Political action may be necessary. As Aronoff suggested, it is indeed a mistake to create a false dichotomy with counter-institution building. But framing “political action” as primarily state action, rather than a component of the counter-institution building movements themselves, is precisely the kind of false dichotomy we need to avoid. Political models centered on the conquest of power, and collective action through captured institutional hierarchies, are — to repeat — obsolete.
Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real by Kevin Carson. Read the full series here or scroll down for the PDF.
Kate Aronoff. Other critics are more thoughtful than McMillan (it would be hard to be less so). Kate Aronoff, for example, recognizes the liberatory potential of the new technologies, despite her fear that they will be successfully hijacked by Silicon Valley capitalism absent political action to divert the currents of change into a more progressive channel. And above all she gets credit for at least describing Mason’s position honestly.
Mason’s call to “direct all actions towards the transition — not the defense of random elements of the old system,” to focus solely on building alternatives, is a false dichotomy. If Syriza’s project in Greece has shown anything, it’s that combining a broad-based solidarity economy with political power is deeply threatening to neo-liberalism, the top brass of which will risk self-implosion to stamp it out. Acting alone, Solidarity for All didn’t provoke a sadistic backlash from Greece’s creditors. Syriza’s victory at the polls, its leadership’s presence at the negotiating table in Brussels, and the egalitarian populist parties grasping at state power across the Mediterranean did — but neither the challenge nor the solution could exist without the other.
Millennial-led movements from Black Lives Matter to Occupy Wall Street have already put the social technologies Mason describes into practice, and are writing new rules for how popular uprisings work in the 21st century. Podemos, Spain’s ascendant populist party, uses a sub-Reddit to make decisions among members at the national level. Thankfully, technology is changing organizing at least as much as it is the economy. Capitalism isn’t going anywhere without a fight, no matter how inventive the alternatives.
If the early 20th century labor heroine Lucy Parsons were alive now, she might add an addendum on to the statement she’s best remembered by: “Never be deceived that the rich will permit you to innovate away their wealth.” Today’s movements will need to be at least as creative as the forces they’re taking on, and be building solutions that are even more so. Post-capitalism is coming, but a new and even more disruptive tradition of organizing will have to clear the way first.[1]
The problem is that Aronoff conflates “political action” as such with political action aimed at controlling the state. It may well be that networked movements like Occupy Wall Street or Syntagma are useful both in articulating the subjectivity of the classes building the new society, and in running political interference and mobilizing the public in defense of the new counter-institutions where the state actively menaces them. The swarming done by the worldwide support movement for the EZLN, back in the ’90s, is a good example of this approach. The direct actions taken by Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland, the Block the Boat campaign on the U.S. west coast, and Black Lives Matter, are also good examples. And such movements can exist as direct outgrowths of the groups engaged in building counter-institutions, if not actually coextensive with them. And Podemos, which Aronoff also mentioned, has a much more distributed and locally focused character, functioning much more as a facilitating platform for the local counter-institutions themselves — arguably closer to Bauwens’s idealized Partner State model than to Syriza.
“Political action” focused mainly on representation in the state, and working through it, on the other hand, is a different matter altogether. And the choice of the Syriza movement as a positive example is particularly unfortunate, for all the reasons we considered earlier.
Political action may be necessary. As Aronoff suggested, it is indeed a mistake to create a false dichotomy with counter-institution building. But framing “political action” as primarily state action, rather than a component of the counter-institution building movements themselves, is precisely the kind of false dichotomy we need to avoid. Political models centered on the conquest of power, and collective action through captured institutional hierarchies, are — to repeat — obsolete.
We don’t need the state’s policy apparatus to implement the new society, as envisioned by Marxist models of the transitional proletarian dictatorship. All we need is to block efforts by the state to suppress the emergence of the new society; and for that purpose movements outside the state, engaged in swarming, blocking and sabotage, are what is needed.
Aronoff’s revision of Lucy Parson’s notwithstanding, we’re not talking about the rich letting us do anything. The whole point of all the horizontalist analyses we’ve seen of the internal contradictions of capitalism is that they can’t stop us. The technological changes that are destroying the capitalist state’s enforcement mechanisms are part and parcel of the technologies of the new society itself. The same technologies that serve as building blocks of the new society are rendering the state unable to suppress the new society. In that sense, we can indeed innovate our way out of capitalism.
Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real (With Special Regard to Paul Mason’s Post-Capitalism)
Download a PDF copy of Kevin Carson’s full C4SS Study: Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 20 (Spring 2016)
I. Capitalist Techno-Utopianism from Daniel Bell On
II. Categories of Leftist Techno-Utopianism
III. Other Non-Capitalist Techno-Utopianisms
IV. Analysis: Comparison of the Two Strands of Techno-Utopianism
V. Paul Mason
VI. Left-Wing Critiques of Mason
- Stephanie McMillan
- Kate Aronoff
Conclusion
Notes.