As I noted at the outset of this study, there are two broad groups — sometimes using superficially similar rhetoric but in fact fundamentally opposed — that celebrate the emergence of a new kind of society based on current technological trends. One such group, whose material interests center on putting new wine in old bottles, enclosing the new liberatory technologies of abundance within a corporate framework of artificial scarcity for the sake of rent extraction, are trying to pass off a counterfeit of the real thing. Another group is promoting the real thing — among them autonomists like Dyer-Witheford, Hardt and Negri, groups like that see peer-production and free and open-source software as kernels of a future communist society, and thinkers like Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation who envision a system incorporating non-capitalist markets along with cooperative production based on the natural resource and information commons.

Mason, I think, falls unmistakably in the latter category.

The false prophets of corporate information capitalism do a great deal of harm in passing themselves off as the real thing. But deluded figures on the Left like McMillan, who pretend that the two groups are the same, arguably do even more damage by discrediting our best hope for a post-capitalist society.

Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real (With Special Regard to Paul Mason’s Post-Capitalism)

Download a PDF copy of Kevin Carson’s full C4SS Study: Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 20 (Spring 2016)

I. Capitalist Techno-Utopianism from Daniel Bell On
II. Categories of Leftist Techno-Utopianism
III. Other Non-Capitalist Techno-Utopianisms

• John Holloway
• Michel Bauwens
• Accelerationism

IV. Analysis: Comparison of the Two Strands of Techno-Utopianism

Areas of commonality

V. Paul Mason
VI. Left-Wing Critiques of Mason

• Stephanie McMillan
• Kate Aronoff

Conclusion

Notes

Photo by Dan Ruscoe

The post Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real 12: Conclusion appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Political action may be necessary. As Aronoff suggested, it is indeed a mistake to create a false dichotomy with counter-institution building. But framing “political action” as primarily state action, rather than a component of the counter-institution building movements themselves, is precisely the kind of false dichotomy we need to avoid. Political models centered on the conquest of power, and collective action through captured institutional hierarchies, are — to repeat — obsolete.

Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real by Kevin Carson. Read the full series here or scroll down for the PDF.

Kate Aronoff. Other critics are more thoughtful than McMillan (it would be hard to be less so). Kate Aronoff, for example, recognizes the liberatory potential of the new technologies, despite her fear that they will be successfully hijacked by Silicon Valley capitalism absent political action to divert the currents of change into a more progressive channel. And above all she gets credit for at least describing Mason’s position honestly.

Mason’s call to “direct all actions towards the transition — not the defense of random elements of the old system,” to focus solely on building alternatives, is a false dichotomy. If Syriza’s project in Greece has shown anything, it’s that combining a broad-based solidarity economy with political power is deeply threatening to neo-liberalism, the top brass of which will risk self-implosion to stamp it out. Acting alone, Solidarity for All didn’t provoke a sadistic backlash from Greece’s creditors. Syriza’s victory at the polls, its leadership’s presence at the negotiating table in Brussels, and the egalitarian populist parties grasping at state power across the Mediterranean did — but neither the challenge nor the solution could exist without the other.

Millennial-led movements from Black Lives Matter to Occupy Wall Street have already put the social technologies Mason describes into practice, and are writing new rules for how popular uprisings work in the 21st century. Podemos, Spain’s ascendant populist party, uses a sub-Reddit to make decisions among members at the national level. Thankfully, technology is changing organizing at least as much as it is the economy. Capitalism isn’t going anywhere without a fight, no matter how inventive the alternatives.

If the early 20th century labor heroine Lucy Parsons were alive now, she might add an addendum on to the statement she’s best remembered by: “Never be deceived that the rich will permit you to innovate away their wealth.” Today’s movements will need to be at least as creative as the forces they’re taking on, and be building solutions that are even more so. Post-capitalism is coming, but a new and even more disruptive tradition of organizing will have to clear the way first.[1]

The problem is that Aronoff conflates “political action” as such with political action aimed at controlling the state. It may well be that networked movements like Occupy Wall Street or Syntagma are useful both in articulating the subjectivity of the classes building the new society, and in running political interference and mobilizing the public in defense of the new counter-institutions where the state actively menaces them. The swarming done by the worldwide support movement for the EZLN, back in the ’90s, is a good example of this approach. The direct actions taken by Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland, the Block the Boat campaign on the U.S. west coast, and Black Lives Matter, are also good examples. And such movements can exist as direct outgrowths of the groups engaged in building counter-institutions, if not actually coextensive with them. And Podemos, which Aronoff also mentioned, has a much more distributed and locally focused character, functioning much more as a facilitating platform for the local counter-institutions themselves — arguably closer to Bauwens’s idealized Partner State model than to Syriza.

“Political action” focused mainly on representation in the state, and working through it, on the other hand, is a different matter altogether. And the choice of the Syriza movement as a positive example is particularly unfortunate, for all the reasons we considered earlier.

Political action may be necessary. As Aronoff suggested, it is indeed a mistake to create a false dichotomy with counter-institution building. But framing “political action” as primarily state action, rather than a component of the counter-institution building movements themselves, is precisely the kind of false dichotomy we need to avoid. Political models centered on the conquest of power, and collective action through captured institutional hierarchies, are — to repeat — obsolete.

We don’t need the state’s policy apparatus to implement the new society, as envisioned by Marxist models of the transitional proletarian dictatorship. All we need is to block efforts by the state to suppress the emergence of the new society; and for that purpose movements outside the state, engaged in swarming, blocking and sabotage, are what is needed.

Aronoff’s revision of Lucy Parson’s notwithstanding, we’re not talking about the rich letting us do anything. The whole point of all the horizontalist analyses we’ve seen of the internal contradictions of capitalism is that they can’t stop us. The technological changes that are destroying the capitalist state’s enforcement mechanisms are part and parcel of the technologies of the new society itself. The same technologies that serve as building blocks of the new society are rendering the state unable to suppress the new society. In that sense, we can indeed innovate our way out of capitalism.

Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real (With Special Regard to Paul Mason’s Post-Capitalism)

Download a PDF copy of Kevin Carson’s full C4SS Study: Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 20 (Spring 2016)

I. Capitalist Techno-Utopianism from Daniel Bell On
II. Categories of Leftist Techno-Utopianism
III. Other Non-Capitalist Techno-Utopianisms

• John Holloway
• Michel Bauwens
• Accelerationism

IV. Analysis: Comparison of the Two Strands of Techno-Utopianism

Areas of commonality

V. Paul Mason
VI. Left-Wing Critiques of Mason

• Stephanie McMillan
• Kate Aronoff

Conclusion

Notes.

Photo by Maldita la hora

The post Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real 11: Left-Wing Critics of Mason — Kate Aronoff appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Increasingly the capitalists’ profits do not depend on ownership of the means of production, but control of the right to use them – the ownership of patents rather than machines. This intermediate stage, capitalism’s last desperate attempt to snatch scarcity from the jaws of abundance, is doomed to failure.

Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real by Kevin Carson. Read the full series here or scroll down for the PDF.

I mentioned above the tendency of the establishment Left and verticalist types, with their fixation on organizational mass and structure and their insurrectionary model of social change based on seizure of the state, to reflexively conflate the liberal capitalist and Leftist versions of techno-utopianism.

Stephanie McMillan. One of the least thoughtful specimens of this genus is Stephanie McMillan,[130] as revealed in her response to Mason’s article “The end of capitalism has begun”[131] (a preview article in The Guardian essentially summarizing the arguments of his book).

She dismisses Mason’s post-capitalist vision as “just another crappy capitalist snowjob” (the title of her article). The problem is, it’s not exactly clear from one paragraph to the next whether her critique is based on a careless reading of Mason’s actual article, or she’s treating him as a type and telescoping together what he actually says with other stuff said by a lot of “New Economy” and Silicon Valley types she doesn’t like.

She wouldn’t be the first figure on the Left to lump decentralism, networks and high tech together with Gingrichoid dotcom capitalism under a general heading of “things I don’t like,” and to unjustifiably dismiss left-wing visions of commons-based peer production and open-source as Trojan horses for Peter Thiel-style capitalism. Thomas Frank is the classic example of this tendency. I’ve also encountered it in personal exchanges with Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer, a sort of centrist social democrat. Henwood — in a conversation where he defended copyright as a protection for creators against my advocacy of information freedom — told me the model of commons-based peer production and information freedom advocated by Bauwens sounded “like 90s dotcom capitalism.” All I can say is that anyone who seriously compares Richard Stallman to Bill Gates is out of their intellectual depth.

McMillan is obviously doing the same thing herself, based on all the “theys” she cites in this passage and their (to put it kindly) tangential relationship to anything Mason actually says:

First they offer reassuring-sounding it-won’t-be-that-bad schemes like “cradle to cradle,” “conscious capitalism,” “social entrepreneurship,” and “green capitalism.” But these are quickly revealed to be the same old crap in prettier packaging.

Then they decry capitalism’s “excesses” by defining the problem not a capitalism itself, but as errors within an otherwise acceptable economic system. They add qualifiers: crony capitalism, disaster capitalism, corporate capitalism, blah blah blah. They build stellar careers as public intellectuals by offering the comforting thought that if we could simply eliminate its worst elements, the system might yet be saved. But this formula sounds increasingly hollow, as people figure out that the worst aspects of capitalism aren’t a mistake. They’re inherent to it.[132]

McMillan, based on her other writing in SkewedNews, favors an insurrectionary approach in which the global working class, organized into a mass movement, seize the means of production. But the problem isn’t that she disagrees with Mason’s vision of post-capitalism as a future system that will grow out of the present one the way capitalism grew out of feudalism. It’s that she doesn’t even do him the courtesy of acknowledging that that is, in fact, what he envisions. She suggests, in a disregard of what he actually wrote that not only borders on disingenuousness but spends a bit of time sightseeing there, that he views the existing sharing economy and precaritization of labor as post-capitalism already in being.

In a Guardian article anticipating his new book “Postcapitalism,” he spreads the good news that we have already entered the post-capitalist era, “without us noticing.”

But hold off on the victory party, comrades. If we were beyond capitalism, we would have noticed. I don’t know about you, but I imagine that a post-capitalist world would feel a little less like the same old frenzied forced march on the treadmill of anxiety, alienation, and failure to make ends meet.[133]

To repeat, it’s hard not to suspect this misconstruction of being flat-out disingenuous or wilfully obtuse, considering how many times Mason unambiguously repeats that “[w]ithout us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era” only in the sense that the nuclei around which post-capitalism will crystallize, in a prolonged evolutionary process, into a full-blown system already exist within the present system — not that post-capitalism already exists as a system. For example:

[Capitalism] will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system…

* * * *

As with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started.

* * * *

Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm.

* * * *

You only find this new economy if you look hard for it.

* * * *

It seems a meagre and unofficial and even dangerous thing from which to craft an entire alternative to a global system, but so did money and credit in the age of Edward III.

* * * *

Present throughout the whole process [of feudalism’s evolution into capitalism] was something that looks incidental to the old system – money and credit – but which was actually destined to become the basis of the new system….

A combination of all these factors took a set of people who had been marginalised under feudalism – humanists, scientists, craftsmen, lawyers, radical preachers and bohemian playwrights such as Shakespeare – and put them at the head of a social transformation.[134]

Get the picture? We are, without noticing, entering the post-capitalist era in the same sense that people near the height of feudalism would have failed to notice the building blocks of what would one day be a radically different capitalist system. It’s hard to see how McMillan could have read the statements quoted above and still misread Mason’s “we are entering the post-capitalist era” in such a crude fashion.

She continues:

He offers as evidence the claim that we’ve “loosened the relationship between work and wages.” This is pretty clever. He knows that people who envision a future beyond capitalism—socialists, communists, anarchists—understand that abolishing the wage system is the key to emancipating humanity from capitalism. But only a fool (or a well-paid content provider) could possibly confuse “abolishing the wage system” with “wages dwindling to nothing.” All that’s happening is that capitalists are taking more and we’re getting less. Far from capitalism being no more, capitalism is doing better than ever, at our expense.

Being ultra-underpaid is not a positive step toward a bright new economy—it sucks! Garment workers in Haiti paid 225 gourdes a day ($4.01 at the current exchange rate) understand this. Prisoners in Alabama paid 23 cents an hour understand this. It certainly must begin to gnaw on the minds of interns, as well as WWOOFers (working on farms in exchange for room and board, then turned loose to starve during the winters), that unpaid work doesn’t lead to “dismantling capitalism” but rather “testing out another form of wage-free capitalist accumulation.”[135]

This is just despicable. Mason explicitly states that cooperative, self-managed work is a way out from the neoliberal sweatshop economy of falling wages, and will eventually supplant it in a post-capitalist social economy. McMillan may think he’s wrong. She may well believe that new communications and production technology will be coopted into capitalism, and that current trends will result in the increasing dominance of precarious, underpaid employment and sweatshop labor, rather than Mason’s vision of an economy of abundance centered on peer-production and self-employment. She may believe that Uber, AirBNB and sweatshops are what will actually result from Mason’s good intentions, his predictions to the contrary notwithstanding. If so she should make a case for it.

But I simply cannot convince myself she’s stupid enough to actually believe low-wage, precarious employment and sweatshop work is what Mason himself defines as the abolition of the wage system. He is obviously not an apologist for sweatshops and precarity or for the capitalist model they’re a part of, and portraying him as such is inexcusable.

The “sharing economy” is another huge restructuring of the employer/employee relationship that benefits investors at the expense of the masses. Our workdays are being stretched into a series of endless tasks, cobbled together out of freelancing and side hustles, with barely any compensation to speak of. Yet they tell us this is somehow liberatory, that we’re participating in some glorious manifestation of the commons because we have to rent out our bedrooms, drive strangers around in our cars, hawk ourselves with “self-branding,” sell our possessions on eBay for a few bucks, and crowdfund our creative work, while millions in fees are collected by … someone. Someone else. Someone not us. Someone not us who lives in a mansion.[136]

Once again, McMillan conflates Mason with the unspecified “they” of greenwashed New Age capitalism. To repeat, Mason may or may not be wrong that the current “sharing economy,” now still imprisoned to a large extent within proprietary corporate walls, will eventually burst forth from its capitalist integument and become a genuinely cooperative and open-source sharing economy controlled by the users themselves. But if so McMillan should make a case for that rather than passing Mason off as an apologist for Uber and AirBNB.

Let’s see what remedies many of them point to: “collaborative commons,” “workplace democracy,” “workers’ co-ops,” “mutual aid,” the “sharing economy.” These sound good, and indeed some of them may be positive and necessary steps toward a non-capitalist mode of production. But they are just that—steps—and it’s a mistake to confuse them with the path as a whole. Unless the framework of capitalism is broken entirely, they circle back to the beginning every time. Capitalism is not damaged simply because we engage in activity that is cooperative, non-hierarchical, collaborative or “socialistic.” It can and often does assimilate this activity, monetize it to generate new revenue streams. At the same time it helps manage and metabolize our discontent.[137]

This despite Mason’s own explicit statement that capitalism is attempting to coopt the p2p and cooperative revolutions within a corporate framework, using “intellectual property” the same way feudal landlords used absentee title to the land the peasants worked, in order to extract rent from them:

You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data, capture the free social data generated by user interaction, push commercial forces into areas of data production that were non-commercial before, mine the existing data for predictive value – always and everywhere ensuring nobody but the corporation can utilise the results.

…The business models of all our modern digital giants are designed to prevent the abundance of information…

By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being.[138]

Obviously Mason’s vision of post-capitalism presupposes the failure of these “intellectual property” enclosures, and the emergence of genuinely cooperative, open-source and p2p versions of the present “sharing economy” falsely so-called. He obviously believes that the corporate enclosure of the information and sharing economies is an interim phase, ultimately doomed to destruction by the same uncontrollable free information technologies that are currently destroying the old-line music industry. His “educated and connected human being” is, in Negri’s words, a new subject of history, a gravedigger, destined to tear the enclosures down.

As Niki Seth-Smith puts it:

In his Telegraph review, Liam Halligan is spooked by Mason’s vision of a world in which “IT means fewer jobs”. This is too pessimistic, he writes. In fact, IT is making capitalism “more efficient”. This encapsulates the paradoxical logic that defenders of late capitalism are today forced to take. Efficiency is good, yet not the obvious result: a decrease in necessary labour hours needed for production and distribution, prices dropping towards zero. No wonder the proliferation of what David Graeber has called ‘bullshit jobs’. No wonder the drop-off in productivity. Technological progress has outpaced capitalism’s ability to adapt. Gillian Tett argues in the Financial Times that Mason has not accounted for “the fact that technology is currently turning many workers into the equivalent of insecure digital sharecroppers, rather than collaborative creative spirits.” She mentions Uber as an example. But Uber, Air B’n’B, or whatever the latest innovation of the commercialized ‘sharing economy’ happens to be, is beside the point. These represent the ‘push back’, the attempt to re-monetize the social wealth of the commons, the innumerable networks of cooperation and reciprocity that the digital age allows. Uber is not an example of Postcapitalism in action, it is at the frontier of the fight to re-capture the commons back into the old system of profit….

It’s true that the gap between humanity’s technological capabilities, and their fruits, is widening. It’s becoming ever harder to ignore that the ‘success stories’ of late capitalism, like Apple and Google, exist predominantly to restrict, not enable, the flow of goods. Google, through its carefully managed relationship to Open Source, is better at understanding the power dynamics of this gatekeeper role, but essentially it too is an Immortan Joe, profiting from control over a potentially abundant resource.[139]

To repeat yet again, McMillan may believe Mason’s scenario isn’t going to happen, and that the corporate enclosures will prevail indefinitely. If so — also to repeat yet again — she should make an argument for that belief rather than simply portraying Mason as an apologist for the corporate enclosures. But that would actually require intellectual honesty.

Mason argues, post-modernistically, that because “information wants to be free,” the concept of value has become meaningless….

It’s obvious to anyone who pays attention that the falling prices of an infinitely-replicable immaterial service does not, by any means, translate to the world of physical commodities. Some things can’t be replicated in pixels or even by a 3-D printer. Clothing, food, housing, fuel and computers can only be replicated by employing the labor power of exploited workers. Those things are not losing value.

Exploitation in the process of production is still at the heart of the global economy. And as long as the value produced by workers is being appropriated and accumulated by capitalists, then we are still in capitalism.

Only a self-serving Silicon Valley dreamer or a severely deluded business journalist can argue, with a straight face, that the falling price of ebooks translates into everyone on the planet being able to have plenty of free food. Perhaps Paul Mason ought to do a little experiment on himself: stay in a room with unlimited information. When he gets hungry, he can eat it.[140]

Anyone who says the unenforceability of information monopolies has no bearing on the cost of physical commodities doesn’t know much about physical production. McMillan should have paid closer attention to this statement of Mason’s: “The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical things that are used to produce them.”

Back in the 1990s, Tom Peters — now there’s a genuine apologist for capitalism, wrapped up in New Age salesmanship, if McMillan wants to see what one actually looks like — crowed in ecstasy over the portion of the price of his new Minolta camera that resulted from “intellect”; that is, he was utterly jubilant that all the embedded rents on “intellectual property” were a larger part of its price than the actual materials and labor. Likewise, it’s primarily patents and trademarks that enable companies like Nike and Apple to completely outsource actual production to independent contractors, and use a legal monopoly over disposal of the product to enable themselves to mark up the price to a thousand or more percent over the actual cost of production. So it doesn’t take a genius to see that abolishing the patents and trademarks — or their growing unenforceability against knockoffs in small job-shops as a result of technological trends — would cause an implosion in the retail price of such goods relative to the income of those who produced them.

But it doesn’t stop there. Technological change is not only enabling the unlimited replication of information at zero marginal cost, but it’s radically cheapening and ephemeralizing physical production as well. If information — bits — want to be free, then atoms at least want to be a hell of a lot cheaper. The emergence of relatively small-scale CNC machine tools in the ’70s enabled the rise of networked cooperative production in Emilia-Romagna, as well as the corporate outsourcing of a growing share of production to independent job shops in Shenzhen. It reduced the cost of production machinery by an order of magnitude and made craft production in smaller cooperative shops feasible. The revolution in even smaller tabletop open-source CNC tools in the past decade or so has reduced the cost of machinery necessary by another order of magnitude, and made it possible to carry out, in a garage shop with ten or twenty thousand dollars worth of open-source machinery, the kinds of production that would have required a multi-million dollar factory fifty years ago.

It’s impossible to overstate the practical significance of this, from the standpoint of labor. The original material rationale for the wage and factory systems in industrial Britain and America was a technological transition from general-purpose craft tools affordable to the average artisan, to extremely expensive specialized machinery owned by capitalists who hired laborers to work it. The availability of a garage factory’s worth of open-source high-tech craft machinery at the equivalent of six months union factory wages — and still rapidly falling — is a direct reversal of that transition.

Increasingly the capitalists’ profits do not depend on ownership of the means of production, but control of the right to use them — the ownership of patents rather than machines. This intermediate stage, capitalism’s last desperate attempt to snatch scarcity from the jaws of abundance, is doomed to failure.

Seizing an old-style factory and holding it against the forces of the capitalist state is a lot harder than producing knockoffs in a garage factory serving the members of a neighborhood credit-clearing network, or manufacturing open-source spare parts to keep appliances running. As the scale of production shifts from dozens of giant factories owned by three or four manufacturing firms, to hundreds of thousands of independent neighborhood garage factories, patent law will become unenforceable. In the mass production age patents were enforceable mainly because the combination of a handful of firms, producing a handful of standard proprietary designs for a handful of major retail chains, lowered the transaction costs of enforcement.

And when we figure the combined cost-reductions from 1) stripping the price of manufactured goods of the embedded rents on patents and trademarks, 2) lean production on-demand for local markets with minimal distribution and marketing costs or management overhead, and 3) all the attendant costs of guard labor, bullshit jobs, planned obsolescence and subsidized waste when the inefficiencies of mass production and monopoly control are eliminated, we’re probably talking about a necessary work week of ten or fifteen hours — with radically reduced raw material and energy footprint — to produce our existing standard of living.

McMillan’s preferred revolutionary agenda of direct, insurrectionary assault, to seize control of the commanding heights of state and corporation, basically throws away the entire advantage that new, liberatory technologies offer to the working class. The fact that material means of production are becoming cheaper, more ephemeral and more affordable, and that material costs of production are declining as a source of value relative to the social capital and social relationships of the working class itself, is the basis of the strategy of Exodus that Toni Negri and Michael Hardt outlined in Commonwealth.

…the trend toward the hegemony or prevalence of immaterial production in the processes of capitalist valorization…. Images, information, knowledge, affects, codes, and social relationships… are coming to outweigh material commodities or the material aspects of commodities in the capitalist valorization process. This means, of course, not that the production of material goods… is disappearing or even declining in quantity but rather that their value is increasingly dependent on and subordinated to immaterial factors and goods…. What is common to these different forms of labor… is best expressed by their biopolitical character…. Living beings as fixed capital are at the center of this transformation, and the production of forms of life is becoming the basis of added value. This is a process in which putting to work human faculties, competences, and knowledges–those acquired on the job but, more important, those accumulated outside work interacting with automated and computerized productive systems–is directly productive of value. One distinctive feature of the work of head and heart, then, is that paradoxically the object of production is really a subject, defined… by a social relationship or a form of life.

* * * *

Capitalist accumulation today is increasingly external to the production process, such that exploitation takes the form of expropriation of the common.[141]

The Old Left strategy centered on mass, structure and hierarchy at least made some sense in the mid-20th century, when its objective was seizure of a mass-production economy (although mass production itself, contra Galbraith and Chandler, was never inherently very efficient and actually wasted most of the advantages of efficiency and decentralization offered by electrical power, as described in the work of prophets like Kropotkin in Fields, Factories and Workshops). When the mass-production economy is itself a decaying dinosaur and it’s within the capability of a growing segment of the working class to produce superior goods in a home workshop, the idea of a frontal assault rather than simply withdrawing our labor into a counter-economy is just plain stupid. To quote a friend of mine, Katherine Gallagher:

We won’t be encircled by “them,” but woven through their antiquated structures, impossible to quarantine off and finish. I’m not a pacifist. I’m not at all against defensive violence. That’s a separate question to me of overthrow. But to oversimplify, when it comes to violence, I want it to be the last stand of a disintegrating order against an emerging order that has already done much of the hard work of building it’s ideals/structures. Not violent revolutionaries sure that their society will be viable, ready to build it, but a society defending itself against masters that no longer rule it. Build the society and defend it, don’t go forth with the guns and attempt to bring anarchy about in the rubble. I think technology is increasingly putting the possibility of meaningful resistance and worker independence within the realm of a meaningful future. So much of the means of our oppression is now more susceptible to being duplicated on a human scale….

And I think we should be working on how we plan to create a parallel industry that is not held only by those few. More and more the means to keep that industry held only by the few are held in the realm of patent law. It is no longer true that the few own the “lathe” so to speak, nearly as much as they own the patent to it. So we truly could achieve more by creating real alternative manufacture than seizing that built. Yes, there will be protective violence, but it’s not as true as it was in the past that there is real necessary means of production in the hands of the few. What they control more now is access to the methods of production and try to prevent those methods being used outside of their watch. Again, I’m not saying that the “last days” of the state won’t be marked by violence. But I am saying we now have real tactical options beyond confronting them directly until they come to us. (originally a series of tweets as @zhinxy in July 2012 — paragraph divisions mine.)

Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real (With Special Regard to Paul Mason’s Post-Capitalism)

Download a PDF copy of Kevin Carson’s full C4SS Study: Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 20 (Spring 2016)

I. Capitalist Techno-Utopianism from Daniel Bell On
II. Categories of Leftist Techno-Utopianism
III. Other Non-Capitalist Techno-Utopianisms

• John Holloway
• Michel Bauwens
• Accelerationism

IV. Analysis: Comparison of the Two Strands of Techno-Utopianism

Areas of commonality

V. Paul Mason
VI. Left-Wing Critiques of Mason

• Stephanie McMillan
• Kate Aronoff

Conclusion

Notes

130. Stephanie McMillan, ” So-Called “Post-Capitalism” is Just Another Crappy Capitalist Snowjob,” SkewedNews, July 22, 2015 <http://skewednews.net/index.php/2015/07/22/called-post-capitalism-just-another-crappy-capitalist-snowjob/>.

131. Paul Mason, “The end of capitalism has begun,” The Guardian, July 17, 2015 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun>.

132. McMillan, op. cit.

133. Ibid.

134. Mason, “The end of capitalism has begun,” op. cit.

135. McMillan, op. cit.

136. Ibid.

137. Ibid.

138. Mason, “The end of capitalism has begun,” op. cit.

139. Niki Seth-Smith, “Post-Capitalism and the Precariat,” Precarious Europe, August 24, 2015 <http://www.precariouseurope.com/power/postcapitalism-precariat>.

140. Stephanie McMillan, op cit.

141. Negri and Hardt, Commonwealth, p. 137.

Photo by Juan Manuel Cruz del Cueto

The post Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real 10: Left-Wing Critics of Mason – Stephanie McMillan appeared first on P2P Foundation.

So compared to that of Bauwens and the Monthly Review Group, Mason’s analysis of the crisis tendencies of late capitalism falls a bit flat. Nevertheless, his general framing has a familiar Marxian ring to it, in the same general tradition we’ve been considering: and become the basis for a fundamentally new system..

Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real by Kevin Carson. Read the full series here or scroll down for the PDF.

Most recently in this general framework is Paul Mason’s book Postcapitalism. As we shall see below it’s very much in the same tradition of “War of Position” and “Exodus” that we’ve been examining so far. On the whole it’s a very positive development. Having achieved publicity roughly comparable to David Graeber’s Debt and Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, it’s probably brought more mainstream attention to these currents of left-wing techno-utopianism than they’ve ever received before.

Perhaps the weakest part of Mason’s book (although his political program, which I’ll come to later, is also a contender) is his treatment of the crisis tendencies of late capitalism.

In some ways his analysis closely resembles that of Bauwens — most notably, the inability of capitalism to capture the value created by peer-production. [95] In this, he is entirely correct. Still, his analysis comes off as weak, in my opinion, compared to the clarity of Bauwens’s framing of the twin structural contradictions of capitalism (its inability to capture the value created by peer production, and the peak resource input crises resulting from the growing socialization of cost). Mason does devote considerable space to the narrower problem if climate change in the latter part of his book, but not to a systematic analysis of resource input shortages as a broader structural problem.

Mason is also correct, as he argues in Chapter Two, that the current crisis is secular and structural rather than cyclical, because capitalism has failed to generate a new Kondratieff wave to renew itself for another epoch. But his explanation of why this is true is a bit garbled, mainly because he rejects the most useful conceptual basis for explaining why the Kondratieff wave is failing this time around: the over-accumulationist/under-consumptionist model of late capitalist crisis. Mason rejects all economic models based on the idea of a chronic mismatch between levels of investment and levels of consumption. [96]

Mason’s analysis would have benefited greatly from incorporating the over-investment model of the Monthly Review group, going back to Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital. The reason new Kondratieff waves give capitalism a renewed life is that they periodically generate another large-scale wave of large-scale investment in fundamentally new infrastructures, and provide an outlet to soak up surplus investment capital for another generation and reset the crisis of over-accumulation.

As Mason points out, people like Carlota Perez argue for generating a new Kondratieff wave based on “info-tech, biotech and green energy.” [97] But the reason such agendas are doomed to failure is that the nature of the new technology itself works directly counter to the need for a new “engine of accumulation” to provide a sink for surplus capital and restore the rate of profit.

For the past generation or so, new production technology has been decreasingly capital-intensive (or increasingly ephemeral), starting in the ’70s and ’80s with new small-scale CNC machinery suited for the job-shops of Emilia-Romagna and Shenzhen, and running through the current generation of open-source tabletop CNC routers, cutting tables, 3D printers, and forth that can be built for under a thousand dollars. The result is that it takes much, much less capital for production and a great deal more superfluous capital is left sitting around without a profitable outlet for investment than in previous technological revolutions.

Douglas Rushkoff remarked on the same phenomenon, in the realm of immaterial production:

The fact is, most Internet businesses don’t require venture capital. The beauty of these technologies is that they decentralize value creation. Anyone with a PC and bandwidth can program the next Twitter or Facebook plug-in, the next iPhone app, or even the next social network. While a few thousand dollars might be nice, the hundreds of millions that venture capitalists want to — need to — invest, simply aren’t required. …

The banking crisis began with the dot.com industry, because here was a business sector that did not require massive investments of capital in order to grow. (I spent an entire night on the phone with one young entrepreneur who secured $20 million of capital from a venture firm, trying to figure out how to possibly spend it. We could only come up with $2 million of possible expenditures.) What’s a bank to do when its money is no longer needed? …

[Decentralized value creation] is, quite simply, cheaper to do. There’s less money in it. Not necessarily less money for us, the people doing the exchanging, but less money for the institutions that have traditionally extracted value from our activity. If I can create an application or even a Web site like this one without borrowing a ton of cash from the bank, then I am also undermining America’s biggest industry — finance. [98]

For Mason the new Kondratieff wave, rather than generating a new cycle of large-scale infrastructure development based on new technologies, to replace a decaying earlier generation’s infrastructure, results from capital’s technological innovation to the power of labor. And the last Kondratieff wave failed because of the unprecedented defeat of the forces of labor by neoliberalism. [99]

So compared to that of Bauwens and the Monthly Review Group, Mason’s analysis of the crisis tendencies of late capitalism falls a bit flat. Nevertheless, his general framing has a familiar Marxian ring to it, in the same general tradition we’ve been considering: the technologies and institutions of post-capitalism are unleashing productive forces that cannot be contained within the productive relations of capitalism, and therefore must eventually “burst out of their capitalist integument” and become the basis for a fundamentally new system.

… [T]he technologies we’ve created are not compatible with capitalism — not in its present form and maybe not in any form. Once capitalism can no longer adapt to technological change, postcapitalism becomes necessary. When behaviours and organizations adapted to exploiting technological change appear spontaneously, postcapitalism becomes possible. [100]

His view of the nature of the technological changes within the capitalist system that doom it to extinction have a lot in common with both the autonomists and Bauwens.

First, information technology has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages.

Second, information goods are corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defense mechanism is to form monopolies on a scale not seen in the past 200 years — yet these cannot last.

Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organizations that are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. [101]

These new social forms amount to a new system arising “within the shell of the old,” that will build a new system within the interstices of capitalism, coalesce and finally supplant it.

Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swathes of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm. Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces have proliferated, and often as a direct result of the shattering of old structures after the 2008 crisis.

New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past ten years, which the media has dubbed the ‘sharing economy’. Buzz-terms such as the ‘commons’ and ‘peer-production’ are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this means for capitalism itself. [102]

And the stigmergic, horizontal forms of organization facilitated by networked communications have drastically reduced the transaction costs of coordinating action outside of traditional institutional hierarchy. They have made the central planning of the large corporation as obsolete as the central planning of Gosplan.

Economists like to demonstrate the archaic nature of command planning with mind-games like ‘imagine the Soviet Union tried to create Starbucks’. Now, here’s a more intriguing game: imagine if Amazon, Toyota or Boeing tried to create Wikipedia. [103]

But, much as Bauwens has argued, Mason sees capitalism attempting to prolong its own life by incorporating the new technologies and social relationships into a corporate institutional structure, and enclosing them as a source of rents.

Once you can copy/paste a paragraph, you can do it with a music track, a movie, the design of a turbofan engine and the digital mockup of the factory that will make it.

Once you can copy and paste something, it can be reproduced for free. It has, in economics-speak, a ‘zero marginal cost’.

Info-capitalists have a solution to this: make it legally impossible to copy certain kinds of information. …

With info-capitalism, a monopoly is not just some clever tactic to maximize profit. It is the only way an industry can run. …

… Only intellectual property law and a small piece of code in the iTunes track prevent everybody on earth from owning every piece of music ever made. Apple’s mission statement, properly expressed, is to prevent the abundance of music. [104]

This applies just as much to control of the physical means of production. When small-scale CNC manufacturing tools fall in price by two orders of magnitude, so that craft production with high-tech, general-purpose tools once again comes within the economic means of individual artisans or small cooperative shops, capitalist ownership of the machinery for profit extraction is replaced by capitalist ownership of the patents.

Mason, in Marxist terms, stresses the contradiction between new productive forces and old social relations of production:

Today, the main contradiction in modern capitalism is between the possibility of free, abundant socially produced goods, and a system of monopolies, banks and governments struggling to maintain control over power and information. That is, everything is pervaded by a fight between network and hierarchy. [105]

Like Dyer-Witheford, Mason also appeals to Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” from the Grundrisse as anticipating the destruction of capitalism by “General Intellect.”

In an economy where machines do most of the work, where human labour is really abou supervising, mending and designing the machines, the nature of the knowledge locked inside the machines must, he writes, be ‘social’. …

In the Fragment on Machines, these two ideas — that the driving force of production is knowledge, and that knowledge stored in machines is social — led Marx to the following conclusions.

First, in a heavily mechanized capitalism, boosting productivity through better knowledge is a much more attractive source of profit than extending the working day, or speeding up labour. … [A] knowledge solution is cheap and limitless.

Second, Marx argued, knowledge-driven capitalism cannot support a price mechanism whereby the value of something is dictated by the value of the inputs needed to produce it. It is impossibly value inputs when they come in the form of social knowledge. Knowledge-driven production tends towards the unlimited creation of wealth, independent of the labour expended. But the normal capitalist system is based on prices determined by input costs, and assumes all inputs come in limited supply.

For Marx, knowledge-based capitalism creates a contradiction — between the ‘forces of production’ and the ‘social relations’. These form ‘the material conditions to blow [capitalism’s] foundation sky-high’. Furthermore, capitalism of this type is forced to develop the intellectual power of the worker. It will tend to reduce working hours. .., leaving time for workers to develop artistic and scientific talents outside work, which become essential to the economic itself. Finally Marx throws in a new concept, which appears nowhere else — before or after — in his entire writings: ‘the general intellect’. When we measure the development of technology, he writes, we are measuring the extent to which ‘general social knowledge has become a force of production… under the control of the general intellect’. …

He imagined socially produced information becoming embodied in machines. He imagined this producing a new dynamic, which destroys the old mechanisms for creating prices and profits. He imagined capitalism being forced to develop the intellectual capacities of the worker. And he imagined information coming to be stored and shared in something called a ‘general intellect’ — which was the mind of everybody on earth connected by social knowledge, in which every upgrade benefits everybody. …

Furthermore, he had imagined what the main objective of the working class would be if this world ever existed: freedom from work. … ‘Free time has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject… in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society.’

This is possibly the most revolutionary idea Marx ever had: that the reduction of labour to a minimum could produce a kind of human being able to deploy the entire, accumulated knowledge of society; a person transformed by vast quantities of socially produced knowledge and for the first time in history more free time than work time. [106]

And as the autonomists argue, in the contemporary setting this means that the primary form of capital becomes human relationships themselves, coextensive with society at large.

… [T]he knowledge it took to produce the code is still in the programmer’s brain. She can, if market conditions allow, move to a different workplace and execute the same solution, should it be required. With information, part of the product remains with the worker in a way it did not during the industrial era.

It is the same for the tool she’s using: the programming language. It has been developed by tens of thousands of people contributing their knowledge and experience. If she downloads the latest update, it is sure to contain changes based on lessons learned by everyone else using it. [107]

The rapid change in technology is altering the nature of work, blurring the distinction between work and leisure and requiring us to participate in the creation of value across our whole lives, not just in the workplace. [108]

This means that work “is losing its centrality both to exploitation and resistance.” The “sphere beyond work” has become “the primary battleground,” and “[a]ll utopias based on work are finished. …” [109] And the autonomist contention that society at large is becoming both the “social factory” and the sphere of struggle has been borne out by the rise of networked social movements like M15, Syntagma and Occupy, and the use of social media as a primary tool of organization by workers in places like China. [110]

In the past twenty years, capitalism has mustered a new social force that will be its gravedigger, just as it assembled the factory proletariat in the nineteenth century. It is the networked individuals who have camped in the city squares, blockaded the fracking sites, performed punk rock on the roofs of Russian cathedrals, raised defiant cans of beer in the face of Islamism on the grass of Gezi Park, pulled a million people on to the streets of Rio and Sao Paolo and now organized mass strikes across northern China. [111]

Mason also eloquently describes the nature of the capitalist economy, in language reminiscent of Thomas Hodgskin, as one in which the capitalist interposes herself between producers and collects a toll on their mutual exchange of labor.

But why, if the real weekly value of my labour is thirty hours of other people’s work, would I ever work sixty hours? The answer is: the labour market is never free. It was created through coercion and is re-created every day by laws, regulations, prohibitions, fines and the fear of unemployment. [112]

Like Bauwens and Holloway, he sees post-capitalism as something emerging primarily through an evolutionary process similar to the emergence of the feudal from the classical political economy and the capitalist from the feudal, rather than the revolutionary models of the twentieth century.

Capitalism… will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which breaks through, reshaping the economy around new values, behaviours and norms. As with feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s demise will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started. [113]

The socialists of the early twentieth century were absolutely convinced that nothing preliminary was possible within the old system. ‘The socialist system,’ Preobrazhensky once insisted categorically, ‘cannot be built up molecularly within the world of capitalism.’

The most courageous thing an adaptive left could do is to abandon that conviction. It is entirely possible to build the elements of the new system molecularly within the old. In the cooperatives, the credit unions, the peer-networks, the unmanaged enterprises and the parallel, subcultural economies, these elements already exist. [114]

Nevertheless Mason also sees the state playing a vital role in managing the transition, certainly to a greater degree than Holloway’s model, or Negri and Hardt’s horizontalist vision. All the individual elements — cooperatives, peer-networks, and the like — will only coalesce into post-capitalism if “we… promote them with regulation just as vigorous as that which capitalism used to drive the peasants off the land or destroy handicraft work in the eighteenth century.” [115] Post-capitalism may offer an “escape route” —

but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a massive change in what governments do.

… Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that work only when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the market system. It will need the state to create the framework. … [116]

Mason at least is closer to the autonomists and to Holloway in putting the primary emphasis on the spontaneous rise of new institutional forms like peer networks, and treating state action as simply a way to run interference for or help along these institutional forms, rather than (as with the Old Left) as an instrumentality for actually creating the new society.

In fact what Mason calls the “wiki-state” [117] is a lot like the “Partner State” that Bauwens advocates. It’s in keeping with a long line of visions that fall under the general heading of (in Comte’s phrase) “replacing the domination of man over man with the administration of things.” The wiki-state, much like the Partner State, is more a support platform than an issuer of commands.

And to give him credit, he at least leaves some rhetorical wiggle room for cooperation with us anarchist types.

What happens to the state? It probably gets less powerful over time — and in the end its functions are assumed by society. I’ve tried to make this a project usable both by people who see states as useful and those who don’t; you could probably model and anarchist version and a statist version and try them out. [118]

Nevertheless I think Mason’s idea of the state’s role, at least in his ideal transition model, has all the faults I pointed out earlier with regard to Negri’s recent attempt to incorporate a verticalist element into his thought.

And I think Mason grossly underestimates the extent to which non-state forces (like non-capitalist market competition, natural resource commons, and direct action in resistance to corporate power by networked activist movements, can weaken and defeat the corporate-state nexus.

Let’s look at some of his specifics. He quotes, with approval, the assessment of John Ashton (former British government special representative on climate change) that “The market left to itself will not reconfigure the energy system and transform the economy within a generation.” [119] Now if by “the market” Ashton and Mason mean, as is usual in mainstream political rhetoric, the “Washington Consensus” or neoliberal capitalist model centered on the cash nexus, they may be right. At least the necessary incentives for reining in carbon emissions will work counter to the structural incentives of neoliberal capitalism.

If, on the other hand, “free market” is used in the libertarian sense of the sum total of voluntary interactions rather than the cash nexus as such, and of a system in which the state does not interfere with voluntary interactions, such a market would entail a vast reduction in the subsidies (both direct and indirect) for energy consumption.

Such a free market would mean the total elimination of all subsidies to long-distance shipping and transportation, the funding of all transportation infrastructure by fees on those who imposed the costs on the system, and an end to eminent domain for the construction or expansion of highways and airports. It would mean an end to neocolonial policies abroad and domestic land use policies aimed at guaranteeing privileged access to natural resources (including fossil fuels) by extractive industries, and replacing such regimes with commons-based resource management on Elinor Ostrom’s model. It would mean an end to all enclosure of vacant and unimproved land and to all absentee landlord rights over arable land traceable to such enclosures, and the restoration of customary peasant and/or indigenous land titles previously taken over for less energy-efficient industrialized cash crop production. It would mean an end to the trillions spent on the imperialist countries’ military and naval forces for keeping shipping choke-points open for container ships and oil tankers, and guaranteeing access to the Persian Gulf and Caspian oil basins.

It would mean an end to the subsidized car culture, subsidized urban freeway systems, cheap fuel from fracking and pipelines on stolen land, and to zoning and regulatory codes that enforce sprawl and monoculture.

It would also mean an end to the role of patents and trademarks in facilitating the outsourcing and offshoring of production to overseas factories, through the enforcement of corporate monopolies on the disposal of products actually manufactured by someone else. And it would mean an end to the role of patents in enforcing planned obsolescence by preventing modular design ecologies with generic, inter-operable spare parts and accessories for entire industries.

In short, a genuine free market would mean the near-total elimination of subsidized waste, a drastic shortening of industrial supply and distribution chains, a relocalization of industry, and a return to mixed-use communities built around walking, bicycling and public transit. In practical terms, that could well mean the reduction of energy use to a fraction of present levels.

Mason also ignores the fundamental facts of Peak Oil, arguing that high energy prices simply create incentives for more production, and that the high valuation of fossil fuel companies means “the market” believes high carbon emissions will continue indefinitely.

Clearly, somewhere, the market as a signalling mechanism has gone wrong.

… [E]ither the global oil and gas companies are really worth much less than their share prices indicate, or nobody believes we’re going to cut our carbon use. …

The lesson is: a market-led strategy on climate change is utopian thinking. [120]

Well, no. First of all, the value of global oil and gas companies reflects massive up-front subsidies to unsustainable levels of extraction. The unsustainability of the current energy output bubble is suggested by the rapid dropoff in output from fracking wells after the first year, and the drastic downgrading of previous wild overestimates of energy reserves in places like the Bakken shale formation. It’s also suggested by the fact that low petroleum prices are the result of unsustainable, politically driven increases in short-term output from the dwindling oil reserves in Saudi Arabia, intended to reduce the revenue-producing capabilities of oil reserves held by Venezuela, Russia and ISIS forces in Iraq. EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Investment), the key concept behind Peak Oil, is one of those “gods of the copybook headings” that can’t be overridden by oil company bluster.

Mason actually points to the drastic expansion in fracking and Saudi oil production, [121] without noting the basic geological constraints (the rapid drop-off in fracking output, and the fact that aging Saudi reserves are going offline far faster than new reserves are being found) will only make the energy supply crash that much harder when the short-term rush evaporates.

And second, my long list above of the ways that the state currently intervenes to make consumption of energy either artificially cheap or artificially necessary suggests that existing state intervention in the market is central to carbon emissions and climate change. If anything it’s framing the issue as the existing “market” versus hypothetical state policies to disincentivize energy usage, rather than the real choice between continuing and stopping existing state interventions to encourage energy extraction and use, that really reflects a lack of contact with reality.

Mason proposes a state-guided “Project Zero” for coordinating the post-capitalist transition, with top level aims that include reducing carbon emissions, stabilizing and socializing the finance system, and

Gear technology towards the reduction of necessary work to promote the rapid transition towards an automated economy. Eventually, work becomes voluntarily, basic commodities and public services are free, and economic management becomes primarily an issue of energy and resources, not capital and labour. [122]

There’s no need to repeat my earlier discussion of carbon emissions.

A genuine free market financial system (with the measure of genuineness of the free market being the extent to which it ceases to be capitalist) would mean an end to the role of capitalist banks in lending the circulating medium into existence at interest, and the creation of an abundance-based libertarian currency something like Thomas Greco’s local mutual credit-clearing networks. This is, incidentally, very close to the sort of village mutual credit systems described by David Graeber in Debt, that existed in pre-capitalist Europe.

As for the reduction of necessary work, the crisis of capitalism, combined with new technologies of small-scale local production, is already pointing in that direction. We reached Peak Employment, in terms of work hours per capita, around 2000. Since then the amount of labor necessary to produce a given standard of living has steadily declined, and an ever-growing share of the population is either not employed or works less than forty hours a week.

At the same time, as James O’Connor noted in Accumulation Crisis, the working class responds to cyclical crisis by meeting as many needs through direct production for use in the informal and household economies. And given that we’ve entered a stage of structural rather than cyclical crisis, this tendency is becoming permanent. Charles Sabel and Michel Piore also argued, in The Second Industrial Divide, that capitalist industry emerging from recessions will expand production by shifting as much output as possible from the mass-production center to the craft production periphery, rather than investing in new mass-production capacity. And again, we’re entering a period of systemic crisis in which these shifts become permanent.

The permanent crisis of under-consumption, taken together with permanent unemployment and under-employment and the new affordable technologies for micro-manufacturing in home workshops and garage factories, mean that the working class will increasingly shift to meeting its own needs through production for local use in the social economy. And the fiscal exhaustion, retreat and collap0se of the old state- and employer-based safety nets will create a necessity for self-organized mechanisms (like micro-villages, multi-family co-housing units, extended family compounds, large-scale squats, etc.) for pooling costs, risks and income. The process of Exodus and counter-institution building is apt to be reminiscent of the rise of the free towns and their horizontal institutions for self-governance in the High Middle Ages, as recounted by Kropotkin.

The reference to automation, by the way, is disturbingly reminiscent of the emphasis on automated factory production, smart infrastructures and the “Internet of Things” shared by the Accelerationists and Jeremy Rifkin’s The Zero Marginal Cost Society. That vision is functionally pretty close to cognitive capitalism even if the goals and ownership forms are different. Like Rifkin and the Accelerationists, Mason places a great deal of emphasis on the continued existence of large-scale production in assembly lines, but completely automated.

And in my opinion this is a sub-optimal approach to achieving a low-work, post-scarcity society. Rather than automating production through capital substitution and centrally coordinating distributed production through smart infrastructure, it would be far better to pursue a model of relocalized artisan production using high-tech, general-purpose craft machinery. The total reduction in necessary labor achieved by decentralizing production to the point of consumption, adopting a lean, demand-pull distribution model and eliminating subsidized waste and planned obsolescence will far outweigh any that could be achieved by capital-intensive automation.

Rather than an automated assembly line, the most efficient model of production in most cases will be highly sophisticated CNC machine tools in a small, self-managed and worker-owned neighborhood shops, with a human being running the CAD/CAM files and putting in the feed stock. And most likely with the human beings in question working a few hours a day and a few days a week, taking frequent breaks or knocking off at a time of their own choosing, in order to putter around the garden or play with their kids, or go off fishing for a few days. In other words, a high-tech version of the life of pre-Enclosure cottagers.

And such a society, in which production was dissolved into the household and social economy, would be a lot closer to Kropotkin’s model of villages in which high-tech manufacturing shops coexisted with intensive horticulture, and the distinctions between town and country and between head and hand work disappeared. Or — if I may — a society in which it would be possible for me “to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”

Even so, I credit Mason for at least seeing that a post-capitalist society would dissolve many of the distinctions between work and play, and that “the transition to postcapitalism is likely to be driven by surprise discoveries made by groups of people working in teams, about what they can do to old processes by applying collaborative thinking and networks.” [123] I just think a lot more of this process will be taking place at the level of households and neighborhood cooperative shops than in mass production factories.

A great deal of Mason’s vision of the kind of salutary market incentives that would be created by a wiki-state amount to what would actually be accomplished by a non-capitalist market in which the state simply stopped doing the bad stuff it’s doing right now. The wiki-state, he writes,

could… reshape markets to favour sustainable, collaborative and socially conscious outcomes. If you set the feed-in tariff on solar panels high, people will install them on their roofs. But if you don’t specify they have to come from a factory with high social standards, the panels will get made in China, generating fewer wider social benefits beyond the energy switch. [124]

Mason neglects the extent to which the extent to which actively promoting the exact opposite of his post-capitalist vision is the main thing the state does right now. Simply ceasing to promote energy consumption, waste, and exploitation — or better yet, ceasing to be able to do them — would have far more of an effect than he imagines.

If anything Mason goes too far at times in the direction of continuing neoliberal capitalism, as when his advocacy for “clear and progressive” government action on the debts of developing or peripheral countries stops short of simply writing them off. He sees this as untenable because of the likelihood of “deglobalization” when the countries and investors that owned the written-off debt cut off defaulting countries from new investment or locked them out of trading zones. [125] In this regard he sees some structural features of neoliberal capitalism — in particular capitalist credit — as more natural or necessary than I do. As I see it, the vulnerability of developing countries to retaliation in the form of capital flight is the result in large part of their not going far enough in cutting themselves off from the capitalist credit system and the other structural features of neoliberalism.

While global corporations and investors can pull their fictitous money out of a country, the physical assets can’t be moved so easily. All the actual productive assets will remain right where they were before — ideally in the form of worker-occupied and self-managed factories, land reclaimed by peasants, and natural resource commons taken back from extractive industries by local communities. And the function of providing liquidity can be provided by self-organized alternatives without a class of global parasites extracting rent for it. Much or most of the need for capital investment will be overcome simply by abolishing artificial scarcities (i.e. ignoring all copyrights and patents) and encouraging low-cost production technologies.

Rather than a genuinely post-capitalist world with horizontally organized, cooperative or peer-to-peer currency and credit systems, Mason wants to leave all the basic structural features of global capitalist finance and its instruments in place with some nationalization of ownership and Rube Goldberg tinkering with incentive structures. [126] He wants a decades-long process of social engineering, at the end of which “money and credit would have a much smaller role in the economy, but the accounting, clearing and resource mobilization functions currently provided by banks and financial markets would have to exist in a different institutional form.” These functions, even after the end of the transition, would include “complex, liquid markets in tradeable instruments….” [127]

I think the rapid implosion of major portions of monetized production, the growing unenforceability of the artificial property rights by which the prices of naturally free goods are maintained, and the self-organized social economy by which working people themselves respond to the decline in paid employment and the collapse of corporate and state safety nets, will together reduce the role of money and credit in the economy a lot faster than Mason could ever imagine his reformist state doing it.

Likewise, rather than simply ceasing to enforce the “intellectual property” rights that could never exist in the first place without the state, Mason advocates redesigning patents and copyrights to “taper away quickly.” [128]

Mason is keen on cooperatives, but absent intervention by the state to actively foster them by creating an encouraging environment he sees them as struggling and withering on the vine in a larger capitalist system that’s structurally hostile to them. He fails to follow the logic of structural collapse to its own conclusions. After repeatedly describing crisis tendencies that will bring neoliberal capitalism down, time and time again he returns to talking as though neoliberalism were inevitable absent positive state action to restrain it. But it’s the very building blocks of the future society that is emerging from within the interstices of neoliberalism, that are themselves destroying the power of the old society to suppress change.

I fully agree with Mason’s opposition to neoliberal “privatization” of natural resources, utilities and other infrastructures. And I fully agree that “[i]f true public provision of water, energy, housing, transport, healthcare, telecoms infrastructure and eduction was introduced into a neoliberal economy, it would feel like a revolution.” [129]

But far from such “privatization” being some sort of inevitable effect of “the market,” it is in fact a central function of the corporate state. And the solution is for the state to stop doing these things, and for genuinely public (i.e. non-state, commons-based) governance to replace the unholy alliance between business and state. All infrastructures originally created with taxpayer money, or built up with money extracted from ratepayers via monopoly rents, all public hospitals, and all state-owned entities organizing services for the public, need to be mutualized as stakeholder cooperatives controlled by some combination of consumers and service staff. All mineral resources, grazing areas, etc., on government land need to be placed under commons-based management. All land from which peasants have been evicted by neo-feudal landed oligarchs or agribusiness corporations, with the help of the state, needs to be reclaimed by its rightful owners.

These things are not compatible with capitalism or with the cash nexus. But they are fully compatible with markets, broadly understood. In fact the only way they could ever have been replaced by the cash nexus and by corporate rule was by state intervention in the market.

In every case, Mason’s framing is backwards. Instead of intervening to break up monopolies or “forbidding” firms to “set monopoly prices,” [130] the state needs to stop enforcing the subsidies, restraints on competition and fictitious property rights on which monopoly depends for its existence. Instead of intervening to limit energy consumption, it needs to stop subsidizing it. Instead of promoting the building blocks of post-capitalism, it needs to stop suppressing them on behalf of capital.

And to return to my earlier critique of the verticalist agendas centering on a “progressive” state, the main problem is that using the state for progressive purposes is just so damnedimplausible given the nature of the state itself. The state is, by its very nature, an instrument for the rule of a privilege minority of rent extractors over a majority of producers. It has never been anything else, whether under the control of priest-kings, the owners of latifundia run on slave labor, feudal landlords, industrial capitalists or — as in the case of the Soviet bloc — the state bureaucracy itself as a ruling class.

Even when the state is theoretically responsible to the producing classes in society at large, and no matter how formally democratic the representative machinery, it will in fact be subject to what Robert Michels, in Political Parties, called the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Standing bodies and permanent staffs will always have an advantage, in terms of things like inside information, level of interest, and agenda control, over the larger group to which they are theoretically accountable. So long as the principle of representation exists, power will always flow from principal to agent, from elector to representative, from mandator to mandatee.

The only real solution is to structure social and production processes so that as much as possible can be done either in directly democratic nodes, or through stigmergic networks in which all actions are undertaken by interested parties and all decisions to do anything reflect the unanimous consent of everyone choosing to participate.

Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real (With Special Regard to Paul Mason’s Post-Capitalism)

Download a PDF copy of Kevin Carson’s full C4SS Study: Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 20 (Spring 2016)

I. Capitalist Techno-Utopianism from Daniel Bell On
II. Categories of Leftist Techno-Utopianism
III. Other Non-Capitalist Techno-Utopianisms

• John Holloway
• Michel Bauwens
• Accelerationism

IV. Analysis: Comparison of the Two Strands of Techno-Utopianism

Areas of commonality

V. Paul Mason
VI. Left-Wing Critiques of Mason

Stephanie McMillan
Kate Aronoff

Conclusion

Notes:

95. Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (Allan Lane, 2015),pp. 25-26.
96. Ibid., pp. 61-62, 69.
97. Ibid., p. 46.
98. Douglas Rushkoff, “How the Tech Boom Terminated California’s Economy,” Fast Company, July 10, 2009
<https://www.fastcompany.com/1307504/how-tech-boom-terminated-californias-economy>.
99. Mason, Postcapitalism, p. 78.
100. Ibid., xiii.
101. Ibid., xv.
102. Ibid., xv.
103. Ibid., p. 129.
104. Ibid., pp. 117, 119.
105. Ibid., p. 144.
106. Ibid., pp. 134-138.
107. Ibid., p. 135.
108. Ibid., pp. 143-144.
109. Ibid., p. 179.
110. Ibid., pp. 211-212.
111. Ibid., p. 212.
112. Ibid. 153.
113. Ibid., xiv.
114. Ibid., p. 244.
115. Ibid.
116. Ibid., xv-xvi.
117. Ibid., p. 273.
118. Ibid., p. 290.
119. Ibid., p. 247.
120. Ibid., pp. 248-249.
121. Ibid., p. 251.
122. Ibid., pp. 269-270.
123. Ibid., pp. 287-288.
124. Ibid., pp. 273-274.
125. Ibid., p. 275.
126. Ibid., p. 281.
127. Ibid., p. 283.
128. Ibid., p. 279.
129. Ibid., p. 278.
130. Ibid., p. 279.

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The post Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real 9: Paul Mason appeared first on P2P Foundation.

So technological progress is radically deflationary, and causes more and more areas of economic life to vanish from the cash nexus into the social or p2p economy.

Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real by Kevin Carson. Read the full series here or scroll down for the PDF.

My comments on the counterfeit nature of neoliberal techno-utopianism are not meant to suggest that all liberal or free market thought that deals with post-scarcity is a sham. Even the left wing of conventional American-style libertarianism has some areas of commonality with left-wing techno-utopianism, and in some cases overlaps with it.

The classical liberal Frédéric Bastiat, in Chapter 8 (“Private Property and Common Wealth”) of his 1850 book Economic Harmonies, described the socialization of wealth (“real wealth constantly passing from the domain of private property into the communal domain”) in language very like Marx’s discussion of “General Intellect” in the “Fragment on Machines”:

And so, as I have already said many times and shall doubtless say many times more (for it is the greatest, the most admirable, and perhaps the most misunderstood of all the social harmonies, since it encompasses all the others), it is characteristic of progress (and, indeed, this is what we mean by progress) to transform onerous utility into gratuitous utility; to decrease value without decreasing utility; and to enable all men, for fewer pains or at smaller cost, to obtain the same satisfactions. Thus, the total number of things owned in common is constantly increased; and their enjoyment, distributed more uniformly to all, gradually eliminates inequalities resulting from differences in the amount of property owned….

The goal of all men, in all their activities, is to reduce the amount of effort in relation to the end desired and, in order to accomplish this end, to incorporate in their labor a constantly increasing proportion of the forces of Nature.… They invent tools or machines, they enlist the chemical and mechanical forces of the elements, they divide their labors, and they unite their efforts. How to do more with less, is the eternal question asked in all times, in all places, in all situations, in all things….

The gratuitous co-operation of Nature has been progressively added to our own efforts.…

A greater amount of gratuitous utility implies a partial realization of common ownership.[1]

The reason is that market competition socializes the benefits of technological progress, absent artificial property rights like patents that enable capitalists to enclose them as private rents. So technological progress is radically deflationary, and causes more and more areas of economic life to vanish from the cash nexus into the social or p2p economy.

There’s also a great deal of overlap between classical liberal or libertarian treatments of the knowledge problem, and anarchist or libertarian socialist critiques of hierarchy. Friedrich Hayek’s criticism of central planning in “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” based on distributed knowledge, is also applicable to knowledge problems within corporate managerial hierarchies. And it coincides to a large extent to James Scott’s intellectual framework in Seeing Like a State, in which he talks about the “legibility” and “opacity” of society to state and capitalist hierarchies and attempts by such hierarchies to render production processes and society itself legible by suppressing metis (roughly equivalent to tacit knowledge).

The Austrian economist David Prychitko, in Marxism and Self-Management, uses both Hayek’s treatment of the knowledge problem and principal/agent problems to argue for the superior efficiency of self-managed firms in a free market. Meanwhile libertarian Marxist Chris Dillow, at Stumbling and Mumbling blog, who focuses on the evils of managerialism and the cognitive problems of hierarchies, argues for a model of socialism based on a combination of free markets, self-management, peer-production networks and non-bureaucratic welfare state measures like a Basic Income.

Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real (With Special Regard to Paul Mason’s Post-Capitalism)

Download a PDF copy of Kevin Carson’s full C4SS Study: Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 20 (Spring 2016)

I. Capitalist Techno-Utopianism from Daniel Bell On
II. Categories of Leftist Techno-Utopianism
III. Other Non-Capitalist Techno-Utopianisms

• John Holloway
• Michel Bauwens
• Accelerationism

IV. Analysis: Comparison of the Two Strands of Techno-Utopianism

Areas of commonality

V. Paul Mason
VI. Left-Wing Critiques of Mason

Stephanie McMillan
Kate Aronoff

Conclusion

Notes:

94. Quoted in Sheldon Richman, “Bastiat on the Socialization of Wealth,” Center for a Stateless Society, March 23, 2013 <https://c4ss.org/content/17835>.

Photo by August Norman

The post Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real 8: Areas of commonality appeared first on P2P Foundation.

So if networked communication and cybernetic technologies are so potentially liberating, why are they so authoritarian in the forms they currently take? The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who died in Mussolini’s prisons in the 1930s, once wrote that “the old world is dying, and the new one struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”.

Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real by Kevin Carson. Read the full series here or scroll down for the PDF.

There’s a whole host of left-wing critiques of the capitalist version of techno-utopianism, centered on the Silicon Valley tech industry and corporate-enclosed sharing economy. A good example is Richard Eskow’s think piece on the “techno-libertarians.” [93] It focuses on the likes of Peter Thiel and Uber; the problem with this culture, he writes, is that their business model treats products primarily as a source of revenue — or more accurately rents — rather than an end in themselves. This primary evil carries with it a number of secondary symptoms, like the pathological culture of motivation-speak and buzzwords and the cult of “Great Men” like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. Monopolies transfer income from workers and consumers to rentiers. And the authoritarian form taken by the technologies, as they are developed under a proprietary information regime, regards users less as the ultimate reason for the technologies than as a revenue stream to be permanently locked in via user agreements and licensing.

So if networked communication and cybernetic technologies are so potentially liberating, why are they so authoritarian in the forms they currently take? The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who died in Mussolini’s prisons in the 1930s, once wrote that “the old world is dying, and the new one struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” In the case of the new world offered by liberatory technologies, most of the birth struggle results from the principalities and powers of the old world fighting to imprison the forces of the new world in their old institutional framework.

Lewis Mumford borrowed a term from geology — “cultural pseudo-morph” — to describe the process by which new, potentially liberating technologies were instead incorporated into the institutional forms of the old world, like new mineral deposits that gradually formed a fossil in the shape of buried organic matter. He was referring in particular to the technologies of what he called the neo-technic age, like the electric motor, which by nature were low-overhead and decentralizing. The optimal use of such technologies would have been to replace the paleotechnic order (in which large factories were built to economize on steam power by running as many machines as possible off a prime mover) with a new model of manufacturing where a motor of any size could be built into a machine wherever it was used, the machine could be scaled to production flow, production flow could be scaled to immediate demand, and the site of production could be located close to the point of consumption.

Instead, the forces of the old paleotechnic world were strong enough to put the new wine of electrical power into the old institutional framework of Dark Satanic Mills, in the form of mass production (which threw away all the special advantages of electric power for decentralized, lean production).

Although Mumford didn’t live to see it, the internal crisis tendencies and inefficiencies of mass production eventually led, from the ’70s on, to the outsourcing of actual production to small job-shops owned by independent contractors. The new technological wine still remained in the old corporate bottles, thanks to the use of patents and trademarks to enforce a corporate monopoly on the distribution of a product they didn’t actually make. But the
rapid implosion in cost and scale of tabletop CNC machinery, especially open-source versions, are unleashing productive forces that are making “intellectual property” unenforceable. It’s only a matter of time before garage factories using small-scale general-purpose machinery to produce on a craft model are ignoring patents and trademarks and making goods for local neighborhood markets all over the world.

The same is true of network communications and digital culture. The kinds of thinkers on the Left we’ve been surveying here see commons-based peer production as the kernel of a post-capitalist society that will gradually emerge from within the interstices of the present system, coalesce into a new system, and supplant the old one.

These new technologies of abundance are still held captive within proprietary frameworks like Windows and OSX operating systems, corporate-owned sharing apps like Uber and AirBNB, and the like — enclosed in a neo-feudal “intellectual property” framework to enable the extraction of rents.

But the days of this intermediate stage are numbered. The productive forces unleashed by these new technologies cannot be contained by the old authoritarian class relations, for all the reasons we’ve examined here. So

Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real (With Special Regard to Paul Mason’s Post-Capitalism)

Download a PDF copy of Kevin Carson’s full C4SS Study: Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 20 (Spring 2016)

I. Capitalist Techno-Utopianism from Daniel Bell On
II. Categories of Leftist Techno-Utopianism
III. Other Non-Capitalist Techno-Utopianisms

John Holloway
Michel Bauwens
Accelerationism

IV. Analysis: Comparison of the Two Strands of Techno-Utopianism

Areas of commonality

V. Paul Mason
VI. Left-Wing Critiques of Mason

Stephanie McMillan
Kate Aronoff

Conclusion

Notes:

93. Richard Escow, “Rise of the Techno-Libertarians,” Salon.com, April 12, 2015 <https://www.salon.com/2015/04/12/rise_of_the_techno_libertarians_the_5_most_socially_destructive_aspects_of_silicon_valley_partner/>.

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The post Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real 7: Analysis: Comparison of the Two Strands of Techno-Utopianism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The claim that “techno-utopians” believe technological advances “will automatically overcome social conflict” — as opposed to the Accelerationist view of new technology as a weapon “to win social conflicts” — is particularly disingenuous. It conflates left-wing techno-utopianism with the technocratic managerialism of the Tofflers, Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp. It also conflates “political action” as such with an insurrectionist or parliamentary politics aimed at seizure of the state.

Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real by Kevin Carson. Read the full series here or scroll down for the PDF.

The Accelerationist movement is roughly divided between right-Accelerationism (closely associated with Nick Land, who went on to be a major figure in the neo-Reactionary movement), which envisions capitalist technological development culminating in a Singularity, and left-Accelerationism. My remarks here refer to the latter exclusively.

Accelerationism, like autonomism and commons-based peer production, aims at unleashing productive forces from their capitalist institutional constraints, and achieving a world without work.

…We need to revive the argument that was traditionally made for post-capitalism: not only is capitalism an unjust and perverted system, but it is also a system that holds back progress. Our technological development is being suppressed by capitalism, as much as it has been unleashed. Accelerationism is the basic belief that these capacities can and should be let loose by moving beyond the limitations imposed by capitalist society. [89]

7. As Marx was aware, capitalism cannot be identified as the agent of true acceleration. Similarly, the assessment of left politics as antithetical to technosocial acceleration is also, at least in part, a severe misrepresentation. Indeed, if the political left is to have a future it must be one in which it maximally embraces this suppressed accelerationist tendency. [90]

Its main shortcoming is a failure to understand the significance of the technologies it sees as the basis for the post-capitalist system. Although Accelerationism celebrates advances in cybernetic technology and network communications as the building blocks of post-scarcity communism, it is tone deaf when it comes to the specific nature of the promise offered by these technologies, and actually runs directly counter to them. This failure includes a lazy conflation of localism and horizontalism with primitivism and backwardness (to the point of treating “neo-primitivist localism” as a single phrase), and a lionization of verticality, centralism and planning.

5. … The new social movements which emerged since the end of the Cold War, experiencing a resurgence in the years after 2008, have been similarly unable to devise a new political ideological vision. Instead they expend considerable energy on internal direct-democratic process and affective self-valorisation over strategic efficacy, and frequently propound a variant of neo-primitivist localism, as if to if to oppose the abstract violence of globalised capital with the flimsy and ephemeral “authenticity” of communal immediacy. …

6. Indeed, as even Lenin wrote in the 1918 text “Left Wing” Childishness:

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

* * *

1. We believe the most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. The former remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in facing foes which are intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure. The failure of such politics has been built-in from the very beginning. By contrast, an accelerationist politics seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow. …

7. We want to accelerate the process of technological evolution. But what we are arguing for is not techno-utopianism. Never believe that technology will be sufficient to save us. Necessary, yes, but never sufficient without socio-political action. Technology and the social are intimately bound up with one another, and changes in either potentiate and reinforce changes in the other. Whereas the techno-utopians argue for acceleration on the basis that it will automatically overcome social conflict, our position is that technology should be accelerated precisely because it is needed in order to win social conflicts.

8. We believe that any post-capitalism will require post-capitalist planning. The faith placed in the idea that, after a revolution, the people will spontaneously constitute a novel socioeconomic system that isn’t simply a return to capitalism is naïve at best, and ignorant at worst. To further this, we must develop both a cognitive map of the existing system and a speculative image of the future economic system.

9. To do so, the left must take advantage of every technological and scientific advance made possible by capitalist society. We declare that quantification is not an evil to be eliminated, but a tool to be used in the most effective manner possible. Economic modelling is — simply put — a necessity for making intelligible a complex world. The 2008 financial crisis reveals the risks of blindly accepting mathematical models on faith, yet this is a problem of illegitimate authority not of mathematics itself. The tools to be found in social network analysis, agent-based modelling, big data analytics, and non-equilibrium economic models, are necessary cognitive mediators for understanding complex systems like the modern economy. The accelerationist left must become literate in these technical fields.

10. Any transformation of society must involve economic and social experimentation. The Chilean Project Cybersyn is emblematic of this experimental attitude — fusing advanced cybernetic technologies, with sophisticated economic modelling, and a democratic platform instantiated in the technological infrastructure itself. Similar experiments were conducted in 1950s-1960s Soviet economics as well, employing cybernetics and linear programming in an attempt to overcome the new problems faced by the first communist economy. That both of these were ultimately unsuccessful can be traced to the political and technological constraints these early cyberneticians operated under.

11. The left must develop sociotechnical hegemony: both in the sphere of ideas, and in the sphere of material platforms. Platforms are the infrastructure of global society. They establish the basic parameters of what is possible, both behaviourally and ideologically. In this sense, they embody the material transcendental of society: they are what make possible particular sets of actions, relationships, and powers. While much of the current global platform is biased towards capitalist social relations, this is not an inevitable necessity. These material platforms of production, finance, logistics, and consumption can and will be reprogrammed and reformatted towards post-capitalist ends.

12. We do not believe that direct action is sufficient to achieve any of this. The habitual tactics of marching, holding signs, and establishing temporary autonomous zones risk becoming comforting substitutes for effective success. “At least we have done something” is the rallying cry of those who privilege self-esteem rather than effective action. …

13. The overwhelming privileging of democracy-as-process needs to be left behind. The fetishisation of openness, horizontality, and inclusion of much of today’s ‘radical’ left set the stage for ineffectiveness. Secrecy, verticality, and exclusion all have their place as well in effective political action (though not, of course, an exclusive one).

14. … We need to posit a collectively controlled legitimate vertical authority in addition to distributed horizontal forms of sociality, to avoid becoming the slaves of either a tyrannical totalitarian centralism or a capricious emergent order beyond our control. The command of The Plan must be married to the improvised order of The Network. [91]

Given the amount of straw consumed in these passages it’s a wonder Nebraska has any left. To begin at the end, equating the stigmergic order of networks to “improvisation” is about as clueless as it’s humanly possible to be. And reducing the tactics of the horizontalist movements to “marching, holding signs, and establishing temporary autonomous zones” is an insult to the enormous effort of building counter-institutions by activists in M15,
Syntagma, Occupy and all over the world.

That the authors see global financial and logistical platforms as progressive contributions of capitalism to be preserved under post-capitalism also says a great deal. Rather than seeing global supply chains and the present international division of labor as subsidized inefficiencies of transnational capitalism — as business models that are profitable only thanks to the socialization of costs — the Accelerationists see them as inherently efficient.

But the main “efficiency” of global supply and distribution chains is access to cheap labor and friendly authoritarian governments for enforcing work discipline. And far from being a throwback to hippie Luddism, relocalized production is the optimal way to capitalize on the potential of advanced CNC micro-manufacturing technology.

The Accelerationist view is directly analogous to that of the Old Left on the inherent efficiencies of capital-intensive mass-production technology in the early and mid-20th century.

The claim that “techno-utopians” believe technological advances “will automatically overcome social conflict” — as opposed to the Accelerationist view of new technology as a weapon “to win social conflicts” — is particularly disingenuous. It conflates left-wing techno-utopianism with the technocratic managerialism of the Tofflers, Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp. It also conflates “political action” as such with an insurrectionist or parliamentary politics aimed at seizure of the state. But in fact the autonomist Exodus is very much a class struggle, and also treats technology as a political weapon insofar as it frees self-organized social labor from dependence on the enormous heaps of obsolescent capital controlled by the ruling class.

Michel Bauwens compares the Accelerationist approach to politics to that of the P2P Foundation:

What is seems to be in the end, is that the combined demand for full automation and the basic income, functions as an utopia, and while utopias are very useful to free the mind and the desires and show possibilities, they are also dangerous. They appear to be a political program to unite a variety of forces, who win power and then, afterwards, can start changing things. But what if we do not gain power this way?

At the P2P Foundation, we see that a bit differently. The first task is to create prefigurative livelihoods which actually embody different post-capitalist logics, and to build social and political forces around this concrete transformative change. …

In the end, asking for two utopian demands that are extremely hard to achieve and impose, seems an expression of the traditional leftist strategy, that we must first win power, and then ‘we will change everything’. The alternative is to build the future right now, to change the mode and relations of production where we can, right now, and to build political power and transition proposals on the basis of a counter-hegemony that has already changed reality through its practice and strength. [92]

Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real (With Special Regard to Paul Mason’s Post-Capitalism)

Download a PDF copy of Kevin Carson’s full C4SS Study: Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 20 (Spring 2016)

I. Capitalist Techno-Utopianism from Daniel Bell On
II. Categories of Leftist Techno-Utopianism
III. Other Non-Capitalist Techno-Utopianisms

John Holloway
Michel Bauwens
Accelerationism

IV. Analysis: Comparison of the Two Strands of Techno-Utopianism

Areas of commonality

V. Paul Mason
VI. Left-Wing Critiques of Mason

Stephanie McMillan
Kate Aronoff

Conclusion

Notes:

89. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” Critical Legal Thinking, May 14, 2013 <https://syntheticedifice.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/accelerate.pdf>
90. Ibid.
91. Ibid.
92. Michel Bauwens, “Michel Bauwens on P2P and Accelerationism (1),” P2P Foundation Blog, January 14, 2016 <https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/53466-2/2016/01/14>.

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The post Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real 6: Accelerationism appeared first on P2P Foundation.