EXODUS Exodus General Idea of the Revolution in the XXI Century K EVIN A. C ARSON Center for a Stateless Society Center for a Stateless Society Copyright © Kevin A. Carson 2021 This book is licensed under the CC-BY-ND Attribution-NoDerivs license and the Woody Guthrie open license: Anyone found copying this work without our permission will be considered mighty good friends of ours, because we don’t give a durn. The photograph of the author is Kevin Carson Reflects (2013). This photograph is licensed under the CC-BY-ND Attribution-NoDerivs license and the Woody Guthrie open license: Anyone found copying this work without our permission will be considered mighty good friends of ours, because we don’t give a durn. Published by Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing for the Center for a Stateless Society Tulsa, Oklahoma ISBN 9798598532225 This book is printed on acid-free paper. Carson, Kevin A. Exodus: General Idea of the Revolution in the XXI Century Includes bibliographic references and index. 1. Revolutions. 2. Revolutions—history—21st century. I. Title To the hundreds of thousands or billions engaged in building the new society within the shell of the old. Contents Contents ..............................................................................................................................ix Preface ..................................................................................................................................xi Part One. Background .............................................................................................................. 1 1. The Age of Mass and Maneuver .................................................................................. 3 I. A Conflict of Visions .................................................................................................................3 II. The Triumph of Mass in the Old Left ................................................................................ 9 III. The Assault on Working Class Agency ............................................................................ 39 IV. Workerism/Laborism.............................................................................................................. 47 2. Transition .......................................................................................................................... 51 I. Drastic Reductions in Necessary Outlays for the Means of Production ............... 51 II. The Network Revolution and the Imploding Cost of Coordination ..................... 58 III. The Impotence of Enforcement, and Superiority of Circumvention to Resistance......................................................................................................................................71 IV. Superior General Efficiency and Low Overhead ........................................................... 76 V. Conclusion...................................................................................................................................80 Part Two. The Age of Exodus .............................................................................................83 3. Horizontalism and Self-Activity Over Vanguard Institutions ....................... 85 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 85 I. The New Left ............................................................................................................................. 87 II. Autonomism ............................................................................................................................... 95 III. The 1968 Movements and the Transition to Horizontalist Praxis ........................ 103 IV. The Post-1994 Movements................................................................................................... 105 4. The Abandonment of Workerism .......................................................................... 121 I. The Limited Relevance of Proletarianism in the Mass Production Age ..............121 II. Technology and the Declining Relevance of Proletarianism ................................... 122 III. The Abandonment of Proletarianism by the New Left............................................. 123 IV. The Abandonment of Workerism in Praxis ................................................................... 133 5. Evolutionary Transition Models.............................................................................. 139 Introduction and Note on Terminology ......................................................................... 139 I. Comparison to Previous Systemic Transitions ............................................................ 140 II. The Nature of Post-Capitalist Transition....................................................................... 155 x EXODUS 6. Interstitial Development and Exodus over Insurrection ................................. 167 Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 167 I. The Split Within Autonomism ......................................................................................... 169 II. The Shift From the Factory to Society as the Main Locus of Productivity ............................................................................................................................... 170 III. Negri et al vs. the Commons ................................................................................................173 IV. Theoretical Implications....................................................................................................... 174 7. Interstitial Development: Practical Issues ........................................................... 209 I. Post-1968 (-1994?) Movements .......................................................................................... 209 II. Strategy ....................................................................................................................................... 218 8. Interstitial Development: Engagement with the State .................................... 229 Part Three. Seeds beneath the Snow .............................................................................. 257 9. The Commons Sector and the Theory of Municipalism ............................... 259 Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 259 I. The Growth of the Commons Sector As a Lifeline ...................................................262 II. Municipalism: The City as Commons and Platform ................................................. 276 10. Municipalism: Local Case Studies .......................................................................... 297 I. North America ......................................................................................................................... 297 II. Europe .......................................................................................................................................... 313 11. Municipalism: Building Blocks ................................................................................. 331 12. The Global South and Federation .......................................................................... 381 I. Commons-Based Economies in the Global South....................................................... 381 II. Federation .................................................................................................................................. 384 Bibliography .................................................................................................................... 399 Index .................................................................................................................................. 435 About the Author ......................................................................................................... 447 Preface On the whole, this is a typical Carson book. Like all my books since Studies in Mutualist Political Economy , it’s to a large extent a direct outgrowth of my earlier books insofar as it addresses in depth issues which I was limited to treat- ing on only in passing in the previous books. In this case, Exodus applies the findings of The Homebrew Industrial Revolution regarding micromanufacturing technology and ephemeralization, and those concerning networked communi- cations and stigmergic organization in The Desktop Regulatory State , to the questions of political organization entailed in post-capitalist transition. Three of my research papers at Center for a Stateless Society were much more limited preliminary investigations into some of the same subject matter: “Techno- Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real,” 1 “The Fulcrum of the Present Crisis,” 2 and “Libertarian Municipalism.” 3 Like the previous books, it is a product of its time, in the sense that I was en- thusiastically immersed in the vital events of the day during the writing process. As with Homebrew and Desktop , I was always two steps behind the news related to my research, and eventually had to draw a line beyond which I would not incor- porate any new material if I was to complete the book at all. And as with the pre- vious books, it was already becoming dated before I wrote down the last word. Although Homebrew and Desktop are both considerably dated in many re- gards, I think much of the analysis is still relevant and holds up fairly well. I hope the same will be true of Exodus In any case, if you liked the previous books, perhaps you will also like this one—or at least find it somewhat useful. I hope so. 1 Kevin Carson, “Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real” (Center for a Stateless Soci- ety, Spring 2016) <https://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/TechnoUtopiaPDF1.pdf>. 2 Carson, “The Fulcrum of the Present Crisis: Some Thoughts on Revolutionary Strate- gy” (Center for a Stateless Society, Winter 2015) <http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04 /SomeRevCarson.pdf>. 3 Carson, “Libertarian Municipalism: Networked Cities as Resilient Platforms for Post- Capitalist Transition” (Center for a Stateless Society, 2018) <https://c4ss.org/wp-content/ up- loads/2018/01/community-platforms.pdf>. xii EXODUS Many thanks to my friend Gary Chartier, of La Sierra University, for for- matting the manuscripts into a finished book that’s actually pleasing to the eyes. January 12, 2021 Part One Background 1 The Age of Mass and Maneuver I. A Conflict of Visions I should note, at the outset, that in this section I deal with two dichotomies which are theoretically distinct, but tend to heavily overlap in practice. The first is between interstitial visions of change based on creating the building blocks of the future society within the present one, and insurrectionary or ruptural visions based on seizure or conquest of the state and other commanding institutions of the existing society. The second is between organizational forms modeled on prefiguring the future society, and organizational forms (defined mainly by mass, hierarchy and the central imposition of discipline) aimed primarily at the strategic requirements of seizing power. In the nineteenth century, prefigurative or interstitial visions coexisted with visions centered on mass-based institutions and insurrection. But even the dominant anarchist schools to some extent emphasized the role of organiza- tional mass and insurrection in the transition process. Following a struggle with the Bakuninists in the First International, the Marxists emerged as the dominant school of socialism—a school that was both insurrectionary and envisioned the seizure of state power as a tool for transfor- mation. (Not that Bakunin himself did not advocate a revolutionary strategy fo- cused on mass and organization; he just saw the immediate abolition of the state as entailed in the act of seizing it.) Marx and Engels from the beginning stressed that the transition to social- ism was a thing to be carried out after the working class’s capture of the state, with the proletarian state playing a central role in carrying out the transition. In the Communist Manifesto , the first step in the transition to communism was the seizure of political power, followed by (in Mihailo Markovic’s words) a series of steps which eventually revolutionize the entire mode of production. . . . [In Marx’s] view the proletariat ‘is compelled by the force of circumstances’ to use [the state] in order to sweep away by force the old conditions of production, classes generally, and its own supremacy as a class. . . . On the other hand, reformists (e.g. 4 EXODUS Bernstein) rejected the idea of a political revolution since they thought the very eco- nomic process of capitalism led spontaneously towards socialism. 1 As Marx and Engels themselves described it, “the first step in the revolu- tion by the working class” is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible. Besides revolutionary policies aimed at smashing bourgeois power, like confiscating the property of emigres and rebels, and economic policies aimed at gradually destroying the economic power of the bourgeoisie (e.g. a progressive income tax and abolition of inheritance), they also envisioned a large-scale, cen- trally organized program of economic reconstruction including: 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil gener- ally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual aboli- tion of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country. 2 In both the Manifesto and Critique of the Gotha Program , Marx described a fairly lengthy process of constructing communism after the working class cap- tured control of the state. The Manifesto included a detailed economic program that would have to be implemented over a prolonged period. As Markovic interpreted it, that specifically ruled out a long process of evo- lutionary transition analogous to the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In contrast to bourgeois revolution which is an overthrow of the political power of the aristocracy at the end of a long process of growth of the capitalist economy and bourgeois culture within the framework of feudal society, the seizure of political power from the bourgeoisie is, according to Marx, only ‘the first episode’ of the rev- olutionary transformation of capitalism into socialism. Marx . . . distinguished be- 1 Mihailo Markovic, “Transition to Socialism,” A Dictionary of Marxist Thought . Edited by Tom Bottomore, Laurence Harris, V.G. Kiernan and Ralph Miliband. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 486. 2 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party . Marx/Engels Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969). Hosted at Marxist Internet Archive <https:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm>. Accessed Septem- ber 21, 2016. THE AGE OF MASS AND MANEUVER 5 tween the lower phase of communism (a mixed society which still lacks its own foundations) and its higher phase (after the disappearance of the ‘enslaving of la- bour’ and of ‘the antithesis between mental and physical labour’, when such abun- dance would be attained that goods could be distributed to each ‘according to his needs’). 1 Marx himself, in The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 (a collection of contemporary newspaper articles he had written analyzing the Revolution of 1848), stressed the mutually determining character of industrial capitalism and the proletariat in creating both the material prerequisites of socialism and a rev- olutionary class capable of building it. The development of the industrial proletariat is, in general, conditioned by the de- velopment of the industrial bourgeoisie. Only under its rule does the proletariat gain that extensive national existence which can raise its revolution to a national one, and only thus does the proletariat itself create the modern means of production, which become just so many means of its revolutionary emancipation. At its Hague Conference in 1872, under the influence of Marx and Engels, the International Working Men’s Association adopted Article 7a which called for the working class to achieve the “conquest of political power” by “constitut- ing itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to all old parties formed by the propertied classes.” 2 And on the occasion of Marx’s death in 1883 Engels reiterated, as his and Marx’s consistent position, that the proletariat must seize—as “the only organi- sation the victorious working class finds ready-made for use”—the state, the state being “the only organism by which [it] can . . . carry out that economic rev- olution of society . . . .” 3 The 1891 Erfurt Programme of the SDP, in whose drafting Kautsky played the primary role, reiterated the themes of small businesses being destroyed and capital concentrated into “colossal large enterprises,” leaving as the only re- sponse “the transformation of the capitalist private ownership of the means of production—land and soil, pits and mines, raw materials, tools, machines, means of transportation—into social property and the transformation of the produc- tion of goods into socialist production carried on by and for society.” This was to be accomplished through struggle by the working class; and it fell to the So- 1 Markovic, pp. 485-86. 2 International Working Men’s Association, “Resolutions,” Hague Conference, September 2-7, 1872. Hosted by Marxist Internet Archive <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/ documents/1872/hague-conference/resolutions.htm>. Accessed July 23, 2018. 3 Friedrich Engels, “On the Occasion of Karl Marx’s Death” (May 12, 1883), in Anarchism & Anarcho-Syndicalism: Selected Writings by Marx, Engels, Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 1972). 6 EXODUS cial Democratic Party “to shape the struggle of the working class into a con- scious and unified one.” 1 In his 1895 Introduction to The Class Struggles in France , Engels framed the destruction of capitalism and creation of socialism as the work of a mass proletarian “army,” based on “big industry” and giant industrial centers. History has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong. It has made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time [ie. 1848] was not, by a long way, ripe for the removal of capitalist production; it has proved this by the economic revolution which, since 1848, has seized the whole of the Continent, has really caused big industry for the first time to take root in France, Austria, Hungary, Poland and, recently, in Russia, while it has made Germany positively an industrial country of the first rank. . . . [T]oday a great international army of Socialists, march- ing irresistibly on and growing daily in number, organization, discipline, insight and assurance of victory. If even this mighty army of the proletariat has still not reached its goal, if, a long way from winning victory with one mighty stroke, it has slowly to press forward from position to position in a hard, tenacious struggle, this only proves, once and for all, how impossible it was in 1848 to win social reconstruction by a simple surprise attack. 2 Meanwhile the working class in Germany developed, as a model for the working class throughout the industrialized world, the combination of universal suffrage and a mass socialist party. And if universal suffrage had offered no other advantage than that it allowed us to count our numbers every three years; that by the regularly established, unexpectedly rapid rise in the number of votes it increased in equal measure the workers’ certainty of victory and the dismay of their opponents, and so became our best means of propaganda; that it accurately informed us concerning our own strength and that of all hostile parties, and thereby provided us with a measure of proportion for our ac- tions second to none, safeguarding us from untimely timidity as much as from un- timely foolhardiness—if this had been the only advantage we gained from the suf- frage, then it would still have been more than enough. But it has done much more than this. In election agitation it provided us with a means, second to none, of get- ting in touch with the mass of the people, where they still stand aloof from us; of forcing all parties to defend their views and actions against our attacks before all the people; and, further, it opened to our representatives in the Reichstag a platform from which they could speak to their opponents in Parliament and to the masses without, with quite other authority and freedom than in the press or at meetings. . . . With this successful utilization of universal suffrage, an entirely new mode of proletarian struggle came into force, and this quickly developed further. It was 1 “The Erfurt Programme” (1891). Translated by Thomas Dunlap, and hosted at Marxist Internet Archive <https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/1891/erfurt- program.htm>. Accessed January 18, 2020. 2 Engels, Introduction. Karl Marx, The Class Conflict in France, 1848 to 1850 . From Marx and Engels, Selected Works , Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969). Proofed and cor- rected by Matthew Carmody, 2009, Mark Harris 2010, transcribed by Louis Proyect, and hosted at Marxist Internet Archive <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles- france/>. Accessed Sept. 15, 2016. THE AGE OF MASS AND MANEUVER 7 found that the state institutions, in which the rule of the bourgeoisie is organized, offer still further opportunities for the working class to fight these very state insti- tutions. They took part in elections to individual diets, to municipal councils and to industrial courts; they contested every post against the bourgeoisie in the occupa- tion of which a sufficient part of the proletariat had its say. And so it happened that the bourgeoisie and the government came to be much more afraid of the legal than of the illegal action of the workers’ party, of the results of elections than of those of rebellion. 1 Old fashioned revolutionary insurrections characterized by street fighting and barricades were only successful a minority of the time even in 1848, Engels ob- served. Developments in military technology since had rendered them completely obsolete. Revolution by spontaneous insurrection and street fighting was no long- er feasible, and if it played a part at all it would be in the later stages of a revolution whose victory had already been largely secured through political organization. If the conditions have changed in the case of war between nations, this is no less true in the case of the class struggle. The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for. . . . The history of the last fifty years has taught us that. But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long, persistent work is required, and it is just this work which we are now pursuing, and with a success which drives the enemy to despair. In the Latin countries, also, it is being more and more recognized that the old tactics must be revised. Everywhere [the unprepared onslaught has gone into the back- ground, everywhere] the German example of utilizing the suffrage, of winning all posts accessible to us, has been imitated. . . . Slow propaganda work and parliamentary ac- tivity are being recognized here, too, as the most immediate tasks of the Party. The German Social-Democracy, with its two and a half million voters, was “the decisive ‘ shock force ’ of the international proletarian army.” Its central task was to conquer the greater part of the middle section of society, petty bourgeois and small peasants, and grow into the decisive power in the land, before which all other powers will have to bow, whether they like it or not. To keep this growth going without in- terruption until of itself it gets beyond the control of the ruling governmental sys- tem. . . . 2 The working class would win by using legal methods, and avoiding being drawn into premature street fighting. The only way the ruling class would thwart the revolutionary project would be by itself resorting to illegality and re- pression; and the proper strategy of the working class was to so permeate the majority of society, mass political institutions and the army that—as with the 1 Ibid. 2 Ibid. 8 EXODUS Christian permeation of Roman society—by the time the ruling class resorted to full-scale repression, it would be too late. 1 All this is not to say that Marx had no use for interstitial development as such. For instance in his 1864 Inaugural Address to the International Working Men’s Association, he praised the cooperative movement and particularly the self-organized cooperative factories. Such factories showed, “by deed,” that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labor need not be monopolized as a means of domin- ion over, and of extortion against, the laboring man himself; and that, like slave la- bor, like serf labor, hired labor is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to dis- appear before associated labor plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart. 2 Worker cooperatives were “transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one. . . .” The growth of joint-stock companies and the reduction of capitalists to rentiers, furthered by the national credit system, illustrated the superfluity of industrial capital to the actual management of in- dustry. And the same national credit system “equally offers the means for the gradual extension of cooperative enterprises on a more or less national scale.” 3 Nevertheless Marx saw cooperatives mainly as a demonstration effect of what was possible, and not as a primary approach to constructing socialism with- in the interstices of the capitalist economy. Since in the Inaugural Address he ex- plicitly repudiated the cooptation of the cooperative movement by pseudo- ”socialist” efforts under the capitalist state like those of LaSalle and Bismarck, the reference above to the credit system is presumably a reference to the con- struction of socialism by means of a credit system socialized by the socialist state, as per the Manifesto . As an actual means of building socialism, Marx made it clear, the cooperative movement could only be effective to the extent that it was subordinated to the political effort to gain control of the state. Cooperatives, however, [extraneous comma sic] excellent in principle and however useful in prac- tice, co-operative labor, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of pri- vate workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries. 4 1 Ibid. 2 Karl Marx, Inaugural Address to the International Working Men’s Association (1864), Marx- ists Internet Archive <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/10/27.htm>. Accessed July 19, 2018. 3 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Capital vol. III, Chapter 27. (New York: International Publishers, n.d.). Hosted by Marxists Internet Archive <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx /works/1894-c3/ch27.htm>. Accessed July 19, 2018. 4 Marx, Inaugural Address