The creative task of managing our civilisational descent – daunting though it is – promises to be both meaningful and fulfilling, provided we are prepared to let go of dominant conceptions of the good life and begin telling ourselves new stories of prosperity.

Excerpted from Samuel Alexander:

“The creative task of managing our civilisational descent – daunting though it is – promises to be both meaningful and fulfilling, provided we are prepared to let go of dominant conceptions of the good life and begin telling ourselves new stories of prosperity. Consumerism was an experiment that failed. It led us down a dead end. Only by letting go – or, rather, only by ripping ourselves free – can we transcend it.

Mercifully, there is a door hidden in the wall, providing us with an escape route if only we are prepared to embrace the unfashionable values of sufficiency, frugality, mindfulness, appropriate technology, self-governance and local economy. Needless to say, personal action alone is not enough. We must also build structures that support a more localised, simpler way to live, and this can only be achieved through the collective genius and power of community action. Together we must write a new future, an undertaking that has already begun as individuals and communities begin to build the new world within the shell of the old.

We should explore alternatives not because we are ecologically compelled to live differently – although we are – but because we are human and deserve the opportunity to flourish with dignity, within sustainable bounds. This does not mean regressing to something prior to consumerism; rather, it means drawing on the wisdom of ages to advance beyond consumerism, in order to produce something better, freer, and more humane – even if it will also be more humble. This revolution, no doubt, will require all the wisdom, creativity and compassion we can muster. But impossible things have happened before. And if we fail, may we fail with dignity.

As John Holloway writes: ‘We need no promise of a happy ending to justify our rejection of a world we feel to be wrong.’

LET US DECLARE, in chorus, that providing ‘enough, for everyone, forever’ is the defining objective of a just and sustainable world, a world that we should try to build by working together in free association. And let us show that material sufficiency in a free society provides the conditions for an infinite variety of meaningful, happy and fulfilling lives. For embracing a ‘simpler’ way of life does not mean hardship or going back to the Stone Age. It means focusing on what is sufficient to live well, and discovering that the good life does not consist in the accumulation of ‘nice things’. Just enough is plenty.

Thus our defining challenge is to seek out and embody the ‘middle way’ between over-consumption and under-consumption, where basic material needs are sufficiently met but where attention is then redirected away from superfluous material pursuits, in search of non-materialistic sources of satisfaction and meaning. Those sources are abundant – inexhaustible – if only we knew it. It is time to abandon affluence and turn to the realm of the spirit to satisfy our hunger for infinity.

It is painfully clear, of course, that governments around the world are not interested in moving ‘beyond growth’ or questioning consumer culture, and there are few signs of things changing at the top. Empire, we can be sure, will not contemplate it’s own self-annihilation; nor will it lie down like a lamb at the mere request of the environmental movement. Empire will struggle for existence all the way down.

It follows that the transformation that is needed must emerge ‘from below’, driven into existence by diverse, inspired and imaginative social movements that seek to produce a post-capitalist society. What role will you play? It is a question with no generalisable answer. However we answer it, we must endeavour to live our alternative worlds into existence, here and now, and show them to be good, while at the same time recognising that the great transition that is needed will likely come only at the end of a rough road – after or during a series of crises.

Can we turn the crises of our times into opportunities for civilisational renewal? That is the question, the challenge, posed by our turbulent moment in history.

There is one way forward: the creation of flesh and blood examples of low-consumption, high quality alternatives to the mainstream pattern of life. This we can see happening already on the counter- cultural fringes. And nothing – no amount of argument or research – will take the place of such living proof. What people must see is that ecologically sane, socially responsible living is good living; that simplicity, thrift and reciprocity make for an existence that is free.

In the words of Theodore Roszak, author of Where the Wasteland Ends (Doubleday, 1973)

– Our task, therefore, is to expose and better understand the myths that dominate our destructive and self-transforming present, and to envision what life would be like, or could be like, if we were to liberate ourselves from today’s myths and step into new ones. We search for grounded hope between naive optimism and despair. Without vision and defiant positivity, we will perish.

Unfortunately, our myths today have become so entrenched that they have assumed a false necessity, which is to say, they no longer seem to be myths at all. Rather, the myths of industrial civilisation – which are the myths of limitless growth, technological redemption, and fulfilment through affluence – seem to be a reflection of some ‘grand narrative’ from which we cannot escape.

But there is a collective rumbling in the world today. Do you hear it? It is spreading in all directions, which means it is both coming your way and emanating from you. Currently dormant, our repressed hopes are all embers ready to ignite, awaiting a rush of oxygen that will flare our utopian ambitions. Breathe deeply, they say, and demand the impossible. Let us stoke the fire of ecological democracy that is burning in our eyes, not because we think we will succeed in producing a just and sustainable world, but because if we do not try, something noble in our hearts and spirits will be lost. So open your mind, gentle reader, for the future is but clay in the hands of our imaginations.

We are being called to make things new.”

Source: This essay was originally published as part of the eBook Griffith Review 52: Imagining the Future – Notes from the frontier.

Photo by leighblackall

The post We need new stories for prosperous descent appeared first on P2P Foundation.

So rather than asking “What happened to Occupy?” or “What happened to 15-M?” as though they were discrete entities with a beginning and an end, it makes more sense to think of the whole trajectory of movements including the Arab Spring, M15 and Syntagma, Madison, Occupy, Quebec, the N14 General Strike, and so on, as one loose global network of associated networked movements. This loose, networked movement is always throwing up new avatars, with new names, which appear to decline after a while. But when something new arises — and it always does, whether in the same country or halfway around the world — it’s built on the same infrastructure and foundations, and the same social capital, as its predecessors.

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

Dyer-Witheford goes on to survey the approaches to cybernetic technology on the part of assorted Marxisms — or at least schools of left-wing or socialistic analysis — of the 20th century.The “scientific socialists” or neo-orthodox Marxists celebrate the liberatory potential of technology, and its role in both making capitalism unsustainable and providing the building blocks of a post-capitalist society of abundance. Their failing, as he sees it, is a tendency towards technological determinism which reduces the agency of the working class — its central role in self-liberation — to almost nothing. Rather an almost inevitable transition is driven by the forces of production or social relations of production. [24]

The second strand of Marxist thought on high technology is the pessimists or neo-Luddites, who emphasize the nature of technology as a totalizing system of control. They include theorists of work-discipline like Braverman and Marglin, and David Noble’s work on deskilling through automated CNC machine tools. [25] Similarly cultural theorists like Marcuse and media analysts Herbert Schiller view the corporate control of communications as a totalitarian force that closes off possibilities of critique. [26]

The ruling class, by definition, always selects among the variety of technological alternatives for one that best serves its interest; it follows that the ruling classes’ need for control is built into whatever technology is in use and there is exploitative by its very nature. [27]

This approach is useful, Dyer-Witheford argues, because it sees through the liberal capitalist techno-utopian project’s treatment of technology as class-neutral and positive-sum, and points to the very real class agenda embodied in that project. [28]

But its shortcomings are far more significant. It makes the mistake of equating “capitalism’s intentions and its capacities,” and “ignores the consequences of [workers’] counter-strategies and resistances.” In particular, it neglects “the possibility — particularly apparent in the field of media and communications technologies — that capital’s laboring subjects may find real use-values, perhaps even subversive ones, for the new technologies.” [29]

These latter possibilities are heightened, I would add, by the radical cheapening and ephemerality of new production and communications technology, and the resulting collapse of entry barriers — at least those based on material conditions — for production directly undertaken and controlled by producers.

The strand on the Left which most resembles liberal capitalist “information society” theory — post-Fordism — may include Marxists but is not necessarily Marxist as such. It shares a blurry border area with liberal capitalist models. The post-Fordist ranks include Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, authors of The Second Industrial Divide. Their flavor, Dyer-Witheford notes, is more Proudhonian than Marxist: “fascinated by the prospects of escaping the alienation of modern capitalism by return to small-scale, cooperative, artisanal production” — a situation which will “allow the restoration to the workplace of the judgment, learning, and variety lost to Taylorism.” [30]

And the more optimistic post-Fordists share the negative qualities of liberal capitalist “information society” enthusiasts, downplaying the extent to which post-Fordist industrial organization and networked supply and distribution chains have been integrated into a corporate capitalist institutional framework and subjected to the logic of labor exploitation and neoliberal austerity. [31] Even post-Fordists from a Marxist background tend to downplay the significance of class conflict and the contradictions of late capitalism, instead framing the emergence of a post-capitalist society in largely peaceful and evolutionary terms. [32]

After surveying all these thought systems, Dyer-Witheford goes on to discuss his own preferred model for transition to a high-tech post-capitalist society: autonomist Marxism.

Autonomism stresses the working class’s role as creative subject of revolutionary struggle, actively laying the basis for a new society.

Far from being a passive object of capitalist designs, the worker is in fact the active subject of production, the wellspring of the skills, innovation, and cooperation on which capital depends. Capital attempts to incorporate labor as a object, a component in its cycle of value extraction, so much labor power. But this inclusion is always partial, never fully achieved. Laboring subjects resist capital’s reduction. Labor is for capital always a problematic “other” that must constantly be controlled and subdued, and that, as persistently, circumvents or challenges this command. [33]

Workers, autonomists argue, “are not just passive victims of technological change but active agents who persistently contest capital’s attempts at control.” One of the most important forms this contestation takes is workers use of “their ‘invention power’ — the creative capacity on which capital depends for its incessant innovation — in order to reappropriate technology.” [34]

Another theme of autonomism is the way in which workers’ own social relationships have become the main source of productive capital, as physical capital has declined in importance relative to human capital and production has taken on a networked, horizontal character. And at the same time, the boundaries between this increasingly social production process and the rest of life — the spheres of consumption, family life, lifelong learning and the reproduction of labor-power — are becoming more and more blurred.

The activities of people not just as workers but as students, consumers, shoppers and television viewers are now directly integrated into the production process. During the era of the mass worker, the consumption of commodities and the reproduction of labor had been organized as spheres of activity adjunct to, yet distinct from, production. Now these borders fray…. Work, school, and domesticity are re-formed into a single, integrated constellation. [35]

And the growing centrality of network communications and information to all forms of production, and the penetration of this networked culture into the entire cultural sphere, means that it becomes a familiar part of the worker’s life.

The “system of social machines” increasingly constitutes an everyday ambience of potentials to be tapped and explored. The elaboration and alteration of this habitat become so pervasively socialized that they can no longer be exclusively dictated by capital. [36]

When workers’ skills and social relationships become the main form of capital, the converse is that — in contrast to the days when “capital” was expensive, absentee-owned physical capital that workers were paid to come to a physical location and work — workers are in direct possession of a much larger share of the prerequisites of production.

In both these regards, Dyer-Witheford’s analysis is rooted in Antonio Negri’s Grundrisse-based approach to Marx, a treatment of class antagonism framed around the working class as revolutionary subject and constitutive element of communist society, and its historic role of abolishing “work” as a conceptual category as it now exists. The mainstream line of Marxist analysis by the Old Left saw Capital as the crowning achievement of Marx’s theoretical system, and after the publication of the Grundrisse tended to treat the former as having distilled everything of importance in the latter. Negri, on the other hand, sees Capital as only a partial completion of the larger project outlined in the Grundrisse. The chapter on labor in Volume One of Capital did not at all cover the ground envisioned by Marx in the projected book on wage labor; he dealt with it only in part, in “reduced and objective terms” in that chapter, whereas the analysis in the Grundrisse that was never incorporated into a separate volume on labor, was intended to link “Marx’s critique of the wage and his revolutionary definition of communism and communist subjectivity.” [37]

The objectivisation of categories in Capital blocks the action of revolutionary subjectivity. Is it not possible… that the Grundrisse, on the other hand, is a text supportive of revolutionary subjectivity? Is it not the case that it succeeds in rebuilding something that the Marxist tradition has all too often broken and split apart — ie the unity between the constitutive process and the strategic project of working-class subjectivity? [38]

…In the Grundrisse, labour appears as immediately abstract labour. … Labour becomes abstract inasmuch as it is immediately intelligible only in terms of the social relations of production. Thus labour can only be defined in terms of the relations of exchange and the capitalist structure of production. The only concept of labour that we find in Marx is that of wage labour, of labour that is socially necessary for the reproduction of capital. Work, as Marx describes it, is not something to be reformed, reinstated, liberated, or sublimated; it exists only as a concept and a reality to be abolished. [39]

4) The open-ended dynamism of Marx’s “system” is directed wholly towards identifying the relationship between crisis and the emergence of revolutionary subjectivity. … In this regard, the Grundrisse is perhaps the most important — maybe the only — Marxian text on the question of transition, and it is curious to note that among the thousand and one positions published on the question of transition, this fact goes completely unregarded.

5) Marx’s definition of communism in the Grundrisse… is an extremely radical definition. The fundamental element here is the nexus between communism and class composition. … The nexus between class composition and power, like that between class composition and transition, is articulated on the real material nature of forms of behaviour, of needs, of structure, and of self-valorisation. [40]

Translated into plain language, that means analysis of the working class in terms of “revolutionary subjectivity” and its role in the transition means looking at the actual working class as it exists right now, how it exercises agency through its actual practices, forms of organization and activity, and how those practices and organizational forms prefigure (or form the nucleus of) the future communist society it will create.

Getting back to Dyer-Witheford’s own analysis of revolutionary subjectivity, it follows from all this that the main form of revolution ceases to be seizing the factories, and instead becomes — to use the term of perhaps the most notable autonomists, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri — “exodus.” It is feasible to undertake an ever larger share of production of life’s necessities in the social sphere, in self-provisioning in the informal economy, through commons-based peer production, or through cooperative labor by workers using affordable high-tech tools in their own homes and shops. And the social relationships which capital has enclosed as a source of profit are vulnerable to being repurposed in the form of counter-institutions. Because the “social factory” is immaterial and permeates every aspect of life, there is no need to physically seize it.

Likewise, as Dyer-Witheford paraphrases Negri, “the new communicative capacities and technological competencies manifesting in the contemporary work force…”

exist in “virtual” form among the contingent and unemployed labor force. They are not so much the products of a particular training or specific work environment but rather the premises and prerequisites of everyday life in a highly integrated technoscientific system permeated by machines and media. [41]

In Negri’s own words, “the raw material on which the very high level of productivity is based — the only raw material… which is suitable for an intellectual and inventive labour force — is science communication and the communication of knowledge.” To extract profit from the cooperative relationships between workers, capital “must… appropriate communication. It must expropriate the community and superimpose itself on the autonomous capability of manufacturing knowledge…”

The socialized worker’s labour is more productive than that of the mass worker. It is endowed with a very high level of productive potential because it is capable of setting in motion the productive potentiality of the whole of society. … At all levels and in all contexts, community has increasingly become the foundation of the productivity of labour…. Today capitalist expropriation no longer takes place through wages alone. Given the conditions we have described, expropriation no longer simply consists in the expropriation of the producer, but, in the most immediate sense, in the expropriation of the producers’ community. … Advanced capitalism directly expropriates labouring cooperation. Capital has penetrated the entire society by means of technological and political instruments… to anticipate, organize and subsume each of the forms of labouring cooperation which are established in society in order to generate a higher level of productivity. Capital has insinuated itself everywhere, and everywhere attempts to acquire the power to coordinate, commandeer and recuperate value. But the raw material on which the very high level of productivity of the socialized worker is based… is science, communication and the communication of knowledge. Capital must, therefore, appropriate communication. [42]

But in doing this, capital must diffuse the informational tools of production into workers’ hands. And the skills and social relationships capital profits off of become an inseparable part of the worker’s mind and personality. Unlike the case of the physical factory, where management could search workers’ lunchboxes for tools and parts on the way out the door, employers cannot force workers to upload their knowledge and skill, or their social relationships, to a company mainframe when they clock out.

By informating production, capital seems to augment its powers of control. But it simultaneously stimulates capacities that threaten to escape its command and overspill into rivulets irrelevant to, or even subversive of, profit. [43]

In many areas of production, the communication and information processing tools used in the workplace are becoming virtually indistinguishable from those used in the social sphere. Wikis and blogs, and social media like Twitter, developed primarily for use outside the workplace, have been seized on by champions of the “Wikified Firm” or “Enterprise 2.0” as tools for coordinating production within the workplace. At the same time, open-sourced desktop or browser-based utilities are frequently more productive and usable than the proprietary “productivity software” forced on workers in the workplace. As Tom Coates put it, “the gap between what can be accomplished at home and what can be accomplished in a work environment has narrowed dramatically over the last ten to fifteen years.” [44]

Since Marx’s day, his simple schema of the circuit of capital (production and circulation) has expanded to encompass virtually all of society, including both the reproduction of nature and the reproduction of labor-power — the “social factory.” [45] And, Dyer-Witheford notes, the map of the circuit of capital, in addition to being something capital seeks to control through automation and cybernetics, is also a map of capital’s vulnerabilities.

…[T]he cartography of capital’s circuit maps not just its strength but also its weaknesses. In plotting the nodes and links necessary to capital’s flow, it also charts the points where those continuities can be ruptured. At every moment we will see how people oppose capital’s technological discipline by refusal or reappropriation; how these struggles multiply throughout capital’s orbit; how conflicts at one point precipitate crises in another; and how activists are using the very machines with which capital integrates its operations to connect their diverse rebellions. In particular, …the development of new means of communication vital for the smooth flow of capital’s circuit — …especially computer networks — also creates the opportunity for otherwise isolated and dispersed points of insurgency to connect and combine with one another. The circuit of high-technology capital thus also provides the pathways for the circulation of struggles. [46]

…In virtual capitalism, the immediate point of production cannot be considered the “privileged” site of struggle. Rather, the whole of society becomes a wired workplace — but also a potential site for the interruption of capital’s integrated circuit. [47]

Dyer-Witheford wrote in the early days of a trend towards networked struggles and comprehensive campaigns (his most notable example was the Justice for Janitors campaign in Silicon Valley), based in the entire social factory rather than in a particular workplace. [48]

…workers’ organizations have entered into experimental coalitions with other social movements also in collision with corporate order, such as welfare, antipoverty, students, consumer, and environmental groups. The result has been new oppositional combinations. Thus striking telephone workers join seniors, minorities, and consumer groups to beat back rate hikes, or unionizing drives in the ghettos of the fast food and clothing industries intertwine with campaigns against racism and the persecution of immigrants. … [Such alliances] expand the boundaries of official “labor” politics, so that the agency of countermobilization against capital begins to become, not so much the trade union, defined as a purely workplace organization, but rather the “labor/community alliance,” with a broader, social sphere of demands and interests. [49]

Although it was written after the completion of Cyber Marx, the Empire trilogy, coauthored by Negri and Michael Hardt, was a masterpiece of the autonomist tradition. And in particular the concept of “Exodus,” developed in the last book of the trilogy (Commonwealth) was a direct outgrowth of the ideas in Negri’s earlier work as well as Dyer-Witheford’s.

…the trend toward the hegemony or prevalence of immaterial production in the processes of capitalist valorization. … Images, information, knowledge, affects, codes, and social relationships… are coming to outweigh material commodities or the material aspects of commodities in the capitalist valorization process. This means, of course, not that the production of material goods… is disappearing or even declining in quantity but rather that their value is increasingly dependent on and subordinated to immaterial factors and goods. … What is common to these different forms of labor… is best expressed by their biopolitical character. … Living beings as fixed capital are at the center of this transformation, and the production of forms of life is becoming the basis of added value. This is a process in which putting to work human faculties, competences, and knowledges — those acquired on the job but, more important, those accumulated outside work interacting with automated and computerized productive systems — is directly productive of value. One distinctive feature of the work of head and heart, then, is that paradoxically the object of production is really a subject, defined… by a social relationship or a form of life. [50]

Capitalist accumulation today is increasingly external to the production process, such that exploitation takes the form of expropriation of the common. [51]

To be sure Negri recently backtracked to some extent on his earlier focus on Exodus, based on what I consider a false lesson taken from the ostensible “failure” of horizontalist movements like M15, Syntagma and Occupy. In a 2015 interview he criticized the “exclusive horizontalism” of the 2011 movements, and suggested based on his assessment of those movements that a partial shift of focus towards seizing power was necessary.

…I must confess that I have developed a problem in recent years. If I am asked to assess the struggles of 2011, I can’t help but concentrate my critical remarks on the question of horizontality — or of exclusive horizontality, at least. I have to criticize it because I think that there is no project or political development capable of transforming horizontal spontaneity into an institutional reality. I think, instead, that this passage must be governed in some way or another. Governed from below, of course, on the basis of shared programs, but always bearing in mind the necessity of having, in this passage, an organized political force capable of constituting itself and of managing this transformation.

I think that the present state of the movement forces us to be self-critical about what happened in 2011, and I think this self-criticism must focus on the question of political organization. …

On this question of struggle at the institutional level and of political organization, I would like to conclude with two more general propositions. The first one is that after 2011 horizontality must be criticized and overcome, clearly and unambiguously — and not just in a Hegelian sense. Secondly, the situation is probably ripe enough to attempt once again that most political of passages: the seizure of power. We have understood the question of power for too long in an excessively negative manner. Now we can reinterpret the question of power in terms of multitudes, in terms of absolute democracy — that is to say, in terms of a democracy that goes beyond canonical institutional forms such as monarchy, aristocracy and “democracy.” I believe that today the problem of democracy is best formulated and addressed in terms of the multitude. [52]

…[C]lass struggle in the biopolitical context takes the form of exodus. By exodus here we mean… a process of subtraction from the relationship with capital by means of actualizing the potential autonomy of labor-power. Exodus is thus not a refusal of the productivity of biopolitical labor-power but rather a refusal of the increasingly restrictive fetters placed on its productive capacities by capital. It is an expression of the productive capacities that exceed the relationship with capital achieved by stepping through the opening in the social relation of capital and across the threshold. As a first approximation, then, think of this form of class struggle as a kind of maroonage. Like the slaves who collectively escape the chains of slavery to construct self-governing communities and quilombos, biopolitical labor-power subtracting from its relation to capital must discover and construct new social relationships, new forms of life that allow it to actualize its productive powers. But unlike that of the maroons, this exodus does not necessarily mean going elsewhere. We can pursue a line of flight while staying right here, by transforming the relations of production and mode of social organization under which we live. [53]

First, I think assessments that the wave of movements that began in 2011 somehow “failed” are fundamentally wrong-headed. The very choice of the word “failure” ignores the fact that networked struggles like Seattle, the Arab Spring and Occupy tend to reproduce themselves from one geographical location to another. Note that the following extended passage was written after the Seattle movement, but before the Arab Spring:

Traditionally… the geographical expansion of movements takes the form of an international cycle of struggles in which revolts spread from one local context to another like a contagious disease through the communication of common practices and desires. …

A new international cycle finally emerged around the issues of globalization in the late 1990s. The coming-out party of the new cycle of struggles were the protests at the WTO summit in Seattle in 1999…. Suddenly the riots against IMF austerity programs in one country, protests against a World Bank project in another, and demonstrations against NAFTA in a third were all revealed to be elements of a common cycle of struggles… We should emphasize, once again, that what the forces mobilized in this new global cycle have is not just a common enemy — whether it be called neoliberalism, U.S. hegemony, or global Empire — but also common practices, languages, conduct, habits, forms of life, and desires for a better future. The cycle, in other words, is not only reactive but also active and creative. …

The global mobilization of the common in this new cycle of struggle does not negate or even overshadow the local nature or singularity of each struggle. The communication with other struggles, in fact, reinforces the power and augments the wealth of each single one. Consider, for example, the revolt that broke out in Argentina on the nineteenth and twentieth of December 2001 in the midst of economic crisis and has continued in different forms, with successes and failures, ever since. …The response of the Argentine population was immediate and creative: industrial workers refused to let their factories close and took over managing the factories themselves, networks of neighborhood and city assemblies were formed to manage political debates and decisions, new forms of money were invented to allow for autonomous exchange, and the piqueteros, the movements of employed…, experimented with new forms of protest in their conflicts with police and other authorities. All of this is clearly specific to the national situation, but it is also… common to all those who suffer and struggle against the exploitation and hierarchy of the global system. The revolt of Argentina was born with the common heritage of the global cycle of struggle at its back. …

The global cycle of struggles develops in the form of distributed network. Each local struggle functions as a node that communicates with all the other nodes without any hub or center of intelligence. Each struggle remains singular and tied to its local conditions but at the same time is immersed in the common web. This form of organization is the most fully realized example we have of the multitude. [54]

Both David Graeber and Immanuel Wallerstein regard the various networked movements since the EZLN uprising in 1994 as a continuing “revolutionary cycle” or “Fourth World War.” — in Wallerstein’s opinion being “the beginning of the counteroffensive of the world left against the relatively short-lived successes of the world right between the 1970s and 1994….” [55]

So rather than asking “What happened to Occupy?” or “What happened to 15-M?” as though they were discrete entities with a beginning and an end, it makes more sense to think of the whole trajectory of movements including the Arab Spring, M15 and Syntagma, Madison, Occupy, Quebec, the N14 General Strike, and so on, as one loose global network of associated networked movements. This loose, networked movement is always throwing up new avatars, with new names, which appear to decline after a while. But when something new arises — and it always does, whether in the same country or halfway around the world — it’s built on the same infrastructure and foundations, and the same social capital, as its predecessors. And the process represents a spiral rather than a mere cycle, with each iteration transcending the previous one. Here’s how Nathan Schneider described the phenomenon in an interview:

What did Occupy Wall Street succeed at? What did it fail at?

It very powerfully succeeded at introducing activists from around the country to one another and turned a lot of people into activists that weren’t before. It produced a tremendous number of networks, both online and offline, which continue to mobilize people on a number of fronts, though few are still called Occupy. …

What innovation in this area do you think is in store for us in the future? What should we be getting excited about?

…This is a movement that has an endless number of clever ideas appearing all the time, but it’s never clear which ones are going to rise above the rest until it happens. The next big idea might very well not be called “Occupy”, which may be a good thing — but the chances are high that, even so, it will be the result of networks that were forged during the Occupy movement. [56]

John Holloway dismisses concerns about the institutional continuity or persistence of any particular movement.

Before we can break with capital altogether, you suggest we begin by ‘cracking’ it in different places and times. Yet these ‘cracks’, as you call them, seem to flourish particularly in times of crisis. We saw this in the popular uprising in Argentina in 2001-’02, as Marina Sitrin powerfully portrayed in her book Everyday Revolutions, and we’re seeing it in Southern Europe today. Do you think there is a way to perpetuate such cracks beyond these economic ‘hard times’? Or is this type of autonomous popular self-organization bound to be something that flourishes in times of crisis and then secedes back into this kind of Kirchnerismo-style state capitalist populism?

I don’t know, first I don’t think times necessarily get better and secondly I’m not sure that we should worry too much about perpetuation. If you look at Argentina, there was clearly a sense that things did get better. Like the economy, rates of profit recovered, in which a lot of the movements of 2001 and 2002 became sucked in into the state. But the problems have obviously reappeared somewhere else. If you look at Spain and Greece, firstly there are no short-term perspectives of things getting substantially better. Secondly, if they did get better, then the crisis would move on somewhere else. And the search for alternative ways of living moves on.

I think there is an accumulation of experience, and also an accumulation of growing awareness that spreads from one country to another, that capitalism just isn’t working and that it is in serious problems. I think that people in Greece look to Argentina and recognize the importance of the experiences of 10 years ago. And I think that people in Argentina — even if things have improved economically for them — look to Greece and see the instability of capitalism. The failure of capitalism is showing up again in another place. I think there is a growing sense throughout the world that capitalism isn’t working. There is a growing confidence perhaps that the cracks we create or the crazinesses we create may really be the basis for a new world and a new society, and may really be the only way forward.

What I don’t like about the idea of perpetuation is that it has to be a smooth upward progress. I don’t think it works like that. I think it’s more like a social flow of rebellion, something that moves throughout the world, with eruptions in one place and then in another place. But there are continuities below the discontinuities. We have to think in terms of disrupting bubbling movements rather than thinking that it all depends on whether we can perpetuate the movement in one place. If we think in terms of perpetuation in one place, I think at times it can lead us into either an institutionalization, which I think is not much help, or it can lead us into a sense of defeat, perhaps, which I don’t think is right. [57]

The most important thing to remember, as Graeber points out, is that “once people’s political horizons have been broadened, the change is permanent.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans (and not only Americans, of course, but Greeks, Spaniards, and Tunisians) now have direct experience of self-organization, collective action, and human solidarity. This makes it almost impossible to go back to one’s previous life and see things the same way. While the world’s financial and political elites skate blindly toward the next 2008-scale crisis, we’re continuing to carry out occupations of buildings, farms, foreclosed homes, and workplaces — temporary or permanent — organizing rent strikes, seminars, and debtors’ assemblies, and in doing so, laying the groundwork for a genuinely democratic culture, and introducing the skills, habits, and experience that would make an entirely new conception of politics come to life. [58]

But second, and at least as important, we have to ask ourselves what kind of “success” is likely to be achieved by leavening predominantly horizontal movements with a bit of verticalism in the form of electoral movements. Admittedly, the idea of supplementing horizontalist movements based on prefigurative politics and counter-institution building, with auxiliary political parties aimed at capturing the state and running political interference for the real effort of building the new society within the shell of the old, or perhaps helping the transition process along, sounds superficially plausible. The problem is that, in practice, such political parties wind up sucking the energy and life out of the counter-institution building effort in civil society, and diverting it instead into parliamentary politics. Or worse yet, when political parties formed out of horizontalist movements actually achieve state power, as with Syriza in Greece, they actually sabotage the efforts of those movements or give away their gains on the ground in order to cut a “realistic” deal with capitalist states. [59]

[Read the rest of Carson’s Study via PDF] Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 20 (Spring 2016)

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

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

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

• John Holloway
• Michel Bauwens
• Accelerationism

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

Areas of commonality

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

Stephanie McMillan
Kate Aronoff

Conclusion

Notes:

24. Dyer-Witheford, pp. 43-47.
25. Ibid., pp. 48-49.
26. Ibid., p. 50.
27. Ibid., p. 52.
28. Ibid., p. 53.
29. Ibid., pp. 53-54.
30. Ibid., p. 56.
31. Ibid., pp. 57-59.
32. Ibid., p. 60.
33. Ibid., p. 65.
34. Ibid., pp. 70-71.
35. Ibid., pp. 80-81.
36. Ibid., p. 84.
37. Antonio Negri, “Marx Beyond Marx: Working Notes on the Grundrisse (1979),” in Antonio Negri, Revolution Retrieved: Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects, 1967-1983. Volume 1 of the Red Notes Italian Archive. Introductory Notes by John Merrington (London: Red Notes, 1988), p. 166.
38. Ibid., pp. 162-163.
39. Ibid., p. 165.
40. Ibid., p. 166.
41. Dyer-Witheford p. 84.
42. Antonio Negri, “Expropriation in Mature Capitalism,” in The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century. Translated by James Newell (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1989), pp. 115-116.
43. Dyer-Witheford, p. 85.
44. Tom Coates, “(Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything…” Plasticbag.org, September 3, 2003 <http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/09/weblogs_and_the_mass_amateurisation_of_nearly_everything>
45. Dyer-Witheford, pp. 91-92.
46. Ibid., pp. 97-99.
47. Ibid., p. 129.
48. Ibid., p. 99.
49. Ibid.
50. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2009), pp. 132-133.
51. Ibid., p. 137.
52. “Toni Negri: from the refusal of labor to the seizure of power,” ROAR Magazine, January 18, 2015 <https://roarmag.org/essays/negri-interview-multitude-metropolis/>.
53. Negri and Hardt, Commonwealth, pp. 152-153.
54. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Multitude: War and Democracy in an Age of Empire (Penguin, 2004), pp. 213-217.
55. David Graeber, “Situating Occupy Lessons From the Revolutionary Past,” InterActivist Info Exchange, December 4, 2011 <http://interactivist.autonomedia.org/node/36685>; Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Neo-Zapatistas: Twenty Years After,” Immanuel Wallerstein, May 1, 2014 <http://www.iwallerstein.com/neozapatistas-twenty-years/>.
56. Joel Dietz, ““Occupy Wall Street turned movements into international networks that didn’t exist before,” OuiShare, January 7, 2013 <http://ouishare.net/2013/01/nathan-schneider-occupy-wall-street/>.
57. Jerome Roos, “Talking About a Revolution With John Holloway,” John Holloway, April 13, 2013 <http://www.johnholloway.com.mx/2013/05/01/talking-about-a-revolution-with-john-holloway/>.
58. Graeber, The Democracy Project, xix-xx.
59. https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/syriza-did-not-support-the-commons/2016/01/02

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The post Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real 2: Categories of Leftist Techno-Utopianism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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

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

• John Holloway
• Michel Bauwens
• Accelerationism

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

• Areas of commonality

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

• Stephanie McMillan
• Kate Aronoff

Conclusion

Too often state socialists and verticalists react dismissively to commons-based peer production and other networked, open-source visions of socialism, either failing to see any significant difference between them and the vulgar ’90s dotcom hucksterism of Newt Gingrich, or worse yet seeing them as a Trojan horse for the latter.

There is some superficial similarity in the rhetoric and symbols used by those respective movements. But in their essence they are very different indeed.

I. Capitalist Techno-Utopianism from Daniel Bell On

According to Nick Dyer-Witheford, capitalist techno-utopianism is “the immediate descendant of a concept of the late 1960s — postindustrial society.” And post-industrial society, in turn, was an outgrowth of Daniel Bell’s earlier “end of ideology” thesis.

Postwar affluence, the institutionalization of collective bargaining, and the welfare state had banished the class conflicts of an earlier era from the scene. [Western industrial] societies presented the successful socioeconomic model toward which other experiments, including those in the “underdeveloped” and “socialist” world, would gradually converge. This was the condition of the “end of ideology” — which meant, in general, an end of alternatives to liberal capitalism…. [1]

According to Bell, post-industrialism meant that knowledge would become “society’s central wealth-producing resource.” This change would bring with it a shift from heavy manufacturing to the tertiary economy of services and from “manual labor to the preeminence of professional and technical work,” meaning that the dominant figures would be

scientists, engineers, and administrators, a new “knowledge class” lodged primarily within government and academia, bearers of the rationalist skills and virtues required by increasing organizational and technological complexity. Bell argue that the endeavors of this new class could create an epoch of rationalized integration and prosperity, which… would finally escape from the material want, economic crisis, and class conflict of the industrial era. [2]

Knowledge would “replace both labor and capital as the main factor of production,” with the conflict between workers and capitalist being transcended by an emerging new class of professionals, “based on knowledge rather than property.”

Capital will be transformed by technical and administrative experts, abandoning fixation with profit, becoming more socially responsible, and giving “moral issues” equal priority with balance sheets. Labor too will be transfigured. Technological development will raise living standards, automate manual toil, and thereby liquidate Marx’s subject of history — the immiserated industrial proletariat. [3]

The primary enemy of this emerging technocratic utopia was radical politics.

Rational progress — embodied in the technocratic state and its knowledge elite — is under siege by the irrational protest by the New Left, student revolt, affirmative action groups, and an “adversary culture.” Only if the pilotage of society is entrusted to the cadres of technical experts, scientists, engineers, and administrators will chaos be avoided and the dawning era safely ushered in. [4]

But in fact all these beliefs could be attributed almost verbatim to the ideologists of the Progressive movement at the turn of the 20th century. Progressivism had its origins as the ideology of the managerial and professional stratum which ran the new, large institutions (corporations, regulatory agencies, universities, large municipal governments, public school systems and foundations) that sprang up to dominate society in the late 19th century.

The first corporate managers came from an industrial engineering background. They saw the corporation — as well as other large organizations — as something to be rationalized the same way engineers on the factory floor rationalized the production process. According to Rakesh Khurana they sought to apply the engineer’s approach of standardizing and rationalizing tools, processes and systems to rationalizing the organization. [5]

And as time passed and the kinds of organizations they headed came to be the hegemonic norm that characterized the larger society, they came to view outside society as a whole as something to be organized and managed by the same scientific principles that governed the large organization. Yehouda Shenhav described, in Manufacturing Rationality: The Engineering Foundations of the Managerial Revolution, the transfer of mechanical and industrial engineers’ understanding of production processes to the management of organizations, and of the managers’ understanding of organizations to society as a whole. [6]

Since the difference between the physical, social, and human realms was blurred by acts of translation, society itself was conceptualized and treated as a technical system. As such, society and organizations could, and should, be engineered as machines that are constantly being perfected. Hence, the management of organizations (and society at large) was seen to fall within the province of engineers. Social, cultural, and political issues… could be framed and analyzed as “systems” and “subsystems” to be solved by technical means. [7]

Probably the most important feature of Progressivism, and its closest point of intersection with liberal post-industrialism, was its focus on the application of disinterested expertise as transcending politics and class conflict. Of course it’s no coincidence this was the heyday of Taylorist “scientific management,” whose purpose was to suppress labor conflict on the shop floor by substituting the manager’s and engineer’s expertise for the skilled worker’s direction of the work process. And according to Shenhav

[l]abor unrest and other political disagreements of the period were treated by mechanical engineers as simply a particular case of machine uncertainty to be dealt with in much the same manner as they had so successfully dealt with technical uncertainty. Whatever disrupted the smooth running of the organizational machine was viewed and constructed as a problem of uncertainty. [8]

Christopher Lasch argued that for the new managerial class

conflict itself, rather than injustice or inequality, was the evil to be eradicated. Accordingly, they proposed to reform society… by means of social engineering on the part of disinterested experts who could see the problem whole and who could see it essentially as a problem of resources… the proper application and conservation of which were the work of enlightened administration. [9]

Going back to Shenhav, “American management theory was presented as a scientific technique administered for the good of society as a whole without relation to politics.” [10] Taylor saw bureaucracy as “a solution to ideological cleavages, as an engineering remedy to the war between the classes.” [11] At the level of state policy, the Progressives’ professionalized approach to politics was “perceived to be objective and rational, above the give-and-take of political conflict.” It reflected “a pragmatic culture in which conflicts were diffused and ideological differences resolved.” [12] Both Progressives and industrial engineers “were horrified at the possibility of ‘class warfare’” and saw “efficiency” as a means to “social harmony, making each workman’s interest the same as that of his employers.” [13]

The end of ideology and post-industrialism exemplified all these earlier qualities of Progressivism in full measure. And so, equally, have all the various strands of capitalist techno-utopianism that have emerged from the 1990s on.

Bell’s post-industrialist thesis intersected, in the 1970s, with the rise of networked digital communications and the personal computer revolution. The result was a new wave of techno-utopian literature exemplified by Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave and John Naisbett’sMegatrends.

Exponents of this model have used exuberantly optimistic, “revolutionary” or utopian rhetoric about the nature of the social transformations that can be expected.

The undesirable features of industrial society — meaningless work, huge impersonal organizations, rigid routines and hierarchies, anonymous and alienating urban existences — are seen dissolving. In their place the information age holds out the hope of diversification, localism, flexibility, creativity, and equality. Promises include the computer-aided recovery of craft skills and artisanal traditions…; the revivication of domestic life in an electronic cottage; the participatory democracy of electronic town halls; and a historically unprecedented diffusion of every sort of knowledge — “all information in all places at all times.” [14]

The liberal capitalist variant of information age utopianism is distinguished — like its Progressive and post-industrial antecedents — by its hand-waving away of class antagonism. The transition to Third Wave information capitalism will be peaceful. It will be positive-sum and benefit everybody, rendering the old class struggles irrelevant. [15]

But the class struggles remain very much real — only under post-industrialism they center on the ownership, not of land or physical capital, but of knowledge. Dyer-Witheford’s reference above to knowledge as a “wealth-creating resource” is central to the real nature of capitalist techno-utopianism.

“The generation of wealth increasingly depends on an ‘information economy’ in which the exchange and manipulation of symbolic data matches exceeds, or subsumes the importance of material processing.” [16]

As Manuel Castells summed up the post-industrial thesis:

1. The source of productivity and growth lies in the generation of knowledge, extended to all realms of economic activity through information processing.
2. Economic activity would shift from goods production to services delivery….
3. The new economy would increase the importance of occupations with a high informational and knowledge content in their activity. Managerial, professional, and technical occupations would grow faster than any other occupational position and would constitute the core of the new social structure. [17]

Toffler described it as a “new system of accelerated wealth creation” based on “the exchange of data, information and knowledge.” Land and labor are less important than the knowledge that can find substitutes for them. [18]

The same principle resurfaces in one of the most recent iterations of post-industrialism, Paul Romer’s “New Growth Theory.” The main source of growth is not simply adding inputs of material resources or labor, which are finite, but developing better ideas — which can be imitated without limit — on how to use the same amount of resources and labor in more effective ways. [19]

The problem is that, absent coercion, the natural result of ephemeralization — the use of knowledge to reduce the material inputs required for production — is deflation. The only way to transform this improved efficiency into wealth — money wealth — is prevent competition from diffusing the benefits and making things cheaper for everybody.

Knowledge can only be a wealth-creating resource — or capital — if it is owned. It can function as a source of rents only if it is enclosed, if access to it is restricted, if tribute can be demanded for allowing such access.

It’s no coincidence that the most fervent enthusiasts of the “Information Superhighway” in the ’90s, were also strident advocates of draconian “intellectual property” laws and subsidies to the telecom industry. Newt Gingrich’s Progress and Freedom Foundation issued a pamphlet called “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” whose agenda included proposals that sounded remarkably like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Telecommunications Act.

And it’s likewise no coincidence that Romer’s model of growth relies heavily on “intellectual property” for monetizing the increased productivity as rents to investors rather than allowing it to deflate prices for consumers.

Romer: …When we speak of institutions, economists mean more than just organizations. We mean conventions, even rules, about how things are done. The understanding which most sharply distinguishes science from the market has to do with property rights. In the market, the fundamental institution is the notion of private ownership, that an individual owns a piece of land or a body of water or a barrel of oil and that individual has almost unlimited scope to decide how that resource should be used.

In science we have a very different ethic. When somebody discovers something like the quadratic formula or the Pythagorean theorem, the convention in science is that he can’t control that idea. He has to give it away. He publishes it. What’s rewarded in science is dissemination of ideas. And the way we reward it is we give the most prestige and respect to those people who first publish an idea.

reason: Yet there is a mechanism in the market called patents and copyright, for quasi-property rights in ideas.

Romer: That’s central to the theory. To the extent that you’re using the market system to refine and bring ideas into practical application, we have to create some kind of control over the idea. That could be through patents. It could be through copyright. It might even be through secrecy…. [20]

Although Romer classifies “intellectual property” as an “institution of the market,” it is in fact no such thing (except perhaps insofar as it’s an institution that enables people to charge money for something on the “market,” in the sense of the cash nexus, that would otherwise be naturally free). The fact that he distinguishes IP, as an “institution of the market,” from “institutions of science” like free sharing of knowledge, is an admission that for him the “market” is not simply the realm of voluntary interaction but the cash nexus as such. “Intellectual property” is an artificial creation of the state. Romer — again — implicitly admits as much, arguing that the natural functioning of the market price-setting mechanism, under which price tends towards marginal production cost, is inadequate to pay back the original outlays for R&D. [21] In fact he explicitly argues for the superiority of monopoly pricing over market competition for some purposes.

There was an old, simplistic notion that monopoly was always bad. It was based on the realm of objects — if you only have objects and you see somebody whose cost is significantly lower than their price, it would be a good idea to break up the monopoly and get competition to reign freely. So in the realm of things, of physical objects, there is a theoretical justification for why you should never tolerate monopoly. But in the realm of ideas, you have to have some degree of monopoly power. There are some very important benefits from monopoly, and there are some potential costs as well. What you have to do is weigh the costs against the benefits. [22]

Romer’s model is essentially Schumpeterian, in the sense that Schumpeter regarded the market power of the monopoly corporation as “progressive” because it enabled it to charge a price above marginal cost in order to subsidize innovation. Hence Romer’s Schumpeterian schema precludes price-taking behavior in a competitive market; rather, it presupposes some form of market power (“monopolistic competition”) by which firms can set prices to cover average costs. Romer argues that his model of economic growth based on innovation is incompatible with price-taking behavior. A firm that invested significant sums in innovation, but sold only at marginal cost, could not survive as a price-taker. It is necessary, therefore, that the benefits of innovation — even though non-rival by their nature — be at least partially excludable through “intellectual property” law. [23]

And cognitive capitalism and Romer’s “new growth theory” are implicit in all the models of “progressive capitalism,” “green capitalism” and the like that we hear from Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Bono and their ilk. …

[Read the rest of Carson’s Study via PDF] Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 20 (Spring 2016)

Notes:

1. Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999). pp. 16-17.
2. Ibid., pp. 17-18.
3. Ibid., p. 19.
4. Ibid., p. 19.
5. Rakesh Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 56.
6. Yehouda Shenhav, Manufacturing Rationality: The Engineering Foundations of the Managerial Revolution (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
7. Ibid., p. 74.
8. Ibid., p. 174.
9. Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America (1889-1963): The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York: Vintage Books, 1965 ), p. 162.
10. Shenhav, p. 5.
11. Ibid., p. 8.
12. Ibid., p. 35.
13. Ibid., p. 96.
14. Dyer-Witheford, p. 25.
15. Ibid., pp. 26-27.
16. Ibid., p. 24.
17. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Blackwell Publishers, 1996), pp. 203-204.
18. Dyer-Witheford, p. 24.
19. Ronald Bailey, “Post-Scarcity Prophet: Economist Paul Romer on growth, technological change, and an unlimited human future” Reason, December 2001 <http://reason.com/archives/2001/12/01/post-scarcity-prophet/>.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Paul M. Romer, “Endogenous Technological Change” (December 1989). NBER Working Paper No. W3210.
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The post Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real (1) appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Reposted from Guerrilla Translation. Amador Fernández-Savater, interviews John Holloway. The original Spanish text was translated by Richard Mac Duinnsleibhe and edited by Arianne Sved.

In 2002, John Holloway published a landmark book: Change the world without taking power. Inspired by the ‘¡Ya basta!’ [Enough is enough!] of the Zapatistas, by the movement that emerged in Argentina in 2001/2002 and by the anti-globalisation 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.

He discerns another concept of social change is 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 organisation 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 recognise each other and connect.

But after Argentina’s “que se vayan todos” [let them all go away] came the Kirchner government, and after Spain’s “no nos representan” [they don’t represent us] 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-organised 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.

John Holloway. I think the central element is labour, understood as wage labour. In other words, alienated or abstract labour. Wage labour 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 labour movement: the struggle of wage labour against capital. But its struggle was limited because wage labour is the complement of capital, not its negation.

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

John Holloway: One way of understanding the connection would be as follows: if you start off from the definition of labour as wage or alienated labour, 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 labour 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…

John Holloway. 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 labour 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 labour entails, at the same time, a critique of the institutional and organisational 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.

John Holloway. 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 labour power in order to survive. But in another, each one of us has dreams, behaviours and projects that don’t fit into the capitalist definition of labour.

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?

John Holloway. 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?

John Holloway

John Holloway. 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 channelling 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?

John Holloway: 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?

John Holloway. 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 recognising 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?

Amador Fernández-Savater

John Holloway. 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 recognise 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 labour. 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 monetised, 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.

Produced by Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License.

Illustrations by ANDRECO

Original article published at eldiario.es

This Translation has also been republished in:

Reflections on a Revolution

Cunning Hired Knaves

The post Cracking Capitalism vs. The State Option appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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.”

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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

The post John Holloway on Changing the World Without Taking Power appeared first on P2P Foundation.