For instance, when a brand like Nike decides to make ads in favor of Colin Kaepernick, we want to push back. I get it. It’s blatant pandering to Black Lives Matter, right? It’s a dilution of the values of the movement. But it’s also an indication that a big company wants to show its support for an important cause.

So when a corporation decides to back Colin Kaepernick, Black Lives Matter, economic equality, or climate remediation, it is making a bet that those are sides that are going to win. This is good.

Or when Pepsi and Kendall Jenner do a zillion-dollar advertisement paying homage to some sort of Black Lives Matter rally, I know it’s inane. It reduces social justice activism to some sort of fashion statement. But it’s also a sign that Pepsi wants to be down with whatever this thing is as best they can understand it. It may have been a watered-down, issueless protest they were depicting, but no one could miss that they were trying to side with millennial angst and social justice in general — just as many millennials do. (As social satire, in some ways it reveals how a lot of activism is really a form of cultural fashion. Maybe that’s the real reason activists are so bothered by their hip representation in a Pepsi commercial. They know that — at least in part — they, too, are suckered by the sexy fun of protests and rallies, stopping traffic, and flummoxing cable news commentators and yet often have trouble articulating what about “the system” they actually want to change.)

No matter how superficial or self-congratulatory their efforts, however, what the corporations are trying to do is get on the right side of history. Think of it cynically, and it makes perfect sense: These giant corporations are picking sides in the culture wars. It’s not short-lived pandering; they can’t afford that. Unlike politicians, who often attempt to stroke and gratify different, sometimes opposed constituencies and appeal to a local base, corporations necessarily communicate to everyone at once. Super Bowl advertising is one size fits all.

So when a corporation decides to back Colin Kaepernick, Black Lives Matter, economic equality, or climate remediation, it is making a bet that those are sides that are going to win. This is good. It’s not simply a matter of employees or shareholders pushing management to do the right thing. No, it’s future forecasters telling the branding department where things are headed. Companies are realizing that their futures better be tied to whichever side of an issue that’s going to win.

The problem is that the more we attack people for whatever they did before they were woke, the less progress we’re going to make.

Cynical? Maybe. But, despite the way the Supreme Court might rule, corporations are not people; they’re just corporations. They don’t have feelings; they only have power. They’re putting their money and reputations on racial equality and social justice over white nationalism. This alone should serve as a leading indicator of where things are actually going. A sign of hope.

Instead of rejecting such efforts, we should welcome them. Maybe think of corporations as dinosaurs that can be trained. Their help is worth more than the pleasure of perpetual righteous indignation.

I’ve been likewise dismayed by many progressives’ take-no-prisoners approach to people who working for social justice. Bernie Sanders, perhaps the person most responsible for bringing the Democratic Party home from its neoliberal vacation, recently became the object of contempt for having used the word “niggardly” in a speech 30 years ago. Though the discomfort is understandable, the word has nothing to do with race. It means stingy. It was on my SATs in 1979. And yet, we’ve now moved into an era where we don’t use such a word because it sounds like a racial slur. I get that.

The problem is that the more we attack people for whatever they did before they were woke or, in Bernie’s case, before progressive standards changed, the less progress we’re going to make. Why agree that we should move beyond a certain behavior or attitude if doing so simply makes us vulnerable to attack? How can a D.C. politician, for example, push for the Washington Redskins to change their name when they know there’s footage somewhere of them rooting for the team or wearing a jersey with a Native American on it? Even though the politician may agree with the need for a change, they would have to resist or at least slow the wheels of progress lest they get caught under the cart. Intolerance and shaming is not the way to win allies.

Progressives are mad, hurt, and traumatized. But they’ve got to dismantle this circular firing squad and begin to welcome positive change rather than punish those who are trying to get woke. Truth and reconciliation work better than blame and shame.

The post Time for Progressives to Stop Shaming One Another appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This inverview, conducted by Pascal Gielen and Sonja Lavaert, was originally published in Open! Platform for Art, Culture & the Public Domain

Pascal Gielen & Sonja Lavaert: Our book Commonism is about the triangle of ideology, aestheticsand the commons.1 Our tentative assumption is that commonism may be the next meta-ideology, after neoliberalism. We understand ideology not only negatively as a false awareness, but also positively as a logic of faith that connects fiction and reality and can make people long for and work towards a better form of living together. In Assembly you and Michael Hardt do something similar with notions such as ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘institution’, ‘leadership’. What does ‘ideology’ mean to you and do you think it may also figure in a positive narrative?

Antonio Negri: In my experience, ideology tends to have mostly negative connotations, or, rather, I have regarded ‘ideology’ mainly in negative terms. This means though that we are speaking of something that is real. Ideology is a real fact. In addition, it is something real that embodies, shapes and constitutes reality. What I see as positive in this embodiment of reality is critique – which can be critique of the ideology or of reality – and the dispositive, understood as the transition of the world of thinking to that of reality. In my view, ideologies make up reality, but I use the term preferably when discussing its negative aspect, whereas when I speak of its positive aspect, i.e., the critique or the dispositive, I prefer these latter words.

The ideological dimension is absolutely crucial when thinking about reality and in trying to analyse and understand it, but, again, it can be both positive and negative. Gramsci, for example, saw it this way. The ideological dimension is an essential part of any analysis of reality, but a discourse on ideology is therefore always both positive and negative. On the one hand there is the bourgeois ideology (that Gramsci opposed, as do we) and on the other hand there is the communist ideology (that we support). Today, I think it is better to call the communist ideology a ‘critique’ or ‘dispositive’; ‘critique’ as in taking place in the realm of knowledge and understanding, and ‘dispositive’ in the Foucaultian sense of the transition of knowledge into action.

And, well, there is the matter of meta-ideology… Again, I agree with your view that ideology, being something that belongs to the realm of knowledge and understanding, in a sense branches out into reality, feeding and shaping it, and that therefore ideology is always and everywhere present in concrete reality. However, I would be very reluctant to speak in terms of ‘meta’, ‘post’ or ‘after’, as if it were something transcendent or as if there is such a thing as a space of transcendence at all.

When we speak of meta-ideology, we refer to the tendency of transcending the traditional party political differences between left and right. It is a trend that can be seen clearly today, wherever the theme of the common is picked up or where common-initiatives are being developed. And elsewhere as well: liberal politicians write books about the importance of the basic income; neonationalism presents itself as a longing for social cohesion; religiously inspired political parties emphasize communion and the community, et cetera.

Common is not the exclusive property of the left, that much is clear. Looking at history from a Marxist perspective, we see how it was precisely the commons that were transformed by capitalism to be financially profitable. Capitalism’s attitude towards the commons is about expropriation, exploration, creating surplus value, and the dominion that is founded on these things. The common exists in two major forms: there are natural commons and social commons and, as Michael and I put forth in Assembly, these can be subdivided into five types: the earth and ecosystems; the immaterial common of ideas, codes, images and cultural products; material goods produced by cooperative labour; metropolises and rural areas that are the domain of communication, cultural interaction and cooperation; and social institutions and services that provide housing, welfare, healthcare and education. Now the essential characteristic of the present-day economy and society is that the social production of the commons is being exploited by capital. The struggle of the commons therefore is working people re-appropriating that of which they were robbed by capital. Re-appropriating what was taken from them and putting it to work for the benefit of the common: that is the meaning of liberation and emancipation. This also means that the fiction of ‘post’ or ‘meta’ is debunked and eliminated. There is no meta. The struggle of the commons is the possibility of eliminating an ‘outside’ (meta [above], post [after]). This struggle is exclusively fought in the domain of immanence, meaning: here and now, at the heart of the reality in which we find ourselves, because there is no ‘outside’. By the way, we can only speak in the abstract about common as a general unitary, singular and exactly definable concept, because in reality the common is always twofold, just like labour is.

There is much talk about ‘common’ nowadays; studies are undertaken, and various movements and schools of thought have emerged around the theme. Here in France, for example, there is the school of the economist Benjamin Coriat, editor of Le retour des communs (2015); we have Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, who posit the common as a demand and alternative in their Commun (2014), and Carlo Vercellone and other comrades – and Michael and myself are two of them – who regard the common as something that can be used ontologically, can be annexed, and for whom the struggle therefore consists of re-appropriating the common. This also ties in with David Harvey’s reading of Marx. In Assembly we concern ourselves in great detail with his analysis and for the most part we agree with him. However, whereas Harvey focuses on capitalism as a continuous primitive accumulation, we see it as a developmental phase and therefore prefer to speak of formal and real subsumption, but this perhaps is a different theme.

What I’m trying to say is: my distrust of the term ‘meta’ is that it suggests that there is no difference or antithesis anymore between left and right. Well, of course left and right are inaccurate concepts, but to put it more plainly: it means that capitalism is no longer recognised and that being liberated of capitalism is regarded as something that could easily happen or would even be a battle that is already won.

To give a concrete example of how we use the term ‘meta’: the occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens in 2011 was predominantly organized by the left, but people from quite different ideological backgrounds are also joining the movement and are developing new initiatives, out of necessity, for their daily survival. For that reason, this movement, which is really more of a patchwork of initiatives, is sometimes ‘accused’ of being apolitical. In that sense we call commonism a practice-based ideology and we call it ‘meta’ because it brings together people from various, traditionally opposed political currents, and does so out of necessity.

I fully agree with that conclusion and analysis, but I would still be wary of using such an ambiguous term. The word ‘meta’ covers a political concern aimed at reconciliation with regard to the profound rift between, to put it bluntly, the bosses and those who are exploited.

What do you think of the fact that the Open VLD, the liberal party in Flanders, is organizing a conference about the commons as apparently they think it is important, without necessarily wanting to capitalize it but, as things look now anyway, because they are genuinely interested or find something lacking in their liberal system?

It is obvious that we are facing enormous problems nowadays. We see a general transformation of the system of production as it is being automated and robotized. These are things that we thematized and analysed in our operaismo movement, some forty years or longer ago. In the first issue of Potere Operaio, in 1969, we demanded the ‘civil income’ (reddito di cittadinanza) and this was because we already foresaw this process in which labour would be reduced to a completely secondary element. The question is how to respond to this revolution and reality and as far as that is concerned I see an urgent need to create spaces for developing initiatives outside of capitalism.

There are a number of interesting initiatives in Belgium: the start-ups, with already 50,000 participants, and Michel Bauwens, the founder of the P2P Foundation. And yes, the commons is a domain that very much interests ‘the right’. The same goes for social democrats, by the way. So, the entire problem consists of understanding what the alternative could be, how to respond, what to do, and this is in fact the very theme of autonomy.

In our research and book we speak of aesthetics not only in regard to art but also in relation to society. We understand aesthetics as the shaping or design of both material and social things, of people. In your book Assembly we detect a similar idea: assembly characterizes the aesthetic style and strategy of the commons. Likewise, in Commonism, we oppose the aesthetic figure with the abstraction that we associate with exchange value, finance capitalism and neoliberalism. What does the ideal assembly look like, in your view? What are the conditions for its realization? How can non-humans (things, nature) be involved in an assembly? What instruments or strategies are needed? In short, how should assembly be practically organized in order to function well, in your view?

We argue that the assembly is already there. It is already there in the structure of the present-day economy in which labour has transformed itself in language and in cooperation that is largely autonomous. The assembly is what we are confronted with. The problem therefore is how these labour forces or subjects / people who produce subjectivity can become political subjects. This is demonstrated by the recognition of the common, by the transition to the common and being together, by the transition of the mere finding of being together to being aware of it. The transition of collaboration and being-in-common to the production of common subjectivity is the central element of the assembly.

The comrades and activists who take part in the fight of the movement, from Occupy Wall Street to the Indignados in Madrid, have attempted to bring about such a transition, especially from the condition of people producing under capitalism and whose situation simply happens to them to a free condition in which the common is built and formed. This transition is fundamental and in addition it demonstrates that commonism is much more feasible today than in the previous situation, in which the workers were organized and brought together by capital. Before, the workers were brought together, they did not come together of their own initiative. This is no longer the case and precisely this means an enormous boost for the possibilities. The possibility for liberation is infinitely larger and wider today, because there is this being-together, an ontological fact that is also a point of departure.

The assembly is an ontological fact that must become political, that is the heart of the matter.

Marx has said of the working classes that they were made by capital and that therefore it was necessary for them to become aware of their situation through a political party, an external organization, an ideology, et cetera, in order to become political. Today we see a maturity and an original organization, so to speak, thanks to the transformation that occurred in labour and society. Labour today is no longer a labour under command. The aspect of the command is becoming increasingly alienated from the possibility to work together subjectively. What is important, is that the language that is formed by the worker comes before the command, precedes it. The importance of neoliberalism, by the way, is that it understood that this autonomous use of language can be reversed and can be made use of by capital. This is why the most important political work of today is to recognize this subjective and special use of language and to reverse again what capitalism and neoliberalism have reversed, and to bring about the liberation.

We are still not quite convinced, in the sense that we miss a concrete definition of what assembly exactly is. Looking at this as a sociologists, we look at examples of assemblies such as the Ex Asilo Filangieri in Naples, and we think: assembly is a tool, a meeting method, a more democratic way of organizing things, of taking autonomous decisions, of achieving self-governance. Can we say that assembly is a formula for organizing direct democracy?

What Michael and I have in mind is exactly the type of phenomenon like L’Asilo in Naples, where sovereignty has been reversed: to the common, to a space and a series of shared goods (beni communi) in the widest sense, both material and immaterial goods. In other words, where a series of remarkable initiatives is undertaken for the common good. The concept of common is always a production, something that is invented, made, shaped. The assembly is this: a body of people, a small multitude that manages well the shared (material and immaterial) goods and thereby constitutes a common. The fundamental concept of assembly is that the political and social are again joined and today we have a chance, an opportunity to do this. Unlike Lenin, we no longer find ourselves in exceptional conditions like it was with the Russian Revolution when there was only hunger, war and catastrophe and everything had to be torn down in order to create a new force. Now, today, we have the opportunity to transform the assembly into a force. Because that is politics: lending force. Or, that is aesthetics, if one wishes to use that term: lending form and force. There is no form without force. Politics is force, power – and that includes the aspect of violence. In politics it is about the force (the power, sometimes violence) to construct peace.

What we see in the practical functioning of assembly, for example, is that the practice of language becomes very important. After all, people have to speak to each other and try to convince others through dialogue. Now this mechanism has two problems: 1) those who speak more and better have an advantage in winning the debate; and 2) there is a class phenomenon. In the situation of an assembly the middle class becomes dominant: those who are white, educated and can speak well have the floor, so there is an element of selection. My question to you is: how can the assembly be organized in such a way that there is no such selection or that this shortcoming is compensated for by letting basis-democratic principles prevail? How does one give a voice to those who remain silent?

We are of course discussing examples and I think that especially in Naples, if one looks at the periphery, in the surrounding region, in all those places where the casa del popolo are strong and many initiatives are taken by the people, one definitely sees a direct proletarian use of language, and in quite dominant forms. There are also initiatives such as L’Asilo that already have quite a tradition, that have statutes and a legal structure. And yes, in those cases a certain political class is involved. However, I think that the assembly is both cause and product of a break with class distinction. The obvious objection one could have against these assembly initiatives is that not everything has been properly defined. We are after all speaking of a process that is not free of contradictions and downfall, but it is an extremely important process and it has begun.

The problem is that we have to develop a different model than that of parliamentary democracy, or, rather, we need a post-parliamentarian model of democracy.

What do you think of the fact that in Naples a commissioner for the commons (assessore dei beni communi) has been appointed? We ask this specifically with regard to your rejection of state institutions.

We cannot have this discussion with Naples as an example. The situation there is quite ambiguous. What is happening there now was achieved with great effort after an immense political crisis: the PD(Democratic Party) in Naples is divided into four or five factions, the 5 Stelle movement is weak, and there is this incredible Mayor Luigi de Magistris, a former magistrate – very straight and tough – who is open to what according to him might constitute the majority. So all this makes Naples a rather unique case, a confluence of events. There are so many contingent factors playing a part there. The first concern of the comrades who occupied buildings was therefore to obtain a guarantee, an anchoring in the institutions.

But to return to our point, the institutions are indeed a major problem, but we should not concern ourselves with the case of Naples as it is very much a separate case.

 In Assembly you regard the new leadership of the commons as a possible strategy of the multitude and as a tactic of the leader. The leader can only temporarily – and depending on her or his expertise – make certain tactical moves in the general strategy of the multitude. How can this be organized and in how much is your reversal of attribution of the strategy (to the multitude) and of tactics (to the leader) different from a representative democracy where leaders are also only appointed temporarily?

I think that we are faced with the problem of removing or eroding the political relationship between movement and leader. What is at stake is decision authority. What exactly was the formula of political parties? A party gathered a great number of people along a certain political line that was decided upon by the top, by the leader, and which was literally imposed on or taught to the people in a top-down fashion. In our work, Michael and I take the critique by movements as our starting point, because these movements reject the existing institutions. Today, we have to reject leadership but not necessarily institutions as such. So we are now faced with the problem of the institutions and we have to solve this, we have to face this, and study it together. Or, in other words: we have to bring back the leadership to the movement and it is within the movement that the hegemonial strategy of leadership must be developed. We have to take the decision authority away from the leader, or rather, take the abstraction and transcendence of the decision away from the leader.

But how does one choose the leader, and how do the commons differ from representative democracy?

The problem is not how to choose, as this can be done in any number of ways. The problem is that of the power that is given to the leader. Often though, the leader will spontaneously emerge from the multitude.

The power of the leader must be limited to the tactical level and this usually means the power to make proposals.

Anyone who has been active within the movement knows the phenomenon of the leader who spontaneously comes forward. It has to do with the actual needs and problems the movement faces and into which the leader has more insight than anyone else. One often sees how a leader’s power is acknowledged at some point and then begins, works out well, and thus becomes a reality.

Let me give an example. During the 1917 revolution, Lenin succeeded in becoming the tactical leader because he could instantly, in a very direct manner, provide answers to two problems that presented itself at the time: peace now, and land to the farm labourers. However, on the other hand, the powers representing the military and the farmers were convinced that neither the soldiers nor the farm labourers were ready for these changes and so they didn’t undertake any action. It was a paradox: the leader, Lenin, saying no to the ruling institutions because he understood what the soldiers and the farm labourers needed. This is a tactic that becomes power and force (forza).

The leader is always temporary, tactical. He steps forward in a struggle of the people / subjects who have demands and needs.

But then how does the leader know what those needs are? Simply because they stem from the people?

Quite so. He knows what is needed because he is part of it, because he is in the middle of it, but, again, this is a paradox. According to the official history books Lenin was a demagogue who played games with the people, but I know that the reverse is true: the revolution succeeded because Lenin understood that these were the real needs and because he immediately articulated an answer to them, without all the compromises, crippling detours and institutions as created by the parliamentary system. Those real needs to which he provided an answer were peace now, immediately, and giving the land to those who worked the land, without any compromise. 

The same is true for many leaders. Churchill, for example, took a direct decision to fight against the Germans in World War II. This is the point: the leader who immediately and directly coincides with the needs and wants of the many / the common.

In Assembly you defend the hypothesis that the institutions or the leader don’t need a centralized rule but that they can be realized by a multitude in a democratic manner. The examples you provide for the future of the movements are in line with this hypothesis: for example, Black Lives Matter. But isn’t this notion and aren’t these examples at odds with or even contrary to your criticism of the ‘horizontal leader-lessness’?

Well, many movements are leaderless, but that is not the issue. What is problematic, or what these movements need, is institutions. What we are trying to say is not so much that movements need leaders – as, again, they should take charge of leadership themselves – but that they do need institutions. It is a mistake for these movements not to have an institution, to not adopt an institutional framework. However, Michael and I are convinced that within the movements there is a tendency to do this, to form institutions – these are not anarchist groups – and thereby realize this horizontal hegemony. Our work is about searching for a type of institution that is not sovereign and is not connected to ownership. How this works out in practice, well, that is exactly what we need to discuss, think about, try out…

This leads nicely to our next question. You advocate complementarity of the three political strategies: pre-figurative politics, antagonistic reformism and hegemony. Existing institutions are abolished and new, non-sovereign institutions are created. What exactly needs to be abandoned when it comes to existing institutions?

We are currently witnessing the death struggle of the concepts that have dominated political thinking and practice in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The most important of these dying concepts are national sovereignty and property, both private and public. National sovereignty has been beaten by globalized capitalism, but at the same time actual capitalism is founded on those same barely surviving concepts that influence and mutually confirm each other. The concept or principle on which national sovereignty is based, in particular the ‘border’, has really become absurd. We transcend and cross borders constantly. Our brains are globalized and have no more use for the concept of border, so we need to get rid of it. That is the theoretical work that needs to be done: giving short shrift to moribund principles and concepts such as the border. As abundantly clear as this is for national sovereignty, so it is for ownership, both private and public: ownership is based on the same logic as the border, an obsolete concept that is at odds with reality. Even more so: property and border are one and the same thing.

The concept of the common, by contrast, is not one of ownership. In thinking about this issue it is extremely important to make a distinction between ‘common goods’ (beni comuni), which can be the object of ownership, and ‘the common’ (il comune) as in ‘commonwealth’, which is a production, something that is formed by the common from within and which consequently cannot be owned.

Is there anything positive you could mention about what these new ‘non-sovereign’ institutions might look like? How should the three political strategies – pre-figurative politics, antagonistic reformism and hegemony over the institutions – work together exactly? Is there a sequence that these three strategies should follow, or should they be deployed in parallel?

That is a question of the political practice. I simply can’t answer that, as it is too hard to do this sitting at a writing desk. It is both impossible and undesirable. I don’t see it as part of my work, which is studying, philosophizing, providing general frameworks in a critical manner, studying the foundation of the discourse, questioning the principles and concepts. And then there is the practice of the struggle and it is within the struggle that debate and consultation should take place, among each other, about what should be done. We cannot be expected to predict the future, and it is not our ambition to do so. To me this is one of the core issues: we will have to wait until the future announces itself, breaks out. That takes place in practice, whereas in my work I wish to point out directions, and formulate a critique of the principles of ideas and structures.

In Assembly you quote Hegel: ‘Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True not only as aSubstance, but equally as Subject’.2 What exactly is subjectivity to you? Does subjectivity take on a different form today and if so, what does it look like?

To Hegel, subjectivity meant synthesis and overcoming. Think of Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of the master-slave dialectic: the slave overcomes the master in as far as he serves him and at the same time constructs him. Also think of the concept of the proletariat in relation to capitalism in the work of the young Marx: the proletariat forms itself and realizes its project in as far as it becomes a fully integrated part of the bourgeois society. In Capital we no longer find this interpretation, and it is also gone from or at least nuanced in our analysis of the reality of workers today. Today, the subjectivity of the worker is that of singularity, of a particularity that is being produced in the construction of the common. This particularity is invention, is immaterial and serves to construct the common, that is, a bringing together of all these things. The (worker’s) subjectivity of today is a production of ‘being’, as it is an innovation and a surplus. It is a practice of freedom and therefore the production of subjectivity is something that transcends any identity. The subject is non-identic, is not an identity (hence the impossibility of providing exact definitions for it). The subject is formed in the collaboration, in being social, and it is something historical.

How do you see the role of art and the art world in the organization of assembly? On the one hand we state that the art world today indeed has a role by creating a space for exchange and debate, which is lacking in mainstream media, at exhibitions and during biennales. On the other hand we conclude that it doesn’t go any further and that these initiatives remain limited to the domain of the discursive. Also, these initiatives are often used as PR tools, turning the debate into a commodity. In light of this, what role can the art world – and art itself – play according to you, and can it have a role at all in shaping and strengthening the commons?

As I have tried to clarify in my book Art and Multitude (1989), art can always be linked to its mode of production. Art is production. Its dignity is derived from the fact that it is production of ‘being’, of meaningful images. In other words, of images that shape ‘being’, that take ‘being’ out of a hidden condition and transform it into an open and public condition. This always happens during a process of production. This is why there is an analogy between how goods are produced in general in a certain historical context and how art is produced in that same context. In art there is always a ‘making’ in the sense of constructing something. Art is always a form of building, a bringing together, a productive gesture. When looking at things from this point of view, it becomes clear that it is all about making distinctions within this world. There is beautiful art and there is ugly art, useful art and useless art; likewise there is art that markets itself as a commodity and there is art that is a form of productive artistic making.

Like language, art produces communication, it makes connections. Especially nowadays, art is like the practice of language in constructing connections, becoming event. Art is getting rid of materiality and is increasingly linked to immaterial production. It follows the same trend as the immaterial production and makes connections in fluid, unstable, and new images, in unexpected forms and figures. In this way art affiliates itself with the present-day mode of production and, like this mode of production, it interprets behaviour that is related to special events and passions. We are in a phase of metamorphosis of art, just like we are in phase of the production mode in which labour is completely transforming itself.

With regard to art I would like to underline two things. First, I assume that art is a form of making and working that is therefore completely linked to the production mode of a specific historical situation. Second, I assume that art has the capacity to produce ‘being’. Of course not all art always produces real ‘being’. By this I absolutely do not mean that there is good and bad art; that is not for me to say. But I do think a distinction can be made between art that serves the market and that is produced and circulates within the market, and art that is absolute production, meaning that it produces ‘being’.

One year ago, at the Venice Biennale, Marx was read; at documenta 14 in Athens, so much engaged political art was shown that the 12 April 2017 issue of Dutch national newspaper NRC Handelsbladlikened it to a ‘stage for the revolution’.  At the same time, however, these revolutionary platforms stay within the confines of biennales and documentas, which reminds one of what Walter Benjamin has called the ‘aestheticization’ of politics, which according to him was also a sign of fascism. Is there a way out of this for art? Can art escape from institutions that maybe do not affirm fascism as such, but certainly neoliberalism, and that turn art into a commodity?

There is always an escape route! Obviously these places must be regarded as battlefields, as places of confrontation and collision, of conflict and rifts. One can always escape that which biennales and documentas represent: that is, one can and should try to escape their control function – these big art institutions of the state or the market do function as control mechanisms – and artists therefore find themselves in exactly the same condition as the workers.

In my view, the problem with art institutions is this: they are arenas, more specifically arenas of a fight for the truth, of critique of ideology and production, places where the discourse of power is exposed, but they are always also marketplaces. The point is to break out of this cage of control by the state and the market and this has always been part of the development of art as it has manifested itself in many different forms, each time in a different manner. For example, at one time we had patrons of the arts who had the same role as the art institutions of today; it was no different then.

And so we have this whole history of constant artistic resistance against these conditions. I don’t think that art has ever been in line with power in any way. The great Italian Renaissance painters and sculptors were not, nor were the painters of the Golden Age in the Lowlands. On the contrary, there have always been breaking points in art that become evident in the artistic production, while these painters and sculptors were nevertheless an integral part of their specific social context. Because of these breaking points one can regard art as a way of unearthing the truth. They qualify art as a mode of truth.

I often talk to friends-comrades who make art and they are becoming increasingly critical of the market. There is a general resistance against the market these days in the actions of those comrades who believe strongest in or empathize with the class struggle – a rejection of the market that is becoming more and more radical. The protest is expressed in this negation, which is quite strong, and it leads to a radical criticism without compromise and without market possibilities.

There is of course also, and quite often, a strong temptation of ‘nothing’, of not doing / making, or of presenting art works that express a not-doing / not-making.

Anyway, I tend to be cautious with regard to these issues, and I think that in every action – and therefore also in art actions – a material composition is required and therefore a composition with reality as well. What I mean is: one should neither look for purity nor demonize the power / force.

In Assembly you emphasize the importance of language and communication. You mention the changing of meaning of words, speaking, and translation, and the appropriation of words as important political action. In this context you posit the idea of entrepreneurship of the multitude. Is this at all possible with a term like ‘entrepreneurship’, which has been associated with capitalism in all its guises for over 200 years? Is there not a risk that critique will wither and distinctions become blurred with such an act of appropriation?

I don’t think so, and frankly I don’t understand why such a polemic arose around specifically this issue as soon as our book was published. We, Michael and I, have always recuperated and reused words, and reversed their meaning in our work. For example, ‘empire’ may be the most academic and traditional term in the history of political science. Not that we were the first to do so: the word ‘capital’ as the title of Marx’s three-part book on the critique of political economy is about as capitalistic as can be. There is nothing wrong in appropriating words that are part of the tradition and ethics of the capitalistic bourgeoisie and assign them a new meaning. On the contrary, this is what we should do. The problem with regard to this form of language practice is to understand the force of reversal.

As to the semantic series of words such as ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘enterprise’, ‘entrepreneur’ in relation to the common – because we never just speak of ‘entrepreneurship’ but about the ‘entrepreneurship of the common’ – the word ‘enterprise’ admittedly is rather ambiguous. Enterprise is something like Christopher Columbus who crossed the Atlantic Ocean and demonstrated a huge capacity for invention. So on the one hand the word refers to a heroic, fantastic project. Columbus engaged in an improbable and completely new undertaking in the space of his time. On the other hand, the term ‘enterprise’ also refers to that with which it is commonly associated, namely a project aimed at financial profit and at generating income.

What we try to do in Assembly is to appropriate words that belong to tradition. We see it as our task to gain words for the common, to recuperate the words. Again, we do not speak of entrepreneurship tout court, but of entrepreneurship of the common. Speaking of the entrepreneurship of the common has the same potential and power as speaking of refusing to work: it leads to a re-appropriation of the common. So the power of this language use lies in this action of re-appropriation and in this the reversal is crucial.

In Assembly you imply that revolution is ontological and not a contingent event – that revolution is not aimed at seizing power, nor that it brings you to power, but that it changes power, or that it can bring you to power but that it changes the nature of power in doing so. You call upon the multitude to seize power in the sense of Machiavelli at the end of The Prince (1532): a call for a new leader who emerges from the multitude, and to not waste the opportunity. What is essential here is the phrase ‘to take power differently’, by which you mean, with Spinoza, that the ‘common’ or ‘freedom, equality, democracy, and wealth’ are guaranteed. ‘Differently’ here does not mean repeating the hypocrisy of freedom (without equality) as a concept of the right, nor that of equality (without freedom) as a proposal by the left. The formulation therefore is inspired by Spinoza to whom the ‘common’ was the basic idea that can also be summarized as: there is no freedom without equality and there is no equality without freedom. Common is an ontological and logical category that assumes and unites an internally contrasting multitude of singularities. Our question is twofold. Why speak of ‘commonism’ instead of simply calling it ‘communism’? And where is solidarity in all this?

Why we don’t call it ‘communism’? Perhaps because that word has been all too much abused in our recent history. In Italy, in the 1970s, there was a group of situationists who called it commontismo(rather a sympathetic lot, these situationists, but it all ended very badly: they turned out to be activist robbers, went to prison or became drug addicts; it all ended tragically).

I have no doubt that one day we will call the political project of the common ‘communism’ again. But it’s up to the people to call it that, not up to us.

Where is solidarity in our discourse? In everything we say there is solidarity because solidarity is in the principles of our discourse. To say it in Aristotelian terms, there is solidarity as in three of the four types of causes: as material cause in the rejection of loneliness, as efficient cause in the collaboration to produce and as final cause in love. In other words, everything that we propose, our entire theoretical building, has its material, efficient and final cause in solidarity. The ‘commontism’ is drenched in solidarity. One cannot live alone, in loneliness, one cannot produce alone, and one cannot love alone.

Our proposals cannot be read in any other way but as proposals of solidarity, or how to escape from loneliness. We have to escape from loneliness in order to define a solidary, close community, as we cannot survive alone in a barren desert. We must escape from loneliness in order to produce, because alone we would never have the means or the time. We must escape from loneliness in order to love, because on your own and without someone else there can be no love. This is the only way to understand this radical transition of / to the common, a transition that we are evolving towards, by the way. There is truly a developing tendency towards solidarity and towards an escape from loneliness.

We live in times of great crisis and terrible emptiness but at the same time these are also times of great expectations. We are facing a void between that which is finished and that which still has to begin. Especially in talking to young people one becomes aware of this terrible loneliness, but also of this great longing. The desert caused by neoliberal capitalism is insufferable in every regard.

Our next question is about that. As in your previous writings, in Assembly you start from the optimistic thought that the Occupy movements demonstrate a rebellion of the multitude, that the ‘possible is a given’, that the ‘common is a given’. But in Assembly you also pose the question, perhaps for the first time, regarding why the revolution of the Occupy movements failed. Does this indicate a turn in your work, a turn away from the earlier optimism? And what does this mean for the idea of revolution?

There is no turn from optimism to pessimism in our work. What we attempted to do is to understand the problem in a realistic manner and to think about possible solutions. The problem as we see it is that of the limits and limitations of movements, both of Occupy and other movements we have seen over the past decade. The most important limitation, in our analysis, is that these movements have not been willing or not been able to translate themselves into institutions and that where they did attempt to do so and in those cases where they actually formed institutions, it all ended in a betrayal of the movement. We see this for example in a part of the Indignados that founded Podemos, who eventually betrayed the situation from which they departed. Having followed all the debates from close up, my opinion of Podemos is negative. They have not succeeded in maintaining the reversal of the relation between strategy and decision or between tactic and strategy, leaving only the tactic.

So it is not about being more or less optimistic, but about grasping the problem in a realistic manner and about thinking of ways to solve the problem and this is what we try to do in our work. We try to see the limits and limitations of the political common-movement. Our conclusion is that power should be seized, but that in and with that operation power should be changed. Therefore, as you quote and as we expressed it in Assembly, it is all about ‘to take the power differently’ and then maintain this radical transition / reversal.

You also deal with populism in Assembly. Shouldn’t we discard the term ‘people’ anyway?

Yes, that’s what the common is all about. The term ‘people’ stays within the logic of Hobbes and the bourgeois line of sovereignty and representation. It is a fiction that violates the multitude and has only that purpose: the multitude should transform itself into one people that dissolves itself in forming the sovereign power. Think of the original frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan, which perfectly illustrates this. But it was Spinoza who, against Hobbes, emphatically used the concept multitudoand underlined that the natural power of the multitude remains in place when a political ordering is formed. Actually, Spinoza, in elaborating these concepts of multitudo and comunis encapsulates the entire issue of politics and democracy, as I have attempted to demonstrate in my book L’anomalia selvaggia and to which we refer again in part in Assembly. Crucial in the transition of singularity to the common, Spinoza teaches us, are imagination, love and subjectivity. Singularity and subjectivity becoming common and translating themselves into newly invented institutions, is one way of summarizing commontism.

With regard to the current digital and communicative capitalism you also dwell on critique and what you call Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s techno-pessimism. You state that in order to arrive at an evaluation of modern technology it is necessary to historicize the arguments of critique. The position of Horkheimer and Adorno only relates to the phase of capitalist development that is controlled by large-scale industry. This constitutes a serious limitation of their critique. My question is: is this restriction of their critique related to the counter image of Enlightenment and modern thinking as forged in the Romantic period by opponents of revolutionary ideas and emancipation and in which their Dialektik der Aufklärung is also caught? Or, to put it differently, is it due to the fact that they do not make an explicit enough distinction between emancipatory modern thinking and capitalism? What is your view on this, also in the light of your thesis on the alternative modernity of Machiavelli-Spinoza-Marx, in which the first two are regarded as the main suspects by Horkheimer and Adorno?

I grew up against the background of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and it is evident that operaismo is indebted to their critical work, but at the same time the entire development of operaismo can be seen as opposing the conclusions of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Horkheimer and Adorno’s work leads to extremes and extremism, it takes you to the border and then you can’t go any further. It is the conceptualization of a hermetic universe. In operaismo we asked ourselves, departing from this hermetic universe, how one could break it open. Instead of ending where they did, in operaismo we took the hermetic universe as a starting point, that is the universe of capitalism, of the excesses of instrumental rationality, and of the logic of control and repression, and we asked ourselves how we could break open this hermetic universe. We looked for ways to force open this hermetic universe, which had deteriorated into commodity and was heading for catastrophe. Introducing subjectivity is the central element in this, the crowbar.

So we are the children of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, but also rebel against it.

What we rediscovered in operaismo (and also in Assembly) against the positions of Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectics is ontology, the class struggle and the possibility of subjectivation. Our interest in the pre-1968 Herbert Marcuse can be seen from this perspective, and what has been especially important, according to us, is the work of Hans-Jürgen Krahl. He was a young student of Adorno who was killed in a traffic accident in early 1970, but he wrote a very important work about the formation of the class struggle, Konstitution und Klassenkampf (published posthumously in 1971). His discourse was similar to what we tried to do in Italy. It involves the discovery of the immaterial and intellectual labour that had the potential for political action, for liberation and for breaking with the total exploitation. Georg Lukàcs also played an important part in this discovery, as did Maurice Merleau-Ponty in France. In the intersection between phenomenology and Marxism we find the fabric in which our movement originates.

If you, as an intellectual, thinker, researcher, critical theorist, were to give an assignment to the future generation, what would it be?

What I see as most important, as fundamental in my life, and what I experience as unique in my life and something that connects everything and is positive, is the fact that I have always been a communist militant. Throughout my life I have never done anything, not as a philosopher nor in any of the many other professions or occupations I engaged in, not as a sociologist or sometimes even as professional politician, never have I undertaken anything that wasn’t completely driven by my communist commitment. I have always been a communist militant in everything. That is what I would like to leave to the future. I would like for communist commitment to become the central element again in people’s lives. Because the commonist militant is the salt of the earth.

Pascal Gielen is full Professor of Sociology of Art and Politics at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts, University of Antwerp where he leads the Culture Commons Quest Office (CCQO). Gielen is editor-in-chief of the international book series Arts in Society. In 2016, he became laureate of the Odysseus grant for excellent international scientific research of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders in Belgium. His research focuses on creative labour, the institutional context of the arts and cultural politics. Gielen has published many books  translated in English, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

Sonja Lavaert is professor of philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She has published on early modern philosophy (Machiavelli, Spinoza), radical contemporary philosophy (Agamben, Negri, Virno), critical theory, Italian studies and philosophy of art. She is the author of Het perspectief van de multitude (2011) and she co-edited The Dutch Legacy. Radical Thinkers of the 17th Century and the Enlightenment (2017) and Aufklärungs-Kritik und Aufklärungs-Mythen. Horkheimer und Adorno in philosophiehistorischer Perspektive (2018). Her research focuses on the philosophical representations of history, and on the genealogy of political and ethical concepts in the interdisciplinary area of philosophy, language, literature, and translation.Credit: This essay is reproduced from the forthcoming book with the kind permission of the authors Pascal Gielen and Sonja Lavaert and publisher Valiz, titled Commonism: A New Aesthetics of the Real, edited by Nico Dockx and Pascal Gielen, for the Antennae-Arts in Society series (Amsterdam: Valiz, September 2018), www.valiz.nl. Text licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeWorks 3.0 License.

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Labour market trends that assess who is most impacted by precarious work all show up the same patterns; these folks are black and brown, often women, and often working class. Precarious work includes digital apps such as Uber, abuse of zero-hour contracts, or those most at risk from losing a job due to automation. As this ‘new economy’ thrives, we need to be aware that race inequality will worsen because white supremacy is a systemic feature of neoliberal capitalism. This article suggests seven concrete steps that progressives can take towards a genuinely new and transformative economy for all workers. 

Play the race card 

Our economic system inherently disadvantages marginalised groups, and this trend is consistent through history. To better understand why this happens, we need to consciously develop a deeper analysis of the problem we are trying to address. In this case, how are Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) workers impacted by the rise of precarious work practices? 

Research conducted by the Resolution Foundation think tank shows that ‘minority ethnic’ families currently earn nearly £9000 a year less than their white British counterparts. This is supported further by the tuc’s Insecure Work and Ethnicity report that identified one in every 13 BAME workers were in insecure employment, compared to one in 20 for white workers. The same report also identifies that of the 3.1 million BAME workers in the UK, nearly a quarter were in insecure work or were likely to be underemployed. Additionally, the number of BAME workers in insecure jobs rose by 2% in five years, whilst the number of white workers remained the same. 

Wages and earnings aren’t the only issues here. Precarious work is often not a choice, but a result of systemic racism in which BAME workers find it harder to access stable employment. In addition, expecting digital platforms to deliver some utopian democracy ignores the reality of white supremacy. When your customer base is largely white affluent middle class, this plays into the race and class power dynamic, sometimes influencing who gets chosen for work. And as independent contractors, these workers are also at risk of abuse or attacks with very little protection. And in a society where the new norms are xenophobic rhetoric and hate crime, this leaves many unsupported workers vulnerable to discrimination, hurt, and shame. 

If you need any more evidence on the broader systemic failures around employment and work, the Race Disparity Audit commissioned by the government offers a sobering and heartbreaking reality check on the lived experience of the BAME population in the workplace. What is important to take away from this evidence is that marginalisation of communities is active, not passive. There are multiple systems at play that are responsible for race inequality; white supremacy, elitism, and patriarchy to name but a few. 

Decolonise economics 

How is this data shaped by the characteristics of neoliberal capitalism? For this we need to look to the origins of capitalism as an economic model and, as a result, how deep white supremacy is embedded in the functions of our society – even today. 

Many people argue that the modern economy has brought us substantial material benefits, better rights for workers, and flexibility in work practices. Whilst this may be the case, these benefits have, by design, been disproportionately distributed amongst a privileged few. For the global majority (non-white people/people of colour), capitalism is a system that is historically tied to colonialism and racism. Colonialism is a project that led to the demolition of sacred land and cultures, extraction of natural resources, sale of black bodies as property, and sent brown bodies to war for the British Empire. 

The colonial mindset continues to this day and is justified by the pursuit of economic growth that is centred around white superiority. We can connect capitalism with white supremacy, and come to understand racism as the tool by which white European colonisers wielded economic power over large parts of the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Well known critical race theorist F.L. Ansley helps us understand the colonial mindset here:

By ‘white supremacy’ I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily re-enacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.”

500 years of colonial rule and settler colonialism has created an economy so entrenched in systems of oppression that we must connect this to the reality of inequality today. In Britain, a colonial mindset dominates the way institutions control our media, legal system, education, financing and policing, and the way we respond to them. As a result, white supremacy is normalised as an invisible force that is subtle and powerful. The evidence for structural racism is clear, and the only justification that is viable is the lasting legacy of white supremacy. Future alternatives to neoliberalism need to be informed by confronting our economic history of colonialism, mercantilism, and imperialism. 

How to centre race in the new economy

Neoliberalism is a particularly vicious form of capitalism that has destroyed so much of the fabric of our society, including public services, decent housing, and stable employment. No one should be surprised that BAME workers are the first to be impacted by precarious work. If anything, it is evidence that neoliberal capitalism is functioning as intended: through the exploitation of people of colour. In responding to this, however, we cannot escape the rapid development of technology and the way this is reshaping our work practices. Wage equality and workers rights can only be realised if we centre the BAME community at the heart of our efforts to build alternatives, so that we can truly challenge the foundations of neoliberal capitalism. We can do this in many ways. 

Stronger movements

In the past century, people of colour in Britain have fought for equal rights alongside white-centred movements, be it through the Suffragettes or labour strikes. They’ve done this in the margins, achieving part but not all of the rights that have been afforded to their white British counterparts. By centreing the lived experience of BAME workers in all our actions, be it labour strikes, protests, or workplace organising, we can be sure to attend to those that are feeling the impact of the gig-economy now, not just the fear of it hitting us in the future. Investigate which sectors are predominantly BAME in identity, and understand their concerns, and do this without essentialising or tokenism of any one identity. Use your time to follow groups such as Hotel Workers Branch and Justice for Domestic Workers, and interrogate campaigns that are whitewashed or lack depth and integrity. 

Intersectional analysis

In our work, we need to recognise the overlapping – or intersecting – nature of discrimination that plays a role in our understanding of wage inequality. In this article I’ve concentrated on ‘people of colour’ as one group without doing the necessary work of breaking this down into gender, ability, class, sexuality, migration status and the many other social factors that influence how society influences the workplace. Uncovering this evidence will open our eyes to the reality of inequality, and a deeper understanding of the structure of the economy. Be mindful that using intersectionality as a tool to better understand different lived experiences does not absolve us of our privilege and the work we need to do on ourselves. 

Challenging narratives

An intersectional analysis also allows us to challenge ideas that are designed to divide us. An example of this is the widespread use of the term ‘white working-class’, which routinely excludes the reality of black, brown and Asian working class communities in Britain. Evidence consistently shows that a higher percentage of the BAME community are working class when compared to the white British population. Let’s also challenge the narrative of ‘Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic’ that comes from a Eurocentric view of our globalised world. Whilst I have embraced this terminology in this article, a vision for a new economy should use terms such as people of global majority, people from formerly colonised nations, or people of colour in order to free us from our colonial mindset. 

Relevant alternatives

The progressive ‘new economy’ scene in the UK is full of ideas for alternative practices to neoliberalism when it comes to work and wages. Consider ‘new economy’ projects that build co-operatives or use the gift economy. They are often designed for a lived experience that is so disconnected from those who need it, it renders them inaccessible and irrelevant to the broader goal of economic systems change. The irony here is that many of the alternatives are rooted in a non-European indigenous history, and have been appropriated by those who already have social power. When designing alternatives, take inspiration from some excellent organisations who are decolonising these ideas to make them work for black and brown communities. Explore why Black Lives Matter adopted Universal Basic Income as a central demand in their manifesto, and how one black community in Jackson, Mississippi is using technology and data to reinvent their local economy. 

So, ask yourself now “where is this work happening in the UK, and who knows about it?” We all want to commit to building a new economy that works for everyone. To do so we need to get our analysis clear, and recognise that capitalism will always be one step ahead of us unless we are willing to centre people of colour in the solutions we build.

If we do so, we will have built the foundations for alternatives that are powerful enough to uproot neoliberal capitalism for good. If we don’t then the ‘new economy’ will be little more than the successor to what we already have.

Gurpreet Bola is an organiser, trainer, researcher, and writer. She is committed to political and social systems change. Her economic analysis has supported activists to identify the root cause of social inequalities and oppression.

This is a print first feature published in STIR magazine.

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It’s time to reclaim the mantle of “Progress” for progressives. By falsely tethering the concept of progress to free market economics and centrist values, Steven Pinker has tried to appropriate a great idea for which he has no rightful claim.

Michel Bauwens: Historical change is complex and gives rise to conflicting interpretations, on the one hand, there are many doom-driven scenarios by environmentalists and those rightfully concerned about climate change; but a one-sided vision of negative developments can lead to paralysis and loss of hope; on the other side of this polarity, are people like Steve Pinker, who rightfully point to a dramatic slide in human violence (this seems well established), but in a context of a entirely positive story of capitalist and liberal development, which entirely ignores the shadowside of these extractive developments.

In the context of this debate, it is a very welcome fact to encounter the critical work of Jeremy Lent, who insists on the stories that Steve Pinker leaves out. We very strongly recommend reading his well documented rebutals and augmentations. My own conclusion is that capitalism, for a while tamed and regulated by the popular power of labour and other movements, did achieve a number of material improvements, at least for part of the world population, but at an increasing unsustainable material cost to the environment and the other beings we share the world with, while also bringing social tensions to a dangerous breaking point. The options are therefore not a simplistic continuation of the western development project, but either a significant drawdown of the human footprint, in the context of retaining the maximum of civilisational complexity, while extending basic health and other welfare services to every human being.

The work of Kate Raworth brings a very good summary of that conundrum, with her ‘doughnut economics’ bringing together material limits together with a clear vision of what still needs to be done to achieve a dignified life for every human being. At the P2P Foundation this summer, we will be working on mapping out environmental and social externalities, to create accounting and accountability for the production and maintenance of human life. What we need is a production system that internalizes both social and ecological externalities, positive and negative. Our economic system needs to become socially predistributive (not merely correcting inequalilties after the fact), and ecologically regenerative (not merely repairing the damage previously done). This article was originally published in Jeremy Lent’s blog and is reproduced here his explicit permission.

Jeremy Lent: In Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, published earlier this year, Steven Pinker argues that the human race has never had it so good as a result of values he attributes to the European Enlightenment of the 18^th century. He berates those who focus on what is wrong with the world’s current condition as pessimists who only help to incite regressive reactionaries. Instead, he glorifies the dominant neoliberal, technocratic approach to solving the world’s problems as the only one that has worked in the past and will continue to lead humanity on its current triumphant path.

His book has incited strong reactions, both positive and negative. On one hand, Bill Gates has, for example, effervesced that “It’s my new favorite book of all time.” On the other hand, Pinker has been fiercely excoriated by a wide range of leading thinkers for writing a simplistic, incoherent paean to the dominant world order. John Gray, in the New Statesman, calls it “embarrassing” and “feeble”; David Bell, writing in The Nation, sees it as “a dogmatic book that offers an oversimplified, excessively optimistic vision of human history”; and George Monbiot, in The Guardian, laments the “poor scholarship” and “motivated reasoning” that “insults the Enlightenment principles he claims to defend.” (Full disclosure: Monbiot recommends my book, The Patterning Instinct, instead.)

In light of all this, you might ask, what is left to add? Having read his book carefully, I believe it’s crucially important to take Pinker to task for some dangerously erroneous arguments he makes. Pinker is, after all, an intellectual darling of the most powerful echelons of global society. He spoke to the world’s elite this year at the World’s Economic Forum in Davos on the perils of what he calls “political correctness,” and has been named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” Since his work offers an intellectual rationale for many in the elite to continue practices that imperil humanity, it needs to be met with a detailed and rigorous response.

Besides, I agree with much of what Pinker has to say. His book is stocked with seventy-five charts and graphs that provide incontrovertible evidence for centuries of progress on many fronts that should matter to all of us: an inexorable decline in violence of all sorts along with equally impressive increases in health, longevity, education, and human rights. It’s precisely because of the validity of much of Pinker’s narrative that the flaws in his argument are so dangerous. They’re concealed under such a smooth layer of data and eloquence that they need to be carefully unraveled. That’s why my response to Pinker is to meet him on his own turf: in each section, like him, I rest my case on hard data exemplified in a graph.

This discussion is particularly needed because progress is, in my view, one of the most important concepts of our time. I see myself, in common parlance, as a progressive. Progress is what I, and others I’m close to, care about passionately. Rather than ceding this idea to the coterie of neoliberal technocrats who constitute Pinker’s primary audience, I believe we should hold it in our steady gaze, celebrate it where it exists, understand its true causes, and most importantly, ensure that it continues in a form that future generations on this earth can enjoy. I hope this piece helps to do just that.

Graph 1: Overshoot

In November 2017, around the time when Pinker was likely putting the final touches on his manuscript, over fifteen thousand scientists from 184 countries issued a dire warning to humanity. Because of our overconsumption of the world’s resources, they declared, we are facing “widespread misery and catastrophic biodiversity loss.” They warned that time is running out: “Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory.”

Figure 1: Three graphs from World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice

They included nine sobering charts and a carefully worded, extensively researched analysis showing that, on a multitude of fronts, the human impact on the earth’s biological systems is increasing at an unsustainable rate. Three of those alarming graphs are shown here: the rise in CO₂emissions; the decline in available freshwater; and the increase in the number of ocean dead zones from artificial fertilizer runoff.

This was not the first such notice. Twenty-five years earlier, in 1992, 1,700 scientists (including the majority of living Nobel laureates) sent a similarly worded warning to governmental leaders around the world, calling for a recognition of the earth’s fragility and a new ethic arising from the realization that “we all have but one lifeboat.” The current graphs starkly demonstrate how little the world has paid attention to this warning since 1992.

Taken together, these graphs illustrate ecological overshoot: the fact that, in the pursuit of material progress, our civilization is consuming the earth’s resources faster than they can be replenished. Overshoot is particularly dangerous because of its relatively slow feedback loops: if your checking account balance approaches zero, you know that if you keep writing checks they will bounce. In overshoot, however, it’s as though our civilization keeps taking out bigger and bigger overdrafts to replenish the account, and then we pretend these funds are income and celebrate our continuing “progress.” In the end, of course, the money runs dry and it’s game over.

Pinker claims to respect science, yet he blithely ignores fifteen thousand scientists’ desperate warning to humanity. Instead, he uses the blatant rhetorical technique of ridicule to paint those concerned about overshoot as part of a “quasi-religious ideology… laced with misanthropy, including an indifference to starvation, an indulgence in ghoulish fantasies of a depopulated planet, and Nazi-like comparisons of human beings to vermin, pathogens, and cancer.” He then uses a couple of the most extreme examples he can find to create a straw-man to buttress his caricature. There are issues worthy of debate on the topic of civilization and sustainability, but to approach a subject of such seriousness with emotion-laden rhetoric is morally inexcusable and striking evidence of Monbiot’s claim that Pinker “insults the Enlightenment principles he claims to defend.”

When Pinker does get serious on the topic, he promotes Ecomodernism as the solution: a neoliberal, technocratic belief that a combination of market-based solutions and technological fixes will magically resolve all ecological problems. This approach fails, however, to take into account the structural drivers of overshoot: a growth-based global economy reliant on ever-increasing monetization of natural resources and human activity. Without changing this structure, overshoot is inevitable. Transnational corporations, which currently constitute sixty-nine of the world’s hundred largest economies, are driven only by increasing short-term financial value for their shareholders, regardless of the long-term impact on humanity. As freshwater resources decline, for example, their incentive is to buy up what remains and sell it in plastic throwaway bottles or process it into sugary drinks, propelling billions in developing countries toward obesity through sophisticated marketing. In fact, until an imminent collapse of civilization itself, increasing ecological catastrophes are likely to enhance the GDP of developed countries even while those in less developed regions suffer dire consequences.

Graphs 2 and 3: Progress for Whom?

Which brings us to another fundamental issue in Pinker’s narrative of progress: who actually gets to enjoy it? Much of his book is devoted to graphs showing worldwide progress in quality in life for humanity as a whole. However, some of his omissions and misstatements on this topic are very telling.

At one point, Pinker explains that, “Despite the word’s root, humanism doesn’t exclude the flourishing of animals, but this book focuses on the welfare of humankind.” That’s convenient, because any non-human animal might not agree that the past sixty years has been a period of flourishing. In fact, while the world’s GDP has increased 22-fold since 1970, there has been a vast die-off of the creatures with whom we share the earth. As shown in Figure 2, human progress in material consumption has come at the cost of a 58% decline in vertebrates, including a shocking 81% reduction of animal populations in freshwater systems. For every five birds or fish that inhabited a river or lake in 1970, there is now just one.

Figure 2: Reduction in abundance in global species since 1970. Source: WWF Living Plant Report, 2016

But we don’t need to look outside the human race for Pinker’s selective view of progress. He is pleased to tell us that “racist violence against African Americans… plummeted in the 20^th century, and has fallen further since.” What he declines to report is the drastic increase in incarceration rates for African Americans during that same period (Figure 3). An African American man is now six times more likely to be arrested than a white man, resulting in the dismal statistic that one in every three African American men can currently expect to be imprisoned in their lifetime. The grim takeaway from this is that racist violence against African Americans has not declined at all, as Pinker suggests. Instead, it has become institutionalized into U.S. national policy in what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

Figure 3: Historical incarceration rates of African-Americans. Source: The Washington Post.

Graph 4: A rising tide lifts all boats?

This brings us to one of the crucial errors in Pinker’s overall analysis. By failing to analyze his top-level numbers with discernment, he unquestioningly propagates one of the great neoliberal myths of the past several decades: that “a rising tide lifts all the boats”—a phrase he unashamedly appropriates for himself as he extols the benefits of inequality. This was the argument used by the original instigators of neoliberal laissez-faire economics, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, to cut taxes, privatize industries, and slash public services with the goal of increasing economic growth.

Pinker makes two key points here. First, he argues that “income inequality is not a fundamental component of well-being,” pointing to recent research that people are comfortable with differential rewards for others depending on their effort and skill. However, as Pinker himself acknowledges, humans do have a powerful predisposition toward fairness. They want to feel that, if they work diligently, they can be as successful as someone else based on what they do, not on what family they’re born into or what their skin color happens to be. More equal societies are also healthier, which is a condition conspicuously missing from the current economic model, where the divide between rich and poor has become so gaping that the six wealthiest men in the world (including Pinker’s good friend, Bill Gates) now own as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the world’s population.

Pinker’s fallback might, then, be his second point: the rising tide argument, which he extends to the global economy. Here, he cheerfully recounts the story of how Branko Milanović, a leading ex-World Bank economist, analyzed income gains by percentile across the world over the twenty-year period 1988–2008, and discovered something that became widely known as the “Elephant Graph,” because its shape resembled the profile of an elephant with a raised trunk. Contrary to popular belief about rising global inequality, it seemed to show that, while the top 1% did in fact gain more than their fair share of income, lower percentiles of the global population had done just as well. It seemed to be only the middle classes in wealthy countries that had missed out.

This graph, however, is virtually meaningless because it calculates growth rates as a percent of widely divergent income levels. Compare a Silicon Valley executive earning $200,000/year with one of the three billion people currently living on $2.50 per day or less. If the executive gets a 10% pay hike, she can use the $20,000 to buy a new compact car for her teenage daughter. Meanwhile, that same 10% increase would add, at most, a measly 25 cents per day to each of those three billion. In Graph 4, Oxfam economist Mujeed Jamaldeen shows the original “Elephant Graph” (blue line) contrasted with changes in absolute income levels (green line). The difference is stark.

Figure 4: “Elephant Graph” versus absolute income growth levels. Source: “From Poverty to Power,” Muheed Jamaldeen.

The “Elephant Graph” elegantly conceals the fact that the wealthiest 1% experienced nearly 65 times the absolute income growth as the poorest half of the world’s population. Inequality isn’t, in fact, decreasing at all, but going extremely rapidly the other way. Jamaldeen has calculated that, at the current rate, it would take over 250 years for the income of the poorest 10% to merely reach the global average income of $11/day. By that time, at the current rate of consumption by wealthy nations, it’s safe to say there would be nothing left for them to spend their lucrative earnings on. In fact, the “rising tide” for some barely equates to a drop in the bucket for billions of others.

Graph 5: Measuring Genuine Progress

One of the cornerstones of Pinker’s book is the explosive rise in income and wealth that the world has experienced in the past couple of centuries. Referring to the work of economist Angus Deaton, he calls it the “Great Escape” from the historic burdens of human suffering, and shows a chart (Figure 5, left) depicting the rise in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, which seems to say it all. How could anyone in their right mind refute that evidence of progress?

Figure 5: GDP per capita compared with GPI. Source: Kubiszewski et al. “Beyond GDP: Measuring and achieving global genuine progress.” Ecological Economics, 2013.

There is no doubt that the world has experienced a transformation in material wellbeing in the past two hundred years, and Pinker documents this in detail, from the increased availability of clothing, food, and transportation, to the seemingly mundane yet enormously important decrease in the cost of artificial light. However, there is a point where the rise in economic activity begins to decouple from wellbeing. In fact, GDP merely measures the rate at which a society is transforming nature and human activities into the monetary economy, regardless of the ensuing quality of life. Anything that causes economic activity of any kind, whether good or bad, adds to GDP. An oil spill, for example, increases GDP because of the cost of cleaning it up: the bigger the spill, the better it is for GDP.

This divergence is played out, tragically, across the world every day, and is cruelly hidden in global statistics of rising GDP when powerful corporate and political interests destroy the lives of the vulnerable in the name of economic “progress.” In just one of countless examples, a recent report in The Guardian describes how indigenous people living on the Xingu River in the Amazon rainforest were forced off their land to make way for the Belo Monte hydroelectric complex in Altamira, Brazil. One of them, Raimundo Brago Gomes, tells how “I didn’t need money to live happy. My whole house was nature… I had my patch of land where I planted a bit of everything, all sorts of fruit trees. I’d catch my fish, make manioc flour… I raised my three daughters, proud of what I was. I was rich.” Now, he and his family live among drug dealers behind barred windows in Brazil’s most violent city, receiving a state pension which, after covering rent and electricity, leaves him about 50 cents a day to feed himself, his wife, daughter, and grandson. Meanwhile, as a result of his family’s forced entry into the monetary economy, Brazil’s GDP has risen.

Pinker is aware of the crudeness of GDP as a measure, but uses it repeatedly throughout his book because, he claims, “it correlates with every indicator of human flourishing.” This is not, however, what has been discovered when economists have adjusted GDP to incorporate other major factors that affect human flourishing. One prominent alternative measure, the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), reduces GDP for negative environmental factors such as the cost of pollution, loss of primary forest and soil quality, and social factors such as the cost of crime and commuting. It increases the measure for positive factors missing from GDP such as housework, volunteer work, and higher education. Sixty years of historical GPI for many countries around the world have been measured, and the results resoundingly refute Pinker’s claim of GDP’s correlation with wellbeing. In fact, as shown by the purple line in Figure 5 (right), it turns out that the world’s Genuine Progress peaked in 1978 and has been steadily falling ever since.

Graph 6: What Has Improved Global Health?

One of Pinker’s most important themes is the undisputed improvement in overall health and longevity that the world has enjoyed in the past century. It’s a powerful and heart-warming story. Life expectancy around the world has more than doubled in the past century. Infant mortality everywhere is a tiny fraction of what it once was. Improvements in medical knowledge and hygiene have saved literally billions of lives. Pinker appropriately quotes economist Steven Radelet that these improvements “rank among the greatest achievements in human history.”

So, what has been the underlying cause of this great achievement? Pinker melds together what he sees as the twin engines of progress: GDP growth and increase in knowledge. Economic growth, for him, is a direct result of global capitalism. “Though intellectuals are apt to do a spit take when they read a defense of capitalism,” he declares with his usual exaggerated rhetoric, “its economic benefits are so obvious that they don’t need to be shown with numbers.” He refers to a figure called the Preston curve, from a paper by Samuel Preston published in 1975 showing a correlation between GDP and life expectancy that become foundational to the field of developmental economics. “Most obviously,” Pinker declares, “GDP per capita correlates with longevity, health, and nutrition.” While he pays lip service to the scientific principle that “correlation is not causation,” he then clearly asserts causation, claiming that “economic development does seem to be a major mover of human welfare.” He closes his chapter with a joke about a university dean offered by a genie the choice between money, fame, or wisdom. The dean chooses wisdom but then regrets it, muttering “I should have taken the money.”

Pinker would have done better to have pondered more deeply on the relation between correlation and causation in this profoundly important topic. In fact, a recent paper by Wolfgang Lutz and Endale Kebede entitled “Education and Health: Redrawing the Preston Curve” does just that. The original Preston curve came with an anomaly: the relationship between GDP and life expectancy doesn’t stay constant. Instead, each period it’s measured, it shifts higher, showing greater life expectancy for any given GDP (Figure 6, left). Preston—and his followers, including Pinker—explained this away by suggesting that advances in medicine and healthcare must have improved things across the board.

Figure 6: GDP vs. Life expectancy compared with Education vs. Life expectancy. Source: W. Lutz and E. Kebede. “Education and Health: Redrawing the Preston Curve.” Population and Development Review, 2018

Lutz and Kebede, however, used sophisticated multi-level regression models to analyze how closely education correlated with life expectancy compared with GDP. They found that a country’s average level of educational attainment explained rising life expectancy much better than GDP, and eliminated the anomaly in Preston’s Curve (Figure 6, right). The correlation with GDP was spurious. In fact, their model suggests that both GDP and health are ultimately driven by the amount of schooling children receive. This finding has enormous implications for development priorities in national and global policy. For decades, the neoliberal mantra, based on Preston’s Curve, has dominated mainstream thinking—raise a country’s GDP and health benefits will follow. Lutz and Kebede show that a more effective policy would be to invest in schooling for children, with all the ensuing benefits in quality of life that will bring.

Pinker’s joke has come full circle. In reality, for the past few decades, the dean chose the money. Now, he can look at the data and mutter: “I should have taken the wisdom.”

Graph 7: False Equivalencies, False Dichotomies

As we can increasingly see, many of Pinker’s missteps arise from the fact that he conflates two different dynamics of the past few centuries: improvements in many aspects of the human experience, and the rise of neoliberal, laissez-faire capitalism. Whether this is because of faulty reasoning on his part, or a conscious strategy to obfuscate, the result is the same. Most readers will walk away from his book with the indelible impression that free market capitalism is an underlying driver of human progress.

Pinker himself states the importance of avoiding this kind of conflation. “Progress,” he declares, “consists not in accepting every change as part of an indivisible package… Progress consists of unbundling the features of a social process as much as we can to maximize the human benefits while minimizing the harms.” If only he took his own admonition more seriously!

Instead, he laces his book with an unending stream of false equivalencies and false dichotomies that lead a reader inexorably to the conclusion that progress and capitalism are part of the same package. One of his favorite tropes is to create a false equivalency between right-wing extremism and the progressive movement on the left. He tells us that the regressive factions that undergirded Donald Trump’s presidency were “abetted by a narrative shared by many of their fiercest opponents, in which the institutions of modernity have failed and every aspect of life is in deepening crisis—the two sides in macabre agreement that wrecking those institutions will make the world a better place.” He even goes so far as to implicate Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election debacle: “The left and right ends of the political spectrum,” he opines, “incensed by economic inequality for their different reasons, curled around to meet each other, and their shared cynicism about the modern economy helped elect the most radical American president in recent times.”

Implicit in Pinker’s political model is the belief that progress can only arise from the brand of centrist politics espoused by many in the mainstream Democratic Party. He perpetuates a false dichotomy of “right versus left” based on a twentieth-century version of politics that has been irrelevant for more than a generation. “The left,” he writes, “has missed the boat in its contempt for the market and its romance with Marxism.” He contrasts “industrial capitalism,” on the one hand, which has rescued humanity from universal poverty, with communism, which has “brought the world terror-famines, purges, gulags, genocides, Chernobyl, megadeath revolutionary wars, and North Korea–style poverty before collapsing everywhere else of its own internal contradictions.”

By painting this black and white, Manichean landscape of capitalist good versus communist evil, Pinker obliterates from view the complex, sophisticated models of a hopeful future that have been diligently constructed over decades by a wide range of progressive thinkers. These fresh perspectives eschew the Pinker-style false dichotomy of traditional left versus right. Instead, they explore the possibilities of replacing a destructive global economic system with one that offers potential for greater fairness, sustainability, and human flourishing. In short, a model for continued progress for the twenty-first century.

While the thought leaders of the progressive movement are too numerous to mention here, an illustration of this kind of thinking is seen in Graph 7. It shows an integrated model of the economy, aptly called “Doughnut Economics,” that has been developed by pioneering economist Kate Raworth. The inner ring, called Social Foundation, represents the minimum level of life’s essentials, such as food, water, and housing, required for the possibility of a healthy and wholesome life. The outer ring, called Ecological Ceiling, represents the boundaries of Earth’s life-giving systems, such as a stable climate and healthy oceans, within which we must remain to achieve sustained wellbeing for this and future generations. The red areas within the ring show the current shortfall in the availability of bare necessities to the world’s population; the red zones outside the ring illustrate the extent to which we have already overshot the safe boundaries in several essential earth systems. Humanity’s goal, within this model, is to develop policies that bring us within the safe and just space of the “doughnut” between the two rings.

Figure 7: Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economic Model. Source: Kate Raworth; Christian Guthier/The Lancet Planetary Health

Raworth, along with many others who care passionately about humanity’s future progress, focus their efforts, not on the kind of zero-sum, false dichotomies propagated by Pinker, but on developing fresh approaches to building a future that works for all on a sustainable and flourishing earth.

Graph 8: Progress Is Caused By… Progressives!

This brings us to the final graph, which is actually one of Pinker’s own. It shows the decline in recent years of web searches for sexist, racist, and homophobic jokes. Along with other statistics, he uses this as evidence in his argument that, contrary to what we read in the daily headlines, retrograde prejudices based on gender, race, and sexual orientation are actually on the decline. He attributes this in large part to “the benign taboos on racism, sexism, and homophobia that have become second nature to the mainstream.”

Figure 8: Racist, sexist, and homophobic Web searches, US, 2004–2017. Source: Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 2018.

How, we might ask, did this happen? As Pinker himself expresses, we can’t assume that this kind of moral progress just happened on its own. “If you see that a pile of laundry has gone down,” he avers, “it does not mean the clothes washed themselves; it means someone washed the clothes. If a type of violence has gone down, then some change in the social, cultural, or material milieu has caused it to go down… That makes it important to find out what the causes are, so we can try to intensify them and apply them more widely.”

Looking back into history, Pinker recognizes that changes in moral norms came about because progressive minds broke out of their society’s normative frames and applied new ethics based on a higher level of morality, dragging the mainstream reluctantly in their wake, until the next generation grew up adopting a new moral baseline. “Global shaming campaigns,” he explains, “even when they start out as purely aspirational, have in the past led to dramatic reductions in slavery, dueling, whaling, foot-binding, piracy, privateering, chemical warfare, apartheid, and atmospheric nuclear testing.”

It is hard to comprehend how the same person who wrote these words can then turn around and hurl invectives against what he decries as “political correctness police, and social justice warriors” caught up in “identity politics,” not to mention his loathing for an environmental movement that “subordinates human interests to a transcendent entity, the ecosystem.” Pinker seems to view all ethical development from prehistory to the present day as “progress,” but any pressure to shift society further along its moral arc as anathema.

This is the great irony of Pinker’s book. In writing a paean to historical progress, he then takes a staunchly conservative stance to those who want to continue it. It’s as though he sees himself at the mountain’s peak, holding up a placard saying “All progress stops here, unless it’s on my terms.”

In reality, many of the great steps made in securing the moral progress Pinker applauds came from brave individuals who had to resist the opprobrium of the Steven Pinkers of their time while they devoted their lives to reducing the suffering of others. When Thomas Paine affirmed the “Rights of Man” back in 1792, he was tried and convicted in absentia by the British for seditious libel. It would be another 150 years before his visionary idea was universally recognized in the United Nations. Emily Pankhurst was arrested seven times in her struggle to obtain women’s suffrage and was constantly berated by “moderates” of the time for her radical approach in striving for something that has now become the unquestioned norm. When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, with the first public exposé of the indiscriminate use of pesticides, her solitary stance was denounced as hysterical and unscientific. Just eight years later, twenty million Americans marched to protect the environment in the first Earth Day.

These great strides in moral progress continue to this day. It’s hard to see them in the swirl of daily events, but they’re all around us: in the legalization of same sex marriage, in the spread of the Black Lives Matter movement, and most recently in the way the #MeToo movement is beginning to shift norms in the workplace. Not surprisingly, the current steps in social progress are vehemently opposed by Steven Pinker, who has approvingly retweeted articles attacking both Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, and who rails at the World Economic Forum against what he terms “political correctness.”

It’s time to reclaim the mantle of “Progress” for progressives. Progress in the quality of life, for humans and nonhumans alike, is something that anyone with a heart should celebrate. It did not come about through capitalism, and in many cases, it has been achieved despite the “free market” that Pinker espouses. Personally, I’m proud to be a progressive, and along with many others, to devote my energy to achieve progress for this and future generations. And if and when we do so, it won’t be thanks to Steven Pinker and his specious arguments.

Photo by alex mertzanis

The post Steven Pinker’s Ideas About Progress Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show Why. appeared first on P2P Foundation.

First of all it’s true, as many Leftist critics say, that Trump’s hardcore fascist voters simply don’t care if liberal commentators, mainstream journalists or fact-check websites prove his statements to be lie; they just laugh. And they just laugh at repeated statements that “this is not normal,” from liberals who judge the behavior of Trump and his henchmen from traditional civics textbook standards of legitimate behavior.

But that’s not the point. We’re not talking about converting hardcore fascists or racists; they may be his base, but they were probably well under half of total Trump voters. The Trump vote included a sizeable number of people who voted for him only reluctantly, and are already experiencing buyer’s remorse. Some of them voted for a black man in 2012, but just couldn’t stomach Clinton. Bad as she is, I really have to wonder about someone who considered Clinton less tolerable than Trump; but be that as it may they’re not fanatics and more of them regret their decision every day. And then there are the people who voted for Obama, and normally would have voted for a Democrat this year, but just stayed home because… well, you know. All these groups are reachable by exposing Trump’s lies, showing them how he’s materially hurting him, and pointing out his extreme deviations from previous standards of normalcy.

I’m not saying all these things are enough by themselves. They must be combined with some demonstration — even a small one — that resistance exists, and that it’s effective. We got that to some extent with the post-election protests, and to a larger extent with concrete actions by advocacy groups and state and local officials demonstrating their intent to resist authoritarian federal encroachments. But the demonstrations on Inauguration Day, and the Womens’ Marches around the world — in Washington alone twice the depressed turnout at Trump’s swearing-in — were a huge show of willingness to resist.

John Robb, a national security theorist who specializes in networked resistance movements and writes at Global Guerrillas, sees it as the potential spark for what he calls an “open source insurgency” against Trump (“The Open Source Protest to Oust Trump,” January 21). He has used that term in the past to refer to Al Qaeda Iraq, the Tahrir Square movement, M15 and Syntagma, Occupy, and the insurgencies for Sanders and Trump last year.

The Women’s March provided what Robb calls a “plausible promise,” which is essential for open source insurgencies. In practical terms, it’s more or less what I described as a demonstration that resistance exists and it’s effective. That starts a feedback of further protests, with strengthen the plausible promise and generate still more protests. These have brought down autocratic regimes like the Shah’s, Ceaucescu’s and Mubarak’s.

Robb dismisses criticism that all the attendees at the Women’s March, or all the potential components of an anti-Trump insurgency, are not on the same page about objectives or tactics. Like liberals and members of the verticalist Left who dismissed Occupy for not having “representatives and a platform,” they miss the point. The only thing they need to agree on is the demand for Trump to go, and be replaced by someone or something that is not as bigoted or pro-plutocrat as he is.

And they don’t need to agree on tactics or operate from a single playbook. Far better is a stigmergic, permissionless movement of movements, with a full-court press by all sub-currents, tendencies and affinity groups engaged in whatever they feel most comfortable with and they are best at. The most agreement that’s necessary is to cut each other some slack in the way of tolerating diversity of tactics, or at least putting more effort into fighting Trump than into criticizing each other’s methods.

To my fellow occupants of the left end of the anti-Trump spectrum, I would add that, like it or not, we won’t win without the help of liberals and center-left types — including those who voted for Clinton, and even those who continue to support her. And like it or not — pace Robb — short of impeachment Trump is less likely to be removed by insurrection or replaced by a soviet of workers’ deputies, than by a Democratic candidate in 2020. I say, without any apologies, that this will help our cause. I argued earlier, when I thought Clinton was likely to win, that — awful, authoritarian neoliberal war hawk though she is — hers would likely be a caretaker administration in which both the country and the Democratic Party would shift further leftward. And more importantly, it would be a more conducive environment for social, economic and technological shifts outside the state towards economic decentralism, self-managed and networked institutions, and commons-based peer production, without fear of large-scale state repression. I think these shifts will continue under four years of Trump; but they’ll continue that must faster under even the most shamelessly opportunistic neoliberal Democrat (think Cory Booker), as surely as they would have under a Clinton administration. And given the way Berniecrats have already started taking over party machinery in states where he won the primaries, and the replacement of a four-year contingent of Boomers by one of Millennials, there’s a pretty good chance the 2020 Democratic nominee will be significantly better than Clinton or Booker.

Either way, as an anarchist, I don’t see electoral politics as the main avenue — or even a significant one — for positive action to build the kind of society we want. But — again — I make no apologies for offering aid to those fighting to replace the current regime with one more conducive to our process of building counter-institutions.

In the meantime, mass demonstrations aren’t the only kind of resistance we’ve got. Divisions within the state threaten to severely weaken Trump. Even though they’re not exactly our allies, large blocks within the ruling machinery — including not only officials at the state and local level, but disgruntled members of the permanent bureaucracy and “Deep State” at the federal — will likely be quietly resisting and monkey-wrenching Trump in ways we can scarcely imagine. These include sabotage like bureaucratic delay and working to rule, as well as leaks from all levels of the bureaucracy. Malcolm Gladwell noted in a recent interview that it will be the easiest time ever for journalists to get dirt from very high-ranking “anonymous sources.” You can bet that whatever kompromat Putin has on Trump, it pales in comparison to what’s lying around in the basements at Ft. Meade and Langley. And remember — Edward Snowden wasn’t a high-ranking official. He was just some schmoe contract worker who know how to download stuff onto a thumb drive; the NSA has no way of knowing how many other people have done, or continue to do, the same thing.

We saw some limited displays of what looked to be sabotage from the national security bureaucracy, via leaks and so forth, against the Bush administration after the scandals surrounding Richard Clarke and Valerie Plame. Some speculated it would evolve into a full-blown war by the Deep State to unseat Bush in the 2004 election. It didn’t happen — that time.

Put together mass resistance to encroachments by the authoritarian state, and sabotage by disgrutled state functionaries at every level of government, and you get what Frances Fox Piven calls for: “Throw Sand in The Gears of Everything” (The Nation, Jan. 18). And such throwing of sand in the gears, she argues, deepens elite cleavages at the very top.

Even ordinary householders can take in and shield immigrants. And all of us can render registries useless by insisting on registering ourselves as Muslims or Mexicans or Moldovians. A sanctuary movement gives lots of people a role that matters. Most important, in our complex federal system, where the policies of the national government depend on cooperation by state and local authorities, these local movements have the potential to block initiatives by the incoming Trump regime.

If movements are to become an important force in the politics of the Trump era, they will have to be movements of a somewhat different kind from the labor, civil-rights, and LGBTQ activism of the recent past that we usually celebrate. Those were movements focused on progress, on winning measures that would remedy long-standing injustices, and they were movements that some elites also endorsed. Now the protests will have to aim not at winning, but at halting or foiling initiatives that threaten harm—either by redistributing wealth to the very top (the Trump tax and energy plans), or by eliminating existing political rights (the cancellation of DACA, the Obama executive order that protected undocumented-immigrant children, known as Dreamers), or by jeopardizing established protections and benefits (the looming prospect of privatizing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, or the threat to turn funding for public education into a system of vouchers for charter schools). So how do resistance movements win—if they win—in the face of an unrelentingly hostile regime? The answer, I think, is that by blocking or sabotaging the policy initiatives of the regime, resistance movements can create or deepen elite and electoral cleavages.

Even the most conventional and civics texty form of such cleavages — this is me talking, not Piven — like peeling off the three most moderate Republicans to deny Trump a Senate majority, is more likely when the public is perceived to be angry and unruly, and Trump to have feet of clay.

And our own most important order of business — actually building the kind of society we want, right now — is also an important component of the resistance. Creating ways to support ourselves and each other outside the state — small-scale open-source manufacturing in neighborhood cooperative workshops with tools a handful of blue collar salaries could pay for, permaculture community gardens on vacant lots and rooftops, edible landscaping on yards in the cul de sacs, community land trusts, squats in abandoned buildings, community policing by armed Black Panther patrols and Copwatch, community technology initiatives in cheap, open source off-grid power and waste recycling, barter currencies, free culture and open source software, multiple-household cohousing institutions, micro-villages, friendly societies and other associations for pooling costs and risks and organizing mutual aid, new radical labor unions on the pattern of OURWalmart and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, revived guilds and cooperative temp agencies for freelancers and precarious workers — every one of these things is not only a building block of the future post-capitalist society, but strengthens us against Trump and his ilk right now. And every one of these things shows people that, while Trump’s promises of help only lead to betrayal, our own ability to create a better world for ourselves working together is very real. And that is a plausible promise indeed.

Many of us are afraid. We’d be fools not to. But they should be more afraid.

Lead image from the Women’s March on Norway by Lynn D. Rosentrater.

The post An “Open Source Insurgency” Against Trump? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I write you because things have indeed fallen apart. While this unspeakable insurgency of despair might goad us into rushing into the next ‘organizational moment’ – the itch to hit them back or do something – I want to invite us to slow down and pay attention to the stark grief that haunts us now. She stares us in the face, this repulsive visitor. If we must survive, we must return her gaze and let her do her important work with us.

I am a Nigerian living in India. But like most people on the planet that tuned in to the surrealism of the 2016 American presidential campaigns, I woke up to the shocking news that Donald Trump was not only beating Hillary Clinton on election day, but that there was a frightening possibility he could win. And then that distant possibility, once laughably out of the question, became a gut-wrenching reality-to-come. Hillary’s ‘blue wall’ fell to the man who promised to build more; the media people stuttered as their once pristine cast of glossy pundits groped for words; the Mexican peso fell. And in one fell swoop, it felt like America, the so-called home of the brave was exactly that: a place dyed in fear, where braveness would now be required to keep on living.

Ever since Donald Trump became the 45^th president of the United States, the internet has been flooded with articles attempting to make sense of this story-bursting, crystal-ball-shattering moment. Politico published a piece with a title that must have resonated with many people around the world: “How did everyone get it so wrong?” The London-based Independent insisted that “Donald Trump would have lost US election if Bernie Sanders had been the candidate”, while Thomas Frank opined on the pages of The Guardian that “Donald Trump is moving to the White House, and liberals put him there”. Across the fractured landscape of YouTubia, self-professed Trumpists – also surprised by their fortune – laughed at liberals, mocking the ‘feminazis’ that thought Hillary Clinton – an admittedly troubled candidate who didn’t seem to have a message beyond insisting on her entitlement – would simply waltz into the White House.

I will not attempt to pry open the cadaver of this moment – it is probably the case that no post-mortem analysis is good enough to assuage our feelings of shock. What happened is not reducible to a single causative factor or a decidable ‘active ingredient’. The world isn’t that simple. I will however state, in the spirit of full disclosure – the kind of radical honesty we probably need at this time – that I secretly wanted this to happen: I was so invested in the idea of a Sanders presidency (and so mortified by what was obvious to me as an establishmentarian attempt to stifle his voice) that I became possessed by a schadenfreude I couldn’t easily exorcise. I understood the dangers of a potential Trump presidency, but decided even that was better off to the inertia of the neoliberal status quo as embodied by a Hillary Clinton regime. That argument is not easily maintained in the face of the orange predicament we now find ourselves in.

In an all-too-real case of “be careful what you wish for”, I find not relief but a painful sympathy with many who had hoped that the morning of 9^th would somehow usher in a more tolerant America. A more beautiful country. A country that cares about its many colours and contours. Now because of Trump and the energies he has activated, minorities are probably less safe. At a time of unprecedented racial tensions and phallic exhibitions of gunmanship, some folks are already dreading their next brief visit to the shopping mall, knowing that the streets are now being painted red with hate, white with racial acrimony and blind nativism, and blue with the authoritarian aloofness of a candidate who promised ‘law and order’. The new America.

It is to these vulnerable ones I write. Those of you that care about diversity, about the environment, about the beauty of queer sexual orientations, about indigenous lands and their right to thrive, and about policing practices that have led to the deaths of many black men and women.

Without pre-empting Donald Trump or falling into the trap of disillusioned punditry – and yet with a keen awareness of the likely consequences of his presidency – I ask: how do we respond to this? What do we do? How do we recover? What opportunities are presenting themselves to us to work for (with) a caring world? At the time of writing this letter, there is news of revolt on the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and other American cities. People are protesting the rise of Trump. People are angry. Around this same time, famed documentarian Michael Moore has suggested concerned Americans should ‘fire the punditry’ and ‘take over the Democratic party’. It is impossible to answer the question of what a ‘right’ response is, or to speak as if one is situated outside the swirl and flow of things. I do however want to invite you to try doing something less spectacular…something small, for it is my opinion that with Trump, the seeds of a ‘new’ politics may yet be planted.

When I was growing up in Christian Nigeria, I was taught to think of my life only in terms of its ‘greatness quotient’. I was conditioned early to yearn for prominence. Fame. Fortune. Legacy. Success. ‘Awakening the Giant Within’. Getting to the top. Lasting forever. Those were resonant memes in my developmental years. The figures of Mandela, Bill Gates, Jack Welch, and Jesus were placed before me as aspirational objects. If I did not do all I can to increase my ‘greatness quotient’, my life did not really matter.

I suspect this story is not uniquely mine to tell. We live in a world that places priority in the ‘top’ and discountenances the ‘bottom’. The condition for living a life of meaning and purpose was moral probity: the stunning city of bigness only admitted those who walked the straight and narrow way, I was told.

Well, if all that held true once, November 8 was a spectacular repudiation. Donald Trump, ill-prepared, a self-decorated humble person, and one who had said awful things about women, attained the highest office in America – his face beamed on to the Empire State Building in New York amidst the pomp and pageantry that defined his life. The Joker won…and nothing adds up anymore. Punditry is broken. Polls are broken. The sure-banker firepower of celebrity is broken. Virtue is broken.

Trump strolled to the grand stage up in the front and wrecked it, but in so doing he inadvertently ‘gave’ us permission to inhabit the aisles – to rearrange the entire room. By becoming president, Trump disturbs the idea that the top is worth reaching – not because he is so vile that his new position as president denigrates the office, but because his unprecedented campaign and quest for power shakes us loose to recognize that where we stand is a thick place, sewn through and through with voices and potential and power.

The stunning revelation of these times of upheaval is that ‘winning’ is defunct, and new relational modes are desperately needed: the red tape, the raised chair, the grand stage, the green room, and the white house are not the interesting, glorified objects they once were. The emperor has lost his clothes. This whole idea that greatness is some end goal to be achieved by the morally pure, the experienced, and the hardworking, has itself been reworked. And we are left with an awkward coming to terms with the fact that life isn’t a highway but an ecology of small things and ordinary becomings.

The way forward is thus awkward – or rather, there is no clear algorithm on what to do now except perhaps, among other things, to pay close attention to these twists and turns, these rabbit holes and tricky terrains. To take a critical look at the material details of our lives outside of the lenses of identity politics. An immaculate straight line was never ‘there’ to begin with. We are left with these small lives the media pretends doesn’t really matter until you achieve celebrity status; we are left with the first stuttering words of a politics that invites us to the incommensurability of our small hours, and – in place of our fascination with distant power and oh-so-shiny things – urges an attention to our bodies, our relationships, our communities, our hidden miracles, our own stories, and our own knowings.

Let me spell it out…what I suggest we can do. Please understand that I do not offer these points with any confidence in their stability or with any sort of finality. I offer them sensing that this moment could very well be that bright spot in the middle of a shadow, affording us an opportunity to co-create a politics that does not terminate with concession speeches – a politics that is not tied so stubbornly to single candidates and anorexic voting lines. I sing the songs of other places of power:

• Embrace the fact that the world is larger than our plots:

The plot of a story is both its gentle guiding hand and its suffocating grip, helping it move along but also blinding it from realizing that life is bigger, sterner, and more promiscuous than its logic. I could have sworn that with Bernie Sanders’ candidacy, the world was finally stepping into an age of deeper justice and beauty – that evolutionary moment we all await. His ‘failure’ to clinch the nomination was a chastising moment for many keen followers of the American primaries. I slowly came to terms with the fact that the world is not beholden to my liberal fantasies. Simply put, the map is not the terrain. The world stretches far and wide beyond our blind spots, our analyses, and our convictions about what justice looks like.

• Let grief do her work:

Globalizing society hardly has any place left for grief. When we get uncomfortable, we are urged to pull ourselves together and get back on the wheel. I reckon that today’s grief has something to teach us; there is a genius to its workings that allow a shift in how we relate with the world. I do not mean that we should all sit down and hold hands. I do however feel we can acknowledge that we are in a mess, and adjourn the quest for a palliative solution for the time being. Perhaps instead of counting down to 2020, or calling on Michelle Obama to run for office, we can use these days to investigate the edges of our politics. I believe grief disciplines us for this slow kind of work. What is at stake here is more than a liberal agenda, it is how we see the world and therefore how we maintain power structures that no longer serve our fondest hopes.

• At least for the moment, nurture a suspicion for shiny objects:

We have become a photogenic people – attracted to the spectacular, repulsed by the unseemly. We live in cosmetic pixels. With selfies, Instagram posts, televised news that seems more committed to graphics and bloated soundtracks, and the ongoing digitization of relationships, our lives have been reduced to images – and we are forgetting the art of living in the spaces between those images. We are thus habituated to a regime of visuality that defines what is real to us – and silences/excludes other voices from mattering. Perhaps the reason why most people were shocked by the news of Trump’s win was because they were contained by narratives and material conditions that forced a certain view about America. But then the terrain met the map. We need a new set of eyes.

• Find the others:

When things break, we are afforded an opportunity to make reconfigurations. This perhaps is a good time to investigate the contours of our relationships with others, with those we love, with our neighbourhoods, with the strangers who breeze past us in a blur of inconsequentiality. American politics is premised on fixed identity categories – that Democrats and Republicans are essentially two aspects of an adversarial binary. To a large extent, each side sees the other as a noxious blight on the face of the country. The first moments of ‘healing this divide’ is the recognition that even evil has a story, that those persons who hate black people, or curse at ‘the gays’, didn’t just spring out from the earth, fully realized and fleshed out. In a sense that often escapes us, we are unfolding, hyphenated aspects of each other. None of us is on the side of ‘good’. Donald Trump and the people that support him are just as much a product of the same media-infused, economically imperilled, people-denying politics that have created us. In a game of sides, the greatest loss we suffer is the other side. Let us leave room for the outlier, for the strange, and for the unexpected. We are not as ‘sorted out’ as we think we are.

• Notice the ground upon which you stand:

I like to say that falling could very well be flying, without the tyranny of coordinates. Technically speaking, falling objects are actually the gravitational pull of attraction between objects. I won’t succumb to, or insist that, we are being ushered into a more glorious paradigm of politics…I cannot make that claim. There are however sympathies between place and feet, between our stories and our contexts, that call on us to participate in the sacredness of where we are. What attracts you now? What questions matter to you? What performances of place are pressing themselves upon you? What do you do every day? Where do you come from? Does that question make sense? A friend, Eric Chisler, put this sentiment this way: “Remember the earth. Remember your ancestors. Remember your four-legged, winged, crawling relatives. Remember life. Your life, your way of living, that is the only activism you’ve ever had. Use it. Make your existence a ritual that honors everything your body and words touch. The times are troubled and you are needed. Wake up—notice the consequence of every action and non-action. You are needed. You are needed. You are needed.”

• The confusion about what to do next is redemptive:

If you are still confused about what this all means, how anyone could vote for Trump, what the future holds and how to respond to this proto-crisis of sorts, count yourself among the lucky ones. Confusion and uncertainty are how multiple agencies negotiate directionality – and this ongoing process is important. Even inertia isn’t determinately still. We must slowdown in these times of urgency, and allow other agentic forces to reshape us.

It might be the case that within the specificity of your own context, you know what to do. That’s great. March on the streets. Print BLM tee-shirts. Learn how to plant your own food. Investigate your ancestry. Or open a gift shop and invite passers-by to get free hugs. Out of the logic of our emergence, new moments are distilled and new activisms become possible. We must be humble enough to recognize that the ‘right thing’ to do is almost always known in retrospect, and that justice is always justice-in-the-making.

• Small lives matter:

Finally, don’t beat yourself up for not saving the day. Even if some archaic policy were conjured by the White House, annulling president-elect Trump’s win, it still wouldn’t do much to address the politics that made him happen. The fight is not so much with Trump as it is for a new way of meeting our own selves – a way of speaking with those we consider ‘other than us’. In short, we must turn to each other, for it is in the smallness of our embrace that new worlds burst into life.

All considered, would it have been great to have a woman president? Yes. That would have assured many of their place in the world and told them that they are valued and needed and worthy of love. And yet, that message finds a more interesting home now that we have lost our way…now that hope seems faraway.

The politics that knocks on our doors right now doesn’t have to wait for the next four years. Let your campaigns of sacred enlivenment continue.

Welcome dear friend and thanks for reading. If you’d like to receive new articles and announcements about my projects via email, join me here.

Cross-posted from http://bayoakomolafe.net

Photo by aftab.

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