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Hope in Common
Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, to flourish, to propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win. To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and police and military intelligence apparatus, propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as they create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Maintaining this apparatus seems even more important, to exponents of the “free market,” even than maintaining any sort of viable market economy. How else can one explain, for instance, what happened in the former Soviet Union, where one would have imagined the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and KGB and rebuilding the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around? This is just one extreme example of what has been happening everywhere. Economically, this apparatus is pure dead weight; all the guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and really produce nothing, and as a result, it’s dragging the entire capitalist system down with it, and possibly, the earth itself. The spirals of financialization and endless string of economic bubbles we’ve been experience are a direct result of this apparatus. It’s no coincidence that the United States has become both the world’s major military (”security”) power and the major promoter of bogus securities. This apparatus exists to shred and pulverize the human imagination, to destroy any possibility of envisioning alternative futures. As a result, the only thing left to imagine is more and more money, and debt spirals entirely out of control. What is debt, after all, but imaginary money whose value can only be realized in the future: future profits, the proceeds of the exploitation of workers not yet born. Finance capital in turn is the buying and selling of these imaginary future profits; and once one assumes that capitalism itself will be around for all eternity, the only kind of economic democracy left to imagine is one everyone is equally free to invest in the market—to grab their own piece in the game of buying and selling imaginary future profits, even if these profits are to be extracted from themselves. Freedom has become the right to share in the proceeds of one’s own permanent enslavement. And since the bubble had built on the destruction of futures, once it collapsed there appeared to be—at least for the moment—simply nothing left. The effect however is clearly temporary. If the story of the global justice movement tells us anything it’s that the moment there appears to be any sense of an opening, the imagination will immediately spring forth. This is what effectively happened in the late ‘90s when it looked, for a moment, like we might be moving toward a world at peace. In the US, for the last fifty years, whenever there seems to be any possibility of peace breaking out, the same thing happens: the emergence of a radical social movement dedicated to principles of direct action and participatory democracy, aiming to revolutionize the very meaning of political life. In the late ‘50s it was the civil rights movement; in the late ‘70s, the anti-nuclear movement. This time it happened on a planetary scale, and challenged capitalism head-on. These movements tend to be extraordinarily effective. Certainly the global justice movement was. Few realize that one of the main reasons it seemed to flicker in and out of existence so rapidly was that it achieved its principle goals so quickly. None of us dreamed, when we were organizing the protests in Seattle in 1999 or at the IMF meetings in DC in 2000, that within a mere three or four years, the WTO process would have collapsed, that “free trade” ideologies would be considered almost entirely discredited, that every new trade pact they threw at us—from the MIA to Free Trade Areas of the Americas act—would have been defeated, the World Bank hobbled, the power of the IMF over most of the world’s population, effectively destroyed. But this is precisely what happened. The fate of the IMF is particularly startling. Once the terror of the Global South, it is, by now, a shattered remnant of its former self, reviled and discredited, reduced to selling off its gold reserves and desperately searching for a new global mission. Meanwhile, most of the “third world debt” has simply vanished. All of this was a direct result of a movement that managed to mobilize global resistance so effectively that the reigning institutions were first discredited, and ultimately, that those running governments in Asia and especially Latin America were forced by their own populations to call the bluff of the international financial system. Much of the reason the movement was thrown into confusion was because none of us had really considered we might win. But of course there’s another reason. Nothing terrifies the rulers of the world, and particularly of the United States, as much as the danger of grassroots democracy. Whenever a genuinely democratic movement begins to emerge—particularly, one based on principles of civil disobedience and direct action—the reaction is the same; the government makes immediate concessions (fine, you can have voting rights; no nukes), then starts ratcheting up military tensions abroad. The movement is then forced to transform itself into an anti-war movement; which, pretty much invariably, is far less democratically organized. So the civil rights movement was followed by Vietnam, the anti-nuclear movement by proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the global justice movement, by the “War on Terror.” But at this point, we can see that “war” for what it was: as the flailing and obviously doomed effort of a declining power to make its peculiar combination of bureaucratic war machines and speculative financial capitalism into a permanent global condition. If the rotten architecture collapsed abruptly at the end of 2008, it was at least in part because so much of the work had already been accomplished by a movement that had, in the face of the surge of repression after 911, combined with confusion over how to follow up its startling initial success, had seemed to have largely disappeared from the scene. Of course it hasn’t really. We are clearly at the verge of another mass resurgence of the popular imagination. It shouldn’t be that difficult. Most of the elements are already there. The problem is that, our perceptions having been twisted into knots by decades of relentless propaganda, we are no longer able to see them. Consider here the term “communism.” Rarely has a term come to be so utterly reviled. The standard line, which we accept more or less unthinkingly, is that communism means state control of the economy, and this is an impossible utopian dream because history has shown it simply “doesn’t work.” Capitalism, however unpleasant, is thus the only remaining option. But in fact communism really just means any situation where people act according to the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”—which is the way pretty much everyone always act if they are working together to get something done. If two people are fixing a pipe and one says “hand me the wrench,” the other doesn’t say, “and what do I get for it?”(That is, if they actually want it to be fixed.) This is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. They apply principles of communism because it’s the only thing that really works. This is also the reason whole cities or countries revert to some form of rough-and-ready communism in the wake of natural disasters, or economic collapse (one might say, in those circumstances, markets and hierarchical chains of command are luxuries they can’t afford.) The more creativity is required, the more people have to improvise at a given task, the more egalitarian the resulting form of communism is likely to be: that’s why even Republican computer engineers, when trying to innovate new software ideas, tend to form small democratic collectives. It’s only when work becomes standardized and boring—as on production lines—that it becomes possible to impose more authoritarian, even fascistic forms of communism. But the fact is that even private companies are, internally, organized communistically. Communism then is already here. The question is how to further democratize it. Capitalism, in turn, is just one possible way of managing communism—and, it has become increasingly clear, rather a disastrous one. Clearly we need to be thinking about a better one: preferably, one that does not quite so systematically set us all at each others’ throats. All this makes it much easier to understand why capitalists are willing to pour such extraordinary resources into the machinery of hopelessness. Capitalism is not just a poor system for managing communism: it has a notorious tendency to periodically come spinning apart. Each time it does, those who profit from it have to convince everyone—and most of all the technical people, the doctors and teachers and surveyors and insurance claims adjustors—that there is really no choice but to dutifully paste it all back together again, in something like the original form. This despite the fact that most of those who will end up doing the work of rebuilding the system don’t even like it very much, and all have at least the vague suspicion, rooted in their own innumerable experiences of everyday communism, that it really ought to be possible to create a system at least a little less stupid and unfair. This is why, as the Great Depression showed, the existence of any plausible-seeming alternative—even one so dubious as the Soviet Union in the 1930s—can turn a downswing into an apparently insoluble political crisis. Those wishing to subvert the system have learned by now, from bitter experience, that we cannot place our faith in states. The last decade has instead seen the development of thousands of forms of mutual aid association, most of which have not even made it onto the radar of the global media. They range from tiny cooperatives and associations to vast anti-capitalist experiments, archipelagos of occupied factories in Paraguay or Argentina or of self-organized tea plantations and fisheries in India, autonomous institutes in Korea, whole insurgent communities in Chiapas or Bolivia, associations of landless peasants, urban squatters, neighborhood alliances, that spring up pretty much anywhere that where state power and global capital seem to temporarily looking the other way. They might have almost no ideological unity and many are not even aware of the other’s existence, but all are marked by a common desire to break with the logic of capital. And in many places, they are beginning to combine. “Economies of solidarity” exist on every continent, in at least eighty different countries. We are at the point where we can begin to perceive the outlines of how these can knit together on a global level, creating new forms of planetary commons to create a genuine insurgent civilization. Visible alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability, that the system must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form—this is why it became such an imperative of global governance to stamp them out, or, when that’s not possible, to ensure that no one knows about them. To become aware of it allows us to see everything we are already doing in a new light. To realize we’re all already communists when working on a common projects, all already anarchists when we solve problems without recourse to lawyers or police, all revolutionaries when we make something genuinely new. One might object: a revolution cannot confine itself to this. That’s true. In this respect, the great strategic debates are really just beginning. I’ll offer one suggestion though. For at least five thousand years, popular movements have tended to center on struggles over debt—this was true long before capitalism even existed. There is a reason for this. Debt is the most efficient means ever created to take relations that are fundamentally based on violence and violent inequality and to make them seem right and moral to everyone concerned. When the trick no longer works, everything explodes. As it is now. Clearly, debt has shown itself to be the point of greatest weakness of the system, the point where it spirals out of anyone’s control. It also allows endless opportunities for organizing. Some speak of a debtor’s strike, or debtor’s cartel. Perhaps so—but at the very least we can start with a pledge against evictions: to pledge, neighborhood by neighborhood, to support each other if any of us are to be driven from our homes. The power is not just that to challenge regimes of debt is to challenge the very fiber of capitalism—its moral foundation—now revealed to be a collection of broken promises—but in doing so, to create a new one. A debt after all is only that: a promise, and the present world abounds with promises that have not been kept. One might speak here of the promise made us by the state; that if we abandon any right to collectively manage our own affairs, we would at least be provided with basic life security. Or of the promise offered by capitalism—that we could live like kings if we were willing to buy stock in our own collective subordination. All of this has come crashing down. What remains is what we are able to promise one another. Directly. Without the mediation of economic and political bureaucracies. The revolution begins by asking: what sort of promises do free men and women make to one another, and how, by making them, do we begin to make another world? |
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Like most people I see the
Like most people I see the the words ' communist' and ' socialist' as interchangeable. However there are still very good reasons why libertarian-socialists ( anarchists like us) should steer well clear of rehabilitating or even using the word communism. To name just three.
1) The peoples republic of China
2) The democratic peoples republic of Korea
3) Name yr favorite Marxist hellhole here...
It is not up to us as the first mass victims of mass Cheka actions ninety years ago this year to help communists wash the blood off their filthy hands. Let communists clean up their own mess.
' The emancipation of the Marxist-Leninist is up the Marxist-Leninist themselves', so to speak.
One of the real drags on anarchism in the west imho seems to be a willing conflation of anarchism with something called ' libertarian-communism'. As if Marxists of any stripe could ever be trusted!
Safer to ally with democratic-socialism if we need friends in low places.
Yes there have been some victories - chiefly over the Bush regime since 2005 - and that was mainly by the web and word-of-mouth. So the net is vital to our fight and vital to the future of global revolution. As for economic alternatives these are reasonably well documented as working models in the social revolutions of South Central Ukraine under the Makhnovista and Spain 1936-7. ( Sear Voline, Orwell and Leval ) As the world increasingly resembles the thirties so we have the great opportunity to re-create anarchist Spain all over the planet ...only without communists in any significant numbers anywhere. We have , in fact now have to deconstruct the most powerful state in the world today. Marxist China. And for that we need less wanky Anglosphere academics and more Greek style direct-action.
i understand all this but
i understand all this but are we not a little hung up on fucking semantics here? i really don't care what anyone calls themselves or where they draw their influence from, really, as long as our goals are the same. also, don't think for even a second that what i am saying here is the same thing as leftist coalition building...i am speaking of working in concert with other individuals, forming a community, whether as a regular thing (also subject to dissolution, of course, if it is felt like it has become pointless and disagreeable) or in terms of some form of social warfare on the current order disolving after a goal is met. i never work with organizations anymore, if i have any contact with them it is cause they are having a party and i have a few personal friends there and wish to get fucked up and socialize or to leech off their resources or otherwise use them or perhaps to subvert them if they are a convincing enough counter power that i think they may become some new form of social order keeping (fortunately these organizations don't scare me much, they are more pathetic and laughable than anything else, as post-nihilist pointed out elsewhere [about left anarchists in that case] they are "militant beggars" at least for the moment and here in the U.S. as i cannot speak for other places).
one last thought here, speaking of marxist-leninists....econonmic alternatives? aye carumba! this hardly seems to me to be a way of differeniating ourselves from marxist-leninist ideologues because they are all about this sort of thing. you want an economic alternative? i actaully do have one: destroy the economy then maybe loot the remains in some cases and good fucking riddance! we need a world where autonomy can bloom, at least if we care about freedom, not further banality where we are all joined into the same damn staright jacket, with plenty of thoarazine for those who don't feel like voluntarily coming along for the ride.
now we do agree on one thing here in all this jumble for damn sure and that is this:
"for that we need less wanky Anglosphere academics and more Greek style direct-action."
though these things require thought and are certainly to be fetished no more than anything else is i agree: the U.S. couldn't have a development like this soon enough!
-lord rambler
"Communism then is already
"Communism then is already here."
I think your getting the "dictatorship of the proletariat" confused with fascism.
And, if you think the coming *NEW* FAMILY FRIENDLY FASCISM is going to allow, much less put up with some UNAPPROVED DA, your going to be painfully disillusioned.
Wasn't that the subtitle of last months CHANGE ? "We can work together" in goose-stepping synch and "make things better" !
"Certainly the global justice movement was. Few realize that one of the main reasons it seemed to flicker in and out of existence so rapidly was that it achieved its principle goals so quickly."
Was it really a handful of anti-globalist protestors that brought down finance capitalism, or was it really Wall Street's diet of champagne and cocaine ?
There is room now for those to show, live and organize 'a better way'. But don't expect the downtrodden masses to turn off their TVs and turn their back on the 'bread and circuses', yet.
the smart money (sniker,
the smart money (sniker, chortle, snort) would be on wall streets diet. we are not doing a very good job, at least here in the U.S. of destabalizing anything. what is happening is that this society is proving quite well that it can and will destablize itself, in much that same way a heroin junkie does. but the question is are we ready for this or are we going to continue to float around in our little solopistic scenester ghetto bubbles or in other cases futilely repeat the same damn protest shit that didn't work over and over and over again?
-lord rambler
i am working on a more
i am working on a more thorough critique of this piece which is fraught with hype, rhetoric, and overblown self-congratulation. but for now i just want to respond to this oft-repeated refrain about the end of capitalism. i kdeep thiunking i already live in a different world 'cause i don't see finance capitalism fallen or even at its end yet. i do ee it faltering as it always does, always has, and always will until such a time it can no longer be maintained. i also see new power structures putting in place mechanisms to prop it, perhaps evven strengthening it with the help of the obamanites and other true believers.
further, capitalism isn't the only means the industrial, workslave world is built and maintained. feudalism and communism deed their share of foundation building. "the people" resisted against these systems too, but it was much more than that resistance that killed or weakened (in the case of communism) them. those that wanted and took a bigger piece of the pie than the ruling class was doling out waged their own resistance. not to create a more equitable society but to create their own wealth creating situation, later to become part of the ruling or controlling classes.
attributing the weakening of an institution solely to the actions of people in resistance is seriously problematic. it is incorrect thus the worst sort of propaganda. it gives a false sense of accomlishment and sets folks up for a painful fall of their own.
-ow
The piece contains
The piece contains intentionally provocative rhetoric but that's because it's meant to challenge people to rethink their categories. It would be good to consider the claims it's actually making.
For instance, it's not calling on anyone to embrace communism as an ideology, or some grand system of coordinating production, or anything like that. It's mainly saying (1) that the conventional mainstream rhetoric, which says that there's only two ways of running an economy, "capitalism" and "communism/socialism", and that the latter "doesn't work", is utterly wrong, in fact if you look at communism in the literal sense ("from each according to their abilities..."), it's obviously the only approach that works when you need to get most things done, (2) that "communism" is best defined not as an imaginary ideal or utopian system of coordinating everything collectively that will exist at some time in the future (which is what communist parties claimed) but as a form of practice that everyone does already much of the time, so the question of "should we be communists" is absurd, we already are, (3) that this doesn't mean communism in the practical sense is necessarily all that great, since there's awful nightmare authoritarian forms and wonderful egalitarian forms and everything in between already present in daily life - so the question is how to make communism more democratic, and (4) there's no real sense even talking about creating an overall "communist" system - it's not even clear what that would necessarily mean - and we should just erase that problem from the board. Rather we have capitalism now as the currently dominant system for organizing communism, and we need to find a new one. What we call that new one is not _that_ important. For obvious reasons - those above stated, obvious historical bad associations - "communism" is not a very good candidate for such a name. But really the name isn't the big issue, we should be thinking about forms.
That's a complicated argument.
It's basically saying "don't you think it would be more interesting and productive to define our terms this way?" - and then see what else might look different as a result.
Now you might think that's a stupid or pointless or ineffective way to redefine the world. But it's not much of a conversation unless you engage with the actual argument being made.
I don't see any reason not
I don't see any reason not to recuperate communism. Anarchism also requires recuperation, since it has been continually associated with chaos, disorganisation and violence. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.
Communism acquired bad connotations because it was in the interests of the State in Russia and China to call their State Capitalism communism, so as to pretend to have succeeded. It suited the western governments, since they could use it to smear the entire idea of communism. Anyone who thinks that the USSR represented communism has bought the imperialist propaganda.
Communism can not exist except in anarchy. As Bakunin pointed out, if the state survives it will create state capitalism, not communism. Communism is production for use-value, rather than exchange-value. It is specifically the negation of the social relation that is the driving force of capitalism.
Agreed. I think the kind of
Agreed.
I think the kind of "communism" Graeber is referring to here is a form of egalitarian self-organization of all kinds of production (making physical things, making ideas, etc). It's a lot closer to the autonomist Marxist or anarcho-COMMUNIST usage of the word than the way Reagan or Stalin used it, both meanings of which many of the commenters on this post seem stuck on (i.e, the word communism means "bureaucratic state capitalism" or "repressive totalitarianism" right off.)
Also agreed that Graeber's a little congratulatory here, but then it does seem to be an attempt to get people to think from the standpoint of resistance, and sop seeing the twists and turns of neoliberalism through the eyes of the ruling classes.
I.e, from one perspective our movements ain't that effective, globalization faltered for its own reasons, and we aren't building any day-to-day alternatives because we don't see them on CNN.com; from the perspective Graeber's trying to encourage, we are effective, globalization faltered as a direct result of the mobilization of social movement across the globe, and emergent networks of solidarity-based / gift economies are already springing up in the cracks of capital. He's sayin lets GET TO IT.
I really do wonder what
I really do wonder what certain people think they're trying to accomplish, making the arguments that they do.
In the case of the globalization movement: some people set out to destroy or hobble the WTO, IMF, devalidate global neoliberalism,and stop future trade agreements. A global movement emerged. Within five years, the WTO, IMF were indeed hobbled or largely destroyed, global neoliberalism was indeed devalidated, and all large future trade agreements were indeed stopped.
Now, looking at historical change is a matter of looking at open systems, where you cannot ever know for absolute certain how the chains of causality work. But what exactly is the point of ardently insisting that all this was a coincidence? Just to convince people that nothing they do can ever, ever have any significant effect, even if you seem to have achieved your goals, really, actually, it must have been something else.
DG
"some people set out to
"some people set out to destroy or hobble the WTO, IMF, devalidate global neoliberalism,and stop future trade agreements."
These assertions are simply not true.
Global trade continues unimpeded - corporations continue to manufacture and distribute goods all over the world. Global neoliberalism continues for the most part completely unimpeded. How can this be if the movement smashed international trade and neoliberalism? Trade talks collapsed because emerging economies forcefully asserted their interests at the meetings - Brazil, India, China - not because some people in black outside smashed some stuff. These countries remain rabidly capitalist, as does the rest of the industrialized and developing world.
It's good to feel a sense of accomplishment in one's undertakings. But the tone in this article - and all of David's writings - are breathtaking hubris and appalling arrogance, verging on abject delusion.
"Now, looking at historical change is a matter of looking at open systems, where you cannot ever know for absolute certain how the chains of causality work."
This is an UTTER copout. Well, we don't know for certain what happened, so it must have been us?
The "point" is to base things on reality, not wild hyperbole and speculation. The point of your articles seem to be to convince people that if they just show up and demonstrate against stuff, it will all go away. And that's helpful?
um, you have to distinguish
um, you have to distinguish between immediate, medium-term and long-term goals. The immediate aims of the movement were not to stop all international trade. Obviously. Almost no one involved was motivated mainly by wishing to see objects stop moving across borders anyway - except insofar as we sought to eliminate borders entirely (but again, that was a long-term goal, no one imagined that was going to happen overnight - just as with the dismantlement of corporations which of course we also wanted to see). The immediate goals of specific campaigns were largely as I stated - stop IMF structural adjustment plans (they have been stopped), discredit the Washington consensus (it has been discredited), stop the WTO rounds (they have been stopped), prevent the MAI and FTAA from being passed (they were not passed), etc etc.
these observations are not arrogant. They are simply noting a fact: that social movements can sometimes be strikingly effective. This is something people involved in social movements often forget, since we all feel rather pathetic most of the time, and would be well to be reminded of. What is astoundingly arrogant is the attitude of people like you, who claim to know for certain that they are not, and care more, apparently, about maintaining your claims of intellectual superiority to benighted souls who actually try to go off and do something in the world than the fate of the earth, humanity, or anything else.
as for the uncertainty factor: if someone throws a rock at a can and observes it to fall over, normally, we can assume the rock was at least partially involved. What you seem to be doing is screaming your head off that there's no way to prove that the rock had any effect at all, how dare the rock-thrower take any credit, how do I know it wasn't some seismic activity we weren't aware of? I thought my reply was pretty generous: I said, well, okay, there are multiple factors and one cannot know for sure, but it seems reasonable to assume the rock was at least partly involved. Because what is the point of arguing otherwise? What does it accomplish? Unless one's purpose is to try to convince people never to even bother throwing rocks, saying "even when you achieve a world-wide mobilization of millions of people on every continent to achieve certain goals, and those goals, at least the immediate ones, are in fact achieved - actually, no, I say even then you weren't in any way effective, it wasn't you, it would have happened anyway. Taking action is meaningless. Futile. Forget it. Forget about even trying to take part in social movements, go home and watch TV or become a capitalist or something. Because I know for absolute certain that whatever happened would have happened anyway and historical agency is impossible."
This position - your position - is not only breathtakingly arrogant, it's about the most politically destructive position it is possible to take.
@ ow and a few others Just
@ ow and a few others
Just in regards to Graebers congratulatory tone; he has written in more detail, elsewhere, about why he came to these conclusions. This is particularly directed at ow since you intend on writing a critique. The essay was called "The Shock of Victory," and some of you may have read it. But I think it may be useful to look at it again.
http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=2007graeber-victory
-Wargasm