This book should be read through to its end, i.e. chapter five, because its first four chapters on the precariat are only set in a more complex geopolitical context in that final chapter. To be honest, I was quite reactive at times during the reading of the first four chapters, because two very important structural elements were missing in Foti’s analysis. First is the commons itself, the other side of the antagonistic struggles of the precariat; and second is the ecological crisis, the very material conditions under which this struggle must occur today. Foti indeed calls for economic and monetary growth, and sounds like an unabashed neo-Keynesian, but only in the last chapter does he stress that this growth should be thermodynamically sound (i.e. he calls for monetary growth, but not growth in material services). Foti also almost completely ignores the role of the commons and ‘commonalism’ in the first four chapters, only acknowledging in a few parts of chapter 5, that it is a vital, constituent part of the precarious condition. If you don’t read chapter 5, you could mistakenly see Foti’s analysis as an exercise in re-imagining the class dynamics and compromises of the New Deal and post-WWII European welfare states, simply replacing working class with precariat, working class parties with social populism, and the New Deal with a social compact for green capitalism. For example, it would have really helped to know from the beginning that Foti realizes that material growth is impossible, something not clear in his language until the last chapter.

So, the fact that this is a remarkably well thought-out book about contemporary strategy for social change should be tempered by a few paradoxes that the author has not completely resolved.

Indeed, at the heart of the book also lies an enduring paradox: Foti calls for the most radical forms of conflict, and identifies with the more radical cultural minorities, acknowledging their anticapitalist and anarchist ethos, yet calls for mere reformism as a focus and outcome. This is, therefore, not a book about transforming our societies to post-capitalist logics; this is a book about a new reformism. This is a book against neoliberalism, not against capitalism. At times, it is plain ‘capitalist realism’, as Foti explicitly acknowledges that he sees no dynamic value creation outside of capitalism. For Foti, it is clear that if sufficient conflict and precariat self-organisation can occur, then a new regulation of capitalism can occur. He justifies this by a detailed analysis of the different regulatory modes of capitalism (Smith-ism, Fordism, jobs-ism) and how they relate to the Kondratieff economic cycles, drawing on the insights of Carlota Perez and others. Foti distinguishes crises of demand, where there is too much accumulation of capital, and not enough distribution. These crises, he says, are essentially reformist crises as people mobilize to restore balance in the redistribution, but not against the system per se. The crisis of the 30s and the crisis after 2008 are such crises, he convincingly argues. Other crises are caused by a failing supply, due to over-regulation of capital and falling profit rates, such as the crisis of the 70s, and these crises, which are inflationary, are revolutionary. This distinction between crises of accumulation and crises of regulation is, in my opinion, very insightful and true. This recognition may, of course, be troubling, but if true, we must take serious stock of it. We simply are not in revolutionary times right now, but rather in a struggle between national populism and social populism. From this analysis, Foti then argues that the first priority is for the precariat to re-regulate for a distribution of wealth, much like the old working class achieved after WWII.

But even if we acknowledge this conjuncture, I would argue that Foti insufficiently balances his outlook between reforming capitalism and constructing post-capitalism, between antagonistic conflict and positive construction of the new. He argues that without income, there can be no such construction. This is very likely true, so we need to rebalance redistribution in a way that income growth can lead to immaterial growth compatible with the ecological limits of our planet, and use these surpluses to transform societal structures. Foti calls for social (or ‘eco’ populist) movements and coalitions as the political means to that end, pointing to Podemos and En Comu, and perhaps Sanders and Corbyn, as such forces, supported by to-be created Precariat Syndicates. He also puts forward the thesis that the enemy is national populism, an alliance between retrograde fossil fuel capitalism and the salariat. On the other side, we find a possible alliance of green capitalism (a real effort, not a marketing ploy) with the precariat, with the former fighting for top-down coalition and the second for bottom-up regulation. This division of the working class is, in my view, far too stark and perhaps even defeatist. I would very strongly argue to seek alliances and develop policies that can give hope to the salariat. The thrust of our work for the Commons Transition aims at precisely that. (Elsewhere in the book, Foti does call for an alliance with progressive middle classes, but if these are not the workers with jobs, where then are these?)

Foti correctly critiques, in my view, people like Mason and Rifkin for failing to problematize the post-capitalist transition. They make it seem like an inexorable process if not affirming that we are already post-capitalist, as some others do, but in my view, Foti himself fails to pay proper attention to this transition. What if the re-regulation of capitalism doesn’t work, for example? Then at some point, say in about 30 years, as Kondratieff cycles would indicate, we would still face a crisis of over-regulation, and a more revolutionary moment. For Foti, we have to take it on faith that green capitalism will be a successful new regulatory mode of capitalism. What if it turns out to be a unworkable compromise and that more drastic action is needed? But Foti has no faith in alternatives to capitalism, which means that the only alternatives would then be eco-fascism as a new feudalism with only consumption for the rich, lifeboat eco-hacking, a situation akin to that of medieval communes, or dictatorial eco-maoism — say, Cuba on a global scale.

Contra this ‘capitalist realism’, our contention at the P2P Foundation is that post-capitalism is both necessary and possible, even if we recognize that today is possibly a reformist moment in that evolution/transformation. In that context, the construction of seed forms, the recognition of other forms of value creation (which can be monetized!), of other forms of self-organization, are absolutely a vital side of the coin in the dialectic of construction and conflict. Foti seems to forget that the traditional working class did not simply ‘fight’, but constructed cooperatives (both consumer coops and producer coops), unions, parties, mutualities and many fraternal/sororal organizations. The very generalization of the welfare system was an extension, by means of the state, of the solidarity mechanisms of the working class, which had taken decades to develop. But vitally, the identity of the working class itself was always more than a mere reaction to capitalism: this was a movement toward another type of society, whether expressed through socialism, social-democracy, anarchism, and other variants. When that hope was all but lost, that was also the end of the strength and identity of working class movements. There can be no offensive social strategy without a strong social imaginary, and reformist designs alone won’t do. So commonalism (Foti’s term for what we’d call “commoning”) is not just something that we do when we come home from work, or tired from our conflictual organizing against an enemy from whom we want mere redistribution. On the contrary, it is vital part of the class formation and identity. This is why we stress our identity as not just precariat, which is a negative formulation that characterizes us as the weaker victims of the capitalist class, but as commoners, the multitude of co-constructors of viable futures that correspond to contemporary, emancipatory desires. We cannot simply trust green capitalism; we vitally need to build thermodynamically sound and mutualized provisioning systems as commons, even if we have to compromise with capitalism. Post-capitalism should not be essentialized as something occuring ‘after the revolution’, but as an ongoing process, dynamically inter-linked with political self-organizing and conflict.  In this book, Foti is only really good at conflict. Even if we look at conflict, I would argue that the strength of the reformist compromise after WWII was very much linked to the fear of the flawed alternative that existed, and that the forms of compromise were the result of decades of invention of new forms.

If we take that view, then I believe the contradiction in Foti’s book can be resolved. In that case, we do not have to ask the radical precariat to give up its values for a reformist compromise, but to productively combine them with a radically transformative post-capitalist practice.

There is another issue with Foti’s book. He strongly stresses the superdiversity of the precariat, and the key role of gender and race/migration unity in their struggles. He also mentions en passe the need for a potential Eurasian alignment between Europe and China, now that the Atlantic unity has been broken by Trump. But, at the same time, this is really a very Eurocentric book, calling for a new compromise in Europe and ‘advanced western states’. Obviously, since in the Global South it is the salariat and proletariat which are growing, there is a theoretical difficulty here. But what if, as we contend at the P2P Foundation, a thermodynamically sound economy would require a cosmo-localization of our global economy combining global sharing of knowledge with substantial relocalization of physical production (as even big bank reports now recognize)? Only if we acknowledge this, can we actually have a new global view of solidarity, as both elements benefit workers, salaried and precarious, in the whole world.

In conclusion, I find Foti’s book to be an excellent first half of a book, which would have been much better and sound if it had more extensively struggled with the commons equation of the precariat. The commons is not something we do ‘afterwards’, after a successful New Green Deal; it is something that is as ongoing and vital. Theoretically, in a few paragraphs at the end of the book, Foti seems to recognize this but does not integrate it in his strategic vision, or only marginally.

Readers who miss this aspect could look at the ten years of research and analysis the P2P Foundation has conducted on that other half of the equation. However, we may suffer from the other weakness. We have intentionally not focused on the conflict part — the natural inclination of the left, which needs no help. Instead, we focus on showing how the self-organization and construction of commons (which inevitably comes with conflict) is just as essential a part of the programmatic alternatives of the precariat. Not only as proposals of electoral parties and syndicates, but as expressions of actual practice. Our orientation is to try to achieve a greater understanding by emancipatory forces — of the salariat, the precariat, and progressive entrepreneurial groups — of the importance of integrating the commons as a programmatic element in their struggles and proposals. We will probably retain our bias towards the constructive side of the equation, fully aware that this alone is insufficient, and requires the kind of understanding of struggle and its attendant strategies as provided by Foti.

In conclusion, Foti’s enduring quality is to have systematically worked out what the conflict part of the equation entails, and that is a very important achievement. Bearing in mind what we think is missing in this book, there is nonetheless much to be learned. I believe that among the different perspectives and weaknesses in the approaches of people like Foti and the commons-centric approaches of the P2P Foundation (and others), there is ample room for convergence and mutual enrichment.

Photo by Andrew Gustar

The post A P2P review of Alex Foti’s General Theory of the Precariat appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Although this book covers much of the same ground, and does much of the same work, as autonomist and post-capitalist theories like Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth and Mason’s Postcapitalism, Olin-Wright comes from the entirely different tradition of analytical Marxism. This school approaches Marxist theory from a background of analytic philosophy and public choice theory; Wright himself is a sociologist, rather than a political economist.

This may explain why he rules out any comprehensive theory of history from the outset. Specifically, in Chapter Four, he rejects Marx’s model of a historical trajectory which views capitalism as a historic system with an end as well as a beginning, and of socialism as something which will fully emerge following the terminal crises of capitalism. As I will argue below, this amounts to discarding some extremely valuable tools for anticipating the course of post-capitalist transition.

I will say right now, just in passing, that Marx is far from the only thinker with historical theories of terminal crises and transition. Anarchist thinkers like Bakunin shared a very similar materialist conception of history with Marx. And a wide variety of thinkers including Thomas Hodgskin and J.A. Hobson have proceeded from non-Marxist theories of surplus extraction to overaccumulationist/underconsumptionist theories of terminal crisis that functionally overlap quite extensively with Marxist theories of late capitalism. Michel Bauwens’s theory of the twin crises of capitalism, threatening both the artificial abundance of natural resources and artificial scarcity of information that it depends on, are also quite convincing.

In Chapter Five, ruling out any comprehensive, universal schematic for the one ideal socialist society, Wright sketches out a few axes along which progress towards basic socialist values can be measured. The metrics all cluster around the basic values implied by the “social” in “socialism.”
He is less interested in dogmatic definitions of socialism based on formal ownership of the means of production than in squishy details like transfer rights and rights over distribution of the product. He also contrasts the concept of socialism, in the sense of “common” or “social ownership,” with both capitalist and state ownership. Social ownership can mean ownership by everyone in a given social unit — including a cooperative enterprise or a kibbutz. That doesn’t mean that state ownership can’t be a form of social ownership — but it requires a state that’s deeply democratic in character. In addition, Wright deliberately refrains from specifying the role of markets in a socialist system, explicitly leaving open the possibility that markets might be part of a system based on social power.

Socialism, as an overall system, is one in which not only are the means of production socially owned but economic decisions are determined primarily by “social power” (i.e., “power rooted in the capacity to mobilize people for cooperative, voluntary collective actions of various sorts in civil society”). A “democracy” is a political system in which the state is firmly subordinated to social power

So the degree of “socialism” is measured by three basic axes specifying the extent to which various social functions are subject to control by social power: Social empowerment over the way state power affects economic activity, over the way economic power shapes economic activity, and directly over economic activity itself.

“Social empowerment” on these three axes can be exercised through a wide variety of means and under a wide variety of models, which Wright elaborates on in detail in the following two chapters.

In defining the state, Wright rejects Weber’s “territorial monopoly of force” definition in favor of Michael Mann’s: “the organization with an administrative capacity to impose binding rules and regulations over territories.” This can include a monopoly of force as one of the means of imposing those rules, but not necessarily the most important means.

And a state according to Mann’s definition can take on an only tenuously statelike character, if the binding rules apply only to a network of self-selected bodies for whom agreement on basic rule-sets is necessary. In this regard it is compatible with a number of Saint-Simonian theories of the state’s function devolving (or “withering away”) “from government of people to the administration of things,” including Proudhon’s and Marx’s. The most relevant contemporary theory is probably that of the Partner State, originally formulated by Cosma Orsi and recently popularized by Michel Bauwens of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives. In this vision, the Partner State functions less as a traditional state than as a basic support infrastructure, utility or platform on which a society of commons-based peer production depends.

In discussing alternative transitional strategies, Wright distinguishes between views of systemic change centered on rupture and those centered on metamorposis. The latter category he divides into interstitial and symbiotic strategies. Symbiotic strategies attempt to promote pro-working class transformations through changes that also simultaneously solve crises of capitalism (sounding a lot like Gorz’s “non-reformist reforms”).

Ruptural and interstitial strategies, in particular, correspond fairly closely to (respectively) Old Left strategies based on organizational mass and insurrectional seizure of power, and contemporary horizontalist strategies based on prefigurative institutions and counter-power.

In ruptural strategies, classes organized through political parties are the central collective actors…. Interstitial strategies revolve around social movements rooted in a heterogeneous set of constituencies, interests, and identities. On one social category is privileged as the leader of the project of transformation. Different collective actors will be best positioned to engage in different kinds of interstitial strategies….

Ruptural strategies envision a political process that culminates in a frontal attack on the state. State power is essential for transcending capitalism…. Interstitial strategies in contrast operate outside the state and try as much as possible to avoid confrontations with state power. The core idea is to build counter-hegemonic institutions in society. There might be contexts in which struggles against the state could be required to create or defend these spaces, but the core of the strategy is to work outside the state.” Symbiotic strategies, finally, envision treating the state as terrain for struggle “in which the possibility exists of using the state to build social power both within the state itself and in other sites of power.

Unlike ruptural strategies which treat war as a central metaphor, interstitial ones are “more like a complex ecological system in which one kind of organism initially gains a foothold in a niche but eventually out-competes rivals for food sources and so comes to dominate the wider environment.”

Wright himself is “quite skeptical of the possibility of system-wide ruptural strategies” given the institutional situation in the early 21st century, and at one point seems to dismiss support for them as mainly the province of young, romantic activists. Nevertheless he considers them worthy of study not only to identify their shortcomings and delineate their differences with other strategies, but also because they may be more relevant under special circumstances or local conditions, and may become relevant on a large scale again as a result of unforeseen systemic changes.

At the same time, in considering circumstances where a ruptural strategy may be viable, he blurs the practical lines between ruptural and symbiotic strategies. In Western liberal democracies, he argues, a successful ruptural strategy will be likely to take a primarily parliamentary and electoral route, with broad popular support, rather than an insurrectional one. The rupture, in the sense of radical systemic transformation, may be real; but it will be accomplished through democratic seizure of the state and “deepening democracy,” rather than overthrowing the state from outside.

Wright’s “most likely scenario” for a successful ruptural strategy seems to reinforce his initial skepticism; he is pretty pessimistic for the retention of power and successful completion of socialist construction after electoral success. He concludes by suggesting that the interstitial strategy might be more realistic and promising.

Like the postcapitalists, Wright mentions the transition from feudalism to capitalism as an example of interstitial transformation. He mentions the reference to “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old” in the I.W.W. Preamble and Colin Ward’s statement that “the parts are already at hand” in Anarchy in Action as examples of interstitialism as a conscious strategy. He also cites the WSF slogan “another world is possible”: “much of what they have in mind are anarchist-inflected grassroots initiatives to create worker and consumer cooperatives, fair-trade networks, cross-border labor standards campaigns, and other institutions that directly embody the alternative world they desire in the here and now.”

Wright’s main disagreement with the post-capitalists is his dismissal of materialist theories of terminal crisis behind the transition process.

Although interstitial and symbiotic strategies are conceptually distinct, and many of the advocates of each disparage the other, Wright considers them potentially complementary.

These differ primarily in terms of their relationship to the state. Both envision a trajectory of change that progressively enlarges the social spaces of social empowerment, but interstitial strategies largely by-pass the state in pursuing this objective while symbiotic strategies try to systematically use the state to advance the process of emancipatory social empowerment. These need not constitute antagonistic strategies — in many circumstances they complement each other, and indeed may even require each other.

Wright summarizes criticisms of the interstitial approach by insurrectionist movements, particularly Marxist ones:

Why many of these efforts at building alternative institutions may embody desirable values and perhaps even prefigure emancipatory forms of social relations, they pose no serious challenge to existing relations of power and domination. Precisely because they are “interstitial” they can only occupy the spaces that are “allowed” by capitalism. They may even strengthen capitalism by siphoning off discontent and creating the illusion that if people are unhappy with the dominant institutions they can and should just go off and live their lives in alternative settings. Ultimately, therefore, interstitial projects amount to a retreat from the political struggle for radical social transformation, not a viable strategy for achieving it. At best they may make life a little better for some people in the world as it is; at worst they deflect energies from the real political challenge of changing the world for the better.

In response to this criticism, Wright says that it presupposes that there currently is “an alternative strategy which does pose a ‘serious threat to the system,’ and… that this alternative strategy is undermined by the existence of interstitial efforts at social transformation.” But the fact is that no strategy poses a credible threat to the system under current conditions.  So the real task is to imagine “things we can do now which have a reasonable chance of opening up possibilities under contingent conditions in the future.”

That leaves the question of the actual strategy of exactly how interstitial institutions and practices are supposed to be used to promote a post-capitalist transition — “how these interstitial activities could have broad transformative, emancipatory effects for the society as a whole. What is the underlying logic through which they might contribute to making another world possible?”

There are two principle ways that interstitial strategies within capitalism potentially point the way beyond capitalism: first, by altering the conditions for eventual rupture, and second, by gradually expanding their effective scope and depth of operation so that capitalist constraints cease to impose binding limits. I will refer to these as the revolutionary anarchist and evolutionary anarchist strategic visions, not because only anarchists hold these views, but because the broad idea of not using the state as an instrument of social emancipation is so closely linked to the anarchist tradition.

Even between the anarchists who envisioned a revolutionary rupture and the Marxists, there was a major difference in how they framed the relationship between prevolutionary practices and the actual revolution:

Where they differed sharply was in the belief of what sorts of transformations were needed within capitalism in order for a revolutionary rupture to plausibly usher in a genuinely emancipatory alternative. For Marx, and later for Lenin, the central task of struggles within capitalism is to forge the collective capacity of a politically unified working class needed to successfully seize state power as the necessary condition for overthrowing capitalism. The task of deep social reconstruction to create the environment for a new way of life with new principles, new forms of social interaction and reciprocity, would largely have to wait until “after the revolution.”

For revolutionary anarchists, on the other hand, significant progress in such reconstruction is not only possible within capitalism, but is a necessary condition for a sustainable emancipatory rupture with capitalism. In discussing Proudhon’s views on revolution, Martin Buber writes,

[Proudhon] divined the tragedy of revolutions and came to feel it more and more deeply in the course of disappointing experiences. Their tragedy is that as regards their positive goal they will always result in the exact opposite of what the most honest and passionate revolutionaries strive for, unless and until this [deep social reform] has so far taken shape before the revolution that the revolutionary act has only to wrest the space for it in which it can develop unimpeded.

If we want a revolution to result in a deeply egalitarian, democratic, and participatory way of life, Buber writes,

the all-important fact is that, in the social as opposed to the political sphere, revolution is not so much a creative as a delivering force whose function is to set free and authenticate – i.e. that it can only perfect, set free, and lend the stamp of authority to something that has already been foreshadowed in the womb of the pre-revolutionary society; that, as regards social evolution, the hour of revolution is not an hour of begetting but an hour of birth – provided there was a begetting beforehand.

A rupture with capitalism is thus necessary in this strategic vision, but it requires a deep process of interstitial transformation beforehand if it is to succeed.

Wright sees four implicit arguments in this interstitial strategy:

First, supporters of the necessity of interstitial transformation within capitalism claim that such transformations can bring into capitalism some of the virtues of a society beyond capitalism. Thus the quality of life of ordinary people in capitalism is improved by such transformation….

Second, the revolutionary anarchist strategy affirms that at some point such interstitial social transformations within capitalism hit limits which impose binding constraints…. Capitalism ultimately blocks the full realization of the potential of socially empowering interstitial transformations. A rupture with capitalism… becomes necessary to break through those limits if that potential is to advance further.

Third, if capitalism has already been significantly internally transformed through socially empowering interstitial transformations, the transition trough will be tolerably shallow and of relatively short duration…. Successful interstitial transformations within capitalism mean that economic life becomes less dependent upon capitalist firms and capitalist markets as as capitalism continues. Workers co-operatives and consumer cooperatives have developed widely and play a significant role in the economy; the social economy provides significant basic needs; collective associations engage in a wide variety of socially empowered forms of regulation; and perhaps power relations within capitalist firms have been significantly transformed as well. Taken together, these changes mean that the economic disruption of the break with capitalism will be less damaging than in the absence of such interstitial transformations. Furthermore, the pre-ruptural transformations are palpable demonstrations to workers and other potential beneficiaries of socialism that alternatives to capitalism in which the quality of life is better are viable. This contributes to forming the political will for a rupture once the untransgressable limits within capitalism are encountered….

And finally, egalitarian, democratic social empowerment will be sustainable after a rupture only if significant socially empowering interstitial transformations had occurred before the rupture. In the absence of such prior social empowerment, the rupture with capitalism will unleash strong centralizing and authoritarian tendencies that are likely to lead to a consolidation of an oppressive form of statism. Even well-intentioned socialists will be forced by the contradictions they confront to build a different kind of society than they wanted.

Interestingly, Wright compares this interstitial strategy to Gramsci’s war of position:

An alternative way of expressing these arguments is to use the language of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci argued that in the West, with its strong civil society, socialist revolution required a prolonged “war of position” before a successful “war of maneuver” was possible. This means that the period before a rupture is a period of building an effective counter-hegemony. Gramsci’s emphasis was on building political and ideological counter-hegemony. While he did not directly discuss the issue of interstitial transformations in the economy and civil society, they could be viewed as transforming key aspects of the “material bases of consent” necessary for such a counter-hegemonic movement to be credible and sustainable.

The primary way that theories centered on Exodus differ from Wright’s pro-interstitial argument, I would point out in addition, is that they seriously downgrade their estimate of capitalism’s ability to impose insurmountable constraints, and of the need to seize control of the state to finish the transformation (more about which below)

Wright adds that for evolutionary anarchists, the apparent limits to transformation at any given time are not necessarily hard and fast, but the limits themselves may be bypassed or altered by an interstitial strategy.

Capitalist structures and relations do impose limits on emancipatory social transformation through interstitial strategies, but those limits can themselves be eroded over time by appropriate interstitial strategies. The trajectory of change through interstitial strategy, therefore, will bemarked by periods in which limits of possibility are encountered and transformation is severely impeded. In such periods new interstitial strategies must be devised which erode those limits. In different historical periods, therefore, different kinds of interstitial strategies may play the critical role in advancing the process of social empowerment. Strategies for building worker cooperatives may be the most important in some periods, the extension of the social economy or the invention of new associational devices for controlling investments (eg. union controlled venture capital funds) in others. The important idea is that what appear to be “limits” are simply the effect of the power of specific institutional arrangements, and interstitial strategies have the capacity to create alternative institutions that weaken those limits. Whereas the revolutionary anarchist strategic scenario argues that eventually hard limits are encountered that cannot themselves be transformed from within the system, in this more evolutionary model the existing constraints can be softened to the point that a more accelerated process of interstitial transformation can take place until it too encounters new limits. There will thus be a kind of cycle of extension of social empowerment and stagnation as successive limits are encountered and eroded. Eventually, if this process can be sustained, capitalism itself would be sufficiently modified and capitalist power sufficiently undermined that it no longer imposed distinctively capitalist limits on the deepening of social empowerment. In effect, the system-hybridization process generated by interstitial strategies would have reached a tipping point in which the logic of the system as a whole had changed in ways that open-up the possibilities for continued social
empowerment.

Of course it’s possible that an insurmountable block (like an authoritarian state) may genuinely require shifting to a ruptural strategy. The point, Wright argues, is that there’s nothing in capitalism as such that prevents gradually changing capitalism from within through interstitial activities.

Despite his obvious sympathies for the approach and openness to incorporate it as a significant part of any hybridized transitional strategy, Wright’s view of the practical limitations of interstitial strategy is faulty.

Interstitial strategies may create enlarged spaces for non-commodified, non-capitalist economic relations, but it seems unlikely that this could sufficiently insulate most people from dependency on the capitalist economy and sufficiently weaken the power of the capitalist class and the dependency of economic activity on capital accumulation to render the transition trough in the revolutionary scenario short and shallow. And while interstitial strategies may expand the scope of social empowerment, it is difficult to see how they could ever by themselves sufficiently erode the basic structural power of capital to dissolve the capitalist limits on emancipatory social change.

At the end of Chapter 10, as a segue to the next chapter, he raises the question of the state’s role and the differences over that issue between the interstitial and symbiotic approaches.

The basic problem of both scenarios concerns their stance towards the state. The anarchist tradition of social emancipation understands that both civil society and the economy are only loosely integrated systems which allow considerable scope for direct action to forge new kinds of relations and practices. In contrast, anarchists tend to view the state as a monolithic, integrated institution, without significant cracks and only marginal potentials for emancipatory transformation. For revolutionary anarchists, in fact, the state is precisely the institution which makes an ultimate rupture necessary: the coercive power of the state enforces the untransgressable limits on social empowerment. Without the state, the erosion of capitalist power through interstitial transformation could proceed in the manner described by evolutionary anarchists.

This is not a satisfactory understanding of the state in general or the state in capitalist societies in particular. The state is no more a unitary, fully integrated structure of power than is the economy or civil society. And while the state may indeed be a “capitalist state” which plays a substantial role in reproducing capitalist relations, it is not merely a capitalist state embodying a pure functional logic for sustaining capitalism. The state contains a heterogeneous set of apparatuses, unevenly integrated into a loosely-coupled ensemble, in which a variety of interests and ideologies interact. It is an arena of struggle in which contending forces in civil society meet. It is a site for class compromise as well as class domination. In short, the state must be understood not simply in terms of its relationship to social reproduction, but also in terms of the gaps and contradictions of social reproduction.

What this means is that emancipatory transformations should not simply ignore the state as envisioned by evolutionary interstitial strategies, nor can it realistically smash the state, as envisioned by ruptural strategies. Social emancipation must involve, in one way or another, engaging the state, using it to further the process of emancipatory social empowerment. This is the central idea of symbiotic transformation.

Wright’s pessimistic view of the limits of interstitial strategy seriously neglects the fundamental shift in correlation of forces resulting from the radical downsizing of the majority production technology in terms of both scale and cost (which reduces the significance of “seizing the means of production” as a strategic goal), and the possibilities of networked communications and stigmergic organization (which reduce the significance of the old “commanding heights” command-and-control institutions for coordinating activity and overcoming transaction costs). These intellectual blinders are part and parcel, in my opinion, of his earlier rejection of all historical theories of material causation behind the transition process.

He is entirely correct, I think, in refusing to treat the state as a monolithic entity and raising the possibility of engaging or transforming parts of it. And the possibility of “non-reformist reforms” should not be dismissed. But that’s not to say his vision of class compromise on the New Deal model is anywhere near as centrally important as he makes it out to be in Chapter Eleven. To the extent that class compromise is useful (in our day it might take the form of land value taxation plus basic income plus radical rollback of “intellectual property” law), it’s more for the purpose of creating a congenial environment for the primary tasks of transition, which will be carried out through interstitial institution-building.

The New Deal/Social Democratic model of class compromise that Wright takes as his paradigmatic example, on the other hand, treats the institutional forms of mass production society — institutional forms which today are technologically obsolete — as its core logic. That really entails, as Negri and Hardt argued in Commonwealth, incorporating new technology into an archaic institutional framework in order to integrate or re-integrate the working class into the wage system. And, in turn, it means actively promoting such hierarchical, centralized and high-overhead models at the expense of interstitial counter-institutions based on opposing principles.

Also Wright’s rejection in principle of all historical theories of terminal systemic crisis or phase transition severely constrains any hope of a class compromise that transforms the fundamental character of the state — unlike Bauwens’s development of the partner state as something defined by its relationship to a fundamentally altered society with commons and networks as its core logic.

So Wright’s analysis, despite its weaknesses, is extremely useful to post-capitalist theories based on the hierarchies-to-networks transition, stigmergic organization and self-organized, prefigurative institutions. But it becomes far more valueable when rendered more coherent by grounding in a proper theory of history.

Photo by CSLmedia Productions

The post Book of the Day: Envisioning Real Utopias, by Erik Olin Wright appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Liberals seem to be about freedom, because freedom is in their name.  Indeed, historically they were all about freedom, freedom from the social strictures of monarchy and feudal power.  The liberals were wealthy bourgeois who wanted the “freedom” to run the country.  In the early days, many of these used populist rhetoric to catalyse the power of the general population behind their campaign.  However, if you look at any of their writings, for example those of Locke, Adam Smith or Rousseau, you can see that the freedom of liberalism was intended not for everyone but specifically for an educated elite. Liberal freedom means even the queen is free to sleep under the bridge.

Once liberals had displaced hereditary feudal power and become ruling parties in the great industrial states, they changed the thrust of their emancipatory campaign. Instead of civic freedom for all, liberals used their power to entrench their economic position and began to apply another notion of freedom, free markets and free trade. To this day liberals “freedom” is principally about free markets and free trade, i.e. global corporatism and its rentier property system.
The Left, on the other hand, advocate an international solidarity economy, the evening out of the inequalities of wealth and opportunity, an economy where value is produced by each according to their abilities and for each according to their needs. The Left reject the false freedom of free markets which generate cabals of colluding monopolists who inevitably abuse their wealth to exercise inordinate political power over the many. The Left reject any form of nationalistic, racist, sexist, or any other normative discriminatory political disenfranchisement. The Left struggles for an economy where rentier title has been mutualized and the value of the productive contribution of each is set towards ensuring the best conditions of the flourishing of all.

In terms of freedom of expression, both the Left and liberals are permissive. However liberals believe in the freedom of the wealthy to make their expression heard louder than anybody else’s, and they exercise this “freedom”.  Liberals also believe in the super-national privilege of corporations to silence criticism of their business as being damaging to their profitability.[1]  The Left attempts to build utopian forums and other social forms of civic organisation where in principle everybody’s views can be negotiated. This highly democratic ideal is still in its infancy, it remains one of the most important sectors of social innovations of the Left.

In the US, it is said, there is a crisis of the liberal media. But the liberal media with their Purple Revolution is showing itself perfectly able to function and adapt to the new reality under Trump.  Times will now only get more difficult for the disenfranchised who voted for Trump and Sanders, and the liberal media will ignore them, because MSM are the voice of free-market bankers and free trade colonial business. Wall street revenues pay the paychecks of the news anchors researchers, journalists and actors on the liberal media, it is no wonder that Bernie Sanders was given such paltry coverage, unlike Trump who blamed illegal workers and minorities for the crisis facing the US, Sanders pointed his finger squarely at the 1%, the owners of the media.

The solidarity Left economy is small, it does not have the luxury to fund massive media juggernauts which crush popular opinion into submission. Nevertheless the movement which rallied behind the Sanders candidacy was able to break fundraising records of small contributions without any benefit of MSM publicity. This is because Sanders’ message, like that of Trump, resonated the suffering and represented the conditions to the vast majority, rendered despondent under liberal austerity economics. Whereas the MSM were fine to showcase the egregious, insulting and offensive excesses of the extreme right candidate, they ignored the one which threatened to truly undermine liberal power through advocating such things as progressive taxation and banking reform.

In the US, all the Left or “progressive” media is constrained, for budgetary reasons to the margins of the Internet.  Despite what we are told about the MSM being “dead”, it is still the authoritative source for news for the vast majority of people, especially the old, who still vote.  Even Wikipedia, apogee of democratic erudition, is biased towards mostly liberal MSM with their condition that only “reliable sources” be used as references in articles.  What are “reliable sources”? The academic publications, liberal media press and publications, or the conservative ones.[2]

The monopolization of broadcast media by a collusive wealthy oligarchy is illegitimate, as is all private rentier title. Unfortunately the Left can have no chance to politically challenge both liberals and conservatives without a truly Left media of scale. Under Trump, the majority of the American people will have it demonstrated again that their best interests will never be served by either the Democratic party or Republican party because they are two sides of the moneyed elite. The conditions of the vast majority will not improve and the emancipation of the human potential of the youth will be suppressed for another generation.

Only a truly Left and not a liberal media can coalesce the political movements which can withstand the crushing intellectual and physical assaults of the elites. We have seen during the democratic primary how independent media can play a transformative role in bringing people into and supporting communication, exchange and collaboration within a movement which truly has their interests at its core. But such media must burst into the mainstream, and this will require great economic resources. Organizations like TYT [3] demonstrate, as did the Sanders campaign, that progressive values can be supported long-term with small donations from a wide base. This model needs to be expanded and extended. In the meantime let us not confuse liberal with Left… it is not helping anyone face down the challenge from the right.

Notes

[1] see https://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/digital-journalists-legal-guide/can-corporation-sue-me-harm-its-reputatio

[2] see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources

[3] the Young Turks, originally a progressive political news network, now offers a wide range of programming primarily for millennials. https://tytnetwork.com/  Photo by david_shankbone

The post Liberal is not Left appeared first on P2P Foundation.