“Hope is rooted in men’s incompletion, from which they move out in constant search – a search which can be carried out only in communion with other men. Hopelessness is a form of silence, of denying the world and fleeting from it. The dehumanization resulting from an unjust order is not a cause for despair but for hope, leading to the incessant pursuit of the humanity denied by injustice. Hope, however, does not consist in crossing one’s arms and waiting. As long as I fight, I am moved by hope, and if I fight with hope, then I can wait.” (Freire 1970: 80).

Arguments pessimistic about change often reflect the upbringing and dominant culture perpetuated by the system to sustain its preservation. Culture influences human psychology and mentality and consequently the thinking about economic system. If one changes one part of the social organization such as the culture and human relations in the production system, the other elements will feel like a misfit and will be easier to change. We tend to forget that culture is something constantly evolving. We treat it as a natural law. Certainly, getting out of habits and mental framework is difficult but not impossible. Although creating an alternative culture requires effort, some effort is also put in maintaining the dominant culture. So the question is where to put the effort.

Culture and Change – Chicken or Egg?

Graeber and Wengrow in their article in Eurozine illustrate that the structural factors such as group size are less determinant of the relations between people than the culture. Egalitarian organization can also function in a large-scale group. Even the same group can apply different forms of governance as seasonal changes in tribes’ organization of work exemplify. Native Americans have adopted a different organization to mobilize during hunting period. In governance system oriented on maintaining stability, the institutions created to sustain production system may have interest in developing compatible culture and structure human relations. Peter Gray argues in the book “Free to Learn” that educational institutions were designed to maintain production based on hierarchy. School system socialized into hierarchical and slave mentality.

Systemic change proposals such as an unconditional basic income or other forms of luxury communism promise a step towards freeing people from fear and a new emotional and psychological functioning. However, there are certain drawbacks to this strategy. It puts too much stress on money and waiting for government to step in as the solution. This may further reflect the fetish of money that dominates our minds. The stress on rights and other abstract ideas makes a distance between us, our capacity to act, and the change that is striven for. Another option to achieve liberation from coercive work and other injustices imposed by the current system is addressing the culture and human relations that sustain this system. In a case study, I mention the need for a different culture and human relations to sustain a UBI. While monetary transfer contributes to the liberation from exploitative precarious employment, to sustain a UBI, a deeper change is required: a culture and mentality that eliminates the desire to exploit. If there is no adequate culture underlying the economic change, the practices from the previous system will be continued. For example, migrants not having the right to a UBI will be more in demand and a parallel labour market will be created.

Horizontal culture is shaped by everyday choices that for people raised in such a culture are an automatic way of structuring daily interactions. Some insights can be extrapolated from Jean Liedloff’s (1975) ethnographic study. When living with an indigenous tribe in Venezuela, she observed an absence of coercion to work there. Society waited until someone decides to work out of one’s own will by discovering this motivation in oneself. The way children are treated in this society helps them to develop the motivation to contribute to it. Their needs of touch and security are responded fully and therefore, personality disorders are prevented. According to her, human beings are naturally inclined to search for belonging and be a contributing part of a community. Liedloff gives several examples of social interactions that do not use force, pressure, or threats to achieve what is in the interest of the community.

Customs, skills, and attitudes for horizontalism

Past and present examples show us that a non-hierarchic culture can be cultivated and chosen intentionally. Peter Gray writes about practices of sustaining non-hierarchic culture in hunter-gatherer bands: punishing competitive behaviors and child rearing that was oriented on meeting children’s basic needs. Hunter-gatherer bands in South East Asia are an example of a large scale cultural work. These groups, living at the margins of the state (understood as a way of organizing human relations) knew how to prevent hierarchical relations from penetrating their interactions and undermining their project. James C. Scott argues that a population of about one hundred million people was living at the margin of state. Their lives were structured around the avoidance of incorporation into state structure and they were pursuing nomadic life and foraging mainly in the hills, which offered a rescue from the state. State representatives saw these people as a potential danger, stigmatizing them, because they constituted a possible tempting life outside of its structures (Scott 2009: 30). This form of living was attractive because of the autonomy and egalitarian social relations. The populations were also healthier than sedentary ones (ibid: 186). Three themes constitute hill ideology: equality, autonomy, and mobility. They would prefer flight rather than rebellion (ibid: 217-218). They developed practices that hinder the development of hierarchies and state power: refusal of history (which could serve as a base for claims about distinction and rank) and creating a culture in form of cautionary tales to warn would-be autocratic headman (the stories would suggest that he would be killed) (ibid: 276). They did not want to have a chief or a headman who could be used by a state.

Local and international initiatives of contemporary social movements, often in form of short-lived uprisings, experiment with governance principles, culture of a new type of democratic system, and human relations. Graeber describes the agenda of the alterglobalization movement in the following way (2009, p. 70): “This is a movement about reinventing democracy. It is not opposed to organization. It is about creating new forms of organization. It is not lacking in ideology. Those new forms of organization are its ideology. It is about creating and enacting horizontal networks instead of top-down structures like states, parties, or corporations; networks based on principles of decentralized, nonhierarchical consensus democracy. Ultimately, it [ . . . ] aspires to reinvent daily life as a whole.”

Another example of experimenting with a new culture can be found in autonomist movements in Argentina. Their new governance system was characterized by the following features: 1) horizontalidad: a form of direct decision making that rejects hierarchy and works as an ongoing process; 2) autogestion: a form of self-management with an implied form of horizontalidad; 3) concrete projects related to sustenance and survival; 4) territory – the use and occupation of physical and metaphorical space; 5) changing social relationships; 6) a politics and social relationships based on love and trust; 7) self-reflection; 8) autonomy: sometimes using the state, but at the same time, against and beyond the state (Sitrin 2012: 3f.).

Raising and becoming cooperative individuals

Graeber and Wengrow conclude that family can be a source of socializing into hierarchical way of thinking and structural violence such as gender inequalities. Furthermore, traumatic experiences within family can induce search and abuse of power as Alice Miller conceptualized in her books. Creating a free society would need to start within family and household.

Schools are well designed to supply compliant workers. Alternative pedagogy projects show that they may focus on raising cooperative individuals. In a French school, which is supported by movement Colibris (hammingbirds) and managed by Elisabeth Peloux, special classes are designated to teaching cooperation skills. There are three occasion to learn cooperative skills: 1) philosophy workshop where children learn how to express themselves and listen to each other; 2) “Living together” meeting where they discuss issues related to being in the group and talk about conflicts; and 3) Peace education where they learn self-awareness, dealing with emotions, and contact with nature. They also play cooperative games. In contrast to competitive games, the aim is to have good time together and win by accomplishing a task through cooperation. All children learn how to be a mediator and mediation is regularly practiced in case of a conflict.[1]

***

Book references

• Freire, Paulo (1970): Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated from Portuguese manuscript by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York The Seabury Press.
• Graeber, David (2009): Direct Action: An Ethnography. Edinburgh Oakland: AK Press
• Gray, Peter (2013): Free to Learn. Basic Books
• Liedloff, Jean (1975): The Continuum Concept. Da Capo Press; Reprint edition (January 22, 1986)
• Miller, Alice (2002): For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 3rd edition (January 1, 1990)
• Scott, James C. (2009): The Art of Not Being Governed : An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press.
• Sitrin, Marina (2012): Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina. Zed Press, London

[1]     The examples were given during public talk by Elisabeth Peloux on 13th January 2018, in Strasbourg, France.

Photo by Hey Paul

The post Making Culture for the Change in the Making: psychological underpinnings of the shift to an egalitarian society appeared first on P2P Foundation.

More indications of how to restore a new balance towards egalitarian (or rather ‘equipotential’) outcomes come from David Graeber, who wrote a very important article summarizing the last 3 decades of findings from archaeology and anthropology, which have overturned many of our insights:

1) In the excerpt on Seasonal Reversals of Hierarchical Structures‎‎ he shows several examples of tribes and societies which combined more egalitarian and more hierarchical arrangements, according to context.

2) In the excerpt on the Transition from Foraging to Farming Societies‎‎, he shows that this was by no means a universal transition towards more hierarchy ; in fact, many agricultural societies and their cities had deep democratic structures (sometimes more egalitarian than their earlier tribal forms)

3) Finally in the last one, Top-Down Structures of Rule Are Not the Necessary Consequence of Large-Scale Organization, he gives several examples showing ‘size does not matter’

All this should give us hope, that the evolution towards the current hierarchical models are not written in stone, and that societies can be more flexible than they appear.

Seasonal Reversals of Hierarchical Structures

David Graeber: “From the very beginning, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities. Anthropologists describe societies of this sort as possessing a ‘double morphology’. Marcel Mauss, writing in the early twentieth century, observed that the circumpolar Inuit, ‘and likewise many other societies . . . have two social structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they have two systems of law and religion’. In the summer months, Inuit dispersed into small patriarchal bands in pursuit of freshwater fish, caribou, and reindeer, each under the authority of a single male elder. Property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, another social structure entirely took over as Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale-rib, and stone. Within them, the virtues of equality, altruism, and collective life prevailed; wealth was shared; husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Seals.

Another example were the indigenous hunter-gatherers of Canada’s Northwest Coast, for whom winter – not summer – was the time when society crystallised into its most unequal form, and spectacularly so. Plank-built palaces sprang to life along the coastlines of British Columbia, with hereditary nobles holding court over commoners and slaves, and hosting the great banquets known as potlatch. Yet these aristocratic courts broke apart for the summer work of the fishing season, reverting to smaller clan formations, still ranked, but with an entirely different and less formal structure. In this case, people actually adopted different names in summer and winter, literally becoming someone else, depending on the time of year.

Perhaps most striking, in terms of political reversals, were the seasonal practices of 19th-century tribal confederacies on the American Great Plains – sometime, or one-time farmers who had adopted a nomadic hunting life. In the late summer, small and highly mobile bands of Cheyenne and Lakota would congregate in large settlements to make logistical preparations for the buffalo hunt. At this most sensitive time of year they appointed a police force that exercised full coercive powers, including the right to imprison, whip, or fine any offender who endangered the proceedings. Yet as the anthropologist Robert Lowie observed, this ‘unequivocal authoritarianism’ operated on a strictly seasonal and temporary basis, giving way to more ‘anarchic’ forms of organisation once the hunting season – and the collective rituals that followed – were complete.”

Transition from Foraging to Farming Societies

David Graeber: “Let us conclude, then, with a few headlines of our own: just a handful, to give a sense of what the new, emerging world history is starting to look like.

The first bombshell on our list concerns the origins and spread of agriculture. There is no longer any support for the view that it marked a major transition in human societies. In those parts of the world where animals and plants were first domesticated, there actually was no discernible ‘switch’ from Palaeolithic Forager to Neolithic Farmer. The ‘transition’ from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on food production typically took something in the order of three thousand years. While agriculture allowed for the possibility of more unequal concentrations of wealth, in most cases this only began to happen millennia after its inception. In the time between, people in areas as far removed as Amazonia and the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East were trying farming on for size, ‘play farming’ if you like, switching annually between modes of production, much as they switched their social structures back and forth. Moreover, the ‘spread of farming’ to secondary areas, such as Europe – so often described in triumphalist terms, as the start of an inevitable decline in hunting and gathering – turns out to have been a highly tenuous process, which sometimes failed, leading to demographic collapse for the farmers, not the foragers.

Clearly, it no longer makes any sense to use phrases like ‘the agricultural revolution’ when dealing with processes of such inordinate length and complexity. Since there was no Eden-like state, from which the first farmers could take their first steps on the road to inequality, it makes even less sense to talk about agriculture as marking the origins of rank or private property. If anything, it is among those populations – the ‘Mesolithic’ peoples – who refused farming through the warming centuries of the early Holocene, that we find stratification becoming more entrenched; at least, if opulent burial, predatory warfare, and monumental buildings are anything to go by. In at least some cases, like the Middle East, the first farmers seem to have consciously developed alternative forms of community, to go along with their more labour-intensive way of life. These Neolithic societies look strikingly egalitarian when compared to their hunter-gatherer neighbours, with a dramatic increase in the economic and social importance of women, clearly reflected in their art and ritual life (contrast here the female figurines of Jericho or Çatalhöyük with the hyper-masculine sculpture of Göbekli Tepe).

Another bombshell: ‘civilization’ does not come as a package. The world’s first cities did not just emerge in a handful of locations, together with systems of centralised government and bureaucratic control. In China, for instance, we are now aware that by 2500 BC, settlements of 300 hectares or more existed on the lower reaches of the Yellow River, over a thousand years before the foundation of the earliest (Shang) royal dynasty. On the other side of the Pacific, and at around the same time, ceremonial centres of striking magnitude have been discovered in the valley of Peru’s Río Supe, notably at the site of Caral: enigmatic remains of sunken plazas and monumental platforms, four millennia older than the Inca Empire. Such recent discoveries indicate how little is yet truly known about the distribution and origin of the first cities, and just how much older these cities may be than the systems of authoritarian government and literate administration that were once assumed necessary for their foundation. And in the more established heartlands of urbanisation – Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Basin of Mexico – there is mounting evidence that the first cities were organised on self-consciously egalitarian lines, municipal councils retaining significant autonomy from central government. In the first two cases, cities with sophisticated civic infrastructures flourished for over half a millennium with no trace of royal burials or monuments, no standing armies or other means of large-scale coercion, nor any hint of direct bureaucratic control over most citizen’s lives.”

Top-Down Structures of Rule Are Not the Necessary Consequence of Large-Scale Organization

David Graeber: “notwithstanding, there is absolutely no evidence that top-down structures of rule are the necessary consequence of large-scale organization. Walter Scheidel notwithstanding, it is simply not true that ruling classes, once established, cannot be gotten rid of except by general catastrophe. To take just one well-documented example: around 200 AD, the city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, with a population of 120,000 (one of the largest in the world at the time), appears to have undergone a profound transformation, turning its back on pyramid-temples and human sacrifice, and reconstructing itself as a vast collection of comfortable villas, all almost exactly the same size. It remained so for perhaps 400 years. Even in Cortés’ day, Central Mexico was still home to cities like Tlaxcala, run by an elected council whose members were periodically whipped by their constituents to remind them who was ultimately in charge.

The pieces are all there to create an entirely different world history. For the most part, we’re just too blinded by our prejudices to see the implications. For instance, almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly ‘scale up’ to anything like a city, a region, or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place.”

Photo by autovac

The post Rethinking the balance between equality and hierarchy: 2) New insights into the evolution of hierarchy and inequality throughout the ages appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Since ‘political economy’ became a subject in the 18th century, the predominant political dichotomy has been framed as labour versus capital. Marx talked about ‘control of the means of production’ as the essential political power that the workers needed to wrest from the capitalists. A great deal of activism and political theory continues in that vein: Gar Alpowitz work What then must we do? is all about rebuilding worker-owned coops and similar institutions. We have 150 years of history testifying to their effectiveness.

The movement has waxed and waned, but never (yet) overcome its antithesis; capitalists have the power to issue almost unlimited credit, and social movements, however popular, seem always to be on the back foot. I am dubious whether worker-owned institutions will ever dominate the economy. On the one hand we see economic justice trying to break out in many forms and places, and on the other dark and powerful forces are suppressing them: laws are being changed to make coops less competitive, and occasionally countries which swim against the neoliberal flow suffer a CIA-led regime change. The Power that controls property also controls the law, the media, the security forces, the military and the banks.

The industrial age needed machinery and factories and hence empowered those with capital and property to invest. That thinking has carried through to the digital era in which a Silicon Valley start-up needs huge amounts of money to engage a raft of skilled people to create (and create a market for) a plethora of unneeded tools, one of which might survive and be sold for a massive profit. Yet there is nothing about the internet that necessitates that capital-centric way of creating wealth. Platform cooperativism is the notion that the digital ‘means of production’, the platform, should be owned by, governed by and should enrich the participating value creators. As an approach and as a tactic, it is a straight extension of rudimentary 19th Century cooperativism into the digital age and cyberspace. In which case we should anticipate it working as it always has on the sidelines but never to impact the wider economy.

Why Protocols?

I believe another strategy shows promise. Let us not focus on property and ownership and control, but on relationships and protocols and collaboration. There are plenty of precedents to work with, but I haven’t seen this thinking applied in the platform cooperativism space.

By protocol I mean a language, convention, or standard. Use of such things cannot be restricted, prevented or monetised any more than use of a word, gesture, or social code. The Internet is essentially a set of protocols such as TCP/UDP, http, HTML, which led to a highly egalitarian participative infrastructure. That need not have been so: in a parallel universe, Microsoft R&D invented the web and now every page is a visual-basic-enhanced word document; MS Office is the only tool for authoring web-pages, and it costs $5000 for a licence and still looks wrong on Firefox!

Fortunately that particular dystopia was avoided because we had those open protocols. I think that is why the early Web inspired a great deal of optimism about the levelling of the socio-economic playing field – recall John Perry Barlow:

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us… We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. A cyberspace Independence Declaration

The basic internet remains free as designed: we still pay nothing for example for sending an email or retrieving a web page but something has gone wrong. The Internet continued to grow, as with all technologies, as new layers were built; the internal logic of each layer is entirely independent of the others just as the stable atomic model of protons, neutrons and electrons owes nothing to the fuzzy quantum reality on which it is based. Gradually the capitalist interests worked out how to replicate their own logic and structures in cyberspace. On top of the open protocols they built pay walls, monetised services and enclosed spaces. The rules are different at every level. In 2017 it seems normal that platforms large and small, own data and control economic territory for the benefit of private investors. The biggest platforms have the most users and the most money and the most political power and that is why I find it hard to imagine any platform like minds.com competing head-to-head with Facebook, and winning.

Beyond platforms to protocols

I want to expand upon this argument:

A platform cooperative or a platform company model is not one that takes full advantage of the potential to have a truly distributed network. They still have a central platform operator at their core, providing coordination, quality assurance and, most essentially, trust. However, it is possible to go beyond platforms to protocols – to commonly agreed ways of operating. Thus anyone who agrees to the rules can become a part of the network.Mikko Dufva

Ride-sharing is the poster child of the sharing economy, the pressure point chosen by platform cooperatives, and the current fiefdom of Uber. It could be considered a natural monopoly, which is to say it involves infrastructure which need not be duplicated – users don’t want to have multiple identities, apps, user interfaces, price structures etc. PayPal creator Peter Thiel is being lauded by businessmen for arguing that these monopolies are desirable and that competition is for losers. Since he doesn’t address the social question of how monopolies should be owned or governed, we should assume from his investment strategies that he intends to own as many as possible himself.

So Uber’s near monopoly, won as a direct result of having unimaginable access to money, is an invaluable commercial advantage in itself because without serious competition it can squeeze the market for all it is worth. But be careful what you wish for; should Uber fall from grace, the market would probably splinter into many incompatible pieces, which benefits neither the people with cars nor those who need rides.

A platform cooperative ride-sharing service sounds like an attempt to form a cooperative and compete with Uber by recycling profits and remunerating workers better. Its not a very convincing business plan even if the allegations about illegally to sabotaging its enemies are not true because Uber has resources to undercut any competitors until they choke.

But an open protocol for ride-sharing changes the game completely. Anyone could sign up to the network and announce their intention to travel or willingness to chauffeur. A simple algorithm would connect them and at journey’s end they might remunerate each other in cash, Bitcoin, home-brewed cider or anything; the line between giving a friend a favour and earning a crust would be very grey. There would be no middle men collecting rent or dictating how drivers should behave as representatives of the company. The open protocol creates a free market – not in the neoliberal sense of Wall Street being able to flush out the economy of any country it likes with imaginary dollars, but in the sense that suppliers and customers can meet without middlemen, regulators or rentiers. This is less optimal for collecting taxes and running protection rackets, but more optimal for granting everyone access to the economy, and probably much more efficient in terms of using underutilised transport infrastructure.

This article’s title suggests that a protocol could replace a platform as a basis for a cooperative infrastructure. More accurately, it seems to me that an open protocol diminishes the role of the platforms and changes the operating environment by:

• the main benefit to users of a monopoly is built in to the protocol, so there is no benefit to users of having the market dominated by a monopoly.
• suppliers and customers can interact without paying middlemen (which was one of the early promises of the internet)
• users benefit from no longer being captured inside walled gardens
• the question of data ownership is probably handled in the protocol, not in law, and not by a 3rd party, which reduces costs.
• the platform owner is no longer responsible for what happens between suppliers and customers, reducing the need for surveillance and fees.
• the law of the land applies only to the traders behaviours, and thus is much simpler

A changed economy

In short, most of the functions of the platform are no longer necessary and in its absence there is room for new kinds of organisations to fulfil new kinds of function. The new kinds of organisations could compete on the basis of what value they can add to the protocol, or they could just cooperate to make the users lives easier. To stay with the concrete example of ridesharing.

• Companies could develop paid apps which compete on the best user experience
• Drivers of old bangers could organise to ensure constant supply and that they don’t undercut each other.
• Drivers could organise mutual insurance and/or finance.
• A system could be built on top of the protocol to help set up multiple passengers with multiple destinations in the same car, perhaps taking a small cut of the savings.
• A private ambulance service could be imagined, along with haulage companies, a postal service, long distance travel and regular commuter ridesharing.
• if the protocol didn’t handle it, a 3rd party service would be needed to ensure that drivers and/or passengers were identified or had a certain reputation.

Likely such a protocol widely deployed would render our transport ecosystem unrecognisable. It might obviate most full time driver jobs in favour of hitch-hiking 2.0 approach. The free market would level out the full time driving jobs and the unemployment of drivers and costs and revenues, leading presumably to a more equal society (at least until driver-less cars took over!)

The role of blockchains

The blockchains are already making this happen because blockchains are basically protocols which allow open participation. Blockchains can perform some of the critical functions of platforms without being owned by any one institution, namely:

• store data
• execute contracts
• manage payments.

This article about Arcade City makes it clear:

In the end, Arcade City will be a protocol composed of Ethereum smart contracts supporting a global logistics network with an entire ecosystem of apps and businesses running on top of our infrastructure. What SMTP is to email, Arcade City will become for distributed logistics.

For all the bluster about Arcade City being an upcoming platform coop, to me it seems there is no platform in the sense of a thing which can be owned & sold. What then does the brochure site mean when it claims to be owned and operated by its members? It seems to me that the language is wrong.

The human factor

The benefits and challenges of co-owning and operating a legal entity such a cooperative within a legal jurisdiction, are quite different to the benefits and challenges of using, governing and stewarding a universal protocol. Regrettably Arcade City has now forked after a disagreement in the board, which poses serious questions about the claim that its members were in control. Technology alone will not create the society we want; at a more fundamental level, we have to learn to work together.

Professor Jem Bendell and I have explored these ideas further in our new paper Thwarting an Uber Future for Complementary Currencies: Open Protocols for a Credit Commons especially as they relate to payment systems, which we argue is the ultimate Death Star platform.

Photo by Glassholic

Photo by Glassholic

The post From Platform Cooperativism to Protocol Cooperativism? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Do completely horizontal organizations truly exist? Fueled by growing excitement about self-management, bossless leadership and new governance models such as Holacracy, I increasingly hear large claims about the potential of “flat organizations”, which are being used as synonymous to “having no hierarchy”. I often wonder whether I am reading correctly: Organizations with no hierarchy at all, with real live people in them? I feel like there has been a misunderstanding here. I might be wrong, but from my 5 year experience running the distributed organization OuiShare, my conclusion is: there is no such thing.

To explain why I’ve been quite frustrated with this misunderstanding, let me describe a scenario I have been confronted with multiple times in the past years: a new person, let’s call her Lisa, joins OuiShare to actively contribute to our network. Most likely, due to the way our organization was initially presented when we started in 2012 (the first draft of our values described us as a horizontal organization), but also the way this description has been interpreted and retold again and again by people from all corners of our network, Lisa arrives with a set of expectations. She expects to find a workplace free of power dynamics, where “everyone is equal”, she can do anything, nobody will tell her what to do and often, where leadership is not tied to specific people.

Pretty soon after joining and getting to work, Lisa notices she is having a hard time putting things in motion and garnering support for their work. This is when Lisa comes to me for help. I then suggest she talk to a specific person with more “power” than them on this matter—a “superior”, which is mostly followed by a confused and disappointed reaction. “I thought you had no hierarchy. Now you are telling me that some people here are superior to others? OuiShare is just like any other organization.” The fact that person A could be superior to person B in a given situation clashes with Lisa’s expectations. The answer I give her is “YES, we do have hierarchy; I don’t remember having ever said otherwise. But there is hierarchy and hierarchy.”

It’s dynamic hierarchy, stupid!

In most organizations today and in line with much of organizational theory, job titles correspond to a specific position within the organization’s hierarchy. There is a defined path for getting into this position (a specific degree, followed by climbing the corporate ladder for x number of years, maybe skipping some steps if you are good at politics) and job titles correlate with specific lines of communication and decision making power.

Rather than having abolished hierarchy all together, what I have perceived as different about the new genre of “emergent organizations” to which I count OuiShare and the Enspiral network, is that hierarchies in these organizations are dynamic. Authority shifts based on who has the most knowledge and experience in a specific context. There is no clearly defined path for holding a specific role.

Hierarchy does not need to disappear from our organizations, but it needs to change.

In such dynamic structures, sometimes authority correlates with age or time spent in the organization, but not necessarily. A new person entering may have superior expertise on a subject to others in the organization, putting them at the “top of the hierarchy” for this area. Simultaneously, they may be answering to a person with more history in the organization in the context of another project. I can both be the chair of OuiShare Fest Paris and answer to those same team members in another context.

Without formal structures, informality rules

So why not just get rid of hierarchy all together and “declare everyone equal”? In any system with humans in it, power relations exist, whether you formalize them or not. And as Jo Freeman states in her essay the Tyranny of Structurelessness, “structurelessness in groups does not exist”. If you refuse to define power structures, informal ones will emerge almost instantly. Not expressing these can be extremely harmful to your organization.

Though I understand why telling stories of fully flat and bossless organizations is enticing for those of us working on new organizational models, I don’t think we’re doing ourselves a favor with this. That’s why my request is that we stop creating unrealistic expectations for newcomers to this field and use this opportunity to truly understand what differentiates us from traditional hierarchies and how we could help others transition to becoming more dynamic hierarchies themselves.

To distribute power and leadership in organizations, we need to acknowledge their existence first.

What happens to bosses in a dynamic hierarchy? It might just be a matter of finding a new term, but contrary to what one often reads about self-organization, I am not convinced organizations should be bossless.

Rather than removing bosses from the workplace, I think their role needs to evolve to that of a facilitator, coordinator and leader—

Stewarding and coordinating rather than commanding,
Holding space and supporting rather than controlling,
Empowering team members to do their best work,
and be their best selves.

More reflections on what it means to be a “boss” in a dynamic hierarchy are upcoming in future articles!

You don’t agree? I look forward to your comments!
These thoughts are based on my personal anecdotal experience, not academic research, so please bear this in mind when commenting.
To learn more about my experiences with dynamic hierarchy, please get in touch and check out francescapick.com.

The post Cut the bullshit: organizations with no hierarchy don’t exist appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Our excerpt:

“No matter how promising the design of a new system might be, it would be unreasonable to expect that a nation would abruptly drop an existing system in favor of a new one. Nevertheless, a viable, even attractive strategy exists by which new systems could be successfully researched, developed, tested, and implemented. I call it engage global, test local, spread viral.

Engage global means to engage the global academic community and technical sector, in partnership with other segments of society, in a well-defined R&D program aimed at computer simulation and scientific field testing of new systems and benchmarking of results. In this way, the most profound insights of science can be brought into play.

Test local means to scientifically test new designs at the local (e.g., city or community) level, using volunteers (individuals, businesses, non-profits, etc.) organized as civic clubs. This approach allows testing by relatively small teams, at relatively low cost and risk, in coexistence with existing systems, and without legislative action.

Spread viral means that if a system shows clear benefits in one location (elimination of poverty, for example, more meaningful jobs, or less crime) it would likely spread horizontally, even virally, to other local areas. This approach would create a global network of communities and cities that cooperate in trade, education, the setup of new systems, and other matters. Over time, its impact on all segments of society would grow.

Cities, big and small, are the legs upon which all national systems rest. Already cities and their communities are hubs for innovation. With some further encouragement and support, and the right tools and programs, they could become more resilient and robust, and bigger heroes in the coming great transition.”

Photo by Occupy Global

The post The Triarchy of Cosmo-Localization: Engage Global, Test Local, Spread Viral appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From this, on an invitation by Rich Carlson to contribute to a book called Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures (a Springer publication), edited by Debashish Banerji and Makarand R. Paranjape, we produced a book chapter called “P2P and Planetary Futures”, modified for public use as “Toward a Synthetic Theory for P2P Alter-globalization.” The chapter presents peer to peer theory and practice in the context of alter-globalization and planetary perspectives on change. It begins through a short elicitation on peer to peer theory. It then synthesizes a dialogic engagement between peer to peer theory and nine perspectives on planetary change:

• reform liberalism,
• post-development,
• relocalization,
• cosmopolitanism,
• neo-marxism,
• engaged ecumenism,
• meta-industrial,
• autonomism / horizontalism,
• and co-evolutionary perspectives.

The chapter then presents a synopsis of a ground breaking effort in the application of peer to peer theory, the FLOK (Free Libre Open Knowledge) project in Ecuador, which provides a concrete example of P2P as an alter-globalisation practice, providing a experience base which captures the synthetic nature of p2p interventions.

Learnings:

Overall the engagement between peer to peer and alter-globalisation theory is both complex and fruitful. On one hand it does provide a sifting mechanism to situate peer to peer thinking in a broader spectrum of theory and discourse, and sharpens our understanding of where peer to peer thinking sits in the landscape of planetary change. On the other hand it also broadens out the dimensions of peer to peer thinking and theory, and is a vehicle for what can be understood as a an emerging synthetic theory-practice. The following bullet points provide a synopsis of the engagement between discourse and theory, with the warning that to really understand the intersection of alter-globalization and peer to peer theory and practice, one must look at the deeper engagements in the book chapter, modified paper and on the P2P Foundation Wiki. However, in general we can provide these general insights that a P2P perspective:

• Disagrees with the Reform Liberalist approach of a reformed capitalism, e.g. promoting ‘green’ capitalism and accepting ‘netachical’ capitalism, which we feel will ultimately lead to a deeper crisis.
• Sees a synergy with the Post Development discourse through building shared innovation communities and commons, selective de-globalization and the combination of neotraditional and P2P/transmodern approaches.
• Agrees with much of the Relocalization discourse on the need to re-localize much of our production and consumption, but sees a danger in over-romanticizing the local, or in ignoring the role of global solidarity systems and knowledge commons. Smart localization means ‘Cosmolocalization’.
• Agrees with the Cosmopolitan discourse’s emphasis on the need to create post-national structures to solve global problems, but would add the phenomenon of ‘Phyles’ and would de-emphasize CSOs and NGO and re-emphasize the critical role of global collaboration communities.
• Would reframe the neo-Marxist discourse’s commitments to global class formation, into the need for a global coalition of the commons, the forces of social justice (workers and labour movements), the forces for the defense of the biosphere (green and eco-movements) and the forces for a liberation of culture and social innovation (free culture movement), as the constituent blocks of a new hegemony.
• Agrees with the Engaged Ecumenist view on the need for spiritual awakening, but would argue that secular forms of spirituality which emphasize the unity of humankind, nature and cosmos, are as important as the non-secular. A peer to peer spiritual practice is based on a common exploration of the spiritual inheritance of humankind, independent of, but not opposed to, denominational religious affiliations.
• Agrees with the Meta-Industrial and Gender perspective that it is vital to take into account all peoples that have historically been excluded, with the female gender as paradigmatic example. A danger exists, however, for a reformed neoliberalism to embrace gender and sexual minorities and replace them with other inequalities and displacements. Therefore a ‘conscious’ P2P approach is needed, aware of both structural externalities and the internal subjective and cultural characteristics which continue to drive inequality.
• Accepts from Autonomism and Horizontalism the logic of the network form, but argues a global movement requires coherence and needs to draw on the principle of ‘diagonality’. A purely horizontalist orientation, which disowns leadership, embodied responsibility, as well as sequential 4 and programmatic social development, cannot wage an effective struggle in the face of hostile and ruthless state and market forces.
• Sees itself as eminently compatible with Co-evolutionary viewpoint: in particular because the advent of the P2P projects and communities are inherently global in their cooperative dynamics, and coincides with other scale shifts toward a planetary mode of thinking and action.

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“Super-Competent Democracies will emerge when the people, their leaders and the technical professionals learn how to use ensembles of participative, management cybernetic and soft-systems processes (i.e. ‘Super-Competencies) to .” *

This approach here from a Brazilian group looks to be very compatible with the partner state:

First, their key argument:

“If we look at societies where the state has failed, Somalia,Eritrea, Syria, Iraq, or is failing, eg Russia, Mexico, and contrast them with relatively robust societies where the states are pretty healthy, eg Scandinavia, most of Western Europe, much of Latin America at this moment , the need for a viable state is crystal clear.

Where states are totalitarian or autocratic or religious, the need for root and branch change is also clear, but that does not mean that the elimination of the state would benefit those societies.

These are fairly obvious truisms, But beyond them, there is the necessity of addressing the obsolete theory of the state dating from the Westphalian Treaty of 1665 or so and offer an alternative paradigm that will redefine its roles and functions so as to enable our human societies to be viable in a finite world.

As Erhard Eppler says:

– “The state – and not just the nation-state as preserved within the European Union – has a future, provided we really want it and plan for it. And we want it if we do not view the democratic constitutional and welfare state as something to be taken for granted, something that can stand any amount of stress and strain, or indeed as something tiresome or restrictive. It is one of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind. We want this future if we do not deceive ourselves about the alternative. For that would be a future without security, without law, without basic rights, without the practice of freedom.”

“It will always be necessary to adapt the democratic constitutional and welfare state to new circumstances – or in other words, to reform it. But it cannot YET !! be replaced by something better. Because a better way of doing things has yet to be devised.”
The Super-Competent Democracy model is perfectly placed to fill that gap. But to do so will not only mean defeating neoliberalism it will also require that many of neoliberalism’s current opponents shift their attention from a concentration on the grass-roots, to a consideration of the kind of 21st Century state that would both nurture local grass-roots involvement and be capable of tackling the huge agenda of transnational threats to the future of the human family.”

But what is then, a super-competent democracy? It is a project under construction:

“Super-Competent Democracies will emerge when the people, their leaders and the technical professionals learn how to use ensembles of participative, management cybernetic and soft-systems processes (i.e. ‘Super-Competencies) to co-create increasingly just, sustainable and super-competent communities, organisations, enterprises, services, cities and states.

The core purpose of the obsolete pseudo-democratic models inherited from the 18th – 20th Centuries, is to constantly increase economic growth to preserve the privileges of ‘the opulent’, as Andrew Hamilton explained to readers of ‘The Federalist’ in 1789.

The core purpose of the Super-Competent model of democracy is to enable citizens and societies to learn how to become increasingly just, sustainable and super-competent.

The special skills, tools and approaches enshrined in the Super-Competent Democracy model have been rigorously tested, evaluated and refined by many thousands of innovative systems-leaders, citizens, employees, technical professionals in every kind of society and organisation, since the 1930s. Their collective knowledge and experience would provide opponents of Neoliberalism with the guidance and support they will need to learn how to apply ensembles of Super-Competencies in their own communities, organisations, enterprises, municipalities, services and states.

In other words, consigning Neoliberalism to the trash-can of history will start when its opponents combine to form a global Super-Competencies Community and learn how to co-create increasingly just, sustainable and super-competent democracies wherever they happen to live and work.”

The post The partner state is a ‘super-competent democracy’ appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“In a 2009 essay called The Education of a Libertarian, Thiel declared that capitalism and democracy had become incompatible. Since 1920, he argued, the creation of the welfare state and “the extension of the franchise to women” had made the American political system more responsive to more people – and therefore more hostile to capitalism. Capitalism is not “popular with the crowd”, Thiel observed, and this means that as democracy expands, the masses demand greater concessions from capitalists in the form of redistribution and regulation. The solution was obvious: less democracy.“

Michel Bauwens:

During my lectures, I sometimes say that in our time, we have to be careful about 3 totalitarianisms; One is the totalitarianism of the state, which we could call fascism (the Stalinist Soviet model was the other form of it) ; the second is the totalitarianism of the commons, which we could call common-ism, marked by a belief that everything should be a commons and everything should be purely horizontal. Belief in a absolute solution stands in contrast to the multi-modal approach we follow at the P2P Foundation, which is not about making one modality absolute, but about thinking about their optimal configuration. Making the commons the prime attractor of our society and economy does not mean that our society only consists of commons.

But there is a third totalitarianism that is very dangerous nowadays, the totalitarianism of the market, terribly mislabeled in the U.S. as ‘libertarianism’. It comes in two forms, one is the current neoliberal system which wants to subsume the whole of society to the dictates of oligarchic finance; but there is another one that is equally dangerous and particularly significant for the peer to peer movement, because it often disguises itself in p2p language. And that is anarcho-capitalism. This political and social movement believes in distributed markets, that would dominate all of our lives. It is based on a distrust of democracy, and building tools that avoid democracy, replacing ‘one citizen one vote systems’, with ‘one dollar one vote’ systems. Much of the force behind Bitcoin and the blockchain comes from this underlying sensiblity. However, without countermeasures and social governance, any system based on a competition for scarce resources, leads inevitably to the creation of monopoly, as players of the game with the same name know all to well. So in practice, anarcho-capitalist technical solutions lead inevitably to the domination of oligarchic market forces. In this way, libertarianism is really the handmaiden of the neoliberal oligarchy. When libertarians become rich capitalists themselves, the veil separating the two evaporates, as with the Koch brothers.

But nowhere is this clearer than with Peter Thiel, a commercially successful libertarian who supports the authoritarian presidential candidate Donald Trump. This may sound contradictory, as why would a freedom-loving libertarian support authoritarian leaders, but the following article explains the logic behind the choice, which is really the hatred of democracy, and the vision that government should be exclusively at the service of the private sector, unhindered by democratic baggage.

Here are the excerpts from the excellent analysis by Ben Tarnoff:

“In a 2009 essay called The Education of a Libertarian, Thiel declared that capitalism and democracy had become incompatible. Since 1920, he argued, the creation of the welfare state and “the extension of the franchise to women” had made the American political system more responsive to more people – and therefore more hostile to capitalism. Capitalism is not “popular with the crowd”, Thiel observed, and this means that as democracy expands, the masses demand greater concessions from capitalists in the form of redistribution and regulation.

The solution was obvious: less democracy. But in 2009, Thiel despaired of achieving this goal within the realm of politics. How could you possibly build a successful political movement for less democracy?

Fast forward two years, when the country was still slowly digging its way out of the financial crisis. In 2011, Thiel told George Packer that the mood of emergency made him “weirdly hopeful”. The “failure of the establishment” had become too obvious to ignore, and this created an opportunity for something radically new, “something outside the establishment”, to take root.

Now, in 2016, Thiel has finally found a politician capable of seizing that opportunity: a disruptor-in-chief who will destroy a dying system and build a better one in its place. Trump isn’t just a flamethrower for torching a rotten establishment, however – he’s the fulfillment of Thiel’s desire to build a successful political movement for less democracy.

Trump is openly campaigning on the idea that American democracy should belong to fewer people. When he talks about deporting 11m immigrants, or promises to build a database of Muslim Americans, or praises FDR’s internment of Japanese Americans during the second world war, or encourages violence against black protesters at his rallies, he’s making an argument about who counts as an American (native-born whites) and who doesn’t (everyone else). “Real” Americans get to enjoy the rights and privileges of citizenship; racial outsiders and internal enemies do not.

This is certainly racist, and possibly fascist. It’s also profoundly anti-Democratic. It’s debatable how many of Trump’s campaign promises he could actually fulfill if elected, and how many he would even want to. But one indisputable effect of a Trump administration would be to diminish American democracy by lending credibility and resources to the forces of white supremacy and ultranationalism.

Such an outcome would fit Thiel’s purposes well. For Thiel, a smaller, more easily manipulated mob is preferable to a bigger one. If democracy can’t be eliminated, at least it can be shrunk through authoritarianism. A strongman like Trump, by exploiting the racial hatred and economic rage of one group of Americans, would work to delegitimize and disempower other groups of Americans. He would discipline what Thiel calls “the unthinking demos”: the democratic public that constrains capitalism.

Limiting democracy isn’t the same as limiting government, however. And this distinction matters to Thiel, who believes that government has an important role to play. Unlike most libertarians, Thiel recognizes that only the state can provide the public goods on which private profit-making depends. He often speaks of his admiration for the Apollo space program, which he considers the crowning achievement of a golden age of federal funding for science. Since then, as he explained in an interview with Francis Fukuyama, “an ossified, Weberian bureaucracy and the increasingly hostile regulation of technology” have crippled government’s capacity to foster technological innovation.

Following this logic, what’s needed is a state that bankrolls scientific research at midcentury cold war levels – without the comparatively high tax rates and social spending that accompanied it. Corporations would mine this research for profitable inventions. The public would foot the bill and ask for nothing in return.
The problem with traditional conservatives is that they’re too anti-government to fulfill this vision. Fortunately for Thiel, Trump is no traditional conservative. One of his talking points is a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, which he openly compares to the New Deal. But if Trump is heretical enough to support public spending to stimulate growth, he’s orthodox on the question of who should benefit from that growth. Federal spending is fine so long as its benefits flow to the rich: Trump’s proposed tax reform would slash rates for the top 0.1% of American taxpayers.

Thiel’s preferred political future isn’t hard to picture. The government shoulders the research costs for capitalists but makes no demands and sets no conditions. An authoritarian leader uses racial anger to set one portion of the population against another, and cracks down on those he sees as alien or illegitimate. The state becomes even more responsive to the needs of capitalists and even less responsive to the needs of workers and citizens. What Thiel calls the “oxymoron” of “capitalist democracy” is resolved – by jettisoning democracy.
This may sound like dystopian science fiction, but it’s also a perfectly reasonable political objective for someone of Thiel’s class position. It’s easy for liberals to dismiss Thiel as a “comic-book villain”, but this caricature obscures the fact that Thiel is a sophisticated thinker – and a perceptive one. His central observation, that American capitalism is facing a crisis, is unquestionably correct.”

Photo by roland

The post Why Would a Libertarian like Thiel Support an Authoritarian Candidate like Trump? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Mackenzie Wark writes:

Kojin Karatani’s The Structure of World History (Duke University Press, 2014) is an astonishing work of synthetic historical theory. Karatani views world history as a history of modes of exchange. He rejects the classical Marxist view of history though as modes of production, to which political, religious and cultural levels are superstructures.

The Marxist base and superstructure model always conjures up for me an image of the social formation as a three-story building, with an economic ground floor and politics and ideology or culture as the second and third. Karatani’s alternative model is more like three elevator shafts running through the social formation from top to bottom. The inadequacies of the base-and-super three-story image led Marxists such as Althusser to stress the relative autonomy and materiality of the political and cultural ‘levels’. Karatani sees two problems with this. One is a loss of a totalizing and systematic approach to history. The other is that it is really only in the west that politics could even be imagined as autonomous from economics.

So rather than the three horizontal levels, three (or perhaps four) elevator shafts, running vertically through the social formation, and though of as modes of exchange. Mode A is association, or rather the reciprocity of the gift. Mode B is brute force, or rule and protection. Mode C is commodity exchange. There’s also a Mode D, which transcends the others, but more on that later. Rather than criticize Marx, Karatani thinks it is time to complete his historical materialist project, by doing for modes A and B what he did for C.

Since Marcel Mauss, mode of exchange A is assumed to be dominant in archaic societies, but did not really exist among nomadic peoples. They could not stockpile goods. They pooled them as pure gift. It was a society of mobility and equality. Clan society only really developed the reciprocity of the gift once there was settlement. Clan society members were made equal by the reciprocity of the gift but were no longer free.

This is relevant to Marx’s notion of primitive communism, which is hard to support with anthropological studies. Marx and Engels looked to Lewis Morgan, who studied clan societies, when they should have been looking not at sedentary clans but nomads. Karatani’s project, as we shall see, is to envision a return to a kind of nomadism, equal and free. It is a social theory for Contant Neuwenhuis’s New Babylon.

The bulk of the study concerns not mode D but the interactions of modes A, B and C, or association, brute force and commodity production, figured not so much as elevator shafts as a Borromean knot (that favorite figure of Asger Jorn’s.) It was Hegel in the Philosophy of Right who first articulated this three-part model. Marx began his historical materialism with a critique of Hegel on this. “But in doing so Marx regarded the capitalist economy as constituting the base structure, while he took nation and state to be part of the ideological superstructure. Because of this, he was never able to grasp the complex social formation that is Capital-Nation-State. This led him to the view that state and nation would naturally wither away once the capitalist system was abolished.” (xvi) But these are not just superstructures and cannot be dissolved “simply through acts of enlightenment.” (xvi)

And so Karatani revisits Marx’s critique of Hegel and Hegel’s idealist view of state and nation, “to turn them on their head the way Marx did via a materialist approach…” (xvii) He claims to extend the methods of Marx’s Capital to state and nation, or rather to modes of exchange A and B of which they are the current forms.

Karatani thinks that unlike Hegel, Marx followed Kant in forming concepts of things in advance of their full expression. And like Kant, he held that such concepts are not real. They are “transcendental illusions” (xvii) or illusions necessary to reason itself, and which reason cannot eliminate. This compares in an interesting way to Zizek, for whom transcendental illusions are even more unavoidable, but who in his own Hegelian fashion takes their constitutive voids to be those of the real itself. Karatani threads the needle of Marx’s relation to German idealism in a way I find for more productive.

For Karatani, Marx neglected the agency of state and nation, or rather, of the modes of exchange of which they are modern forms. Materialism here means mode of exchange, not of production. “… if we posit that economic base equals mode of production, we are unable to explain pre-capitalist societies.” (4) I am not convinced by this argument, but let’s rather see what Karatani’s modes of exchange can explain.

Another constant of Karatani’s thought is that it is always a world-system approach, rather than one that takes social formations as having internal developmental processes that take priority over their external relations. (Although as we shall see, there is one strange exception to this). The Boromean knot of Capital-Nation-State is the product of a world system, not of any one nation-state, as were the previous arrangements of the three modes.

So while Karatani follows Mauss in thinking that Mode A dominates pre-modern societies, he thinks Mode A’s gift exchanges arose not within, but between societies: “reciprocity is not so much a principle of community as it is a principle for forming larger, stratified communities.” (5) Mode of exchange B, brute plunder and force, also has a critical role between societies. The conquered come to accept protection in exchange for plunder, and peace is kept with gestures of redistribution.

Interestingly, he sees Schmitt’s friend-enemy relation of Politics as just a subset of mode of exchange B, and hence in a sense actually ‘economic’. What is particularly delicious about Karatani is that it is a more, not less ‘economistic’ theory than most now current. All three modes are ‘economic’ modes – but of exchange, not of production.

Mode of exchange C is commodity exchange, or mutual consent between parties, but with neither the reciprocal obligation of Mode A or the brute force compulsion of Mode B. In Mode C each recognizes the other as a free being owning nothing more to community or ruler once the transaction is done. This freedom from constraint in Mode C is constitutive of the city as social form.

There is no separate sphere of politics or culture or ethics in this theory. All historical social formations include all three modes. The modes of exchange A, B and C produce different modes of power, which are successively the laws of community, state, and international law. Not all forms of power are based on coercion. The reciprocal gift of Mode A is also a power, and so too is the ‘natural law’ of trade and money characteristic of Mode C. While Karatani implies it rather than directly states it, Modes A, B and C seem to be successive stages in scales of organization.

Karatani makes external relations at least as constitutive as internal ones for social formations at all historical stages. With one exception. He mentions in passing that Marx drew on the work not only of Hegel also of Mosses Hess, who advanced Feuerbach’s critique of religion even further toward a critique of nation and state. Karatani notes that Marx borrowed from Hess the concept of an exchange between the human and nature as Stoffwechsel, usually translated as metabolism.

In the footnotes at least Karatani is aware of how this leads towards things like the work of John Bellamy Foster on Marx’s ecology, of thinking human history as part of natural history, with a stress on what Marx in Capital vol. 3 called the metabolic rift that opens when collective human labor interrupts the cycles of molecular flow within the planetary system. For example, Marx knew from Leibig’s classic studies that modern agriculture disrupted the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles.

Karatani: “In Hess’ view, the relation of man and nature is intercourse. More concretely, it is metabolism (Stoffwechsel), or material exchange. In German, Wechsel literally means ‘exchange’, so that the relation of humans to nature is one of intercourse or exchange. This is an important point when we consider Marx’s ‘natural history’ perspective – as well as when we consider environmental problems. The material exchanges (Stoffwechsel) between man and nature are one link within the material exchanges that form the total earth system.” (15-17) But in Karatani, this ‘stuff-exchange’, or metabolism, slips from view, and all that remains is exchange between human parties. And this in spite of his awareness of waste products as a general problem, and climate change as a key instance of such metabolic rift.

Unfortunately, Karatani shares a certain humanistic disdain for scientific thought, and remains naively positive about what humanistic thought can achieve on its own. Were it not for science and technology, we would not even be able to produce a knowledge of what climate change is, let alone of other metabolic rifts, which together are the symptomatology of the Anthropocene. So while there is progress here in thinking cultural, ethical and political phenomena in a materialist manner, it is not quite materialist enough. And while there is attention to externalities that impinge on social formations, the externalities of the engagement with the natural world are never an integral part of the theory.

One enduring bugbear of historical materialism is Marx’s sketchy idea of an ‘Asiatic mode of production’. Refreshingly, Karatani thinks it is a viable concept, just better thought as something not limited to Asia, just as the feudal mode is not limited to Europe. The ‘Asiatic’ is a despotic state or empire where Mode B dominates Modes A and C. In an interesting shift of perspective, China appears as the ‘normal’ developmental form, and Greece and Rome as failed approximations.

Borrowing from Karl Wittfogel, Karatani divides the pre-capitalist world up spatially into the despotic empires, their margins, their submargins and the ‘out of sphere.’ Margins get absorbed into despotic states, but submargins need not, even though they often adopt things like the writing systems of the despotic empires. Greece and Rome were submargins to despotic states. Germany was submargin to Rome, where feudalism took root. Trade and cities were able to emerge there outside feudal control. Or in short, capitalism arose at the periphery of world empires, giving rise to the modern world system. Russia and China escaped this fate. Socialists unwittingly gave new form to old despotic states.

Within a social formation, the rise of Mode C, commodity exchange, does not mean abolition of Mode A and Mode B. It was Mode B that became the modern state. Absolutism created the state with a standing army and no reciprocal exchange among ruling elites. Absolutism established what had long existed under despotic states. Mode A then returns in the form of the nation as “imagined community” – once local communities have been weakened or abolished.

This world-systems theory actually has three successive stages. World mini-systems characterized the archaic world, and were dominated by Mode A. The world empires that subsumed them were dominated by Mode B, or what Marx thought of as the ‘Asiatic mode of production’. The modern world market system is dominated by Mode C. Karatani then suggests we are ready for a “fourth great shift: the shift to a world republic.” (28)

With mini world systems, the “great leap” (31) was from hunting to farming. He opposes V. Gordon Childe’s thesis of a Neolithic revolution, for whom agriculture led to fixed settlements. Karatani thinks it is the other way around. Inequality arises from the storage capacity of that comes with settlement. Following Marshall Sahlins, he argues that pooling happens within a household, whereas reciprocity happens between them. Reciprocity is actually a continuum from pure gift giving to war and reprisal. After Pierre Clastres, he sees gifts as a way of cementing alliances for war, and war as what prevents the state from forming in pre-modern mini-world systems. Here and elsewhere there are curious convergences with Deleuze and Guattari, with whom he shares some political but not philosophical commitments.

In a mini-world system, war exists because there is no transcendent power over the clans. Reciprocity is an in-between, it does not dissolve the parties in a higher unity. It can lead to a federal unity, but not a state. So why did hunter-gatherers settle? Climate change. During the Ice Age, human spread. Warming led to reforestation and decline in game. The stockpiling of smoked fish led to a “sedentary revolution” (45) that produced agrarian clan society still based on a reciprocity that maintained the independence of social formations from each other.

This reciprocity of the gift extends beyond the human. Magic is a form of the gift. Magic is the attempt to control another through the gift in the form of the sacrifice. “Sacrifices are gifts that impose a debt on nature, thereby sealing off the anima of nature and transforming it into an It.” (53) Magic despiritualizes nature. Settlement means coexisting not only with others but with the dead, and the attempt to placate them with gifts.

The sedentary revolution is a move away from the communism of the nomad, from equality and freedom. Freud was not entirely wrong to highlight the myth of the murder of the father, but it wasn’t a primal event, but rather a murder in advance of the ur-father by the brotherhood of clan society, to cut off a further drift away from equality and freedom – at least for the clan ‘brotherhood.’

Karatani’s historical materialism is entirely focused on social relations – except in odd moments when natural changes enter from without. Karatani has the chutzpah to accuse V. Gordon Childe of not being Marxist enough, but Childe at least though seriously about labor-nature metabolism. Karatani makes makes relations of exchange prior to relations of production. Here is the thread of an argument I find interesting, but with which I can’t agree.

“In Capital, Marx begins his exploration of capitalist production not from the invention or deployment of machines but rather from the manufactures – that is, from the organization of labor that he called the division and combination of labor.” (60) Karatani dismisses the significance of invention such as that of the deep-furrow plough. “In the terms of the relationship between technology and nature, the innovations achieved by ancient civilizations had little impact.” (61)

The shift from bronze to iron was for Karatani more important to the rise of the state (weapons) than agriculture. The most important tech in the pre-modern world was administrative. “The technologies for ruling people don’t rely on naked compulsion: instead, they install forms of discipline that make people voluntarily follow rules an work.” (61) Religion is about organizing labor – a view that brings Karatani close to Bogdanov.

In another of his reversals of perspective, he argues that “The state did not arise as a result of the Agricultural Revolution: to the contrary, the Agricultural Revolution was a consequence of the rise of the state.” (63) Trading and warfare led to city-states, these states that then led to agriculture: “…the rise of the city cannot be separated from the rise of the state. In other words, mode of exchange B and mode of exchange C are inseparable from one another.” (65)

Interestingly, he views the state as a development of Mode B, as a form of exchange: “… the state is based on a non-reciprocal principle of exchange.” Hobbes thought the social contract was extorted by fear, Karatani sees it as the transformation of plunder into a mode of exchange, of plunder for protection. The state put an end to horizontal reciprocity, an end to both gift and vendetta. States do not arise from a single community, but in the space of world-empire: “the sovereign is something that comes from outside.” (71) State comes from exchange between ruling and ruled social formations.

Agrarian clan communities come after, and are produced by, the state. “Reciprocity does not acknowledge any higher authority. The agrarian communities that formed under Asiatic despotism preserved reciprocity in such aspects as mutual aid and equalization. But they lost the other aspect of reciprocity: their autonomy.” (74) While the Greeks, out on the submargin, were making city states, the Qin and Han empires formed the characteristic form of despotic state. “Once a centralized order was established, the despotic state then tried to actively co-opt traditions dating back to clan society. This is why the agrarian community organized by the despotic state took on the appearance of being a continuation of clan society.” (75)

Hence Mode B depends on a modified and extended form of Mode A: “the agrarian community is an imagined community whose framework is provided by the despotic state – just as the modern nation cannot exist in the absence of the framework of the centralized state. Asiatic despotism existed in the form of an amalgamation of the despotic state wit the agrarian community.” (76) Dynasties come and go, but the Mode B despotic state and the Mode A agrarian clan remain. Backward Greece and Rome did not develop these forms.

Marx, Weber, Wittfogel and Joseph Needham all argued that the Chinese despotic state was a hydraulic state, that its administrative elaboration was a result of building the technology to control flooding and irrigation, or in short that metabolism, ‘stuff-exchange’ determined human-to-human exchange. Following an argument made by Michael Mann in Sources of Social Power vol. 1, Karatani disputes this, and once again makes the social relation causative over and against its relation of externality with nature.

Karatani: “The civilization realized by hydraulic societies was not just a matter of technologies for dominating nature; more than that, it consisted of technologies for governing people – namely, state apparatuses, standing armies, bureaucratic systems, written language, and communication networks.” (79) One could wonder, however, whether this is a false distinction, and if one can entirely subordinate ‘stuff-exchange’, or metabolism, to purely inter-subjective exchange.

Where do administered and administering people come from? After all, “…people do not voluntarily choose to become bureaucrats.” (79) As Max Weber argued, a money economy is a precondition for a bureaucratic system. Thus, just as the despotic Mode B state depends on a modified form of Mode A, it also requiresthea development of Mode C. But money arises not within but between social formations. “Karl Marx repeatedly stressed that commodity exchange began with exchanges between different communities.” (81) The form of power of Mode C is money, which the state cannot do without. As in David Graeber, Karatani stresses the role of money in sustaining standing armies.

For Karatani, money does not require a labor theory of value for its explication. The power of money is grounded in a social contract. Money is king in the same way that the king is king. The king is king because others are subjects, while they imagine they are subjects because he is king. Likewise money. Money is sovereign, but sovereign as empty position anyone can occupy.

Money is minted by the state, but not its power to circulate globally. Karatani: “… we cannot understand money only by looking at it locally, within a single country – in the same way that we cannot understand the state if we confine ourselves to the context of a single country.” (93) And in another reversal of perspective, Karatani argues that “the power of precious-metal money to circulate worldwide is not something owing to the state. To the contrary, the state’s ability to mint money depends in this power.” (92)

In a manner strikingly parallel to Deleuze and Guattari, Karatani sees Mode C as something Mode B depends on but tried to limit and contain. Mode C gets out of hand. “Exchange is pursued to seek not use values but rather exchange values, and for this reason is without limit.” (94) Mode C is one of eternal and limitless expansion. But it still depends on Mode B. Enforcing the repayment of debt calls for both the habits of reciprocity of Mode A and the sanctions of Mode B. These are its real conditions of existence. “The existence of exchange C, far from being a materialist, rational base structure, is fundamentally a world of credit and speculation, a speculative world.” (97)

In despotic states such as China, trade was managed by the state bureaucracy, which Greece and Rome lacked. There the market could play a destructive role. In Greece, “letting the market set prices was politically equivalent to letting the masses decide public questions.” (101) But Mode C without limits damaged the polis, resulting in inequality and servitude. Democracy in Athens was an attempt to preserve a community of rulers within the polis, back by an ever-expanding slave system.

The despotic states exist within systems of world empire. They exist in contexts of world religions, languages and law that extend beyond and between them. Only some are irrigation based, and here Karatani much expands the concept beyond an Asiatic mode of production. While some were based on irrigation (in China, Peru, Mexico), some were martime (Rome), some nomadic (the Mongols) and some combined the nomadic with a merchant base (Islam). Karatani: “we come to see that Marx’s distinctions between Asiatic, classical and feudal do not mark successive diachronic stages but rather positional relationships within the space of world-empire.” (124) In sum, the three modes of exchange exist in parallel and are inter-connected, but in successive historical epochs, Modes A, then B, then C have been dominant.

What then of Mode D? It is the polar opposite of Mode B. Mode of exchange D marks the attempt to restore the reciprocal community (A) on top of the market economy (C). It is an ideal form that never existed in reality, although it is given expression, at least in their formative moments, by the great world religions. But perhaps this line of thought could be made rather more ‘materialist.’ In his book Debt, Graeber notes that when precious metals are used to ornament temples, it is the withdrawal from circulation of the material means of making the coinage to sustain an army. The sacrifice of gold to imaginary Gods is thus nevertheless a real sacrifice.

Karatani stresses the difference rather than continuity of religion and magic. Prayer is directed, via the priest-king as guardian of the portal, to a transcendent God. It lacks the horizontal and egalitarian aspect of magic. “The development of magic into religion was nothing other than the development from clan society to the state.” (131) But religion did not intend to be this: “… universal religions originally appeared in the form of a negation of this sort of world empire and religion. As soon as they achieved stable form, however, they found themselves appropriated into the ruling apparatus of a world empire.” (133) As Raoul Vaneigem stresses in his histories of heresy, religions are part of a history of modes of sacrifice.

World empires (Mode B) need both world religion (Mode A) and world money (Mode C). “The worship of money is, to borrow Marx’s language, a fetishism, and with the rise of world money, this fetishism became monotheistic.” (134) Money frees individuals from community and reciprocity. But religions are also expressions of something else: “In the process of empire formation, there is a moment when, under the sway of mode of exchange B, mode of exchange C dismantles mode of exchange A; at this moment, and in resistance to it, that universal religion appears, taking the form of mode of exchange D.” (135)

Religions both restore, but also abstract, the reciprocity of Mode A. For example, the Jewish god as of a new kind. When their state failed, the people did not abandon Him. “The defeat of a state no longer meant the defeat of its god…. This meant the rejection of reciprocity between God and people.” (139) This is a power of God that transcends community, state and money.

Christianity stressed Jesus’ rejection of state, money, community. He speaks of God’s love as an absolute gift that cannot be reciprocated. Universal religions preach a pure love, pointing beyond the particular reciprocity of Mode A: “universal religions do not become universal by negating the particular. Rather, they become universal through an incessant awareness of the contradiction between universality and particularity.” (143) Contra Badiou, what matters about, for example, Saint Paul is not just a transcendent universalism. “The transcendence and immanence of God forms an inseparable, paradoxical unity.” (144)

Universal religions arise when Mode C has become generalized, and (as Graeber shows in detail) borrow their metaphors of universality from the market place. World religions are critical of kings and priests, but they become the religion of the state, or fade away. “What Buddha carried out was the deconstruction of existing religions.” (152) Confucius taught benevolence, and his social reformism was stressed even more by Mencius. Laozi opposed not only the state but also clan society, pointing back to nomadic way of life, and Taoism was, as Needham also thought, “a fountainhead of utopianism and anarchism.” (156) Karatani’s project is in essence to revive not the religious but social force of Mode D to push once again for forms of exchange that are both free and equal, but at a higher level of organization and more extensive scale.

World economy is different from world empire in not being so based on coercion. In a gesture toward what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls Provincializing Europe, Karatani thinks Mode C broke out of the constraints of Mode B in Europe because of its marginality rather than its centrality to world history. He cites Needham on the advanced level of technical and social organization in China up until late modern times. “… a world economy emerged in western Europe not because its civilization was advanced but rather because it was located on the submargin.” (160) The Mongolian empire collapsed, after which rose Qing, Mughals and Ottoman despotic states. Europe colonized the margins and out of sphere spaces of the empires. Russia and China resisted marginalization, and both tried to build a different world system.

In short, a world economy could only arise where there wasn’t a powerful despotic state controlling a world empire. This world economy would be composed eventually of modern nation-states. What made such states possible was the absolutist monarchy, which were a bit different to despotic states in that mode C was stronger. Absolute monarchs rejected higher order power above them, whether emperor or church, and did their best to abolish the autonomy of communities within their domain. Absolutism made a more or less homogeneous people under a sovereign, a necessary step prior to that people itself claiming to be sovereign. Absolutism forged the link in the Borromean knot between state and nation.

Absolutist monarchies also differed from despotic states in that Mode C had a much freer hand. There is a union of capital and state in absolute monarchies, in the form of mercantilism. Western powers could not challenge Ottoman, Mughal or Qing power directly, but spread the doctrine of national self-determination and denounced imperial rule. “…the existence of a sovereign state inevitably leads to the creation of other sovereign states.” (168) The state’s essence comes out in war, as a state exists really in relation to other states.

The absolutist state produces the possibility of the modern state’s Borromean knot of Capital-State-Nation. The state has to call into existence the means of making a nation, through compulsory education and conscription. Just as Mode B in the form of the state produces Mode A in the form of the nation, it also creates the conditions of possibility for Mode C: “… there has never been a time when the state did not intervene in the economy.” (174). It is the world market system that produces the modern state, not the other way around. “The state’s distinctive form of power will never be understood if we view it only from the perspective of its interior.” (174)

Marxists treat the state as superstructure, and expect it to wither away after the revolution. But after the Russian revolution of 1917 it actually got stronger. “Marx had penetrating insight into the nature of capitalism, but his understanding of the state was inadequate.” (175) In Capital he bracketed off Ricardo’s interest in taxation. Karatani turns to Marx’s ‘18^th Brumaire’ for a more nuanced Marxist understanding of the Capital-State-Nation knot.

As Karatani reads it, Marx was grappling with Louis Bonaparte’s distinctive structural role: “his power as emperor was established by projecting the external appearance of gift-counter-gift reciprocal exchanges onto what was in reality a plunder-redistribution exchange carried out by the state machinery.” (178) Karatani takes the structural, sovereign role of both Louis Bonaparte and Otto von Bismarck as evidence of autonomous power of the state.

Karatani argues that Mode C has always existed, but was kept contained until recently by early forms of Mode A and Mode B. As with his analysis of Modes A and B, Karatani sees Mode C as arising within a world system, or between social formations, rather than within a social formation. Commodity exchange that takes place between different value systems can yield a profit. The totality of capital has to engage in an equal exchange with labor and yet it has to extract surplus value. Capital has to go outside and find new consumers. “In order for the accumulation of capital to continue, it has to ceaselessly engage in the recruitment of new proletarians.” (192) Karatani revisits the famous Dobb-Sweezy debate on the origins of capitalism, and sides with Sweezy, who thought it began with merchant capital and the world markets.

The capitalist class prefers finance and merchant to industrial capital. (Keynes’ ‘liquidity preference’) Holland already led in finance and merchant capital, so Britain had to go for industrial, and used the state to make it possible. “The belief that the capitalist market economy develops autonomously, outside the influence of the state, is simply mistaken.” (197)

What is distinctive about industrial capital is its discovery of labor power. Industrial capital commodifies labor power, which is in the end is in limited supply. Industrial capital has to expand across the world system in search of new populations to make over as workers. Moreover, “the emergence of the industrial proletariat is simultaneously the emergence of the consumer.” (188)

Industrial capital requires also ceaseless tech-change to improve relative surplus value through rising labor productivity. Capital is rapidly approaching the limits of resources and the ability to process waste. There’s an opening here for Karatani to take up the buried theme of metabolic rift in his text, but he doesn’t take it. “But the human-nature relationship is of course primary. We need, however, to remain wary of ideologies that stress this and forget about human-human relations.” (206) This is of course itself an ideology, and indeed the dominant one among humanities scholars.

One of the most interesting discussion in Karatani is on the nation as a (failed) attempt to revive Mode A in modern form. “… the nation is something that appears within the social formation as an attempt to recover, through imagination, mode of exchange A and community, which is disintegrating under the rule of capital-state. The nation is formed by capital-state, but it is at the same time a form of protest and resistance to the conditions brought about by capital-state, as well as an attempt to supplement for what is lacking in capital-state.” (209) As in Benedict Anderson, the nation replaces religion as what gives people a sense of the eternal. Nations formed under the absolute monarchs, who united the people by breaking up community within and by refusal of any empire or church beyond it. For them, national law trumps empire law (natural law).

The cultivation of nationalism is connected to that of labor-power (or what the Foucauldians call biopower). But nationalism was also a form of resistance. The romanticism from which It sprang wanted to restore a sentiment of community lost to capital-state. ”…late eighteenth century Europe saw the rise not only of Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ but also of imagination itself…” (214)

The source was Kant, for whom sensibility and understanding are synthesized through imagination. But the romantics lost sight of the imagined status of the nation. They took it for real. “… even in Hegel’s philosophy, it is forgotten that this knot was produced in a fundamental sense by the imagination, in the form of the nation; he forgets that the nation exists only in imagination. This also explains why his philosophy was unable to foresee any possibility of superseding this knot.” (224)

For a tantalizing moment, Karatani maps the triad of Understanding-Sensibility-Imagination onto State-Capital-Nation. As if Kant’s categories were a mapping of the organizational forms of modernity itself. Mode C ends in inequality, “but the nation, as something that intends communality and equality” will try to resolve the contradictions. The state realizes those intentions.

Most modern thinkers read their Marx through the supplement of another philosopher. There are Spinozist-Marxists (Althusser, Negri), Hegelian-Marxists (Lukacs, Adorno, Zizek), Nietzschian Marxists (Deleuze, Lyotard). The supplement in Karatani is Kant, and in particular Kants Kingdom of Ends, his regulative idea of the treating others not as means but as ends, a reciprocity of freedom itself. “Kant negated religion absolutely – yet he also extracted its basic morality.” (230)

This is not the same as distributive justice, which assumes the inequalities generated by Mode C are left intact and dealt with at the second order by a Mode B that has to make concessions to demands usually framed in the Mode A of the nation as imagined community. Rather, Karatani thinks Kant’s kingdom of ends implies the abolition of both state and capital. It would be a world republic of peace not just within but between states. This is of course no more than a regulative idea, a kind of transcendental illusion. Like the unified self, the kingdom of ends is an idea that makes it possible to think and act but which is not itself real or realizable. “Ultimately, people cannot help but find an end or purpose to history.” (232)

Like Charles Fourier, Karatani rejects the Jacobin strand of socialism, which saw itself as inheriting and completing the project of the French revolution, with its imaginary invocation of an ideal Borromean knot of Capital-State-Nation under the slogan of liberty, equality, fraternity – which was only realized under Napoleon as sovereign, and in the form of revolutionary war.

Rather, Karatani turns to Proudhon’s pre-Marxist scientific socialism and its rejection of statist schemes. “Because equality is realized through redistribution carried out by the state, equality always leads to a greater or lesser extent to Jacobinism and increased state power.” (235) Drawing on his more extended argument in his book Transcritique (MIT Press, 2005), he picks up Max Stirner as a socialist thinker, for whom a higher form of associationism can only come after people free themselves from community.

Karatani argues that Marx is much closer to Proudhon on the state than to Lassalle, who is the real origin of state-socialist politics, even though Engels tacked much closer to such a position after Marx’s death. Following Engels, Kautsky and Bernstein argued for a statist socialism in Germany, while Luxemburg and Trotsky thought revolution could happen on the margin, due to the necessarily inter-state character of the world system and the super-exploitation of the margin. Lenin would pick up this argument and marry it to Jacobin and statist socialism.

Karatani wants to revive a quite other tradition. He agrees with the Leninists that labor unions tend to get absorbed into capitalism and raise only partial and particular demands within its framework. He turns instead to cooperative movements. “… labor unions are a form of struggle against capital taking place within a capitalist economy, while cooperatives are a movement that moves away from the capitalist system. In other words, the former is centered on production, the latter on circulation.” (243)

Marx did indeed see the necessity of seizing state power, but in order to make a cooperative commonwealth possible. This Karatani counter-poses to the dangers of the Lassalle-type state socialist line. “This was not a product of Stalinism, to the contrary, belief in state ownership produced Stalinism.” (250) Karatani thinks Marx broke with the Jacobin politics that had its heyday in the 1848 revolutions. “The Paris Commune marked its last burst of glory and was not a harbinger of the future.” (253) And Marx knew it, despite his fidelity to the Paris Commune.

Karatani is opposed to the politics of the leap. There’s no shortcuts. “In trying to master capitalism by means of the state, Marxists fell into a trap laid by the state.” (257) It is also impossible to supersede capital-state through the nation. That way lies fascism. The opening is rather to rethink Mode D, which would be a “return of the repressed” (xi), or a way for reciprocity to comes back under the dominance of Modes B and C.

But Mode D does not just restore community. It is possible only after community has been negated. It is regulative idea that restores reciprocity after and without community: “…communism depends less on shared ownership of the means of production than on the return of nomadism.” (xii) Mode D has to be “simultaneously free and mutual.” (7)

Mode D escapes from particular social formations. The overcoming at a higher level of the Capital-Nation-State has to be realized in the form of a new world system. Karatani’s argument could be broadly classified as what Benjamin Noys calls negationist rather than accelerationist, and it is certainly not one of what I call extrapolation or inertia. The negation of the Capital-State-Nation world system has to come from cooperative practices and from a new imagining of Mode D. But even within the text there’s the materials for another kind of historical thought. It would be one that has to pay more attention to both metabolism and production, which are, after all, the same thing.

Karatani sees the stages of the world market system in terms of the key world commodity of each. Thus for Mercantilism it is textiles, forLiberalism it is light industry, for Finance capital it is heavy industry, for State monopoly capital it is durable consumer goods, and for Multinational capitalism it is information.

This most recent stage some would call ‘neoliberal, but Karatani rightly finds it too imperialistic for such a benign-sounding term. The current stage, despite appearances, is one of the weakness of the old hegemon, the United States, within the world system. It is an era of the accelerated export of capital and corresponding cuts to redistributive justice by the states at the core of the old world system, as “state-capital was freed from egalitarian demands” (279)

This is not quite what Hardt and Negri described in Empire. Karatani thinks, incorrectly in my view, that they see Empire as an extension of the United States’ hegemonic role. I thought rather than their point is that Empire extends the form of American constitutionalism, which they read as a uniquely expansionist kind of legal frame. For them Empire is a shift in power away from Nation-State, not just towards Capital, but to a new transnational constitutionalism.

But Karatani is perhaps correct in seeing in their work a certain nostalgia for what Wallerstein called the counter-systemic movements of “May 68.” Like Marx in the 1840s, they think a kind of revolution as clarifying moment, cutting through state-nation-capital to reveal the ‘real’ workings underneath, now figured as multitude rather than productive labor.

As Karatani stresses, the state does not wither away even as Mode C globalizes, and state-nation are no mere superstructures. If there’s an end to capital, it may have to do with the entry of China and India into the world market system, and the final exhaustion of the process of making new worker-consumers. Not to mention waste products catching up with us all.

There is an opening here to make more of an accelerationist or even extrapolationist argument about world history. Rather than a regulative idea from without, perhaps actual developments from within might be key factors. One could imagine the Capital-State-Nation system accelerated from below into a new mode, which is essentially what Hardt and Negri try to describe. But they are weak on the systemic constraints of metabolism.

Perhaps then one could attempt to describe a shift in levels of organization forced by the confrontation with scarcity. Sartre usefully constructs a world-historical thought on scarcity (which appears nowhere in Karatani), but links it to violence and the practico-inert, a kind of repetition of reified and passive affects. But it seems scarcity can lead to a third alternative, which is the extrapolation out of existing forms of organization of new ones.

Bogdanov thought there was a tendency to substitute from one’s own labor practices ideas about organization and impose them on the world. Hence Kant’s Kingdom of Ends appears as philosophical practice itself writ large. Other organizational practices might also substitute from their activities to worldviews. Thus it is not only Mode A that might give rise to a regulative idea, but Mode B and Mode C as well. Substituting from Mode B produces what I call the drone of Minerva, a reactive policing, particularly by waning states, based on total surveillance and force projected at a distance. Substituting from mode C, we get financialization, and a concentration of all decision making power in the form of the quantification and pricing of all possibilities.

These regulative ideas, or rather substitutions, all have something in common: an actual infrastructure that would make them possible. They presupposed an actually existing vectoral world. So too might attempts to extend Mode A as Mode D. As I argued in A Hacker Manifesto, this abstraction of the world is riven with class tensions. The same vector, the same information infrastructure, makes possible both control and commodification, but also more abstract forms of the gift. The politics of sharing free information then becomes the leading form for thinking new possibilities.

While I find Karatani illuminating in many ways, I think what we need is a more vulgar Marxist perspective, or rather two. One is based on Marx’s understanding of the labor-nature interaction as metabolism, as elaborated by John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burchett and others. The second is to revive an old Anglo-Marxist interest in the forces of production, which can be found in V. Gordon Childe, but also Joseph Needham and JD Bernal. Karatani, like so many others, argues as if this was still somehow the dominant version of Marxism, when it is clear that since the anti-systemic movements of ’68 and the rise of new left ideologies, the opposite is the case.

All of the schools of Marx, from the Spinozists to the Hegelians to the Nietzchians join in refusing such a vulgar account. But a dialectic (if it is still that) which connects metabolism, scarcity, waste products and changes in technical-organizational form might seem like a useful perspective in these times.

If one might make more of the substitutions that spill out of the organizational practices of Modes B and C, one might also put more stress on the materiality and less on the imaginative side of Mode A, particularly in its modern form. Here Harold Innis might be a better guide than Benedict Anderson, with his stress on the communication vectors within which the nation is realized geographically, or one might follow Raymond Williams and look at the materiality of the practices of producing a culture.

Still, there’s much to celebrate in Karatani’s achievement. He refuses pomo fragmentation and thinks the totality, but in unexpected ways, and opens history up once again to further developments. It is not history that ended, but Fukuyama’s feeble imagining of it.

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•  Video interview Michel Bauwens, ETUC/ETUI conference ‘Shaping the new world of work’, Brussels, 27-29 June 2016.

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