Abstract

Marx proposed that capitalism’s destructive force is caused, at root, by the alienation of labor value from its generators. Environmentalists have added the concept of unalienated ecological value, and rights activists added the unalienated expressive value of free speech, sexuality, spirituality, etc. Marx’s vision for restoring an unalienated world by top-down economic governance was never fulfilled. But in the last 30 years, new forms of social justice have emerged that operate as “bottom-up”. Peer-to-peer production such as open source software or wikipedia has challenged the corporate grip on IP in a “gift exchange” of labor value; community based agroecology establishes a kind of gift exchange with our nonhuman allies in nature. DIY citizenship from feminist makerspaces to queer biohacking has profound implications for a new materialism of the “knowledge commons”; and restorative approaches to civil rights can challenge the prison-industrial complex. In contrast to top-down “distributive justice,” all of the above are cases of bottom-up or “generative justice”.

Generating Unalienated Value

In Marx’s original formulation of “alienated labor value”, he contrasted the meaningful work of traditional skilled artisans, taking pleasure in their craft and earning respect from their community, with the dull repetition, low pay and enervating conditions of factory labor under capitalism. There are at least four challenges to making the alienation concept useful today. First, corporate marketing schemes are increasingly appropriating the artisanal allure: my Starbucks coffee is served by an underpaid “barista”; my cookies claim they were hand-made by Keebler elves. I can buy Domino’s Artisan Pizzas, Tostitos’ Artisan Recipes Tortilla Chips, Burger King’s Artisan bun, and Dunkin’ Donuts’ Artisan Bagels. If artisanal labor is so easily simulated, what chance do we have for making it a basis of social critique? Second, evoking older, pre-capitalist forms could be read to imply that artisanal labor is better because it is more natural. But as I will outline below, some of the best examples of unalienated craft labor today are in highly “unnatural” realms of open source hardware and software. And romantic organicist notions of what constitutes “natural” labor are notoriously tied to stereotype gender roles; homophobic claims that only heterosexuality is natural; nationalist claims that “nature did not intend the races to mix” and so on. Third, older production forms may be a poor fit to contemporary population densities and needs. And finally, the stress on artisanal production often overlooks the gender, race and ecological dimensions of economies of care and histories of colonialism. To address these problems, we need a deeper look at what the concept of “generating unalienated value” could mean if liberated from some of this unwelcomed baggage.

The phrase “generating value” is implicitly referring to the power of “self-generation.” In his 1944 book What is Life? physicist Erwin Schrödinger noted the mysterious way organisms seemed to defy the second law of thermodynamics: “It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of ‘equilibrium’ that an organism appears so enigmatic; so much so, that from the earliest times of human thought some special non-physical or supernatural force… was claimed to be operative” (p. 70). He characterized this self-generative property of life as “negative entropy” (later shortened to “negentropy”). Terms for this phenomenon can now be found at every scale: “autocatalysis” for cycles in which biomolecules produced themselves; “autopoiesis” for an organism’s self-reproduction; “sympoiesis” for ecosystem self-assembly, and so on. When we grow living organisms for food, we tap into this self-generating power; that is to say, some of the value that is normally circulated can be diverted for our own use. It is here that we must choose between either becoming part of the circulation, or extracting— i.e. alienating—that value. Soils for example can be easily depleted of nutrients. Yet traditional farmers and horticulturalists have avoided this problem for thousands of years simply by returning our waste to the soil, and thus becoming part of the circulation of value through a broader array of sustainable practices called agroecology.

Marx made an analogy between unalienated labor and agroecology in Capital volume 1, where he stated that capitalist farming “prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing… All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil…” (Marx 1976, pp. 637-638). Recalling Schrödinger’s comment that the negentropic character of life is often attributed to a supernatural force, it is no surprise that Marx’s inspiration for this insight, German chemist Justus von Liebig, originally justified recycling sewage back to farm lands because of a “vital force” that gave living soils their generative power. Marx was dedicated to eliminating “mystification”, but when he invokes the “living labor” of unalienated production, it sounds suspiciously like the vitalist “living soil” of von Liebig. This is not necessarily a flaw. Granted, it does pose the dangers of any organicist or naturalizing discourse, as noted above. But one can also interpret vitalism as humility; as a way of saying “there is something complex and wonderful in the generative force that we do not fully understand”. Indeed that was Schrödinger’s final conclusion. Today we know that the “living soil” concept was not far off: ordinary dirt is a complex ecosystem of bacteria, fungi, nematodes, decaying matter, water percolation, minerals and other features that form a dynamic, evolving network which still challenges our understanding. Analogous complex, selfsustaining networks in the social domain—not the simulation of artisanal labor in the Starbucks barista or Keebler elf—are necessary for real unalienated labor. We will now turn to one exemplar for such a network.

The full article can be found here.

Photo by the pain of fleeting joy

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David Bollier: What is “value” and how shall we protect it?  It’s a simple question for which we don’t have a satisfactory answer.

For conventional economists and politicians, the answer is simple: value is essentially the same as price. Value results when private property and “free markets” condense countless individual preferences and purchases into a single, neutral representation of value:  price.  That is seen as the equivalent of “wealth.”

This theory of value has always been flawed, both theoretically and empirically, because it obviously ignores many types of “value” that cannot be given a price. No matter, it “works,” and so this theory of value generally prevails in political and policy debates. Economic growth (measured as Gross Domestic Product) and value are seen as the same.

Meanwhile, the actual value generated outside of market capitalism – the “care economy,” social labor, eco-stewardship, digital communities and commons – are mostly ignored or considered merely personal (“values”).  These types of “value” are seen as extraneous to “the economy.”

My colleagues and I wondered if it would be possible to develop a post-capitalist, commons-friendly theory of value that could begin to represent and defend these other types of value.  Could we develop a theory that might have the same resonance that the labor theory of value had in Marx’s time?

Marx’s labor theory of value has long criticized capitalism for failing to recognize the full range of value-creation that make market exchange possible in the first place.  Without the “free,” unpriced services of child-rearing, social cooperation, ethical norms, education and natural systems, markets simply could not exist.  Yet because these nonmarket value-regimes have no pricetags associated with them, they are taken for granted and fiercely exploited as “free resources” by markets.

So we were wondering:  If modern political/economic conceptions of value are deficient, then what alternative theories of value might we propose? In cooperation with the Heinrich Boell Foundation and anthropologist David Graeber, who has a keen interest in these themes, we brought together about 20 key thinkers and activists for a Deep Dive workshop in September 2016 to explore this very question.  So much seems to hinge upon how we define value.

I am pleased to say that an account of those workshop deliberations is now available as a report, Re-imagining Value:  Insights from the Care Economy, Commons, Cyberspace and Nature (pdf download). The 49-page report (plus appendices) explains that how we define value says a lot about what we care about and how we make sense of things – and therefore what kind of political agendas we pursue.

Here is the Contents page from the report:

Introduction

I.  THE VALUE QUESTION 

A.  Why “Value” Lies at the Heart of Politics

B.  Should We Even Use the Word “Value”?

II.  TOWARDS A RELATIONAL THEORY OF VALUE

III.  KEY CHALLENGES IN DEVELOPING A NEW THEORY OF VALUE 

A.  Can Abstract Metrics Help Build a New Value Regime?

B.  How Shall We Value “Nature”?

C.  Should We De-Monetize Everyday Life?

IV.  COMMONS-BASED PEER PRODUCTION: A FUNDAMENTAL SHIFT IN UNDERSTANDING VALUE?                       

A.  Practical Strategies for Building New Systems of Value

B.  The Dangers of Co-optation and Wishful Thinking

C.  But Peer Production Still Relies Upon (Unpaid) Care Work and Nature!

V.  NOTES TOWARD A COMMONS THEORY OF VALUE 

CONCLUSION 

Appendix A:  Participants

Appendix B:  A Commons Theory of Value

Appendix C:  Readings for Value Deep Dive

Excerpts

Below, some excerpts from the report:

The absence of a credible theory of value is one reason that we have a legitimacy crisis today.  There is no shared moral justification for the power of markets and civil institutions in our lives.  Especially since the 2008 financial crisis, the idea of “rational” free markets as a fair system for allocating material wealth has become something of a joke in some quarters.  Similarly, the idea of government serving as an honest broker dedicated to meeting people’s basic needs, assuring fairness, providing ecological stewardship and advancing the public interest, is also in tatters.

“We cannot do without a value regime,” said Michel Bauwens, founder of the Peer to Peer Foundation and cofounder of the Commons Strategies Group.  “Today, we have a dictatorship of one kind of value as delivered by the market system, which determines for everyone how they can live.”  Consider how the labor of a nurse is regarded under different value regimes, he said:  A nurse working as a paid employee is considered value-creating – a contributor to Gross Domestic Product.  But the same nurse doing the same duties as a government employee is seen as “an expense, not a value-creator,” said Bauwens.  The same nurse working as a volunteer “produces no value at all” by the logic of the market system.

Bauwens said that his work in fostering peer production communities is an exploratory project in creating a new type of “value sovereignty” based on mutualism and caring.  An important aspect of this work is protecting the respective community’s value sovereignty through defensive accommodations with the market system.  “The peer production system lives a dichotomy,” explained Bauwens.  “It is based on contributions for which we don’t get paid.  We therefore have to interact with the market so that we can earn a living and get paid for what we have to do.”  Maintaining a peer community within a hostile capitalist order requires that the community “create membranes to capture value from the dominant system, but then to filter it and use it in different ways” – i.e., through collective decisionmaking and social solidarity, not through the market logic of money-based, individual exchange.

…. One participant, Ina Praetorius, a postpatriarchal thinker, author and theologian based in Switzerland, asked a provocative question:  “Do we need to use the word ‘value’ at all?”  She explained that as an ethicist she does not find the word useful.  “Value is not part of my vocabulary since writing my 2005 book, Acting Out of Abundance [in German, Handeln aus der Fülle].  It’s perfectly possible to talk about the ‘good life’ without the notion of value.”  Praetorius believes the word “value” is useful to merchants and economists in talking about money and markets.  But it has little relevance when talking about ethical living or the human condition.

Praetorius is also suspicious of “value” as a word associated with the German philosophical tradition of idealism, which she regards as “an unreliable authority because of its strange methodological origins” – “Western bourgeois men of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, who created an invisible sphere of abstract concepts meant to denote certain qualities, as a means to forget their own belonging to nature and their own basic needs, especially towards women.”

But ecophilosopher Aetzel Griffioen, based in The Netherlands, regards the word “value” as “a necessary abstraction that can be used in some places and not in others.”  In his dealing with a labor union of domestic workers, for example, Griffioen considers the word too philosophical and abstract to use.  However, “for commoners trying to tackle what so-called economists call ‘value-creation,’ it is a practical necessity to use the word in trying to create commons based on their own values.”

Again, the value/values dichotomy cropped up.  Economics claims the word “value” for itself while everyone else, in their private and social lives, may have their own personal “values.”  This rift in thinking and vocabulary is precisely what this workshop sought to overcome.  Economists are eager to protect their ideas about “value” as money-based and make them normative. Commoners and others, by contrast, want to broaden the meaning of the term to apply to all of human experience.  This conflict prompted Ina Praetorius to conclude, “Language is politics.”  For herself, she has no desire to contest with economists over control of the term.  Others, however, are determined to continue that very struggle.

Towards a Relational Theory of Value

The conventional economic definition of “value” has a significant rhetorical advantage over other notions of value/s.  It can be encapsulated in numbers, manipulated mathematically and ascribed to individuals, giving it a tidy precision.  Value defined as price also has an operational simplicity even though it flattens the messy realities of actual human life and ecosystems.  It purports to precisely quantify and calculate “value” into a single plane of commensurable, tradeable units, as mediated by price.

Through discussion, workshop participants set forth a rough alternative theory of value based on a radically different ontology.  This theory sees value arising from relationships.  Value does not inhere in objects; it emerges through a process as living entities – whether human beings or the flora and fauna of ecosystems – interact with each other.  In this sense, value is not fixed and static, but something that emerges naturally as living entities interact.

“In a commons, value is an event,” said Silke Helfrich of the Commons Strategies Group.  “It is something that needs to be enacted again and again.”  The difference between the standard economic theory of value and a commons-based one is that the latter is a relational theory of value, said Helfrich.

According to Nick Dyer-Witheford, this idea aligns with Marx’s thinking.  While some observers say that a Marxist theory of value ascribes value to things, Dyer-Witheford disagreed, noting that “Marx condemned the idea of value inhering in objects as commodity fetishism.  He believed in a relational theory of value – the relations between workers and owners – even if Marx may not have considered the full range of social relationships involved in the production of commodities.”….

Everyone agreed that a relational theory of value has great appeal and far-reaching implications.  It means that the “labor” of nonhumans – the Earth, other creatures, plants – can be regarded as a source of value, and not definitionally excluded, said Neera Singh, the geographer.  Indeed, this is a point made in a John Holloway essay on Marx’s ideas about “wealth”:  the nonhuman world produces such an excess of wealth that it overflows what capitalism can capture in the commodity form, said Sian Sullivan, a co-investigator with the Leverhulme Centre for the Study of Value in the UK and Professor of Environment and Culture at Bath Spa University.  “This of course leads to the paradox of capitalism trying to use commodity form, an engine of accumulation, to solve ecological crises that the commodity form created in the first place.  It does not know how to protect intrinsic value.”

The report deals with a wide variety of other issues related to the “value question”:  Can abstract metrics help build a new value regime?  How shall we value “nature”?  Should we attempt to de-monetize everyday life?  The report also includes a major discussion of commons-based peer production as a fundamental shift in understanding value.  This point is illustrated by open value accounting systems such as those used by Sensorica, and by organizational experiments in finance, ownership and governance.

While workshop participants did not come up with a new grand theory of value, they did develop many promising lines of inquiry for doing so.  Each prepared a short statement that attempted to identify essential elements for a commons theory of value.  (See Appendix B in the report.)  We hope that the record of the workshop’s discussions will help stimulate further discussion on the question of value – and perhaps bring forth some compelling new theories.

Event photography by Pedro Jardim

The post Re-imagining Value: Insights from the Care Economy, Commons, Cyberspace and Nature appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Mackenzie Wark writes:

Kojin Karatani’s The Structure of World History (Duke University Press, 2014) is an astonishing work of synthetic historical theory. Karatani views world history as a history of modes of exchange. He rejects the classical Marxist view of history though as modes of production, to which political, religious and cultural levels are superstructures.

The Marxist base and superstructure model always conjures up for me an image of the social formation as a three-story building, with an economic ground floor and politics and ideology or culture as the second and third. Karatani’s alternative model is more like three elevator shafts running through the social formation from top to bottom. The inadequacies of the base-and-super three-story image led Marxists such as Althusser to stress the relative autonomy and materiality of the political and cultural ‘levels’. Karatani sees two problems with this. One is a loss of a totalizing and systematic approach to history. The other is that it is really only in the west that politics could even be imagined as autonomous from economics.

So rather than the three horizontal levels, three (or perhaps four) elevator shafts, running vertically through the social formation, and though of as modes of exchange. Mode A is association, or rather the reciprocity of the gift. Mode B is brute force, or rule and protection. Mode C is commodity exchange. There’s also a Mode D, which transcends the others, but more on that later. Rather than criticize Marx, Karatani thinks it is time to complete his historical materialist project, by doing for modes A and B what he did for C.

Since Marcel Mauss, mode of exchange A is assumed to be dominant in archaic societies, but did not really exist among nomadic peoples. They could not stockpile goods. They pooled them as pure gift. It was a society of mobility and equality. Clan society only really developed the reciprocity of the gift once there was settlement. Clan society members were made equal by the reciprocity of the gift but were no longer free.

This is relevant to Marx’s notion of primitive communism, which is hard to support with anthropological studies. Marx and Engels looked to Lewis Morgan, who studied clan societies, when they should have been looking not at sedentary clans but nomads. Karatani’s project, as we shall see, is to envision a return to a kind of nomadism, equal and free. It is a social theory for Contant Neuwenhuis’s New Babylon.

The bulk of the study concerns not mode D but the interactions of modes A, B and C, or association, brute force and commodity production, figured not so much as elevator shafts as a Borromean knot (that favorite figure of Asger Jorn’s.) It was Hegel in the Philosophy of Right who first articulated this three-part model. Marx began his historical materialism with a critique of Hegel on this. “But in doing so Marx regarded the capitalist economy as constituting the base structure, while he took nation and state to be part of the ideological superstructure. Because of this, he was never able to grasp the complex social formation that is Capital-Nation-State. This led him to the view that state and nation would naturally wither away once the capitalist system was abolished.” (xvi) But these are not just superstructures and cannot be dissolved “simply through acts of enlightenment.” (xvi)

And so Karatani revisits Marx’s critique of Hegel and Hegel’s idealist view of state and nation, “to turn them on their head the way Marx did via a materialist approach…” (xvii) He claims to extend the methods of Marx’s Capital to state and nation, or rather to modes of exchange A and B of which they are the current forms.

Karatani thinks that unlike Hegel, Marx followed Kant in forming concepts of things in advance of their full expression. And like Kant, he held that such concepts are not real. They are “transcendental illusions” (xvii) or illusions necessary to reason itself, and which reason cannot eliminate. This compares in an interesting way to Zizek, for whom transcendental illusions are even more unavoidable, but who in his own Hegelian fashion takes their constitutive voids to be those of the real itself. Karatani threads the needle of Marx’s relation to German idealism in a way I find for more productive.

For Karatani, Marx neglected the agency of state and nation, or rather, of the modes of exchange of which they are modern forms. Materialism here means mode of exchange, not of production. “… if we posit that economic base equals mode of production, we are unable to explain pre-capitalist societies.” (4) I am not convinced by this argument, but let’s rather see what Karatani’s modes of exchange can explain.

Another constant of Karatani’s thought is that it is always a world-system approach, rather than one that takes social formations as having internal developmental processes that take priority over their external relations. (Although as we shall see, there is one strange exception to this). The Boromean knot of Capital-Nation-State is the product of a world system, not of any one nation-state, as were the previous arrangements of the three modes.

So while Karatani follows Mauss in thinking that Mode A dominates pre-modern societies, he thinks Mode A’s gift exchanges arose not within, but between societies: “reciprocity is not so much a principle of community as it is a principle for forming larger, stratified communities.” (5) Mode of exchange B, brute plunder and force, also has a critical role between societies. The conquered come to accept protection in exchange for plunder, and peace is kept with gestures of redistribution.

Interestingly, he sees Schmitt’s friend-enemy relation of Politics as just a subset of mode of exchange B, and hence in a sense actually ‘economic’. What is particularly delicious about Karatani is that it is a more, not less ‘economistic’ theory than most now current. All three modes are ‘economic’ modes – but of exchange, not of production.

Mode of exchange C is commodity exchange, or mutual consent between parties, but with neither the reciprocal obligation of Mode A or the brute force compulsion of Mode B. In Mode C each recognizes the other as a free being owning nothing more to community or ruler once the transaction is done. This freedom from constraint in Mode C is constitutive of the city as social form.

There is no separate sphere of politics or culture or ethics in this theory. All historical social formations include all three modes. The modes of exchange A, B and C produce different modes of power, which are successively the laws of community, state, and international law. Not all forms of power are based on coercion. The reciprocal gift of Mode A is also a power, and so too is the ‘natural law’ of trade and money characteristic of Mode C. While Karatani implies it rather than directly states it, Modes A, B and C seem to be successive stages in scales of organization.

Karatani makes external relations at least as constitutive as internal ones for social formations at all historical stages. With one exception. He mentions in passing that Marx drew on the work not only of Hegel also of Mosses Hess, who advanced Feuerbach’s critique of religion even further toward a critique of nation and state. Karatani notes that Marx borrowed from Hess the concept of an exchange between the human and nature as Stoffwechsel, usually translated as metabolism.

In the footnotes at least Karatani is aware of how this leads towards things like the work of John Bellamy Foster on Marx’s ecology, of thinking human history as part of natural history, with a stress on what Marx in Capital vol. 3 called the metabolic rift that opens when collective human labor interrupts the cycles of molecular flow within the planetary system. For example, Marx knew from Leibig’s classic studies that modern agriculture disrupted the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles.

Karatani: “In Hess’ view, the relation of man and nature is intercourse. More concretely, it is metabolism (Stoffwechsel), or material exchange. In German, Wechsel literally means ‘exchange’, so that the relation of humans to nature is one of intercourse or exchange. This is an important point when we consider Marx’s ‘natural history’ perspective – as well as when we consider environmental problems. The material exchanges (Stoffwechsel) between man and nature are one link within the material exchanges that form the total earth system.” (15-17) But in Karatani, this ‘stuff-exchange’, or metabolism, slips from view, and all that remains is exchange between human parties. And this in spite of his awareness of waste products as a general problem, and climate change as a key instance of such metabolic rift.

Unfortunately, Karatani shares a certain humanistic disdain for scientific thought, and remains naively positive about what humanistic thought can achieve on its own. Were it not for science and technology, we would not even be able to produce a knowledge of what climate change is, let alone of other metabolic rifts, which together are the symptomatology of the Anthropocene. So while there is progress here in thinking cultural, ethical and political phenomena in a materialist manner, it is not quite materialist enough. And while there is attention to externalities that impinge on social formations, the externalities of the engagement with the natural world are never an integral part of the theory.

One enduring bugbear of historical materialism is Marx’s sketchy idea of an ‘Asiatic mode of production’. Refreshingly, Karatani thinks it is a viable concept, just better thought as something not limited to Asia, just as the feudal mode is not limited to Europe. The ‘Asiatic’ is a despotic state or empire where Mode B dominates Modes A and C. In an interesting shift of perspective, China appears as the ‘normal’ developmental form, and Greece and Rome as failed approximations.

Borrowing from Karl Wittfogel, Karatani divides the pre-capitalist world up spatially into the despotic empires, their margins, their submargins and the ‘out of sphere.’ Margins get absorbed into despotic states, but submargins need not, even though they often adopt things like the writing systems of the despotic empires. Greece and Rome were submargins to despotic states. Germany was submargin to Rome, where feudalism took root. Trade and cities were able to emerge there outside feudal control. Or in short, capitalism arose at the periphery of world empires, giving rise to the modern world system. Russia and China escaped this fate. Socialists unwittingly gave new form to old despotic states.

Within a social formation, the rise of Mode C, commodity exchange, does not mean abolition of Mode A and Mode B. It was Mode B that became the modern state. Absolutism created the state with a standing army and no reciprocal exchange among ruling elites. Absolutism established what had long existed under despotic states. Mode A then returns in the form of the nation as “imagined community” – once local communities have been weakened or abolished.

This world-systems theory actually has three successive stages. World mini-systems characterized the archaic world, and were dominated by Mode A. The world empires that subsumed them were dominated by Mode B, or what Marx thought of as the ‘Asiatic mode of production’. The modern world market system is dominated by Mode C. Karatani then suggests we are ready for a “fourth great shift: the shift to a world republic.” (28)

With mini world systems, the “great leap” (31) was from hunting to farming. He opposes V. Gordon Childe’s thesis of a Neolithic revolution, for whom agriculture led to fixed settlements. Karatani thinks it is the other way around. Inequality arises from the storage capacity of that comes with settlement. Following Marshall Sahlins, he argues that pooling happens within a household, whereas reciprocity happens between them. Reciprocity is actually a continuum from pure gift giving to war and reprisal. After Pierre Clastres, he sees gifts as a way of cementing alliances for war, and war as what prevents the state from forming in pre-modern mini-world systems. Here and elsewhere there are curious convergences with Deleuze and Guattari, with whom he shares some political but not philosophical commitments.

In a mini-world system, war exists because there is no transcendent power over the clans. Reciprocity is an in-between, it does not dissolve the parties in a higher unity. It can lead to a federal unity, but not a state. So why did hunter-gatherers settle? Climate change. During the Ice Age, human spread. Warming led to reforestation and decline in game. The stockpiling of smoked fish led to a “sedentary revolution” (45) that produced agrarian clan society still based on a reciprocity that maintained the independence of social formations from each other.

This reciprocity of the gift extends beyond the human. Magic is a form of the gift. Magic is the attempt to control another through the gift in the form of the sacrifice. “Sacrifices are gifts that impose a debt on nature, thereby sealing off the anima of nature and transforming it into an It.” (53) Magic despiritualizes nature. Settlement means coexisting not only with others but with the dead, and the attempt to placate them with gifts.

The sedentary revolution is a move away from the communism of the nomad, from equality and freedom. Freud was not entirely wrong to highlight the myth of the murder of the father, but it wasn’t a primal event, but rather a murder in advance of the ur-father by the brotherhood of clan society, to cut off a further drift away from equality and freedom – at least for the clan ‘brotherhood.’

Karatani’s historical materialism is entirely focused on social relations – except in odd moments when natural changes enter from without. Karatani has the chutzpah to accuse V. Gordon Childe of not being Marxist enough, but Childe at least though seriously about labor-nature metabolism. Karatani makes makes relations of exchange prior to relations of production. Here is the thread of an argument I find interesting, but with which I can’t agree.

“In Capital, Marx begins his exploration of capitalist production not from the invention or deployment of machines but rather from the manufactures – that is, from the organization of labor that he called the division and combination of labor.” (60) Karatani dismisses the significance of invention such as that of the deep-furrow plough. “In the terms of the relationship between technology and nature, the innovations achieved by ancient civilizations had little impact.” (61)

The shift from bronze to iron was for Karatani more important to the rise of the state (weapons) than agriculture. The most important tech in the pre-modern world was administrative. “The technologies for ruling people don’t rely on naked compulsion: instead, they install forms of discipline that make people voluntarily follow rules an work.” (61) Religion is about organizing labor – a view that brings Karatani close to Bogdanov.

In another of his reversals of perspective, he argues that “The state did not arise as a result of the Agricultural Revolution: to the contrary, the Agricultural Revolution was a consequence of the rise of the state.” (63) Trading and warfare led to city-states, these states that then led to agriculture: “…the rise of the city cannot be separated from the rise of the state. In other words, mode of exchange B and mode of exchange C are inseparable from one another.” (65)

Interestingly, he views the state as a development of Mode B, as a form of exchange: “… the state is based on a non-reciprocal principle of exchange.” Hobbes thought the social contract was extorted by fear, Karatani sees it as the transformation of plunder into a mode of exchange, of plunder for protection. The state put an end to horizontal reciprocity, an end to both gift and vendetta. States do not arise from a single community, but in the space of world-empire: “the sovereign is something that comes from outside.” (71) State comes from exchange between ruling and ruled social formations.

Agrarian clan communities come after, and are produced by, the state. “Reciprocity does not acknowledge any higher authority. The agrarian communities that formed under Asiatic despotism preserved reciprocity in such aspects as mutual aid and equalization. But they lost the other aspect of reciprocity: their autonomy.” (74) While the Greeks, out on the submargin, were making city states, the Qin and Han empires formed the characteristic form of despotic state. “Once a centralized order was established, the despotic state then tried to actively co-opt traditions dating back to clan society. This is why the agrarian community organized by the despotic state took on the appearance of being a continuation of clan society.” (75)

Hence Mode B depends on a modified and extended form of Mode A: “the agrarian community is an imagined community whose framework is provided by the despotic state – just as the modern nation cannot exist in the absence of the framework of the centralized state. Asiatic despotism existed in the form of an amalgamation of the despotic state wit the agrarian community.” (76) Dynasties come and go, but the Mode B despotic state and the Mode A agrarian clan remain. Backward Greece and Rome did not develop these forms.

Marx, Weber, Wittfogel and Joseph Needham all argued that the Chinese despotic state was a hydraulic state, that its administrative elaboration was a result of building the technology to control flooding and irrigation, or in short that metabolism, ‘stuff-exchange’ determined human-to-human exchange. Following an argument made by Michael Mann in Sources of Social Power vol. 1, Karatani disputes this, and once again makes the social relation causative over and against its relation of externality with nature.

Karatani: “The civilization realized by hydraulic societies was not just a matter of technologies for dominating nature; more than that, it consisted of technologies for governing people – namely, state apparatuses, standing armies, bureaucratic systems, written language, and communication networks.” (79) One could wonder, however, whether this is a false distinction, and if one can entirely subordinate ‘stuff-exchange’, or metabolism, to purely inter-subjective exchange.

Where do administered and administering people come from? After all, “…people do not voluntarily choose to become bureaucrats.” (79) As Max Weber argued, a money economy is a precondition for a bureaucratic system. Thus, just as the despotic Mode B state depends on a modified form of Mode A, it also requiresthea development of Mode C. But money arises not within but between social formations. “Karl Marx repeatedly stressed that commodity exchange began with exchanges between different communities.” (81) The form of power of Mode C is money, which the state cannot do without. As in David Graeber, Karatani stresses the role of money in sustaining standing armies.

For Karatani, money does not require a labor theory of value for its explication. The power of money is grounded in a social contract. Money is king in the same way that the king is king. The king is king because others are subjects, while they imagine they are subjects because he is king. Likewise money. Money is sovereign, but sovereign as empty position anyone can occupy.

Money is minted by the state, but not its power to circulate globally. Karatani: “… we cannot understand money only by looking at it locally, within a single country – in the same way that we cannot understand the state if we confine ourselves to the context of a single country.” (93) And in another reversal of perspective, Karatani argues that “the power of precious-metal money to circulate worldwide is not something owing to the state. To the contrary, the state’s ability to mint money depends in this power.” (92)

In a manner strikingly parallel to Deleuze and Guattari, Karatani sees Mode C as something Mode B depends on but tried to limit and contain. Mode C gets out of hand. “Exchange is pursued to seek not use values but rather exchange values, and for this reason is without limit.” (94) Mode C is one of eternal and limitless expansion. But it still depends on Mode B. Enforcing the repayment of debt calls for both the habits of reciprocity of Mode A and the sanctions of Mode B. These are its real conditions of existence. “The existence of exchange C, far from being a materialist, rational base structure, is fundamentally a world of credit and speculation, a speculative world.” (97)

In despotic states such as China, trade was managed by the state bureaucracy, which Greece and Rome lacked. There the market could play a destructive role. In Greece, “letting the market set prices was politically equivalent to letting the masses decide public questions.” (101) But Mode C without limits damaged the polis, resulting in inequality and servitude. Democracy in Athens was an attempt to preserve a community of rulers within the polis, back by an ever-expanding slave system.

The despotic states exist within systems of world empire. They exist in contexts of world religions, languages and law that extend beyond and between them. Only some are irrigation based, and here Karatani much expands the concept beyond an Asiatic mode of production. While some were based on irrigation (in China, Peru, Mexico), some were martime (Rome), some nomadic (the Mongols) and some combined the nomadic with a merchant base (Islam). Karatani: “we come to see that Marx’s distinctions between Asiatic, classical and feudal do not mark successive diachronic stages but rather positional relationships within the space of world-empire.” (124) In sum, the three modes of exchange exist in parallel and are inter-connected, but in successive historical epochs, Modes A, then B, then C have been dominant.

What then of Mode D? It is the polar opposite of Mode B. Mode of exchange D marks the attempt to restore the reciprocal community (A) on top of the market economy (C). It is an ideal form that never existed in reality, although it is given expression, at least in their formative moments, by the great world religions. But perhaps this line of thought could be made rather more ‘materialist.’ In his book Debt, Graeber notes that when precious metals are used to ornament temples, it is the withdrawal from circulation of the material means of making the coinage to sustain an army. The sacrifice of gold to imaginary Gods is thus nevertheless a real sacrifice.

Karatani stresses the difference rather than continuity of religion and magic. Prayer is directed, via the priest-king as guardian of the portal, to a transcendent God. It lacks the horizontal and egalitarian aspect of magic. “The development of magic into religion was nothing other than the development from clan society to the state.” (131) But religion did not intend to be this: “… universal religions originally appeared in the form of a negation of this sort of world empire and religion. As soon as they achieved stable form, however, they found themselves appropriated into the ruling apparatus of a world empire.” (133) As Raoul Vaneigem stresses in his histories of heresy, religions are part of a history of modes of sacrifice.

World empires (Mode B) need both world religion (Mode A) and world money (Mode C). “The worship of money is, to borrow Marx’s language, a fetishism, and with the rise of world money, this fetishism became monotheistic.” (134) Money frees individuals from community and reciprocity. But religions are also expressions of something else: “In the process of empire formation, there is a moment when, under the sway of mode of exchange B, mode of exchange C dismantles mode of exchange A; at this moment, and in resistance to it, that universal religion appears, taking the form of mode of exchange D.” (135)

Religions both restore, but also abstract, the reciprocity of Mode A. For example, the Jewish god as of a new kind. When their state failed, the people did not abandon Him. “The defeat of a state no longer meant the defeat of its god…. This meant the rejection of reciprocity between God and people.” (139) This is a power of God that transcends community, state and money.

Christianity stressed Jesus’ rejection of state, money, community. He speaks of God’s love as an absolute gift that cannot be reciprocated. Universal religions preach a pure love, pointing beyond the particular reciprocity of Mode A: “universal religions do not become universal by negating the particular. Rather, they become universal through an incessant awareness of the contradiction between universality and particularity.” (143) Contra Badiou, what matters about, for example, Saint Paul is not just a transcendent universalism. “The transcendence and immanence of God forms an inseparable, paradoxical unity.” (144)

Universal religions arise when Mode C has become generalized, and (as Graeber shows in detail) borrow their metaphors of universality from the market place. World religions are critical of kings and priests, but they become the religion of the state, or fade away. “What Buddha carried out was the deconstruction of existing religions.” (152) Confucius taught benevolence, and his social reformism was stressed even more by Mencius. Laozi opposed not only the state but also clan society, pointing back to nomadic way of life, and Taoism was, as Needham also thought, “a fountainhead of utopianism and anarchism.” (156) Karatani’s project is in essence to revive not the religious but social force of Mode D to push once again for forms of exchange that are both free and equal, but at a higher level of organization and more extensive scale.

World economy is different from world empire in not being so based on coercion. In a gesture toward what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls Provincializing Europe, Karatani thinks Mode C broke out of the constraints of Mode B in Europe because of its marginality rather than its centrality to world history. He cites Needham on the advanced level of technical and social organization in China up until late modern times. “… a world economy emerged in western Europe not because its civilization was advanced but rather because it was located on the submargin.” (160) The Mongolian empire collapsed, after which rose Qing, Mughals and Ottoman despotic states. Europe colonized the margins and out of sphere spaces of the empires. Russia and China resisted marginalization, and both tried to build a different world system.

In short, a world economy could only arise where there wasn’t a powerful despotic state controlling a world empire. This world economy would be composed eventually of modern nation-states. What made such states possible was the absolutist monarchy, which were a bit different to despotic states in that mode C was stronger. Absolute monarchs rejected higher order power above them, whether emperor or church, and did their best to abolish the autonomy of communities within their domain. Absolutism made a more or less homogeneous people under a sovereign, a necessary step prior to that people itself claiming to be sovereign. Absolutism forged the link in the Borromean knot between state and nation.

Absolutist monarchies also differed from despotic states in that Mode C had a much freer hand. There is a union of capital and state in absolute monarchies, in the form of mercantilism. Western powers could not challenge Ottoman, Mughal or Qing power directly, but spread the doctrine of national self-determination and denounced imperial rule. “…the existence of a sovereign state inevitably leads to the creation of other sovereign states.” (168) The state’s essence comes out in war, as a state exists really in relation to other states.

The absolutist state produces the possibility of the modern state’s Borromean knot of Capital-State-Nation. The state has to call into existence the means of making a nation, through compulsory education and conscription. Just as Mode B in the form of the state produces Mode A in the form of the nation, it also creates the conditions of possibility for Mode C: “… there has never been a time when the state did not intervene in the economy.” (174). It is the world market system that produces the modern state, not the other way around. “The state’s distinctive form of power will never be understood if we view it only from the perspective of its interior.” (174)

Marxists treat the state as superstructure, and expect it to wither away after the revolution. But after the Russian revolution of 1917 it actually got stronger. “Marx had penetrating insight into the nature of capitalism, but his understanding of the state was inadequate.” (175) In Capital he bracketed off Ricardo’s interest in taxation. Karatani turns to Marx’s ‘18^th Brumaire’ for a more nuanced Marxist understanding of the Capital-State-Nation knot.

As Karatani reads it, Marx was grappling with Louis Bonaparte’s distinctive structural role: “his power as emperor was established by projecting the external appearance of gift-counter-gift reciprocal exchanges onto what was in reality a plunder-redistribution exchange carried out by the state machinery.” (178) Karatani takes the structural, sovereign role of both Louis Bonaparte and Otto von Bismarck as evidence of autonomous power of the state.

Karatani argues that Mode C has always existed, but was kept contained until recently by early forms of Mode A and Mode B. As with his analysis of Modes A and B, Karatani sees Mode C as arising within a world system, or between social formations, rather than within a social formation. Commodity exchange that takes place between different value systems can yield a profit. The totality of capital has to engage in an equal exchange with labor and yet it has to extract surplus value. Capital has to go outside and find new consumers. “In order for the accumulation of capital to continue, it has to ceaselessly engage in the recruitment of new proletarians.” (192) Karatani revisits the famous Dobb-Sweezy debate on the origins of capitalism, and sides with Sweezy, who thought it began with merchant capital and the world markets.

The capitalist class prefers finance and merchant to industrial capital. (Keynes’ ‘liquidity preference’) Holland already led in finance and merchant capital, so Britain had to go for industrial, and used the state to make it possible. “The belief that the capitalist market economy develops autonomously, outside the influence of the state, is simply mistaken.” (197)

What is distinctive about industrial capital is its discovery of labor power. Industrial capital commodifies labor power, which is in the end is in limited supply. Industrial capital has to expand across the world system in search of new populations to make over as workers. Moreover, “the emergence of the industrial proletariat is simultaneously the emergence of the consumer.” (188)

Industrial capital requires also ceaseless tech-change to improve relative surplus value through rising labor productivity. Capital is rapidly approaching the limits of resources and the ability to process waste. There’s an opening here for Karatani to take up the buried theme of metabolic rift in his text, but he doesn’t take it. “But the human-nature relationship is of course primary. We need, however, to remain wary of ideologies that stress this and forget about human-human relations.” (206) This is of course itself an ideology, and indeed the dominant one among humanities scholars.

One of the most interesting discussion in Karatani is on the nation as a (failed) attempt to revive Mode A in modern form. “… the nation is something that appears within the social formation as an attempt to recover, through imagination, mode of exchange A and community, which is disintegrating under the rule of capital-state. The nation is formed by capital-state, but it is at the same time a form of protest and resistance to the conditions brought about by capital-state, as well as an attempt to supplement for what is lacking in capital-state.” (209) As in Benedict Anderson, the nation replaces religion as what gives people a sense of the eternal. Nations formed under the absolute monarchs, who united the people by breaking up community within and by refusal of any empire or church beyond it. For them, national law trumps empire law (natural law).

The cultivation of nationalism is connected to that of labor-power (or what the Foucauldians call biopower). But nationalism was also a form of resistance. The romanticism from which It sprang wanted to restore a sentiment of community lost to capital-state. ”…late eighteenth century Europe saw the rise not only of Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ but also of imagination itself…” (214)

The source was Kant, for whom sensibility and understanding are synthesized through imagination. But the romantics lost sight of the imagined status of the nation. They took it for real. “… even in Hegel’s philosophy, it is forgotten that this knot was produced in a fundamental sense by the imagination, in the form of the nation; he forgets that the nation exists only in imagination. This also explains why his philosophy was unable to foresee any possibility of superseding this knot.” (224)

For a tantalizing moment, Karatani maps the triad of Understanding-Sensibility-Imagination onto State-Capital-Nation. As if Kant’s categories were a mapping of the organizational forms of modernity itself. Mode C ends in inequality, “but the nation, as something that intends communality and equality” will try to resolve the contradictions. The state realizes those intentions.

Most modern thinkers read their Marx through the supplement of another philosopher. There are Spinozist-Marxists (Althusser, Negri), Hegelian-Marxists (Lukacs, Adorno, Zizek), Nietzschian Marxists (Deleuze, Lyotard). The supplement in Karatani is Kant, and in particular Kants Kingdom of Ends, his regulative idea of the treating others not as means but as ends, a reciprocity of freedom itself. “Kant negated religion absolutely – yet he also extracted its basic morality.” (230)

This is not the same as distributive justice, which assumes the inequalities generated by Mode C are left intact and dealt with at the second order by a Mode B that has to make concessions to demands usually framed in the Mode A of the nation as imagined community. Rather, Karatani thinks Kant’s kingdom of ends implies the abolition of both state and capital. It would be a world republic of peace not just within but between states. This is of course no more than a regulative idea, a kind of transcendental illusion. Like the unified self, the kingdom of ends is an idea that makes it possible to think and act but which is not itself real or realizable. “Ultimately, people cannot help but find an end or purpose to history.” (232)

Like Charles Fourier, Karatani rejects the Jacobin strand of socialism, which saw itself as inheriting and completing the project of the French revolution, with its imaginary invocation of an ideal Borromean knot of Capital-State-Nation under the slogan of liberty, equality, fraternity – which was only realized under Napoleon as sovereign, and in the form of revolutionary war.

Rather, Karatani turns to Proudhon’s pre-Marxist scientific socialism and its rejection of statist schemes. “Because equality is realized through redistribution carried out by the state, equality always leads to a greater or lesser extent to Jacobinism and increased state power.” (235) Drawing on his more extended argument in his book Transcritique (MIT Press, 2005), he picks up Max Stirner as a socialist thinker, for whom a higher form of associationism can only come after people free themselves from community.

Karatani argues that Marx is much closer to Proudhon on the state than to Lassalle, who is the real origin of state-socialist politics, even though Engels tacked much closer to such a position after Marx’s death. Following Engels, Kautsky and Bernstein argued for a statist socialism in Germany, while Luxemburg and Trotsky thought revolution could happen on the margin, due to the necessarily inter-state character of the world system and the super-exploitation of the margin. Lenin would pick up this argument and marry it to Jacobin and statist socialism.

Karatani wants to revive a quite other tradition. He agrees with the Leninists that labor unions tend to get absorbed into capitalism and raise only partial and particular demands within its framework. He turns instead to cooperative movements. “… labor unions are a form of struggle against capital taking place within a capitalist economy, while cooperatives are a movement that moves away from the capitalist system. In other words, the former is centered on production, the latter on circulation.” (243)

Marx did indeed see the necessity of seizing state power, but in order to make a cooperative commonwealth possible. This Karatani counter-poses to the dangers of the Lassalle-type state socialist line. “This was not a product of Stalinism, to the contrary, belief in state ownership produced Stalinism.” (250) Karatani thinks Marx broke with the Jacobin politics that had its heyday in the 1848 revolutions. “The Paris Commune marked its last burst of glory and was not a harbinger of the future.” (253) And Marx knew it, despite his fidelity to the Paris Commune.

Karatani is opposed to the politics of the leap. There’s no shortcuts. “In trying to master capitalism by means of the state, Marxists fell into a trap laid by the state.” (257) It is also impossible to supersede capital-state through the nation. That way lies fascism. The opening is rather to rethink Mode D, which would be a “return of the repressed” (xi), or a way for reciprocity to comes back under the dominance of Modes B and C.

But Mode D does not just restore community. It is possible only after community has been negated. It is regulative idea that restores reciprocity after and without community: “…communism depends less on shared ownership of the means of production than on the return of nomadism.” (xii) Mode D has to be “simultaneously free and mutual.” (7)

Mode D escapes from particular social formations. The overcoming at a higher level of the Capital-Nation-State has to be realized in the form of a new world system. Karatani’s argument could be broadly classified as what Benjamin Noys calls negationist rather than accelerationist, and it is certainly not one of what I call extrapolation or inertia. The negation of the Capital-State-Nation world system has to come from cooperative practices and from a new imagining of Mode D. But even within the text there’s the materials for another kind of historical thought. It would be one that has to pay more attention to both metabolism and production, which are, after all, the same thing.

Karatani sees the stages of the world market system in terms of the key world commodity of each. Thus for Mercantilism it is textiles, forLiberalism it is light industry, for Finance capital it is heavy industry, for State monopoly capital it is durable consumer goods, and for Multinational capitalism it is information.

This most recent stage some would call ‘neoliberal, but Karatani rightly finds it too imperialistic for such a benign-sounding term. The current stage, despite appearances, is one of the weakness of the old hegemon, the United States, within the world system. It is an era of the accelerated export of capital and corresponding cuts to redistributive justice by the states at the core of the old world system, as “state-capital was freed from egalitarian demands” (279)

This is not quite what Hardt and Negri described in Empire. Karatani thinks, incorrectly in my view, that they see Empire as an extension of the United States’ hegemonic role. I thought rather than their point is that Empire extends the form of American constitutionalism, which they read as a uniquely expansionist kind of legal frame. For them Empire is a shift in power away from Nation-State, not just towards Capital, but to a new transnational constitutionalism.

But Karatani is perhaps correct in seeing in their work a certain nostalgia for what Wallerstein called the counter-systemic movements of “May 68.” Like Marx in the 1840s, they think a kind of revolution as clarifying moment, cutting through state-nation-capital to reveal the ‘real’ workings underneath, now figured as multitude rather than productive labor.

As Karatani stresses, the state does not wither away even as Mode C globalizes, and state-nation are no mere superstructures. If there’s an end to capital, it may have to do with the entry of China and India into the world market system, and the final exhaustion of the process of making new worker-consumers. Not to mention waste products catching up with us all.

There is an opening here to make more of an accelerationist or even extrapolationist argument about world history. Rather than a regulative idea from without, perhaps actual developments from within might be key factors. One could imagine the Capital-State-Nation system accelerated from below into a new mode, which is essentially what Hardt and Negri try to describe. But they are weak on the systemic constraints of metabolism.

Perhaps then one could attempt to describe a shift in levels of organization forced by the confrontation with scarcity. Sartre usefully constructs a world-historical thought on scarcity (which appears nowhere in Karatani), but links it to violence and the practico-inert, a kind of repetition of reified and passive affects. But it seems scarcity can lead to a third alternative, which is the extrapolation out of existing forms of organization of new ones.

Bogdanov thought there was a tendency to substitute from one’s own labor practices ideas about organization and impose them on the world. Hence Kant’s Kingdom of Ends appears as philosophical practice itself writ large. Other organizational practices might also substitute from their activities to worldviews. Thus it is not only Mode A that might give rise to a regulative idea, but Mode B and Mode C as well. Substituting from Mode B produces what I call the drone of Minerva, a reactive policing, particularly by waning states, based on total surveillance and force projected at a distance. Substituting from mode C, we get financialization, and a concentration of all decision making power in the form of the quantification and pricing of all possibilities.

These regulative ideas, or rather substitutions, all have something in common: an actual infrastructure that would make them possible. They presupposed an actually existing vectoral world. So too might attempts to extend Mode A as Mode D. As I argued in A Hacker Manifesto, this abstraction of the world is riven with class tensions. The same vector, the same information infrastructure, makes possible both control and commodification, but also more abstract forms of the gift. The politics of sharing free information then becomes the leading form for thinking new possibilities.

While I find Karatani illuminating in many ways, I think what we need is a more vulgar Marxist perspective, or rather two. One is based on Marx’s understanding of the labor-nature interaction as metabolism, as elaborated by John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burchett and others. The second is to revive an old Anglo-Marxist interest in the forces of production, which can be found in V. Gordon Childe, but also Joseph Needham and JD Bernal. Karatani, like so many others, argues as if this was still somehow the dominant version of Marxism, when it is clear that since the anti-systemic movements of ’68 and the rise of new left ideologies, the opposite is the case.

All of the schools of Marx, from the Spinozists to the Hegelians to the Nietzchians join in refusing such a vulgar account. But a dialectic (if it is still that) which connects metabolism, scarcity, waste products and changes in technical-organizational form might seem like a useful perspective in these times.

If one might make more of the substitutions that spill out of the organizational practices of Modes B and C, one might also put more stress on the materiality and less on the imaginative side of Mode A, particularly in its modern form. Here Harold Innis might be a better guide than Benedict Anderson, with his stress on the communication vectors within which the nation is realized geographically, or one might follow Raymond Williams and look at the materiality of the practices of producing a culture.

Still, there’s much to celebrate in Karatani’s achievement. He refuses pomo fragmentation and thinks the totality, but in unexpected ways, and opens history up once again to further developments. It is not history that ended, but Fukuyama’s feeble imagining of it.

The post All power to the {historical} imagination! McKenzie Wark on Karatani appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Karl Marx memorably described the commoditizing logic of capitalism, saying, “All that is solid melts into air.” Enclosures eclipse the history and memory of the commons, rendering them invisible. The impersonal, individualistic, transaction-based ethic of the market economy becomes the new normal.

If we are to understand the commons, then, it is useful to learn more about its rich, neglected history. Capitalist culture likes to think that all of history leads inexorably to greater progress, if not perfection, as society climbs towards the present moment, the best of all possible worlds. The complex, overlooked history of the commons tells a different story. It is an account of how human beings have learned new and ingenious ways to cooperate. It is a story of building new types of social institutions for shared purposes despite systems of power (feudalism, authoritarianism, capitalism) with very different priorities.

Commons tend to be nested within other systems of power and institutional relationships, and therefore are not wholly independent. There is often a deep “creative tension” between the logic of the commons and the imperatives of its host environment (whether feudal lords, technology markets or national laws). This is why many commons thrive in the interstices of power, in “protected zones” tolerated or overlooked by Power, or accidentally remote from it.

The stark reality is that commons tend not to be dominant institutional forms in their own right. This subordinate role can be seen in the flourishing of medieval land commons under feudalism; in mutual associations under socialism and communism; and, in our time, in gift economies such as academia and civic associations under capitalism. Such commons were (and still are) nested within larger systems of power and rarely functioned as sovereign forces.

Still, human reciprocity and cooperation go back millennia. With the dawn of civilization, legal traditions were invented that sought to protect the shared interests of the many and of future generations. The human impulse to cooperate is rarely expressed in purely altruistic forms; it tends to work in creative tension with individualism and power. Even though we like to contrast “individualism” and “collectivism” as opposites, in the commons they tend to blur and intermingle in complicated ways. The two are not mutually exclusive, but rather dynamic yin-and-yang complements.

Historical, small-scale commons belie the claims made by contemporary economists that humans are essentially materialist individuals of unlimited appetites, and that these traits are universal. Quite the opposite. The real aberration in human history is the idea of Homo economicus and our globally integrated market society. Never before in history have markets organized so many major and granular elements of human society. Never before has the world seen so many societies organized around the principles of market competition and capital accumulation, which systematically produce extremes of selfish individualism, inequalities of wealth and crippling assaults on natural ecosystems.

This is worrisome on its own terms, but also because of the instability and fragility of large-scale, market-based systems. Six years after the 2008 financial crisis, the greater powers are still scrambling to re-establish trust, credibility and social stability to many global and national markets. Whether through crisis or choice, it is virtually inevitable that the human race (or at least the industrialized West) will need to rediscover and reinvent institutions of human cooperation.

What Evolutionary Sciences Tell Us About Cooperation

Given their premises about individual self-interest, it is not surprising that economists consider the world a nasty, competitive place that will degenerate into anarchy unless the State steps in to restrain bad actors and mete out punishment. A formidable set of political philosophers — John Locke, David Hume, Thomas Hobbes — set forth this worldview in the eighteenth century; in the words of Hobbes, life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Upon its principles of universal selfishness and individual “rationality” entire systems of law and public policy have been built.

But what if this is mostly a “just so” story — a partially accurate fable that does not really describe the full, empirical realities of human nature? What if it could be shown that human cooperation, reciprocity and non-rational behavior are just as significant a force as “competitive rationality” and “utility maximization”?

This is the startling conclusion of much contemporary research in the evolutionary sciences, especially brain neurology, genetics, developmental and evolutionary psychology, biology, organizational sociology and comparative anthropology. These sciences are confirming that social reciprocity and trust are deeply engrained principles of our humanity. They may even be biologically encoded.

One of the first scientists to explore this possibility was the Russian zoologist Petr Kropotkin in his 1902 book, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. Kropotkin surveyed the animal kingdom and concluded that it “was an evolutionary emphasis on cooperation instead of competition in the Darwinian sense that made for the success of species, including the human.” Animals live in association with each other and mutually aid each other as a way to improve their group fitness.

Mainstream science in the twentieth century took a very different direction, however. It has generally embraced models of rational self-interest to explain how organisms behave and evolve. In the evolutionary sciences, natural selection has traditionally been seen as something that happens to individuals, not to groups, because individuals have been considered a privileged unit in the biological hierarchy of nature. Thus evolutionary adaptations have been thought to happen to individuals, not to collectivities or entire species. Scientists have generally dismissed the idea that biological traits that are “good for the group” can be transmitted and evolve at the group level.

Over the past decade, however, there has been an explosion of new research by respected scientists such as Martin Nowak, E.O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson, who argue that group-level selection is a significant force in human and animal evolution. Empirical evidence suggests that evolutionary adaptations can and do occur at all levels of the biological hierarchy, including groups. The basic idea is that while cooperation and altruism can be “locally disadvantageous” for individuals, they can be highly adaptive traits for groups. As E.O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson put it, “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.” In short, reciprocal social exchange lies at the heart of human identity, community and culture. It is a vital brain function that helps the human species survive and evolve.

Controversy still rages, of course, but it would appear that human beings are neurologically hardwired to be empathic and cooperative, and to connect emotionally with their fellow human beings. As author and essayist Rebecca Solnit showed in her book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, members of communities beset by catastrophes such as the San Francisco earthquake of 1907, the German Blitz of London during World War II and the 9/11 terrorist attacks generally show incredible self-sacrifice, joy, resolve and aching love toward each other. The communities such disasters create are truly “paradises built in hell.” Her book is an answer to the economists and political leaders who believe that the world is made up of isolated, selfish individuals who must be governed through authoritarianism and fear.

“Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of evolution,” writes Harvard theoretical biologist Martin A. Nowak, “is its ability to generate cooperation in a competitive world,” adding, “Thus, we might add ‘natural cooperation’ as a third fundamental principle of evolution beside mutation and natural selection.” It bears noting that the popularity of “individual selection theory” during the latter half of the twentieth century coincided uncannily with the heyday of market culture and its ethic of competitive individualism. A case of culture affecting scientific observation?

What is notable about the more recent findings of evolutionary science is the recognition that individual organisms function within a complex system of interdependence. This means that individual self-interest and group survival tend to converge, making the supposed dualism of “self-interest” and “altruism” somewhat artificial. Anyone who participates in useful online communities will recognize this feeling; individual and group interests become more or less aligned and self-reinforcing, if occasionally disrupted by disagreements and external jolts.

As a social scientist, Professor Elinor Ostrom studied hundreds of cases around the world in which communities were able to self-organize their own systems of commons-based governance and develop a cooperative ethic. Her research unearthed an ethnographic reality: that commons can persuade individuals to limit their narrow self-interests and support a larger collective agenda. The gratifying news is that evolutionary scientists are confirming these claims at the more elemental level of genetics, biology, neurology and evolutionary psychology.

The Forgotten Legal History of the Commons

The subterranean life of the commons in evolutionary science — which is only now being recognized — parallels its legal history. The law of the commons has also been largely ignored, and yet it actually goes back to ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire, and is stitched like a golden thread throughout medieval history in Europe. Landmarks of commons-based law — such as Roman legal categories for property and the Magna Carta and its companion Charter of the Forest — are deeply embedded in Western law.

Consider King John. In thirteenth-century England, a series of monarchs began to claim larger and larger plots of forest lands for their personal recreation and use, at the expense of barons and commoners. By threatening the basic livelihoods of commoners who depended on the forest for their food, firewood and building materials, these royal encroachments on the commons provoked prolonged and bitter civil strife. Livestock could not roam the forests; pigs could not eat acorns; commoners could not gather timber to fix their homes; boats could not navigate rivers upon which dams or private causeways had been built.

After years of brutal armed conflict, King John in 1215 formally consented to a series of legal limitations on his absolute power and stipulated that other members of society, including commoners, were entitled to due process, human rights and subsistence, among other rights. This was the great Magna Carta, one of the foundations of Western civilization. The rights of habeas corpus, trial by jury, the prohibition of torture and the rule of law all derive from the Magna Carta. All these legal principles have since found expression in modern constitutions around the world as the fundamental rights of citizens. They are also affirmed by a number of leading human rights conventions.

A near-forgotten document, the Charter of the Forest, also bears mention here. Signed two years after the Magna Carta and later incorporated into it, this charter recognized the traditional rights of commoners to use royal lands and forests. Thus commoners formally enjoyed the rights of pannage (pasture for their pigs), estover (collecting firewood), agistment (grazing) and turbary (cutting of turf for fuel) on royal properties. As a practical matter, the Charter of the Forest gave commoners basic rights to subsistence. It also protected them against state terror as waged by the king’s sheriffs in their defense of the king’s enclosures.

As this brief history suggests, the law of the commons points to a different type of law — one that originates from the lived experience of commoners; one that tends to be informal, situational and evolving rather than fixed and written; and one that encourages social mutualism and equality over commercial goals or state authority. Peter Linebaugh is instructive on this point: “Commoning is embedded in a labor process; it inheres in a particular praxis of field, upland, forest, marsh, coast. Common rights are entered into by labor. They belong to experience, not schooling.… Commoning, being independent of the state, is independent also of the temporality of the law and state. It’s much older. But this doesn’t mean that it’s dead, or premodern, or backward.”

Commoning remains vitally important as a bulwark against the abuses of formal law because it represents one of the few ways that formal law can be made accountable to the people. Formal law can be more easily corrupted and betrayed because it has identifiable access points — legislatures, courts, heads of state — where bad actors can traduce it, whereas vernacular law is deeply rooted in the daily lives of people and their culture and is therefore harder to manipulate or corrupt.

As welcome as the Magna Carta was to commoners, its guarantees could only be assured through constant vigilance. Commoners were skeptical, and understood the necessity of fighting back. This is one reason why kings repeatedly republished the Magna Carta over the years, ritualistically affirming that the basic human rights of commoners were indeed being upheld. Of course, a piece of paper has proved to be of only limited value in stopping the abuses of state power. As we’ve seen in our own times, the US government has, in the name of fighting terrorism, ignored with impunity the rights of habeas corpus, due process, the prohibitions on torture and other principles of the Magna Carta.

So, too, in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, the Magna Carta did little to impede enormous new enclosures of land. In 1536, King Henry III eliminated Catholic monasteries, unleashing a fierce round of enclosures by lords and nobles — a “massive act of state-sponsored privatization,” as Linebaugh calls it. Authorized by four thousand acts of Parliament over several centuries, a rising class of gentry seized roughly 15 percent of all English common lands for their own private use. These enclosures destroyed many commoners’ social connection to the soil and trampled their social identities and traditions, paving the way for their proletarianization.

As enclosures intensified, women who tried to maintain their old ways of commoning — who asserted their rights to common, if only because they had no other way to subsist — often found themselves accused of being witches. Silvia Federici explores these themes in her feminist history of the medieval transition to capitalism, Caliban and the Witch. She writes: “The social function of the commons was especially important for women, who, having less title to land and less social power, were more dependent on them for their subsistence, autonomy and sociality.”

The Eclipse of the Law of the Commons

“Enclosure meant a shift away from lives guided by customs preserved in local memory toward those guided by national law preserved in writing,” observed commons scholar Lewis Hyde. “It meant a shift in the value of change itself, once suspect and associated with decay, now praised and linked to growth. It meant a change in the measurement and perception of time” (as factories began to rationalize and measure time and direct people’s activities based on it).

As people’s access and rights to land were separated from social custom, a new type of person arose — the individual, someone who was not visibly a member of a collective and whose worldview became oriented around personal wages, technological progress, social progress and material gain. The new market order, writes Karl Polanyi, created people who were “migratory nomadic, lacking in self-respect and discipline — crude, callous beings.” All of this followed when the “bundle” that constituted the commons — resources, commoners and social practices — was disassembled and commoditized to serve the needs of the new industrial market order.

Of course, enclosure had some positive effects, such as doing away with the master/commoner relationship, transforming vassals into freeholders. But this new “freedom” cut both ways: while it liberated people to pursue new identities and social freedoms, it also destroyed the social cohesion of the commons, a person’s assured subsistence, ecological sustainability and the stabilizing linkages between identity and resource use.

The history of socialism and political liberalism can be seen as attempts to ameliorate some of the worst structural problems created by the dissolution of the commons. European socialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries introduced new sorts of social mutualism and bureaucratic systems to try to meet the needs of former commoners in the new circumstances of industrialized society. Bottom-up innovations such as consumer cooperatives, social security systems and municipal water supplies were invented. The idea was to meet the basic needs of commoners in a very different historical context, that of the Market/State.

These innovations were certainly an improvement over the laissez-faire order, and indeed, many of the early socialistic or utopian projects more or less functioned as commons, perhaps because they still had a lively memory of traditional commons. But as workers’ collectives adapted to the requirements of state law, bureaucracy, corporations and market forces, the practice of commoning — and the vitality of commons — slowly disappeared.

State regulation has been another means to compensate for the problems introduced by “free markets,” namely the displacement of costs and risks onto the environment, communities and the human body. The regulation of environmental practices and the safety of food, drugs, medical devices, chemicals, autos and consumer products can be seen as attempts to use the cumbersome apparatus of formal law, science and bureaucracy to enforce the social and ethical norms of commoners. Given the scale of commercial dealings and the power of multinational corporations, state regulation is absolutely necessary; conventional commons are too small, unorganized and lacking in resources to assure socially responsible outcomes.

On the other hand, regulation has not worked so well. The centralization and formalization of law made it easier for regulated industries to capture and corrupt the process — no surprise given the power of the Market/State and the depth of its overlapping interests. It remains something of an open question how governance might be restructured to rein in the chronic social and environmental abuses generated by markets.

Just as state regulation has a very uneven record, so the state’s role as a trustee of common assets is uneven and often dismal. We easily forget that many resources managed by the state belong to the people. The state does not “own” the air, water, public lands, coastal areas or wildlife, and cannot do what it pleases with them. It is authorized to act only as an administrative and fiduciary agent of the people. Under the public trust doctrine it cannot give away or allow the destruction of these resources. To emphasize the state’s stewardship obligations, I like to call large-scale, state-mediated commons state trustee commons.

Unfortunately, the state often neglects its responsibilities to “intervene” in markets because it fears that it might inhibit economic growth and violate widely believed fictions about “free market” principles. Safety regulations and public-service requirements, for example, tend to stabilize society, prevent serious harm and assure a rough social equity. But in our neoliberal times, even these goals are seen by most governments as an unacceptable burden on capital and corporations, and as a drag on economic growth.

To be sure, many grassroots movements have developed a modest independent sector of cooperatives and mutual association. Unfortunately, these alternative provisioning systems have generally failed to reach a meaningful scale. Similarly, while many important regulatory protections have been won over the years, they have failed to keep pace with the relentless stream of new problems generated by markets. In addition, regulation is generally dominated by legal proceduralism and scientific expertise, so that the views of local residents or individual consumers do not carry as much weight in decision-making as those of lawyers, credentialed technical experts and corporate officials. Commoners often find themselves delegitimized as participants in the governance process, or simply unable to afford the costs of participating.

In practice, the very institutionalization of the process, ostensibly intended to assure fair, equal and universal participation, also tends to disenfranchise commoners. This can be seen when social democratic states have taken over the administration of projects (social security) and when state communism has marginalized collective initiatives (co-ops). It is no surprise that the success of commoners in developing adequate protections for themselves and their resources through the legal systems of the nation-state has been highly irregular and limited.

Some of the most astute commentators on these problems are autonomous Marxists such as Massimo De Angelis, editor of The Commoner website; George Caffentzis, founder of the Midnight Notes Collective; Silvia Federici, an historian who concentrates on the feminist implications of the commons; Peter Linebaugh, author of The Magna Carta Manifesto and other histories of English commons; and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the political theorists and authors of Multitude, Empire and Commonwealth. Each in different ways has noted that the core problem of unfettered capitalist markets is their tendency to erode the authentic social connections among people (cooperation, custom, tradition) and to liquidate the organic coherence of society and individual commons. Capital breaks commons into their constituent parts — labor, land, capital, money — and treats them as commodities whose value is identical with their price.

This has caused a persistent moral and political crisis because market capitalism cannot answer the questions, What can bind people together beyond the minimal social and civic ties needed to participate in market exchanges? Can a market-based society survive without the commons?

2016 May 18

The following is an excerpt from Think Like A Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. Copyright © 2014 by David Bollier. Reprinted with permission of New Society Publishers.

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In the preface to his major book, “The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange.”, published by Duke University Press in 2014, he makes the exact same argument I made in P2P and Human Evolution in 2005-6. He similarly distinguishes, using a different terminology, the gift economy reciprocity (called Equality Matching by Alan Page Fiske), characteristic of clan societies, from the pure gift of pooling (called Communal Shareholding by Fiske), which is characteristic of nomadic society. And it is all grounded in a large body of evidence of anthropological research and findings. Karatani similarly hypothizes an emerging “Mode D” of exchange, which is again based on pooling, AND, this is a illumination for me, on renewed nomadism. Think about it, the major and principal effect of internet technology is to massively enable and allow nomadism! In those conditions, the author shows, contributory pooling as an exchange mechanism ‘naturally’ emerges as a necessity.

I am majorly excited to read this important book and if you have any interest in the theoretical and historical grounding of the P2P transition, then it is strongly recommended for you as well!

Karatani Kojin, from the Preface:

“This book is an attempt to rethink the history of social formations from the perspective of modes of exchange. Until now, in Marxism this has been taken up from the perspective of modes of production— from, that is, the perspective of who owns the means of production. Modes of production have been regarded as the “economic base,” while the political, religious, and cultural have been considered the ideological superstructure. In the way it splits the economic from the political, this view is grounded in capitalist society.

Accordingly, the view runs into difficulties in trying to explain pre-capitalist societies: in Asiatic or feudal societies, to say nothing of the clan societies that preceded these, there is no split between political control and economic control. Moreover, even in the case of contemporary capitalist societies, viewing the state and nation as simply ideological superstructures has led to difficulties, because the state and nation function as active agents on their own. Marxists believed that ideological superstructures such as the state or nation would naturally wither away when the capitalist economy was abolished, but reality betrayed their expectation, and they were tripped up in their attempts to deal with the state and nation.

As a result, Marxists began to stress the relative autonomy of the ideological superstructure. In concrete terms, this meant supplementing the theory of economic determinism with knowledge derived from such fields as psychoanalysis, sociology, and political science. This, however, resulted in a tendency to underestimate the importance of the economic base. Many social scientists and historians rejected economic determinism and asserted the autonomy of other dimensions. Even as it led to increased disciplinary specialization, this stance became increasingly widespread and accepted as legitimate. But it resulted in the loss of any totalizing, systematic perspective for comprehending the structures in which politics, religion, philosophy, and other dimensions are interrelated, as well as the abandonment of any attempt to find a way to supersede existing conditions.

In this book, I turn anew to the dimension of the economic. But I define the economic not in terms of modes of production but rather in terms of modes of exchange.

There are four types of mode of exchange:

* mode A, which consists of the reciprocity of the gift ;

* mode B, which consists of ruling and protection;

* mode C, which consists of commodity exchange; and

* mode D, which transcends the other three.

These four types coexist in all social formations. Th ey differ only on which of the modes is dominant. For example, in capitalist society mode of exchange C is dominant. In Capital, Marx considered the capitalist economy not only in terms of modes of production but also in terms of commodity exchange — he theorized how the ideological superstructure could be produced from mode of exchange C. Particularly in volume 3 of Capital, he took on the task of explicating how a capitalist economy is above all a system of credit and therefore always harbors the possibility of crisis.

But Marx paid only scant attention to the problems of precapitalist societies.

It would be foolish to criticize him on this though. Our time and energy would be better spent in explaining how ideological superstructures are produced through modes of exchange A and B, in the same way that Marx did for mode of exchange C. That is what I have attempted in this book. One other question I take up is how a society in which mode of exchange A is dominant emerged in the first place.

Since Marcel Mauss, it has been generally accepted that mode of exchange A (the reciprocity of the gift ) is the dominant principle governing archaic societies. But this principle did not exist in the band societies of nomadic hunter-gatherers that had existed since the earliest times. In these societies, it was not possible to stockpile goods, and so they were pooled, distributed equally. This was a pure gift , one that did not require a reciprocal countergift. In addition, the power of the group to regulate individual members was weak, and marriage ties were not permanent. In sum, it was a society characterized by an equality that derived from the free mobility of its individual members. Clan society, grounded in the principle of reciprocity, arose only after nomadic bands took up fixed settlement. Fixed settlement made possible an increased population; it also gave rise to conflict with outsiders.

Moreover, because it made the accumulation of wealth possible, it inevitably led to disparities in wealth and power. Clan society contained this danger by imposing the obligations of gift – countergift . Of course, this was not something that clan society intentionally planned. Mode of exchange A appeared in the form of a compulsion, as Freud’s “return of the repressed.”

This, however, led to a shortcoming for clan society: its members were equal but they were no longer free (that is, freely mobile). In other words, the constraints binding individuals to the collective were strengthened.

Accordingly, the distinction between the stage of nomadic peoples and that of fixed settlement is crucial. As is well-known, Marx hypothesized a “primitive communism” existing in ancient times and saw the emergence of a future communist society as that primitive communism’s restoration after the advancement of capitalism. Today this stance is widely rejected as a quasi-religious historical viewpoint. Moreover, if we rely on anthropological studies of currently existing primitive societies, we are forced to reject this idea of primitive communism. We cannot, however, dismiss the idea simply because it cannot be found empirically — nor should we. But Marxists have largely ducked this question.

The problem here is, first of all, that Marx and Engels located their model of primitive communism in Lewis H. Morgan’s version of clan society. In my view, they should have looked not to clan society but to the nomadic societies that preceded it. Why did Marx and Engels overlook the difference between nomadic and clan societies? This was closely related to their viewing the history of social formations in terms of mode of production. In other words, when seen from the perspective of their shared ownership of the means of production, there is no difference between nomadic and clan societies.

When we view them in terms of modes of exchange, however, we see a decisive dif erence — the difference, for example, between the pure gift and the gift based on reciprocity.

Second, when seen from the perspective of modes of exchange, we are able to understand why communism is not simply a matter of economic development nor of utopianism, but why it should be considered instead the return of primitive communism. Of course, what returns is not the communism of clan society but that of nomadic society. I call this mode of exchange D. It marks the return of repressed mode of exchange A at the stages where modes of exchange B and C are dominant. It is important to note, though, that clan society and its governing principle mode of exchange A themselves already constitute the return of the repressed: in fixed settlement society, they represented attempts to preserve the equality that existed under nomadism. Naturally, this did not arrive as the result of people’s desire or intention: it came as a compulsory duty that offered no choice.

Mode of exchange D is not simply the restoration of mode A — it is not, that is, the restoration of community. Mode of exchange D, as the restoration of A in a higher dimension, is in fact only possible with the negation of A.

D is, in sum, the restoration of nomadic society. Yet this too does not appear as the result of human desire or intention, but rather emerges as a duty issued by God or heaven or as a regulative idea. In concrete terms, D arrives in the form of universal religion, which negates religions grounded in magic or reciprocity.

But there is no need for mode of exchange D to take religious form. T ere are cases where mode of exchange D appeared without religious trappings — in, for example, Ionia from the seventh to the sixth centuries BCE, or Iceland from the tenth through the twelfth centuries CE, or the eastern part of North America in the eighteenth century. What these share in common is that all were poleis formed by colonialists: covenant communities established by persons who had become independent from their original states or communities. In them, if land became scarce, rather than perform wage labor on another person’s land, people would move to another town. For this reason, disparities in landed property did not arise. Because people were nomadic (free), they were equal. In Ionia, this was called isonomia.

This meant not simply formal political equality but actual economic equality.

Of course, these communities were all short-lived: they ended when they reached the limits of the space available for colonization. These examples show that communism depends less on shared ownership of the means of production than on the return of nomadism.

But in actuality, all around the world socialist movements that aimed to bring about mode of exchange D were generally carried out under the guise of universal religions. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, socialism became “scientific” and lost its religious hue. But the key question here is not whether socialism is religious; it is whether socialism intends mode of exchange D. Socialism in the twentieth century was only able to realize societies dominated by modes of exchange B and C, and as a result it lost its appeal. But so long as modes of exchange B and C remain dominant, the drive to transcend them will never disappear. In some form or another, mode of exchange D will emerge. Whether or not this takes religious form is unimportant. This drive is fundamentally rooted in that which has been repressed from nomadic society. It has persisted throughout world history, and will not disappear in the future— even if we are unable to predict the form in which it will appear.”

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“Between the 15th and 19th centuries, the rich and the powerful fenced off commonly held land and transformed it into private property. Land switched from a source of subsistence to a source of profit, and small farmers were relegated to wage laborers. In Das Kapital, Marx described the process by coining the term land-grabbing. To British historian E.P. Thompson, it was “a plain enough case of class robbery.”

More recently, a similar enclosure movement has taken place. This time, the fenced-off commodity is life-saving medicine. Playing the role of modern-day lords of the manor are pharmaceutical corporations, which have taken a good that was once considered off-limits for private profiteering and turned it into an expensive commodity. Instead of displacing small landholders, this enclosure movement causes suffering and death: Billions of people across the globe go without essential medicines, and 10 million die each year as a result.

Many people curse the for-profit medicine industry. But few know that the enclosure erected around affordable medicines is both relatively new and artificially imposed. For nearly all of human history, attempting to corner the markets on affordable medicines has been considered both immoral and illegal.

It’s time now to reclaim this commons, and reestablish medicines as a public good.

Most of us define public goods broadly. We use the term to refer to benefits like law enforcement, street lights, and mass transit, which are collectively provided and deliver shared value to all. Economists narrow down that definition somewhat, saying that public goods are non-rivalrous and non-excludable in their consumption.

Non-rivalrous means that any one person can benefit from a good without reducing others’ opportunity to benefit as well. My eating an apple prevents you from consuming it, so that’s a rivalrous good. But I can watch the same TV show as you without lessening your opportunity to enjoy it as well—that’s non-rivalrous.

Non-excludable means what it sounds like: A person cannot be prevented from consuming the good in question. Clean air is a good that can be enjoyed by all without the possibility of denying access to those who don’t register or pay a fee. But access to a private swimming pool is an excludable good. The classic example of a non-rivalrous, non-excludable public good is a lighthouse: One ship benefitting from its warning doesn’t subtract from any other ships’ chances of enjoying a similar benefit, and there’s no practical way of limiting the lighthouse’s warnings to a select few.

As the English enclosure movement proved, exclusivity can be artificially created by literally or figuratively walling off common access. Exclusivity can be undone as well: The modern open-source software movement takes a good that some have tried to make exclusive—software code—and freely shares it, leading to a plethora of creative developments.

In terms of medicines, an individual pill is rivalrous, but the details of the formula for creating that pill are not. Knowledge is a classic public good, in that it can be shared widely without penalty to the original owner. As Thomas Jefferson said, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening me; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

The public-health implications of access to medicines generate another core quality of public goods: positive externalities.

One person’s consumption of an essential medicine provides clear benefits beyond the direct consumer. Vaccines, for example, prevent the recipient both from getting ill and from spreading the disease to others. If a society vaccinates widely enough, the chain of disease transmission is broken, leading to the quintessential public good of mass immunity. Global distribution of the smallpox vaccine, for example, has led to the eradication of a disease that once infected 50 million people a year.

Even less obviously social medicines allow their recipients to better contribute to the social fabric and economic productivity of their communities. These medicines save costs for the broader society, too. When a diabetic takes insulin or a person with a risk for heart disease takes cholesterol-reducing medicine, they not only function better: They also lower their prospects of needing more expensive medical treatment, which is a cost often shared across societies.

Conversely, a lack of access to medicine causes enormous social problems in terms of contagion and economy-depressing illnesses.

So it’s little wonder that, for nearly all of human history, societies have treated medicine as a commonly held benefit. Until well past the middle of the 20th century, few countries allowed individuals or companies to hold exclusive rights to produce medicines. And governments have long been involved early and often in the pharmaceutical industry, creating the very opposite of a laissez-faire market. Most industrialized governments tightly regulate the production and distribution of medicine, while actively promoting vaccinations and encouraging safe use of other medicines. Governments are both leading funders of medicine research and top purchasers of the end products of that research.

When governments don’t take a sufficiently activist role in the field of medicines, public opinion pushes them further. In the 1990s and 2000s, advocates gave voice to passionate outrage over the devastating human cost of patent-priced HIV/AIDS medicines, which limited access to sufferers who could afford expensive treatments. US activists threw the ashes of AIDS victims on the lawn of the White House, while African activists called treatment-resistant government ministers murderers. The protests led to the dismantling of patent price barriers—and then to massive public programs to distribute the medicine at low or no cost.

Among governments and the public alike, medicines continue to be treated as a good quite distinct from consumer items like cell phones or flat-screen TVs. A human right to access essential medicines has found its way into international treaties and national constitutions. A moral claim for universal access to essential medicines has been put forth not only by faith-based organizations and civil society actors, but also by many drug developers themselves. Jonas Salk, for example, declined to pursue a patent for the polio vaccine, saying the patent belonged to the people. The creator of the first synthetic malaria vaccine donated the patent to the World Health Organization.

As Salk said in 1952: “Would you patent the sun?”

Photo by Victoria Reay

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To see just how stupid this “argument” is, we only have to imagine its equivalent being used by apologists for other class systems throughout history. Imagine an apologist for the classical Roman slave system addressing a proletarian critic of the system: “Why, the very grain dole you live on was produced by slave labor on a latifundium!” Imagine an apologist for the Soviet planned economy mocking a dissident for advocating free markets — on a typewriter manufactured by centrally-planned state industry!

Yes, we’re quite aware that those iPhones are produced by Apple. Or rather, produced by workers in independent job shops in Asia, with Apple’s actual “contribution” being simply to use its ownership of patents and trademarks to set up a toll gate between the people who make them and the people who use them. It’s hard to see the corporation’s role in all this as anything but parasitic.

On top of everything else, the “anti-capitalists on iPhones, huh huh, huh huh” meme displays total ignorance of actual radical critiques of capitalism. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels praised capitalism for the unprecedented productive forces it had unleashed since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution just a few decades earlier. And Marx argued, in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, that systems of class domination like feudalism and capitalism were “epochs marking progress in the economic development of society.” Such systems of domination persisted so long as they were progressive in furthering the development of productive forces, and would come to an end only when the productive forces to which they had given rise were too great to be contained within the old social relations of production. And thinkers like Antonio Negri, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Paul Mason see peer production and networks as having a dual nature: they are absolutely necessary for capitalism’s further development, but their own full development is ultimately incompatible with capitalism’s continued existence.

The idea of a system giving rise to the seeds of its successor system is just Marxian Dialectics 101.

The irony is that Marx and his followers give capitalism far more credit than I do for its role in “unleashing productive forces.” Unlike Marx, I’m not a historical materialist who sees each successive system of class domination as a necessary stage for developing productive forces, which has to be passed through before productive technology finally lays the material basis necessary for freedom and abundance to exist. As an anarchist, I believe freedom and cooperation are not only possible, but more productive, in every day and age. Abundance is not something that has to be created by long epochs of coercion and slavery, before the material foundations for freedom have been laid.

Western capitalism, like the state communism of the USSR and the Soviet bloc, has been largely parasitic on the creativity of ordinary people working together as equals, and has put their creativity to far less productive use than they would have done themselves. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, capitalists have adopted new technologies and organized production mainly with a view to making it easier to impose discipline on the labor force and extract a surplus from it, rather than increasing productivity for its own sake. In fact it has sabotaged genuinely more productive technologies by using them in sub-optimal ways, because their most efficient use was incompatible with the needs of capital.

For example, the most suitable use of electrically powered machinery, after the invention of the electric motor, would have been craft production in small shops integrated into local agro-industrial villages, of the sort envisioned by Kropotkin in Fields, Factories and Workshops. Instead the new corporate economy, created by an unholy alliance between the state and capital, harnessed the new technology in a highly inefficient and wasteful, centralized mass-production economy that essentially threw away the unique advantages of electricity.

Fifty years ago, Paul Goodman wrote that “A system destroys its competitors by preempting the means and channels, and then proves that it is the only conceivable mode of operating.” Fortunately there are glitches in the Matrix, and those who can’t conceive of any other system are rapidly becoming outnumbered by those who can.

Citations to this article:

• Kevin Carson, Once again, a tired pro-capitalist argument rears its stupid head, Augusta Free Press, 2016-01-20

Photo by Keoni Cabral

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