)

needed to suit this end. It should be noted, that we did not rule out

the notion that Chokwe should win the election, but this was not our

initial focus.

However, in the process of agreeing to pursue this course of action,

comrades in the Jackson chapter (keep in mind that neither I or Kamau

lived in Jackson in 2008) stated that they did not want to engage in a

“symbolic action,” that they wanted to “win,” meaning actually attain

the office…. Given that we had done some preliminary research on the

possibility of winning an election that was favorable, I initially

offered no resistance to this notion. For my part, I went along with

this notion because I thought that we all agreed with the power building

objectives stated above. As it turns out, we did not…. We did not

agree on whether the victory was defined as building power, or winning

and holding office. Or, if the answer was both/and, how would this

advance the liberation of Black people within the US in the short and

midterm? How would this victory support the building of the New Afrikan

Nation, the decolonization of Turtle Island, and the dismantling of the

US government? We moved forward on the basis of assumptions, not on the

basis of concrete clarity. And moving forward on this basis is what has

led us to the impasse that we find ourselves in today….

As a result of this compromise, winning elections became the primary

focus of the “on the ground“ work in Jackson from 2009 on. In practice

this election centered focus has translated into downplaying the

politics of the New Afrikan Independence Movement, limiting public

discussion of the Jackson-Kush Plan, crafting a more “popular” political

platform called the “people’s platform” that orientated itself towards

the restitution of a welfare state as opposed to the construction of

socialism, and making public overtures to appease capital expressed in

statements that “Jackson is open for business” and “we want corporations

to come here and get rich.” All of these moves were made to enable the

candidates to become more “electable.” These actions and orientations

are in contradiction with the focus and pursuits of the original

campaign proposal. This development sadly repeats a time worn pattern of

revolutionaries throughout the world over the past 200 + years who turn

to electoral politics to allegedly transform the system from within, who

along the way get transformed by the system and step by step become

revisionists, reformers, and agents of neo-colonial subjugation and

neo-liberal social destruction.

…For my part, I see electoral politics as a field of struggle that

revolutionaries cannot ignore, given the balance of forces in society as

a whole. But, I don’t think we need to give much of our limited time and

energy towards this pursuit. Rather, I argue that we need to put the

majority of our time and energy into building working class

organizations that are focused on enhancing the productive capacities of

the class in its comprehensive composition (meaning those who are

employed, under employed, structurally unemployable, those who labor in

the fields, and those who labor in prison) and amassing the skills and

resources to transform society and defeat the corrosive powers of

capital.

…If anything, without a major course correction, the Lumumba

administration is structurally poised to reenact an “American” version

of the neo-liberal tragedy currently being executed and administered on

the Greek people by Syriza.[740]

The split was further dramatized by the appearance of rival People’s

Assemblies in summer 2020. The original Jackson People’s Assembly was

long-time governance body chaired by Rukia Lumumba, the mayor’s sister.

The Jackson People’s Assembly’s vision for the future, as described by

an official document, is to be incorporated into the formal policy

process as an a sort of officially endorsed open government initiative.

“The current Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba (allows) the development of the

People’s Assembly as an autonomous structure that will eventually be an

institution of government that through legislation will be an entity

city government must utilize for community input and engagement in local

government decision-making.” Rukia Lumumba stated that “the basis of the

assembly is actually as a link between the government and the people.”

The Real People’s Assembly, on the other hand, views its relation to JPA

in an adversarial light:

[Jackson finance worker Greg] Griffin said he and Jackson-based lawyer

Adofo Minka, who writes columns for this newspaper, formed a coalition

on June 30. “Out of that coalition, we formed the group that is called

the Real People’s Assembly.”…

Minka made it clear that the RPA is designed as an alternative to the

Lumumba’s approach, explicitly saying so in a document containing its

resolution at the end of the meeting, which Minka shared with the

Jackson Free Press.

“Ordinary people recognize that the original pretense to a movement for

popular assemblies never taught commoners how to be independent from

city government and to take action to govern themselves. Now the process

of popular government as self-directed liberating activity is underway,”

the RPA document said.

The basic concept of both people’s assemblies is a focus on gathering

together to express ideas on the direction the city of Jackson should

go. Both define their end-goal as some form of direct democracy, though

they differ in the definition of what the term means.

For RPA, direct democracy means the people determining what will happen

and taking the initiative themselves to make it so.

For JPA, the goal is to become a legal government entity through future

legislation, achieving the rule of the people and changing government

from within. RPA, in contrast, believes that the government cannot

reform itself and that the people must replace it by direct rule.

Illustrating the difference, Mayor Lumumba and his wife, Ebony, were

part of the July 11 JPA meeting, attended by more than 80 people

virtually. City and administration officials spoke at the Lumumba

assembly, as they often do at length at the traditional people’s

assemblies.

RPA, on the other hand, is committed to excluding the mayor and his

administration’s officials. The leaders are openly critical of the

mayor, with Minka often critiquing Lumumba’s decisions, particularly on

police violence and allowing the Jackson Police Department to work with

the federal government on Project Eject.

The organizers also do not believe it is possible for the government, or

those close to it, to organize a real people’s assembly.

“Unlike a city council or PTA meeting, the RPA was not reported to by

elite administrators or politicians, leaving a few minutes for ordinary

people to express themselves and be ignored,” the RPA resolution

document stated. “The meeting established an overwhelming consensus that

the RPA is not a place where professional politicians, police or

surveillance operatives in uniform or plain clothes, are welcome….”

That is, what the newer RPA prohibits is embedded in the traditional JPA

model….

“The Real People’s Assembly is not associated with the Jacks [sic]

People’s Assembly associated with Mayor Lumumba’s administration, the

Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the People’s Advocacy Institute. It is

an independent body that will act independent of the government and will

not be subordinated to any government officials,” Minka told the Jackson

Free Press.

“It is looking to establish its own independent self-government so that

ordinary people can arrive on their own authority and control their own

political, economic, social ecology and judicial affairs within the city

of Jackson….”

Minka says RPA aims to organize and place “ordinary people at the center

of what we do and people being able to arrive at their own authority,

instead of giving their authority to a government that is rooted in

hierarchy and domination.”[741]

Probably the most realistic approach is to view the two assemblies as

complementary tracks of the sort of dual strategy examined in Chapter

Eight. The RPA is the primary axis of self-organization both for the

task of actually constructing the new society within the shell of the

old, and for orchestrating pressure on the municipal government from

outside. The JPA plays a secondary role, in taking advantage of whatever

limited opportunity is presented for direct participatory governance,

and shifting the government in a Partner State direction through direct

engagement. The important thing is to see the secondary track for what

it is, and under no circumstances authorize those participating in JPA

to bind those engaged in the primary action of counter-institution

building in any way.

In any case the damage from this split has been mitigated by the fact

that Akuno and Cooperation Jackson from the beginning saw electoral

politics, not as the primary driver for implementing their vision, but

as a way of opening up opportunities for initiatives undertaken from the

outside. So the disaffection between the electoral and social wings of

the movement has not sucked the life out of the latter the way the

Syriza government did the Syntagma movement in Greece.

In an inversion of the civil rights movement strategy of leveraging the

federal government against local white-supremacist elites, Jackson

activists see municipal government as a tactical space where their

movement can gain strength. The strategy, in the words of Kali Akuno,

cofounder and director of Cooperation Jackson, is to use the power of

city hall to help create the base for a social and solidarity economy —

by ensuring a stable market and access to capital for workers’

cooperatives through city contracts and credit unions, and by opening

access to expertise, training, and other resources.[742]

Seattle. The Neighborhood Action Coalition (NAC) was

set up following* *Trump’s election, with a focus on

protecting marginalized groups against hate crimes. Unlike the Occupy

movement with its city-wide general assemblies, NAC has chapters in each

city district.

Each neighborhood chapter is empowered to select its own activities and

many groups have evolved through door-to-door listening campaigns.The

NAC is creating new forms of encounter between citizens and city

officials.

The NAC’s Nikkita Oliver, a Black Lives Matters activist, ran for mayor

this year (unsuccessfully) on a platform of radical government

accountability.[743]

Portland. Portland Assembly enrolls new members in

existing neighborhood* *associations. “They are currently

working to create a citywide, pro-homeless coalition; they advocate for

radical reformation of the police.” PA was in the news recently when

members in Black Bloc attire obtained asphalt and fixed neglected

potholes themselves.[744]

*Kitchener.** Inspired by ecological economist Tim Jackson, the

Kitchener, Ontario economic development commissioner launched the “Make

It Kitchener” campaign to “help transition Kitchener into a new economic

phase.

Manufacturing was previously a main source of employment, but Kitchener

lost out to Hamilton, Ontario as a primary place for investors. As the

manufacturing companies closed, and the sister-city of Waterloo, Ontario

began devoting immense resources into becoming a hub for tech

industries, Kitchener was struggling to find its innovative place. Make

It Kitchener is the city’s attempt to give citizens something new to buy

into at a municipal level. The city invested in programs to reskill

those that had lost their manufacturing jobs to join new employment

opportunities, funded artists and makers in residence at any local

business to boost local sales, paid for maker activity nights at local

libraries such as repair cafes, helped support the development of local

maker spaces, and began giving out up to $20 000 CND to any group of

community members that had a small project that would improve their

local areas.

Because of the city’s commitment to a community-oriented, citizen

empowering, and local production initiative, Kitchener is now a hub in

Ontario for local economic development. The municipality saw a

significant reduction in waste, revitalized the local theatre, is a hub

for various kinds of start-ups (food, tech, artists), has a vibrant

sharing economy with tool libraries and sharing services, and has

successfully revitalized the suburbs by giving community grants. The

city has also repeatedly refused to allow significant gentrification of

their downtown core, rejecting a number of property-led development

proposals oriented purely to return on capital investment. Kitchener is

an example for how municipalities can implement maker principles to help

fund citizen innovation. Kitchener is now one of the top 25 start-up

ecosystems in the world and the start-up density is second only to

Silicon Valley. In under 20 years, Kitchener created over 30 000 tech

jobs used to improve systems across the world.[745]

*Montréal.** In the 1960s, according to Aaron Vansintjan and Donald

Cuccioletta, citizens there “started up *groupes populaires* like

citizens’ committees, collective childcare, cooperative housing and

businesses, community-run clinics, neighborhood food cooperatives — the

first of their kind in Quebec and Canada — and political action

committees.”

Residents of the Milton-Parc neighborhood organized what became the

largest housing cooperative in North America. Citizens’ assemblies and

tenant associations sprang up in different neighborhoods to coordinate

these efforts. By the end of the 1960s, Montreal’s residents had built

an ecosystem of mutual aid organizations by and for the working class.

At the same time, union leaders, recognizing the immense power coming

from the *quartiers populaires* (people’s neighborhoods), began to see

the need for a “second front” (*deuxiéme front*) beyond traditional

labor organizing. In 1969, the FRAP (Political Action Front) — a

coalition of grassroots municipal activists and autonomous political

action committees based in the neighborhoods — formed a party and ran

for city elections.

Its progress was derailed to some extent by the Quebec independence

movement and a kidnapping campaign by some of its hardliners, followed

by military occupation of Montréal, the arrest of many FRAP leaders, and

its failure in the elections. Nevertheless a general strike of 300,000

workers organized by Quebec unions did a lot to maintain the radical

tradition of the city’s neighborhoods — and politicians’ fear of it.

Through the ‘80s the expansion of the welfare state and its cooptation

of autonomous social movements and institutions had done more than

anything to sap the radical tradition of strength.

By the 1990s, the Quebec government had helped create a class of

professional “community organizers” who spent much of their time

competing for government funding, while having little incentive to help

build up people-power.

Fast forward to 2012, in the aftermath of the 2011 horizontalist

movements, when the Montréal municipalist movement took on new life on

the model of M15 and the post-M15 municipal movements in Spain.

…[T]he massive student strike — the Maple Spring — sought to block

tuition increases imposed by the Liberal government. An estimated

250,000 students from universities and community colleges went on strike

across the province. Students were organized in a leaderless horizontal

confederal model. Ordinary people joined the daily protest marches and

began to self-organize neighborhood-based assemblies, which briefly

confederated before withering away when the movement lost its momentum.

Today, Montréal’s social movements are once again turning toward radical

municipalist action.

In 2018, activists opened Bâtiment 7, a huge self-run autonomous

cooperative center in the working-class area of Pointe Saint-Charles,

the same neighborhood where the first community health clinic was

established in 1968.

Residents of Milton-Parc are organizing a series of conferences on

municipalism and advancing a dual power framework. In response to the

election victory of Projét Montréal, a “progressive” — but largely

neoliberal — municipal party, radicals formed the Montreal Urban Left,

an organization seeking to bring together radical municipal struggles

around the city.

Throughout Montréal, there is a renewed interest in cooperative housing,

and a growing movement for social housing and tenant rights, largely as

a reaction to gentrification. Indeed, the housing movement is today

emerging as the key struggle.[746]

II. Europe

Barcelona and Other Spanish Cities. The new

municipalist movement first appeared in Spain, growing out of M15’s

cross-pollination with several other phenomena. The M15 movement

remained vibrant at the local* *level, both in building

economic counter-institutions and in municipal politics, despite the

abandonment of its occupation camps in 2011. Despite the triumph of

right-wing parties at a national level, towns and cities all over Spain

have elected local political movements derived from M15, and pursuing a

variety of post-capitalist agendas based on cooperatives and the

commons. As Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel describe it:

In the spring of 2014, spurred on by Podemos’ success in the European

elections, [[http://commonstransition.org/a-charter-for-democracy/][a

group of activists]] met in *el Patio Maravillas*, one of Madrid’s most

prominent occupied social centers. “We’re going to win this city,” they

announced. They began organizing, enabling unprecedented levels of

citizen participation and facilitating a common space for previously

unaffiliated and disaggregated political actors. Anyone who agreed with

the basic principles and wanted to be present could propose him or

herself as a candidate on fully

[[http://commonstransition.org/this-is-how-people-power-wins-an-election-the-story-of-ahora-madrid/][open

and participatory]] electoral lists.

A month or so earlier, activists from Barcelona launched a manifesto to

invite existing social movements and political organizations to converge

around four fundamental objectives:

1. Guaranteeing the citizenry’s basic rights and a decent life for all,

2. Fostering an economy that prioritizes social and environmental

justice,

3. The participative democratization of institutions,

4. To meet an ethical commitment towards citizens.

The call for convergence was an astounding success, and Guanyem

Barcelona, publicly represented by anti-eviction and right to housing

campaigner Ada Colau, begins its yearlong mutation into Barcelona en

Comú, an “instrumental” electoral coalition comprising a variety of

actors from social movements and anti-establishment political parties

working together to take back the city.

Ignored or decried in the popular media, these coalitions, much like the

15-M and Occupy encampments, replicated themselves in other locales,

forming alliances and swarming around shared values and beliefs. The

process was messy, effervescent and busy. No one had tried this before

and there is no instruction manual; in practice, it can only be written

together.

Against poll expectations, a hostile media, and entrenched political

interests, these parties overwhelmingly won in Spain’s main cities, not

only Madrid and Barcelona, but also in Valencia, A Coruña, Zaragoza, and

Cadiz. Podemos, although a participant in many of these coalitions,

chose to run the regional (as opposed to the city) ballot on their own.

The result? Zero victories in all the places where the citizens’

coalitions had triumphed.[747]

The outcome of the municipal elections was an unprecedented situation,

according to Stefanie Ehmsen and Albert Scharenberg.

For the first time in almost 40 years of Spanish democracy, the

country’s major cities would no longer be ruled by either the Partido

Popular (PP) or the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), or any of

the other long established political forces, but by new “Municipalist

Confluences” such as Ahora Madrid, Barcelona en Comú, and Cadiz Si Se

Puede, to name just a few.[748]

The municipalist victories reflected their roots in the M15 movement,

according to Troncoso and Utratel:

Spain’s municipalist coalitions were the result of a number of movements

representing changes in cultures, mindsets and relations to power. The

most notable among these is 15-M and, unlike Podemos, the coalitions can

be considered its true political byproducts. Prior to the 2014–2015

electoral cycle, 15-M had also developed strong transversal relations

with movements around housing, public health and education and culture.

Known as “*las mareas*,” or “citizen’s tides,” these were characterized

by self-organized protests and capacity building that, although

inclusive of traditional actors such as labour unions and political

parties, were truly multi-constituent in nature. For example, the public

health *marea* would include healthcare professionals, patients, civil

workers, health reformers, hospital staff, specific disease-focused

associations and help groups, etc., as well as all supporters of the

public health service. 15-M itself was also a product of already

existing tendencies, with people who had been working in digital

activism, free culture, de-growth, the commons and a host of other

movements….

Beyond their local concerns and trans-local alliances, all the

municipalist platforms have their eye on the transnational dimension in

order to form a network of “Rebel Cities.”[749]

News of Colau’s election was widely accompanied by a photo from 2013 of

her being hauled away by police during the occupation of a Barcelona

bank that was foreclosing on homes.

Barcelona En Comú*‘s first order of business was to fight the

gentrification that was driving up rents** **and destroying old

neighborhoods. As part of an attempt to stop outside investors and

speculators from buying up local real estate for development and

evicting tenants, Colau put a freeze on further construction of hotels

and other tourist accommodations.

Barcelona En Comú is limited internally by the fact that it

controls only 11 of 44 city council seats.** **At the same time, it

is the political arm of a large social economy movement outside the

government, and is involved not only in conventional policy initiatives

but also a wide variety of quasi-official initiatives in collaboration

with activists in civil society.

Besides fostering greater participation in governance, Barcelona En Comú

hopes to fortify and expand what it calls the “commons collaborative

economy” – the cooperatives, commons and neighborhood projects that

comprise a remarkable 10% of the city economy through 1,300 ventures.

For example, there is the impressive Guifi.net, a broadband

telecommunications network that is managed as a commons for the benefit

of ordinary Internet users and small businesses. The system provides

welcome competition to the giant Telefónica by providing affordable

Internet access through more than 32,000 active wifi nodes.

The city is also home to Som Energia Coop, the first renewable energy

coop in Catalunya. It both resells energy bought from the market and is

developing its own renewable energy projects – wind turbines, solar

panels, biogas plants – to produce energy for its members.

Barcelona En Comú realizes that boosting that commons collaborative

economy is an act of co-creation with commoners, not a government

project alone. So the city has established new systems to open and

expand new dialogues. There is a group council called BarCola, for

example, which convenes leading players in the collaborative economy and

commons-based peer production to assess the progress of this sector and

recommend helpful policies. There is also an open meetup called

Procomuns.net, and Decim.Barcelona (Decide Barcelona), a web platform

for public deliberation and decision-making.

It remains to be seen how these bodies will evolve, but their clear

purpose is to strengthen the commons collaborative economy as a

self-aware, active sector of the city’s life. The administration is

exploring such ideas as how existing coops might migrate to open

platforms, and what types of businesses might be good allies or

supporters of the commons collaborative economy.[750]

In March 2016 Barcelona hosted the Commons Collaborative Economies (or

Procomuns) event, which was “focused on commons-oriented peer production

and the collaborative economy. This event centered on producing public

policy proposals and technical guidelines for building software

platforms for collaborative communities….” It issued a series of 122

policy recommendations addressed both to the Barcelona municipal

government and to the European Commission. It also focused on guidelines

for building software platforms to support the collaborative

economy.[751]

Barcelona has taken a small step towards the Partner State model with

decidim.barcelona, a public collaborative platform for making policy

proposals.[752] Decidim (“we decide” in Catalan)

allows the public to participate directly in government as they would a

form of social media, and they have had early success. The city council

hosted several organizing events to decide on a strategic plan, and

nearly 40,000 people and 1,500 organizations contributed 10,000

suggestions.

According to Xabier Barandiaran, a project leader, one of the functions

Decidim supports is participatory budgeting, but

there are many others. Decidim makes possible almost all of them. It is

only limited because we are still developing the software and developing

new features. We have learned a lot. We have gathered collective

intelligence from different expert citizens. All hackers, people

interested in their government. We run workshops and open citizen

meetings. We came out with a wider spectrum of possibilities for

participatory democracy, other than participatory budgeting. There are

budgeting pilots in Barcelona. But we did not put all our eggs in that

basket. We felt it was more important to identify the problems to bring

people together to speak about public services.[753]

The city also actively encourages “sharing economy” ventures on a

platform cooperativist model, and is designing a collaborative economy

incubator.[754]

Two years later, the list of their accomplishments was still more

impressive.

Even though housing regulation is not city-run, Barcelona en Comú was

able to put a moratorium on new hotel construction, close over 2,000

illegal tourist apartments, sanction Airbnb for illegal establishments,

and even begin to expropriate landlords who keep apartments vacant. They

set up a sustainable public energy company, a publicly owned dental

clinic that offers affordable rates, and the city’s first municipal

LGBTQ center. The city created coop businesses for migrants and refugees

and is attempting to use city procurement to source from cooperatives.

More recently, they enacted a measure requiring that 30 percent of new

buildings be used for affordable housing and created an anti-eviction

unit. The platform also continues to coordinate neighborhood assemblies

and issue-based “commissions” to guide the party’s elected

representatives. Currently, Barcelona en Comú has over 15,000 active

participants in an online forum built to debate and vote on policies. At

the party headquarters, a thermometer chart on the wall tracks the

number of people active in grassroots bodies: before the 2019 election

it was over 1,500.[755]

The Barcelona en Comu success in Barcelona inspired, or was accompanied

by, similar municipalist successes in a number of other Spanish cities.

Unfortunately they suffered electoral setbacks in 2019 everywhere but in

Cadiz, and it has emerged that the relationship between the electoral

and social wings of the movements has been characterized by frictions

similar to those between Cooperation Jackson and Mayor Lumumba, Syntagma

and Syriza, etc.

In the case of Barcelona, the losses were caused in part by division

over the Catalan independence issue. Many supporters were left feeling

betrayed by Mayor Colau’s opposition. But the other municipalist party

in Barcelona, CUP, also lost seats despite supporting independence.

Colau has also responded to the hostility of the police unions and their

barrage of scare propaganda about crime rates by attempting to appease

them with tough-on-crime rhetoric. Despite the loss of seats and

minority vote, Colau was able to retain the mayor’s office thanks to

support from the pro-austerity Socialists — promising a further watering

down of the municipalist agenda.

Colau’s attempt to steer a middle course has succeeded only in

alienating people in both directions. This happened with her approach to

reining in law enforcement abuses:

In the last elections, Colau promised to abolish the riot division of

the city police, and in the end all she did was change their name. In

effect, she pissed the cops off and mobilized them against her

administration without weakening them institutionally.

One of the first campaigns the police and the media waged against the

Colau administration was to manufacture a crisis with the manters,

undocumented immigrants primarily from sub-Saharan Africa who make their

living selling goods like clothing or sunglasses in public areas without

permission. The cops fanned the flames through increased harassment and

the media created racist fears and annoyances around these vendors, but

Colau’s solution was insubstantial dialogue ending in a further

crackdown on the immigrants….

Likewise with housing, her signature issue:

But as the PAH [Plataforma de Afectados por las Hipotecas — Platform of

those Affected by Mortgages] grew and radicalized, it became ever more

distanced from its most famous activist turned politician. Most chapters

are now staunchly critical of Podemos and the municipalist governments

of change it allies with. In Barcelona, the PAH is largely recognized as

a fief of BComú, a fact that led the “Obra Social,” the part of the

organization that occupies buildings and puts them to social use, to

break away.

Meanwhile, BComú and the other governments of change get the credit for

“expanding the public housing stock” when in reality, this is an

achievement of the PAH and similar grassroots groups, who occupy unused

buildings and fight banks tooth and nail to force them to make their

repossessed properties available for housing….

A more sordid example comes in the form of Jaume Assens, “third

lieutenant” to the mayor and deputy for En Comú Podem, the Podemos-BComú

alliance. Before his election on Ada Colau’s ticket, he was well known

as one of the principal lawyers for the Barcelona squatters’ movement.

In his very first week upon assuming office, he was already signing

eviction orders against families that needed to squat in order to get

housing. The new administration, at that time, was careful not to evict

social centers or squats connected to a political movement, which meant

that unconnected immigrant or gitano families were the most vulnerable.

The much-vaunted agenda to “combat tourism” was actually aimed almost

entirely at traditional mass-tourism, while shifting to encourage tech

tourism and gentrification.

Colau has fared no better with her labor agenda: “She has engaged in

strike-breaking and slander against transportation workers, as denounced

by the CGT.”

Perhaps most worrisome, her party has become the vanguard of the “Smart

City” model, which is the future of the capitalist city. On a world

scale, Barcelona has become a leading Smart City, advancing rational and

AI integration of urban management, total surveillance, and completely

illusory “green” measures that have completely hoodwinked reformist

sectors of the environmental movement, while also attracting additional

high tech investment that is helping push out poorer city residents.

Peter Gelderloos’ reflections on the lessons of this outcome are

relevant to our earlier discussion of issues involved in engagement with

the state, and on the need for social movements to focus primarily on

their own agenda of institution-building:

Without a doubt, this latest attempt to engage in a “long march through

the institutions” has been fueled by the failings of anti-institutional

movements that focus on self-organization. After all, Podemos and many

of the affiliated municipal parties were not born as a co-optation of

the 15M movement. Many would-be politicians tried, but the people were

sick of political parties and they were armed with the historical memory

of how consistently political parties had failed us in the past, so they

were able to defend their rejection of parties throughout the duration

of the movement.

No, these parties were born in the vacuum left behind after the 15M

movement died. And it died because we were unable to elaborate our

spaces of self-organization to the point where they could take on the

self-organization of daily life.

They remained *political* spaces rather than *social* spaces, concerned

exclusively with the organization of protests, blockades, strikes, and

events. Without a doubt, protests, blockades, and strikes are important,

but they are not enough to make a revolution. Even in Barcelona, where

the 15M movement matured the most, leaving behind the massive, central

plaza occupation — that clunky, disillusioning experiment in direct

democracy — and morphed into a versatile, rhizomatic complex of dozens

of neighborhood assemblies, we failed to go further.

In those neighborhood assemblies, we began to construct truly social

relations, but we did not use those relations to launch practices of

mutual aid and expropriation of the social wealth. In only a few cases

did the assemblies link up with the housing struggle, generally leaving

that to specific, single-issue groups, only occasionally did they open

up the metro for free public transport, and as far as I know, never did

they break merrily into supermarkets to fill up carts and share the

abundance with neighbors struggling to make it to the end of the month.

Rather, they focused on protests, opposition to austerity measures, and

getting people in the streets, a task made difficult by our pre-existing

political identities.

That is not to say that an electoral strategy is fruitless as part of

the larger toolkit. But it should be treated as auxiliary, and electoral

movements should be treated as allies of convenience rather than relied

on significantly.

Though I am critical of municipalism as a strategy, I think it is

possible to find common ground within those structures that allow people

to fight for housing, to defend their neighborhoods, and to protect

their livelihood, as long as such structures preserve their autonomy

from the institutions of power and the electoral vagaries of a politics

that is by definition bourgeois.[756]

*Catalan Integral Cooperative.** Τhe Catalan Integral Cooperative

(Cooperativa Integral Catalana — CIC) was created by an assembly of

local activists in Catalonia in May 2010, subsequently launching “a

series of initiatives and projects around the development (at the local

level) of a cooperative economy and a cooperative public system, in

which basic needs like food and health care are not commodities but

social goods everyone has access to.” The Indignado/M15 movement in the

following year, and CIC’s participation in it, left the latter much

stronger and swelled its membership with activists.[757]

The CIC system is organized into around a dozen committees, with a

functional division of labor.

For example, the Economic Management Committee… is responsible for the

economic management of the cooperative, the Legal Committee is entrusted

with legal matters, the IT Committee deals with the IT infrastructure

and so on. In consequence of this division of labour, committees work

largely autonomously from each other. To coordinate their activities,

the cooperative holds assemblies…, where committee members make

decisions collectively based on consensus. In line with the principles

of cooperativist and anti-authoritarian organization, these assemblies

serve to collectivize the managerial process, thereby ensuring its

participative and inclusive character.[758]

Its main objective is “nothing less than to build an alternative economy

in Catalonia capable of satisfying the needs of the local community more

effectively than the existing system, thereby creating the conditions

for the transition to a post-capitalist mode of organization of social

and economic life.”

To fulfil the purpose it has set itself, the CIC is engaged in an

impressive spectrum of activities: although it was formed just seven

years ago, it has already been actively involved in developing

infrastructures as diverse as barter markets, a network of common

stores, an alternative currency called ‘eco’, a ‘Cooperative Social

Fund’ for financing community projects and a ‘basic income programme’

for remunerating its members for their work. By setting up such

structures, the CIC aspires to be an organizational platform for the

development of a self-sufficient economy that is autonomous from the

State and the capitalist market.[759]

In addition to its member cooperatives and collectives, CIC has about

six hundred individual self-employed members, “who use the legal and

economic ‘tools’ of the cooperative.”

They are mostly independent professionals and small producers (both

individuals and collectives) who operate informally without having any

legal hypostasis. In Spain, as a general rule, people who start a small

business or set themselves up in private practice register with the Tax

and Social Security Office as ‘autónomos’. The cost of becoming an

‘autónomo’, however, is prohibitive for a large number of people, given

that they have to pay a minimum of around €250 a month. Consequently,

for many, the cost of this system precludes the possibility of operating

formally. To them, the CIC offers a practical solution: the CIC has set

up a series of legal entities, whose legal form its self-employed

members can use in order to issue invoices. Legally speaking, therefore,

auto-ocupados are not members of the CIC, but members of those

organizations. In exchange for this service, auto-ocupados have to pay a

(minimum) membership fee of €75 every three months. Unlike ‘core

members’, however, few of them tend to get involved in CIC’s

organizational matters.[760]

It also has around 2500 members in its local exchange network. Together

with other local exchange networks in Catalonia, it

forms a crucial component of CIC’s territorial network and of the

economic system that it proposes as an alternative to the dominant

market.

Alongside this ecosystem of local exchange groups, CIC’s territorial and

economic network encompasses the consumer groups that are responsible

for the daily operation and management of twenty ‘pantries’ (the

so-called ‘rebosts’) across Catalonia. These local consumer groups are

connected to each other through CIC’s Catalan Supply Center (CAC), which

is the CIC committee coordinating the transportation and delivery of

products from the producers to the pantries….

Finally, CIC’s territorial network includes several so-called

‘autonomous projects of collective initiative’. These are basically

projects in which the CIC has been involved or is collaborating

with.[761]

The Catalan Supply Center, formed in 2012, is entrusted with “creating a

logistics network for the transportation and delivery of the products of

small producers, who are ‘self-employed’ CIC members, across the entire

Catalonia. In effect, it is a ‘public service’ that CIC offers to small

producers and consumer-prosumer groups in Catalonia.”

The main infrastructure of the network are the so-called “rebosts,” that

is, the self-managed pantries that the CIC has set up all over Catalonia

– twenty of them, to be exact – which constitute the “cell” of the

organizational structure of the network. Each one of them is run

autonomously by a local consumer group that wishes to have access to

local products as well as products made (by producers associated with

the CIC) in other parts of Catalonia through the list of products

provided by the CAC (which currently includes more than a thousand

products). The way in which the supply chain is organized is as follows:

the products go from the seventy producers that currently supply the

network to the two principal rebosts in L’Arn and Villafranca and then

are distributed by the CAC vans to the local rebosts, where from the

local consumer groups collect them.[762]

The Network of Science, Technique and Technology (XCTIT) is a committee

that oversees development of tools and machines for the production

facilities in the CIC cooperative network.

The driving force of XCTIT is its conviction that the machines developed

by the industry are not appropriate for the needs of commons-oriented

projects, which they imprison into a relation of dependence with

capitalist firms. By contrast, XCTIT develops solutions – which

exemplify the principles of open design, appropriate technology and the

integral revolution – geared to the needs of small cooperative projects.

In this way, XCTIT serves as a “vehicle” for the re-appropriation of

science, technique and technology by the new cooperative

movement.[763]

CIC is involved in several autonomous projects of collective initiative,

“cooperative projects the CIC is connected with through a relation of

collaboration, solidarity and mutual aid on the basis of common values

and principles.” A leading example

is Calafou, the self-proclaimed “post-capitalist colony” which settled

in 2011 in the ruins of an abandoned industrial village in the Catalan

county of l’Anoia, about 65km away from Barcelona.

The colony was set up with the participation of several heavily-involved

CIC members with the aim of becoming a collectivist model for living and

organizing the productive activities of a small community based on the

principles of self-management, ecology and sustainability. At the same

time, it represents an example of the form that former industrial

villages could assume in a post-capitalist era.

…[A]t the moment, the colony accommodates a multitude of productive

activities and community infrastructures, including a carpentry, a

mechanical workshop, a botanical garden, a community kitchen, a biolab,

a hacklab, a soap production lab, a professional music studio, a

guest-house for visitors, a social centre with a free shop, as well as a

plethora of other productive projects.

Presently, the colony, which has twenty-seven houses…, is inhabited by

twenty-two people. For the collective management of housing, Calafou

members have set up a housing cooperative, which grants them as tenants

only the right to use the space they inhabit. In that way, as tenants do

not have the right to re-sell or lease their rights of use to others,

the land and the houses of the village remain the unalienable property

of the housing cooperative. Thus, based on the above agreement, tenants

pay €175 per month for each house….[764]

Ghent. Over the past decade, the commons economy has

mushroomed in* *Ghent, growing to comprise some 500-odd

commons-based projects. The projects include a community land trust

promoted by the local government, numerous co-housing projects, and a

thriving local food sector.[765]

Ghent was the first city to establish a Commons Transition Plan. Michel

Bauwens and Yurek Onzia of the P2P Foundations conducted a mapping

project[766] commissioned by the city government,

systematically cataloging commons assets in a shared

wiki[767] “organized by major ‘provisioning’ systems, i.e.

food, mobility, housing, etc.” At the same time, they held meetings to

promote more interconnections between the main actors in different local

economic sectors.

The Flanders region has known a tenfold increase in commons-connected

citizen initiatives in the last ten years, but as in many other places,

there is still too much fragmentation. We are using the commons

narrative to catalyze more convergence across projects, so that they can

have a systemic effect on the city ecosystem and even influence

policymaking.

Among the possibilities they envision moving forward are organizing a

coherent, interconnected local food system, and leveraging the

collective purchasing power of local anchor institutions to promote

sustainability and the commons-based economy.[768]

The project also proposed new municipal institutions to promote the

commons economy on a coherent, comprehensive basis. One of the most

important is a City Lab “that helps people develop their proposals and

prepares Commons Agreements between the city and the new initiatives,

modeled after the existing Bologna Regulation on Commons.” Another is a

system of support for startups, including an incubator for commons-based

cooperative enterprises and a public bank.[769]

Amsterdam. In the March municipal elections across the

Netherlands, Amsterdam elected a progressive council dominated by the

green party GroenLinks, resulting in the establishment of a left-leaning

four-party coalition. Its program included a digital technologies policy

that promoted what amounted to platform cooperativism. Digital

technologies

should be designed and implemented around the needs of the city, as

expressed by its citizens (rather than its ‘consumers’). Thus, the

coalition supports the development of platform cooperatives that provide

alternatives to platform monopolists like Uber, and steps up its efforts

to open up city data in ways that allow for active participation.

It also had an open/participatory governance agenda and an approach to

the social commons reminiscent of the Bologna regulation and its

imitators.

Of particular interest is the coalition’s promise to actively support

the establishment of new commons (resources that are controlled and

managed by the community, for individual and collective benefit) in the

areas of ‘energy transition, healthcare, and neighbourhood activities’.

Not coincidentally, the topics of ‘Democratisation’ and the ‘Digital

City’ are merged together under one heading in the programme. If we want

to prevent the smart city from becoming a digital dystopia, a

diversified and intensified urban democratic practice is key. Citizens

and communities need to have control of how measuring, tracking and

profiling is being done and by who. By developing the democratic or

participatory toolbox — including public debate, voting systems, having

rights to ‘challenge’ and suggest self-managed alternatives — many

digital ills can be avoided. Already the city has reached out to many

Amsterdam initiatives that work on democratisation, participation and

stronger neighbourhoods to start working on this agenda

together.[770]

Local Case Studies: Frome. The local government of

Frome, a town of 25,000 people in the* *western English

county of Somerset, was taken over by the “Independents for Frome” in

2011. Peter Macfayden, who galvanized the effort, is a member of the

Labour Left with a background in the Frome branch of the Transition

Towns movement as well as “working for disability charities… [and]

founding an eco-friendly local undertakers.”

Although the group (named for its refusal to run under national party

labels) eschews platform as a matter of principle, its politics is

largely greenish and oriented towards economic relocalization — as could

be guessed from the fact that Mcfadyen was previously leader of

Transition Town Frome. Mcfadyen questioned local officials about the

green policies they had in place — policies regarding Peak Oil, energy

descent, resilience in the face of climate change, etc. — and was told

“the park.” A group of equally dissatisfied locals who frequently

complained about the quality of the town’s government in the pub decided

to run for office on a set of principles that Mcfadyen later popularized

as “Flatpack Politics” (based on Ikea’s self-assembled furniture). They

won ten of seventeen seats on the town council, as well as the mayor’s

office (which went to Mel Usher). In 2015 they took all seventeen seats,

following Mcfadyen’s replacement of Usher as mayor the previous year.

While their agenda in office — consciously inspired to a large extent by

the example of Podemos in Spain — has been constrained by policies at

higher echelons of government, their accomplishments have nevertheless

been significant. They strengthened the local credit union, and a

renewable energy cooperative and a tool library/library of things (the

Share Shop). The Share Shop was the first facility of its kind in the

UK, although the idea has since spread to communities all over the world

and been popularized by publications like Shareable. Kate Bielby, also

of the Independents, replaced Mcfadyen as mayor in 2015; he now serves

as chair of the town council and head of the energy cooperative.

The Frome example, along with Mcfadyen’s book, has inspired other local

efforts — mainly in Somerset, but some elsewhere in the UK.

The booklet has so far sold close to 1,000 copies, and Macfadyen is

regularly in touch with similar groups of independents in such towns as

Liskeard in Cornwall, Newbury in Berkshire, Bradford-on-Avon in

Wiltshire, and Wells, Wedmore and Shepton Mallet, all in Somerset. Most

notably, on 7 May, people who had directly followed the example set out

in his text took control of two councils in very different parts of the

country.

One was in Arlesey, a settlement of 5,000 people in Bedfordshire – just

under 40 minutes by train from London – whose town council is now run by

the Independents for Arlsey group, after they won 14 of its 15 seats.

Its founders were alerted to the flatpack democracy idea via Facebook

and resolved to shake up the politics of a town that had got used to

uncontested elections and a council run by old-school independents. One

of the prime movers was 64-year-old Chris Gravett, who says that whereas

the town’s ancien régime was “dysfunctional,” he and his colleagues are

now set on starting everything from scratch. “We’ve followed the core

principles in the Flatpack Democracy book pretty closely,” he says. “We

took a lot of advice from it. And I must say: the results were beyond

our wildest expectations.”

In Buckfastleigh in Devon (population: 3,326), the Buckfastleigh

Independents group have followed a similar path. “This isn’t an affluent

community,” says the town’s new deputy mayor, Pam Barrett. “It’s a

working-class town that’s been suffering from a real loss of services.”

Fired up by the possibilities of localism and their experience of

fighting – successfully – to keep open a library and swimming pool, she

and other residents resolved to stand for town council seats that had

not been contested for “20 or more years.” One of the catalysts, she

says, was a box of 10 copies of the Flatpack Democracy booklet, which

was brought in by one of her colleagues. “It was articulating what we

were already thinking,” she says, “and it helped us take a lot of

shortcuts.” On 7 May, they took they took nine of 12 seats, and started

running the show.[771]

Open Works (London). The Open Works project in the

neighborhood of* *West Norwood, Lambeth, London, was a

prototype system built in 2014–2015 “to discover if a high density of…

micro participation activity, built into the fabric of everyday life,

has the potential to aggregate and combine to achieve lasting long-term

change, both for individuals and for neighbourhoods.”[772] A

joint venture between the Lambeth Council and Civic Systems Lab, the

Open Works team co-created

a network of 20 practical projects with 1000 local residents. These

projects were inspired by ideas from across the world that offered the

potential to support a new and more sustainable way to live our everyday

lives…. These 20 projects created new and engaging opportunities for

sharing knowledge, spaces and equipment; for families to work and play

together; for bulk cooking, food growing and tree planting; for trading,

making and repairing and for suppers, workshops, incubators and

festivals.[773]

For such projects to achieve long-term sustainability, “participation

levels need to reach a threshold where sufficient direct, collective and

networked effects can accumulate over time to create compound outcomes.”

Preliminary estimates were that “around 10%-15% of local residents would

need to be participating regularly at any one time (c. 3 times a week)

for multiplier effects to be achieved.”[774]

The experience of Stage One, or the first year of the project, suggested

that a fully developed participation ecology should consist of two

levels of activity. The first level is a highly accessible and inclusive

network of commons-based co-production activity built into everyday

life. Building on this foundational level of mass participation in micro

activities, the second level would see the development of community

businesses, co-operatives and hybrid ventures through platform

incubation programmes.[775]

At the time the report on the project was written, it was entering Stage

2 (“Build complete system”), which was to be a two-year phase of

evaluating the feasibility of putting the prototype into widespread

operation. Stage 3 would entail “sustaining investment long

term.”[776]

From the first meetings to discuss proposals, the project was

coordinated from a headquarters located in an empty shop on the high

street in West Norwood. “Citizens were able to come in, propose project

ideas or be inspired by ideas already put forward, and began putting

them into practice on the same day with no complicated bureaucratic

approval process.”[777] The platform model of supporting

projects from the Headquarters “shifted the centre of gravity” and

enabled a “new mutual space” to emerge for community

governance.[778] Open Works projects are open-source, and are

available for reference in the Project Directory.[779] The

complete list includes:

1. Trade School (a knowledge exchange with barter-based payment for

teaching skills)

2. Great Cook (a project for batch-cooking meals in common)

3. Potluck Suppers

4. Start Here (an incubator for young people’ projects, ventures, and

businesses)

5. BeamBlock (a fitness enterprise)

6. Bzz Garage (bee-friendly neighborhood gardens and landscaping)

7. Library of Things

8. The Joinery (a platform to connect people’s under-utilized skills

with work opportunities)

9. Festival of Ideas (basically a fair to promote public awareness of

existing projects and to discuss projects being developed in other

communities)

10. Open Orchard (edible landscaping in public places)

11. Rock Paper Scissors (collective retail space)

12. The Stitch (a sewing group and skills exchange, with shared tools

and equipment)

13. Out in the Open Season (a community calendar for increasing

awareness of participation opportunities in the other projects)

14. Civic Incubator (practical training for leaders of existing

projects to promote further organizational growth and coordination

between projects, as well as for people interested in starting new

projects)

15. Play Works (an ecosystem of connected projects involving children)

16. Play Streets (one of the Play Works projects — temporarily stops

traffic on residential streets so children can play)

17. Department of Tinkerers (another Play Works project — allows

children, with adult supervision, to dismantle electrical

appliances to see how they fit together, practice working with

tools, etc.)

18. Collaborative Childcare (still another Play Works project)

19. Public Office (co-working spaces for freelancers in public cafes)

20. West Norwood Soup (crowdfunded dinner to raise money for community

projects)[780]

*Preston.** According to Matthew Thompson, “local authorities, think

tanks and third sector organisations in the UK are adopting the new

municipalist moniker to describe municipalisation of local economic

circuits of value with priority placed on economic over political

democracy.” And this applies particularly to Preston. The Preston model

involves

generating and retaining local wealth through harnessing untapped

spending powers of anchor institutions – public, non- profit

organisations anchored to place with important civic functions, such as

universities, housing associations and hospitals – by redirecting

institutional budgets towards cooperative firms that employ local labour

and produce social value locally rather than profits elsewhere. This is

a strategy driven by progressive think tanks led by the Centre for Local

Economic Strategies (CLES) and the Democracy Collaborative, whose

‘community wealth building’ approach contrasts with more radical

municipalisms. In a recent report, *New Municipalism in London*, CLES

(2019) names Preston alongside Barcelona and Jackson as exemplars of new

municipalism before exploring the contributions of three London Boroughs

(Camden, Islington, Hackney) to what CLES characterises as an embryonic

new municipalist movement in the UK….

The Preston model is adapted from the Cleveland model, both inspired by

the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque Country, the world’s largest

network of cooperative firms. In a context of industrial decline and

severe urban shrinkage, the Cleveland model is cultivating a local

movement of ‘Evergreen’ worker-owned co-ops specialising in anchor

institutional contracts – laundry, food, renewable energy…. Unlike

Cleveland, Preston is driven by elected local government

representatives, appearing to share more with municipal socialism.

However, these models are ‘municipalist’ in the sense of harnessing the

municipal-urban scale to create a systematic, holistic and democratic

approach to local economic development through a federated network of

worker-owned co-ops accountable to community-owned trusts. They gesture

towards a new urban horizon in which economic democratisation and

re-localisation are sought not through direct re-municipalisation but an

alternative urban system of non-state actors with the local state as a

partner anchor institution.[781]

The Preston model was adopted in response to austerity and

dissatisfaction with the conventional model of local economic

development. The share of local government revenue coming from the

national government fell by more than half. Members of the Preston

council led by Matthew Brown looked for ways to get more bang for the

pound, in terms of local employment, from municipal spending. This meant

abandoning an economic development model bases on luring in outside

corporations to “create jobs,” along with the traditional model of

hiring services from the lowest-bidding outside corporations. Instead,

Preston turned to a model of incubating local enterprises and

contracting as many services as possible locally.

The shift to spending local funds locally includes both the Preston

council itself and other bodies performing public functions.

Brown’s team persuaded six of the public bodies on their doorstep to

commit to spending locally wherever possible….

To hear how that conversation sounded from the other side of the table,

I visited Community Gateway, which manages 6,500 homes around Preston.

In a tower overlooking the docks, where ships once came in, head of

finance Phil McCabe explained what the new regime meant to his team.

Once they outsourced repairs and grass cutting; now they are inhouse….

In 2015, Lancashire county council put a contract to provide school

meals out to tender. That was impossibly large for local firms, so

officers broke it into bite-size chunks. There was a tender to provide

yoghurt, others for sandwich fillings, eggs, cheese, milk, and so on.

One contract was split into nine different lots. It meant officials

actually shaping a market to fit their society – and it worked. Local

suppliers using Lancashire farmers won every contract and provided an

estimated £2m boost to the county.

In 2013 the six local public bodies spent £38m in Preston and £292m in

all of Lancashire. By 2017 those totals stood at £111m in Preston and

£486m throughout the county. That is a huge turnaround, especially as

their budgets shrank from £750m to £616m. The county’s pension fund is

now building student accommodation in the city and doing up a hotel.

Over the next few months Brown will get two new worker co-ops off the

ground – one in IT, the other in food. He talks about establishing a

local bank for Lancashire.[782]

The “public bodies” compare roughly to the anchor institutions in the

Cleveland model.

The Preston model he [Brown] devised involves 12 of the city’s key

employers – including the county constabulary, a public sector housing

association, colleges and hospitals – buying goods and services locally,

to stop 61% of their procurement budget being spent outside of the

Lancashire economy….[783]

The council itself has increased the share of funds spent locally from

14% to 28% between 2012–13 and 2014–15.[784] But 28% seemed

to be something of a ceiling, given the number of local enterprises

capable of serving as contractors. Local officials have attempted to

address those constraints by incubating local worker cooperatives.

In February, the first co-op to be established since the authorities

began refocusing spending opened in Preston’s city center. The Larder

sells food made from ingredients sourced locally and teaches people in

disadvantaged areas of the city to make their own healthy meals. The

café is the culmination of five years of hard work for its founder, Kay

Johnson, and while winning catering contracts with local businesses has

proved tricky, she and others here hope that the Larder’s efforts will

be emulated….[785]

Not only does Preston pursue economic development through the expansion

of locally-owned enterprises, to the greatest extent feasible it

promotes cooperative and commons-based ownership models.

Instead of traditional economic development through public-private

partnerships and private finance initiatives, which waste billions to

subsidize the extraction of profits by footloose corporations with no

loyalty to local communities, community wealth building supports

democratic collective ownership of — and participation in — the economy

through a range of institutional forms and initiatives. These include

worker co-operatives, community land trusts, community development

finance institutions, so-called ‘anchor’ procurement strategies,

municipal and local public enterprise, participatory planning and

budgeting, and — increasingly, it is to be hoped — public banking.

Community wealth building is *economic system change, but starting at

the local level*.[786]

France. More recently, municipalist movements swept the

June 2020 elections in a number of cities in France, in a manner

reminiscent of Spain in 2015, according to Xavi Ferrer and Elena

Arrontes. In Paris,

the incumbent socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo secured her candidacy for

*Paris en Commun*, a party which, whilst more traditional than others of

its kind, has a bold commitment to one of the most important aspects of

the 21st Century city model: urban sustainable mobility.

More important still, green candidates made gains across the rest of

France’s major cities, winning in Marseille (second largest city in the

country), Lyon (third largest), Bordeaux (eighth largest) and Strasbourg

(home to the European Parliament headquarters); as well as Nantes,

Rennes, Nancy, Rouen… and close behind in second place in Lille and

Toulouse.

Alongside this, and this is one of the most encouraging signs of all,

over 400 towns and cities presented local electoral candidates that were

independent from the larger parties and spearheaded by citizen-led

movements. Inspired by radical democracy and citizen participation, they

are driven by the same principles that motivated candidates from

“Ciudades del Cambio” (Cities of Change) back in 2015 and 2019 across

Barcelona, Coruña, Madrid, Cadiz, etc. Of the 410 citizens running for

office, more than 80 per cent won representation and 66 of those won the

majority, thus securing the mayoral office for the next five

years.[787]

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Chapter Eleven: Municipalism: Building Blocks

Transparency and Participatory Governance. If anything

is central to the Partner* *State goal of becoming less

statelike, it is transparency of the government apparatus and direct

citizen participation in the process of formulating policy. And if any

level of government is suited to participatory governance and the

Partner State model, it’s the municipal level; hence the concept of P2P

Urbanism.

Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione use the terms, variously, “urban

collaborative governance,” “enabling state” and “relational state” as

near-synonyms for Partner State at the urban level. This is what emerges

when the city itself is run as a platform on the same basis as

individual commons-based resources, i.e. when we “scale up from the

individual resource to the city level the democratic design principles

that already characterize existing urban commons management structures.”

Urban collaborative governance

resituates the city as an enabler and facilitator of collaborative

decision making structure(s) throughout the city, and attends to

questions of political, social and economic inequality in

cities.[788]

…These [democratic design] principles — horizontal subsidiarity,

collaboration, and polycentrism — reorient public authorities away from

a monopoly position over the use and management of common assets and

toward a shared, collaborative governance approach. In other words, the

Leviathan state gradually becomes what we call the facilitator, or

enabling, state. The governance regime for shared urban resources

becomes one without a dominant center but instead one in which all

actors who have a stake in the commons are part of an autonomous center

of decision making as co-partners, or co-collaborators, coordinated and

enabled by the public authority.

Similarly, by thinking of the city itself as a commons, we might look

beyond the reigning public regulatory regime in most cities to more

collaborative and polycentric governance tools capable of empowering and

including a broader swath of urban residents in decisions about resource

access and distribution in the city.[789]

This approach makes it possible

to re-situate the role of the state, or city, as an enabler and

facilitator of collaboration and ultimately of political and economic

redistribution…. The facilitator state creates the conditions under

which citizens can develop collaborative relationships with each other,

and cooperate both together and with public authorities, to take care of

common resources, including the city itself as a

resource.[790]

P2P Urbanism can take the form — as described by Nikos A. Salingaros and

Federico Mena-Quintero — of open-source regulatory codes:

In parallel to the free/open-source software movement, designing a city

and one’s own dwelling and working environment should be based upon

freely available design rules rather than some ‘secret’ code decided

upon by an appointed authority. Furthermore, open-source urban code must

be open to modification and adaptation to local conditions and

individual needs, which is the whole point of

open-source.[791]

Let us consider briefly the kinds of participation that can be open to

different people. Architects of course deal with the design of

buildings. An architect familiar with the needs of a certain region may

know, for example, that an 80cm eave is enough to protect three-metre

tall storeys from rainfall, in a particular region with a certain

average of wind and rain. A builder may be well versed in the actual

craft of construction, that to build this kind of eave, with the

traditional forms used in this region, requires such and such materials

and techniques. The final dweller of a house will certainly be

interested in protecting his windows and walls from rainfall, but he may

want to have a say in what kind of window he wants: if he wants it to

open to the outside, then it must not bump against the wide eave. Thus

it is important to establish communication between users, builders,

designers and everyone who is involved with a particular environment.

Our hypothetical rainy region will doubtless have similar problems to

other similar regions in different parts of the world. P2P-Urbanism lets

these geographically separated people connect together to learn from

each other’s experience. Trial-and-error can be reduced by being able to

ask, “who knows how to build windows and eaves that will stand this kind

of rainfall?,” and to get an answer backed by evidence.[792]

Compare this to the fictional account of the wikified construction

process for the Belt and Braces — a sort of combination restaurant/pub,

hostelry, community hub, and co-living space — in Cory Doctorow’s

Walkaway*. It was built from scavenged materials located by

surveillance drones, and put together according to an evolving wikified

design by stigmergically organized, permissionless labor using a

modified version of UN High Commission on Refugees software.

You told it the kind of building you wanted, gave it a scavenging range,

and it directed its drones to inventory anything nearby, scanning

multi-band, doing deep database scrapes against urban planning and

building-code sources to identify usable blocks for whatever you were

making….

These flowed into the job site. The building tracked and configured

them, a continuously refactored critical path for its build plan that

factored in the skill levels of workers or robots on-site at any

moment.[793]

In Taiwan, a large open government movement has made significant

accomplishments in opening up policy to citizen participation and

critique. At the heart of the movement is g0v, which got its name from

setting up alternative versions of government websites with .gov domains

changed to .g0v. These digital activists have, among other things,

forced the Taiwanese government to revise a treaty with the People’s

Republic of China and schedule the decommissioning of all nuclear power

plants by 2025. Last year Tsai Ing-wen, who ran on a platform of

government transparency, appointed a member of g0v — Audrey Tang — as

Digital Minister. Under pressure from the citizens’ movements, the

government has responded by adopting digital tools for crowdsourcing

feedback on government policies.[794]

Participatory budgeting is also an integral part of participatory

government. It’s an innovation identified with Porto Alegre, Brazil,

where it was introduced in 1989 under a Workers Party government. Belo

Horizonte adopted the policy in 1992, and it subsequently spread to

about half of the major cities in Brazil. Participatory budgeting is now

an option for all municipal governments. Although a municipality can

subject all new capital spending projects to participatory budgeting, in

most localities it ranges from 5–15% of the municipal budget.

The model follows an annual cycle: First, the city presents the previous

year’s budget for review. Then, residents attend neighborhood meetings

where they offer proposals and discuss spending decisions relating to

social services and big projects.

From the neighborhood assemblies councillors are elected who debate and

refine the proposals. Residents also vote for delegates – around 50,000

residents – who end up voting on the final proposals.[795]

Information Commons. Cities and universities are not in

a position to alter or* *replace national and

international copyright law. But it is entirely within their capacity to

promote information freedom by such means as adopting free and

open-source software for official use in preference to proprietary

software, and mandating that all research and writing supported by

public funds will be in the public domain.

Universities have great potential in their own right for being

reorganized along libertarian lines, based on principles of stakeholder

governance and self-management. Regarding information in particular,

they can encourage faculty to assign readings that are freely available

online or published under open licenses, discourage assignment of

overpriced textbooks, use their bargaining power as purchaser to

sanction price-gouging academic journals and textbook publishers, and

encourage faculty to publish in cooperatively governed and non-paywalled

publications, or organize coordinated boycotts of shakedown operations

like Elsevier altogether. Instead of slavishly acting as adjuncts of the

content industries in enforcing music and movie copyright, they can

refuse to provide student information or otherwise cooperate without

legally binding orders, and inform students on fair use rights. They can

require instructors to accept citations from preprints and other

unofficial versions of articles/chapters on personal academic websites

or sharing sites like Academia.edu and Researchgate, as alternatives to

the versions that appear in paywalled venues. For that matter university

and library functionaries can unofficially, as individuals, and with

plausible deniability, make students aware of download sites like

Library Genesis and B-ok.cc.

Monica Bernardi stresses the need for openness and accountability as a

rationale for municipal use of free and open-source software. Pubic

administrations

are important users and providers of software. They procure, fund and

support the development of products and services that can affect large

groups of people. However, when these endeavours do not involve Free

Software, critical questions concerning security, efficiency,

distribution of power, and transparency arise. Indeed, in order to

establish trustworthy systems, public bodies must ensure they have full

control over the software and computer systems at the core of their

state digital infrastructure. But right now, this is rarely the case due

to restrictive software licenses that:

- Forbid sharing and exchanging publicly funded codes, preventing

cooperation between public administrations and hindering further

development.

- Support monopolies by hindering competition, with the result that

many administrations become dependent on a handful of companies.

- Pose a threat to the security of our digital infrastructure by

forbidding access to the source code and creating fixing backdoors

and security holes.

On the contrary the kind of software that fosters the sharing of good

ideas and solutions, that guarantees freedom of choice, access, and

competition, that allows IT services improvement, that helps public

administrations regain full control of their critical digital

infrastructure, and thus supporting them in becoming independent, is

more and more necessary….

But above all, publishing source code is a way to give taxpayers’ money

back to society…. Public bodies are financed through taxes and they

must make sure they spend funds in the most efficient way possible.

Under the claim “if it is public money, it should be public code as

well,” the [Free Software Foundation of Europe] pushes for legislation

requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public

sector be made publicly available, under a Free and Open Source Software

license….

…FS has become a core element of the Barcelona’s smart city and

digitalization agenda, under the nudging action of Francesca Bria, the

Commissioner of Technology and Digital Innovation at the City

Council….

…Basically, Barcelona is migrating its computer system away from the

windows platform; the strategy is first to replace all user’s

applications with open-source alternatives, until the underlying Windows

operating system is the only proprietary software remaining; in a final

step, the operating system will be replaced with Linux.[796]

As Bria herself describes it:

Barcelona City Council has joined the free software movement and

supports the use of free and open technology (software, hardware,

computing, data) with the aim of achieving full technological

sovereignty. This choice allows the digital infrastructures and systems

of City Council to be audited publicly in a transparent way. It also

facilitates interaction between the local developers’ communities and

local entrepreneurs and the public administration, which may lead to the

development of more stable, secure, accountable and democratically

governed digital infrastructures.

This means, in practical terms, that software is “published in public

repositories, such as Git hub, with free licences that allow third

parties (councils, individuals or companies) to use it, expand on it or

improve it.” The lack of proprietary licenses is a cost savings. “It

also helps to create a network with other administrations for sharing

technology and reusing solutions.”[797]

In some cases FOSS and the information commons overlap with

participatory government. For example Barcelona’s Decidim platform,

already discussed in an earlier chapter, “is entirely and

collaboratively built as free software.”

*As of march 2018* www.decidim.barcelona had more than 28,000 registered

participants, 1,288,999 page views, 290,520 visitors, 19 participatory

processes, 821 public meetings channeled through the platform and 12,173

proposals, out of which over 8,923 have already become public policies

grouped into 5,339 results whose execution level can be monitored by

citizens.[798]

Land Platforms. In general, Community Land Trusts and

related institutions are a* *way of using land titles

under capitalist property law to recreate the state of affairs before

communal land tenures were nullified and land was commodified on the

basis of fee simple commodity ownership. Land can be removed from the

capitalist land market, particularly when it is still cheap and can be

bought in quantity, and then governed internally by possession and

transfer rights closer to a commons-based model. Because they are

permanent, they can function as a growing non-capitalist island within

the capitalist economy, with land permanently and irreversibly vanishing

from the capitalist real estate market much like land bequests to the

Church — an immortal corporation — in medieval times. “Creating a stock

of permanently affordable housing with a one-time public investment” —

as Gregory Scruggs puts it — “and that same affordable housing is kept

affordable for generations to come.”[799] Pat Conaty and

Michael Lewis argue that, in addition to cancelling spiralling real

estate costs, trusts “preserve over the long term government investments

in affordable housing, rather than allowing both public subsidies and

capital gains to accrue to whoever sells the house?”[800]

In this regard land trusts are analogous to open information licenses,

which use capitalist intellectual property law to create a state of

affairs such as would prevail if copyright did not exist at all. And

like land trusts, open licenses are characterized by irrevocable,

one-way growth in which anything “contaminated” by them becomes

permanently free, thanks to share-alike provisions.

Land trusts are also preferable — because more permanent and less prone

to reversal following a change of government — to other policy

alternatives. Ivo Balmer and Tobias Bernet point out that policies like

individual subsidies are extremely vulnerable to budget cuts, and

traditional public housing is vulnerable to privatization or

demutualization.

In contrast, property rights in a narrower sense are consistently

respected in capitalist democracies, regardless of current political

majorities. Instruments that are directly linked to the property rights

system might thus be capable of decommodifying housing in a more

sustainable way and guaranteeing dwellers’ self-organization in the long

run.[801]

Another function of land trusts is to acquire cheap tax foreclosed

homes, in which their current owners can continue to live. The Right to

the City Alliance worked with local organizations to build community

land trusts in ten cities in 2015 alone. One of these cities was

Detroit, where the land trust has organized crowdfunding campaigns to

buy up foreclosed properties one at a time and protect residents from

eviction. Much more could be done if the project was actively supported

at the municipal level; unfortunately the Detroit city government, under

an appointed Emergency Manager, isn’t exactly warm on the idea. The city

government’s land bank holds title to abandoned property, which it is

supposed to return to productive use. Local activists have pressured the

government to transfer land bank properties to a land trust, but so far

to no avail.[802]

Consider the sheer scale of tax-delinquent land in Detroit in the

post-2008 decay, as described by Sara Safransky:

City officials categorized a staggering 100,000 lots, or one third of

the Detroit’s landed area, as “vacant” and “abandoned.” [John] Hantz’s

proposal [to buy 180 acres of land for $520,000 and build an urban

forest on it] was attractive to the financially strapped municipal

government because it promised to move the city’s sizable accumulation

of tax-reverted property to private ownership….

…Many residents resist descriptions of Detroit’s neighborhoods as

“empty” because such characterizations discursively elide the hundreds

of thousands of people living in the city…. Moreover, residents claim

and re-purpose “vacant” lots outside the purview of government and

market-sector support. People assert their rights to land in a variety

of ways — from invoking historical loss and racial injustice to

establishing gardens and community centers, mowing fields, and squatting

in houses — meaning that many properties officially designated as vacant

have competing ownership claims, some formal, others

informal.[803]

Under the predominant model of tax lien securitization, as Paula Segal

describes it, cities sell tax debts to speculators. Faced with the

piling up of interest and fees, owners often walk away, leaving

neighbors to deal with the abandoned property. Sometimes neighborhood

residents take repairs on themselves or build community gardens, or

squats spring up with squatters improving the property, but all these

things take place with no title or confidence in the future, and

investors frequently move in without warning years later to enforce

their claim and expropriate all the improvements created by the

neighborhood.[804] Instead of securitization, Segal

recommends municipalities

[c]ompletely eliminate tax lien securitization; replace it with *in rem*

foreclosure in which the city acquires tax delinquent private property

on the grounds of taxes owed to it, along with programs that transfer

these properties into responsible not-for-profit ownership that will

provide resources for the community.[805]

Another way in which tax-delinquent land might be incorporated into land

trusts, with possession restored to the original residents, is suggested

by the Tricycle Collective.

Formed in 2014, the Tricycle Collective buys occupied homes at the

county auction, often for considerably less than the back taxes owed,

and signs ownership back to the occupants. Although this form of

temporary tax relief for such families is essential, it leaves them

vulnerable to future tax delinquency and does nothing to change the

structural forces of the real estate market that drive eviction,

residential segregation, and gentrification. The only solution that

guarantees housing for low-income citizens is socialization: removing

housing from the market altogether.[806]

Purchasing as much land as feasible at the low auction prices is the

same model by which Strike Debt retires private debt.

Through this CLT, organizers would raise funds to purchase both

abandoned and (with the homeowner’s or renter’s consent) inhabited

properties, restore them, and secure them for income-adjusted affordable

housing outside of the market. Like Habitat for Humanity’s model, those

who receive housing through the CLT would commit a certain number of

labor hours (by themselves or someone else on their behalf) to future

projects of home restoration to expand the cooperative housing system.

We would also assemble a tool library, cutting costs for both home

renovation teams and the library’s community members.[807]

Besides incorporating existing homes, such land trusts could also build

housing varying in degree of communalism from individual houses to

apartments with shared facilities to communal co-living arrangements.

They could also intersect with the food sovereignty movement by

providing land for community gardens.[808]

This could be combined with the land trust model, with local governments

automatically transferring tax-delinquent land to the trusts, restoring

them to their original residents at the same time.

Another way to tie the land trust function together with the land

acquisition function is through land banks. According to Saki Bailey,

land banking is

accomplished often through a city ordinance mandating that properties

that remain vacant and in neglect for a specific number of years, can be

appropriated by the city, often through property tax foreclosure, and

placed back into productive use. Today, as a result of the sudden growth

of the model since 2011 (in response to the foreclosure crisis), there

are over 172 land banks across the country. Land banks usually take the

form of a quasi-public entity, sometimes run directly out of a specific

city department, or they can be structured as independent entities,

either as corporations or non-profits.

…[Land banks] have a long and independent practice and history, and as

a result, present a complementary and powerful strategy in creating

permanently affordable housing. To date there are very few partnerships

between land banks and CLTs, however more recently, both policymakers

and CLTs are realizing that such a partnership may have advantages in

overcoming challenges for both models.[809]

To take one example: In Richmond, Virginia, the Richmond Land Bank, an

initiative of the Maggie Walker Community Land Trust, serves the land

acquisition function by “repurposing vacant and tax-delinquent

properties for the public interest.”[810]

The largest community land trust in the United States is the Champlain

Housing Trust in Burlington, Vt. In a city of 40,000, it owns 2,000

housing units.[811]

Closely related is the Permanent Real Estate Cooperative. Those who

purchase homes in a PERC have full possession and transfer rights, but

their equity — the “resale” price — is limited to purchase price and

improvements adjusted for inflation. They can potentially grow quickly

to include hundreds or thousands of members.[812]

Some activist groups engage in intensive data-mapping to systematically

catalog all municipal land, in order to pursue a coordinated agenda for

commons-based development. For example, the 596 Acres project in

Brooklyn identified 596 acres (hence the name) of unused public land in

that borough. That’s almost a square mile. The political goal is to

permanently reserve as much as possible under various forms of common

ownership like community gardens, neighborhood parks, and community land

trusts, often encouraging the people of a neighborhood to occupy and

transform the vacant land in order to create a *fait

accompli*.[813]

In depressed cities where abandonment has approached catastrophic

levels, land trusts have the potential to grow on an exceptionally large

scale. In the Dudley Street neighborhood in Boston, for example, white

flight resulted in some 1300 lots — over 20% of the total in the

neighborhood — being vacant. Because of the implosion of real estate

prices, the Dudley Street neighborhood initiative was able to

incorporate 225 of them.[814] In Buffalo, where 23,000

properties were vacant, the PUSH citizen’s movement challenged the state

housing agency’s practice of using the vacant housing to speculate on

Wall Street as a source of revenue, and pressured it to turn them over

to the community instead.[815]

Another means of land acquisition is forced sale. This is a legal tool

available to cities in Spain’s Catalonia region, which Barcelona

recently began making use of.

This week, the city’s housing department wrote to 14 companies that

collectively own 194 empty apartments, warning that if they haven’t

found a tenant within the next month, the city could take possession of

these properties, with compensation at half their market value. These

units would then be rented out by the city as public housing to

lower-income tenants, while the companies in question could also face

possible fines of between €90,000 and €900,000 ($103,000 and

$1,003,000), according to Spanish news outlets.

The plan builds on previous measures in the city to fill empty

apartments. Since 2016, it has been legal for municipalities in the

Catalonia region, which includes Barcelona, to take control of

properties that have been left without tenants for more than two

years…. Now, using a legal tool approved by the Catalonia region in

December 2019, Barcelona will have expanded power to actually buy the

apartments outright by compulsory purchase, at 50% of market

rate.[816]

It was also one plank of Jeremy Corbyn’s Land For the People program, as

we saw in a previous chapter.

There is a great deal of potential, as well, in municipalist movements

and community land trusts making cause with squatters’ movements,

running political interference for their occupations, and attempting to

use such occupations as faits accomplis in bargaining with local

government to regularize them after the fact. In Philadelphia, for

example,

single mothers and their children have moved into abandoned, publicly

owned buildings, in the most significant housing take over in the

country — at a time when millions have lost their jobs and the country

is on the brink of another housing crisis. Jennifer Bennetch has helped

place unhoused people into vacant homes owned by the Philadelphia

Housing Authority (PHA), as the founder of Occupy PHA and a member of

the Philadelphia Housing Action coalition…. So far, Bennetch and other

organizers have housed over 40 people by occupying 11 homes, all owned

by the authority whose responsibility it is to match people with public

housing. Bennetch says that the families have no intention of leaving,

and organizers are currently negotiating with the city to come to a

resolution. Elsewhere in the city, unhoused people have escalated their

demands for the right to housing by creating two protest encampments,

one in front of PHA headquarters and the other in the middle of Center

City….[817]

In the Global South, likewise, one of the most important potential

functions of community land trusts is to secure current possession by

marginalized populations that has not been formalized under existing

conventional law. Both claims under indigenous land tenure, and plots of

land occupied in favelas, can be regularized within the community land

trust framework. For example, a community land trust was created in San

Juan, Puerto Rico to regularize holdings in eight informal communities

along the Peña Canal.[818]

Neighborhood and Community Industry. Economic

relocalization, import* *substitution and community

control of production machinery are all intersecting ways that enable

local communities to build independence from corporate power and

resilience against unemployment.

Two closely related and overlapping concepts are relevant here:

Cosmo-localism, and “Design Global, Manufacture Local” (DGML).

Cosmo-localism was originally introduced as a much broader concept in

the 1990s by Wolfgang Sachs. Design Global, Manufacture Local is an

application of the concept specifically to industrial production. DGML

“follows the logic that what is light (knowledge, design) becomes global

while what is heavy (manufacturing) is local, and ideally

shared.”[819] As David Bollier and Silke Helfrich elaborate:

People share “light” knowledge and design via peer-to-peer learning and

the internet, but build “heavy” physical things such as machinery, cars,

housing, furniture, and electronics locally. In the peer production

community there is a saying, “If it’s light, share it globally — if it’s

heavy, produce it locally….”

In recent years, digital technologies have greatly empowered global

collaborations that have local outputs. Global communities of designers,

engineers, and programmers are collaborating online to develop design

prototypes for everything from farm equipment (tractors, wind turbines,

rototillers and soil pulverizers, compressed earth block presses for

brickmaking) to high-end scientific microscopes (OpenSPIM) to sailing

robots to detect ocean pollution (Scoutbots). All of these machines are

licensed to be shareable, open source style. This means that any farmer,

scientific researcher, or curious amateur can take advantage of

world-class innovation by building their own tools less expensively

using modular, adaptable, locally sourceable materials.

Open Source Ecology is one such project that designs diverse

non-proprietary types of farm equipment and machinery that can be

locally produced. The project started in 2003 in the USA and now has

local hubs in Germany, Guatemala, and other locations around the world.

An array of architects, engineers, and designers with the WikiHouse

project have developed an “open source construction kit” that is akin to

“a big IKEA kit for your home that is easy to assemble and affordable.”

In a similar vein, the Open Building Institute, an offshoot of Open

Source Ecology, builds low-cost, modular houses that are ecological and

energy-efficient using techniques that are open source, convivial, and

distributed.[820]

Cosmo-localism, according to an article in *tripleC*, consists of a

“digital commons of knowledge, software and design, combined with

localized manufacturing technologies (from 3D printing and CNC machines

to low-tech tools and crafts)…”[821]

Thousands of experts, engineers and scientists can mobilise around such

open projects and work on common infrastructures and protocols to better

respond to crises…. Local makerspaces could manufacture them with low

cost, using shared protocols and practices, based on local materials and

capacities, minimising dependence on global supply chains…. With more

autonomy locally, and more sharing globally, more agile and resilient

production systems may be created to better respond to global

crises.[822]

As examples, the authors mention locally manufactured agricultural

tools, rural electrification using small wind turbines, and respirator

valves, based on designs in the digital commons.[823]

Vasilis Kostakis and Chris Giotitsas describe the emergence of the

technological prerequisites for cosmo-localism:

Cosmolocalism emerges from technology initiatives that are small-scale

and oriented towards addressing local problems, but simultaneously

engage with globally asynchronous collaborative production through

digital commoning….

While the first wave of digital commoning included open knowledge

projects, the second wave has been moving towards open design and

manufacturing. Contrary to the conventional industrial paradigm and its

economies of scale, the convergence of digital commons with local

manufacturing machinery… has been developing commons-based economies

of scope…. The physical manufacturing arrangement for cosmolocalism

includes makerspaces, which are small-scale community manufacturing

facilities providing access to local manufacturing technologies.

Unlike large-scale industrial manufacturing, cosmolocalism emphasizes

applications that are small-scale, decentralised, resilient and locally

controlled. Cosmolocal production cases such as L’Atelier Paysan

(agricultural tools), Open Bionics (robotic and bionic hands), WikiHouse

(buildings) or RepRap (3D printers) demonstrate how a technology project

can leverage the digital commons to engage the global community in its

development….

The technology produced is unlike the equivalent market options or is

entirely non-existent in the market. It is typically modular in design,

versatile in materials, and as low-cost as possible to make reproduction

easier. Through our work we have identified a set of values present in

the “technical codes” of such technology which can be distilled into the

following themes: openness, sustainability and autonomy. It is these

values that we believe lead to an alternative trajectory of

technological development that assists the rise of a commons-based mode

of production opposite the capitalist one.[824]

An early promoter of industrial cosmo-localism, Ezio Manzini, paired it

with his own concept of “Slow, Local, Open, and Connected” (SLOC). SLOC

entails physical production which is small and local, while nevertheless

remaining open and connected (in the sense that local physical economies

are embedded in a distributed global information network). It is

governed by “a new localization principle; products must be designed so

that their production can be as near as possible to where they will be

used (point of use production).” But it is the open and connected parts

of the concept that fundamentally distinguish it from E.F. Schumacher’s

earlier “Small is Beautiful” version of decentralization.

Forty years ago, the “small” that Schumacher referred to was really

small. In fact, it was so small, it had little chance of influencing

things on a large scale. The same can be said for his concept of “local”

– it was truly local as it was (quasi) isolated from other locals….

Today, as we have seen, the context is extremely different. Today, the

small can be influential on a large scale, as it acts as a node in a

global network. The local can break its isolation by being open to the

global flow of people, ideas and information…. The small and the

local, when they are open and connected, can therefore become a design

guideline for creating resilient systems and sustainable qualities, and

a positive feedback loop between these systems.[825]

Manzini sees cosmo-localism as a “linear evolution” of the logic of lean

and just-in-time manufacturing, and a realization of its spirit:

…[D]istributed systems can be seen in general as the lightest and most

flexible of fabrication systems, able to create products for specific

clients not only when they are needed (customized and just-in-time

production), but also where they are needed (or, at least, as near as

possible to the place where they are needed)….[826]

Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel observe, similarly, the ways in

which DGML promotes ephemeralization, low overhead and radical

efficiency:

1. Nonprofit: Objects are designed for optimum usability, not to create

tension between supply and demand. This eliminates planned obsolescence

or induced consumerism while promoting modular, durable and practical

applications.

2. Local: Physical manufacturing is done in community workshops, with

bespoke production adapted to local needs. These are economies of scope,

not of scale. On-demand local production bypasses the need for huge

capital outlays and the subsequent necessity to “keep the machines

running” night and day to satisfy the expectations of investors with

over-capacity and over-production. Transportation costs — whether

financial or ecological — are eradicated, while maintenance, fabrication

of spare parts and waste treatment are handled locally.

3. Shared: Idle resources are identified and shared by the community.

These can be immaterial and shared globally (blueprints, collaboration

protocols, software, documentation, legal forms), or material and

managed locally (community spaces, tools and machinery, hackathons).

There are no costly patents and no intellectual property regimes to

enforce false scarcity. Power is distributed and shared autonomously,

creating a “sharing economy” worthy of the name.[827]

“Design Global, Manufacture Local” has a strong affinity for the

industrial district model, with its economies of scope and diverse local

industrial ecologies, as described by José Ramos.

Because much of what we consume has high manufacturing requirements,

there needs to be an orchestration of micro-clusters: local enterprise

ecosystems created through networks, sharing and exchange platforms with

human supported administration and support that do resource and needs

matching. This may also tap the possibility of circular economic /

closed loop production.[828]

It has, likewise, “a strong commitment to open source and knowledge

justice approaches, localization, community learning and sustainable

closed loop/circular economy strategies.”

Reuse, repair, repurpose are common words. The potential of the maker

movement for cosmo-localism lies in this broad church beginning to learn

from each other’s knowledges and capabilities and to collaborate on the

design and manufacturing of things that require a high level of

coordination or organization.[829]

The design philosophy it promotes is fundamentally different the one

that prevails under capitalism’s incentives to rent extraction,

subsidized waste, and planned obsolescence. “It is typically modular in

design, versatile in materials, and as low-cost as possible to make

reproduction easier.”[830]

Ramos notes that cosmo-localization may be conducive to a local

development strategy centered on “import substitution” — something

readers of Jane Jacobs, Colin Ward and Karl Hess will be familiar

with.[831]

In addition, addressing growing levels of economic precarity under

neoliberalism may be a killer app for which cosmo-localism is

particularly suited.

Where people are excluded from the dominant market system, they must

create alternative subsistence systems. [Manuel] Castells sees the

emergence of ‘new economic cultures’ from populations which, in addition

to looking for ways out of the dominant economic system, simply cannot

afford to consume goods from the dominant system. In terms of

cosmo-localism, both values and need drive a new type of social actor

which can leverage the global design commons and community maker

space-based production in ways that can produce agency, empowerment and

livelihood for people in need. Cosmo-localism potentially creates

enterprise opportunities for those people out of work to create

livelihoods, or at least to begin to experiment with new production

potentials. To the extent that cosmo-localism is seen as a way to

support citizen livelihoods, we may see cosmo-localism taken up as state

or city supported process.[832]

Cosmo-localism is reflected in many municipalist strategies for economic

relocalization. The Fab Cities[833] project, for example, is

a joint project of Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia

(IAAC), MIT’s Centre for Bits and Atoms (CBA), the Barcelona City

Council and the Fab Foundation. It works in cooperation with the global

Fab Lab network.[834] According to the *Fab City Whitepaper*:

In 2014 at FAB10 the mayor of Barcelona invited his colleagues around

the world to join the Barcelona pledge: a countdown for cities to become

at least 50% self-sufficient by 2054. In 2015 in FAB11 at Boston, 7 new

cities joined the Fab City project, including Boston, Cambridge,

Ekurhuleni and Shenzhen. This year (2016) Amsterdam city is joining the

program, and we expect new cities to commit to the Barcelona pledge at

the FAB12 conference in Shenzhen, potentially: London, Copenhagen,

Paris, Santiago de Chile, and more.[835]

As Sharon Ede described it, a Fab City “is a locally productive,

globally connected, self-sufficient city.”

Fab Labs (Fabrication Laboratories) and makerspaces offer opportunities

for people to make and produce what they need for themselves, and to

bring back to citizens the skills and knowledge needed to make things.

Makerspaces and Fab Labs are open access workshops, which means that

anyone can access a range of production equipment (including but not

limited to 3D printers and other means of digital fabrication) and

networks of knowledge….

Harnessing these spaces and digital manufacturing technologies in

service of the circular economy offers the potential for returning

production to cities in the form of distributed manufacturing with

microfactories – small scale, cleaner production that is also less

wasteful, occurring as-needed, often customised, instead of

over-producing for markets.[836]

The first Fab Lab in the network opened in Barcelona in 2014; since then

it has been joined by “12 cities, 2 regions, 2 states and 2 countries.”

Today there are over one thousand fab labs across the world, that

together function as a distributed production system on a small scale. I

can design something in Barcelona, and without using fossil fuel, create

the identical product in Cape Town, Wellington or Tokyo.

Our approach is closely linked to the notion of circular economy, in the

sense that we aim to shorten and localize production loops. With the

right infrastructure and knowledge we could reduce the amount of

material that a city imports and rescale globalization. It also allows

companies to create social value and not only profit.[837]

According to the Fab Cities website, “The FAB City is a global project

to develop locally productive and globally connected self-sufficient

cities.”

FAB City is a new urban model of transforming and shaping cities that

shifts how they source and use materials from ‘Products In Trash Out’

(PITO) to ‘Data In Data Out’ (DIDO). This means that more production

occurs inside the city, along with recycling materials and meeting local

needs through local inventiveness. A city’s imports and exports would

mostly be found in the form of data (information, knowledge, design,

code).

The project aims to develop prototype industrial districts in all

participating cities, with Fab Labs as the nucleus, and circular

economies relocalizing as many functions as possible….

The project will entail identifying and mapping

local source materials, manufacturers, producers, artisans and other

activities connected to circular economy and local production at

neighbourhoods, and scalable to cities. The goal is to bridge with

larger scale supply chains, in order to connect supply and demand for

local production.[838]

In terms of economic relocalization, its goals are relatively modest: to

relocalize some 50% of manufacturing by 2054.[839]

Barcelona’s first Fab Lab inspired a network of Fab Labs in the city

itself (designated *ateneus*, or “atheneums”).

Supported by Barcelona’s civic leaders, each Ateneu receives public

funds to run popular local events — family days and school visits;

training courses and social innovation programs: everything necessary to

equip citizens with the digital fabrication nous necessary to

‘materialise their ideas and create their worlds’ (according to the

Ateneus slogan). By this vision, high-tech public infrastructure will

make it easier for Barcelona’s citizens to lock into a global ‘maker’

network – uploading designs which folks, say, in Singapore, might use;

or collaborating in prototyping with FabLabs in São Paulo, adapting

ideas produced globally to fit their own local needs.

…In adopting the term ‘Ateneu’ for their workshops, city authorities

have evoked a Catalan tradition of social centres where people used to

meet up, build bonds, and debate issues about the type of society they

want — but which in this case civic leaders wish to associate with

selectively.

The first Ateneu opened in July 2013, in an abandoned silk ribbon

factory in the Les Corts district. A further 20 workshops are planned to

some degree for later down the line….[840]

Barcelona’s experience with ateneus was somewhat shaky, serving as an

object lesson in the dangers attendant on promoting a relocalization

model driven from the top down by “anchor institutions” rather than by

people’s self-organization to meet their own daily needs (as we saw

elsewhere with regard to Cleveland’s Evergreen model).

Whilst setting-up is also relatively straightforward — installing

machinery, running courses — the real challenge comes in weaving the

workshops into the everyday fabric of the local community….

The experiences around the Ateneu in Ciutat Meridiana highlight these

tensions. Ciutat Meridiana is the poorest neighbourhood in Barcelona —

unemployment exceeds 20 percent, and family incomes are one third of

city averages. The neighbourhood association is constantly in battle

with the council over changes to social services, and resisting

evictions from mortgage lenders.

So what, exactly, does a high-tech, MIT-inspired workshop, with no

immediate role in alleviating the daily crisis of people’s lives, have

to offer the neighbourhood? Very little, it would seem — at least

initially. The people of Ciutat Meridiana needed food, not 3D printers,

and the project didn’t help itself by siting the workshop in a building

that neighbours were already using as a food bank…. Rather than

embracing the project, locals were alienated and occupied the Ateneu in

protest. Negotiations ensued, eventually leading to two conditions of

agreement — the food bank was re-established, albeit elsewhere in the

neighbourhood; and the Ateneu would emphasise training and work for

young people.[841]

The global network inspired a similar project in Brazil in February

2015, to create a network of 12 public FabLabs.[842]

The Open Source Circular City model, developed by Lars Zimmermann,

focuses on local economies that keep value within the community by

designing goods for repair, reuse and recycling, and creating the

capability for those functions at the local level. The latter capability

— which he calls “Reversibility Facilities” — are “something between a

second hand market*, a *repair shop*, a *factory*, a research

facility and a** Fab-lab**.”[843]

The Poblenou neighborhood of Barcelona is a good illustration of two of

Jane Jacobs’ central principles: import substitution, and conversion of

waste byproducts into new inputs. Poblenou, once considered a *former*

industrial district which had fallen victim to deindustrialization, “has

become a poster child for urban renewal through a bottom-up approach,

creating an epicentre of technology and creativity — leading the Catalan

paper Publico and other media to describe it as a mini Silicon Valley

for sustainable industry.”

The neighbourhood is spearheading a new urban model of resiliency and

local innovation, where citizens are perceived not just as consumers but

as producers, empowered through access to digital fabrication tools, and

knowledge. Poblenou is today an experimentation playground to build the

vision of how we might step away from importing most things into the

city and export our waste, and instead introduce a circular model, where

all resources flow in a closed-loop system within the city itself.

In fact, Poblenou is already building the infrastructure to be locally

productive and globally connected, in order to produce at least half of

what it consumes by 2054, using materials that are sourced locally or

reclaimed from waste creating a partly circular model, where waste is

remade into new products.

Poblenou is also a major participant in the FAB Cities network. During a

special five-day event, the Made Again Challenge,

local workshops, research centers, design agencies and local producers

in the neighbourhood was [sic] connected into an ecosystem. Biologists,

tech professionals, local makers, craftsmen, IKEA designers, and other

trailblazers gathered in Barcelona for the project and collected wasted

products from the streets of Poblenou in order to breath new life into

materials that were heading to landfill.

Following the success of the Made Again Challenge, the Barcelona city

government successfully proposed turning a square kilometer of Poblenou

into a Maker District.[844] The objective of the Maker

District is “prototyping a fractal of a Fab City, focusing on…”

- Fabrication & materials: with complementary production ecosystems

happening inside the local network of Fab Labs, citizens have the

possibility to produce what they consume, recirculating materials

inside the neighbourhood and the city to reduce waste and carbon

emissions associated with long-distance mass production and

distribution chains.

- Food production: growing food on the rooftops of Barcelona. Through

urban agriculture practices, citizens can grow part of what they eat

turning production of local clean food in a regular part of their

lives.

- Energy: Renewable energy production. With the arrival of domestic

batteries and the cost drop of solar technologies, citizens have the

tools to produce part of their domestic energy

consumption.[845]

Following the devastation of Hurricane Sandy in the Sunset Park

neighborhood in Brooklyn, the UPROSE environmental group mobilized the

community to rebuild using an economic model centered on environmentally

friendly, community controlled industry.

…UPROSE has joined forces with labor unions, the Working Families

Organization, and business owners to transform Sunset Park’s industrial

space into a manufacturing hub that produces environmentally friendly

building and construction materials, powered by renewable energy. And

they are encouraging these industries to hire locally….

…UPROSE consults with residents on the future they want, then arms

them with the tools they need to make that vision a reality. Some

residents take on the role of block captains and gather input and

educate their neighbors on city planning processes. Through partnerships

with researchers, residents conduct participatory action research on

issues of concern. It’s a deeply democratic, holistic approach that

builds local power and increases community control over resources – key

elements of community resilience.[846]

Alternative Currencies and Credit. Alternative currency

systems differ widely in* *how much actual value they

offer to the people of a community. At their worst, LETS systems which

entail simply trading dollars earned outside the system for alternative

currency notes on a one-to-one basis, in order to use those notes for

purchases at participating merchants, are nothing but glorified green

stamps systems that (aside from modest discounts) are actually more

trouble to use. Thomas Greco refers to it as the Convertible Local

Currency model:

Up to now, virtually all community currencies have followed the

‘convertible local currency’ (CLC) model, including the Bristol Pound

and Brixton Pound in the UK, Toronto Dollars and Salt Spring Island

Dollars in Canada, and Berkshares in the US. Typically, these currencies

are sold for, and can then be redeemed back into, conventional or

official money. But even their proponents admit that these currencies

have not been effective in achieving economic relocalization.

What really needs to be relocalized is the control of credit, which is

the essence of every modern currency…. The fundamental need of

communities is for additional means of exchange that supplement the

available supply of money in circulation. Communities therefore need to

find ways of providing their own home grown liquidity i.e their own

means of payment to support their local economies and achieve some

measure of self-determination.

The CLC model does not provide the community with additional liquidity.

Rather, it substitutes a limited local currency in place of a relatively

universal official one. Such currencies bear a strong resemblance to the

gift cards that are sold by myriad retail companies like Marks and

Spencer and Amazon.[847]

The proper function of a currency system is to create liquidity where it

did not exist before and create purchasing power for those who lack

conventional money. It primes the pump in an environment where members

have useful skills and unmet needs, by advancing credit so that members

can trade against future services to obtain present

consumption.[848]

The idea of currency as a “store of value,” something saved up from past

production, or of credit as the lending of past savings, is a capitalist

myth that obscures the real nature of money and credit.

Apologists for the profits of capital argue that labor would not be

productive without the contributions of capital. A trucker would not be

very productive without a truck, for example. But the truck itself is

produced by workers. And the factory that makes trucks is built by

workers. And the food and other necessities of life consumed by workers

while the factory and truck are being built are also produced by other

workers. This “wage fund doctrine” was effectively demolished by radical

political economist Thomas Hodgskin. According to Hodgskin, the material

subsistence goods advanced to workers aren’t really saved from past

production at all, but are produced near-simultaneously with their

consumption. All capital goods and all subsistence goods consumed during

the production process are created by other workers. Absent the

capitalists, workers could carry out this function of continuously

advancing their products to each other through some form of mutual

credit. It could be organized entirely as a system of flows — no stocks

required. All capitalists do — thanks to their having appropriated most

wealth through enclosures and other large-scale robberies in past

centuries, and having been given a state monopoly on the right to issue

credit — is preempt the horizontal channels by which workers might

otherwise have mutually advanced their labor products to each other. To

quote Hodgskin,

Betwixt him who produces food and him who produces clothing, betwixt him

who makes instruments and him who uses them, in steps the capitalist,

who neither makes nor uses them, and appropriates to himself the produce

of both. With as niggard a hand as possible he transfers to each a part

of the produce of the other, keeping to himself the large share.

Gradually and successively has he insinuated himself betwixt them,

expanding in bulk as he has been nourished by their increasingly

productive labours, and separating them so widely from each other that

neither can see whence that supply is drawn which each receives through

the capitalist. While he despoils both, so completely does he exclude

one from the view of the other that both believe they are indebted him

for subsistence…. Not only do they appropriate the produce of the

labourer; but they have succeeded in persuading him that they are his

benefactors and employers.[849]

So the most valuable alternative currencies are those that are primarily

a form of credit and a measure of value — a channel for the mutual

advance of credit between producers, even when no one has stored wealth

from past production. This is especially true of mutual credit clearing

systems on Greco’s model, as well as of time-based barter networks where

people put their skills to work performing services for others in the

system and obtain purchasing power in return.

As recounted by David Graeber in *Debt*, mutual credit clearing systems

were the primary source of liquidity for exchange in medieval villages,

before the imposition of specie currency. In their modern incarnation,

they vary in how large a deficit they permit members to run; ideally,

once trust has been established over time they will allow deficits of up

to six month’s of the member’s average account turnover, which amounts

to a significant form of micro-credit which can be used for setting up

or expanding a small enterprise. Greco has described such systems

functioning all over the world.[850]

One particularly successful recent example is the Sardex system in

Sardinia.166 It has around 3000 members and a financial

turnover of around 1.5 million Euros per month. Perhaps most important

of its qualities is “[e]mphasis on monetizing the unused capacity of

members. Connecting unused supplies with unmet needs is a primary

benefit of credit clearing services.” It functions primarily as a

business-to-business clearinghouse for enterprises located in, or which

maintain branches in, Sardinia.

The Open Credit Network also operates on Greco’s model, enabling

participating businesses to obtain credit interest-free and to “buy from

suppliers even if you have no money,” and enables trade for the

community when money is scarce. It also keeps money local and builds

community resilience against crashes.[851]

A member begins by joining the directory and posting what their business

has to offer and what it needs. The system’s algorithm matches them up

with potential suppliers and outlets, and they’re given a line of

credit. Members who make connections trade with each other run open

accounts and accrue credits and debits.[852]

The network’s credit relationships sometimes take the form of “loops”

between a number of participants.

Around 100 businesses have expressed interest in joining The Open Credit

Network – everything from farmers, accountants and graphic designers to

weavers, IT specialists and printers. Each business has listed some of

its ‘offers’ and ‘wants’.

Our job is now to find trading loops between those businesses.

Eventually, this will all be automated so that participating businesses

can find what they want without having to be part of a ‘loop’.

But for now, we’re initiating trading loops involving 3 or 4 businesses

that can trade with each other, to complete a full cycle. Business A

provides something for business B, which provides something of the same

value for business, C, which provides something of the same value for

business A.

We built the required software to run trade accounts for each business,

who will be in credit or debit depending on how much they’ve bought from

or sold to other members of the network.

Trades can be partly in mutual credit and partly in cash. One credit is

equivalent to one pound. Credits can’t be exchanged for for pounds, or

vice versa.

In our first trading loop Lowimpact.org provided a banner advertisement

for Outlandish, who provided web services for Community Regen, who

provided fundraising advice for Lowimpact.org with a trade value of

£100, but in credits, rather than cash.

Once a business is a member of the Open Credit Network, trading itself

is as simple as logging on to the website and filling out a short form.

The admin team then check and approve the trades, one account is

credited, the other debited and voilà – the businesses get what they

want, without having to come up with scarce cash.[853]

The ultimate goal is to map all the mutual credit systems in the world

and federate them, so that needs beyond the capacity of a given local

system’s members can be met from outside.[854]

Platform Cooperatives: Sharing Economy and Temp Work.

Sharing the idle capacity of capital goods —

power tools, cars, etc. — that individual owners seldom utilize to full

capacity, in order to spread the overhead burden of ownership out among

a larger community, is an important way of lowering individual

subsistence costs through access to the commons.

Unfortunately, a major part of the so-called “sharing economy,” as it’s

called in the mainstream press, is nothing of the sort. It actually

consists of what commons advocates call “Death Stars,”[855]

like Uber or Airbnb. Alessia Palladino distinguishes between

- genuinely collaborative initiatives that promote the sharing of

underutilized assets, as well as involve some form of sustainable

exchange based on resource inequality, excess capacity, power parity,

and the possibility to engage in repeated interactions (e.g., spare

guestrooms). Some examples of genuine sharing practices are home-swaps

(e.g., HomeExchange), ride-sharing and carpooling platforms (e.g.,

BlaBlaCar);

- non-collaborative platforms that are not driven by sustainable

consumption, but profits (e.g. Uber).

She proposes “a society-based version of the sharing economy, the

so-called pooling economy, as opposed to market-based sharing economy

initiatives.”[856]

Advocates of platform cooperativism — that is, of organizing the

so-called “sharing economy” on a p2p or commons basis rather than

through Death Stars — see the municipal level as a primary venue for

action. Trebor Scholz defines it as “a way of joining the peer-to-peer

and co-op movements with online labor markets while insisting on

communal ownership and democratic governance.”[857]

As Mayo Fuster Morell describes it, the commons platform economy is

defined by

(1) favouring peer to peer relations — in contrast to the traditionally

hierarchical command and contractual relationships detach from

sociability, and mere mercantile exchange— and the involvement of the

community of peers generating in the governance of the platform; (2) it

is based on value distribution and governance among the community of

peers, and the profitability is not its main driving force; (3) it

developed over privacy aware public infrastructure, and results in the

(generally) open access provision of commons resources that favour

access, reproducibility and derivativeness; and finally (4) the

responsibility with the externalities generated by the

process.[858]

The city of Barcelona officially promotes platform cooperatives as an

organizational model, as part of its general orientation towards

encouraging a local ecosystem of economic counter-institutions. Álvaro

Porro, Social Economy Commissioner for Barcelona, argues that the least

desirable platform model is proprietary and profit-oriented, with

control of information primarily by the firm. The most desirable model,

platform cooperativism, is characterized by

- *Collaboration*. Production-consumption-exchange (generally open) of

resources and services.

- *Governance*. Platforms where the community of participants or users

plays a role in governance.

- *Peer to peer*. Between peers; relationships that tend to be more

egalitarian (communities of self-governing contributors).

- *Commons*. A shared property of a common resource, which is

accessible. This generally comes with the use of free licenses and

technologies (copyleft, creative commons, open

access…).[859]

Platform cooperativism advocates have begun to organize locally in

Berlin, Valencia, Oakland, Bologna and other major cities as

well.[860]

As Scholz suggests, the development of a local ecosystem of platform

cooperatives, on the basis of economies of scope, can be actively

encouraged through enterprise incubators at the municipal level, and the

use of municipal property like libraries and museums to host

organizational activity.[861]

Besides its high-capacity light rail system and its rejection of some of

the more common subsidies to car culture Vancouver has also promoted

projects that fall under the umbrella of the sharing economy or platform

cooperativism. It actively encourages ride-sharing systems created on a

p2p or cooperative model, as well as seeding a large-scale bike-sharing

program with stations all over the city.[862]

The classic example of a non-Death Star alternative to Uber is

RideAustin. After voters rejected a ballot initiative to overturn city

regulation of ride-sharing services in May 2016, Uber and Lyft pulled

out of the Austin market. Ride Austin, a non-profit organized by the

Austin tech community, launched its app in June. Unlike Uber, which

charged drivers a 25% commission, it charged only a flat $2 booking fee

and otherwise left 100% of fares to drivers. RideAustin booked 2.25

million rides in its first 16 months. When the state legislature

overturned local ride-sharing regulations, Uber and Lyft reentered the

Austin market in Summer 2017 with a predatory pricing strategy (i.e.

discounts of up to 50%). RideAustin lost two-thirds of its customers,

but RideAustin VP of strategic programs and operations Bobbi Kommineni

estimated that

the nonprofit can bottom out at about 20% of the market in the long run.

Enough Austinites want to keep Austin “weird” – that is, serviced by

locally owned companies – she argues….

“There’s definitely a part of our customer base who are price-sensitive,

particularly students, who will switch to the other services,” she says

(as well as Uber and Lyft, Fasten is another major competitor). “But we

also have a core base that wants to use us versus a big corporation.

It’s about doing right by the drivers, ensuring they have a fair wage,

and doing right by the community….”

[Arun] Sundararajan believes ride hailing ultimately will be a

low-margin, high-volume business, with low barriers to entry. The cost

of building an app is coming down all the time, he says, making

defending a market position harder and harder for Uber and Lyft and

giving more opportunities for workers who want to work for

themselves.[863]

In London, the New Economics Foundation recommended the city take a

similar approach following transport authorities’ 2017 denial of a

license to Uber.

The Foundation believes that now is the moment for TFL and the Mayor of

London to go further to provide better working conditions for drivers

and higher safety standards for passengers.

The Mayor’s next step should be to start the job of creating ‘Khan’s

Cars’: a mutually owned taxi platform for London which would share

benefits with drivers and users.[864]

Likewise the cooperative ride-sharing app Eva in Montreal, sponsored by

the Desjardins credit union.

It’s like Uber, but aimed at people who want to support a local

business. The platform has 500 active drivers, with 500 more in the

process of joining, and a growing base of 17,000 users, according to

co-founder Dardan Isufi….

Under Eva’s governing rules, both drivers and riders have voting rights,

and receive a share of profits, though turning a profit is still unheard

of in the ride-sharing business, including for heavyweights Uber and

Lyft.

“I like that we can vote on how much of our fares go to the head

office,” said Eva driver Imran Karmali, who will be attending his first

meeting. Drivers currently contribute 15 percent of their fares towards

the fledgling company’s marketing and operating costs, while Uber takes

25 percent.

Isufi began working on Eva two years ago with fellow university student

Raphael Gaudreault. He remembers asking Gauldreault, “How hard could it

be to start a better ride-sharing platform?” In practice, there’s been

no shortage of challenges, like a period of sleepless days and nights

rooting out fraudulent activity and creating new protocols….

In line with their cooperative business model, the code for the app is

being made available to other local co-ops around the world. The first

“social franchise” to register is a drivers’ cooperative in Dhaka,

Bangladesh….[865]

Another case of a genuinely user-controlled ride-sharing service, with

the user community pooling the costs of ownership, is a program set up

in Cantua Creek, a rural community of several hundred people an hour’s

drive from Fresno. It’s an impoverished community with many carless

people, in a virtual food desert at least 20 minutes from the nearest

store, and similarly far from doctors and other necessities. Ridership

fees will be set high enough to cover the operating costs of the

community’s seven-passenger van. The dispatcher’s office is accessible

by landline, avoiding the barriers an app-based system present to those

who can’t afford a smart-phone.[866]

Besides competing cooperative platforms, another strategy for blowing up

Death Stars like Uber is what Cory Doctorow calls “adversarial

interoperability”: creating p2p apps that piggyback on proprietary

platforms, without their permission, and import user data. In the case

of ride-sharing, here’s how he describes it:

The real barriers are not technical, but legal.

Tech law is a minefield of overly broad, superannuated rules that have

been systematically distorted by companies that used “disruption” to

batter their way into old industries, but now use these laws to shield

themselves from any pressure from upstarts to seek to disrupt *them*….

Together, the CFAA and DMCA have given digital businesses access to a

shadowy legal doctrine that was never written by Congress but is

nevertheless routinely enforced by the courts: *Felony Contempt of

Business-Model*….

…Uber and Lyft have lengthy terms-of-service that set out the rules

under which you are authorized to communicate with Uber and Lyft’s

servers. These terms of service prohibit using their servers to locate

drivers for any purpose other than booking a ride. They certainly don’t

permit you to locate a driver and then cancel the booking and re-book

with a co-op app.

And Uber and Lyft’s apps are encrypted on your phone, so to

reverse-engineer them, you’d have to decrypt them (probably by capturing

an image of their decrypted code while it was running in a virtual phone

simulated on a desktop computer). Decrypting an app without permission

is “bypassing an effective means of access control” for a copyrighted

work (the app is made up of copyrighted code).

Uber and Lyft can use DMCA 1201 to stop you from figuring out how to use

them to locate co-op drivers, and they can use the CFAA to stop you from

flipping your booking from Uber to Meta-Uber.[867]

So the purely technical aspect will have to be combined with a strategy

of circumventing enforcement.

In any case, the platform cooperative model is closely aligned with the

values of Free and Open Source Software.

Members and supporters of cooperative platforms want to create software

and businesses that are fundamentally different from the apps like Uber,

Lyft, and DoorDash that currently dominate the market.

“We don’t want to create a poor copy of extractive platforms,” said

Jutta Treviranus, Director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre at

OCAD University in Toronto. “First of all, we don’t have the money they

do. Our measure of success is how far we explore the difficult terrain

that extractive platforms ignore.”[868]

Besides high-profile examples like ride-sharing and sharing extra space

in one’s home with visitors, the sharing economy includes smaller-scale

projects like tool libraries and other libraries of things. One pioneer

in such efforts is the Toronto Tool Library, which has four locations.

In 2016 it opened a Sharing Depot where members can borrow “sporting

goods, board games, camping equipment, children’s toys, and party

supplies” for a subscription fee of $50 -100 a year. The project was

successful enough to adopt a second branch.[869] Libraries

for lending tools, musical instruments, kitchen appliances and many

other things have spring up in cities around the world.[870]

Platform cooperatives aren’t limited to capital assets people own.

They’re also ideally suited to labor-intensive industries where the main

source of value is “human capital,” and outlays for physical capital and

other overhead are minimal. These include temp work of all kinds

(especially nursing and other healthcare jobs), cleaning services, and

the like. The only real overhead that’s actually necessary is someone to

coordinate openings with workers, some computer scheduling and payroll

software, a dedicated fax and phone account, and a post office box

(assuming it isn’t run out of a spare room in someone’s home). And yet

for-profit agencies collect a huge share of what clients pay for

performing these functions. A cooperative temp agency could drastically

reduce the price to clients or raise the pay of workers, or split the

middleman rent between clients and workers.

For example in New York six cleaning workers formed their own

cooperative, Brightly Cleaning.[871] Another cleaning

cooperative, also in New York, is Up & Go.

What would happen if low-wage workers came together to cut out the

middleman and build their own platforms? This isn’t just a thought

experiment. Worker-owned apps are already providing real alternatives to

dismal working conditions in the global gig economy.

Up & Go is a home cleaning app owned by workers in New York City. “On

other apps, the owners set your wages, but we set our own wages,” said

worker-owner Esmeralda Flores.

Up & Go cleaners earn $25 per hour, more than double what workers

typically earned independently, according to Project Manager Sylvia

Morse. While apps generally take a cut of 20 percent or more, Up & Go

only takes 5 percent, which it then reinvests in the platform.

The cleaners, primarily immigrant women from Latin America,

cooperatively own the Up & Go code and brand, launched publicly in May

2017. They meet monthly to make decisions on topics like cancellation

policies and pricing.

“If you look at other platforms, it’s clear they artificially lower

prices by subsidizing first-time users and paying as little as possible

to their workers. Our value proposition is that our prices are

transparent, workers earn a fair wage, and clients receive

professional-quality cleaning,” said Maru Bautista.

Bautista directs the Cooperative Development Program of the Center for

Family Life in Brooklyn. Over the past 13 years, the Center has formed

20 worker-owned co-ops that have generated more than $13 million in

revenue.

The development of Up & Go was guided by three immigrant-led cleaning

co-ops over a year-long process of co-design and testing, made possible

in part by funding from the anti-poverty Robin Hood

Foundation.[872]

A key focus of cooperative temp agencies is the power of member

solidarity to guarantee workers’ dignity against abuse by customers.

What would an app look like that centers women’s safety instead of

making it an afterthought? Members of the Self-Employed Women’s

Association in India are exploring various solutions to this challenge

for beauty workers who make home visits such as panic buttons, an

anonymous tip line, and doing away with individual worker profiles….

Salonie Hiriyur, Senior Associate with SEWA’s 300,000 member Cooperative

Federation, stressed that the co-op model itself adds a layer of safety.

“There is an awareness that the worker is backed by a collective. This

awareness protects the worker against harassment.”[873]

The Federation, she said elsewhere, “is carrying out a number of

platform co-op experiments, including a food delivery service, a health

co-op combining education work with the sale of Ayurvedic products like

shampoo, and a project with the International Development Research

Centre in Chicago to develop domestic work co-ops.”[874]

There are a number of other trans-national federations promoting or

incubating gig and temp work cooperatives. New York City was the site

for Who Owns the World? in November 2019, a conference for the global

platform co-op movement. It was convened by Trebor Scholz, director of

the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy (itself a subsidiary

of the Platform Co-op Consortium at the New School).[875]

And the gig workers’ cooperatives themselves are federated into numerous

bodies for mutual support. For example the bicycle delivery federation

CoopCycle:

Cooperatives like these are supported by the wider federation of

CoopCycle – a ‘platform cooperative’ countering mainstream economic

models of platform capitalism. This movement is the effort of workers

who sought each other in the hope of a fair alternative to the rampant

worker exploitation within the gig-economy.

…In the words of the founders, CoopCycle works against ‘rentier

capitalism’ that has led to near economic monopolisation by large

companies that do not contribute but only control. The task that

platform cooperatives face is to socialise a labour market which sees

unfair wages and worsening working conditions under these companies.

This unfairness is being challenged by workers worldwide, including by

partners of CoopCycle such as Belgium’s Molenbike, Spain’s Mensakas or

the UK’s York Collective….

How does one then begin chipping away at such a digital edifice?

CoopCycle and similar alternatives like them step in. They provide the

critical functions which form the backbone of a gig-economy business.

The main moving parts of the platform cooperative would include

software, smartphone applications, mapping, insurances and building

alliances with potential vendors. The technology that enables all these

functions from CoopCycle is free and open for all cooperatives to

use.[876]

The idea in all such cases where workers provide their own capital,

whether physical or human is — to paraphrase Yochai Benkler — to “use

technology to reduce or entirely eliminate those who play a primarily

‘extractive’ role in markets, the players whose main or sometimes only

function is to come between the producers or providers of goods and

services and consumers.”[877]

At its highest level, the concept of platform cooperativism applies to

the city itself as a platform. Municipal governance, when reorganized in

accordance with the principles of platform cooperativism, gives us

something like the Partner State. Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel

paint an appealing picture:

Imagine a radically reconfigured and democratically accountable

structure. One that, while preserving the more desirable characteristics

of the Welfare State — social and public health provision and large

infrastructure management and upkeep — radically democratizes them. It

would do away with the State’s cozy symbiosis with market entities,

while deconstructing its pernicious monopolies over money creation and

exchange, and property and judicial rights. A second radical set of

measures would prohibit the structural enforcement of inequality and the

often violent repression of emancipatory alternatives. This structure

would function in much the same way as foundations do in the Open Source

software economy: providing the infrastructure for cooperation and the

creation and upkeep of commons but not directing the process of social

value creation and distribution. In other words, it would empower and

protect the practice of commoning.

This enabling metastructure — often referred to as “The Partner State” —

would also take on new functions derived from already existing

P2P/Commons practices. Among these, we would see a promotion of real,

needs-oriented entrepreneurship, bolstered by explicit recognition and

support of bottom-up productive infrastructures, such as Open Coops,

mesh wireless networks or community renewables through public-Commons

partnerships. It would allow commoners to repurpose or take over unused

or underutilised public buildings for social ends while giving legal

recognition to the act of commoning, whether through copyleft-inspired

property-law hacks or through a longer process of gradually

institutionalizing commons practices. Its grassroots democratizing ethos

would create new financing mechanisms and debt-free public money

creation, which, alongside social currencies, could fund environmentally

regenerative work and the creation of new, distributed Open-source

infrastructure. These would be supported by taxation schemes favouring

the types of labor described above, while penalizing speculation,

parasitic rents and negative social and environmental externalities. The

overall system has to be kept in check through a pervasive culture of

participatory politics — made feasible through its attendant pedagogy —

to involve a newly enfranchised citizenry in the deliberation and real

time consultation of political and legislative issues and budgeting. In

issues of power, the Partner State shifts to being a fluid facilitator

to assist and emancipate the bottom-up counter-power that keeps it in

check.[878]

But far more mainstream attention is devoted to concepts like “Smart

Cities” being promoted by capital, that amount to nothing more than

Death Star platforms at the municipal level. The term “smart cities”

itself dates back to IBM’s coinage “Smarter Cities,” which was a

marketing gimmick “to boost sales of enterprise software to city

governments as tools for urban planning and

administration.”[879] But even major figures in IBM itself

have misgivings about the original vision. For example Steven Adler,

IBM’s chief information strategist:

…when IBM created the idea of smart cities, “our definition was a city

that is self-aware.” In the beginning, this was a matter of making a

city administration more instrumented and intelligent from the point of

view of top-down control. “But increasingly,” said Adler, “we have seen

that we need to help citizens participate in the self-awareness of a

city. In New York City, there are about eight million residents and

300,000 city employees, and there is no possible way that 300,000 people

can know as much about the law, architecture, design, sanitation and

other facets of the city as eight million citizens. So how do we get the

eight million experts in our city to participate in governing

decisions?”[880]

Of course, that’s not to say Adler’s got the platform co-op gospel or

wants to open-source local government. He’s just a more perceptive and

reasonable person than average in the belly of the Beast. But plenty of

others are explicitly working in that direction. And people like Adler

may be the ones we can actually bargain with if sufficient pressure is

brought to bear from the outside.

Stefaan Verhulst of GovLab calls for turning citizens into

“‘co-designers, co-producers and co-learners,’ with government in

developing better city services and processes…” And Chief Technology

Officer Peter Marx of the City of Los Angeles strongly hints at

something like the commons model as an alternative to both state and

“private” sector.

“Private is held up as the panacea of wonderfulness and innovation, and

government is cast as an old, gray, stodgy, never-changing bureaucracy.

That’s the running vernacular. I think the reality, like all such

stereotypes, is rather different. We all know that private [sector] is

not a panacea and that government is changing continuously.” We need to

get beyond this simplistic narrative, he asserted, and recognize that

self- organized citizen engagement as a third force — neither public nor

private — holds great promise.[881]

The end goal, David Bollier argues, “is for city governments to regard

their resources as flexible, open platforms that welcome citizen-led

innovation, rather than government clinging to brittle systems of

centralized, rule-driven control.”[882] City government must

be seen, not as something that does things, but as a platform that

enables citizens to do things in cooperation with one another.

Policy-making must become an open source activity carried out

collaboratively by citizens, and facilitated by city government as a

platform.

Platform Cooperatives: Public Services and Utilities.

Platform cooperatives are also relevant as a model for

organizing the delivery of public services — electricity, water,

Internet, education, etc. — on a commons basis rather than through

either government bureaucracy or corporations. Remunicipalization of

utilities and services, after decades of neoliberal privatization, is a

global trend. Among many other reasons, cities are learning that the

alleged cost savings from corporate privatization were a scam. As

Olivier Pettitjean points out, local authorities in Europe have found,

in spite of what private sector propagandists continue to repeat

tirelessly, that privatisation is more expensive than direct public

management. When, for example, Paris remunicipalised its water services

in 2010, it saved 35 million euros a year just by foregoing payments to

parent companies….

In Newcastle, United Kingdom, the modernisation of signalling and fiber

optic cable system was carried out by a new in-house team for about 11

million pounds, compared with more than double this figure that it would

have cost if done by a private company. The city of Bergen, Norway,

where two elderly care centres were taken back in-house, had a surplus

of half a million euros whereas a one million loss was expected. The

costs of waste collection and cleaning services decreased from 20 to 10

million euros annually in León, Spain, with

remunicipalisation….[883]

And the new wave of remunicipalization — perhaps most notably in Jeremy

Corbyn’s onetime policy agenda — differs from the old model of

bureaucratic administration in a manner analogous to the way Labour’s

industrial nationalization proposals differ from the old managerialist

Morrisonian nationalization model.

Importantly, the new wave of public ownership is increasingly understood

as needing to avoid some of the limitations of past models — including

the overly centralised, opaque, and managerial top-down public

corporation model of the postwar period, which was deliberately kept at

arm’s length from democratic accountability and control….

The aim is to develop powerful new forms of public ownership that

stimulate broad-based participation, increase accountability and

transparency, and empower communities and individuals that have

traditionally been excluded from economic decision-making. In sum, what

is needed is *democratic* public ownership, an approach that that [sic]

combines the benefits of broadly shared ownership — such as more

equitable distributional outcomes — with the individual and societal

benefits of confronting alienation with increased agency and

empowerment.[884]

Keir Milburn and Bertie Russell propose private-commons partnerships as

an alternative to the conventional model of municipal ownership.

…[T]hey involve co-ownership between appropriate

state authorities and a Commoners Association, alongside co-combined

governance with a third association of project specific relevant parties

such as trade unions and relevant experts. Rather than a mono-cultural

institutional form applied indiscriminately PCPs should emerge as an

overlapping patchwork of institutions that respond to the peculiarities

of the asset concerned, the scale at which the PCP will operate (whether

it be city-region wide energy production in Greater Manchester or the

commercial activity of a North London market), and the individuals and

communities that will act together as commoners.[885]

David Bollier explains that commons are “not the same as government

because, in its ideal form, it is about the commoners owning and

managing resources as directly and locally as possible. It usually

entails a significant measure of participation, transparency,

decentralised control and accountability – factors that are not always

present when the state is managing a resource.”[886]

Milburn and Russell, much like De Angelis, emphasize the potential of

commons to serve as building blocks for an expanding counter-system that

increases our bargaining leverage and power of exit from capitalism.

This is owing to

the potential of PCPs to emerge as a core element of a transformative

socialist project concerned not only with the immediate redistribution

of wealth and power, but the development of a self-expanding tendency

towards collective self-government and the decommodification of daily

life. What is fundamentally novel about PCPs is not their particular

institutional form, but how they relate to one another as part of a

wider circuit.[887]

Individual Commons Associations are also liable to want to capitalise

projects along their own supply and value chains, as this is the

quickest way to disembed themselves from the circuits of capital. In

principle, this is to be encouraged as it facilitates the formation of

circuits of commons in specific sectors; yet this tendency must be

balanced against the strategic needs of the wider project of socialist

transformation. The ability to trigger the self-expansive dynamic of the

commons will require the capitalisation of projects most likely to

produce a surplus (with energy, water, housing, and transport

infrastructure being obvious starting points) and thus allow the

capitalisation of further PCPs. Again, this will require an ongoing

negotiation between the various participants in the joint

enterprise.[888]

…Reducing people’s reliance on capital for their basic social

reproduction helps strengthen our hand in more direct antagonistic forms

of struggle. Strikes, for instance, become eminently more winnable when

many of our life-support systems – such as energy, water, housing and

transport – are commonly owned and governed resources. As the commons

circuit grows and encompasses more and more of the vital infrastructure

upon which our lives depend, then the ability of capital to exercise

leverage through disruption becomes significantly

undermined.[889]

Public broadband is an especially important example* *of

how municipal property can contribute to a commons-based city ecology.

In many places the city’s fiber-optic infrastructure for supporting

public utilities or communications by government bodies has sufficient

excess capacity to provide Internet service superior to that provided by

telecom companies (which isn’t saying a lot). A good example is the

municipal broadband in Chattanooga, affectionately known by locals as

“The Gig.” Telecom corporations have fought such efforts tooth and nail,

and in many states obtained legislation to prevent entities like cities,

public utilities, and school systems from using the spare capacity of

their fiber-optic networks to provide cheap, high-quality broadband

service.

But the potential for providing such service, even with only existing

infrastructure, is enormous. As it is, many communities have followed

Chattanooga’s model — Longmont and Santa Monica in California, just to

name a couple. Although Colorado law prohibits municipal broadband,

localities are allowed to opt out by referendum; as a result, some 26

cities and counties have decided to permit municipal Internet

service.[890] Absent industry-written regulatory

prohibitions, most large and medium-sized cities in the United States

could probably provide high-quality Internet service. Altogether more

than 750 towns, cities, and counties in the US have done so. And 197

other communities have some publicly owned fiber service already

available to parts of the community, another 120 have publicly-owned

dark (unused) fiber available for use.[891]

Local meshworks — “[c]ommunity created and user-managed… decentralized

wireless access points connected to each other,” as Sheila Foster and

Christian Iaione describe them — are one example.

Mesh networking relies on existing urban infrastructure and the combined

efforts of many local actors — including public and private property

owners who grant access to buildings and other structures to mount the

access points — to create a solution to the “last mile” connectivity

gap. The goal of these networks is to bring internet service to

communities and populations that lack high speed wireless or broadband

access, increasingly seen as a necessary public good or “fourth

utility.” In this model, no one owns the entire infrastructure (open and

free access), but everyone who wants to access can contribute with their

own resources to run the network which, in turn, is managed and governed

by the community.

Mesh networks have been established in many European and American

cities, including the famed community mesh network in Red Hook Brooklyn

designed to overcome the digital divide, to the Detroit, Michigan

network which provides connectivity to the 40 percent of its residents

without internet access, to the mesh network in Berlin, Germany designed

to provide vital internet service to newly arrived migrants living in

refugee shelters.[892]

There are also many examples of direct, cooperative action by citizens

themselves to create Internet service with acceptable levels of quality

where none is currently provided.

In rural southern Minnesota over two dozen small towns in four counties,

faced with lousy service and slow connections from the corporate service

providers, pooled their resources in the RS Fiber project, which is

expected to provide Internet service to 6,000

households.[893] All across the country, rural electric

cooperatives are deciding to provide high-speed Internet service to

their members as well.[894] In Europe, the Exarchia

neighborhood in Athens is organizing Internet service for refugee

communities in the surrounding area.[895]

*Incubator Hubs.** As an alternative to startups being bought out by

capitalist investors, Schneider proposes “Exit to Community.” Under this

model,

the company would transition from investor ownership to ownership by the

people who rely on it most. Those people might be users, workers,

customers, participant organizations, or a combination of such

stakeholder groups. The mechanism for co-ownership might be a

cooperative, a trust, or even crypto-tokens. The community might own the

whole company when the process is over, or just a substantial-enough

part of it to make a difference.

When a startup exits to community, founders should see enough of a

reward that they feel their risk and hard work was worth it. Investors

should see a fair return for their risk. Most importantly, the key

stakeholders should know the company is worthy of their trust and

ongoing investment because they co-own it. For a social-media company,

this might mean that users have a meaningful say in how their private

data is or isn’t used. For a gig platform, it might mean that the gig

workers co-determine their working conditions and what is done with the

profits they produce. These kinds of outcomes could help prevent the

massive accountability crises that now beset today’s most successful

venture-backed startups….

Of course it is desirable to create startups under community auspices in

the first place, rather than buying them from capitalists. But in some

cases that isn’t practical.

Ambitious startups are a risky endeavor, and it may not be fair to

distribute that risk with early-stage participants. Also, startups

usually need to make a few dramatic pivots early in their life, and

having a large community of co-owners would make those hard decisions

more difficult than if a small, high-trust group of founders is in

charge…. Later, once the company has found its market and its footing,

the transition to accountable community ownership will better suit the

nature of the business.[896]

Municipal Facilities — and Repurposed Vacant Buildings — as

Commons. Using city government buildings, along with buildings

owned by other community institutions like churches and universities, as

hubs for community organizations and activities, is a common theme among

decentralist writers like Paul Goodman. The idle capacity of public

buildings (like public school buildings in off hours and during summer)

can serve as community centers.

According to Foster and Iaione, “…[a]mong the most prominent sites

of… contestation”

include efforts to claim vacant or abandoned urban land and structures

for affordable housing and community gardening/urban farming in many

American cities, the occupation and reclamation of formally public and

private cultural institutions as part of the movement for beni comuni

(“common goods”) in Italy, and the rise of informal housing settlements

on the periphery of many cities around the world.[897]

Community residents often recuperate abandoned or neglected properties

as a commons on their own initiatives, and one of the most important

tasks of a municipalist movement is to protect and reinforce such

efforts by formalizing or legalizing them.

…[R]esidents who live in these communities often begin using property

that has been abandoned and which may be adding to the conditions of

blight in the surrounding community. In many cases, community members

may begin to treat the property as an open access resource, utilizing it

in ways that add value to the surrounding community and/or which produce

goods for that community (as in the case of community gardens or urban

farms or using abandoned homes to house the homeless). In other

instances, public users conduct illegal activities (dumping, crime,

etc.), which clearly does not add value to the surrounding community.

Thus, in addition to creating the potential for tragedy, conflict

surrounding the use of vacant or underutilized property in distressed

cities also has the potential to capture positive value for the

community by virtue of using the property to create goods (both tangible

and intangible) that can be shared. Unlike Hardin’s tale of tragedy…,

opening up access to abandoned or vacant property instead can enhance

its value to the community.

Foster and Iaione note that, as we already saw in our discussion of

abandoned lots under the heading of land trusts, there is sometimes

political conflict because local government prefers to sell unused space

for commercial development to expand the tax base.

Members of the community, however, might want to claim the land for

“commoning” activities — such as to build a community garden or urban

farm which enables residents to produce both tangible (food, green

space, recreational space, and public safety) and intangible (social

networks, mutual trust, fellowship, a sense of security) goods for the

surrounding community.

In other cases, local residents may be pushing to transform the land or

vacant structures into affordable housing units, a town commons, a

community center, a charter school, or infrastructure for local

businesses. In cities still struggling to revitalize their inner core,

residents are working to transform entire neighborhoods pockmarked with

vacant lots and abandoned property into livable and affordable

communities.[898]

When there is conflict about the future use of open, abandoned or vacant

land or structures, the conflict is often highlighted or magnified by

the illegal occupation of the resource as a way of claiming it as a

common resource. This characterizes a number of social movements in the

United States and abroad in which activists occupy vacant, abandoned or

underutilized land, buildings and structures as a means of altering the

underlying property arrangement of certain goods away from an

exclusively owned good (either public or private) to one that is held

open for and managed by a community of users.

These movements are responding to what they view as market failures and

the failures of an urban development approach which has neglected the

provision of goods necessary to human well-being and flourishing. The

tactic of occupation is a form of resistance against the enclosure —

through private sale or public appropriation — of these goods.

Occupation is also a way of asserting that the occupied property has

greater value or utility as a good either accessible to the public or

preserved and maintained as a common pool resource.

While not explicitly using the language of the “commons,” these

contemporary “property outlaws,” are very much staking claim to the

property in transition as a common good. For example, in many parts of

the United States, as well as in countries such as Brazil and South

Africa, activists occupy and squat in foreclosed, empty, often boarded

up homes and housing units (including public housing units) as a means

to convince municipalities to clear title and transfer these homes and

units to communal forms of ownership. This “occupy” or “take back the

land” movement is a response to the displacement of homeowners and

tenants brought on by the confluence of the housing/ mortgage crisis and

the forces of gentrification. As investors move to buy up foreclosed

homes at auctions and flip them, or raise rents, nonprofit organizations

propose instead to take some of these properties out of the real estate

market altogether and to create either limited-equity apartments or

long-term affordable rentals.

Moreover, the difficulty and high cost of excluding users, and the

potential for rivalry, sometimes result in such abandoned structures

becoming sites for illegal drug activities and other nuisances, adding

to the visible blight and over- all decline of the surrounding

community. For this reason, it is perhaps not surprising that local

officials (and in some instances local laws) often condone the

occupation and transformation of these structures by community members

who aim to return the asset to productive use in ways that beautify and

improve the properties and, by extension, the surrounding neighborhood.

Transferring previously privately held structures to a community land

trust, or converting them into deed-restricted housing, would keep these

properties perpetually affordable for low- and moderate-income

households and would allow the residents to self-manage them as an urban

commons.[899]

Sandrina Burkhardt mentions repurposing libraries as common spaces, with

the library as “an access center that encourages a resource based,

shared economy.”

Think of 3D printing, (wood/sewing/workshops), a library of things and

even a library of people (where people meet and share and help each

other who would usually not engage with one another)….[900]

Besides public buildings in use, vacant and unused buildings can be

transformed into community hubs. Giuseppe Micciarelli writes of

abandoned and obsolete places which have been recuperated for new

purposes in the commons.

We can start from a common situation around Europe: a great number of

citizens, local communities, groups of workers, and cultural activists

are mobilized in defense – often a discovery – of new kinds of urban

commons: ancient buildings, former prisons, abandoned convents and

barracks, brownfields and other properties in ruin raised like ghosts in

metropolis affected by the crisis…. Similar sites were something in

their previous lives: former orphanages, ex schools, ex barracks,

psychiatric hospitals, former convents, ex stations…. In such ex

places different experiment of self-government and community management

have developed. Today a lot of people use them for social, cultural and

different kind of activities….

The collective and urban civic use is an innovative, replicable and

sustainable model of management of urban commons. This is a form of

direct administration of public spaces, such as abandoned historical

sites, led by citizenship, without the mediation of any association or

other legal entity.[901]

Italy, in particular, has had a strong recent history of such

recuperation, according to Foster and Iaione:

…the Italian movement for “beni comuni” (common goods) utilizes

occupation to stake public claim to abandoned and underutilized cultural

(and other) structures in an effort to have these spaces either retained

as, or brought back into, communal use. The most famous of these

occupations is that of the national Valle Theatre in Rome. The theatre

had become largely defunct as a result of government cuts for all public

institutions, and the Italian Cultural Ministry transferred the

management of the theater to the City of Rome. Out of fear by many that

the City would then sell it to a developer as part of a larger project

for a new commercial center, a collection of art workers, students, and

patrons occupied the theater. This occupation was followed by similar

occupations of cultural institutions and other structures that were

subject to privatization in cities all over Italy. In each case, the

occupants’ aim was “to recover people’s possession of under-utilized”

structures and “open up” these spaces for the flourishing of common

goods like culture.[902]

The 2014 Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban

Commons broke ground for such activity. Neil Gorenflo describes it as

a history-making institutional innovation that enables Bologna to

operate as a collaborative commons. Now Bologna’s citizens have a legal

way to contribute to the city. Since the regulation passed one year ago,

more than 100 projects have signed ‘collaboration pacts’ with the city

under the regulation to contribute urban improvements with 100 more in

the pipeline.[903]

A number of cities in Italy, most notably Turin and Naples, expanded the

Bologna regulation on the commons to provide for

recuperating/repurposing abandoned and under-used buildings. The Bologna

regulation itself was comparatively tame, according to Daniela Patti:

…[T]his Regulation has the limitation of addressing only the less

problematic situations of collaboration between civic and public

stakeholders when promoting the urban commons. In fact, collective

cleaning of public spaces, paintings of murals or creation of street

furniture have been valuable initiatives taking place even more

frequently thanks to the legal clarity in which they can take place, but

are rather unproblematic in social and political terms. Urban Commons

involving higher stakes in terms of ownership, management and economic

conditions, as in the case of public buildings or even private ones, are

not part of the scope of the Bologna Regulation of the Commons.

The provisions in Turin and Naples, although based on the Bologna

prototype, were considerably further-reaching.

Such a challenge was instead recently taken on by the City of Turin,

which as many other Italian cities adopted the Bologna’ Regulation of

the Commons with very small adjustments in January 2016. Within the

framework of the Co-City project supported by the Urban Innovative

Actions program, Turin aims at developing the experience of the commons

towards the creation of an innovative social welfare that will foster

the co-production of services with community enterprises. Low cost urban

regeneration activities in open spaces as well as buildings will take

place and will be financially supported through the European-funded

project….

An experience stemming from a different background to the one of Bologna

is the Regulation of the Commons in Naples. It was in this city that for

the first time in 2011, the juridical definition of Commons was

introduced in the City Council’s Statute, referring especially to the

case of water, which had been object of the national Referendum that

same year. The following years, the “Regulation for the Discipline of

the Commons” and the “Principles for the government and management of

the Commons” were established…. The focus towards the urban commons was

explicit in 2013, when the City Council adopted the Public Space

Charter, elaborated by the Biennial of Public Space held that same year

in Rome, which aims at the creation of concrete processes towards the

promotion of the urban public spaces.

It is in 2014 that the current regulation deliberating on the urban

commons in Naples was approved by the City Council…. This approach

therefore attempts to foster a logic of self-governance and experimental

management of public spaces, aiming at recognising these spaces as

commons of collective interest and fruition. In 2016 seven locations in

Naples were identified as commons because of the collective commitment

of citizens in their regeneration after a long period of abandonment.

Before such recognition these spaces were officially identified as

illegal occupation of public properties, for which all people involved

were subjected to legal persecution…. This is the case of the Je So’

Pazzo initiative taking place in the old mental asylum in the city

centre of Naples, where a group of inhabitants, many of whom youngsters,

have taken over the space to provide a series of local services, such as

music classes, sports facilities and many other community-run

activities. Currently the agreement with the Municipalities implies that

utility costs of the space are paid by the City Council but all

activities related expenses are responsibility of the users. In terms of

property rights, the space remains in public ownership and users are

granted freely access as long as the activities remain of public

interest and open to all citizens.

At first sight the Regulations of the Commons of Bologna and Turin and

the one of Naples could appear to be rather similar, having been

developed at the same with an overall same objectives, yet they greatly

differ in terms of concepts of property and usage of the commons.

Bologna and the blueprint in Turin, do not effectively intervene on the

property model of the public estates, that remain an asset exclusively

managed by the Authority, albeit in the public interest. Even in terms

of what is the usage model of these properties, this remains unaltered

as the Authority is ultimately responsible for the refurbishment of the

estates or for the development of social and economic functions. For

this reason, it can be said that the civic-public collaborations to be

activated tend to take place in open public spaces with a low conflict

threshold. Instead, Naples has attempted to pursue a different model of

property and management of the commons. in fact, to be identified as a

commons are the buildings themselves, based on a series of social and

cultural elements, and not the communities operating in them, therefore

avoiding conflicts in terms of public procurement in assigning tenants

to a public property. The activities currently taking place within these

identified Urban Commons are accepted by the Administration as long as

they respect the Commons ethics and guarantee access to

citizens.[904]

Regarding the Turin case, Elena De Nictolis adds, the city’s version of

the Bologna Regulation

looks at the transformation of abandoned structures and vacant land in

hubs of resident participation, in order to foster the community spirit

as well as the creation of social enterprises that will contribute to

reduce urban poverty in different areas of the city….

The regeneration of abandoned or underused spaces

in different areas of the city will contribute to create new jobs in the

social economy sector through the creation of new

enterprises….[905]

Eleonora de Majo, similarly, describes the measures taken in Naples

after the election of a populist Luigi de Mastris, “only supported by

local movements and civil society,” in 2011.

The municipality… decided to approve resolutions about the recognition

(not legalisation) of a third kind of social spaces, neither public nor

private, but common. These resolutions recognised the local assemblies

which formed to administer occupied spaces as their only sovereign

bodies and, for this reason, as the only decision making

bodies.[906]

Marta Cillero adds more details, involving the city’s 2016 recognition

of seven citizen-occupied pubic properties as “emerging commons and

environments of civic development.”

All these buildings were public properties, which had for years been in

a terrible state of neglect and decay. Citizens and social movements

transformed these spaces into places “that create social capital in

terms of collective uses with a commons value.” The seven properties

identified by the Resolution… share the fact that Neapolitans were

worried about speculation and the possible privatisation of the

buildings. This concern drove them to take the decision to act first and

restore them to the public interest….[907]

And as Iaione notes, the Naples regulation has in turn inspired copycat

policies. The Civic eState Network was created by Naples in cooperation

with a number of other European cities — Barcelona, Gdansk, Ghent,

Amsterdam, Iasi (Romania) and Presov (Slovakia) — to replicate the same

policy.[908]

In Montreal, the post-1960s secularization and associated drop in church

attendance has resulted in roughly one-sixth of churches being

desacralized and sold. Some of these have been transformed into

community hubs or cultural centers.[909]

The Church of England has had similar recent experience with repurposing

under-utilized buildings. A number of functions, including sub-post

offices and community banks, are housed within church buildings. Some

church spires house routers for free community wireless.[910]

Repurposing existing vacant buildings as community hubs (for activities

like “coworking, maker and leisure spaces”) is also preferable, in terms

of carbon emissions, to the dedicated construction of new “green”

buildings, according to Christiaan Weiler:

Even the most energy-efficient new buildings will likely take up to 20

years to compensate for the energy they spent on the extraction,

manufacture and transportation of the building materials required for

their own construction….

Large organisations, such as local governments, property developers and

investors, mostly manage large assets for the long term and are rarely

concerned with temporary and small under-occupied assets because of

their small yield. This creates ‘free’ cavities of vacancy like

abandoned buildings that have no business model, only security issues.

Rather than pay security to watch over empty properties, in The

Netherlands it is common to sign temporary contracts with occupants who

also improve local security while occupying a home temporarily. This

practice is easily extended to nonprofit or small businesses, and offers

a low-cost place for local initiatives to grow into feasible social

businesses.[911]

Policing. Although the Black Lives Matters protests in

2014, and the renewed protests in 2020, have drawn American attention to

police abolition and local police alternatives, such proposals go back

at least to the Black Panthers’ neighborhood patrols and community

control in the U.S., and have been put into practice elsewhere in the

world.

The Movement for Black Lives, in their “Vision For Black Lives” platform

(initially drafted in August 2016), called for

Direct democratic community control of local, state, and federal law

enforcement agencies, ensuring that communities most harmed by

destructive policing have the power to hire and fire officers, determine

disciplinary action, control budgets and policies, and subpoena relevant

agency information.[912]

A number of anarchist and libertarian socialist enclaves around the

world have experimented with community peace and security forces, most

notably Kurdish Rojava and the EZLN territories in Chiapas. In Rojava

the functions are distributed between Asayish (Internal Security Forces)

and HPC (Civil Defense Forces).

The Asayish work as traffic controllers, arrest criminals, protect

victims of domestic violence, serve as security guards at main governing

buildings and control the movement of people and goods from one canton

to another. The HPC in contrast, are people trained in basic security

who only patrol their own neighborhood. The purpose of both forces is

explicitly to protect the people from outside threats such as terrorist

forces. It is always the HPC that protects a neighborhood, never the

Asayish. The Asayish protects the city while the HPC protects the

community. Both organizations have a gender quota of at least 40 percent

women, if not more.

Through this alternative method, the possibility of instituting

hierarchies of power and authority are considerably reduced. The people

are protecting themselves. Security forces protect those who they live

with and interact with daily in the neighborhood. This proximity ensures

that violations occur only rarely. When they do occur, the neighborhood

communes immediately activate community mechanisms of justice, honor and

restoration.

The chances of one group establishing a monopoly over this process are

further reduced by the encouragement of everyone in the community to

participate in a roster system. Anyone can volunteer. This explicitly

includes the elderly, who have to take on more responsibility due to the

fact that most young men and women are fighting at the front lines in

the war against ISIS. Particularly women are active in civil protection.

Nothing restores and empowers the soul of a traumatized, war-torn

community more than seeing the matriarchs of a neighborhood stand

confidently at street corners wielding AK-47 rifles for the people’s

protection. These images do not inspire fear and terror; they inspire

communal confidence, pride, dignity, self-respect and

belonging.[913]

The community justice system in areas under Zapatista control in Mexico

shares some similarities, although it has not entirely abolished jails.

Having adopted a position of refusal of any aid from the so called “bad”

government, Zapatistas took on the state’s function of service provision

in communities affiliated with the movement. That meant building their

own, community-based justice, education, healthcare and production

systems.

The Zapatista justice system has gained trust and legitimacy even beyond

the movement’s supporters. It is free of charge, conducted in indigenous

languages and is known to be less corrupt or partial compared to

governmental institutions of justice. But more importantly, it adopts a

restorative rather than punitive approach and places an emphasis on the

need to find a compromise that satisfies all parties….

Sentences most of the time involve community service or a fine; jail

sentences normally do not exceed several days. As Melissa Forbis

explains, community jail is usually just a locked room with a partially

open door so that people can stop by to chat and pass food. Since the

perpetrator often has to borrow money for a fine from his or her family

members, the latter are also involved and their pressure helps prevent

further transgression. Women-related and domestic issues are addressed

by women on the Commission.

Mariana Mora provides a telling illustration of the movement’s approach

to punishment, documenting a case in which Zapatistas issued a year-long

community service sentence for a robbery. Those found guilty were

allowed to alternate service with work on their own cornfields so that

their families did not have to share in the punishment.

Although the Zapatistas refer to their security forces as “police,” in

material terms they are essentially the same as the proposals of police

abolitionists elsewhere for replacing police forces: Unarmed,

non-professionalized peace patrols from within the community, and

directly responsible to it.

While Zapatistas still have police, it is quite distinct from how we are

used to think of it. As Paulina Fernandez Christlieb documents, they are

neither armed, uniformed, nor professional. Similar to other

authorities, police are elected by their community; they are not

remunerated and do not serve in this function permanently. Every

community has its own police, while higher administrative levels — those

of municipality and region — do not. Decentralized and

deprofessionalized, police thus serve and are under control of the

community that elects them.[914]

In the United States the police and prison abolitionist movements have

gained increasing visibility and support since the first wave of Black

Lives Matter protests in 2014. For example, For a World Without Police,

a leading abolitionist website, promotes this general approach to

abolition:

Disbanding the police means more than the creation of “community

peacekeepers” who will continue to enforce capitalist exploitation,

oppression and inequality through other means. Along with disempowering

and disarming, disbanding police institutions aims at a larger goal: the

abolition of police and policing entirely….

Here are some steps to disband the police:

- Transform how we think about crime, conflict and identity. We can

break the association between crime and violent punishment, justice

and jail cells, and criminality and certain kinds of people. We can

expose how “crime” talk is used to dehumanize black, indigenous,

NBPOC, poor, queer, unruly and rebellious people. When we don’t think

in terms of punishment, control and division, we can begin to imagine

what real justice might entail.

- Fight to disband particular police units when they are involved in

scandals or otherwise politically vulnerable, as happened to the NYPD

Street Crimes Unit that murdered Amadou Diallo in 1999.

- Decommission police precincts when they’re threatened by funding

shortages, demographic changes, or challenges by popular protest.

- Organize to drive police forces out of specific institutions, such as

schools or hospitals. Instead of replacing them with private

security, develop community safety teams that are democratically

elected and directed by those they protect.

- Demolish the political power of police unions, including lessening

their influence in local governments, and ultimately decertifying and

disbanding their unions entirely.

- Once our movement is strong enough, disband police forces entirely in

democratic self-governing areas, and replace them with systems of

community safety and conflict resolution.[915]

On the occasion of renewed BLM protests following George Floyd’s murder

by police, *Rolling Stone* reran a 2014 article by Jose Martin outlining

a similar laundry list.

1. Unarmed mediation and intervention teams

Unarmed but trained people, often formerly violent offenders themselves,

patrolling their neighborhoods to curb violence right where it starts.

This is real and it exists in cities from Detroit to Los Angeles….

2. The decriminalization of almost every nonviolent crime…

3. Restorative Justice

Also known as reparative or transformative justice, these models

represent an alternative to courts and jails. From hippie communes to

the IRA and anti-Apartheid South African guerrillas to even some U.S.

cities like Philadelphia’s experiment with community courts, spaces are

created where accountability is understood as a community issue and the

entire community, along with the so-called perpetrator and the victim of

a given offense, try to restore and even transform everyone in the

process….

4. Direct democracy at the community level

Reducing crime is not about social control…. It’s giving people a

sense of purpose. Communities that have tools to engage with each other

about problems and disputes don’t have to consider what to do after

anti-social behaviors are exhibited in the first place….

5. Community patrols

This one is a wildcard. Community patrols can have dangerous racial

overtones, from pogroms to the KKK to George Zimmerman. But they can

also be an option that replaces police with affected community members

when police are very obviously the criminals. In Mexico, where one of

the world’s most corrupt police forces only has credibility as a

criminal syndicate, there have been armed groups of Policia Comunitaria

and Autodefensas organized by local residents for self-defense from

narcotraffickers, femicide and police….

6. Real mental-healthcare[916]

In the aftermaths of both the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests

in 2014, and the new wave of protests in mid-2020, a number of local

experiments in community-controlled alternatives to policing have

emerged. For example the Institute for Nonviolence in Chicago, founded

in 2015 following the police murder of Laquan McDonald.

Imagine a world where after being accused of using a counterfeit bill,

George Floyd was approached by a community member who helped mediate the

situation, rather than the police officer who suffocated him as he

begged for his life. A world where Rayshard Brooks was not murdered for

falling asleep in his car in a Wendy’s parking lot, but given a ride

home. A world where Elijah McClain was not choked and injected with

ketamine for “acting suspicious,” but simply asked by a neighbor how he

was doing….

Those in power would have us believe that such a world is impossible —

but for the past four years, the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago has

been providing a roadmap for what this radical reimagining of justice

might look like….

…Whenever there is a shooting, outreach workers arrive at the scene

within 30 minutes to advocate against retaliation — and even when they

insert themselves in potentially dangerous situations, they do not wear

bullet proof vests and refuse to carry weapons….

Although it’s impossible to attribute lowering crime levels in Chicago

to any one source, Nonviolence Chicago’s outreach has been

overwhelmingly successful. Between 2016 and 2019, Austin had 47 percent

fewer homicides and 45 percent fewer nonfatal shootings. After leading

the city in homicides for over a decade, [the Austin neighborhood] had

the sharpest reduction in violence in 2018.

Similar organizations have had positive results in other cities,

including Philadelphia, Nashville, Oakland and Washington, D.C.

…Nonviolence Chicago focuses on nurturing and empowering at-risk

individuals so that they can prevent violence from ever taking place. In

2019 alone, its workers were able to make 45,467 contacts with

individuals involved in violence.

“When we do our job, people don’t get shot, and they also don’t go to

jail,” Patterson said. “When there’s a conflict, we’ve asked community

members to try calling us before they call the police. We’ve said that

in front of the police, and they agree.”[917]

In Minneapolis, where the murder of George Floyd initially sparked the

new wave of BLM protests, and where the City Council voted to abolish

the police department, communities have experimented with citizen

patrols.

Across Minneapolis, community-organized citizen patrols have sprung up

in recent weeks as confidence in the Minneapolis Police Department has

plummeted. Distrust in the agency had been building for years, and now,

with emergency responders focused on riots and looting in the

hardest-hit part of the city and with the police department’s own 3rd

Precinct set ablaze, some residents worry that their neighborhoods have

been left vulnerable.

Even as riots and violence in the city have subsided, the string of

high-profile killings at the hands of Minneapolis police in recent years

has prompted calls to defund or disband the department. A majority of

the Minneapolis City Council now supports the idea of replacing it with

a new model for public safety.

But in the meantime, residents have taken it upon themselves to create

alternatives, including forming armed defense forces….

In [City Council member Jeremiah] Ellison’s neighborhood of north

Minneapolis, the local chapter of the NAACP has begun to try to do just

that: Create a community alternative to police with armed citizen

patrols. They call their group the Minnesota Freedom Riders, a reference

to the civil rights activists who rode buses through the segregated

South in 1961.

On Tuesday, dozens of volunteers, mostly African American, filtered into

Sammy’s Avenue Eatery, a sandwich and coffee cafe. They checked in with

a woman holding a clipboard, who gathered their contact information,

asked how many were in their parties, and noted whether they were armed.

Almost all of them said they were.

Then each volunteer took a seat as orientation began, led by Minneapolis

NAACP President Leslie Redmond.

“Too often, when black people are trying to do the right thing and

fight, we are left defenseless, and America has shown us time and time

again that they’re not coming to our protection,” she told the group.

“So we’ve got to protect ourselves.”

The project began the previous weekend, just days after Floyd’s death,

and has grown to 50 volunteers. They divide into groups of three that

keep watch at key intersections while others go on patrol.

Redmond said she spoke to Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo

about the project, and also informed the National Guard. She wasn’t

asking them for permission, she insists; she just wanted to let them

know: “We are activating our community.”

“We are out here simply to defend and protect,” she told the group of

volunteers. “We are not chasing anybody. We’re not here to shoot

anybody. We are literally here to protect black businesses and our black

community.”[918]

Besides police abolition as such, a number of activists in the United

States have called for community control over police, either as a goal

in itself or as a step towards abolition. For example Max Rameau:

The primary institution for the exercise of Community Control over

Police is the Civilian Police Control Board (CPCB).

To be clear, the power of this body is to exercise control and power

over the police, not review or oversight. This is not a review board

and, at this stage in history, review boards represent a step backwards

and one that further entrenches existing power relationships instead of

upending them in favor of the oppressed. We are no longer satisfied with

the ability to review abuses of our communities, we are in pursuit of

the power to end those abuses.

The CPCB must be empowered to establish police Priorities, set

department Policies and enforce Practices of the new police force. Even

though they do not make the laws, every police department, and even each

district inside of a department, establishes policing priorities….

The drive towards Community Control over Police begins by organizing the

target city (county or town) into clearly identified policing districts.

These districts can be identical to existing commission districts, wards

or other political boundaries, or can be drawn up entirely from scratch.

The districts should be physically, economically and socially

contiguous, enabling Black communities to have their own policing

district or districts.

Once each district is delineated, the next phase is to launch a

Community Control over Police ballot initiative, wherein each policing

district faces a choice: keep their existing police department or start

their own. While the rules for launching a ballot initiative differs

from one locale to the next, the overall objective is the same in that

each community or section of the city has the right to vote for the

police department they want….

Once we are able to secure Community Control over Police and ensure that

entire communities are empowered to exercise such control, we will be

free to re-imagine and re-envision the very nature of policing

itself.[919]

The National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression (a Chicago

group founded in the early 1970s in support of Angela Davis against

criminal prosecution) includes the following as entailed in genuine

community control:

- A directly-elected all-civilian council

- Final authority over police policy, oversight policy, and budget…

- Full authority on disciplinary measures and legal recourse, including

subpoena power and the convening of grand juries

- Hiring and firing power over the police chief or superintendent, all

officers on the force, the head of any existing oversight or review

boards and offices, and the members of those.

- Full access to all investigations by the oversight or review

institutions

- Broaden the scope of investigations to include all allegations of

misconduct, including sexual assault

- Negotiation on police union contracts

- Exclude all current and former law enforcement

agents…[920]

Jazmine Salas, writing against the background of the Summer 2020

protests, called for just this:

Specifically, community control means a democratically

elected civilian council that would give residents final

authority on police policies and budgets, disciplinary actions

and legal recourse, along with hiring and firing power over all

police, including the superintendent. Such a council would be able

to intervene immediately to reduce many police abuses. It would

also serve as a fundamental first step toward longer-term

transformation of law enforcement. It would empower the people who

suffer the most under police impunity — Black, Latinx, Indigenous

and other oppressed communities. And now is the time to fight for

it….

Community control is about exercising our fundamental

democratic right not just to have a seat at the table, but to put

the police under our oversight. Every action, policy and budget must

be subject to the will of the people, allowing for everything from

changes to police department practices to reductions in police

spending. On their own, corrupt police departments and complicit

city councils are unlikely to deliver on movement demands to defund,

demilitarize or abolish police, but members of community

control councils would be accountable to the communities who elect

them. Many campaigns for community control specifically exclude

current and former law enforcement officials (and their direct

family members) from running for a spot on the council…. These

guidelines would give us the power to carry out demands without the

risk of the council being co-opted by forces that serve the

police.[921]

As Rameau and Salas suggest above, demands to abolish the police

instead* of community control — on the grounds that police “cannot be

reformed” — are nonsensical. They’re in keeping with the reform vs.

revolution dichotomy popular on much of the Left, which assumes that we

are either “under capitalism” or not under it, either one or the other,

with the transition from one to another coming entirely from some kind

of cataclysmic rupture and not from a series of changes starting under

the existing system. In fact community control, as both Rameau and Salas

point out, is a prerequisite for abolition. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò makes this

argument in much stronger terms:

…It’s true; the police are white supremacist. But so is the

government that policing defends, the same government that

abolitionists are petitioning to make change. In the absence of

community control, the demand to abolish police is functionally

a request for the state to reorganize itself and reshuffle its

resources — but the powerful stay powerful and the disempowered

stay disempowered. The question is not whether to abolish, then,

but who we can trust to do the abolition.

Massive networks of institutions, across jurisdictions, combine

to incentivize and stabilize policing as we know it, from

prosecutors to prisons to legislatures. Many of these

institutions operate most powerfully after the point of arrest.

Community control intervenes, surgically: By taking public

control over the police who handle the bulk of arrests, we act before

other parts of the system can get involved. Without community

control, abolition just means asking a larger set of white

supremacist institutions to restructure a smaller set. Instead, we

are asking our neighbors.[922]

Elsewhere he argues, likewise, that “community control over police is

the best position from which to reach these other laudable goals.”

Instead of asking the elite funders of the police to give them less

funding this fiscal year — a process reversible during next year’s

budget negotiations, when attention will likely have diminished — we

should demand to be the funders of the police, to permanently and

directly determine which dollars go where. Instead of asking those who

set police departments’ rules of engagement and goals to make them in a

more community- minded fashion, we should demand to be the agenda

setters.

From the bedrock of community control, further goals to defund, abolish,

or differently regulate police are no longer requests made to the state,

which is full of actors whose incentives are irretrievably aligned with

maintaining the general features of the current system. If and where we

want to abolish the police, we can use community control over hiring and

firing to simply fire departments out of existence. If we seek to defund

police (in the sense of redirecting resources to other aspects of

community life), we can use community oversight over personnel,

priorities, and budgets to shrink departments to the precise size and

shape that we want.[923]

Tying it All Together. In this section we’ve seen a

wide variety of municipal initiatives illustrating* *bits

and pieces of a full-blown, commons-based municipal economy. But the

different parts are seldom all seen together in the same place. What’s

needed is to integrate them into a fully fleshed-out ecosystem of

information and land commons, cohousing, community gardens, worker and

consumer cooperatives, makerspaces and community workshops, coworking

spaces, sharing infrastructures to maximize capacity utilization of

capital goods and reduce the need for ownership, infrastructures for

sharing or bartering skills like child care, local barter currencies and

mutual credit, and so forth.

Imagine a municipal government making a concerted effort to pursue these

major commons-oriented policies in a serious manner:

- Inalienable community land trusts incorporating all city- &

- Municipal wireless piggybacked on spare capacity of city- and

- Opening the idle capacity of all municipal buildings for use as

- Open sourcing of all city, county- and public university/community

Together they would form the kernel of a significant commons-based local

economy.

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Chapter Twelve: The Global South and Federation

I. Commons-Based Economies in the Global South

Our survey of municipalist movements so far has been focused

overwhelmingly on Europe and North America. But commons-based economic

institutions are even more vital as safety nets to the impoverished and

precarious people of the Global South — not to mention the fact that the

majority of the world’s population lives there.

EZLN. We already discussed in Chapter Three, at

considerable length, the ideological history of the EZLN and its

revolutionary praxis. The following discussion concerns its political

governance and economic projects.

The EZLN uprising of New Years Day 1994 was initially a response to the

implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the

Mexican state’s extractive policy agenda pursuant to it.

San Cristobal de Las Casas and four other major towns were briefly

captured, townhalls ransacked and land ownership documents burnt during

a 10- day revolt which the Mexican army attempted to crush through the

mass murder of prisoners and the aerial bombing of villages, leaving

over 150 dead. However, the rapid national and international

mobilisation carried out partially through the Internet, the first of

many such ‘cyber mobilisations’, quickly isolated the corrupt and

discredited regime of former President Salinas, forcing it into direct

negotiations with the EZLN.[925]

Following the 1994 rebellion it was described by the Mexican

intellectual Carlos Fuentes as a ‘post-modern guerrilla movement… the

first rebellion of the 21st century’, because, in stark contrast with

the rest of Latin America’s ‘focoist’ tradition of armed struggle, it

was not interested in the seizure of state power. Instead, the EZLN’s

strategy has been to build a series of alliances with what they term as

‘organised national and international civil society’ made up in Mexico

of social movements, such as the inner city Assemblea de Barrios

(Neighbourhood Assemblies), and El Barzon (The Yoke). The latter is a

movement of small and medium scale farmers, business people and general

debtors such as mortgage holders, whose struggle to reschedule or cancel

their debts has helped to deepen the crisis of the Mexican banking

sector. This sector is itself part of an overall tendency towards

fragility among Latin American banking which some economists see as the

Achilles tendon of the globalisation process. The EZLN’s aim is to help

to construct a network of such movements, both nationally and

internationally, against the designs of NAFTA in Mexico and of

globalised neoliberalism in general, so transforming society ‘from the

bottom upwards’ and autonomously from the political and economic

institutions of both the state and the market.[926]

Land under Zapatista control was subsequently organized into five

autonomous areas (caracoles, or snails), and 27 autonomous

municipalities.

These self-governing units provide schools, teaching in both indigenous

and Spanish languages; and they provide healthcare based in both

indigenous and Western knowledge. Economically, cooperatives form a

strong part of the economy – not least producing coffee. Community

banking is created through credit unions. The whole Zapatista region has

around 250,000 inhabitants, covering roughly a third of Chiapas.

Neighbouring peoples can also access services.[927]

In August 2019 the EZLN added seven new caracoles and four new

autonomous municipalities, significantly expanding its

territory.[928]

The Revolutionary Laws proclaimed in January 1994 included the

cancellation of debt for poor people, guarantee of free healthcare, and

the freeing of most prisoners. The Revolutionary Agrarian Law

expropriated large private farms, allowing their reorganization either

as individual smallholdings, cooperatives, or communal

lands.[929]

*Recoleta.** Although the Pink Tide has retreated from most of South

America, and neoliberalism seems to be resurgent, the commune of

Recoleta — population 157,000 — in the greater Santiago, Chile area is

an exception. “Recoleta,” writes Alexander Pinez Pinto, “has developed

several programs in the areas of health, housing, cleaning, and

education that have public ownership at their core.”

Daniel Jadue, a member of the Communist Party of Chile, has been the

mayor of Recoleta since 2012. He won by promising to recover public

ownership through participation-based local development and reject the

market-based solutions that had turned public services into a matter of

business and profit. One of the main challenges was the service

provision expenses: The costs of service provision was high due to

inefficient contracts that the municipality maintained with private

companies. The new municipality council therefore sought to create new

public services in areas important to the commune. One of these was

education.

In this context, the local government created the Open University of

Recoleta (Universidad Abierta de Recoleta, UAR). The goal was to improve

access to education and encourage critical, liberated, and active

citizenry. The UAR was developed using the successes of the Free

Universities in Europe and Latin America as its inspiration and has been

operative since the spring semester of 2019. To bring the initiative to

life, the municipality built partnerships with several universities and

educational institutions both locally and internationally, like the

University of Chile, the University of Santiago and the United Nations

Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). A unique

feature of UAR is that it is open and free of charge to anyone, also

internationals, who wishes to participate both in on-site and online

courses offered by the university. As such, it represents a radical

alternative to the highly privatized and exclusive educational system

seen in the rest of Chile. Today, the UAR offers 150 courses in several

disciplines and 3,300 students have taken one or more courses.

…Other initiatives, such as the ‘People’s Real-Estate Agency of

Recoleta’ – a local government housing project that ensures investment

in affordable housing – and a new workers’ cooperative for cleaning

services that secures decent income and labor rights, also form part of

the public ownership model Recoleta seeks to promote. The former has

already started the building of a housing complex with 38 apartments

available to low-income families, and 90 more flats are scheduled for

the future.

Additionally, going back to 2015, Recoleta was the first municipality to

set up a so-called ‘popular pharmacy’ – a municipal pharmacy that offers

cheap medicine for the commune residents that use the public health

system….

The ‘popular pharmacies’ model has since been replicated by other local

governments all over Chile. Alongside the UAR success, this demonstrates

the strategic importance of local governments in overcoming

neoliberalism.[930]

*Rojava.** The PKK’s original ideology was heavily Maoist-influenced,

focused on a people’s war against feudal structures in the countryside,

under the leadership of the proletariat (represented by the party). Only

when the guerrilla struggle has shifted the balance of force

sufficiently in the countryside and built up an adequate base, can the

army launch its final, conventional assault on the cities. In the 90s,

the PKK drifted away from any orthodox model of Marxism-Leninism to its

own version of socialism centered on personal transformation, which

emphasized the interests of “the whole of humanity” and “ exceeds the

interests of states, the nation and classes.”[931]

Increasingly from the 90s on, and especially during his imprisonment,

Abdullah Öcalan was heavily influenced by Bookchin’s Libertarian

Municipalism.

As part of a shift away from its previous emphasis on a Kurdish national

character to a new multi-ethnic identity, Rojava has changed its name.

It is now the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (DFNS). ‘Rojava’

is Kurdish. For the same reason the crucial women’s movement, Yekîtiya

Star, became Kongreya Star. DFNS also welcomes all refugees from

surrounding warn-torn Syria, respects every international human rights

law, and offers a peaceful solution for the whole of

Syria.[932]

II. Federation

Post-capitalist cities can’t make it alone. For one thing, they’re often

surrounded by hostile national governments like Trump’s. And we have all

too many historical examples of isolated radical urban regimes like the

Paris Commune being crushed by reactionary governments. The accession to

power of reactionary political movements at the level of the

nation-state has created a political vacuum. A federation of

commons-based municipal movements can occupy the political space at the

level of the nation-state, as a challenge to the forces in control of

the national government. “We must create a political space so that we

can work with others to challenge, with greater strength and from more

areas, the democratic deficit imposed by states and markets…. Given

that we face adversaries who cross borders, our response must also be

transnational.”[933]

We confront problems that are global in scale and seek to supplant a

global system. Horizontal ties create institutional depth and

resilience. And by engaging in mutual support, radical municipalities

provide political cover for one another and force hostile governments to

deal with them as a cohesive global force. Federated cities are not only

the ideal organizational platform for supporting a commons-based society

on a global scale, but also serve as a political vehicle through which

global civil society – the “Second Superpower” – can speak with a united

voice against hostile states. (See, e.g., our earlier discussion of

Mexico being blind-sided by the scale of the global reaction to its

assault on the EZLN.)

Cooperation Jackson’s Kali Akuno explains the strategic value of being

part of a global movement in terms that are clearly relevant to the EZLN

example.

Cooperation Jackson is a locally situated project, as you noted, but we

see ourselves as part of an international, or more appropriately,

several international movements. I say this because we don’t think the

answers to the questions posed are local or national; they are of

necessity global. We have to build an international movement to stop

runaway climate change and the sixth great extinction event that we are

living through right now. There is no way around that.

One of the reasons why we have to build a powerful international

movement is to fortify our national, regional, and local movements

against the reactionary threats and counter-movements that exist

throughout the US, but that are extremely concentrated in places like

Mississippi. For instance, on a practical level, being connected to an

array of international forces helps give cover to our work in Jackson.

We can bring various types of pressure to bear on local reactionary

forces whose constant threats against us can be mitigated (to varying

degrees) by acts of economic and political reprisal by our international

(and national) allies.[934]

An internationalist agenda that emphasizes solidarity with the Global

South, in particular, can create synergies that further the construction

of post-capitalism everywhere.

1. Policies that create international institutions that work directly

with indigenous peoples and communities in the rainforest regions of

Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Oceania to stop the

operations of multinational mining, petrochemical, agricultural,

fishing, and medical corporations….

2. Policies that promote the development of open source technologies to

directly transfer technology and information to peoples throughout the

world. This will enable communities to produce the new carbon-reducing

or carbon-neutral technologies that are innovated locally, thus

eliminating the need for long-distance trade that would fuel more carbon

emissions.

3. Policies that will end the international operations of the US-based

petrochemical, mining, agricultural, fishing, and medical transnational

monopolies. This will enable local production of essential goods and

services when and where needed and put a halt to the extraction and

accumulation regimes that currently dominate our planet.

4. Policies that eliminate the impositions of the World Trade

Organization (WTO) that negate national and local sovereignty, which has

been detrimental to the introduction of major climate mitigation

initiatives in the US and Canada.[935]

And when it comes to the problem of “scaling up,” which features

prominently in Old Left and verticalist critiques of municipalism, the

networked or federal approach is a useful way of achieving scale and

coordination without the pathologies and pitfalls of the Old Left’s

focus on politics at the nation-state level. Laura Roth and Bertie

Russell call this approach “scaling out,” in contrast to the traditional

“scaling up” approach of “focusing on a higher level.”

Should these initiatives simply be seen as stepping stones to national

government, leaving intact traditional scalar understandings of power

that construe the municipality as “nested” under the nation-state? Or do

they represent an effort to build an altogether different type of power,

disrupting these conventional scales of power in an effort to produce

some form of networked, translocal power?…

Despite a commitment to internationalism, the theory and practice of

left politics commonly takes the nation-state as the fundamental site of

transformative social change. Despite the relative successes of

municipalist initiatives, there are still some within these movements

who maintain that the “real” aim remains to capture the institutions of

the nation-state….

The strategy of winning locally, in this view, is understood either as a

strategy we are forced to adopt in a time of weakness — the “best we can

achieve for now” — or a systematic approach to build our capacity to

mfove to the national scale….

The demand to simply “scale up” municipalism, which tends to be based on

a vision where the local state is considered an instrument or tool to be

wielded differently on behalf of the working class, is in significant

danger of misinterpreting what many within these initiatives are looking

to achieve….[936]

The transnational federative approach does not rule out political

engagement at the level of the nation-state, but as Kate Shea Baird

argues, such engagement should be characterized by loose ties with

electoral parties and movements and a primary focus on pressure from

outside. This means, in practical terms,

to establish strategic alliances with existing regional or national

political actors. If there are parties with similar political goals at

national level, it may make sense to support their election campaigns,

collaborate with them on joint projects, or bring political demands to

their door. Of course, this strategy won’t give municipalist

organizations direct control or accountability mechanisms in relation to

these parties, but it will allow them to support or pressure them from

the outside, as appropriate, with a relatively small organizational

investment and while maintaining their autonomy.[937]

This latter strategy — analogous to both Great Britain’s “balance of

power” strategy on the Continent, and to the electoral strategy of the

Nonpartisan League in the American Upper Midwest — enables leverage

entirely out of scale to actual size.

David Bollier regards legal recognition of commons rights as one of the

most central principles of any federal network of municipal platforms.

His main analogy is the Charter of the Forest and the Magna Carta under

King John, which recognized rights of common access to what had

previously been regarded as royal property.[938] In my

opinion, this would mean today, at the very least, reorganizing all

municipal property, all publicly owned natural resources, all public

services, and all publicly owned information as self-managed commons

with universal access rights.

The platform-like character of transnational urban networks — in which

actual enforcement capability exists only on the part of the local

members — is suggested by Sheila Foster and Chrystie Swiney:

Through their collective actions, declarations, and commitments cities

around the world are creating their own quasi-binding legal norms and

policies outside of the narrow strictures of international law. This is

evidenced in the use of legal or quasi-legal agreements — compacts,

declarations, action plans, covenants, etc. — adopted by cities and

(more often) their networks on a particular topic, such as migration or

climate change. Though typically lacking in enforcement mechanisms,

these documents look and act strikingly similar to international legal

agreements signed by nation-states. They require the signature of an

officially authorized individual (often a mayor or top city official),

formal depositing with a specially designated agency or authority

(typically an agency or representative of the agreement’s sponsor), and

some form of monitoring and reporting, albeit often in the form of

self-monitoring and self-reporting. The only thing often missing is the

application of sanctions in the event of a violation, but this is also

typical of public international law, which in many instances is enforced

through “softer” measures, such as shaming and pressure campaigns,

rather than typical “hard” enforcement measures.[939]

A transnational municipalist platform might formulate model policies as

a sort of non-sociopathic ALEC. More importantly, networked global

cities might bring to bear sufficient moral pressure to counteract

repression and interference with progressive local policies by higher

jurisdictions within a single nation-state (like the GOP state

government in Mississippi hampering the efforts of Cooperation Jackson).

The Alternative UK* asks:

Imagine a national structure within which communities could say: “After

appropriate deliberation, which considered the impact upon our community

as well as the broader impact upon the global environment, we the people

of [fill in the name of your town or city here] have decided to hold a

festival / house the homeless / trial a basic income / prioritise local

produce…”

Reading that might make you smile – it sounds so far-fetched. But don’t

we already have the technical resources to work out ‘good practice’ for

the interconnected, interdependent, I-We-World?… What we lack is the

organisation to do so. If more towns and cities committed to these

practices locally, the national and international bodies would bend

towards them.[940]

Real-World Steps. There are already nascent movements

to creating federal networks of cities,* *both within

individual nation-states and across national borders, without the

intermediation of national governments.

developments around inter-municipalism and transnational municipalism

are already taking place — and even accelerating. Organizations within

many cities are already banding together through coalitions such as the

Right to the City Alliance (RTTC), which has put together a progressive

platform around issues as wide-ranging as the commons, economic,

indigenous and environmental justice, police harassment and migrant

rights.

Under the banner of “Democracy and Participation,” the RTTC proposes

“the right of community control and decision-making over the planning

and governance of the cities where we live and work, with full

transparency and accountability, including the right to public

information without interrogation.” Another core component of the RTTC

strategy is internationalism, described in their mission statement as

“the right to support and build solidarity between cities across

national boundaries, without station intervention.”

A semblance of such internationalism can be found in programs such as

Sister Cities International (Rome actually declared Kobane a sister

city) and United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), which is

effectively an international league of municipalities. Relatedly, there

are also state-level municipal leagues, and a National League of Cities

(NLC). Issue targeted inter-city organizations include 100 Resilient

Cities, the Creative Cities Network, International Cities of Refuge

Network (ICORN), and a number of others. In effect, municipalism,

municipalization and regionalism is already being

mainstreamed.[941]

In Europe, cities controlled by citizen-based parties and undertaking

commons initiatives (particularly in Spain) are setting up collaborative

platforms to coordinate their agendas and promote the commons-based

political and economic model in other European cities (particularly in

France).

CommonsPolis — a civil society initiative to create dialogue between

progressive municipalist movements, city governments, and European

citizens — held an encounter described as “a common space for exchange;

cities in transition and citizen struggles” in Paris on November 24,

2016, at the offices of the Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation (FPH) and

with the collaboration of the Utopia Movement. Spanish activists from a

variety of regions were invited to share with their French counterparts

their recent experiences of entering the municipal public

administrations, and their efforts to make the political process more

participatory and inclusive for citizens. The event was held in Spanish

(Castellano) and French, with simultaneous

interpretation.[942]

The Barcelona en Comú movement, in particular, has been quite active in

urban federations at the Spanish, European and worldwide levels.

BComú is not a ‘local’ arm of a bigger political party, and

does not exist merely as a branch of a** **broader strategy to

control the central political institutions of the nation-state. Rather,

*BComú* is one in a series of independent citizen platforms that have

looked to occupy municipal institutions in an effort to bring about

progressive social change.

From A Coruña to Valencia, Madrid and Zaragoza, these municipal

movements are the direct effort of citizens rejecting the old mode of

doing politics, and starting to effect change where they live. Instead

of a national party structure, they coordinate through a “network of

rebel cities” across Spain. Most immediately, this means coordinating

press releases and actively learning from how one another engage with

urban problems.

…*BComú* has established an international committee tasked with

promoting and sharing its experiences abroad, whilst learning from other

‘rebel’ cities such as Naples and Messina. Barcelona has been active in

international forums, promoting the “right to the city” at the recent UN

Habitat III conference, and taking a leadership role in the Global

Network of Cities, Local and Regional Governments.

These moves look to bypass the national scale where possible,

prefiguring *post-national* networks of urban solidarity and

cooperation. Recent visits of the First Deputy Mayor to the Colombian

cities of Medellín and Bogotá also suggest that links are being made on

a supranational scale.

One of the most tangible outcomes of this level of supranational urban

organizing was the strong role played by cities in the rejection of the

Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP). As hosts of a

meeting entitled ‘Local Authorities and the New Generation of Free Trade

Agreements’ in April 2016, *BComú* led on the agreement of the

‘Barcelona Declaration’, with more than 40 cities committing to the

rejection of TTIP.[943]

Right to the City began in 2007 as a response to urban gentrification

and mass evictions of marginalized communities from their historic

neighborhoods. It was heavily influenced by

“Le Droite à la Ville” (*Right to the City*) a book published in 1968 by

French intellectual and philosopher Henri Lefebvre. In the sphere of

human rights, this powerful idea was adopted by the World Urban Forum

and elaborated into the World Charter of the Right to the City in 2004.

Building from this powerful idea, international principles, and forward

looking grassroots organizing, the Right to the City Alliance was

established in January 2007.[944]

Its political platform centers largely on social justice and economic

equity:

Land for People vs. Land for Speculation. The right to

land and housing that is free from* *market speculation

and that serves the interests of community building, sustainable

economies, and cultural and political space.

Land Ownership. The right to permanent ownership of

urban territories for public use.

Economic Justice. The right of working class

communities of color, women, queer and* *transgender

people to an economy that serves their interests

Indigenous Justice. The right of First Nation

indigenous people to their ancestral lands that* *have

historical or spiritual significance, regardless of state borders and

urban or rural settings.

Environmental Justice. The right to sustainable and

healthy neighborhoods & workplaces,* *healing, quality

health care, and reparations for the legacy of toxic abuses such as

brown fields, cancer clusters, and superfund sites.

Freedom from Police & State Harassment. The right to

safe neighborhoods and protection* *from police, INS/ICE,

and vigilante repression, which has historically targeted communities of

color, women, queer and transgender people.

Immigrant Justice. The right of equal access to

housing, employment, and public services* *regardless of

race, ethnicity, and immigration status and without the threat of

deportation by landlords, ICE, or employers.

Services and Community Institutions. The right of

working class communities of color to* *transportation,

infrastructure, and services that reflect and support their cultural and

social integrity.

Democracy and Participation. The right of community

control and decision making over the* *planning and

governance of the cities where we live and work, with full transparency

and accountability, including the right to public information without

interrogation.

Reparations. The right of working class communities of

color to economic reciprocity and* *restoration from all

local, national, and transnational institutions that have exploited

and/or displaced the local economy.

Internationalism. The right to support and build

solidarity between cities across national* *boundaries,

without state intervention.

Rural Justice. The right of rural people to

economically healthy and stable communities that are protected from

environmental degradation and economic pressures that force migration to

urban areas.[945]

Right to the City holds urban congresses in different cities, as well as

engaging in local activism that includes building united fronts with a

variety of social justice organizations, labor movements, etc., at the

local level.[946]

The Transition Towns movement has been around for some time as an

attempt to coordinate municipal policies for energy transition. It was

founded by Rob Hopkins, who teaches permaculture at Kinsale College of

Further Education in Ireland. He and his students work to create energy

descent action plans (EDAPs) for a post-fossil fuel future. At Totnes,

Devon, on the Cornish peninsula, he helped organize the first transition

town in 2006, and in 2008 wrote the *Transition Handbook* as a guide to

replicate the process elsewhere.

….The issue at hand is… one of inventing and

promoting ‘post-oil’ lifestyles that can be built on the reinforcement

of communities’ ‘resilience’ — a concept taken from the environmental

sciences that, in this context, designates the ability of a system

(here, a community) to resist an external shock (the scarcity of oil).

This capacity for ‘resilience’ amounts to reducing communities’

dependency on oil by pursuing an ‘energy descent’ objective, in other

words a reduction in energy consumption, together with a relocation of

production, in particular of food….

[M]easures that seek to ‘relocate’ exchanges, such as locally sourced

veg-box schemes, local and complementary currencies, LETS (local

exchange trading systems) and time banks or waste recovery centres

(places where discarded objects can be reused or recycled) clearly have

their place within the Transition Movement. But it is through efforts

to reintegrate agriculture into the city that the work of

‘transitioners’ is most visible. This takes the form of actions and

projects (community gardens, composters, crop plantation in public

spaces, city roofs used for agriculture) that reflect the fact that the

movement’s foundations lie in permaculture. This in turn forms “the

design ‘glue’ and the ethical foundations [used] to underpin Transition

work.”[947]

John Robb, a specialist on networked/open-source resistance movements,

describes the movement as an “open-source insurgency”: a virally

replicable, open-source model for resilient communities capable of

surviving the Peak Oil transition. As of April 2008, some six hundred

towns around the world had implemented Transition Town

projects.[948]

The Transition Towns Wiki[949] includes, among many other

things, a Transition Initiatives Primer (a 51 pp. pdf file), a guide to

starting a Transition Town initiative in a local

community.[950] It has also published a print book, *The

Transition Handbook*.[951]

Totnes remains a model for the subsequent global movement.

The thinking behind [Transition Town Totnes] is simply that a town using

much less energy and resources than currently consumed could, if

properly planned for and designed, be more resilient, more abundant and

more pleasurable than the present.

Given the likely disruptions ahead resulting from Peak Oil and Climate

Change, a resilient community — a community that is self-reliant for the

greatest possible number of its needs — will be infinitely better

prepared than existing communities with their total dependence on

heavily globalised systems for food, energy, transportation, health, and

housing.

Through 2007, the project will continue to develop an Energy Descent

Action Plan for Totnes, designing a positive timetabled way down from

the oil peak.[952]

The most complete Energy Descent Action Plan is that of Kinsale. It

assumes a scenario in which Kinsale in 2021 has half the energy inputs

as in 2005. It includes detailed targets and step-by-step programs, for

a wide range of areas of local economic life, by which energy

consumption per unit of output may be reduced and local inputs

substituted for outside imports on a sustainable basis. In the area of

food, for example, it envisions a shift to local market gardening as the

primary source of vegetables and a large expansion in the amount of land

dedicated to community-supported agriculture. By 2021, the plan says,

most ornamental landscaping will likely be replaced with fruit trees and

other edible plants, and the lawnmower will be as obsolete as the buggy

whip. In housing, the plan calls for a shift to local materials,

vernacular building techniques, and passive solar design. The plan also

recommends the use of local currency systems, skill exchange networks,

volunteer time banks, and barter and freecycling networks as a way to

put local producers and consumers in contact with one

another.[953]

As major parts of the West are experiencing the rise of reactionary

national governments, it becomes more important to bypass the

nation-state altogether and build counter-institutions at the local

level that are federated globally. This is the argument of Baird and

Hughes above, as we saw.

There are a number of reasons why city governments are particularly

well-placed to lead resistance to Trumpism. Most obviously, much of the

popular opposition to Trump is physically located in cities. With their

younger, more ethnically diverse demographics, urban voters swung

heavily against Trump and, in fact, played a large role in handing

Hillary Clinton the majority of the national popular vote.

Not only did Clinton win 31 of the nation’s 35 largest cities, but she

beat Trump by 59% to 35% in all cities with populations of over 50,000.

In most of urban America, then, there are progressive majorities that

can be harnessed to challenge Trump’s toxic discourse and policy

agenda.[954]

In North America, the most promising attempt at federating municipalist

movements is Symbiosis. Symbiosis existed as a research collective at

least as early as 2018, coordinating the Fearless Cities conference in

July of that year.[955] The collective submitted a

prize-winning paper to the Next System Project, in which it emphasized

dual power and interstitial development.

Both concrete and comprehensive, our proposal is to organize practical

community institutions of participatory democracy and mutual aid that

can take root, grow, and gradually supplant the institutions that now

rule ordinary people’s lives….

The next system is more likely to succeed and endure if we steadily

transform existing institutions, modes of production, and ways of

relating to one another rather than try to conjure up a whole new system

out of thin air. The heart of our argument is that building networks of

radically democratic, cooperative institutions can sustain our

communities and our collective struggle in the near term, organize our

base to win fights with the state and private sector, begin eroding

public support for the current dysfunctional system, and, in time,

become the dominant institutions of tomorrow’s world.[956]

It was officially launched as an organization in January 2019. Its focus

on dual power was suggested by the Launch Statement it put out:

Our calls to action are infused with the fierce urgency of now like

never before… When we organize, we can resist, but resistance is not

governance. Even popularly elected governments disempower ordinary

people, by placing an elite political class above us to rule on our

behalf… This framework — of building popular power outside the

governing institutions of our present system, to challenge and displace

those institutions through truly democratic ones of our own — is called

“dual power.” Such a process of political transformation is not only

revolutionary in changing institutions; it also has the potential to

transform ourselves. Radical democracy is a framework for helping to

overcome racism, patriarchy, and other social hierarchies, by

disassembling the material underpinnings of oppression and unravelling

prejudice through common struggle to bring principles of equality to

life. It is through this lived practice of cooperation and solidarity

that we can learn to be democratic beings, to be citizens, who have

re-learned the art of making decisions together.[957]

In September 2019 Symbiosis hosted 29 participatory democracy and dual

power organizations in Detroit for a “Congress of Municipalist

Movements.” The Congress finally agreed on the terms of a confederation,

including local movements from Oaxaca to Calgary.

…Members of the network include worker-owned business initiatives,

such as Cooperation Jackson, and community organizing platforms, like

Olympia Assembly. The network also has partner organizations, such as

Black Socialists of America, ROAR Magazine and the Institute for Social

Ecology….

One of Symbiosis’ partner organizations is the Democratic Socialists of

America-Libertarian Socialist Caucus. Founded in 2017 as a section of

the larger DSA, the DSA-LSC focuses on “dual power,” challenging the

hegemony of the state and capitalism with projects such as community

gardens, childcare collectives, tenants’ unions, worker cooperatives,

and tool libraries.[958]

Although the groups represented at the Congress represented a broad

range of left-libertarian philosophies, with significant disagreements

on strategy and praxis, they were able to agree on six Points of Unity:

Direct Democracy, Anti-Hierarchy, Ecology, Solidarity Economy,

Revolution From the Ground Up, and Unity in Diversity.[959]

And again, Symbiosis and its member movements are distinguished from the

predominant municipalist model in Barcelona and elsewhere in Europe —

“which are more oriented towards electoral politics and social change

from ‘inside the institutions’” — by their focus on “the strategy of

dual power outside of the state institutions….”[960]

In the area of civil liberties in the United States, we’ve seen largely

uncoordinated instances of resistance at the state and municipal level

since Trump’s election as president. A number of U.S. cities have

announced their intentions not only to maintain “sanctuary city” status,

but to destroy databases that might be used to identify undocumented

immigrants for sanction.

*With Trump in the White House and GOP majorities in the House and

Senate, we must look to cities to protect civil liberties and build

progressive alternatives from the bottom up.*

“I want New Yorkers to know: we have a lot of tools at our disposal;

we’re going to use them. And we’re not going to take anything lying

down.” On the morning after Donald Trump was declared the victor in the

US presidential election, Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, wasted no

time in signaling his intention to use the city government as a bulwark

against the policy agenda of the President-Elect. The move made one

thing very clear; with the Republican Party holding the House and

Senate, and at least one Supreme Court nomination in the pipeline, it

will fall to America’s cities and local leaders to act as the

institutional frontline of resistance against the Trump

administration….

Bringing the political conversation back to the local level also has a

particular advantage in the current context; the city provides a frame

with which to challenge the rise of xenophobic nationalism. Cities are

spaces in which we can talk about reclaiming popular sovereignty for a

demos other than the nation, where we can reimagine identity and

belonging based on participation in civic life rather than the passport

we hold.

By working as a network, cities can turn what would have been isolated

acts of resistance into a national movement with a multiplier effect.

Networks like Local Progress, a network of progressive local elected

officials, allow local leaders to exchange policy ideas, develop joint

strategies, and speak with a united voice on the national stage.

On the issue of racial equity, an essential question given the racist

nature of Trump’s campaign and policy platform, cities across the US

have already started to mobilize to combat Islamophobia, as part of the

American Leaders Against Hate and Anti-Muslim Bigotry Campaign, a joint

project of Local Progress and the Young Elected Officials Action

Network. The campaign pushes for local policies to tackle hate crimes

against Muslims, including the monitoring of religious bullying in

schools, intercultural education programmes, and council resolutions

condemning Islamophobia and declaring support for Muslim

communities.[961]

Following Trump’s election, the number of sanctuary churches in the

United States doubled from an estimated 400 to 800. However, it’s

doubtful that ICE under a Trump administration will continue the Obama

policy of largely avoiding invasions of sensitive locations like

churches. That raises the issue of direct action as another line of

defense.

Sanctuary in the Streets was organized under Obama, in response to the

rising number of deportations of Central American refugees — which was

overwhelming the physical resources of sanctuary churches.

It mobilizes volunteers to interrupt immigration raids in progress,

based on the idea that the members of a church — not just its physical

structure — can create sanctuary for vulnerable members of their

congregation. To facilitate the campaign, the New Sanctuary Movement set

up two hotlines to report ICE activity — one in Spanish and one in

Indonesian. At first, the lines received few calls.

Then, the day after the election, there was a huge surge of interest,

says Peter Pedemonti, director of the New Sanctuary Movement. “Amidst

the despair and disbelief, it was a really concrete campaign that was

ready on day one.”

As of April, 1,800 people have signed up to participate in Sanctuary in

the Streets, up from 65 people last year. With those numbers, the group

hopes to be able to deploy volunteers to immigrant-heavy neighborhoods

within five minutes of a distress call. Since Trump took office, the

hotline has received dozens of calls. In order to be involved in direct

action, volunteers must go through a nonviolence training. “We want

people not only to know what to do when they get there, but the spirit

and tone of what we’re doing—that discipline of nonviolence,” explains

Pedemonti.

Early one morning in March, Turcios got a call from a woman whose

neighbor’s home was being raided by ICE. Turcios, a small group of

volunteers and several other neighbors hurried over and surrounded the

home, taking photos and asking agents why they were detaining the man.

The crowd grew until the ICE agents said the young man wasn’t the person

they were looking for and left. Turcios counts this as an encouraging

victory.[962]

On both an American national level and a global level, cities including

a major part of the world population have committed to continued pursuit

of COP21 carbon emissions-reduction targets.

Climate change will be another contentious issue over the coming years.

While much has been made of the policy implications of Trump’s claim

that global warming was invented by the Chinese, it has been local

administrations, rather than the federal government, that have led on

the environmental agenda over recent years. Sixty two cities are already

committed to meet or exceed the emissions targets announced by the

federal government and many of the largest cities in the country,

including New York, Chicago and Atlanta have set emissions reductions

goals of 80 percent or higher by 2050.[963]

In the last couple of years, the proliferation of commons-based

municipal movements in Europe has been followed by the rise of

transnational commons bodies.

For the first time commoners from around Europe met in the European

Parliament in Brussels. Over 150 Europeans came to Brussels to discuss

European politics, policy proposals and the protection of the commons.

The aims: To establish new synergies, to show solidarity, to reclaim

Europe from the bottom-up and, overall, to start a visible commons

movement with a European focus. For the first time Europe´s

democratically elected Members of the European Parliament exchanged

views with a “Commons Assembly” made up of an explosively creative

myriad of urban regenerators, knowledge sharers, energy cooperativists,

community artists, food producers as well as disruptive social hackers

of many different flavours.[964]

Jorge Pinto describes the significance of another assembly in Barcelona,

in 2017:

A key characteristic of the current municipalist vision is the fact

that, besides the attention given to the city itself, there is a clear

global vision: a cosmopolitan sense, in which all citizens feel part of

the city but also part of the global community. It was precisely under

the banner of municipalism and a vision of a global polis that more than

700 mayors and activists from 180 countries came together in Barcelona,

in June 2017, to discuss what ‘fearless cities’ can do. It might not be

too optimistic to argue that this has planted the seeds of a new global

and municipalist order – the ‘Order of Barcelona’ – that could

potentially supplant the previous Westphalian order….[965]

Another European Commons Assembly was initially planned for Madrid in

November 2017, with the mission of taking the accomplishments of the

2016 Brussels Assembly to a higher level.

ECA Madrid and the collaboration with Transeuropa 2017 provides the

energy to move the process further along. It is becoming clear that the

ECA needs to offer an added value beyond ideational affiliation.

Assembly members will have to co-create the resources and practices that

will strengthen the movement. That is why the idea of “production”

figures so prominently in the discourse around this Assembly. The focus

of the assembly this time will be on urban commons, taking advantage of

ECAs presence in Madrid and Spain to examine strategies, failed and

successful, to promote the commons politically and in public policy,

including citizens in this process.

In Madrid working groups will focus on specific themes of the commons in

the city, to create shareable outputs that bring these local experiences

to a broader audience. This creation will nourish the toolbox of the

ECA, in turn helping other efforts to support and scale commoning. This

opportunity will allow initiatives to learn from and share with each

other, attaining a level of technical depth and understanding that is

necessary for change, deepening the European political agenda for the

commons. At the same time, what is at stake goes beyond the specific

themes and issues that color the commons movement.[966]

It was actually held in October.

<right>

=[October 9, 2020]=

</right>

Backmatter

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About the Author

KEVIN A. CARSON is Karl Hess Distinguished Research Scholar at the Center for

a Stateless Society. He is the author of

The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto*, *Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective*,

*The Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing Power of Individuals and Networks*,

and *Studies in Mutualist Political Economy*—the focus of a symposium in the

Journal of Libertarian Studies*—as well as pamphlets including
Austrian and Marxist Theories of Monopoly-Capital*,
Contract Feudalism: A Critique of Employer Power over Employees*, and
The Ethics of Labor Struggle*. His writing has appeared

in such venues as *Just Things, Any Time Now*, *The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty*, and

Land and Liberty*. A member of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Alliance

of the Libertarian Left, and the Voluntary Cooperation Movement, he writes

from Springdale, AR.

; Footnotes

[4] Mihailo Markovic, “Transition to Socialism,” *A Dictionary of

[5] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, *Manifesto of the Communist Party*.

[6] Markovic,** **pp. 485–86.

[7] International Working Men’s Association, “Resolutions,” Hague

[8] Friedrich Engels, “On the Occasion of Karl Marx’s Death” (May 12,

[9] “The Erfurt Programme” (1891). Translated by Thomas Dunlap, and

[10] Engels, Introduction. Karl Marx, *The Class Conflict in France, 1848

[11] *Ibid.*

[12] *Ibid.*

[13] *Ibid.*

[14] Karl Marx, *Inaugural Address to the International Working Men’s

[15] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, *Capital* vol. III, Chapter 27.

[16] Marx, *Inaugural Address*.

[17] Robert Graham, “The General Idea of Proudhon’s Revolution,” *Robert

[18] John Curl, *For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of

[19] *Ibid.* pp. 35, 47, 107.

[20] Marx and Engels, *Manifesto of the Communist Party*.

[21] Lenin, “Third Letter: Concerning a Proletarian Militia,” from

[22] V.I. Lenin, *“Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder* (1920).

[23] See in particular the Third Address (“The Paris Commune”) and

(English edition of 1871). Hosted at Marxist Internet

[24] Karl Marx, **The Civil War in France **(English edition of

[25] Karl Marx, “Marx to Dr Kugelmann Concerning the Paris Commune,”

[26] Friedrich Engels, 1891 Postscript, Civil War in France.

[27] Peter Hudis, *Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism*

[28] *Ibid.*, pp. 186, 186n. The phrase itself is cited from Kojin

[29] Marx, *Civil War in France*, “The Paris Commune.”

[30] Marx, Conspectus of Bakunin’s **Statism and Anarchy **(1874).

[31] Hudis, *op. cit.*,** **p. 182.

[32] Anne Showstack Sassoon, “Civil Society,” *A Dictionary of Marxist

[33] Engels to Philipp van Patten, April 18, 1883

[34] Matthew Crossin, “Interpreting Marx’s Theory of the State and

[35] Friedrich Engels, “On Authority,” **Marx-Engels Reader **(New

[36] Friedrich Engels, *Anti-Duhring: Herr Eugen Duhring’s Revolution in

[37] V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the

(written 1917, published 1918), *Collected Works*, Volume 25,

[38] *Ibid.*

[39] *Ibid.*, “Chapter V. The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of

[40] Simon Mohun, “Labour Process,” in *A Dictionary of Marxist

[41] V.I. Lenin, “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,”

[42] Lenin, *State and Revolution*, Ch. V.

[43] Neil Harding, “Lenin,” in *A Dictionary of Marxist Thought*, p.

[44] Peter Kropotkin, *The Conquest of Bread* (New York and London: G.P.

[45] Daniel De Leon, “Brandeis and Efficiency,” *The Daily People*,

[46] De Leon, “The Burning Question of Trades Unionism.” Address

[47] Rosa Luxemburg, **Reform or Revolution **(1900), “Chapter II.

[48] *Ibid.*, “Chapter VII. Co-operatives, Unions, Democracy”

[49] *Ibid.*, “Chapter IX. Collapse”

[50] *Ibid.*, “Chapter V. The Consequences of Social Reformism and

[51] Luxemburg, “What Does the Spartacus League Want?” *Die Rote Fahne*,

[52] This technological periodization comes from Lewis Mumford’s

[53] For an extended discussion of this process, see Carson, The

(Center for a Stateless Society, 2010), Chapter Two.

[54] Robert Michels, *Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the

[55] *Ibid.*, p. 365.

[56] Hilaire Belloc, *The Servile State* (Indianapolis: Liberty

[57] *Ibid.*, p. 143.

[58] *Ibid.*, pp. 145–146.

[59] *Ibid.*, pp. 183–184.

[60] *Ibid.*, p. 193.

[61] William English Walling, *Socialism As It Is* (New York: The

[62] *Ibid.*, p. 17.

[63] *Ibid.*, p. 18.

[64] *Ibid.*, pp. 112–113.

[65] *Ibid.*, pp. 47 et seq.

[66] *Ibid.*, pp. 64–65. None of this is to say that nationalization of

H. G. Wells, one of the more genuinely

…[E]very step that [collectivized capitalism, or state socialism]

Marx’s and Engels’s demand in the *Manifesto* for “the extension of

…“State Socialism” is indispensable as a basis for Socialism,

The measures of a new socialist government that would distinguish

[67] *Ibid.*, pp. 118–119.

[68] *Ibid.*, p. 66.

[69] *Ibid.*, p. 164.

[70] *Ibid.*, p. 146.

[71] Gabriel Kolko, *The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of

[72] Paul Goodman, *Like a Conquered Province*, in *People or Personnel*

[73] Goodman, *People or Personnel*, in *People or Personnel* and *Like

[74] *Ibid.*, p. 113.

[75] *Ibid.*, p. 113.

[76] Ronald Radosh, “The Myth of the New Deal,” in Murray Rothbard and

[77] G. William Domhoff, *The Higher Circles: The

[78] *Ibid.*, p. 225.

[79] Stuart Hall, “The Great Moving Right Show,” *Marxism Today*,

[80] Ralph Miliband. Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of

[81] *Ibid.*, p. 80.

[82] *Ibid.*, pp. 88–89.

[83] *Ibid.*,** **pp. 101–102, 104–105.

[84] *Ibid.*, p. 109.

[85] *Ibid.*, pp. 142–143.

[86] *Ibid.*, pp. 144–145.

[87] *Ibid.*, p. 148.

[88] Paul Foot, “Portrait of an Appalling Man,” International

[89] Miliband, pp. 279–280.

[90] Andrew Cumbers and Robert McMaster, “Revisiting Public Ownership:

[91] Miliband, p. 287.

[92] *Ibid.*, p. 288.

[93] Belloc, pp. 162 et seq.

[94] Miliband, p. 288.

[95] *Ibid.*, p. 339.

[96] Dan Evans, “The Struggle That Lies Ahead,” *New Socialist*, March

[97] John Saville, “Labourism and the Labour Government,” *The Socialist

[98] Marx, Third Manuscript, “Private Property and Communism,” *Economic

[99] *Ibid.*

[100] *Ibid.*

[101] *Ibid.*, Third Manuscript, “Human Requirements and Division of

[102] Karl Marx, *Theses on Feuerbach*. *Marx/Engels Selected Works*,

[103] Karl Marx, The German Ideology:Critique of Modern German

[104] Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in

[105] *Ibid.*

[106] Karl Marx, *The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to the Philosophy of

[107] Quoted in Michael Harrington, *Socialism* (New York:

[108] *Ibid*. p. 75.

[109] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, *Capital* Vol. 3, Chapter 48 (New

[110] Friedrich Engels, *Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution

[111] James D. White, *Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins of

[112] **Ibid. **pp. 288–289.

[113] **Ibid. **p. 346.

[114] Hudis, *op. cit.*, p. 9.

[115] V. I.Lenin, *What Is To Be Done? Burning

[116] Rosa Luxemburg, **Reform or Revolution **(1900), “Chapter V:

[117] *Rules and Administrative Regulations of the International

[118] Friedrich Engels, Preface to 1872 German edition of Communist

[119] Isaiah Berlin, *Karl Marx: His Life and Environment*. Fourth

[120] Marx and Engels, *Manifesto of the Communist Party*.

[121] Marx, Part III “Saint Max,” *The German Ideology*

[122] Marx, Part I “Feuerbach,” *The German Ideology*

[123] Marx, “Draft of an Article on Friedrich List’s book: *Das

[124] See Hudis’s discussion of this in his section on *Critique of the

[125] Guy Standing, *A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens*

[126] Feel free to read into the text any Mumfordian caveats you want

[127] Murray Bookchin, **Post-Scarcity Anarchism **(Ramparts Press,

[128] Colin Ward, **Anarchy in Action **(London: Freedom Press,

[129] <http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/>;

[130] <http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/>

[131] John Curl,

[132] *Ibid.*, p. 33.

[133] *Ibid.*, pp. 34–35, 47.

[134] Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel, The Second Industrial

[135] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production

[136] *Ibid.*, pp. 212–213.

[137] *Ibid.*, p. 32.

[138] Tom Coates, “(Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly)

[139] Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation, *A

[140] *Ibid.*, p. 23.

[141] Luigi Zingales, “In Search of New Foundations,” *The Journal of

[142] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Multitude: War and Democracy

[143] **Ibid. **p. 147.

[144] **Ibid. **p. 150.

[145] [[https://www.onlineopen.org/the-salt-of-the-earth#contributor-bio-0][Pascal

[146] Negri and Hardt, *Multitude*,** **p. 336.

[147] Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the

[148] *Ibid.*, p. 2.

[149] *Ibid.*, pp. 32 *et seq*.

[150] *Ibid.*, p. 36.

[151] *Ibid.*, pp. 7–8.

[152] *Ibid.*, p. 9.

[153] Mark Elliott, “Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group

[154] Francis Heylighen, “Why is Open Access Development so Successful?

[155] Elliott, “Stigmergic Collaboration.”

[156] Mark Elliott, “Some General Off-the-Cuff Reflections on

[157] Gus DiZerega, “Outlining a New Paradigm,” Cosmos and

[158] David de Ugarte, *The Power of Networks : An Illustrated Manual

[159] Benkler, *The Wealth of Networks*, p. 100.

[160] Heather Marsh, “Stigmergy,” *GeorgieBC’s Blog*, December 24, 2012

[161] Benkler,** The Wealth of Networks **pp. 66–67.

[162] De Ugarte, *The Power of Networks*, p. 38.

[163] *Ibid.*, pp. 39–40.

[164] De Ugarte, Phyles: Economic Democracy in the Network

Century (n.d.), pp. 18–19

<verbatim><http://deugarte.com/gomi/</verbatim> phyles.pdf>.

[165] Rick Falkvinge, “Selling Your Vision With a Swarm,” *Falkvinge on

[166] Francis Heylighen, “Stigmergy as a Universal Coordination

[167] Paul Mason, **Post-Capitalism: A Guide to Our Future **(Allan

[168] “…. in order to win, we should operate at a faster tempo or

[169] Jeff Atwood, “Boyd’s Law of Iteration,” *Coding Horror*, February

[170] Nicholas Nassim Taleb, *Antifragile: Things That Gain From

[171] *Ibid.*, p. 135.

[172] *Ibid*., pp. 180–181.

[173] Cory Doctorow, “We need a serious critique of net activism,” *The

[174] Harry Cleaver. “Kropotkin, Self-valorization And The Crisis Of

[175] David Ronfeldt and Armando Martinez, “A Comment on the Zapatista

[176] Harry Cleaver. “Computer-linked Social Movements and the Global

[177] Cleaver, “Neozapatismo and Autonomy,” Presentation to the workshop

[178] Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin,” pp. 10–11.

[179] M. Mitchell Waldrop, *Complexity: The

[180] *Ibid.*, pp. 316–317.

[181] Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, *The Starfish and the Spider:

[182] Taleb, p. 8.

[183] John Robb, *Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End

[184] *Ibid*., p. 96.

[185] *Ibid.*, p. 7.

[186] *Ibid.*, p. 13.

[187] *Ibid.*, p. 99.

[188] *Ibid*., p. 105.

[189] Charles Johnson, “Counter-economic optimism,” *Rad Geek People’s

[190] Cory Doctorow, “Microsoft DRM Research Talk,” in *Content:

[191] Doctorow, “It’s the Information Economy, Stupid,” in *Ibid*., p.

[192] Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security

[193] *Ibid*., p. 96.

[194] John Robb, “The Bazaar’s Open Source Platform,” *Global

[195] Robb, “STEMI Compression,” *Global Guerrillas*, November 12, 2008

[196] Nathan Cravens, “Productive Recursion Proven,” Open Manufacturing

[197] Cravens, “Productive Recursion,” *Open Source Ecology Wiki*

[198] Marcin Jakubowski, “OSE Proposal — Towards a World Class Open

[199] Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural

[200] *Ibid.*, pp. 116–117, 121.

[201] *Ibid.*,** **pp. 114, 119–120.

[202] Vinay Gupta, “The Global Village Development Bank: financing

[203] *Ibid*.

[204] John Robb, “Resilient Communities and Scale Invariance,” *Global

[205] Carl Boggs. “Marxism, prefigurative communism, and the problem of

[206] Saio Sofa Gradin, “Could pre-figurative politics provide a way

[207] Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, The New Radicals: A Report With

[208] E.P. Thompson, “The New Left,” **The New Reasoner **No. 9

[209] C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left”

[210] “Port Huron Statement,” in Jacobs and Landau, pp. 155–156.

[211] Tom Hayden, “The Politics of ‘The Movement’,” *Dissent*,

[212] Jacobs and Landau, p. 60.

[213] **Studies on the Left **vol. 5, no. 2 (Spring 1965), “Up From

[214] Tom Hayden et al, “Up From Irrelevance,” in Jacobs and Landau, pp.

[215] Weinstein et al, “A Reply,” in Jacobs and Landau, p. 277.

[216] *Ibid*. pp. 273–276.

[217] **Ibid. **p. 278.

[218] **Ibid. **p. 279.

[219] Harry Cleaver, *Reading Capital Politically* (Edinburgh and San

[220] *Ibid.* p. 11.

[221] **Ibid. **p. 12.

[222] Quoted in Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to

[223] Cleaver, *Reading Capital Politically*,** **pp. 11–14;

[224] **Ibid. **pp. 64–65.

[225] **Ibid. **p. 30.

[226] **Ibid. **p. 24.

[227] **Ibid. **p. 45.

[228] **Ibid. **p. 48.

[229] **Ibid. **pp. 51–52.

[230] Mario Tronti, “Lenin in England” *Classe Operaia* Issue No.1,

[231] Cleaver, *Reading Capital Politically*,** **p. 58.

[232] *Ibid.*, pp. 59–60.

[233] *Ibid.*, 60n.

[234] Dyer-Witheford, pp. 43–47.

[235] *Ibid.*, pp. 48–49.

[236] *Ibid.*, p. 52.

[237] *Ibid.*, p. 53.

[238] *Ibid.*, pp. 53–54.

[239] *Ibid.*, p. 65.

[240] *Ibid.*, pp. 70–71. The exploitation of open-source versions of

[241] Antonio Negri, “Marx Beyond Marx: Working Notes on the

Grundrisse (1979),” in Antonio Negri, *Revolution

[242] Quoted in Martin Nicolaus “Foreword” to Karl Marx, *Grundrisse:

[243] Negri, “Marx Beyond Marx,” p. 166.

[244] *Ibid*., p. 166.

[245] John Holloway, “Preface: From Nouns to Verbs,” *We Are the Crisis

[246] **Ibid. **xiv.

[247] Holloway, “The State in Everyday Struggle,” in **Ibid. **p.

[248] David Graeber, “Situating Occupy Lessons From the Revolutionary

[249] Gregory P. Williams, “Special Contribution: Interview with

[250] *Ibid.*

[251] Wallerstein, “Revolts Against the System,” New Left Review

18 (November-December 2002)

[252] Immanuel Wallerstein and Sharon Zukin, “1968, Revolution in the

[253] *Ibid.*, p. 439.

[254] *Ibid.*, pp. 440–442.

[255] *Ibid.*, pp. 442–446.

[256] Wallerstein, “Revolts Against the System.”

[257] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, *Multitude: War and Democracy in

[258] **Ibid. **p. 159.

[259] **Ibid. **p. 189.

[260] **Ibid. **pp. 189–90.

[261] **Ibid. **p. 337.

[262] **Ibid. **pp. 217–218.

[263] Peter Critchley, “The Lost Tradition of Marxism and Anarchism,” in

Associational Socialism (1997)

[264] Graeber, “Situating Occupy Lessons From the Revolutionary Past.”

[265] Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Neo-Zapatistas: Twenty Years After,”

[266] Holloway, “Dignity’s Revolt,” in *We Are the Crisis of Capital*,

[267] *Ibid.*, pp. 116–117, 117n.

[268] *Ibid.*, pp. 117–118, 117n.

[269] *Ibid.*, p. 120.

[270] *Ibid.*, p. 121.

[271] *Ibid.*, p. 120.

[272] *Ibid.*, p. 126.

[273] *Ibid.*, pp. 137–138.

[274] Patrick Cuninghame and Carolina Ballesteros Corona, “A Rainbow at

[275] Holloway, “Dignity’s Revolt,” pp. 138–139.

[276] Negri and Hardt, *Multitude*, pp. 213–217.

[277] Joel Dietz, ““Occupy Wall Street turned movements into

[278] Jerome Roos, “Talking About a Revolution With John Holloway,”

[279] Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel, “Commons in the time of

[280] Jack Shenker, “This wave of global protest is being led by the

[281] David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a

[282] Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Social Movements and Globalization:

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 67, 69.

[283] Marina Sitrin, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in

[284] *Ibid.*, pp. 2–3.

[285] S. Tormey, Anti-Capitalism: A Beginner’s

[286] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, *Declaration* (2012)

[287] *Ibid.*, pp. 59–61.

[288] *Ibid.*, p. 91.

[289] Harry Cleaver, “Deep Currents Rising: Some notes on the global

[290] W. Lance Bennett, Alexandra Segerberg and

[291] Nicholas Hildyard, Licensed Larceny: Infrastructure, Financial

[292] *Ibid.*, p. 91.

[293] *Ibid.*

[294] *Ibid.*, p. 97.

[295] *Ibid.*, p. 98.

[296] *Ibid.*, p. 99.

[297] James C. Scott, *Two Cheers for Anarchism* (Princeton and Oxford:

[298] Guy Standing, *A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens*

[299] Tom Hayden, “The Politics of ‘The Movement’,” *Dissent*,

[300] Harry Cleaver, *Reading Capital Politically* (Edinburgh and San

[301] *Ibid.*, pp. 39–40.

[302] *Ibid*., pp. 43–44.

[303] *Ibid*., pp. 58–59.

[304] An Interview With Harry Cleaver” *vis-a-vis* 1 (Autumn 1993).

[305] *Ibid*., pp. 86–87.

[306] *Ibid*.

[307] *Ibid.*

[308] Cleaver. “Socialism” (1992). Published in Wolfgang Sach(ed), *The

[309] Cleaver. “Deep Currents Rising: Some notes on the global challenge

[310] Cleaver, “Theses on Secular Crisis in Capitalism: The

[311] Cleaver, “Work Refusal and Self-Organisation.” In Anitra Nelson

[312] Cleaver, “Kropotkin, Self-valorization And The Crisis Of Marxism”

[313] Cleaver, “Marxian Categories, the Crisis of Capital and the

[314] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Multitude: War and Democracy

[315] *Ibid*., p. 129.

[316] *Ibid*., p. 131.

[317] *Ibid.*, p. 135.

[318] Cleaver, *Reading Capital Politically*,** **pp. 70–71.

[319] *Ibid*., pp. 124–125.

[320] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, *Declaration* (2012)

[321] *Ibid*., p. 46.

[322] *Ibid*., p. 8.

[323] *Ibid*., p. 14.

[324] *Ibid*., p. 32.

[325] *Ibid*., pp. 36–37.

[326] *Ibid*., p. 41.

[327] *Ibid*., p. 43.

[328] *Ibid*., p. 45.

[329] *Ibid.*, pp. 88–89.

[330] John Holloway, “Dignity’s Revolt,” in We Are the Crisis of

[331] *Ibid*., p. 149.

[332] *Ibid*., p. 142.

[333] *Ibid*., pp. 144–145.

[334] Holloway, “Where is Class Struggle?” in *We Are the Crisis of

[335] Holloway, “1968 and the Crisis of Abstract Labour,” in *We Are the

[336] Negri and Hardt, *Declaration*, p. 55.

[337] *Ibid*., p. 55.

[338] *Ibid*., p. 56.

[339] *Ibid*., p. 60.

[340] Harry Cleaver interview with Kevin Van Meter, quoted in Van Meter,

[341] Murray Bookchin, “The Forms of Freedom,” in *Post-Scarcity

[342] [[https://www.shareable.net/author/bart-grugeon-plana/][Bart

[343] James Livingston, “How the Left Has Won,” *Jacobin*, August 2012

[344] Paul Mason, **Post-Capitalism: A Guide to Our Future **(Allan

[345] *Ibid.*, p. 244.

[346] *Ibid.*,** **xv.

[347] *Ibid.*,** **xiii.

[348] *Ibid.*,** **p. 144.

[349] *Ibid.*, xv.

[350] *Ibid.*, pp. 117, 119.

[351] See footnote under first listing of his name in the Bibliography

[352] Michel Bauwens, “Three Times Exodus, Three Phase Transitions” *P2P

[353] Bauwens and Franco Iacomella, “Peer to Peer Economy and New

[354] Section 2.1.B. The emergence of peer to peer as technological

(MasterNewMedia: November 3, 2007)

[355] Section 3.1.B. The Communism of Capital, or, the cooperative

[356] Section 7.1.B. P2P, Postmodernity, Cognitive Capitalism: within

[357] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. *Multitude: War and Democracy in

[358] **Ibid. **p. 212.

[359] Section 7.1.A. Marginal trend or premise of new civilization? in

[360] Bauwens, The Peer to Peer Manifesto: The Emergence of P2P

[361] Douglas Rushkoff, “How the Tech Boom Terminated California’s

[362] Bauwens, “Interview/ on Peer to Peer Politics with Cosma Orsi,”

[363] Bauwens and Iacomella**.**

[364] *Ibid.*

[365] *Ibid.*

[366] Christopher Wright, “Revolution in the Twenty-First Century: A

[367] *Ibid.*

[368] Wright, *Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and

[369] Wright, “Revolution in the Twenty-First Century.”

[370] Wright, *Worker Cooperatives and Revolution*, p. 160.

[371] *Ibid.*, p. 194.

[372] Wright, “Revolution in the Twenty-First Century.”

[373] *Ibid.*

[374] Shawn Wilbur, “Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Self-Government and the

<verbatim><http://archive.vn/vOZR1>,</verbatim> pp. 1–2.

[375] *Ibid.*, p. 12.

[376] John Restakis, *Cooperative Commonwealth & the Partner State* (The

[377] Bauwens, “The ‘welfare state’ is dead — long live the ‘partner

[378] Bauwens, “Evolving Towards a Partner State in an Ethical Economy,”

[379] Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis, “Peer-to-peer production and the

[380] Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel,

[381] Christian Iaione, “The Platform-State. Government as an enabler of

[382] *Ibid.*, p. 34.

[383] Abdullah Ocalan, Democratic Confederalism. International

[384] Excerpts from a text prepared by Tommaso Fattori as part of the

[385] Massimo De Angelis. *Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the

[386] **Ibid. **p. 21.

[387] **Ibid. **p. 22.

[388] **Ibid. **p. 176.

[389] **Ibid. **p. 22.

[390] **Ibid. **p. 192.

[391] **Ibid. **p. 13.

[392] **Ibid. **pp. 24–25.

[393] **Ibid. **p. 25.

[394] **Ibid. **pp. 103–107.

[395] **Ibid. **p. 111.

[396] **Ibid. **p. 279.

[397] Karl Marx, **Grundrisse ** pp. 471–472.

[398] *Ibid.*, p. 492.

[399] *Ibid.*, p. 495.

[400] *Ibid.*, p. 476.

[401] *Ibid.*, pp. 497–498, 503.

[402] *Ibid.*, p. 496.

[403] Tom Hayden, “The Politics of ‘The

[404] Saio Sofa Gradin, “Could pre-figurative politics provide a way

[405] Carl Boggs, “Marxism, prefigurative communism, and the problem of

[406] Angelos Varvarousis, “The rhizomatic expansion of commoning

[407] Nick Dyer-Witheford, *Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle

[408] *Ibid.*, p. 84.

[409] *Ibid.*, p. 84.

[410] Antonio Negri, “Expropriation in Mature Capitalism,” in *The

[411] Dyer-Witheford, p. 85.

[412] Tom Coates, “(Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly)

[413] Dyer-Witheford, pp. 91–92.

[414] Cited by Harry Cleaver in Rupturing the Dialectic: The

[415] Antonio Negri, *Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse*.

[416] Harry Cleaver, Rupturing the Dialectic: The Struggle Against

[417] Proletarians and the State: Toward a Discussion of Workers’

[418] *Workers Party Against Work* (1973) in Negri, *Books for Burning*,

[419] *Ibid.*, p. 92.

[420] Domination and Sabotage: On the Marxist Method of Social

[421] *Ibid.*, p. 272.

[422] Negri, *Marx Beyond Marx*, p. 215.

[423] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, *Commonwealth* (Cambridge:

[424] *Ibid.*, p. 137.

[425] Negri and Hardt, *Commonwealth*, pp. 152–153.

[426] Bengi Akbulut, “Commons,” in Clive L. Spash, ed. *Routledge

[427] Cleaver, **Rupturing the Dialectic **, p. 123.

[428] **Ibid. **, p. 77.

[429] Cleaver. “The Inversion of Class Perspective in Marxian Theory:

[430] Cleaver, *Rupturing the Dialectic*, pp. 275–279.

[431] Cleaver, “Industrialism or Capitalism? Conviviality or

[432] Cleaver, “Introduction,” Antonio Negri, *Marx Beyond Marx*

[433] Cleaver. “Kropotkin, Self-valorization And The Crisis Of Marxism”

[434] Cleaver. “Work Refusal and Self-Organisation.” In Anitra Nelson

[435] Silvia Federici, “Feminism and the Politics of the Common in an

[436] Federici, “Counterplanning from the Kitchen “ (1975), in

[437] *Ibid.*, p. 38.

[438] Federici, “Women, Globalization, and the International Women’s

[439] Federici, “The Reproduction of Labor Power in the Global Economy

[440] Federici, “On Elder Care Work and the Limits of Marxism” (2009),

[441] *Ibid.*, p. 125.

[442] Federici, “Women, Land Struggles, and Globalization: An

[443] *Ibid.*, p. 131.

[444] *Ibid.*, p. 137.

[445] “Feminism and the Politics of the Common in an Era of Primitive

[446] *Ibid.*, pp. 144, 146–147.

[447] John Holloway, “Stop Making Capitalism,” in *We Are the Crisis of

[448] *Ibid.*, p. 212.

[449] *Ibid.*, p. 215.

[450] *Ibid.*, p. 216.

[451] *Ibid.*, p. 217.

[452] *Ibid.*, pp. 218–219.

[453] Holloway, “Communise,” in *We Are the Crisis of Capital*, p. 276.

[454] Massimo De Angelis, *The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and

[455] *Ibid.*, pp. 134–135.

[456] *Ibid.*, pp. 136–137.

[457] *Ibid.*, p. 12.

[458] *Ibid.*, p. 34.

[459] *Ibid.*, p. 226.

[460] *Ibid.*, pp. 191–193.

[461] De Angelis, *Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the

[462] **Ibid. **p. 12.

[463] **Ibid. **p. 25.

[464] **Ibid. **p. 128.

[465] **Ibid. **pp. 137–140.

[466] **Ibid. **pp. 13–14.

[467] *Ibid.*, pp. 192–193.

[468] *Ibid.*,** **p. 205.

[469] *Ibid.*,** **pp. 251–252.

[470] **Ibid. **p. 276.

[471] **Ibid. **p. 358.

[472] **Ibid. **p. 270.

[473] **Ibid. **pp. 288–289.

[474] **Ibid. **p. 27.

[475] Bengi Akbulut, “Cooperative economies as commons: Labour and

[476] De Angelis, *Omnia Sunt Communia*,** **pp. 275–276.

[477] **Ibid. **p. 383.

[478] **Ibid. **pp. 384–385.

[479] **Ibid. **pp. 386–387

[480] Nick Dyer-Witheford, “Commonism,” *Turbulence* 1 (2007)

[481] *Ibid.*

[482] Dyer-Witheford, “The Circulation of the Common,” Talk at the

[483] Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford, “Commons and

[484] *Ibid.*, pp. 39–40.

[485] *Ibid.*, pp. 45–46.

[486] *Ibid.*, pp. 46–47.

[487] Dyer-Witheford, “The Circulation of the Common.”

[488] *Ibid.*

[489] De Puyter and Dyer-Witheford, p. 47.

[490] J.K. Gibson-Graham. *A Postcapitalist Politics* (Minneapolis and

[491] *Ibid.*, xxv.

[492] *Ibid.*, p. 59.

[493] *Ibid.*, xxvi.

[494] *Ibid.*, xxvi.

[495] *Ibid.*, pp. 7–8.

[496] *Ibid.*, p. 54.

[497] *Ibid.*, p. 70.

[498] *Ibid.*, pp. 73–74.

[499] *Ibid.*, p. 78.

[500] *Ibid.*, p. 80.

[501] *Ibid.*, p. 191.

[502] *Ibid.*, p. 178.

[503] *Ibid.*, pp. 144–146.

[504] *Ibid.*, p. 144.

[505] *Ibid.*, p. 148.

[506] *Ibid.*, p. 149.

[507] *Ibid.*, pp. 153–154.

[508] Eri, Olin Wright. *Envisioning Real Utopias* (London and New York:

[509] *Ibid.*, pp. 306–307.

[510] *Ibid.*, pp. 323–325.

[511] *Ibid.*, p. 322.

[512] *Ibid.*, pp. 328–329.

[513] John Michael Colón, Mason Herson-Hord, Katie S. Horvath, Dayton

[514] *Ibid.*, pp. 5–6

[515] *Ibid.*, pp. 7, 8.

[516] Chris Dillow, “In defence of conservative Marxism,” *Stumbling and

[517] Erik Olin Wright, “The Real Utopias Project: a general overview”

[518] David Bollier, “Vernacular Law and Complexity Science: Two Guides

[519] Yung Neocon, Twitter, Sept 26 2018

[520] Erik Olin Wright, “How to Be an Anticapitalist Today,” *Jacobin*,

[521] *Ibid.*

[522] Richard Gunn and Adrian Wilding, “Alternative horizons –

[523] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, *Multitude: War and Democracy in

[524] *Ibid*., pp. 81–82.

[525] Holloway, “Dignity’s Revolt,” in *We Are the Crisis of Capital*

[526] Holloway, “Zapatismo and the Social Sciences,” in *We Are the

[527] Holloway, “Zapatismo Urbano,” in *We Are the Crisis of Capital*,

[528] Andalusia Knoll and Itandehui Reyes, “From Fire to Autonomy:

[529] David Graeber, “The New Anarchists,” *New Left Review* 13

[530] *Ibid.*, pp. 7, 15.

[531] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, *Declaration* (2012) [page

[532] *Ibid.*, p. 87.

[533] *Ibid.*, pp. 87–88.

[534] Andy Beckett, “The new left economics: how a network of thinkers

[535] “Post-Post-Fordism in the Era of Platforms: Robin Murray talks to

[536] *Ibid.*, pp. 186–187, 190.

[537] Beckett, *op. cit.*

[538] Joe Guinan and Martin O’Neill, “The institutional turn: Labour’s

[539] John Trickett, “Land for the Many,” *Tribune*, June 2019

[540] Beckett, *op. cit.*

[541] Sarah Jaffe, “Labour’s Secret Weapon,” *The American Prospect*,

[542] Chris Smaje, “Let us Eat Brexit,” *Small Farm Future*, December

[543] Alex Sobel, “Labour doesn’t have to wait five years to start

[544] Paragraph divisions mine. Originally a string of tweets by

[545] John Robb, “Hypercenteralized or hyperdecentralized? Both…,”

[546] Holland, *Nomad Citizenship*, p. 169.

[547] Negri and Hardt, *Multitude*, p. 357.

[548] *Ibid.* p. 342.

[549] *Ibid.* p. 344.

[550] Eugene Holland, *Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the

[551] *Ibid.*, pp. 155–156.

[552] Jay Ufelder, “ISO Revolution, Organized Opposition Not Req’d,”

[553] B. H. Liddell-Hart, Strategy: The

[554] Amador Fernández-Savater, “Strength and Power:

[555] Angelos Varvarousis, “The rhizomatic expansion of commoning

[556] *Ibid.*, p. 6.

[557] *Ibid.*

[558] *Ibid.*, p. 7.

[559] *Ibid.*

[560] *Ibid.*, p. 8.

[561] *Ibid.*, p. 9.

[562] Robert Kirchner, “Russell Brand’s Revolution,” Center for a

[563] Kim Stanley Robinson. **2312 **(New York: Orbit Books, 2012),

[564] Liddell-Hart, pp. 59–60.

[565] *Ibid.* p. 72.

[566] *Ibid.*, p. 338.

[567] T. E. Lawrence, letter to B.H. Liddell-Hart,

[568] Liddell-Hart, p. 365.

[569] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Multitude: War and Democracy

[570] David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a

[571] Jerome Roos, “Talking About a Revolution With John Holloway,”

[572] Amador Fernández-Savater, “John Holloway: cracking capitalism vs.

[573] *Ibid*.

[574] *Ibid.*

[575] John Holloway, “Dignity’s Revolt,” in *We Are the Crisis of

[576] Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, “Why does the political left fail

[577] Fernández-Savater, *op. cit*.

[578] John Holloway, *How to Change the World Without Taking Power*. New

[579] Theodoros Karyotis, “Chronicles of a Defeat Foretold,” *ROAR

[580] David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, *Free, Fair and Alive: The

[581] Bollier, “Andreas Karitzis on SYRIZA: We Need to Invent New Ways

[582] Katrina Kozarek, “Venezuela’s Communes: a Great Social

[583] George Ciccariello-Maher, “Building the Commune: Insurgent

[584] María Pilar García-Guadilla, “The Limits of Chávez’s Communal

[585] *Ibid.*, pp. 3–4.

[586] Kozarek, “Venezuela’s Communes.”

[587] María Pilar García-Guadilla and Ana Mallenf, “Polarization,

[588] “Latin America: End of a golden age? Franck Gaudichaud interviews

[589] Eric Olin Wright. *Envisioning Real Utopias* (London and New York:

[590] Wright, “How to Be an Anticapitalist Today,” *Jacobin*, December

[591] *Ibid.*, pp. 89–107.

[592] Wright, *Envisioning Real Utopias*, pp. 335–336.

[593] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, *Declaration* (2012)

[594] Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, “Why does the political left fail

[595] Negri and Hardt, *Declaration*, p. 53.

[596] *Ibid.*, pp. 71–73.

[597] Richard Bartlett, “Organizing Beyond Organizations: Good News

[598] Bernardo Gutiérrez, “The Madrid P2P Commune,” *Guerrilla

[599] “The commons, the state and the public: A Latin American

[600] *Ibid.*

[601] **Ibid. **Steve Rushton makes a similar point about Venezuela

[602] *Ibid.*

[603] Holloway, “Dignity’s Revolt,” p. 135.

[604] *Ibid.*

[605] *Ibid.*, xv-xvi.

[606] *Ibid.*, p. 290.

[607] *Ibid.*, p. 273.

[608] Negri and Hardt, *Multitude*, p. 289.

[609] Harry Cleaver, Rupturing the Dialectic: The Struggle Against

[610] **Ibid. **pp. 240–241.

[611] **Ibid. **p. 266.

[612] **Ibid. **p. 275.

[613] **Ibid. **pp. 235–236.

[614] André Gorz, *Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal* (Boston:

[615] *Ibid.* p. 6.

[616] *Ibid.* p. 8.

[617] *Ibid.* p. 8n

[618] *Ibid.* pp. 9–10.

[619] **Ibid. ** p. 33.

[620] Paul Mason, “Postcapitalism and the City,” P2P Foundation Blog,

[621] Vangelis Papadimitropoulos, “The Politics of the Commons: Reform

[622] *Ibid.*, p. 568.

[623] George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici. “Commons against and beyond

[624] *Ibid.*, p. i101.

[625] Papadimitropoulos *op. cit.*, p. 573.

[626] *Ibid.*, p. 575.

[627] *Ibid.*, p. 576.

[628] Massimo De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and

[629] **Ibid. **p. 45.

[630] **Ibid. **p. 322.

[631] Bollier and Helfrich, *Free, Fair and Alive*, pp. 289–290.

[632] *Ibid.*, p. 294.

[633] Immanuel Wallerstein, “Revolts Against the System,” *New Left

[634] Bollier and Helfric, *Free, Fair and Alive*, pp. 300–301.

[635] Neal Gorenflo, “Preface,” *Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost

[636] Juliet B. Schor, Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth

(New York: Penguin, 2010), p. 3.

[637] *Ibid.*, p. 5.

[638] [[https://geo.coop/people/luis-razeto-migliaro][Luis Razeto

[639] *Ibid.*

[640] Ben Reynolds, *The Coming Revolution: Capitalism in the 21st

[641] Silvia Federici, “Commons against and beyond Capitalism (with

[642] Federici, “Commons against and beyond Capitalism,” p. 89.

[643] Immanuel Wallerstein, “Household Structures and Labor-Force

(Cambridge, New York, Oakleigh, Victoria, Paris: Cambridge

[644] Brigitte Kratzwald, “Urban Commons – Dissident Practices in

[645] James O’Connor, *Accumulation Crisis* (Oxford and New York: Basil

[646] *Ibid*., p. 184.

[647] *Ibid.*, pp. 185–186.

[648] Schor, *Plenitude*, p. 107.

[649] *Ibid.*, p. 118.

[650] Colin Ward, *Anarchy in Action* (London: Freedom Press, 1982), p.

[651] Keith Paton, *The Right to Work or the Fight to Live?* (1972),

[652] Karl Hess, *Community Technology* (New York, Cambridge,

[653] <http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/>;

[654] Jane Jacobs, *The Economy of Cities* (New York: Vintage Books,

[655] Jacobs, *Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic

[656] Karl Hess and David Morris, *Neighborhood Power: The New Localism*

[657] *Ibid.*, p. 142.

[658] Jacobs, *Economy of Cities*, pp. 63–64.

[659] Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, *Wikinomics: How Mass

[660] Kevin Carson, *The Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing

[661] Murray Bookchin, *The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and

[662] Eric Hunting. Solarpunk: Post-Industrial Design and Aesthetics

[663] William Irwin Thompson, *Darkness and Scattered Light*, quoted in

[664] Murray Bookchin, *The Limits of the City* (New York, Evanston, San

[665] *Ibid.*, p. 3.

[666] Amanda Abrams, “Why ‘urban villages’ are on the rise around the

[667] Anna Cash, “Solidarity Economy Part I: Cooperative Development in

[668] Kate Shea Baird and Steve Hughes, “America Needs A Network Of

[669] Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel, “Commons in the time of

[670] Baird and Hughes, *op. cit*.

[671] Stacco Troncoso, “This is how people power wins an election: the

[672] *Ibid.*

[673] David Bollier, “Reinventing Politics via Local Political Parties,”

[674] Helena Smith, “Athens’ unofficial community initiatives offer hope

[675] *Ibid.*

[676] *Ibid.*

[677] *Ibid.*

[678] Stacco Troncoso, “Finding Common Ground 6: Constructive

[679] “David Bollier and the City as a Commons,” P2P Foundation Blog,

[680] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, *Multitude*, pp. 339–340.

[681] LabGov, The Co-Cities Open Book: Transitioning from the Urban

[682] *Ibid.*

[683] David Graeber, “Fancy Forms of Paperwork and the Logic of

[684] Troncoso, “Finding Common Ground 6.”

[685] Rob Hopkins, “In Transition 2.0: a story of resilience and hope in

[686] Ross Beveridge, Philippe Koch, “Contesting austerity, de-centring

[687] *Ibid.*, p. 16.

[688] Davina Cooper, “Prefiguring the State,” *Antipode*, Oct 31, 2016

[689] Bertie Russell, “Beyond the Local Trap: New Municipalism and the

[690] Matthew Thompson, “What’s so new about New Municipalism?”

[691] *Ibid.*, p. 10.

[692] David Harvey, *Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to Urban

[693] **Ibid. **pp. 128–129.

[694] **Ibid. **pp. 132–133.

[695] **Ibid. **p. 134.

[696] **Ibid. **p. 135.

[697] **Ibid. **p. 141.

[698] **Ibid. **pp. 147–148.

[699] **Ibid. **p. 151.

[700] Paul Mason, “Postcapitalism and the City,” P2P Foundation Blog,

[701] David Bollier, *Transnational Republics of Commoning: Reinventing

[702] **Ibid. **pp. 26–27.

[703] *Ibid.*, p. 27.

[704] “‘The City as Commons’ with Professor Christian Iaione,” *Commons

[705] *Ibid.*

[706] Murray Bookchin, “Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview” (April 3,

[707] Bookchin, “The Communalist Project” (2002), in Debbie Bookchin and

[708] Bookchin, “Thoughts on Libertarian Municipalism.” Keynote speech

[709] Bookchin, “A Politics for the Twenty-First Century” (1998), in

[710] *Ibid*., p. 59.

[711] Roy Morrison, *Eco Civilization 2140: A Twenty-Second-Century

[712] Harvey, p. 117.

[713] Cat Johnson, “How Can We Redesign Cities as Shared Spaces?”

[714] Guy Alperovitz, Thad Williamson and Ted Howard, “The Cleveland

[715] Joe Guinan and Martin O’Neill, “From community wealth-building to

[716] “Cleveland Goes to Mondragon,” *Owners at Work* (Winter

[717] “Mondragon, Cleveland, Sacramento,” *Cooperate and No One Gets

[718] Alperovitz *et al.*

[719] “Greenhouse,” *Evergreen Cooperatives*

[720] Alperovitz *et al.*

[721] *Ibid.*

[722] David Brodwin, “Evergreen Cooperative is a Cleveland Jobs Success

[723] “Evergreen Business Services,” *Evergreen Cooperatives*

[724] Alperovitz *et al.*

[725] Matthew Thompson. “What’s so new about New Municipalism?”

[726] Laurie Charles, “Venture Socialism: Cooperation and the Political

[727] *Ibid.*, p. 29.

[728] Max Ajl, “A Socialist Southern Strategy in Jackson,” *Viewpoint

[729] “The Jackson Plan: A Struggle for Self-Determination,

[730] *Ibid.*

[731] “Cooperation Jackson’s Kali Akuno: ‘We’re trying to build vehicles

[732] Peter Moskowitz, “Meet the Radical Workers’ Cooperative Growing in

[733] Ajl, “A Socialist Southern Strategy in Jackson.”

[734] “It’s Eco-Socialism or Death: An Interview With Kali Akuno,”

[735] Jamiles Lartey, “A revolutionary, not a liberal: can a radical

[736] Thompson, “What’s so new about New Municipalism?” p. 10.

[737] Erik Forman, Elia Gran, Sixtine van Outryve, “Socialism in More

[738] Kali Akuno, “Jackson Rising,” *Red Pepper*, April 30, 2018

[739] “Building a Solidarity Economy in Jackson, Mississippi,”

[740] Kali Akuno, “Casting Light: Reflections on the Struggle to

[741] Kayode Crown, “Moving Jackson Forward: Opposing Visions of a

[742] Foreman *et al*, “Socialism in More Than One City,”** **pp.

[743] Eleanor Finley, “The New Municipal Movements,” *P2P Foundation

[744] *Ibid.*

[745] Kaitlin Kish and Stephen Quilley, “Work, labour, and regenerative

[746] Aaron Vansintjan and Donald Cuccioletta, “The Radical History of

<verbatim>#9</verbatim> (Autumn 2019),

[747] Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel, “Commons in the Time of

[748] Stefanie Ehmsen and Albert Scharenberg “A Sea Change in the

[749] Troncoso and Utratel, “Commons in the Time of Monsters.”

[750] David Bollier, “Barcelona’s Brave Struggle to Advance the

[751] Ann Marie Utratel, Stacco Troncoso, “The Commons Collaborative

[752] *Ibid.*

[753] Kevin Stark, “Barcelona’s Decidim Offers Open-Source Platform for

[754] Anna Bergren Miller, “Barcelona Crowdsourced its Sharing Economy

[755] Forman et al, “Socialism in More Than One City,” p. 137.

[756] Peter Gelderloos, “What went wrong for the municipalists in

[757] George Dafermos, *The Catalan Integral Cooperative: An

[758] *Ibid.*, pp. 7–8.

[759] *Ibid.*, p. 4.

[760] *Ibid.*, p 8.

[761] *Ibid.*, p. 9.

[762] *Ibid.*, p. 13.

[763] *Ibid*., p. 14.

[764] *Ibid*., pp. 16, 21–23.

[765] Mai Sutton, “9 Awesome Urban Commons Projects in Ghent,” *P2P

[766] Such asset-mapping stages are a common part of many municipalist

[767] <http://wiki.commons.gent/>.

[768] Vasilis Niaros, “First Impressions on the Commons Transition in

[769] Dirk Holemans, “How New Institutions Can Bolster Ghent’s Commons

[770] Socrates Schouten, “‘Fearless’ Amsterdam government: digital city

[771] John Harris, “How Flatpack Democracy beat the old parties in the

[772] Tessy Britton et al. *Designed to Scale: Mass Participation to

[773] *Ibid.*, p. 20.

[774] *Ibid.*, p. 21.

[775] *Ibid.*, p. 21.

[776] *Ibid.*, p. 22.

[777] *Ibid.*, pp. 218–19.

[778] *Ibid.*, p. 21

[779] *Ibid.*, p. 226

[780] *Ibid.*, pp. 260–393.

[781] Thompson, “What’s so new about the New Municipalism?” pp. 10–11.

[782] Aditya Chakrabortty, “In 2011 Preston hit rock bottom. Then it

[783] Hazel Sheffield, “‘Poverty was entrenched in Preston. So we became

[784] *Ibid.*

[785] Hazel Sheffield, “A British Town’s Novel Solution to Austerity,”

[786] Thomas M. Hanna, Joe Guinan and Joe Bilsborough, “The ‘Preston

[787] Xavi Ferrer and Elena Arrontes, “Municipalist France!” *Red

[788] Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione, “The City As a Commons,”

[789] *Ibid.*, pp. 289–290.

[790] *Ibid.*, p. 335.

[791] Nikos A. Salingaros and Federico Mena-Quintero, “A Brief History

[792] *Ibid.*, p. 121.

[793] Cory [[https://craphound.com/walkaway/][Doctorow,

]][[https://craphound.com/walkaway/][(New York: Tor]], 2017).

[794] Nithin Coca, “Meet g0v, the Open-source, Digital Community

[795] Steve Rushton, “Rebel Cities 13: Porto Alegre in Brazil Shows How

[796] Monica Bernardi, “Digital Democracy and Data Commons (DDDC) a

[797] Francesca Bria, *Barcelona digital city: Putting technology at the

[798] Bernardi, “Digital Democracy and Data Commons.”

[799] Gregory Scruggs, “‘Shared equity’ model for U.S. housing boosts

[800] Pat Conaty and Michael Lewis, “Affordability Locked In” (Canadian

[801] Ivo Balmer and Tobias Bernet, “Housing as a Common Resource?

[802] Abigail Savitch-Lew, “How Community Land Trusts Can Fix Detroit’s

[803] Sara Safransky, “Rethinking Land Struggle in the Postindustrial

[804] Paula Z. Segal, “Tax Delinquent Private Property and City

[805] *Ibid.*, p. 103.

[806] John Michael Colón, Mason Herson-Hord, Katie S. Horvath, Dayton

[807] *Ibid.*, p. 26.

[808] *Ibid.*, pp. 26–28.

[809] Saki Bailey, “Why CLTs and city land banks should work together to

[810] Juliana Broad, “Fighting gentrification and displacement: Emerging

[811] Conaty and Lewis, “Affordability Locked In.”

[812] Janelle Orsi, “Homeownership is Dead. Long Live the Permanent Real

[813] David Bollier, “Using Data Mapping to Help Reclaim Urban Commons,”

[814] Penn Lah, “How One Boston Neighborhood Stopped Gentrification in

[815] Taj James and Rosa Gonzalez, “How to turn neighborhoods into nubs

[816] Feargus O’Sullivan, “Barcelona’s Latest Affordable Housing Tool:

[817] Mindy Isser, “Single Mothers and Their Children Are Taking Over

[818] RioOnWatch, “An Informal Settlement in Puerto Rico Has Become the

[819] “Design global, manufacture local: a new industrial revolution?”

[820] David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, *Free, Fair and Alive: The

[821] Alex Pazaitis, Vasilis Kostakis, Giorgos Kallis, and Katerina

[822] *Ibid.*, p. 618.

[823] *Ibid.*, pp. 615–617

[824] Vasilis Kostakis and Chris Giotitsas, “Intervention – ‘Small and

[825] Ezio Manzini, “Small, Local, Open and Connected: Resilient Systems

[826] Ezio Manzini, “Resilient systems and cosmopolitan localism — The

[827] Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel, “Reimagine, don’t seize,

[828] José Maria Ramos, “Cosmo-localism and Urban Commoning,” in Ramos,

[829] **Ibid. **p. 64.

[830] Kostakis and Giotitsas, “Intervention.” ** **

[831] Ramos, “Cosmo-localism and the futures of material production,”

[832] Ramos, “Cosmo-localism and Urban Commoning.”

[833] <fab.cities>.

[834] Christel van de Craats and Tomas Diez, “The Fab City movement

[835] Fab City. Fab City Whitepaper: Locally productive, globally

<verbatim><https://fab.city/uploads/whitepaper.pdf>,</verbatim> p.

[836] Sharon Ede, “The Real Circular Economy: How Relocalising

[837] Benjamin Tincq, “The Fab City: It’s More Than Just a City Full of

[838] Tom Dietz, “Fab City Prototypes – Designing and making for the

[839] Ede, p. 9.

[840] Adrian Smith, “Tooling Up: Civic visions, FabLabs, and grassroots

[841] *Ibid.*

[842] *Ibid.*

[843] Lars Zimmerman, “The Open Source Circular City—a SCENARIO for City

[844] Tomas Dietz, “Made Again Documentary — The ‘Silicon Valley of

[845] Ede, p. 10.

[846] James and Gonzalez, *op. cit.*

[847] Thomas H. Greco, “Monetary Alchemy: How to Turn Bad Money into

[848] I discussed this in the Introduction to Chapter Six in *The

Individuals and Networks (Center for a Stateless Society,

[849] Thomas Hodgskin, *Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital*

[850] Thomas Greco, “Sardex, an emerging model for credit clearing

[851] <https://opencredit.network/>.

[852] <https://opencredit.network/mutual-credit-explained>.

[853] “And we’re off! The Open Credit Network conducts its first

[854] “Mapping the world’s mutual credit networks,” *Open Credit

[855] Neal Gorenflo, “How Platform Coops Can Beat Death Stars Like Uber

[856] Alessia Palladino, “Cities at the Crossroads in the Regulation of

[857] “Bringing the Platform Co-op ‘Rebel Cities’ Together: An Interview

[858] Morell, “Introduction,” in Morell (ed.), *Sharing Cities: A

[859] Álvaro Porro, Commissioner for Social Economy, Local Development

[860] “Bringing the Platform Co-op ‘Rebel Cities’ Together.”

[861] *Ibid.*

[862] Cat Johnson, “10 Ways Vancouver Created a Greener, More Efficient

[863] Ben Schiller, “Could London Set Up A Nonprofit, Cooperative

[864] “New Economics Foundation Calls For ‘Khan’s Cars” As Mutually

[865] Ryan Hayes, “Worker-Owned Apps Are Trying to Fix the Gig Economy’s

[866] Natalie Delgadillo, “How an Eco-Friendly Rideshare Is Changing

[867] “Cory Doctorow: Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me,” *Locus*,

[868] Hayes, “Worker-Owned Apps Are Trying to Fix the Gig Economy’s

[869] Cat Johnson, “New Sharing Depot Opening Reflects Success of

[870] Johnson, “These 5 Lending Libraries Are Redefining the Meaning of

[871] Nithin Coca, “How Innovative Funding Models Could Usher in a New

[872] Hayes, “Worker-Owned Apps Are Trying to Fix the Gig Economy’s

[873] *Ibid.*

[874] Miles Hadfield, “‘Fire the bosses’: Platform co-ops set out their

[875] *Ibid.*

[876] Shyam Krishna, “Reclaiming Work: Can Cooperatives Overthrow the

[877] Hal Plotkin, “Two Big Reasons for Hope: The Platform Cooperative

[878] Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel, “Commons in the Time of

[879] David Bollier, *The City as Platform: How Digital Networks Are

[880] *Ibid.*, p. 4.

[881] *Ibid.*, pp. 6–7

[882] *Ibid.*, p. 12.

[883] Olivier Petitjean, “Can Cities and Citizens Reinvent

[884] Thomas M. Hanna, “Democratising public ownership:

[885] Keir Milburn and Bertie T. Russell, *Public-Common Partnerships:

[886] Quoted in *Ibid.*, p. 11.

[887] *Ibid.*, p. 5.

[888] *Ibid.*, pp. 19–20.

[889] *Ibid.*, p. 20.

[890] Nathan Schneider, “A people-owned internet exists. Here is what it

[891] Karl Bode, “More Than 750 American Communities Have Built Their

[892] Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione, “Ostrom in the City: Design

[893] Ben DeJarnette, “Tired of Waiting for Corporate High-Speed

[894] Nathan Schneider, *op. cit.*

[895] Dan Bateyko, “Athens’ community wifi project Exarcheia Net brings

[896] Nathan Schneider, “Startups Need a New Option: Exit to Community,”

[897] Foster and Iaione, “The City As a Commons,” p. 282.

[898] *Ibid.*, pp. 302–303.

[899] *Ibid.*, pp. 303–305. The authors mention Illinois as one

[900] Sandrina Burkhardt, “Repurposing Public Spaces in a City as a

[901] Giuseppe Micciarelli, “Introduction to urban and collective civic

[902] Foster and Iaione, “The City As a Commons,” pp. 305–306.

[903] Neal Gorenflo, “Bologna Celebrates One Year of a Bold Experiment

[904] Daniela Patti, “Regulating the Commons – What We Can Learn From

[905] Elena De Nictolis, “Co-City Turin: legal

[906] Eleonora de Majo, “The municipalist revolution,” *International

[907] Marta Cillero, “What Makes an Empty Building in Naples a ‘Common

[908] Christian Iaione, “Pooling urban commons: the Civic eState,”

[909] Ruby Irene Pratka, “Quebec’s Vacant Church Buildings Resurrected

[910] Stir to Action, “What Does it Mean to Unlock the Next Economy?”

[911] Christiaan Weiler, “Cross-sector ‘third spaces’ incubate social,

[912] Movement for Black Lives, “Vision For Black Lives: Community

[913] Hawzhin Azeez, “Police abolition and other revolutionary lessons

[914] Anya Briy, “Zapatistas: Lessons in community self-organisation in

[915] <http://aworldwithoutpolice.org/the-strategy/disband/>.

[916] Jose Martin, “Six Ideas for a Cop-Free World,” *Rolling Stone*,

[917] Loretta Graceffo, “Community peacemakers in Chicago offer a proven

[918] Jared Goyette, “Citizen patrols organize across Minneapolis as

[919] Max Rameau, “Community Control over Police: A Proposition” The

[920] NAARPR, “Campaign for Community Control of Police” (June 15, 2020)

[921] Jazmine Salas, “To Transform Policing, We Need Community Control,”

[922] Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, “Want to Abolish the Police? The First Step Is

[923] Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, “Power Over the Police,” *Dissent*, June 12,

[924] Of course indigent people whose homes were seized for property tax

[925] Patrick Cuninghame and Carolina Ballesteros Corona, “A Rainbow at

[926] **Ibid. **p. 15.

[927] Steve Rushton, “Rebel Cities 3: Zapatistas Are Still Trailblazing

[928] Leonidas Oikonomakis, “Zapatistas announce major expansion of

[929] Monty Neill, George Caffentzis, and Johnny Machete, *Toward the

[930] Alexander Pinez Pinto, “How a communist mayor is defeating

[931] Alex de Jong. “Stalinist caterpillar into libertarian butterfly? —

[932] Steve Rushton, “Rebel Cities 2: Rojava Shows Pathway Towards a

[933] Kate Shea Baird and Steve Hughes, “America Needs A Network Of

[934] “It’s Eco-Socialism or Death: An Interview With Kali Akuno,”

[935] *Ibid.*

[936] Laura Roth and Bertie Russell, “Translocal Solidarity and the New

[937] Kate Shea Baird, “Municipalism: an Icarian warning,” *Kate Shea

[938] Bollier. *Transnational Republics of Commoning: Reinventing

[939] Sheila R. Foster and Chrystie Swiney, “City Networks and the

[940] “Alternative Editorial: Where To Look,” *The Alternative UK*, June

[941] Alexander Kolokotronis, “Is America ready for a municipalist

[942] Ana Marie Utratel, “Lessons on Creating Collaborative Political

[943] Stacco Troncoso, “Eight lessons from Barcelona en Comú on how to

[944] “Mission and History,” Right to the City website

[945] *Ibid.*

[946] “Our Work,” Right to the City website

[947] Adrien Krauz, “Transition Towns, Or the Desire for an Urban

[948] John Robb, “Resilient Communities: Transition Towns,” *Global

[949] <http://transitiontowns.org/>

[950] Ben Brangwyn and Rob Hopkins, *Transition Initiatives Primer:

[951] Rob Hopkins, *The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to

[952] *Ibid*., p. 10.

[953] Rob Hopkins, ed. *Kinsale 2021: An Energy Descent Action Plan*.

College

[954] Baird and Hughes, *op. cit.*

[955] “Symbiosis: a new North American grassroots political network,”

[956] Symbiosis Research Collective (John Michael Colón, Mason

[957] Matt Stannard, “Symbiosis Is Different: Why This Revolutionary

[958] Arvind Dilawar, “Grassroots democracies form North American

[959] “Our Points of Unity,” Symbiosis

[960] “Symbiosis: federating municipalist movements in North America for

[961] *Ibid.*

[962] Yana Kunichoff, “A revitalized sanctuary movement is spreading to

[963] Kate Shea Baird, Enric Bárcena, Xavi Ferrer and Laura Roth, “Why

[964] Sophie Bloemen and David Hammerstein, “Commoners hit the capital

[965] Jorge Pinto, “The Order of Barcelona: Cities Without Fear,” *P2P

[966] Sophie Bloemen and Nicole Leonard, “The European Commons Assembly

[967] Despite the value of his contributions cited here, I feel

<verbatim>pieces.*</verbatim> This has been extended to include

; END This is the end.

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