After the fall of the Soviet Union in the mid-nineties,  there was much talk of pensée unique, singlemindedness or “single thought”^[1]: a discourse affirming market democracy as the only imaginable and discernable framework for common life. As Noam Chomsky would caution, the only strategy for assuring the uptake of this narrative would be the concentration of information and media, meaning, the consolidation of the voice and the imagination of what is possible. It was the belle époque of neoliberalism.

In her book, Networked Activism and Connected Multitudes (Activismo en red y multitudes conectadas:Comunicación y acción en la era de Internet), Guiomar Rovira tells the story of how that unitary discourse was questioned to open up new possibilities. It began with the emergence of activist networks that, taking advantage of the internet’s open and decentralized infrastructure, created new technological tools to share images, words and feelings distinct from the official narrative. These were the times of Zapatismo and anti-globalization. Later, with Web 2.0, the politicized use of networks became socialized, providing access to anyone. This was the time of connected multitudes, including 15-M and other movements spawned by the crisis.

#YoSoy132

Guiomar’s account distinguishes itself from regular academic production in two ways. To begin with, the book is fundamentally affirmative, rather than critical. It affirms the political power of technologies once people have seized their ownership. The author does not view the world from the angle of power: she does not reinforce our impotence, or how dominated and manipulated we are, nor does she victimize us. On the contrary — she speaks about what’s been done, what’s being done and what can be done. She contemplates the world from the perspective of potentiality.

Secondly, it is a lived book. The author’s personal experiences – through punk, Zapatismo or Mexico’s #Yosoy132 movement – form a basis for reflection. Guiomar Rovira is a Catalonian journalist and writer living in Mexico since 1994. She is the author of numerous essays and a teacher in Mexico City’s UAM-Xochimilco University.

Amador Fernández-Savater: “Activist networks” is how you characterize the first historical period described in your book. One of its fundamental ingredients was punk, something that you personally experienced while living in Barcelona during the eighties. How did punk influence the creation of these networks?

Guiomar Rovira: I like it that you want to start there. “No future” is one of the most important messages in punk. In a way, contemplating that “there is no future” opens up a new politics, a much more prefigurative politics. It’s no longer a question of waiting and dreaming of utopias, but of doing what we need to do here and now, and in the ways we can and want to. We’re not waiting for further instructions or permissions to get started. We will take ownership of music and spaces. In punk, anyone can pick up a guitar while someone else starts singing, speaking, doing. This is where we find the DIY spirit, with whatever you have at hand. The cultural becomes political: it is a way to exit the defined boundaries of the system that constantly procrastinates and sacrifices in service to the promise of a non-existent future.

In that sense, from fanzines to squatting, punk is very rich. There is no future, so we have to live. Now. There is no housing, so we have to squat buildings. It’s a movement that also becomes transnational, not embedded in state or national structures but in the spaces in the cities, in the creation of networks. An extended sense-making community. A global movement with its local appropriations, one that needs not ask permission to build a politics and ways of making culture and communicating. A movement where anyone can say what they want to say.

In a way, punk prefigures the hacker mentality. At that time, I was part of a magazine called Lletra A. We made it by cutting and pasting the whole thing manually. We also had a very important network for occupying houses in Barcelona. We opened our modest self-organised social center, el Anti. The idea was, “there is no future, let’s build our lives now”. It wasn’t limited to counter-information, it was about creating a distinct ecosystem.

Zapatismo and the Hope International

Amador: There is a second social movement that would be central to the creation of those activist networks. I’m referring to Zapatismo which, unlike punk, wouldn’t be a “dark” movement. Zapatismo opens a horizon of hope, removed from the metropolis. What can you tell us about the relation between Zapatismo, technologies and communication?

Guiomar: We have to take into account that in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and we lived in a unipolar world marked by the “end of history”. But suddenly, from the most surprising and unexpected place, there is rebellion, hope, and a movement that speaks to us, and where I found myself.

I feel that the significance of Zapatismo is that it allowed for a global common framework. This was a moment marked by despondency across all struggles: the global left was despondent, the Latin American guerrillas were in the doldrums, and so on.  Suddenly, an interpellating framework that rescued us from isolated processes of resistance was born. A framework for active mobilization that allows many different struggles to have a shared sense of identity and a common foe. It is humanity against neoliberalism, the Zapatistas say. And who proposed this framework? The indigenous peoples of Chiapas, the most forgotten, the smallest, coming from a corner of the world where many weren’t even aware that there were indigenous communities, or resistance, or the possibility of struggle.

This was still a global media event, accordingly relayed by traditional mass media (newspapers, radio, television). The World Wide Web was barely a year old, hardly anyone was using it. After a few days, though, the newspapers and radio dropped the story. Nevertheless, people sought ways to keep abreast and intervene in what was happening in Chiapas, supporting this rebellion as a locus of hope for the world.

Amador: This is when the appropriation of the Internet takes place. At that time, it was a new means of communication. How did that come about?

Guiomar: The appropriation was almost natural, spontaneous even. Given the lack of information from the traditional media, alternative media moved to occupy that space. Like many others present, I was participating and publishing in hegemonic media, important newspapers…but I was also sending a wealth of information to alternative radio stations, alternative media, fanzines…

In the midst of all this, these gringos (sometimes gringos can also bring about good things!) kept telling us, “you have to use the Internet”. They were the first hackers, tramping around with their spiky hair, installing modems and strange artefacts in your computer. We had no clue what those maniacs were on about. Less than three months later, we were all using the Internet. When I say “all”, I’m referring to the journalists, the NGOs, the activists. The first websites covering the revolution in Chiapas appeared spontaneously. Some US students decided to follow the situation and began publishing the EZLN’s communiqués. These were sent by fax and then published in the website (called Ya Basta). More people turned up spontaneously and started translating to English, French…

That is how information began to be shared and an informational scaffolding was built around the situation in Chiapas. This was huge: at that time the Mexican government was still quite invested in pushing a positive image internationally (that is no longer the case). But information was not the only thing circulating; many people were travelling to Chiapas, visiting the communities, and generating even more information. There were inputs and outputs, a communicative atmosphere supporting an indigenous rebellion and indigenous rebellion proposing the idea that another world is possible. An interpellation finding resonance in many places around the world and allowing for common action, aside from any differences in our ways of doing.

Walter Benjamin: Power above all things

Amador: I want to pose a question a bit beyond our conversation about activist networks and connected multitudes, about the support you find in the classic author Walter Benjamin. What is it about Benjamin, what kind of ally is he?

Guiomar: What I find in Benjamin is a profound metaphorical, poetical and political inspiration. In the darkness of his time he was able to see the light, more so than any other member of the Frankfurt School. Benjamin helps me understand this need of mine to find the power in each moment, each place.

Technique is not our enemy. It also represents the possibility of living in a fuller world, where our covenant with nature is not hostile, nor does it force the violence by which we survive or perish. Predatory capitalism, based on artificially created pain and scarcity, undermines the potential of technique. The blame for the expulsion of life and accumulation through dispossession lies not with the Internet, but with a montage, a global system, that takes technique and, rather than put it in the service of humanity, gifts it to capitalism and the predatory production of scarcity. Benjamin invites us to conceive of another, non-capitalist modernity.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin sees the democratizing possibility enabled by the fact that we can all take ownership of technique, become authors, and have fuller lives, our own voices. There is another idea of his, which appears in Theses on the Philosophy of History, the concept of jetztzeit: the radiant moment that constellates a kind of epiphany in the here and now where everything opens. This is the idea of the constellation, which I keep coming back to in the book. Those that precede us implore us to see that justice is done. At the same time, there isn’t a single genealogy for all movements. Rather, every movement constructs its own history, shines a light on its radiant moments and, from there, articulates its own destiny. It is a tremendously creative way of understanding that the political also represents an opening to the past.

Benjamin is an inspiration. He died in Portbou, my grandparents’ village. This summer I went to see his grave. He lived a terrible life and never achieved the recognition he deserved. Still, he was the most optimistic, the most creative of the intellectuals of his time. It’s ironic that the one who suffers the most is more able to see the openings, the possibilities, the power.

Connected Multitudes: Technology in anyone’s hands.

Amador: First there is networked activism, the appropriation of technology by activists (punk, Zapatismo, the anti-globalization movement), but then there would be a second movement marking a radical transformation from networked activism, which would be the “connected multitudes”. I would like you to tell us about that transition.

Guiomar: The communicative environment of networked activism remains permeated and populated mainly by militants — people with political consciousness. The shift to connected multitudes is highlighted by the fact that the leading voices are no longer limited to those coming from activism. Anyone using a social network has a voice, without necessarily having been previously politicized or part of any specific activist space. And this can happen in politically incorrect spaces like Twitter, or Facebook or YouTube, which are privative networks.

For example, take Mexico’s #Yosoy132 movement. Not all the Ibero-American University students that started the protests were already politicized, but they did feel aggravated, and used tools to voice that discontent and be heard in the media after remarks were made about president Peña Nieto’s visit to their University. The video they uploaded to YouTube had impressive consequences, generating a wave of indignation that many sorts of people felt identified with. Everybody wondered how it was possible that such an important movement hadn’t come from the UNAM^[2], or from the groups that had been cutting their teeth for years, denouncing unjust situations. Instead, this came from a totally unexpected, unpredictable collective.

In those protests we see a phenomenon that Manuel Castells calls Mass Self Communication: everyone becomes an information producer, a remixer, a retweeter. Everyone takes part in conversations and strengthens the movement with his or her own ability, for example, graphic arts. The processes of putting out and taking in become fuzzy; the entrenched notions of origin, authority and attribution become somewhat “lossy”.

Amador: The book highlights the positive character of the shift between these two stages of alternative communication. This is a process of democratization: if networks had previously been in the hands of activists, now the political use of technology is in the hands of anyone. But, doesn’t this mean that we’ve also lost sight of the importance of technological infrastructures and technological sovereignty? These elements, crucial to the hacker mentality, seem to have been sidelined in favor of “ease of use” in the distribution of content, thanks to social networks made freely available by the same system we are trying to undermine.

Guiomar: While what you’ve mentioned is undoubtedly important, I can’t fully agree with your assertion of what it is we’ve lost. I think that we’re shifting from a very uninformed and automatic use of networks to a more conscious usage due to the Snowden or Wikileaks revelations on spyware. I think that we’re seeing the emergence of a new movement that is far more aware about surveillance, control and data appropriation in social networks. This awareness is something new and we’ve reached it thanks to the work of certain hackers. I see Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange as hackers. They’ve shown why we need to be careful and use Tor, use free software, why we need to have secure passwords and use the web responsibly. We’ll see what comes of that.

Doing it together

Amador: Instead of intellectuals raising a finger to tell us: “be careful, this is not going well”, what we need is more social appropriation of technology, more learning, more technological literacy, more hacklabs. I think that this is one of the key messages in your book. You acknowledge that the Internet is taking a somber turn, while asserting that the solutions will not be found outside the Internet.

Guiomar: Discursive critiques of technology never solve anything. How can we teach ourselves about sociability in networks? By appropriating spaces, constructing them collaboratively, sharing what we know…by doing what we feel like doing, in ways we feel like doing it, and generating new ways. This is what, in my book, I describe as “hacker unfolding.” This is not just a technological possibility; to me, the concept of hacking goes far beyond technology. The hacker takes something apart to then build something new, deconstructing what is offered as a black box to open new possibilities. And this is not limited to technology, it can be done anywhere. Widen your scope and construct new potentials, whether it’s in the university, or in human relations. As Fernanda Briones, the hackfeminism expert, says “Let’s do it together”.^[3]

Amador: How do you consider of the relation between technology and bodies, between the world of bytes and the world of atoms.

Guiomar: My position is that, beyond the differentiation between online and offline worlds, everything occurs on-life. Seen this way, the corporeal experience of encountering is the key. Going out, looking at each other, experiencing the body-to-body connection. Physical encounters, opening spaces for emergence, experimenting with the body’s vulnerability, all of this is essential. The very logic of networks stresses the commonality of how impossible it is to live under the conditions imposed by this expropriating capitalism. This encounter is the quintessential political moment of our times.

To me, this dimension that deals with the vulnerability of the body, this exposition, has transformed voluntary activism into something more alive, less predetermined. The body becomes visible; it interacts and creates convivial, caring spaces while simultaneously politicizing what is private. My current thesis identifies a feministization of connected multitudes, a kind of free appropriation of feminism, a feminism that becomes inevitable. No emancipatory movement can ignore the widely varied approaches to women’s struggles and feminist struggles over the course of time. All of this happens through the body.

Internet feminista y redes libres – Liliana Zaragoza Cano (Lili_Anaz)

Bodies in the street and communication through networks; I can’t think of these as separate. We are a type of cyborg: we carry our own technological extensions. When I think about politics, technology becomes part of collective action. It’s not something additional, or different. If you pay attention, the most important cyberspace and network actions have always taken place within a context of street mobilization. Acting is communicating and vice versa. Everything happens in the on-life dimension. Our brains are the ultimate platform. There is nothing non-physical. The idea that networks are beyond physicality is just dead wrong, and I have put my mind to opposing it.

This text was transcribed from an interview during Guiomar’s book launch. It took place on September 19, 2017 in UAM-Xochimilco. The original Spanish interview was transcribed by Gerardo Juárez and edited by Amador Fernández-Savater.

^[1] Pensée unique, a term coined by French journalist Jean-François Kahn refers to hegemonic ideological conformism. See the Wikipedia entry for more.

^[2] Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México or National Autonomous University of Mexico, one of the world’s highest ranking University in R&D. See the Wikipedia entry for more.

^[3] “Hagámoslo juntas” in the original. Spanish is gendered, “juntas” is the female form of “together”. Female (as opposed to the “default” male) grammatical forms have become more commonly used after the 15M movements, such that people of any gender identity more frequently choose to use the female form to describe mixed gender groups.

Republished from Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License.

Translated by Stacco Troncoso, edited by Ann Marie Utratel

Lead image from It’s Going Down

Original article published at eldiario.es

The post No Future: From Punk to Zapatismo and Connected Multitudes appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London and New York: Verso, 2015, 2016).

I approached this book with considerable eagerness and predisposed to like it. It belongs to a broad milieu of -isms for which I have strong sympathies (postcapitalism, autonomism, left-accelerationism, “fully automated luxury communism,” etc.). So I was dismayed by how quickly my eager anticipation turned to anger when I started reading it. Through the first third of the book, I fully expected to open my review with “I read this book so you don’t have to.” But having read through all of it, I actually want you to read it.

There is a great deal of value in the book, once you get past all the strawman ranting about “folk politics” in the first part. There is a lot to appreciate in the rest of the book if you can ignore the recurring gratuitous gibes at horizontalism and localism along the way. The only other author I can think of who similarly combines brilliant analysis with bad faith caricatures of his perceived adversaries is Murray Bookchin.

I quote at length from their discussion of folk politics:

As a first approximation, we can… define folk politics as a collective and historically constructed political common sense that has become out of joint with the actual mechanisms of power. As our political, economic, social and technological world changes, tactics and strategies which were previously capable of transforming collective power into emancipatory gains have now become drained of their effectiveness…. Petitions, occupations, strikes, vanguard parties, affinity groups, trade unions: all arose out of particular historical conditions. Yet the fact that certain ways of organizing and acting were once useful does not guarantee their continued relevance…. Our world has moved on, becoming more complex, abstract, nonlinear and global than ever before.

Against the abstractions and inhumanity of capitalism, folk politics aims to bring politics down to the ‘human scale’ by emphasizing temporal, spatial and conceptual immediacy. In terms of temporal immediacy, contemporary folk politics typically remains reactive (responding to actions initiated by corporations and governments, rather than initiating actions); ignores long-term strategic goals in favour of tactics (mobilizing around single-issue politics or emphasizing process); prefers practices that are often inherently fleeting (such as occupations and temporary autonomous zones); chooses the familiarities of the past over the unknowns of the future (for instance, the repeated dreams of a return to ‘good’ Keynesian capitalism); and expresses itself as a predilection for the voluntarist and spontaneous over the institutional (as in the romanticisation of rioting and insurrection).

In terms of spatial immediacy, folk politics privileges the local as the site of authenticity (as in the 100-miles diet or local currencies), habitually chooses the small over the large (as in the veneration of small-scale communities or local businesses); favours projects that are un-scalable beyond a small community (for instance, general assemblies and direct democracy) and often rejects the project of hegemony, valuing withdrawal or exit rather than building a broad counter-hegemony. Likewise, folk politics prefers that actions be taken by participants themselves—in its emphasis on direct action, for example—and sees decision-making as something to be carried out by each individual rather than by any representative. The problems of scale and extension are either ignored or smoothed over in folk-political thinking.

Finally, in terms of conceptual immediacy, there is a preference for the everyday over the structural, valorising personal experience over systematic thinking; for feeling over thinking…; for the particular over the universal…; and for the ethical over the political…. Organizations and communities are to be transparent, rejecting in advance any conceptual mediation, or even modest amounts of complexity…. As a result, any process of constructing a universal politics is rejected from the outset.

Understood in these ways, we can detect traces of folk politics in organizations and movements like Occupy, Spain’s 15M, student occupations…, most forms of horizontalism, the Zapatistas, and contemporary anarchist-tinged politics….

…But no single position embodies all of these dispositions…. The ideas that characterise this tendency are widely dispersed throughout the contemporary left, but some positions are more folk-political than others…. [T]he problem with folk politics is not that it starts from the local; all politics begins from the local. The problem is rather that folk-political thinking is content to remain at (and even privileges) that level…. Therefore, the point is not simply to reject folk politics. Folk politics is a necessary component of any successful political project, but it can only be a starting point…. [Finally,] folk politics is only a problem for particular types of projects: those that seek to move beyond capitalism. Folk-political thinking can be perfectly well adapted to other political projects aimed solely at resistance, movements organized around local issues, and small-scale projects…. Strategic reflection—on means and ends, enemies and allies—is necessary before approaching any political project. Given the nature of global capitalism, any postcapitalist project will require an ambitious, abstract, mediated, complex and global approach—one that folk-political approaches are incapable of providing.

…[F]olk politics lacks the tools to transform neoliberalism into something else…. The project of this book is to begin outlining an alternative—a way for the left to navigate from the local to the global, and synthesise the particular with the universal.

…If complexity presently outstrips humanity’s capacities to think and control, there are two options: one is to reduce complexity down to a human scale; the other is to expand humanity’s capacities. We endorse the latter position.

They trace contemporary folk-political wisdom to the experience of the late ’60s, when the New Left rejected the parallel growth of totalizing bureaucracies in Western corporate capitalism and state communism. Much of this critique, they stipulate, is valid.

…At its most extreme, however, this antisystemic politics led towards the identification of political power as inherently tainted by oppressive, patriarchal and domineering tendencies. This leaves something of a paradox. On the one hand, it could choose some form of negotiation or accommodation with existing power structures, which would tend toward the corruption or co-optation of the new left. But on the other hand, it could choose to remain marginal, and thereby unable to transform those elements of society not already convinced of its agenda. The critiques many of these antisystemic movements made of established forms of state, capitalist and old-left bureaucratic power were largely accurate. Yet antisystemic politics offered few resources to build a new movement capable of contending against capitalist hegemony.

…[The dissemination of feminist, anti-racist, gay-rights and anti-bureaucratic demands on a global level] represented an absolutely necessary moment of self-critique by the left, and the legacy of folk-political tactics finds its appropriate historical conditions here. Simultaneously, however, an inability or lack of desire to turn the more radical sides of these projects into hegemonic ones also had important consequences for the period of destabilization that followed. While capable of generating an array of new and powerful ideas of human freedom, the new social movements were generally unable to replace the faltering social democratic order.

As the old Keynesian/Social Democratic order became destabilized, neoliberalism managed to dominate the debate over a replacement order and control the framing of alternatives, and the Left was unable to offer a coherent, unified counter-proposition. And neoliberalism, by partially conceding to the racial and gender justice demands of the left, gained additional leverage in pursuing its economic agenda

It was against this backdrop that folk-political institutions increasingly sedimented as a new common sense and came to be expressed in the alter-globalisation movements. These movements emerged in two phases. The first, appearing from the mid 1990s through to the early 2000s, consisted of groups such as the Zapatistas, anti-capitalists, alter-globalisers, and participants in the World Social Forum and global anti-war protests. A second phase began immediatedly after the 2007-09 financial crisis and featured various groups united by their similar organisational forms and ideological positions, including the Occupy movement, Spain’s 15M and various national-level student movements…. Drawing influence from the earlier social movements, this latest cycle of struggles comprises groups that tend to privilege the local and the spontaneous, the horizontal and the anti-state…. On its own, however, this kind of politics is unable to give rise to long-lasting forces that might supersede, rather than merely resist, global capitalism.

These are all themes which Srnicek and Williams stated even more crudely and explicitly—if you can believe it—in their accelerationist manifesto of 2013, which they went on to develop into this book. Anything local or horizontalist is “luddite tree-hugging crypto-primmie hippie crap.”

In fairness, in the Afterword to the new edition they issue the disclaimer—no doubt sincere—that the “folk politics” they denounce does not equate localism, horizontalism or prefiguration as such—just the current folk-political tendency to pursue it for its own sake when it is not suited to the situation or is actively counter-productive. Rather, it’s an implicit tendency frequently found within localism, horizontalism and prefiguration. To be more exact, “the concept [of folk politics] is designed to pick out a particular subset of characteristics from them.”

But what they consider problematic about this subset of characteristics is itself conceptually flawed:  they distinguish “good” attempts at local counter-institution building (e.g. the Black Panthers’ community initiatives like school lunches, community patrols, kindergartens, etc.) from “bad” folk-political localism insofar as these movements sought to “scale [their] efforts” in keeping with a global strategy rather than to “withdraw” into a “prefigurative paradise.”

The very reference to “scaling” betrays their failure to examine their real implicit bias against decentralism and horizontalism as such, and all the questionable assumptions behind it. They repeatedly use the expression “scale up”:

…[P]references for immediacy in democracy… hold back its spatial scalability. To put it simply, direct democracy requires small communities…. The very mechanisms and ideals of direct democracy (face-to-face discussion) make it difficult to exist beyond small communities, and make it virtually impossible to respond to problems of national, regional and global democracy…. Small communities of the kind required by direct democracy are not a suitable goal for a modern left movement….

How can it be expanded and scaled up?

But like others I have encountered who share their unconscious technological assumptions, they throw the phrase around without making it at all clear what they mean by it. For example, in an argument with an apologist for industrial agriculture I pointed to the superior productivity of soil-intensive horticulture in terms of output per acre (e.g. Jeavons’s raised bed techniques that can feed one person on one-tenth of an acre); their response was “Yes, but how will you scale it up?” I kept pressing them to explain what that meant: “Why does it need to ‘scale up’ at all? If one person can feed themselves with a tenth of an acre, or a village can feed itself with fifty acres, why does any single operation need to be larger?” I get the impression some advocates of “scaling up” are unable to grasp the possibility of 300 million people brushing their teeth in an uncoordinated effort using their own toothbrushes, unless it is somehow “scaled up” to everybody brushing at one time with a single 10,000 ton toothbrush—coordinated by a central body that formulates tooth-brushing guidelines. If an individual action is already taking place at the optimal scale, the best way to “scale up” is probably to proliferate horizontally.

Their fundamental aesthetic distaste for decentralism and horizontalism as such—all their protestations to the contrary, sincere or not, notwithstanding—is almost palpable. To verify this, we need only look at the much harsher, and less qualified, language in their original manifesto. They go so far as to quote favorably from Lenin’s denunciation of left-communist ideas on self-management as an “infantile disorder.”

Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of this, and it is not worth while wasting two seconds talking to people who do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries).

Behind their shibboleth of “scale” is a broader set of unexamined assumptions that amounts to a “folk politics” of their own:  a set of managerialist just-so stories, inherited from leading economic ideologists of the mass-production era like Schumpeter, Galbraith and Chandler, about the inherent superior efficiencies of large scale and the superior productivity of capital-intensive forms of production. This comes through, repeatedly, in their very choice of examples to illustrate what they consider toxic folk-political versions of localism.

Indeed, highly inefficient local food production techniques may be more costly than efficiently grown globally sourced foodstuffs.

Here I can only suggest an intensive reading course that focuses heavily on Jeavons, Frances Moore Lappe and Permaculture. Most neoliberal defenses of industrial factory farming involve numerous strawman fallacies, typically juxtaposing mechanized chemical agribusiness against archaic stand-ins for “organic” agriculture that ignore modern organic agriculture’s massive incorporation of soil science and microbiology, and the superior efficiency in output per acre of intensive techniques. In addition the “inefficiency” critiques of the food-mile movement and food localism they cite, in particular, are flawed in many ways. Srnicek’s and Williams’s point that long-distance shipping of out-of-season produce may be more energy-efficient than greenhouse growing may be correct in some instances. But for in-season produce Ralph Borsodi’s observation that nothing can beat the efficiency of production at the actual point of consumption stands. “Food-mile” critiques still assume fairly conventional, transportation-intensive retail distribution systems, as opposed to the form food production is likely to actually take in a post-capitalist shift from the cash nexus to social economy: the production of most in-season fruits, vegetables, nuts, etc., in rooftop, backyard and neighborhood gardens, and exchange in neighborhood farmers’ markets.

They also accept at face value all of neoliberal capitalism’s claims about the superior efficiency of “comparative advantage” based on outsourced production and globalized logistic chains. “The rapid automation of logistics presents the utopian possibility of a globally interconnected system in which parts and goods can be shipped rapidly and efficiently without human labour.”

In so doing, they ignore cases where diverse local economies with small-scale production at the point of consumption are objectively more efficient. Indeed they smugly dismiss advocates of industrial relocation as essentially nothing more than Luddite hippies, motivated by false nostalgia and yearning for the “simplicity” of a world long gone.

Other movements argue for an approach of withdrawal, whereby individuals exit from existing social institutions… Often these approaches are explicitly opposed to complex societies, meaning that the ultimate implied destination is some form of communitarianism or anarcho-primitivism.

(Never mind that movements like autonomism also adopt an “approach of withdrawal,” which is explicitly based on the possibilities of advanced technology. They beg the question of whether the best approach to transition, in regard to existing institutions, is to conquer or withdraw from them. Their framing, quoted earlier, of “exit” and “building a counter-hegemony” as mutually exclusive alternatives, is fundamentally flawed; advocates of Exodus see their project as building a counter-hegemony through exit.)

In their localism these tree-hugging folk politicos, they say, ignore the “interconnectedness” of the world.

Shared between all of these [variants of localist ideology] is a belief that the abstraction and sheer scale of the modern world is at the root of our present political, ecological and economic problems, and that the solution therefore lies in adopting a ‘small is beautiful’ approach to the world…. The problem with localism is that, in attempting to reduce large-scale systemic problems to the more manageable sphere of the local community, it effectively denies the systemically interconnected nature o today’s world. Problems such as global exploitation, planetary climate change, rising surplus populations, and the repeated crises of capitalism are abstract in appearance, complex in structure, and non-localised…. Fundamentally, these are systemic and abstract problems, requiring systemic and abstract responses.

…Though undoubtedly well-meaning, both the radical and mainstream left partake in localist politics and economics to their detriment.

In their paean to interconnectedness, they ignore the fact that a great deal of this “interconnectedness” is artificial, resulting from state subsidies and protections to economic activity and division of labor on a scale far beyond the point of diminishing returns. As Murray Bookchin argued, much of the “complexity” used to justify centralism is unnecessary. It can be “rationally simplified”

by reducing or eliminating commercial bureaucracies, needless reliance on goods from abroad that can be produced by recycling at home, and the underutilization of local resources that are now ignored because they are not “competitively” priced: in short, eliminating the vast paraphernalia of goods and services that may be indispensable to profit-making and competition but not to the rational distribution of goods in a cooperative society [“The Ecological Crisis and the Need to Remake Society”].

To take one example of a manufactured need for large scale, consider auto production. Most of existing engine block weight results from the need for additional horsepower for rapid acceleration in freeway driving. And Detroit’s three-story stamping presses result entirely from design choices (i.e. curved body panels) made for purely aesthetic reasons. In a society with mixed-use communities built on the pre-automobile pattern for travel by foot, bike or public transit, and with light rail for travel between communities, the private automobile’s ideal users would be those in low-density areas outside of towns not served by light rail heads (e.g. truck farmers needing to get in and out of town). This could be accomplished with the light engine blocks of the original Model-T factories, or for that matter with light electrical motors produced by local industry. And flat body panels could be cut out in a neighborhood garage factory.

Besides that, “interconnectedness” is not a generic quality—there are different kinds of interconnectedness, and a critique of strawman “localism” that does not differentiate between them is useless; far better is an approach (like the P2P Foundation’s “Design Globally, Produce Locally”) that tailors itself to what’s appropriate for different spheres of life.

And the cooptation of new, decentralized production technologies and job shop production over the past few decades by corporations with global supply chains was only possible by state intervention. Massive transportation subsidies play a role, of course, but perhaps more important is the use of patent and trademark law to give global corporations a legal monopoly on the disposal of outsourced production. They—they, who chide others for clinging to past models in the face of material and technological reality—ignore recent and ongoing developments in production technology that enable a growing share of consumption goods to be produced with cheap micro-manufacturing tools for neighborhood and community consumption, including outside the cash nexus in the informal, social and household sectors, not less but more efficiently than can be done for their much-vaunted global supply and distribution chains.

The most forward-thinking specialists in lean, just-in-time manufacturing themselves say as much. For example H. Thomas Johnson, who wrote the Foreword to Waddell’s and Bodek’s Rebirth of American Industry (a magisterial book on adapting managerial accounting models to the Toyota Production System), argued that introducing Taichi Ohno’s production model into a transnational corporate framework amounted to putting new wine in old bottles.

The cheap fossil fuel energy sources that have always supported [large-scale manufacturing] cannot be taken for granted any longer. One proposal that has great merit is that of rebuilding our economy around smaller-scale, locally-focused organizations that provide just as high a standard living [sic] as people now enjoy, but with far less energy and resource consumption. Helping to create the sustainable local living economy may be the most exciting frontier yet for architects of lean operations.

Lean production guru James Womack observed (Lean Thinking), similarly, that “oceans and lean production are not compatible.” Simply shifting inventories from giant warehouses of finished product or intermediate goods to warehouses disguised as trucks and container ships isn’t really reducing overall inventory stocks at all. It’s just sweeping the batch-and-queue bloat of Sloanism under the rug. The outsourced component manufacturers are located on the wrong side of the world from both their engineering operations and their customers… [in order] to reduce the cost per hour of labor.”

The production process in these remotely located, high-scale facilities may even be in some form of flow, but… the flow of the product stops at the end of the plant.

In other words, Williams and Srnicek are drinking the neoliberal capitalist Kool-Aid in taking at face value the claims of efficiency for global supply and distribution chains. They really do not reflect superior efficiency at all, but rather the irrationalities resulting from perverse incentives under capitalism. Far more efficient, as a high-tech manufacturing model, is a networked local economy of job shops with CNC machines like that of Emilia-Romagna/Bologna, oriented to supplying local markets; or better yet, an economy of even cheaper and smaller tabletop CNC machines in workshops producing for multi-family cohousing projects, neighborhoods and micro-villages.

In short, Srnicek and Williams are at least as guilty as any they criticize of failing to adapt their strategy to changed circumstances; in this case they fail to acknowledge the radical technological advances in cheapening, ephemeralization and reduced scale of production machinery, and to take advantage of their promise for creating a counter-economy outside the existing capitalist economy and leaving the latter to starve for lack of labor-power or demand, instead of taking it over.

They apply similar assumptions to political organization and strategy, treating stigmergic, horizontalist movements enabled by network communications tech as “a rejection of complexity,” or as “unscalable” when they’re actually a different kind of scalability. And accusing the new wave of horizontalist movements of having no strategic vision for scalability or “counter-hegemony” is ridiculous. Whatever you think of it, the municipalist strategy that emerged from M15 and allied movements in Europe is a coherent strategy. If anything US Occupy is an outlier in treating the occupations and General Assemblies as ends in themselves without using them as the launchpad for building an ecology of counter-institutions.

One of the most revolutionary effects of networked communications technology is lowering the transaction costs of stigmergic organization over larger spatial areas.

Stigmergic, or networked, organization is characterized by a module-platform architecture. The way it “scales up” is not by creating progressively larger organizational units under a common management, but by proliferating small units horizontally.

And a key benefit of stigmergic organization is that, in a large horizontal network consisting of many nodes, a useful tactical innovation can be rapidly picked up and adopted by many or most nodes in the network—essentially amounting to the coordinated use of that tactic by the network—without any central coordinating or permission-granting authority being required.

Criticism of Occupy for failing to coalesce around a set of demands like post-work is misplaced, and reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of that movement. Occupy was a platform for an entire stigmergic network of movements, providing a common enemy, a common toolkit, and common symbolism. Any anticapitalist movement opposed to economic inequality and the 1% could access this platform and avail itself of this toolkit, regardless of its specific agenda or goals.

In the case of Occupy, local nodes of the movement developed promising innovations (see the Appendix to my book The Desktop Regulatory State, pp. 379-84) that for the most part were not picked up by the rest of the network. For this the movement deserves legitimate criticism. But it is misleading to chalk this failure up to the horizontalist model as such. This brings us, in turn, to a criticism of the authors that I will repeat later: their reliance on Occupy as a model is itself misleading. The Occupy movement, arguably, was an outlier in the degree to which it relied exclusively or primarily on the encampments as an organizational model, and pursued a version of “prefigurative politics” limited largely to the general assemblies and other internal aspects of the encampments themselves.

Srnicek and Williams argue that spontaneous uprisings like urban unrest in 1960s America, or the Occupy movement, can be very effective in putting pressure on ruling elites. But they fail to do so unless they make alliances with more permanent organizations that can help translate the immediate pressure into concrete political action. For example the Tahrir Square movement in Egypt building ties with organized labor, or Spain’s post-M15 social movements “engag[ing] in a dual strategy both within and outside the party system.

No horizontalist movement that I’m aware of objects to alliances with more permanent organizations. Indeed such alliances with local labor unions, civil rights and social justice organizations, churches, etc., have been part of the basic toolkit of horizontalist organization going back to Saul Alinsky and community campaigns. Speaking for myself, I have no objection even to a dual strategy that includes political parties and electoral politics, so long as efforts within political parties do not crowd out, coopt or suck energy from efforts at counter-institution building. But Occupy’s failure to do so was not a failure of “horizontalism” or “localism.” M15, which the authors here mention favorably, was very much a horizontalist movement.

Their caricature of “prefigurative politics” is equally dishonest. Prefigurative politics is not lifestylist attempts at building “temporary autonomous zones.” It is an attempt at planting the seeds or creating the building blocks of the future society right now, with the intent that they coalesce into something that eventually supplants the existing society.

Contrast Srnicek’s and Williams’s contemptuous dismissal of local prefigurative institutions as doomed exercises in lifestyleism with Massimo De Angelis’s analysis of them as examples of an emerging commons-based alternative mode of production, in Omnia Sunt Communia. The goal is “expansion of the commons systems and their greater integration in commons ecologies” culminating in the future with “claiming the wealth produced by all social cooperation as commonwealth.”

If anyone is guilty of imposing a one-size-fits-all strategy regardless of suitability to the situation, it’s Srnicek and Williams, who ignore the existence of a strategic vision when it is found anywhere but in their own preferred model.

That’s not to say that the building of counter-institutions should not be coordinated with political efforts of various sorts, including the organization of resistance to the state or even parties like Syriza and Podemos. But ideally efforts within party politics will, while promoting political objectives like UBI or copyright rollback, also run interference on behalf of local institution-building efforts and actively promote public awareness and enthusiasm for them. Ideally, a political effort that gains power at the polls like Syriza will pursue a good cop, bad cop strategy in negotiating with neoliberal forces like the European Central Bank: “We’ll try to negotiate with you, but we can’t control what our local comrades on the ground are doing on their own.” The worst-case scenario is what actually happened, with Syriza being coopted by the ECB and used as a stick against the post-Syntagma movements.

And if Occupy made a grave strategic error in fetishizing the General Assemblies as an end in themselves, rather than sporulating into an ecology of institution-building movements like M15—which I agree with Srnicek and Williams that it did—an equally grave error would have been for it to either be coopted internally by the Workers World Party or Avakian cultists, as very nearly happened and was averted by David Graeber and his horizontalist allies, or coopted externally by efforts like Van Johnson’s to transform it into a voter mobilization arm for the Democratic Party’s neoliberal agenda.

Occupy was greatly at fault for not building permanent local alliances on the pattern of Community Campaigns or Corporate Campaigns with a whole range of established labor, environmental and social justice organizations, and directing their energies into building lasting counter-institutions in cooperation with other existing movements after the camps were shut down.

Compare this to M15 in Spain, which actually pioneered the general assembly model picked up by Occupy in the United States. Unlike American occupiers, who mostly viewed the dissolution of the camps as the end of the movement, the Spanish Indignados took the dissolution of their large general assemblies as a jumping-off point to create small, permanent neighborhood assemblies devoted to building commons-based counter-institutions. These continuing efforts by the Indignados—coming from an ideological space every bit as “horizontalist” as Occupy—eventually grew into the municipalist movements that have achieved major political influence in Barcelona, Madrid and other cities, and spread further to cities across Europe.

Even in the United States, although the direct lines of influence from Occupy are weaker, there is an array both of preexisting municipalist movements in cities like Cleveland and Jackson that were invigorated by the Occupy movement, and many other such local movements that have grown directly out of it.

Even so, it’s true that purely stigmergic coordination may be insufficient in some cases, and that movements must be coordinated by discussion in larger federal bodies. Again, though, the focus on Occupy is misleading. Those municipalist movements in Europe, starting in Spain and spreading through cities all over Europe (Bologna and Antwerp particularly notable among them), have created Assemblies of the Commons and other federal coordinating bodies on a continent-wide scale. But that doesn’t fit the authors’ narrative regarding the failures of “horizontalism.”

Srnicek and Williams  acknowledge Argentina’s achievements compared to Occupy, most notably the factory recuperations. Nevertheless they find them wanting. There was some coordination between neighborhood assemblies in Argentina, but such inter-neighborhood assemblies “never approached the point of replacing the state, or of being able to present themselves as a viable alternative” in providing functions like “welfare, healthcare, redistribution, education, and so on…”

Beyond these organisational limits, the key problem with Argentina as a model for postcapitalism is that it was simply a salve for the problems of capitalism, but not an alternative to it. As the economy started to improve, participation in the neighborhood assemblies and alternative economies drastically declined. The post-crisis horizontalist movements in Argentina were built as an emergency response to the collapse of the existing order, not as a competitor to a relatively well-functioning order….

In the case of both neighborhood assemblies and worker-controlled factories, we see that the primary organisational models of horizontalism are insufficient. They are often reactive tactics that fail to compete in the antagonistic environment of global capitalism.

Yes, prefigurative counter-institutions tend to arise in periods of downturn and crisis, and then to fade away or be coopted in times of recovery. But there is more to the picture than the normal business cycle. Besides cyclical downturns, there are secular or systemic crises characterized by long-term falling direct rate of profit, stagnant wages, growing levels of precarity and underemployment, etc. And these tendencies carry with them a longer-term shift to counter-institutions as normal means of survival. James O’Connor noted, in Accumulation Crisis, that workers not only shifted their efforts in part from wage labor to direct production for use in the household and social economy during downturns, but did the same thing on a more permanent basis in response to long-term systemic downturns.

What it boils down to is an inability on their part to understand “prefiguration” on its own terms. One of their greatest shortcomings, in such strawman attacks on prefigurative institutions, is their failure to take into account that capitalism is a system in terminal crisis. They take a snapshot approach, juxtaposing prefigurative institutions and attempts at “withdrawal” against a triumphal capitalism, and then warn that prefigurative projects will be coopted into the capitalist framework. Prefigurative movements will fail,

partly because they misrecognize the nature of their opponent. Capitalism is an aggressively expansive universal, from which efforts to segregate a space of autonomy are bound to fail. Withdrawal, resistance, localism and autonomous spaces represent a defensive game against an uncompromising and incessantly encroaching capitalism.

But it is Srnicek and Williams who are guilty of misrecognizing the strategic situation. They fail to address the question of whether the system is a system with an end, which won’t be able to keep “encroaching” because it is exhausting its potential for expansion. As they point out themselves:

With the dynamics of accumulation at the heart of capital, a non-expansionary capitalism is an oxymoron.

Yes. Capitalism can only survive by expanding. And it is reaching, or has already reached, the limits of all the kinds of artificial abundance in subsidized resource inputs, and artificial scarcity as a source of rents from enclosure of various commons, which have to this point allowed it to keep expanding. Therefore…?? So close to getting the point, and yet so far.

Srnicek and Williams treat the correlation of forces between the horizontalist movements and their counter-institutions, and the forces of state and capital, as largely static rather than a moment in a multigenerational transition process. But all these local counter-institutions and other building blocks are developing against the backdrop of the decaying system within which they exist.

They are not ephemeral exercises in lifestylism, doomed to be periodically wiped out like Zion in the Matrix trilogy. By far the majority of people and groups engaged in prefigurative efforts see themselves as “scaling up” by creating counter-institutions which will proliferate horizontally and become building block institutions of post-capitalist society. And exodus (“withdrawal”) is based on a strategic assessment of capitalism’s crisis tendencies and vulnerable points, with the aim of taking advantage of the possibilities of new technology for directly producing for consumption in whatever cases it has become cheaper and more efficient to do so than to work for wages and purchase on the cash nexus, in order to starve the wage system and the engine of accumulation.

In the framework of De Angelis, the circuit of capital and the circuit of the commons have coexisted and interacted since the beginning of capitalism, with the correlation of forces between them constantly shifting. We’re in the early states of a transition process in which the correlation of forces are shifting permanently towards the commons.

This longer transition process will be one of the local building blocks coalescing into a whole and supplanting the old system as it becomes progressively weakened and bankrupted and retreats from the scene. And the coalescence of the new system, as various components are adopted more and more widely and grow into an ecosystem, will occur precisely as a “killer app” made necessary for survival by the collapse of the old system. What occurred in Argentina as a local and cyclical phenomenon, and compelled the partial and temporary adoption of alternative economic models, will of necessity occur on a more widespread and permanent basis when the collapse is global and systemic.

Prefigurative alternatives are not the strategic means by which to defeat a properly functioning capitalism in full bloom. They are the seeds of a new system which will gradually develop to replace a system in decay.

And simply assuming that capitalism will coopt them as the basis for a new lease on life via the next Kondratiev wave or “engine of accumulation,” etc., begs the question of whether it can.

Michel Bauwens and Franco Iacomella argue that capitalism is beset by twin crisis tendencies that undermine the two central supports it has depended on up to now for its continued survival and expansion. Those two supports are artificial abundance of cheap, subsidized material resource inputs, and artificial scarcity of information.

1. The current political economy is based on a false idea of material abundance. We call it pseudo-abundance. It is based on a commitment to permanent growth, the infinite accumulation of capital and debt-driven dynamics through compound interest. This is unsustainable, of course, because infinite growth is logically and physically impossible in any physically constrained, finite system.

2. The current political economy is based on a false idea of “immaterial scarcity.” It believes that an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies – for copyrights, trademarks and patents – should restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations. Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity. In an age of grave global challenges, the political economy keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits.

The capitalist economy is reaching the point of Peak Resource crises (e.g. Peak Oil) and the state’s inability to subsidize and socialize input costs as fast as capital’s need for them is growing (thanks to the “fiscal crisis of the state”), and at the time the “intellectual property” laws that capital depends on for a massive and growing share of its profits are becoming increasingly unenforceable.

Likewise, in dismissing (as another manifestation of “folk politics” and “immediacy,” of course) local obstruction and resistance movements like #NoDAPL, they miss the real point: how the proliferation of such movements, against the backdrop of capitalist decay, amount cumulatively to yet another crisis tendency that will further stress the dying system and hasten its death by attrition.

In the specific case of anti-pipeline movements, the combination of obstruction and physical delays, legal and administrative challenges, divestment movements, and sabotage of already completed pipelines, have together become a permanent part of the cost-benefit calculation of any new pipeline project, and reduce the likelihood on the margin that such projects will be completed in the future. In so doing, they have exacerbated (and continue to exacerbate) the system’s declining capacity to provide the extensive addition of subsidized inputs capital relies on for its profits. This is a real shift in the correlation of forces between the dying old system, and the new one-coming into being–regardless of whether or not it is coordinated on a dying level. The system’s growing vulnerability to such disruption, and the increasing feasibility of such disruption, are themselves part of the system’s death process.

In the case of resisting transnational mining corporations, a combined strategy of raising the costs and difficulties for extractive corporations and substituting (on a partial but increasing scale) locally salvaged and recycled inputs, is an approach with potentially systemic effects. That’s all the more true when local import substitution for raw materials, components, etc. is adopted as a solution to increasingly costly and disrupted supply and distribution chains.

Srnicek and Williams themselves seem to recognize as much:

If a populist movement successfully built a counter-hegemonic ecosystem of organisations, in order to become effective it would still require the capacity][to disrupt. Even with a healthy organisational ecology and a mass unified movement, change is impossible without opportunities to leverage the movement’s power. Historically speaking, many of the most significant advances made by the labour movement were achieved by workers in key strategic locations. Regardless of whether they had widespread solidarity, high levels of class consciousness or an optimal organisational form, they achieved success by being able to insert themselves into and against the flow of capitalist accumulation. In fact, the best predictor of worker militancy and successful class struggle may be the workers’ structural position in the economy.

They mention dock-workers, auto workers and coal miners as examples of workers who, at various times in the past, have been able to leverage their structural position into achieving significant victories against capital. I would add that transport and distribution workers, in particular, have a long history of expanding industry strikes into national or regional general strikes starting with the Pullman Strike of the 1890s. Attacks on the distribution system by non-workers (e.g. the highly effective blockade of Israeli shipping on the U.S. West Coast by BDS activists) have also been quite disruptive, especially when joined by workers. And the recently-emergent system of global supply and distribution chains operating on a just-in-time basis is especially vulnerable to disruption.

And again, while strategic coordination to heighten the disruptive effect would be altogether desirable, the fact remains that the increased incidence of such disruptive attacks as part of the background noise of the system, the increasing feasibility of carrying them out, and the increasing vulnerability of global JIT capitalism to disruption by them, are all part of the transition process even without strategic coordination.

And in fact they are strategic in effect, insofar as connectivity is the strategic link in global capitalism, and its vulnerability to disruption is its central strategic weakness.

The same is true of another leverage point against Bauwens’s and Iacomella’s other systemic vulnerability: the declining enforceability of copyrights and patents. The proliferation of cheap, ephemeral production technologies means that the main engine of accumulation has shifted from ownership of the physical means of production to legal control of who is allowed to use them. So anything that undermines this legal control is striking a blow at the heart of the accumulation process.

On the other hand, Srnicek and Williams fail to address a key leverage point against capitalism, and one that has been heavily addressed by autonomists like Negri and Hardt:  its vulnerability, thanks to cheap, ephemeral production technologies scaled to direct production for use in the household sector or for neighborhood and community markets, to exodus. The availability of such alternatives enables the partial and gradual withdrawal of labor from the capitalist wage system and its shift into the social economy–hence depriving the capitalist system, on the margin, of resources it needs and increasing the pressures on it.

Against this backdrop, strategies of obstruction and withdrawal do indeed “scale up,” and make real strategic sense, in a way that Srnicek and Williams fail to recognize. Local economic counter-institutions, by creating possibilities for subsistence outside the global corporate system and draining it of resources, have an effect that is cumulative and synergistic. And coupled with networked resistance campaigns against mining companies, oil and gas pipelines, etc., they achieve a still higher synergy. Even uncoordinated actions that cumulatively raise the costs of resource inputs or undermine artificial scarcity rents from information, obstruct connectivity and disrupt production chains, or sap capital of needed labor-power and demand on the margin–especially in an environment in which such actions, obstructions and withdrawal are proliferating and are facilitated by material and technological developments–are themselves part of the terminal crisis.

So the primary drivers of the post-capitalist transition are likely to be spontaneous. On the one side the crisis tendencies of capitalism, increasing levels of unemployment and underemployment and precarious living conditions of the working class, the failure of employer- and state-based safety nets, Peak Resource Input crises and the state’s faltering ability to provide capital with the subsidies it needs to remain profitable or to enforce patent and copyright law, the state’s inability to suppress cheap and efficient sources of direct subsistence outside the wage system. On the other, the availability of such small-scale, high-tech means of direct production for use in the social economy, and the proliferation of commons-based institutions for co-production and mutual aid. At the same time that growing unemployment and underemployment and the collapsing safety net makes the turn to alternatives imperative, alternatives are coming to hand on an unprecedented level. The only real question is how much path dependency and cultural inertia must be overcome for the pressure on one side to connect with the vacuum on the other, and for a tipping point to be reached; nevertheless the likelihood that such a point will be reached amounts to an issue of hydraulics.

As Srnicek and Williams themselves note:

…Capitalism did not emerge all at once, but instead percolated to a position of dominance over a course of centuries. A large number of components had to be put in place:  landless labourers, widespread commodity production, private property, technical sophistication, centralization of wealth, a bourgeois class, a work ethic, and so on. These historical conditions are the components that enabled the systemic logic of capitalism eventually gain traction in the world. The lesson here is that, just as capitalism relied upon the accumulation of a particular set of components, so too will postcapitalism. It will neither emerge all at once nor in the wake of some revolutionary moment. The task of the left must be to work out the conditions for postcapitalism and to struggle to build them on a continually expanding scale.

And this transition is not something to be brought about only through political activism and the exertion of will, or that will be inevitably be suppressed or coopted by capitalism absent such activism and exertion. There are also material forces in place making for some such transition, on the same pattern as the internal decay of classical political economy and feudalism from their own internal contradictions, and the emergence of successor systems from the coalescence of many components according to laws of growth.

To the extent that they acknowledge the possibility of capitalism being a system in terminal decline, they do so only in passing, as they state that

[a] post-work world will not emerge out of the benevolence of capitalists, the inevitable tendencies of the economy or the necessity of crisis… [T]he power of the left… needs to be rebuilt before a post-work society can become a meaningful strategic option. This will involve a broad counter-hegemonic project that seeks to overturn neoliberal common sense and to rearticulate new understandings of ‘modernisation’, ‘work’ and ‘freedom’. This will necessarily be a populist project that mobilises a broad swath of society….

Perhaps so. Nevertheless, the relative importance of large-scale social mobilization and electoral politics is at its lowest point in over a century, and the importance of prefigurative counter-institutions has grown correspondingly.

That is not to deny that strategic coordination would be invaluable, or that such a transition would be smoother and less painful with the help of friendly forces in electoral politics. I would be the last to deny the possible role of other forms of strategic engagement with the dying system, in addition to the creation of prefigurative building-blocks and working from the ground up, as part of the mix.

Attempts to engage the state to make it less statelike, to (in Proudhon’s phrase) dissolve it in society, are as old as the anarchist movement. In my opinion there is much promise in projects to transform the state along the lines of Michel Bauwens’s “Partner State,” and in concrete efforts like the local municipalist platforms and regional commons assemblies in Europe to achieve something much like that. And there is more to be gained than lost by putting sympathetic parties like Syriza inside national governments—so long as it is clearly understood that their primary role is to run interference on behalf of the social movements efforts on the ground to construct a new society and give them more breathing room, and not (as was actually the case with Syriza) to undertake the primary effort of building the society themselves or using the social movements as bargaining chips in negotiating with the European Central Bank.

Once we get past the part of the book devoted primarily to the critique of “folk politics,” the subsequent sections on the reasons for the triumph of neoliberalism and their own program for a post-capitalist agenda are quite good. Like David Graeber they see the origin of cash nexus-dominated societies and wage labor, not as the natural outgrowth of a “tendency to truck and barter” or the “original accumulation of capital,” but as an imposition of the state. Likewise “private property”—as opposed to possession—as a construct. The process of imposing the cash nexus has entailed the artificial creation of property rights—most notably the nullification of common rights to the land through enclosure, and the creation of “intellectual property”—in order that there be more scarce private goods to truck and barter in. And they understand the massive scale of the ongoing state intervention required to keep the cash nexus functioning.

Our view is that, contrary to its popular presentation, neoliberalism differs from classical liberalism in ascribing a significant role to the state. A major task of neoliberalism has therefore been to take control of the state and repurpose it…. [Unlike classical liberals], neoliberals understand that markets are not ‘natural’. Markets… must instead be consciously constructed, sometimes from the ground up.

At the same time, they credit the Mont Pelerin Society and all the neoliberal nodes clustered around it of building a toolkit of proposals and waiting until the time was opportune to put it forth as an alternative—namely during the crisis of Keynesianism in the 70s. But that is arguably what the decentralist Left is doing in building an ecosystem of counter-institutions, ready to be adopted as survival mechanisms when capitalism hits its terminal crises.

We argue that a key element of any future-oriented left must be to contest the idea of ‘modernity’. Whereas folk-political approaches lack an enticing vision of the future…

Once again we’re back to the straw, which the authors can never leave far behind. In contrasting their embrace of “modernity” with “folk politics,” under which heading they lump essentially all horizontalist movements, they (deliberately?) obscure the existence of movements like autonomism that are very much about reclaiming a vision centered on technological progress.

But straw aside, I’m entirely in favor of their proposal for a recuperated version of the postwar Mont Pelerin strategy, with the Left presenting broad images of an appealing future centered on the liberatory potential of technology.

The classic Leninist strategy of building dual power with a revolutionary party and overthrowing the state is obsolete. Proponents of the Bolshevik Revolution model appear more useful as historical re-enactors than as guides for contemporary politics….

Given the limits of these other approaches [insurrection and reformism], we argue that the best way forward is a counter-hegemonic strategy…. A counter-hegemonic strategy entails a project to overturn the dominant neoliberal common sense and rejuvenate collective imagination. Fundamentally, it is an attempt to install a new common sense…. In this, it involves preparatory work for moments when full-scale struggle erupts, transforming our social imagination and reconfiguring our sense of what is possible. It builds up support and a common language for a new world, seeking to alter the balance of power in preparation for when a crisis upsets the legitimacy of society.

The point is, there already are a number of loosely associated subcurrents of the Left promoting similar versions of such a vision right now; just off the top of my head right now, I can think of the P2P Foundation, Grassroots Economic Organizing, the Solidarity Economy Network, and countless networked municipalist efforts like those in Barcelona, Madrid, Bologna, Cleveland and Jackson. And as a pop culture theme, it has resonated with the public at least since Star Trek: The Next Generation. Ideas like Universal Basic Income and social media memes like Fully Automated Luxury Communism are spreading virally, and will increase their reach and impact exponentially as tens of millions are unemployed by automation in the next two decades. It would be wonderful if all these tendencies could do more to create mutual synergies, and promote the general concept of post-scarcity and reduced work as a visible alternative to neoliberalism. But far from engaging in such a cooperative effort, Srnicek and Williams are basically trying to put themselves forward as the inventors of this vision, and caricature all the subcurrents that have already been promoting it all this time as a bunch of Luddites.

The book’s treatment of “synthetic”–as opposed to both “negative” and “positive”–freedom is especially good.

Whereas negative freedom is concerned with assuring the formal right to avoid interference, ‘synthetic freedom’ recognizes that a formal right without a material capacity is worthless. …[W]e are all formally free not to take a job, but most of us are nevertheless practically forced into accepting whatever is on offer…. This reveals the significance of having the means to realise a formal right, and it is this emphasis on the means and capacities to act that is crucial for a leftist approach to freedom…. The more capacity we have to act, the freer we are…. A primary aim of a postcapitalist world would therefore be to maximise synthetic freedom, or in other words, to enable the flourishing of all of humanity and the expansion of our collective horizons….

Underlying this idea of emancipation is a vision of humanity as a transformative and constructible hypothesis:  one that is built through theoretical and practical experimentation and elaboration…. What we are and what we can become are open-ended projects to be constructed in the course of time…. This is a project of self-realisation, but one without a pre-established endpoint. It is only through undergoing the process of revision and construction that humanity can come to know itself…. Emancipation, under this vision, would therefore mean increasing the capacity of humanity to act according to whatever its desires might become.

They echo Gramsci on the transition from the “realm of necessity” to a realm of freedom. Reduction of necessity is positive freedom. For much of human history, living in a community entailed having a guaranteed right of access, or share, in the community’s common ownership of much of the means of livelihood. And the movement for commons governance entails treatment of a growing share of the prerequisites for action as a social commons.

A full range of synthetic freedom must seek to expand our capacities beyond what is currently possible…. That is to say, freedom cannot simply be equated with making existing options viable, but instead must be open to the largest possible set of options. In this, collective resources are essential. Processes of social reasoning, for instance, can enable common understandings of the world, creating a ‘we’ in the process that has much greater powers to act than individuals alone. Equally, language is effectively cognitive scaffolding that enables us to leverage symbolic thought to expand our horizons. The development, deepening and expansion of knowledge enable us to imagine and achieve capacities that are otherwise unattainable. As we acquire technical knowledge of our built environment and scientific knowledge of the natural world, and come to understand the fluid tendencies of the social world, we gain greater powers to act.

They also agree with Toni Negri and Michael Hardt on a number of topics. For example, the growing share of productivity that results from collective capacities like scientific knowledge, language, culture, etc. We are at the point where emergent aspects of human interaction are becoming the greatest source of productive capacity.

They agree, likewise, with much of their class analysis, e.g. in acknowledging the decomposition of the traditional proletariat and the need for a new revolutionary subject to replace it. However they choose “people” as the new revolutionary subject, which carries vaguely monolithic implications and doesn’t correspond very well to Negri’s and Hardt’s “multitude.”

In order for the “people” of populism to merge, however, additional elements are necessary. First, one particular demand or struggle must come to stand in for the rest…. The difference between a populist movement and folk-political approaches [is that] whereas the  former seeks to build a common language and project, the latter prefers differences to express themselves as differences and to avoid any universalizing function.

Their failure to recognize the benefits of a unity-in-diversity or of stigmergic organization, on the pattern of the multitude, is probably connected to their dim view of Occupy.

In arguing for cross-sectoral alliances between wage-workers, the unemployed and those engaged in unpaid reproductive labor, Srnicek and Williams also echo autonomist thinkers like Negri and Hardt, Harvey, etc.:

This requires… a recognition of the social nature of struggle, and the bridging of the gap between the workplace and the community. Problems at work spill over into the home and the community, and vice versa. At the same time, crucial support for union action comes from the community, and unions would best be served by recognizing their indebtedness to the invisible labour of those outside the workplace. These include not only domestic labourers, who reproduce the living conditions of waged workers, but also immigrant workers, precarious workers and the broad array of those in surplus populations who share in the miseries of capitalism. The focus of unions therefore needs to expand beyond supporting only dues-paying members…. Unions can involve themselves in community issues like housing, demonstrating the value of organised labour in the process. Rather than being built solely around workplaces, unions would therefore be more adequate to today’s conditions if they organised around regional spaces and communities.

In expanding the spatial focus of union organising, local workplace demands open up into a broad range of social demands…. [T]his involves questioning the Fordist infatuation with permanent jobs and social democracy, and the traditional union focus on wages and job preservation. An assessment must be made of the viability of these classic demands in the face of automation, rising precarity and expanding unemployment. We believe many unions will be better served by refocusing towards a post-work society and the liberating aspects of a reduced working week, job sharing and a basic income.

They are entirely correct in calling  for the development of a broad common post-work Left agenda in preparation for the coming economic and political crises over automation and technological unemployment—already foreshadowed by the increase in precarity, the shift to poorly paid service sector jobs and the disappearance of full-time benefits as a norm.

Their concrete political agenda—full automation, universal basic income, reduced standard working hours and destruction of “work ethic” culture—is fairly unremarkable for their milieu, although their explanation of the harm done by the work ethic and the benefits of Basic Income for the bargaining power of labor is unusually lucid. But their pose of distinguishing themselves from the rest of the Left, which is allegedly not doing any of these things, and the novelty of calling for an ecosystem of leftist movements and organizations promoting this common agenda on the Mont Pelerin model, is a bit much given the array of thinkers from Dyer-Witheford to Negri and Hardt to Rifkin to Mason, the apparent “steam engine time” for UBI in Western politics, and growing popular fear of technological unemployment from automation.

Things like shorter work hours and Basic Income are definitely suited to viral memetic propagation and to the coalescence of a networked alliance of movements sharing those goals or something similar to them. But such an alliance is appropriate for specific movements and organizations under the Occupy umbrella—quite conceivably a majority of them—not Occupy itself. In Spain, M15 as such did not venture into formulating a concrete political agenda (or at least the most visible approximation of such a venture, Podemos, did not fare particularly well); rather, various constituencies within M15 reconfigured themselves at the local level in assorted commons-based municipalist movement and made significant gains both at the local level and a networked nation- and continent-wide political force, not as Indignados per se.

The discussion of “organisational ecology” and attendant practical recommendations is quite good, aside from the obligatory dig at “folk politics” in passing.

On a purely quantitative level, the left is not noticeably ‘weaker’ than the right—in terms of its ability to achieve popular mobilisation, the reverse seems to be true. Particularly in terms of crisis, the left seems eminently capable of mobilising a populist movement. The problem lies in the next step:  how the force is organized and deployed. For folk politics, organisation has meant a fetishistic attachment to localist and horizontalist approaches that often undermine the construction of an expansive counter-hegemonic power.

Once again, it’s hard to decipher, behind all this straw, what actual aspects of horizontalism and localism they see as militating against an “organisational ecology.” To return to my recurring example of recent municipalist movements, we have not only the post-M15 movements in Spain but allied movements across Europe from Antwerp to Bologna to Greece, as well as the Evergreen project in Cleveland and Cooperation Jackson and dozens and dozens of similar movements in the U.S. and UK. Besides these mutually supporting local movements there is a growing, multi-layered and robust support network of academics, think tanks, and networked assemblies promoting this model, from the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives to the Right to the City Alliance. I myself have, for several years, strenuously advocated that such movements expand their ties both locally and globally with the open-source movement and the open hardware/maker movement in order to create the kernels of multifaceted local commons-based economies including not only cooperative retail but micromanufacturing, Permaculture, pro-information freedom policies and exclusive use of open-source software by local government and universities, municipal high-speed broadband, land trusts, transformation of unused public buildings into community hubs, etc. And many projects are engaged in just such institution-building projects. The entire movement, in short, eminently illustrates what Srnicek and Williams call for:

…Every successful movement has been the result, not of a single organisational type, but of a broad ecology of organisations. These have operated, in a more or less coordinated way, to carry out the division of labour necessary for political change. In the process of transformation leaders will arise, but there is no vanguard party—only mobile vanguard functions. An ecology of organisations means a pluralism of forces, able to positively feedback on their comparative strengths. It requires mobilisation under a common vision of an alternative world, rather than loose and pragmatic alliances. And it entails developing an array of broadly compatible organisations…. This means that the overarching architecture of such an ecology is a relatively decentralized and networked form—but, unlike in the standard horizontalist vision, this ecology should also include hierarchical and closed groups as elements of the broader network…. The divisions between spontaneous uprisings and organisational longevity, short-term desires and long-term strategy, have split what should be a broadly consistent project for building a post-work world. Organisational diversity should be combined with broad populist unity.

And, yet again, I am banging my head on my desk wondering what strawman caricature of “localism” and “horizontalism” the authors consider incompatible with the above statement.

I also agree that “media institutions are an essential part of any emergent political ecology aimed at building a new hegemony…. [Its tasks include] creating a new common language…, generating narratives that resonate with people,” etc. Creating visible organizations with spokespersons who get included into TV journalists’ rolodexes is vital.

The brain trust ecology must include not only post-capitalist counterparts of the Mont Pelerin Society  and CFR, but Gramscian “organic intellectuals” from the movements on the ground who are directly involved in creating the institutions.

My biggest area of skepticism regarding their agenda is “full automation.”

…logistics is at the forefront of the automation of work, and therefore represents a prime example of what a postcapitalist world might look like:  machines humming along and handling the difficult labour that humans would otherwise be forced to do.

No doubt global supply and distribution chains would be the most efficient way of producing some goods in a postcapitalist future (although, equally no doubt, a much smaller share of total production than Srnicek and Williams assume). And the transportation and warehouses involved in these networks are a logical target for 100% automation. But a great deal of production, probably including the production of most components and the final assembly of a majority of consumer goods and the production of most fruits and vegetables, is likely to be on a small-scale, on-demand basis near the point of consumption. The ideal means of production for local manufacturing are high-tech CNC machinery. But production in small workshops in Kropotkinian agro-industrial villages is far less amenable to automation of processes like handling feedstock, and is likely to involve human craft workers (working short hours in self-managed shops) reprogramming the machines and transferring intermediate products from one machine to another; total automation, in contrast, would require much higher levels of centralization and scales of production, with most production and distribution being coordinated by long-distance logistics with an extremely “thick” and materials-intensive infrastructure.

And getting back to the theme of capitalism and the state being subject to systemic decay, and people turning to the building blocks of the successor society and developing them as a necessity for survival, the transition is likely to take the institutional form of a growing share of production shifting from corporate control, wage labor and the cash nexus into the social economy, with micro-villages and other multi-family primary social units taking over production for direct subsistence. The long-distance logistics networks that are eventually automated with self-driving trains and ships, RFID chips and GPS tracking are apt to be much smaller in volume than those of the present.

For all the good in this book, and all that it offers of value to the broader post-capitalist and post-scarcity milieu of which Srnicek and Williams are a part, their approach itself is fundamentally opposite to that of the autonomists and other horizontalists — and in every case, they come off the worse in comparison. Autonomists and horizontalists, no less than accelerationists, acknowledge the importance of strategic coordination, integration and coalescence into a macro system, including the creation of federal bodies, media ecosystems and the like. But for them, the primary orientation is one of respect for the agency and self-organization of ordinary people as revolutionary subjects and creators of the successor system, and for the myriad of counter-institutions they are building in the interstices of the dying state-capitalist system. The larger systems of coordination, the media ecologies, and so forth, are an emergent phenomenon following from the primacy of efforts on the ground.

For Srnicek and Williams, on the other hand, the main focus in building a post-capitalist society is what the capitalists and their state have already built or are building; the strategy is to accelerate that construction process and put it under new management via a macro political process. At best, their attitude towards commons-based counter-institutions is permissive tolerance towards a secondary praxis that’s fine as long as it doesn’t divert effort or resources from their primary political strategy; at worse it’s contemptuous dismissal as a “folk-political” distraction from the real effort.

Photo by azule

The post Book of the Day: Srnicek and Williams’ Inventing the Future appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This interview with Gustavo Esteva was conducted in 2014 by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery for Joyful Militancy. For this email interview we (Nick and carla) sent a ‘preamble’ outlining some of the ideas behind our book project, and then included a series of questions based on Esteva’s other writings. As time went on in the process of researching, doing interviews, and writing the book, our ideas and articulations shifted, and for that, we are deeply indebted to all our interviewees who offered new insights and shed light on areas that needed reworking.

Consider joining the collective of supporters for Gustavo Esteva: For decades, Esteva has been supporting grassroots movements and initiatives; however, he recently lost his main source of income. At the age of 81, he has no savings or pension and is facing some very large medical bills. Many of us have experienced his hospitality, the grace with which he offers his time and wisdom, and the deep love and support he provides to his friends, family, and fellow-travellers. Please consider sharing or donating to this Fundly page on a monthly or a one-time basis.

carla & Nick (c&N): What is your initial reaction to the preamble on joyful militancy: how did it feel?  What resonated, and what didn’t?  Are there particular pieces that make you curious?  Excited?  Annoyed?

Esteva: It feels great! I am excited and curious about the whole thing, the approach, which clearly resonated with my theory and practice.

Your distinction between joy and sadness is obviously rooted in an old tradition but presented in a new way, more clear, more open, and you escape immediately from the temptation of a binary separation. I can associate the proposal and many specific statements with my own experience.

We have been using in recent years a word in Spanish that does not function in English: sentipensar. What is behind the word is that you can not think without feeling or feel without thinking…but there is a dominant, absurd conviction that you can and must separate thinking and feeling, and you can thus get “scientific thinking”, “objective thinking”, etc. supposedly separated from any subjectivity and feeling and consequently more valid. I feel a profound connection between our sentipensar and your concepts of joyful militancy and sad militancy.

There is a serious challenge in the proposal: how to assume it and apply it without falling into sadness, i.e. classifying, excluding, disqualifying? Yes, the idea is to live in “a truly radical, creative, and joyful way”. In that expression, are we not disqualifying the “other” ways, which will not be “truly” radical? We need to be very careful to say what we want to say.

And I have a problem with the words “activist” and “militancy”…which we cannot cease to use!

1. On the one hand, the military implication: an activist is “an individual who favors, incites or demands intensified activities, especially in time of war” (Webster). On the other hand, the role assumed by the activist as a “leader”. An activist is a person activating others. This may imply that you think that the others, the people, are not active; we need to activate them. This is usually wrong: the people are always doing something, they are moving. Or, even worse, you think that the people are moving but in the wrong direction and you know the right direction. You thus try to activate them in the right direction. A kind of vanguard, again.
2. Militancy cannot be delinked from war, the military. Militant is: “1. Fighting; engaged in war; serving as a soldier. 2. Of a combative or warlike character or disposition; ready and willing to fight.” Militancy is “fighting spirit, attitude or policy” (Webster).

True, we are involved in a war. The powers that be are waging a war in which we, the people, are the identified enemy. We are in what the Zapatistas called the Fourth World War. Are we engaged in it, serving as soldiers in such a war, in one of the sides? “Choose well your enemy,” says an old Arab proverb; “you will be like him.” If our enemy is an army, you will become an army…

Some of us (activists, militants) have suffered the urgency and the compulsion to do something against those oppressing us (“the dominant order”) and for a decent society, a different kind of world. For many of us, it is almost impossible to resist this impulse…and we don’t want to resist it: we feel that it makes us human and protects our dignity. But very often this impulse shapes us as sad militants and destroys the joy of being alive and thus fighting (to fight is to dream).

In my case, after a long, solid period of sad militancy, the path to escape from that condition was three-fold:

1. My experience at the grassroots. Unable to understand what I was seeing and experiencing at the grassroots with the lens, the categories, in which I was educated, I took off one day those lenses and began to see and experience a whole new world, full of joy, creativity, and conviviality.
2. My late discovery of the Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Deleuze and Guattari, and particularly its preface by Michel Foucault opened my heart. For Foucault the book poses some of the questions implicit in your presentation: “How does one introduce desire into thought, into discourse, into action? How can and must desire deploy its forces within the political domain and grow more intense in the process of overturning the established order? Ars erotica, ars theoretica, ars politica.” It was not easy to read the book itself; perhaps it is too French, and too located in a specific intellectual context of certain time and place. But it is fascinating and useful. As Foucault clarifies in the preface, the book combats three adversaries: the sad militant, the technicians of desire (psychoanalysts and semiologists), and fascism, particularly “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” And he states, firmly: “Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.”
3. The most important, what seems to be the most radical sentence of the Zapatistas: “We are quite ordinary women and men, children and old people, that is to say, rebels, non-conformists, uncomfortable, dreamers.” (La Jornada, 4 August 1999). With the Zapatistas we learned to be activated by ordinary men and women and accepted their leadership…instead of trying to lead them, as activists, organizers, etc. And we learned with them, with the people, how to transform our militancy into a joyful, peaceful struggle. This was probably the “final” cure (I hope) from the Leninism guiding my political activities and in fact my whole life until the mid-80s but still surreptitiously present in the 90s.

c&N: How did you come to grapple with sad/joyful militancy: i.e. how did it emerge as something you’re oriented towards (how’d you get here?)

Esteva: As most things in my life, I got ‘there’ through practice, experience.

In the 60s, when I became associated with a group in the process of organizing a guerrilla in Mexico, whose members were assuming that they were already the vanguard of the proletariat because they had the revolutionary program, I was fully immersed in what we now call sad militancy. Our ‘program’ was evidently an intellectual construction in the Leninist tradition. We had already our criticism of Stalinism, etc. but we still were in the tradition of trying to seize the power of the state for a revolution from the top-down, through social engineering. We were thus preparing ourselves (military training, etc.) and organizing. I can apply to the experience your description: “perfectionism, suspicion, cynicism, fear, ideological purity, competition, race to radicalism, fear of mistakes/humiliation, self-hatred…” Of course, as you observe, there were moments or conditions of joy, laughter, intensified emotion, exhilaration… The environment of conspiracy and clandestinity and the shared ideology shaped real camaraderie and episodes full of joy, but it was clear that the experience itself was pure sad militancy: “creating boundaries, making distinctions, comparing, making plans, and so on.” One day I will share many stories of that phase of my life that illustrate this very well. How the whole experience ended makes the point better than any of those stories: one of our leaders killed the other leader because of a woman. The episode evidenced for us the kind of violence we were accumulating in ourselves and wanted to impose on the whole society. In the military training, for an army or a guerrilla, to learn how to use a weapon is pretty easy; what is difficult is to learn to kill someone in cold blood, someone like you, that did nothing personal against you… Nothing sadder than that.

The joy of living, the passion for fiestas, the capacity to express emotions, the social climate that I found at the grassroots, in villages and barrios, in the midst of extreme misery, began to change my attitudes. My participation in different kinds of peasant and urban marginal movements gave me a radically different approach. The break point was perhaps the explosion of autonomy and self-organization after the earthquake in Mexico City in 1985. It became for me a life-changing experience. The victims of the earthquake were suffering all kind of hardships. They had lost friends and relatives, their homes, their possessions, almost everything. Their convivial reconstruction of their lives and culture would not have been possible without the amazing passion for living they showed at every moment. Such passion had very powerful political expressions and was the seed for amazing social movements. In the following years the balance of forces changed in Mexico City, already a monstrous settlement of 15 million people. There was a radical contrast between the guerrilla and these movements. The very notion of militancy changed in me: it was no longer associated with an organization, a party, an ideology, and even less a war… It was an act of love.

c&N: What’s been your experience of sad militancy in everyday life—and especially in radical spaces?

Esteva: In the 60s, in the preparation of our guerrilla, an important aspect of our training was to bring our ideological commitment and the principles of our training as would-be guerrillas to our daily lives. This attitude brought coldness, separation, sadness…

Emma Goldman expressed this in a beautiful way:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.”

One very important point is that in the practice of sad militancy it is almost unavoidable to fall in love with power. You are trying to seize it –from the State- or to create your own power, “people’s power”, “popular power”. And this obsession, this fascism, is applied to the life in the family, with friends, with every one. It is one that very radical and progressive men can be feudal at home, in their attitudes with their wifes and children. Machismo is everywhere in sad militancy.

c&N: What sustains sad militancy?

Esteva: Dogmatism, even fundamentalism, the strong conviction that you own the truth,  objective truth, scientific truth – and that theory guides practice: you must obey your theory, the program, the ideas…

c&N: What provokes or inspires it?  What makes it spread?

Esteva: The separation of means and ends. The joy is projected to the future –the promised land, the new society- and all kinds of means are accepted for your high ideals, means that can be very sad and terrible: killing, betraying, oppressing… This is very serious business and you must commit all your effort, energy, feelings, connections, etc. to the revolutionary goal, subordinating to it every minute, every emotion, every love…

This is contagious. Of course, there is a kind of exhilaration in this attitude: you are saving the world, you are fighting against the identified enemy, you are offering the sacrifice of your life for the common good, etc. etc. But you can commit the worst crimes and be very sad in this endeavor.

c&N: What’s been your experience of joyful militancy? can you speak to the Zapatistas and the use of this tactic?

Esteva: The Zapatistas are of course a perfect illustration for the alternative attitude.

In a letter to the Argentinian people in 2003 subcomandante Marcos wrote:

…sometimes you forget the points and lines that in the maps mark frontiers… All scientists know that music, dance, food and feeling are fundamental ingredients to construct what some call utopia, but is possible and necessary: a new world, that is, better. Here in Mexico, a place of transgressors of oblivion, and professionals of hope, there are some human beings who have decided to keep awake the powerful organizing a fiesta that some disoriented call an uprising and is nothing but the common dance of dignity. The dance in which the human being is, and is human.”

In a letter to Eric Jauffret, on July 5, 1995, subcomandante Marcos wrote:

We are not fighting with our weapons. Our example and our dignity now fight for us. In the peace talks the government delegates have confessed that they have studied in order to learn about dignity and that they have been unable to understand it. They ask the Zapatista delegates to explain what is dignity. The Zapatistas laugh, after months of pain they laugh. Their laughter echoes and escapes unto the high wall behind which arrogance hides its fear. The Zapatista delegates laugh even when the dialogue ends, and they are giving their report. Everyone who hears them laughs, and the laughter re-arranges faces which have been hardened by hunger and betrayal. The Zapatistas laugh in the mountains of the Mexican southeast and the sky cannot avoid infection by that laughter and the peals of laughter emerge. The laughter is so great that tears arise and it begins to rain as though the laughter were a gift for the dry land…With so much laughter raining, who can lose? Who deserves to lose?

In December 2007, in their intervention in the symposium to honor Andrés Aubry, subcomandante Marcos shared that a young woman told him a few years before: “If your revolution does not know how to dance, don’t invite me to your revolution”. This is probably a variant of a statement commonly attributed to Emma Goldman that occurs in several variants: If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution!; If I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution!; If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution; A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having; If there won’t be dancing at the revolution, I’m not coming.

No quote, however, can illustrate the character of Zapatismo as joyous militancy better that the daily life in Zapatista communities. Yes, you have the amazing sense of humour of subcomandante Marcos and many comandantes and comandantas. But there is nothing like the joy and freedom of the children in Zapatista communities. The Zapatistas work a lot, very day, and they are dealing with all kinds of hardships, restrictions and aggressions. They have real motives to be sad. And they know how and when to cry. But they laugh all the time and they have wide spaces for creativity, hospitality, love. There is no event without a fiesta. They have created a convivial society, perhaps the first.

We use the word aesthetic to allude to the ideal of beauty. The etymological meaning, almost lost, associate the word with the intensity of sensual experience, it meanse perceptive, sharp in the senses. That meaning is retained in words like anesthesia. Comparing a funeral in a modern, middle class family and in a village in Mexico or India, we can see then contrast in how you express or not your feelings and how joy and sadness can be combined with great intensity.

Zapatismo is clearly an aesthetic movement, both for its beauty and the intensity of the senses in it.

c&N: What inspires/encourages/sustains joyful militancy?

Esteva: Again, one important lesson from the Zapatistas. If you are not separating means and ends, your struggle embodies and takes the shape of the outcome. If you are looking for a society without violence, you are not using violence in the struggle. Joy, love, kindness, everything that you want in the decent society you are tying to create, appear in the militancy, in the real, immediate actions of the struggle.

c&N: How do you try to embody it?

Esteva: Gandhi said this beautifully: Be the change you wish for the world. Instead of preaching, telling everyone what to do, qualifying and disqualifying everyone, focusing your effort and energy in identifying the ‘enemy’ and fighting against it, I try to do the kind of things in which I believe and to embody, in my daily live, the attitudes and practices of the new society as I imagine it.

For a long time now, I have been try to apply in my daily life Paul Goodman’s advice:

Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!

c&N: Because we think joy and sadness are always moving and shifting into new configurations, we are really curious about how these shifts take place.  Have you seen spaces, conversations, or practices shift from joyful militancy into sad militancy, or vice-versa?  What leads to these shifts?

Esteva: Yes, continually, day after day and almost hour after hour, in the Oaxaca Commune, our experience in 2006. Our movement evolved in a continual confrontation between the people themselves, self-organized and autonomous groups, and a variety of organizations of a vertical structure—unions,  “vanguards”, etc. —most of which can be typically described as sad militancy. There was a continual fluctuation and shifting. I do think that the main factor producing the shifts to sad militancy was power, the struggle for power, the way in which many militants were mirroring the power we were fighting against in what they saw as the construction of “popular power”. Such struggle was often projected inside the movement, when the militants were competing for power and transforming their comrades into enemies as an expression of rivalry. In the same way, the shift to joyous militancy came from the creativity and joy of the people themselves. In the radio we controlled, we had a very popular program: “Barricade love,” beautiful love stories emerging during the nights in the barricade, when young people were preparing themselves to defend the neighborhood from the police and the governor’s goons. A lot of ingenuity and creativity emerging from the people became a limit to the actions imposed by sad militants.

c&N: A common perception we’ve been grappling with is that joyful militancy is naïve—a failure to appreciate how bad things are (if you’re not sad/angry/cynical, you’re not paying attention) – how do you react to this?

Esteva: There is a point in the critique: we need to be continually aware of the horror, not to hide it…as the ‘system’ does. Reaction: irony, laughter, ridiculization… When Galeano states: “Who is not afraid of hunger, is afraid of food” and I comment this statement saying: “We cannot expect a moral epiphany in the CEOs of Monsanto and WalMart,” we are combining the awareness of the horror, paying attention to it, with the joy of laughing at them and doing our own thing.

c&N: There’s also a perception that joyful militancy is just a symptom of privilege (in the north American context). How do you think about joyful militancy in the context of privilege and oppression?

Esteva: My feeling is that such perception is a prejudice. The poor and oppressed should be sad. I did learn sad militancy with highly educated people, middle-class professionals and so on. I did learn joyful militancy with urban marginal, peasants and particularly indigenous peoples – under extreme oppression and misery.

c&N: How do you think about joyful militancy across divides of colonialism, ageism, heteropatriarchy, racism, ableism, etc?

Esteva: It is what may erase those divides! It is the way out!

At the end of the interview, Esteva included some pertinent quotes from other authors:

Radicalism is not “a certain set of ideas, but rather an attitude, an approach”, doubting everything, “readiness and capacity for critical questioning of all assumptions and institutions which have become idols under the name of common sense, logic and what is supposed to be natural…Radical doubt as a process of liberation from idolatrous thinking; a widening of awareness, of imaginative, creative vision of our possibilities and options… The radical approach…starts from the roots”, i.e., man, “but we speak of man as a process;…of his potential for developing all his powers; those for greater intensity of being, greater harmony, greater love, greater awareness. We also speak of man with a potential to be corrupted of his power to act being transformed into the passion for power over others, of his love of live degenerating into the passion to destroy life (“Introduction,” by Erich Fromm, in Ivan Illich, Celebration of Awareness, London: Marion Boyars, 1972, pp.7-9).

“This call to face facts, rather than deal in illusions-to live change, rather than rely on engineering-is an attempt to re-introduce the word ‘celebration’ into ordinary English… To discover…what we must do to use mankind’s power to create the humanity, the dignity and the joyfulness of each one of us” (“A Call to Celebration” in Illich, Celebration of Awareness, p.14-5)

In English ‘convivial’ now seeks the company of tipsy jolliness, which is distinct from that indicated by the OED and opposite to the austere meaning of modern ‘eutrapelia’ which I intend. (OED: Of or belonging to a feast or banquet; feasting or jovial companionship; fond of feasting and good company; disposed to enjoy festive society; festive; jovial)… ’Austerity’ has also been degraded and has acquired a bitter taste, while for Aristotle and Aquinas it marked the foundation of friendship… Thomas deals with disciplined and creative playfulness…a virtue that does not exclude all enjoyments, but only those that are distracting from or destructive of personal relatedness. For Thomas ‘austerity’ is a complementary part of a more embracing virtue, which he calls friendship or joyfulness. It is the fruit of an apprehension that things or tools could destroy rather than enhance eutrapelia (or graceful playfulness) in personal relations. (Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, New York/Evanston/San Francisco/London: Harper & Row, 1973, pp, xxiv-xxv).

From Michel Foucault’s Preface to Anti-Oedipus:

Whence the three adversaries confronted by Anti-Oedipus. Three adversaries who do not have the same strength, who represent varying degrees of danger, and whom the book combats in different ways:

1. The political ascetics, the sad militant, the terrorists of theory, those who would preserve the pure order of politics and political discourse. Bureaucrats of the revolution and civil servants of Truth.
2. The poor technicians of desire — psychoanalysts and semiologists of every sign and symptom — who would subjugate the multiplicity of desire to the twofold law of structure and lack.
3. Last but not least, the major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism (whereas Anti-Oedipus’ opposition to the others is more of a tactical engagement). And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini — which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively — but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.

I would say that Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time (perhaps that explains why its success was not limited to a particular “readership”: being anti-oedipal has become a life style, a way of thinking and living). How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior? The Christian moralists sought out the traces of the flesh lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the body.

Paying a modest tribute to Saint Francis de Sales, one might say that Anti-Oedipus is an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.

This art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide for everyday life:

• Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.

• Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.

• Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

• Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.

• Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.

• Do not demand of politics that it restore the “rights” of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to “de-individualize” by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.

• Do not become enamored of power.

Reposted from Joyful Militancy

Image of Gustavo Esteva from Joyful Threads on vimeo

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