This work from 2007 was probably my last lecture on enclosure before turning back to the commons, in a sense. My work now builds on this to try and find new ways to understand the qualities of relationship that characterise what I now call the Heart of the Commons – those predominantly uncommodifying ways of being in the world that support the most ordinary qualities of helpful ethics in our lives. For an example of my more recent work, listen to the #CultureChange recording on the Bandcamp page.

The original lecture can be streamed or downloaded at Anthony’s Bandcamp page.

About Anthony Thomas McCann

Anthony McCann (garaiocht.com) is a specialist in culture change, ethics, and leadership. He works as an international keynote speaker and trainer, researcher, lecturer, coach, consultant, broadcaster, composer, poet, performer, and children’s songwriter and entertainer. Anthony lives in Bangor, Northern Ireland, with his family

Photo by barnyz

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The election of Donald Trump has left millions, maybe even billions of us in shock. Although we may be looking with bewilderment at the US today, we should remember that he is not an isolated phenomenon. He is a symptom of a sickness that is raging all around the world. People are hurting, disillusioned with mainstream politics and increasingly angry at a neoliberal economic system that is destroying lives and the planet with increasing ferocity. And in their desperation they are willing to consider extreme measures to make themselves heard.

Demagogues thrive amid fear and insecurity, which is why they paint the world in such dark terms. It’s a strategy that has put right-wing populist leaders in power in an Axis of Egos: from Brazil to Turkey, the Philippines to Russia, authoritarian strongmen like Trump are on the rise. Meanwhile, many centrist liberals, like the Democratic Party in the US, have been so intent on rejecting left-wing populist solutions, and so sure of their ability to beat anyone running on a white supremacy platform with its misogyny and homophobia, that they opened the door for Mr. Trump to walk straight through. Their preference is always to maintain the status quo that has served them so well.

As dangerous as the election of Trump is for the world, we can also see in this moment the truth that we simply cannot rely on the electoral political system to save us, because it is designed to prevent the fundamental change we need. Its own survival is at stake and it will marshal all its champions and resources to defend itself and stop the emergence of a new system. But when we work, or continue working for change from the ground up; when we build or keep on building new ways of living and being with each other where we live; when we construct or keep constructing the future we know is possible with our own hands, rather than hoping distant leaders will build it for us, we find our true power. Finally, when we combine that with the unbending hope that has powered change through the ages, we know our power has meaning.

A 400-year-old economic system is dying and another is struggling to be born. Change on this scale is not going to be smooth or easy. We should not be surprised, then, that moments like this?—?where the establishment is dealt a body blow?—?become more and more common. We can despair when that blow comes in the form of right-wing extremists, or we can step-up. We are the ones we are looking for, who can and must grasp the opportunities in these crises that are undoubtedly there.

So it’s time to come together, taking time to remember the earth. Remember all the successful struggles for justice that came before us, and imagine all those to come. Remember that social movements are growing all over the world and realising the common struggle. Remember life. Then, organise. Find each other and help midwife the inevitable transition that brings forth from the ashes of neoliberal capitalism a system that works for the good of all life on Mother Earth. This is not just activism; this is our responsibility as human beings alive as this all unfolds.

This is why we are here.

In hope, love and solidarity,

/The Rules team

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In fact Michael Arnovitz (“Thinking About Hillary — A Plea for Reason,” The Policy, June 12) comes right out and says that, because the Right and Left criticize Clinton for opposite, mutually inconsistent reasons, her critics must be wrong — presumably meaning that splitting the difference between them puts her in the Baby Bear position at the exact center, which is “just right.”

The problem is that But in fact the positions taken by those two parties are neither mutually exhaustive nor mutually exclusive. And the great majority of issues they agree on — the fundamental structural assumptions of corporate capitalism and American global hegemony — never become visible as “issues” at all because they’re not in dispute.

The “two sides” reflect the range of acceptable disagreement within a ruling class that shares most of its interests and assumptions in common. In fact even bringing up the concept of a ruling class, or of the basic structure of our system as reflecting the interests of that ruling class, is enough to make Chris Matthews clutch his pearls over “tinfoil hats.”

So that means both “centrism” and “extremism” are defined entirely in terms of the status quo. A centrist is one who implicitly accepts the normality and legitimacy of the existing system and its power structures. Any radical structural critique that looks into the role of class interest, race or gender privilege or the exercise of unaccountable power in its creation, is “extremist.”

“Moderates” are defined entirely in terms of how closely they adhere to a system regarded as normal, natural and inevitable in its fundamental nature, and “extremists” by how far they deviate from it.

Any “reform” that involves tinkering around the edges of a power structure without fundamentally changing it, and can be implemented by the same classes of people who are running the present system, will be classified as “moderate.” Any proposal that involves changing the fundamental power-structure and disempowering the current ruling class is “radical.”

Radical structural analysis refuses to treat the existing state of things as something that’s “just that way,” or “what most people want.” It sees the exercise of power for what it is — being in the interest of some at the expense of others. And it is therefore labeled “extremist” by the “centrists” who hold power.

Some of the most ardent centrists — like the smarmy Chris Matthews — dismiss any such radical structural critiques as “conspiracy theories.” On a late 2010 episode of the Matthews show, a guest who opposed the new TSA scanners and associated peep-or-grope regime claimed that the scanners were actually ineffective and mentioned that a number of high-ranking Homeland Security officials had stock in the company that made them. Matthews was near-apoplectic in denouncing this “conspiracy theory” — despite his own 30-second spots on MSNBC quoting Eisenhower on the Military-Industrial Complex.

So we wind up with a policy-making elite who limit themselves to a set of alternatives ranging from M to N, governed by what C. Wright Mills called “Crackpot Realism.” As Buckminster Fuller put it: They’re trying to solve problems with the same level of thinking that created those problems. Ivan Illich described such people’s approach as “attempting to solve a crisis by escalation.”

A good example of the latter is urban planners, who attempt to solve the traffic congestion caused by car-centered monoculture development by building new freeways and bypasses — which simply generate more traffic to and from the new suburbs and strip malls that grow up at every cloverleaf along the new subsidized highways. Or the American national security state, which deals with terrorism (the product of blowback from previous imperial intervention) through new interventions which generate even more terrorism.

Although centrists see themselves as the “adults in the room,” who see what must be done and don’t draw back from doing it, they also pride themselves on being the “real” humanitarians and idealists. To quote Michael Lofgren:

The benefit of crackpot realism is that the ordinary prudence of advocating avoidance of war can be depicted either as sloppy and unrealistic sentimentalism or as the irresponsible avoidance of the burdens and duties of a superpower in a dangerous world. In its refined form, crackpot realism wears the camouflage of idealism: military invasions are really aimed at humanitarian rescue, spreading democracy, or peacekeeping. In those cases, the crackpot realist can even affect a morally censorious tone: How can any serious person be in favor of letting Saddam Hussein remain president of Iraq? Or Bashir al Assad in Syria? Or whoever the Hitler du jour might be.

Centrism is utterly unself-critical, insofar as it ignores its own status as a component in a legitimizing ideology. Any system of power includes a cultural reproduction apparatus that tends to create the kinds of “human resources” who accept as normal and given the structure of power under which they live.

As part of a legitimizing ideology, centrist Horseshoe Theory is guilty of — as @NerbieDansers, a friend on Twitter, pointed out — “constant erasure of violence for which the reasonable, moderate center is responsible”; instead it “turns violence into a function of mere distance from a mythic peaceful center.” The system represented by the center is not simply “responsible” for violence; massive levels of violence have been, and are, entailed in establishing and maintaining the system of power that centrists recognize as normal.

The present system is not some natural or inevitable fact of nature that “just happened,” because it makes the most sense to do things that way. It is a thing with a beginning, a history — and (with apologies to Marx) it’s a history written in letters of blood and fire. As I have written elsewhere:

Bear in mind that the corporate-state power structure didn’t come about naturally or spontaneously.  It came about through conscious, massive application of political power over the past 150 years.

From the Gilded Age on, the state intervened massively in the market to create a society dominated by giant, centralized organizations like government agencies and corporations, and later by centralized state education, large universities, and nonprofit foundations. When this state-created and state-subsidized centralized industrial economy became plagued with chronic excess capacity and underconsumption, the state turned toward policies to keep it going.  This included a domestic economy centered on federal spending to absorb surplus capital through such massive state spending projects as the Interstate Highway System, a military-industrial complex that ate up huge amounts of surplus industrial output, and a foreign policy aimed at forcibly incorporating the markets and resources of the entire planet as a sink for surplus capital and output.

At the time the system was being imposed by the state, there was large-scale resistance by a general population that didn’t accept it as normal.  From the 1870s through WWI, a major part of the population refused to accept as normal a situation in which they worked as wage labors for large authoritarian hierarchies.  Movements such as the farm populist movement and the Knights of Labor amounted to near-insurrections, and such measures as the post-Haymarket repression and Cleveland’s suppression of the Pullman Strike constituted counter-revolution.

After the insurrection was defeated, the white-collar bureaucrats controlling corporate and state hierarchies adopted an educational system aimed at processing people who accepted the structure of power as normal.  The official public education movement, advocates of “100% Americanism,” and the like, aimed at creating “human resources” who were “adjusted” to accept authoritarianism and hierarchy as normal, and to “comply” with any orders coming from an apparatchik behind a desk — whether in a classroom, factory, or government office.

But we don’t have to look at history to see how much violence is at the heart of the system that these “reasonable centrists” take for granted. The system requires massive ongoing violence for its preservation. Just pick up a copy of William Blum’s KILLING HOPE and look at the United States’ post-WWII record of invading countries, overthrowing governments, backing military coups and sponsoring death squads. And the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that has prevailed for the past few decades has been defined around the legitimacy of such intervention. Even so-called “liberals” share the consensus that, as Chomsky put it, “America owns the world.”

The “reasonable centrists,” for their part, are typically shameless apologists for this consensus and the bloody intervention it promotes. The current news is full of examples of what garbage human beings these “adults in the room” really are.

At Business Insider, Josh Barro (“Donald Trump  and the GOP’s crisis,” May 3) contrasts Trump to “adults in the room” like Jeb Bush. The first three of Trump’s deviations from the alleged moderate orthodoxies of the donor class that Barro mentions are “opposing free trade, promising to protect entitlements from cuts, [and] questioning the value of America’s commitment to military alliances.” The fourth, challenging the growing acceptance of transgender people, is common to most of the GOP. So in practice, the main differences the Republican “adults in the room” have with Trump are his rejection of neoliberal orthodoxy on the global political hegemony of the U.S. and the corporate order it enforces, not his godawful social views.

Neera Tanden — head of Center for American Progress, Hillary Clnton ally and Clinton appointee to the Democratic Party’s Platform Committee — in 2013 stated on Twitter in regard to Syria that “while I don’t want to be the world’s policeman, an unpoliced world is dangerous. The US may be the only adult in the room left.”

Clinton herself, most centrists’ beau ideal of an adult in the room, associates herself with figures like Rahm Emanuel, who as head of the Democratic National Campaign Committee denied national party campaign funds in 2006 to candidates who opposed the Iraq war, and as Chicago mayor has run political cover for a police illegal detention site and promoted school charterization on the largest scale seen outside New Orleans. She voted to authorize Bush’s war in Iraq and regurgitated his lies about “weapons of mass destruction,” in order to maintain her future viability as a politican. As Obama’s Secretary of State, she was consistently the strongest voice in favor of military intervention as a tool of policy; she was the most influential voice behind Obama’s reluctant intervention in Libya, and to this day regrets that she did not persuade him to intervene in Syria full-scale. More recently she has not only defended Netanyahu’s crimes against humanity in Gaza, but promised to take America’s relationship with Netanyahu — not just Israel, but Netanyahu — to “the next level.”

Clinton recently devoted an entire speech (after praising her hosts, the American Legion — which started out as a right-wing paramilitary fighting Wobblies in the street) to smarmy self-congratulations that “the United States stands up to dictators” and promises to continue to maintain the world’s largest military to meet all the “threats” out there. This despite the fact that she actively encouraged a right-wing military coup in Honduras, and wears with pride the endorsement of her vacation buddy, war criminal Henry Kissinger, who was instrumental in Pinochet’s overthrow of Allende and the sweep of the entire South American continent by military dictatorships, as well as the invasion and genocide in East Timor.

As for all those “threats,” Clinton and Tanden share the same operating assumptions as Henry Kissinger and the rest of the bipartisan National Security establishment — a set of assumptions summarized by Chomsky’s statement quoted above that “the United States owns the world.” It is for the United States to unilaterally define what size military is sufficient for a given country’s “legitimate defensive needs,” while it defines its own “defensive” needs in terms of the ability to project offensive force anywhere in the world and successfully invade and defeat any other country. It is for the United States to unilaterally define “aggression” anywhere in the world, to define as a “threat” the capability to successfully defend against an American attack, and to define as “defense” encircling any such country, on the other side of the world, with offensive military bases.

The United States is the hegemonic power which upholds a global political, economic and military order established at the end of WWII, which exists to integrate the markets and natural resources of the Global South into the needs of Western corporate capital; and in the parlance of the U.S. National Security elite, any country which attempts to challenge that order by seceding from it is a “threat.”

In the name of upholding this global order against “threats,” the United States since WWII has invaded and/or overthrown the governments of more countries than any other empire in history, backed military coups and death squads, with a death toll of multiple millions.

This is what your “adults in the room” have done. They have constructed a system of power, first domestically and then globally, the main purpose of which is to extract surplus labor from us to feed the rentiers they represent. In enforcing this system of power, they have inflected megadeaths on the world, and have no compunctions against inflicting more. The “adults in the room” are monsters. It’s time to take away their plaything — the American state — which they have used to wreak this destruction and mayhem on the world, and to make sure nobody else ever wields it again.

Citations to this article:

• Carson, Kevin, “Why Are the ‘Adults in the Room’ So Awful?”, Libertarian Alliance Blog, Sept. 15, 2016
• Carson, Kevin, “Why Are the ‘Adults in the Room’ So Awful?”, The Gilmer Mirror, Sept. 15, 2016
• Carson, Kevin, “Why Are the ‘Adults in the Room’ So Awful?”, Augusta Free Press, Sept. 15, 2016

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John Holloway, a sociology professor in Mexico, recently gave an interview with Roar magazine suggesting how to introduce a new social and economic logic in the face of the mighty machine of neoliberal capitalism.  Holloway’s idea, recapitulating themes from his previous book and 2002 thesis, is to build “cracks” in the system in which people can relate to each other and meet their needs in non-market ways:  “We have to keep building cracks and finding ways of recognizing them, strengthening them, expanding them, connecting them; seeking confluence, or preferably, the commoning of cracks.”

This strategic approach has immediate appeal to commoners, it seems to me — even though some engagement with state power is surely necessary at some point.  Below, Holloway’s interview with by Amador Fernández-Savater. It was translated by Richard Mac Duinnsleibhe and edited by Arianne Sved of Guerrilla Translation.

In 2002, John Holloway published a landmark book: Change the World Without Taking Power. Inspired by the ‘¡Ya basta!’ of the Zapatistas, by the movement that emerged in Argentina in 2001/’02, and by the anti-globalization movement, Holloway sets out a hypothesis: it is not the idea of revolution or transformation of the world that has been refuted as a result of the disaster of authoritarian communism, but rather the idea of revolution as the taking of power, and of the party as the political tool par excellence.

Holloway discerns another concept of social change at work in these movements, and generally in every practice—however visible or invisible it may be—where a logic different from that of profit is followed: the logic of cracking capitalism. That is, to create, within the very society that is being rejected, spaces, moments, or areas of activity in which a different world is prefigured. Rebellions in motion. From this perspective, the idea of organization is no longer equivalent to that of the party, but rather entails the question of how the different cracks that unravel the fabric of capitalism can recognize each other and connect.

But after Argentina’s “que se vayan todos” came the Kirchner government, and after Spain’s “no nos representan” appeared Podemos. We met with John Holloway in the city of Puebla, Mexico, to ask him if, after everything that has happened in the past decade, from the progressive governments of Latin America to Podemos and Syriza in Europe, along with the problems for self-organized practices to exist and multiply, he still thinks that it is possible to “change the world without taking power.”

:::::::::::::::::::::::

Firstly, John, we would like to ask you where the hegemonic idea of revolution in the 20th century comes from, what it is based on. That is, the idea of social change through the taking of power.

I think the central element is labor, understood as wage labor. In other words, alienated or abstract labor. Wage labor has been, and still is, the bedrock of the trade union movement, of the social democratic parties that were its political wing, and also of the communist movements. This concept defined the revolutionary theory of the labor movement: the struggle of wage labor against capital. But its struggle was limited because wage labor is the complement of capital, not its negation.

I don’t understand the relation between this idea of labor and that of revolution through the taking of state power.

One way of understanding the connection would be as follows: if you start off from the definition of labor as wage or alienated labor, you start off from the idea of the workers as victims and objects of the system of domination. And a movement that struggles to improve the living standards of workers (considered as victims and objects) immediately refers to the state. Why? Because the state, due to its very separation from society, is the ideal institution if one seeks to achieve benefits for people. This is the traditional thinking of the labor movement and that of the left governments that currently exist in Latin America.

But this tradition isn’t the only approach to a politics of emancipation…

Of course not. In the last twenty or thirty years we find a great many movements that claim something else: it is possible to emancipate human activity from alienated labor by opening up cracks where one is able to do things differently, to do something that seems useful, necessary, and worthwhile to us; an activity that is not subordinated to the logic of profit.

These cracks can be spatial (places where other social relations are generated), temporal (“Here, in this event, for the time that we are together, we are going to do things differently. We are going to open windows onto another world.”), or related to particular activities or resources (for example, cooperatives or activities that pursue a non-market logic with regard to water, software, education, etc.). The world, and each one of us, is full of these cracks.

The rejection of alienated and alienating labor entails, at the same time, a critique of the institutional and organizational structures, and the mindset that springs from it. This is how we can explain the rejection of trade unions, parties, and the state that we observe in so many contemporary movements, from the Zapatistas to the Greek or Spanish indignados.

But it isn’t a question of the opposition between an old and a new politics, I think. Because what we see in the movements born of the economic crisis is that those two things come to the fore at the same time: cracks such as protests in city squares, and new parties such as Syriza or Podemos.

I think it’s a reflection of the fact that our experience under capitalism is contradictory. We are victims and yet we are not. We seek to improve our living standards as workers, and also to go beyond that, to live differently. In one respect we are, in effect, people who have to sell their labor power in order to survive. But in another, each one of us has dreams, behaviors and projects that don’t fit into the capitalist definition of labor.

The difficulty, then as now, lies in envisioning the relation between those two types of movements. How can that relation avoid reproducing the old sectarianism? How can it be a fruitful relation without denying the fundamental differences between the two perspectives?

Argentina in 2001 and 2002, the indignados in Greece and Spain more recently. At a certain point, bottom-up movements stall, they enter a crisis or an impasse, or they vanish. Would you say that the politics of cracks has intrinsic limits in terms of enduring and expanding?

I wouldn’t call them limits, but rather problems. Ten years ago, when I published Change the World without Taking Power, the achievements and the power of movements from below were more apparent, whereas now we are more conscious of the problems. The movements you mention are enormously important beacons of hope, but capital continues to exist and it’s getting worse and worse; it progressively entails more misery and destruction. We cannot confine ourselves to singing the praises of movements. That’s not enough.

Could one response then be the option that focuses on the state?

It’s understandable why people want to go in that direction, very understandable. These have been years of ferocious struggles, but capital’s aggression remains unchanged. I sincerely hope that Podemos and Syriza do win the elections, because that would change the current kaleidoscope of social struggles. But I maintain all of my objections with regard to the state option.

Any government of this kind entails channeling aspirations and struggles into institutional conduits that, by necessity, force one to seek a conciliation between the anger that these movements express and the reproduction of capital. Because the existence of any government involves promoting the reproduction of capital (by attracting foreign investment, or through some other means), there is no way around it. This inevitably means taking part in the aggression that is capital. It’s what has already happened in Bolivia and Venezuela, and it will also be the problem in Greece or Spain.

Could it be a matter of complementing the movements from below with a movement oriented towards government institutions?

That’s the obvious answer that keeps coming up. But the problem with obvious answers is that they suppress contradictions. Things can’t be reconciled so easily. From above, it may be possible to improve people’s living conditions, but I don’t think one can break with capitalism and generate a different reality. And I sincerely believe that we’re in a situation where there are no long-term solutions for the whole of humanity within capitalism.

I’m not discrediting the state option because I myself don’t have an answer to offer, but I don’t think it’s the solution.

Where are you looking for the answer?

Whilst not considering parties of the left as enemies, since for me this is certainly not the case, I would say that the answer has to be thought of in terms of deepening the cracks.

If we’re not going to accept the annihilation of humanity, which, to me, seems to be on capitalism’s agenda as a real possibility, then the only alternative is to think that our movements are the birth of another world. We have to keep building cracks and finding ways of recognizing them, strengthening them, expanding them, connecting them; seeking the confluence or, preferably, the commoning of the cracks.

If we think in terms of state and elections, we are straying away from that, because Podemos or Syriza can improve things, but they cannot create another world outside the logic of capital. And that’s what this is all about, I think.

Finally, John, how do you see the relation between the two perspectives we’ve been talking about?

We need to keep a constant and respectful debate going without suppressing the differences and the contradictions. I think the basis for a dialogue could be this: no one has the solution.

For the moment, we have to recognize that we’re not strong enough to abolish capitalism. By strong, I am referring here to building ways of living that don’t depend on wage labor. To be able to say “I don’t really care whether I have a job or not, because if I don’t have one, I can dedicate my life to other things that interest me and that give me enough sustenance to live decently.” That’s not the case right now. Perhaps we have to build that before we can say “go to hell, capital.”

In that sense, let’s bear in mind that a precondition for the French Revolution was that, at a certain point, the social network of bourgeois relations no longer needed the aristocracy in order to exist. Likewise, we must work to reach a point where we can say “we don’t care if global capital isn’t investing in Spain, because we’ve built a mutual support network that’s strong enough to enable us to live with dignity.”

Right now the rage against banks is spreading throughout the world. However, I don’t think banks are the problem, but rather the existence of money as a social relation. How should we think about rage against money? I believe this necessarily entails building non-monetized, non-commodified social relations.

And there are a great many people dedicated to this effort, whether out of desire, conviction or necessity, even though they may not appear in the newspapers. They’re building other forms of community, of sociality, of thinking about technology and human capabilities in order to create a new life.

John Holloway is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Autonomous University of Puebla in Mexico. His latest book is Crack Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2010).

Originally posted at bollier.org

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