Most of that transformation will come from the efforts of ordinary people at creating the building blocks of the successor society on the ground, and from those building blocks replicating laterally and coalescing into an ecosystem of counter-institutions that expands until it supplants the previous order.

Some of it will come from political engagement to run interference for the new society developing within the shell of the old, and pressuring the state from outside to behave in more benign ways. Some of it will come from using some parts of the state against other parts, and using the state’s own internal procedural rules to sabotage it.

Some of it will come from attempts to engage friendly forces within the belly of the beast. Individuals here and there on the inside of corporate or state institutions who are friendly to our efforts and willing to engage informally with us can pass along information and take advantage of their inside positions to nudge things in a favorable direction. As was the case with the transition from feudalism and capitalism, some organizational entities — now nominally within state bodies or corporations — will persist in a post-state and post-capitalist society, but with their character fundamentally changed along with their relationship to the surrounding system.  If you want to see some interesting examples of attempts at “belly of the beast” grantsmanship and institutional politics, take a look at the appendices to some of Paul Goodman’s books.

A great deal, I predict, will come from efforts — particularly at the local level — to transform the state in a less statelike direction: a general principle first framed by Saint-Simon as “replacing legislation over people with the administration of things,” and since recycled under a long series of labels ranging from “dissolution of the state within the social body” to “the Wikified State” to “the Partner State.” The primary examples I have in mind today are the new municipalist movements in Barcelona, Madrid, Bologna, and Jackson and the dozens and hundreds of cities replicating that model around the world, as well as particular institutional forms like community land trusts and other commons-based local economic models.

There is no “magic button” that will cause the state to instantaneously disappear, and it has currently preempted the avenues and channels (to paraphrase Paul Goodman) for carrying out many necessary social functions. So long as the state continues to be a thing, I prefer that its interventions in society and the economy take the least horrible forms possible, and that its performance of the necessary social functions it has preempted be carried out in the most humane and humanly tolerable ways possible during the period of socializing them — i.e., returning them to genuine social control by non-coercive, cooperative forms of association. I prefer that reforms of the state be Gorzian “non-reformist reforms” that lay the groundwork for further transformations, and bridge the transition to a fundamentally different society.

In dealing with cases like catastrophic climate change, where lifeboat ethics comes into play and it’s justifiable to forcibly shut down economic activities that actively endanger us, when the regulatory state has already preempted the avenues for otherwise shutting down such activities, stepping back and allowing the state  to actually do so — especially when it’s acting against entities like corporations which are abusing power and privilege granted by the state in the first place — may be the least unsatisfactory short-term option. When the state has created and actively subsidized the entire economic model that threatens the biosphere, intervening to partially curtail and reverse that model is probably the form of intervention I’m least likely to lose any sleep over.

To take a case from ten years ago as an illustration, something like Obama’s stimulus package was necessary, given the existence of corporate capitalism on the current model and its chronic crisis tendencies towards surplus capital and idle productive capacity, to prevent a Depression. So long as capitalism and the state existed, some such intervention was inevitable. Given those facts, I would prefer that the hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus spending go towards fundamental infrastructures that would bridge the transition towards a more sustainable and less destructive model. I recall reading at the time that for $200 or $300 billion dollars — about a third or less of the total package — it would have been possible to build out the bottlenecks in the national railroad system and transfer around 80% of long-haul truck freight to trains, thereby reducing carbon emissions from long-distance shipping to a fraction of their former value. Instead, Obama elected to dole out the money to “shovel-ready” projects, which meant local infrastructure projects already promoted and approved by local real estate interests and other components of the urban Growth Machines, to promote further expansion of the ultimately doomed model of car culture, sprawl, and monoculture.

Given that massive deficit spending to avert Depression was inevitable, it would have been far less statist to simply spend money into existence interest-free along the lines suggested by Modern Monetary Theory, either by appropriation for government projects or simply depositing it into people’s checking accounts as a Citizen’s Dividend, than to finance deficit spending by the sale of interest bearing securities to rentiers. It would have been less statist to carry out quantitative easing functions by eliminating the current central banking model of authorizing banks to expand the money supply by lending it into existence at interest, and instead creating new money by simply issuing in the form of a Basic Income. It would have been better to make the bank bailout conditional on banks marking mortgages in default down to their current market value and refinancing them on more affordable terms. You get the idea.

Which brings us back to the Green New Deal.

Getting back to our earlier principle that, if the state has already entered the field, I prefer state interventions that are less shitty rather than more shitty, I would definitely prefer that tax money be spent building public transit that partially reverses or undoes a century of social engineering through state subsidies to highways and civil aviation, to interventions that continue to subsidize the further expansion of car culture.

The question is, to what extent does the Green New Deal actually do this?

Insofar as it proposes shifting public funding from the automobile-highway complex and civil aviation system to local public transit and intercity passenger rail, or reducing fossil fuel extraction and shifting to renewable energy, I think it’s about the best line of action we could possibly expect from a state given the likely realities in the near-term future.  

But there are two main structural problems with the Green New Deal as proposed by Michael Moore, Jill Stein, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. First, it takes for granted most of the existing economy’s patterns of energy use and simply calls for decarbonizing actual power generation.

As an illustration of the general spirit of this approach, Alex Baca mentions a Berkeley parking garage:

It’s got “rooftop solar, electric-vehicle charging stations, and dedicated spots for car-share vehicles, rainwater capture, and water treatment features” — not to mention 720 parking spots. It cost nearly $40 million to build. At night, it positively glows. And it’s a block from the downtown Berkeley BART station.

That America’s most famous progressive city, one where nearly everything is within walking distance, spent $40 million to renovate a parking garage one block from a subway station suggests that progressive Democrats remain unwilling to seriously confront the crisis of climate change.

In fairness to Ocasio-Cortez, she does favor shifting a considerable share of public subsidies from highways to public transit. But the overall thrust of her approach is far more towards decarbonizing power generation than changing the ways we use energy.

The Green New Deal, Baca says, “has a huge blind spot.”

It doesn’t address the places Americans live. And our physical geography — where we sleep, work, shop, worship, and send our kids to play, and how we move between those places — is more foundational to a green, fair future than just about anything else. The proposal encapsulates the liberal delusion on climate change: that technology and spending can spare us the hard work of reform.

Baca points, in particular, to the car-centered urban design model — promoted by decades of social engineering by the automobile and real estate industries in conjunction with urban planners — which locates housing and work/shopping in monoculture enclaves widely separated from one another and linked by freeways. More than anything, we need to return to the kind of urban layout that prevailed before widespread car ownership: compact population centers with a mixture of residences and businesses where people can get to work and shopping by walking, wheelchair, bicycle, bus, or streetcar. And rather than just replacing internal-combustion vehicles with electric ones and coal plants with solar panels, we need to travel fewer miles and consume less power.

Baca’s focus on urban layout, as on-the-mark as it is, doesn’t go nearly far enough. Equally important is industrial organization and the need to relocalize production and change the fundamental ways that production and distribution are organized.

Because of a combination of massive subsidies to energy consumption and transportation, entry barriers that promote cartelization and enable oligopoly firms to pass on overhead from waste and inefficiency to consumers on a cost-plus basis, socialization of the cost of many material and social inputs to production, and artificial property rights like trademarks and patents that facilitate legal control over the disposal of products whose manufacture is outsourced to overseas firms, we have market areas, supply chains, and distribution chains many times larger than efficiency-maximizing levels if all costs were internalized by capitalist firms. And even when production within a plant is rationalized on a lean or just-in-time basis, the existence of continental or trans-oceanic distribution chains means that the old supply-push model of the mass production era is just swept under the rug; all the in-process inventories stacked up by the assembly lines and warehouse inventories of finished goods that characterized Sloanist production have just been shifted to warehouses on wheels and container ships.

Ultimately, what we need is a relocalized economy on the lines described by Kropotkin, Mumford, and Borsodi, which capitalizes on all the advantages offered — but ignored — by the introduction of electrically powered machinery in the Second Industrial Revolution. Namely, we need high-tech craft industry with community and neighborhood workshops using general-purpose CNC machine tools to produce for consumption within the community, frequently switching between product runs as orders come in on a just-in-time basis. This would eliminate not only a huge share of the transportation costs embedded in the current system, but additional costs associated with mass marketing in an environment where production is undertaken without regard to existing orders, and the cost of waste production (planned obsolescence, the Military-Industrial Complex, car culture and suburbanization, etc.) that is used as a remedy for idle production capacity.

Building “infrastructure” as such is not progressive. It’s only progressive when it’s compatible with things like industrial relocalization and the replacement of the car culture with compact mixed-use communities.

Second, the Green New Deal is very much an agenda for saving capitalism in the same spirit as the original New Deal. It’s an anti-deflationary program to create new outlets for surplus labor and capital and provide “jobs” for everyone, instead of directly confronting the fact that technical progress has drastically reduced the amount of labor and material inputs required to produce a high standard of living and seeing that the leisure and productivity benefits are distributed fairly.

This was central to the Green New Deal model proposed by Michael Moore several years back, and it’s central to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s version.

The Wikipedia article on “Green New Deal” attributes first use of that phrase to Thomas Friedman, who envisioned it as a way to “create a whole new clean power industry to spur our economy into the 21st century.” And the creation of new “green” industries as a huge source of “jobs” has been the chief selling point of every Green New Deal proposal since. More broadly, it’s the defining theme of the whole “Progressive Capitalist” or “Green Capitalist” paradigm promoted by Warren Buffett, Bill  Gates and the like. The idea is to use new technology as a weapon against capitalism’s chronic problem of surplus capital without a profitable outlet, by enclosing it as a source of profit, and using it to create new industries and new support infrastructures that will provide a new “engine of accumulation” or “Kondratiev wave” to soak up capital for another generation or so. This creation of new industries is one of the “counteracting tendencies” to the tendency for the direct rate of profit to fall that Marx described in volume 3 of Capital.

And that’s basically the same vision promoted by Michael Moore: run those Ford and GM factories at full capacity and put millions of auto workers back to work building buses and bullet trains, and employ millions more building solar panels and wind generators. The problem is that the cheapening and ephemeralization of production technology is rendering a growing share of investment capital superfluous at such a rapid rate that building buses and trains and generators will barely put a dent in it. And in any case, a major share of existing production is waste that just needs to be ended, not run on a different power source;  while replacing necessary transportation with more environmentally friendly forms is a great idea, the fact remains that most existing transportation is also unnecessary and should be eliminated by restructuring the layout of cities and industry. The buses and bullet trains may take up the slack left by ceasing to produce cars for a few years, at most.

There is simply no way to invest enough money in producing alternative energy, trains and public transit to guarantee 40-hour-a-week jobs, get the assembly lines moving in Detroit again, and prevent the bottom from falling out of the capital markets, without enormous levels of waste production.

So to the extent that AOC and her friends want to keep oil and coal in the ground and promote decarbonization, and end America’s subsidies to car culture, I wish them well. But “green jobs guarantees,” promises of economic expansion through new “green industries,” and similar approaches aimed at prolonging the long-term survival of capitalism, are a dead end.

Where does that leave us? What do we do in the meantime?

In framing the alternatives, I start from the assumption that our primary purpose is actually building the post-capitalist society, and that our engagement or lack of engagement with the state is a secondary course of action whose main purpose is to create a more conducive, less harmful environment in which to do the building. If you want to vote strategically for the sake of damage mitigation, or try to push the state in less environmentally harmful directions, or shift its existing interventions in a more environmentally favorable direction, more power to you.

It was this kind of thing that Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt referred to, in Declaration, as part of a symbiotic strategy between the horizontalist left with its practice of building prefigurative counter-institutions, and leftist parties attempting to influence state policy. It’s fine for grassroots movements engaged in constructing a new society outside the state to throw support behind political actors who are taking specific measures to push things in the right direction, or enlist their help in running interference for us and creating a more favorable environment for the process of building the new society. But it’s absolutely vital to retain total autonomy and freedom of action, and resist being turned into the social movement auxiliary of a political party as Van Jones tried to do with Occupy, and not let leftist parties in government divert suck up all the energy and oxygen from those engaged in building counter-institutions like Syriza did to Syntagma after coming to power in Greece.

Our most important strategic focus must be on institution-building. The most important form of institution-building is at the local level, and some of it may or may not entail incidental engagement with local government.

Pressuring local government to scale back zoning laws that mandate sprawl and monoculture, and to stop actively subsidizing sprawl through below-cost extension of utilities to outlying developments, may well be fruitful. But the most productive path in local decarbonization will be the work of actually retrofitting suburbs and strip malls into mixed-use communities with diversified local economies.

These things will become a matter of necessity for survival, as the combined effect of Peak Fossil Fuel and monkeywrenching efforts aimed at keeping it in the ground make long commutes prohibitively expensive for growing numbers of people, and growing numbers at the same time are forced by rising unemployment, underemployment, and precaritization to supplement or replace their wage incomes with direct production for use in the social economy.

When it comes to strategic action to promote decarbonization, direct action to make the fossil fuel industries unprofitable and fossil fuel projects unworkable in practice are at least as important as any local “carbon free” initiatives. Physical obstruction of pipeline projects, the use of the legal system and bureaucracy to sabotage them with their own system of rules, divestment efforts, and sabotage of existing pumping stations and other vulnerable nodes, together offer great hope for making such projects increasingly risky and decreasingly attractive and hastening post-carbon transition.

And it’s the people engaged in open hardware and micro-manufacturing efforts, hackerspaces, neighborhood gardens, community currencies, community broadband projects, squats in abandoned buildings and vacant lots, community land trusts and cohousing projects, tool libraries and other genuine sharing efforts, who are actually building a society that will function on zero waste and sustainable energy.

In the end, I think it’s a mistake to put our hopes in a party or in progressive celebrities like Bernie Sanders or AOC, no matter how much better they are than more mainstream politicians. I have much more modest hopes for whatever level of political engagement with the state I choose. A political party — the Millennial wing of the Democrats, the Greens, DSA — will not be the avenue by which we create a post-state, post-capitalist society that’s worthy of the human beings who live in it. Our main goal, and most attainable one, is simply using whatever opportunistic center-left non-entity is most likely to get elected to stave off the immediate fascist onslaught and buy time. At best, in the most ideal situation — and this is at least plausible as the demographics of both the country and Democratic Party shift toward leftish Millennials — we might hope for a caretaker state that offers a somewhat less virulent social democratic model of capitalism and allows a relatively benign atmosphere for our own efforts.

But if you want to see the actual future, look at what people are building on the ground. As a character in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time put it, revolution, was not uniformed parties, slogans, and mass-meetings; “It’s the people who worked out the labor- and land intensive farming we do. It’s all the people who changed how people bought food, raised children, went to school… who made new unions, withheld rent, refused to go to wars, wrote and educated and made speeches.”

The post One Cheer — More or Less — For the Green New Deal appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I.

The story opens at a communist party in an unspecified post-industrial town in Ontario sometime in the late middle of this century, from the first-person perspective of Hubert, Etc. A communist party, you should understand, is not an institution but a social event: something like a rave at an abandoned factory where, along with dancing, drinking, drugs, and hookups, illegal acts of post-scarcity are committed. In this case, which is presumably typical, the temporarily recuperated facility is a furniture factory with machinery that’s apparently user-friendly enough a random assortment of intoxicated teens and twenty-somethings can get it up and running and turn out fairly large runs of shelving, beds, or whatever. Using the abandoned machinery and large amounts of abandoned feedstock, one communist party can “do enough furnishings for a couple thousand families” in one evening. The next party is scheduled for a feedstock plant in a neighboring town to keep the supply chain going. And so on.

As Natalie — an attendee at the communist party who becomes a main character — describes it, the whole point of it all is post-scarcity.

Look… at all this. On paper, this place is useless; the stuff coming off that line has to be destroyed. It’s a trademark violation: even though it came off an official Muji line, using Muji’s feedstock, it doesn’t have Muji’s official license, so that configuration of cellulose and glue is a crime. That’s so manifestly fucked up and shit that anyone who pays attention to it is playing the wrong game and doesn’t deserve consideration.

The larger setting is a society in which technology has become so cheap and productive that Muji, the company the factory belonged to, can relocate every few months as its tax holiday ends in one location and another would-be host offers it a bigger subsidy, and abandon the machinery every time as not worth the cost of moving. The main thing standing in the way of this ultra-cheap machinery being unleashed to provide the necessities of life for virtually free to everybody is the patents and trademarks of Muji and companies like it. Machinery is abandoned because it’s cheaper to replace on-site than to move, but communist parties are routinely shut down by police drones enforcing Muji’s monopoly on the right to actually produce things with processes that would otherwise be too cheap to meter.

For those outside the zotta class (and a few million or so of their hired overseers and providers of professional services to them and their overseers), the whole society is made up of precarious laborers who hold on to temp gigs for a few months at a time, with their first few gigs typically being unpaid.

It’s a fictional illustration of Peter Frase’s hypothetical anti-Star Trek scenario, in which matter-energy replicators can produce anything — including other replicators — at zero marginal cost, but capitalists can continue to extract scarcity rents from post-scarcity technology through ownership of patents on the replicators and the designs. That’s the trend in today’s actually-existing capitalism, where the rapid cheapening of production technology means capital’s main source of profit is ceasing to be physical control of the means of production, and profit is instead derived from legal control over the conditions under which people are allowed to produce. The ultimate outcome, if they get their way (which they won’t), is an economy where profit comes not from ownership of the means of production, but from making us sign a EULA to use tools we already own.

The personification of this mentality is Natalie’s zottarich father Jacob Redwater (“zottarich” denoting, in a society where inflation has dovetailed with the concentration of wealth to make astronomical numbers necessary, a level of wealth beyond giga-, tera- and petarich). After bailing his daughter out of trouble in the aftermath of the communist party, he defends the logic of the system in language that’s quite familiar.

Natalie looked grim. “…That factory we switched on last night. It was worth more as a write-off than it was as a going concern. Some entity that owned it demanded that it sit rotting and useless, even though there were people who wanted what it could make.”

“If they wanted the factory, they could buy the factory, Jacob said. “Then make things and sell them.”

“I don’t think these people could afford to buy a factory,” Hubert, Etc said….

“That’s what capital markets are for,” Jacob said. “If you’ve got a plan for profitably using an asset someone else isn’t using, then you draw up a business plan and take it to investors. If you’re right, one of them will fund you….”

“What if no one invests?” Hubert, Etc said….

Jacob took on the air of someone explaining a complex subject to a child. “If no one wants to invest, that means that you don’t have an idea worth investing in….”

“Don’t you see the circularity there?” Natalie said. If you can’t convince someone to turn on the factory to make things that people need, then the factory shouldn’t be turned on?”

“As opposed to what? A free-for-all? Just smash down the doors, walk in and take over?”

“Why not, if no one else is doing anything with it?”

The talking-to-a-toddler look: “Because it’s not yours.”

Jacob’s logic is even more circular than Natalie points out. In any rational society, the factory would be considered abandoned. And obviously, running the abandoned factory to produce furniture at near-zero marginal cost isn’t worth investing in, because the main source of profit is using the state to prevent the factory from being used. In a society where production costs next to nothing, profit results from the right to prevent production that can’t be sold for a monopoly price.

“What do you think about breaking into private property and stealing what you find there?”….

“No one was using it…. The hydrogen cells’d filled up. So the windmills were going to waste. The feedstock was worth practically nothing.”

Natalie said, “What’s the point of having private property if all it does is rot?”

“Oh, please. Private property is the most productive property. Temporary inefficiencies don’t change that. Only kooks and crooks think that stealing other property is a valid form of political action.”

But Jacob’s circular logic is necessary, as Natalie points out.

He wants to be the one percent of the one percent of the one percent because of his inherent virtue, not because the system is rigged. His whole identity rests on the idea that the system is legit and that he earned his position in it fair and square and everyone else is a whiner.

That same desire, in the real world, is the reason billionaires like the Koch brothers pour so much money into pet right-libertarian think tanks just to churn out second-hand pablum justifying their wealth. And it’s a successful strategy, at least with some people; all you have to do is check the reply threads under any social media post critical of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk to see dozens of sycophants saying some variation of “Who cares? It’s his money — he earned it” or “If you don’t like it work harder and earn some money of your own.” And beneath this meritocratic myth is an even uglier Hobbesian myth.

“…I think that the tragedy of human existence is our world is run by people who are really good at kidding themselves, like your father. Your dad manages to kid himself that he’s rich and powerful because he’s the cream and has risen to the top. But he’s not stupid. He knows he’s kidding himself. So underneath that top layer of bullshit is another, more aware belief system: the belief that everyone else would kid themselves the same way he does, if they had the chance….

“His beliefs don’t start with the idea that it’s okay to kid yourself you’re a special snowflake who deserves more cookies than all the other kids. It starts with the idea that it’s human nature to kid yourself and take the last cookie, so if he doesn’t, someone else will, so he had better be the most lavishly self-deluded of all, the most prolific taker of cookies, lest someone more horrible, immoral, and greedy than he gets there first and eats all the cookies, takes the plate, and charges rent to drink the milk.”

I suspect there’s yet another, equally twisted layer to this ideology. Deep down they believe that if people are left to their own devices, without being kept busy with the requirement to work in order to survive, they’ll run wild and wreck all the progress that people like Jacob Redwater have painstakingly built up over the millennia. People are naturally self-centered, short-sighted, and amoral, and stable societies are only possible when equally amoral — but more intelligent — elites keep them in line. It’s necessary to destroy abundance in order to preserve society.

In the same conversation Hubert, Etc disposes of Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” with the contempt it deserves.

“Sounds like bullshit to me.”

“Oh, it is…. It’s more than mere bullshit. It’s searing, evil, world-changing bullshit. The solution to the tragedy of the commons isn’t to get a cop to make sure sociopaths aren’t overgrazing the land, or shunning anyone who does it, turning him into a pariah. The solution is to let a robber-baron own the land that used to be everyone’s, because once he’s running it for profit, he’ll take exquisite care to generate profit forever.”

“That’s the tragedy of the commons? A fairy tale about giving public assets to rich people to run as personal empires because that way they’ll make sure they’re better managed than they would be if we just made up some rules? God, my dad must love that story.”

“It’s the origin story of people like your dad,” Hubert, Etc said….

II.

In a discussion of alternatives for reform, none of which seems to be satisfactory or politically viable, Hubert, Etc raises the question that the rest of the book spends answering: “What about walkaways?…. Seems to me that they’re doing something that makes a difference. No money, no pretending money matters, and they’re doing it right now.” Hubert, Natalie, and their friend Seth decide to check it out.

In keeping with convention for this genre, the reader is introduced to the utopian society through the eyes of the three outsiders and learns its mechanics along with them.

The walkaway society — which apparently emerged a decade or so earlier — exists in areas on the margins of neoliberal capitalism, mainly in rural or decaying places not worth enforcing territorial control over, and using waste or abandoned materials similarly not worth enforcing ownership of. Its largely post-scarcity and communistic economy is an ad hoc mix of high-tech open-source hardware hacking, p2p organization, and vernacular materials and design.

The Belt and Braces Inn, where the three travelers initially make contact with walkaway society, is our introduction to its basic principles. It’s a sort of combination restaurant/pub, hostelry, community hub, and co-living space. The Belt and Braces 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 scrapse 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.

The B&B power source was hydrogen fuel cells, recharged by wind-driven electrolysis of waste water.

As mentioned before, not only the construction process, but all day-to-day activities were governed by walkaway society’s combined ethos of permissionlessness and freedom from work ethic: “You’re not supposed to covet a job, and you’re not supposed to look down your nose at slackers, and you’re not supposed to lionize someone who’s slaving. It’s supposed to be emergent, natural homeostasis….” As explained by Limpopo, a veteran member of B&B: “Asking someone if you can pitch in is telling them that they’re in charge and deferring to their authority. Both are verboten. If you want to work, do something. If it’s not helpful, maybe I’ll undo it later, or talk it over with you, or let it slide.”

Another illustration of the technological basis of the walkaway economy is a community built in the relatively early days of walkaway culture, as recounted by Limpopo:

We’d built rammed-earth houses on the escarpment, two dozen of them. Real refu-luxury: power, water, fresh hydroponics, and soft beds. Took about three hours a day each to keep the whole place running. Spent the rest of the time re-creating a Greek open-air school, teaching each other music and physics and realtime poetry. It was sweet. I helped build a pottery and we were building weird wheels that did smart adaptic eccentric spinning in response to your hands and mass, so that it was impossible to throw a non-viable pot.

The harshest bit of the three new walkaways’ introduction to the new society was discovering their travel gear had been ripped off. Limpopo took that as a teachable moment for explaining the minimalist ethos of traveling light, keeping information backed up, and treating physical goods as replaceable.

The latter point was driven home by their visit to the community fablab, more or less standard for all walkaway settlements, where they replaced their stolen gear. The process involved shopping through the fablab’s large inventory of designs for just about any kind of good anyone could imagine, adding the selections to a checkout basket along with size and other options specified, and executing the production cycle (which usually took a few hours). It could be done faster, “but this rate allows us to use feedstock with more impurities by adding error-correction passes.” The inventory included medicine produced by wet-printers.

Communications infrastructure was largely ad hoc and with high degrees of latency; connectivity was sporadic, often involving large data dumps when broken connections were routed around or relay airships came into range and reestablished connection.

Some of the best R&D in the world took place at the various Walkaway U campuses.

For a decade, word around the world’s top research institutions was that the most creative, wildest work happened in walkaway. It leaked into default: Self-replicating beer and semi-biological feedstock decomposers that broke down manufactured goods into slurries ready to be dumped into printers. A lot of radio stuff, things you could only pull off through cooperative models of spectrum management, where any radio could speak in any frequency, all radios cooperating to steer clear of each other, dynamically adjusting their gain, shaping their transmissions with smart phased arrays.

One reason for walkaway’s superior technology is the absence of the proprietary capitalist restraints on progress.

“You know, when the first walkaway prostheses projects started, most of the people contributing had lost an arm or a leg in Belarus or Oman, and were tired of paying a loan shark for something that hurt and barely worked and could be remotely repossessed by an over-the-air kill-switch if they missed a payment. But once they got here and started living, realized how much had been left on the table by conservative companies that didn’t want to get into a patent fight and didn’t see any reason to add advanced functionality to something that you didn’t have any choice about, they got radicalized.

“They stopped saying ‘I just want to make an arm that’ll get through the day,’ and started saying ‘I want an arm that does everything my old arm did.’”

As Cory Doctorow has noted, he intended walkaway society’s discouragement of work ethic and reputation-scoring as a deliberate contrast to the Bitchun Society of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, where a reputational mechanism (“whuffie”) was used to allocate scarce goods like personal attention, preferred locations, etc. As explained by Limpopo:

“If you do things because you want someone else to pat you on the head, you won’t get as good at it as someone who does it for internal satisfaction. We want the best-possible building. If we set up a system that makes people compete for acknowledgement, we invite game-playing and stats-fiddling, even unhealthy stuff like working stupid hours to beat anyone. A crew full of unhappy people doing substandard work. If you build systems that make people focus on mastery, cooperation, and better work, we’ll have a beautiful inn full of happy people working together well.”

III.

A question that always arises, in discussions of interstitial projects that involve “building the new society in the shell of the old,” is how the old and new society get along and whether the old society just lets it happen. Will neoliberal society shut down post-capitalist experiments like it did Allende’s Chile? Will US or EU drones and mechas destroy server farms in Iceland to enforce global copyright accords, or engage in house-to-house fighting to stamp out federations of commons-based municipal projects in Europe?

In this case the old society — “default,” in walkaway slang — largely ignored walkaway society for most of its history until around the time of the story. There were sporadic attacks by state military forces on walkaway settlements, variously justified as reprisals for “harboring fugitives,” “terrorism,” and “intellectual property violations.” But they were mostly just that — sporadic. Walkaway society served as a safety valve for the surplus population of default society, without seriously challenging the zottas’ economic exploitation of those who remained in their jurisdiction.

But in the time-frame of Walkaway, there’s been a sharp uptick in the number and severity of government and corporate military attacks. The reason for the change is that walkaway scientists — themselves in large part deserters from default institutional science who find the walkaway atmosphere more congenial — are on the verge of achieving a breakthrough in human immortality before their counterparts in default. Since the whole zotta project involves withdrawing into fortified city-states, space platforms, and other stately pleasure domes — and ultimately achieving immortality while they abandon the rest of the human race as superfluous — the idea that a bunch of dirty fucking hippies might beat them there is intolerable.

What’s more, the idea that the zottas might speciate into a separate immortal race, on top of all the other indignities they inflict on humanity, is undermining their legitimizing ideology and rendering subject populations less governable. Hence the zottas are even more desperate to ensure that they reach the goal first.

“It’s one thing to imagine a life of working to enrich some hereditary global power broker when you know you got eighty years on the planet, and so does he…. But the thought of making those greedy assholes into godlike immortals, bifurcating the human race into infinite Olympian masters and mayflies, so they not only get a better life than you could ever dream of but they get it forever…”

She sighed. “They’re scared. They keep raising salaries, doesn’t matter. Offering benefits, doesn’t matter. Stock, doesn’t matter. A friend swears some zotta was trying to marry him into the family, just to keep him from defecting… It’s a race: either the walkaways release immortality to the world, or the zottas install themselves as permanent god-emperors.”

Researchers at Walkaway U successfully scan and upload a human mind to computer hardware for the first time, figuring out how to keep the personality running on a meta-stable basis without existential meltdown spinning into an out-of-control positive feedback cycle.

The prospect of human immortality is the ultimate development of the walkaway ethos of minimalism and non-attachment. Any physical good can be replicated in a fab lab in hours. Settlements can be rebuilt from scavenged materials bigger and better in a matter of months if they’re taken over or destroyed (as the B&B was at one point in the story). And now the same promises to become true of the human body as an accessory to consciousness. It will be possible to literally “walk away” from anything and start over.

Watching the new B&B conjure itself had been a conversion experience, a proof of the miraculous on Earth. They’d walked away from the old B&B when those assholes had shown up, and pulled a new one from the realm of pure information. That was their destiny. Things could be walked away from and made anew; no one would ever have to fight. Not yet — they couldn’t scan people at volume, couldn’t decant them into flesh. But there would come a day… when there would be no reason to fear death. That would be the end of physical coercion. So long as someone, somewhere, believed in putting you back into a body, there would be no reason not to walk into an oppressor’s machine-gun fire, no reason not to beat your brains out on the bars of your prison cell….

IV.

Of course the zottas realize this as well. With indisputable news of walkaway’s achievement of human immortality, the previous generation’s Cold War between default and walkaway turns very hot. Walkaway settlements all over the world are raided, obliterated, and have their populations either exterminated or taken into captivity.

At the same time, the dramatic rupture and sense of revolutionary momentum motivates entire cities within default jurisdictions — Akron, Liverpool, Minsk, and others — to go rogue and transform themselves into revolutionary walkaway communes. Take Akron, for instance:

Walkaways did a coordinated mass squat on the whole downtown, 85 percent of which was boarded up and underwater…. They’d flown under the radar, smooth and coordinated. One day, Akron was haphazardly squatted by homeless people, the next, a walkaway army reopened every shuttered building, including fire stations, libraries, and shelters. Factories turned into fabs, loaded with feedstock, powered by eggbeater fields that sprung up overnight, electrolyzing hydrogen from sludge flowing in the Little Cuyahoga River, feeding hydrogen cells that walkaways wrestled around in wheelbarrows.

Default was caught off guard. Connecticut flooding had FEMA and the National Guard tied up. The contractors who backstopped FEMA couldn’t use their normal practice of hiring local talent as shock troops. By the time they mobilized, their entire recruiting pool was walkaway.

It gave the Akron walkaways — they called themselves an “ac-hoc,” said they were practicing “ad-hocracy” — a previous week to consolidate. By the time default besieged Akron, they were a global media sensation, source of endless hangouts demonstrating a happy world of plenty salvaged from a burned husk with absentee owners.

The effect of the first genuine walkaway cities is revolutionary. Until the outbreak of open warfare, walkaway “tend[ed] to be a building or two, a wasp’s nest wedged in a crack in default,” in order to avoid presenting anything default would consider a threat to be destroyed.” The emergence of walkaway communities on the scale of Akron amounted to “walk towards.” In response to Limpopo’s prediction that the government would nuke Akron before allowing it to stand as an example, another B&B member — Tam — replied: “Seriously, fuck that. The point of walkaway is the first days of a better nation. Back when that was more than an eye roll, it was a serious idea. Someday, walkaway and default will swap places.”

Of course default responds by brutally suppressing the rogue cities. The US army and private contractors advanced in force with drones, mechas, and armored vehicles, officially in the name of fighting “the Four Horsemen” always used to justify state terror by imperialist nations: “pornographers, mafiosi, drug dealers, and terrorists.”

The two dozen buildings targeted by air strikes included a hospital, on the pretext that it was producing biological warfare agents. In reality it was printing out ebola and H1N1 vaccines without licenses. Missiles and aerostats also took out the city’s Internet with strikes on the fiber optic infrastructure and wireless routers. Next, the “boots on the ground phase,” tasing and tear gassing by “pacifier bots,” ensued.

But the assault on Akron only caused efforts to escalate on the walkaway side. Akron itself didn’t just roll over, and the repression inspired a worldwide support network to engage in resistance.

That was the push; then came the pushback. The walkaways and Akronites who’d assumed control of the city planned for this kind of shock/awe. They had bunkers, aerostat-seeking autonomous lasers, dark fiber backups that linked up to microwave relays far out of town, offline atrocity-seeking cameras that recorded footage automatically when the network went dark, crude HERF weapons that stored huge amounts of solar energy whenever the sun shone, ready to discharge in a powerful whoomf the moment they sensed military spread-spectrum comms.

Once the word got out about Akron, there was online pushback, too. Walkaways all over the world battered at the comms and infrastructure of the contractors in the vanguard, the DHS, the DoD, the White House internal nets, the DNC’s backchannels, Seven Eyes chatter nets — the whole world of default super-rosa and sub-rosa connectivity. Walkaway backbones prioritized traffic out of Akron, auto-mirrored it across multiple channels.

The walkaway propaganda machine was also going full-blast, with suicide drones capturing and transmitting footage of atrocities despite default’s efforts to censor events in Akron from the mass media and control the narrative. Soldiers and private mercenary contractors were identified from video footage and doxxed, and open letters sent to their families to shame them. The doxxings often started a chain reaction of defections and destroyed morale.

Kids left home, leaked their parents’ private documents implicating their superiors, publishing secret-above-secret rules of engagement with instructions to use lethals when cameras were off, to buy evidence, or implicate insurgents in atrocities. Sometimes parents disowned children who’d done zottas’ dirty work, publicly disavowing slaughter. It split families and communities, but it also brought new ones together.

The ripple effect resulted in general strikes, and mass demonstrations in major cities on a scale sufficient to absorb all police resources — after which new demonstrators continued to pour into the streets. In some places walkaway prisoners were freed when guards simply unlocked the doors and abandoned their jobs.

Meanwhile, Akron itself was rebuilt after the jackboots withdrew from the scene.

The new Akron, built on the site of the leveled buildings, refused to be a graveyard. The people who’d flocked to it to rebuild after the army and the mercs and the guardsmen had joined returning locals to build new kinds of buildings, advanced refugee housing straight out of the UNHCR playbook, designed to use energy merrily when the wind blew or the sun shone, to hibernate the rest of the time. The multistory housing interleaved greenhouses and hydroponic market-gardens with homes, capturing human CO2 and giving back oxygen. They were practically space colonies, inhabited by some of the poorest people in the world, who adapted and improved systems so many other poor people had improved over the disasters the human race had weathered. The hexayurt suburbs acted as a kind of transition zone between default and the new kind of permanent walkaway settlement, places where people came and went, if they decided that Akron wasn’t for them.

Akron wasn’t the first city like this — there was Lodz, Capetown, Monrovia. It was the first American city, the first explicitly borne of the crackdown on walkaways. It put the State Department in the awkward position of condemning a settlement that was functionally equivalent to many it had praised elsewhere.

The wave of all-out violence between default and walkaway — popularly named World War Default — was followed, after an interval of turbulence, by the Walkaway Decade. Default more or less folded on its efforts to violently eradicate walkaway society, although the zottas persisted in their strongholds (“walled cities, the Harrier-jet-and-mountaintop set”) and default society persisted to a greater or lesser degree as contested terrain. Projects on the Akron model continued to spread among rust-belt towns like Gary, some of them technically the property of holding companies that had bailed them out of bankruptcy. All kinds of default facilities were simply abandoned and converted to walkaway use, like an enormous private prison complex outside Kingston, Ont. previously owned by TransCanada. The refurbishment project “followed a template that was developed and formalized in the stupidly named ‘Walkaway Decade.’”

Some walls came down, others went up. They’d build rammed-earth machines and add sprawling wings and ells, almost certainly an onsen, because that was de rigueur at anything walkaway bigger than a few people.

The rhythm of the place would change. On days when the sun shone or the wind blew, they’d run coolers with abandon, heat huge pools of water for swimming and bathing, charge and loose drones and other toys. When neither were around, the buildings would switch to passive climate control, the people would switch activities to less power-hungry ones.

Iceweasel (formerly Natalie) tries to tell a resurrected Limpopo, several years after the war, how much things have changed.

“Limpopo,” Iceweasel said, softly. “It’s not like that anymore. Default isn’t the default. I know what it was like. It looked like war, they were going to lock us away or kill us. It changed. The zottas went to war against each other, fought for control over countries whose people refused to fight for any side, walked away with us, turned refugee living into the standard. It was the people who stayed in one place and claimed some chunk of real estate was no one else’s became weirdos. Everyone else hit the road when those people showed.

…“There are enclaves of people who pretend that it’s normal and things will go back the way they were or were supposed to be soon. These days, it’s not about armed conflict, it’s war of norms, which of us is normal and who are the crazy radicals.”

Walkaway culture is destroying nation-state governments’ ability to control their own people all over the world. An attempted Iranian invasion of Iraq failed because most of the troops on both sides were involved in a Gulf-wide walkaway affinity group. The Iranian pilots landed their jets in Kurdistan rather than carry out their bombing missions; infantrymen refused to fight and some officers deserted along with them. The same thing occurred on the Iraqi side, with the minority of soldiers who attempted to obey orders being disarmed by their comrades. Rumors circulated that generals on both sides had given orders to drone mutinous troops, but had tried to avoid drawing further attention to themselves after drone operators refused to obey orders.

An anti-climax of sorts occurs when TransCanada sends an army of private mercenary contractors to reclaim its private prison complex, presumably as a trial run for restoring default control of other walkaway enclaves. But the transition was already too far-gone for the attack to succeed. Things had reached a tipping point where most mercenaries were one or two degrees of separation from a walkaway relative, and they were relentlessly propagandized to defect. Many of them did, and gradually coalesced into a separate group within view of the standoff. At the same time, walkaway broadcasts of the attempted assault and the scale of damage to the facilities caused TransCanada share value to implode. In the end, the confrontation was brought to an end by a crowd of hundreds of civilians, accompanied by the walkaway private cops in full body armor, marching into the prison complex and simply surging past the paralyzed besieging forces and forming a human chain around the buildings. Some of TransCanada’s remaining mercenaries defected, and the rest retreated to their APCs and left in defiance of orders.

The story resumes a generation later, when walkaway scientists have developed the ability to download human consciousness back into cloned bodies. Iceweasel, who died of cancer, awakens in a new body and is greeted by Hubert, Etc in a more recent body of his own. The clear implication is that the conflict is long over, and walkaway is the new default.

V.

Doctorow has mentioned being influenced by Rebecca Solnit’s work on spontaneous grassroots disaster relief and mutual aid in writing this book. It comes through in Limpopo’s expression of faith that humanity will reach a tipping point towards default because “covered-dish people” outnumber “shotgun people”:

“If there’s a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor’s house with a) a covered dish or b) a shotgun? It’s game theory. If you believe your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun, you’d be an idiot to pick a); if she believes the same thing about you, you can bet she’s not going to choose a) either. The way to get to a) is to do a) even if you think your neighbor will pick b). Sometimes she’ll point her gun at you and tell you to get off her land, but if she was only holding the gun because she thought you’d have one, then she’ll put on the safety and you can have a potluck.”

And the abundance of walkaway society turns people into covered-dish types. “There’s not any reason not to be one when we can all have enough, so long as we’re not fucking each other over.”

That’s borne out by certain accounts of history, by the way. In Riane Eisler’s typology, foraging groups and neolithic agrarian villages were, under normal circumstances, relatively egalitarian “cooperator societies.” “Dominator societies” — with authoritarian social hierarchies, harsh punishment of dissent, strict gender roles, and patriarchal sky-father religions — arose among nomadic peoples living under harsh scarcity conditions in marginal deforested or desertified environments. These people saw existence as a zero-sum game and turned to conquest. It’s a plausible hope — one I cling to, at least — that conditions of abundance and security will eventually heal the worst authoritarian tendencies in our society and lead to the predominance of a better type of human.

VI.

Cory Doctorow is by far the best author of near-future post-scarcity fiction I know of (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Makers and some short stories I reviewed on my postscarcity blog), and of some amazing stories about networked resistance and information freedom movements as well (Pirate Cinema and For the Win!, and a subplot of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town). About the only thing of his that ever just fell flat with me was Rapture of the Nerds, co-authored with Charles Stross. Marge Piercy (Woman on the Edge of Time), Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age), Daniel Suarez (Daemon and Freedom(TM)) and Bruce Sterling (The Caryatids) have written brilliantly on similar themes, some of their work very nearly as good. But none has been remotely as prolific as Doctorow on specifically post-scarcity themes while maintaining such consistent quality.

Of everything Doctorow has written, this book is my favorite. I can’t recommend it highly enough,

Photo by Urban Isthmus

The post Book of the Day: Walkaway by Cory Doctorow appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In 2011 Shareable organized the Share San Francisco conference to promote the city as a platform for sharing, which in turn inspired the “Sharing Cities” movement. The goal of Sharing Cities was to create horizontal linkages between local communities and serve as a platform to coordinate policies for encouraging the growth of sharing economies. Shareable itself, under the “Sharing Cities” tag, highlighted commons-based projects like open-source hailing platforms and other shared mobility projects, coworking spaces, participatory budgeting, multi-family cohousing/coliving arrangements, tool libraries, community land trusts, neighborhood gardens, shared renewable energy, municipalist projects like those in Barcelona and Jackson, hackerspaces and repair cafes, and many more.

Shareable created the Sharing Cities Network as a support platform for the project. According to the project’s website:

Fifty cities around the world began mapping their shared resources in October and November 2013 during Shareable’s first annual #MapJam. This was just the beginning of the Sharing Cities Network – an ambitious project to create one hundred sharing cities groups by 2015.

As of this writing, there are seventy-three cities worldwide listed on their Community Maps page, each one with a detailed map of sharing projects and assets. In addition, the movement led to a series of Sharing Cities Summits, the second of which in 2017 set up the Sharing Cities Alliance — which includes thirty-odd cities worldwide — as a standing body.

The book Sharing Cities is the outgrowth of these nine eventful years. Following an introduction by Gorenflo, in which he summarizes the background of the Sharing Cities movement, states its basic principles and assesses its significance, the book — a collaborative effort by fifteen people — provides over two hundred pages of case studies of local sharing economy projects in dozens of cities.

The case studies, organized topically into eleven chapters, offer fairly comprehensive and systematic coverage of sharing projects in pretty much every functional subdivision of local economies, including land ownership and housing, food, cooperative finance, micro-manufacturing, transportation — and, well, everything else.

As Gorenflo notes in the introduction, the commons “was part of, but not the core of,” the initial Share San Francisco meeting. This changed, he says, because of the realization that “sharing” functions could and would be coopted by the above-mentioned corporate Death Star model if the movement did not explicitly embrace open and commons-based models.

Even more so, it changed because of the Sharing Cities movement’s interaction and cooperative engagement with a number of other commons-based movements. From organizations like the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives (P2P Foundation) founded by Michel Bauwens, to scholar-advocates of commons-based municipal economies like Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione (the closest thing the municipalist movement has to organic intellectuals), and even actual large-scale municipalist policy efforts (those emerging from M15 in Barcelona and Madrid, commons-based movements in Bologna and Amsterdam, older movements like Cooperation Jackson and the Evergreen Initiative in Cleveland, and the efforts that have since proliferated in hundreds of other cities), the Sharing Cities project has drawn inspiration from many areas.

In addition this ecosystem of movements includes a number of Autonomist thinkers like Massimo De Angelis who emphasize the commons as the kernel of an emerging post-capitalist society. And the role of the city in post-capitalist transition has been a theme in the work of thinkers ranging from Murray Bookchin to David Harvey.

All these things coming together amount, between them, to Steam Engine Time for commons-based municipal economies. This is more true than ever in the last couple of years. As even nominally leftist governments like Syntagma in Greece show their impotence or unwillingness to act in the face of neoliberal assault, and fascist or fascist-adjacent leaders come to power in a growing share of the West, municipal platforms and networks of such platforms have become the primary base for popular empowerment.

The importance of the urban commons to cities today is that it situates residents as the key actors — not markets, technologies, or governments, as popular narratives suggest — at a time when people feel increasingly powerless. To paraphrase commons scholars Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione, the city as a commons is a claim on the city by the people. Furthermore, a commons transition is a viable, post-capitalist way forward….

And if the various strands of municipalism add up to an ecosystem, Shareable and Sharing Cities occupy a vital niche in that ecosystem.

On the purely theoretical side, commons-based scholars of post-capitalist transition (De Angelis, for example) have done superb work on the commons as a new mode of production growing within the interstices of capitalism. But aside from general recommendations like growing the commons by incorporating a growing share of the material prerequisites of physical and social reproduction into its circuit, they have been light on the nuts and bolts of institutional examples of such practice. And activists like Chokwe Lumumba and Ada Colau have done amazing work in building local municipal platforms to promote a commons-based model of economic development. But when it comes to developing the full range of tangible alternatives and integrating them into a cohesive commons-based economy, such local movements have been quite uneven in identifying the possibilities. For example Cleveland and Jackson have focused heavily on incubating cooperative enterprises under the inspiration of Mondragon, but have in my opinion failed to take advantage of the potential of open-source information and cheap open-source micromanufacturing machinery for community bootstrapping.

The combined and coordinated development of all the possibilities for sharing economies within a community’s discretion, to the full extent of its discretion, would be revolutionary beyond anything we have seen. What if a municipality incorporated all vacant municipal land and housing into community land trusts, and acted as a cooperative enterprise incubator on the Cleveland and Jackson models, and used the surplus capacity of city and public utility fiber-optic infrastructure to provide low-cost community broadband, and made the unused capacity of public buildings available as community hubs, and implemented participatory budgeting and citizen policy platforms, and facilitated the creation of open/cooperative sharing platforms as alternatives to Uber, and facilitated the creation of hackerspaces and repair cafes and Fab Labs and garage factories, and required government offices and public education facilities to use open-source software and mandated that all publicly funded research and scholarship be in the public domain? All at the same time? It would amount to an entire commons-based economy, comprising a sizeable core of the entire local economy, with synergies and growth potential beyond imagining.

This is where Shareable comes in, and where it has done more than anyone else to kick-start needed action. Shareable took the lead not only in encouraging municipalities to become platforms for supporting and facilitating local sharing economies. It also promoted concrete mapping projects in individual cities to systematically identify and catalog all the potential assets for incorporation into a commons-based economy, and publicized concrete examples of commons-based praxis in all areas of social, economic, and political life from around the world. The subsequent emergence of other efforts at urban commons mapping and commons-based development policies in specific cities around the world (particularly notable is the P2P Foundation’s efforts in Ghent) is arguably the fruit of a seed planted by Shareable.

If scholars like De Angelis point to the commons as the core of the post-capitalist economy, and Barcelona and Madrid point to the municipality as the primary locus for facilitating commons-based projects, then Shareable has taken the lead in cataloging and sharing the full range of specific examples of such projects and encouraging others to follow their example.

Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons embodies this cataloging and sharing project. Given the number of localities with municipalist movements, and the number of local activists and tinkerers worldwide developing commons-based projects, there are more projects on the ground than would fit into a thirty-volume encyclopedia, let alone one book. But the survey in Sharing Cities is a representative sample of the full range of what’s being done; every case study can be taken as a proxy for what others are doing in countless other communities around the world.

In short, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in what’s being done on the ground to build the society of the future.

The post Book of the Day: Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this article, Shukaitis surveys “the particular role outer space and extraterrestrial voyage play within the radical imagination.” In particular, he sees , and a way to construct utopian worlds that give meaning to our struggles for justice in this world here and now. In autonomist Marxist terms, it presents fictional scenarios of what autonomists call “recomposition” — rebuilding, under our own hegemony, the social spaces and institutions that have been destroyed and atomized by capitalism — in an outer space setting. It was “a forward projection of an outside to capitalism enabling a space of possibility in the present.”

Leftist social criticism has displayed an ambivalent set of attitudes towards outer space — attitudes that mirror the dichotomy between the techno-utopian and primitivist or technophobic strands of the Left. Although many see outer space (whether in fictional scenarios or real agenda) as an arena for building post-capitalism and lifting the earth itself out of its current state, some quarters see it as a frivolous diversion of resources from fixing poverty and inequality here on earth.

Perhaps an interesting question… is not so much a question of whether there is a presence of outer space imagery and extraterrestrial travel residing within the workings of the social imaginary, but of their function. Their presence is felt both when the poet and songwriter Gil Scott-Heron complains that he can’t pay his doctor bills or rent and wonders what could be done with all the resources that would be available if they weren’t being spent on getting ‘Whitey on the Moon’ (1971), and when Stevie Wonder contrasts the utopian conditions of ‘Saturn’ (1976), which are peaceful and free from capitalist exchange, with conditions and problems of the urban ghettos.

Outer space is a favorite setting for radical treatment, Shukaitis argues, because “the unknown and the mysterious are almost by definition of particular fascination to those crafting mythopoetic narratives and imagery.”

This has long been true of imaginary settings other than outer space, I would note, going back to ancient festivals (recounted by James Scott in Domination and the Arts of Resistance) in which the world was turned upside-down for a day and the social order inverted, medieval peasant utopias like Cockaigne, the 20th century hobo utopia of Big Rock Candy Mountain, and Jimi Hendrix’s vision of an Atlantean escape from the ugliness of war and capitalism in the “1983” suite.

The ruling classes have been aware of the subversive potential of such speculation, Shukaitis writes, as demonstrated by the post-WWII wave of repression against utopian collectivism in fiction and the corresponding popularity of anti-collectivist themes in works like 1984 and Invasion of the Body Snatchers that treat any alternative to “our free enterprise system” and the American model of individualism as a totalitarian dystopia. And as the latter example indicates, themes of alien invasion have been used to play up xenophobia against other nations of our own species.

This does not mean, of course, that technological utopianism as such has not been used in the dominant narrative. As Shukaitis points out, American-style “rugged individualism” and the export of the “pioneer spirit” to the frontiers of space were recurring theme in Golden Age science fiction.

At the same time, libertarian socialist techno-utopian themes were seen as a threat not just to corporate capitalism as a system of power, but to authoritarian state communism. Although “early efforts towards cybernetic communism were initially developed within the Soviet Union,” they were ultimately repressed because the party “feared, rightly, that they could not control it.” (Actually, if I recall correctly, it was the Soviet military leadership that vetoed conversion of the military’s computer network into the backbone of a civilian Internet as was done with Arpanet in the United States.)

Shukaitis can’t let the theme of radically utopian treatments of outer space pass without mentioning one of the most bizarre examples, that of the dissident Trotskyite Juan Posadas, who not only hoped advanced aliens would export communism to the earth, but looked forward to a devastating nuclear war as the trigger for revolution and post-capitalist transformation.

Getting back to our earlier dichotomy between positive and negative views of technology on the Left, anarcho-primitivism “does not find much considered redeemable” in the space travel genre, any more than it does in technology in general. This determinist view of technological development, Shukaitis says, is a form of mystification that reflects their unfamiliarity with it, and ignores the radically divergent alternatives presented by technology depending on the nature of the structural power framework into which it is integrated.

In language that echoes David Graeber, Shukaitis notes that the actual development of technology under late capitalism has been a considerable disappointment, compared to the utopian predictions in popular fiction. Technological development has been disproportionately diverted into servicing institutional needs like the Military-Industrial Complex, waste consumption to overcome the crisis of overaccumulation and idle production capacity, and the control and distribution infrastructures required by corporate globalization, and not to reducing hours of labor or making daily life more fulfilling.

This leaves us with the necessity of contesting state and capitalist control of the process of technological development, and harnessing it to our own liberatory ends. And speculative fiction, Shukaitis argues, functions as a sort of cognitive map for this purpose: “an imaginal landscape is a precondition for actually finding a northwest passage in the physical world.” In this regard, the fictional setting of outer space is more symbolic than literal, implying not so much “a conception of exodus in physical terms” as “one in terms of intensive coordinates.”

In other words a shift towards an exodus that does not leave while attempting to subtract itself from forms of state domination and capitalist valorization.

Shukaitis mentions hippie dropout communities and Italian autonomist social centers as examples of such exodus within the physical surroundings of capitalist society.

Similar themes of exodus were developed in Afrofuturist science fiction, “which as a literary and cultural movement is based on exploring the black experience through the relation between technology, science fiction and racialization.” In particular he mentions the fascinating decades-long trajectory of the Sun Ra Arkestra (including the 1974 film Space is the Place), which fused themes of libertarian alien societies, Afrocentric history and advanced technology, and related them to issues of racial oppression in the United States.

In recent decades space has become a setting for explicit Leftist development of radically utopian and anti-capitalist visions. Shukaitis quotes Eduardo Rothe, who put it as plainly (and messianically) as anyone could want in a Situationist journal in 1969. Rothe directly addresses the seizure of science from capitalism and the state by the people, and its recuperation for their own utopian goals.

Humanity will enter into space to make the universe the playground of the last revolt: that which will go against the limitations imposed by nature. Once the walls have been smashed that now separate people from science, the conquest of space will no longer be an economic or military ‘promotional’ gimmick, but the blossoming of human freedoms and fulfillments, attained by a race of gods. We will not enter into space as employees of an astronautic administration or as ‘volunteers’ of a state project, but as masters without slaves reviewing their domains: the entire universe pillaged for the workers’ councils.

(Leaving aside, obviously, the question of whether there are other people on the worlds out there who aren’t quite ready to be “pillaged.”)

As the example of Rothe suggests, the use of outer space by radical Leftists is not always utopian or fictional. There are efforts here and now to take back space exploration from government agencies and capitalist corporations, and bring it within the domain of free, cooperative, and self-organized human endeavor. Shukaitis mentions the formation of the Association of Autonomist Astronauts in 1995, in protest against the Pentagon’s militarization of space. Although they initially emerged from the radical artistic scene, they formulated (admittedly for the most part as a spur to the imagination) a five-year plan to “establish a planetary network to end the monopoly of corporations, governments and the military over travel in space.”

A more pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts vision along similar lines was presented in the fictional short story “Open Shot” in Analog science fiction magazine, about the Stallman, an open-source hardware group’s victorious entry in a private moonshot competition in a field otherwise dominated by capitalist corporations.

Although Shukaitis’s 2009 article predates most of these developments, the continuing development of cheap micro-manufacturing tools and open hardware communities since then has led to a proliferation of real-world open hardware space projects. Elon Musk’s space ventures have, at the same time, been the source of misguided but understandable hopes along the same lines. In an earlier commentary (“One Cheer for SpaceX”), I surveyed some of the current FOSS space projects and noted that even though Musk’s own corporate vision is toxic, he is nevertheless pushing space technology in cheaper, more modular, and ephemeral directions that can be pirated and otherwise recuperated by commons-based peer production for the eventual post-capitalist expansion into space.

I’m disappointed that Shukaitis didn’t give Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy the attention it deserved, as a fictional scenario of a viable libertarian socialist society being developed on another planet, and providing a demonstration effect for the oppressed peoples of earth that was a real and present danger to the power structure.

In contrast to Robinson’s relatively optimistic visions in the Mars Trilogy and 2312, the television series The Expanse presents a dystopian vision of a solar system under the hegemony of exploitative capitalist corporations.

My own guess is that the truth is a lot closer to Robinson’s vision than to that of the TV show, and capitalist and state technologies of control are simply not equal to the requirements of maintaining hegemony over people living and working off-planet. Once the first mining colonies and space habitats are set up in the asteroid belt, or the first colonies on the moon and Mars, I suspect earth’s government agencies and corporations will quickly discover that whatever contractual arrangements they’ve made with the inhabitants of space — and whatever absentee titles they have to the land and resources those people are working — aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. In that case the future of space will be post-capitalist regardless of what happens here on earth, and may well provide leverage for the transition here at home.

Photo by SerenityRose

The post Essay of the Day: “Space is the (non)place: Martians, Marxists, and the outer space of the radical imagination” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Massimo De Angelis is a thinker very much in the autonomist tradition; he mentions being a student of Harry Cleaver. This comes through loud and clear in his focus on the self-activity of ordinary people, and on the centrality of their self-created and -governed institutions as the kernel of a postcapitalist successor society.

For De Angelis, the defining feature of common goods is not any inherent quality of the goods in question. It is the objective fact of commoning, that is being currently governed as a commons by its members.

By and large, the commons imply a plurality of people (a community) sharing resources and governing them and their own relations and (re)productive processes through horizontal doing in common, commoning…. [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.

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, renew their social compositions, develop multicultures of horizontality, destabilise official science… and give rise to commons ecologies, that is, plural and cooperating commons with institutions and arrangements we cannot predict.

As George Caffentzis writes in his cover blurb, De Angelis does for the commons what Marx did for capital. He posits the commons circuit (C-M-C) 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.

De Angelis criticizes Marx for largely focusing on capital, to the neglect of the role that the commons play in social reproduction under capitalism.

The commons circuit, C-M-C, is a “selling-in-order-to-buy circuit.” 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.”

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.

* * *

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).

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….

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.

…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.

* * *

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.

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…

He advocates a synergy between the commons and the new 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.

* * *

The strategic problem faced by postcapitalist commons is here how to extend the boundaries of their operations, through development, boundary commons and commons ecologies [i.e. uniting different commons into larger interconnected systems], to include the ecological and capitalist systems with which they interrelate.

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…. Capital can mobilise social labour and subject it to its measure, to its valuing of things, through different means…. 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 withdrawal of the means of existence, 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…, that allows movements to construct a powerful ground upon which all other struggles can be waged for all sorts of other commonwealth uses.

And the intensification of capitalist crisis and further proletarization “creates the conditions for the flourishing of reproduction commons….”

This fundamental stratum of commons would, in turn,

be such a crucial strategic asset that they would 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.

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.

The commons circuit’s analog to capital’s expansionary circuit is “boundary commoning.” 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, 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.

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. He quotes Marx on the “beginning” of “the epoch of social revolution.”

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.

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.”

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….

* * *

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.

“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.

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.

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 and Bauwens’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.

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….

1. 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…;
2. maximum accountability and transparency and the ability to recall every public servant… and other stakeholder involved in the production of the service;
3. 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….

He mentions Barcelona en Comu as an example, with such experiments in direct democracy and transparency as participatory budgeting, open policy proposal wikis, etc.

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.” 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.  Authoritarian institutions are always subject to concupiscence, the kind of “war within their members” that St. Paul described in the individual. The commons sector can often hope to find friendly individuals and subcultures within the “Belly of the Beast.”

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.

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 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.

Here a sub-system of society is comprising a set of self-regulation of the commons…. This wider commons ecology, defended and enlarged by social movements, reduces the power to regulate complexity of the state/capital regulator, who is left with the increasingly impossible task of matching society’s variety in order to regulate. This is the case when commons movements outflank the state and capital.

I would note here 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. This is even more so if the self-governed system is largely stigmergic or permissionless, on the model of Wikipedia or open-source software design. A commons ecology that decentralizes and modularizes the complex subsistence and reproduction activities of the spheres of capital and state, and reorganizes them on a permissionless basis, will render them far less complicated than their authoritarian counterparts.

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.

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 transportation is predicated not only on increasing complexity, but also on the multiplication of commons governing such a complexity.

Somewhat similar to Negri’s and Hardt’s choice of “multitude,” De Angelis prefers “commoners” to “workers” as a name for the subject engaged in constructing a postcapitalist society, because it includes “the self-activity of this class in so far as the many-faceted (re)production of livelihoods outside capital,” and “captures both an underpinning relation to capital and a quest for the production of alternatives.” And, I would add, Marx saw the working class’s ultimate task as abolition of itself as a class; this is an ongoing task at present under capitalism, as part of the construction of the successor society here and now.

He identifies, as one of the ideological barriers to the emergence of commoners as a growing class subjectivity, the idea of the “middle class.”

…which I define not as a homogeneous social group, with a given level of income, but as a stratified field of subjectivity disciplined to a large degree to the norms of behaviour of a modern society in which capital has a fundamental role in organising social production through disciplinary markets, enclosures, governance and its profit-seeking enterprises. In other words, ‘middle-classness’ is constituted through an idea of the betterment and order achieved within the boundaries of the capitalist system.

This is especially true, I think, of the United States, which in many ways as a settler society on the frontier of Western capitalism has become simultaneously the savior of old-world capitalism and — with such components of the American ideology as “American Exceptionalism” and “the American Dream” — an intensification of its most toxic tendencies. Building class consciousness against exploitation is probably harder in America than anywhere else in the developed capitalist world because of this internalized tendency of ordinary people to see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” To see this, one need only go to any tweet or Facebook post critical of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, and look at the dozens of replies from sycophantic dudebros outraged at the blot to their escutcheon.

Among other important points, finally, De Angelis stresses the need for intersectionality within the commons as a source of unity.

Photo by nikita_nikiforov

The post Book of the Day: Omnia Sunt Communia, by Massimo De Angelis appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London and New York: Verso, 2015, 2016).

I approached this book with considerable eagerness and predisposed to like it. It belongs to a broad milieu of -isms for which I have strong sympathies (postcapitalism, autonomism, left-accelerationism, “fully automated luxury communism,” etc.). So I was dismayed by how quickly my eager anticipation turned to anger when I started reading it. Through the first third of the book, I fully expected to open my review with “I read this book so you don’t have to.” But having read through all of it, I actually want you to read it.

There is a great deal of value in the book, once you get past all the strawman ranting about “folk politics” in the first part. There is a lot to appreciate in the rest of the book if you can ignore the recurring gratuitous gibes at horizontalism and localism along the way. The only other author I can think of who similarly combines brilliant analysis with bad faith caricatures of his perceived adversaries is Murray Bookchin.

I quote at length from their discussion of folk politics:

As a first approximation, we can… define folk politics as a collective and historically constructed political common sense that has become out of joint with the actual mechanisms of power. As our political, economic, social and technological world changes, tactics and strategies which were previously capable of transforming collective power into emancipatory gains have now become drained of their effectiveness…. Petitions, occupations, strikes, vanguard parties, affinity groups, trade unions: all arose out of particular historical conditions. Yet the fact that certain ways of organizing and acting were once useful does not guarantee their continued relevance…. Our world has moved on, becoming more complex, abstract, nonlinear and global than ever before.

Against the abstractions and inhumanity of capitalism, folk politics aims to bring politics down to the ‘human scale’ by emphasizing temporal, spatial and conceptual immediacy. In terms of temporal immediacy, contemporary folk politics typically remains reactive (responding to actions initiated by corporations and governments, rather than initiating actions); ignores long-term strategic goals in favour of tactics (mobilizing around single-issue politics or emphasizing process); prefers practices that are often inherently fleeting (such as occupations and temporary autonomous zones); chooses the familiarities of the past over the unknowns of the future (for instance, the repeated dreams of a return to ‘good’ Keynesian capitalism); and expresses itself as a predilection for the voluntarist and spontaneous over the institutional (as in the romanticisation of rioting and insurrection).

In terms of spatial immediacy, folk politics privileges the local as the site of authenticity (as in the 100-miles diet or local currencies), habitually chooses the small over the large (as in the veneration of small-scale communities or local businesses); favours projects that are un-scalable beyond a small community (for instance, general assemblies and direct democracy) and often rejects the project of hegemony, valuing withdrawal or exit rather than building a broad counter-hegemony. Likewise, folk politics prefers that actions be taken by participants themselves—in its emphasis on direct action, for example—and sees decision-making as something to be carried out by each individual rather than by any representative. The problems of scale and extension are either ignored or smoothed over in folk-political thinking.

Finally, in terms of conceptual immediacy, there is a preference for the everyday over the structural, valorising personal experience over systematic thinking; for feeling over thinking…; for the particular over the universal…; and for the ethical over the political…. Organizations and communities are to be transparent, rejecting in advance any conceptual mediation, or even modest amounts of complexity…. As a result, any process of constructing a universal politics is rejected from the outset.

Understood in these ways, we can detect traces of folk politics in organizations and movements like Occupy, Spain’s 15M, student occupations…, most forms of horizontalism, the Zapatistas, and contemporary anarchist-tinged politics….

…But no single position embodies all of these dispositions…. The ideas that characterise this tendency are widely dispersed throughout the contemporary left, but some positions are more folk-political than others…. [T]he problem with folk politics is not that it starts from the local; all politics begins from the local. The problem is rather that folk-political thinking is content to remain at (and even privileges) that level…. Therefore, the point is not simply to reject folk politics. Folk politics is a necessary component of any successful political project, but it can only be a starting point…. [Finally,] folk politics is only a problem for particular types of projects: those that seek to move beyond capitalism. Folk-political thinking can be perfectly well adapted to other political projects aimed solely at resistance, movements organized around local issues, and small-scale projects…. Strategic reflection—on means and ends, enemies and allies—is necessary before approaching any political project. Given the nature of global capitalism, any postcapitalist project will require an ambitious, abstract, mediated, complex and global approach—one that folk-political approaches are incapable of providing.

…[F]olk politics lacks the tools to transform neoliberalism into something else…. The project of this book is to begin outlining an alternative—a way for the left to navigate from the local to the global, and synthesise the particular with the universal.

…If complexity presently outstrips humanity’s capacities to think and control, there are two options: one is to reduce complexity down to a human scale; the other is to expand humanity’s capacities. We endorse the latter position.

They trace contemporary folk-political wisdom to the experience of the late ’60s, when the New Left rejected the parallel growth of totalizing bureaucracies in Western corporate capitalism and state communism. Much of this critique, they stipulate, is valid.

…At its most extreme, however, this antisystemic politics led towards the identification of political power as inherently tainted by oppressive, patriarchal and domineering tendencies. This leaves something of a paradox. On the one hand, it could choose some form of negotiation or accommodation with existing power structures, which would tend toward the corruption or co-optation of the new left. But on the other hand, it could choose to remain marginal, and thereby unable to transform those elements of society not already convinced of its agenda. The critiques many of these antisystemic movements made of established forms of state, capitalist and old-left bureaucratic power were largely accurate. Yet antisystemic politics offered few resources to build a new movement capable of contending against capitalist hegemony.

…[The dissemination of feminist, anti-racist, gay-rights and anti-bureaucratic demands on a global level] represented an absolutely necessary moment of self-critique by the left, and the legacy of folk-political tactics finds its appropriate historical conditions here. Simultaneously, however, an inability or lack of desire to turn the more radical sides of these projects into hegemonic ones also had important consequences for the period of destabilization that followed. While capable of generating an array of new and powerful ideas of human freedom, the new social movements were generally unable to replace the faltering social democratic order.

As the old Keynesian/Social Democratic order became destabilized, neoliberalism managed to dominate the debate over a replacement order and control the framing of alternatives, and the Left was unable to offer a coherent, unified counter-proposition. And neoliberalism, by partially conceding to the racial and gender justice demands of the left, gained additional leverage in pursuing its economic agenda

It was against this backdrop that folk-political institutions increasingly sedimented as a new common sense and came to be expressed in the alter-globalisation movements. These movements emerged in two phases. The first, appearing from the mid 1990s through to the early 2000s, consisted of groups such as the Zapatistas, anti-capitalists, alter-globalisers, and participants in the World Social Forum and global anti-war protests. A second phase began immediatedly after the 2007-09 financial crisis and featured various groups united by their similar organisational forms and ideological positions, including the Occupy movement, Spain’s 15M and various national-level student movements…. Drawing influence from the earlier social movements, this latest cycle of struggles comprises groups that tend to privilege the local and the spontaneous, the horizontal and the anti-state…. On its own, however, this kind of politics is unable to give rise to long-lasting forces that might supersede, rather than merely resist, global capitalism.

These are all themes which Srnicek and Williams stated even more crudely and explicitly—if you can believe it—in their accelerationist manifesto of 2013, which they went on to develop into this book. Anything local or horizontalist is “luddite tree-hugging crypto-primmie hippie crap.”

In fairness, in the Afterword to the new edition they issue the disclaimer—no doubt sincere—that the “folk politics” they denounce does not equate localism, horizontalism or prefiguration as such—just the current folk-political tendency to pursue it for its own sake when it is not suited to the situation or is actively counter-productive. Rather, it’s an implicit tendency frequently found within localism, horizontalism and prefiguration. To be more exact, “the concept [of folk politics] is designed to pick out a particular subset of characteristics from them.”

But what they consider problematic about this subset of characteristics is itself conceptually flawed:  they distinguish “good” attempts at local counter-institution building (e.g. the Black Panthers’ community initiatives like school lunches, community patrols, kindergartens, etc.) from “bad” folk-political localism insofar as these movements sought to “scale [their] efforts” in keeping with a global strategy rather than to “withdraw” into a “prefigurative paradise.”

The very reference to “scaling” betrays their failure to examine their real implicit bias against decentralism and horizontalism as such, and all the questionable assumptions behind it. They repeatedly use the expression “scale up”:

…[P]references for immediacy in democracy… hold back its spatial scalability. To put it simply, direct democracy requires small communities…. The very mechanisms and ideals of direct democracy (face-to-face discussion) make it difficult to exist beyond small communities, and make it virtually impossible to respond to problems of national, regional and global democracy…. Small communities of the kind required by direct democracy are not a suitable goal for a modern left movement….

How can it be expanded and scaled up?

But like others I have encountered who share their unconscious technological assumptions, they throw the phrase around without making it at all clear what they mean by it. For example, in an argument with an apologist for industrial agriculture I pointed to the superior productivity of soil-intensive horticulture in terms of output per acre (e.g. Jeavons’s raised bed techniques that can feed one person on one-tenth of an acre); their response was “Yes, but how will you scale it up?” I kept pressing them to explain what that meant: “Why does it need to ‘scale up’ at all? If one person can feed themselves with a tenth of an acre, or a village can feed itself with fifty acres, why does any single operation need to be larger?” I get the impression some advocates of “scaling up” are unable to grasp the possibility of 300 million people brushing their teeth in an uncoordinated effort using their own toothbrushes, unless it is somehow “scaled up” to everybody brushing at one time with a single 10,000 ton toothbrush—coordinated by a central body that formulates tooth-brushing guidelines. If an individual action is already taking place at the optimal scale, the best way to “scale up” is probably to proliferate horizontally.

Their fundamental aesthetic distaste for decentralism and horizontalism as such—all their protestations to the contrary, sincere or not, notwithstanding—is almost palpable. To verify this, we need only look at the much harsher, and less qualified, language in their original manifesto. They go so far as to quote favorably from Lenin’s denunciation of left-communist ideas on self-management as an “infantile disorder.”

Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of this, and it is not worth while wasting two seconds talking to people who do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries).

Behind their shibboleth of “scale” is a broader set of unexamined assumptions that amounts to a “folk politics” of their own:  a set of managerialist just-so stories, inherited from leading economic ideologists of the mass-production era like Schumpeter, Galbraith and Chandler, about the inherent superior efficiencies of large scale and the superior productivity of capital-intensive forms of production. This comes through, repeatedly, in their very choice of examples to illustrate what they consider toxic folk-political versions of localism.

Indeed, highly inefficient local food production techniques may be more costly than efficiently grown globally sourced foodstuffs.

Here I can only suggest an intensive reading course that focuses heavily on Jeavons, Frances Moore Lappe and Permaculture. Most neoliberal defenses of industrial factory farming involve numerous strawman fallacies, typically juxtaposing mechanized chemical agribusiness against archaic stand-ins for “organic” agriculture that ignore modern organic agriculture’s massive incorporation of soil science and microbiology, and the superior efficiency in output per acre of intensive techniques. In addition the “inefficiency” critiques of the food-mile movement and food localism they cite, in particular, are flawed in many ways. Srnicek’s and Williams’s point that long-distance shipping of out-of-season produce may be more energy-efficient than greenhouse growing may be correct in some instances. But for in-season produce Ralph Borsodi’s observation that nothing can beat the efficiency of production at the actual point of consumption stands. “Food-mile” critiques still assume fairly conventional, transportation-intensive retail distribution systems, as opposed to the form food production is likely to actually take in a post-capitalist shift from the cash nexus to social economy: the production of most in-season fruits, vegetables, nuts, etc., in rooftop, backyard and neighborhood gardens, and exchange in neighborhood farmers’ markets.

They also accept at face value all of neoliberal capitalism’s claims about the superior efficiency of “comparative advantage” based on outsourced production and globalized logistic chains. “The rapid automation of logistics presents the utopian possibility of a globally interconnected system in which parts and goods can be shipped rapidly and efficiently without human labour.”

In so doing, they ignore cases where diverse local economies with small-scale production at the point of consumption are objectively more efficient. Indeed they smugly dismiss advocates of industrial relocation as essentially nothing more than Luddite hippies, motivated by false nostalgia and yearning for the “simplicity” of a world long gone.

Other movements argue for an approach of withdrawal, whereby individuals exit from existing social institutions… Often these approaches are explicitly opposed to complex societies, meaning that the ultimate implied destination is some form of communitarianism or anarcho-primitivism.

(Never mind that movements like autonomism also adopt an “approach of withdrawal,” which is explicitly based on the possibilities of advanced technology. They beg the question of whether the best approach to transition, in regard to existing institutions, is to conquer or withdraw from them. Their framing, quoted earlier, of “exit” and “building a counter-hegemony” as mutually exclusive alternatives, is fundamentally flawed; advocates of Exodus see their project as building a counter-hegemony through exit.)

In their localism these tree-hugging folk politicos, they say, ignore the “interconnectedness” of the world.

Shared between all of these [variants of localist ideology] is a belief that the abstraction and sheer scale of the modern world is at the root of our present political, ecological and economic problems, and that the solution therefore lies in adopting a ‘small is beautiful’ approach to the world…. The problem with localism is that, in attempting to reduce large-scale systemic problems to the more manageable sphere of the local community, it effectively denies the systemically interconnected nature o today’s world. Problems such as global exploitation, planetary climate change, rising surplus populations, and the repeated crises of capitalism are abstract in appearance, complex in structure, and non-localised…. Fundamentally, these are systemic and abstract problems, requiring systemic and abstract responses.

…Though undoubtedly well-meaning, both the radical and mainstream left partake in localist politics and economics to their detriment.

In their paean to interconnectedness, they ignore the fact that a great deal of this “interconnectedness” is artificial, resulting from state subsidies and protections to economic activity and division of labor on a scale far beyond the point of diminishing returns. As Murray Bookchin argued, much of the “complexity” used to justify centralism is unnecessary. It can be “rationally simplified”

by reducing or eliminating commercial bureaucracies, needless reliance on goods from abroad that can be produced by recycling at home, and the underutilization of local resources that are now ignored because they are not “competitively” priced: in short, eliminating the vast paraphernalia of goods and services that may be indispensable to profit-making and competition but not to the rational distribution of goods in a cooperative society [“The Ecological Crisis and the Need to Remake Society”].

To take one example of a manufactured need for large scale, consider auto production. Most of existing engine block weight results from the need for additional horsepower for rapid acceleration in freeway driving. And Detroit’s three-story stamping presses result entirely from design choices (i.e. curved body panels) made for purely aesthetic reasons. In a society with mixed-use communities built on the pre-automobile pattern for travel by foot, bike or public transit, and with light rail for travel between communities, the private automobile’s ideal users would be those in low-density areas outside of towns not served by light rail heads (e.g. truck farmers needing to get in and out of town). This could be accomplished with the light engine blocks of the original Model-T factories, or for that matter with light electrical motors produced by local industry. And flat body panels could be cut out in a neighborhood garage factory.

Besides that, “interconnectedness” is not a generic quality—there are different kinds of interconnectedness, and a critique of strawman “localism” that does not differentiate between them is useless; far better is an approach (like the P2P Foundation’s “Design Globally, Produce Locally”) that tailors itself to what’s appropriate for different spheres of life.

And the cooptation of new, decentralized production technologies and job shop production over the past few decades by corporations with global supply chains was only possible by state intervention. Massive transportation subsidies play a role, of course, but perhaps more important is the use of patent and trademark law to give global corporations a legal monopoly on the disposal of outsourced production. They—they, who chide others for clinging to past models in the face of material and technological reality—ignore recent and ongoing developments in production technology that enable a growing share of consumption goods to be produced with cheap micro-manufacturing tools for neighborhood and community consumption, including outside the cash nexus in the informal, social and household sectors, not less but more efficiently than can be done for their much-vaunted global supply and distribution chains.

The most forward-thinking specialists in lean, just-in-time manufacturing themselves say as much. For example H. Thomas Johnson, who wrote the Foreword to Waddell’s and Bodek’s Rebirth of American Industry (a magisterial book on adapting managerial accounting models to the Toyota Production System), argued that introducing Taichi Ohno’s production model into a transnational corporate framework amounted to putting new wine in old bottles.

The cheap fossil fuel energy sources that have always supported [large-scale manufacturing] cannot be taken for granted any longer. One proposal that has great merit is that of rebuilding our economy around smaller-scale, locally-focused organizations that provide just as high a standard living [sic] as people now enjoy, but with far less energy and resource consumption. Helping to create the sustainable local living economy may be the most exciting frontier yet for architects of lean operations.

Lean production guru James Womack observed (Lean Thinking), similarly, that “oceans and lean production are not compatible.” Simply shifting inventories from giant warehouses of finished product or intermediate goods to warehouses disguised as trucks and container ships isn’t really reducing overall inventory stocks at all. It’s just sweeping the batch-and-queue bloat of Sloanism under the rug. The outsourced component manufacturers are located on the wrong side of the world from both their engineering operations and their customers… [in order] to reduce the cost per hour of labor.”

The production process in these remotely located, high-scale facilities may even be in some form of flow, but… the flow of the product stops at the end of the plant.

In other words, Williams and Srnicek are drinking the neoliberal capitalist Kool-Aid in taking at face value the claims of efficiency for global supply and distribution chains. They really do not reflect superior efficiency at all, but rather the irrationalities resulting from perverse incentives under capitalism. Far more efficient, as a high-tech manufacturing model, is a networked local economy of job shops with CNC machines like that of Emilia-Romagna/Bologna, oriented to supplying local markets; or better yet, an economy of even cheaper and smaller tabletop CNC machines in workshops producing for multi-family cohousing projects, neighborhoods and micro-villages.

In short, Srnicek and Williams are at least as guilty as any they criticize of failing to adapt their strategy to changed circumstances; in this case they fail to acknowledge the radical technological advances in cheapening, ephemeralization and reduced scale of production machinery, and to take advantage of their promise for creating a counter-economy outside the existing capitalist economy and leaving the latter to starve for lack of labor-power or demand, instead of taking it over.

They apply similar assumptions to political organization and strategy, treating stigmergic, horizontalist movements enabled by network communications tech as “a rejection of complexity,” or as “unscalable” when they’re actually a different kind of scalability. And accusing the new wave of horizontalist movements of having no strategic vision for scalability or “counter-hegemony” is ridiculous. Whatever you think of it, the municipalist strategy that emerged from M15 and allied movements in Europe is a coherent strategy. If anything US Occupy is an outlier in treating the occupations and General Assemblies as ends in themselves without using them as the launchpad for building an ecology of counter-institutions.

One of the most revolutionary effects of networked communications technology is lowering the transaction costs of stigmergic organization over larger spatial areas.

Stigmergic, or networked, organization is characterized by a module-platform architecture. The way it “scales up” is not by creating progressively larger organizational units under a common management, but by proliferating small units horizontally.

And a key benefit of stigmergic organization is that, in a large horizontal network consisting of many nodes, a useful tactical innovation can be rapidly picked up and adopted by many or most nodes in the network—essentially amounting to the coordinated use of that tactic by the network—without any central coordinating or permission-granting authority being required.

Criticism of Occupy for failing to coalesce around a set of demands like post-work is misplaced, and reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of that movement. Occupy was a platform for an entire stigmergic network of movements, providing a common enemy, a common toolkit, and common symbolism. Any anticapitalist movement opposed to economic inequality and the 1% could access this platform and avail itself of this toolkit, regardless of its specific agenda or goals.

In the case of Occupy, local nodes of the movement developed promising innovations (see the Appendix to my book The Desktop Regulatory State, pp. 379-84) that for the most part were not picked up by the rest of the network. For this the movement deserves legitimate criticism. But it is misleading to chalk this failure up to the horizontalist model as such. This brings us, in turn, to a criticism of the authors that I will repeat later: their reliance on Occupy as a model is itself misleading. The Occupy movement, arguably, was an outlier in the degree to which it relied exclusively or primarily on the encampments as an organizational model, and pursued a version of “prefigurative politics” limited largely to the general assemblies and other internal aspects of the encampments themselves.

Srnicek and Williams argue that spontaneous uprisings like urban unrest in 1960s America, or the Occupy movement, can be very effective in putting pressure on ruling elites. But they fail to do so unless they make alliances with more permanent organizations that can help translate the immediate pressure into concrete political action. For example the Tahrir Square movement in Egypt building ties with organized labor, or Spain’s post-M15 social movements “engag[ing] in a dual strategy both within and outside the party system.

No horizontalist movement that I’m aware of objects to alliances with more permanent organizations. Indeed such alliances with local labor unions, civil rights and social justice organizations, churches, etc., have been part of the basic toolkit of horizontalist organization going back to Saul Alinsky and community campaigns. Speaking for myself, I have no objection even to a dual strategy that includes political parties and electoral politics, so long as efforts within political parties do not crowd out, coopt or suck energy from efforts at counter-institution building. But Occupy’s failure to do so was not a failure of “horizontalism” or “localism.” M15, which the authors here mention favorably, was very much a horizontalist movement.

Their caricature of “prefigurative politics” is equally dishonest. Prefigurative politics is not lifestylist attempts at building “temporary autonomous zones.” It is an attempt at planting the seeds or creating the building blocks of the future society right now, with the intent that they coalesce into something that eventually supplants the existing society.

Contrast Srnicek’s and Williams’s contemptuous dismissal of local prefigurative institutions as doomed exercises in lifestyleism with Massimo De Angelis’s analysis of them as examples of an emerging commons-based alternative mode of production, in Omnia Sunt Communia. The goal is “expansion of the commons systems and their greater integration in commons ecologies” culminating in the future with “claiming the wealth produced by all social cooperation as commonwealth.”

If anyone is guilty of imposing a one-size-fits-all strategy regardless of suitability to the situation, it’s Srnicek and Williams, who ignore the existence of a strategic vision when it is found anywhere but in their own preferred model.

That’s not to say that the building of counter-institutions should not be coordinated with political efforts of various sorts, including the organization of resistance to the state or even parties like Syriza and Podemos. But ideally efforts within party politics will, while promoting political objectives like UBI or copyright rollback, also run interference on behalf of local institution-building efforts and actively promote public awareness and enthusiasm for them. Ideally, a political effort that gains power at the polls like Syriza will pursue a good cop, bad cop strategy in negotiating with neoliberal forces like the European Central Bank: “We’ll try to negotiate with you, but we can’t control what our local comrades on the ground are doing on their own.” The worst-case scenario is what actually happened, with Syriza being coopted by the ECB and used as a stick against the post-Syntagma movements.

And if Occupy made a grave strategic error in fetishizing the General Assemblies as an end in themselves, rather than sporulating into an ecology of institution-building movements like M15—which I agree with Srnicek and Williams that it did—an equally grave error would have been for it to either be coopted internally by the Workers World Party or Avakian cultists, as very nearly happened and was averted by David Graeber and his horizontalist allies, or coopted externally by efforts like Van Johnson’s to transform it into a voter mobilization arm for the Democratic Party’s neoliberal agenda.

Occupy was greatly at fault for not building permanent local alliances on the pattern of Community Campaigns or Corporate Campaigns with a whole range of established labor, environmental and social justice organizations, and directing their energies into building lasting counter-institutions in cooperation with other existing movements after the camps were shut down.

Compare this to M15 in Spain, which actually pioneered the general assembly model picked up by Occupy in the United States. Unlike American occupiers, who mostly viewed the dissolution of the camps as the end of the movement, the Spanish Indignados took the dissolution of their large general assemblies as a jumping-off point to create small, permanent neighborhood assemblies devoted to building commons-based counter-institutions. These continuing efforts by the Indignados—coming from an ideological space every bit as “horizontalist” as Occupy—eventually grew into the municipalist movements that have achieved major political influence in Barcelona, Madrid and other cities, and spread further to cities across Europe.

Even in the United States, although the direct lines of influence from Occupy are weaker, there is an array both of preexisting municipalist movements in cities like Cleveland and Jackson that were invigorated by the Occupy movement, and many other such local movements that have grown directly out of it.

Even so, it’s true that purely stigmergic coordination may be insufficient in some cases, and that movements must be coordinated by discussion in larger federal bodies. Again, though, the focus on Occupy is misleading. Those municipalist movements in Europe, starting in Spain and spreading through cities all over Europe (Bologna and Antwerp particularly notable among them), have created Assemblies of the Commons and other federal coordinating bodies on a continent-wide scale. But that doesn’t fit the authors’ narrative regarding the failures of “horizontalism.”

Srnicek and Williams  acknowledge Argentina’s achievements compared to Occupy, most notably the factory recuperations. Nevertheless they find them wanting. There was some coordination between neighborhood assemblies in Argentina, but such inter-neighborhood assemblies “never approached the point of replacing the state, or of being able to present themselves as a viable alternative” in providing functions like “welfare, healthcare, redistribution, education, and so on…”

Beyond these organisational limits, the key problem with Argentina as a model for postcapitalism is that it was simply a salve for the problems of capitalism, but not an alternative to it. As the economy started to improve, participation in the neighborhood assemblies and alternative economies drastically declined. The post-crisis horizontalist movements in Argentina were built as an emergency response to the collapse of the existing order, not as a competitor to a relatively well-functioning order….

In the case of both neighborhood assemblies and worker-controlled factories, we see that the primary organisational models of horizontalism are insufficient. They are often reactive tactics that fail to compete in the antagonistic environment of global capitalism.

Yes, prefigurative counter-institutions tend to arise in periods of downturn and crisis, and then to fade away or be coopted in times of recovery. But there is more to the picture than the normal business cycle. Besides cyclical downturns, there are secular or systemic crises characterized by long-term falling direct rate of profit, stagnant wages, growing levels of precarity and underemployment, etc. And these tendencies carry with them a longer-term shift to counter-institutions as normal means of survival. James O’Connor noted, in Accumulation Crisis, that workers not only shifted their efforts in part from wage labor to direct production for use in the household and social economy during downturns, but did the same thing on a more permanent basis in response to long-term systemic downturns.

What it boils down to is an inability on their part to understand “prefiguration” on its own terms. One of their greatest shortcomings, in such strawman attacks on prefigurative institutions, is their failure to take into account that capitalism is a system in terminal crisis. They take a snapshot approach, juxtaposing prefigurative institutions and attempts at “withdrawal” against a triumphal capitalism, and then warn that prefigurative projects will be coopted into the capitalist framework. Prefigurative movements will fail,

partly because they misrecognize the nature of their opponent. Capitalism is an aggressively expansive universal, from which efforts to segregate a space of autonomy are bound to fail. Withdrawal, resistance, localism and autonomous spaces represent a defensive game against an uncompromising and incessantly encroaching capitalism.

But it is Srnicek and Williams who are guilty of misrecognizing the strategic situation. They fail to address the question of whether the system is a system with an end, which won’t be able to keep “encroaching” because it is exhausting its potential for expansion. As they point out themselves:

With the dynamics of accumulation at the heart of capital, a non-expansionary capitalism is an oxymoron.

Yes. Capitalism can only survive by expanding. And it is reaching, or has already reached, the limits of all the kinds of artificial abundance in subsidized resource inputs, and artificial scarcity as a source of rents from enclosure of various commons, which have to this point allowed it to keep expanding. Therefore…?? So close to getting the point, and yet so far.

Srnicek and Williams treat the correlation of forces between the horizontalist movements and their counter-institutions, and the forces of state and capital, as largely static rather than a moment in a multigenerational transition process. But all these local counter-institutions and other building blocks are developing against the backdrop of the decaying system within which they exist.

They are not ephemeral exercises in lifestylism, doomed to be periodically wiped out like Zion in the Matrix trilogy. By far the majority of people and groups engaged in prefigurative efforts see themselves as “scaling up” by creating counter-institutions which will proliferate horizontally and become building block institutions of post-capitalist society. And exodus (“withdrawal”) is based on a strategic assessment of capitalism’s crisis tendencies and vulnerable points, with the aim of taking advantage of the possibilities of new technology for directly producing for consumption in whatever cases it has become cheaper and more efficient to do so than to work for wages and purchase on the cash nexus, in order to starve the wage system and the engine of accumulation.

In the framework of De Angelis, the circuit of capital and the circuit of the commons have coexisted and interacted since the beginning of capitalism, with the correlation of forces between them constantly shifting. We’re in the early states of a transition process in which the correlation of forces are shifting permanently towards the commons.

This longer transition process will be one of the local building blocks coalescing into a whole and supplanting the old system as it becomes progressively weakened and bankrupted and retreats from the scene. And the coalescence of the new system, as various components are adopted more and more widely and grow into an ecosystem, will occur precisely as a “killer app” made necessary for survival by the collapse of the old system. What occurred in Argentina as a local and cyclical phenomenon, and compelled the partial and temporary adoption of alternative economic models, will of necessity occur on a more widespread and permanent basis when the collapse is global and systemic.

Prefigurative alternatives are not the strategic means by which to defeat a properly functioning capitalism in full bloom. They are the seeds of a new system which will gradually develop to replace a system in decay.

And simply assuming that capitalism will coopt them as the basis for a new lease on life via the next Kondratiev wave or “engine of accumulation,” etc., begs the question of whether it can.

Michel Bauwens and Franco Iacomella argue that capitalism is beset by twin crisis tendencies that undermine the two central supports it has depended on up to now for its continued survival and expansion. Those two supports are artificial abundance of cheap, subsidized material resource inputs, and artificial scarcity of information.

1. The current political economy is based on a false idea of material abundance. We call it pseudo-abundance. It is based on a commitment to permanent growth, the infinite accumulation of capital and debt-driven dynamics through compound interest. This is unsustainable, of course, because infinite growth is logically and physically impossible in any physically constrained, finite system.

2. The current political economy is based on a false idea of “immaterial scarcity.” It believes that an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies – for copyrights, trademarks and patents – should restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations. Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity. In an age of grave global challenges, the political economy keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits.

The capitalist economy is reaching the point of Peak Resource crises (e.g. Peak Oil) and the state’s inability to subsidize and socialize input costs as fast as capital’s need for them is growing (thanks to the “fiscal crisis of the state”), and at the time the “intellectual property” laws that capital depends on for a massive and growing share of its profits are becoming increasingly unenforceable.

Likewise, in dismissing (as another manifestation of “folk politics” and “immediacy,” of course) local obstruction and resistance movements like #NoDAPL, they miss the real point: how the proliferation of such movements, against the backdrop of capitalist decay, amount cumulatively to yet another crisis tendency that will further stress the dying system and hasten its death by attrition.

In the specific case of anti-pipeline movements, the combination of obstruction and physical delays, legal and administrative challenges, divestment movements, and sabotage of already completed pipelines, have together become a permanent part of the cost-benefit calculation of any new pipeline project, and reduce the likelihood on the margin that such projects will be completed in the future. In so doing, they have exacerbated (and continue to exacerbate) the system’s declining capacity to provide the extensive addition of subsidized inputs capital relies on for its profits. This is a real shift in the correlation of forces between the dying old system, and the new one-coming into being–regardless of whether or not it is coordinated on a dying level. The system’s growing vulnerability to such disruption, and the increasing feasibility of such disruption, are themselves part of the system’s death process.

In the case of resisting transnational mining corporations, a combined strategy of raising the costs and difficulties for extractive corporations and substituting (on a partial but increasing scale) locally salvaged and recycled inputs, is an approach with potentially systemic effects. That’s all the more true when local import substitution for raw materials, components, etc. is adopted as a solution to increasingly costly and disrupted supply and distribution chains.

Srnicek and Williams themselves seem to recognize as much:

If a populist movement successfully built a counter-hegemonic ecosystem of organisations, in order to become effective it would still require the capacity][to disrupt. Even with a healthy organisational ecology and a mass unified movement, change is impossible without opportunities to leverage the movement’s power. Historically speaking, many of the most significant advances made by the labour movement were achieved by workers in key strategic locations. Regardless of whether they had widespread solidarity, high levels of class consciousness or an optimal organisational form, they achieved success by being able to insert themselves into and against the flow of capitalist accumulation. In fact, the best predictor of worker militancy and successful class struggle may be the workers’ structural position in the economy.

They mention dock-workers, auto workers and coal miners as examples of workers who, at various times in the past, have been able to leverage their structural position into achieving significant victories against capital. I would add that transport and distribution workers, in particular, have a long history of expanding industry strikes into national or regional general strikes starting with the Pullman Strike of the 1890s. Attacks on the distribution system by non-workers (e.g. the highly effective blockade of Israeli shipping on the U.S. West Coast by BDS activists) have also been quite disruptive, especially when joined by workers. And the recently-emergent system of global supply and distribution chains operating on a just-in-time basis is especially vulnerable to disruption.

And again, while strategic coordination to heighten the disruptive effect would be altogether desirable, the fact remains that the increased incidence of such disruptive attacks as part of the background noise of the system, the increasing feasibility of carrying them out, and the increasing vulnerability of global JIT capitalism to disruption by them, are all part of the transition process even without strategic coordination.

And in fact they are strategic in effect, insofar as connectivity is the strategic link in global capitalism, and its vulnerability to disruption is its central strategic weakness.

The same is true of another leverage point against Bauwens’s and Iacomella’s other systemic vulnerability: the declining enforceability of copyrights and patents. The proliferation of cheap, ephemeral production technologies means that the main engine of accumulation has shifted from ownership of the physical means of production to legal control of who is allowed to use them. So anything that undermines this legal control is striking a blow at the heart of the accumulation process.

On the other hand, Srnicek and Williams fail to address a key leverage point against capitalism, and one that has been heavily addressed by autonomists like Negri and Hardt:  its vulnerability, thanks to cheap, ephemeral production technologies scaled to direct production for use in the household sector or for neighborhood and community markets, to exodus. The availability of such alternatives enables the partial and gradual withdrawal of labor from the capitalist wage system and its shift into the social economy–hence depriving the capitalist system, on the margin, of resources it needs and increasing the pressures on it.

Against this backdrop, strategies of obstruction and withdrawal do indeed “scale up,” and make real strategic sense, in a way that Srnicek and Williams fail to recognize. Local economic counter-institutions, by creating possibilities for subsistence outside the global corporate system and draining it of resources, have an effect that is cumulative and synergistic. And coupled with networked resistance campaigns against mining companies, oil and gas pipelines, etc., they achieve a still higher synergy. Even uncoordinated actions that cumulatively raise the costs of resource inputs or undermine artificial scarcity rents from information, obstruct connectivity and disrupt production chains, or sap capital of needed labor-power and demand on the margin–especially in an environment in which such actions, obstructions and withdrawal are proliferating and are facilitated by material and technological developments–are themselves part of the terminal crisis.

So the primary drivers of the post-capitalist transition are likely to be spontaneous. On the one side the crisis tendencies of capitalism, increasing levels of unemployment and underemployment and precarious living conditions of the working class, the failure of employer- and state-based safety nets, Peak Resource Input crises and the state’s faltering ability to provide capital with the subsidies it needs to remain profitable or to enforce patent and copyright law, the state’s inability to suppress cheap and efficient sources of direct subsistence outside the wage system. On the other, the availability of such small-scale, high-tech means of direct production for use in the social economy, and the proliferation of commons-based institutions for co-production and mutual aid. At the same time that growing unemployment and underemployment and the collapsing safety net makes the turn to alternatives imperative, alternatives are coming to hand on an unprecedented level. The only real question is how much path dependency and cultural inertia must be overcome for the pressure on one side to connect with the vacuum on the other, and for a tipping point to be reached; nevertheless the likelihood that such a point will be reached amounts to an issue of hydraulics.

As Srnicek and Williams themselves note:

…Capitalism did not emerge all at once, but instead percolated to a position of dominance over a course of centuries. A large number of components had to be put in place:  landless labourers, widespread commodity production, private property, technical sophistication, centralization of wealth, a bourgeois class, a work ethic, and so on. These historical conditions are the components that enabled the systemic logic of capitalism eventually gain traction in the world. The lesson here is that, just as capitalism relied upon the accumulation of a particular set of components, so too will postcapitalism. It will neither emerge all at once nor in the wake of some revolutionary moment. The task of the left must be to work out the conditions for postcapitalism and to struggle to build them on a continually expanding scale.

And this transition is not something to be brought about only through political activism and the exertion of will, or that will be inevitably be suppressed or coopted by capitalism absent such activism and exertion. There are also material forces in place making for some such transition, on the same pattern as the internal decay of classical political economy and feudalism from their own internal contradictions, and the emergence of successor systems from the coalescence of many components according to laws of growth.

To the extent that they acknowledge the possibility of capitalism being a system in terminal decline, they do so only in passing, as they state that

[a] post-work world will not emerge out of the benevolence of capitalists, the inevitable tendencies of the economy or the necessity of crisis… [T]he power of the left… needs to be rebuilt before a post-work society can become a meaningful strategic option. This will involve a broad counter-hegemonic project that seeks to overturn neoliberal common sense and to rearticulate new understandings of ‘modernisation’, ‘work’ and ‘freedom’. This will necessarily be a populist project that mobilises a broad swath of society….

Perhaps so. Nevertheless, the relative importance of large-scale social mobilization and electoral politics is at its lowest point in over a century, and the importance of prefigurative counter-institutions has grown correspondingly.

That is not to deny that strategic coordination would be invaluable, or that such a transition would be smoother and less painful with the help of friendly forces in electoral politics. I would be the last to deny the possible role of other forms of strategic engagement with the dying system, in addition to the creation of prefigurative building-blocks and working from the ground up, as part of the mix.

Attempts to engage the state to make it less statelike, to (in Proudhon’s phrase) dissolve it in society, are as old as the anarchist movement. In my opinion there is much promise in projects to transform the state along the lines of Michel Bauwens’s “Partner State,” and in concrete efforts like the local municipalist platforms and regional commons assemblies in Europe to achieve something much like that. And there is more to be gained than lost by putting sympathetic parties like Syriza inside national governments—so long as it is clearly understood that their primary role is to run interference on behalf of the social movements efforts on the ground to construct a new society and give them more breathing room, and not (as was actually the case with Syriza) to undertake the primary effort of building the society themselves or using the social movements as bargaining chips in negotiating with the European Central Bank.

Once we get past the part of the book devoted primarily to the critique of “folk politics,” the subsequent sections on the reasons for the triumph of neoliberalism and their own program for a post-capitalist agenda are quite good. Like David Graeber they see the origin of cash nexus-dominated societies and wage labor, not as the natural outgrowth of a “tendency to truck and barter” or the “original accumulation of capital,” but as an imposition of the state. Likewise “private property”—as opposed to possession—as a construct. The process of imposing the cash nexus has entailed the artificial creation of property rights—most notably the nullification of common rights to the land through enclosure, and the creation of “intellectual property”—in order that there be more scarce private goods to truck and barter in. And they understand the massive scale of the ongoing state intervention required to keep the cash nexus functioning.

Our view is that, contrary to its popular presentation, neoliberalism differs from classical liberalism in ascribing a significant role to the state. A major task of neoliberalism has therefore been to take control of the state and repurpose it…. [Unlike classical liberals], neoliberals understand that markets are not ‘natural’. Markets… must instead be consciously constructed, sometimes from the ground up.

At the same time, they credit the Mont Pelerin Society and all the neoliberal nodes clustered around it of building a toolkit of proposals and waiting until the time was opportune to put it forth as an alternative—namely during the crisis of Keynesianism in the 70s. But that is arguably what the decentralist Left is doing in building an ecosystem of counter-institutions, ready to be adopted as survival mechanisms when capitalism hits its terminal crises.

We argue that a key element of any future-oriented left must be to contest the idea of ‘modernity’. Whereas folk-political approaches lack an enticing vision of the future…

Once again we’re back to the straw, which the authors can never leave far behind. In contrasting their embrace of “modernity” with “folk politics,” under which heading they lump essentially all horizontalist movements, they (deliberately?) obscure the existence of movements like autonomism that are very much about reclaiming a vision centered on technological progress.

But straw aside, I’m entirely in favor of their proposal for a recuperated version of the postwar Mont Pelerin strategy, with the Left presenting broad images of an appealing future centered on the liberatory potential of technology.

The classic Leninist strategy of building dual power with a revolutionary party and overthrowing the state is obsolete. Proponents of the Bolshevik Revolution model appear more useful as historical re-enactors than as guides for contemporary politics….

Given the limits of these other approaches [insurrection and reformism], we argue that the best way forward is a counter-hegemonic strategy…. A counter-hegemonic strategy entails a project to overturn the dominant neoliberal common sense and rejuvenate collective imagination. Fundamentally, it is an attempt to install a new common sense…. In this, it involves preparatory work for moments when full-scale struggle erupts, transforming our social imagination and reconfiguring our sense of what is possible. It builds up support and a common language for a new world, seeking to alter the balance of power in preparation for when a crisis upsets the legitimacy of society.

The point is, there already are a number of loosely associated subcurrents of the Left promoting similar versions of such a vision right now; just off the top of my head right now, I can think of the P2P Foundation, Grassroots Economic Organizing, the Solidarity Economy Network, and countless networked municipalist efforts like those in Barcelona, Madrid, Bologna, Cleveland and Jackson. And as a pop culture theme, it has resonated with the public at least since Star Trek: The Next Generation. Ideas like Universal Basic Income and social media memes like Fully Automated Luxury Communism are spreading virally, and will increase their reach and impact exponentially as tens of millions are unemployed by automation in the next two decades. It would be wonderful if all these tendencies could do more to create mutual synergies, and promote the general concept of post-scarcity and reduced work as a visible alternative to neoliberalism. But far from engaging in such a cooperative effort, Srnicek and Williams are basically trying to put themselves forward as the inventors of this vision, and caricature all the subcurrents that have already been promoting it all this time as a bunch of Luddites.

The book’s treatment of “synthetic”–as opposed to both “negative” and “positive”–freedom is especially good.

Whereas negative freedom is concerned with assuring the formal right to avoid interference, ‘synthetic freedom’ recognizes that a formal right without a material capacity is worthless. …[W]e are all formally free not to take a job, but most of us are nevertheless practically forced into accepting whatever is on offer…. This reveals the significance of having the means to realise a formal right, and it is this emphasis on the means and capacities to act that is crucial for a leftist approach to freedom…. The more capacity we have to act, the freer we are…. A primary aim of a postcapitalist world would therefore be to maximise synthetic freedom, or in other words, to enable the flourishing of all of humanity and the expansion of our collective horizons….

Underlying this idea of emancipation is a vision of humanity as a transformative and constructible hypothesis:  one that is built through theoretical and practical experimentation and elaboration…. What we are and what we can become are open-ended projects to be constructed in the course of time…. This is a project of self-realisation, but one without a pre-established endpoint. It is only through undergoing the process of revision and construction that humanity can come to know itself…. Emancipation, under this vision, would therefore mean increasing the capacity of humanity to act according to whatever its desires might become.

They echo Gramsci on the transition from the “realm of necessity” to a realm of freedom. Reduction of necessity is positive freedom. For much of human history, living in a community entailed having a guaranteed right of access, or share, in the community’s common ownership of much of the means of livelihood. And the movement for commons governance entails treatment of a growing share of the prerequisites for action as a social commons.

A full range of synthetic freedom must seek to expand our capacities beyond what is currently possible…. That is to say, freedom cannot simply be equated with making existing options viable, but instead must be open to the largest possible set of options. In this, collective resources are essential. Processes of social reasoning, for instance, can enable common understandings of the world, creating a ‘we’ in the process that has much greater powers to act than individuals alone. Equally, language is effectively cognitive scaffolding that enables us to leverage symbolic thought to expand our horizons. The development, deepening and expansion of knowledge enable us to imagine and achieve capacities that are otherwise unattainable. As we acquire technical knowledge of our built environment and scientific knowledge of the natural world, and come to understand the fluid tendencies of the social world, we gain greater powers to act.

They also agree with Toni Negri and Michael Hardt on a number of topics. For example, the growing share of productivity that results from collective capacities like scientific knowledge, language, culture, etc. We are at the point where emergent aspects of human interaction are becoming the greatest source of productive capacity.

They agree, likewise, with much of their class analysis, e.g. in acknowledging the decomposition of the traditional proletariat and the need for a new revolutionary subject to replace it. However they choose “people” as the new revolutionary subject, which carries vaguely monolithic implications and doesn’t correspond very well to Negri’s and Hardt’s “multitude.”

In order for the “people” of populism to merge, however, additional elements are necessary. First, one particular demand or struggle must come to stand in for the rest…. The difference between a populist movement and folk-political approaches [is that] whereas the  former seeks to build a common language and project, the latter prefers differences to express themselves as differences and to avoid any universalizing function.

Their failure to recognize the benefits of a unity-in-diversity or of stigmergic organization, on the pattern of the multitude, is probably connected to their dim view of Occupy.

In arguing for cross-sectoral alliances between wage-workers, the unemployed and those engaged in unpaid reproductive labor, Srnicek and Williams also echo autonomist thinkers like Negri and Hardt, Harvey, etc.:

This requires… a recognition of the social nature of struggle, and the bridging of the gap between the workplace and the community. Problems at work spill over into the home and the community, and vice versa. At the same time, crucial support for union action comes from the community, and unions would best be served by recognizing their indebtedness to the invisible labour of those outside the workplace. These include not only domestic labourers, who reproduce the living conditions of waged workers, but also immigrant workers, precarious workers and the broad array of those in surplus populations who share in the miseries of capitalism. The focus of unions therefore needs to expand beyond supporting only dues-paying members…. Unions can involve themselves in community issues like housing, demonstrating the value of organised labour in the process. Rather than being built solely around workplaces, unions would therefore be more adequate to today’s conditions if they organised around regional spaces and communities.

In expanding the spatial focus of union organising, local workplace demands open up into a broad range of social demands…. [T]his involves questioning the Fordist infatuation with permanent jobs and social democracy, and the traditional union focus on wages and job preservation. An assessment must be made of the viability of these classic demands in the face of automation, rising precarity and expanding unemployment. We believe many unions will be better served by refocusing towards a post-work society and the liberating aspects of a reduced working week, job sharing and a basic income.

They are entirely correct in calling  for the development of a broad common post-work Left agenda in preparation for the coming economic and political crises over automation and technological unemployment—already foreshadowed by the increase in precarity, the shift to poorly paid service sector jobs and the disappearance of full-time benefits as a norm.

Their concrete political agenda—full automation, universal basic income, reduced standard working hours and destruction of “work ethic” culture—is fairly unremarkable for their milieu, although their explanation of the harm done by the work ethic and the benefits of Basic Income for the bargaining power of labor is unusually lucid. But their pose of distinguishing themselves from the rest of the Left, which is allegedly not doing any of these things, and the novelty of calling for an ecosystem of leftist movements and organizations promoting this common agenda on the Mont Pelerin model, is a bit much given the array of thinkers from Dyer-Witheford to Negri and Hardt to Rifkin to Mason, the apparent “steam engine time” for UBI in Western politics, and growing popular fear of technological unemployment from automation.

Things like shorter work hours and Basic Income are definitely suited to viral memetic propagation and to the coalescence of a networked alliance of movements sharing those goals or something similar to them. But such an alliance is appropriate for specific movements and organizations under the Occupy umbrella—quite conceivably a majority of them—not Occupy itself. In Spain, M15 as such did not venture into formulating a concrete political agenda (or at least the most visible approximation of such a venture, Podemos, did not fare particularly well); rather, various constituencies within M15 reconfigured themselves at the local level in assorted commons-based municipalist movement and made significant gains both at the local level and a networked nation- and continent-wide political force, not as Indignados per se.

The discussion of “organisational ecology” and attendant practical recommendations is quite good, aside from the obligatory dig at “folk politics” in passing.

On a purely quantitative level, the left is not noticeably ‘weaker’ than the right—in terms of its ability to achieve popular mobilisation, the reverse seems to be true. Particularly in terms of crisis, the left seems eminently capable of mobilising a populist movement. The problem lies in the next step:  how the force is organized and deployed. For folk politics, organisation has meant a fetishistic attachment to localist and horizontalist approaches that often undermine the construction of an expansive counter-hegemonic power.

Once again, it’s hard to decipher, behind all this straw, what actual aspects of horizontalism and localism they see as militating against an “organisational ecology.” To return to my recurring example of recent municipalist movements, we have not only the post-M15 movements in Spain but allied movements across Europe from Antwerp to Bologna to Greece, as well as the Evergreen project in Cleveland and Cooperation Jackson and dozens and dozens of similar movements in the U.S. and UK. Besides these mutually supporting local movements there is a growing, multi-layered and robust support network of academics, think tanks, and networked assemblies promoting this model, from the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives to the Right to the City Alliance. I myself have, for several years, strenuously advocated that such movements expand their ties both locally and globally with the open-source movement and the open hardware/maker movement in order to create the kernels of multifaceted local commons-based economies including not only cooperative retail but micromanufacturing, Permaculture, pro-information freedom policies and exclusive use of open-source software by local government and universities, municipal high-speed broadband, land trusts, transformation of unused public buildings into community hubs, etc. And many projects are engaged in just such institution-building projects. The entire movement, in short, eminently illustrates what Srnicek and Williams call for:

…Every successful movement has been the result, not of a single organisational type, but of a broad ecology of organisations. These have operated, in a more or less coordinated way, to carry out the division of labour necessary for political change. In the process of transformation leaders will arise, but there is no vanguard party—only mobile vanguard functions. An ecology of organisations means a pluralism of forces, able to positively feedback on their comparative strengths. It requires mobilisation under a common vision of an alternative world, rather than loose and pragmatic alliances. And it entails developing an array of broadly compatible organisations…. This means that the overarching architecture of such an ecology is a relatively decentralized and networked form—but, unlike in the standard horizontalist vision, this ecology should also include hierarchical and closed groups as elements of the broader network…. The divisions between spontaneous uprisings and organisational longevity, short-term desires and long-term strategy, have split what should be a broadly consistent project for building a post-work world. Organisational diversity should be combined with broad populist unity.

And, yet again, I am banging my head on my desk wondering what strawman caricature of “localism” and “horizontalism” the authors consider incompatible with the above statement.

I also agree that “media institutions are an essential part of any emergent political ecology aimed at building a new hegemony…. [Its tasks include] creating a new common language…, generating narratives that resonate with people,” etc. Creating visible organizations with spokespersons who get included into TV journalists’ rolodexes is vital.

The brain trust ecology must include not only post-capitalist counterparts of the Mont Pelerin Society  and CFR, but Gramscian “organic intellectuals” from the movements on the ground who are directly involved in creating the institutions.

My biggest area of skepticism regarding their agenda is “full automation.”

…logistics is at the forefront of the automation of work, and therefore represents a prime example of what a postcapitalist world might look like:  machines humming along and handling the difficult labour that humans would otherwise be forced to do.

No doubt global supply and distribution chains would be the most efficient way of producing some goods in a postcapitalist future (although, equally no doubt, a much smaller share of total production than Srnicek and Williams assume). And the transportation and warehouses involved in these networks are a logical target for 100% automation. But a great deal of production, probably including the production of most components and the final assembly of a majority of consumer goods and the production of most fruits and vegetables, is likely to be on a small-scale, on-demand basis near the point of consumption. The ideal means of production for local manufacturing are high-tech CNC machinery. But production in small workshops in Kropotkinian agro-industrial villages is far less amenable to automation of processes like handling feedstock, and is likely to involve human craft workers (working short hours in self-managed shops) reprogramming the machines and transferring intermediate products from one machine to another; total automation, in contrast, would require much higher levels of centralization and scales of production, with most production and distribution being coordinated by long-distance logistics with an extremely “thick” and materials-intensive infrastructure.

And getting back to the theme of capitalism and the state being subject to systemic decay, and people turning to the building blocks of the successor society and developing them as a necessity for survival, the transition is likely to take the institutional form of a growing share of production shifting from corporate control, wage labor and the cash nexus into the social economy, with micro-villages and other multi-family primary social units taking over production for direct subsistence. The long-distance logistics networks that are eventually automated with self-driving trains and ships, RFID chips and GPS tracking are apt to be much smaller in volume than those of the present.

For all the good in this book, and all that it offers of value to the broader post-capitalist and post-scarcity milieu of which Srnicek and Williams are a part, their approach itself is fundamentally opposite to that of the autonomists and other horizontalists — and in every case, they come off the worse in comparison. Autonomists and horizontalists, no less than accelerationists, acknowledge the importance of strategic coordination, integration and coalescence into a macro system, including the creation of federal bodies, media ecosystems and the like. But for them, the primary orientation is one of respect for the agency and self-organization of ordinary people as revolutionary subjects and creators of the successor system, and for the myriad of counter-institutions they are building in the interstices of the dying state-capitalist system. The larger systems of coordination, the media ecologies, and so forth, are an emergent phenomenon following from the primacy of efforts on the ground.

For Srnicek and Williams, on the other hand, the main focus in building a post-capitalist society is what the capitalists and their state have already built or are building; the strategy is to accelerate that construction process and put it under new management via a macro political process. At best, their attitude towards commons-based counter-institutions is permissive tolerance towards a secondary praxis that’s fine as long as it doesn’t divert effort or resources from their primary political strategy; at worse it’s contemptuous dismissal as a “folk-political” distraction from the real effort.

Photo by azule

The post Book of the Day: Srnicek and Williams’ Inventing the Future appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I’ve known Derek Wall for some time as a friend on Twitter, a fellow admirer of Elinor Ostrom, an Ostrom scholar, and an official in the Green Party of England and Wales. This is not my first introduction to him as a scholar; I read his The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom (2014), which he was kind enough to share with me in proof.

As is customary (and unfortunately necessary) in any general treatment of Ostrom, Wall begins his introductory chapter by citing Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” as a jumping off point. I say it’s unfortunately necessary because Hardin’s ahistorical nonsense has gotten around the world many times while Ostrom’s truth about the governance of actual, historical commons was just getting its boots on. Never mind that Hardin himself later admitted that he knew little to nothing about the actual history of commons governance, and conceded that the title was unfortunate. He is still a perennial “authority” for neoliberal ideologues and right-libertarians (many of whom apparently know nothing of the commons beyond Hardin’s reference to them) who wish to “prove” that efficient commons governance is impossible.

Elinor Ostrom’s most famous work, Governing the Commons, was a broad survey of case studies of commons governance in history — including some commons which persist under their old governance rules to this day — and a set of eight principles of successful commons governance which she inferred from that history.

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel for ‘demonstrating how local property can be successfully managed by local commons without any regulation by central authorities or privatization’ (Nobel.org 2009). She argued that commons, including common land, forests or fisheries that were owned collectively, could be conserved. This was radical stuff; other economists argued, along with Garrett Hardin, that collective ownership would always fail because of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ which led to over use and disaster….

According to Ostrom indigenous people and others have often maintained commons for hundreds or even thousands of years without destroying these environments. Ostrom argued that democratic control, rather than top-down management or simple privatisation, works to conserve nature.

After a brief biographical sketch — including a childhood where she picked up a frugal DIY ethos, and the possible influence of her husband Vincent on her interest in the commons — Wall goes on to finish up the introductory chapter with an argument for the general importance of Ostrom’s work.

Although Ostrom did not regard herself as being on the Left, as Wall concedes, and could at least plausibly be accused of ignoring class conflict, her work is nevertheless of value to those of us on the Left who do use a class analysis. First, the commons — with the rules for successful governance she distilled from her historical studies — are an invaluable addition to the organizational toolkit for a postcapitalist society. Regardless of whether Ostrom herself paid adequate attention to the historic nature of the state as an instrument of class power, and in suppressing and enclosing the commons, those of us who are interested in resurrecting the commons as an organizing logic (e.g. the commons-based peer production model promoted by the P2P Foundation, the commons-based local economies promoted by the new municipalist movements, etc.) owe it to ourselves to take her seriously. And second, regardless of her arguable lack of historical class analysis, her findings are themselves a valuable weapon of class struggle.

She developed a body of research that can be used to defend the commons and commoners. Theory, including Ostrom’s, can have a material effect. For hundreds of years, perhaps thousands, collectively-owned resources have been stolen from communities with the simple justification that the commons was inevitably ‘tragic’. Left to collective ownership, it is often claimed, individuals would abuse the system and wreck the commons. Either privatisation or strong state control was needed to prevent catastrophe…. [Ostrom] found that commons could be made to work and were not automatically doomed because of an intrinsic flaw in human nature. Her careful research is a powerful weapon of self-defence for those who wish to protect a commons under threat.

“Equally radical and useful,” Wall continues, is Ostrom’s broader argument for political and economic organizational models “beyond the market and the state.” She demolishes, obviously, the neoliberal conception of corporate “privatization” as the only alternative to state ownership. But her work is more important still for the Left. In practice, the main currents of 20th century socialism adopted either some mix of market and state as their primary organizational model — the “market socialism” of Lange and Tito, or central planning that can only be distinguished from state control with heavy-duty squinting. With the commons, Ostrom offers the Left — and in particular Marxists — a way to recover Marx’s vision of a future society that is genuinely both post-capitalist and post-state.

Although Ostrom did not regard herself as a Leftist, and the main influences on her work were fairly mainstream (e.g. institutional economics, public choice theory and game theory), she developed those influences in directions that were, intentionally or not, quite congenial to certain currents of the Left. Her approach to research, in itself, reflected considerable elements of what would later be called a P2P ethos; her work “was based on what she termed co-production,” acting as “part of a larger network,” with knowledge and theory “constructed with the active participation of the community.”

And her idea of democracy, which she saw as the key to commons management and the solution of many other problems, was far from the conventional notions being peddled in academia at that time.

[B]y democracy she meant not just traditional liberal democracy but popular involvement through direct participation, not top-down institutions. She and her husband Vincent spent a lifetime arguing that the more that people were involved in constructing the rules of governance, the better the rules would work…. She thought the exact form that such direct democracy might take was likely to differ from place to place.

In this regard she resembles thinkers from Kropotkin to Graeber, who see “democracy” not as some crowning achievement of dead white males in a handful of privileged times and places, but something that people have naturally been doing in face-to-face groups everywhere since the beginning of humanity, in settings from folkmotes to pirate utopias, when their efforts were not suppressed — often by formally “democratic” states.

But in the end, Wall dismisses the question of whether Ostrom was “really” on the Left as irrelevant compared to that of what uses her work can be put to by the Left.

I am not ultimately making any claim in this book that Elinor Ostrom was on the left, nor even trying with much precision to pigeonhole Ostrom politically…. [M]y main aim is to make her work accessible and to show how those on the left, especially the ecosocialist left, can make productive use of her diverse and provocative thinking…. The extent to which she was radical can be judged by the effects of her work…. Thus, this book, chapter by chapter, examines her work and shows how it can be of practical use.

(NOTE: Anyone who enjoys this book but would like some more detailed background on Ostrom’s early life and the specific formative influences on her work can find plenty of both in Wall’s earlier book The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom.)

Chapters Two through Four are an examination, at increasing levels of generality, of the lessons of Ostrom’s studies on the commons: on the subject matter of Governing the Commons itself in Chapter Two, on the broader lessons of her research on the commons for ecological issues in general in Chapter Three, and the implications of an organizational model “beyond market and state” for society as a whole.

Chapter Two begins with the original context of Ostrom’s research into the commons: Hardin’s unfortunate article (doubly unfortunate in its influence) on the subject, and summarizes the results (including the eight rules for effective governance she distilled from her historical investigations).

Hardin’s presumption comes across as even more egregious in Ostrom’s account of the lecture she attended: not only did he feel justified in saying, based entirely on an a priori analysis of his totally imaginary and ashistorical model of the “commons,” that they were doomed absent massive state intervention, but he went so far as to proclaim that the only solution was mandating universal sterilization after the first child.

Hardin saw the overconsumption of resources as the inevitable result of overpopulation and human incapacity for self-restraint. I would note the irony of this, considering that: 1) the actual overgrazing of the commons in England was the work of landed interests — the same people pushing for enclosure in the interest of “efficiency” — using their political influence to ignore the rules by which villagers had up until then governed their commons quite effectively and sustainably; 2) overconsumption of resources is the result, not of a do-nothing state, but of the state actively promoting the consumption of subsidized resource inputs by capitalist industry through the enclosure of land and resource commons and giving big business preferential access to them. The real villain, in the destruction of natural resources, is not ordinary villagers overgrazing their sheep in the want of proper government or corporate oversight; it is Nestle draining aquifers free of charge and California factory farms wasting subsidized irrigation water, with the active help and encouragement of the state.

It’s also worth noting that Hardin’s right-libertarian fans have no coherent criterion for distinguishing the “private” property they favor from the “collective” property they oppose, and no basis for explaining how the capitalist corporation qualifies as “private property” but the natural resource commons does not. The corporation is every bit as much an example of collective ownership as the commons. It is legally not the property of the shareholders, either collectively or severally, but of a corporate person; the “property” rights of the shareholders consist mostly in participating in the election of the Board of Directors (in most cases a self-perpetuating oligarchy of inside directors selected by cooptation, in actual practice), and to whatever dividends management sees fit to issue.

If anything it’s the corporation that’s subject to a real tragedy of the commons because its de facto property rights are vested in a managerial oligarchy whose material interests are diametrically opposed to those of the people who are in direct contact with the day-to-day situation, experience the effects of the policies made by management, and whose situational knowledge, social capital and effort are the actual source of value. On the other hand it is in the interest of management to strip the organization of human capital and gut its long-term productive capacities for the sake of boosting quarterly earnings (and with them their own bonuses and stock holdings).

Although Ostrom was not an anarchist and not opposed in principle (or even practice) to either the state or the large corporation, her findings in Governing the Commons were nearly the opposite of Hardin’s assumptions. If Hardin believed humans were incapable of self-governance and could be saved from themselves only by the intervention of higher authority, Ostrom had faith in the ability of people in face-to-face groups to work out solutions to the problems they faced if they were not prevented from doing so by interference from above. Some five or six of her eight principles of governance, based on her observation of successful commons, involve either vesting ownership and decision-making authority in those who use the resources, directly experience the effects of the governance rules, and are in day-to-day contact with the situation, or preventing interference from above by authoritarian institutions beyond the control of users.

The design rule that commons should be “nested” or federated within larger systems — particularly at the bioregional level — is also the main principle of her views on environmental policy (Chapter Three). It strikes me that in Ostrom’s vision of a polycentric system of governance with the commons as its core logic, the state plays a role similar to that of Cosma Orsi’s “Partner State,” as developed by Michel Bauwens:  i.e. a platform which enables or facilitates the work of the commons, and maintains a congenial environment for their operation. In this she is in the very broad tradition going back to Saint-Simon, developed by Proudhon and Marx among others, that envisons “governance of persons” being replaced by “the administration of things.”

In her work on the commons, Ostrom showed that humans were capable of cooperative behavior mediated neither by the cash nexus nor by state administration. The larger application of this principle to society as a whole is the subject of Chapter Four. Ostrom was no one-trick pony. “Beyond Markets and States” does not mean simply the commons as a “third alternative,” but a whole ecosystem of cooperative and democratic options. She saw modern institutions like the corporation as commons prone to dysfunctions from incentive problems, and saw the stakeholder cooperative as a way to align the incentives of those in direct contact with the situation and who created the value with the success of the corporation. She also endorsed Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO) and supported the broader vision of a Solidarity Economy.

The knowledge and incentive principles that emerged from Ostrom’s study of the commons, and led her to support other Solidarity Economy institutions like the cooperative, also informed her general understanding of democracy — the subject of Chapter Five,”Deep Democracy.” All decision-making, she believed, is apt to be improved by involving those directly affected by it. And this vision of deep democracy is extremely relevant to libertarian strands of socialism. Although Ostrom shied away from the “socialist” label and tended to identify it with top-down state control, Wall notes, her concrete principles are quite compatible with socialist models like that of the autonomists Negri and Hardt. He also draws parellels between her thought and Bookchin’s confederalism (as well as Kurdish attempts to put this into practice in Rojava).

Given this preoccupation with empowering those affected by decisions, it only makes sense that Ostrom would have a broader interest in amplifying the voices of the unheard and powerless. This is the subject of the chapter on “Feminism and Intersectionality.” She was also heavily influenced by her own experience of discrimination, as a woman (about which you can read in more detail in the biographical material in Chapter One); for example, she was denied the opportunity to major in economics because she lacked adequate background in higher mathematics, but also was prevented from enrolling in a course of mathematical studies because faculty felt such studies would be wasted on a woman who would just get married anyway.

The chapter on “Trust and Cooperation” starts with the significant influence of game theory on Ostrom’s institutional analysis. As with most issues, Ostrom shied away from adopting general positions on “human nature,” whether they made cooperation or competition the more essential human characteristic. Rather, she focused on institutional designs and procedural rulesets to optimize for cooperative behavior.

Interestingly, the Prisoner’s Dilemma game — which influences many thinkers who are pessimistic about the potential for human cooperation — starts with the assumption that the subjects are isolated from direct communication with each other, and have all their contact with the world outside their cell filtered through authority figures. Ostrom’s approach to commons design and governance, on the other hand, assumes free and ongoing communication between those seeking to deal with their shared circumstances in an optimal manner. In other words, isolation and atomization tends to increase authoritarianism and betrayal, while communication produces the optimal result. Perhaps this is why authoritarians who promote the ugliest and most authoritarian pictures of “human nature” also have the biggest vested interest in turning groups of people against each other, and isolating them in the face of their rulers. People who are worried about nonsense like the threat to “traditional marriage,” or “illegal aliens,” or trans women in public restrooms, or “Sharia Law,” are a lot less likely to notice their areas of commonality and work together to promote their common interest against the billionaires who are actually screwing them over.

Ostrom found that, conversely, ongoing relationships with high levels of communication tend to build trust.

She found… that research suggested that cheap talk was useful. By cheap talk, she meant that if commoners or others were able to communicate directly with each other, trust was more likely to occur than if they did not meet and exchange views.

Given everything we’ve seen about Ostrom’s views so far, it would be reasonable to expect strong sympathies for a peer-to-peer approach to science. And as it turns out, that’s right on the mark (Chapter Eight, “Science for the People”). Science, she believed, was prone to dominance by elites whose paradigms became generational dogmas. She sought to empower dissidents and outsiders to challenge these dogmas. Ostrom’s approach to research, Wall writes, was similar to Paolo Freire’s: a co-learning process in which the community was involved, not a “Knowledge Bank.” It’s reflected in her approach to investigating the commons.

Her approach to this was to suggest that the people who participate in a commons are just as likely, probably more so to have good ideas about solving this problem than outside experts. Garrett Hardin argued that the commoners would fail to maintain the commons and an outside power would need to be brought in. The outside power would be equipped with expertise that the commoners lack.

She took a similarly Freirean attitude toward education as such, arguing that democracy, commons management, and other forms of self-governance would likely fail if public school pedagogy was passive rather than participatory.

Finally, she took the position that knowledge itself was a commons and put her P2P approach to research into practice in her workshops at Bloomington.

In her analysis of institutions (Chapter Nine, “Transforming Institutions”), Ostrom’s focus was on what people actually do, not on paper rules and tables of organization. Her mapping of institutions included actual power relationships within institutions, how powerful members could use formal rules and procedures to pursue their own interest, and how technical “legality” could serve as a cover for robbery.

At the same time, the form taken by institutional rules can affect the balance of power between different interests, and rules can be rewritten to make institutions more democratic and egalitarian. For example, the rules of corporate governance can be rewritten to empower internal and external stakeholders whose interests are currently ignored by self-aggrandizing management. But because of the law of unintended consequences, there must be a tentative and ad hoc nature to institutional design and rulemaking, and a willingness to frequently reassess policies in the face of ongoing experience. And obviously, based on previously examined considerations in Ostrom’s design philosophy, the best way to promote successful adaptation to circumstances is by empowering those directly involved to assess and respond to feedback from previous decisions.

The final chapter (“Conflict and Contestation”) is Wall’s overall assessment of Ostrom’s value for lessons. The biggest lesson he takes away is pluralism: a skepticism towards schematizers who want to build an entire society according to any one uniform blueprint, or any hegemonic organizational model. It’s this quality in Ostrom that made me include a C4SS study on her in my series on “Anarchists Without Adjectives” (I know she wasn’t an anarchist). Like Kropotkin and Ward, she had a fondness for the particularity and sense of place of all the different ad hoc experiments in cooperative organization that ordinary people have come up with in the nooks and crannies of history, and a faith and openness in whatever arrangements people happen to come up with when dealing with one another as equals.

At the same time, as a Marxist, Wall subjects her to some criticism. Ostrom failed to pay adequate attention — or much at all — to the class dimension in history. She treated issues like the workability of the commons as primarily a difference in ideas or understanding, a matter simply of showing where people like Hardin were mistaken and correcting his ideas, when in fact the driver of Enclosure historically has not been any disinterested concern for “efficiency” but rather naked power interest — with “thinkers” like Hardin serving, to borrow a phrase from Marx, as hired prize-fighters on behalf of the propertied classes. I noted this unfortunate tendency myself in researching my study of Ostrom: for example her dismissal as “conspiracy theories” of the suggestions that World Bank loans and other foreign aid served mainly the imperialist goals of integrating the Global South into the global system of corporate power.

Nevertheless, from Wall’s Marxist perspective and from other postcapitalist and anarchist perspectives, Ostrom’s functional analysis of commons and other institutions is of great value to those of us thinking about what kind of society we want to build in the future. Wall notes that Marx himself “in his later writings became more and more interested in the indigenous and actual working commons.” For example, he acknowledged late in life that open field systems like the Russian Mir might develop directly into components of a socialist society, without being amalgamated (on the later Soviet model) into state property under professional administrators.

Photo by derekbruff

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Peak Oil (and other fossil fuels) is creating pressure to shorten global supply and distribution chains. At the same time, the shift in advantage from military technologies for power projection to technologies for area denial means that the imperial costs of enforcing a globalized economic system of outsourced production under the legal control of Western capital are becoming prohibitive.

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. As Michel Bauwens puts it, the commons paradigm replaces the traditional Social Democratic paradigm in which value is created in the “private” (i.e. corporate) sector through commodity labor, and a portion of this value is redistributed by the state and by labor unions, to one in which value is co-created within the social commons outside the framework of wage labor and the cash nexus, and the process of value creation is governed by the co-creators themselves. Because of the technological changes entailed in what Bauwens calls “cosmo-local” production (physical production that’s primarily local, using relatively small-scale facilities, for local consumption, but using a global information commons freely available to all localities), the primary level of organization of this commons-based society will be local. Cosmo-local (DGML = Design Global, Manufacture Local) production is governed by the following principles:

• Protocol cooperativism: the underlying immaterial and algorithmic protocols are shared and open source, using copyfair principles (free sharing of knowledge, but commercialization conditioned by reciprocity)
• Open cooperativism: the commons-based coops are distinguished from ‘collective capitalism’ by their commitment to creating and expanding common goods for the whole of society; in Platform coops it is the platforms themselves that are the commons, needed to enable and manage the exchanges that may be needed, while protecting it from capture by extractive netarchical platforms
• Open and contributive accounting: fair distribution mechanisms that recognize all contributions
• Open and shared supply chains for mutual coordination
• Non-dominium forms of ownership (the means of production are held in common for the benefit of all participants in the eco-system.

In this paper, we will examine the emerging distributed and commons-based economy, as a base for post-capitalist transition, at three levels: the micro-village and other forms of cohousing/co-production, the city or town as a unit, and regional and global federations of cities.

View or download a PDF copy of Kevin Carson’s full C4SS Study: Libertarian Municipalism: Networked Cities as Resilient Platforms for Post-Capitalist Transition

Photo by Aurimas Adomavicius

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Frase’s book builds on Rosa Luxemburg’s prediction a hundred years ago in the Junius Pamphlets that “[b]ourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” Specifically, he sketches — in very broad strokes — two versions of socialism and two versions of barbarism as possible alternative futures all resulting from large-scale automation. As Frase himself admits, “my approach is deliberately hyperbolic, sketching out simplified ideal types,” or “simplified, pure models…, designed to illuminate a few key issues that confront us today and will confront us in the future.”

Popular press treatments of automation, Frase notes, range from pessimistic predictions of technological unemployment to “liberal bromides” about “entrepreneurship and education.” But all of them are missing one thing: “politics, and specifically class struggle.”

This outlook ignores the central defining features of the society we live in: capitalist class and property relations. Who benefits from automation, and who loses, is ultimately not a consequence of the robots themselves but of who owns them.

In Frase’s presentation of the four possible futures of automation, class power is front and center: “the distribution of scarcity and abundance, …who will pay the costs of ecological damage and who will enjoy the benefits of a highly productive, automated economy.”

This not a conventional venture in what’s commonly referred to as “futurism.” “Rather, it is an attempt to use the tools of social science in combination with those of speculative fiction to explore the space of possibilities in which our future political conflicts will play out.” And on the speculative fiction side, Frase’s work is closest to those forms of science fiction like Star Trek which “take their world-building seriously” and root their characters in “a richly and logically structured world.”

The four exercises in building alternative automated future scenarios represent the possible combinations of two variables with two values each. The ecological crisis will either be solved at relatively low levels of environmental damage and cost of energy transition, or it will not. The issue of class power will be resolved either by confronting and defeating inequality, or the rich will maintain their power. In the latter case, “they [will] enjoy the  benefits of automated production, while the rest of us pay the costs of ecological destruction….”

So the four possibilities are abundance with equality (Communism), abundance with hierarchy (Rentism), scarcity with equality (Socialism), or scarcity with hierarchy (Exterminism).

To return to Luxemburg’s framing, “[t]he starting point of the entire analysis is that capitalism IS GOING TO END.” And along with that assumption, “a central structuring theme of this book” is the existence of a capitalist ruling elite “that will try to preserve itself into any possible future.” So Frase’s world-building exercises are “an attempt to make sense of the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if we fail.”

“Communism” is a moneyless economy of total or near-total abundance, in which the consumption of goods and services is divorced from labor.

Using Vonnegut’s Player Piano as a foil, Frase notes that an automated economy needn’t be centralized, mass-production or planned by a managerial elite. “Technologies like 3-D printing (and for that matter the personal computer) point in [the] direction” of a decentralized, less management-intensive economy.

This amounts also to a critique of models like Jeremy Rifkin’s Zero Marginal Cost Society, which posits extremely thick, smart infrastructures like the “Internet of Things” and, by implication, a rather large amount of production for the global market even if production itself is decentralized.

For me the most interesting part of Frase’s chapter on Communism was his speculation on how we might get there. Like Mason, Holloway and others in the autonomist tradition, he devotes relatively more attention to gradualist, evolutionary models (analogous to the transition from feudalism to capitalism) than to insurrectionary models. That means, namely, strategies that “build the alternative to capitalism before it is completely overturned,” and “giving people the ability to survive and act independently of capitalist wage labor in the here and now….” Such strategies will take the form of what Andre Gorz called “non-reformist reforms” — for example, the Universal Basic Income.

He describes a scenario in which the introduction of a Universal Basic Income, tied to some percentage of GDP, leads through a sort of invisible hand mechanism to a moneyless or near-moneyless communism.

One criticism of the basic income is that it will not be systemicaly viable over the long run, as people increasingly drop out of paid labor and undermine the tax base that funds the basic income in the first place. But from another point of view, this prospect is precisely what makes basic income a non-reformist reform Thus one can sketch out a more programmatic kind of utopianism that uses the basic income as its point of departure.

Frase bases the specifics on a 1986 essay by Robert van der Veen and Philippe van Parijs, “A Capitalist Road to Communism.”

If the UBI is sufficient to fund basic subsistence needs, it will likely lead to the withdrawal of labor altogether or coupled with a demand for higher wages in the jobs that are currently the most unpleasant and lowest paid (e.g. fast food work). It will also mean that people have freedom to seek out more fulfilling kinds of work that pay less. As a result, the wages of the most unpleasant and demeaning forms of work will be driven up, and pay for pleasant and fulfilling work will be pushed down. So a growing share of unpleasant work will be automated, and a growing share of labor will be shifted either into fulfilling jobs with lower pay, and many will withdraw from wage labor altogether and into the informal and social sector. Much of the labor force shifts into lower-paid but socially meaningful work. Many more will choose to live entirely on their UBI and volunteer their efforts in the informal and social economy, perhaps participating in commons-based peer production — and perhaps even with some non-monetary support in-kind from others similarly producing outside the money economy.

The long-run trajectory… is one in which people come to depend less and less on the basic income, because the things they want and need do not have to be purchased for money. Some things can be produced freely and automatically, as 3-D printing and digital copying technologies evolve into something like Star Trek’s replicator. Other things have become the product of voluntary cooperative activity rather than waged work.

So the money economy and the Basic Income, reductions in the one leading to reductions in the other and vice versa, both eventually wither away and societies approach full communism.

“Rentism” is a social model in which post-scarcity technologies are fully developed, but scarcity is nevertheless maintained artificially maintained through property rights. The technologies for pure abundance are available, “but stymied by ossified class structures and the state powers that defend them.” Frase anticipated rentism in 2010 with a blog post on “Anti-Star Trek,” in which replicators and all the other technologies of abundance from Star Trek: The Next Generation existed — but rentier capitalism was enforced through patents on the replicators themselves and on the molecular patterns of the goods which they reproduced.

The U.S. Security State is all too aware of the central role “intellectual property” plays as the main source of profits in the capitalist global economy. An article by Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn, in a 2010 Foreign Affairs article (“Defending a New Domain: The Pentagon’s Cyberstrategy“), predicted that the “threat to intellectual property” would be “the most significant cyberthreat the United States will face over the long term.”

The third possibility, “Socialism,” is basically the full communism of chapter one, but with the addition of natural resource scarcity and other constraints resulting from environmental damages from climate change and pollution. Or to put it another way, Chapter One is the socialism of Chapter Three with such factors abstracted from it. So for me the difference between them isn’t really that dramatic or interesting. It’s hard to imagine any plausible post-scarcity economy without some birth scars from our degradation of the natural environment. And his “Socialism” strikes me as pretty abundant, regardless of natural resource constraints.

Given the energy savings from eliminating planned obsolescence, guard labor, and waste production, and the radical shortening of distribution chains attendant on relocalization, renewable energy (perhaps including safer and democratically controlled fission power, and eventually even fusion power) would be more than sufficient to support an economy of abundance. Closed-loop recycling of bottleneck natural resources, and eventually robot asteroid mining, would likewise minimize resource constraints.

Generally speaking, technologies of abundance (i.e. those which maximize the production of use-value per labor input), tend to also be ephemeral (in the sense of minimizing the consumption of other resource inputs and the ecological footprint as a whole).

To the extent that repairing environmental damage is a major consideration, Frase’s Socialism reminds me a bit of the world of Marge Piercy’s Woman On the Edge of Time — certainly a humanly appealing post-scarcity world by our standards. The same is true of areas under the control of the Acquis networked society in Sterling’s The Caryatids.

Frase’s Socialism scenario strikes me as a bit pessimistic in its vision of a command economy for allocating energy and scarce resources and coordinating the repair of environmental damage (“some kind of centralized, state-driven project that can mobilize resources and labor in a way that is beyond the capabilities of either the free market or the communist free-for-all of Chapter 1”). He envisons enormous projects for rebuilding infrastructure, and and central planning rationing scarce energy supplies.

In regard to scaling back energy consumption, he underestimates what can be done purely on a decentralized, stigmergic basis, by such means as pricing natural resource inputs at true cost. My guess is that, absent subsidies to fossil fuel extraction (including preferential access to deposits on public land, eminent domain for pipelines, subsidized long-distance transportation, subsidies to sprawl, wars for access to foreign oil reserves, and taxpayer-subsidized naval protection for oil tanker routes), and absent subsidies and protections for all forms of waste production, greenhouse gas emissions would rapidly fall far below 1990 levels. And there’s far more low-hanging fruit for achieving such reductions than Frase imagines:  the shortening of supply and distribution chains, through import substitution by local micro-manufacturing and recycling of local scrap; shifting remaining long-distance freight to trains and airships; transition to local mixed-use economies through developing mini-“downtowns” in suburbs and adding walk-up apartments and other cheap housing in downtown areas; elimination of most business air and train travel by telecommuting and teleconferencing; etc. Rather than large-scale retooling to greenwash the transportation system via high-speed trains (“Green New Deal,” in Jill Stein’s phrase), it would make far better sense to reduce the need for such transportation in the first place.

Frase also suggests the Basic Income as the means for allocating whatever scarce inputs remain under socialism — not the output of the Star Trek replicators themselves, but of the scarce inputs that go into them. My guess, as already stated above, is that closed loop recycling would go a long way towards addressing this need. But the use of a price system to ration remaining scarce goods is an expedient common to many post-scarcity utopias — e.g., “whuffie” in Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. In this regard, the actual boundary between “Communism” and “Socialism” once again blurs.

The fourth, and darkest scenario is “Exterminism.” In this scenario, the capitalists automate production within their own luxury enclaves (gated communities, offshore platforms like those envisioned by the techno-fascist Peter Thiel, or perhaps enormous space-colonies like in the movie Elysium), rendering human labor obsolete for serving their needs. Disposable humanity is locked out to starve in an overpopulated, polluted world — to be policed by automated hunter-killer drones, or possibly eliminated altogether through some kind of large-scale democide to eliminate the burden on the ecosystem.

Fortunately, both barbarisms — Rentism and Exterminism — strike me as utterly implausible.

One issue that Frase neglects, in framing the the dystopian scenarios of Rentism and Exterminism, is the extent to which the technologies of abundance themselves undermine the class power of capitalists. To a considerable extent, the very technologies of abundance themselves are reducing the enforceability of the legal monopolies that rentism depends on.

In the informational realm, the technologies of circumvention — encryption, cracking DRM, etc. — are generally several steps ahead in the arms race against technologies of artificial scarcity. Look at what file-sharing has done to record company profits. Anyone who wants to badly enough can get a copyrighted album free from a download site, at minimal risk. As a result, the price of songs on iTunes has been driven down to a nominal level just equivalent to the convenience of getting a copy of guaranteed authenticity with minimal searching around.

In the physical realm, CAD/CAM files stripped of DRM, and downloaded by local garage factories for production with open-hardware CNC tools, will probably have a similar effect. And low-cost patent enforcement, historically, has assumed the production of a small number of product models from a handful of oligopoly corporations, marketed through a handful of nationwide retail chains. The dispersion of production into tens of thousands of neighborhood economies will raise the transaction costs of patent enforcement well well beyond sustainable levels.

The question is whether the capitalists can prevent everybody else from adopting technologies at least of soft, if not hard abundance.

As for Exterminism, our irrelevance to automated capitalist production is beside the point. If they don’t need us, we don’t need them either. Barbarism — particularly Exterminism — is unlikely because of the inability of capitalists to prevent grass-roots adoption of technologies of communist abundance. Exterminism is possible only when capitalists own the machines. When the machines themselves are ultra-cheap, their power to exclude disappears.

Even if the capitalists own expensive robots, the availability to ordinary people of the next-best alternative of cheap, open-source, small-scale CNC tools will prevent a capitalist monopoly on access to the means of production and subsistence. And as Frase himself says, total automation is somewhat hyperbolic anyway. The “next-best” alternative would require very little labor — probably no more than, if as much as, Keynes’s prediction of 15 hours a week. When we talk about “who owns the machines,” we must remember there is more than one model of super-abundant machines — and one of them is not amenable to capitalist monopoly.

For that matter, an economy of 15-hour weeks at worker-controlled craft production or in the community garden, perhaps largely divorced from consumption rights and engaged in production for consumption within communistic social units like multi-family cohousing projects or micro-villages, might be more appealing than fully automated robot production. Although human effort would not be abolished in such an economy, toil would be — with the remaining effort analogous to Adam and Eve tending the Garden, and hard to distinguish between other forms of purposeful creative and social activity.

Frase notes that work, in Marx’s terms, “is still the realm of necessity and not of freedom.” But people still putter in their gardens or workshops after work and on the weekends. And he himself also quotes Marx on the higher, communist stage in which “labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want.” That would mean, Frase says, “erasing the distinction between what counts as a business and what counts as a collective leisure activity…. Then we could all obey the injunction to ‘do what you love’ — not as a disingenuous apology for accepting exploitation, but as a real description of the state of existence.” As it is now, Frase points out, millions of people garden, or engage in paid labor they find socially fulfilling even at the cost of taking large cuts in pay, because they derive some inherent fulfillment from them. When “bullshit jobs” http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ like guard labor and production for planned obsolescence are done away with, and some of the more unpleasant tasks are automated, it may well be that people sort themselves into the remaining hours of labor based on affinity and enjoyment on the model of Bob Black’s “abolition of work.”

Frase closes by reiterating the choice between socialism and barbarism, and calling us to action for the former. As he said in the Introduction, his goal in writing this book was to help make the dystopian prophecies self-defeating, and make the utopian ones self-fulfilling.

The reason there are four futures, and not just one, is because nothing happens automatically. It’s up to us to determine the way forward.

Climate justice activists are currently fighting for socialist rather than exterminist solutions to climate change, even if they wouldn’t put it that way. And those fighting for access to knowledge, against strict intellectual property in everything from seeds to music, are struggling to hold off a rentist dystopia and keep the dream of communism alive.

The post Book of the Day: Four Futures by Peter Frase appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In Four Futures Peter Frase poses, as a thought experiment, an “anti-Star Trek”: a world that shares the same technologies as Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s post-scarcity communist society, but in which those technologies of abundance are enclosed with “intellectual property” barriers so that capitalists can continue to live off the rents of artificial scarcity.

“…[I]magine that unlike Star Trek, we don’t all have access to our own replicators. And that in order to get access to a replicator, you would have to buy one from a company that licenses the right to use it. You can’t get someone to give you a replicator or make one with their replicator, because that would violate their license and get them in legal trouble.

What’s more, every time you make something with the replicator, you also need to pay a licensing fee to whoever owns the rights to that particular thing. Captain Jean-Luc Picard customarily walks to the replicator and requests “tea, Earl Grey, hot.” But his anti-Star Trek counterpart would have to pay the company that has copyrighted the replicator pattern for hot Earl Grey tea.”

In such a world, earning the money to pay for the things will be a problem, since there is no need for labor to actually make anything. What remaining work there is will be a small pool of intensely competed-for jobs designing stuff, some amount of guard labor enforcing “intellectual property” against piracy and protecting the accumulated property of the rich, and an odd assortment of work in household service or hand-crafting luxury goods for those in the propertied classes who value the status symbolism entailed in such things.

This is the world of The Diamond Age. In Stephenson’s medium-term future, Star Trek’s matter-energy replicators are a reality (well, the food replication is considerably well below Star Trek standards). A world of plentiful sustenance for all, without money, is technologically feasible. But there the similarity ends.

The story is set at some indefinite point in the mid-21st century—presumably somewhere around the 2060s or so, given that a quite old lady reminisces about being a thrasher in the ’90s.

The world in this future is governed by the international order that emerged from a period of chaos—the Interregnum—following the collapse of most major nation-states that occurred when encrypted currencies starved them of tax revenue. The basic unit of organization is the phyle—a deterritorialized, networked opt-in community with associated support platforms, which is based on some shared point of affinity like ethnicity, ideology or religion.

The first phyle to emerge from the Interregnum was the First Distributed Republic, apparently an entirely pragmatic, non-ideological platform whose chief purpose—like the lodges in Poul Anderson’s Northwestern Federation (Orion Shall Rise)—was to keep the lights on and the trash picked up. By the time of the story, there are many scores of phyles. The largest and richest are the neo-Victorians (recruited largely from the Anglosphere) and the Nipponese, both governed by an intensively work-oriented and capitalistic ethos and making money through nanotech and other forms of engineering and design. The others—Mormons, Israelis, Parsis, Boers, Ashanti, Hindustani, Sendero Luminoso, etc., etc.—range widely in size. CryptNet is a phyle governed by a pirate ideology, and classified somewhere between subversive and terrorist by the mainstream phyles and their international order.

Depending on their size and wealth, the various phyles maintain territorial enclaves ranging in size from city-states to clusters of a few buildings in cities around the world, with the largest and most widely proliferated belonging to the neo-Victorians and Nipponese for obvious reasons.

Given the existence of technologies of abundance, the profitability of neo-Victorian and Nipponese industry obviously depends on patents and copyrights. And the post-scarcity potential of matter-energy replicators—“matter compilers”—is limited by the Feed. Feeds are long-distance pipelines of various volumes transferring feed stocks of assorted atoms to supply mater compilers. A Feed, in turn, is supplied by a Source—a facility which uses nanotech membranes and other nano-filtering mechanisms to sort out the various elements from seawater and air and store them in separate holding tanks. The major Sources are located in, and operated by, enclaves of the most technically advanced phyles.

The combination of “intellectual property” and the dependence of matter compilers on the Feed severely hobbles the potential for abundance. Some basic minimum of essential life support—fabricated staple foods, clothing, blankets—is available for free from public matter compilers. Everything else has a price, often steep. The “thetes”—a large underclass of people, perhaps a majority of the Earth’s population, unaffiliated with any phyle—stay alive through a combination of casual labor for members of the rich phyles and access to free stuff from the MCs. A considerable burden of high-interest debt, enforced in the last resort by workhouses for defaulters, is apparently the norm among this population.

This system of artificial scarcity is maintained through an international regime called the Common Economic Protocol (CEP). The CEP is enforced by the joint military forces of Protocol Enforcement. Constable Moore, himself Scottish, is a retired Brigadier who served with the Second Brigade of the Third Division of the First Protocol Enforcement Expeditionary Force—largely recruited from the American, British, Ulster Protestant and Uitlander lumpenproletariat, and other thetes of the Anglosphere. Mention is also made of a Nipponese division. The primary purpose of Protocol Enforcement is to enforce “intellectual property” law and secure the Feeds against attack from disgruntled local populations in the territories they pass through.

Although David De Ugarte‘s adoption of the term “phyle” for neo-Venetian platforms like the Las Indias Group was obviously an homage to The Diamond Age, the capitalist phyles in the story are nothing like De Ugarte’s vision of networked platforms incubating cooperative enterprises for commons-based peer production. The neo-Victorians, the only phyle whose internal workings are described in much detail, adhere to a social regime based—as their name suggests—on intense social hierarchy and strict sexual mores. The majority of their members are salaried laborers in the engineering firms like Machine-Phase Systems Limited and Imperial Tectonics Limited that produce most of the phyle’s income. The phyle itself is a giant corporation governed by “Equity Lords” with ownership stakes of various sizes (earl-level, duke-level, and so forth).

The main geographic setting of the story is the southern coast of China—the coastal city-states and the neo-Victorian clave of New Atlantis—along with the regional successor states of the Chinese interior. The relationship Stephenson depicts between the capitalist phyles, Protocol Enforcement and the various Chinese states is reminiscent—deliberately so, obviously—of the era of the Open Door and gunboat diplomacy, with the Rape of Nanking thrown in for good measure.

At the time of the story, the disemployment of hundreds of millions of peasants in the Chinese interior by newly developed synthetic rice from the MCs has resulted in a radical uprising—the Fists of Righteous Harmony—obviously based on the Boxer Rebellion. Peasant armies are marching southward, preparing to invade the coastal city-states and phyles, and burning Feeds along the way. Protocol Enforcement is fighting a losing war against them and gradually retreating southward.

Meanwhile, a coalition of CryptNet, other dissident phyles, and local mini-states allied with the Fists is at work developing a genuine post-scarcity alternative to the Feed, which will destroy the material foundation of the CEP’s global order. This rival technology—the Seed—will use self-assembling nanotech to compile food, tools and goods of all kinds from ambient matter on-site, independently of Feed lines.

The various subplots of the novel involve, directly or indirectly, the complex intrigues between New Atlantis and Protocol Enforcement, which are trying to thwart completion of the Seed, and the coalition struggling to complete it. Central to the latter coalition is the Celestial Kingdom, a city-state in the Greater Shanghai area governed by a caste of Mandarins with a Confucian ideology. Their leadership sees the Seed, a producer-centered technology amenable to village economy, as a way to restore the dignity of the peasantry and create an independent society with an organic social order independent of the CEP’s international order.

The attitude of the capitalist phyles and Protocol Enforcement towards the Seed is, understandably, one of revulsion. John Hackworth, an artifex (senior engineer) in one of the New Atlantan nanotech firms, describes it from his point of view:

“CryptNet’s true desire is the Seed—a technology that, in their diabolical scheme, will one day supplant the Feed, upon which our society and many others are founded. Protocol, to us, has brought prosperity and Peace—to CryptNet, however, it is a contemptible system of oppression. They believe that information has an almost mystical power of free flow and self-replication, as water seeks its own level or sparks fly upward…. It is their view that one day, instead of Feeds terminating in matter compilers, we will have Seeds that, sown on the earth, will sprout up into houses, hamburgers, spaceships, and books—that the Seed will develop inevitably from the Feed, and that upoin it will be founded a more highly evolved society….

Of course, it can’t be allowed—the Feed is not a system of control and oppression, as CryptNet would maintain. It is the only way order can be maintained in modern society—if everyone possessed a Seed, anyone could produce weapons whose destrucive power rivalled that of… nuclear weapons. This is why Protocol Enforcement takes such a dim view of CryptNet’s activities.”

The real reason for his horror—of course—is that the Seed would “dissolve the foundations of New Atlantis and Nippon and all of the societies that had grown up around the concept of a centralized, hierarchical Feed.” More specifically it would, by enabling people to meet all their needs for free and without limit or permission, destroy the wealth of those who lived by claiming ownership over the right to use ideas.

The Mandarins of the Celestial Kingdom, on the other hand, envisioned a high-tech neo-Confucian order in a China “freed from the yoke of the foreign Feed,” in “the coming Age of the Seed.”

“Peasants tended their fields and paddies, and even in times of drought and flood, the earth brought forth a rich harvest: food, of course, but many unfamiliar plants too, fruits that could be made into medicines, bamboo a thousand times stronger than natural varieties, trees that produced synthetic rubber and pellets of clean safe fuel. In an orderly procession the suntanned farmers brought their proceeds to great markets in clean cities free of cholera and strife, where all of the young people were respectful and dutiful scholars and all of the elders were honored and cared for.”

The book ends, as the victorious Fists surge through the coastal claves, with the destruction of the near-complete design for the Seed. The clear implication is that, absent any alternative to the Feed, the Fists’ uprising will collapse and the hegemony of the CEP will reassert itself over China. At the same time there is also a hint—but perhaps this is just my wishful thinking—that the setback to development of the Seed is only a temporary postponement.

Photo by torbakhopper

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